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How do investors shape the early hiring decisions of startups, and what impact does this guidance have on both immediate hiring outcomes and future fundraising success?

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This video discusses the collaborative process of job design between entrepreneurs and investors in early-stage startups, emphasizing the importance of structuring roles and responsibilities as part of organizational development. It explains that entrepreneurs often engage external collaborators, particularly investors, to help build enduring job structures due to their limited resources. While investors are crucial to the success of startups, the relationship can be fraught with tension as both parties desire control over company direction.

The research conducted via interviews and observations in the startup ecosystem reveals insights into how entrepreneurs and investors navigate the job design process. The findings indicate that job design is especially consequential at early stages, with initial job roles serving as foundational scaffolding for future organizational structures. Despite existing literature primarily focusing on job design as a deliberate internal process, there is limited understanding of how external influences, particularly investors, contribute actively to this process.

The study introduces a two-step model of job design collaborations—recognizing the need for new work and engaging in interrelated processes to allocate tasks across jobs. The collaboration not only addresses immediate hiring needs but also equips entrepreneurs with frameworks for future job design, showing that the collaborative processes yield lasting job structures that adapt as startups grow.

The contribution of this research highlights the significance of external actors in shaping job design and suggests that similar dynamics may occur in established firms, where different types of investors and experts play a role in job design processes. This video opens avenues for understanding how external collaboration can influence organizational structures across various contexts.

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Here are five key points from the video:

1. **Job Design and Organizational Structure**: Entrepreneurs play a crucial role in designing jobs and the surrounding organizational structures, which significantly influence the efficiency of work and employee behavior. These initial job designs create a foundational framework for future organizational development, impacting who is hired, the nature of tasks, and relationships formed within and outside the organization.

2. **Resource Constraints and Collaboration**: Due to limited resources (time, money, expertise), entrepreneurs often seek external collaborators, particularly investors, who can contribute valuable resources and insights for effective job design and organizational structure creation.

3. **Potential Conflicts in Collaboration**: While collaboration between entrepreneurs and investors can lead to improved job design, it may also result in conflicts over control and decision-making within startups, complicating their working relationship as both parties are interested in maintaining influence over the startup's direction.

4. **Importance of Initial Job Designs**: The initial job designs in startups significantly influence subsequent organizational structures and hiring practices, as these early jobs tend to become entrenched over time, limiting flexibility in future job design processes.

5. **Two-Step Model of Job Design Collaboration**: The research identifies a two-step model for job design collaborations, where entrepreneurs recognize the need for job design and then engage with investors to structure jobs effectively. Investors provide expertise or broker connections to others who can assist in job design, leading to the hiring of appropriate talent and ensuring enduring organizational processes.

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Here are some key quotes and concepts from the video that capture the main ideas:

1. **Job Design Importance**:
- "Entrepreneurs design jobs, and the structures that will surround them. These designs determine what work is done, how well the work is done, and how employees behave in their jobs."

2. **Resource Constraints**:
- "It's a process that can actually be costly in terms of scarce resources of time, money, expertise, and so it's normal that they want to do whatever they can to avoid repeating the process by creating the structures that will endure."

3. **Role of Investors**:
- "Investors are a key set of actors who may be available, qualified, and willing to play this role. They are literally invested in the success of startups, and they hold many resources that are useful for designing these jobs and structures."

4. **Control and Collaboration Tensions**:
- "However, there is, there is a potential conflict, because both entrepreneurs and investors, they want to maintain control over the future of startups and how things are done, right? And so that makes the collaboration in this job design process a little bit more complicated."

5. **Long-Term Influence of Initial Job Designs**:
- "Initial jobs designs...have an outsized and consequential influence on what other jobs and routines are built, who is hired with what kind of skills, what work is done, and how well that work is done."

6. **Evolving Nature of Job Design**:
- "Managers often lack the information on how to design jobs and what they need to do moving forward. And so that means that the jobs actually can change and evolve."

7. **External Influences on Job Design**:
- "These outside forces can be sources of input into this process...but the research on this translation process or this design process is actually very limited if we go to the entrepreneurship literature."

8. **Nature of Collaboration**:
- "We are talking about a potential collaboration between these two parties...how they can overcome these challenges and how they can find a path to move forward and to move beyond these tensions."

9. **Two-Step Model of Job Design Collaborations**:
- "The first step is recognizing that there is a need to do new work and to do job design...The second step is that investors and entrepreneurs engage in two interrelated processes of determining how."

