Paranoid Curiosity

I’ve talked with many great leaders, and there's something that most of them have in common and that is they all have this amazing insatiable curiosity. Do you agree? How important is curiosity in leadership?

Oh, it's so important. You know, curiosity about everything and a little bit of, I would say, curiosity matched with a little bit of paranoia. Because as you're going through these journeys, and almost everything is a journey, decisions you make about hiring, organizational design, new products you're going to bring to market and how you're going to deliver that product to market, all of these things. And so the curiosity means you're always asking that one more question, to just seal it a little bit more that you are on the right pathway, right, because everything you're doing often in these kinds of businesses is really new.

The paranoia is always having backup plans. We often say we always have a plan and we always have a plan B at Veracyte. It's just part of the cultural norms and the kind of structure that we've put around the things that help people be successful at the company from a cultural standpoint. And that little bit of paranoia will always have you ask, ask, and then go ask again and ask a different way, because you want to be as confident as you can in decisions yet never stop taking those risks and pushing the envelope, otherwise, you'll never achieve the big goals at the end of the tunnel.