Should I Stay or Should I Go? Founder Power and Exit via Initial Public Offering

Founders can voluntarily exit their ventures via initial public offerings (IPOs). This study builds on power theory to develop and test a model of founder exit using a dataset of 313 founders from 177 entrepreneurial IPOs between 2002 and 2010. We largely find support for the model—a negative relationship between founder power and full exit. To capture the underlying mechanism of the power–exit relationship, we conducted two experiments in which...