Put in your blood, sweat, tears: 5 traits of our most successful founders

An entrepreneur's sense of urgency can make them want to do everything at once, reports Tech in Asia

Since 2000, we have invested in over 50 digital companies across Asia, Europe, and the US and have seen great successes as well as the occasional spectacular failures. A few weeks after launching our VC firm, Cocoon Capital, my co-founder and I sat down and talked a bit about the largest success stories and asked the question: Did the successful founders possess certain qualities over those that failed? The answer, we think, is yes. Here are the top five traits we were able to draw from our past and ongoing success stories. Enjoy.

Trait 1: Confidence and resilience

Our good founders are self-confident—not arrogant or over-confident. Self-confidence has a lot of positive side effects that we’ve seen were important when navigating the stormy waters of fast-growing startups. 

Trait 2: Staying focused

Good founders are creative and full of ideas, but startups have very limited resources. This means the best founders and teams focus on one problem at a time. By this, we mean one product, one key customer segment, or one key market at a time. The entrepreneur’s sense of urgency can make them want to do everything at once. 

Trait 3: Being a hustler

One of the common complaints investors hear from entrepreneurs is that they never have enough money. Sadly, early-stage companies will always be short of both cash and other resources. Hustlers are those that can achieve amazing things with very little or even nothing. They put in blood, sweat, and tears with only one goal in mind: success.

Trait 4: Failing forward

“Failing forward” is the concept of gradually finding your path by multiple, controlled experiments that most often fail. In this concept, failing is actually expected.

Trait 5: Ruthlessness

It might sound wrong at first, but many of our favorite founders are “ruthless;” they understand that the business should always come first. They are able to let go of the wrong hires and are willing to admit their own mistakes and take corrective action. 

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here