We do this interview at Mux we call “Role and Career.” It’s an unusual interview, apparently, or at least the people we interview tell us it’s unusual. I don’t understand why; it’s effective, and we’ve done it for so long that it feels perfectly normal to me, but I guess other companies don’t do it.

The purpose of this interview is to get to know someone. Not to test their skills or knowledge or intelligence, but to understand their background and interests and career arc. If you’re going to bring someone on a team and work closely with them for years, you should probably care about more than just their skills as an engineer or designer or marketer or whatever. Maybe you should also want to know what they’re like as a human, and what they would be like to work with on a team. We start at the beginning: “Tell me about your childhood.” Maybe that’s why people tell us it’s unusual.

What I look for in hiring is pretty simple. Is someone excellent at whatever they’re being hired to do, relative to their level? Will their behavior fit the way I want my teams to work? In our Role and Career interview, we focus on behavior.

I don’t know what AI is going to do to job markets, and I don’t think anyone else does either. If someone confidently tells you that AI is going to cause mass unemployment, or create a world of superabundance, or kill us all, go ahead and discount their confidence by like 90%. The range of possible outcomes is wide, and a lot of important variables are unknowable at this point. If you want to prepare for the AI future, prepare for that whole range.

So: it might be the case that job markets will be harder in ten years. It might be; I’m not sure.

This feels important to me, because I have two teenagers. I’m not an AI doomer, but I feel uncertain and a little anxious on their behalf, and a lot of people in their teens and twenties are feeling uncertain and anxious right now too, or so I’m told.

I think there are three behaviors that will help you succeed and stand out in your career. If you’re 15 or 25, or older, here is my advice to you.

The first behavior is initiative. There is a constellation of behavior around initiative that is also important—like hard work, hunger, ambition, drive—but initiative is the behavior that really sets someone apart.

I interviewed someone a few years ago whose first job was at a giant health care conglomerate. It’s hard to get more bureaucratic and slow-moving than that. The interview was going well, but about halfway through the interview, she jumped from “possible hire” to “strong hire” in my mind.

She told the story of a project she had worked on at the health care conglomerate. There was some annoying internal process in the bureaucracy that everyone hated, and she had built a new software application to make the process better.

At least four things impressed me about her story. 1: She was a junior employee at a megacorp. 2: She wasn’t even a software engineer; she worked on the business side of the house, but she had some technical chops and desire to learn. 3: The application actually rolled out, despite the organization being bureaucratic and slow-moving, because employees loved it.

But the most important part of this story is number 4: No one told her to build this application. She saw a need, took initiative, and made something happen.

The opposite of initiative is passivity. Passivity means you wait for people to tell you what to do, or you wait for opportunities to fall in your lap. This doesn’t mean you’re lazy; you can be hard-working and still be passive. I get how that could be confusing. “I work hard—why am I getting passed over for promotion? Why can’t I break into a new field?” The answer might be passivity. Passivity is a career killer.

The second behavior is humility. This one might be a little controversial, since egotistical people can be really, really successful (exhibit A: politics), but humility still wins 8 times out of 10.

Humility is easy to misunderstand. It doesn’t mean you lack confidence. It doesn’t mean you’re a pushover. It doesn’t mean you can’t have swagger or ambition. I like C.S. Lewis’s definition: humility is not thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less.1

Why is humility useful?

1: Humble people are in it for the team, not for themselves. Steph Curry is the best point guard in basketball history,2 and he’s shockingly humble. He’s also confident, ambitious, and supremely competitive. Being humble doesn’t mean he doesn’t play to win—it means he plays to win as a team, not as an individual. This behavior works, because basketball is a team sport, not an individual sport.

Companies are the same. It’s literally in the name: company. Companion. Com (with, together) + panis (bread). Companies are people who share bread.3

Maybe this is why politicians can be egotistical and win. Unlike basketball or business, politics is an individual sport.

