The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the drivers of collective persistence of social ventures. Specifically, we investigate how founders’ individual commitment profiles shape the collective agentic effort to pursue a social business project. Through an eight years qualitative longitudinal study led on two nascent social ventures, we identify different patterns related to the profiles of commitment driving collective persistence, to the collective dynamics affecting individual commitments, and to the conditions of collective persistence. We argue that the individual/project nexus – associating persistence to individual commitment, is insufficient to account for the complexity of social entrepreneurship. Rather, we propose that collective persistence is driven by specific combinations of individual commitments, which evolve through time. We also explain the conditions for persistent commitment in social entrepreneurship.