Founding teams rely on their prior experiences to identify the breadth of market segments their startups can pursue. Contrasting founding teams with and without academic founders, we use an abductive approach on a sample of 988 startups in the Artificial Intelligence field, to investigate the difference in the breadth of markets segments between the two groups. Upon finding a positive association between academic startups and the number of market segments, we discover that academics formulate and solve general problems. Our results indicate that teams with academic founders produce more general publications and patents than others, which drives the association with more market segments. Our findings complement prior literature by highlighting the role of problem-formulation in new ventures and that of academic startups within AI.
