AI Coding Tools and Digital Entrepreneurship: The Role of Software Expertise

Ruiqing Cao and Abhishek Bhatia

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: While digital technologies expand entrepreneurial access by providing technical resources, it is less known whether they enable ventures to create durable value and whether they can substitute for technical expertise accumulated through software work experience. This paper studies how digital ventures respond to the wide diffusion of AI coding tools, and how these responses are shaped by founders' software expertise. Measuring product-category exposure to AI coding using pre-LLM product descriptions and linking venture launch, traffic, and financing data, we show that exposure to AI coding increases first-time venture launches after 2022Q4, while entrants are less likely to survive but raise more financing conditional on one-year survival. Crucially, founders with software work experience drive a larger fraction of new launches, ameliorate the decline in survival when product development is partially rather than fully automated, and explain all of the increase in venture financing.

Date: 2025-11, Revised 2026-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ain, nep-cfn and nep-ent
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.06545 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2511.06545

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().