Often overshadowed by the excitement of starting a new business venture is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs will face: will they work alone or bring in co-founders, employees, and investors to help grow the business? Beyond financial rewards, friendships and relationships are also at stake. Poor decisions during the founding of a promising business lay the groundwork for its eventual destruction. The Founder's Dilemmas is the first book to examine the early decisions that entrepreneurs face that can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders encounter and how to avoid them. He examines whether it's a good idea to found with friends or relatives, how and when to share the equity of the founding team, and how to recognize when a successful founder-CEO should step down or be fired. Wasserman explains how to predict, avoid, or recover from the disastrous mistakes that can split a founding team, strip founders of control, and leave them without financial reward for their hard work and innovative ideas. He emphasizes the need at every step to achieve a careful balance between maintaining control of the business and attracting the best resources for its growth, demonstrating why the easy choice in the short term is often the most dangerous in the long term. The Founder's Dilemmas draws from the inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, while analyzing quantitative data from nearly ten thousand founders. Human problems are the primary cause of failure in startups. This book offers solutions.