Patrick Collison: preference

Transcript context

…Oh, interesting. Is there a type of craft that is just not amenable to speed, growth, scale? If you think of a Japanese chef, he's been learning to cook rice for a decade, and then he can move on to sushi. Is that just not competitive in the modern world? Craft, scale, and speed. I don't know if they are strictly necessarily intentioned in every case, but they're definitely frequently intentioned, so yes is the short answer to that. At the same time, a lot of the most successful companies are those that are distinguished by the extent to which they exhibit appreciation for and skill in realizing craft and beauty. LVMH is one of the largest companies in the world, and that's literally their business. Tesla is pretty good at this. They're good at many things, including this. Obviously, there's Apple. TSMC is not the Japanese sushi chef you mentioned, but it's the TSMC chip sushi chef in Taiwan. They have so much tacit knowledge and difficult to transfer skills. It might be the case that craft and the pursuit of it is as important as it's ever been. Certainly, as Stripe has gotten larger, we have come to greater conviction in this. Part of what's interesting about these aesthetic qualities is they're generally speaking unquantifiable. I don't know if they're intrinsically unquantifiable, maybe you could train a model to do so, but today, they are broadly speaking unquantifiable. And yet they influence people in significant ways. People very demonstrably care about aesthetics. And if they're a company, they care about the aesthetic characteristics of the products that they produce. On an intuitive level, people know that that's true. But it's difficult to manage that at an organizational level, where there isn't a P&L associated with it, and if you're screwing it up, you don't see a neat time series decline. Over the 14 years of Stripe, we have, not exactly through trial and error, but by studying cases where things worked well and less well at Stripe, what customers responded well to, and so on, understood, that even in a domain like ours, where we are selling primarily to businesses, that is something that's truly important. Getting back to what we were discussing previously, in as much as the sociology and "cultural" explanations of defensibility are real, the best people consider themselves crafts people in their domain and they really, above almost all else, want to work with the best other people. It may almost be true, that even if from a customer-facing standpoint, craft was not valued by the market, you might still want to build an organization that indexes very heavily on this, because you just want the best people for other reasons. Now, as it happens, I think customers do, in fact, value it. The evidence is broadly consistent with that. It's very hard to assemble groups of the best people, if you don't take the practice of the work super seriously. What kind of beauty or craft or simplicity is more important— interface or implementation?There's famously that essay that Unix is successful because the implementation is simple and not the interface.…

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