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Online communities offer their members various benefits, such as information access, social and emotional support, and entertainment. Despite the important role that founders play in shaping communities, prior research has focused primarily on what drives users to participate and contribute; the motivations and goals of founders remain underexplored. To uncover how and why online communities get started, we present findings from a survey of 951 recent founders of Reddit communities. We find that topical interest is the most common motivation for community creation, followed by motivations to exchange information, connect with others, and self-promote. Founders have heterogeneous goals for their nascent communities, but they tend to privilege community quality and engagement over sheer growth. These differences in founders' early attitudes towards their communities help predict not only the community-building actions that they pursue, but also the ability of their communities to attract visitors, contributors, and subscribers over the first 28 days. We end with a discussion of the implications for researchers, designers, and founders of online communities.

This collection presents a selected set of unsolved problems in semigroup theory, a fundamental branch of modern algebra. The publication is dedicated to the 110th anniversary of the birth of E. S. Lyapin, one of the founders of the field and the author of the world's first monograph on semigroups. The collection covers several major directions of contemporary research: potential properties and embeddability of semigroups; structural problems and finiteness conditions in varieties; endomorphisms; solvable and unsolvable classes of finite semigroups and groups; power semigroups; inclusive varieties; and the theory of partial groupoids. It serves both as a tribute to Lyapin's memory and as a roadmap for current and future research in algebraic systems.

Wikipedia's founders could not have dreamed they were creating the most important laboratory for social scientific and computing research in history but that is exactly what happened. Hill and Shaw take account of Wikipedia's enormous effect on academic scholarship

Predicting startup success from founder career data is hard. The signal is weak, the labels are rare (9%), and most founders who succeed look almost identical to those who fail. We engineer 28 structured features directly from raw JSON fields -- jobs, education, exits -- and combine them with a deterministic rule layer and XGBoost boosted stumps. Our model achieves Val F0.5 = 0.3030, Precision = 0.3333, Recall = 0.2222 -- a +17.7pp improvement over the zero-shot LLM baseline. We then run a controlled experiment: extract 9 features from the prose field using Claude Haiku, at 67% and 100% dataset coverage. LLM features capture 26.4% of model importance but add zero CV signal (delta = -0.05pp). The reason is structural: anonymised_prose is generated from the same JSON fields we parse directly -- it is a lossy re-encoding, not a richer source. The ceiling (CV ~= 0.25, Val ~= 0.30) reflects the information content of this dataset, not a modeling limitation. In characterizing where the signal runs out and why, this work functions as a benchmark diagnostic -- one that points directly to what a richer dataset would need to include.

Large language model (LLM) families are improving rapidly, yet it remains unclear how quickly multimodal capabilities emerge and propagate within open families. Using the ModelBiome AI Ecosystem dataset of Hugging Face model metadata and recorded lineage fields (>1.8x10^6 model entries), we quantify multimodality over time and along recorded parent-to-child relations. Cross-modal tasks are widespread in the broader ecosystem well before they become common within major open LLM families: within these families, multimodality remains rare through 2023 and most of 2024, then increases sharply in 2024-2025 and is dominated by image-text vision-language tasks. Across major families, the first vision-language model (VLM) variants typically appear months after the first text-generation releases, with lags ranging from ~1 month (Gemma) to more than a year for several families and ~26 months for GLM. Lineage-conditioned transition rates show weak cross-type transfer: among fine-tuning edges from text-generation parents, only 0.218% yield VLM descendants. Instead, multimodality expands primarily within existing VLM lineages: 94.5% of VLM-child fine-tuning edges originate from VLM parents,

Family-firm scholarship offers competing predictions about whether family control protects or threatens market integrity. We argue that the answer depends on how family involvement is exercised. Drawing on socioemotional wealth and agency-entrenchment perspectives, we examine 8,634 U.S. firm-years (2007-2018) and link family-firm constructs to exchange-generated surveillance flags from NASDAQ SMARTS. Founder-CEO control is associated with approximately 9.5% fewer flags, family governance involvement with 21.3% more, and deep multi-generational family control with 47.1% more. The findings reveal heterogeneous identity and entrenchment mechanisms within family firms and connect family-firm governance to a market-integrity outcome previously absent from the literature.

We introduce an information-theoretic generalization of the fixation statistic, the Tsallis-order $q$ F-statistic, $F_q$, which measures the fraction of Tsallis $q$-entropy lost within subpopulations relative to the pooled population. The family nests the classical variance-based fixation index $F_{\textbf{ST}}$ at $q{=}2$ and a Shannon-entropy analogue at $q{=}1$, whose absolute form equals the mutual information between alleles and population labels. By varying $q$, $F_q$ acts as a spectral differentiator that up-weights rare variants at low $q$, while $q{>}1$ increasingly emphasizes common variants, providing a more fine-grained view of differentiation than $F_{\textbf{ST}}$ when allele-frequency spectra are skewed. On real data (865 Oceanian genomes with 1,823,000 sites) and controlled genealogical simulations (seeded from 1,432 founders from HGDP and 1000 Genomes panels, with 322,216 sites), we show that $F_q$ in One-vs-Rest (OVR) and Leave-One-Out (LOO) modes provides clear attribution of which subpopulations drive regional structure, and sensitively timestamps isolation-migration events and founder effects. $F_q$ serves as finer-resolution complement for simulation audits

The Lifshitz theory provides a semiclassical description of the Casimir-Polder atom-plate interaction, where the electromagnetic field is quantized whereas the material of the plate is considered as a continuous medium. This places certain restrictions on its application regarding the allowable atom-plate separation distances and the dielectric properties of the plate material. Below we demonstrate that in some recent literature the application conditions of the Lifshitz theory established by its founders are violated by applying it at too short separations and using the dielectric permittivities possessing the negative imaginary parts in violation of the second law of thermodynamics.

