Startup Psychology: What the Big-5 Personality Traits Can Tell Us About Running a Startup
Psychology is underrated. People who are starting a company tend to overlook the psychology of a person they were trying to hire — as a staff or even a co-founder — unless maybe that said person has a discernible character flaw. They might not even realize there are some psychological traits which they themselves can improve to be more effective at work.
While skills and knowledge can predict whether or not your product can be built and how long it can take, psychology can tell you a lot of information about the mind of a person which you can leverage to increase your chance of success. I write this piece so that you would consider psychology, this powerful yet underutilized knowledge, as a tool in your repertoire.
One of major findings in the field of psychology is the big five personality traits. The big-5 for short. The big-5 models human personality into — as the name suggests — five cardinal dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. I’m gonna quote the definition of each trait from Truity from which I took my big-5 personality test:
Openness describes an individual’s tendency to think in complex, abstract ways. People who are high in Openness are abstract thinkers, while people who are low in Openness are concrete thinkers.
Conscientiousness describes a person’s tendency to be persistent and determined in achieving their goals. People who are high in Conscientiousness tend to work hard to put their plans into action, while people who are low in this trait tend to change course and get distracted easily.
Extraversion describes a person’s tendency to be energized by being around other people versus being by oneself. Extraverts are energized by socializing with others, while Introverts (people low in Extraversion) are energized by spending time alone.
Agreeableness describes an individual’s tendency to put the needs of others ahead of their own needs. Highly Agreeable people are mostly concerned with getting along with others. People low in Agreeableness are mostly concerned with serving their own interests.
Neuroticism describes an individual’s response to stress. Highly Neurotic people are susceptible to anxiety, depression, anger, and other negative emotions when subjected to stressful conditions. People low in Neuroticism resist stress and tend not to experience many negative emotions.
These traits originated from human physiology. They vary because of the difference in how our brain is networked and which parts of our brain are more active in response to a stimuli, among other things. That’s why these traits are hard to change. Studies have observed however, that the traits are likely to change over a long period of time. For example, as we grow older we’re likely to be more agreeable and conscientious.
I’d recommend that you take the big-5 personality test. I found that there are two personal benefits of knowing your big-5:
- It helps you to make peace with your past. Realizing that your personality might have impacted you to do what you did could help you to get a better sense of things and to go easy on yourself.
- It helps you to plan for your future. Knowing yourself better psychologically can help you figure out what kind of career fits your personality. Choosing career which fits you means that you’re playing to your strength. It can increase your chance of success and your career satisfaction.
This piece covers how the big-5 play out in an organizational level, specifically a startup. First let’s define what constitutes a startup. I will use the definition of a startup according to Eric Ries, the author of The Lean Startup, which is the most commonly used one:
A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
I’ve worked at 5 start-ups. Three at formation stage, one at validation stage, and one at growth stage. In this piece I compile some takeaways from my experience at these companies related to the big-5 which I think you might find useful. I made this compilation by asking some of my colleagues in the startups I’ve been in to take the big-5 tests and combining those data with my observations and with my newly found knowledge about the big-5.
The Entrepreneurial Type
Here are the personality type of an entrepreneur: they are high in trait openness and extraversion and low in trait agreeableness. All of my co-founders from all my previous startups that I asked to take the test are of this type. Does that mean that people who have those traits tend to be an entrepreneur or does that mean that that’s what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur? My answer to that is that both are true. People with this personality type have some edges to start a startup and starting a startup entails activities in which they will likely to be interested. But it doesn’t mean that people who are lacking in some of the traits cannot start a startup.
People who are high in trait openness like to try new things. They are good at connecting seemingly unrelated ideas. They are adaptable. They like journey into the unknown and starting a startup is pretty much that. We don’t yet know what people want, and even when we do we’re not sure if the product or service that we build can answer it, and when we are we might not yet possess the technical knowledge to build them.
One activity which starting a startup will inevitably entail is interacting with other people. People who are high in extraversion are energized by interacting with others. They are not shy in starting a conversation or become the center of attention, so they have less barrier in engaging with potential customers, or vendors, or team members.
Another thing that you will encounter is conflict resolution. How will you respond when things don’t go in your favour? Or your team’s favour? You have to be willing to put your own interests over others, and disagreeable people are more forthright in fighting so things can go to their team’s interest.
One of the startups I founded was LitSync. It’s a platform to write fictions and to connect fiction readers and writers. It is now closed because we realized that Wattpad is too big to compete with so we stopped the development.
There was a moment that I remember from that time when we the MVP was ready and we need to find our first batch of early users. Our idea was to go to the biggest bookstore in our city and pitch LitSync to people who were browsing at the fiction section of the store. An idea which only people with some degree of extraversion would be willing to do.
