The power of rapid insatiable curiosity

It’s not enough to just be curious about your products, your industry at large, or your competitors.

Today, we’re thinking about curiosity and how it can accelerate learning.

Curiosity should be an essential mindset for every founder. But, as we learned from Jack Conte, the CEO and co-founder of Patreon, it’s not enough to just be curious about your products, your industry at large, or your competitors. You also, and maybe most importantly, need to be curious about the decisions you’ve made in the past — and the learnings that you can extract from them.

That’s exactly what today’s episode of Masters of Scale — Part Two of Jack Conte’s story — is about.

Part Two looks at how Jack and his team grew Patreon into a thriving company worth $4B, hosting hundreds of thousands of creators. Consider this a field study into some of Patreon’s biggest learnings, derived from their biggest mistakes.

And remember, those learnings wouldn’t have been possible if Jack wasn’t open to hearing about how he could’ve been wrong.

As he says in today’s episode: "What I've learned is: rapid insatiable curiosity is one of the most important things. If you don't approach everything with curiosity, then you don't know fast enough when you were wrong and when you were right about things."

This week’s featured episode:

The Wrongness Playbook, part 2, w/Patreon's Jack Conte

When is it time to double down on your instincts, and when is it time to open yourself up to feedback? Sometimes it comes down to a hard call… that you might get totally wrong. In Part Two of our episode with Patreon’s Jack Conte, you’ll hear how he was able to raise capital by telling his authentic story after a series of pitches that went disastrously wrong! And you’ll hear how his worst mistake as a founder helped him reconnect with Patreon’s mission and community, and build Patreon into a $4B company. How can being wrong accelerate your business? It takes running at the solution with insatiable curiosity.

Listen now

Building on this...

Google's Eric Schmidt:

"In aviation, they teach you to make rapid decisions, and they say over and over again: 'Decide, decide, decide.' It's better to make a decision and just accept the consequences. And that discipline helped me in the hard times."

Listen >>

The Lean Start-up's Eric Ries:

"That first product, I remember, we couldn't even pay customers in a usability test to use it. They would give us our money back. It was that bad. But if you don't get that feedback, you can't learn."

Listen >>

Reid Hoffman:

"Almost all entrepreneurial journeys have some fairly serious setbacks. You’re always trying to convert it into an advantage, convert it into a learning moment."

Listen >>

NEW on Rapid Response:

Rapid Response: Holding business accountable from Meta to McDonald’s, w/Color of Change’s Rashad Robinson

When it comes to racial justice, many companies and organizations haven't matched their reality to their words. Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change, the largest online racial justice organization in the U.S., is holding major corporations accountable. Hear Rashad talk through the difficulties of changing systems from Hollywood, Silicon Valley, to Washington DC, getting help from President Barack Obama, and what business leaders can do to actively change racial injustice.

Listen here >>

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