Founder experience, intellectual property and corporate venture capital: Rethinking knowledge spillovers in highly valued startups

Highly valued ventures represent an important subset of entrepreneurial firms that successfully integrate and commercialise knowledge spillovers. While much of the research examines predictors of high growth, less is known about how founders strategically leverage knowledge-based resources during rapid scaling. This study examines how the prior entrepreneurial experience of founders, intellectual property (IP) and corporate venture capital (CVC) partnerships interact to shape a startup’s likelihood of achieving billion-dollar valuations. Using a curated dataset of 1295 startups, we find that the founding team’s prior entrepreneurial experience and the IP of the startup are complementary in driving unicorn outcomes. However, CVC partnerships, while offering some financial and strategic advantages, constrain IP development and diminish the effectiveness of founder-led innovation. We introduce the ‘Paradox of Relational Spillovers’ to capture the tension between accessing knowledge through partnerships and retaining the autonomy to appropriate it. These findings extend the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship to highly valued ventures and highlight how collaboration with CVCs can be a multifaceted process.