Amir Sariri

Welcome to my academic website!

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 the R&D group at Creative Destruction Lab, a non-profit mentoring program for technology startups. I continue to help run CDL's Space Stream and advise its R&D team on expanding research-grade databases for entrepreneurship studies.

My research examines how information asymmetries and heterogeneous beliefs shape entrepreneurial decision-making and firm development. I study how differences in what entrepreneurs, investors, and employees know—and believe—about startup quality affect critical early-stage outcomes. My work reveals why seemingly implausible ideas sometimes generate extraordinary value while obvious opportunities often fail, and how structured approaches to learning can improve entrepreneurial resource allocation.

During my doctoral studies, I built the world's largest relational database on early-stage entrepreneurship, uniquely combining structured operational data with unstructured transcripts of mentor-founder interactions across 27 technological domains. This infrastructure secured $25 million from the Government of Canada's Strategic Innovation Fund and now supports four published papers and fifteen projects in progress across multiple institutions.

My research has been published in Management Science and American Economic Journal, featured in The Economist, Globe and Mail, and Frankfurter Allgemeine, and recognized with the Heizer Dissertation Award and the Royal Bank of Canada's Borealis AI Fellowship.

I completed my doctoral studies at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

When not teaching or researching, I enjoy skiing, playing tennis, learning new pieces on the piano and violin, or renting a small aircraft to explore new places.