Resumo

It is easy to name a successful startup not because they are plenty, but because we forget who did not succeed. In Brazil, only 58% of the companies were active at its second anniversary (IBGE, 2014). It is easy to fail, but success is far more complex and subjective. For startup companies, defining success can be even more vague and complex. We have seen many promising high-growth companies that failed. Several of them even received external funding from believing savvy investors. Success of a startup is subjective and will depend on the entrepreneur’s perspective and time frame.

What are, if any, the common characteristics shared by successful entrepreneurs, defined as those who managed to keep their startups alive for three years or more and succeeded in selling their product or service at least once in this period. Our objective is to identify those common factors that distinguishes the successful entrepreneurs, rank the startups based on those characteristics and estimate how likely a startup is to be successful, as per our definition, based on the characteristics of its entrepreneurs.

Many studies have been conducted to define an organization's success factors, such as entrepreneurial characteristics of the company leader and its behavior (Cooper & Bruno, 1977; Duchesneau & Gartner, 1990; Watson & Scott, 1998) and their motivations (Watson & Scott, 1998). In this paper, we review i) startup and success factors (Shane and Venkataram, 2000 and Cooper, Woo and Dunkelberg, 1989); ii) the external support for startup development (Cohen e Hochberg, 2014), iii) the entrepreneurial profile (SEBRAE, 2018 and Muraro and Verruck, 2012).

A qualitative-quantitative approach based on a 61-questions survey that was pre-tested with 10 entrepreneurs and applied to 107 respondents to get a qualified sample of 86 individuals selected by convenience. The survey comprised: the startup; the entrepreneurial profile; the individual; startup support; commitment to entrepreneurship; and entrepreneur's qualification. Based on the results presented, we have elaborated six hypotheses based on entrepreneurs’ characteristics to explain success. We have run a different information trees and logit regressions on IBM SPSS to explain success.

This paper validates SEBRAE’s (2018) entrepreneurial profile but failed to present common characteristics of the successful entrepreneur, as we have defined. It is noticeable some subtle differences between successful entrepreneurs and the qualified sample, however, we couldn’t find any specific characteristic that would explain success, with statistical significance, based on a logit regression. Our analysis is limited by the small, non-random sample and additional information of the startup as financials, among other limitations.

Our study validates SEBRAE (2018) and Malheiros et. al. (2015) main characteristics of an entrepreneur. These characteristics, however, do not necessarily reflect the unique profile of a startup that has survived over 3 years and have completed at least one sale in this period, which we labeled as Successful Entrepreneurs for this work. Additional characteristics such as age, past experience, percentage ownership in the company and number of dependents, to name a few, did not add information that explained a Successful Entrepreneur.

Cohen, S., Hochberg, Y. V. (2014), Accelerating Startups: The Seed Accelerator Phenomenon Cooper, A. C; Bruno, A. V.(1977). “Success among High- Technology Firms”. Business Horizons. IBGE (2014). Pesquisa Demografia das Empresas. Malheiros, R. C. C.; Ferla, L. A.; Cuha, C. J. A. (2005). Viagem ao mundo do empreendedorismo. 2. ed. Florianópolis: LEA. SEBRAE (2018). Empretec. Comportamento empreendedor. Ries, E. (2012). “A Start up Enxuta: Como os empreendedores atuais utilizam a inovação contínua para criar empresas extremamente bem-sucedidas”. 1° Edição. Editora Leya.