Founder Character Strengths and Entrepreneurial Outcomes

This symposium investigates fundamental questions in the study of entrepreneurial psychology. The first two studies examine the psychology of founders, including who they are, how who they are changes in response to social and economic conditions, and which founder characteristics are linked to startup success. The second two studies analyze the psychology of early-stage employees, and how combinations of psychological profiles come together as a startup scales to achieve successful venture outcomes. All four studies utilize recent advances in natural language processing to construct large-scale ecologically valid datasets, predicting psychological constructs from founder and employee digital footprints, respectively. In doing so, they help to overcome many issues challenging related work such as small sample sizes, reverse causality, and subjective measures of startup success. Together, these papers illustrate the influence of founding team psychology on startup success in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, and how combinations of psychological profiles play an important role in venture scaling.