What kind of CEO are you really?
Ten questions. About three minutes. You'll get your CEO archetype, the culture you're most likely to build, your strengths and structural risks, and the three founders most like you.
Four ways to lead a company to a public offering.
Distilled from 173 tech founders who took their companies public between 2000 and 2026. Each style has its own strengths, its own risks, and its own playbook.
Five kinds of companies these founders build.
Your CEO type is who you are. Your Culture type is what you ship: the internal DNA that hires, retains, and decides at scale. Most of the time they pair in predictable ways — but not always.
173 founders. 26 years of tech IPOs.
Every founder that took a tech company public via IPO, Direct Listing, or SPAC between 2000 and 2026 — classified across six dimensions. Filter, search, and find the founders most like you.
Will you two survive the next six months?
Pick both archetypes. Get the specific fight you'll have in month 6, the deal to make in month 1, and the famous pairs who walked this path before you.
You are a Visionary Product Architect
Structural strengths
Risks to watch
The three founders most like you
Public founders who share your archetype
The founders below share both your CEO Type and your Culture Type. Study them — their playbooks are the closest thing to a map for your profile.
The first 10 hires for your archetype
Five ways founders like you blow up
Specific, named, pulled from the dataset. Read this at 2am when something feels off — one of these is probably starting to bite.
Got a co-founder? Check your chemistry.
See how your archetype pairs with theirs — the specific fight you'll have in month 6 and the deal to make in month 1.
How this is scored
Each of the 10 questions has 5 possible answers. Every answer is tagged with two codes — one CEO type (VPA, AC, RO, or PC) and one Culture type (BH, MZ, GH, CB, or AM) — based on which archetype that answer most clearly signals.
When you select an answer, +1 is added to its tagged CEO code and +1 to its tagged Culture code. After all 10 questions your highest CEO count is your CEO Type and your highest Culture count is your Culture Type. Ties resolve to the first archetype in canonical order.
The archetypes themselves are distilled from a curated dataset of 173 tech founders who took their companies public via IPO, Direct Listing, or SPAC between 2000–2026. The tag-to-answer mappings are editorial judgment calls, calibrated so that the archetypes map cleanly onto how these founders actually built and led.
Nothing is sent to a server. The scoring runs entirely in your browser.
Visionary Product Architect
Structural strengths
Risks to watch
The three founders most representative of this archetype
The cultures this archetype tends to build
The first 10 hires for this archetype
Five ways founders like this blow up
Specific, named, pulled from the 173-founder dataset. If you match this archetype, read this at 2am when something feels off.
Founders in this archetype
Which of the four archetypes are you?
Ten questions. About three minutes. You'll get your CEO archetype, the culture you're most likely to build, your strengths and structural risks, and the three founders most like you.