The Art of Scaling Taste

Anyone at MSCHF—from the four-person design team to the chief legal counsel, who practiced law with Obama in Chicago—can suggest what to build next. They’ll enter the idea into a Google document. A central brain trust of five people, consisting of Whaley and the four other founding members who joined in 2019 (including Wiesner), reviews the ideas o... See more

Scale is not the goal. Scale is a tool to make the concepts better and more powerful.”

“Our only goal when we started was to make anything we wanted and only what we wanted.”

Taste is the bone-deep feeling that you’ve made something good. It is a sense, inexplicable and ephemeral. But it’s also a tangible skill that’s increasingly essential. Taste is how a business differentiates itself when attention is scarce and choice is abundant. Knowing what to make is just as important as the ability to make it.

How can a startup survive in this environment? The answer is deceptively simple: Have good taste.

MSCHF didn’t make any money from the ATM. They never displayed it again. It was seen in person by, at most, a few thousand people. So it might appear to be a dud. But the company derived value from the narrative network effects for the brand. Every person who interacted with the ATM encountered an object that expanded MSCHF’s creative universe. It ... See more

“Everyone bifurcates the world into content and distribution,” Whaley told me. He has brown hair, is of average height, and was wearing a nondescript gray t-shirt and jeans when we talked. “From the beginning, we viewed those as the same thing. Each object gets better with more participation, and so does MSCHF. Scale is not the goal. Scale is a too... See more

Taste is a double-edged sword. Because it is ephemeral, you’re untouchable if you have it. Competitors won’t be able to copy it—what is there to copy? You can expand products as rapidly as MSCHF has without any negative consequences. But taste can also disappear quickly. If the artists collective loses touch with what makes them special, their adva... See more

If you’re disappointed by the mundane nature of this process, so was I. When I arrived at the office, I was half-expecting a bunch of artsy weirdos bedazzled with tattoos and attitude. Instead, I met a group of plainly dressed nice folks, mostly in their 20s and 30s, who worked hard at their craft but tried to keep the real world in sight. When I a... See more