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162 6 SECRETS TO STARTUP SUCCESS

ion. The most reliable predictor of your venture’s future climate is
your own outlook and behavior. So, if you aim to set a tone for
healthy communication and minimize the distortion of reality within
your new business, start with yourself. I have found that a core set of
personal attributes, curiosity, humility, candor, and scrutiny, will lay a
foundation for truth-telling and create a ripple effect that drives
healthy relationships with co-founders, team members, investors, and
other business partners.

CURIOSITY

Jim Collins, the bestselling author and renowned student of business
leadership, has observed that all creative and entrepreneurial endeav-
ors require “the precision of a scientist and the wonder of a child.”9
Successful entrepreneurs and investors tend to have ravenous ap-
petites for new knowledge and are persistently curious about what
newly discovered data might mean. They crave objective sources of
information, but are curious, too, about the subjective opinions of
other people—their customers, investors, and team members—es-
pecially when these opinions clash with their own. Instead of shrink-
ing back or tuning out when faced with a differing point of view, the
curious entrepreneur leans forward and invites the speaker to elab-
orate. Their intellectual posture is not one of knowing, but of ques-
tioning: What am I missing? What does this person see or understand that I
don’t? What do these data suggest about the path forward? The insatiable na-
ture of this brand of curiosity means that the entrepreneurial learning
curve never ends. The more one learns, the greater the appetite to
learn more. Malcolm S. Forbes, longtime publisher of Forbes maga-
zine, could have been talking about entrepreneurial curiosity when
he said, “Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an
open one.”10

But founders who have fallen in love with an idea are usually
looking for assurance instead of illumination. In his well-circulated
list, 17 Mistakes Startups Make, John Osher, seasoned entrepreneur and
creator of hundreds of consumer products, highlights a root cause of
startup derailment: Seeking confirmation of your actions rather than seeking

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