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Working Paper
Failing Just Fine: Assessing Careers of Venture Capital-backed Entrepreneurs via a Non-Wage Measure
This paper proposes a non-pecuniary measure of career achievement: seniority. Based on a database of over 130 million resumes, this metric exploits the variation in how long it takes to attain job titles. When non-monetary factors influence career choice, assessing career attainment via non-wage measures, such as seniority, has significant advantages. Accordingly, we use our seniority measure to study labor market outcomes of VC-backed entrepreneurs. Would-be founders experience accelerated career trajectories prior to founding, significantly outperforming graduates from same-tier colleges ...