Understanding the fate of start-ups and the preconditions for their success has been a goal of entrepreneurship research for years. Investors, understandably, are interested in predicting a venture’s success as well. While the idea, product, and business model themselves are arguably the most important precondition for a start-up’s success, venture capitalists have for years communicated their focus on the founders as well. Having a balanced founding team that complements each other regarding skillsets and operational responsibility is a crucial asset for any start-up.

In the scientific community, this line of thought has been developed further, attempting to find causality between personality and start-up success.

The aim of this research is to give an overview of all relevant literature about the impact of founder personality on start-up success and to contribute to this field of research by showing implications and identifying existing research gaps.

A systematic literature review was conducted to synthesize the existing literature. First, relevant literature sources and keywords were selected. Second, the resulting literature was reviewed.

• The effect of some traits on start-up success, e.g. psychopathy or proactiveness, is covered only by few authors. The influence of these traits should be investigated further.
• Comparisons in this area of research would be made much easier and clearer if a universal definition of the term “start-up” and its synonyms would be used, the same is true for success and its different metrics such as growth, survival, and performance.
• Only four of the 80 articles in this review included the topic of team founders. Research in this field should be extended.
• Regarding female vs. male founders, most papers limit their explanation for the predominance of successful male founders to female gender bias, omitting the potential impact of gender induced differences in founders’ personalities on the start-ups’ trajectories. Therefore, further research on the interrelation of gender and its impact on founder personality as well as the subsequent influence on start-up success would be desirable.
• Entrepreneurial orientation, a firm-level strategy concept was included in the results through the choice of keywords. There already exists a lot of literature about entrepreneurial orientation. Consequently, it would be interesting to study if entrepreneurial orientation on firm-level could also be transferred to an individual’s personality.

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