These 5 Traits Predict Founder Success

We're going to start this by busting a myth. Having a high willingness to take big risks is not actually a recurring trait in successful founders. Yeah, there are a lot of founders who take big risks, but there's more to it than that. As Nikubra put it. The most irresponsible thing I could do is put what I've built at risk. Lucky for you though, I've put together a list of actual recurring traits in founders based on the past two years of the show and also some external research. I'm Jackie Lynn Porton, this is MoneyWides, a podcast that has made four founders who are not in the beginning stages, but who are already on their way over at joinhampton.com. That is for founders who are doing at least three million in revenue. If you are, you should check it out because it's a really great resource for connecting with other people, getting business advice, life advice. Also, maybe just hanging out in person because that's happening a lot now too. Check it out, joinhampton.com. But we have five traits to get through here, so let's get to it. The first trait here is openness and curiosity. This was actually the thing that came up the most in both the interviews that we've done over the past two years and also the research. It's basically the willingness to listen to new ideas, to try new things, to be consistently curious, and to be looking for those new things to try and be curious about. On the data side, there's a research paper from 2023. They actually went into specifically the big five personality traits and they did a pretty deep dive actually because they came up with six different personality types for founders. If you want to read that whole thing, I'll actually leave the link to that in the description for this. Overall, what they found was openness was the main category and that was pretty significant. Within that, the subcategory of adventurousness was the most significant trait in their entire study for successful founders. This is clear from nearly all of the founders that we've had on the show. In fact, there's a lot of founders who kind of just fell into owning a business because they just got super into something that they found interesting and then they realized, there's actually an opportunity here. I'm as well follow this and plus I'm having a lot of fun, so I'm going to keep doing it. Then bam, they've sold a company for millions or tens of millions of dollars. Peter Walkwitz is worth about $500 million and he equates a lot of his success to just always being curious. As a child, I remember you bored a lot. I just didn't have exposure to much. I think that was always a goal I had as a kid that, hey, I want to have exposure to the world and now look at it. I think it was paid off. Yeah, because that curiosity never left. If I achieved some of that one as younger, that I wouldn't have the desire when I'm older to do that. It does make a lot of sense why this trait would be beneficial from the perspective of moving fast and being innovative. Because yeah, I mean, you're willing to try any things and therefore you're doing new things. But I do think there's another layer to this. It's drive. Being driven by financial gain or success alone means that you kind of have to have a lot of perseverance, the ability to get through the maybe rough, stressful, boring parts. So maybe just a little bit of a knack for suffering, which I mean, that's a bit harder to come by. But being curious in open-minded means that you get to be driven or actually honestly kind of just pulled along by that trait that you have within you naturally. It means that you are almost excited to continue to just try new things and fail and learn from that and try again and then, oh, see this thing and maybe do this one this time. You're not giving up and it's not because you have this strong willpower that might eventually actually get exhausting. It's more just because you just naturally want to and being in constant pursuit of these new interesting things is how you end up doing new interesting things that are worthwhile because you just keep looking and eventually you find one. But there is a pretty notable downside here and that's the whole Chinese object syndrome thing. If you are just jumping around and looking at the new things exciting, then you're not really actually seeing anything too fruition. So focus is going to be a very important trait to balance this with. All right. Money wise listeners. So what's the deal on this podcast we talk about money and that's great. But the one thing that's even more important than money is your health and a few years ago, I made a change. So I made a change to get fit. I wanted to get fit for vanity reasons. 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And you can offer a 100% money back guarantee within 30 days, no questions asked. Make a change. Check them out dailybodycoach.com/moneywise. Again, that's dailybodycoach.com/moneywise. Moving on to trait number two, we get the need for achievement. So that's the need to win. The need to prove to yourself and to others that you are capable. We've heard so many times on the show the same phrase. It's kind of funny now every time I hear it. We just out in the wild even. They have a chip on their shoulder. Sam Parr jokes that he thinks every founder who is successful has some sort of bad breakup or somebody who has done them wrong in their past that has made them want to prove themselves so badly. But this isn't to be equated with financial gain. The financial part of this is really just part of the scoreboard. And for a lot of founders, getting on that scoreboard has become kind of like a game. Actually, that's exactly how Anker not fault describes