Tag Archives: Founder

The Science of Startups: The Impact of Founder Personalities on Company Success

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When a young colleague of mine (thanks Amine!) mentioned a paper entitled The Science of Startups: The Impact of Founder Personalities on Company Success, I was intrigued not to say interested. You can find the version published on Nature here and the one on arXiv there.

When I look back on the 741 articles of this blog, 118 are tagged with founders, coming only second after Silicon Valley. Most of them deal with facts and figures but 38 mention the term personality. For example:
– Knowledge, skills and personality of entrepreneurs (dated March 2021) https://www.startup-book.com/2021/03/19/knowledge-skills-and-personality-of-entrepreneurs/ where it is claimed “There’s an entrepreneurial character.”
– The Founder’s Dilemmas – The Answer is “It depends!” (dated December 2013) https://www.startup-book.com/2013/12/12/the-founders-dilemmas-the-answer-is-it-depends/ where the claim is “There are no real pattern in becoming a founder (age, experience, childhood influences, personality, family status, economic status), however early influences and natural motivations seem to be important.”
– Larry Page and Peter Thiel – 2 (different?) Icons of Silicon Valley (date October 2021) https://www.startup-book.com/2021/10/30/larry-page-and-peter-thiel-2 -différentes-icônes-de-la-silicon-valley/
and I would advise anyone interested in the topic to read the book Founders at Work. I put my long notes about this great book at the end of this post.

This new article is long and a little complex. So I just took notes directly in the text and paste them here. But the article is worth reading if you have the time and interested.

Attention has increasingly considered internal factors relating to the firm’s founding team, including their previous experiences and failures, their centrality in a global network of other founders and investors as well as the team’s size. […] The effects of founders’ personalities on the success of new ventures are mainly unknown. […] Here we show that founder personality traits are a significant feature of a firm’s ultimate success.

[…]

Key personality facets that distinguish successful entrepreneurs include a preference for variety, novelty and starting new things (openness to adventure), like being the centre of attention (lower levels of modesty) and being exuberant (higher activity levels). However, we do not find one Founder-type personality; instead, six different personality types appear, with startups founded by a “Hipster, Hacker and Hustler” being twice as likely to succeed. Our results also demonstrate the benefits of larger, personality-diverse teams in startups.

[…]

In this article, we analyse a variety of firm-level, founder-level and founder-team-level determinants of the success of startups, which are by their very nature experimental, high risk and likely to fail.
Firstly, we examine a range of firm-level determinants of startup success, including location, industry and age of startup to explore to what extent these factors are associated with success. Then building on our previous occupation-personality fit research, we use a large collection of public data on startup companies from Crunchbase to examine the detailed personality profiles of founders.

[…]

Firm-Level Factors of Startup Success. On a country level, chances for success are highest in the US, Japan, West Europe, and Scandinavian countries. Firms from the payment and software industries have high chances of success. Chances of success are positively related to a firm’s maturity, with firms that are seven years or older having higher chances of success.

[…]

Does the combination of founders and their personalities play a role in startup success, and is there any evidence to support the commonly held view in the venture capital investment community that startups require three types of founders: a Hacker, a Hustler and a Hipster?

[…]

In technology, the categorical roles of Hackers (skillful computer programmers and developers) and Hustlers (entrepreneurial leaders able to win over customers and investors to new
products and ideas) have been around for decades, with […] oppositional tension. For example, when Steve Jobs announced he would take medical leave from Apple in January 2009, Mat “Wilto” Marquis described him as a hacker and a hustler in a well-wishing tweet. However, the first use of Hacker and Hustler in conjunction with Hipster in the context of the putative startup founder dream was coined by influential venture capitalist Elias Bizannes in 2011. It was then popularised in 2012 by an address at the influential technology conference South by Southwest by Rei Inamoto and in a subsequent Forbes article “The Dream Team: Hipster, Hacker, and Hustler”. Hipster is a broad term used to describe members of an urban subculture in many cities in the US and other countries who are design conscious and favour non-mainstream fashions, trendy foods and alternative music. Bizannes co-opted the term to reflect what he perceived was the increasing need for successful startups to have a founder with design-savvy, aesthetic imagination and insider knowledge (Hipster) in addition to the traditional roles of someone good at selling things (Hustler) and creating technology products (Hacker).

