Against Conventional Wisdom, whether a founder/CEO is technical does not differentiate company success. Also, founders of all ages can be successful.
However, having a complementary cofounder, often a technical one, is correlated with success. The best founders know their strengths and weaknesses and recruit a complementary team that maximizes the company’s chance of success.
We discovered six archetypes of founders that cluster around their own unique traits (or superpowers). 3 doing very well... 
and 3 struggling...
Let’s unpack some of the superpowers and what makes each type successful vs not
Strong execution. Across all archetypes, day-to-day effectiveness and whether the founder learns and adapts quickly are most correlated with success. A few other studies even found that execution is the only thing that is consistently correlated with startups’ success.
Results-driven. When making decisions under uncertainty, successful founders also tend to be results-driven. That is, they explore many solutions to quickly find the best one, which is advantageous given the limited runway that startups have to achieve their next milestone.
Storytelling. The successful storytellers are also scrappy and agile thinkers. They execute day-to-day. However, when great storytellers get too enthralled in their own vision, they sometimes can’t adapt to market needs and fail to find product-market fit.
Humility, scrappiness and grit. When these traits combine with strong founder-market fit and an early team that follows a founder from a previous company, the companies tend to take off.
Stubbornness. When stubborn is coupled with “not scrappy” or “not able to confront realities”, a company struggles. However, some of the most successful founders like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are notoriously the most stubborn. They run through walls to make an idea work.
Customer empathy. It is great when a founder has high confidence, except when it prevents them from empathizing with customers. A great founder has a strong vision and is also incredibly empathetic to users to find product-market fit.
Agile thinking, or rapidly incorporating external market signals, is an important quality. It is not in conflict with being principled in pursuing the vision. In fact, the best founders think from first principles and iterate quickly based on market feedback to find PMF.
Humility. Confidence and humility are two different dimensions. One can be very confident yet very humble. At the same time, low humility and high ego does not necessarily spell doom. Many successful entrepreneurs have big egos.
Our job as an early stage investor is to look for brilliant entrepreneurs when their success is not yet obvious. We hope to look beyond the obvious signals and spend time with each founder to understand his/hers unique journey and support them the best that we can.