it. It's not even about the money. It's just like, it feels like that's my sport in a way. And I want to play my sport and be the best I can at the sport I play. And Malume said something similar. There is a ridiculous drive that comes from somewhere. Like I need to constantly outperform, outshine everybody to get people to accept and love me and be impressed by me. And that's I think where a lot of my drive came from. I had a lot to prove. Okay, and there's an obvious point here to be made about how just a single one of these traits doesn't make a founder. It's how all of these things work together. Thinking about this need for achievement, pairing that with the openness thing that we already talked about here, it kind of makes sense that they go together so well. Because being open to new things and trying new things, that's a great way to, like we said, find the thing that's going to bring you success. But taking that to fruition is what's going to actually make you successful. So this need for achievement is going to help you actually get through the maybe the boring parts because there will be boring parts. I heard you say that in the one in your most recent video, you had that workshop in Hong Kong. Like every doesn't matter how shiny and sexy a business looks. Three years in, it's going to be just as boring as the one you're already running. Everything feels like work after a while. Yeah. So these things work together. But that's only two traits so far. So we still have three to go. But I have to list the downside of the trait as well. Because yeah, I mean, in this case, you have to balance the need for achievement with recognizing that you have achieved things. If you are consistently moving the goal posts, then you're on this hamster wheel that is going to exhaust you in the end. And a lot of the founders that we have talked to who haven't been able to stop or slow down and actually just like appreciate what they've done. They end up kind of feeling empty after a while. So that's an important thing. This is a great driver, but don't be hard on yourself and stop moving goal posts. Celebrate your wins. Moving on to part three, we have agency and autonomy. I think I have heard a lot from founders on the show as the reason that they ended up being founders was that they just couldn't work for somebody else. They tried and they just wasn't for them. And they just craved being autonomous, being their own boss. So they kind of almost had no choice but to be an entrepreneur. In fact, I would say that this freedom or this need to work for yourself is cited almost just as much as just financial gain or the need for success as a reason that people have got started. And it's not even always something that they notice right away. It's something that they realize after they have tried to work for somebody else. Josh Payne was one person. I hated that place. Or I hated working in corporate America. Chuck was another. The thought process was always like don't really go work for someone. Try to go build something that has value. Steve Houghton was another. I learned that I didn't want to work in corporate America and that I just hated being under somebody's thumb. Having agency in autonomy does insinuate that you're not only fully in charge of what you do, but you are fully liable for what happens as a result. Good or bad. And this explains why this trait would lead to success because you have more to gain and you have more to lose. So you kind of have a fire lit under you. And this is actually a feeling that a lot of the founders that we spoke and do post exit have described as missing. It's a lot harder to feel motivated when you have 10 million in the bank than it is when you got nothing. In the early days of a business, it's like exhilarating. Is the fire of motivation is there? You wake up every morning feeling like yes, I'm like building this thing. And I still I feel like I'm still chasing that old fire of motivation that I used to have before. But of course, there is always a balancing act. And obviously if you are wanting to be too autonomous, then you have a hard time detaching or delegating and just kind of relinquishing control a little bit, which can be a very difficult thing for founders, especially as they level up. Growth means trusting other people because a successful business can't rely on the founder forever. A founder's job, your job, is to make the business run successfully independent from you. So yeah, you have want to be in control, but you do eventually have to let it go. Of course, wanting autonomy and being controlling are not actually the same trait. There's just a bit of a sliding scale that they're both on in some way. Really, this is just about listening to the people that you've hired, trusting them, and letting go of some of that. autonomy, maybe, and letting other people make decisions when they're better suited to make those decisions. The eye search is quickly becoming one of the easiest ways for companies to get in front of customers right now. And the best way to take advantage of it is with mentions.so. It was built by a Hampton member and it gives you one simple dashboard that shows you exactly how your company ranks inside LLMs like ChatGPT. And more importantly, what you need to do to get ChatGPT to recommend your product or service to potential customers. Every 10 years or so, a new growth channel is born. And for a small window of time, companies are able to get attention for cheap and drive massive growth. Imagine being able to go back in time and buy Facebook ads in 2007 with all the knowledge that you have now, or even being able to go back and create TikTok content in 2017. 