• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.27-40
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• 2023

This study analyzes the factors affecting the survival of young start-up companies. A youth start-up company was defined as a company with a founder's age under 39. The study was based on evaluation data from 3,540 companies evaluated by the Technology Guarantee Fund to support youth start-up guarantees during the period from 2012 to 2015. In this study, independent variables were defined as founder characteristics, start-up environment, and start-up strategy, and entrepreneurship, knowledge level, and development capabilities were set as variables for start-up characteristics, competition conditions and comparative advantage with alternatives in the start-up environment, and item novelty, commercialization plan and financing plan were set as variables. For variable measurement, the evaluation index of the youth start-up evaluation model of the Technology Guarantee Fund was used. Management performance was defined as the survival of a company, and the survival of 12, 36, 60, and 84 months was measured based on the occurrence of insolvency registered by the Korea Technology Guarantee Fund. The Cox proportional risk model was used for hypothesis testing. As a result of the analysis, knowledge level and development capability were statistically significant in the characteristics of the founder, and the financing plan in the start-up strategy was statistically significant regardless of the survival period. Among the start-up strategies, the novelty of the item had a positive effect on survival after 36 months. Entrepreneurship was significant only in 12-month survival. The most important order for survival was identified in the order of financing plan, knowledge level, item novelty and development capability, of which the founder's knowledge level in the beginning and the funding plan in the second half had the greatest impact.