Professor Noam Wasserman, an expert on challenges and pitfalls of start-ups, knows the lessons learned from business founders’ experiences are really about life in general

A few years back, ace techie Lew Cirne, founder and chief executive of California-based Wily Technology, had led his 50-man start-up software company past all projected milestones, making major sales of Wily’s flagship product and raising two rounds of financing from top venture capitalists. Then his financial backers called him in for a meeting — and insisted that he step down as CEO. Cirne was stunned. How could his main supporters want him replaced?

To analyze what had gone wrong, Cirne turned to Noam Wasserman, an expert on the challenges and pitfalls of start-up companies, then a professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School (HBS) and now the head of a center for entrepreneurial research and teaching at the University of Southern California (USC). Wasserman observed that the very talents Cirne had used to get his company off the ground had led to his own demise — a dilemma Wasserman had seen many founders face.

Professor Wasserman worked with Cirne to capture his experiences in a Harvard Business School case study so students could learn from them. “I introduced Lew to my research on the ‘paradox of entrepreneurial success’ — whereby success as a founder can heighten the chances of getting replaced. That, and the process of writing the case and attending my class when I taught the case, helped him reflect on the early decisions that had planted the seeds of his eventual firing,” Wasserman — an uncompromising Torah-observant and learned Jew who will soon complete his second siyum on Shas with the daf yomi cycle — reflects. “After he left Wily, we delved into how he could harness the power of gam zu l’tovah to derive lessons for founding his next company. And indeed, his next venture, New Relic, is a large public company that Lew still leads as CEO.”

Many of Noam’s insights into the potential pitfalls when starting a business have come from his firsthand work with such well-known founders as Evan Williams, cofounder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium; Tim Westergren, who started Pandora Radio; Curt Schilling, a star major-league pitcher who went on to found a high-profile tech start-up that encountered major problems; and Brian Scudamore, the man behind 1-800-GOT-JUNK and a pioneer of the residential rubbish-hauling industry.

He incorporated those insights into his first book, the 2012 The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup, which was an Amazon #1 bestseller in Management and has spent more than half a decade on its Strategy bestseller list. It also cemented his reputation as perhaps the country’s preeminent authority on the challenges facing founders of start-up enterprises and how to address them.

With his most recent book, Life is a Startup: What Founders Can Teach Us About Making Choices and Managing Change (Stanford University Press), Noam has turned the experience and expertise he gained over a nearly 20-year teaching and research career into a vehicle for enriching the lives of his readers, whether or not they’re in the business world.

And when he takes the podium on November 13 for his keynote speech at the TribeWorks business acceleration conference for Jewish entrepreneurs, this father of eight will do more than impart the insights of a world-renowned expert on how to start a business. He’ll also be modeling how an observant Jew ascends to the highest levels of his chosen field — as an Ivy League business school professor and best-selling author — while remaining true to his religious principles.

Case in point: On a recent book tour following the release of Life Is a Startup, Professor Wasserman’s first stop brought him to  San Antonio, Texas, for a three-hour workshop at the Inc. 5000 conference, where his initial audience doubled after word spread during a mid-session break that this was a talk not to be missed. From Texas he was headed to Northern California’s Silicon Valley for a fireside chat the following day with up-and-coming entrepreneurs in that epicenter of tech innovation. There was only one problem: He’d have no opportunity to daven Minchah in San Antonio before the flight, and his flight to the Valley would get in too late to join a minyan there.

What to do? For Noam, it was obvious: He flew from San Antonio to Los Angeles in time for Minchah and Maariv, stayed the night, and flew up north the next morning after Shacharis for his talk in San Francisco. That kind of synthesis — a top-tiered academic and business career with a non-negotiable commitment to the rhythms of life as a frum Jew — is a built-in feature of Noam Wasserman’s regular workday, several hours of which are devoted to nonnegotiable Torah study.

Then again, Noam’s daily Gemara seder might be considered a form of course preparation. At Harvard Business School, the “Founders Dilemmas” course he created (with the same name as the book) was the elite school’s most popular entrepreneurship elective, garnering him its Faculty Teaching award. To formulate the course, which focuses on the early decisions of a company’s founders that can make or break its success, he gleaned lessons from case studies of start-ups and interviews with their founders, behavioral sciences research, his own data on 10,000 founders, and, as he puts it in his latest book, “the entrepreneurial wisdom in ancient writings, such as the Talmud and the classical work Ethics of the Fathers.”