Researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and educators increasingly recognize the extreme variation of performance in entrepreneurship. However, a variance-centric understanding of entrepreneurial outcomes remains largely lacking. While extreme performers draw attention via case studies, celebrity status, and media stories, those who teach, promote, or pursue entrepreneurship often focus on ‘average’ entrepreneurs or ventures. In response, scholars have begun to adopt distributions as a lens to examine the variance in quantitative measures of entrepreneurial performance. Therefore, this exploratory empirical study proposes a framework to examine exceptional performance in entrepreneurial endeavors. Here, we introduce and explicate three aspects of performance distributions – tail extremity, tail frequency, and tail impact. Moreover, we introduce a methodological innovation, the moment-ratio plot, and simulations to extract nuanced insights into exceptional performance using statistical data reported in past average-centric studies. Finally, we discuss the implications of related findings for targeted policy interventions, venture creation, venture capital investing, corporate venturing, entrepreneurship pedagogy, and future research.
