Want to Build? Technical Excellence Won’t Be Enough.

“Technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”

I’ve been reflecting on this quote from Steve Jobs, which he said during the unveiling of the iPad 2 in 2011, a lot lately. The explosion in AI tools is rapidly decreasing how much it costs to create new technology. Many of the simple market opportunities, the easy and obvious things, are either dominated by pseudo-monopolies, like Google, or are blood baths filled with thousands of minnows (see SaaS). We’ve had a decade of good times and abundant capital, with most founders locked in a cage match over opportunities that have been market-mapped and analyzed to death. Now, the bottom has fallen out. More than 3,200 startups and $27.2 billion in venture capital are gone. All of this put together makes for one of the most confusing times in the history of the technology industry. Sprinkle in a lack of clarity on whether VR, AI, or crypto will be the next big thing, and it’s a mess. Founders don’t know what to build, investors don’t know what to fund, and to some extent, consumers don’t know what they want. 

We are in an age of noise. 

The frameworks that got us here, of jobs-to-be-done or product-market fit, will be insufficient going forward. For founders to have extraordinary outcomes, they will have to find alpha in markets that aren’t easily understood. 

Which is to say, technology alone won’t be enough. The other essential ingredient will be taste. Technology without taste is a melody without a rhythm. To operate well, to build winning companies and enduring careers, you have to clear a bar that is beyond technical excellence. It requires an intuitive grasp of human need. And building products for these needs demands not just technical excellence but superior taste.

This is not a new insight because, like, Jobs himself said it. But I have found that when most technologists apply this idea, they tend to do so in a misguided way. In threads where people list off their favorite books of 2023, people fart out the same nonfiction drivel they think will help them—stuff like Sapiens, How to Win Friends and Influence People, or the new Musk biography.

And even if people read, which is rare enough, it often devolves into an intellectual masturbation habit. For example, the 75 HARD challenge is a diet/exercise regime with over 1 million participants that is supposed to be an “Ironman for your brain.” You do things like work out twice a day and avoid alcohol. One of the most important parts of the challenge is that you can only read nonfiction or self-help books for 10 minutes a day—a dual indignity that reduces consumption to a checklist. 

This is a shallow, performative version of the humanities. What’s missing is the why and the how. Without those two, the default path, the one offered up by airport bookstores and VC content marketing, will slowly take over your mind. 

The problem you solve for customers is increasingly one they can’t even articulate for themselves. The ones that are easy to understand have already been built and funded over the last 20 years. Building something of true excellence will require a hungrier engagement with the world—and that will have to start with developing superior taste.

Why consuming helps building

T.S. Eliot was the rare literary critic who had more talent than the folks he was writing about. His most famous poem, "The Waste Land,” is one of the pinnacles of modernist writing and a wonderful winter read. In between writing ground-breaking poetry, he dabbled in nonfiction. One of his best works was his 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

His relevant argument  is on the role of tradition. I apologize for the big ol’ quote, but the guy wrote in the 1910s, and they weren’t exactly quippy back then. 

“Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.” [Emphasis added]

Eliot is arguing that a creation that is “traditional,” meaning a work so profound that it resonates in the bones, is one that is grounded in an understanding of what came before it. In the technology world, that means not only understanding what products were built, and why they did or did not succeed; it also requires developing a historical sense, an understanding of the many factors that go into a generation’s experience. You have to know the soul of the object and the culture surrounding its use case. 

Look at the best technology products. Their aesthetic and features vary widely, but regardless of what they do, something ignites customers’ souls. Beyond simple utility, the unique mix of look, feel, and benefit is otherworldly. Recently, for me, it was ChatGPT. I also have fond memories of the first time I used an iPod or discovered a community on Reddit. I don’t think you can make something of this resonance with Gantt charts and spreadsheets. It requires, as Eliot would say, the historical sense. It requires “a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal.”