Many concepts that sound good on paper are infeasible to implement, or simply don’t produce the expected results. It’s frustrating when that happens, of course, but the pace of experimentation and learning at a startup is unparalleled. I think this is an especially important form of rigor for theorycels like me. Building product forces a different kind of thinking than essay-writing: going from a critical mindset to a solutions-oriented one, from beautiful abstractions to concrete (and falsifiable) reality.3 And when you’re lucky, the ideas work!

Our Head of Design, Mills, Constable of Qualia, wrote a brilliant and funny post called “The Irrepressible Monkey in the Machine.” He argues that for all the talk of social media companies conspiring to “hack dopamine” and “manipulate elections,” platforms like Facebook can’t even manage to persuade its users of more prosaic business goals like “post more often” and “believe Facebook is good.” Or take a Substack example: I sometimes see users hypothesize that Substack is artificially boosting notes and posts about subscriber count to pressure writers to grow. Nothing could be further from the truth. We’ve actually tried to downrank this kind of content, but it performs well because users keep engaging with it. Platform evils are often projections of very human sins.4

I had a conversation with Chris once about why good product thinkers are like good novelists. In both cases, didacticism is the enemy. Designing consumer internet products requires viewing humans as we really are, not how we wish we were.

Jasmine Sun • exit interview