The Founder's Dilemmas

By: Noam Wasserman

Narrated by: Mark Mosely

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 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 10,000 founders. People problems are the leading cause of failure in startups. This book offers solutions.

Download the accompanying reference guide.©2012 Princeton University Press (P)2012 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"[A] seminal work.... Sure to be required reading in business school curricula, this illuminating and captivating read will also appeal to aspiring entrepreneurs or founders who want to make better decisions in existing ventures." ( Publishers Weekly)

"Ten years of extensive research combined with winning case studies make this a trustworthy source not only for the potential startup owner but also for the classroom." ( Library Journal)

A comprehensive and precise reference, a must read for any start up founder

The book is thorough and addresses all the decisions that a start up founder may face to make and provides solutions for making the best decisions based on each specific start up's particular issue while giving several examples of the start ups and their founders to learn from.

Essential

If you're an entrepreneur, you must read this book. No joke. Very insightful and worth your time we've money.

Monotone/boring

The reader's voice was so monotone and boring my mind kept wandering. I couldn't even finish and moved on to a different audiobook. Maybe I'm just used to listening to overly passionate readings but this one sounded so robotic that I stopped listening.

gets repetitive, but very useful insights

Enjoyed it, could have been more concise. worth the read especially for first time founders!

A very informative book on starting a startup

A very informative book on starting a startup. how ownership is split and how investors impact the process

Must Read for Founder's

This book was very insightful and contains great advice on how to start a company and what things a startup founders should consider when embarking on the next venture.

foundational

this is a foundational work for all would be entrepreneurs. excellent data and good conclusions, and sound advice

Too long

Things were repeated too many times.

The summary chapter would have sufficed.

It's a lot of data, but little advice on how to actually set up a company so that you as a founder can actually plan to avoid the dillemas.

lots of good information

I gave this book five stars despite one major flaw, which was the constant referring to charts. Even with that, this book was very helpful. I especially liked how much the book covered how to handle equity.
The information was also sometimes very dense for audio book form, but I'd rather have too dense than just glossed over, though I wish I could find a book entirely on traditional company equity that delves even deeper on that subject.

great data about entrepreneurship

data is well collected and presented. it shows what entrepreneurship decisions have to be made during startup and later phases, however does not provide guidance or recommendation to what works or what's a good course of action rending the study a mere report of pretty much every possible scenario that could be faced by entrepreneurs. Tarik