Identifying resilient founding teams while avoiding bias

In the realm of early-stage investing, many professionals tend to prioritise hard metrics such as gross margin or burn rate, as these are the signals we are trained to trust for identifying long-term success. However, at the seed stage, these signals are often incomplete.

The dynamics among a startup’s founding team can be a significant source of strength or a critical weakness. We have observed companies with promising initial momentum stumble, not due to an absence of market demand, but rather because the team struggled to manage the pressure of operating within that market. It is important to acknowledge that, despite seemingly exceptional metrics, a team’s performance can pose a significant risk.

How your team can be a risk

As investors, we like to think that we are supporting innovation and execution. However, in reality, at the earliest stages, we are supporting people. A founding team may appear perfectly complementary on paper, with a strong mix of commercial and technical experience. Yet, under stress, those neat divisions blur. This causes responsibilities to overlap and unresolved tensions to surface, slowing decision-making and clouding the product vision.

Building a resilient team requires more than assembling an impressive set of résumés. It’s not just who is on the team that matters, but also how they function as a cohesive unit when things go wrong – because they inevitably will. Startups are environments of constant uncertainty, and founders must make high-stakes decisions with incomplete information while under significant financial pressure. In this context, team dynamics are fundamental to the company’s success, meaning they are not a soft metric.

When evaluating a founding team, we always have to ask: how will these individuals behave under pressure – not in theory, but in practice? How do they handle disagreement? Who takes ownership when something fails? Are they investing their energy into building the company or fighting for control of it? These questions are difficult to answer from a pitch deck or during initial meetings, because founders always try to present a united front to investors. However, how a team behaves during a pitch is not necessarily indicative of how they will act in the face of adversity.

Evaluating founders without bias

Traditional evaluation frameworks often fall short, and sometimes do more harm than good. They tend to reward familiar archetypes, such as the charismatic visionary, the seasoned operator, and the technically brilliant outsider. While these patterns are comforting, they also risk reinforcing bias by favouring individuals who already fit the industry’s implicit mould over those who could build stronger, more balanced teams. To move beyond this, we must shift our focus from identifying “ideal” founders to understanding team composition in a more nuanced and data-driven way. What capabilities are present? More importantly, what or who is missing? Are there any gaps that could become fault lines under stress?

Mapping team dynamics

In our work, we’ve found that integrating advanced software analytics with structured tools is invaluable, not as a means of selecting a specific type of founder – but rather as a way to identify blind spots. During the advanced stages of due diligence, we use proprietary and third-party software to ingest data inputs and conduct scientific personality assessments.

Specifically, we conduct a founding team’s DISC personality analysis and then map it onto the Big Five personality model (O.C.E.A.N.). Then, we use that mapping to analyse the team’s composition for factors that predict startup success – drawing specifically from the “FOALED” founder typology framework.

These analyses allow us to categorise founders into specific behavioural profiles, such as Leader, Developer, Operator, Expert/Engineer, Accomplisher, or Fighter. This enables us to rigorously evaluate team complementarity. For example, an analytical mapping may reveal that a team is strong in vision and external storytelling but lacks operational discipline. Another team might excel in execution but struggle with strategic alignment. Neither profile is inherently better, but both carry risks if unaddressed.

Our approach is grounded in a growing body of rigorous, published research on the impact of founders’ personalities on the success of new ventures – highlighting the advantages of larger, personality-diverse teams in startups, which exhibit an increased likelihood of success. The findings underscore the significance of personality diversity as a novel dimension of team diversity, highlighting its impact on performance and success.

Our process and methodology is informed by another body of research that comes from the fields of psychology, business, and personal development, which attempts to categorise human behaviour into primary types. This focuses on how people act, communicate, and adapt to their (stressful) environment. Finally, our tools are becoming increasingly sophisticated, thanks to the continuous advancements in artificial intelligence.

See Also

Why AI-driven startups must embrace domain knowledge for success

The goal is not to exclude teams but rather to determine where post-investment support is needed and whether the founders recognise these gaps. It is crucial to apply these tools carefully because any form of structured analysis can become reductive or, worse, reinforce existing biases. We’ve already seen how algorithmic systems in other domains can amplify inequality when trained on biased data. In an industry still fighting to create equity for founders from diverse backgrounds, this would be a significant setback.

Avoiding familiar archetypes

If we rely on preconceived notions of what a founder “should” look like and use analytical tools to confirm them, we are effectively automating exclusion. Instead, the objective is to leverage these scientific insights to expand our perspective, enabling us to formulate more effective questions, challenge our assumptions, and deliver targeted support to facilitate team growth following an investment.

It is imperative that we do not penalise teams that do not conform to traditional standards, as they may possess a higher level of resilience due to their diverse experience, unique thinking styles, or leadership strategies. Investing at the seed stage is inherently uncertain, and there will always be unknowns.

Team dynamics represent the hidden variable that determines whether a company can survive and scale. While strong metrics are important for gaining initial traction, it is the strength of the team, including how they complement each other, handle pressure, and grow together, that determines whether they will continue to be successful.