Endeavor

2 5 This mass outreach campaign used standard questions, but the interviews were adapted to be more conversational. The survey has remained relatively unchanged over the past few years, with only minor updates to reflect city-specific factors and to address areas where entrepreneurs have been most reticent about sharing data. Endeavor maintains confidentiality, and collected data is accessible only to Endeavor and its research partners. In order to ensure that the company list was comprehensive, a secondary list of companies was compiled from those mentioned in the interviews and surveys that were not already on the primary list. The secondary list also included additional companies sourced from the portfolio companies of those associated with the new mentions. The secondary list also included new companies found on LinkedIn while collecting data on entrepreneurs and companies. These secondary targets then received invitations to complete surveys and interviews. The research and outreach process was repeated multiple times depending on the size of the city. NETWORK ANALYSES: The network analysis process within an entrepreneurship community typically lasts 6-9 months, from the preliminary data gathering to the concluding analysis. Previous research by Endeavor Insight has found that there are four main connection types among entrepreneurs that drive the growth of an industry. For analyses that only include connections between entrepreneurial tech companies, these are: 1. Angel investment; 2. Mentorship; 3. Serial entrepreneurship; and 4. Former employee spinoffs. For analyses that also included support organizations and other stakeholders in the sector, these same four connection types were used while expanding the scope of the first two. Angel investment included all forms of investment. Mentorship was expanded to include any type of entrepreneurship support from a stakeholder in the sector, such as an accelerator or a business plan competition. To learn about these connections within entrepreneurship communities, the surveys and interviews discussed above focused on five core questions: 1. Who invested in your company? (This includes both angel and institutional investors.) 2. Who was your mentor during the growth and development of your company? 3. Have you founded other tech companies in your city? 4. Which of your former employees have gone on to found tech companies in your city? 5. In which entrepreneurship support organizations has your company participated? The survey and interviews also asked about work and education history. LinkedIn provided data to fill in the gaps for founders who did not respond. The responses to these questions formed an edge list of connections among organizations, along with a corresponding set of four types of outbound connections. The edge list then informed all subsequent network analyses and created the network map visualizations in D3. For all network analyses, each founder was assigned to only one company or organization. Where an entrepreneur had founded multiple companies, his or her most prominent company represents his or her influence in the analysis and on the map. This was based on an index of founding date, number of employees, total investment, and exit sizes. Where an entrepreneur had founded an investment firm or support organization, it was the company entity that took precedence (if they founded one), followed by the founder's investment firm, followed by the accelerator or support organization. The size of an organization's influence in the network was based on directed closeness centrality for unconnected graphs. In other words, the size of an organization was a function of the number of first-, second-, third-, etc. degree connections that the organization and its entrepreneurs had to others in the network. There was no limit to the degrees of separation that factored into the centrality score. For example, if one mentor led to a chain of mentorship among entrepreneurs, the original mentor's centrality score will increase even if the mentor only directly mentored one entrepreneur. All connections on the map were weighted equally. Financials and employee counts did not factor into an organization's centrality. Connections accrue to an organization based on the time period in which the connections occurred. Where the year of a connection was unknown, two different approaches informed the date used in the study. Where year information for a former employee, investment, or founder connection was missing, it was assumed that the year of the connection between the source and the target companies was equal to the year the target company was founded. To estimate a mentorship relationship start year, authors reviewed mentorship relationships. Companies were only included in the analy- sis if it was possible to identify their found- ing year. For companies whose employee count could not be determined, authors used the median number of employees for companies founded in the same year, where companies founded over ten years ago were combined into one cohort. Companies that were no longer operating were includ- ed in the analysis if it was possible to find enough data to target them. For companies that were acquired, the number of employ- ees at the time of acquisition were used.

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