The Founder's Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup (The Kauffman Foundation Series on Innovation and Entrepreneurship)

by Noam Wasserman

Series:The Kauffman Foundation Series on Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Description

Often downplayed in the excitement of starting up a new business venture is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs will face: should they go it alone, or bring in cofounders, hires, and investors to help build the business? More than just financial rewards are at stake. Friendships and relationships can suffer. Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin. The Founder's Dilemmas is the first book to examine the early decisions by show more entrepreneurs that can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them. He looks at whether it is a good idea to cofound with friends or relatives, how and when to split the equity within the founding team, and how to recognize when a successful founder-CEO should exit or be fired. Wasserman explains how to anticipate, avoid, or recover from disastrous mistakes that can splinter a founding team, strip founders of control, and leave founders without a financial payoff for their hard work and innovative ideas. He highlights the need at each step to strike a careful balance between controlling the startup and attracting the best resources to grow it, and demonstrates why the easy short-term choice is often the most perilous in the long term. The Founder's Dilemmas draws on the inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, while mining quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders. People problems are the leading cause of failure in startups. This book offers solutions. show less

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muwaffaq 78 reviews

I did enjoy the book and found it interesting. It highlighted many interesting areas for introspection. The main reason I gave it 3 stars though is it really does not provide any decent advice other than "know thyself". Given certain motivations etc it tells you what may happen in the future and may help shape early decisions that you make for the better but that would be the best case scenario. Without all the supporting examples and repetition it could have been written in about 25 pages.

Mar 20, 2019

BizCoach 89 reviews

academic reading / Based on an HBR article called RICH OR KING

Jul 29, 2020