What you are describing is called Upper Echelon Theory or the Upper Echelon Perspective which is backed up by quite a solid base of research. It basically states that a company is a reflection of its officers (or founders) and that they therefore are largely responsible for a company's successes or failures.
Upper echelon theory is one of the things used to justify the bonuses and salaries that Top Management Teams receive in today's world. Also a lot of the research into entrepreneurship in the last years has focused on the upper echelon perspective a lot and tried to establish a link between factors in the founder team and a company's success.
For my Master Thesis I myself looked into the fact if diversity in a founder team increases the likelihood of startup success. The result there have been that) diversity largely has no significant influence on the success of an internet startup, only diversity in Nationality had a significant, negative impact.
If you are interested in the topic I can dig up and post a few of the papers that I used as the base for my Thesis. Unfortunately I am not yet allowed to post my own Thesis.
I only looked at diversity and no other factors. I did a survey which I also published here on HN and in total got back 67 usable results. Quite a small sample but enough.
I checked for a total of 7 different kinds of diversity that can be split into two broad categories:
1. Ascribed Characteristics - Things that are "visible" and others ascribe to you. Here I checked for Gender, Age, Nationality, and Race. Hypothesis here was that diversity in Ascribed Characteristics has a negative effect because it fosters non-task related conflict.
2. Achieved Characteristics - Things that people have worked for. Here I checked for type of education, level of education, industry experience, functional experience. Hypothesis here was that diversity in achieved characteristics enlarges the overall knowledge available to the company and fosters task related conflict which leads to better decisions. Therefore diversity in achieved characteristics should have a positive effect.
As mentioned before while the results trended towards what I expected the results weren't significant enough to reject the Null-Hypothesis in all cases but Nationality diversity which had a small negative effect.
To summarize what I found: The effects of diversity in founder teams of internet startups are so small that they are outweighed by many other factors that are easier to achieve than to fine tune the composition of your founder team.
Upper echelon theory is one of the things used to justify the bonuses and salaries that Top Management Teams receive in today's world. Also a lot of the research into entrepreneurship in the last years has focused on the upper echelon perspective a lot and tried to establish a link between factors in the founder team and a company's success.
For my Master Thesis I myself looked into the fact if diversity in a founder team increases the likelihood of startup success. The result there have been that) diversity largely has no significant influence on the success of an internet startup, only diversity in Nationality had a significant, negative impact.
If you are interested in the topic I can dig up and post a few of the papers that I used as the base for my Thesis. Unfortunately I am not yet allowed to post my own Thesis.