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Openness explains the ability to innovate and come up with big ideas because you're open to them, and fluid intelligence explains the ability to go and execute.
An open-minded person running a business might catch a problem faster than a closed-minded person. And when they identify a problem, they can fix it much faster.
There is a saying in entrepreneurship that your early employees are all commandos. Commandos are people who can do almost everything well: emails, strategy, code, design.
The most successful entrepreneurs in the world have a combination of the right type of personality and fortunate life circumstance. A lot of them have been doing it most of their life.
A high openness score means you're open-minded - you see the world for what it is - whereas a low openness score means you're incredibly closed-minded, and you see the world the way you want to see it, regardless of what is actually going on.
Fluid intelligence is not a Big Five personality trait: It's a measurement of one's ability to rapidly learn and apply a rule set. As an entrepreneur, you're rapidly dealing with different issues, and your ability to switch from one issue to another is very important.
Start-ups often die in the first 18 to 24 months because of formative mistakes, like choosing a bad co-founder or the wrong corporate entity or an inappropriate platform. Ninety percent of the companies the Founder Institute has created are alive because we've helped them avoid those mistakes.
There are a number of traits that combine to create entrepreneurial potential. We find that openness coordinates very well with successful entrepreneurs. The more open-minded you are, the more you see the world as it actually is. The more closed-minded, the more you see the world as you want it to be.
Some of the traits that make you a great entrepreneur also work against you. Examining data of high-scoring people, we find that oftentimes the world frustrates them: They're super-smart, they're super-capable, and the work quality of their peers is vastly inferior to what they can achieve on their own.