2: Humble people are willing to learn. If you think you’re right about everything, how will you ever grow? If you think you’re better than everyone else, or if you put on a game face that says you’re the best, you can’t have a growth mindset. I'll be honest: I have a lot to learn, and that mindset keeps me learning. I’m in my 40s and I’m learning so, so much right now, as a founder and as a human. I hope I’m still learning in my 70s.

For both initiative and humility, you don’t just want a little bit; you want to excel. If you’re in the middle of the pack, expect a middle-of-the-pack career. If you get to top 10%, the sky is the limit.

The third behavior is worth splitting into “basic” and “advanced” mode, because you don’t have to get to the top 10% of this one. Just avoid the bottom quartile, really.

The basic version of this behavior: don’t be toxic. Toxic people ruin teams and drag others down. Ever get a text or an email from someone, and as soon as you see their name—before you even read the message—you feel anxious? Or as soon as they enter the room, you feel your heart sink? That’s what toxic people do to the people around them. No one wants to work with someone who is toxic.

I don’t really know how to give advice on how to avoid being toxic. Toxic people are toxic for a range of reasons: fear, anger, self-doubt, lack of awareness, etc. If you worry you might be toxic, or if people tell you you’re difficult to be around, or if you notice people avoiding you, I guess my advice is: be curious about this, and be open to change.4

“Don’t be toxic” is a relatively low bar; most people aren’t toxic. If you’re high initiative and high humility and non-toxic, you’re set up for success, and you should consider applying for a job at Mux.

There is an advanced mode of this behavior, though. It’s a little hard to name, but I’ll try it this way: connect with people well. What’s the common denominator across just about every profession: karate teachers, doctors, landscape architects, choreographers, software engineers, astronauts, politicians, scholars? They all work with people.

Connecting with people is a skill, and it isn’t easy, but it can be learned. It requires vulnerability, self-disclosure, curiosity, care, and annoying things like talking about your feelings. If this sounds touchy-feely to you, it is. There is a famous class in the Stanford MBA program about connecting with people called Interpersonal Dynamics, and its nickname is literally “Touchy-Feely.” If you’re interested in getting good at this, try a t-group or read the Interpersonal Dynamics book.

There is one more piece to “How to get a job in ten years.” I won’t say too much about this, because it’s obvious, and I don’t want to distract from the more interesting points, but it’s still worth saying: you should also be good at whatever you’re doing.

What’s maybe surprising is that the more you grow in your career, the less important this actually is. I have an exec who spent eight years in the military as an intelligence officer. A lesson she learned is that good leaders need to be ready to lead anything. I really think I could drop her into any team, and she would lead it well, no matter the domain. It might not be pretty, and a good leader who is also an expert in their domain would have an edge, but behavioral skills are transferrable.

High initiative, high humility, low toxicity. For bonus points, high connecting. And get good at something or other. That’s how you get a job, or how you still have a job, in ten years, no matter what happens to the world.

I work in tech, as an engineer-turned-startup-founder, but I think this advice applies other places too. If you told me you wanted to become a great writer, or philosopher, or brewer, or musician, or barista, or athlete, I’d offer the same advice. I think it probably worked 200 years ago, and I think it will still work in 200 years.

I don’t know what AI is going to do to job markets, but as long as it doesn’t kill us all, the common denominator behind every single job will be other humans. Get good at making big things happen alongside other humans; get good at winning alongside other humans; and get good at connecting with other humans (or, at minimum, don’t make them hate you).

AI might disrupt technical skills, but behavioral skills are impervious.

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Text version

...I don't know what AI is going to do to the world.

The impact of AI is probably going to be somewhere between the impact of The Internet and the impact of Terminator.

I also don’t know what’s going to happen to job markets, but it could be disruptive. But in an AI world, I can think of at least one job that is going to be really hard for AI to displace: entrepreneurship, because someone needs to mobilize the robots.

Of course, being a founder has always been a risky job. Most startups fail. I want to talk about why most startups fail by sharing 3 things you need to succeed.

