The Founder’s Imprint: Why Leadership Shapes Everything
How your style sets the trajectory of your startup
This article was written in collaboration with David Qu, MBA, a seasoned CEO, investor, and board member, who’s written extensively about startup leadership. What follows is drawn from his experiences and insights.
Every founder leaves fingerprints on their company. The question is whether those prints will guide it forward or hold it back. In our work with early-stage leaders, we’ve seen again and again that your leadership style quickly becomes your company’s culture.
When a company is young, the founder is the culture. People watch how you work, how you react, and how you treat others. Your habits, both good and bad, set the tone. Steve Jobs obsessed over product details at Apple; Glen Tullman made people-first leadership the center of his healthcare companies; Patrick Soon-Shiong stayed close to the science at NantHealth. In every case, the founder’s imprint became the company’s DNA.
The most effective leaders lean toward what’s called transformational leadership. It’s built on four principles that matter enormously in startups:
Role Modeling (Idealized Influence): You show, not just tell, what good looks like.
Vision (Inspirational Motivation): You articulate a future that excites people to go further than they thought possible.
Challenge (Intellectual Stimulation): You encourage innovation, invite new ideas, and push the team to stretch.
Support (Individualized Consideration): You invest in people personally, developing their skills and giving them confidence.
This style works because startups require more than execution. They need belief. They need teams who will sprint through uncertainty, pivot on a dime, and still trust each other at the end of the week.
There are also personal traits that show up again and again in resilient founders:
Conscientiousness: the discipline to stay organized and deliberate.
Resilience: the grit to recover quickly from rejection and setbacks.
Openness: the curiosity to spot new opportunities and embrace pivots.
Self-confidence: not arrogance, but the ability to listen to others and still make sound judgments.
Adaptability: the willingness to adjust strategy when the landscape changes.
If you’re a founder, you don’t need to embody all of these perfectly. But you should reflect on which ones come naturally and which you need to deliberately practice.
Closing Thoughts
The imprint you make as a leader echoes for years. Next week, we’ll look at how to strengthen that imprint with vision and values; the guardrails that give speed and growth direction.
Check out David’s full book, from which this article was drawn: The Long Fight - A Strategic and Practical Guide for Digital Health Entrepreneurs.