Why Great Founders Have Great Taste (Part 1)
Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Entrepreneurship and The Pursuit of Beauty
I was recently reflecting on the beliefs and ideas that most changed since starting my founder journey over 10 years ago. As I wrote in Tao of Founders, keeping your mind fluid and updating faulty beliefs is the logical approach to long term success. Given just how dynamic our world is, holding on to your expired beliefs is very risky.
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. - Mark Twain
I most changed my mind around beauty and taste since embarking on my own founder journey. Before I became a founder, I used to believe that beauty & aesthetics were somewhat accessory, luxury ideals that had no hard economic purpose in business. The pursuit of beauty, I thought, was only a concept relevant to the tortured poets and painters of this world. Maybe having trained as an accountant, an MBA, working at Amazon, etc. had led me to worship the gods of data as a religion founded on the belief that a business is first about numbers, quantifiable progress, cost-benefits, and efficiency above all. Anything important should and could be measured. No room for intangibles. To me, beauty in business was like a nice cherry on top, just to be cute- not an integral ingredient of great, enduring businesses.
Turns out qualitative data is usually the most direct, 3D insights with the customer, the market, the product. Quantifying anything always introduces a compression, a loss of resolution - it moves the reality of a single user to a collective statistic. You go from a 3D representation to a 2D representation. Just using numbers won’t tell you anything about how customers think, how they use your product, etc. Good luck making good product decisions without a detailed mental model of your customers. Most humans are confused, conflicted, living imperfectly, making imperfect and emotional decisions. You can’t find that anywhere in the numbers.
It’s hard to convey just how important beauty is in entrepreneurship.
This is where taste comes in. Having great taste enables you to boil down what truly matters for your customers, your product, what to focus on, how to stand out, how to balance things out, and also how to win, how to become a better person, a better team.
We will take a science-first approach to understand why ultimately developing great taste can be a founder superpower.
I’ll use various research insights from different fields to convince you that developing good taste is:
Valuable for guiding founder personal growth
Extremely valuable for economic and social progress
Extremely under-explored as source of competitive advantage
Beauty is purely subjective, so it’s hard to express just how valuable building good taste can be - it’s one of those things you have to see for yourself to fully understand. Even today when I meet my non tech friends, I struggle to communicate to them just how important good taste is. They probably see me as a design snob. That said, beauty is everywhere, if you know how to look for it.
“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”
― Confucious
Part I: The Science of Beauty
This is a three-part series on the science of beauty, and how it creates real, meaningful economic and social value that founders can harness as a way to become more unique and gain a competitive edge. My goal: at the end of the posts I will have clearly expressed, with science-based evidence, just how valuable good taste is. So valuable that I now believe that the intangible, subjective aspects of a business that relate to good taste and good design are actually what drives most differentiation, most competitive advantages.
Today we will discuss the scientific fundamentals that show the purpose beauty plays and how valuable it can be, looking into modern research from biology, sociology, psychology, and any other fields of science. With that core understanding of the science of beauty, the second part will discuss its role in building businesses and how great founders deliberately hone their sense of taste and design. The last part will bring it all together to provide tools and mental concepts for entrepreneurs who want to harness taste, beauty and design to propel their founder journey.
Your brain on beauty
Your brain can’t tell the difference between beauty and money. When neuroscientists put people in fMRI scanners and show them beautiful faces, paintings, or designs, specific brain regions light up—the orbitofrontal cortex, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the nucleus accumbens. These same regions activate when people evaluate prices, assess investment opportunities, or calculate expected returns. The neural machinery that processes “this is beautiful” is identical to the machinery that processes “this is valuable.”
This isn’t a metaphor. It’s neurological fact.
The luxury industry was built on this insight. In luxury, price is part of the design. It shapes the object’s beauty before the eye even sees it. The more expensive something is, the more people expect it to be extraordinary—and the brain works hard to confirm it. People rate wines, chocolates, and experiences as better tasting when told they are more expensive. It doesn’t matter if they are really more expensive - just being told they are is enough to increase perceived value.