[…]

While recent research has demonstrated that many employees in the same occupations share similar personality traits, being a startup founder is not a conventional job. we inferred the personality traits across 30 dimensions (Big 5 facets) of a large global sample (n=4.4k) of successful startup founders.

[…]

Using two samples together: Successful Entrepreneurs and Successful Employees (unlikely to be founders), we trained and tested a machine learning random forest classifier to distinguish and classify entrepreneurs from employees and vice-versa using inferred personality vectors alone. As a result, we found we could correctly predict Entrepreneurs with 77% accuracy and Employees with 88% accuracy. Thus, based on personality information alone, we correctly predict all unseen new samples with 82.5% accuracy.

[…]

Adventurousness— the key feature

We explored in greater detail which personality features are the most important in distinguishing successful entrepreneurs from successful employees and found that the subdomain or facet of
Adventurousness within the Big 5 Domain of Openness was both significant and had the largest effect size. The facet of Modesty within the Big 5 Domain of Agreeableness and Activity Level within the Big 5 Domain of Extraversion was the subsequent most considerable effect. All thirty dimensions of the Big 5 facet were found to be significantly different in their distribution, with ten features having large effect sizes. […] Adventurousness in the Big 5 framework is defined as the preference for variety, novelty and starting new things

[…]

Six types of startup founders

Once we understood that startup founders have distinctive personality features that are different from regular employees, we explored whether there are distinct types of personalities among startup founders.

[…]

We discovered clear clustering tendencies in the data. Then, once we established the founder data clusters, we used agglomerative hierarchical clustering; a “bottom-up” clustering technique that initially treats each observation as an individual cluster and then merges them to create a hierarchy of possible cluster schemes with differing numbers of groups. And lastly, we identified the optimum number of clusters based on the outcome of four different clustering performance measurements. We found that the optimum number of clusters of startup founders based on their personality features is six (labelled #0 through to #5).

[…]

Together, these six different types of startup founders represent a framework we call the FOALED model of founder types—an acronym of Fighters, Operators, Accomplishers, Leaders, Engineers and Developers. Each founder Personality-Type has its distinct facet footprint. Also, we observe a central core of correlated features that are high for all types of entrepreneurs, including intellect, adventurousness and activity level.

[…]

By analysis of the six types of startup founders in our FOALED model within the broader Occupation-Personality landscape, we identify three types to be characterised as types of Hackers (Fighters, Operators and Developers) and two as Hustlers (Accomplishers and Leaders). The remaining type is different in personality to both Hackers and Hustlers. It is more of a subject matter expert whose insider field knowledge and problem-solving design strengths can be seen as a type of Hipster (Engineer). When we subsequently explored the combinations of personality types among founders and their relationship to the probability of the firm’s success, adjusted for a range of other factors in a multi-factorial analysis, we found significantly increased chances of startup success for Hipster, Hacker and Hustler foundation teams.

[…]

Our modelling shows firms with multiple founders are more likely to succeed, as illustrated in Fig. 3a), which shows firms with three or more founders are more than twice as likely to succeed as solo-founded. The benefits of larger and more personality-diverse foundation teams can be seen in the apparent differences between successful and unsuccessful firms based on their combined Big 5 personality team footprints, illustrated in Figure 3b). Here maximum values within each startup for each Big 5 trait for any of its cofounders are mapped, and the spread of these between sucessful firms — those who have IPOed, been acquired or acquired another firm and the other firms are shown. […] We found that ten combinations of founders with different personality types were significantly correlated with greater chances of startup success when accounting for other variables in the model. The coefficient of each of these factors is illustrated concerning other features that were also found to be significantly associated with success in Figure 3c.

[…]

We have learnt through this research that there is not one type of ideal “entrepreneurial” personality but six different types. Many successful startups have multiple co-founders with a combination of these different personality types. Startups are, to a large extent, a team sport; as such, diversity and complementarity of personalities matter in the foundation team. It has an outsized impact on the company’s likelihood of success. While all startups are high risk, the risk becomes lower with more founders, particularly if they have distinct personality traits. Our work demonstrates the benefits of diversity among the founding team of startups. Greater awareness of these benefits may help create more resilient startups capable of more significant innovation and impact.

