In recent years, researchers and practitioners alike have been studying the personalities of successful startup founders to understand what makes them tick. By analysing the Big Five personality traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—we can gain insights into the characteristics that contribute to a founder's success or failure. In this blog post, we will use what a quick Google search list as the best and worst rated founders and take a look at their personality traits. However, I only did a small sample set as a quick experiment.
Best Rated Founders
The following five founders stand out as examples of those who excel in their roles:
1. Patrick Collison (Stripe)
2. David Vélez (Nubank)
3. Max Levchin (Affirm)
4. Brian Armstrong (Coinbase)
5. Stewart Butterfield (Slack)
These founders generally exhibit high levels of openness and conscientiousness, moderate to high agreeableness, moderate extraversion, and low neuroticism. These traits help them navigate the challenges of building and growing successful startups.
Worst Rated Founders
On the other hand, there are founders whose actions and decisions led to negative consequences for themselves and their companies. Some notable examples include:
1. Travis Kalanick (Uber)
2. Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos)
3. Parker Conrad (Zenefits)
4. Billy McFarland (Fyre Festival)
5. Adam Neumann (WeWork)
Founders here often display high openness and extraversion, but extremely low conscientiousness and agreeableness, along with low neuroticism. Their actions and decision-making processes contributed to the failures of their respective ventures.
Findings
Based on the analysis of these founders, several patterns emerge:
- Successful founders typically exhibit high openness and conscientiousness, moderate to high agreeableness, moderate extraversion, and low neuroticism.
- Unsuccessful founders often show high openness and extraversion, but very low conscientiousness and agreeableness, and low neuroticism.
- Sociopathic founders are characterized by very high extraversion, very low agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism, with variable openness.
- Founders with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) tend to have high extraversion, very low agreeableness, moderately low conscientiousness and neuroticism, with no clear pattern in openness.
As Rumi once said, "What you seek is seeking you." Similarly, the qualities that make great founders also attract them to entrepreneurship.