{"id":20290,"date":"2025-09-28T16:44:38","date_gmt":"2025-09-28T14:44:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesmartcityjournal.cibeles.net\/sin-categoria\/for-startup-success-teams-with-both-u-s-born-and-immigrant-founders-have-an-edge\/"},"modified":"2025-09-28T16:47:34","modified_gmt":"2025-09-28T14:47:34","slug":"for-startup-success-teams-with-both-u-s-born-and-immigrant-founders-have-an-edge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thesmartcityjournal.com\/en\/business\/for-startup-success-teams-with-both-u-s-born-and-immigrant-founders-have-an-edge","title":{"rendered":"For startup success, teams with both U.S.-born and immigrant founders have an edge"},"content":{"rendered":"

When immigrant and U.S.-born entrepreneurs team up, their startups perform better than those founded by either group alone,\u00a0<\/span><\/i>according to a new study<\/span><\/i><\/a>.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

An analysis of nearly 91,000 U.S. startups by researchers\u00a0<\/span>Timothy McQuade<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/span>Amir Kermani<\/span><\/a>\u00a0from UC Berkeley Haas and\u00a0<\/span>Zhao Jin<\/span><\/a>\u00a0of the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business found that companies with mixed founder teams grow faster, employing 20% more people than U.S. native-only ventures three years after launch. They also raise larger funding rounds and are more likely to be acquired or go public.<\/span><\/p>\n

The advantages appear to come from expanded access to talent pools, international funding sources, and international markets, the researchers say.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBy exploiting these broader networks, they get higher quality labor, higher quality sources of capital, and more product market access,\u201d says McQuade, an associate professor and California Chancellor\u2019s Chair of Real Estate and Land Economics at the Haas School.<\/span><\/p>\n

Collaborative \u201csecret sauce\u201d<\/h2>\n

High-skilled immigration remains at the forefront of the policy debate in the United States\u2014most recently with\u00a0<\/span>President Trump\u2019s proposed overhaul of the H-1B visa program<\/span><\/a>. While the economic consequences of high-skilled immigration are multifaceted and complex, there is significant evidence that immigrants play an important role in U.S. innovation and creation of new companies. For example, immigrants comprised 23% of the total workforce in STEM occupations.\u00a0<\/span>As of 2022<\/span><\/a>\u00a0the four most valuable private, venture-backed U.S. companies had immigrant founders (SpaceX, Stripe, Instacart, Databricks), as did three of the most valuable public companies globally (Alphabet, Nvidia, Tesla).<\/span><\/p>\n

At the same time, many immigrant founders collaborate with U.S.-born entrepreneurs when starting a company. The researchers were interested in whether such collaborations between immigrant and native entrepreneurs lead to greater startup success. \u201cWe wanted to understand whether mixed entrepreneurial teams could create synergies leading to higher employment, larger funding rounds, and more successful exits,\u201d says McQuade. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The researchers merged startup data from Crunchbase with data from Revelio Labs, which draws from LinkedIn profiles to provide detailed information on the employment, education, and skillsets of more than 850 million people in over 200 countries. Through Revelio, the researchers were able to identify individual founders of the startups in Crunchbase. Their sample consisted of nearly 135,000 entrepreneurs who founded almost 91,000 companies in the U.S. between 2000 and 2022.<\/span><\/p>\n

Entrepreneurship trends<\/h2>\n

Their initial review of the data showed:<\/span><\/p>\n