Weighing the Business Case for Quality

Most of us want to do great work. Building things of exceptional quality – work that’s beautiful, lovable, fast – is one of life’s great joys. However, the story goes, capitalism doesn’t value quality. Businesses don’t fund software that is lovable. Thus, you need to make a career choice: do you want to be a craftsperson, or do you want to make money? This dichotomy is nonsense. I mean, yes, these two things are in some tension. You can easily make money maintaining EOL plumbing if you can motivate yourself to do it well, and you can easily make beautiful products if you can afford to give them away for peanuts. But there absolutely exist businesses that are very large and successful in part because they invest in quality. Beauty, speed, and user experience can drive profits. Patrick Collison spoke about this back in 2023: My intuition is that more of Stripe’s success than one would think is downstream of the fact that people like beautiful things, and for rational reasons. Because…