But the thing that we maybe haven’t said or touched on as much that just in your invocation of the rocking chair and sepia tones and so on looking back. Something about beauty and craft. 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, I think the world is uglier than it needs to be.

It’s a free lunch where one can just do things well or poorly and beauty is not a rivalrous-ly good. We can just architecture, but 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 rational reasons. Because what does a beautiful thing tell you?

Well, it tells you the person who made it really cared, and you can observe some superficial details, but probably they didn’t only care about those and then everything else in a very slapdash way. 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.

Patrick Collison

Don’t dismiss the importance of making something beautiful. Even in your monotonous work. Giving attention to the details demonstrates you care.

Collison, John and Patrick Collison. “A Business State of Mind.” Invest Like the Best Patrick O’Shaughnessy, episode 311, 16 October 2023, https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/85748309/collison-a-business-state-of-mind?tab=transcript