Journal article
The impact of founder personalities on startup success
- Abstract:
- Startup companies solve many of today’s most challenging problems, such as the decarbonisation of the economy or the development of novel life-saving vaccines. Startups are a vital source of innovation, yet the most innovative are also the least likely to survive. The probability of success of startups has been shown to relate to several firm-level factors such as industry, location and the economy of the day. Still, 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, however, mainly unknown. Here, we show that founder personality traits are a significant feature of a firm’s ultimate success. We draw upon detailed data about the success of a large-scale global sample of startups (n = 21,187). We find that the Big Five personality traits of startup founders across 30 dimensions significantly differ from that of the population at large. 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). We do not find one ’Founder-type’ personality; instead, six different personality types appear. Our results also demonstrate the benefits of larger, personality-diverse teams in startups, which show an increased likelihood of success. The findings emphasise the role of the diversity of personality types as a novel dimension of team diversity that influences performance and success.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Supplementary materials, pdf, 8.4MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41598-023-41980-y
Authors
- Publisher:
- Nature Research
- Journal:
- Scientific Reports More from this journal
- Volume:
- 13
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 17200
- Publication date:
- 2023-10-17
- Acceptance date:
- 2023-09-04
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2045-2322
- Language:
-
English
- Pubs id:
-
1550326
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1550326
- Source identifiers:
-
1948595
- Deposit date:
-
2024-07-20
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- McCarthy et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2023
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2023, corrected publication 2024. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Notes:
- An author correction to this article was published on 07 May 2024 at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-61082-7
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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