Co-mobility, Emergence, and New Firm Performance

This paper addresses the endogenous nature of employees sorting into a group of similar others. Many studies have focused heavily on successful ventures using ex post metrics of early-stage firms to then, in turn, explain the existence of differences in organizational growth. In this paper, we measure the new firm performance outcomes as a function of the heterogeneity and the dynamics of (co-)mobile employees. Our results show that the nature of employee co-mobility provides an important initial condition for understanding the emergence and success of new organizations. Moreover, we find that firms attracting others become an intermediate self-selection of the survival of new organizations. By looking at the ex ante factors that contribute to the performance of new organizations, we make a contribution to understanding entrepreneurial (co-)mobility and its strategic implications.