10. **Consequences of Collaboration**:
- "We believe that this collaboration process solves the immediate problem that triggered it. New jobs are designed, and in many cases, people are hired to fill in these jobs."

11. **Contribution to Literature**:
- "The main contribution of this paper is creating an understanding of how outsiders can collaborate in creating structures to have a lasting impact."

These quotes summarize key aspects of the video, including the collaborative dynamics between entrepreneurs and investors, the significance of job design in startups, and the implications of external influences on organizational structure.

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As part of their growth process,

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entrepreneurs design jobs,

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and the structures that will surround them.

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Um, these designs determine, what work is done,

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how well the work is done,

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and how employees behave in their jobs.

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And later on become the scaffolding on which later

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organizational structures are going to be built.

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Um, and it's, it's a process

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that can actually be costly in terms of scarce resources

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of time, money, expertise,

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and can actually put entrepreneurs at risk.

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Uh, and so it's normal that they want

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to do whatever they can to avoid repeating the process

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by creating the structures that we'll endure.

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And because they lack these resources that I just mentioned,

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they, they, they try to engage external

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collaborators in this process.

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People who can, who can come in and, and,

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and help them figuring out these structures

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and build them in a way that will well endure into future.

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Um, and investors are a key set of actors

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who may be available, qualified,

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and willing to play this role.

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They are literally invested in the success of startups,

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and they hold many resources that are useful for

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designing these jobs and structures.

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Um, however, there is, there is, a potential conflict,

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I would say tension inherent in this relationship

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because both entrepreneurs

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and investors, they wanna maintain control over the future

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of startups and how things are done right?

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And so that makes the collaboration in this job design

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process a little bit more complicated, right?

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And so we thought that we wanna know how investors

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and entrepreneurs actually collaborate to design jobs

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and ultimately create structures that will endure.

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And to be able to understand that,

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we drew on extensive interviews and,

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and observations in the context of startup ecosystem,

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in with the early stage, tech startups to be able

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to answer this question.

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I think the first line of literature that I need

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to mention here is, the one that shows that the,

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that the design of jobs, this process

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of allocating tasks into

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and across jobs,

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is really consequential for early stage startups.

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Um, it has been shown

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that adding the fifth job in an organization

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represent a much more substantive change than designing the

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55th or the 500th job, right?

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So actually in one of the conseque, conceptual,

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papers that I wrote with my co-authors recently,

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we argued that these initial jobs

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are the scaffolding on which organizational,

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designs are based on

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and ha they have an outsize

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and consequential influence on what other jobs

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and routines are built, who is hired with what kind

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of skills, what work is done,

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and how well that work is done,

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and what relationships are, are created as a result

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of these structures, within

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and outside the organizations.

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And there is a good literature on imprinting.

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Um, and this literature imprinting shows that as startups,

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mature and grow,

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their initial structures actually become entrenched

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and shape what jobs are later are put in place, who is hired

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and what resources become available.

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So initial jobs are important.

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They also become entrenched in the organizations.

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These are two important part of the literature.

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Despite the importance of job, there is little knowledge

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of the process of the design in any organization,

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let alone startups.

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Um, and again, what we have in the literature

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around the job design tend to focus on very internal

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and, intentional process of job design.

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What it means is that we are talking about job design

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as a deliberate process where well-informed managers

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allocate tasks to meet managerial admin technical needs.

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In one of my previous, related, research projects,

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that is kind of based on the same data set as this one,

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my co-author

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and I, we showed that, one problem

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with this perspective is that

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actually managers often lack the information on how

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to design jobs and what they need to do moving forward.

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And so that means that the jobs actually can change

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and evolve, between a time a manager decides

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to hire someone to the time they actually hire

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someone into a job.

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Because through these interactions and,

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and conversations that they have with other people,

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they get a better understanding of what the job needs to be.

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Uh, and so, what these outside forces can be sources

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of input into this process, they are mostly

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considered passively providing work demands, right?

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Um, that form the mandates of what work should be done,

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and how these jobs should be created.

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Um, and these mandates, again, in the literature are,

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are mostly ambiguous,

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and they require a lot of translation

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to become actual job design.

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Um, but the, the research on this, translation process

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or this design process is actually very limited if we go

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to the entrepreneurship literature.

