Marc Andreessen calls Elon Musk the ‘paramount example’ of an entrepreneur who ‘can’t turn it off’

Next comes disagreeableness. “You need somebody who’s just, like, basically ornery, right? Because if they’re not ornery, then they’ll be talked out of their ideas by people…because the reaction most people have to new ideas is, ‘Oh, that’s dumb,’” he said. 

He added, “The nature of disagreeableness is they tend to be disagreeable about everything, right? So they tend to be these very sort of iconoclastic, you know, kind of renegade characters.” 

They also “need to be high IQ,” he said, because “it’s hard to innovate in any category if you can’t synthesize large amounts of information quickly,” and they should “be relatively low in neuroticism,” because “if they’re too neurotic, they probably can’t handle the stress.” 

Of course, not all disruptive entrepreneurs have all these traits, or have them to the same degree—and Andreessen’s perspective is shaped by his perch atop an influential VC firm in Silicon Valley. Oprah Winfrey is a serial entrepreneur, but what makes her tick might be different from the traits Andreessen focuses on.

Andreessen noted that some entrepreneurs he interviews only pretend to possess those traits.

“They’ve read all the books, they will have listened to this interview, right? They study everything, and they construct a facade, and they come in and present as something they’re not,” he said.

One way he pokes through the facade, he said, is by asking increasingly detailed questions. Homicide detectives use the same approach. At some point people have trouble making stuff up, “and things just fuzz into just kind of obvious bullshit. And basically, fake founders basically have the same problem.”