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The entrepreneurial motivations to give or to take refer, respectively, to a founding team’s desire to start a new venture in order to benefit others or to benefit themselves. We argue that these motivations are important for understanding startup survival. We develop hypotheses about these entrepreneurial motivations and test them on a unique dataset that includes 178 founders from 77 startup teams operating at the Harvard Innovation Lab. Our findings suggest that startups whose founders were primarily motivated by giving survived for longer than did startups whose founders were primarily motivated by taking. However, the longest-surviving startups were those whose founders had a mix of giving and taking motivations.