This close pairing of beauty and value in the mind explains why founders with sophisticated aesthetic judgment—Jobs obsessing over corner radii, Chesky treating design as strategy, von Koenigsegg approving carbon fiber weaves—aren’t indulging in superficial perfectionism. They’re optimizing the same neural systems that make products feel valuable to customers.
The question is: why did your brain evolve this way? Why does beauty trigger value assessment circuits at all?
Beauty as Survival Technology
The evolutionary answer is simpler than you’d think: your ancestors who found the right things beautiful survived and reproduced more successfully than those with different aesthetic preferences. Beauty isn’t arbitrary cultural conditioning—it’s ancient pattern-detection technology that evolved because it predicted value.
Consider facial beauty, the most studied domain in evolutionary aesthetics. Why do humans across vastly different cultures respond similarly to facial symmetry? Because symmetry signals developmental stability—the absence of genetic mutations, parasites, or environmental stress during growth.
Cross-cultural studies show remarkable consistency: people from isolated tribal societies who’ve never seen Western media respond to the same facial features as people in New York or Tokyo. They prefer averageness (faces near the population mean), symmetry, and specific proportions—not because culture taught them to, but because these features predicted reproductive value for hundreds of thousands of years.
Your aesthetic preferences didn’t emerge from art history classes or fashion magazines. They emerged because your ancestors who found healthy mates attractive, fertile landscapes beautiful, and nutritious foods appealing left more descendants. Beauty evolved as a proxy for adaptive advantage—a shortcut your brain uses to identify what matters for survival.
This is why babies as young as two months old prefer attractive faces before they’ve had time to learn cultural standards. Your aesthetic sense isn’t taught—it’s inherited.
Your Brain’s Prediction Machine
But evolution explains why beauty matters, not how it works mechanically. What’s actually happening in your brain when you perceive something as beautiful?
The answer comes from predictive processing theory: your brain is constantly generating predictions about sensory input and rewarding itself when predictions prove accurate. Aesthetic pleasure is the subjective experience of successful prediction—your brain giving itself a dopamine hit for pattern recognition efficiency.
This is called “processing fluency.” When visual information resolves into coherent patterns quickly and efficiently, you experience that resolution as beautiful. Research on visual perception demonstrates this through simple experiments: patterns people rate as most attractive are precisely those that compress most efficiently—where complex information can be reduced to simple rules.
Your experience of beauty is your brain celebrating its own computational success. The “aha!” moment of aesthetic appreciation is neurologically similar to solving a puzzle—both are dopaminergic rewards for successful pattern recognition. This is how your brain tags important information for attention and memory.
The Neural Circuitry of Beauty and Value
Here’s where it gets interesting for founders: the neural systems that evolved for aesthetic judgment don’t stay confined to mate selection or landscape evaluation. They get co-opted for other domains where pattern detection and value assessment matter—including economic decision-making.
Brain imaging studies show that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), critical for aesthetic judgment, is also central to economic valuation. The OFC integrates sensory information with reward prediction to compute subjective value—whether you’re evaluating a potential mate, a piece of art, or a business opportunity.
This isn’t convergent evolution where different systems coincidentally use similar architecture. It’s the same system doing the same computation—assessing whether something is worth attention, approach, and investment—across different input domains.
Research on neuroaesthetics documents this explicitly: “The neural systems underlying aesthetic appreciation and those underlying reward-based decision-making are substantially overlapping, suggesting beauty is processed similarly to more utilitarian forms of value.” When Jobs says a design “feels right” or Chesky describes an interface as having the “right energy,” they’re accessing neural value-detection circuitry that evolved to identify mates and resources.
Beauty as Social Cognition Training
There’s another evolutionary function beauty serves that’s less obvious: art and beauty function as training simulations for social cognition.
