30 questions designed to surface your real founder DNA. Not what you hope you are — what the evidence suggests. You'll get an honest founder profile, a co-founder need score, and a precise portrait of the person who could make the difference.
You've answered all 30 questions. Ready to see your founder profile and co-founder match?
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Personalised from your 30 answers
This page explains what we measure, why we measure it, how the survey is designed, and exactly how your report is produced — including the full AI prompts. It's written for founders, coaches, and HR professionals who want to understand what's under the hood before using or recommending this tool.
The most common reasons co-founder relationships break down aren't strategic — they're psychological. One person burns out. One person can't share control. Their motivations were never truly aligned. One was mission-driven; the other wanted an exit. These incompatibilities rarely show up in early conversations, but they're usually visible in the right kind of self-assessment — if the questions are honest enough to surface them.
Find My Co-Founder was built to do two things: give a founder an honest picture of their own DNA — strengths, gaps, blind spots, and how much solo founder potential they actually have — and then describe precisely the kind of co-founder who would complement rather than clash with them.
The model organises founder traits into three layers — from observable skills at the surface to deep psychological fuel at the core. Each layer plays a different role in the assessment and in the report.
Learnable skills a founding team needs but no single founder must possess. They can be split across co-founders, hired for, or developed over time. The assessment measures them to understand the gaps a co-founder might fill.
| Skill | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Storytelling & clarity (Cognitive Synthesis) | Turning complex, ambiguous ideas into clear narratives — for investors, clients, and team |
| Persuasion & trust-building (Social Influence) | Building trust quickly, persuading without formal authority, inspiring confidence early |
| Getting things done (Execution Intelligence) | Translating strategy into daily action; shipping, closing, following through without external structure |
| Building a team from scratch (Emergent Leadership) | Building and motivating a small team before the company has a brand or track record |
| Commercial hustle (Commercial Instinct) | Capital discipline, revenue generation, understanding burn as a strategic clock, selling ability |
Deep dispositional characteristics — largely stable, not easily coached. Both co-founders need their own supply of these. They cannot be borrowed, delegated, or compensated for by the other person.
| Trait | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Sticking power (Long-Horizon Resilience) | Emotional endurance under years of uncertainty, failure, and rejection — tested vs. theoretical |
| Why you're really doing this (Motivational Fuel Strength) | The durability and authenticity of drive — regardless of whether it's mission-driven or commercially-driven |
| Curiosity & comfort with the unknown (Openness to Experience) | Intellectual curiosity, comfort with ambiguity, willingness to question consensus and try new angles |
| Loving the build itself (Autotelic Orientation) | Loving the act of building and shipping — not just the idea of it or the outcome |
| Knowing when you're wrong (Epistemic Humility) | The capacity to update your beliefs, act on hard feedback, and not defend a bad position |
| Needing to be your own boss (Autonomy Drive) | A genuine need for self-direction; deep discomfort under external control or bureaucracy |
| Refusing to accept the way things are (Disruptive Drive) | Refusal of mediocrity and the status quo; a sense of urgency that keeps moving |
These aren't skills or traits — they're background factors that can dramatically amplify everything above. They show up disproportionately in the founder population. Neither is required, but when present and channelled well, both are rocket fuel.
A poor background. A family that didn't believe in you. Being told no, repeatedly, early. That kind of exposure to manageable adversity — not the kind that breaks you, the kind you survived and converted — tends to produce a drive that is almost impossible to extinguish. It's not resentment. It's not a grievance. It's fuel: a deep, personal, bottomless need to prove something. When it combines with high resilience scores, we treat it as a multiplicative signal. Tested toughness is categorically different from untested toughness.
ADHD and Asperger's both come with the capacity for extreme focus on the thing you care about — ADHD has its hyperfocus state where distractions simply disappear; Asperger's brings the ability to go incredibly deep on a single domain for years. Both also share something else: the near-impossibility of tolerating a conventional job. The bureaucracy, the politics, the slow pace, the lack of control — it's not just unpleasant, it's genuinely painful. For many founders on the spectrum, starting a company isn't the bold choice. It's the only tolerable one. That's a powerful motivational structure. The assessment doesn't ask you to self-identify — we look for the behavioral signatures throughout.
A critical design decision in this model is distinguishing between traits that are non-negotiable for every co-founder individually, and traits that a founding team can distribute across its members.
A great co-founder profile is worthless if the founder can't function in a partnership. One question in the assessment asks directly about the person's experience sharing control — and how they handled the hardest moment in it. Someone who has navigated a real shared project through a genuine crisis, and come out stronger, is demonstrating co-founder readiness. Someone who has never shared control, or who describes taking over, avoiding conflict, or going it alone when things got hard, is flagging a risk that the report will name directly.
The assessment is structured around a core principle: behavioral and situational questions are harder to answer dishonestly than self-rating scales. Most questions ask "what did you do?" or "what would you do in this specific situation?" rather than "how would you rate yourself?" The result is a picture based on evidence, not self-impression.
The questions with the highest predictive value — commercial hustle, partnership history, the "why are you really doing this" — use open text rather than options. Genuine insight only shows up in specific stories. The length, specificity, and honesty of what someone writes tells the AI something that option selection cannot.
When you submit the assessment, your answers are sent to Claude (Anthropic's AI model) via two sequential API calls. The first generates your founder profile. The second receives both your answers and the first output, and generates your co-founder portrait. Neither call stores your data — everything happens in your browser session.
Below are the exact system prompts — the instructions that tell the AI how to think about your answers. Nothing is hidden.
The seven scored dimensions: Long-Horizon Resilience · Motivational Fuel Strength · Commercial Instinct · Openness & Creativity · Execution Intelligence · Epistemic Humility · Autonomy Drive.
The numeric scores are generated by the AI reasoning carefully from your answers. They are directional signals informed by a well-designed prompt, not psychometrically validated measurements. Treat them as a thoughtful estimate, not a precise grade. We are working toward empirical validation.
Behavioral questions raise the bar, but a motivated person can still construct a flattering story. A 360-degree version — where former colleagues or partners rate the same dimensions — would substantially improve accuracy. That's on the roadmap.
The AI's numeric scores come from a carefully designed prompt, not from empirically derived algorithms trained on outcome data. They reflect informed reasoning, not statistical measurement. We'd welcome collaboration with researchers interested in developing validated scoring from anonymised response data.
The bias correction — treating commercial and mission-driven archetypes equally — is implemented through the prompt. We have not yet systematically tested whether the model actually produces equivalent scores for equivalent-strength answers across both types. This should be tested.
The instrument was designed with a primarily Western, English-language founder population in mind. Some motivational framing, famous founder references, and question wording may not translate equally across cultures. We welcome feedback from non-Western contexts specifically.
Find My Co-Founder is part of Org360 — a set of AI-powered tools for organisational development, leadership assessment, and team diagnostics. Org360 is built for coaches, HR teams, and fast-growing organisations who need real insight, not off-the-shelf frameworks.
Learn more about Org360 →