Lead with Love, Build with Care: What Every Founder Can Learn from Jonathan Ive
Why Love and Care Are the Ultimate Competitive Advantages for Founders
Dear Readers,
From time to time, I write about something that impresses me to the core and something I learn.
The following story was based on a recent interview with Jonathan Ive, Apple’s renowned designer, who shared his life and business lessons. The talk was a true gem that founders (and anyone) can benefit from. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Please give it a “like” or share it with others if it resonates with you.
Marianne
It used to infuriate me before I came to have a more generous interpetation…People generally want to talk about product attributes that you can easily measure with a number…The problem is much of my contribution, designers, and other creatives can’t easily be measured by a number…the insidious lie follows: we spend all our time talking about attributes because we can easily measure them, therefore it is all that matters, and that’s a lie; it’s important but a partial truth…
All the stuff designers and other creatives can contribute to an experience or to a product that can make it delightful and joyful to use, as well as more productive (if it’s delightful and joyful, things tend to be used more), are equally important.
In a rare interview with Stripe’s founder, Patrick Collison, Jonathan Ive, Apple’s most influential industrial designer of the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, shared his lessons at the 2025 Stripe Sessions, its annual conference.
Love and care can transform product design and company culture just as much as other hard, measurable qualities. Yet, this is often overlooked. By integrating love and care into the foundation of building — be it products, teams, or companies — the products bring about a more meaningful and lasting impact.
People who use iPhones have admired their elegant look, the simple user interface, and functional design that comes with a multitouch screen and virtual keyboard, integrating a phone, browser, music players, and powerful cameras. These elegant phones changed people’s lives.
All of Ive’s designs reflect his deep care and effort to maximize efficiency and comfort for the users. “There is beauty when something works and it works intuitively”, said Ive.
What are some inspirations and lessons founders can learn from Jonathan Ive in building meaningful and enduring businesses?
There are 5 key areas:
Defining a clear north star.
Crafting experiences with love.
Building teams grounded in care and connection.
Measuring impact beyond metrics.
Embracing responsibility and evolution in technology.
First, let us explore the influential people and philosophies that have shaped Ive’s design approach.
A Designer Rooted in Care
Jonathan Ive was captivated by the simplicity and functionality of his father’s Braun razor, designed by the legendary Dieter Rams.
Rams’ “Ten Principles For Good Design” became a guiding light for Ive.
Good design is: innovative; makes a product useful; aesthetic; makes a product understandable; honest; long-lasting; thorough down to the last detail; environmentally friendly; and as little design as possible.
In brief, good design is less, but better.
Lesson for founders: design our products and services with clarity and purpose, rather than embellishing fancy features that may not be functional or easy to use.
Ive has been equally influenced by Steve Jobs, who shared a close creative partnership rooted in shared ideals, especially care, attention, and user empathy.
The British designer, Richard Seymour, described the bond between Jobs and Ive as one that has a vision, and the other makes it real. Jobs empowered Ive to lead the design group with autonomy, focus, and obsession with detail.
Lessons for founders: visions need to be combined with thoughtful design and detailed implementation. Embrace delegation and ensure the right, aligned talent has the power and autonomy.
To perfect the super-thin aluminium unibody for Apple’s laptops and iPads, Ive studied and visited Japanese metalworkers to learn how to hammer metal thin and use high-grade titanium and aluminium. Also influenced by his father, who is a skilled silversmith, Ive develops a deep appreciation of the materials he works with and respects traditional techniques.
Lessons for founders: do our homework and pay attention to “finishing the back of the drawer”, i.e., unseen details, and how the quality of our product makes people feel and impacts their lives. By deeply understanding a product from its raw to finished state, we can make things that become truly appropriate and functional for users.
Defining a Clear North Star
Ive believes that creation begins with a clear purpose — to enable and inspire people, followed by a conviction and a resolve to make it happen.
Innovation, to him, is not being different or breaking things apart, but creating something better, a thoughtful and purposeful advancement.
Ive’s design is associated with minimalism, clarity, and simplicity. He aims at bringing order to chaos. To him, simplicity is not about removing clutter but “succinctly expressing the essence of something, and its purpose and role in our lives”.
Importantly, Ive’s work brings a sense of joy. In Silicon Valley’s line of work, joy and humour are often missing. Our state of mind is ultimately embodied in our work. If we are consumed by anxiety, that is how our work will end up. Therefore, it is important to bring hope, optimism, and joy to our practice—it is likely how our product will end up.
Crafting Experiences with Love
Ive told the story of how he spent an copious amount of time designing how people unwrap an Apple box and manage the cable because he deeply cared for the people and their experience. He recited something beautiful Steve Jobs had said:
When you make something with love and care, even the people you make it for, you don’t know their story, it is a way of expressing our gratitude to our species.