More figures

Is there anything to conclude? Are the authors right or wrong? Can this be used for prediction? I do not know. The authors admit themselves there are biases in their research (it is based on the Twitter accounts of the founders…). I missed the element of the relationships between founders and I am a little skeptikal that more founders is better beginning with 3 or 4. My experience is that a team of 2 founders is ideal (you could chekc my long series of studies on startup data here. But who am I say this today ? What is certain is that the article is interesting and its ambtion to be praised !

Founders at Work - May08

Equal ownership of founders in startups ?

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Yesterday I had a short debate about Wozniak and Jobs initial ownership in Apple Computer. It is true that at the IPO Wozniak had much less ownership than Jobs, but this can be explained by the fact that he gave or sold at a low price shares to employees (whom he thought deserved it and Jobs did not). But at the origin, they had equal shares as the extract from the prospectus shows.

So I thought of having a look at my startup database (currently having 890 cap. tables) and I studied the numbers. Here they are:

So what are the lessons?

First majority of startup have between 1 and 3 founders, and 1 founder (contrarily to intuition maybe) is not so rare. Now there is a caveat: the history of a startup is never fully known. Apple had initially (and for 2 weeks) 3 founders! The third one was Ronald Wayne

Second, equal ownership is not the majority but it is not rare. Around 15-20%.

But this does not mean, one founder owns more than 50%. Of course yes with 2 founders. But for 3 founders, this happpens in 41% of the cases. When more than 3 founders, this is 31% of the cases. I did not check (yet) if geography or fields of activities have an impact…

Finally, if you read this blog, you should know that statistics do not say it all. Startups are a world of exceptions (and the statistics are seldom Gaussian but follow a power low, so beware of means of %). Therefore more anecdotally, but still important, here are some famous examples:

Famous startups – 2 founders with equal shares
Adobe
Akamai
Apple
Atlassian
Broadcom
Cisco
Genentech
Google
Intel
Netscape
Riverbed
Skype
Soitec
Spotify
Tivo
Yahoo
Zalando

Famous startups – 3 founders with equal shares
Airbnb
Checkpoint
Compaq
DoubleClick
Equinix
Marimba
nVidia
Palantir
Revolut
RPX
WeWork

Famous startups – 3+ founders with equal shares
AMD
Regulus
ROLM
Xiaomi

Famous startups – founders with non-equal shares
Cypress
DropBox
Etrade
Eventbrite
Facebook
Lyft
Microsoft
Mysql
Oracle
Pinterest
Salesforce
Sun Microsystems
Twitter
Uber

Figma, a new cap. table and there is much more to Dylan Field’s story

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Figma is the latest startup success story. Not an IPO, there are so few in 2022, but a $20B acquisition by Adobe. I did not have much data to build its cap. table so this is mostly tentative. Still it is interesting. So here it is. However there is much more to the story of its founders Dylan Field and Evan Wallace. Read below.

Not much to add to the numbers except the founders (including possibly some earnout shares) & investors stake, 20% & 50% respectively as well as the time it took for all this. A few months for seed, 10 years for an exit.

Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

So let us have a look more specifically at Dylan Field. Again the typical even if rare school drop-out in his early twenties who is still the CEO 10 years later. His cofounder is a friend. The rest is history. Well not really. Read his Wikipedia page for more or this article from Business Insider.

First, Field received the $100k that Peter Thiel was offering to young students ready to drop out of school. Field’s parents were against the idea but Field dropped out of Brown University. I have always been intrigued with the idea of pushing people out of school. Will Field ever go back there?

Second, he found some VC money despite the fact that Field recalled that he experienced a “wake up call” when [a potential] investor turned down the chance to invest in Figma’s seed round and said, “I don’t think you know what you’re doing yet.”

Third, he remained as CEO despite his lack of business experience. At one point early into Figma’s existence, Field said he once faced the very real risk of an exodus of disaffected employees. He had to learn, quickly, how to be more open to feedback and to empower his teams, while also hiring experienced managers. “I didn’t know how to manage effectively,” he said. “I didn’t know the basics around how to have good judgment around who to hire. When we were 10 people, I was a year into management. Usually if you are a new manager, you manage a few people. I was trying to do this at the same time and get the product to market.” Apparently he survived a few crises and the VCs let him lead.

