In This Episode:
In this episode, Denise Silber HBS MBA welcomes Professor Daniel Elfenbein, a triple Harvard alumnus and entrepreneurship researcher at Olin Business School. Together, they explore the delicate balance entrepreneurs must strike between confidence and overconfidence, commitment and detachment, and the hard truth of knowing when to pivot—or when to quit.
Dan shares insights drawn from his own entrepreneurial journey, research experiments, and global teaching experience. From biotech boardroom standoffs to mathematical models of founder behavior, he unpacks how emotions, attachment, and overconfidence affect decision-making in startups. You’ll learn why “quitting” may just be the smartest pivot of all—and how founders can better calibrate their confidence to avoid costly mistakes.
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A Glimpse of What You’ll Learn
Why confidence is essential—but overconfidence can be dangerous
What it means to “fall in love with the problem”
How attachment affects an entrepreneur’s ability to pivot or quit
What role emotions and language play in decision-making
The worst combination of founder mindset, based on research
How team dynamics can balance differing strengths
Why quitting might be the ultimate pivot
How teaching entrepreneurs to think like scientists can improve outcomes
How confidence can both attract funding and distort judgment
What the Dunning-Kruger effect means for founders
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Daniel Elfenbein is Professor of Strategy at Washington University in St. Louis’s Olin Business School. A triple Harvard alumnus, Dan earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in Business Economics from Harvard, and graduated summa cum laude with an A.B. in Chemistry.
Dan is a leading scholar at the intersection of strategy, entrepreneurship, and organizational economics. His research delves into how trust, incentives, and behavioral biases shape outcomes in entrepreneurial ventures and strategic alliances. His work has been published in top-tier journals including the Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Management Science, and The Review of Economic Studies.
A central theme of Dan’s research is understanding the nuanced role of overconfidence in entrepreneurial decision-making. His work—spanning computational modeling, experiments, and economic theory—has provided deep insights into how different forms of overconfidence (including overestimation and overprecision) influence venture formation, pivot strategies, and exit decisions. He has demonstrated that some forms of overconfidence can impede learning and decision-making, while others may be counterbalanced by well-designed experimentation programs.
Dan served as Chair of the Strategy and Entrepreneurship Area at Olin from 2020 to 2024, where he championed a culture of scholarly excellence and cross-disciplinary collaboration. He served as Academic Director and then as Associate Dean for Olin’s joint Executive MBA Program with Fudan School of Management in Shanghai.
Prior to academia, Dan worked as a consultant at Monitor Company—a firm founded by Harvard Business School professors and graduates, including Michael E. Porter, with whom Dan had the great privilege to work. He also served as a staff economist with the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in the Clinton Administration.
He has held faculty appointments at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and has delivered invited talks at Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan, and London Business School, and more than 30 other universities around the globe.