It’s Time to Build Beautiful. An Essay on Software and the World We Live In

19 min readFeb 21, 2023

In this essay:

Ideas as fragile mysteries
Code, Covid and the global realignment
The road to salvation
The confused economist
Beauty and the try-buy gap

1. Ideas as fragile mysteries

Like most people, Mikhail Bulgakov is complicated (or was — he died more than 80 years ago).

Born in Kiev in Ukraine, Bulgakov spoke and wrote in Russian. His play The Days of the Turbins was a favourite night out for Josef Stalin, who is said to have seen it 15 times in Moscow in the 1920s and ’30s. The play was banned in 1926 but the ban was later lifted after Stalin’s intervention, continuing its theatre run for almost 1000 performances.

For Bulgakov, it was not exactly triumph in his own lifetime — like all 20th century Russian writers and artists who did not tow the pro-Revolution, pro-Soviet line, he was marginalised, allowed only to work as a lowly production assistant at the theatre where his play was staged. Even so, he fared better than many of his contemporaries, who were exiled, executed or forced into hard labour in the Siberian gulags.

As Russia’s war in Ukraine continues, Bulgakov has come back into the consciousness of both countries.

There are at least two Bulgakov museums — one in Kiev, which exhibits more than 2000 Bulgakov possessions, photos, postcards and writings; and one in Moscow, a “writer’s house” museum in the apartment where he lived and wrote after moving there in 1921. In 2022, activists opposed to the way Ukrainians were portrayed in some of his writing campaigned for the closure of the Bulgakov House in Kiev in favour of a new museum that promotes pro-Ukrainian literature and culture.

You will, certainly, be wondering if there is some mistake here, and if there’s no mistake, what in all hell are we doing starting an essay about the present and future of software in 2023 by talking about a Ukrainian-born Russian writer who was working a century ago.

The reason is The Master and Margarita.

Written in a shroud of secrecy and first published in 1966 — decades after the author’s death and only after the tireless efforts of his wife Elena — the book is often cited as the greatest Russian artwork of the 20th century.

It is an unsettling, strange and darkly comic portrayal of a visit by the Devil to authoritarian Moscow — hence, the secrecy in the writing and the long delay in the publication.

For the past few years, when I think of software, I think of The Master and Margarita.

In the summer of 2020, I corresponded with a software engineer, entrepreneur and builder about something as apparently everyday as product development and user experience.

He said to me,

“I always reach to literature when thinking about work. And when thinking about products, above all: Master and Margarita. You want to create an atmosphere just like Bulgakov did.”

This made my antennae buzz. I was a literature student back in the day, and all my working life has been in online media and communications. I asked for more.

He replied:

“I cannot precisely explain. Oftentimes I feel like a lot of non-fiction boils down to recipes and when I’m reading literature there’s less agenda and less ‘actionable’ stuff. Of course I try to read literature for pleasure and reflection, but it finds its ways into my work … With most pieces of literature, I can usually at least summarise what I’ve read, but with Master and Margarita (I’ve read it twice) all I can think of is this purple haze, an atmosphere that’s present but not quite easy to grab.
“I feel like it’s similar to how ideas and products take their earliest shape — you know what’s inside the less defined, and it’s a very personal experience. And I just prefer this ‘willingly unknown’ as opposed to ‘highly detailed’. Ideas are fragile mysteries, and so is this book.”

A few lines keep coming back to me.

When thinking about products you want to create an atmosphere just like Bulgakov did.
With Master and Margarita … all I can think of is this purple haze, an atmosphere that’s present but not quite easy to grab.
Ideas are fragile mysteries.

When it comes to software, and especially the type of software that relies on self-serve and automated onboarding, we hear plenty about user interface design and UX, about delighting the end user so much that it will lead to a type of bottom-up viral growth where customers discover, test and deploy a product to solve one precise problem in their workflow, and before long— best case scenario — become such staunch advocates of its benefits that they are the product’s de-facto chief marketers, selling it upwards and sideways in their organisations in an endless invisible cycle that seems to be ever-present and ubiquitous in the journey of every successful SaaS to unicorn status.

