Founder DNA: what does it look like and why is it hard to find?

Talent is the lifeblood of any organisation. There’s literally no one I have met in my career who has said that hiring great people was easy and that they would like to spend less time on it. No amount of importance placed on finding and onboarding great talent is ever enough, but sometimes organisations forget that alongside other business priorities like sales and revenues. The right talent can change the trajectory of an organisation. It is no wonder, then, that strong CEOs spend up to 50% or sometimes even more of their time recruiting.

Since I joined Antler, in 2018, as part of the founding team in Singapore, every time I meet my friends, family and others in my network I get tons of questions about Antler, founders, startups etc. So while some of you might have heard me talk about this in the past, I thought of sharing it with my wider network.

Antler scouts for and brings together the most capable entrepreneurs from across the globe with the highest potential to build successful companies.

In the last 2 years, we have interviewed ~50000 founders and accepted 1100 into our program. At about 2.2% rate of acceptance, this makes us more selective than Stanford.

Founders who entered Antler have now gone on to start 170+ companies in 5 different continents. In the process, these founders have created over 1000+ jobs and created products worth millions of dollars.

Here’s what I have observed and learnt over the last 2 years at Antler.

1. Successful founders have common traits but have disparate backgrounds

Highly ambitious & smart individuals with a strong vision come from all walks of life, with diverse backgrounds, bearing varied life experiences and education. They can be hardcore techies, business leaders, scientists, architects, or even educators. Their nationality, age and education can vary in all directions. However, if you observe closely there are certain strong predictors of these successes.

There are traits and signals that are common to them — grit, high internal motivation, speed of execution, high self-awareness and most importantly street smartness or better known as “the hustle”.

If your strategy relies on focusing on markers popularised by a few “accepted” ecosystems and targeting the cookie-cutter profile that you have heard or been told, then you will be missing out on the outliers who are going to build the mega successes. So, if you want to find the most exceptional individuals who would build the next billion-dollar companies, you have to open your mind, cast the widest net and scout the globe for them. Don't box yourself in.

2. Founders have one and only one ultimate goal

The only reason why someone should think of starting a company in the first place is that they are so obsessed with a problem or idea that they can’t wait for someone else to do it for them. They are 200% convinced that they are both best positioned and totally suited to make it a success. This problem that the founders are so drawn towards is their ultimate goal. This goal is BIG, AMBITIOUS and very HARD to achieve. Every other short term goal should weave a path to achieve that ultimate goal. They think about every other achievement, experience, accolade as being mere milestones on the way to their destination.

If you don’t have your ultimate goal yet, or you are not overly drawn towards it, wait till you are. Don’t start yet.

3. No one is born a founder

High performance, grit and limitless thinking is not something you are born with. It comes from your lived experiences — how you have interacted with the world. It is a combination of early life experiences, self-awareness, and careful choices made in life. The successful founders that I have observed make me a huge believer in unlocking the limitless potential within one’s self, no matter what part of life they are in. These founders show that with well planned deliberate practice, cultivating the right mindset and habits, finding your ultimate goal — you can achieve what you never imagined you could.

Challenging yourself and finding your inner drive is critical. Time spent on figuring out what fuels your engine is worth its weight in gold. When you couple this with careful practice, discipline, and relentless hard work, you will get really good at what you want to build.

This is how EVERY successful founder starts.

So if you think that you are missing those ideas, traits or skills required to be a successful founder, it doesn’t mean you can never be one. You can be one! You will need to start where everyone you admire started — figuring out what drives you. Of course, the journey will be as long as with everything else in life worth having. But trust me, you will get there!

4. Evaluating founders is HARD, but a very exciting pursuit

It is challenging to identify people who’d have the traits/signals mentioned above, are exceptionally brilliant at what they do and are poised to build great companies of the future. But evaluating founders doesn't stop here — You are not only identifying and assessing the traits of the individual, but you are also looking for a subset of those exceptional people who are obsessed with solving the problem and are ready to iterate & build a kickass product at the right place and at the right time while enduring all that comes their way.

And this is exactly what the Founder Assessment team at Antler does every day. So far, globally in 10 different locations where we are currently active, we have screened through about 50000 applicants (and this number is growing exponentially week on week), out of which about 1200 are selected after a rigorous assessment process to build amazing startups together with us. This makes us even more selective than Stanford.

Essentially, we are looking for signals of highly successful future founders amongst a lot of noise.

I will do another post on my thoughts around evaluating those signals and traits that make exceptional founders.

At Antler, through the wealth of experience of the founding team, we knew from the beginning, that our design of the founder discovery and recruitment pipelines will have a direct impact on the cohort qualities and by extension, the overall Antler investments. As a result, we built out and deployed continuous process improvements through tight feedback loops between at every stage of a Founder’s journey at Antler. We monitor the efficiency at every step of the process by tracking outcomes that are of importance to us. There is a constant and conscious effort to identify our personal biases and systematically address them. Overall, we have focused on developing strong Founder recruiting methodology, global best practices, and data driven decision making carefully curated by the Antler team.