My credentials: I've started two companies that have hit some level of scale: Zencoder and Mux. Zencoder and Mux are also responsible in some way for creating VideoJS and Demuxed. Now I’ve personally done very little to make either VideoJS or Demuxed succeed, and so I’m going to give you my bonus 0th tip for starting a startup: choose good co-founders.

1: Start with a big problem (not cool tech). The best startup founders are engineers, but that leads to a trap. I talk to a lot of founders who imagine some cool tech and then want to start a company around it. Cool tech without a big problem never works, and a lot of startups fail for this reason. “A better way to do XYZ with video” is probably a bad startup idea. “A better way for customers to solve XYZ pain” is probably better. Find a big problem in a big market and then solve it.

Once you’ve found a problem, how do you solve it?

2: Have good taste. Taste is what separates the best founders from the pack, and it’s why engineers make good founders when building highly technical companies. Taste is also something AI doesn't have, and it's unclear if or when or how it will.

How do you develop taste? That's a much longer topic, but check out my favorite work of 20th century philosophy for the answer: Truth and Method by Gadamer. (Or ask Claude to summarize it for you.)

3: You need durable strategic power. This is sometimes called a moat. What does this mean? It means you need a structural reason why other companies can’t do what you’re doing. You can get to product/market fit without durable strategic power, but you can’t build a really big company.

Have you noticed how there are hundreds of companies in this industry that all kind of look the same? It’s hard to find a moat. It’s true in AI too, and I think most AI startups are probably going to fail for this same reason. There are only a few types of strategic power, so make sure you have one.

I love this industry. Most days, I love being a startup founder. But every day, it’s hard. If this is something you’re interested in and I can be helpful, reach out.

San Francisco is another beautiful city, with a long history of culture and counterculture. It also has tech, in abundance. Coming from Minneapolis, with its tiny, tight-knit tech scene, I worried about getting lost in SF. What I found was an incredibly open and welcoming community. Founders and CEOs of larger startups would take the time to get coffee or beers with a new founder, new to town, and I learned a lot from them. They did this because when they were just getting started, someone else took the time to help them too. It’s genuinely a part of Silicon Valley tradition, and it’s a beautiful thing.

My company at the time was a cloud video startup called Zencoder. We were fifteen people with a little bit of Angel funding and a passionate customer base. Our users were engineers building things with video, from side projects to hot startups to giants. Anyone remember Posterous, the startup founded by Garry Tan and Sachin Agarwal? Literally our first customer. PBS was a customer. Amazon was a customer.

At Zencoder, we were developers building for developers. I think twelve of the fifteen of us were hands-on engineers in some capacity. There is something special about companies where the customer and the team are the same persona; it gives you deep empathy and good taste.

What pulled us to San Francisco was a program called Y Combinator, where an interesting collection of people give you a small amount of money for a decent chunk of equity, and then offer mentorship for three months.1 Y Combinator was led by Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, and they had impeccable taste.2 This taste meant they knew how to select good founders, and that they knew how to give them good advice. Reddit, Dropbox, and Airbnb were early successes.

Before Y Combinator, the conventional wisdom was that engineers should stay in the basement and build things, while MBAs ran the show. Founders would start a company, raise venture funding, and then get pushed out by VCs to make room for a Professional CEO. Y Combinator changed this. Paul Graham realized the best tech companies were run by developer-founders, even at scale. YC paved the way for a new class of startups: startups run by hackers.

People sometimes ask me how the tech world has changed in the last 15 years. My answer is that founders used to be hackers. They were technical and creative. They loved to build things that were good, or beautiful, or impressive. In the pecking order, it was better to be the founder of an interesting company at N scale than the founder of a boring company at N+1 scale. There was absolutely a “gold rush” spirit to it too—if you built something good, you’d be rewarded—but being obsessed with money wasn’t cool, and went against the ethos.

