The Founder Effect

Published by Wiley in 2025, The Founder Effect sets out the pillars behind the world's most successful founder-led companies: how founders allocate capital, design incentives and build decision-making systems that outlast them, and how investors can tell enduring founder-led companies from charismatic failures.

The book draws on a decade of research and on interviews with founders who built global businesses, and it underpins the classification methodology now applied across roughly 14,700 listed companies at Lumenary.

Order

• Wiley, the publisher; ships worldwide
• Amazon and Amazon Australia
• Barnes & Noble, in the United States
• Dymocks and Readings, in Australia
• Audible Australia, Audible US and Audible UK, for the audiobook
• Also available in print, ebook and audiobook wherever books are sold.

For readers of the book

The research continues at Lumenary Research: annual reports, data notes and founder interviews, free to read.