Beauty Is a Free Lunch
Collison: If Stripe is a monstrously successful business but what we make isn't beautiful, and Stripe doesn't embody a culture of incredibly exacting craftsmanship — I'll be much less happy.
I think the returns to both of those things in the world are really high. Even beyond the financial returns — the world is uglier than it needs to be. It's kind of a free lunch. One can just do things well or poorly. And beauty is not a rivalrous good.
The world is uglier than it needs to be. Beauty is a free lunch.
What a Beautiful Thing Tells You
Collison: My intuition is that more of Stripe's success than one would think is downstream of the fact that people like beautiful things. And for rational reasons — what does a beautiful thing tell you? It tells you the person who made it really cared.
You can observe some superficial details. But probably they didn't only care about those and then implement everything else in a slap-dash way. If you care about the infrastructure being holistically good, indexing on the superficial characteristics you can observe is not an irrational thing to do.
A beautiful thing tells you the person who made it really cared. That's not irrational.
Banks Figured This Out 100 Years Ago
Collison: There's a reason there's very intricate filigree on the dollar bill. Banks had it figured out 100 years ago. Bank buildings should be nice. We're just continuing that.
But also — if someone really convinced me that the financial returns to craftsmanship and beauty were not greater, I'd still do it. Life's too short.
Banks figured this out 100 years ago. Even if the returns to beauty weren't greater — life's too short.