Patrick Collison on the importance of beauty and craftsmanship when building products

If stripe is a monstrously successful business, but what we make isn't beautiful, I'll be much less happy. I think the returns to both of those initial returns, I think they're just like the world's uglier than it needs to be. It's kind of a free lunch where, like, one can just do things well or poorly. And beauty is not a rivalrous good. My intuition is that more of Stripe success than one would think is downstream of the fact that people like indexing on the superficial characteristics that you can actually observe is not right. Banks had it figured out 100 years ago where bank buildings should be nice, and we're just continuing that. But also, look, if someone really convinced me that the financial returns to craftsmanship and beauty, like which I believe are greater, are not greater, and I'd still do it. It's like life's. Life's too short.