Moral clarity creates market opportunities. Notion thrives by enhancing users' ability to organize their thoughts rather than maximizing time-in-app—its block-based architecture prioritizes user control and flexibility. Substack focuses on helping writers build direct relationships with readers instead of ad-driven revenue—writers own their... See more
there’s simply no way around the fact that we’re pretty fed up with a certain philosophical framework in Silicon Valley. It has many names: the growth mindset. OKRs. KPIs. Even Minimalism — the predominant aesthetic of our era. But at its core, it all comes down to one thing: the relentless optimization of everything in our world.
Figma acquisition shows how hard it is to turn money into software. You'd think for $20B you could build something as good as Figma yourself, but you can't. Software is art.
We can build software to eat the world, or software to feed it. And if we are going to feed it, it will require a different approach to design, one which optimizes for a different type of growth, and one that draws upon—and rewards—the humility of the designers who participate within it.