There’s a question I’ve been turning over for years, both as a founder and as an early-stage investor: What separates the people who build something truly extraordinary from those who build something merely good?
I’ve had an unusual amount of pattern recognition to draw on. I’ve backed 18 companies that have crossed $100 million in revenue, watched five go public, and seen 10 get acquired, including my own. I’ve spent 500-plus hours in conversation with the world’s best founders on my podcast, Inspired, studying how they think and what drives them. I’ve also studied behavioral psychology, positive psychology, and growth mindset, including work in Daniel Gilbert’s positive psychology lab.
After all of that, here’s what I know for certain. The best founders don’t lead primarily with confidence or conviction. It isn’t charisma. It isn’t even grit, though those things matter enormously.
It’s curiosity.
The research bears this out. A landmark study reported in Harvard Business Review found that curiosity leads to higher-performing, more adaptable organizations, and yet most leaders actively stifle it, fearing it will increase risk and inefficiency. A global Merck study of more than 3,000 employees found that 85% of workers believe a curious person is more likely to bring an idea to life at work. Only 20% describe themselves as curious on the job. “Curious” ranked 12th among workplace traits, behind organized, collaborative, and detail oriented. That gap is a leadership problem. And I think it starts at the top.
Curiosity as a strategic edge
Consider Ben Lamm. When he cofounded Colossal Biosciences alongside the Harvard geneticist George Church, he had no background in genetics whatsoever. He was walking into one of the most technically demanding scientific endeavors imaginable: de-extincting species that had been extinct for thousands of years. And yet Church later said Ben was the best student he’d ever seen. Not because Ben already knew the answers, but because of how relentlessly and methodically he pursued them.
Ben describes his approach simply: “Before we started Colossal, I didn’t know how we could go about building this business, but I felt like I could ask enough questions, and probably enough of the right questions, that we could figure it out.” He wrote things down. He went back and asked the same question until he genuinely understood it. He never pretended to have expertise he didn’t have.
What I find most striking is the balance he described: being informed enough to ask the right questions, but naive enough to ask the ones everyone else had stopped questioning. That tension, between being informed enough to ask the right question and unburdened enough to ask the obvious one, is incredibly rare. The people who have been deep in an industry for decades often can’t see what someone on the outside can ask in their first week. Founders who stay comfortable not knowing are the ones who find the questions that incumbents stopped asking years ago. In my experience, those are almost always the most important ones.
Lead with curiosity, not judgment
Curiosity isn’t only about how you learn a new field. It shows up just as powerfully in how the best leaders handle the people around them, especially when things go sideways.
Dr. Becky Kennedy, the psychologist and founder of the parenting platform Good Inside, has spent her career studying why smart, well-intentioned people default to judgment when things go wrong, and what it costs them. Think about what that means in practice. You hear that someone on your team made a baffling call, and your brain files it immediately. Leading with curiosity means slowing that reflex and asking what’s actually going on before you decide you already know. Her entire framework is built on a single premise: “You cannot solve a problem you don’t understand.” The founders who build the most loyal, high-performing teams operate exactly that way. They ask before they conclude. They wonder before they judge. And in my experience, the ones who don’t do that tend to create cultures where people stop bringing them the hard things, which is exactly when companies get blindsided.
Humility plus curiosity
What makes curiosity so powerful in practice is that it requires something most leaders find genuinely difficult: admitting, in real time, that you don’t know. Michael Brown, cofounder and CEO of Teamshares, which has acquired more than 90 small businesses from retiring owners across dozens of industries, has built an entire career on doing exactly that. He has spent his career walking into rooms where he knew no one and understood nothing, in new cities and industries he’d never touched, and he kept going anyway. He kept asking.
“If you can balance humility of realizing you don’t know anything and be curious,” he told me, “it can be a powerful combination.” That’s deceptively simple. The humility piece is the hard part. Most leaders, once they’ve achieved a certain level of success, find it difficult to remain the person who doesn’t know. But Michael has made that posture a feature of his leadership. The results speak for themselves: more learning, more collaboration, fewer decision-making errors, and greater adaptability under pressure. At Inspired Capital, I’m fundamentally making bets on which founders will keep learning faster than the world around them changes. Curiosity is the engine of that.
What I look for
When I think about what curiosity looks like fully internalized, I think about Jeff Thompson. A Princeton professor, Jeff describes himself simply as a tinkerer. “Tinkering with stuff, building stuff, understanding how the world works. It’s really just fun for me. I don’t see it as education,” he says. For Jeff, curiosity isn’t a discipline he practices. It’s just how he moves through the world. He doesn’t separate the act of learning from the act of doing. They are the same thing.
When I’m evaluating a founder, that’s the quality I’m watching for. Not whether they have all the answers, but whether they are constitutionally drawn toward the question. Do they light up when they hit something they don’t understand? Do they follow the thread even when it’s inconvenient? Those who never lose that instinct, who treat every gap in their knowledge as an invitation rather than a liability, are the ones I want to back. They’re also, almost without exception, the ones who build the things that last.
The harder truth
The same Merck study found that 73% of respondents don’t feel comfortable asking more questions at work. Think about what that means: how many obvious questions went unasked, how many assumptions calcified into roadmaps, how many problems got solved for the wrong thing.
The best founders don’t just know things. They stay interested enough to keep learning them. In a market moving this fast, that quality. More than any pitch, any deck, any TAM calculation. That’s what I’m actually looking for across the table.