Scott Belsky, the founder of successful design portfolio platform Behance, wrote in his business/product development/entrepreneurial self-help book The Messy Middle:

“The experience of using someone else’s creation comes from the path the creator took to make it. It is not the plastic, metal or pixels that make a successful product or service. Rather it is the thoughtfulness and tough choices made by the makers.”

At its best, software design and development is about much more than solving a specific problem, much more than UX and UI, much more than simply delighting the user.

It’s about the painstaking tasks, the depth of thoughtfulness and the endless array of tough choices made, that goes into creating an atmosphere.

In the two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, a trifecta of tailwinds created a global windfall for the software industry.

First, the pandemic fast-tracked the deployment of software that suddenly became a business continuity necessity.

Second, the injection of trillions of dollars of stimulus and credit to keep the global economy afloat.

And third, rock-bottom or even negative interest rates continued to force investors to seek higher-growth-potential investment vehicles for their cash.

As Blake Bartlett of venture capital firm Open View Ventures put it in one podcast:

“It was an absolute sales bonanza. The biggest challenge was being able to effectively meet all the demand that was falling from the sky.”

With inflation and interest rates now jumping, energy availability and climate change on every front page, and stark warnings about the economic outlook in 2023 and beyond, the landscape has changed again.

Success for software startups — whether through a major acquisition by one of the big hitters or a billion-dollar IPO in your own right — has never been an easy path.

But the bar has been raised, and software entrepreneurs and teams must raise their game too.

And it could be that atmosphere — that “purple haze” that lies tantalisingly out of reach for most builders, at the far end of the user experience yellow-brick road — is the new terrain.

But before we plot a way forward, let’s consider exactly where we are, and how we got here.

2. Code, Covid and the global realignment

Code

Visualising the future is a difficult task. For most people, most of the time, it takes great discipline to cast your eyes and mind forward to a future and imagine it in any great detail.

Less widely appreciated, though, is that it’s often just as hard to picture the past.

It’s never easy to think in detail about the way things were. One of the reasons the past often seems rosier — when we talk about “the glory days” or someone’s “heyday” — is because of this inability to actually place ourselves into the reality of the way things were.

For one thing, all of the uncertainty that comes with every present moment, all of the million possible futures that are yet to play out, all that uncertainty disappears when we look backwards. From that single point in the past there now exists just one future — the one that crosses the divide from then to now — and therefore it can be impossible to bring ourselves back there.

So it’s almost impossible to place ourselves in August 2011, at the moment Marc Andreessen, technologist and venture capitalist, wrote a now seminal article in the Wall Street Journal under the heading “Why Software is Eating the World”.

What was going on in August 2011?

Much of Europe was three years into Brussels-sanctioned, IMF-approved austerity after the continent’s outliers — Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain, the so-called PIIGS — found themselves heavily exposed to the global financial crisis.

In Ireland, where emigration has traditionally been the preferred solution for economic devastation, hundreds of thousands of young people left for Canada, Australia and the US — which was already bouncing back from the worst of the financial meltdown that started in the creative productizing of Wall Street, perhaps spurred on by the perhaps fleeting optimism that greeted the election of Barack Obama.

In mediterranean Europe, by contrast, the young people stayed at home and entered the dark cycle of joblessness and economic badlands: youth unemployment in Spain and Greece peaked at a staggering 55% in 2013 and has since become endemic: in every year since then, approximately 1 in 3 young people are out of work. Italy’s youth unemployment rate has not dropped far below 29% any year since 2011. (Comparative figures demonstrate the depth of the crisis. In the UK, for example, the youth unemployment number never exceeded 25%. In the US, the worst year was 2010, when it peaked at 18.3%.)

