545 The primary purpose of this study is to study the moderating effect of entrepreneurial leadership and competitive advantage in the relationship between the business model innovation and the performance of the start-up business.  We hypothesized that business model innovation has a significant association with the performance of the start-up, and entrepreneurial leadership or competitive advantage connects substantially to the business model innovation and start-up. Fifty-one respondents participate in this study. The partial least square statistical technique is used to analyse the data, which is appropriate for parametric analysis for such a sample size. The analysis shows a significant relationship between business model innovation and start-up performance. Also, there are significant relationships of entrepreneurial leadership and competitive advantage to business model innovation. However, it shows no direct relationship between entrepreneurial leadership and start-up; the association is not direct but indirect. The null hypothesis that there is no direct association between competitive advantage and start-up performance is rejected. There is a negative association between competitive advantage and start-up. Both entrepreneurial leadership and competitive advantage improve the relationship between business model innovation and start-up.  However, they must be interpreted with caution https://doi.org/10.24052/JBRMR/V14IS03/ART-06 https://www.staging.ijbed.org/details&cid=545 https://www.staging.ijbed.org/cdn/article_file/2021-02-16-22-14-40-PM.pdf Volume 14 Issue 03 46 2020-07-01 2020-07-23 Business model innovation competitive advantage entrepreneurial leadership and startup performance. 632438 121 0 Joni Phangestu PPM. School of Management, Indonesia Ronny Kountur PPM. School of Management, Indonesia Dolly A. Prameswari PPM. School of Management, Indonesia