🕹 Technological Taste ♥️
It is the only thing in the technology industry that cannot be bought. It has to be earned over time. You know when someone does not have it. It is so special when they do. 🥰
After ~15 years of poking around the Internet Industry and ~5 years of exploring protocols, I am starting to develop an internal sense of why I love and hate things. I wanted to share some of this thinking in writing to see if it resonates.
At it’s core, it all boils down to taste.
Steve Jobs had fantastic intuition for hardware design, pretty amazing thoughts on software interfaces, and fairly poor judgment when it came to protocols he should embrace. Bill Gates had excellent opinions on operating system distribution, no care for objects, and absolutely zero humanity when it came to trying to craft humane human interfaces for new technologies.
These two people were the dominant forces in personal computing before pancreatic cancer and Epstein’s private plane removed them from the scene. They had developed their technological taste in many ways: they cared deeply about their teams and the impact their companies’ could have.
💡 Jony & Tim 🔩
Ethereal ideas melding with real world molecules
After consuming dozens of books, hundreds of podcasts, thousands of blog posts, and countless tweets about Apple, I have reached this conclusion about the company. Steve’s primary contribution was getting Jony & Tim in the same room and then telling everyone and everything else in the world to bend the knee to their will.
Jony’s team created the objects. Tim’s team shipped the objects. I strongly recommend reading both of their biographies to learn more about the men that shaped your entire digital world:
I cannot think of two people alive today who have better technological taste when it comes to hardware. Neither of them have a serious software background but they put their faith in fairly fantastic people who care.
The decisions these two have made in the last 20 years have totally turned the technology industry upside down. Jony’s maniacal commitment to tool creation and Tim’s rigorous supply chain management turned dreamy vision into trillions.
The numbers are a reflection of the care. These two just care more.
🤢 Zuck & Tobi 🤓
Zuckerberg feeds your insecurities. Tobi helps people run their business online.
I cannot think of two public founder-CEOs who have more different energies than Zuck and Tobi. Mark didn’t come up with the idea for Facekook and has since had to buy every major innovation that his team could not come up with. Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus are all initiatives that he had to acquire because he has no new ideas. He simply exists to feed you a swill of insecurity-inducing imagery that makes you feel depressed.
Tobi is totally the opposite. This man is arming the rebels. While Jeff Bezos is taking steroids and pumping his over-pumped girlfriend on a yacht, Tobi is working.
The biggest similarity between Zuck and Tobi? They can hack. Both of them can actually make software. That is why they are both so formidable in today’s world.
Tobi spends his evenings hacking on Solidity and learning about the world of Ethereum. This is what gave him the insights to launch NFT infrastructure.
It is this kind of in-the-weeds software expertise that gives a man with technological taste such devastating power. I am very excited to see how Shopify and Web3 combine.
⛓ Protocol Palate 👅
I feel like my taste in decentralised protocol creators is getting more mature
One of the reasons many people started following me on Twitter was because I was right about EOS and told them to their face. In the video above, you can see me and Taylor from MyCrypto absolutely rip a bunch of EOS shills to shreds.
Why do I still hate EOS?
🤑 Greedy founding team who raised way too much money and used it personally.
😧 Brock Pierce is a paedophile who keeps trying to hide from justice.
😵💫 Dan Larimer is a known scammer who always leaves when things get tough.
A blockchain protocol is just a collection of people who gather around a set of standards. The standards those people holds themselves to really matter.
A lot of people look Ethereum vs. Solana and think about the Transactions Per Second. I look at how Raj—one of the founders—treats people I love online. He is the kind of person who issues hollow lawsuit threats and then deletes the tweets.
No one would follow Raj into battle. He is a damp squib of a man.
Who do people follow into battle today? V.
This man has a fine protocol palate. He is a nerd’s nerd who is deep in the bowels of protocol creation. He wants Ethereum to work for people. He seeks dominion over no man. He just wants to empower others. I will not stop following him for the rest of my life. That is true power.
That is taste.
Can you help us improve our taste? ♢
The Safari Wallet Community wants all kinds of help from people with taste. If you have it—or you want to learn from people who do—come join us today:
Very powerful article.