This is the Tooby and Cosmides argument: fiction, art, and aesthetic experience evolved because they let you simulate social scenarios without real-world consequences. When you watch a tragedy, read a novel, or engage with visual art depicting human relationships, your brain runs simulations of social dynamics—modeling others’ mental states, predicting consequences of actions, understanding coalitional relationships.
These simulations train the neural machinery you need for real-world social navigation. Someone who’s consumed thousands of hours of narrative fiction has run cognitive simulations of vastly more social scenarios than their actual lifespan would permit.
This explains why aesthetic engagement correlates with enhanced empathy, better theory-of-mind capabilities, and superior social cognition. It’s not that empathetic people prefer art—it’s that engaging with art trains empathy through repeated simulation.
For founders, this matters because entrepreneurship is fundamentally a social cognition task. You need to model customer psychology, predict team dynamics, understand partner motivations, navigate investor relationships. The founder who’s trained their social modelling systems through aesthetic engagement has practiced these skills thousands more times than someone who hasn’t.
The Chills Factor
One of the most intriguing findings in aesthetic neuroscience is the phenomenon of “aesthetic chills”—the physical sensation (goosebumps, shivers, hair standing on end) that some people experience during intense aesthetic appreciation.
Research on aesthetic chills shows this correlates with specific neural activity: increased activation in reward circuitry and decreased activity in threat processing. Chills represent a peak aesthetic experience—when your pattern detection systems recognize something significant enough to trigger physiological arousal.
Here’s what’s surprising: the capacity to experience aesthetic chills predicts personality traits that matter for entrepreneurship. The NEO Personality Inventory includes “experiencing chills from beauty” as a marker for Openness to Experience. High Openness predicts both aesthetic sensitivity and entrepreneurial opportunity recognition—not coincidentally, but because they’re manifestations of the same underlying cognitive capability. That openness could partially explain why people tend to be more creative and more open to perceiving beauty when they are younger.
“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
― Franz Kafka
People who experience aesthetic chills have more sensitive reward systems for pattern detection. They notice subtle patterns others miss. This is exactly the cognitive profile that enables opportunity recognition: noticing patterns across domains (technology trends + demographic shifts + regulatory changes) and recognizing when they combine into valuable opportunities.
You can train this. Studies on music education show that musical training increases frequency of aesthetic chills by enhancing predictive processing capabilities. The capacity for peak aesthetic experience isn’t fixed—it develops through deliberate practice with pattern-rich environments. As a musician myself, I can attest how this skill-building transfers directly to any other creative work.
The (excellent) book Range by David Epstein supports the same findings—people pursuing varied interests tend to outperform in their main profession.
Beauty as Social Coordination Technology
The neuroscience of individual aesthetic judgment tells only half the story. When people experience beauty together, their brain’s reward systems show greater activation than when experiencing identical stimuli alone.
This isn’t about social validation or peer pressure. It’s about beauty’s primary evolutionary function—not individual pleasure, but group coordination. When your ancestors gathered for rituals combining song, dance, costume, and visual display, they were using aesthetic experience as social technology for emotional synchronization, cultural transmission, and collective meaning-making.
Recent research reveals the mechanism: synchronized neural activity across participants during collective aesthetic moments. When choral singers engage in group performance versus solo singing, they report significantly higher wellbeing—because shared aesthetic experience activates additional neural circuitry for social bonding.
Your product’s aesthetics don’t just trigger individual reward circuits—they create conditions for social coordination among your users. When people collectively appreciate your product’s design, they’re neurologically bonding as a group around shared aesthetic experience.
Consider why some products become cultural phenomena while functionally equivalent competitors languish. Apple users form communities around shared aesthetic values. The beauty of Apple products serves as coordination mechanism, allowing users to identify fellow tribe members and synchronize around common standards. This isn’t marketing. It’s evolved social technology.
