An HBS Career Coach (awesome professionals) brought this new approach to my attention - PositiveIQ. There is IQ, EQ - and now PQ. It's a heavily supported by research (750,000 participants) approach to gain "mind fitness" by first uncovering your saboteurs (which often are your strong suits but may work against you in other situations), and then training your mind daily to re-balance (going to a gym-like). There are 2 self-assessment tests, which I found interesting. It would be very curious to see if Founders tend to have the same saboteurs.

Test 1 https://www.positiveintelligence.com/saboteurs/

Test 2 https://assessment.positiveintelligence.com/pq/overview

One venture studio has asked me to take these two tests as a founder. The results were accurate and I've enjoyed the insights.

1. Kolbe Index A - Kolbe measures your instinctive way of doing things and the result is called your MO (method of operation). It is the only validated assessment that measures a person's conative strengths. Unlike any other assessments, Kolbe gets directly at how people execute (not their IQ or personality). https://www.kolbe.com/
2. CliftonStrengths by Gallup - is an assessment created by Gallup that helps individuals discover their unique talents and strengths. https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/252137/home.aspx

Sharing some thoughts from my experience:

• We did Meyer briggs and other online tests only when it became clear that we were having a challenge working together. So no matter how good the assessments are, there is a behavior change element that would be required among the Entrepreneurs and investors to feel obligated and required to do this from the start.
• We were recommended a coach that specializes in helping start up/ founder teams work better together through solo and group sessions. My sense is this works better than any test because live assessment and help from a subject matter expert is more tangible.
• If the primary customer is funds/investors to help them predict whether team's will work out, I think this may be a small market since there is a working solution today (coaching/counselor -> separation if needed) and the %age of start ups that fail due to team issues is not the same per investor/fund.

Hey folks, happy to meet you all in this collaborative environment. I'm a MS Ed Psych test developer with 20 years experience in Talent Assessment test publishing. If I may add a publisher's perspective, I'm mostly in agreement with all the great comments so far, but I'm countering with an alternative to the Big 5 approach.

Various models of personality have been built into assessments for workplace selection and development, including several Five Factor based assessments like the Hogan Personality Inventory. The Big Five is clearly the main trend in personality assessment today. But how fine-toothed does this psychometric comb need to be to select candidates for specific roles? Often a particular role may have competencies that require more than a five layered definition of personality to align with. Often the competency map from job analysis to assessment is too complex for a simple five scale assessment.

I come from the "more is better" school, so long as each personality factor involved is psychometrically distinct. Not all of those scales are going to correlate when you validate real test data against competency aligned performance data. Better to start with more scales, and let the math find out what is and what is not related to success for a specific job title (across organizations or within a specific organization). The Dept of Labor's O*NET uses a model of workplace personality that models 16 workstyles. I prefer having that many distinct scales to work with so we can really differentiate what is and what is not a valid predictor. I'm ure the O*NET taxonomy has something to say about entrepreneurial roles like startup founders; what workstyles does O*NET suggest align with such roles? How do we want to measure those traits?

As only an example (this is not a sales pitch) at Pearson we utilized the O*NET model of workplace personality so that psychometric interpretations could be leveraged from the vast taxonomy of KSAs available at O*NET. we created an assessment called the Workplace Personality Inventory, which mirrors each O*NET Workstyle as a unique scale of personality. Whatever tool is used in your analyses, validation may have a greater chance of success if you have more scales to line up against the competencies of successful startup founders and teams. More is better when doing an exploratory analysis! Thanks for your time and contributions to the discussion.

The only scientifically constructed instrument is the Five Factor Model. I used this extensively in coaching hedge funds. This method is also used by academic researchers because the output is quantitative and can be correlated against a number of other factors. There are even studies of brain function v. five factor assessments. Because it is trait not type the results are also more valid for comparison. Would love to help!

In my professional life, I have seen a DISC assessment website that will let you connect your team with their individual assessments. Then the program will give you hints on how to interact with that person. I found it useful. So maybe something like that but aimed specifically at startups knowing that the teams will be smaller and with more emphasis on the founder and how they mesh as a cohesive unit

Tim Connors recently posted about this personality test for startup founders: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_OXwpTL1vxQsfrMP9gXe0pgRWSnb3Xiagpv_kHlEu18/edit?usp=sharing

I'm going to check it out now, hope this is helpful!