Controlling for a wide variety of differences across the 460 startups I analyzed,11 founders who had kept control of both the CEO position and the board of directors held equity stakes that were only 52% as valuable as those held by founders who had given up both the CEO position and control of the board, as shown in Figure 11.3. (The founders’ equity stakes had an intermediate value if they had given up control of either the CEO position or the board but not both.) This result held in both younger startups and older ones, suggesting that founders face a trade-off between wealth and control,
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