Foreword
What makes a founder a founder? Not just an entrepreneur, but someone who can build a product, lead a team, scale it up from seed and keep it on track to a successful exit.
At EQT Ventures, we’ve spent nearly a decade backing some of the most successful founders. Now, we’ve pinpointed what sets them apart and put it to the test.
EQT Ventures and founder success
Commanding Europe's largest venture fund, our mission is to deliver strong returns to our investors. Outsized results come from a number of factors, including backing outsized talent. We focus on finding those individuals who don’t just start and run companies but build them to last.
These are people who have the ability not only to drive at speed through the early stage, but also to deliver sustained growth, scale their execution, align leadership, retain and keep talent and maintain momentum throughout the journey. In the high-risk and high-reward venture capital industry, identifying these individuals early is critical.
This contribution to start-up success is frequently left to investor hunches v science so we have developed a predictive framework to improve how we source and support exceptional founders.
A data-driven approach to founder success
By analyzing over 5,000 psychometric profiles and the commercial results of the most successful founders of the past five years, we have distilled the six universal traits needed for founders to excel in a competitive venture market.
Validated by the Oxford University Behavioural Psychology team and reinforced by AI-driven analysis from our proprietary platform Motherbrain, these traits consistently appear in high performing founders, with a 99% accuracy rate for certain traits.
This isn’t just theory. For investors, it is a framework to support sourcing activity, unlocking more capital for early-stage innovators by improving selection. For founders – aspiring and experienced alike – it offers a data-backed roadmap for identifying strengths, overcoming weaknesses, and building teams that amplify each other’s abilities.
Accompanying this research is the Founder Test – a proprietary, free, three-minute assessment.
Polly Barnes
Talent Operating Partner, EQT
The six traits of successful founders
These traits don’t exist in isolation. They work together in different combinations at every stage of a company’s life. Transparent Self-awareness, in particular, is the key to unlocking growth across all the others.
Yet, according to our data analysis, only 85 in a million people will be naturally high-scoring across all six.
Are you built for this?
To provide a deeper understanding of these traits, we’ve complemented our findings with interviews from some prominent founders and CEOs, including Helene Huby, CEO of The Exploration Space, Michelle Lu, CEO and Co-founder of Vism, Thomas Plantenga, CEO of Vinted, and Carl, Pei, CEO and Co-founder of Nothing and Samir El-Sabini, Founder of Juni.
Despite different backgrounds, industries, and geographies, their success stories highlight a key finding of our research: the six traits are universal, transcending gender, race, age, and nationality.
Success in startups often exists at the extremes, and the best founders are outliers, pushing beyond their abilities, making bold decisions, and adapting at speed.
So, where do you stand?
Take the Test to find out. Measure your strengths, identify gaps, and see if you have what it takes to be one of the rare few who can go all the way