Paul Graham has an essay called Cities and Ambition where he talks about the “message” sent by different cities. The message of New York: you should make money. The message of Boston: you should be smarter. The message of Silicon Valley: you should be powerful, impactful. Think of the creators of major open source projects: power and impact, usually without massive material success.

When you think about it, the whole phenomenon of “open source” should blow your mind. According to a 2024 study, the global value of open source software is $8.8 trillion, and by some estimations, 77% of software used today is open source. If you aren’t familiar with open source: it’s software that is both free to use and free to modify or copy. Every time you load an app or web page, you’re using open source code in the app, the operating system, and the remote server, all at the same time. From the perspective of capitalism, open source doesn’t make much sense, and yet it’s enormous.

How do you explain the success of open source? The only explanation is that some people aren’t only motivated by money; they also care about building interesting things.

I remember the people I looked up to in 2010. They weren’t the most successful founders or engineers; they were the ones doing the most interesting things. Being a core contributor to the Ruby programming language, in my little world, was way more interesting than being a founder of a boring growth-stage company.

Paul Graham has another great essay called Hackers and Painters. Actually, Paul Graham has dozens of great essays. If you haven’t already, read them online or as a book. There is a lot of wisdom to be picked up from PG; he’s a good writer and an interesting human.

In Hackers and Painters, PG says things like this:

What hackers and painters have in common is that they’re both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things.

…what hackers are actually trying to do: designing beautiful software

The … problem with startups is that there is not much overlap between the kind of software that makes money and the kind that’s interesting to write.3

I love this version of tech. It’s motivating and inspiring and creative.

So when people ask me what has changed in the San Francisco tech scene over the last 15 years, it’s the end of hackers. Founder-hackers were driven out by founder-tycoons. A decade or two ago, if you wanted to get rich, you entered the world of finance. Now you work in tech. There is so much money pouring into tech, and so many millionaires being minted, that it’s the rational thing to do.

Back in my day, it was about the love. Now it’s about the money. I know, I know—what a clichéd thing to say. I have enough introspection to know that I’m currently Old Man inveighing against chthe youth to Get Off My Lawn.

Of course, clichés exist because they capture a kind of wisdom. Practice makes perfect. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Don’t judge a book by its cover. The problem with clichés isn’t that they’re wrong; it’s that they’re true, but lazy.

I’ll try to be less lazy.

What happened to startups is what has happened over and over in human history: money squeezes out other concerns. Something starts with a mix of motives—money and love and virtue and vice, in some combination—and ends up dominated by money alone.

Capitalism is an exceptionally powerful force, like a river cutting through rock. It’s brutally effective. Imagine you and I are both starting a tech company, and we’re competing with each other. If I care about two things—financial success, plus building something I think is beautiful—and you’re thinking about only one thing—financial success—you have the advantage over me. I’m splitting my focus, and I’ve limited the range of what I’m willing to do. As markets get more and more competitive, every competitive advantage or disadvantage gets amplified, and as tech has matured, hackers who like to build are getting squeezed out by founders whose only goal is financial return.

I really don’t like this. I like startups. I like tech. Making money is motivating, but it needs to be kept in perspective, because there is so much more to life than money. At best, money is a minor good in the pantheon of good things, squarely behind friendship, love, happiness, virtue, community, character, health, meaning, purpose, truth, art. Put money at the center of your life, or at the center of society, and things go off the rails.

Does tech have to be this way? Is selling your soul the most successful way to play the game?

I don’t know.

Over here, in the Gold corner, representing the hometown, is a fighter telling you that material success is the only thing that matters in life. That your value is what you do. That making the economy spin faster is a good thing in itself, no matter where it goes. That what makes SF good is that there isn’t much to do except code—“more dogs than kids” means more hours working. That your team should work nights and weekends; tell them “pop a Zyn and work at the factory all day.” That you shouldn’t spend time thinking about the past, and you definitely shouldn’t waste time on introspection. Just move forward. Make money first; everything else optional.4

The Gold corner gives you enough credit that they know they can’t give you orders; they have to capture your imagination. So they’re crafting a philosophy of life.5 Their literal marketing teams are literally working to sell you a worldview, an ethic, a religion. They’ve realized, quite rightly, that this is a path to maximizing returns, at least for a while.

