The Founder's Dilemmas

This book by Noam Wasserman brought scientific rigor to the difficult, often painful decisions entrepreneurs face. Wasserman was one of the first to deeply analyze these challenges, and I found his approach innovative.

I was particularly impressed by his creative method of gathering data—founders who were too busy to fill out traditional surveys were drawn in by an executive compensation benchmarking survey, only to find that 90% of the questions fed directly into his research. 

I like this book because it’s based on mining quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders, not only anecdotal experience.

There is a lot of debate about the importance of co-founders and not trying to ‘go it alone.’ According to Noam, 65 percent of startups fail because of co-founder conflict. I find that super interesting, and it emphasizes why, if you want success, you’ve got to pick your co-founder(s) wisely. The same is true of the management team as well of course. 

For a couple years, Noam Wasserman was an entrepreneurship colleague of mine at the University of Southern California.

Founders Dilemmas is the first book to focus on the critical decisions founders of new ventures must make starting on day one. Wasserman studied nearly 10,000 founders including Tim Westergren of Pandora and Evan Williams of Twitter.

It should be no surprise that he found that people are the leading cause of startup failures. The best recommendation I can give is to tell you that Wasserman offers solutions that I have personally used and passed along to hundreds of founders, because they… show more.

The Founder’s Dilemmas is a cult book of in-the-know entrepreneurs. This is a distillation of a famous class Noam Wasserman taught at Harvard Business School, a class that other b-schools have copied because students found it so useful. Basically, the book leads the reader to conclusions about how to handle the dilemmas faced by founders as they struggle to put together and lead their founding teams. The contents derive from how students discussed and analyzed about a dozen different Harvard case studies. Reading the book is like being in a b-school class about practical entrepreneurship without any of the stress… show more.

This book is a practical and research-driven guide to making smart decisions from the earliest days of an enterprise, whether you’re structuring your partnership or figuring out how much capital to raise. Packed with interesting and memorable stories, this is a book about how doing things right from the beginning can be the difference between failure and success in an entrepreneurial venture.