CHAPTER 3

Founder’s Traits and Skills

Founder’s Personality Traits

Founders start businesses for a number of reasons, as discussed below, and it is difficult to identify a set of personality traits that can associated with everyone who starts a new business. In fact, a fair number of businesses are started for reasons not chosen by the founder, such as when the founder loses his or her job with an employer. Putting aside these “accidental” or “reluctant” founders, however, it is useful to explore some of the research that has been done on the personality traits of founders and most of the work in this area has been done by researchers interested in the overall phenomenon of “entrepreneurship.”1 This is not surprising given that ...

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