About Professor Noam T. Wasserman
Associate Professor | Tukman Faculty Fellow
At HBS, Noam Wasserman teaches a second-year MBA elective, entitled
"
Founders' Dilemmas: Money and Power in Entrepreneurial
Ventures," for which he was awarded the 2009 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. Most recently, his article on "The Founder's
Dilemma" was featured in the February 2008 issue of Harvard Business
Review. 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.
