How to write a LinkedIn About section as a founder

A founder's LinkedIn About section has four readers who want different things: a candidate deciding whether to take your offer, a customer deciding whether to reply, an investor doing quick diligence after a warm introduction, and occasionally a journalist or partner. You cannot serve all four in the two or three lines LinkedIn shows before it cuts to “see more”, and trying produces the vague paragraph most founder profiles already carry. Pick the reader tied to your current bottleneck, write the preview for them, and change it when the bottleneck moves. That is the whole method, and the rest of this page is how to execute it.

Who actually reads a founder's LinkedIn About section?

Four people, arriving through different doors, scanning for different things.

Read that table across and the conflict is obvious. The customer wants their own problem described. The investor wants your insight. The candidate wants to know about you as a manager. The journalist wants a sentence they can paste. Those are four different openings, and you have room for one.

Why can you not serve all four at once?

Because the compromise has a predictable shape and everyone has read it. It goes: “Founder and CEO of a fast-growing company building the future of [category]. Over a decade of experience across product, operations, and go-to-market. Passionate about building teams that do their best work.”

Every audience gets something and none of them gets anything useful. The customer learns no problem. The investor learns no insight. The candidate learns nothing about how you manage. The journalist gets a sentence too generic to quote. It is the profile equivalent of a product that tried to serve four segments.

The structural reason the compromise happens is that founders write the About section once, at the point where they created the profile or announced the company, and then never revisit it. It was written for nobody in particular because at that moment there was nobody in particular.

Which reader should you pick this quarter?

Match the field to your current bottleneck. The rule is crude and it works.

• You are hiring and struggling to fill a role. Write for the candidate. The About section becomes a short, honest account of what the company does, how big the team is, and what working with you is actually like. Founders systematically underestimate how much candidate research runs through their personal profile rather than the careers page.
• You are selling and your outbound is being ignored. Write for the customer. Every person you message will look at your profile before replying, and a profile that names their situation converts that look into a reply.
• You are raising in the next two quarters. Write for the investor. Not by announcing the raise, but by making the insight visible: why this problem, why you, what you learned that is not obvious.
• None of the above. Write for the customer. It is the default that ages best, and it is the audience most likely to arrive without a warm introduction.

Rotate it when the bottleneck changes, which for most early companies is every two or three quarters. This is not a big job: the preview changes and the middle of the section mostly stays.

What goes in the first 250 characters?

LinkedIn does not publish a character limit for the About section. Its help page on editing the About section gives no figure at all. Third-party sources consistently report 2,600 characters, and third-party testing puts the visible preview at roughly 250 to 300 characters on desktop and closer to 200 on mobile. Since most profile views happen on a phone, treat the mobile number as the real constraint. The general mechanics are covered in what to write in your LinkedIn About section.

Four preview openings, one per reader. All invented for this article.

• For a candidate:“We are eleven people building warehouse software. I do product and I still answer support tickets on Fridays. If you want a job where nobody will hand you a spec, this is a good one.”
• For a customer:“Most warehouses I visit are running a twelve-year-old system plus four spreadsheets that only one person understands. That person is usually about to retire. We build the thing that replaces both.”
• For an investor:“I spent six years selling software to warehouses and watched almost every deal die on implementation rather than price. That is the problem we are building around, and it is why we ship differently.”
• For press:“I run Halyard, a warehouse software company working with 90 mid-size distributors across the UK and Netherlands. Before this I ran operations at a third-party logistics firm.”

Notice that none of them starts with the words “founder” or “CEO”. Your title is already on the profile twice, in the introduction and in Experience, and it is the least informative thing you could spend the preview on. The same argument applies to the headline, which we take apart in LinkedIn headline examples for founders.

Should your About section describe you or the company?

You, with the company as evidence. This is the mistake founders make most often and the easiest one to fix: the personal profile carries a paragraph lifted from the company website, sometimes word for word.

The company already has a page with its own About section, its own tagline, and its own description. Duplicating it means one of your two surfaces is doing nothing. Worse, the company voice is written by committee and reads that way, which undoes the main advantage a founder profile has over a company page: a person appears to be talking.

The division that works: the company page explains the product, and your profile explains why you are the person building it. Those are genuinely different documents. Your version can contain the thing you got wrong, the customer conversation that changed your mind, and the constraint you are deliberately operating under. None of that belongs on a company page and all of it is why someone follows a founder.

What structure works for a founder About section?

Block three is the one that distinguishes a founder's About section from anyone else's, and it is the one most often missing. “I spent six years selling into this market and watched deals die for the same reason every time” is worth more than any amount of category description, because it is the only part nobody else could write.

What does a finished founder About section look like?

Three worked examples, invented for this article. Each one is written for a different reader and each is under 200 words, which is roughly where founder About sections should land.

Seed-stage, hiring mode

We are eleven people building warehouse software. I do product and I still answer support tickets on Fridays.

Halyard replaces the twelve-year-old system plus four spreadsheets that most mid-size distributors are running. Our first eleven customers are all industrial distributors between 50 and 400 people, and nobody who has switched has switched back.

Before this I ran operations at a third-party logistics firm for six years, which is where I watched software deals die on implementation rather than price. That is the problem we build around.

I am hiring two backend engineers and a first designer, all in Berlin or remote within CET. If you want a job where nobody hands you a spec, message me and say which one.

Series A, selling mode

Most clinics I meet are waiting 60 days to get paid and have one person who understands why. That person is usually part time.

Cardan is payments infrastructure for clinics. We handle the billing, the coding, and the arguments with insurers. 900 practices use us, and most of them came from another practice telling them to.

I spent four years building payments at a bank and two years watching healthcare providers get the worst version of it. We turned down two large hospital deals last year because they needed a workflow we did not want to maintain.

