Natasha N. Overmeyer

Stanford Graduate School of Business, Organizational Behavior

Natasha Overmeyer is a doctoral candidate in Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her research specializes in entrepreneurship, labor markets, and inequality, using unique data and cutting-edge methodologies that combine traditional qualitative and econometric methods with computational linguistics and machine learning. She is on the 2022-2023 job market.

Her research agenda focuses on how individuals acquire the crucial human and financial resources to create startups, and, simultaneously, how investors evaluate and select early-stage startups in different market settings ranging from Silicon Valley to Africa. Ultimately, her work helps to identify underlying and often subconscious drivers of bias and inequality in startup funding, as well as how entrepreneur and investor practices can be effective in remediating such biases and inequities while creating and funding high-potential startups. She further examines the consequences of valuation and evaluation practices on organizational misconduct and innovation in the startup context. A second stream of related research similarly explores how cultural processes undergird evaluations in labor markets, and the effects of these processes on labor market inequality.

At the GSB, Natasha is part of the Equity by Design Lab, which drives research on structural and cultural contributors to inequality in organizations and market settings including startup funding using a data-driven approach. Prior to her doctoral studies, Natasha worked as a Research Associate at the Harvard Business School. Before joining HBS, Natasha worked on the legal side of funding rounds with early-stage startups at Goodwin Proctor LLP in Boston. Natasha received her A.B. from Harvard University.