Great opportunities don’t execute themselves.

Ideas don’t become ventures on their own. Someone has to win the resources, the partners, and the belief.

• Making-do gets you started. It doesn’t get you far. Tech ventures in resource-scarce contexts survive by improvising, but the ones that make the leap also professionalize their resource mobilization to get what they lack. Journal of Business Venturing, 2021, with Reypens and Bacq.
• The scrappiness that makes you inventive at home makes it expensive when going abroad. Bricolage cuts both ways in international expansion: more innovation, higher cost. JBV Insights, 2024, with Fernhaber, Terjesen, and Ruehl.
• Provocation is a privilege of status. Elon-style language lifts engagement for ventures that already have venture capital behind them, and suppresses it for ventures that don’t. Same words, opposite result, depends on your status. Journal of Business Venturing, 2023, with Seigner, Lundmark, and Shepherd.
• Pick your first partner well: it is a permanent record. The status of industry newcomer’s very first relationship keeps shaping its network and standing years later. Strategic Management Journal, 2013, with Shepherd. On network imprinting also Journal of Business Venturing, 2009, with Fernhaber.
• What ventures learn at home travels with them, under conditions. Learning at home can prepare a venture for foreign markets, but only when entering alliances with internationally experienced partners. Journal of Business Venturing, 2014, with Fernhaber.
• Investors improvise too. Venture capitalists syndicate out of need as much as opportunity, and follow distinct learning patterns when entering industries they don’t yet understand. With new entry, their network status beats past successes. Journal of Business Venturing, 2010, with Dimov. Industrial and Corporate Change, 2012, with Dimov and Martín de Holán.

Funding feels meritocratic. The evidence disagrees. Backers, from venture capitalists to crowds, evaluate founders through implicit categories of who ‘fits’.

• Fit penalties cut both ways. Men raising capital for Femtech are penalized for not fitting the market. The first evidence in equity fundraising that lack-of-fit is not only a women’s problem. Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, 2026, with Seigner and Lundmark.
• The same innovation claim pays differently depending on who makes it. Crowds reward novelty when it comes from the founder they expect, and discount it when it doesn’t. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 2022, with Seigner and McKenny. On founders’ appearance, JBV Insights, 2023, with Seigner.
• A signal only works if it fits who’s sending it. Expressions of faith help some borrowers raise microfinance and hurt others, depending on whether the signal matches expectations of the sender. Journal of Business Ethics, 2022, with Anglin and Short.
• Not everyone converts relationships into resources at the same rate. In microcredit groups, gender and group boundaries decide who actually benefits from being connected. Journal of Business Venturing, 2015, with Justo and Bradley.
• The words a field uses decide what it can see. Entrepreneurship research borrows its core metaphors from management studies, but selectively hears what it wants, although it can listen to more. Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, 2025, with Lundmark and Krzeminska. On measuring critiques of the field, JBV Insights, 2022, with Lundmark and Seigner.

Founders are people, with careers, families, and identities beyond the venture.

• Capable women aren’t opting out of founding for lack of confidence. They’re doing the math and declining. Interviews with Stanford engineering graduates who had the skill, the network, and the self-belief reveal four distinct career paths, and for most, founding simply didn’t pay for what they wanted from careers. Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 2025, with Prantl, Sheppard, and Ge.
• Having a baby doesn’t slow a venture down. It grows the company up. First-time parenthood pushes founders to formalize roles, rules and authority far earlier than growth alone would. But it splits in two directions: founders who read parenthood as a threat build walls around the founder role and delegate tasks while keeping control; founders who read it as compatible hand real authority to others. The first professionalizes to protect the founder’s centrality. The second professionalizes by reducing the company’s dependence on it. Journal of Business Venturing, 2026, with Amelie Pahl and Blake Mathias. Covered in Forbes, 2025. Read the article