Top 9 Traits of a Startup CEO for Venture Capital

Did you ever want to start your own business or have a dream of being part of an early stage startup as the CEO? Read this.

In the age of startups, small biz and entrepreneurs that we are at the beginning of, many businesses make it or not, due to the relationships with venture capital (VC) and their ability to negotiate rounds of funding appropriate to their startup's growth, market penetration and proof of ROI. So what leadership qualities are most essential in a CEO?

That is the topic of this list. In essence, this is a list of leadership qualities I encourage you to take up if you plan to start your own business one day. 

Vision & Branding

1- Inspiring a shared vision and being the best sales person of the product, brand and solution points to a wide range of audiences. 

Recruiting & Persuasiveness

2- Attracting top talent and leading such talent in a flexible and empowering way. This is a deal-breaker, do you have an eye for talent and an intuition of best fit with your existing or future co-founders. 

Mastermind

3- Planning and Strategy the incorporates expert domain specific consultants on a wide range of aspects of the business to find the best timing, coordination and method of scaling the business. This includes teamwork, ability to delegate, experience in scaling and executing business plans. 

Relationship Maintenance Savvy

4- Transparency and the ability to maintain relationships with partners, VC, consultants, key industry mentors, industry influencers and co-founders. This includes verbal fluidity, emotional intelligence, integrity, charisma, confidence and authenticity. Basically you want an employee engagement Guru in the making.

Leadership Experience

5- Demonstrated track-record of executive ability, and ability to grow small companies with venture backing. CEOs with previous startup-experience tend to have strategies to adapt to diverse situations and tend to have more structure and coping frameworks both human, technological and psychological to guide them. 

Integrated Social Selling 

6- Ability to make top notch presentations that are inclusive of the audience. Board meetings, sales pitch, adapting the pitch to the audience, building bridges in bus dev, with partners, key mentors and VC relationships entails more than just charisma, it implies a social fluency that has a balance of business development, marketing and sales IQ. In the digital age, this includes online reputation management, social media branding and thought leadership of content marketing. When we think of social selling, we typically think only online, but for the startup CEO, it's a hybrid of many channels. 

Culture & Team Identity Formation ~ Internal Branding 

7- Startup culture facilitation. To create an authentic, credible and positive atmosphere with co-founders that creates a solid foundation for a company culture that is disruptive and appropriate for the industry. A personality that can create an environment where people are inspired to give their best. A place where impressive talent meets with mutual respect, and cross-department communication that cultivates close-knit teams that are diverse and productive. Because the winning formula, is a team whose CEO is respected, engaged with employees and listens to their opinions. 

Scrappy Under Pressure

8- Have an uncanny ability to say no and to focus on what is the priority. Ability to cope with failure, manage conflict and face adversity with calm and composure. All startups will face major and minor obstacles, the best CEOs will shine when the going gets tough. VC likes to see a CEO that has a strong work-ethic, but also a CEO that knows how to delegate to work smarter and be more productive and know their own limitations. No leader can do everything and scaling means often distributing power throughout the company and to each individual. 

Facilitating Information Flow and Execution of Tasks

9- Be a great communicator, this means knowing when to shut up and let others share leadership, share the stage and share the burden of the stress of some of the major decisions. A startup CEO has the opportunity to be more collaborative than in times past. This also means the startup CEO has to keep evolving, learning and especially learning from employees and not assuming they already know it all. This is especially why, in some ways, new found startup CEOs that have no previous experience make the best visionaries. They have no entitlement, no past accolades and no ego. The best communicators foster the implementation of the best ideas, not necessarily their own. 

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