Leavey Professor Jennifer Woolley on Rethinking the IPO Playbook
As the IPO market shows signs of renewed momentum after several volatile years, questions about who gets companies to the public markets, and why, are once again top of mind for founders, investors, and policymakers. At Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business, Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship Jennifer Woolley is helping to reshape that conversation with research that challenges long-standing assumptions about entrepreneurship, gender, and what truly drives a successful IPO.
Woolley’s paper published in the Academy of Management Discoveries, Who Founds Public Firms? The Influence of Founder Gender, Human Capital, and Social Capital on the Likelihood of IPO, examines a question that surprisingly few studies have addressed directly: who actually takes firms public? While much prior research has focused on firm performance after an IPO, Woolley turns the lens to the founding team itself. Specifically, how founders’ experience, education, networks, and gender shape the likelihood that a company will ever reach the public markets.
“The big takeaway is that it’s not just what experience you have – it’s how you use it,” Woolley explains. “We can measure human capital on paper, but what really matters is how founders leverage those experiences as they build and grow their companies.”
Drawing on a comprehensive dataset of U.S. genomics companies founded between 1983 and 2018, Woolley and her coauthor tracked firms through 2022 to see which ultimately went public. The genomics sector offers a rich testing ground: it is science-driven, capital-intensive, and increasingly central to innovation in healthcare, biotech, and AI-enabled research. Their findings reveal that female-founded firms are just as likely to go public as those founded by men, dismantling a long-standing narrative that women-led ventures are less likely to succeed.
Where the research becomes especially compelling is in how founder experience interacts with gender. While men and women in the sample had broadly similar educational and professional backgrounds, those experiences translated very differently into outcomes. For example, women founders with prior IPO experience were significantly more likely than their male counterparts to successfully take a subsequent company public. In other words, when women had navigated the IPO process before, they were exceptionally effective at applying that knowledge again.
This insight is particularly timely as policymakers, venture capital firms, and startup accelerators grapple with how to support underrepresented founders during a period of renewed public-market activity. In 2024 and 2025, IPO filings in biotech and life sciences have rebounded alongside advances in genomics, precision medicine, and artificial intelligence. Woolley’s work suggests that overlooking experienced female founders isn’t just inequitable – it’s economically shortsighted.
The study also complicates traditional ideas about social capital. While elite educational networks and venture capital connections often boost IPO prospects for men, Woolley finds that women do not always benefit from those same networks in the same way. Instead, women appear to rely more heavily and more successfully on deep, role-defying expertise. In high-tech and science-driven sectors where entrepreneurship itself can be seen as a “masculine” domain, women who break through may have their skills and experience scrutinized more closely and ultimately valued more highly.
Beyond its academic contributions, Woolley’s research offers practical guidance for founders and leadership teams. Alignment within the founding team, she notes, matters deeply. “It’s critical for teams to be clear about shared values – how they want to grow, what tradeoffs they’re willing to make, and what an ideal exit looks like,” she says. “Those conversations early on can shape everything that comes later.”
Looking ahead, Woolley is taking this work even further. She plans to interview founders directly to better understand how they made key decisions, such as choosing acquisition over IPO, assembling complementary teams, or leveraging government grants, and how those choices shaped long-term outcomes.
As markets evolve and entrepreneurship continues to diversify, Woolley’s research offers a powerful reminder: success isn’t defined by a single profile or pathway. Instead, it emerges from how founders translate experience into action and how ecosystems learn to recognize that value in all its forms.