Early Joiners and Startup Performance
利用美国初创企业的行政数据，以员工意外死亡作为自然实验，发现失去早期加入员工（第一年入职的非创始人）会长期损害企业就业和收入，而失去后期加入员工影响较小，表明组织资本体现在早期员工身上。
Abstract We show that early joiners—nonfounder employees in the first year of a startup—play a critical role in shaping firm performance. We use administrative employer-employee matched data on U.S. startups and utilize premature death as a natural experiment that exogenously separates talent from startups. We find that losing an early joiner has large negative effects on employment and revenues that persist for at least ten years. In contrast, losing a later joiner yields only a small and temporary decline in firm performance. Our results imply that organization capital, an important driver of startup success, is embodied in early joiners.