New venture dissolution and the comobility of new venture teams

While the dissolution of new ventures is a common phenomenon in the organizational landscape, it seldom means the end of the road for those involved in the new venture. Nevertheless, most research treats this dissolution with a sense of finality. Using the Danish Integrated Database for Labor Market Research (IDA), we explore the persistence of cofounders and early employees to continue their work relationships after the dissolution of the new venture. We investigate where these team members continue their career and whether they pursue entrepreneurship together in another new venture. Overall, over 18.3% move jointly, and comobility is more prevalent among new venture team members who worked jointly prior to founding the new venture and among those new venture teams demonstrating high levels of homogeneity. Moreover, comovers tend toward small firms, and comobility occurs largely in similar industry. A large share of comovers move to new ventures, which is indicative of serial or habitual new venture teams. This also raises further question on team-level dimension of learning from failure. There is lots of empirical research that investigates the emergence and growth of team-based new ventures. But what happens with these new venture teams when the business they established closes? Do these teams outlive the startup itself? In this study, we investigate this topic in detail by following the career trajectories of new venture team (NVT) members. Based on a sample of 2400 team-based Danish startups, we find that 18% of NVT members continue their collaboration. The results demonstrate that similarity between NVT members, the extent that they are engaged in knowledge intensive work, and prior joint work experience are drivers of such comobility. Also, we find that NVT comobility often means re-entering into entrepreneurship. The fact that such comobility is common and that many re-enter into entrepreneurship means that our study has implications for both research and practice. More specifically on how learning from failure takes place in the setting of NVT teams.