Charlie Harary (left) and Dr. Noam Wasserman

Dr. Noam Wasserman, a noted entrepreneurship and leadership expert who was a longtime professor at Harvard Business School and is now dean of the Sy Syms School of Business at Yeshiva University, and Charlie Harary, an investor, advisor and business executive, are teaming to launch a new podcast based on Dr. Wasserman’s well-known book, The Founder’s Dilemmas. The Founder’s Dilemmas podcast is the only Torah-oriented audio and video series to be based on a bestselling book. It is also the first business podcast to be grounded in rigorous academic research and systematic data on 10,000 founders in addition to the experiences of actual founders.  

Episode 1 on Spotify

 

Episode 1 on YouTube

  The podcast release coincides with the 10th anniversary of Dr. Wasserman’s book, The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup. The book remains on Amazon’s bestseller lists for Strategy & Competition and Starting a Business. The book is a roadmap for starting a company while avoiding the typical pitfalls, providing entrepreneurs with invaluable knowledge and advice on such topics as acquiring funding, finding talented employees and fostering business growth. When first released, the book was a top-ranked Amazon Bestseller in New Business Enterprises, Management, Business Systems & Planning and Popular Economics. “We will be looking at the most important dilemmas faced by founders, tapping the data on 10,000 founders that forms the basis of the stories in The Founder’s Dilemmas,” Dr. Wasserman said. “Our conversations will center around the case studies that bring the challenges and lessons to life, and timeless lessons from the Torah and Talmud that add insights to the dynamics and decisions we’ll be examining. We’ll be looking at the skills, best practices and elements of business that separate successful businesses from ones that fall short. We’ll also be recapping the takeaways in each episode so listeners who may be aspiring to start businesses of their own will be able to learn from the lessons of those before them.” In addition to covering the most important early decisions founders face that tend to go awry, Dr. Wasserman and Harary will tackle Burning Questions submitted by listeners. The first eight episodes have been recorded and will be released soon. Episode titles include People Problems and Preparing Yourself to Found, Relationship Problems, Relationship Solutions, Roles and Decision Making, Reward Dilemmas: Splitting the Equity, Founding Questions and Answers, The Promise and Perils of Entrepreneurial Persistence, Financing Dilemmas and Rich vs. King Tradeoffs. Dr. Wasserman became dean of Sy Syms in 2019. Prior to that, he was a longtime professor of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School and a chaired professor and founding director of the Founder Central initiative at the University of Southern California. Dr. Wasserman’s second book, Life Is a Startup: What Founders Can Teach Us about Making Choices and Managing Change, was released in 2018. It became an Amazon #1 bestseller in Entrepreneurship and won the 2019 Gold Award from the Axiom Business Books Award (in the Success/Motivation/Coaching category). Harary, who wrote the bestselling book Unlocking Greatness, has been investing in and working with companies for over a decade. He was a standout Clinical Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship at Sy Syms. “I’ve spent a lot of time working with entrepreneurs who encounter difficult challenges,” Harary said. “They wish they had solutions, but they don’t. They are far along in their careers, so they are not going to go to business school, and they end up learning from the ‘School of Hard Knocks.’ This podcast is the rare chance to pepper questions to Dr. Wasserman, who has spent hundreds of hours researching the activities of 10,000 company founders. We will cover the most frequent mistakes that CEOs and entrepreneurs make – and teach other business owners how to avoid those pitfalls.” “It’s been amazing to watch the hunger that founders have for data-grounded best practices that will improve their chances of success,” Dr. Wasserman said. “Over the last decade, it’s also been rewarding to see how my books have spread to so many investors, incubators, campuses and startups. Founders and investors have been able to grapple with difficult issues more effectively by sharing a framework for how to think about them, a language for discussing them and more foresight about the challenges they’ll face down the road.” Episodes of Season One of the Founder’s Dilemmas podcast will be released on Wednesdays, starting on June 22. The Founder’s Dilemmas podcast will be available on popular podcasting platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify and more.