What Makes a Successful Founder?

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What makes a
successful founder?
—
DECEMBER 2019

2
WHAT MAKES A
SUCCESSFUL FOUNDER
—
VCs have many theories
on what makes great founders
TECHNICAL
SKILLS
YOUNG
STORYTELLER...

3
METHODOLOGY
We set out to explore this key question.
We collected data on 60+ founders from their
early stage investors ...

4
Whether a founder/CEO is
technical does not differentiate
company success.
FOUNDER SUCCESS
BY TECHNICAL SKILLS
TECHNICAL...

5
However, having a
complementary cofounder,
often a technical one, is
correlated with success.
FOUNDER HAS A COFOUNDER
WI...

6
Founders of all ages can
be successful.
FOUNDER SUCCESS
BY AGE*
AGED 25—29 AGED 30—34 AGED 35—39
Doing well Not doing we...

7
We often judge people too quickly based on obvious signals:
WHAT MAKES A
SUCCESSFUL FOUNDER
—
ARE YOU
TECHNICAL?
HAVE YO...

8
We want to evaluate the most critical aspects
of what makes a great founder.
AGILE THINKING
“Founder is able to rapidly ...

9
We discovered three archetypes of
successful founders that cluster
around certain characteristics…
Humble
Operator
Excep...

10
Passionate
Outsider
Overconfident
Storyteller
Stubborn
Individualist
PERCENTAGE IN
OUR DATABASE 10% 23% 12%
WORDS VCS U...

11
Across all archetypes,
day-to-day effectiveness
is highly correlated
with success.
FOUNDER RUNS HIS/HER COMPANY
EFFECTI...

12
Also important to success
is whether the founder
learns and adapts quickly.
FOUNDER IS A QUICK LEARNER
DOING WELL NOT D...

13
When making decisions under
uncertainty, successful founders
tend to be results-driven. That is,
they try many possibil...

14
WHAT MAKES A
SUCCESSFUL FOUNDER
—
Why do similar founder archetypes
have diverging outcomes?

15
WHAT MAKES A
SUCCESSFUL FOUNDER
—
The most powerful person
in the world is the storyteller.
The storyteller sets the vi...

16
For founders who are strong
storytellers, highly confident,
and uniquely advantaged in
their market…
Why are some succe...

17
Successful storytellers are
also scrappy and agile thinkers.
They execute day-to-day
(Agile Visionaries).
However, when...

18
WHAT MAKES A
SUCCESSFUL FOUNDER
—
Working hard, that’s the only thing
I know better than my competitor.
There are so ma...

19
For founders who are humble,
scrappy, and gritty…
Why are some successful
(Humble Operators) and others
are less so (Pa...

20
When hard work combines with
strong founder-market fit and an
early team that follows them from
a previous company, the...

21
WHAT MAKES A
SUCCESSFUL FOUNDER
—
We are stubborn on vision. We are
flexible on details….We don’t give
up on things eas...

22
Counter-intuitive concepts you may not realize…
WHAT MAKES A
SUCCESSFUL FOUNDER
—
It is great when a founder has high c...

23
WHAT MAKES A
SUCCESSFUL FOUNDER
—
Our early takeaways
—
The technical founder requirement is a
venture trope. Founders ...

24
WHAT MAKES A
SUCCESSFUL FOUNDER
—
Our job as a seed stage investor is to look for brilliant entrepreneurs
when their su...

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