Akam Hamak names curiosity as one of the engines of his career, and he is unusually specific about how he feeds it. The fuel is other people, specifically people who know more than he does. “Surrounding yourself with people who know more than you can accelerate personal and professional growth,” he says, and he treats the principle as a working strategy rather than a platitude.
It is advice he follows, not merely dispenses. Part of why Hamak moved from Sweden to the United States was to get physically closer to the experienced founders and investors he wanted to learn from. He relocated his entire life partly in pursuit of proximity to knowledge, which is curiosity taken to its most committed extreme. The willingness to reorganize his geography around learning says a great deal about how seriously he takes it.
The posture explains much of his trajectory. Hamak’s path runs through several distinct domains, self-taught coding, security research, cryptocurrency, entrepreneurship, investing, and crossing into each new one required learning from people already inside it. A person who stays curious can keep entering unfamiliar fields and becoming competent in them. Hamak has done this repeatedly, treating adaptability as a deliberate practice rather than a happy accident.
He pairs curiosity with genuine humility about the limits of his own knowledge. “I enjoy learning from experienced founders and investors,” he says, framing learning as ongoing rather than something that ends once you have achieved a measure of success. The willingness to keep positioning himself as the least knowledgeable person in the room, deliberately, is rarer than it sounds, especially among the accomplished.
For Hamak, this is not soft self-improvement language; it is a competitive edge with hard consequences. The faster you learn from people ahead of you, the faster you accumulate the judgment to make good decisions. And good judgment is what turns risk-taking from gambling into calculation. His curiosity feeds directly into his ability to take calculated risks, because learning from others sharpens his read on which risks are worth taking.
The strategy also compounds, like everything else he values. Each person Hamak learns from expands his understanding, which helps him recognize and connect with the next person worth learning from, which expands his understanding further. Knowledge accumulates the way capital does in his portfolio, slowly at first and then with increasing momentum, as long as you keep deliberately seeking it out.
His self-taught background makes the habit especially natural. A person who learned to code by building, breaking, and fixing without formal instruction develops an intrinsic comfort with not knowing, and an intrinsic drive to find out. That same orientation, applied to business and investing, keeps him perpetually in learning mode, treating every gap in his knowledge as a problem to solve rather than a weakness to hide.
There is a discipline embedded in choosing your influences this way. Surrounding yourself with people who know more is harder than it sounds; it requires setting aside ego, tolerating the discomfort of being the least experienced, and actively seeking out those who can challenge you. Hamak treats that discomfort as a feature, a sign that he is in a position to grow rather than to coast.
The principle connects to his broader rejection of performance. People obsessed with appearing successful tend to surround themselves with admirers, not teachers, because admiration feels better than instruction. Hamak’s preference for people who know more than he does is the opposite instinct. He optimizes for learning over flattery, for growth over comfort, which is exactly why he keeps growing.
His curiosity is finally inseparable from his patience. Learning from people ahead of you is a long-term investment, one that pays off over years rather than days. Hamak’s willingness to keep learning, keep asking, keep positioning himself near greater knowledge, is the same multi-year orientation he brings to his businesses and his capital, applied to the development of his own mind.
There is a real cost to choosing your influences this way, and Hamak seems to accept it willingly. Surrounding yourself with people who know more than you requires setting aside ego and tolerating the discomfort of being the least experienced person in the room. Most people, given the choice, optimize for admiration instead, gathering audiences who flatter rather than teachers who challenge. Hamak’s preference for the harder, more useful company is exactly why he keeps growing while others plateau the moment success makes flattery easy to find.
What it produces is a founder who treats his own education as a never-finished project, fueled by curiosity and structured around the people he chooses to be near. For Hamak, staying curious and learning from those ahead of him is not a phase of early career but a permanent strategy, the engine that keeps the rest of the machine improving. More on his approach is available at his official site.
Learn more: akamhamak.com | Connect on X