This paper discusses the initial development of Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) as a theoretical idea, from its inception as a cloud microphysics process in circe 1990 to the full-blown concept by 2015. It primarily focuses on the work of founders John Latham and Stephen Salter and their contributions. Recently the concept has been developed further, e.g. in the UK ARIA project, as a prospective method to ameliorate the Earths rapid warming.

This research examines the empowerment of women entrepreneurs in the context of entrepreneurial financing in France. It explores the factors that allow some women entrepreneurs to access certain categories of external finance more easily. The theoretical framework used is based on the concept of empowerment, explored through its personal and relational dimensions. The study relies on a quantitative approach, using data from a representative of women entrepreneurs. The results show that the status of a founder affects access to external finance in different ways: it increases the chances of successful fundraising, but reduces the chances of obtaining bank finance. This finding highlights the importance of empowerment dynamics, which vary according to the type of financing. In addition, characteristics such as the presence of a spouse in the business, high income, membership of a professional network and the diversity of this network complete the analysis of inequalities in access. This study, the first of its kind in France, suggests ways of enriching our understanding of the diversity of situations experienced by female founders, thus helping to deconstruct the homogeneous image of

Foundation Models (FMs) and World Models (WMs) offer complementary strengths in task generalization at different levels. In this work, we propose FOUNDER, a framework that integrates the generalizable knowledge embedded in FMs with the dynamic modeling capabilities of WMs to enable open-ended task solving in embodied environments in a reward-free manner. We learn a mapping function that grounds FM representations in the WM state space, effectively inferring the agent's physical states in the world simulator from external observations. This mapping enables the learning of a goal-conditioned policy through imagination during behavior learning, with the mapped task serving as the goal state. Our method leverages the predicted temporal distance to the goal state as an informative reward signal. FOUNDER demonstrates superior performance on various multi-task offline visual control benchmarks, excelling in capturing the deep-level semantics of tasks specified by text or videos, particularly in scenarios involving complex observations or domain gaps where prior methods struggle. The consistency of our learned reward function with the ground-truth reward is also empirically validated. Our

While founder backgrounds account for less than 4% of funding variation among Y Combinator startups, this suggests that other factors, such as industry trends and product innovation, may play a more significant role in funding outcomes. Using data on 4,323 YC companies from 2005-2024 merged with S&P Global funding data, I estimate OLS regressions with batch year fixed effects on a regression sample of 2,113 companies. The coefficient on prior FAANG work experience is -0.251, indicating approximately 22% less funding. However, this result is not robust, as it changes direction in further analyses, suggesting that FAANG experience may not be a reliable predictor of funding. The most robust finding is that startups within Y Combinator that consist of larger founding teams tend to raise more funding, with each additional co-founder associated with approximately 21% more capital raised. While observable credentials such as prior FAANG work experience and top-tier education explain minimal variation in funding, the size of the founding team emerges as a more consistent predictor, highlighting the importance of team dynamics in securing capital. Unobserved factors like industry and pr

One of the main challenges of startups is to raise capital from investors. For startup founders, it is therefore crucial to know whether investors have a bias against women as startup founders and in which way startups face disadvantages due to gender bias. Existing works on gender studies have mainly analyzed the US market. In this paper, we aim to give a more comprehensive picture of gender bias in early-stage startup funding. We examine European startups listed on Crunchbase using Semantic Web technologies and analyze how the share of female founders in a founding team affects the funding amount. We find that the relative amount of female founders has a negative impact on the funding raised. Furthermore, we observe that founder characteristics have an effect on the funding raised based on the founders' gender. Moreover, we find that gender bias in early-stage funding is less prevalent for serial founders with entrepreneurial experience as female founders benefit three times more than male founders from already having founded a startup. Overall, our study suggests that gender bias exists and is worth to be considered in the context of startup funding.

LLM based agents have recently demonstrated strong potential in automating complex tasks, yet accurately predicting startup success remains an open challenge with few benchmarks and tailored frameworks. To address these limitations, we propose the Startup Success Forecasting Framework, an autonomous system that emulates the reasoning of venture capital analysts through a multi agent collaboration model. Our framework integrates traditional machine learning methods such as random forests and neural networks within a retrieval augmented generation framework composed of three interconnected modules: a prediction block, an analysis block, and an external knowledge block. We evaluate our framework and identify three main findings. First, by leveraging founder segmentation, startups led by L5 founders are 3.79 times more likely to succeed than those led by L1 founders. Second, baseline large language models consistently overpredict startup success and struggle under realistic class imbalances largely due to overreliance on founder claims. Third, our framework significantly enhances prediction accuracy, yielding a 108.3 percent relative improvement over GPT 4o mini and a 30.8 percent rela