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  • The Founder's Dilemmas

  • By: Noam Wasserman
  • Narrated by: Mark Mosely
  • Length: 13 hrs and 28 mins
  • 4.1 out of 5 stars (17 ratings)

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The Founder's Dilemmas

By: Noam Wasserman
Narrated by: Mark Mosely
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Publisher's Summary

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.

©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)

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Great content poor and too fast reading

The content is outstanding and is essential to every new founder, but the reader is too fast and his voice doesn't keep you engaged.

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1 person found this helpful

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    3 out of 5 stars

Well researched, quality content, strong lessons

Well presented facts to challenge any budding or seasoned entrepreneurs to consider and dialogue about to achieve the best decisions for the best win/win results.

Being a huge Jim Collins fan, I saw parallels in style and strong research based material. The real life stories were great.

I'm sure it's not easy to do but I think at times I found some of the storytelling jump around too much from example to example where I had difficulty connecting to the lesson for those stories. Refining into larger overarching principles and sticking with examples from companies for longer to embellishI think would have had even greater and simpler learning and retention. All I all though it was still very good.

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