Taste is the Bottleneck

And why it goes hand in hand with conviction

A few weeks ago shared a great tweet with our team that highlighted Steve Jobs’ thoughts on the importance of taste in product design, quoted here:

“Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you're doing. I mean Picasso had a saying, he said good artists copy great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

We riffed on this a bit internally, and one of our scouts, Seb Frankel, had an interesting take about how taste alone isn’t enough. Taste has to be paired with conviction to be meaningful. To paraphrase the idea:

“…to have taste, you have to be convinced that you are right and everyone else is wrong— about whether or not something is tasteful (AI at this point can seldom achieve either one, making taste and conviction true bottlenecks)…it’s the conviction that your product has taste that makes it good, not the focus groups.”

I’m always inspired by true conviction. I look for it in founders, co-investors, and investment talent. Conviction and taste are a killer combination, and it’s a combination that has the potential to build generational companies.