So me and one of my co-founders went to the biggest bookstore in our city and went to the fiction section. There are some people there who seemed to be enjoying reading a novel. We then exercised our disagreeableness by stopping them from whatever it was they enjoyed reading and pitched our awesome fiction writing platform that we hope could soon kill that bookstore. We showed them the mobile version of the app and let them have a tour. We asked them if they were interested in the app and if they have any input. Most of them were indeed interested and we also got some useful comments. We noticed that some guards were suspicious and watching us. But they didn’t tell us to stop so we didn’t. We made a handful of first users that day.
That story was an example of how the entrepreneurial traits can help you in your journey. My co-founder and I have that traits. We are high in openness and extraversion, and we are low on agreeableness. We could say that we did that because we didn’t have that much options to get our first users — online approaches weren’t effective, but I know now if it weren’t for the traits we wouldn’t do it so forthrightly.
Now that we know the personality traits of an entrepreneur, here are some tips related to that which you might find useful in your journey of starting a startup.
- If you’re looking for a co-founder, consider this traits alongside their technical skills. Sometimes these traits are apparent from a person but if you need a hint here are some. People who are high in openness are creative, unconventional, imaginative, original, and artistic. People who are high in extraversion are enthusiastic, energetic, excitable, friendly, and gregarious. And people who are low in agreeableness are competitive, argumentative, self-interested, rational, and brash.
- If you have taken the test and you found out that you have this trait, maybe consider starting your own business. You might already have an intuition about this. You know you’re an entrepreneurial type but maybe your circumstances don’t allow you to be one. If that’s the case I would suggest that you choose another path that is suitable for that personality type. Entrepreneurial type is by no mean only suitable for entrepreneurship.
- If you have taken the test and you found out that you don’t have this trait but you need to be an entrepreneur — because maybe your circumstances force you to be one — you can work to sort of “bolster” some of the traits that you’re lacking from the cognitive level, although your traits will stay more or less the same over a long time frame. For example, for agreeableness there is something called assertiveness training, which will help you to become more combative, but won’t alter much of your your agreeableness.
If You’re High in Trait Neuroticism You’re More Susceptible to Stress in Facing Challenge
People who are high in trait neuroticism are susceptible to anxiety, depression, anger, and other negative emotions when exposed to a stressor. They have a more dramatic response to it, and their brains become more activated for longer periods of time.
One of the negative impacts from being neurotics is that you might become less likely to retry upon a failure. On the other hand, neurotic people tend to be more vigilant. They are more careful in handling cases for their work because they are more sensitive towards any cue that might signal disaster.
I remember my early days working with JavaScript. For LitSync which I worked part-time on but also for my full-time job. I was doing frontend for both of them and JS tech-stack for frontend was the clear winner in terms of performance and developer productivity. Many companies chose it, including mine.
Now, JS is a language with lots of quirks and pitfalls. It’s easy to learn but difficult to master. In both the startups the features that I had to build were quite uncommon. So in those days, I had to use a tech-stack and language I wasn’t familiar with to build features so edgy you can’t get many clues by googling. At the time I spent a not unsubstantial amount of my time yelling at my laptop because my code didn’t work as I expected. It felt personal. I exhibited that kind of response because I score above average in trait neuroticism.
What helped me in this challenging time was reading “fundamental” textbooks. I read two fundamental JS books and a couple other books about programming. They helped me to anticipate many pitfalls, taught me the good attitudes of a programmer and how to write good codes. I should also say that the sense of responsibility from deadlines could motivate you to keep trying.
To sum up: one of the ways to deal with neuroticism in regards to facing challenge is to learn from the bottom up and not just from the top down. Learning top-down is when you learn by trying to solve a problem in front of you. Let’s say you want to build a feature for your site. Then you google how to do it. Then you find the steps to do it. You follow those steps until you have that feature. You learn what needs to be done without knowing much of what’s inside each of those steps. So when things don’t go as expected — say you need to change a behaviour of the new feature — you’ll have a hard time because what you googled didn’t tell you how. This style of learning is oftentimes inevitable because you have to meet deadlines, but to be less stressed you have to make things more predictable. You have to know deeper. I’d recommend balancing it with learning bottom-up. Learn the basics of how things work. Read the “textbook”. When you learn from the bottom-up, incrementally gaining new fundamental knowledge, while also solving problems in front of you, you’ll have less chance of encountering unpredictable problem.
Another way to deal with neuroticism, is to practice mindfulness. My nutshell definition of mindfulness is the act of being fully present. By being mindful, you quickly acknowledge that you’re facing a problem and it’s causing you to feel upset. By doing that, you intervene from engaging in your neurotic tendency of self-criticism and go straight to solving the problem. It is a useful skill to have and you might need to practice to have it. Researchers have found that people high in neuroticism who has mindfulness skill exhibited lower psychological distress than those who are high in neuroticism alone. Because of the benefits and how relatively easy it is to learn, mindfulness has now been widely used, in medicine and even in the workplace. Bambu, the robo advisory startup I work at practices a daily mindfulness training. We were covered in a newspaper The Straits Time for it.
Here are some references if you want to learn more about mindfulness:
- Mindful.org, a website containing news and infos about mindfulness.
