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The Art of Scaling Taste
Hype is a flash in the pan. Narrative network effects are durable, long-lasting, and broadly applicable.
Evan Armstrong • The Art of Scaling Taste
How can a startup survive in this environment? The answer is deceptively simple: Have good taste.
Evan Armstrong • The Art of Scaling Taste
Taste is the bone-deep feeling that you’ve made something good. It is a sense, inexplicable and ephemeral.
Evan Armstrong • The Art of Scaling Taste
Consider the difference between Trader Joe’s (a beloved grocery store with a wide variety of goods, all of which you can trust) and whatever new CPG goods are popular on TikTok. Hype is a flash in the pan. Narrative network effects are durable, long-lasting, and broadly applicable.
Evan Armstrong • The Art of Scaling Taste
narrative network effects — how else can that be applied? personal branding?
The more people who buy a product, the further the product’s message spreads, the more money the company makes, the more they can invest in their projects. It's a virtuous cycle of creation and consumption. By making scale—the number of people who use or see the creation—an explicit part of the art’s statement, they naturally marry the business’s g... See more
Evan Armstrong • The Art of Scaling Taste
making scale the process not the work
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
Evan Armstrong • The Art of Scaling Taste
“Our only goal when we started was to make anything we wanted and only what we wanted.”
Evan Armstrong • The Art of Scaling Taste
“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
Evan Armstrong • The Art of Scaling Taste
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