CleanWater, Inc.: Running Dry & Out of Time

Shai  Bernstein

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Teaching Note | HBS Case Collection | October 2020

CleanWater, Inc.: Running Dry & Out of Time

by Shai Bernstein

Language: English

Format: Print

12 pages

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Bernstein, Shai. "CleanWater, Inc.: Running Dry & Out of Time." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 821-048, October 2020.

About the Author

Shai Benjamin Bernstein

Associate Professor of Business Administration

Entrepreneurial Management

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Teaching Note | HBS Case Collection | October 2020

NewView Capital and Venture Capital Secondaries

Shai Bernstein

Citation:
Bernstein, Shai. "NewView Capital and Venture Capital Secondaries." Harvard Business School Teaching Note 821-049, October 2020. View Details

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Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

Does Venture Capital Attract Human Capital? Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

Shai Bernstein, Kunal Mehta and Richard Townsend

Attracting talent is widely believed to be critical to the success of a startup. In this paper, we investigate whether potential employee interest in a startup is affected by venture capital funding. We do so by analyzing a field experiment conducted on Angel-List Talent, a large online search platform for startup jobs. In the experiment, whether a startup was funded by top-tier VCs and/or whether it was funded recently is randomly highlighted in search results. We find that the same startup receives significantly more interest from potential employees when the fact that it was funded by a top-tier VC is highlighted. In contrast, highlighting the fact that a startup was funded recently has no effect. High-quality job candidates care the most about the identities of startup investors. The results provide direct evidence of the certification role played by VCs and their impact on the labor market.

Keywords: Startup; funding; Venture Capital; Business Startups; Employees; Attitudes;

Citation:
Bernstein, Shai, Kunal Mehta, and Richard Townsend. "Does Venture Capital Attract Human Capital? Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 21-049, October 2020. View Details

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Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

Flight to Safety: How Economic Downturns Affect Talent Flows to Startups

Shai Benjamin Bernstein, Richard Townsend and Ting Xu

This paper investigates how economic downturns affect the flow of human capital to startups. Using proprietary data from AngelList Talent, we study how individuals’ online job searches and applications changed during the emergence of the COVID-19 crisis. We find that job seekers shifted their searches toward larger firms and away from early stage ventures, even within the same individual over time. Simultaneously, job seekers broadened their other search parameters, considering lower salaries and a wider variety of job types, roles, markets, and locations. Relative to larger firms, early stage ventures experienced a decline in the number of applications per job posting, a decline driven by higher quality and more experienced job seekers. This led to a deterioration in the quality of the human capital pool available to early stage ventures during the downturn. These declines hold within a firm as well as within a job posting over time. Our findings uncover a flight to safety channel in the labor market, which may amplify the pro-cyclical nature of entrepreneurial activities.

Keywords: startup labor market; flight to safety; COVID-19; recession; Business Startups; Human Capital; Business Cycles; Health Pandemics;

Citation:
Bernstein, Shai Benjamin, Richard Townsend, and Ting Xu. "Flight to Safety: How Economic Downturns Affect Talent Flows to Startups." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 21-045, September 2020. View Details

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CleanWater, Inc.: Running Dry & Out of Time

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