Every entrepreneur faces trade-offs when founding and growing their company. As we discovered at YouTube, those early decisions have far-reaching impacts and lead to unforeseen pitfalls down the road. Noam Wasserman uses vivid anecdotes and deep research to expertly outline the key early choices that define a startup, making The Founder's Dilemmas an invaluable alternative to real-world trial and error.
The research that Noam Wasserman has assembled here can help entrepreneurial companies who want to prepare well for their future. The Founder's Dilemmas is a must-read for anyone thinking about starting a business.
In the early days of a startup, people's compensation is whatever you negotiate with a founder and it's all over the place.
As a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and public company CEO, nothing irks me more than when a startup founder talks about wanting to cash in with an initial public offering.
Whether you lead an early-stage startup or a well-established company, it is critical to challenge yourself and your team to prepare for the next disruptive force - be it a shift in the market, a new consumer trend, or a competing innovation.
One of the most important things that I have learned in my 57 years is that life is all about choices. On every journey you take, you face choices. At every fork in the road, you make a choice. And it is those decisions that shape our lives.
You don't start a company because you want to be an entrepreneur or the fame and glory that comes along with it. You become an entrepreneur, and you create a company to solve a real problem. And by real problem, I mean a problem that is going to exist down the line.
As a young entrepreneur starting an enterprise company, be prepared for the fact that you'll need to get involved in enterprise sales. Everyone wants to speak to the founder, and this is also how you'll get feedback on your product. It's worth bringing in early somebody with enterprise sales experience.
In my early career, I look at that time as a series of trial and error and learning as I go.
Continually one faces the horrible matter of making decisions. The solution is, as far as possible, to avoid conscious rational decisions and choices; simply to do what you find yourself doing; to float in the great current of life with as little friction as possible; to allow things to settle themselves, as indeed they do with the most infallible certainty.
Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it's about deliberately choosing to be different.
In many cases, water stress is more about politics, economics, behaviour and governance than absolute water scarcity. Better planning is needed, to allocate water where societal need is greatest, and to allow trade-offs between alternative uses.
I discovered early in my career as an entrepreneur that I'm not good at many things, and I said 'I need help.'
I realised early on that there were two groups of people in the world: those who made the decisions and those who had the decisions made for them. I wanted to be one of the decision-makers.
HubSpot has used the lean startup method to build a spectacularly successful company. What I particularly love about HubSpot is that they are so geeked out on data analysis and making evidence-based decisions, which are at the heart of the Lean Startup process.
There are two very different types of artists: those I call Old Masters, who work by trial and error and tend to improve with age, and conceptual people, or Young Geniuses, who generally do their best work early in their careers.
I got better the way everyone gets better: by trial and error and error and error, by fumbling around and making mistakes but not giving up and working incredibly hard at it every day and eventually, through a painful and laborious process of eliminating every wrong turn, finding my way.