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.
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©2012 Princeton University Press (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
"[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)
"Story is not bad but bad performance"
It was very informative however, for an audio book to rely on charts and graphs is kind of tough. The material is very good and has some insights that are useful, overall the content is not too bad, it is very all over the place but not a bad book.
I thought it was awful, it was like listening to hours of an overly dramatic movie trailer actor. I was barley able to make it through with the way the narrator, I would never buy another book by this narrator it was just too cheesy it was overly dramatic for the context and painful to listen to.
Internet entrepreneur from the Netherlands.
"Very chaotic style of writing and presenting"
The subject of this book is very fascinating and I really want to know, but the way this book is written is pretty chaotic. You can sense that it is written by a researcher-type writer who wants to beat you to death with facts. He uses a lot of other people as examples, but in a way that he constantly switches between characters so you quickly get lost.
The narrator, though he uses a lot of intonation in his voice, sounds a little like a news anchor which, in combination with the detailed level of information and chaotic writing style, makes you tune out time and again. It requires a lot of effort to stay focused on listening and understanding the point. That makes it unsuitable to listen to in the car in my opinion, which is the whole reason for me to listen to audio book versions instead of reading.
But if you listen to it behind your desk and take notes, it might work.
I do recommend reading or listening to this book, because of the topic it adresses, but you must be really focused all the time to understand it.