I’ve read a lot of founder bios lately, on About pages, LinkedIn profiles and podcast show notes, and a surprising number of them could belong to anyone. “Passionate entrepreneur. Visionary leader. Coffee enthusiast.” Swap the name and the photo, and the bio still works for a different person in a different industry. That’s the problem with it.
A bio matters more than it looks. It’s often the first thing a client reads about you before a call, and Google now uses it too. As I wrote in our take on Google’s new Search profiles, Google says the Knowledge Panel for a profile owner “will also feature an AI-generated summary based on your bio.” For now that applies to creators with at least 10,000 followers in the US, Canada and India. Still, the direction is clear: a few sentences you wrote years ago are starting to introduce you to strangers.
The good news is that the research on what makes people believe a self-description is older and clearer than I expected. Below is what it says, followed by worked examples you can copy the shape of.
What a reader wants from your bio
When the Nielsen Norman Group studied how people use “About Us” information on websites in 2019, across three rounds of research with more than 70 users, the researchers found that “users often wonder who’s behind a business, how it’s funded, and whether it’s credible.” Participants liked seeing photos of real employees, and they were skeptical of “complex corporate speak, jargon, and stock photography.”
That lines up with much older work. The Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility, based on three years of studies involving over 4,500 people and published in 2002, advise sites to “show that there’s a real organization behind your site” and to highlight the expertise of the people in it, adding: “Be sure to give their credentials.”
So a founder bio has a simple job. It tells a stranger that a real person runs this business, what that person is good at, and why they can be trusted with the work. Everything below is about doing that job with fewer, better words.
Say the specific thing
The single biggest upgrade for most bios is swapping general claims for concrete ones. In a set of four experiments, psychologists Jochim Hansen and Michaela Wänke found that “statements of the very same content were judged as more probably true when they were written in concrete language” rather than abstract language. Their 2010 paper links the effect to vividness: concrete words are easier to picture.
Apply that to a bio and the difference is obvious. “Passionate about helping businesses grow” is abstract. “Has set up the books for 45 cafés in Denver since 2019” is concrete, and a reader can picture it. They can also check it, which makes it more believable still.
Plain words help in the same way. Daniel Oppenheimer at Princeton tested what happens when writers use long words where short ones would do, and his 2006 paper found a negative relationship between complexity and judged intelligence. Readers rated the writers of needlessly complex text as less intelligent. The paper is titled “Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity,” so it proves its point twice.
Brag plainly
Many founders hedge their achievements because a straight claim feels like showing off. The research suggests the hedge is the worse choice. A team at Harvard Business School ran nine studies on humblebragging, which means wrapping a brag in a complaint or in false modesty (“So humbled to be named one of the top 40 founders under 40”). Their 2018 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that humblebrags “are less effective than straightforward bragging”. They reduced liking and perceived competence, and the researchers traced the cause to one thing: people saw them as insincere.
For a bio, that means stating the achievement and moving on. “Named to Crain’s 40 Under 40 in 2024” does its work in eight words. The “humbled” version spends the same space telling the reader how to feel about it, and the reader notices.
Let someone else do some of the praising
There is a reason so many professional bios are written in the third person, and it isn’t only tradition. Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford and three colleagues, including the persuasion researcher Robert Cialdini, ran three experiments on what happens when someone else praises you instead of you praising yourself. They found that having an agent “sing one’s praises” led to more favorable perceptions. In one study, students rated a job applicant as more likable and competent when an intermediary described his strengths, and recommended a higher salary. The effect held even when people could see the agent was on the applicant’s side.
I’d take two practical ideas from this. For speaker pages, press kits and your website’s About page, a bio written about you reads like an introduction from someone else, and readers seem to accept that frame even when they know you wrote it. And wherever you write in the first person, as on LinkedIn, one short line from a client can carry the praise for you.
One founder, four bios
To make this concrete, here are four versions of a bio for one founder. She’s made up for this article, but she’s built from the patterns above. Maya runs a bookkeeping studio that works only with restaurants.
The one-liner, for social profiles, a newsletter footer or a Search profile:
Bookkeeper for restaurants. I help owners see their food costs every week, not every tax season.
It names who she serves and the change she makes, in words a restaurant owner would use. There’s nothing in it a competitor could paste their own name into.
The short third-person bio, for podcasts, events and press (about 60 words):
Maya Ortiz is the founder of Ledgerline, a bookkeeping studio for independent restaurants. Since 2017 she has set up weekly cost reports for more than 60 restaurants in Chicago, most with fewer than 30 staff. Before Ledgerline, she spent eight years managing kitchens, which is why her reports fit on one page. She also writes a monthly column on restaurant margins.
Each sentence answers one question a host or editor has: who is she, what has she done, why is she different, and where can I see her work. The kitchen detail is doing quiet work, because it explains her advantage without the word “unique.”
The long About-page bio adds the story behind the business. Either voice works here, as long as each paragraph earns its place. A good shape is a paragraph on her work today, another on how she got there and a third on what working with her looks like, ending with a client’s words:
“Maya’s Monday report is the first thing I read each week. We cut food waste by a third in our first year.” (Owner of a 40-seat bistro)
The first-person LinkedIn About section. LinkedIn’s own help page on creating a good profile suggests that “ideally, you should limit the text to one or two paragraphs,” and LinkedIn’s Talent Blog puts the hard limit at 2,600 characters. Most people don’t need half of that:
I spent eight years running restaurant kitchens and watching good places close because the owners saw their numbers too late. So in 2017 I started Ledgerline. We do the books for independent restaurants and send owners a one-page cost report every Monday. If you run a restaurant and your accountant only calls in April, I’d like to talk.
It opens with a scene instead of a title, gives one clear offer and ends by telling the right reader what to do next.
Three more one-liners, for very different founders
The pattern travels well. Here it is applied to three other kinds of businesses, also made up:
Founder of Fieldnote, the inspection app used by 1,200 roofing crews in Texas.
I make 20-minute YouTube documentaries about forgotten inventions. 180,000 people watch along.
Pediatric dentist in Leeds. Most of my patients are nervous adults who were once nervous kids.
Each one has a role, a specific audience and one detail that sticks. The last one even has a small joke, and it works because it’s true to the job rather than added on top.
The photo next to it
A bio rarely appears alone, and the picture beside it counts. A 2009 study in MIS Quarterly by Dianne Cyr and colleagues, run in Canada, Germany and Japan, found that images of people with visible faces made websites feel warmer and more personal, and that feeling in turn predicted trust. LinkedIn makes a similar point on its help page, noting that members with a profile photo “receive up to 2X more profile views.” A recent, clear photo where people can see your face is the minimum. It doesn’t need a studio.
A test before you publish
Once a draft is done, I check it against six questions:
- Could a competitor put their name on it and have it still be true? If yes, add a detail only you have.
- Is there at least one number, place, client type or named result in it?
- Does it say who you help, in their words rather than yours?
- Is there any word you wouldn’t say out loud to a client? Cut it.
- Does it brag plainly, with no “humbled,” “honored” or “blessed” doing the bragging for you?
- Read it aloud. If you run out of breath, the sentence is too long.
Then put the same core facts everywhere: your website, LinkedIn, speaker pages and, if you qualify, your Google Search profile. When Google’s AI writes a summary of you, it should find the same clear story in every place it looks.
A bio is a small piece of writing, and that’s why it’s easy to put off. If you’d like a second pair of eyes on yours, or a full set of versions written for you, that’s part of our personal branding work.
