The Startup Workforce

Éditeurs invités

• James Bort, DePaul University
• Veroniek Collewaert, Vlerick Business School
• Yuval Engel, University of Amsterdam
• Evy Van Lancker, Ghent University
• Johan Wiklund, Syracuse University

Synthèse

The startup workforce represents a distinct and consequential stakeholder in entrepreneurship that has been systematically understudied relative to founders and funders. Early insights from the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies revealed how organizational changes within startups disproportionately impacted long-tenured employees. This pioneering work laid the foundation for understanding how startups differ from established firms in their approach to human capital, including fundamental aspects such as compensation, staffing, and performance management.

Contemporary research has deepened our understanding of the unique dynamics between startups and their employees. Whereas early research identified demographic patterns, illustrating that startup employees tend to be younger and risk-tolerant, recent work has uncovered more nuanced dynamics. For example, experienced employees often join startups when they have partners with stable careers, but can also command wage premiums as firms grow. Startup employees are drawn in by passionate founders, opportunities for greater freedom and responsibility, and the potential for significant financial upside.

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Thèmes proposés

• Employee motivations and retention across venture stages
• Recruitment, employer branding, and the role of prior affiliations in startup hiring
• The influence of early employees on organizational culture, routines, and strategic direction
• Compensation structures, equity arrangements, and evolving psychological contracts
• Workforce well-being, occupational stress, and founder-employee emotional spillovers
• The impact of hybrid and remote work on startup employment dynamics
• The opportunities and adversity of AI in light of startup employment and work ethic, and workforce diversity, inclusion, and the role of HR professionalization in early-stage ventures
• Worker voice, collective action, and power asymmetries in startups, including unionization, whistleblowing, hustle culture and exploitation, equity and vesting disputes, and the dark side of founder–employee relations
• The regulatory and institutional environment of startup employment, including non-compete enforcement, worker classification, equity taxation, and visa regimes
• Non-standard and hybrid labor forms, including contractors, fractional executives, agencies, platform and ghost work, and globally distributed teams
• Post-startup career trajectories, including employee mobility, alumni networks, and entrepreneurial spawning after exit, acquisition, or failure
• The scaleup transition and its workforce implications, including when and how a startup workforce ceases to be one and how HR professionalization reshapes the employment relation
• AI-native ventures as a new organizational form, where a small number of humans operate agentic systems and the category of workforce is itself reconstituted
• Startup workforces outside North America and Western Europe, including emerging-economy, informal, and cross-border contexts