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Um, the focus of much of this, research on job design

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and organizations are around the role of founders as either,

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either themselves having designed blueprints,

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or as the funnels through which

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outside ideas into enter into the job design process.

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Um, but the literature speaks little to the process

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through which these ideas funneled through founders come

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to directly influence structures.

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One way for the entrepreneurs

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or founders to overcome these liabilities of newness and,

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and, and challenges with respect to job design would be

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to engage outsiders who might know more

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or who might know someone who might know more, right?

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And who would bring these, really,

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valuable resources to these collaborations.

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Going back to the entrepreneurship literature,

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investors are one set of actors who can offer a lot

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of resources, both financial and social.

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Um, and the evidence suggests

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that they do much more than that.

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They bring advice,

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and some of that advice is specifically around hiring,

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and it goes beyond the top management teams.

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Um, however, they do not offer these advices for free.

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Um, they often want control

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and the desire, to basically know what is going

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to happen in future.

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Uh, and that may threaten entrepreneurs' desire

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to be independent.

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Um, and, and they're consistent with this.

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There is this popular image on social media and,

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and popular media that as well as academic literature that,

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this investor, entrepreneur, relationship,

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is, is sometimes

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has a lot of tensions in it

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and is not easy to navigate for either of the parties.

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And, this project, I think,

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is an answer to that.

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Um, we are talking about

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a potential collaboration between these two parties

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that goes beyond these, popular image of,

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them always fighting together to, to maintain control.

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Um, because past reach research provides less clarity of

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how they, they can overcome these challenges

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and how they can find a, a path to move forward and,

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and to move beyond these tensions,

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in this crucial process of, job design

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In, in, in a way that kind of supports creating structures

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that endure into the future

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and helps the startups grow and survive.

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We thought that here we can examine this

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and find out, basically about the details

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of this process and what goes on

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and what are the consequences,

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because the question that we had was exploratory in nature.

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Um, we thought that qualitative methods were appropriate

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because we, this is an unknown territory, so we need

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to first know about what is going on.

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And qualitative methods, would allow us

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to learn about the phenomenon of interest as

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in a situated manner, right?

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Um, they would provide information about how

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and when startups and, and,

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and investors collaborate around hiring and job design

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and how these collaboration unfolds

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and what are the implications.

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Um, for this particular paper,

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our data came from two distinct,

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but complementary, data sets.

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And across the two startup settings, we included multi

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early stage startup, interviews.

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Um, they were mostly tech, tech enabled startups

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because in that way we could basically keep some aspects

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constant, but to still see a broader range of activities

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and, and to understand more about

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how different organizational

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and contextual conditions would play in this process.

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The first project, which actually we, we,

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we wrote a paper based on the, this first dataset,

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previously is a study of unintended consequences

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of hiring in entrepreneurial firms,

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primarily using interviews

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and less observations, between 2014

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and 2021,

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because the job design is very much linked

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to hiring the data

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provided us with information on job design.

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Um, based on our initial learning about role of

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external actors in general, and investors as a powerful

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and influential, group of outside actors,

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we strategically chose the context of our second project,

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which was accelerators.

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Um, because we thought that it would give us opportunity

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to look more closely at the influence

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of investors on startups.

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A project came from an ethnographic study,

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including new interviews

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and observations conducted between 2021

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and 2022, which startup teams

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and investors at a FinTech accelerator, based in Canada.

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And across these two project, we conducted,

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semi-structured interviews,

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with more than 100 individuals in more than 100 startups

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and associated organizations.

214
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Um, we interview different types of informants,

215
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including investors, angel investors, VCs,

216
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accelerators, entrepreneurs, including founders,

217
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hiring managers, those who were working

218
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for different startups, those

219
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who were seeking jobs in startups

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and ex experts in the, in the startup ecosystem.

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We also did more than 250 hours of observations,

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across these two projects.

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Um, in the first one, more than one 50, hours,

224
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were made mostly during startup events and fairs and,

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and university fairs and, and all of that in the,

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and, in the second one, the observations were mainly

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during the weekly sessions between startup teams

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and investors were basically, they would get,

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they would talk about all, all of, the, the progress

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that ha they have been experiencing, the,

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the relationships that they have built, the, the feedback

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that they got, in that week.

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And then investors would basically provide

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them with some feedback.

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Um, and at the last step,

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we gathered information on the startups,

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and they're structured from LinkedIn

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and their company websites, over three years

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after they graduated from those accelerators to learn about

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how the jobs and incumbents stayed in place

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and whether they, they they dissolved or expanded,

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and, how many people were hired afterwards,

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and so on and so forth.

