Dr. Amir Sariri

Biography

I am an assistant professor of strategic management at Purdue University, currently visiting the TIES group at MIT Sloan School of Management. Before joining Purdue, I founded and led an R&D group, the Creative Destruction Lab, a non-profit mentoring program for technology startups. I continue to help run CDL's Space Stream and advise the R&D team expanding research-grade databases in entrepreneurship studies. My research examines how information asymmetries and heterogeneous beliefs shape entrepreneurial decision-making and firm development. I study how differences in knowledge and beliefs about startup quality affect critical early-stage outcomes. My work has revealed that seemingly implausible ideas can generate extraordinary value, while obvious opportunities may fail, and that structured approaches to learning may improve entrepreneurial resource allocation. During my doctoral studies, I built one of the world's largest relational databases of early-stage entrepreneurship, which uniquely combines structured operational data with unstructured transcripts of mentor-founder interactions across 27 technological domains. This infrastructure was supported by $25 million from the Government of Canada's Strategic Innovation Fund and underpins four published papers and fifteen projects in progress across multiple institutions. My research has been published in Management Science and the American Economic Journal and featured in The Economist, Globe and Mail, and Frankfurter Allgemeine. I was recognized with the Heizer Dissertation Award and the Royal Bank of Canada's Borealis AI Fellowship. Outside of teaching and research, I enjoy skiing, playing tennis, learning new pieces on the piano and violin, and renting small aircraft to explore new places.

Research Interests