Top 10 traits of an entrepreneur

"He should have Gonzalez's forehand, Rios's touch, Isner or Sampras's serve and Agassi or Djokovic's backhand. The fighting spirit should be someone like Rafa's. Edberg or Laver's volley and Borg's calmness. I will not put myself.”

Roger Federer’s description of the perfect tennis player is a masterpiece in humility. He names the greatest qualities from legends but deliberately excludes himself. This modesty speaks volumes about true greatness: it’s not about self-aggrandizement but recognizing excellence in others.

Perfection is a concept we all chase, or at least aspire to. It’s an elusive ideal; a theoretical utopia that promises much but remains out of reach, yet continues to captivate our imagination. In the world of entrepreneurship, this quest for perfection is no different.

In this article, we embark on a journey to analyze the top traits of successful entrepreneurs. But rather than generalize, we’ll identify the standouts with those who exemplify the best qualities in each trait. You might say this is our attempt to play the role of Victor Frankenstein, piecing together the perfect entrepreneur from the finest elements. Let’s hope our story ends with greater kindness. 

Curiosity

An omnipresent over the course of human existence, this is a must-have for most walks of life. The what, when, where, how, and why have pushed humans to look for answers. It is a quest to scratch that itch to keep looking for answers that pushes us to ask more questions. 

Focusing on these questions enables discovering need-want gaps, building solutions for them, experimenting, iterating and improving. It is the magic bullet that makes entrepreneurs adaptable, innovative and pick their spots for the right opportunities, which is essential for long-term focus. 

Best in class: In the wake of Lenskart’s IPO, we will give this one to Warby Parker. Born out of frustration of one of the co-founder’s losing their glasses, he was amazed at how much it cost to replace them. They dug deeper and identified a problem. Eyewear was overpriced and the current channels were hard to break into. Warby Parker went D2C and offered a range of services and made themselves into a fun, creative brand. 

Adaptability

If you are working as an entrepreneur, the only certainty is the uncertainty that you will face on a day-to-day basis. Many a time, a startup explores uncharted waters with no guarantees in terms of revenue, customers, growth, the feasibility of business, or anything else. We work in a probabilistic environment in life in most cases. Our brains are wired to build deterministic stories based on the outcome and our biases. At the core of most decisions in life, we rely on informed guesswork and working as an entrepreneur requires us to keep our eyes and ears open and pivot and improvise our decisions based on weak signals. The difference between a startup and a corporation is that startups are nimble, responsive and have shorter signal mechanisms, therefore, they can make changes more efficiently in these spots. 

Best in class: This one goes to the local restaurants that adopted novel approaches during the Covid-19 pandemic, managing supply shocks, turning into take-away joints, and going farm to fork with local partners. They brought a much-needed spark and hope to many while delivering quality food. 

Decisiveness

Being able to decide and decide correctly is often make or break for startups and entrepreneurs. A big percentage of those working in this space don't have infinite capital, bankroll or support to make mistakes or procrastinate. One has to live in the moment and be aware of what is coming, allocate resources efficiently, manage to measure up to the competition. The crystal ball world of startups is seldom clear and one of to make decisions dealing with ambiguity, delaying is not useful, as it often piles up, and sometimes piles up beyond redemption. Being decisive is a trait strong leader exhibit, and they are remembered for it. 

Best in class: The late great Steve Jobs takes this one. His decisiveness includes cutting product  lines on his return to the company, being a bellwether in defining what’s cool in design, taking unconventional approach like refusing to install Adobe Flash on the iPhone, and prioritising his sensibilities over market currents and being right for a lot of his choices. 

Self-awareness

Know thyself is a maxim that was inscribed in the temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece. Various similar sayings exist in philosophy and poetry around the world. The crux is simple, before seeking the divine blessings, know what and who you are so the Oracles can guide you effectively and live wisely. 

The world of entrepreneurship is similar. We are all human beings who are composites of strengths, weaknesses, emotions, motivations. These helps us shape our worldview, take decisions, build relationships, develop intelligence, resilience and learn to adapt. Working with lean resources and nimble teams, self-awareness can help you become an efficient and effective member of the team, if not a superstar. Startups require the workers to don multiple hats, which is a good skill to have, but the flipside is that it creates a bit of a Dunning Kreuger loop where you might have more than you can chew on your plate. 

