What Makes a Startup Founder Successful?

For every 1 successful startup founder, there are 1000 “experts” (read: snake oil salesmen) teaching the world about the secret sauce behind the founder’s success.
In reality, the vast majority of these arbitrary checkmarks are largely unfounded. For every success story who “presented their true self” (or some other such platitude), there exists another hundred who “presented their true self” and failed.
When deeply analyzing the success stories of the world’s greatest startup founders in the last 20 years, 5 core characteristics turn up.
  • They multitask. Successful startup founders are ruthlessly efficient, breaking all of their work down into compartments and outsourcing relentlessly. See: Jack Dorsey, CEO of 2 different billion dollar companies and owner of 0 laptops.
  • They’re stubborn. The story goes that Mark Zuckerberg overruled the advice of his entire board in acquiring WhatsApp. This works for successful startup founders, because...
  • They’re right, often. Bezos credits much of Amazon’s success to “being right a lot” - so much so it’s one of Amazon’s famous leadership principles. Bezos insists that this is a trait that can be learned - if you disagree, he has about 163 billion reasons to believe him.
  • They sleep. Contrary to certain popular narratives (or “Musk-isms” we might call them), top startup founders aren’t typically pulling 18 hour days. Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg among others all advocate for a regular 8-hour sleep cycle.
  • They bet on themselves. As the story goes, when Mark Zuckerberg turned down Yahoo’s $1 billion acquisition offer a decade ago, he barely thought about it. Unicorn calibre startup founders rarely, if ever, make their fortunes on an acquisition - they bet on themselves, right to the very end.
At the end of the day, there’s no one nifty trick that’ll BLOW your mind.
Successful founders are successful because they’ve nailed the fundamentals. They’re smart, they work hard, they take smart risks, and they succeed – throw in a healthy smattering of luck here and there, and you have an empire.