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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.
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.
The problem you solve for customers is increasingly one they can’t even articulate for themselves . The ones that are easy to understand have already been built and funded over the last 20 years. Building something of true excellence will require a hungrier engagement with the world—and that will have to start with developing superior taste.
Evan Armstrong • Want to Build? Technical Excellence Won’t Be Enough.
4 requirements for building good software
- understanding of user value
- taste
- ability to execute
- willingness to keep grinding until it is valuable and good/tasteful
all of this remains much less a science than an art, and AIs still work more like people than software.
Ethan Mollick • Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
Instead, it’s becoming obvious that the “software” businesses of the future will be more like compound companies that combine software with operational excellence, services, and/or real world physical businesses. And software might be the least interesting part of that to work on!
Software has an extremely rich design space — closer in the breadth of possibilities to creative activities like fiction writing than traditional engineering.
What I try to look for, and I'll tell you how I look for these things, but I try to look for companies that are early and inevitable. This is the combination of words that I think about. Stripe did an amazing job of this.Their mission is to increase the GDP of the Internet. Cool. Most people probably believe it's inevitable, that the GDP of the Int... See more