Andreoli and ten Rouwelaar survey 174 Dutch venture capitalists using the Big Five personality framework to examine which entrepreneur traits VCs prefer when selecting investments, comparing funds pursuing purely financial goals against funds pursuing impact goals alongside financial return, addressing the long-standing jockey versus horse debate about whether investors bet more on the founder or the business itself. The study finds financial VCs and impact VCs both confirm the importance of standard hard traits like education and prior experience, but the two investor types seek distinct personality traits beyond those hard credentials, meaning a fund's underlying purpose, purely financial versus blended financial and social, meaningfully shapes which soft entrepreneur traits it selects for. The authors argue these findings give empirical substance to the gut feeling VCs often cite when explaining investment decisions, since the entrepreneur personality traits identified help explain part of that intuitive judgment in more concrete terms, and the paper grew out of a broader Venture Capital Perception research initiative launched at Nyenrode Business University in 2019.

Founders pitching an impact-oriented fund versus a purely financial VC get a genuinely useful, evidence-based reason to tailor their personal presentation, not just their business case, since the paper shows the two investor types select for meaningfully different personality traits beyond shared baseline expectations around education and experience. The Big Five framing gives founders and researchers a concrete, established psychological vocabulary for discussing entrepreneur traits, connecting this paper directly to the earlier Science of Startups founder personality research already cataloged in this archive, and offering a useful comparison point between how academic personality research frames founders versus how VCs themselves report evaluating them. Emerging fund managers designing their own selection criteria get a concrete reminder that a fund's stated purpose should genuinely shape its founder evaluation process, useful for impact funds specifically trying to formalize what distinct traits they are actually screening for beyond the standard financial VC playbook.