The same pattern appears in ceremonial contexts across cultures. Religious rituals worldwide represent humanity’s first “total works of art”—aesthetic experiences fusing multiple sensory channels to create what Durkheim called “collective effervescence,” the emotional bonding that transforms individuals into communities. Remove the aesthetic components—the music, the costumes, the choreography—and they fail to produce social cohesion. The beauty isn’t decoration on top of function. It is the function.
For founders building products used by teams, this matters enormously. Well-designed collaboration tools create conditions for synchronized experience—the neural equivalent of singing in harmony. Poorly designed tools fracture attention, disrupt flow, and prevent the collective states where teams operate most effectively.
Research on transformative aesthetic experiences shows “unfamiliar and uncomfortable settings” prove particularly effective for growth contexts. This explains why products that push aesthetic boundaries often create stronger bonds than conventionally “pleasant” designs. When Tesla’s minimalist interiors first appeared, they violated automotive design conventions. The aesthetic discomfort was intentional—forcing users to rethink assumptions about what cars should be, creating stronger identity commitment through the resolution of that cognitive dissonance.
Your aesthetic choices set the stage for social coordination, determine what kind of community forms around your product, and influence whether users bond collectively or remain isolated individuals who happen to use the same tool.
When Prediction Fails: Aesthetic Violations
Understanding how aesthetic violations work illuminates the predictive processing model. When something violates your aesthetic expectations—faces with wrong proportions, visual compositions with jarring elements, music with unexpected dissonance—you don’t just feel neutral. You feel negative affect. Sometimes strongly negative.
Research on aesthetic disgust shows it activates the insula, the brain region processing contamination threats and physical disgust. Why should a poorly designed interface trigger disgust circuits evolved for avoiding rotten food?
The answer connects back to prediction. Your brain interprets large prediction errors as potential threats. Something that violates your learned patterns might signal danger, confusion, or unreliability. Aesthetic violations activate threat-processing systems because unpredictable environments were dangerous for your ancestors.
Users don’t just fail to appreciate poorly designed products—they experience active aversion. Studies on user experience show that aesthetic quality failures increase perceived difficulty, decrease trust, and activate stress responses even when functional performance is identical. Bad aesthetics aren’t neutral—they’re neurologically threatening. Bad taste makes bad founders.
This explains why founders with aesthetic judgment build products people trust intuitively. Good design reduces prediction error, activates reward circuitry instead of threat circuitry, and makes users feel safe and competent. You’re not optimizing for decoration. You’re optimizing for neural comfort.
Perceiving Beauty in Nature
One of the strongest pieces of evidence for evolutionary aesthetics is cross-cultural consistency. Despite dramatic differences in cultural history, isolated populations show remarkable agreement on what they find attractive.
When shown nature photographs, indigenous populations with no history of Western landscape painting preferred the same types of scenes: savanna-like environments with water sources, varied vegetation, and long sight lines—exactly the landscape features that would have indicated resource-rich habitats on the African savanna where humans evolved.
Studies of color preferences show similar patterns. Across diverse cultures, people prefer blue and green hues (colors associated with clear skies and vegetation) over brown and gray (colors of decay and waste).
Culture absolutely shapes specific aesthetic preferences—what clothing styles signal status, which body modifications indicate beauty, how spaces should be organized. But culture operates on top of universal foundations. Culture customizes the details, but the underlying mechanisms are evolutionary universals.
Why All Of This Matters for Founders
The science of beauty highlights what I had previously missed: when you optimize for aesthetics, you’re not adding superficial polish. You’re targeting ancient neural machinery that assesses value, makes predictions, and drives decision-making. So much of beauty and taste comes down to pattern recognition - a very useful trait for any founder.
It’s important to understand how assessments of beauty happen in milliseconds, using the same systems that evolved to identify valuable mates, resources, and environments. All of this subconscious mental work informs precisely how a customer feels, their experience and whether they want to choose you again or not.
In part 2, we’ll continue to explore the links between beauty and value collectively.
Happy Sunday ✌🏼