The lines between technology and culture are blurring. And so, it’s no longer enough to build great tech.

Whether in expressed via product design, brand, or user experience, taste now defines how a product is perceived and felt as well as how it is adopted, i.e. distributed — whether it’s software or hardware or both. Technology has become deeply intertwined with culture.3 People now engage with technology as part of their lives, no matter their location, career, or status.

founders are realizing they have to do more than code, than be technical. Utility is always key, but founders also need to calibrate design, brand, experience, storytelling, community — and cultural relevance. The likes of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are admired not just for their technical innovations but for the way they turned their products, and themselves, into cultural icons.

The elevation of taste invites a melting pot of experiences and perspectives into the arena — challenging “legacy” Silicon Valley from inside and outside.

B2C sectors that once prioritized functionality and even B2B software now feel the pull of user experience, design, aesthetics, and storytelling.

Arc is taking on legacy web browsers with design and brand as core selling points. Tools like Linear, a project management tool for software teams, are just as known for their principled approach to company building and their heavily-copied landing page design as they are known for their product’s functionality.4 Companies like Arc and Linear build an entire aesthetic ecosystem that invites users and advocates to be part of their version of the world, and to generate massive digital and literal word-of-mouth. (Their stories are still unfinished but they stand out among this sector in Silicon Valley.)

Any attempt to give examples of taste will inevitably be controversial, since taste is hard to define and ever elusive. These examples are pointing at narratives around taste within a community.

So how do they compete? On how they look, feel, and how they make users feel.6 The subtleties of interaction (how intuitive, friendly, or seamless the interface feels) and the brand aesthetic (from playful websites to marketing messages) are now differentiators, where users favor tools aligned with their personal values. All of this should be intertwined in a product, yet it’s still a noteworthy distinction.

Investors can no longer just fund the best engineering teams and wait either. They’re looking for teams that can capture cultural relevance and reflect the values, aesthetics, and tastes of their increasingly diverse markets.

How do investors position themselves in this new landscape? They bet on taste-driven founders who can capture the cultural zeitgeist. They build their own personal and firm brands too. They redesign their websites, write manifestos, launch podcasts, and join forces with cultural juggernauts.

Code is cheap. Money now chases utility wrapped in taste, function sculpted with beautiful form, and technology framed in artistry.

The dictionary says it’s the ability to discern what is of good quality or of a high aesthetic standard. Taste bridges personal choice (identity), societal standards (culture), and the pursuit of validation (attention). But who sets that standard? Taste is subjective at an individual level — everyone has their own personal interpretation of taste — but it is calibrated from within a given culture and community.

Taste manifests as a combination of history, design, user experience, and embedded values that creates emotional resonance — that defines how a product connects with people as individuals and aligns with their identity. None of the tactical things alone are taste; they’re mere artifacts or effects of expressing one’s taste. At a minimum, taste isn’t bland — it’s opinionated.

The most compelling startups will be those that marry great tech with great taste. Even the pursuit of unlocking technological breakthroughs must be done with taste and cultural resonance in mind, not just for the sake of the technology itself. Taste alone won’t win, but you won’t win without taste playing a major role.

Founders must now master cultural resonance alongside technical innovation.

In some sectors—like frontier AI, deep tech, cybersecurity, industrial automation—taste is still less relevant, and technical innovation remains the main focus. But the footprint of sectors where taste doesn’t play a big role is shrinking. The most successful companies now blend both. Even companies aiming to be mainstream monopolies need to start with a novel opinionated approach.

I think we should leave it at “taste” which captures the artistic and cultural expressions that traditional business language can’t fully convey, reflecting the deep-rooted and intuitive aspects essential for product dev

With the comprehensive application of Artificial Intelligence into the creation and post production of images, it seems questionable if the resulting visualisations can still be considered ‘photographs’ in a classical sense – drawing with light. Automation has been part of the popular strain of photography since its inception, but even the amateurs with only basic knowledge of the craft could understand themselves as author of their images. We state a legitimation crisis for the current usage of the term. This paper is an invitation to consider Synthography as a term for a new genre for image production based on AI, observing the current occurrence and implementation in consumer cameras and post-production.

software gives you its own set of abstractions and basic vocabulary with which to understand every experience. It sort of smells like mathematics in some ways. But software’s way of looking at the world is more about abstractions modeling underlying complexities in systems; signal vs. noise; scale and orders of magnitude; and information — how much there is, what we can do it with, how we can learn from it and model it. Software’s interpretation of reality is particularly important because software drives the world now, and the people who write the software that runs it see the world through this kind of “software’s worldview” — scaling laws, information theory, abstractions and complexity. I think over time I’ve come to believe that understanding this worldview is more interesting than learning to wield programming tools.

So when ex-Telltale Games designer and writer Sean Vanaman announced last month that the first game from Campo Santo, his new video game development studio, was "being both backed by and made in collaboration with the stupendous, stupidly-successful Mac utility software-cum-design studio slash app/t-shirt/engineering company Panic Inc. from Portland, Oregon," it wasn't expected, but it wasn't exactly surprising, either. It was, instead, the logical conclusion of years-long friendships and suddenly aligning desires.

"There's a weird confluence of things that have crisscrossed," he said. "One is that we're lucky in that Panic is the kind of company that has never been defined by a limited mission statement, or 'We're the network tool guys' or anything like that. I mean, we made a really popular mp3 player. Then we kind of fell into network tools and utilities, but we've always done goofy stuff like our icon changer and these shirts and all that other stuff. "I kind of love that we can build stuff, and the best reaction that we can get when we do a curveball like this is, 'That's totally weird, but also that totally makes sense for Panic.'"

"To me," Sasser said, "when you have actually good people who are more interested in making awesome things than obsessing over the business side of things or trying to squeeze every ounce of everything from everybody, then that stuff just goes easy. It's just fun. The feeling that you're left with is just excitement.