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.