And over there, in the Blue corner, is an aging fighter, old fashioned at this point, telling you that there is more to life than money. That technology can do good things, but what’s good or bad is its impact, not acceleration for the sake of acceleration. That it is better to build something beautiful that fails than something ugly that succeeds. That as you lie on your deathbed, you aren’t going to say “I wish I’d worked more hours.” That you should probably balance your hard work with books and art and friendships and family. That there isn’t even really a conflict here, and a balanced life is more effective than a narrow life, even if you want to be pragmatic about it. That happiness goes deeper than money, and that meaning goes deeper than fleeting feelings of happiness. That what makes humans human is asking big questions.

Who wins? I don’t know the answer for the world, but I know the answer for myself.

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I’m just going to assert that without rigorous defense. You might not agree—“How can you say that Bach is better than Matchbox Twenty? Isn’t that just, like, your opinion, man?”—but you already know that taste exists in practice. Some movies win audiences; some don’t. Some music speaks for centuries, and some is lost. The iPod resonated in a way the Nomad didn’t. Slack succeeded and Hipchat failed, in part because of design.

Beethoven’s late String Quartets will blow your ever-loving mind, if you let them.

If they don’t, I have good news for you: you have the opportunity to discover something incredible. Maybe start with No. 15.

The late quartets actually have an interesting story when it comes to taste. They’re pretty much the last things Beethoven composed, and most people hated them. They’re unusual, sometimes dissonant, exploring musical spaces and modes that had never been explored before. They were called “incomprehensible” and “indecipherable horrors” at the time. Even today, audiences struggle with them.

To others, they are some of the greatest music ever composed. Actually, that’s too small: they are amongst the greatest works of art in human history. Superlatives abound. Schubert: “After this, what is left for us to write.” Schumann: “on the extreme boundary of all that has hitherto been attained by human art and imagination.” Stravinsky: “…will be contemporary forever.”

I had to force myself to listen to the late quartets at first, which is the kind of thing you do when you’re 19 and a philosophy major and you like TS Eliot. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” were supposedly named after, or inspired by, the five late quartets of Beethoven. So I bought a CD and listened. I didn’t really understand them at first, but I listened again, and again.

I started as a dumb kid who thought it would be cool to read Eliot and listen to Difficult Music. A few months later, I was a dumb kid who had somehow been gifted an encounter with the sublime.

I repeat: good taste exists. Something doesn’t have to be objective, or unanimous, to be true.

Good taste wins in a world of AI.

This has become a truism lately. In this case it’s a true truism, because the statement “Good taste wins” has also been true for a long time, regardless of AI. So let’s explore what taste really is and how it’s developed.

The idea here is that AI is going to get really good at writing code, writing prose, designing interfaces, and making movies…but it won’t be good at knowing what to build or write, or what separates a good interface or a good movie from a bad one. We’re all looking for the “safe space” that AI isn’t going to disrupt. "Taste” might be that safe space.

Of course, there’s a pretty important assumption buried in this little truism: that AI will struggle to develop good taste. Let’s Parking Lot that one for the purpose of this post, if you know what I mean. (If you don’t know what I mean, you probably don’t spend hours a day in tech company meetings, and I envy you.)

Anyway.

How do I develop taste?

I’m going to tell you in a few minutes, and there is an answer, and it’s not that hard to understand. But before that, I need to make a short detour to this soapbox over here.

Developing good taste was considered a worthwhile thing to do for a long time. Humans used to think that art had value, and that you build a cathedral at least partly because building a cathedral was a good thing to do, because it was beautiful and impressive.