- Build Your Resilience: How to Survive and Thrive in Any Situation.
- Oak, a mindfulness training app. This is what we use in Bambu.
Once Your Startup is More Matured, Introduce More Order by Hiring Conscientious People
People who are high in trait conscientiousness are orderly, dependable, determined, ambitious, and dutiful while ones who are low in it are spontaneous, adaptable, impulsive, disorganized, and haphazard.
If you and your co-founders are conscientious to begin with, that’s great. It means you have some positive attitudes which give you an edge. However, in the early stage it can be useful to curb some of your conscientious characteristics. In a startup, premature introduction of order can cost you time and money. Having a strict role, having all the product and/or technical specification laid out, and over-engineering your code when your product or service hasn’t been validated are going to make your feedback loop slower, which in turn cost you time and money. You have to be able tolerate chaotic environment until you know for sure what you’re building is working.
If you and your co-founders are not conscientious, you are at risk of having some willpower problems. But there are cases where people who are not conscientious become more conscientious under some circumstances.
The company I work at, Bambu, is a B2B company that build softwares to help people invest. Our clients are big financial institutions like bank and insurance companies. My lead developer there is one of the first developers. He is involved in all of the project that are under development and ones that are being maintained. He laid out the foundations of many of our projects codebase.
Bambu has a massive growth in 2018. We have many projects that are under development concurrently which are planned to be released in close successions. We were understaffed. At the late stage of the projects most of them has lots of sudden requirements and bug reports that we — for various reasons — can’t say no to.
During this period my lead dev works long hours because he’s involved in all of the projects. He is being pulled back and forth between them. It went on for months. I already know about the big-5 during this period and I’m quite convinced that my lead dev is high in trait conscientiousness. Finally, with the purpose of writing this piece I asked him to take the test for me. And thanks to him he was willing to help. You want to know his conscientious score? It’s 29/100. The average is 55. Yet he’s one of the hardest working guy in my company.
His conscientiousness comes from the sense of responsibility. My lead dev feels responsible for his teammates. That sense is further accentuated by his skills and ability. When problems arise, he’s perfectly willing to take as much as he can to begin with. And then because he’s quick on his feet when it comes to solving problems and he knows the ins and outs of all the projects, he is able to take care of most of the problems. And so that’s what he did.
That new-found conscientiousness might also find you in your journey. You might find yourself feeling responsible for someone. It could bloody well be yourself because you want to thrive. It could be your teammates. Or it could be your clients or customers of your startup.
When your startup has finally been validated — which could mean that you have a sustainable business model or user growth, or that you have delivered your quirky projects — you will likely to find your company in need of some degree of order. You now have a clear product definition. Now you might want to optimize your process so you can deliver your product faster and better. You might have a frankenstein codebase because you reused and tweaked it for multiple projects and you need to refactor it. This is when conscientious people can be really impactful.
Conscientious people are persistent in achieving a goal and they are orderly. When you have clearly defined task — be it in product or tech or leadership — having conscientious people to work on them will likely to produce a high-quality result in a timely manner. Improving product or process quality, refactoring a codebase, reorganizing a team or a project are suitable tasks for them. For that reason, you should consider hiring them when your startup has reached this stage.
In Bambu I’m now considering conscientiousness when hiring a new engineer. I personally judge a candidate’s conscientiousness by looking at their code quality and digging a bit in the interview.
Now the “old” and new engineers are working to standardize the way we build softwares for our next batch of clients and tidy up our codebase. Our goal is to have a clearer division of responsibility among engineers and to make our codebase cleaner. So far I would say that it’s going well. Our code for the next wave of projects is better architected, we have more shared library that we use across projects, and some of our vital projects have better docs now.
We also hired more project managers. I’m not sure if it’s a PM thing or if our senior PMs take into account conscientiousness in the interviews but statistically most of them are conscientious. They often work long hours — talking or writing — to lay out the specs of our projects to make them well defined and documented.
Summary
Knowing the concept of the big-5 and knowing the big-5 type of your current or future teammates can help you run your startup. This piece has (hopefully) explained with each point, that it can give you insights about what you might need to improve in yourself, what you can expect to get from your teammates besides their skills and knowledge, and what kind of characters that you should look for in a person at various stages of your company.
I would also like to add that psychology is a decent starting point if you want to learn to be more people smart (which I highly recommend if you want to run a company). It can teach you a lot about how people’s mind work. It encompasses many “people stuff” that you will likely encounter in your startup journey like hiring, negotiating, pitching, and teaching, among other things. Because of how useful it is, I would very much like to see the knowledge of psychology being more commonly used by founders.
Finally, if you disagree with some of my points in this writing, or you have a question, or want to have a discussion, please write a comment. I’ve been engaged in this topic for quite a while and I want to know what you think about it.
I would like to thank everyone who has participated in making this piece come to be: my founders friend for taking the big-5 test for this writing, my lead dev for taking the test and for sharing your willpower story, my good friend Tri Adi Pasha for your brilliant editorial insights and for taking the test.
