Abstract
Research summary: Entrepreneurship research overlooks the dynamics of changing diversity in founding teams. Our simulations calibrated from existing studies suggest that founding teams that change diversity exhibit greater discounted performance for their ventures due to being less diverse and thus their ventures surviving longer, compared to teams that maintain their diversity. Moreover, discounted performance is higher for teams changing diversity due to other teams' performance than due to their own poor performance. Simulating without membership changes the interdependence between team diversity, venture performance , and team disruption, we find that while team diversity is overall performance-enhancing, this association differs across contexts and its impact varies as ventures mature. Founding team diversity should thus be seen as a continuum where moderate diversity can best serve teams in turbulent environments. Managerial summary: We simulated the behavior of founding teams over time to show that compared to teams that do not change their diversity, those who do experience