Founders, Keepers : Why Founders Are Built to Fail, and What It Takes to Succeed

Based on decades of empirical research and data, Founders, Keepers gives founders a practical roadmap for navigating the inevitable challenges that come with startup growth.

Every founder is a time bomb waiting to explode. Why? Because the same personal attributes a founder needs to launch a startup will invariably blow it up. Successful founders learn how to defuse their worst impulses and build durable companies. But most don’t.

For founders, investors, and academics alike, Founders, Keepers is the distillation of a lengthy collaboration between Rich Hagberg, Silicon Valley’s “CEO Whisperer,” and his client Tien Tzuo, founder and CEO of Zuora. Steeped in nearly 40 years of research in leadership psychology, it delivers a Swiss Army knife of mental models and practical tools that will give founders a much better chance of making it to the next level of success.

This sharp, lively guide gives readers insights into:

• The three pillars of leadership every founder needs to be successful
• How certain personality traits can lead to fatally flawed decisions
• Common blind spots, including the default tendencies and leadership styles that often undermine success
• The key factors that differentiate successful and unsuccessful founders
• Why founders often frustrate their investors, partners, and employees—and what to do instead

It’s a difficult but unavoidable truth: in order to grow a startup, you have to grow as a person. Founders may be unable to account for all the complexities entailed in scaling a company, but they can learn how to account for themselves. Founders, Keepers offers the way forward.

Rich Hagberg, Ph.D., often referred to as “Silicon Valley’s CEO Whisperer,” is a trained psychologist who has spent the last 40 years of his career as an executive management coach for over 6,000 executives. Since 2009 he has worked with companies like Tinder, Twitter, Dropbox, MixPanel, Zendesk, Quora, Asana, Pinterest, Salesforce, Munchery, Reddit, Gusto, Cruise, Tinder, Optimizely, Instacart, Patreon, Nerdwallet, and Super Evil Megacorp (it’s a gaming company). Dr. Hagberg is often quoted in the business and general media and has been featured in publications such as Fortune, Forbes, BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, Inc., Entrepreneur, The Information, Business Insider and CNN.

Tien Tzuo, Founder and CEO of Zuora, evangelized the shift to subscription and service-based business models, coining the phrase “Subscription Economy.” In an effort to empower this new economy, Tien created what became an award-winning monetization suite capable of powering any recurring revenue model. Before Zuora, Tien was one of the “original forces” at Salesforce, joining as employee number 11. In his 9 years at Salesforce, he built its original billing system, later serving as Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Strategy Officer. Tien is also the author of the USA Today, LA Times and Amazon best-selling book, Subscribed, which has sold over 100,000 copies in 14 languages around the world. He holds a BS in electrical engineering from Cornell and an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Tien was born in Taiwan and raised in Brooklyn, New York.