There is certainly much more to learn from this unique story, but it is enough here. One final point. I would love to know more about VC performance. I worked at Index in the early days so I learnt that a great success does not guarantee a fund performance. But here Index made apparently more than $2B and made at least a 400x multiple in the seed part of its investment in Figma. But information about VC performance is close to impossible to find…

More (interesting?) data about French unicorns

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A month ago, I published data about French startups. I had been surprised to discover that access to data about private companies was finally possible for free in my dear country. So I looked at some (famous) French unicorns with an interest in the shareholder structure and how much money they had raised overall, as well as in their seed and A rounds. You will find the detailed information in a pdf in the bottom of the post.

But before moving on to this analysis, I want to mention an excellent article on seed fundraising, which gives advice and quite rich information. It is in French though and is entitled La levée de fonds seed ou amorçage. So here are the results:

In this first table, I just had a look at their age and fund raising. To give simple rule of thumbs, about the ones which are still private, they are about 5 to 15 years old, they have raised about €200M, with seed rounds of €0.5M and A round of €2-3M. The market capitalization should be (by definition) above one billion euros, but apparently this is not always the case (let us say that the value of a private company is a very volatile metric!) and the ratio of this value to amount raised seems also to be 5 to 15…

I then looked at how much dilution the seed and A rounds correspond to as well as the age of the companies for these rounds. Again, not taking outliers into account, both the seed and A rounds seem to induce a 25% dilution, therefore, with rounds of €0.5M and €2-3M respectively, the value at seed is about €2M and at A round is €8-12M. Finally the startups are less than 1-2 years old at seed and less than 4 years old at A round.

The last table is about the shareholding or equity structure as well as some data about the founders. The founders keep 25-30% of their startups, investors have 60-65% whereas employees have 5-10%.

There are about two founders per startup, they are surprisingly often below 30 with a median and average age of 29 and sadly with not a single woman.

Equity List – French Unicorns

Access to French startups data

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I should have known sooner about new rules on data about French startups. In the past, you had to pay on sites like societe.com or Euridile to get filing documents of private companies from the register of companies. This is the past! Now it is possible to access this data for free. And this is great news. So my favorite exercise which consists in building cap. tables of startups, which had become a habit for companies going public, for Swiss companies in certain cantons like Zurich or Basel, or for British companies thanks to Companies House is now possible in France with Pappers.

I obviously tried with some of the current famous private startups. I failed with Dataiku, probably because it moved to the USA, but could build some partial tables for Doctolib, Mirakl, Alan, Ledger and BlaBlaCar. It is far from perfect because you need to read many documents. I had to go through 68 ones for BlaBlaCar. I did not go into the details of stock options, granted or exercised. But I could get the info about the founders and the funding rounds. Here is a summary:

and here are the individual tables. QUite fascinating to see the recent trends in France through 5 examples:

Why you should never look for a cofounder

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This recurring question of looking for a cofounder has been bothering me for years. Similarly I do not like the idea of giving titles in the early days of a startup (project) as you may read here : Titles in Start-ups.

My argument is that you don’t look for cofounders. You have them already, you found them by talking about your project to friends or colleagues. It’s a bit like falling in love, you do not look to marry, you meet people. Point.

Of course, this does not help much, because there remains the loneliness of the entrepreneur. But do we get married just to fill the loneliness? As it turned out, thinking about it, I came across an excellent article in which I totally recognized myself: Everything You Need to Know About Startup Founders and Co-Founders.

Here are some key points:
– A founder is a person who comes up with an idea and then transforms it into a business or startup. If a founder sets up a company with other people, they are both a founder and a co-founder.
– “Founder” and “CEO” are two […] startup titles that people can carry simultaneously. One is a permanent title, while the other is not. “You will always be a Founder or Co-Founder.” Be sure to be careful however how you dole out the Founder/Co-Founder titles. That should be a lifetime title so be sure it goes to the right people who played a major role in the starting of the company and who will continue to play a role in the years to come.
– A founding member can often feel similar to a founder or co-founder because they come on so early in the process that they’re also putting in crazy hours and maybe even taking a pay cut in order to be a part of something important. But a founding team member is an early employee, not a founder. One important difference? The types of stock the two groups receive. Founder’s equity is different from Employee Stock Grants.
– “I’m totally unconvinced that two people can find a person they haven’t known previously, and become effective co-founder,” […] “I think you’re better off finding the money to hire someone than actually find a co-founder.
– If someone has come along a little later in the game, but still early — as in, pre-first employee — then you treat the same any other co-founder! If you’re choosing to add a “co-founder” after you already have employees, though, things can get a little tricky.

