The Founder’s Dilemmas

Whether to found a company alone or to bring in cofounders, investors and early hires is one of the early decisions that, in Noam Wasserman's research, can determine whether a startup and its team survive. The research spans a decade and combines quantitative data on close to 10,000 founders with inside accounts from founders such as Tim Westergren of Pandora and Evan Williams of Twitter. Wasserman weighs founding with friends or relatives, the timing and terms of dividing equity among founders, and the point at which a successful founder-CEO should leave or be fired, along with the tension between keeping control and attracting resources to grow. His starting point is that people problems are the leading cause of startup failure.

Cody McLain, chief executive of SupportNinja, named it among the books he recommends for running a startup, landing clients and managing a team.