Developing taste is an exercise in vulnerability: it requires you to trust your instincts and preferences, even when they don’t align with current trends or the tastes of your peers. Because while having taste is cool, taste itself reflects a certain type of uncool earnestness – a commitment to one’s own obsessions and quirks.
When it comes to the specific question around products built to be engaging, that is what they should do. “Hey, Netflix, can you please make shitty shows? Because I like to watch your shows a lot. Hey, Apple, your devices are really user-friendly. Can you please stop making them so user-friendly?” No. We want these products to be engaging. This... See more
In crypto’s early days, the low-hanging fruits were up for grabs. Ethereum didn’t need to think about every specific use case - it just needed to work.Uniswap and Aave didn’t need to predict the growth of DeFi, stablecoins, interest-bearing tokens etc. to know that trading and borrowing were foundational use cases.Opensea didn’t need to predict P2E... See more
Can a company that wants to make the best-quality outdoor clothing in the world be the size of Nike? Can a ten-table, three-star French restaurant retain its third star when it adds fifty tables? Can you have it all? The question haunted me throughout the 1980s as Patagonia evolved.
A huge part of the problem is that digital spaces generally have no equivalent of a disapproving glare. You're stuck choosing between staying silent and entering the fray, with few options in between. If you have little reason to believe that other reasonable people will back you up, you're going to stick with the default: silence.