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That's mentions.so code MoneyWise for 50% off your first month and a free search audit. Moving on to trait number 4 we have emotional regulation and stress tolerance. This next part is basically just the willingness to go to therapy, which a lot of the founders that we've spoken to have described as a pretty essential part of their life. Running a business being fully liable, having a bunch of people who are depending on you for their livelihood, that can be a lot of stress and pressure. Marshall Hass says much. You can delegate yourself all the way out, but when you get to that level like it's no longer about the time that you're working on the thing, it's about the mind share that it takes up in your head. Not everyone can handle that. So it becomes really really important to have the skill and the willingness to be able to not push those things down, but to actively deal with them. On the research side emotional stability and resilience were some of the most common predictors for success among founders. The founder job is basically a cycle of something goes wrong and you have to figure out how to deal with it and then you deal with it and then it goes right and then something goes wrong and then you have to figure out how to deal with it and it's a lot of ups and downs. And if you're not able to regulate through that, then your ability to make the right decisions is hindered and more importantly, your ability to execute on those decisions is hindered. Not only that, but your leader. So your team is also looking at you to be regulated so that it tells them that they can become and have faith in the process and things will work out. And something that's really important to note here is that that doesn't mean that you should be stoic or just like present as calm. You have to actually do it. You have to be active with it. And the founders who have spoken to have had success with this are the ones who are taking actionable steps like therapy, like journaling, like meditation, like taking time for themselves to make sure that they're able to handle things in the work life. Because if you just kind of try to tough it out, then I mean, that doesn't go away. It's going to come up eventually. This is what Ryan Beagleman said. Like in my case, I was trying to be a quantumist. I wanted to be like the stoic, manly, even-keeled, nothing bothers me. You know, because I'm the leader, I need to stay cool, calm, and collected at all times. When actually things were bothering, there would be things bothering me. And I wish I had learned a little earlier to just have a little bit more self-kindness, to have more self-knowledge, to know some of what I'm sensitive to, some things that maybe don't bother other people, but bother me. And then assert my needs a little more, have a little bit more boundaries around certain behaviors that I don't want to put up with. For this last part, we're going to go back to the point that I made at the very beginning of this. Risk isn't something that is to be romanticized. Successful founders don't have a reckless approach to risks. This isn't a game about consistently taking big swings and putting it all in the line because it might pay off. Sure, it pays off for some people, but for the majority, it doesn't. In reality, what is actually a recurring trait is the ability to recognize when big risks need to be taken and be able to manage it when you do have to do it. When risk was discussed in the research, it was pretty heavily disagreed upon. But there was something interesting from a study in 2010 that showed that a propensity for risk was very weekly correlated with business success, but it did support business foundation. What does recur across the research, though? Is that successful founders are pretty comfortable with uncertainty. They are able to make decisions under ambiguity. They don't need all of the information. And particularly when you're making big decisions, that can feel risky. But here, they just have the tolerance for that. They're able to accept that and move forward. And that is the trait that's important. And when taking risks, you do want to make sure that you're protecting your base. You don't want to just always be putting everything on the line because that's kind of sloppy. So the takeaway here isn't be a risk taker. It's be comfortable with uncertainty and become and emotionally stable when risks come up so that you can take them when they're needed. Here's something that I noticed that a lot of these traits have in common. More than things that are going to make them good at business, these are traits that drive founders to continue working towards success. If I were to have written this episode solely from my perspective, I would have said that grit and persistence were the most important traits of a founder. Because no matter what your strengths are, there are always going to be weaknesses. And there's not really a perfect formula for what a successful founder looks like. The real winning comes from always working through the rough parts, not letting them bring you down. And if something goes wrong and it does bring you down, you get back up and you just keep trying. And that's kind of the pattern that I've seen from everybody that we've spoken to. They've all had their ups and downs. But the most common thing was that they all just kept going. And if you're listening to this right now and you're thinking, "Wow, I keep going also and I'm about to see that success and maybe the form of an exit." You should check out our video of what happens when you actually do exit for like $10 million or something because most founders, it's not what they were expecting. You can listen to that episode by clicking here.