A sincere thanks for sharing your experience and insights. Curiosity and a flexible mindset with a fast learning rate and a willingness to challenge even closely held assumptions can result in innovative knowledge under any context, including a vc investment one.

But curiosity is not limitless. It is a function of time. And it would be disingenuous to completely refute the fact that a vc frame of reference will affect curiosity - perhaps even in an adverse manner that can reduce innovation.

Let's get practical and technical with a Cloudflare example. Arguably, there would be no Cloudflare without the ability to change nameservers from domain registrars. You spotted some network slack with the ability of people to easily move to Cloudflare with a relatively simple nameserver change.

That was innovative and surely a result of your curiosity. That allowed you to then build upon that traction and offer a wider range of cloud services.

However, Cloudflare itself eventually became a domain registrar. In the terms of service, Cloudflare blocks all nameserver changes for domains registered with Cloudflare - the very option that allowed Cloudflare to emerge in the first place.

There is no justifiable technical reason for this. It is essentially a political decision borne out of a vc frame of reference. Perhaps the political justification is : Let's lock in people that registered domains with us on Cloudflare. So, they will will be forced to use Cloudflare services.

Arguably, this is a violation of ICANN guidelines that allowed you to obtain your domain registrar license. The block is essentially pointless. Most people interested in nameserver changes for Cloudflare registered domains just want to coordinate across multiple Cloudflare accounts. Multiple questions have been posted in Cloudflare community forums for years. Yet, nothing gets done about it.[1]

The fundamental point is that curiosity led you to use nameserver changes to get some traction. As the vc frame of reference gained more importance over the years, it blocked your curiosity by nudging you to block nameserver changes.

You are undoubtedly still curious. But that curiosity time is spent on board meeting formats and and how to optimise slide presentations - instead of realizing that some curiosity doors that allowed the existence of Cloudflare in the first place are getting closed. Ramifications of that attitude and mindset going forward are overlooked.

So yes, curiosity is good. But, there is no inherent primacy of curiosity under vc versus outside vc. Highly curious people tend to be self directed in any context. If anything, the direction provided by vc can limit curiosity and be ultimately self defeating.

[1] https://community.cloudflare.com/t/unable-to-change-cloudfla... https://community.cloudflare.com/t/still-no-way-to-transfer-... https://community.cloudflare.com/t/how-can-i-change-nameserv...