Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

One of this week’s more intriguing (and controversial) rumors in the IT industry was about Apple’s possible interest in acquiring Twitter.

I was planning to use my next blog-post to give an overview of my new MBA course (“Founders’ Dilemmas: Money and Power in Entrepreneurial Ventures”), followed by posts on its individual case studies. However, given the Apple-Twitter rumors, I decided to jump the gun regarding two individual cases.

As it turns out, the course’s introductory case is about the early founding fireworks at Apple, and the middle of the semester features a case looking at Evan …

For those who prefer to receive new posts via email, I have integrated email subscriptions into this blog. Just enter your email address into the field in the right-side column to be emailed each new post.

My one request to email-subscribers is that when you see something relevant or interesting in a post, please hop into the blog to post your insights/comments on it. If you can do that on a regular basis, adding the email option will hopefully increase rather than decrease our interactive blog-dialogue about founding issues.

Coming next: “How Much (Equity) is an Idea Worth?” and …

On Friday in class, we showed — and discussed — a documentary about life inside a start-up. The movie, “Startup.com,” focuses on the birth and evolution of govWorks.com. In class, we showed scenes that focused on:

• How the founders’ relationships evolved as the venture grew, and as the two core founders had to buy out a third co-founder (see my “Quick Follow-up” note here about the relevance to equity splits).
• The founders’ experiences raising capital — most centrally, their negotiations with Bob Higgins of Highland (now a colleague of mine who came to class to give us

…

Thank you to everyone who has played a role in building the dialogue within this blog over the last 14 months! I’ve really enjoyed reading your observations and experiences regarding the most critical issues and choices faced by founders and those who work with them.

A Look Back

Since its launch in mid-September 2005, the blog has had almost 29,000 unique visitors, who have been responsible for more than 43,000 page views. Taking a step back to reflect on the past year-plus, here are a few quick snapshots of where the blog has been and currently stands.

The first “snapshot” …

Here’s a preview of some upcoming posts to this blog:

• “Rich versus King” paper, short version — My “Rich vs. King” paper (past postings: core concept and charts and discussion) was recently selected for the Best Paper Proceedings of this year’s Academy of Management meeting. The good news for anyone who might be interested in reading the paper is that, for the Proceedings, I have to create a 6-page version of the (much-longer) original paper. I’ll post a link to the short version.
• “Golden Handcuffs” paper — This focuses on the different vesting terms used by boards to increase

…

We wrapped up our semester last week, so I’ll now have more time to crunch numbers, write and revise papers and cases … and, hopefully, do some blogging!

Thank you to everyone who either posted comments or emailed me over the last couple of months. I hope to reply to as many posts/emails as I can, and will also start rolling out new posts about the founder issues I’m studying. In the next couple of weeks in particular, I will be posting another “upcoming features” list and an update on this year’s Entrepreneurship and Compensation survey, which has gone …

I will be giving a keynote presentation at the “Emerging Ventures” conference in a couple of weeks. Title: “Founder Frustrations” (surprised?).

Love to hear from anyone who attends. Feel free to post comments on the talk (or, if posting isn’t appropriate, to email me directly).…

In addition to the studies described in posts below, my other Founder Frustration research includes the following studies:

• Building a Board - In new ventures, do CEO characteristics (prior years of work experience, functional background, founder status) and equity holdings affect Board characteristics (board composition, frequency with which the board meets, board size)?
• Splitting the Pie - Does the initial equity split among the founders (the standard/”easy” equal split versus the more-contentious unequal split) affect the stability of the founding team as the venture grows, the venture’s growth/valuation, and its ability to attract outside investors?
• Entrepreneurial Handcuffs - What factors

…

The creation of new organizations is a major driver of economic development (Schumpeter 1934). Despite this, founders, the people who create those new organizations, are largely absent from past academic research. It is much harder to get systematic data on privately-held companies, so past research has focused almost exclusively on public companies, where founders rarely still number among the members of the top management team. However, young, private start-ups can differ markedly from large public companies (particularly regarding the motivation, presence, and impact of founders on the companies they started), making it risky to extrapolate from research on non-founders to …