Elsewhere in the world, the backdrop to 2011 was dominated, maybe most of all, by events in Islamic Asia and Africa, where first Osama bin Laden was killed by SEAL Team Six in Pakistan before that summer brought the Arab Spring, citizens rallying to overthrow leaders such as Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, who had been in power for 30 and 32 years respectively, although similar civil unrest in Syria was mercilessly dealt with by Bashar al-Assad.

In all of these events — from the financial crisis that spread like a virus through Western economies to the early hopeful optimism of the Arab Spring — something central and vital could clearly be seen for anyone who chose to look.

In all of this, not just facilitating the events, but actively driving them, we could see the effects of technology — and behind the tech, the software.

In Europe, the depth and breadth of the problems were driven by the interconnectedness of the world’s financial systems, in which commercial banks from Athens to Dublin could rack up unsustainable debts that would require central banks and the IMF to come to some sort of rescue, even if the medicine might be as toxic as the malady.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers in New York was the domino that caused the European housing sector to sink into a morass of half-built apartment blocks, so-called “ghost estates” and big builders who had rapidly become big businessmen before just as quickly sinking into big bankruptcies. The pathogen entered the bloodstream in middle America before seeping, via Wall Street, through all the tech-connected veins of the global financial system. Decisions made in a New York office, relating to parcels of mortgages in Indiana, could bring financial meltdown to homeowners in Galway.

One recurring word that appeared in the commentary around the global financial crisis was “contagion”. Contagion was caused, more than anything, by the interconnectedness of everything. And what was it that created this interconnectedness? Code.

In the US, the creeping dissatisfaction that was a decade in development — a general unrest that would bring both Donald Trump to the White House and hundreds of thousands of mostly young men to early graves from addiction to the opioids that they hoped might have been balm to their unending psychological and physical pain — was beginning to foment towards an explosion of polarised division and civil unrest through online chatrooms and messageboards and the emotion-tugging algorithms of social media.

What was it that built the chatrooms and the messageboards and the social media platforms, and the apps and websites that housed them? Code.

In the Middle East and North Africa, even at the time the role of technology was heralded as important, even vital: rebels leveraged the borderless domains of Facebook and Twitter to organise and push for freedom. It was one of those moments, to misquote the Seamus Heaney poem serially popularised by US presidents Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, “when hope and history rhymed”. This rhyme of history and hope was facilitated and made possible by code.

This was the landscape that Andreessen, and many like him, saw and embraced in 2011, and which many outside the Internet and tech world struggled to comprehend. [Even a decade and more later, that lack of understanding in official corridors remains profound. in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder and CEO invited to Congress to answer questions about data breaches and the possibility of election influence via the social network, was asked by 80-something Senator Orrin Hatch, “If Facebook is free, just how do you make money?”, to which Zuckerberg replied, “We sell advertising, sir”.]

In 2011, the world’s biggest companies included retail giants like Wal-Mart and oil companies such as Exxon Mobile. (Microsoft was the only technology company in the top 10.)

In 2022, the top 10 biggest companies in the world by market capitalization include Apple, Amazon, Meta (Facebook), Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Chinese tech giant Tencent and Tesla, which has been treated by stock exchange players more as tech firm than car manufacturer.

From Revolut vaults to Whoop straps, from Strava segments to McDonald’s ordering screens, code is in almost everything we do.

Software is no longer eating the world.

Increasingly, software is the world.

That is the motivation for Zuckerberg’s big bet on the future of Facebook: the metaverse, where we will live, work, eat, breathe and, presumably, copulate in an emergent new reality built in bits and bytes.

The challenge for most businesses is as simple as it is daunting: what will you do to survive?

The opportunity for software businesses is similarly straightforward: how can you take advantage?

Covid

Arriving into this maelstrom, at just about the exact point in time when it became clear that software was becoming the world, arrived Covid-19.

