Does a Founder’s Personality Predict Startup Success?
Who are the people succeeding at the height of business leadership? The extraverts? The logical thinkers? The psychopaths?
At various times in the past, I’ve heard people talk about the psychology and personality of business leaders, but it’s not always a consistent story. You can find reports of high levels of psychopathy among CEOs, confidence in embracing change, a tendency to be friendly, and many other traits that may or may not be relevant.
So what does the latest science actually say? A study just published in the journal PNAS (May 2023) takes us a step closer to a reliable answer. Researchers at Columbia Business School observed over 10,000 startup founders and investigated how their personalities correlated with business outcomes through the lifespan of their companies.
To work out each founder’s personality type, the researchers first trained a personality prediction model using data from Facebook. Between 2007–2012, Facebook users could take a validated personality questionnaire known as the Big Five personality test, which provided each user with a score along five personality axes: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism.
Using this data, the researchers trained a model to predict user personality by analyzing status updates…
