Startup companies are most likely to fail due to personal disagreements within their management teams. Choices such as whether to co-found, how to split equity, and whom to hire as the first employees often have drastic effects on the long-run vitality of a startup.
Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman says if entrepreneurship is a battle, most casualties stem from self-inflicted wounds. Within high-potential start-ups, nearly two-thirds of failures are caused by the founders’ decisions about the people they involve. First-time founders lack a roadmap and understandably rely on their “heart” - on gut, intuition, and rules of thumb. In fact, three out of four venture-capital funded start-ups fail.
Wasserman’s book draws upon statistics and narratives he gathered from nearly 10,000 founders of technology and life sciences startups in the U.S. over the past 12 years. He tracks the individual experiences of founders as models of the early mistakes that he cautions future startups to avoid.
Among other dilemmas, Wasserman’s book also studies the trade-off faced by many founders between maintaining control and promoting growth of the enterprise.
Just days after the book’s publication, it was the bestselling management book on Amazon.com.
“The Founders’ Dilemmas” is based on a course of the same name that Wasserman has taught at the Business School since 2009. The class was named one of the top 10 entrepreneurship courses in the country by Inc. Magazine in 2011.
"Wasserman's book is on track to take as lofty a position in the entrepreneurial literature as HBS's Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma did in the field of technological change."--Peter Cohan, Forbes
"This book provides the rare combination of practical advice and scholarly research. It gets to the heart of the people issues that can bedevil every, and I do mean every, startup. Issues such as founder motivations, equity splits, and equity control can make or break a company. I guarantee that the price of this book is approximately one-thousandth of what you'll pay lawyers to clean up your mess if you don't read it."--Guy Kawasaki
Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman says if entrepreneurship is a battle, most casualties stem from self-inflicted wounds. Within high-potential start-ups, nearly two-thirds of failures are caused by the founders’ decisions about the people they involve. First-time founders lack a roadmap and understandably rely on their “heart” - on gut, intuition, and rules of thumb. In fact, three out of four venture-capital funded start-ups fail.
Wasserman’s book draws upon statistics and narratives he gathered from nearly 10,000 founders of technology and life sciences startups in the U.S. over the past 12 years. He tracks the individual experiences of founders as models of the early mistakes that he cautions future startups to avoid.
Among other dilemmas, Wasserman’s book also studies the trade-off faced by many founders between maintaining control and promoting growth of the enterprise.
Just days after the book’s publication, it was the bestselling management book on Amazon.com.
“The Founders’ Dilemmas” is based on a course of the same name that Wasserman has taught at the Business School since 2009. The class was named one of the top 10 entrepreneurship courses in the country by Inc. Magazine in 2011.
"Wasserman's book is on track to take as lofty a position in the entrepreneurial literature as HBS's Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma did in the field of technological change."--Peter Cohan, Forbes
"This book provides the rare combination of practical advice and scholarly research. It gets to the heart of the people issues that can bedevil every, and I do mean every, startup. Issues such as founder motivations, equity splits, and equity control can make or break a company. I guarantee that the price of this book is approximately one-thousandth of what you'll pay lawyers to clean up your mess if you don't read it."--Guy Kawasaki
