Publications

2012
Working Paper

The First Deal: The Division of Founder Equity in New Ventures

By: Thomas F. Hellmann and Noam Wasserman

This paper examines the division of founder shares in entrepreneurial ventures, focusing on the decision of whether or not to divide the shares equally among all founders. To motivate the empirical analysis we develop a simple theory of costly bargaining, where... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Equity

September 2008 (Revised December 2011)
Case

Frank Addante, Serial Entrepreneur

By: Noam T. Wasserman and Antony Uy

Frank Addante is a 28-year-old serial entrepreneur who is in the process of building his fifth venture. Of his first four ventures, two were sold, one went public, and in the last he decided to close the venture and return unused capital to his investors. With the... View Details

Keywords: Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Equity; Selection and Staffing; Groups and Teams

Educators

Article

Refined Configuration Results for Extremal Type II Lattices of Ranks 40 and 80

By: Noam D. Elkies and Scott Duke Kominers

We show that, if L is an extremal Type II lattice of rank 40 or 80, then L is generated by its vectors of norm min(L)+2. This sharpens earlier results of Ozeki, and the second author and Abel, which showed that such lattices L are generated by their vectors of norms... View Details

Keywords: Mathematical Methods

August 2017
Article

The First Deal: The Division of Founder Equity in New Ventures

By: Thomas F. Hellmann and Noam Wasserman

We examine the trade-off between efficiency and equality within the context of entrepreneurial founding teams. Using a formal theory where founders may have preferences over relative outcomes, we derive predictions about the antecedents and consequences of dividing... View Details

Keywords: Equality and Inequality; Entrepreneurship; Equity

01 Sep 2009
News

Class Day, Commencement Mark New Beginning for Newest Alumni

students for teaching excellence were Professor Joseph Lassiter (The Entrepreneurial Manager); Professor Jan Rivkin (Strategy); Professor David Moss (Creating the Modern Financial System); and Associate Professor Noam View Details

Keywords: commencement; Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services

27 Mar 2019
News

Life Is a Startup

Subscribe on iTunes Subscribe on SoundCloud More Skydeck episodes In 2010, Noam Wasserman (MBA 1999, PhD 2002) was teaching a course he developed at HBS called Founder’s Dilemmas, which focused on the... View Details

01 Jun 2012
News

Ideas

Web Extras Watch Professor Wasserman explain key insights from his book, Founders Dilemmas Listen to a webinar recording for alumni entrepreneurs Faculty Q&A with Professor Noam View Details

Keywords: Finance; Manufacturing

November 2008 (Revised March 2014)
Supplement

Savage Beast (B)

By: Noam Wasserman, LP Maurice and Yael Braid

For several months, things had been spiraling downwards at Savage Beast, the music-recommendation company started three years before by Tim Westergren. The company's founder-CEO recently left due to pressures both at home and within the venture. Dozens of investors... View Details

Keywords: Business Ventures; Entrepreneurship; Compensation and Benefits; Employee Relationship Management; Lawsuits and Litigation; Groups and Teams

20 Jul 2010
First Look

First Look: July 20

Founding of Nike Noam Wasserman and Kyle AndersonHarvard Business School Case 810-077 It had taken Phil Knight 16 long years to build Nike into the number one athletic-shoe company in the country. When... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

28 Jun 2016
First Look

June 28, 2016

forthcoming Management Science The First Deal: The Division of Founder Equity in New Ventures By: Hellmann, Thomas F., and Noam Wasserman Abstract—We examine the trade-off between efficiency and equality... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

May 2014
Article

Right Up the Middle: How Israeli Firms Go Global

By: Jonathan Friedrich, Amit Noam and Elie Ofek

The article considers international business enterprises based in Israel and how they successfully expanded from their origins as small businesses. A common technique of those companies in which they focused on market entry in other countries whose markets were too... View Details

Keywords: Globalized Firms and Management; Israel

2010
Article

On the Classification of Type II Codes of Length 24

By: Noam D. Elkies and Scott Duke Kominers

We give a new, purely coding-theoretic proof of Koch's criterion on the tetrad systems of Type II codes of length 24 using the theory of harmonic weight enumerators. This approach is inspired by Venkov's approach to the classification of the root systems of Type II... View Details

Keywords: Mathematical Methods

17 Feb 2010
First Look

First Look: Feb. 17

resisting change as well as having conflicts amongst themselves. Purchase this case:http://cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cb/product/410002-PDF-ENG Savage Beast (A1) Noam Wasserman and Louis-Philippe MauriceHarvard... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

2019
Article

Configurations of Extremal Type II Codes via Harmonic Weight Enumerators

By: Noam D. Elkies and Scott Duke Kominers

We prove configuration results for extremal Type II codes, analogous to the configuration results of Ozeki and of the second author for extremal Type II lattices. Specifically, we show that for n ∈{8,24,32,48,56,72,96} every extremal Type II code of length n is... View Details

Keywords: Mathematical Methods