Build Something Beautiful
The craft of building great things
Yoshio Goto and
Build Something Beautiful
Most innovation is a new wrapper for an old thing, meaning there's a fanbase already foraging for it. Your marketing job? Make sure the 'new' still 'looks like food' to this crowd. Use the same images, words, and ideas that resonate.
I think we have so many examples of assholes starting businesses, and if they’re the majority of examples, we’re only going to have shitty businesses. I want to see people with very specific perspectives and opinions on how to manifest things into the world. More people should take business personally.
There are essentially two business models right now: boring, useful things that can print money and tastemaker brands that can brute force cultural relevancy. Dumb $ is funding the middle: stuff that is neither useful nor cool enough to make it past current startup headwinds.
Daisy Aliototwitter.comPatrick Collison on Stripe:
“My intuition is that more of Stripe success than one would think is down to the fact that people like beautiful things and for rational reasons.
Because, what does a beautiful thing tell you? It tells you the person who made it really cared, and you can observe... See more
We got these phone booths (a K6 from the 1930s, and a KX100 from the 1990s) for the @stripe lobby, as a reminder that there are always two paths in everything we make: something that elevates and makes you smile, or, well, whatever the thing on the right is. https://t.co/OREBUJElp6
A good reminder to self: stop overthinking and make the call
in order to will any meaningful new project into existence, I actually must be untethered from reality. I need to view the world as bendable and controllable, not as this unchangeable force for me to analyze and carefully dodge around. So for me, “becoming more agentic” has really been a project in carefully maintaining a state of delusion.