On taste
The tech industry once dismissed the non-technical. Now it wants their taste. Here’s what the tech milieu is misunderstanding about the new buzzword.
The hive mind of tech has found its new favorite word: taste. You’ve heard it — “taste is the new moat,” “taste is everything” — tossed around in a world where AI now promises to handle the busywork of both the technical and the creative. Taste, they say, will set us apart. Taste in product design. Taste in strategy. Taste in leadership, too.
Why? Because taste suggests something deeper: an understanding that can’t be outsourced. A judgment that can’t be bought. Taste is cultivated, rooted in context, impossible to automate — though many will try.
And yet here’s the thing: for months now, I’ve watched this word get passed around like social currency, more of a signal that is half-understood and devalued with every exchange. We like how “taste” sounds. Yet, we forget what it actually means.
Let’s be honest about what we mean when we talk about “taste” in tech. The moment a word becomes a buzzword, it gets said so often that its meaning collapses into nothing at all.
More often than not, taste is just shorthand for good strategic choices.
What problems are worth solving with AI? What do we build that serves the mission and makes money? What feels novel, what delights, what holds up under an ethical lens? Questions like these don’t answer themselves. They demand deep work, the kind we’ve nearly forgotten how to do in a world wired for speed and distraction.
When an investor says, “That founder has good taste,” what they usually mean is: They make effective decisions. They know what to build and what to leave alone. They meet the moment and do something exceptional.
There is no such thing as good taste without deep thought. No real insight that comes fully formed.
The ‘aha’ is never magic — it’s just the slow compound interest of paying attention.
Taste is not a binary concept.
Taste resides in a matrix of values — aesthetic, strategic, or moral — where you can strive for classic and conventional excellence or choose to defy those expectations and rules altogether. Sometimes you do both at once.
Taste has always been about selection, the spectrum of choices. And in any domain, developing taste first requires seeking to understand. You must be aware of how taste aligns with or contradicts the given set of values.
Taste is a relationship = Time + Mistakes + Love
Earning “good taste” requires having made mistakes and investing more emotional energy and time in a field than most people are ever willing to commit.
The beautiful thing is that it begins with love. You cannot cultivate taste — real taste — without a deep affection for the thing itself. Without the kind of attention that feels, to outsiders, like time wasted.
So when we talk about “taste,” we should remember what it is: a relationship. An intimacy with a domain, built up quietly over a lifetime. No shortcut can give you that. No machine can rush it along, no matter how much we wish it could.
Taste doesn’t mean cool. It doesn’t mean popular. Taste is contextual.
Good taste is knowing what works — what is effective, powerful, or resonant in a particular moment, against a particular set of values.
It isn’t a virtue signal. It isn’t a moral judgment. It’s the quiet art of knowing what fits — and what does not, but it goes beyond the act of selection. As Pierre Bourdieu wrote, “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.”
Taste may be a form of social capital, but are today’s arbiters truly qualified?
It’s worth acknowledging an unspoken irony in today’s tech culture: The same professional cohort now claiming that “taste is a moat” is often the very group that, just a few years ago, dismissed “non-technical” professionals — the designers, artists, and other creators who were quietly honing the craft and critical thinking that now define the taste we’re all coveting.
We exalt “taste” now because we see, at last, what an advantage it really is — how hard it is to come by, how impossible it is to fake, how quickly it exposes who can’t be rushed through the deeper work.
What the zeitgeist deems commercially valuable will always change. But what is always en vogue is the ability to think critically, to know what matters, and what does not. And most importantly, to do the work you care about most: the work that feels urgent and calls to you beyond the bounds of logic.
Taste reminds us that true understanding cannot be delegated or automated.
There is a quiet danger in forgetting what it takes to cultivate good taste: resistance. In an age of urgency — with AI setting a new pace for what we make and how fast we make it — we have to protect the one currency taste demands above all else: time.
