Entrepreneurial Success in the Internet Era : A quantitative analysis into the personality of internet entrepreneurs

Sammanfattning: The personality approach to entrepreneurship has often been criticized and disproved due to inconsistencies in findings and heterogeneity of concepts used to describe entrepreneurs.With  the vast amount of data created by individuals on social media day by day, along with technology advancements, one can look into personality more objectively. In this paper, the authors propose a quantitative method to analyse the Big 5 personality traits, values and needs by using IBM Watson to examine tweets from twitter accounts of 99 successful techentrepreneurs and 99 non-entrepreneurs. It is further argued that through statistical methods, tech entrepreneurs show a common set of distinctive characteristics when compared to non-entrepreneurs. Among the results, 9 Big 5 personality traits, 2 needs and 7 values are shown to be statistically different between both sample groups and therefore, tech entrepreneurs tend to evince a certain personality.