Does hiring a professional CEO at the founding stage improve startup outcomes compared to founder-led startups?

This thesis examines how founder-led and professional-led startups differ in performance using a dataset of 7,143 venture-backed firms in North America and Europe with manually validated CEO classifications. Professional-led startups raise more capital and fail less often, while founder-led startups show no exit disadvantage but face nearly twice the odds of failure. Yet founders who reach an IPO command valuations approximately twice as large as their professional-led counterparts. In the field of Artificial Intelligence, founder-led firms raise more funding. These patterns suggest that neither leadership type dominates universally. The optimal configuration depends on stage, sector, and context.