The most serious pandemic in a century, it brought a new and immediate mortality awareness to almost everyone on the planet, regardless of their age or prior health status. It fast-tracked changes to how we live and where, to how we work, where we work from and with whom we choose to share our precious time and germ-infested space.

Remote work and the ever-present Zoom room were the earliest manifestations of the Covid impact, with several downstream effects, including a clear and perhaps irreversible social distance between those who could live in peaceful seclusion, travel by private car and work from anywhere (or not at all), and those who found themselves locked into tiny apartments and had to brave the subway or bus to a job on the new frontline of supermarket tills and hospital wards.

The disenfranchisement and dissatisfaction of the masses, so clearly in evidence everywhere from mass youth unemployment in southern Europe, to the American opioid crisis, to anti-establishment votes for Trump, Brexit, Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orban and others, could be seen in public discussions around Covid-19 too.

Mature reflection and open discourse was impossible to find. Indeed, what used to be seen as mature reflection and open discourse was often tarred with a broad brush marked “misinformation”, so much that those who sought deeper truths and asked questions about flawed or biased media coverage were scared into silence, or forced underground, or had their reputations tarnished in ugly character assassination hit-jobs.

In the environment that resulted, a climate of generalised fear of any outsider set in, where the outsider could be a migrant in a boat or a microbe in your body.

As with every era of fundamental change — the end of the Roman empire, say, or the gunpowder revolution — when things change utterly, they never go back the way they were.

Now, with climate change and out-of-control inflation, with supply chain fragility and energy shortages and central banks at war with their own governments, when we look at the real physical world outside our homes and offices, it’s easy to find problems that seem insurmountable.

Even the very act of being human — breathing, working, living, loving — is in flux, or soon to be. As Naval Ravikant, the investor and tech philosopher, says,

“If they can train you to do it, eventually they will train a computer to do it.”

There are, as always, two ways to respond to flux. The first way, possibly the more tempting, is to fear it, and jump into fight, flight or freeze. The second way, arguably the more difficult, is to take up a pan full of silt and sand and soil, and look for the gold.

We can have certainty over few things in life but we can be certain of this: software will provide much of the gold.

In many ways, it already is. The stock market being the best long-term trends barometer there is, tech stocks remain in the ascendancy, even through the fall-out of the past two years. Bitcoin, the new money built on cryptography and globally interconnected computers, has been called “digital gold” for almost as long as it’s been in existence.

In the 1820s, the ability to read and write English became a massive competitive advantage. Historians might eventually say the same about reading and writing code in the 2020s.

This is the world that has been created in the past two decades and fast-tracked since the spring of 2020.

3. The road to salvation

“Every crisis has both its dangers and its opportunities. Each can spell either salvation or doom.” — Dr Martin Luther King Jnr

There’s a popular TV show that has been running on Channel 4 in Britain since the early 1980s. Countdown is a words and numbers game where contestants have 30 seconds on the clock to solve a maths puzzle or make the longest possible word from nine random letters.

Suzie Dent, a pretty and softly-spoken lexicographer, has become a minor celebrity for her role in “Dictionary Corner”, where she provides the Oxford definition of rare words and, in every show, offers a segment called “Origins of Words”.

Whether she ever dissected the origin of the word “crisis” I don’t know, but crisis is a word that’s worthy of discussion. Crisis is typically seen as something uniformly bad, a negative spiral to make us hold on tight and see through to its conclusion.

Look closer, though, and there are much deeper, much more hopeful resonances to be found. The etymology of crisis goes back to the Ancient Greek κρίσις or krísis, which was “a separating, a power of distinguishing, a decision, a choice, an election, a judgment or dispute”. Krísis itself derives from the verb κρίνω, or krínō, which means “to pick out, choose, decide, judge”.

Suddenly, it doesn’t seem so bad.

Of course, if every crisis spells salvation for some and doom for others, there is sure to be plenty of pain and suffering and anguish.

