Entrepreneurs frequently experience venture outcomes that fall between outright failure and clear success, yet it remains unclear whether such intermediate outcomes simply produce middle-ground responses or generate distinct behavioral patterns. Leveraging Kickstarter's project success threshold, we construct balanced comparison groups of failed, marginally successful, and clearly successful entrepreneurs to examine responses to early marginal success. We find that entrepreneurs who are marginally successful in their first project exhibit greater risk aversion and undertake fewer strategic changes, making them more likely to experience marginal success again. Despite limited improvement, they persist as stakeholder commitments reinforce continued engagement. Our findings show that marginal success can anchor entrepreneurs into a distinctive pathway of persistence without change, highlighting marginal success as a qualitatively distinct performance state and an overlooked barrier to entrepreneurial learning and adaptation.
Selected for Best Paper Proceedings at the 2026 AOM Annual Meeting
To be presented at 2026 AOM (United States)
Presented at 2026 Asian Management Research Consortium (Singapore)
Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) are reshaping who enters entrepreneurship, but not who reaches the top of the quality distribution. Using data on over 160,000 product launches on Product Hunt, we find that entrepreneurial entry increased sharply following the public release of ChatGPT-3.5, driven disproportionately by solo entrepreneurs. This shift toward solo entry is particularly pronounced in categories that historically favored team-based ventures. However, much of this growth reflects low-commitment, experimental entry and does not translate into greater representation among the highest-quality outcomes. Team-based ventures are increasingly dominant in the top tiers of platform rankings. These findings suggest that generative AI lowers barriers to solo entrepreneurship while reinforcing team-based advantages.
Nominated for Best Phd Paper Prize at the 2026 SMS Annual Conference
To be presented at 2026 AOM (United States)
To be presented at 2026 SMS (Germany)
To be presented at 2026 AAAI Summer Symposium (South Korea)Â
Presented at 2026 Asian Management Research Consortium (Singapore)