Founders' Dilemmas
Description
Founders' Dilemmas examines the early, often difficult, decisions that have important long-term consequences for founders and their ventures. Potential consequences include losing control of their ventures, breaking up of the founding team due to tensions between founders, and jeopardizing the financial gains from their hard work and innovative ideas. The course's goal is to help students be much more informed about those long-term consequences before they make early choices that can lead to them.
We will focus on "people" issues (i.e., the key challenges faced when deciding when and how to involve other people in the venture) and on "universal" issues (i.e., those issues faced by founders regardless of the industry, geographical location, or period of time in which they are founding their ventures). The cases emphasize high-potential ventures (as opposed to "mom-and-pop shops"), where the choices we examine have the most impact on the future success or failure of the venture.