From dart boards to dashboards: How founder blueprints and investor demands shape evolving management control systems in a startup

Sammanfattning

As startups grow, they must introduce more formal management control systems (MCSs) while maintaining the founder-shaped culture that supported their early success. This thesis examines how this balance is navigated through a retrospective longitudinal single-case study of AI Co, a Swedish software startup. We trace the development of its control systems across three ownership stages and analyse how the founder's engineering blueprint shaped both the timing and the form of emerging controls. The study shows that formalisation did not follow automatically from receiving external capital but accelerated when new, more active owners introduced a strict profitability mandate. We further demonstrate how the engineering blueprint functioned as a translation mechanism, enabling new financial and results controls to be perceived as tools for technical efficiency rather than bureaucratic impositions. Overall, the case illustrates that founder imprints are not replaced as investor demands shift,but reweighted in ways that preserve the firm's core identity while accommodating stricter control requirements.