The Founder's Dilemmas

De: Noam Wasserman

Narrado por: Mark Mosely

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.

Download the accompanying reference guide.©2012 Princeton University Press (P)2012 Audible, Inc.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"[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)

A comprehensive and precise reference, a must read for any start up founder

The book is thorough and addresses all the decisions that a start up founder may face to make and provides solutions for making the best decisions based on each specific start up's particular issue while giving several examples of the start ups and their founders to learn from.

Essential

If you're an entrepreneur, you must read this book. No joke. Very insightful and worth your time we've money.

Must Read for Founder's

This book was very insightful and contains great advice on how to start a company and what things a startup founders should consider when embarking on the next venture.

foundational

this is a foundational work for all would be entrepreneurs. excellent data and good conclusions, and sound advice

Too long

Things were repeated too many times.

The summary chapter would have sufficed.

It's a lot of data, but little advice on how to actually set up a company so that you as a founder can actually plan to avoid the dillemas.

Monotone/boring

The reader's voice was so monotone and boring my mind kept wandering. I couldn't even finish and moved on to a different audiobook. Maybe I'm just used to listening to overly passionate readings but this one sounded so robotic that I stopped listening.

gets repetitive, but very useful insights

Enjoyed it, could have been more concise. worth the read especially for first time founders!

A very informative book on starting a startup

A very informative book on starting a startup. how ownership is split and how investors impact the process

Parenting 101 for your startup baby

If you could sum up The Founder's Dilemmas in three words, what would they be?

Bad decision prevention.

What did you learn from The Founder's Dilemmas that you would use in your daily life?

This book has given me a very good basis for taking decisions on my own fledgeling startup. It was on one hand reinforcing existing gut feelings (like preferring a dynamic over a static equity split) and also eye-opening (like what can happen when you take money from friends & family).

Any additional comments?

This book is rich in content and charts. The first makes for a great, educational listening experience. The latter not so much. There are plentiful references in the book to figure x and chart y. But this here is an _audio_book. If extra thought had been given how to make this aspect of the book more digestible, I would have gladly given 5 stars. As it stands, this makes it 4.

Amazing research done

Noam Wasserman has done an amazing research on the topic startups and it's financial and strategic decisions. However two negative points on this audiobook. There js almost no enjoyable narration in this book and the speaker's intonation on semantically important words is really off and one therefore gets the impression it's a computer animated voice. Besides this I would read it again but it's not easy to grasp.