Last week, I saw a post by The Generalist’s Mario Gabriele on a challenge every new investor faces: to show you have good taste. Having good taste and demonstrating it is something I’ve heard not just in the context of investing, but also related to products, talent, and more. And it seems like I’m not the only one wondering what good taste even means: Brie Wolfson, former Editor at Stripe Press and founder of The Kool-Aid Factory, has written an essay in the form of jottings on the emergence, characteristics and cultivation of taste. The main takeaway, at least for me, is that taste is a mode (something is tasteful), honouring someone’s standards of quality in e.g. coffee, woodworking, or clothes. Taste can be cultivated by learning and exploring what one finds compelling, and why. It is often binary (either you have taste in something or you don’t) and you cannot hack taste.
Personally, I have a page on Notion called Cool Shit which is a collection of ideas, products, and sites that I find tasteful. It’s difficult to explain why these things made it onto the list and resonated more than others - I guess I should start pattern-matching them at some point! To give you an idea of what’s on there, here’s a selection:
All interviews on The Observer Effect, especially the one with Shopify founder Tobi Lütke
Runway’s airplane themed landing page
Patrick Collison on the Knowledge Project, talking about the default outcome of a startup’s relatively, near-term non-existence
Stripe Press both in terms of the authors and the design of the books
Matt Huang’s The Casino on Mars, illustrating how he thinks about crypto
Lowercarbon’s press announcement in 2023 for their newly raised funds
Segment’s APIs are eating the world, explaining how value chains have evolved in a API-first world
Benn Stancil’s Ambition, then and now, discussing ambition in the context of Silicon Valley and Entrepreneurship
Products like Solugen, Attio, Notion, Linear, Cradle, Plain
Alex Danco’s Why the Canadian Tech Scene Doesn’t Work, introducing the notion of the infinite game based on James Carse
Alex Murrell’s The age of average, explaining why everything feels and looks the same
Where do you (think you) have taste?
Other Nuggets of the Week
Molly Graham’s Captains - Molly Graham, founder of the Glue Club, writes about an ownership model pioneered by Lambda School called Captains. It’s a simple yet beautiful way of ensuring each project has a clear owner.
AI vs. Climate Goals - Google’s emissions increased 48% over the past five years mainly due to the surge in demand for data centres and AI use. To get an overview of AI’s impact on global energy production & consumption read this article by Bloomberg and this one by Contrary VC.
Compound.VC - A thesis-driven firm where I want to read their Robotics FOMO and Meta Moats of AI articles.