As recently as the 1960s, classical music was actually quite mainstream and quite popular in the United States, not a niche preference for wealthy octogenarians. Leonard Bernstein was a household name. Aaron Copland wrote movie scores. Families listened to symphonies, live, on the radio.

In the 90s, in a public high school, in North Dakota of all places, I read Milton and Dante and Shakespeare and Aeschylus and Austen and Steinbeck and poetry and history and philosophy and music theory, and it wasn’t just my high school, that’s just what high schools did.

Any guesses where this is going?

It turns out that reading literature isn’t profitable. It won’t teach you a trade, and it certainly won’t make the global financial system spin faster.

Capitalism coexisted with other values systems for quite a while, but it was just too darn successful. Markets have boomed for forty-something years. The average person works longer hours, the average family needs two incomes, and yet financial stability hasn’t increased. Capitalism has been slowly, steadily squeezing out culture. Why waste time reading Shakespeare when what we really care about is the GDP?

Look—I’m a capitalist, in the sense that I would much prefer to live in a capitalist system than a non-capitalist system (and yes, Ocasio-Cortez and Denmark are both capitalist, whatever Fox News might tell you). I think economic development is the most efficient way to combat extreme poverty, and I think innovators should take risks and do interesting things and be financially rewarded for it. But that doesn’t mean one can’t be clear-eyed and honest about its flaws.

The story I’m trying to tell you looks like this.

1. The System turns art into an elective and humanities into a waste of time, and higher education optimizes for alumni income as its success metric.

2. Markets spin faster, technology advances, and no one tells Zuck that he’s making choices that are bad for humanity, because they haven’t read history; or if they tell him, no one cares because it’s profitable to not care.

3. AI portends doom or at least disruption, and human taste is interesting once again.

Well, well, well. Look who’s come crawling back.

I said: how do I develop taste?

OK, this time, for real. Theory first.

Gadamer (20th century German philosopher; awesome) recognized that taste is not just preference. Taste is a way of knowing.

Someone with good taste knows things that others don’t. Think of design; how does a great designer do what they do? It’s not a technique or a method; they aren’t a good designer because they know how to use Figma, or because they have memorized what colors go with what. It’s that they have honed their imagination to see and understand things that the rest of us don’t know.

This is taste, and it turns out taste is actually everywhere, not just in art and design. “Will this essay, or menu, or company, or policy resonate with others?” is a taste question.

Gadamer says that taste is developed through deep engagement with tradition, and in the process, openness to being called into question.

Taste is developed through deep engagement with tradition, history, culture. I like Beethoven at least in part because of tradition. This goes in two different ways. On the one hand, my tradition tells me to like Beethoven, because two centuries of humans have liked his music. So far, so culturally relativist.

But that’s not all. Beethoven is himself responding to a longer tradition and history and culture that you and I also share: the music, art, history, politics, religion, philosophy, habits, practices, and daily life that preceded him. He was formed by the same things that form me, and he turned that formation into something that transformed the centuries after him. I can ignore the subjective preferences of music critics; I can’t ignore the tradition that shapes every thought and value and preference I have, which I share with Beethoven, and which he mastered.

So taste is developed by reading, listening, practicing, and experiencing things, engaging both broadly and deeply.

How do you decide what things to actually read, listen to, taste, practice, and experience? I can’t tell you which way to go, because there isn’t a single answer. Engage with something and your taste-as-a-way-of-knowing will get smarter in that direction. You can improve your taste in comic books or classic literature or Indian cooking or math by engaging deeply with those things, and by engaging in the cultures and traditions behind them. What I can recommend is: find things that are good, and then go deeper.

Developing taste also requires openness to being called into question.

Beethoven called me into question. I thought I knew what good music was, and it was Weezer, Smashing Pumpkins, Ani, Rush (don’t judge me), and some of the more accessible parts of the classical music tradition. String Quartet 15 didn’t fit my categories, and that’s the whole point.

Every time you encounter a new person or a new skill or a new work of art, your horizon has the potential to expand. Your little world gets just a little bigger. Or at least: your horizon expands if you’re open to it.

