Thanks so much, Jeff! Looking forward to discussing it in person soon!

Btw, this is another good read: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

The full paper is now on @ssrn.bsky.social and forthcoming in the Cardozo Law Review.

Comments and feedback are most welcome!

👉 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

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@eui-eu.bsky.social

These dynamics shape where and how startups incorporate, how Unicorns emerge, and the governance risks that accumulate in private markets.

In short: corporate law matters for startup ecosystems—just not in the way the traditional literature assumes.

7/

Using a new Unicorn dataset, I identify 2 previously unrecognized patterns in talent & capital mobility:

#FounderDrain → entrepreneurs moving to jurisdictions with enabling corporate laws

#OffshoreGovernance → multi-jurisdictional structures VCs use to bypass corp. laws

6/

This flexibility is highly selective.

Countries adopt politically easier reforms (like multiple-vote shares) while leaving intact rigid rules that actually limit founder–investor deals, especially around board powers.

5/

Corporate laws are not uniformly enabling.

And—in contrast to classic measures used in financial economics (e.g., the anti-director index)—
the #SCLIndex shows a clear trend toward greater flexibility.

But…

4/

With support from an extraordinary international team of legal researchers, I built the #StartupCorporateLaw (SCL) Index—a 20-year, 12-country measure of the corporate legal rules that frame founder–investor relations.

The results challenge the conventional wisdom

3/

For decades, law and finance scholars have argued that corporate law is largely irrelevant for startups: founders and VCs can simply “contract around” legal rules.

That claim never matched my own experience. So I decided to test it.

2/

Thank you very much!