HBS Club of Charlotte

Location: Your Office or Home
Date: March 10, 2010
Time: 12:00pm-1:00pm EDT
Cost: No Charge; Members Only Event
RSVP by March 5 by noon
We will e-mail conference call instructions and instructions for submitting questions via e-mail

We'll supply the conference call and professor and you listen in. This unique series of events will pop up monthly throughout the year with business topics of exceptional importance and significant current interest. All you have to do is put your phone on "mute" and listen to the most up-to-date comments and insights regarding the topic at hand. Questions will be submitted via e-mail, either before-hand or in real time during the call. These events are for paid members of the Club only.

Founders’ Dilemma – Recipient of the Class of 2009 Faculty Award, Professor Noam Wasserman will discuss how early decisions around money and power in entrepreneurial ventures have important long-term consequences for founders and their ventures. Professor Wasserman’s research indicates that a founder who gives up more equity to attract cofounders, new hires, and investors builds a more valuable company than one who parts with less equity. More often than not, however, those superior returns come from replacing the founder with a professional CEO more experienced with the needs of a growing company. This fundamental tension requires founders to make "rich" versus "king" trade-offs to maximize either their wealth or their control over the company.

Professor Noam Wasserman
At HBS, Noam Wasserman teaches a second-year MBA elective, entitled "Founders' Dilemmas," for which he was awarded the 2009 HBS Faculty Teaching Award. The course is based on his research over the last decade into the tough, early choices that founders face that have important, long-term implications for them and their ventures. From 2004-2007, he taught in HBS's required first-year MBA course on Entrepreneurial Management, and he has also taught in Harvard's Doctoral and Executive Education programs. For three years in a row, Noam's MBA students elected him to teach their "second-year reunion" classes (Capstone and EC Viewpoints). He is one of three members of the core faculty of the Kauffman Foundation's Global Scholars program, and has delivered numerous keynote addresses to meetings of the Young Presidents Organization (YPO) and various entrepreneurship conferences. Noam received his PhD in Organizational Behavior (with concentrations in Sociology and Microeconomics) from Harvard University in 2002, and received an MBA (with High Distinction) from Harvard Business School in 1999, graduating as a Baker Scholar.

Noam's research on Founder Dilemmas focuses on the tough, early decisions faced by founders that have important, long-term implications for them and their ventures. His article on "The Founder's Dilemma" was featured in the February 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review, and became an HSP Publishing best-selling article. His paper on entrepreneurial compensation, entitled "Stewards, Agents, and the Founder Discount: Executive Compensation in New Ventures," appeared in the Academy of Management Journal in October 2006, and was featured in the Best Paper Proceedings of the 2004 Academy of Management Conference and of the 2003 Babson-Kauffman Research Conference. His paper entitled “Founder-CEO Succession and the Paradox of Entrepreneurial Success” was published in Organization Science in March-April 2003, and won Harvard's 2003 Aage Sorensen Memorial Award for sociological research. Noam's early draft of his “Rich versus King: The Entrepreneur's Dilemma” paper was featured in the Best Paper Proceedings of the 2006 Academy of Management Conference and of the 2005 Babson-Kauffman Research Conference, and his working paper on “Jumpstarting the Board” (co-authored with Warren Boeker) was featured in the Best Paper Proceedings of the 2005 Babson-Kauffman Research Conference.

Noam's dissertation, entitled “The Venture Capitalist as Entrepreneur,” won Harvard’s George S. Dively award for dissertation research. In the dissertation, Noam examined the organizational dynamics and characteristics within venture capital firms themselves, viewing the general partners within VC firms as a founding team that has to start its own (venture) firm, craft a strategy, structure its activities and internal organization, and negotiate with its own investors and other external parties. A central paper from the dissertation, now titled "Revisiting the Strategy, Structure, and Performance Paradigm: The Case of Venture Capital," was featured in the March 2008 issue of Organization Science. A paper from the dissertation ("Upside-down Venture Capitalists and the Transition Toward Pyramidal Firms") is included as a chapter in the book Research on the Sociology of Work: Entrepreneurship (2005), and a case from the dissertation has been published in Lerner and Hardymon's Venture Capital and Private Equity Casebook. In 2001-2002, Noam was a Fellow of the Harvard Program on Negotiations, and he won the Outstanding Reviewer award from the Academy of Management (Business Policy and Strategy division) in 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005.

Noam first came to HBS as a student in the MBA program. Despite being voted “Most Likely to Become a CEO” by his MBA section, he decided to pursue academia as a career and to enter the PhD program (thereby giving up on ever becoming a CEO!). Before coming to Harvard, he was a Principal and Practice Manager at a management-consulting firm near Washington, D.C., where he founded and led the Groupware Practice. He has also worked as a venture capitalist at a firm in Boston. He received a BSE (magna cum laude) in Computer Science and Engineering from the School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, and a BS (magna cum laude) in Corporate Finance and Strategic Management from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He lives in Brookline with his wife and seven children (5 girls, 2 boys), coaches a Little League baseball team on which his older son and 3rd daughter play, and completed Shas in 1997-2005 with the 11th Daf Yomi cycle.