Founder's Dilemmas

Some EXCEPTIONALLY good data here from a Harvard Business School study of 10K founders and 20K execs in 4K US startups. Most important challenge: how and when to divide equity amongst founding team. Basically don't do it emotionally, do it in a rational and forward-thinking way.

Yes, the speaker, Noam Wasserman, has written a book on the topic. I just received it and am interested to see more data. The data are hard to come by.

Thanks for posting the Noam Wasserman data, Lara.

Here are my favorite parts:

Start-ups causes for failure: 35% product market fit and 65% due to people problems. And these are the ones VCs decided to back!

Steve Jobs: "Follow your heart, but check it with your head."

Only 16% of startups have just one founder.

No difference in failure rates between solo founding and team founding. People who misread that they should solo found, fail.

Co-founding with friends is less stable than founding with acquaintances!

Most common way for how teams split equity: equally. Make sure your founders have vesting!

It was a great talk, and I am now reading the book!

The book is getting great reviews -- I look forward to hearing what you think.

By the way, Lara, you can change the title of this post to "Founder Dilemmas" by clicking on the title.