• Identify which early people decisions can cause problems for founders and their startups.
• Describe the tradeoffs of involving cofounders, hires, investors, and board members in startups and apply appropriate frameworks to analyze them systematically.
• Compare and contrast how different institutional environments shape the dilemmas founders are likely to face.
• Analyze the external and internal factors that heighten the chances that a founding team will splinter or that founders will lose their positions as CEOs of startups.
• Reflect on their own motivations for becoming involved in startups and understand how those should affect their founding decisions throughout the lifecycle of the startup.

Within high-potential ventures, the biggest source of failure is “people problems”: the tensions among the founders, or between the founders and the non-founders who join them. In this course, we will examine critical dilemmas that span the lifecycle of a venture, regarding the choice of cofounders and hires, splitting the roles and equity within the team, whether and how to involve investors, why and how founders are replaced, and exit dilemmas.

With each decision, we will delve into the potential pitfalls that exist and the ways to anticipate and avoid those pitfalls. Through experiential exercises, we will develop your skills at dealing with a variety of difficult conversations and negotiations that you might face within your startups. From the discussion of case studies that focus on the founders of high-potential startups, we will develop frameworks to guide your decision making.

To provide greater context and understanding of these founding dilemmas, we will tap statistics gleaned from a dataset on 15,000 founders over the last two decades and discuss how different national contexts and institutional environments affect founder’s choices. We will pay special attention to the differences between the US and Europe, and explore how strategies differ and which pitfalls emerge when startups move from one national environment to another.

This course is for students who plan to become involved in new ventures. This involvement can occur in any of the following ways:

1. As founders of a new venture, now or at mid-career
2. As early hires, early advisors, or board members in new ventures
3. As potential investors (e.g., venture capitalists), customers, partners, or acquirers of new ventures

The course is designed to help these potential founders, hires, and investors prepare for the decisions they will face both before and during their involvement with new ventures.

• HBSP coursepack: Students will be able to acquire the required cases from the Harvard Business School site through the link shared during class/posted on Canvas.
• Wasserman, N. 2012. The Founder's Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
• Feld, B., & Ramsinghani, M. 2014. Startup Boards: Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley.