It’s 2016. I’m sitting in a Facebook user research session watching young people talk about why they send each other memes. Outside Facebook’s campus, the world feels unsteady. Brexit. Trump. Syria. Migration.
And here I am, listening to a teenage girl explain why she sent a personality quiz to her friends.
She’s a Ravenclaw, she says. Next she’s showing us a post that “only Swifties understand” that she sent to her group chat. Then a video she sent her friend Sarah to cheer her up after Sarah’s boyfriend broke up with her.
At face value, what she’s sharing seems frivolous.
But one of the advantages of being young is that you haven’t yet learned which parts of yourself you’re supposed to dismiss. You haven’t built the armor that tells you the things you care about are embarrassing or unserious. You haven’t learned that you shouldn’t show you care.
Because the thing is—at this moment—this girl cares a lot. She cares about how her friends see her. She cares about how her Taylor fandom serves as a shortcut to belonging. She cares about her friend’s heartbreak.
These things aren’t frivolous.
They’re identity.
They’re belonging.
They’re connection.
If you don’t take those things seriously, then you don’t take being human seriously. And if you don’t take being human seriously, you can’t build the tools that help us do it better.
Famously, when TikTok first broke out, people wondered how teenage girls lip-syncing to pop songs could ever compete with Netflix. When Snapchat was pitched at Stanford, a competition judge told Evan Spiegel it was the dumbest idea he’d ever heard. The whole point of taking a photo is to save it. Today we see similar disbelief that humans would turn to AI for therapy and companionship. Why would humans talk to a computer about their most personal issues?
Despite the experts’ best predictions, these products exploded because they connected to something in the messy, unpredictable reality of being human.
A few weeks ago, as I was starting to put together pitch materials for our startup, I caught up with a VC friend who invests in B2B companies.
“Man,” she told me, “I don’t understand why you would want to build in consumer. I don’t get consumer. It’s so random.”
She’s not wrong. Consumer markets are punishing. The hits look inexplicable until they’re inevitable. Even the successes often can’t articulate why they worked.
But “hard to predict” isn’t the same as “random.”
Consumer building is experimental anthropology. You’re not optimizing against a known metric. You’re trying to notice something about people you feel, but can’t yet name. You’re paying attention, asking why one thing resonated and one thing didn’t. Trying again and again to get inside the head of another person to find something that captures their imagination.
The work is sitting with someone, walking through ideas you were convinced were it, and feeling the sting each time they shrug and say, “Yeah. Maybe.” It’s living that moment again and again, until you mention something you almost left out—an idea you weren’t fully sure about, maybe even a little embarrassed by—and you watch their expression change.
“Oh,” they say. “That’s cool.”
Of course, this isn’t how the story gets told in our culture. We prefer the myth of the genius founder who simply knew—who emerged from the desert with the perfect product. Who doesn’t want to be a prophet? But the real work is messier: iteration without a clear target, guided by curiosity instead of conviction.
This has always been true. Humans are famously unpredictable. It’s what makes us fun. It’s also what makes the consumer market so interesting in an age of AI.
AI keeps compressing what’s legible—you can spin up a SaaS tool from a prompt. Anything modelable will be modeled; anything optimizable will be optimized. Ask an AI for a SaaS idea and it will not only suggest something reasonable, it will build it for you.
So the only durable advantage lives in the part of our lives that resists formalization. The messy human thing. The part that’s dead by the time you’ve pinned it down.
There is no prompt for connection. No reward function for belonging.
But, ineffability isn’t a vice. It’s a comparative advantage. To play this consumer game means you, too, have to get out of the world of frameworks and models. You have to get comfortable sifting through the strange ambiguities of why humans like the things they like.
That means being willing to look foolish while explaining to your friends who work in finance why you find personality quizzes or memes so damn fascinating. It means taking people, and the things they choose to care about, seriously.
The people who end up drawn to this work are the ones who keep asking “Why?” long after it’s socially acceptable to move on. They step into the mess not because it’s comfortable, but because they can’t help themselves.
The Roman playwright Terence wrote: homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto—I am human, and nothing human is alien to me. Consumer builders take this as a mantra. They don’t wall off the weird—they know it’s the most interesting part of being human.
For those of us wired this way, who live for the moment when a puzzle clicks into place, when the strange becomes self-evident, when you finally understand why people do what they do—there’s no better work.
Those moments when someone leans forward, when the idea lands, you feel closer not only to a breakthrough, you feel closer to your humanity. Even if, to the outside world, you’re just talking about memes.