Why is “Are startup founders different?” Still a Meaningful Question??

It’s always amusing when mainstream media stumbles into a conversation the rest of us have been having for, oh, I don’t know… decades?

This week, The Economist decided to pose the bold question: “Are startup founders different?” as if it’s some new frontier of behavioral science. Imagine walking into a neuroscience conference and breathlessly announcing that sleep is important, only to find out the keynote was literally titled “The Cognitive Impact of Sleep Deprivation” and started three hours ago.

Yes, startup founders are different. They have to be. And no, this isn’t up for debate in any serious academic, psychological, or entrepreneurial circle. Just as a startup is distinct from a new business, a founder is different from a business owner. The real news is that mainstream media keeps floating this question it’s some inspired realization.

Researchers at institutions like MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford have long studied the behavioral traits and cognitive wiring of founders. This question should no longer be clickbait; grounded in empirical, peer-reviewed work, when society continues questioning a difference, it also enables the presumption that they’re not different (we don’t ask if there is oxygen in the air because it’s a foregone point of fact). For example, a 2023 study revealed that successful startup founders tend to exhibit a “remarkably similar personality profile” — notably: higher openness to experience, greater conscientiousness, and lower agreeableness (yes, being a little disagreeable helps). Why? Because being the founder of a startup is not the same as starting a new business. Founders are wired to see opportunity where others see chaos, to obsess over solving things no one else cares enough to notice, and to persist long after the rational brain would have filed for Chapter 7.

Psychologists like Saras Sarasvathy have articulated entire frameworks (like effectuation theory) that explain how founders think fundamentally differently from managers. Instead of starting with a goal and acquiring the means to reach it, founders start with what they have and imagine what they can create. It’s not just risk tolerance; it’s uncertainty obsession. It’s not just being visionary; it’s often borderline delusional… and that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Meanwhile, venture capital firms have baked this into their investment theses. Entire portfolios are built around founder-market fit; essentially, a bet on whether a founder has the unique grit, obsession, and irrational conviction to outlast and outlearn their competition. You don’t need a headline in The Economist to realize why Y Combinator’s interviews look more like psychological warfare than business pitches. Product-Market Fit is a concept used to help people understand how startups work; when it’s clearly established that the Team is the more important factor in the success of a startup, we’re not actually looking for Product-Market Fit, we’re trying to discern if the founders fit.

The industry’s dirty little secret? We’ve already optimized for the fact that founders are weird. It’s just that mainstream media still talks about startups the way National Geographic talks about undiscovered tribes: with awe, distance, and a hint of patronizing fascination.

So sure, it’s cute that the question keeps being asked because it draws more attention to the startup sector, but we need to be careful that the question asked does not mean that the answer is unknown or newly discovered. Startups are different from new businesses. Founders are unusual and not likely the person opening that new business in town. What I’d love to see more of is that mainstream media digs deeper into the real implications so that investors, advisors, and policy makers can better serve: if founders are different, why are most support systems — from banking to healthcare to education — built for not founders? Why do we push aspiring entrepreneurs into MBA programs that groom them for middle management rather than teach them to break the rules intelligently? Why do government grant programs punish volatility when volatility is the essence of creation?

Here’s a better headline: “The World Still Doesn’t Understand Founders — And It’s Killing Innovation.”

If you’re still waiting for polite society to validate your founder DNA, stop. The data’s in: You’re not normal. And that’s exactly the point.

Now what systems need to change because of that?