Artwork by David Hockney. “Mulholland Drive”, 1980, Los Angeles.
The most enduring businesses are born from creativity that is turned into systems. They begin with a spark so compelling, so emotionally resonant, that it earns loyalty before it earns margin. This is because creativity isn’t just an input; it’s the wellspring. A product becomes a business the moment someone falls in love with it. A business becomes a brand the moment that love scales.
We often talk about business through the lens of operational excellence: how to scale supply chains, optimize unit economics, or master the CAC-to-LTV equation. These things matter to build a sustainable business. But what precedes all of it—what makes any of the operational work truly worth doing—is the imaginative leap that compels someone to care about your product in the first place.
Creativity is the origin story of every iconic, enduring company.
Companies like LVMH and Kering are not just luxury groups. They’re businesses that incepted a system that scaled taste and expert-level craftsmanship into business empires. It’s the reason you see LVMH and Kering investing in the arts, from grant programs to museums. The more luxury brands invest in the core arts and culture around them, the more they fuel the creative aura of their ecosystems. It’s a fuel to the business of commerce.
Pixar didn’t start by optimizing animation pipelines—it began with crafting a storyboard. Apple turned industrial design into a cultural religion. Apple didn’t scale on utility alone, it built a machine for producing elegance, down to the sound a box makes when it opens. A24 made curatorial discernment its entire business model and disrupted media giants as a result. The through line for all of these companies is the importance of treating creativity as the core engine of a profitable business working as intended.
These companies don’t treat creativity as an afterthought. They structure around it. They protect it, operationalize it, scale it. That’s the difference. Creativity isn’t fragile, but it needs a system. And when you build one well, the system becomes a flywheel. A brand. A culture. A business. Once the engine works, once it resonates, then the systems come in: brand architecture, distribution, licensing, pricing models, CRM, logistics. That’s the beauty of it. Systems scale a product. But only creativity can birth one that’s worth scaling.
This idea is a personal one to me, a through line in my life and career. One funny example of this is a time in middle school when most kids printed their book reports on glossy folders for our summer reading assignment. I came in carrying a cardboard build out of life-size denim pants stuffed with cotton balls for my report on The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. A little over the top for a 6th grade project, but it taught me early on that the extra mile matters. The detail people don’t expect is the one they never forget.
Years later, I was walking through the courtyard of Kering’s headquarters in Paris when Gregory Boutté handed me a small canister of honey, made by bees kept on their lavender-filled campus. That detail stayed with me; not because of its monetary value, but because it revealed something deeper about the company’s soul. Real creativity obsesses over the full sensory experience.
I see the same principle in my own creative process through poetry. Poetry is where I process emotion, sharpen instinct, and deepen taste. It’s not separate from the work, it’s upstream of it. Nearly every product idea I’ve had has come from a moment of creative play, from following my curiosity without an agenda. It’s why I’ve stopped separating creativity from strategy. The former feeds the latter. The more creativity I allow into my life, the better my judgment becomes.
This is my one gripe with MBA programs. Many of them teach students how to tend the machine, not how to see where the machine should begin. Instead of structured programs, I believe experiential knowledge is more necessary today than ever, especially with the rapid rise of AI. These tools don’t replace creative instinct, they aim to amplify it. They raise the stakes. The more you train your eye and sharpen your taste, the more you build from true necessity and authenticity. The business becomes a flywheel system, built around the product at its core.
The myth that creativity can’t scale is one of the most persistent lies in business. And it’s held a lot of people back, especially those who identify as artists, designers, or generalists. But in my own work and in the companies I’m inspired by, I’ve seen the opposite: creativity isn’t inherently chaotic. It just needs the right containers, a natural environment that feeds it. A system doesn’t kill creativity; it protects it, repeats it, distributes it. As Scott Belsky put it to me, “the art of a great business often lies in the things that don’t—and maybe shouldn’t—scale. True creative scale comes not from generating more ideas, but from aligning deeply around the right one.”
This is the real work of building a great consumer business. It’s not just about finding product-market fit. It’s about capturing a creative instinct: an emotional insight, a visual language, a new way of seeing and translating that into a structure other people can contribute to. That’s the difference between a fleeting idea and an enduring business. The latter is designed to sustain its imagination.
This is also why I believe AI will be a generational unlock, not just for productivity, but for creativity. For the first time, anyone can visualize an idea, remix references, simulate scenarios, generate options, and iterate all in a matter of seconds. AI, for all its noise, is a multiplier. Creativity can now be rendered, tested, and evolved at scale. You don’t need a team of ten designers to shape a world. You can do it with tools that expand your imagination. It’s an accelerant for creativity that’s never existed before and it opens the door to businesses that start with soul, not spreadsheets.
The next wave of great companies will be built with strong creative instincts from the very beginning. Knowing that this is an edge versus something to dilute down, we can look to incept company ideas from our own well of creative energy that can evolve into sharing authentic products and services with communities of people. And this also means carrying through businesses across disciplines, allowing for the perspectives of filmmakers, writers, technologists, creatives, and artists alike to be folded into the conversation. To know that business efficiency matters, but resonance is what endures.