The effect of immigrants in the founding team on the international attention of new ventures

Abstract

Do immigrants as part of founding teams lead to internationally recognized new ventures? Using secondary data from multiple sources, we find a positive relationship between immigrants on the founding team of digitized US-based new ventures and international attention of the firm and that this relationship is negatively moderated by both the financial situation of the new venture and the size of the new venture’s top management team. Our findings suggest that founders from foreign nationalities play a key role in the international attention attraction efforts of newly founded US firms. Thus, it is emphasized that immigrant entrepreneurs play a key role in enabling internationalization efforts of new ventures, especially by aligning available resources with international operations of new ventures.