Venture Capitalists back a few dozen companies every year, but they go through thousands of startup pitches, and meet hundreds of startup founders. And when they say that they have insights on what makes successful entrepreneurs, you listen.
Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen has listed out the 5 qualities he sees in innovators. They’re delivered in Andreessen’s characteristic structured way — Andreessen lists out the 5 qualities, along with his reasoning as to why the quality is crucial.
1. Openness
The first trait that innovators need to have is openness, or being receptive to new ideas. “ When you’re talking about real innovators, like people who actually do really creative breakthrough work, I think you’re talking about a couple things,” Andreessen said in an interview. “One is very high in what’s called trait openness, right? Which is one of the big, one of the big five, which is basically just like flat out open to new ideas. And of course the, the nature of trade openness is trait openness means you’re not just open to new ideas in one category, you’re open to many different kinds of new ideas,” he adds.
2. Conscientiousness
And hard work is just as important. “You (also) need a high level of conscientiousness, which is another one of the big five,” Andreessen says. “You need somebody who’s really willing to apply themselves — and in our world, typically over a period of many years — to accomplish something. They typically work very hard. That often gets obscured, because the stories that end up getting told about these people are just, there’s this kid and he just had this idea and it was like a stroke of genius and it was like a moment in time and it’s just, oh, he was so lucky. No, for most of these people, it’s years and years of applied effort,” Andreessen says.
3. Disagreeableness
But there’s also a counter-intuitive trait that’s required — disagreeableness. “And third is you need somebody high in disagreeableness, which is the third of the big five,” Andreessen says. “You need somebody who’s ornery, because if they’re not ornery, then they’ll be talked out of their ideas by people who will be like, oh, that — the reaction most people have new ideas is, oh, that’s dumb,” Andreessen says.
“And so somebody who’s too agreeable will be easily dissuaded to not pursue, not pulling the thread anymore. You need somebody highly disagreeable,” he explains.
4. Intelligence
Innovators are thought to be highly intelligent in popular culture, but that only features fourth on Andreessen’s list. “And then there’s just a table stakes component, which is they just also need to be high IQ, right? They just need to be really smart because it’s hard to innovate in any category if you can’t synthesize large amounts of information quickly,” Andreessen says.
5. Low Neuroticism
The ability to handle stress is also important. “At some point need to be relatively low on neuroticism, which is another, the big five,” says Andreessen. “’cause if they’re too neurotic, they probably can’t handle the stress, right?” he says.
“If you’re into the sort of science of the big five, basically these are all people who are on the far outlying point, on the normal distribution across all these traits,” he says, pointing to the right of the normal distribution. “And that just gets you to, I think, the sort of hardest topic of all around this whole concept, which is just there are very few of these people,” Andreessen says. It’s quite rare that people have high degrees of all these five traits, which might be one of the reasons why while there are millions of people who aspire to build businesses, only a handful really make it really big.