Grow Old with Me: The Temporal Dynamics of Founder–Market Interactions in Capturing Market Attention

How do founders attract and sustain market attention over time? While prior research often portrays founders as market-shaping agents, it has overlooked the reciprocal nature of founder–market interactions and how their effects evolve. Drawing on the entrepreneurial action literature and the design view of entrepreneurship, we develop a longitudinal framework that highlights the role of entrepreneurial artifacts—conceptual and material—in capturing market attention. We identify three theoretically relevant pathways to market attention: (1) founders leading the market discussion, (2) founders following the market discussion (both forms of conceptual artifacts), and (3) introducing new products (a material artifact). We argue that the effectiveness of each pathway changes over time. Using a sample of 1,529 U.S. startups founded in 2014–2015 and a novel combination of social media data, text analytics (LDA), and time-series methods (VAR), we find that leading the market discussion is most effective early on, while following becomes more beneficial as time progresses. New product introductions show a delayed but increasingly positive effect. Our study contributes to entrepreneurship research by offering a longitudinal view of how founders can attract and grow market attention through different artifacts, addressing calls for studies on founder–market interaction over time.