How Founder Expertise Shapes the Impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence on Digital Ventures

The rapid diffusion of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has substantially lowered the costs of launching and developing digital ventures. GenAI can potentially both enable previously unviable entrepreneurial ideas by lowering resource needs and improve the performance of existing ventures. We explore how founders' technical and managerial expertise shapes GenAI's impact on digital ventures along these dimensions. Exploiting exogenous variation in GenAI usage across venture categories and the timing of its broad availability for software tasks (e.g., GitHub Copilot's public release and subsequent GenAI tools), we find that the number of new venture launches increased and the median time to launch decreased significantly more in categories with relatively high GenAI usage. GenAI's effect on new launches is larger for founders without managerial experience or education, while its effect on venture capital (VC) funding likelihood is stronger for founders with technical experience or education. Overall, our results suggest that GenAI expands access to digital entrepreneurship for founders lacking managerial expertise and enhances venture performance among technical founders.