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The document discusses the unique mindset of successful entrepreneurs, exemplified by Dutch entrepreneur Salar al Khafaji, who seeks to tackle significant challenges rather than just personal gains. It highlights the difference between founders and employees, noting that founders often possess traits such as adventurousness and a strong internal locus of control. Additionally, it references a study that analyzes the personality traits of entrepreneurs through their social media activity.

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3 views1 page

BARTLEBY

The document discusses the unique mindset of successful entrepreneurs, exemplified by Dutch entrepreneur Salar al Khafaji, who seeks to tackle significant challenges rather than just personal gains. It highlights the difference between founders and employees, noting that founders often possess traits such as adventurousness and a strong internal locus of control. Additionally, it references a study that analyzes the personality traits of entrepreneurs through their social media activity.

Uploaded by

nknngb
Copyright
© All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

BARTLEBY

Are founders different?


The best entrepreneurs ask themselves a particular question

When you think about your next career move, you may well have your sights set on a higher
salary, a new skill or just a shorter commute. When Salar al Khafaji, a Dutch entrepreneur, was
thinking about his next venture, he had slightly different criteria.
Mr al Khafaji had already founded a data-visualisation startup and spent time working at Palantir,
after the Silicon Valley tech firm had bought that business. For his next act he wanted to work on
a chunkier challenge, something big enough to show up in GDP statistics. His choice was
construction, a huge industry with a long-standing productivity problem. The upshot was
Monumental, a bricklaying-robotics firm co-founded by Mr al Khafaji that is profiled in our latest
Boss Class podcast.
The case that founders (or at least the successful ones) are different rests in part on stories like
this. Other people want to pay the mortgage; founders want to change the world. Before he
started ushering in the singularity as the boss of OpenAI, Sam Altman was one of the people in
charge of Y Combinator, a hothouse for startups. In a blog post in 2020, musing on the qualities
that unite the best entrepreneurs and the best researchers, Mr Altman wrote that they “spend a lot
of time reflecting on some version of the Hamming question.”
If you think this is something to do with sandwiches, there’s probably no hope for you. It is
named after Richard Hamming, a mathematician who famously asked chemistry fellows at Bell
Labs what the most important problems in their field were, then what they were working on at the
time, and then why they were working on things that were unimportant. This may not have been
the best technique for making friends, but asking what was the most important problem he could
be working on is pretty much exactly what Mr al Khafaji did before founding Monumental.
There have been more systematic attempts to work out the ways in which founders are different.
In a recent study, Paul McCarthy of the University of New South Wales, in Australia, and his co-
authors infer some common personality traits by analysing the tweets of a large cohort of
entrepreneurs. They find that these characteristics do a good job of predicting whether someone
was an employee or a founder. As you might expect, founders tend to be more adventurous and
open to novelty than the population at large, and less modest.
In a review of literature on entrepreneurial traits, published in 2017, Sari Pakkala Kerr of
Wellesley College and her co-authors cite research suggesting that business founders tend to have
an internal “locus of control”. Psy

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