• Certificate of Attendance: You will receive a certificate upon completion of this training program.

  • Continuing Professional Development (CPD): You will receive 1.0 credit hour upon completion of this program.

About this session

This program will help you understand The Founder's Dilemma Framework & how to examine the early decisions by entrepreneurs that can make or break a startup and its team.

About The Founder’s Dilemma Framework

How to examine the early decisions by entrepreneurs that can make or break a startup and its team.

Every would-be entrepreneur wants to be a Bill Gates, a Phil Knight, or an Anita Roddick, each of whom founded a large company and led it for many years. However, successful CEO-cum-founders are a very rare breed. When I analyzed 212 American start-ups that sprang up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I discovered that most founders surrendered management control long before their companies went public. By the time the ventures were three years old, 50% of founders were no longer the CEO; in year four, only 40% were still in the corner office; and fewer than 25% led their companies’ initial public offerings. Other researchers have subsequently found similar trends in various industries and in other time periods. We remember the handful of founder-CEOs in corporate America, but they’re the exceptions to the rule.

Choosing money: A founder who gives up more equity to attract investors builds a more valuable company than one who parts with less—and ends up with a more valuable slice, too.



Choosing between money and power allows entrepreneurs to come to grips with what success means to them. Founders who want to manage empires will not believe they are successes if they lose control, even if they end up rich. Conversely, founders who understand that their goal is to amass wealth will not view themselves as failures when they step down from the top job. Once they realize why they are turning entrepreneur, founders must, as the old Chinese proverb says, “decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.”


Credit: The intro is taken from Dr. Wasserman's article in HBR


Biography

Dr. Noam Wasserman

Noam Wasserman is the dean of Yeshiva University’s Sy Syms School of Business. Before becoming dean in mid-2019, he was a professor of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School and a chaired professor and founding director of a center at the University of Southern California. He has written two bestselling books that have won international awards, has had his research published in top academic journals (e.g., Management Science, Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science), and has written multiple features and columns for the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Inc. magazine.

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    1. The Founder’s Dilemma by Dr. Noam Wasserman

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About this course

  • Free
  • 3 lessons
  • 0.5 hours of video content