CEOs and Intellectual Curiosity
Intellectual curiosity is a “must have” attribute for Technology CEOs. In fact, “intellectual curiosity” is the attribute for which we assign the greatest weighting in our CEORater database.
My experience is that Technology founders are typically more intellectually curious than hired manager CEOs. Founders are curious by nature. They typically started their company to solve a problem and/or meet a market need. Founders can be uncompromising and will often deliver an A+ product or service versus a product offering that is “good enough”.
I believe that NVIDIA (NVDA) has best-in-class chips because its founder & CEO Jensen Huang willed it. Startups that have crossed the chasm to become market leaders carry themselves with a certain well-earned swagger. NVIDIA is hardly a startup, but has pursued a single mission (produce the best chips in the world) since its founding in 1993 as mandated by Jensen.
OpenAI (private) has uncompromisingly pursued its goal of creating AGI since its founding in 2014, leapfrogging Google (GOOGL) – the AI market leader – in the process. I hate to say it because I am not a personal fan, but Sam Altman outworked and outthought Google CEO Sundar Pichai (I would kick him to the curb) while Google’s founders were asleep at the switch (Eric Schmidt was right about Google’s soft culture, even if he requested that his recent Stanford Q&A video session where he said as much be pulled from YouTube – you can watch it HERE).
Andy Florance built CoStar (CSGP) into a natural monopoly in a market that Bloomberg (private), Factset (FDS), or S&P (SPGI) ought to have owned with little effort. Instead, Florance focused like a laser on using technology to ingest CRE data across the U.S., building a moat around each MSA and eventually around the entire CRE market - building the world’s leading CRE information service in the process.
These companies did not become market leaders by accident. NVIDIA, OpenAI and CSGP are great at what they do because of the people that lead each firm – each of which happens to be a founder CEO with an abundance of intellectual curiosity.
How does one measure intellectual curiosity? We specialize in measuring CEO attributes. Investors, I-Banks and Executive Recruiters should reach out to jmaietta@tek2day.com to learn more.