We used a cross-country sample of more than 9,000 startup

ventures from over 100 countries to examine the relationship

between the cultural diversity in the founding team and the

likelihood of admission into impact-oriented acceleration programs.

Building on signaling theory, we hypothesized that the

formation of multi-cultural founding teams sends a signal from

the applicants to the decision-makers of social impact accelerators.

The results confirm this hypothesis, showing that cultural

diversity has a positive and statistically significant association

with the likelihood of being admitted. This finding is robust

across several specifications and accounts for the potential

endogeneity of cultural diversity. In further analysis, we examined

whether and how cultural diversity interacts with other

signals concerning the human capital and demographical characteristics

of the founding team. We found that these signals

not only have an individual effect on the admission likelihood,

but their interaction effects are also statistically significant.