Week 2: Discuss “Maintaining Control versus Maximizing Wealth’ – The Founder’s Dilemmas

WEEK TWO

When it comes to prepare or to be an Entrepreneur, the exploring potential founder faces difficult decisions that significantly affect his or her startup direction and outcomes.

In this topic, I want to focus on how decisions affect important outcome: what founders should do and what founder can do? such as the startup growth, the founding team’s stability and the founder long term control. This is the most common and difficult dilemmas for any startup business.

First, find out what is the true definition of Entrepreneur? For me, an entrepreneur is a person with a vision who orchestrate obvious time, talent and money to make his vision real.

What is my business? What is my vision for it? where I want to go? Mostly, I am not quite sure where to go. Communicate with my vision by Mission statement, for example, it holds me accountable. What I will become in 5 years. How to qualify? How to document it? What is my most important motivation? Be aware that motivations call for very different decisions when I conduct my business.

For founders, the best way for them to know what to do is to know their motives to start a business and their decisions automatically or technically oriented toward:

1. Maximizing Wealth (calls: Rich outcome) or
2. Driving and maintaining Control (calls: King outcome)

These two above are the most common in the top 6 motivations (altruism, variety, intellectual challenge, etc.,) and also conflict with each other. “A founder who knows whether wealth or control is his or her primary motivation will have an easier time making decision and can make consistent decisions that increase the chances of reaching the desired outcome – Rich or King” – page 14, the Founder’s Dilemmas.

Those motivations effect founder’s decisions on:

• Pre-founding career (where, when, what to found)
• Founding team (relationship, role, rewards)
• Hiring (relationship, role, rewards)
• Investor (who, when, what term and where to found)
• With whom to partner (Whether and how to form corporate partnership)
• Business-strategy (Whether and how to exit from the startup)

Founders need to attract outside resources: people, information and money in order to pursue opportunities and build greatest value. But these resources typically that founders cede more and more control, in other words, founder to give up valuable assets. They must choose between profiting from their hard work and keeping the control of “their baby”-their own creation. A recurring dilemma of what resources to acquire and what cost in ownership and control.

But knowing one’s motivation is only one piece of the puzzle. The founders need a clearer and bigger picture when they are at a crucial fork on the road they are on, about to make decision that will have important consequences for the journey which lead to the outcomes for the founder, the team or the startup:

• King (remain founder-CEO)
• Rich
• Motivation-choice consistency
• Founding team stability
• Employment grow.

If the founders could figure out the core motivations before making the decision and consistent about their decisions, they could dramatically increase their probabilities of achieving the more attractive outcomes.

Sources:

Wasserman, Noam (2012). The Founder’s Dilemma. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

Several You Tube Entrepreneurship Videos. Example: Dan Lok and many more.