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We developed a two step model

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of job design collaborations.

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That's our main model and main finding, in this model.

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Um, we have two steps.

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Um, the first step is recognizing that there is a need

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to do new work and to do job design.

250
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And this is triggered in discussions

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of the problem in three different areas, discussions

252
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between founders and investors.

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One area is founders doing too much work,

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one area is having a vacant job,

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and the third area is various forms of expansions in, in,

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in whatever they were doing.

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The second step is that investors

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and entrepreneurs, they engaged in an,

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in two interrelated processes of determining how

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to allocate those tasks, across new and existing jobs.

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And so first, when investors have relevant expertise,

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they work together with entrepreneurs to design jobs

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by offering very detailed advice on what jobs are needed

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and how they should be structured, how

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to write job description, where to post, how

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to do interviews, how to evaluate, and so forth.

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Second is the case where investors actually do not have

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that expertise themselves, right?

269
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And so investors in those cases act as a brokers

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between entrepreneurs

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and either people who can serve as living templates

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for the job design, or who can help them build job designs

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or provide links to still more people who can serve

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as living templates.

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And these two allocation processes are basically the

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backbones of two pathways that we call building

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and brokering, to collaborative job design.

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And its multiple consequences.

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Um, we believe that this collaboration process

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solves the immediate problem that triggered it.

281
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Uh, new jobs are designed,

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and in many cases, people are hired to fill in these jobs.

283
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Entrepreneurs learn a general framework of how

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to do the job design and how to hire that they can, they can

285
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and actually do apply in future.

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And so what we see is that these jobs

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and processes endure, even as startups face other changes

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and other challenges in their growth

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and in their, journey, forward.

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The main contribution of this paper is

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creating an understanding of

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how outsiders can collaborate in creating structures to have

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a lasting impact.

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And, and more specifically about

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how job design process happens, our description

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of this collaborative job design process,

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I think arguments are knowledge of the transfer

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and translation of, of elements of job design from

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outside organizational boundaries.

300
00:16:58.785 --> 00:17:03.125
And, even though there is considerable evidence

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that the forces of, let's say technology, social movements,

302
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regulations, new regulations, unexpected exogenous events

303
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create new work tasks to be done

304
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and probably need, alteration of existing jobs,

305
00:17:21.935 --> 00:17:26.085
there is less known, about how

306
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external actors become active contributors in this process.

307
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And we provide evidence for one set of external actors,

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investors and, and how they engaged in this process

309
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and in the details of the job design process,

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which we already talked about,

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but how, how consequential for the survival

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of startups it can be.

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And we believe that similar phenomena of

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outsiders collaborating in the job design would be seen even

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in the established firms and in the established jobs.

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Um, most probably in, in more established firms.

317
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Other type of investors might, might,

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might get engaged in this process.

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So for instance, institutional investors,

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board members, some representatives of bigger investors

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and so on and so forth.

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But we think that we might also see other types of experts

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and external actors influencing the hiring

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and job design process for both new

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and established organizations.

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And, and basically,

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these actors can become partners in designing the jobs,

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that, that, the work is assembled into.

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And, and, and people will, will hire into

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and perform, their jobs

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and get engaged in the routines of startups and

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or established organizations.

Collaborative Job Design in Startups

00:00:00 - As part of their growth process, entrepreneurs design jobs, and the structures that will surround them. these designs determine, what work is done, how well the work is done, and how employees behave in their jobs. And later on become the scaffolding on which later organizational structures are going to be built. and it's, it's a process that can actually be costly in terms of scarce resources of time, money, expertise,

00:00:35 - and so it's normal that they want to do whatever they can to avoid repeating the process by creating the structures that we'll endure. And because they lack these resources that I just mentioned, they, they, they try to engage external collaborators in this process. People who can, who can come in and, and, and help them figuring out these structures

00:01:10 - and investors are a key set of actors who may be available, qualified, and willing to play this role. They are literally invested in the success of startups, and they hold many resources that are useful for designing these jobs and structures. however, there is, there is, a potential conflict,

Collaborative Job Design in Startups: Navigating Control Between Entrepreneurs and Investors

00:01:38 - because both entrepreneurs and investors, they wanna maintain control over the future of startups and how things are done right? And so that makes the collaboration in this job design process a little bit more complicated, right? And so we thought that we wanna know how investors and entrepreneurs actually collaborate to design jobs and ultimately create structures that will endure. And to be able to understand that,

