New founder resilience research uncovers the truth behind entrepreneurial performance

The latest Foundology research set out to understand what the most resilient, high performing founders do differently to build a solid and sustainable platform for thriving, not just surviving in a life of founderhood and leading a startup team, as by Forbes magazine

This is part 2 of a series that dives into the Founder Resilience Research Results. Part 1 provided the latest snapshot on founder health, mental health and psychological states – uncovering just how vital resilience is to life as an entrepreneur.

Ask any founder and they’ll say that the path of entrepreneurship can be tough at times. Deeply rewarding and empowering, but tough. The uncertainty, the need for constant adaptation, and the emotional connection make for an exhilarating ride but a cognitively and emotionally challenging one, distinguishing it from other types of leadership.

These unique challenges explain why 92% of founders identified resilience as the #1 trait required in our founder research five years ago. More than problem-solving, communication, and influencing skills, nearly all founders still choose resilience as the most vital competency for entrepreneurship – and it is increasingly being connected to individual career accomplishments, work satisfaction and business outcomes.

92% of founders identify resilience as the #1 trait required for entrepreneurship

 

Despite its importance, little was known about founder resilience and, more importantly, how to build it. With this research, we integrated cohort analysis to plug that gap. Nearly 400 entrepreneurs shared their experiences in the study, making it the largest study on founder resilience yet. By examining leadership factors, health, psychological state and founder resilience, it provides a snapshot of founder health and provides evidence-based, actionable insights for surviving and thriving as a founder – both for entrepreneurs themselves and for those enabling them in the startup and investment ecosystem.

You can download your copy of The Founder Resilience Report for free here

The research method incorporated the Brief Resilience Scale (BRS) – a validated tool for assessing an individual’s ability to recover and bounce back from challenging situations. This enabled comparisons between cohorts of founders with high resilience scores and those with low resilience scores.

Founderhood demands high resilience

As shown in the Founder Health Snapshot for 2024, entrepreneurship puts unique and profound pressures on entrepreneurs, leading to poor mental health and impacting performance. It is this acute pressure that leads most entrepreneurs to select resilience as the number one requirement for a life of founderhood.

“Entrepreneurship is really, really hard… Nothing comes without pain.”

Anne Boden, founder of Starling Bank

 

Resilience is the ability to adapt to change and cope with stress and adversity while also developing one’s potential in the process. While many founders might benefit from grit – the ability to persist toward long-term goals – high resilience extends beyond pure persistence, enabling founders to bounce back from setbacks and maintain mental and emotional strength in the face of challenges, and challenges are the norm for a life of founderhood.

“To solve large-scale problems, entrepreneurs face a long journey. Success depends on the entrepreneur being able to self-regulate, be resilient and have a solid well-being.”

Lisa Mikkelsen, Head of Human Capital, Flourish Ventures

 

Resilience matters for founder health

While founders report high passion and motivation regardless of their levels of resilience, their health metrics vary widely based on their resilience scores.  Those founders with low resilience scores record more symptoms of mental health strain and experience those symptoms more frequently and more recently. 

Comparing founders with high resilience scores versus those with low resilience scores, those with a low scores:

• Have 65% more poor health symptoms on average (7.38 compared to 4.43 average number of symptoms)
• Were nearly three times more likely to have experienced these symptoms weekly (61% compared to 23% who experienced symptoms weekly)
• More than twice as likely to be experiencing these symptoms recently/currently (69% compared to 29%)

Resilience matters for founder and startup performance

The gap between high and low-resilience founders is equally apparent when diving deeper into their psychological states. When asked how often they feel a certain way in an average week, founders with low resilience scores felt a third less motivated for most of their week, over a third less confident and far less high-performing when compared to their higher resilience scoring counterparts.

Founders with low resilience scores are four times more overwhelmed than high

 

Their performance is likely being undermined by the high prevalence of negative emotions they are experiencing too. Founders with low resilience scores are four times more overwhelmed and stressed most of their week and more than twice as worried and anxious, which can undermine their confidence and self-efficacy.

 

Examining the evolution of these emotions over time reveals an alarming trend. When asked if these emotions are better or worse than a year ago, founders who scored themselves as low resilience record feeling less motivated, more worried and more stressed. By contrast, those scoring high resilience appear to be rising to the challenge and report feeling even more high-performing.

Taken together, these emotions have a tangible impact on whether a founder’s startup will ultimately succeed or fail, with founders who scored themselves as low resilience nearly twice as likely to have considered quitting than founders who scored as highly resilient.

What founders with high resilience scores do differently

One of the primary aims of our research was to reveal what those founders with high resilience scores might be doing differently. Our results uncover that the most statistically significant differences fall into three categories: mindsets, habits and support. 

Performance-enhancing mindsets

Founders with high resilience scores are proactively developing ways of thinking designed to bolster their resilience. They demonstrate a significantly lower fear of failure, are less likely to experience guilt and have difficulty taking breaks, and are more than two times more likely to feel confident most days. Knowing what we know about the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, this demonstrates a mental fortitude and metacognition that has likely been developed proactively and can be learned and practised by others.

“Keep reminding yourself of why you’re there and what you are trying to achieve – focusing on the goal rather than the adversity. It’s about finding whatever tricks work for your own internal mind to keep moving forward.”

Jack O’Meara, founder of Ochre-Bio

 

Much like a sports coach, a founder coach can work on resilient and performance-enhancing ways of thinking like this, and founders with high resilience scores are more likely to be working with a professional coach than those with low resilience scores (61% vs 41%). 

Commitment to sustainable performance habits

Our results show that sustainable high performance comes from self-monitoring, intervening at times of stress, and re-regulating regularly with the rest and recovery habits that work for the individual. This approach is evident for founders with high resilience scores when compared to those with low scores. These founders are more likely to tune into their early indicators of stress and intervene proactively, and are nearly two times more likely to commit to habits like exercise, downtime and sleep hygiene to protect their long-term performance.  

Learn more about these habits in PART 3 or download the full Founder Resilience Report packed with practical strategies from founders themselves here

Valuing and prioritising support

87% say having peers to learn from has a positive impact on performance

 

While nearly all founders said that having peers to learn from has a positive impact on their performance, it is the founders with high resilience scores who are more likely to take action. These founders are much more likely to make time to see other founders regularly and be in a peer support group or coaching group, leading to them being 50% more likely to feel supported as founders.

“It’s easy to think ‘Am I crazy for doing this?’ then I hear other founders in the group that I respect saying similar things and realise we’re all in the same boat”

Daniel Dunn, founder of Paperplanes

 

In the unique founder role, where there are few straightforward answers, founders recognise the need to actively learn from and share experiences with each other, with 86% of founders feeling it helps to know that others have been through similar challenges to them. To enable this level of beneficial sharing, founders need to be in spaces that facilitate openness and vulnerability safely and ethically.  

When examining the types of non-therapeutic support that founders with high-resilience scores engage with, other than peer-group coaching, they are also prioritising individual coaching. With the stigma that coaching signals a deficit now largely eradicated, coaching both satisfies the need for a safe-space as well as performance-enhancing habits and mindsets.

We’ll be diving more into the results and how founders can do this over the coming months.

To access all the recommendations for founders and the ecosystem builders that support entrepreneurs, download the full Founder Resilience Report for free here

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