Everything Looks The Same

Within the past few years, tech companies’ digital design all started to look the same: marginally, monotonously quirky; safe. From the sans-serif fonts to the muted pastel color palette, the stark white backgrounds to the curvy shape and hue of the buttons, most modern software blurs together into a familiar, squint-and-you’ll-confuse-it aesthetic... See more

And I hear all sorts of interesting worries and anxieties from people. Lots of people say something like, “Oh, I would like to be more playful and passionate, but that’s not what the world cares about. The world only cares about what is popular, what is controversial, what makes money.” To which I say – so what? You don’t have to care about what “t... See more

Rival products (burgers, pop songs, political parties) tend to grow more alike over time, because creators copy more successful rivals to replicate their success and steal their customers/audiences.

Paradoxically, this increases the value of being different.

Imagine working at Meta and making $1m/year in total comp as a product manager and your entire job is to just copy and paste things from other apps. That’s the dream

Gotta say, it feels like we missed an opportunity to reinvent social. Can you tell them apart?