The Founder's Dilemmas examines how early decisions by entrepreneurs can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, including quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders as well as inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them.

This revised and updated edition of Nesheim's underground Silicon Valley bestseller incorporates twenty-three case studies of successful start-ups, including tables of wealth showing how much money founders and investors realized from each venture. The phenomenal success of the initial public offerings (IPOs) of many new internet companies obscures the fact that fewer than six out of 1 million business plans submitted to venture capital firms will ever reach the IPO stage. Many fail, according to start-up expert John Nesheim, because the entrepreneurs did not have access to the invaluable lessons that come from studying the real-world venture experiences of successful companies. Now they do. Acclaimed by entrepreneurs the world over, this practical handbook is filled with hard-to-find information and guidance covering every key phase of a start-up, from idea to IPO: how to create a winning business plan, how to value the firm, how venture capitalists work, how they make their money, where to find alternative sources of funding, how to select a good lawyer, and how to protect intellectual property. Nesheim aims to improve the odds of success for first-time high-tech entrepreneurs, and offers an insider's perspective from firsthand experience on one of the toughest challenges they face -- convincing venture capitalists or investment banks to provide financing. This complete, classic reference tool is essential reading for first-time high-tech entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs already involved in a start-up who want to increase their chances of success to rise to the top.

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2016 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1,3, Technical University of Munich (TUM School of Management), language: English, abstract: Entrepreneurship is a booming topic. More and more entrepreneurs set out to launch their own startups to eventually turn them into unicorns one day. But what makes people choose a risky, unsafe alternative over a safe, waged employment? I digged into personal motives, social and cultural aspects to fully understand the drivers of entrepreneurship. To get empirical evidence, a study among startup founders from TU Munich was conducted. Chapter 1 will therefore describe the nature of HTSOs, differentiate their nature from non-technology start-ups and further highlight their importance in securing economic progress. After getting an understanding of the topic's importance to the business community and why exactly such specific foundations are subject of this thesis, the focus in Chapter 2 shifts from an institutional to a personal level. Chapter 2 will investigate different theories which explain how an individual's characteristics and personality are shaped throughout the course of life. This is important to get an understanding of the core subject of this thesis, the individuals who have come-up with promising innovations and founded their own spin-off. Research on start-ups and their founders is relatively new compared to traditional fields of studies, but has already contributed remarkable insights into founder characteristics, personality traits of founders and success factors of start-ups in general. Chapter 3 is dedicated to the empirical section of this thesis, describing the methodology of the survey and conducting a descriptive analysis of the survey findings. In a second step, the results are discussed and elaborated on in more detail.

This book examines the adverse effects of complexity, information asymmetries, transaction costs, and uncertainty on investors’ decision making. It suggests mitigating those effects using appropriate and matching signals, and analyzes a sample of 903 German startups to quantitatively highlight the distinct financing patterns and characteristics of high-tech startups. It then investigates the reasons for these patterns on the basis of a qualitative study that includes 34 interviews with investors and entrepreneurs in the US and Germany and an international expert panel. Lastly, it presents a framework that matches complexity factors with appropriate productive signals.

The present study analyses the international activities of British start-up companies in high-technology industries. The research makes the following contributions. First, it is the first study that establishes the prevalence of internationally operating start-up companies in a particular country. Accordingly, we find that the majority of British high-tech start-ups have engaged in international activities within a few years since formation. Second, it consolidates the existing knowledge in the fields of international entrepreneurship and subjects it to empirical testing. Third, it assesses the power of different theories in international business to explain the cross-border activities of start-up companies. Overall, the research lends support to a resource-based perspective of international entrepreneurship since the proxies for transaction cost-based arguments and the internationalisation process theory are of limited explanatory power.

This collection of studies presents an understanding of the processes, methods, and approaches towards decision-making in international entrepreneurship. It is essential reading to synthesise the process of decision-making towards exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities across national borders.