Best in class: Lets put our hands together for Sir Richard Branson for this one. He was charismatic, rolled the dice and used his own brand to build the Virgin brand. One of the standout moments included launching Virgin cola to much fanfare at Times Square, New York knowing fully well that he could not compete with such a brand on resources. 

Branson, Warby Parker, Spanx

Innovative Thinking

Innovative thinking drives problem solving, creativity and the ability to spot markets and openings. Those with an innovative bent of mind can differentiate their businesses, create disruptive models, and are able to plant their flags and claim their space under the sun.

Success in the world of entrepreneurship relies on a lot of decision points and is often back-constructed based on confirmation biases and building a narrative that fits into the storyline. The real world is fraught with more dangers, requires resilience, strategic foresight, finding the right spots and going all-in when opportunities present themselves. Shackling oneself with finite boundaries and not thinking outside the box can be deterrents and thinking innovatively can help you get past in spots like these. 

Best in class: This one is for the boys of AirBnb. They built a greenfield service by reimagining travel and lodging experience turning underutilised personal spaces into a global hospitality brand. It wasnt merely a reflection of the platform’s technology first approach but a signal that the sharing economy had arrived and was here to stay. 

Persistence

Persistence is a quality that has been a hallmark of mankind since the beginning of time. Albert Einstein claimed that he was successful because he just stuck around with problems longer, Thomas Edison claimed that success is 99% perspiration, and 1% inspiration, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was more simplistic, he defined success as being able to stumble from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. 

Failure and setbacks are foundational to life. It is ironic how our worldview is shaped and biased towards being successful that we miss the woods for the trees. Success is not easy, and failure is the numerous stepping stones in that trail. Entrepreneurs need to be made of stronger stuff as they combat a lot of adversarial circumstances, including business challenges and ambiguity. Persistence builds resilience, improvement and sustained effort that enables scaling businesses and achieving lasting success. 

Best in class: Seldom do entrepreneurs hit the jackpot when it comes to their first business ideas. They are invariably in for the long haul. Walt Disney was once fired for lacking creativity and faced several failures, yet his name lives on as a behemoth. He persisted for 16 years to be able to adopt Mary Poppins! 

Accepting failure

Failure is an outcome. Outcomes are often random variables, effectively meaning that you don't control the extent of your success. Entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs didn't envisage Apple as a trillion dollar behemoth but to put a personal computer in every home in America. The outcome is that Apple diversified and grew their business into other fields including movie production, music and now an OTT platform. 

Failure is not a personal shortcoming, but is central to the learning, experimenting, polishing and refining ideas. Learn to fail quickly, and move on, even more quickly. Embrace and accept failure, analyze mistakes, be resilient, and pivot towards new ideas. Rinse, and repeat. 

The trouble is that many a time failure arrives too early or too late for many and leaves an indelible mark. Building a business is not as easy as getting straight As in a semester exam. The route is long, and difficult. Acceptance of failure builds a mindset where setbacks are learning and opportunities to gain insights. 

Best in class: If you think you have it rough, consider the curious case of John Dyson. He went through 5,127 prototypes for a bag less vacuum cleaner and viewed each attempt as a vital learning step that brought him closer to a solution. Failure was the education for lasting success. 

Risk Tolerance

This is an interesting one. Startups and entrepreneurs need to have a probabilistic mindset, as opposed to a deterministic one, Risk tolerance and the prevalent commentary on it seems to be based on two sets, ones that made it and others that do not. India, as a society is risk-averse, possibly due to a resource scarcity mindset. The system is one of grind, hard work, and keeping your head down. And on top of this comes the other problems that businesses face anyway. When you read all this, you would wonder why anyone would put themselves through all this. 

One of the early expeditions to Mount Everest involved Georges Mallory in the 1920s. Whether he made it to the mountain top or not is not certain beyond reasonable doubt, but he did freeze to death near the summit and his body was discovered nearly a century later, When he was asked on why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, his response simply was, “Because its there”. 

