The Founder's Dilemmas

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.