If you read (say) the book of Genesis through a fixed lens, convinced that you already know what it means, then you aren’t letting the text call you into question and your horizon isn’t going to grow.1

What if I just want to get into Y Combinator and start a cool AI company? I just want to get rich; I don’t care about Steinbeck or Beethoven.

First, you should, because Steinbeck and Beethoven are good.

Second, try not to be so narrowly transactional and utilitarian. If you want to develop taste for the purpose of making money, you’re not actually open to new experiences calling you into question, and you aren’t going to grow.

Third, if you’re annoyed with me for rambling for N thousand words about music and philosophy, this is what you’re waiting for. Develop taste in software, taste in your product domain…and also taste in our shared human tradition.

I’m belaboring the point about “our shared human tradition” because that is, mostly, the point. Who do you think will have better taste: the founder who cares about nothing but software, who works 996 on software, who studied software, who thinks everything that isn’t software is a waste of time? Or the founder who cares deeply about software…but also reads books, has an artistic outlet, studies history, and has friends outside of tech? Taste is developed by going wide, not just by going deep.

If you’re building for users in (say) North America or Europe, then every thought and belief and value and mental model of your users has been deeply conditioned by the same tradition of which Steinbeck and Beethoven are master practitioners, and which they in turn influenced.2 There isn’t a simple, direct link between art and literature and your YC startup, but going deep in the culture and history and art and traditions of your users will give you better taste, and maybe that can help your YC startup.

How do I develop taste in a domain like software?

The answer is the same as in other domains. Dwell deeply in the world of software and in the world of your users. Approach these worlds with openness and a desire to learn. Don’t be a narrow specialist. Find the things that challenge you and engage with them. Let them call you into question.

This is why developers make good startup founders. It’s not because you want your CEO writing code—it’s that you want your CEO to have good taste about software. Product people make good founders for a similar reason.

I taught myself programming in my early 20s. It turns out The System was right, and being a philosophy major doesn’t maximize your income or job opportunities right out of school.3 I cut my teeth on Perl, Ruby, and Lisp. Then I built a bunch of bad apps. Then I built a few ok apps. Then I built something good.

The first thing that I built that was good was a cloud video API called Zencoder. I knew this was a good idea, and it worked. How did I know? Taste. (What you might not know from my LinkedIn profile is I also had a few failed startups before Zencoder. Why did they fail? Deficient taste.)

Part of why I had the right taste at Zencoder was that I’d been in the shoes of our users. I’d been a developer reaching for APIs, video and non-video. I’d used, and built, video systems. And I’d gone wide, studying everything from UX to functional programming to business to humanities.

Let’s be honest: on a scale of L3 to L8, as an engineer I was nothing special. But I’d developed some taste, and it worked.

My taste in software is stale at this point. Software in 2026 has some things in common with software in 2012, but man, a lot has changed. Thank God for co-founders.

So yes: taste can atrophy. Some kinds of taste are relatively timeless, and I think I understand some things better now than I did when I was younger. Other domains change quickly, like software. I mostly stopped shipping software before Kubernetes was a thing. Maybe I’m like the critics who didn’t understand late Beethoven: it was something new, and they didn’t take the time to engage, or they remained closed to it.

I didn’t say it would be easy.

All I think about is AI, all the time. Can you say it in a way I’ll understand?

Understanding grows by assimilating a wider and more diverse range of inputs, especially inputs that challenge prior understanding.4

This is too long; I didn’t read it.

Taste is a form of knowledge.

It is developed by engaging deeply with tradition, while remaining open to being called into question by new experiences.

Tradition is both the narrow thing (say, taste in software or taste in wine) and also the broad thing (the history, culture, philosophy, and art of the humans involved in the software or the wine, including neighboring traditions).

Don’t be transactional about this; if you try to develop taste for the mercenary purpose of building a unicorn, you’re not really going to develop taste.