If your practice is chasing claims manually, message me the word claims and I will send the two-page breakdown of where the time goes.

Bootstrapped, insight mode

I run a one-person software company. Two products, 1,400 customers, no employees and no plans for any.

Both products do something narrow for accountants: one reconciles bank feeds, one chases late invoices. Neither will ever be a platform, which is the point.

I spent nine years in practice before this, so I built the tools I wanted and could not buy. The first one took four months and made money in month five. The second took a year and nearly did not work.

I write about running a software business alone every Tuesday. If that is useful, the archive is in my Featured section.

Three things are true of all three. None opens with a title. Each contains at least one specific that a competitor could not paste into their own profile. And each ends with one instruction rather than three.

How do you write proof when you cannot share your numbers?

Most early founders cannot publish revenue, and the ones who can often should not. There are five kinds of proof that do not require a number you are protecting.

1. Customer shape.“Our first eleven customers are all industrial distributors between 50 and 400 people.” This says more about product-market fit than a revenue figure does, and it costs you nothing.
2. Retention described in words.“Nobody who has switched to us has switched back.” True or not true, and easy to check with a reference call, which is what makes it credible.
3. The thing you refused to build.“We turned down two enterprise deals that would have required a mobile app we did not want to maintain.” A refusal is expensive, so it reads as real.
4. Prior work. The team you built, the product you shipped, the company you sold. One line, with the specifics.
5. Distribution facts.“Most of our customers came from referrals from other customers.” This is a quality signal that no marketing claim can substitute for.

What does not work as proof: your investor list, your press coverage, and the size of your market. The first two are borrowed credibility and the third is a number about somebody else.

What do you do about the company that failed?

Name it, in one sentence, with the specific decision that went wrong. Founders tend to pick one of three bad options instead: leave it off the profile entirely, describe it in language so vague that the reader assumes the worst, or turn it into a lesson so polished it sounds rehearsed.

The version that works reads like an operator explaining a decision. “We built for enterprise buyers with a self-serve price point and ran out of runway before we fixed the mismatch” is a sentence that makes a reader trust the rest of your profile more, not less. It demonstrates that you can diagnose your own mistakes, which is the specific capability investors and senior candidates are checking for.

Two practical notes. Keep it to one or two sentences: a failure that occupies a third of your About section becomes the thing you are known for. And put it in block three, where it functions as part of the “why you” argument, rather than in the preview where it becomes the headline.

What does founder writing that works actually sound like?

Plain, first person, and specific about something that happened. Here is a real post from the founders and CEOs bucket of our dataset, shown as it appeared above the “see more” fold.

That is not a good About section, obviously. It is a demonstration of the register. No category description, no adjectives, a specific number, and a person visibly annoyed about something concrete. A founder profile written in that voice reads as a person. A founder profile written in the announcement voice reads as a press release, and the reader treats it accordingly.

The pattern holds across the segment. Among founder and CEO posts in our cohort, the ones in that group's own top decile (561 posts from 17 authors) opened in first person 19.6% of the time, against 5.2% in the same group's own bottom half (2,810 posts from 12 authors). The weak ones read like company announcements.

The usual caveats: this is correlational, the cohort skews toward established creators with 1,000 or more followers, engagement counts are lifetime totals at scrape time, and the text findings describe only the visible hook rather than the whole post. It is also post data applied to a profile field by analogy. We have no profile measurements, and neither does anyone else, which is why the widely quoted claim that a completed About section produces 3.9x more profile views turns out to have no traceable source. We go through that one in the general About section guide. More segment data is on our founders and CEOs page.

What should a founder cut?

• The investor list. It impresses other founders. Customers do not care and candidates care less than you think.
• The market size paragraph. A number about a market is not a number about you. Save it for the deck.
• “Serial entrepreneur” and “visionary”. Both have been used widely enough that they now read as substitutes for specifics.
• The award logos in text form. Forbes 30 Under 30, TechCrunch Battlefield, and similar belong in Featured or Honours, where they render as objects.
• The full career chronology. Experience already lists it. Your About section is an argument, not a timeline.
• Three calls to action.Pick the one that matches this quarter's reader.

How do you keep it current?

Put a fifteen-minute review in your calendar once a quarter and ask three questions. What is the bottleneck now: hiring, selling, or raising? Does the preview speak to that reader? Is any number or claim in the section out of date?

The third question catches the most common decay. A funding announcement from two years ago, a headcount from before the layoffs, a customer count you passed long ago. Stale specifics do more damage than no specifics, because they suggest nobody has looked at the profile in a while, and a reader reasonably extends that inference to the company.

You can also check whether anyone is reading it. LinkedIn's Search Appearances page reports profile engagement including total impressions, total clicks, average viewing time, and impressions per section, along with the top job titles of the people who found you. If the job titles skew toward recruiters when you are trying to reach buyers, the words are pointed at the wrong reader.

Where does this sit in the rest of the founder profile?

The About section is one of four fields that carry almost all of the weight, alongside the headline, Featured, and your job titles. The full pass is in LinkedIn profile optimization, and the founder-specific version of the headline problem is in headline examples for founders.

Then the harder part. A profile converts the traffic your posts send it, so the ceiling on everything above is how often you publish and how good the first line is. The patterns that separated the top decile from the bottom half across our cohort are in our study of 34,012 LinkedIn posts, and the founder-facing version of building an audience from scratch is in getting your first 1,000 LinkedIn followers.

A founder's LinkedIn About section is not a biography and not a company description. It is 250 visible characters aimed at one person, followed by the argument for why you are building this. Pick the reader, write the preview, put the honest part in the middle, and come back to it when the bottleneck moves.