Who’s Winning the “Survivor” Race? Gazelle or Non-Gazelle Startups

High-growth firms are of particular interest for academics and policymakers due to their serious contributions to the economy, job market, and knowledge creation. Previous studies have majorly focused on firm growth rates, their persistence over time, and their determinants. Nevertheless, open research windows still remain in predicting what sort of companies will grow or even survive and in understanding the inconsistency of high-growth levels. The complexity of the relationship macroeconomic environment, high-growth regimes and firm capabilities deserves further research efforts. Here we will focus on the microeconomic determinants of startups’ survival, namely, the founder’s attributes and the firm’ characteristics and capabilities, and their relation with business survival, contrasting gazelle and non-gazelle startups. To address this, we use a Cox proportional hazard model, for a sample of 4919 firms, collected from the Kauffman Foundation Survey. Results reveal that the main entrepreneur and entrepreneurial-level determinants of firm survival are the founders’ college education, IP activity, firms’ small- and medium-size, and the gazelle condition impact on the firms’ chances of survival. Taken these all together and including the moderating effect of startup capitalization, results point to the fact that owners’ work experience and the small- and medium-sized companies as well as the companies’ R&D activities moderated by capitalization access increases the chances of firm survival. Crisis spurs firms’ exit, nonetheless startups pursuing a competitive advantage strategy and the moderating effect of startup capital on their internal R&D activities increase the chances of survival.