Beliefs
Beliefs as hypotheses. Each one is a strong claim. Click to open it and see the structured hypothesis and the derivation from first principles. If something here is wrong, the derivation is where it breaks.
ID FORMAT · HP hypothesis · BIO biology · HW hardware · ORG organizations · SPACE space · TASTE design + craft · META how to think
HP-TASTE-001 Taste outperforms scale in early stage anything.
Hypothesis
- Claim
- For new products, companies, and teams under 50 people, the operator's taste (judgment about which details matter) predicts long term outcomes more reliably than initial scale or capital.
- Mechanism
- Early stage decisions compound. A founder with taste makes 100 small choices that each look identical to the version without taste on day one, but diverge enormously by year three. Scale early just amplifies whatever taste exists; without taste, it amplifies mistakes.
- Would refute
- If a tasteless company with massive distribution consistently beats a tasteful undercapitalized one. Distribution wins alone exist (mostly in fast moving consumer goods with low taste sensitivity), but they are minority cases in software, hardware, and high craft industries.
From first principles
- Early decisions compound at higher rates than late decisions.
- A "taste" operator makes systematically better small decisions on details that compound.
- Capital can be raised after demonstrating product market fit. Taste cannot be acquired at the same rate.
- Therefore the binding constraint at the start is taste, not capital.
- Therefore the best hire is someone whose judgment you trust on the details, even if expensive.