A garage and an idea: What more does an entrepreneur need?

California Management Review

Volumn 48, Issue 1, 2005, Pages

  Audia, Pino G ^a   Rider, Christopher I ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 29144516302     PISSN: 00081256     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/41166325     Document Type: Article

References (108)

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2. For a review of this literature, see Pino G. Audia and Chris I. Rider, "Entrepreneurs as Organizational Products: Revisited," in Robert Baum, Michael Frese, and Robert Baron, eds., The Psychology of Entrepreneurship (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005).
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4. M. Overfelt, "Stan-Me-Up," Fortune Small Business, 13/7, (2003): 118, Ibid.
5. PRNewswire, "Garage Technology Ventures Enter 2005 with New Investments and Successful Exits," January 28, 2005.
6. "Garage Technology Ventures Enter 2005 with New Investments and Successful Exits," 2005, Ibid.
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9. Throughout this article, we refer to "the garage" and acknowledge that basements, dorm rooms, and kitchens may easily substitute for "garage" in our arguments.
10. The venture capital investment data was obtained from the MoneyTree Survey, a quarterly data source jointly published by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Thompson Venture Economics, and the National Venture Capital Association, and from Gompers and Lerner, who compiled data from various issues of the Venture Capital Journal. P. Gompers and J. Lerner, "The Venture Capital Revolution," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 15/2 (Spring 2001): 145-168.
11. The data source was Thompson Venture Economics VentureXpert database which, in cooperation with U.S. venture capital firms, tracks U.S. venture capital investment activity. Each company was contacted by phone and then by e-mail if the phone attempt was unsuccessful. Research assistants explained that they were students conducting research on entrepreneurship in the U.S. and then asked to speak to an employee familiar with the company's history (i.e., the founder or a public relations or marketing employee). If no one was available to field the call, the research assistants asked the person who answered the phone if they were familiar with the company's history. Once someone with the company's history was on the phone, research assistants asked: where the founders got the idea for the business; how the founders knew each other; if the startup was related to the founders' previous employment; and if the company started in a garage, basement, or dorm room.
12. For the remaining companies, we were unable to discuss the founding story for a variety of reasons, including dissolved businesses, disconnected phone numbers, a lack of knowledgeable employees to answer our questions, and an unwillingness of employees to answer our questions. Although the response rate is lower than we would like (39%), we did speak to a fairly large number of young startup companies about their founding story and it is unlikely that companies that did or did not start in a garage were more or less likely to discuss the company's history with us. Therefore, the sample is sufficiently large and representative for our research questions.
13. Only one of the eight actually started in a garage.
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19. We use the general term "organizations" here rather than "companies" because many entrepreneurs (including those in our random sample) start companies based upon prior experiences in organizations like research labs, educational institutions, and non-profit organizations. These experiences are often just as important to entrepreneurs as company experiences are.
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106. 〈www.mootcorp.org/index.asp〉
107. 〈http://50k.mit.edu/about/index.php〉
108. For example, ZipRealty, a public firm with a market capitalization of almost $300 million as of May 2005, was a finalist in the 1999 University of California, Berkeley Business Plan Competition.