Insight from Patrick O'Shaughnessy podcast episode with the Collison brothers: Software is this intersection between creative work and mechanical industrial work, which is why there's a lot of people who have tried to put $1 billion dollars into software but it hasn't resulted in high quality software. It's similar to Hollywood, where you can't just spend $500 million to make a good movie. The whole thing is pointless unless someone has a vision, taste, and judgment. And the hard thing is that it's hard to build robust processes on taste and judgment because there's something unquantifiable about those things.

On the Tim Feriss show, Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison said “Just think of any big, major company … for whatever reason, they can’t turn capital into good software. And it would be immensely valuable for them if they could. But they can’t. Or at least, they don’t. And I don’t think it’s for lack of trying or lack of realizing this. And so I thi

Everyone’s software is good enough. Software used to be the weapon, now it’s just a tool.

In a world of scarcity, we treasure tools. In a world of abundance, we treasure taste. The barriers to entry are low, competition is fierce, and so much of the focus has shifted — from tech to distribution, and now, to something else too: taste. [2]

Taste is

Trae argues that a lot of high-margin software businesses have no impact on society, and sometimes even a negative impact on society 

• There are high-margin software companies that do important things, but many are related to advertising, capturing human attention, or creating obscure developer tools for enterprises


• These software compani