The Importance of Design with Kristian Andersen

Speaker 1: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real- world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with my friend Kristian Andersen. Kristian is a partner at High Alpha. High Alpha is a B2B, SaaS Venture Studio and seed investor, and they are also investors in Bolster. Kristian, welcome to The Daily Bolster.

Kristian Andersen: Matt, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. So your career before you started High Alpha was very focused on branding and design. You started and ran an agency, a very good agency. And so my question to you is, over the years, you inaudible developed a very strong philosophy or set of beliefs about design. So I would love to ask you to riff on that for a minute today and talk about a few beliefs you have about the importance of design in business and in life.

Kristian Andersen: I love it. All right. I'll give you two non- controversial takes and then we'll end on a controversial one. How's that sound?

Matt Blumberg: Fantastic.

Kristian Andersen: So the first one I think is really obvious but not particularly well understood, which, at least through the kind of prism of business, we tend to think of design as something very particular to brand, marketing, product. Maybe if you're particularly ambitious, the design of your office. My contention is that everything's designed and it's either being designed intentionally by you and your organization or it's subject to the entropy of culture in your organization and it is being designed for you and oftentimes not optimally. Matt, I was sharing with you earlier, when I was running Studio Science, we looked at every interaction with customers and our team through the lens of how do we design the process and experience in such a way that everything feels intentional? And I showed one example of when I would pick somebody that we were recruiting, like a new hire who lived out of state, we were trying to get them to move to Indianapolis, we would design the route, we would drive them from the airport to the office and kind of tailor that to what we knew about them, if they were a sports fan or interested in museums, and what highlighted the skyline in the best way. And I think that's a really silly example, but it's one that people always commented on. And so I think that's-

Matt Blumberg: I think it's not a silly example. It's actually a perfect example of something that you don't think about designing but makes a difference.

Kristian Andersen: Yeah, your outgoing voicemail message. I mean, there's so many opportunities for these things that are kind of banal and easy to fall beneath the waterline that if you just bring a little of intentionality to it, it makes a huge difference.

Matt Blumberg: All right, so that's non- controversial belief number one. What is non- controversial belief number two.

Kristian Andersen: The other one is that the difference between good and great design is usually the last five or 10% of your investment. So it's very easy to fall into a trap of everybody else is going 70% of the way, I'm going 90% of the way, we're done. And the reality is, and you know this, whether you're looking at classic architecture or reading a great book or a film or what have you, it's the last 5% of effort that nets the majority of the kind of value creation. And so I think the reason that's important and maybe how to apply that philosophy inside the context of a business is great operators are really good at strategy, but the really good ones, almost exclusively, the really good ones are also really great at the details. And they're able to suppress their decision fatigue. When something looks pretty darn good on the surface, that extra mile or in many cases the extra few inches is what makes the difference.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, it's interesting. It does kind of run a little counter to the principle of 80/ 20 or the principle of move fast and break things.

Kristian Andersen: It certainly runs counter to the rule of 80/ 20. I'm not sure it runs counter to the rule of move fast and break things, because I think even through the lens of like an MVP. Well, we can't do everything. We can't nail every detail. Well, when you're trying to create the smallest, most incremental unit of value, an MVP is a good example, I would argue all those details matter. You're not going to get all those details right, of course. We never get all of that right. But if you fall into the trap of good enough, especially when you're focused on building something small and tight, I would argue that the need to pay attention to the details is even more pronounced.

Matt Blumberg: All right, so now the moment we've been waiting for in our five- minute conversation. What's the controversial belief?

Kristian Andersen: Okay, this is one I've been playing with for a few years and it never fails to offend people. So we'll see if maybe your audience has a different take. But the big idea is that taste is not subjective. That the difference between good taste and bad taste is quite objective. And I think most people think about inner experiences or their own personal experiences and what they like and what they don't like. And of course no one can argue with that. If you see an objectively terrible film that you really enjoyed, that's great, you liked it, and I can't argue with that. But the idea of good taste and bad taste and how that manifests itself in the design of a business or an artifact or a product or a service, I think it's really important to grok that. Not everyone has good taste. We know this, right? I mean, there's a reason music critics have a job, there's a reason food critics have a job because society has imbued them with authority to make decisions, oftentimes rooted in objectivity, around what works and what doesn't work. That's why I oftentimes, while I always search for this, often will point- blank ask job candidates, for example, " Do you have good taste? And if so, can you articulate that and defend that?" And it's something that I think can offend people's sensibilities around agency and their own kind of specialness. But here's the bottom line. There are good auto mechanics and there are bad auto mechanics. There are good tailors and there are bad tailors. There are people with good taste and bad taste. And I personally think highest performing businesses have a disproportionate number of people in that business that exhibit good taste.

Matt Blumberg: I love it. That is a really, really interesting lens for sure. Look, I think the corollary I would put on that is good taste can also be learned and cultivated over time.

Kristian Andersen: A hundred percent. As a matter of fact, I think one thing that defines people that have objectively good taste is their experiential sample size. So I can bring a kid into a museum and say, " Do you like that painting?" And if all they've ever seen is a doodle versus somebody who has studied the arts for a decade and has a reference set of tens of thousands of pieces, that's going to drive significant improvement in your ability at least to identify things that are beautiful. I mean, listen, there's some physics of beauty that exists, Matt. I'm not aware of any culture throughout recorded history that's ever thought a rose was ugly. There's this physics of beauty. And just like any other, whether it be science or theology or philosophy, I think the way you get good at understanding it is by studying it, and you've got to be exposed to it a lot. So if you have bad taste, I might suggest that you spend more time interacting with things that are well- made, things that are beautiful, and understanding the objective rules that drive that.

Matt Blumberg: All right, Kristian Andersen from High Alpha, thank you for joining me.

Kristian Andersen: You bet. My pleasure, Matt.