Inside Cortex’s Culture Engine: How Curiosity Drives Innovation

Company culture isn’t built through motivational posters or annual retreats. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Cortex CEO Zack Rosenberg revealed how making curiosity operational drives sustained innovation.

The key is in the company’s name itself. “Cortex, the name derives from, obviously, the part of the brain that helps make decisions,” Zack explains. “It’s not just about decision making, but it’s about the inputs into those decisions, which comes from curiosity.”

This philosophy translates into concrete practices. “Every Friday, we have an all hands meeting. And each all hands is geared towards some aspect of curiosity,” Zack notes. One key initiative involves monthly guest speakers, chosen based on office conversations about “a company, about a space, somebody in the news. Who can we get where we can in a safe environment ask tons of questions about their job, their life, what got them to where they’re at?”

The company also implements “dream meetings”—structured brainstorming sessions where “people submit a lot of things that are on their mind that they’re either curious about or questions about, or have thoughts on how to solve. And then we pick a couple of those ideas and we address them as an entire company once a month.”

This culture of curiosity extends beyond formal meetings. Zack describes a dedicated Slack channel “based on great books and culture” and a company book club, creating multiple touchpoints for curiosity to flourish.

The impact of this approach extends beyond internal innovation—it shapes customer relationships. “If you are curious about them and their lives, they will invite you to their weddings, and the relationships will last longer than the jobs,” Zack observes.

For B2B founders, Cortex’s approach offers a template for operationalizing culture. Instead of treating curiosity as an abstract value, they’ve created specific structures and routines that encourage questioning, learning, and innovation.

This systematic approach to curiosity has proven especially valuable in their work with enterprise clients. By fostering genuine interest in customer challenges, they’ve built deeper, more enduring relationships that transcend typical vendor-client dynamics.

The lesson? Culture isn’t what you say—it’s what you systematize. By creating concrete mechanisms for curiosity to flourish, Cortex has built an innovation engine that powers both product development and customer relationships.