The Founder's Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup (The Kauffman Foundation Series on Innovation and Entrepreneurship)

Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin. Friendships and relationships can suffer. 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. 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. 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. 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 financia

Wasserman's book is a towering guide to making these decisions thoughtfully and purposefully. Professor Wasserman provides a great deal of data and stories about high-potential technology and life-sciences startups. His book offers much more information than most entrepreneurs can handle at once, but it is probably essential for them to know."--Harvey Schachter, Globe & Mail"Wasserman presents a series of entrepreneurship vignettes and case studies, drawn from a massive 10,000-founder survey he created. Comingling research, straight talk, and a human voice--so often lacking in books with an academic bent--Dilemmas totally rocks as a business school required read and a founder's gripping, abs

This is a must read for anyone in the entrepreneurial/venture capital space. EQ Expert Book Review of The Founder's Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup by Noam WassermanJust occasionally you read a book that you wish you had read 25 years ago. I worked in the entrepreneurial/venture capital sector 1984-2007 and I so wish I had read this book in 1984. Unfortunately it was not published until 2012 so it was not possible but if you are (budding) entrepreneur, potential start-up hire, angel investor or venture capitalist you should really read this book. This is the first book that really gets . "not on lifestyle businesses intended only to keep the founder comfortable. He also accessed a wide range of reliable" according to Ian Mann. Every economy needs a steady flow of “start-ups” (new businesses,) to grow and create jobs. Estimates vary on the value to the country of small business, but there is strong support for the idea that small businesses create more jobs larger companies. And, behemoths such as Microsoft, Facebook and Google were once start-ups.The problem is that of seven start-ups only two will be operating in a year later! That is a 71% failure rate. Imagine if close to all business that started succeeded, and went on to employ only five people. I. Excellent read. Would recommend this to ANYONE!! Book is excellent. Within the first two pages of the introduction I was already learning a great deal of knowledge. Not as hard to understand as someone would expect. I would definitely recommend this to anyone interested in entrepreneurship, starting their own company/business, and someone looking to maintain their business and expand to the best of their ability.

. Noam Wasserman is an associate professor at Harvard Business School