A note from the founder

Drew D’Agostino

Founder, Crystal · October 5, 2026

Personality tests are useful tools, because they often put words to things that we already know to be true about ourselves and others. But a personality test can only tell you so much: it captures one dimension of your personality, at one specific point in time.

Crystal’s goal is to provide the deepest, most accurate picture of your personality with a combination of traditional assessments, AI-powered analysis, self-reflection, and peer reviews. With that information, we can help you understand others better, create a clear vision of your future, and provide personalized coaching to help you turn it into reality.

How to think about personality tests

Most people hold personality tests at one of two extremes. At one end they ascribe far too much accuracy to them, and it starts to feel like a horoscope: a four-letter label becomes an explanation for everything you do, and quietly removes your agency.

At the other end people dismiss the whole field as useless, usually as a reaction to the first group, and end up with no model at all for why the people around them behave the way they do. Neither position survives much contact with real relationships.

I started my career in the more dismissive camp, seeing personality models as useful tools for starting conversations, but not much more. I had taken a few, found the results moderately interesting, and didn’t give it too much thought.

But that changed when I learned DISC.

Why Crystal exists

In 2014, I was fired along with my cofounder from our first technology company. We had raised a few million dollars, hired a few dozen employees, and were on a modestly successful growth trajectory.

But while we had a decent understanding about building and selling software, we completely misunderstood the interpersonal side of business. That’s a story for another day (you can read about it in our book, Predicting Personality), but before we completed our second year, we were unemployed, humbled, and with egg on our face.

In the aftermath of our first major career failure, we ended up meeting an executive coach named Bob who introduced us to the personality model DISC. Despite my skepticism, he was able to pinpoint the exact conflicts that led to our demise with a few simple questions. He never even met most of the people involved. It was as if he had superpowers.

It was like he had a map of the relationships in our company and our board, and he was showing us exactly where we had made wrong turns. This simple personality model explained a year of grinding, confusion, and stress that we could have easily avoided.

When I learned how to analyze situations through the lens of DISC, I realized that Bob wasn’t a wizard. He was just using a well-designed tool for its intended purpose. Just like math is a language for describing facts, DISC is a language for describing human behavior. It’s a 100-year-old technology which, when applied in the right context, can put words to patterns we observe in each other every day.

At this point in 2014, I thought I was going to use DISC as a tool to help build my next company, but it actually became my next company.

We launched Crystal as a simple Chrome Extension in March of 2015, giving people access to DISC predictions from LinkedIn profiles, resumes, and other public content. It was an early application of AI (which we called machine learning at the time), and it resonated with a wide audience.

As we grew, we expanded into more personality products and expanded our core profile beyond DISC to include other models (Big Five, Enneagram, and others), along with new sources like peer reviews and self-reflections. Our company now offers tools for both individuals and businesses, and we have re-invented our products several times over as AI has reshaped the technology landscape.

Since 2015, we have served more than 2.5 million people with our free personality products, and many thousands of businesses with our premium and enterprise products. We have built an industry-leading platform for personality assessment, with a unique, proprietary dataset that is moving the field of personality psychology into the AI era (you can read our research here).

What Crystal can give you

In a world with unlimited options for your attention, I am grateful for every single user who decides to sign up and use some of their precious time to try our products.

To get the most out of Crystal, I would focus on three areas: Personality, Relationships, and Routine.

Personality

Even if you have taken lots of personality tests in the past, I’d recommend that you create a free Crystal profile and fill in your 6 core assessments:

• DISC
• Enneagram
• Big 5
• MBTI
• Strengths
• Values

With these 6 results, you’ll get an extremely valuable blended personality profile. You can read deep insights about your behavior, communication style, blind spots, stress patterns, and much more.

Once you have your profile, you can keep going deeper into areas like peer reviews, Q&A, and personalized guides for specific situations. People are all unique, complicated, and endlessly fascinating, so we have built many tools to help you understand yourself across many dimensions.

Relationships

Building and reading your own personality profile is a very interesting and fruitful experience, but where it becomes truly impactful is when you start understanding other people’s profiles.

Crystal has always been about communication and relationships. There’s something almost magical about comparing two personalities, putting words to the similarities, differences, and underlying dynamics that were always there, but never acknowledged.

We have built several tools to help you understand others, including:

• Personality comparisons, which allow you to compare your personality with anyone else.
• LinkedIn Personalities, which shows you a personality prediction on the side of anyone’s LinkedIn profile, with the Chrome Extension.
• Team Assessments, which allow businesses to easily run personality assessments for their employees, clients, and candidates.

In addition to these tools, I always recommend using Crystal in a group. You’ll be surprised at how a simple personality profile can unlock deep, meaningful conversations that you’ve needed to have for a long time.

Routine

After a decade of building personality tools, we realized that Crystal was becoming something more of a coach than a personality platform.

Your personality profile is a snapshot of who you are today, how you behave, and how you relate to others. It’s like a dot on the timeline of your life.

The dot is useful for today, but the line is what really matters. A personality test asks, “who are you?” but a coach asks, “who are you becoming?”

People usually arrive at Crystal with a reason: a job change, a conflict, a crisis, a conversation they have been avoiding. These are line questions, not dot questions.

So in 2026, we rebuilt the company around this idea. Rather than a personality profile, Crystal has become a coach that understands who you are, where you’ve come from, where you’re going, and how to get you there.

With your personality as the jumping-off point, Crystal can now build a personalized daily routine based on your most important long-term goals. Over time, Crystal can put success-driving habits on autopilot, like:

• Morning warm-ups and preparation.
• Evening cool-down and reflections.
• Weekly, monthly, and quarterly goal reviews.
• Nudges and reminders when you’re getting off-track.
• Ongoing observations to identify patterns in your behavior.
• Tracking mood, energy, and stress levels over time.

Where we are going

As Crystal’s most active user (I have the data since 2015 to prove it), I can tell you that it has impacted my life in major and unexpected ways over the past decade.

At times, I use Crystal to look inward, when I need to step back and make a major decision or life change, and I really need to understand how my natural wiring may be working against me.

At other times, I use Crystal to look outward, when I meet someone new, or when I’m trying to navigate a tough interpersonal situation at work and want to accurately understand our differences.

More recently, I have been using Crystal to look forward. With Crystal as my personal coach, I’m keeping more focused on my long-term goals and getting gently nudged when I get off track, which happens more often than I care to admit.

AI will never replace the connection that a human coach can give you, but it’s amazing how it can still provide the same level of accountability, reflection, and habit-building, even more so in some ways. Whether you’re a tech CEO, or a writer, or a classical pianist, or a college student, we all could use a coach.

Ultimately, my hope is that Crystal can help millions of ordinary people understand themselves better, improve their relationships, create a clearer vision for the future, and start effective daily routines to turn that vision into reality.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to serve you, and always feel free to reach out with any ideas.

Drew