mj

Strategy, sales, go to market, customer acquisition and marketing have always mattered but in an era of software companies, the engineers called the shots. We all stood in line waiting for them as the internet blossomed and boomed. This is flipping as we speak.

What matters now is identity, community, belonging, and being out in the world, experiencing life in various ways. This means the intersection of who you work with, why you’re building, and what you’re building really matters and will directly reflect your values and your ability to be in communities. The vibes must be good at your company to have... See more

Second, there are early cohorts of founders who will aim to find vibe-alignment with their capital. This is the bull case for more opinionated or smaller firms at the early-stage. I’m talking my own book here, but as the mission actually starts to matter again (not in the “wink-wink” sense), if a core value-add of VCs has been “brand halos”, then... See more

When institutions start to lose their soul, the people inside them start to care about different things. Aesthetic warmth, values coherence, institutional vibe. These are now functioning as primary signals for where elite talent goes (and more importantly, stays), and by extension, which companies breakaway and which don’t.

The relationship between founders and their investors reflects a status shift too. Venture capitalists have been dehumanized.8 When firms were led by individuals with recognizable taste and conviction, founders treated allocation as something worth thinking about. Now the partners are interchangeable, the institutions behind them are... See more

They never saw the craft part of the industry and thus are not rejecting something they once admired because they never saw the version worth admiring. This manifests itself as a nihilism that perhaps is a sadder form of status erosion than disillusionment.

The venture-backed startup path doesn’t have its 2008, but instead has has something more diffuse and possibly harder to reverse: cultural exhaustion.

The noise outpaces the signal as the system is optimized to produce as many founders as possible, as safely as possible. The legible thing becomes the average thing, and thus the average thing becomes the low-status thing.

Optimize for relationships

I call this the “Jaye Test.” Does your home (and neighborhood) act as a center of gravity for your friends and family or does it isolate you in favor of status and storage?

This difference helps explain why Europeans report higher well-being than their American counterparts, despite having smaller homes and smaller... See more