Year of entry: 2021
Education:
B.E. in Computer Science, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani
M.S. in Management, ESSEC Business School
MBA (Exchange), Duke University – The Fuqua School of Business
Pulkit Yadav is a PhD candidate in Entrepreneurship & Family Enterprise at INSEAD. His research examines Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA) as a pathway to firm ownership, focusing on how individuals become owners and operators of existing businesses rather than founding new ventures. His work sits at the intersection of entrepreneurship, strategy, and entrepreneurial finance, and is motivated by the growing succession challenge facing developed economies, where millions of privately held small and medium-sized businesses will require new owners as aging founders retire.
His dissertation uses search funds as a setting to study Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA) markets. The first chapter examines how investors evaluate and select search fund entrepreneurs during fundraising. The second chapter studies how buyers search for and evaluate ETA opportunities under information frictions. The third chapter examines how search funds diffuse across countries and entrepreneurial ecosystems as an organizational form.
To study these questions, he built the first large-scale proprietary dataset on search funds, compiling data on search fund entrepreneurs, investors, fundraising, and ETA transactions. He also built a platform for small-business buyers and sellers where real market participants interact, and he uses it to run field experiments. This approach allows him to generate causal evidence on decision-making in ETA markets using a hard-to-reach population that is rarely observable in existing datasets.
His research is supported by the Rudolf and Valeria Maag Scholarship in Entrepreneurship and the Will Mitchell Dissertation Research Grant (WMDRG) from the Strategy Research Foundation of the Strategic Management Society (SMS)