But equally, a different road, the road to salvation — it’s up to you to say exactly what that means for you — is available. As always, it will be the road less travelled by.

For software companies willing to hold the present moment of converging crises to the light and see how they might take advantage, there are obvious tailwinds among the pressing difficulties presented by what many experts warn will be a deep and general recession.

Indeed, many of the tailwinds will be created by the difficulties.

While many industry sectors find themselves curtailed by the real-world gravitational pull of energy and transport and manpower, when the precarious checks and balances just one day stop adding up, software’s competitive advantage is likely only to expand exponentially.

It’s worth considering, too, how early in the technological revolution we still might be. It’s always tempting to look around at our present and think one of two things — one, that most problems are already solved; or two, that the remaining unsolved problems are already in the crosshairs of major companies with massive budgets.

John Collison, co-founder of Stripe, remembers being told during his company’s earliest days, that he was too late to the party, that all the spoils had been safely divvied up by Visa and Mastercard and Bank of America and all the other big financial institutions who dominated the global payments infrastructure.

In an interview with Patrick O’Shaughnessy on the Invest Like the Best podcast in 2020, he said:

“When we were starting Stripe, one of the biggest obstacles we faced was people thinking ‘This is just a solved problem, there are already ways to accept money on the Internet, it’s the year 2009, I’m pretty sure we got this thing figured out.’”

Fast forward 14 years from those early challenges, and even with a 50% drop in its valuation in 2022–23, Stripe is still reputedly worth over $50 billion, making it one of the most valuable private companies in the world.

Now delete “payments” and drop in any of an endless list of problem areas: project management, profit & loss, budgeting, customer service, funding, cashflow management, indebtedness, general numeracy, political upheaval, travel, education, anxiety, depression, loneliness, dementia.

As the prescription drug side-effects sheet might say, everything “up to and including death”.

Can software solve them all?

Who knows.

But two points.

First, given the relative weightlessness of code in a world where the ability of fossil fuels to reduce time, space and gravity appears to be running out (or is, at least, an increasingly expensive and unpalatable choice), software will be centrally involved in solving all problems forevermore.

And second, for all that the iPhone and Stripe and WhatsApp and Slack, and countless SaaS products that offer everything from enterprise-architecture-in-the-cloud to solving one tiny recurring issue for a million bookkeepers, have cut through and succeeded in all their various markets, we are still firmly outside the ground floor of the skyscraper we’re building, gazing up to where the light from the rooftop restaurant of the future is peeping through the clouds.

4. The confused economist

“One of the things that really has everybody confused is, jobs are strong but growth is not. Productivity is just terrible! Is it because wages are higher than they seem, employers are distracted by the pressures to take on social issues, or just a global phenomenon? I don’t know what it is, but [there’s] a real disconnect between what’s going on with growth and what’s going on with labour.”
— Kenneth Rogoff, Harvard professor of economics and former IMF Chief Economist on Fox News

Out of all of this flux and chaos, crisis and opportunity, what will emerge?

It’s hard enough to predict general workaday cause-and-effect, never mind second and third order effects.

Is it unreasonable to suggest that the present economic challenges of rising inflation and panicking central banks could lead to bankrupt governments, in turn morphing into a debt spiral that prompts bank runs, collapsed pension funds and global civil unrest?

Given a wide enough time horizon, almost nothing is unreasonable.

Looking at the present, though, it’s easy to say that the combination — alluded to by Ken Rogoff — of almost full employment and tapering productivity is impossible to sustain.

He suggests that employers might have become distracted by the new commercial imperative of CSR, but equally likely, perhaps, is that many companies have been given an artificial runway by dint of vast funding availability, zero interest rates and government stimulus.

Eventually, the law of the farm applies: as you sow, so shall you reap. Those weird “A Day in the Life of a Tech Product Manager” videos — like this one, with peppermint matcha lattes, sushi, green tea ice-creams, apple-ginger juices, a handful of meetings and almost zero work — might be more about carefully orchestrated recruitment-in-disguise, but even if they’re partially representative, then it’s easy to see where wheat can be separated from chaff.

