Patrick Collison on the importance of beauty and craftsmanship when building products
“If Stripe is a monstrously successful business, but what we make isn’t beautiful, and Stripe doesn’t embody a culture of incredibly exacting craftsmanship, I’ll be much less happy. I think the returns to both of those things in the world are really high. I think even beyond the pecuniary or financial returns, the world’s just uglier than it needs to be… One can do things well or poorly, and beauty is not a rivalrous good.”
Patrick believes a commitment to craftsmanship and beauty played an important role in Stripe’s success:
“My intuition is that more of Stripe’s success than one would think is downstream of the fact that people like beautiful things—and for kind of rational reasons because what does a beautiful thing tell you? Well it tells you the person who made it really cared… And so if you care about the infrastructure being holistically good, indexing on the superficial characteristics that you can actually observe is not an irrational thing to do.”
I love following @debliu_ ’s writings because of her very human and thoughtful voice. This one on the “sandwich generation” particularly resonated today. https://t.co/LjNtvErbLw
Watch the whole video yourself. Mark is the best because his creativity and child-like wonder is pretty infectious. Thanks Mark! (5/5) https://t.co/I9la6jq3QT
@MarkRober dropped some essential advice at @MIT commencement last week that everyone should hear. Known for his epic squirrel maze video, Mark is the best at making science and engineering captivating for kids (and adults!). 🚀 #MarkRober#MIT (1/5)
3. Foster relationships 🧑🤝🧑. As we grow older, life gets busier, and making close friends becomes harder. Especially after our collective pandemic hermit existence, we need to put energy and time into the relationships we care about. (4/5)
@adrivalue@patrick_oshag@Visa@Mastercard 😂. Systems are complex which is why it's often hard to see the path forward. Equally hard: aligning various people who only see one part of the elephant on that path forward.
Canada vs US healthcare...as one data point, one of my prescription medications cost ~$500CAD for a 2 month supply. Same supply in US would cost me about ~$150USD. That assumes I use a prescription discount app like @GoodRx which I don’t think has an equivalent up here yet(?)
This tweet sums up all the opportunities that lie ahead as we evolve how we educate people and align supply and demand for the workforce going forward.
Liberal education is a luxury product that the conventional wisdom mistakenly believes to be more utilitarian than it is as a result of the clumsy hiring practices of big companies.