Informed Success: A Bibliography for Student Entrepreneurs

Often downplayed in the excitement of starting up a new business venture is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs will face: should they go it alone, or bring in cofounders, hires, and investors to help build the business? More than just financial rewards are at stake. Friendships and relationships can suffer. Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin. "The Founder's Dilemmas" is the first book to examine the early decisions by entrepreneurs that can make or break a startup and its team.

Drawing on a decade of research, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them. He looks at whether it is a good idea to cofound with friends or relatives, how and when to split the equity within the founding team, and how to recognize when a successful founder-CEO should exit or be fired. Wasserman explains how to anticipate, avoid, or recover from disastrous mistakes that can splinter a founding team, strip founders of control, and leave founders without a financial payoff for their hard work and innovative ideas. He highlights the need at each step to strike a careful balance between controlling the startup and attracting the best resources to grow it, and demonstrates why the easy short-term choice is often the most perilous in the long term.

"The Founder's Dilemmas" draws on the inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, while mining quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders.

People problems are the leading cause of failure in startups. This book offers solutions.

An essential guide to understanding the dynamics of a startup's board of directors Let's face it, as founders and entrepreneurs, you have a lot on your plate--getting to your minimum viable product, developing customer interaction, hiring team members, and managing the accounts/books. Sooner or later, you have a board of directors, three to five (or even seven) Type A personalities who seek your attention and at times will tell you what to do. While you might be hesitant to form a board, establishing an objective outside group is essential for startups, especially to keep you on track, call you out when you flail, and in some cases, save you from yourself.

In "Startup Boards", Brad Feld--a Boulder, Colorado-based entrepreneur turned-venture capitalist--shares his experience in this area by talking about the importance of having the right board members on your team and how to manage them well. Along the way, he shares valuable insights on various aspects of the board, including how they can support you, help you understand your startup's milestones and get to them faster, and hold you accountable.

* Details the process of choosing board members, including interviewing many people, checking references, and remembering that there should be no fear in rejecting a wrong fit
* Explores the importance of running great meetings, mixing social time with business time, and much more
* Recommends being a board member yourself at some other organization so you see the other side of the equation

Engaging and informative, "Startup Boards" is a practical guide to one of the most important pieces of the startup puzzle.

A practical, expert-reviewed guide to growing software engineering teams effectively, written by and for hiring managers, recruiters, interviewers, and candidates.

This book is the "Hello, World" tutorial for building products, technologies, and teams in a startup environment. It's based on the experiences of the author, Yevgeniy (Jim) Brikman, as well as interviews with programmers from some of the most successful startups of the last decade, including Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, Stripe, Instagram, AdMob, Pinterest, and many others. Hello, Startup is a practical, how-to guide that consists of three parts: Products, Technologies, and Teams. Although at its core, this is a book for programmers, by programmers, only Part II (Technologies) is significantly technical, while the rest should be accessible to technical and non-technical audiences alike. If you're at all interested in startups--whether you're a programmer at the beginning of your career, a seasoned developer bored with large company politics, or a manager looking to motivate your engineers--this book is for you.

Features tried-and-true, ready-to-use tools, examples, and resources, this guide teaches the nuts and bolts of HR for small businesses and startups and is the perfect desk reference for any organization who may not have the financial resources to invest in a fully-staffed HR department. Guides readers through the HR essentials, including developing policies and organizational best practices, managing and measuring performance, driving engagement and cultivating a culture, understanding legal obligations, assessing, risk, and guidance for developing leaders.

Is your company's top talent jumping ship as good replacements become harder to get? If you need the best practices and ideas for winning the race for talent--but don't have time to find them--this book is for you. Here are 11 inspiring and useful perspectives, all in one place.

This collection of HBR articles will help you:
- Look for good people in all the right places
- Interview more effectively
- Make--and keep--compelling promises to candidates and employees
- Mitigate the risks of hiring stars from other companies
- Coach and mentor to shore up commitment
- Stretch promising employees' responsibilities
- Rotate high performers into a variety of teams
- Reverse the female brain drain