One thing is forgotten in the article, it is the investor (friends & family, BA, VC) or institution entering at the creation and from my point of view they are not founders because they do not (generally) contribute to the business…

Finally, the term founder does not seem to me to have a legal existence. It is only awarded by the group of people who recognize themselves as such. There is, however, an interesting example, namely how one of the founders of Tesla filed a complaint against Elon Musk, in particular because he considered that he was not a founder. The complaint is readable here (see page 28).

If you wish to dig a little more, here are two older posts:
– The Founder’s Dilemmas – The Answer is “It depends!”
– Founder without experience, lonely founder.

Female founders – an analysis from 800 (former) startups

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I just decided to add a new analysis to my recent study of 800 (former) startups. Although the topic is an important one in high-tech entrepreneurship, I had never looked at it except anectoticaly in the posts with the tag #women-and-high-tech.


Eight female founders or entrepreneurs. I am not sure how many I would have automatically recognized. And you?

And here are the results I found. My apologies in advance as this work is far from perfect: I tried to identify female founders from their name and this is not always easy. I believe however I cannot be too far from the exact results.

So what does this say?

– There are 76 female founders in 825 companies, which says 9% of these former startups had a female founder. Now to make it worse, the total number of founders identified is 1644.
– It is in the biotech field, that they are most represented (hence Boston, Switzerland, California outside Silicon Valley)
– The good news is that the number is up to 15% for the last decade. Still…
– Now there are only 31 female CEOs, this is only 4% (remember that founding CEOs are a little more than 60% so this is even worse as some of these female CEOS are not even founders – see here if you don’t know what I am talking about). In fact, 20 of these women were founders and 11 were not…

The age of founders and non-founding CEOs

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The age of founders has been a recurrent topic here as you might see from tag #age. In my analysis about hundreds of startups (822 at this time, and 600 lately), I just thought it would be interesting to check the correlation, if any, there might be between the age of founders and a CEO among these founders or not. Intuitively, one might think that the less experimented founders may induce a non-founding CEO. So here are the results:

The numbers speak and may seem counterintuitive. A majority (and often an overwhelming majority in the digital world) of startups have a founding CEO and the average age of founders is lower in this case. Question of dynamism, of envy of the team, I do not know …. Do not hesitate to react and comment.

Philippe Mustar – Entrepreneurship in Action – final episode

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Here is my last article on the excellent Entrepreneurship in action of which you will find the 5 previous articles with the tag #entrepreneurship-in-action. Here are some final notes:

The ingredients of success

But, those who fund this project are not doing it just for the skills and experience of the three entrepreneurs. They show other qualities that convince to follow them: their passion, their motivation, their ambition. Investors know that these qualities will allow the team to stay focused and better deal with the many uncertainties that lie ahead. To a student who asked a venture capitalist what are the three most important qualities that a project must have to be financed; he replied: the first is the team, the second is the team, the third is the team. Another joke, common in this industry, says that investors prefer to finance a good team with a bad project rather than the other way round (because a good idea carried by a team whose skills do not match those necessary to developing it is unlikely to go far; while a good team will always be able to modify, transform or change an initial idea of ​​low quality). The rest of the story shows that these statements, usually made in the tone of a joke, apply particularly well to Criteo and that those who make them, the venture capitalists, will have to believe in them and hold onto them firmly for several years. [Page 220]

Some criteria explaining success (according to one of the co-founders of Criteo):
– Have been able to focus on a single product
– Aim for excellence in all areas of the company
– Find the right cursor between managing daily problems and anticipating the future
– The ability to make difficult decisions
– Trust in technology

And finally Mustar returns to this process of innovation which looks like anything but a mechanical process:
– A long and winding process, made of many transformations
– An emerging process
– An experimental process
– A process filled with uncertainties, choices to be made, decisions to be made
– A collective process and a distributed action
– A social process

What is an entrepreneur? Are you born an entrepreneur or do you become one?

