Is taste a decisive, cultivable capability in building products?

Victor Riparbelli · published Jan 15, 2025

Removing technical barriers does not remove the need for skill — storytelling, taste and knowing what's important will matter more than ever, while distribution connections and deep visual-effects craft will matter less

AI can automate the technical layers but not the judgment about what to say and how to combine familiar and novel elements so content stands out

Scope: concedes Harry's point about skill requirements

40:38 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia

Kieran Flanagan · published Jul 11, 2025

AI is a great assistant for media production — first drafts of video and scripts — but usually cannot produce genuinely tasteful content; a human is still needed to inject taste, personality and point of view

AI handles the draft layer well but taste and point of view still require people

Scope: 'maybe in some respects' AI can be tasteful; most of the time not

49:42 20Growth: The Death of Growth Teams? | How Hubspot Use AI to Triple Email Conversion | The Future of AI SEO | Why Prompt Engineering is the New Coding | What Every CMO Needs to Know About AI in 2025

Anton Osika · published Aug 18, 2025

The current slow, detailed, one-person design process will be replaced by humans specifying design philosophy at a high level while AI does the implementation and humans feed back external context

Humans are too obsessed with small details being perfect, which makes them move much slower; an opinionated AI pipeline can carry a product all the way through marketing, growth, testing and QA

27:40 20VC: Lovable CEO Anton Osika on $120M in ARR in 7 Months | The Honest Truth About Defensibility and Unit Economics for AI Startups | The State of Foundation Models: Long Grok, Short OpenAI, Why | Replit vs Lovable vs Bolt: What Happens

Paul Graham · published Feb 2002

Technical ability alone is insufficient for graduate students in design-adjacent fields; what distinguishes them is taste — the ability to use technical knowledge to design beautiful things.

An MIT professor flooded with applications says he can tell the applicants are smart but can't tell whether they have taste.

Scope: as reported from a conversation with a friend who teaches at MIT

source Taste for Makers

Shiv Rao · published May 16, 2026

Taste is not just judgment — it is seeing patterns and combining things in ways that feel different and authentic, and it is what distinguishes the truly magical companies today.

In the best products you can feel the human behind it, the decisions they made and the things they said no to.

9:35 20VC: Lessons from Jensen Huang on "Founder Mode" | How to Know if OpenAI or Anthropic Will Kill your Company | How USV Liking Music Made Them $1BN on an Investment | The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao @ Abridge

Nabeel Hyatt · published Apr 4, 2025

Execution speed and taste are directly in conflict in founders, and the right point on that spectrum must be cast to match the specific startup opportunity

Pure shoot-first founders aren't introspective and chase shiny pennies, while founders who are all taste never ship; highly competitive markets with a clear roadmap demand top-0.0005% execution, while creating a new market demands incredible taste

26:44 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital

Nabeel Hyatt · published Apr 4, 2025

The best founders can tell at any given moment which muscle — execution or taste — they should be using and how to use it

30:14 20VC: Why To Win in AI, Investors Need to Change Their Approach | Why VC is Run by Principals and Associates and is a Broken System | The Bull Case for Anthropic & Whether Deepseek Changes Their Strategy with Nabeel Hyatt @ Spark Capital

Raman Malik · published Nov 15, 2024

Taste is the ability to recognise what good looks like and reverse-engineer it, and that skill matters more than being excellent at any individual craft

He believes he isn't actually that good at anything himself; his edge is observing what's working in the world and reverse-engineering it

45:58 Taste is recognizing and reverse engineering what good looks like not craft excellence

Raman Malik · published Nov 15, 2024

You detect taste in an interview by the depth of the questions a candidate asks about your actual problems, not by testing them on artifacts

Being an open book about company challenges and jamming on them reveals very quickly how deeply someone is thinking and whether they can reverse-engineer good efficiently

46:21 Depth of questions about real problems reveals taste not artifact testing

Shiv Rao · published May 16, 2026

Cultivating taste requires deliberate exposure — reading the latest ML papers, tracking new UI/UX patterns, living at the edge of culture — while still being discerning rather than tasting everything.

If you don't expose yourself to certain flavors you won't even be aware they exist.

10:26 Taste is cultivated by deliberate discerning exposure

Max Junestrand · published Aug 15, 2025

Easy LLM prototyping will not let companies skip the design stage; end-to-end experience design remains necessary

Without a design eye owning the whole experience you get a Frankenstein product where individual pages look fine but the overall experience is incoherent, and design has to be integrated with brand

73:12 Easy llm prototyping does not eliminate need for end to end design

Paul Erlanger · published Jun 27, 2026 · hedged

Design becomes increasingly important relative to engineering as AI absorbs mid-level engineering tasks

Larger companies have many mid-level engineers doing work AI can take over fairly easily

29:01 Design outweighs engineering as ai absorbs mid level work

Nabeel Hyatt · published Apr 4, 2025

Granola's Chris demonstrated real taste by completely resetting the product between the seed and Series A despite okay internal metrics, where competitors would have built a me-too product and tried to out-execute

He could self-inspect and recognize it wasn't working even though the metrics didn't force it

29:30 Resetting product despite ok metrics demonstrates real taste

Paul Graham · published Apr 2009

What makes Jobs unique is his sense of design rather than cleverness or drive, which are common in the Valley; before him most companies treated design as a frivolous extra, and Apple's competitors now know better.

Many people in the Valley are clever and driven; before Jobs most companies dismissed design, and Apple's competitors now know better.

source Design sense not cleverness or drive is the key differentiator and was once dismissed as frivolous

Paul Graham · published Feb 2002

The recipe for great work is very exacting taste plus the ability to gratify it, and taste requires first becoming expert in the field.

Intolerance for ugliness isn't enough; you have to understand a field well before you develop a good nose for what needs fixing.

source Recipe for great work is exacting taste plus ability to gratify it requiring field expertise first

Paul Graham · published Jul 2004

The design paradox: you cannot manage a process meant to produce beautiful things without knowing what beautiful is, since portfolios, awards and jobs are driven by fashion and schmoozing rather than ability — which is why American cars are ugly.

Without good taste you can't recognize a good designer, and the usual credentials don't track ability.

source You cannot manage a design process without having taste yourself since portfolios and credentials dont track ability

Paul Graham · published Jul 2004

Taste is neither elusive nor frivolous; a manager can only drive design by being the company's most demanding user, and great taste turns satisfying the manager into a problem good people want to solve.

Design quality has to be pulled out by someone who can recognize it, as Steve Jobs does.

source A manager with great taste can drive design by being the most demanding user turning satisfying them into a desirable problem