This week, we assembled advice from an all-star group of founders, product leaders and first marketing hires for a tactical guide to taste.
The Unsung Ingredient in Stripe, Square and Linear’s Success: Taste
Taste is trending — in Substack newsletters, X replies, and LinkedIn posts, conversations about craft are spilling out from the artistic world and popping up in tech circles more than ever.
There have long been companies (like Apple and Stripe) revered for their taste and quality. So why does it seem like the rest of tech is just starting to catch on now over the past couple of years?
To put it simply (and to borrow from product designer Shane Levine), code is no longer a moat. We are living in the most accessible time in history to build software — and AI’s flood into the mainstream has lifted all boats. It’s faster and cheaper than ever to build, market and sell new products — just executing quickly is not a differentiator anymore. You’re probably not the “first of” anything; or if you are, a competitor is likely not far behind, nipping at your heels.
We’d rather not add to the cacophony of voices echoing each other about how taste and craft are important. Instead, what we’ve found underexplored is discussions on operationalizing taste.
So, we mined the Review archives and the In Depth podcast airwaves for the best bits of advice we could find from folks at companies like Stripe, Square, Linear and Slack. As it turns out, at First Round we’ve been asking people about craft long before taste was taking over the zeitgeist. Here’s who we spoke to:
- Krithika Muthukumar, Stripe’s first marketing hire and former VP of Marketing at OpenAI
- Karri Saarinen, founder & CEO of Linear
- Alyssa Henry, former CEO of Square
- Milin Desai, CEO of Sentry
- Julie Supan, YouTube’s first Head of Marketing
- Anthony Casalena, CEO of Squarespace
- Noah Desai Weiss, former CPO of Slack
- Jiaona “JZ” Zhang, CPO of Linktree
And here’s a preview of some of the advice that's in store:
- Implement reviews at the 20% and 80% mark. Do not wait until a project is nearly out the door to review it. “At Stripe, we would do a 20% strategy review to make sure that we were aligned on the goals and intent of any big project. Then we would do an 80% review for the execution and check in on how things were going, like what the collateral looked like,” says Krithika Muthukumar, who was Stripe’s very first marketing hire. “It’s important that you review at the 80% mark, not the 99% mark because you still want the ability to make changes based on what comes up.”
- Test drive taste with a work trial. Probing for something as nuanced as taste can be exceptionally difficult in an interview setting. That’s why, before committing to any full-time hire, Linear has candidates complete a paid 2-5 day work trial, where they work with the team on a real project.
- Codify your product principles. To distill Slack founder Stewart Butterfield’s distinct product intuition throughout the rest of the company, Chief Product Officer Noah Desai Weiss instituted a set of product principles (like “don’t make me think” and “be a great host”). “They are all a bit simple and almost glib when you hear them, but when you unpack them, there’s a whole set of stories and examples around them. They created a shared language within the product org for not just our values, but how we apply those values in instances where it’s more subjective and about taste.”
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors
Recommended resources:
-Vercel's CEO Guillermo Rauch on building taste
-How to build your early marketing team (from Notion’s former CMO)
-4 questions for assessing new job fit