This statement in a nutshell reflects on why someone would want to try and build a startup. Risk tolerance is a must-have skill in the core team of a startup, either through individual members or collectively. It enables businesses to analyze, mitigate and accept risks and work towards building a sustainable competitive advantage. 

Best in class: Thinking of a time when Nike struggled to sell a pair of shoes would seem an exercise in futility today. But, this was real. Phil Knight went to Japan borrowing money from his father. He imported shoes before transitioning into becoming a manufacturer. He took on debts and risks beyond his pocket would allow at the time and came out on the other side. His memoir, Shoe Dog, is a riveting read and highly recommended. 

Long term focus

Long term focus is essential for entrepreneurs because it prioritizes sustained growth and resilience over short-term gains. Think of it like competing in a 100m race and an infinite marathon. Business writing focuses on winning and losing without actually defining what these are with clarity. Does winning include one of profits, market share, revenue, efficiency, or none, or all of these? If you lead in market share in one quarter and lose over the next, then have you lost? 

Management often gets caught up in these short term targets and embraces a transactional approach. Some of the oldest companies in the world are in Japan. While they might not be household names, they are successful, reliable and generationally good in honouring their customers. Japanese corporations do not also embrace the MBA style management approach to businesses. 

You can build short term profits by inflating the P&L accounts by selling assets, but in the long-run, this is not likely to reap rewards. A long-term vision and outlook aligned with business dynamics should empower entrepreneurs to endure uncertainty, innovate persistently, and build sustainable value. This fosters resilience, disciplined resource allocation and pursuing long-term goals that will lead to lasting success. 

Best in class: Warren Buffett’s investments describe this virtue the best. His favourite holding period for a stock is forever. His reliance on strong fundamentals and compound interest further punctuate the fact that wealth building and creating follow a long term focus. In terms of companies, CostCo is a great example that relies on a long term focus valuing discipline, customer centric approach and simple operations.  

Motivation

This is also foundational to starting businesses and validating business ideas. It is often an individual’s passion for an idea, a desire for personal growth and achievement, having social impact, autonomy and financial and material success that leads to finding meaning and purpose in life and work beyond the money. The money is an outcome. The goal is to build what you set out to. The motivation is what brought you to the table and what was that initial idea. In our series of articles, we have talked about wanting to shorten queues and bring more efficiency to a process. The motivation could be as simple as that. 

Best in class: Bumble, the dating platform was born out of a motivation. Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder, wanted an app where women make the first move giving them agency. She had gained experience at Tinder and wanted to build a brand in her own image. 

Empathy

An entrepreneur is a person for all seasons and being empathetic is useful in enabling building a successful business. It is important to understand the world from the point of view of customers, employees and other stakeholders. Its not till you wear the proverbial shoes that you understand the issues that they face. This understanding will help you to build trust, sustainable relationships and foster lasting trust along the value chain. As opposed to seeing one compete against the other, create a collaborative work culture, respond to challenges effectively, analyze and incorporate multiple worldviews. If there are issues that you face, try and add more seats to the table. Build a culture of consensus as opposed to one built on confrontation and adversarial behaviour. 

Best in class: Blake Mycoskie started TOMS with a clear “One for One” approach. While on a trip to Argentina, he saw abject poverty and many who walked without shoes. His compassion and empathy led him to build a mission driven brand that has helped communities around the world. 

Discipline 

Focus, time management, resilience, and a structured approach to achieving goals is central to entrepreneurship. Discipline requires commitment, prioritization, face up to challenges with persistence and proceed to running day to day operations. It involves a lot of repetition and might not always reap rewards right off the bat. But, staying the course, setting clear goals, executing correctly to execute them, maintatin and focus on priorities, be diligent and patient while facing recversals, and staying nimble and accountable even in the face of adversity differentiates the best from the rest. 

There is a fine line between reasons and excuses. Entrepreneurs have to identify it and be reasonable to themselves and their team. The internet has an idea for a minute. It takes a lot of repetition to turn them into successful ventures. Discipline is like the bass player in a band, or the intelligence operations in a country. If they make the headlines, there is a fair chance that something is awry. 

