Why Good Taste Makes Good Founders (3/3)
"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." - Douglas Adams
The pursuit of beauty drives entrepreneurs
Now that we’ve explored the psychology of beauty and how good taste and design are core to a functioning society—not accessory—let’s bring it home by talking about beauty, taste and design in the context of entrepreneurship.
This last part explores the WHY and HOW of pursuing beauty and good design in all aspects of entrepreneurship with evidence-based insights.
The pursuit of beauty is itself a core entrepreneurial driver—as fundamental as the desire to solve hard problems or grow as a person. It’s not decoration on top of ambition. It is its own form of ambition.
A 2025 study from Lund University found that founders who scored high in aesthetic sensitivity were far more likely to pursue mission-driven ventures. Not slightly more likely—dramatically more likely. Beauty wasn’t their branding strategy. It was their selection criteria for what problems were worth solving.
A 2023 European study on “design authorship” found that designer-founders typically start companies to materialize a personal creative vision—not to maximize financial returns. Research on creative entrepreneurs found the same dynamic: creative founders consistently ranked aesthetic integrity and craft above profit maximization.
Beauty is a form of intrinsic motivator and north star that guides them towards their grand vision. When the work itself is rewarding—when refining the solution generates its own satisfaction—motivation becomes self-sustaining. You’re not drawing down willpower. You’re tapping into something that replenishes itself.
“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”
— Leonardo da Vinci
Research on aesthetic openness shows that people high in this trait experience a dopaminergic response when encountering or creating harmonious patterns. For these founders, the refinement loop is pleasurable. Tuning a feature until it feels right. Rewriting copy until it clicks. Reworking a brand system until it achieves coherence. These aren’t costs to minimize—they’re intrinsically rewarding, like playing music or solving an interesting puzzle.
This changes the economics of persistence. The founder who finds refinement tedious spends willpower with every iteration. The founder who finds refinement pleasurable generates energy. Over multi-year timescales, this difference compounds dramatically. The most impactful, driven founders are building something that will outlive them, chasing elegance using a form of aesthetic obsession: Jobs, Edwin Land, Dyson, Chesky. Those founders directly and openly attacked the status quo using aesthetic obsession to drive bold, innovative and meaningful designs.
Taste as Perception, Not Preference
As I said, taste is known to be entirely subjective. Beauty is seen as preference. However as we have seen from scientific insights from our brains and collective stance on beauty, beauty might be subjective, but it does serve an objective, real evolutionary function. The research tells us that taste is a cognitive resolution enhancer. It literally helps you see more of reality.
A study from the University of Liège put serial entrepreneurs in fMRI machines and found distinctive neural connectivity patterns. Compared to managers, successful founders showed stronger connections between regions associated with cognitive flexibility (the right insula) and exploratory decision-making (the anterior prefrontal cortex). The researchers interpreted this as enhanced ability to toggle between exploring new possibilities and exploiting what works.
But notice what this neural architecture also enables: aesthetic judgment. The same circuitry that lets founders flexibly consider multiple options is the circuitry involved in perceiving patterns, recognizing elegance, and sensing when something “fits.” Aesthetic sensitivity and entrepreneurial cognition aren’t separate capabilities—they share neural substrate.
This is why Harvard Business Review’s work on “aesthetic intelligence” matters for founders: leaders who can sense when something no longer looks or feels right in their product, brand, or environment are detecting problems earlier. Sensitivity to aesthetic violations functions as early warning for deeper issues—cluttered flows, “Frankenstein” UI, incoherent features, off-brand behaviour, messaging drift.
Good design is high-fidelity information compression: it filters noise and presents signal in an intuitively graspable form. When a founder says “this feels elegant,” they’re often recognizing—subconsciously—that the model compresses a complex reality correctly. When something feels “off,” that’s often your brain detecting a mismatch between the model and reality before you can articulate why.
Beauty operates as a diagnostic tool for entropy. Systems often become ugly and messy before they become a real problem. The founder who can see these patterns has a perceptual advantage unavailable to the one who only reads dashboards.
This also explains why research on highly sensitive persons found that high-sensitivity individuals performed equally or better than typical entrepreneurs in opportunity recognition. Emotional and aesthetic sensitivity isn’t a liability—it enhances pattern detection. The same attunement that makes someone notice a slightly off colour palette makes them notice a slightly off market signal.
Enough With Ugly Experiences!