Mustar addresses in his conclusion a topic as old as startups with all the humility and caution, because it seems like we don’t really know (even if many claim they do know). Apart from the tautological definition, the entrepreneur is the one who creates (and builds) a business, it seems very difficult to find common traits and qualities specifically for entrepreneurs. Still, I am less confortable with his reminder of Peter Drucker’s claim. “Most of what you hear about entrepreneurship is all wrong. It’s not magic; it’s not mysterious; and it has nothing to do with genes. It’s a discipline and, like any discipline, it can be learned.” [Page 287]

I’m a little more comfortable with Komisar’s point of view in How Do You Teach High-Tech Entrepreneurship according to Randy Komisar.

There is no such thing as a monolithic entrepreneurial condition. Even among the very small number of first-time entrepreneurs I interviewed, there is a very diverse range of relationships with entrepreneurship. What characterizes them, beyond the great diversity of their profiles, their temperament, their way of behaving, is more a desire to do, to learn, to succeed, a great capacity for work, listening to others, ambition… but this is by no means specific to entrepreneurs. We find these same desires or aptitudes among employees, executives of large companies, philanthropic activities, athletes, artists, etc. [Page 289]

This journey with these young engineers allowed me to get rid of a conception of entrepreneurship that separates on the one hand an entrepreneur or a team, and on the other an activity of creating a new product and a company. The entrepreneur and the company are built together, in the same movement. [Page 290]

Philippe Mustar – Entrepreneurship in Action – episode 5

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This new episode of Philippe Mustar’s book relates to the history of Criteo, a startup already mentioned on this blog here and there.

For once, I disagree slightly with a quote from the book (which is not from the author): “The profile of the team formed by the three creators of Criteo is a perfect example of the one described theoretically by Kathleen M. Eisenhardt (Professor of Management at Stanford University and Co-Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program) as “the best it can be.” Kathleen Eisenhardt, based on a lot of research on the subject, defines (somewhat mechanically she herself admits) what a great team is:
– it initially consists of three, four or five people. If there are only two, it is not enough because there are so many things to do in a start-up and above all, being two does not offer a wide enough diversity of opinions, of points of view. If there are six, seven or eight, it is no longer a team, it is a group whose management and coordination take too much time.
– it is multidisciplinary and transversal, that is to say it combines skills in engineering, marketing, finance. But, these skills must be real, that is to say not based only on a diploma, but on actual experience.
– it includes people who have already worked together, this is an important asset because the creation of a start-up is made up of stressful situations, which are easier to share with people you know.
– finally, and this is more surprising, the “best teams” are those which have people of various ages, not only young people in their twenties but also others who have more experience. This often allows you to see different aspects of the same problem.
For Kathleen Eisenhardt, teams that meet these criteria are the ones that perform best. ” [Page 199]

As much as I can agree if we talk about the management team, I believe that at the time of creation, the founders have different pedigrees. As I wrote in my own book in 2008, “A start-up is a baby created by its parents – the founders. They are responsible for its development and to help it adapt to an evolving world. It does not mean that a founder has to give up control of his start-up. Would a parent give up his child just because he has no experience in feeding and educating? Is the analogy of little value? There is also a responsibility in succeeding in the development. Experts will be used, medical doctors, teachers for the child, professionals, and consultants for the start-up. The Google founders kept such “ownership” during the company’s growth. Eric Schmidt has become CEO but he is more a partner of the two founders. Start-ups seldom develop that well and investors sometimes have to make tough decisions when they take away the “parent” power from the founders. Investors do not like to do this in general and only do it when they consider it absolutely necessary. This is an ideal world but everyone knows reality is more complex”. And I could add, two parents is probably the ideal model.

On the other hand, I fully agree with the sources of innovation: The sociology of innovation has shown that the sources of innovation, like those of the Nile, are multiple and sometimes difficult to identify. It also pointed out that ideas for new products or services are the most common things in the world, and even that they are always bad, always poorly framed and approximate at the origin. As Bruno Latour says: “All important discoveries are born ineffective: they are hopeful monsters,“ promising monsters ”. [Page 251] and the French text by Latour http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/P-92-PROTEE.pdf . [A short parenthesis about Hopeful Monsters, a term I knew only from one of my favorite novels, and I blogged about it here.]