By crafting products that invoke a sense of wonder and delight, by obsessing over the smallest details, by making things with focus on their core function and not unnecessary detail, by making the products easy to understand and use, Ive is conveying respect and consideration for the user, providing her an intuitive and delightful experience.
This deeply resonates with me. When we design our investment technology software to guide people to create and customize their investment portfolios, we strip down to display only the core information on the screen (with little financial jargon) and minimize the number of clicks for people to reach the final destination — their investment portfolios, accompanied by bold but coherent and beautiful visuals to make the journey delightful and information accessible. Investing already seems like a black box for people, so they deserve ease, intuition, and joy when using our product.
Building Teams Grounded in Care and Connection
When asked what the rituals of his design team were, Ive highlighted a clear process where people know their role and contribution, a safe space for people to listen to, trust, and care for each other, and team rituals that bring people together.
At Apple, every Friday morning, his team took turns to make breakfast for each other. Ive would also bring interns into his home and encourage people to work together. This fosters trust, connection, and vulnerability among the team, important to build collaboration and creativity. Ive sat quietly and listened to everyone for their opinions (as he believes people are desperate to express themselves), in the process not only embracing diverse experiences but also building authentic relationships.
Measuring Impact Beyond Metrics
Recall the beginning quote of this article, I showed how Ive criticized the industry’s overreliance on easily quantifiable attributes (schedule, cost, speed, weight, etc.) to judge a designer’s work and impact.
Instead, he believes the qualitative experience of the user — joy and emotional response — is a more important measure of success.
He said we should confront care as we would confront a person. Customers are very sophisticated and sense carelessness in a product or design.
His design approach incorporates diverse perspectives and experiences, reflecting his humanity in design and gratitude to the customers.
Our mindset and team psychology can influence the quality of our products. Founders should not only promote a positive and focused mindset among their teams but also nurture a healthy work environment to ensure their team’s well-being and productivity.
Embracing Responsibility and Evolution in Technology
I think even if you’re innocent in your intention, I think if you’re involved in something that has poor consequences, you need to own it. ~ Jonathan Ive
An iPhone, while a useful and elegant product, nevertheless has unintended effects on society, the most notable being the impact on our attention span, addiction to social media, and other harms.
There will be unintended consequences when innovating; even if the creator has no intention, they still have a responsibility.
The rate of change of technology is dangerously fast, and the time to set up infrastructure to deal with these shifts is often not enough. Ive has been encouraged by the discussions around AI safety as the technology flourishes and blooms, but he is worried that there is no conversation on the consequences of social media on human behaviour.
During his interview, Ive reflected on how Victorian industrialists and early designers built not just products, but housing, towns, and whole social systems. He respects that they saw design as part of civic duty.
Ive also reminded as we are growing our companies, what we started is not what we finish, and we need to adjust constantly. We need to figure out what we are not going to compromise— focus on your principles, values, and motivation.
As founders, our focus should not only be speed, features, and profits, but also ask ourselves:
How does this tool that we have built change behaviour?
What emotions or habits does it encourage?
Could it be misused, and how?
Are we creating value for humanity, or just for the market?
My co-founder and I mulled over why we built our investment software and not just how and what. In the end, we concluded we created “True Finance for the Masses” because using data, technology and our decades of investment expertise, our solution meticulously targets an investor’s objective and risk profile to the appropriate investment strategies (and not just automatically put each investor into a risk bucket and suggest a model portfolio), thereby increasing the probability of reaching the wealth goal of the customers for a successful outcome.
LEGO is another company that exhibits love and care for its customers. They have kept brick compatibility unchanged since 1958 — so a grandpa’s LEGO will fit perfectly with his grandkid’s today. Their products are built with storytelling, accessibility, trust, timelessness, durability, and emotional continuity in mind, creating trust across generations and decades, envy for every builder, creative, and entrepreneur.
Whether we are writing a story, researching a thesis, or building a product, we can use Jonathan Ive’s “love and care” principles as our guidepost:
Defining a clear north star.
Crafting experiences with love.
Building teams grounded in care and connection.
Measuring impact beyond metrics.
Embracing responsibility and evolution in technology.
Founders like ourselves want others to use our products, and we truly believe we are creating something the world needs.
By integrating Ive’s design principles into their ventures, founders can create products and cultures that resonate deeply with users, fostering meaningful and lasting impact and leading to enduring success, without losing sight of their ethical responsibility.
This was a wonderful gem of an interview and an authentic sharing of Jony’s valuable life and business lessons for all walks of life. I would refer to it regularly. I highly recommend it.