
The Founder's Dilemmas
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Narrated by:
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Mark Mosely
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By:
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Noam Wasserman
About this listen
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.Listeners also enjoyed...
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The founders and driving force behind the Foundry Group - a venture capital firm focused on investing in early-stage information technology companies - Brad and Jason have been involved in hundreds of venture capital financings. Their investments range from small startups to large Series A venture financing rounds. The new edition of Venture Deals continues to show fledgling entrepreneurs the inner-workings of the VC process, from the venture capital term sheet and effective negotiating strategies to the initial seed and the later stages of development.
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Must read for entrepreneurs trying to raise fund
- By Max Lee on 07-29-20
By: Brad Feld, and others
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Disciplined Entrepreneurship Expanded & Updated
- 24 Steps to a Successful Startup
- By: Bill Aulet
- Narrated by: Al Kessel
- Length: 13 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Disciplined Entrepreneurship Expanded & Updated starts by combining the timeless and insightful principles of Disciplined Entrepreneurship with the practical tools found in the Disciplined Entrepreneurship Workbook into a single, comprehensive package. The book also has been updated with recent developments in the field and examples as well as a robust new library of additional resources. Author, entrepreneur, professor, and managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, Bill Aulet, systematically walks listeners through exactly how to create a successful startup.
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Robotic Audio
- By felipersd on 02-04-25
By: Bill Aulet
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The Great CEO Within
- The Tactical Guide to Company Building
- By: Matt Mochary, Alex MacCaw, Misha Talavera
- Narrated by: Joe Scalora
- Length: 5 hrs
- Unabridged
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Matt Mochary coaches the CEOs of many of the fastest-scaling technology companies in Silicon Valley. With The Great CEO Within, he shares his highly effective leadership and business-operating tools with any CEO or manager in the world. Learn how to efficiently scale your business from startup to corporation by implementing a system of accountability, effective problem-solving, and transparent feedback.
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Best for "touchy-feely" startups in the US
- By Matt J on 12-14-21
By: Matt Mochary, and others
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Masters of Scale
- Surprising Truths from the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs
- By: Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff
- Narrated by: William DeMeritt, Reid Hoffman
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Behind the scenes in Silicon Valley, Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn, investor at Greylock) is a sought-after adviser to heads of companies and heads of state. On each episode of his podcast, Masters of Scale, he sits down with a guest from an all-star list of visionary founders and leaders, digging into the surprising strategies that power their company’s growth. In this book, he draws on their most riveting, revealing stories - as well as his own experience as a founder and investor - to distill the secrets behind the most extraordinary success stories of our times.
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It's not a book it's meandering excrement
- By ashtor llc on 06-05-22
By: Reid Hoffman, and others
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Rework
- By: Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 2 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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With its straightforward language and easy-is-better approach, Rework is the perfect playbook for anyone who's ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs who want to get out, and artists who don't want to starve anymore will all find valuable inspiration and guidance in these pages. It's time to rework work.
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Simple, Quick, Timely, Contrarian Advice
- By Paul on 06-18-10
By: Jason Fried, and others
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Corporate Explorer
- How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation Game
- By: Andrew Binns, Charles A. O'Reilly, Michael Tushman
- Narrated by: Ryan Burke
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Innovation used to be seen as a game best left to entrepreneurs, but now a new breed of corporate managers is flipping this logic on its head. These Corporate Explorers have the insight, resilience, and discipline to overcome the obstacles and build new ventures from inside even the largest organizations. Corporate Explorer is a guidebook to the practices that enable these managers to go from idea into action. This actionable and proven framework explains how managers can become successful corporate innovators.
By: Andrew Binns, and others
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Delivering Happiness
- A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
- By: Tony Hsieh
- Narrated by: Tony Hsieh
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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In this, his first audiobook, Tony Hsieh - the widely admired CEO of Zappos, the online shoe retailer -explains how he created a unique culture and commitment to service that aims to improve the lives of its employees, customers, vendors, and backers. Using anecdotes and stories from his own life experiences, and from other companies, Hsieh provides concrete ways that companies can achieve unprecedented success.
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Delivering Spin
- By Marc L. Mintz on 08-06-10
By: Tony Hsieh
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How to F--k Up Your Startup
- The Science Behind Why 90% of Companies Fail - and How You Can Avoid It
- By: Kim Hvidkjaer
- Narrated by: L.J. Ganser
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Kim Hvidkjaer was twenty-nine years old when he became a millionaire. Two years later, after a cluster of disasters, he found himself basically broke. Now, having rebuilt his fortune as the founder of several successful enterprises and studied thousands of failed startups, Hvidkjaer has become an expert in failure: what it means, what it looks like, and the strategies that business owners can use to prevent it. In How to F--k Up Your Startup, he takes us on an entertaining and enlightening journey through the complex patterns of failure in the life cycle of a business.
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Exactly the same as every other business book
- By Jon B Woo on 11-16-23
By: Kim Hvidkjaer
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Founders at Work
- Stories of Startups' Early Days
- By: Jessica Livingston
- Narrated by: Chelsea Kwoka, full cast
- Length: 21 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.
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Wish I had listened to the book sooner.
- By Kindle Customer on 04-11-22
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The Second in Command
- Unleash the Power of Your COO
- By: Cameron Herold
- Narrated by: Cameron Herold
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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As founder and CEO, you know you need to hire a COO. You need a COO who can help you build the company you don’t know how to build on your own. As founder and CEO, you know you need to hire a COO. You need a COO who can help you build the company you don’t know how to build on your own.
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Great author, average reader
- By Zachary Ryan Pettis on 02-18-24
By: Cameron Herold
What listeners say about The Founder's Dilemmas
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- Deanna
- 07-05-15
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.
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- Smiles McCray
- 03-21-17
Essential
If you're an entrepreneur, you must read this book. No joke. Very insightful and worth your time we've money.
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- *AT
- 12-01-15
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.
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- Clipz
- 11-16-18
foundational
this is a foundational work for all would be entrepreneurs. excellent data and good conclusions, and sound advice
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- Paal Skjetne
- 07-23-20
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.
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- Matthew Rall
- 02-28-19
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.
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-15-20
gets repetitive, but very useful insights
Enjoyed it, could have been more concise. worth the read especially for first time founders!
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- Kindle Customer
- 12-30-18
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
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- Stefan & Suli
- 01-07-16
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.
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- Jimbob
- 08-08-17
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.
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