Founder Personality Benchmarks
Across 101 completed Founder Mode assessments from 93 people (counting each person's latest result), the average Big Five profile is openness 71, emotional stability 70, conscientiousness 69, extraversion 62 and agreeableness 52 on a 0 to 100 scale. Openness is the highest trait and agreeableness the lowest, the same direction published research finds for entrepreneurs.
Big Five scores
| Trait | Mean | Middle 50% | Famous founders* | Distribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Openness | 71 | 65 to 78 | 86 | |
| Conscientiousness | 69 | 60 to 79 | 82 | |
| Extraversion | 62 | 50 to 78 | 62 | |
| Agreeableness | 52 | 44 to 60 | 52 | |
| Emotional stability | 70 | 67 to 75 | 79 |
*Average of our estimates for the 30 famous founders in the Big Five founders dataset, which are assessments from public behaviour, not test results. Histograms show 10-point bands from 0 to 100.
Entrepreneurial traits
| Trait | Mean | Middle 50% | Distribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Risk tolerance | 69 | 63 to 75 | |
| Visionary thinking | 76 | 70 to 85 | |
| Execution focus | 78 | 74 to 85 | |
| Work intensity | 78 | 75 to 88 | |
| Resilience | 66 | 50 to 75 | |
| Analytical rigor | 73 | 65 to 80 | |
| Sales ability | 65 | 50 to 78 | |
| People orientation | 68 | 58 to 79 | |
| Creativity | 64 | 50 to 80 | |
| Founder Mode score | 71 | 65 to 76 |
By stage of the founder journey
| Stage | People | Openness | Conscientiousness | Extraversion | Agreeableness | Emotional |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Building with co-founders | 34 | 71 | 70 | 62 | 55 | 72 |
| Building solo | 30 | 71 | 65 | 61 | 47 | 70 |
| Exploring an idea | 22 | 71 | 68 | 61 | 53 | 67 |
Mean scores. Only groups of 10 or more people are shown.
Which founder archetype people match
Closest of the 30 founder archetypes. Archetypes matched by fewer than 5 people are grouped as Other.
MBTI types
Types are derived from the Big Five scores, not from a separate MBTI questionnaire (see how MBTI maps to the Big Five). Because scores cluster above the midpoint, extraverted, intuitive and judging types are over-represented, which says as much about the method as about the people.
Stage of the founder journey
Method and limitations
Scores come from the Founder Mode assessment: an adaptive questionnaire of 20 questions, where an AI model scores each answer against the Big Five and nine entrepreneurial traits on a 0 to 100 scale. It is not a clinically validated psychometric instrument such as the NEO-PI-R, so compare these numbers with each other, not with published population norms.
The sample is self-selected: people who found the site and chose to take a founder personality test. It is not representative of founders in general, and 93 people is a small sample. Treat differences of a few points as noise.
Included: completed assessments in production; where someone took the test more than once, only their most recent result counts, so the statistics describe people, not attempts. Excluded: test runs, our own team's accounts, and incomplete results. Figures refresh automatically as people take the test.
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How to cite
Founder Mode (2026). Founder Personality Benchmarks (n=93, updated 2026-10-10). https://enterfoundermode.com/founder-benchmarks
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