Technology startups often scale by entering new markets. Doing so as a full commitment allows gaining more users to spur network effects, while doing so experimentally by staging market entries enables more learning. (When) do startups expand into new markets as full commitments or experimentally? We assess this question in the international context. As the first study to track startup internationalization worldwide, we use BuiltWith data on language adoption by nearly 50,000 software firms from 2001-2022. Startups, on average, adopt languages gradually, even from smaller markets and with platform business models. These results suggest that startups pursue market expansion experimentally.
