Spousal cofounding teams are common, yet we know little about how they affect startups’ ability to attract new hires. While prior work highlights internal advantages of spousal teams, such as trust, cohesion, and resilience, we propose that they may trigger concerns among external audiences by blurring professional and personal roles. Focusing on prospective employees, we predict that startups led by spousal cofounders face an “illegitimacy discount” in hiring, attracting fewer applicants, especially when the lead founder is male. We test these claims using a preregistered field experiment embedded in a live early-stage recruitment process. We find that candidates are less likely to apply to a startup cofounded by spouses and that this penalty is asymmetric: it is pronounced when the lead founder is male but weaker when the lead founder is female. Analysis of the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics II (PSED II) corroborates external validity: spousal cofounding teams are prevalent but hire less than comparable non- spousal teams. Together, the results extend research on founding team composition and gender disparities in entrepreneurship by showing how spousal cofounding affects talent attraction and how gendered expectations condition perceptions of legitimacy in early startup hiring.…Read More