Here I come to save the day: Proposing necessary and sufficient conditions for founder-CEO comeback

Founder-CEOs have garnered considerable research attention from entrepreneurship scholars. Researchers have built and tested hypotheses about when founders will leave their firms, when they will stay, and how their presence impacts firm performance. However, no theory exists to explain when founders who have left the CEO role will return to the leadership position. A recent string of high-profile Founder-CEO comebacks suggests this is a phenomenon worth studying. Using qualitative comparative analysis on a sample of Founder-CEO successions, we identify configurations of attributes that are necessary and sufficient to produce a Founder-CEO comeback. With this paper, we contribute new theoretical insights about a rare, but important, entrepreneurial phenomenon about which little knowledge exists.