I’m on a personal mission to eliminate bias in this process and bring data to founders that will help them scale themselves and their teams all the way to successful exit.
The result is six key traits that define founder success and eliminate bias in investment decisions. And, we’ve created a test you can use to benchmark yourself.
In this series, week by week, I will share each of the six traits, the data behind it and why it’s important.
Week 2
Resilience Alchemy – the most common top trait.
High scores in this trait are absolutely integral to success as a Founder. But high resilience scores on their own will not deliver outsize outcomes and its important not to over-index on strength in just this one area.
Every founder hits the wall. What matters is how fast they bounce back.
That’s why Resilience Alchemy – the ability to absorb setbacks, stay grounded, and keep
moving – is the most common top trait among successful founders. 28.67% of test takers scored highest here.
It’s also one of the most visible and easily recognisable traits. You see it in founders’ energy and ability to recover quickly.
https://thefoundersix.com/
The mental and emotional mastery required to bounce back from setbacks, maintain
self-worth, and sustain a positive outlook to embrace the next unknown challenge.
“The first company I founded was when I was 16. […] I was organizing music events in schools and I was calling little shops in the city so they could sponsor the whole thing. And 98% of the time they said no. The first time being a founder, I learned it’s part of the game to fail and stand up again.” – Malte Kosub, CEO and Co-founder, Parloa
From our founder interviews, this was the one that was non-negotiable for startup success. Every founder who has made it far has had to withstand setbacks and failures. It’s not necessarily about having exceptional resilience but about having enough resilience to keep going through the inevitable rough patches.
“Lightning Focus is more about training an intellectual muscle, being rigorous, applying frameworks and thinking your way to success. Resilience Alchemy has very little to do with that part of the brain. It’s less cerebral. It’s more about emotional grounding – it’s about building your self-worth beyond ROI, net dollar retention, and external validation. That could be through a super strong relationship with your partner, your spouse, with your kids.” – Oscar Höglund, CEO and Co-founder, Epidemic Sound
It’s the ability to roll with the punches – where no setback lingers for more than 24 hours – and to view obstacles as opportunities rather than personal failures. The most impressive version of this trait is being able to apply it not just to yourself, but to your team, keeping the company culture independent of personal ego.
“Things always go wrong in a startup. The market keeps changing. People question your vision. If you can’t deal with that, what can you do? […] As a leader, if you bring negativity to the team, you influence the whole team. You have to stay motivated, even when things go wrong.” – Michelle Lu, CEO and Co-founder, Vsim
Beyond endurance, setbacks can also be a powerful source of energy and focus. “I thrive on setbacks. I’m attracted to problems. That’s why I’m a horrible investor! But I’m a reasonable operator,” says Thomas Plantenga, CEO of Vinted. “I’m attracted to the stress and tension of problems and setbacks that make me focus and make it easier to know what I need to work on.”
For Oscar Höglund of Epidemic Sound, it all comes down to grit. “Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer lost 46% of all the points they ever played. So they only marginally got it more right; they got 54% of balls in. But you do it for a long enough time and you’re resilient, you become the greatest of all time. […] As long as you get it slightly more right than wrong every single day, week, month, year, and you’re willing to put in the hours, you’re ultimately going to win.”
When is it crucial in a company’s life journey?
Resilience is vital at every stage. Early on, founders need it to push through rejection, failures, and relentless problem solving. Later, as the company scales, resilience is required to manage complexity, maintain focus, and make difficult, sometimes painful, decisions.
“For me, it really helps that I know that if I don’t make these hard decisions, I’m going to
hurt everybody, because I’ve seen that happen. So you need to be hard on the few and
make hard calls everywhere. At Vinted, we have little reorganizations almost every
quarter. People know it and people lose their jobs and things are reorganized, but it’s
always at a scale of four or five people losing their jobs, and it’s painful. Every quarter
you take a little bit of pain, but then you don’t have to have the bigger pain.” – Thomas
Plantenga, CEO, Vinted
And these rough patches play a role in long-term leadership evolution. “Adversity sometimes also brings a few positive things.” says Cesar Carvalho, CEO and Co-founder of Wellhub. “During the prior eight years before Covid, we were only growing and I only knew one mode. Signing deals. Grow, grow, grow. I had to become a real CEO after Covid, doing a transformation on the business. And I got better. Now I have more scars and way more experience.”
Why founders fail
They start off with huge amounts of resilience but burn out, as the inevitable set-backs damage them personally. They don’t invest the right amount of time in both building mental resilience and protecting their own balance. Investment in personal growth and therapy is critical to building and retaining this capability.
“Remove the emotion and go to execution. To me, that’s resilience. […] Put the problem in context and divide it into different buckets that you can solve. And then you try to have enough self-awareness to really ask yourself the hard questions about each part of the problem and just cut through the crap and get to the solution.” – Salma Bakouk, CEO and Co-founder, Sifflet
It is a superpower to see things for what they are, while staying optimistic and committed to solving the big issues, especially if you haven’t quite nailed it yet. Unless you really understand what you’re up against and what you need to do to overcome it, over time you’ll be a poor allocator of resources, doing too many things at once. A lack of focus is often a function of not fully appreciating that some problems require all your resources and bandwidth.
And don’t mistake competitiveness or success in other fields for the resilience needed to build a company all the way. Running a marathon or climbing Mount Everest are individually impressive, but they don’t make you good at running a company.
“If you really care about the product, it can be very hard to be resilient in relation to building a company because these are two very different things.” – Samir El-Sabini,
CEO and Co-founder, Juni
It’s also about being driven by intrinsic, not extrinsic, motivation. Samir, Oscar, and Cesar talked about the importance of being fueled by something deeper than financial outcomes, because you can only get so far chasing a bag of gold.
At first, resilience comes easy. The pursuit of a more comfortable life – having your own place, the ability to travel, financial stability – is something most people are naturally motivated by. But to keep building once you’ve already achieved financial security, you need to attach value to something bigger. All the moreso, because “the ratio of personal cost versus value add in your life is much lower. So you need to have some other reason, like a chip on your shoulder,” says Samir. “You need to really be passionate about what you’re building and its impact on people’s lives. It needs to be a purpose that you’re very, very attached to.”
“I started measuring the number of lives that could change versus investing in luxury A or B. And then that was the point, you know, that things made sense for me. I also surrounded myself with people that are close to my values. So, if you look at my friends, none of them are necessarily in technology but are people I admire for their values, for how they educate their children.” – Cesar Carvalho, CEO and Co-founder, Wellhub
Take the test.
Founders don’t fail because they fall. They fail because they don’t bounce back.
Curious how your resilience compares? Take the Founder Six test.
https://thefoundersix.com/
