
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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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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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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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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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
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The Four Steps to the Epiphany
- By: Steve Blank
- Narrated by: Graham Rowat
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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The Four Steps to the Epiphany launched the lean start-up approach to new ventures. It was the first book to offer that start-ups are not smaller versions of large companies and that new ventures are different than existing ones. Start-ups search for business models while existing companies execute them. The book offers the practical and proven four-step customer development process for search and offers insight into what makes some start-ups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture.
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Piercing Narrator
- By David P on 01-09-21
By: Steve Blank
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Zero to IPO
- Over $1 Trillion of Actionable Advice from the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs
- By: Frederic Kerrest
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Over the past twenty years, as he first worked as an early employee at Salesforce and later cofounded Okta, a publicly traded software company now valued at over $40 billion, Frederic Kerrest met hundreds of business leaders and investors in Silicon Valley and beyond. In Zero to IPO, he's collected a trove of nitty-gritty tips for each stage of a company's growth and assembled them into a clear blueprint for how to build a business.
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Worst startup advice you could ever hear, give all cofounders the same amount of shares
- By Keenan on 09-07-23
By: Frederic Kerrest
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Start Small, Stay Small
- A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup
- By: Rob Walling
- Narrated by: Rob Walling
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Start Small, Stay Small is a step-by-step guide to launching a self-funded start-up. If you're a desktop, mobile, or web developer, this audiobook is your blueprint to getting your start-up off the ground with no outside investment.
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Can't get past the vocal fry
- By Mahesh on 07-31-21
By: Rob Walling
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Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution
- A Handbook for Entrepreneurs
- By: Uri Levine
- Narrated by: Perry Daniels
- Length: 11 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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As the cofounder of Waze—the world's leading commuting and navigation app with more than 700 million users to date, and which Google acquired in 2013 for $1.15 billion—Levine is committed to spreading entrepreneurial thinking so that other founders, managers, and employees in the tech space can build their own highly valued companies. Levine offers an inside look at the creation and sale of Waze and his second unicorn, Moovit, revealing the formula that drove those companies to compete with industry veterans and giants alike.
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Ok but not great
- By Didier Vallauri on 01-30-23
By: Uri Levine
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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- jeremy
- 06-05-16
lots of good information
I gave this book five stars despite one major flaw, which was the constant referring to charts. Even with that, this book was very helpful. I especially liked how much the book covered how to handle equity.
The information was also sometimes very dense for audio book form, but I'd rather have too dense than just glossed over, though I wish I could find a book entirely on traditional company equity that delves even deeper on that subject.
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Overall
- Tarik
- 03-13-15
great data about entrepreneurship
data is well collected and presented. it shows what entrepreneurship decisions have to be made during startup and later phases, however does not provide guidance or recommendation to what works or what's a good course of action rending the study a mere report of pretty much every possible scenario that could be faced by entrepreneurs. Tarik
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