Tech Culture

The Founder’s Vision Trap: Why Culture Beats Tech Every Time

It starts, as these stories often do, with a bold vision.

A founder has an idea — one they’re convinced is going to change the game. It’s innovative. Disruptive. The kind of idea that turns heads and opens investor checkbooks. Before long, there’s money in the bank, a team in place, and the runway to bring this vision to life.

From the founder’s perspective, the stars are aligning. The idea has been validated — after all, someone just put money behind it. Now it’s just a matter of execution.

But this is where things often go wrong.

Is Product Management the Same as UX Design?

Peter Merholz recently published a thought-provoking article suggesting that “Product Management is UX Design.” While this may hold in certain contexts, I believe it’s largely meant to spark debate rather than capture a broad truth.

The Future of Design: How AI is Shifting Designers from Makers to Curators

When we think about designers, two main characteristics often come to mind: craft skills and taste. Craft skills are the technical abilities that allow designers to manipulate tools—whether physical, like pen and paper in the early days, or digital design software like Photoshop and Figma today—to create their desired output. Taste, on the other hand, is the ability to perceive and refine quality in design, guiding the look and feel of an output toward something that feels refined and cohesive.

The Real Reason Why Executives Don’t Want you Involved

We’ve all been there. You get hired for your expertise in a specific domain, and yet for some reason the powers at be seem to ignore your input, make a bunch of random decisions you think are at best ill-informed or at worst just plain wrong, and then hand it to you for implementation. If only they’d have consulted you sooner and you might have been able to avoid this mess.

Why I'm Still on the Fence About Crypto

As somebody who has been lucky enough to not only experience a number of online trends—early Web adoption, The Web Standards Movement, the emergence of UX Design, Web 2.0, the Mobile Web—but to benefit from them, I can see why folks are excited about the rise of Crypto.