Patrick Collison explains the value of “micro pessimism” and “macro optimism”

I think there was just like a fundamental contradiction in the startup mindset and this cognitive dissonance where on the one hand, you have to be incredibly attentive to your problems, right? And to recognize the myriad ways in which your product totally sucks, right? If you're oblivious to that, if you're kind of, you know, just cheerfully whistling along kind of Lego Movie style, you know, everything is awesome, obviously reality is going to kind of give you a rude slap in the face pretty quickly. You simultaneously need to have this attitude that, okay, everything is terrible today, but we really have conviction that we can make it fantastic in two years time, in four years time, in six years time. And so this kind of micropessimism, macro optimism, part of what we're trying to do is acknowledge this tension and to give you structural permission to be extremely critical of that which exists today, because I think otherwise people feel a bit tentative, like, I don't know, are they criticizing my baby? Can they say that our dashboard sucks or this API sucks or whatever the case might be?