Taste is Eating Silicon Valley.
AI summary of the linked articleTaste now matters more than technical skill in Silicon Valley, according to the essay's central argument, because software has become commoditized and AI has accelerated that shift. The essay says the barriers to entry are low and competition is fierce, so products are increasingly differentiated by design, brand, user experience and storytelling. It cites Arc and Linear as examples of companies whose design and brand are core selling points alongside functionality. It also argues that AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are likely to converge on similar functionality, so they will compete on how they look and make users feel. |
2 comments  I disagree! Sure, taste and branding is important, but this article feels very much like the "new paradigm!!" phase in the Gartner hype cycle chart. We were working in the trenches over the summer. There was very little activity and the crypto market was down bad. To a degree it still is. Anyways, I then asked myself what is the fundamental value of some of the things we're doing. And it dawned on me that some value is more permanent and long-term that other. Take for example Gitcoin, a company with great taste in ideas and excellent capacity to curate. In the "Taste is eating SV" model, where are they? The market has now clearly weighted them as a really bad investment. That is because they haven't managed to create fundamental business value. They're not returning the investment. But they are taste makers, that's for sure! On the other hand, there are now crypto projects which make amazing returns but have created very little brand equity. Do you think it matters to investors how the website of Aave looks like? Or is it that they haven't been hacked for so many years? And that their functionality is pretty matching to user stories?  naomiii.ethSubmitter What bothers me more is that taste is also something that very much has been pushed by SV in a certain direction, and that doesn't really find any mention in that post either. I mean sure, having a nice looking brand is cool. But when it comes to building shit to last, I don't think that's all there is to it. It might help to get people interested, but at the end having returning users who come for the actual product and not the virtue-signalling is preferrable. |