Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Founders as curators
Snap's founder, Evan, turned down better ideas than almost any other consumer startup launch. Watching him led to a goal for working with founders at high-growth companies: help them become the richest museum curators in the world, where whatever sits in the product at any one time is what the curator judges right for that time and place in society.
Finding restraint
Restraint is one of the few muscles of taste a person can exercise. A way to find it in an interview is to ask about things the candidate built and never shipped: prototypes they held in their hands and judged the world was not ready for. A person with a shelf of good ideas like that has been using the muscle. A museum with its whole collection on the walls has a curator who has done nothing.
The same pattern shows up in people with taste in art. They stop one step before everybody else does, and let a trend go once it starts to jump the shark.
Why do museums show only part of their collections?
Most large museums keep the majority of their holdings in storage and rotate works onto the walls for particular exhibitions. Paper, photographs, and textiles are rotated partly because light damage accumulates the longer they are displayed. Wall space is also limited, and a show with a clear theme needs far fewer objects than a museum owns. A curator's main output is the selection.
Why does jump the shark mean a decline?
The phrase comes from a 1977 episode of the sitcom Happy Days in which the character Fonzie water-skis over a shark. Critics later pointed to it as the moment the show ran out of ordinary ideas and reached for stunts. Jon Hein turned the phrase into a general term for the moment a series declines and launched a website about it in 1997. It now gets applied to products, brands, and trends as well as television.
Why did Dieter Rams favor less?
Rams was the chief design officer at the German appliance maker Braun from 1961 to 1995. He summed up his approach in the phrase weniger, aber besser, which means less, but better. His ten principles of good design include the line that good design is as little design as possible. His radios, calculators, and shavers for Braun are held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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