All of this plays into the hands of software companies that are high on vision and agility and have the power to dance the line between minimal costs and maximal value.

To achieve that, there is some hard work to be done: the emotional labour that comes with difficult conversations about difficult problems.

The old Henry Ford joke about market research — “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, I would have built a faster horse” — still has merit, but perhaps the most valuable skill of tech entrepreneurs, software engineers and product managers alike is the ability to download all of a prospect’s challenges, identify the underlying problem that has yet to be clearly articulated, and solve for that.

Hidden in this netherworld the express train to productivity, value and growth — and, just maybe, a billion-dollar IPO — awaits.

Playing a big part in whether you get there, or not, is old and undervalued skills: how you think about things, how you ask questions, how you listen and observe.

5. Beauty and the try-buy gap

To finish, let’s go back for a moment to the place we started: the “purple haze” that might represent a desirable atmosphere within a product.

For many software builders, high on left-brain rationality and logic, the functionality of the thing is all-important. As an old web developer friend used to say, “If it runs and works, it runs and works.”

This, however, is an incomplete worldview in whatever environment we’re now in, and it threatens to derail a product before it’s off the ground.

Because running and working is only a small part of the equation.

Software is not an Olympic sprint, with starting blocks calibrated to thousandth-of-a-second infringements and a straight line for all participants 100 metres away.

Software is much closer to a love affair.

For most software — enterprise grade to microSaaS browser add-on — there is almost always a wide bridge between the moment you try and the moment you buy.

Think of this bridge as the courtship phase.

Yes, some wooing has already taken place to get you to try — whether that’s a nicely optimised product page, compelling copywriting, micro-targeted YouTube ads or strong word of mouth.

But the real courtship comes in the try-buy gap, after you sign up and before you go hunting for your credit card.

And, just as in real-life love affairs, beauty — the purple haze of a transcendent atmosphere — plays a key role in every successful courtship.

What is beauty?

Beauty is, of course, undefinable.

It is much more than “in the eye of the beholder”.

Maybe beauty is truth, as in the well-remembered but ever-cryptic lines of the poet John Keats more than two centuries ago (although that presents another unanswerable question: what is truth?)

Another poet, another few hundred years further back, Dante Alighieri, wrote: “Beauty awakens the soul to act.”

Are we getting somewhere?

The key question is not, “what is beauty?”

The key question is, “what does beauty do?”

Beauty hugs us, holds us, lifts us up. Beauty stops us in our tracks and also makes us move forward effortlessly. Beauty takes us somewhere new and makes us feel at home.

The task of encapsulating beauty is the task that has gripped the minds of artists and writers and musicians for millennia.

Great art — a turn of phrase by Hemingway, an arresting array of notes in an Edgar cello concerto, the expression in a woman’s eyes in a Vermeer painting — presents to us something we cannot describe but instantly know.

We see what’s universal, and we see it instantly.

This is the challenge and the opportunity facing software.

Because beauty is fleeting, the endless pursuit of beauty can become an impossible quest that leads to the perfectionist’s paradox: I do what’s perfect, therefore I do nothing.

But this is what we sign up for.

Beauty lovingly holds the customer’s hands during the try-buy gap, and onwards through every step of their journey.

The moment beauty departs is the moment churn starts.

Logic and its brothers — functionality, utility, reliability — takes you so far.

Beauty and her sisters — love, soul, simplicity — carries you the rest of the way.

None of this, of course, has any place on a design brief.

Then again, a design brief will only ever get you a slightly faster horse.

— By Shane Breslin —

Thank you for reading. I write for globally ambitious businesses, helping them elevate their brand through writing that reaches for the stars. If you run or own a globally ambitious business and you’d like to talk about how I can help, please get in touch.