Beauty Is the Missing Metric

A missing variable, not a decline in character

Micky Malka argues that the otherwise superior generation of founders now coming up still lacks taste, and traces the gap to measurement rather than to character: "if you think about the last 15 years, the incentive systems and every metric of success were wired on scale, grow, go bigger... it wasn't about building beautiful products... because we have given a prize and a reward for efficiency, algorithm, compounding of those things, and we have put aside how it makes you feel."¹ The claim is not that people stopped caring, it is that the scoreboard never contained the variable, so it went unoptimized for a decade and a half.

His test: when was the last time you bought a technology product you loved, that you looked at and thought, this is beautiful? What he means by beautiful is narrow on purpose and explicitly not brand or advertising. "It's not just the brand with a TV commercial, that's the point I'm less worried about," he says, meaning instead what is authentic, what is beautifully designed, and what it makes you feel to be around it.¹ And the stakes, unusually for him, are stated without hedging: "the founders that will do that will win, and the founders that don't have that ability, they don't have a chance." His interviewer David Senra supplies a corroborating case from a Jony Ive biography he had been rereading that morning: Ive found computers ugly and tacky until a Mac made him think, in Senra's words, "there is a human behind this, you can tell there is an actual human that cares."

Why it matters

Converting a taste complaint into an incentives argument makes it actionable. If beauty went missing because no scoreboard held it, the fix is not exhortation, it is founders with enough control to optimize for a variable the scoreboard does not contain. Malka did not only make the argument, he built a free public building in downtown Palo Alto on the same premise, that Silicon Valley needs creativity back, which gives the argument a lease rather than leaving it as a talking point. See Artist as Own Curator.

Open question

The two concrete examples of a beautiful technology product on offer are both hardware and roughly a decade old: a Dyson vacuum cleaner, David Senra's own admittedly embarrassing answer when the question turns to him, and a discontinued small iPhone size that Malka notices a member of Senra's team still carrying. That is thin evidence that nothing beautiful has been made in software in fifteen years and may say more about the difficulty of loving software specifically. The claim that founders without the ability "don't have a chance" is also hard to square with the last fifteen years of company building, which mostly rewarded scale, distribution, and efficiency exactly as Malka describes, and the source does not explain what changed to reverse that beyond AI making everything else abundant. Beauty is also being asked to carry two different loads, product craft and authenticity, which come apart: plenty of beautifully designed things are inauthentic, and Malka's own strongest examples of authenticity elsewhere are digital artists like Beeple, not arguments about craft at all.