The pros and cons of 3 common startup founder personality traits

When it comes to personality, there is no right or wrong – there are only pros, cons and trade-offs.

There are many things in common in the kind of people who are inclined to start a risky business. You would often see highly intelligent, hard-working, ultra-ambitious people in the startup world.

However, even these types of people need to know their own strengths and weaknesses if they want to be successful.

1. Belief

You don’t embark on a journey to create something completely new and innovative if you don’t have a clear vision of its potential. Holding on to your vision when attacked by other people’s opinions and sometimes even conflicting evidence takes a lot of conviction.

While this is good – you certainly shouldn’t throw your vision out the window at the first sight of adversity, it also hides a danger. If your conviction is too strong, you will not have the necessary flexibility to adjust your vision and idea when you receive feedback from the market.

It’s important to be a visionary as the head of a new innovative venture, but it’s also important to balance your belief with scientific skepticism.

So while persuasion is vital, it’s also something you need to be able to suppress as you go through the process of validation experiments, iterations, and pivots. If clear evidence is found, you must be prepared to kill your darling.

2. High Risk Tolerance

Startups are the extreme sports of entrepreneurship. As a founder, you should feel comfortable with the thought of losing time and money due to the extremely high failure rates of innovative new businesses.

While it is good to be a measured risk taker, it is important not to become a compulsive gambler.

While startups are risky, success requires you to act strategically and manage your risks accordingly. Impulsively jumping into new risky opportunities just because they can contain potential is not a winning strategy.

To be successful, you need to be able to say no to many opportunities to focus your efforts on your main goal. In fact, lack of focus is one of the most common common startup errors from new founders.

3. Resilience

If there is one quality that is a prerequisite for the success of a startup, it is perseverance. The professional journeys of many startup founders are full of failures and unsuccessful ventures. Having stamina and being very resilient is a must if you want to stay in the game long enough to be successful.

But at the same time, relying too much on your resilience can have two major negative consequences.

First, if you have too much vision for your current idea and you think you can only make it happen through hard work, you may be ignoring strong signals from the market that you need to make big changes to be successful.

In other words, to get anywhere, it’s important to keep walking. At the same time, going stubbornly on a straight path wouldn’t get you where you want to go if you look the wrong way. Resilience is important, but you can’t use it blindly.

Second, an extreme work ethic is something many startup founders share, but its price is usually paid by their personal lives. This is a sacrifice you may be willing to make, but it’s something you need to navigate strategically. Otherwise, not only your relationships would suffer. It’s hard to be productive at work when your personal life is collapsing.