When you look at what many legendary founders describe as their founding moment, it came from aesthetic offense. They encountered something ugly—a clunky process, an inhuman interface, a graceless experience—and they just couldn’t tolerate it.
Jobs talked about being offended by the ugliness of existing computers. Dyson was aesthetically bothered by an inelegant solution. Chesky wanted travel to feel like something other than a sterile transaction. Whitney Wolfe Herd built Bumble because the existing dating experience felt degrading. Brian Armstrong started Coinbase because sending money internationally felt absurdly clunky for the digital age.
These weren’t primarily efficiency arguments. “This is ugly” preceded “this could be 10% more efficient.” The aesthetic violation came first; the business case came later.
The most common founding motivation isn’t “I spotted a market inefficiency.” It’s “I experienced something ugly and felt compelled to replace it with something beautiful.”
This is founding as aesthetic protest. The bureaucratic, clunky, inhuman systems that accumulate in mature industries aren’t just inefficient—they’re offensive to people with developed taste.
In their minds, the founders who build genuinely new categories aren’t attacking competitors, cornering the market and disrupting incumbents. They’re proposing a new aesthetic standard for how things should work. They’re saying: “Here’s what good looks like in this domain”—and the market reorganizes around that vision. Taste is a clear and comprehensive vision of how things should be.
There’s also a structural reason this matters beyond motivation. Beautiful systems degrade gracefully; ugly systems accumulate “design debt” and collapse under complexity. Across architecture, software, and biology, systems with fewer arbitrary exceptions and cleaner forms are easier to scale and maintain.
Think about what this means practically. A product with coherent design principles can absorb new features without becoming a Frankenstein. A company with aesthetic coherence in its culture—how decks look, how meetings run, how people talk to customers—can scale without losing its identity. An ugly system, by contrast, accumulates exceptions, workarounds, and special cases until the complexity becomes unmanageable. That’s why the simpler designs seem to win every time.
In fact, You can assess anti-fragility simply by looking at aesthetic coherence. Beauty is structural resilience.
Why is taste-as-a-skill so under-appreciated?
If beauty is this valuable, why isn’t everyone already investing in it? Perhaps biases explain why aesthetics remain a mispriced opportunity for those who developed good taste.
STEM training generally devalues beauty. Engineering education frames aesthetics as “nice-to-have”—something you add after functional requirements, if there’s time. It’s not treated as a variable in trust, perceived quality, or cognitive load. Yet research on product perception shows that aesthetics significantly shifts how people assess performance and reliability. Users judge well-designed products as more trustworthy and competent—before they’ve even used them.
MBA training ignores it. I was that person. Business education focuses mostly on quantifiables: CAC, LTV, unit economics. But customers choose primarily based on how offerings make them feel. Metrics tell you nothing about how a customer thinks and decides. Spicy take: “you can’t manage what you don’t measure” is bullshit. Numbers have a place sure, but qualitative data is actionable data.
Startup culture tends to overlook it. Lean startup and MVP culture have pushed us to ship early and ship ugly. Scrappy can be helpful, but as we’ve seen, beauty scales better while ugly is confusing and complex to users—sometimes that triggers a visceral negative response in them.
“Ugly but working” is celebrated as scrappy pragmatism. Polish is dismissed as vanity. Studies on product aesthetics demonstrate that form heavily shapes perceived function, trust, and willingness-to-pay.
Taste is actually a capability that sharpens with intentional practice. Research on aesthetic education shows that exposure to aesthetic training enhances creativity, adaptability, and entrepreneurial capability.
Treat your environment as curriculum. Work with well-designed tools, spend time in beautiful spaces, study products and brands with strong aesthetics. The architect Christopher Alexander argued that harmony with your surroundings creates inner coherence and better design judgment. Your inputs shape your outputs.
So much of being a great founder comes down to how you design the environment for your team, your customers, yourself to flourish. A bad environment (bad system) will beat a good founder every time.
Develop aesthetic intelligence deliberately. Keep a swipe file of interfaces and objects you find beautiful. It really comes down to looking. Beauty can be found in anything, if you know how to look for it.
Good design skills and principles transcend any individual field. Simply explore what makes something great, better than the other products and alternatives. This is the starting point for understanding what makes a good design. From experience: great designs tend to be universal in nature. The design is beautiful when you zoom in and when you zoom out. It looks just as gorgeous from inside as outside.
