Traits of a Founder - Introspection

As the President of the New Jersey Innovation Institute and the leader of the NJII Venture Studio, I meet with an extraordinary number of founders. Every week, I sit across the table from scientists, technologists, inventors, academics, and first-time entrepreneurs who believe that they have discovered the next big thing.

In the venture studio, we are actively trying to build companies, so we are constantly sourcing ideas and evaluating the people behind them. The technologies range from artificial intelligence to robotics to life sciences to software. After hundreds of these conversations, you begin to notice patterns and you start to recognize the repeating behavior, mindset, and psychological tendencies that separate the founders who succeed from the vast majority who do not.

The question I continually ask myself is simple but important: “What are the actual traits of a successful founder?” Not the traits that people write about on inspirational social media posts, but what are the real traits that show up consistently in the few people who actually build something meaningful and produce significant financial outcomes?

When you meet enough founders, something interesting happens in that your perception becomes biased by volume. Most founders are never going to succeed as the success rate for startups is extremely low where even amongst the 10% that do exit, most don’t walk away with life changing money. This means that if you spend your time talking to founders, your “sample set” is overwhelmingly composed of people who will not become successful.

They may have enthusiasm, hoody & sneakers, energy, and the narrative of entrepreneurship, but they lack the deeper traits necessary for eventual success. When you live inside the venture ecosystem, you can become desensitized to this, and you start to accept that the typical founder behavior you see as normal. However, when you meet the founders who have succeeded, the contrast is stark and you start to realize how different they are in the way they think, the way they listen, the way they interpret the world, and the way they improve themselves.

Among all the traits I have observed across my career, the one that stands out just behind grit and perseverance is introspection. Introspection is the ability to step outside of yourself and evaluate your own assumptions, decisions, and weaknesses with honesty. It is a trait that sounds simple but is extremely rare as people often confuse introspection with self-doubt or weakness which is thought have no place in startups.

True introspection is the ability to believe in your own vision (perhaps even to a delusional degree) while still having the maturity to question it which enables you to see your blind spots. Without introspection, even the most talented founder will inevitably sabotage themselves.

Many people romanticize entrepreneurship by repeating a well-known idea: “A founder never takes no for an answer.” The mythology says that the best founders ignore the world, believe they are right, and push forward in the face of rejection. While you want to have optimism in your idea bordering on delusion, you simultaneously need to always consider your fundamental assumptions could be wrong.

The founders that win are the ones with strong convictions but who are able to truly sit in a room with someone smarter or more experienced than themselves and listen. They ask themselves a simple but critical question – “Could I be wrong?”

This does not mean that they question the entire premise of their company every day or that they collapse into self-doubt. Instead, they question the execution, their go-to-market plan and all of their assumptions and even those which are fundamental.  They do not anchor on the belief that their first idea is always the best idea and they remain open to the possibility that the path they envisioned is not actually the optimal one.

When I built Visikol, this lesson became clear very early as we interacted with dozens of founders from small companies, many of whom came from Ivy League institutions where these individuals were often brilliant. They had impressive credentials and academic pedigrees but a large percentage of them shared one recurring flaw in that they were completely unwilling to accept that they might be wrong. They walked into meetings assuming that they already understood everything about their own technology, their customers, their market, and even our business. They would not listen to advice, even when it came from people with more industry experience and their ego blocked their ability to absorb new information.

Over time, we actually chose not to work with founders like this and we were not alone in this decision as many venture capital firms quietly avoid these archetypes as well. Investors constantly look for the subtle signals that reveal a founder’s mindset and one of the most important signals is whether the founder displays humility and curiosity when confronted with expertise. It is a red flag when a founder talks over seasoned operators, dismisses customer feedback, resists advice, or assumes they are the only intelligent person in the room.

Be confident in your company and ideas, but be open-minded and always willing to consider you are wrong.