The Most Underrated Startup Skill Isn’t Hustle. It’s Curiosity.

If you keep asking “what if?”, you’ll find doors other people never even notice.

When I was in fifth grade, I pulled the school fire alarm.

Not because I wanted to skip a test. Not because I was trying to be a tiny anarchist. I did it for a simpler—and, in hindsight, dumber—reason:

I wanted to know what would happen.

Would the bells be as loud as they seemed in my imagination? Would teachers sprint like Olympic runners? Would the fire department actually show up with sirens and drama?

Spoiler: yes. All of it.

Also yes: principal’s office.

Now, before you start picturing me as some kind of adorable future-entrepreneur-in-training, let’s be clear. This was not a noble act. It was a kid making a questionable choice with a strong commitment to curiosity and a weak grasp of consequences.

But it did teach me something I’ve seen play out again and again—in startups, in leadership, and in life:

The people who get ahead aren’t always the smartest. They’re the ones who keep asking better questions.

Certainty is wildly overrated.

When Reed Hastings and I started Netflix, we weren’t Hollywood insiders. We weren’t “movie people.” We just had a problem that bugged us. Late fees. Due dates. The whole awkward dance of renting a VHS tape, forgetting about it for a week, and then paying more in penalties than the movie was worth.

So we started asking questions that didn’t have answers yet. What if you didn’t have to return a movie on a specific day? What if you could pay one monthly price and just... keep watching? What if choosing what to watch got easier over time instead of harder?

None of those questions came with a guarantee. They couldn’t. Because nobody had done it before.

And that’s what a lot of people miss about innovation: if you’re doing something truly new, there is no roadmap.

Which means your normal tools—expert advice, best practices, industry playbooks—start to fail you right when you need them most.

So what do you use instead?

You use curiosity.

Curiosity is what makes you run the experiment you can’t quite justify. It’s what pushes you to try the “stupid” version of an idea just to see if it has a pulse. It’s what keeps you moving when everyone else is waiting for certainty that will never arrive.

Curiosity creates pattern recognition—and that’s the real superpower

We love to mythologize genius. We tell ourselves the great innovators are special beings who come down from the mountain carrying tablets.

But most of the time, what looks like genius is just pattern recognition—seeing connections other people don’t see yet.

And pattern recognition comes from range. From being interested in more than your narrow job description.

Steve Jobs famously cared about typography and design, not just circuits. Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t “an artist” or “a scientist”—he was a guy who couldn’t stop poking at the world. Ben Franklin bounced from lightning rods to politics to printing.

Was that distraction?

Or was that the point?

Here’s my favorite example: Isaac Newton.

The guy basically invents modern physics, and then—no kidding—spends a huge chunk of time obsessing over alchemy. Potions. Secret formulas. The whole mystical “turn lead into gold” vibe.

It’s tempting to say, “Well, everybody has hobbies.”

But I think there’s something more useful here for founders.

Newton wasn’t brilliant despite the weird curiosity.

He was brilliant because he was willing to chase questions other people dismissed.

That’s a big lesson: don’t be embarrassed by your curiosity.

The questions that make you feel a little ridiculous? The interests that don’t “fit” your role? The ideas your friends politely ignore at dinner?

Those are often the ones with the highest upside.

At Netflix, curiosity wasn’t a slogan. It was a hiring strategy.

People talk about Netflix culture like it sprang fully formed from the forehead of a Greek god.

It didn’t. Because culture is just behavior you reward (and tolerate) long enough that it becomes normal.

And one of the behaviors we kept rewarding—intentionally and accidentally—was curiosity.

We hired people who wanted to test things. Who didn’t need permission slips for every experiment. Who would say, “I don’t know, but I can find out.”

Which matters, because Netflix didn’t “execute a plan.” Netflix evolved. DVD-by-mail wasn’t some sacred destiny. Streaming didn’t arrive as a divine revelation. Original content wasn’t a line item in a twenty-five-year strategy we wrote on day one.

These shifts happened because we kept asking: What’s changing? What’s possible now that wasn’t possible before? What would we do if we were starting over today?

And then we acted on the answers—fast.

I’ve learned it’s impossible to tell if an idea is good in advance, so I no longer waste time “thinking things through.” Instead, my mind immediately switches to searching for some quick, cheap, and easy way to test it. A dozen sloppy tests teach me more than a single perfect one.

That’s curiosity in action. Not as a personality trait — as a discipline.

If you want one practical takeaway, try this

The next time you’re stuck—personally or professionally—stop asking, “What’s the right answer?” and start asking better questions. What assumption am I treating as a fact? What would I try if I wasn’t trying to look smart? What experiment could I run this week that would give me real information?

Notice how none of those require permission from the future. They require action. Because curiosity without movement is just daydreaming. But curiosity with movement? That’s the beginning of something real. Something that often lands you in places other people never even thought to look.

So go ahead. Ask “what if?”

Then pull the lever.