Best in class: David O’Leary, one of the Shark Tank judges, talked about how Steve Jobs extreme discipline was unrelenting. He would just look at small tranches of tasks that he had to complete in the next 18 hours, usually in batches of three to five. Everything else was put on the back burner. He would just focus on the signal and cull out the noise. 

Creativity

Chronicling and documenting problems is the first step. Sometimes, people need to take a step further and refine their thoughts beyond conventional solutions and ideas. Businesses are dynamic in nature, customers expectations change, preferences change, and businesses need to keep changing and keep up with the dynamics. 

Best in class: The iPhone was truly a product ahead of its time, revolutionizing the smartphone industry by challenging the conventional design of phones with physical keypads. Apple’s team pioneered an out-of-the-box solution by integrating the screen as both a display and a dynamic keypad, creating the first widely successful touchscreen smartphone. This breakthrough innovation didn’t just launch a new product but also sparked an entirely new ecosystem of devices, apps, and user behaviors, generating enormous economic value.

By 2023, Apple had sold over 2.5 billion iPhones worldwide, capturing a significant share of the global smartphone market, which is valued at approximately $480 billion annually. 

The app economy that the iPhone helped spawn is now estimated to be worth over $1.5 trillion globally, including app sales, advertising, and related services. The iPhone's innovation opened the door to a greenfield market, enabling not only new hardware but an entire software and services ecosystem that continues to fuel growth for Apple and countless developers worldwide.

While debates about the social and political impacts of smartphones persist, there is no doubt that the iPhone created a fundamentally new market. Apple’s creative vision allowed it to spot untapped potential, develop a novel product, and build a connected digital environment that transformed how people communicate, work, and interact with technology

Intelligence

Many mistake intelligence as merely sharpness and responsiveness to situations. In our worldview, it has many forms. Moving away from the traditional definition, we can look at the various forms of intelligence. Entrepreneurs should exhibit emotional, spatial and mindful intelligence. Emotional intelligence allows entrepreneurs to manage their own emotions, balance empathy, strength and become effective leaders. 

Mindful intelligence allws entrepreneurs to be aware and thoughtful about their decisions, reduce stress and adopt clarity. 

Best in class: This one is slightly different. We have tried to include one example of a different type of intelligence. 

Emotional Intelligence: Satya Nadella revitalized Microsoft by cultivating empathy and understanding within teams and customers.

Spatial Intelligence: Architects-turned-entrepreneurs like Zaha Hadid used spatial creativity to build iconic, innovative structures.

Mindful Intelligence: Entrepreneurs like Arianna Huffington emphasize mindfulness to maintain focus, creativity, and resilience. Elon Musk and Tesla’s stated intentions to move on from electric cars to robots is another example. 

Comfortability 

Being an entrepreneur is stressful, and being comfortable. As the Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling eloquently said, “If you can keep your head when all about are losing theirs” exemplifies calmness, control and comfort. The same poem has another line, "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same" reflects an entrepreneur’s ability to be equally comfortable in success and failure, maintaining equilibrium and perspective. In simpler terms, there is no good news or bad news; news is what we get, and we work accordingly and adjust.

Being able to be at ease in diverse and challenging situations, and being ambivalent to these situations, fosters confidence, creates an ecosystem of balancing risk and reward with equal aplomb, helping navigate unpredictable markets and complex decisions. If a core team is uncomfortable in their own skin, they are likely to make better decisions than if they are not. 

Best in Class: Known for his adventurous spirit, Sir Richard Branson launched Virgin Cola against strong headwinds from the two cola giants, Pepsi and Coca-Cola. He even turned up driving a tank through Times Square in 1998. Though the brand shut down, Branson further strengthened his standing as someone comfortable in his skin. He offers the same to Virgin group employees, encouraging them to look after themselves. 

Conclusion

We have tried to articulate the traits that help make an entrepreneur. These are based on our understanding and are in no way exhaustive. Our attempts at trying to substantiate these traits with examples are to help us and our readers understand what the corresponding individual or the group has to offer. Together, these traits form a composite blueprint for entrepreneurial excellence, rich with lessons on resilience, humility, and innovation.