Curiosity as Strategy: What Business Leaders Can Learn from Perplexity’s Aravind Srinivas

Hayden Browning
Sep 12
3 min read

At HubSpot’s recent conference, Aravind Srinivas, Co-Founder of Perplexity, delivered a talk that was equal parts provocative and practical. His central message: the leaders who win are not those with the best answers, but those who consistently ask the best questions. For CEOs, business leaders, and executive coaches, his insights cut against the grain of traditional management thinking and offer a blueprint for cultivating curiosity as a competitive advantage.

Here are five key takeaways from Srinivas’s remarks that leaders can put into practice.

1. Curiosity Is the Real Constant

When most executives think about the future, their first instinct is to ask, “What will the world look like five years from now?” Srinivas suggested this is the wrong question—or at least an incomplete one. The better question is: “What will remain the same?”

His answer: curiosity. The defining thread through history is that curious teams ultimately outperform their peers. From the invention of the transistor to the birth of the internet, it has always been a small set of people. And, those who have asked, “What if there were a better way?” always were the ones who created breakthroughs. Losing curiosity, by contrast, is what Srinivas considers the most dangerous thing any leader or organization can do.

2. Meetings Should Begin with Questions

At Perplexity, meetings don’t start with agendas; they start with questions. The most effective conversations are driven not by the length of discussion or the number of slides, but by the clarity of the questions being asked.

Srinivas argued that a good meeting could, in some cases, be replaced entirely with a single well-posed prompt. The most powerful question, in his view, is this: “What do we need to know to solve the problem in front of us?”

For CEOs and executive coaches, this provides a tangible takeaway: shift your organizational culture so that meetings compete on the quality of their questions, not just their action items.

3. Humans Ask, AI Answers

One of Srinivas’s most memorable lines was this: “Humans are good at questions; AI is good at answers.” This framing reverses the common fear that artificial intelligence threatens human uniqueness. Instead, it suggests that AI can liberate leaders from repetitive answer work, allowing them to double down on curiosity and creativity.

Rather than asking how AI will replace jobs, Srinivas urged leaders to ask how AI can help humans become more human—more capable of wonder, questioning, and exploration.

4. The Question Comes After the Answer

Counterintuitively, Srinivas suggested that questions don’t always precede answers. In practice, accurate answers generate the next, better set of questions. At Perplexity, this principle is embedded into their product: answers are not the endpoint but the foundation for curiosity-driven exploration.

The lesson for leaders: accuracy matters. A faulty answer leads to faulty questions, which compounds over time. CEOs should therefore prioritize systems, partners, and tools that maximize accuracy to create fertile ground for the next wave of inquiry.

5. The CEO’s Job Is to Stay Curious at Scale

Srinivas described his own leadership practice: he reads across every Slack channel, supported by an assistant that highlights what deserves his attention. This isn’t micromanagement; it’s curiosity at scale. By staying plugged into the flow of questions and answers circulating across his company, he models a culture where curiosity is systemic rather than episodic.

For executive coaches and CEOs alike, this is a reminder that leadership in the age of AI requires more than vision. It requires cultivating an environment where the best questions are surfaced, shared, and acted upon.

The Main Takeaway

Success is limited by the questions you ask. AI may deliver answers faster than ever, but the leaders who thrive will be those who never stop asking, “What if there were a better way?”

Any errors in interpretation remain with this summary.