“When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” — Steve Jobs
Research on functional diversity shows that teams combining design, engineering, and business backgrounds outperform homogeneous groups. The same applies to individuals. The founder who understands typography, knows why certain code architectures are elegant, and can feel when a business model has too many moving parts has more aesthetic bandwidth than the specialist who only knows one domain. Seeing beauty is a lot about pattern recognition, and so being a generalist across domains is helpful to connect various, seemingly unrelated patterns. That is where innovative insights come from usually—your fresh-yet-informed perspective.
The Founder’s Ethical Dilemma
Here’s where I wanted to end this 3-part piece on the psychology of good taste. The imperative of good design goes way beyond beauty. Good design is also about doing the right thing for everyone.
Good design is positive sum. It refuses predatory patterns in product: dark user patterns, addiction loops, deceptive layouts. For all its glory, the internet and AI still have a long way to go to be well-designed for humans. In fact the internet traffic is a majority of bots, so humans might not even be the center of the experience after all!
Beautiful, humane products respect users rather than extract from them. Research on moral elevation shows that exposure to ethical beauty—witnessing virtue, experiencing humane design—actually increases prosocial behaviour. Feelings of beauty are more intense when shared with others, prompting others to further seek and appreciate beauty, further reinforcing pro-social bonds. Ethical beauty proves to us that there is goodness in others, further building trust within communities.
If entrepreneurs don’t insist on good taste, who will?
Managers tend to optimize for efficiency (and their reputation) within existing constraints. Their job is to hit metrics and deliver or exceed high expectations, not question whether the metrics are worth hitting in the first place. To them a questionable tactic that lifts conversion 2% is a win they can bank in the metrics. That’s how we ended up with disgusting telephone customer service lately.
Likewise, investors are incentivized for returns within existing playbooks. The fund’s incentives don’t include “is this beautiful and humane?” The engagement loop that’s technically legal but ethically questionable? That’s growth. These people also may have a reputation at stake, so employees and investors do not have the incentives to insist on good design—quite the opposite in fact.
Taste as founder’s superpower
Only entrepreneurs and similar creators have the freedom—and often the desire—to ask: “But is it beautiful? Is it humane? Is this how things should work?”
The founder is typically the only person in the ecosystem with both the skin in the game, incentives and the aesthetic sense to insist on something better. If founders abdicate this role, no one else fills it. That’s why many public companies struggle after the founder(s) depart. At the societal level, given just how valuable beauty is and how under-appreciated it is, founders have the collective duty to insist on good design, educating and advocating others so we come to recognize the value of good taste beyond ‘vibes’.
Bureaucratic, extractive, inhuman systems, in person or online, don’t emerge because evil people design them - mostly. Most emerge because no one insisted on a “not-shitty-experience”. It’s our role as entrepreneurs to revolt aesthetically against ugly products, services and systems—that sort of reaction is always required to challenge the status quo and to invent a better solution.
Closing the Loop
Let’s summarize the core entrepreneurial insights we’ve explored in the last 3 posts.
In Part 1, we explored how beauty and value share neural circuitry—your brain can’t tell the difference between “this is beautiful” and “this is valuable.”
In Part 2, we saw how beauty operates as social infrastructure—coordinating communities, reducing collective stress, producing measurable returns in health, safety, and social behaviour.
In Part 3, we saw how the pursuit of beauty is itself a founder superpower. It’s an intrinsic motivation that sustains effort when external rewards fail. It’s a perceptual capacity that reveals opportunities others miss. It’s a competitive advantage precisely because it’s systematically undervalued by the training most founders receive.
Founders have the unique skills, worldview and incentives to stand for good taste, to insist on beauty because it is truly valuable, and to teach good design principles.
That’s the work of great entrepreneurs. Not just building companies, but building beautiful systems, products worthy of standing the test of time. Not just solving problems, but solving them tastefully. Henry Ford, James Dyson, Edwin Land, and many other great founders spent their entire careers painstakingly perfecting the design of their cars, vacuum cleaners or instant cameras.
They understood that beauty for its own sake was worth pursuing and felt a strong responsibility in pushing the limits of their designs to new frontier, while maintaining a simple and coherent vision of their end goals.
Happy Sunday ✌🏼
Exceptional synthesis of why aesthetic offense becomes founding fuel. The observation that "this is ugly" precedes market analysis really nails something most startup advice misses entirely. What's counterintuitive is that founders optimizing for beauty actually end up with more anti-fragile systems, not less, becuase aesthetic coherence naturally resists the feature-bloat and exception-creep that kills most products at scale. The part about founders having unique incentives to insist on good taste while managers and investors literaly can't afford to care hits hard.