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 ten
thousand founders. People problems are the leading
cause of failure in startups. This book offers
solutions.
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