Practitioners and academics identify three key frictions limiting the growth and innovation activity of early-stage ventures: difficulties in acquiring and retaining talent, challenges in attracting investors, and lack of training and mentoring. While these issues affect firms at all stages and in all countries, they are particularly acute for innovative early stages high-growth startups, and especially in emerging markets, where talent and finance shortcomings are most severe. This project aims to shed light on these issues through the combination of: (a) a novel confidential administrative dataset of business school students, startups, incubators and accelerators, angel investors, and venture capitalists; (b) new original survey data on the decision process of each agent; and (c) three sets of randomised field experiments on the matching between startups on the one hand, and (i) talent, (ii) investors, and (iii) incubators and accelerators on the other.