00:02:11 - and observations in the context of startup ecosystem, in with the early stage, tech startups to be able to answer this question. I think the first line of literature that I need to mention here is, the one that shows that the, that the design of jobs, this process of allocating tasks into and across jobs,

00:02:43 - it has been shown that adding the fifth job in an organization represent a much more substantive change than designing the 55th or the 500th job, right? So actually in one of the conseque, conceptual, papers that I wrote with my co-authors recently, we argued that these initial jobs

Impact of Initial Job Design on Startups' Organizational Structure

00:03:12 - designs are based on and ha they have an outsize and consequential influence on what other jobs and routines are built, who is hired with what kind of skills, what work is done, and how well that work is done, and what relationships are, are created as a result of these structures, within and outside the organizations.

00:03:43 - and this literature imprinting shows that as startups, mature and grow, their initial structures actually become entrenched and shape what jobs are later are put in place, who is hired and what resources become available. So initial jobs are important. They also become entrenched in the organizations. These are two important part of the literature. Despite the importance of job, there is little knowledge

00:04:16 - let alone startups. and again, what we have in the literature around the job design tend to focus on very internal and, intentional process of job design. What it means is that we are talking about job design as a deliberate process where well-informed managers allocate tasks to meet managerial admin technical needs.

The Challenges of Job Design in Managerial Decision-Making

00:04:48 - that is kind of based on the same data set as this one, my co-author and I, we showed that, one problem with this perspective is that actually managers often lack the information on how to design jobs and what they need to do moving forward. And so that means that the jobs actually can change and evolve, between a time a manager decides to hire someone to the time they actually hire

00:05:16 - Because through these interactions and, and conversations that they have with other people, they get a better understanding of what the job needs to be. and so, what these outside forces can be sources of input into this process, they are mostly considered passively providing work demands, right? that form the mandates of what work should be done, and how these jobs should be created.

00:05:50 - are mostly ambiguous, and they require a lot of translation to become actual job design. but the, the research on this, translation process or this design process is actually very limited if we go to the entrepreneurship literature. the focus of much of this, research on job design and organizations are around the role of founders as either, either themselves having designed blueprints,

Collaborative Dynamics in Job Design: The Role of External Actors

00:06:23 - outside ideas into enter into the job design process. but the literature speaks little to the process through which these ideas funneled through founders come to directly influence structures. One way for the entrepreneurs or founders to overcome these liabilities of newness and, and, and challenges with respect to job design would be to engage outsiders who might know more or who might know someone who might know more, right?

00:06:58 - valuable resources to these collaborations. Going back to the entrepreneurship literature, investors are one set of actors who can offer a lot of resources, both financial and social. and the evidence suggests that they do much more than that. They bring advice, and some of that advice is specifically around hiring, and it goes beyond the top management teams. however, they do not offer these advices for free.

00:07:29 - and the desire, to basically know what is going to happen in future. and that may threaten entrepreneurs' desire to be independent. and, and they're consistent with this. There is this popular image on social media and, and popular media that as well as academic literature that, this investor, entrepreneur, relationship, is, is sometimes

Navigating Collaboration: Overcoming Tensions Between Entrepreneurs and Investors

00:08:03 - and is not easy to navigate for either of the parties. And, this project, I think, is an answer to that. we are talking about a potential collaboration between these two parties that goes beyond these, popular image of, them always fighting together to, to maintain control.

00:08:40 - how they, they can overcome these challenges and how they can find a, a path to move forward and, and to move beyond these tensions, in this crucial process of, job design In, in, in a way that kind of supports creating structures that endure into the future and helps the startups grow and survive. We thought that here we can examine this

00:09:10 - of this process and what goes on and what are the consequences, because the question that we had was exploratory in nature. we thought that qualitative methods were appropriate because we, this is an unknown territory, so we need to first know about what is going on. And qualitative methods, would allow us to learn about the phenomenon of interest as in a situated manner, right?

Collaborative Dynamics in Startup Job Design

00:09:42 - and when startups and, and, and investors collaborate around hiring and job design and how these collaboration unfolds and what are the implications. for this particular paper, our data came from two distinct, but complementary, data sets. And across the two startup settings, we included multi early stage startup, interviews.

00:10:15 - because in that way we could basically keep some aspects constant, but to still see a broader range of activities and, and to understand more about how different organizational and contextual conditions would play in this process. The first project, which actually we, we, we wrote a paper based on the, this first dataset, previously is a study of unintended consequences

00:10:45 - primarily using interviews and less observations, between 2014 and 2021, because the job design is very much linked to hiring the data provided us with information on job design. based on our initial learning about role of external actors in general, and investors as a powerful and influential, group of outside actors,

Investigating Investor Influence in Startup Accelerators

00:11:16 - which was accelerators. because we thought that it would give us opportunity to look more closely at the influence of investors on startups. A project came from an ethnographic study, including new interviews and observations conducted between 2021 and 2022, which startup teams and investors at a FinTech accelerator, based in Canada.

00:11:48 - semi-structured interviews, with more than 100 individuals in more than 100 startups and associated organizations. we interview different types of informants, including investors, angel investors, VCs, accelerators, entrepreneurs, including founders, hiring managers, those who were working for different startups, those

00:12:16 - and ex experts in the, in the startup ecosystem. We also did more than 250 hours of observations, across these two projects. in the first one, more than one 50, hours, were made mostly during startup events and fairs and, and university fairs and, and all of that in the, and, in the second one, the observations were mainly during the weekly sessions between startup teams

Collaborative Job Design in Startups: Progress and Feedback Mechanisms

00:12:51 - they would talk about all, all of, the, the progress that ha they have been experiencing, the, the relationships that they have built, the, the feedback that they got, in that week. And then investors would basically provide them with some feedback. and at the last step, we gathered information on the startups, and they're structured from LinkedIn and their company websites, over three years after they graduated from those accelerators to learn about

00:13:25 - and whether they, they they dissolved or expanded, and, how many people were hired afterwards, and so on and so forth. We developed a two step model of job design collaborations. That's our main model and main finding, in this model. we have two steps. the first step is recognizing that there is a need to do new work and to do job design.

00:13:57 - of the problem in three different areas, discussions between founders and investors. One area is founders doing too much work, one area is having a vacant job, and the third area is various forms of expansions in, in, in whatever they were doing. The second step is that investors and entrepreneurs, they engaged in an, in two interrelated processes of determining how

Collaborative Job Design: Investor and Entrepreneur Synergy

00:14:35 - And so first, when investors have relevant expertise, they work together with entrepreneurs to design jobs by offering very detailed advice on what jobs are needed and how they should be structured, how to write job description, where to post, how to do interviews, how to evaluate, and so forth. Second is the case where investors actually do not have

00:15:04 - And so investors in those cases act as a brokers between entrepreneurs and either people who can serve as living templates for the job design, or who can help them build job designs or provide links to still more people who can serve as living templates. And these two allocation processes are basically the backbones of two pathways that we call building

00:15:39 - And its multiple consequences. we believe that this collaboration process solves the immediate problem that triggered it. new jobs are designed, and in many cases, people are hired to fill in these jobs. Entrepreneurs learn a general framework of how to do the job design and how to hire that they can, they can

Collaborative Job Design: The Role of External Actors in Startups

00:16:08 - And so what we see is that these jobs and processes endure, even as startups face other changes and other challenges in their growth and in their, journey, forward. The main contribution of this paper is creating an understanding of how outsiders can collaborate in creating structures to have a lasting impact.

00:16:38 - how job design process happens, our description of this collaborative job design process, I think arguments are knowledge of the transfer and translation of, of elements of job design from outside organizational boundaries. And, even though there is considerable evidence that the forces of, let's say technology, social movements,

00:17:13 - create new work tasks to be done and probably need, alteration of existing jobs, there is less known, about how external actors become active contributors in this process. And we provide evidence for one set of external actors, investors and, and how they engaged in this process

Collaborative Job Design: Impact on Startups and Beyond

00:17:44 - which we already talked about, but how, how consequential for the survival of startups it can be. And we believe that similar phenomena of outsiders collaborating in the job design would be seen even in the established firms and in the established jobs. most probably in, in more established firms.

00:18:15 - might get engaged in this process. So for instance, institutional investors, board members, some representatives of bigger investors and so on and so forth. But we think that we might also see other types of experts and external actors influencing the hiring and job design process for both new and established organizations. And, and basically,

00:19:01 - that, that, the work is assembled into. And, and, and people will, will hire into and perform, their jobs and get engaged in the routines of startups and or established organizations.

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