Cristóbal Valenzuela


What Makers Want

September 2026

I read about an experiment where people are paid to build little Lego action figures called Bionicles. They’re paid for each one they complete, but each one pays a little less than the last. $2 for finishing the first one, $1.89 for the second, and 11 cents less for each one after.

The builders are split into two groups. In one group, each Lego figure is taken apart after it’s finished and the pieces put back in the box. In the other, completed figures are kept intact and lined up on the desk in front of them. The more figures they build, the fuller the desk gets.

The second group keeps building longer, even as they get paid less and less.

People want to get paid, sure, but they also want their work to amount to something. At the most basic level, they want their work not to disappear the second it’s done. And that’s just in an experiment.

In real life, work gets tangled up with who you are and how you spend your life. People want something to show for their work. They want to see their creations in their hands, on screen, on display, out in the real world. They want to go to dinner with friends and family, show them something, and say, I made that.

The Valley likes its binaries. Mercenaries versus missionaries. And all the talk about how much we prefer to work with the latter. The Lego experiment draws out a third motivation that the binary misses. For makers, making the thing and the finished thing itself are part of the reward, along with the simple recognition of having made it.

The headlines make AI research look a lot like free agency. Researchers swapping team jerseys and getting poached by big labs and bigger offers. Some of this is real. But the best people always have options. A lot of companies can pay them well. Not that many can give them something genuinely hard and new to work on that really matters.

There are different kinds of things people want to have made.

Some people want to take a new capability and figure out how to package it, get it into people’s hands, make it a bit more useful. Others want to be on the ground floor of creating an entirely new capability. Every technology wave has people moving the frontier, and others figuring out what to build with what just became possible.

I’ve always been drawn to creating that new thing. There’ll always be another chance to arbitrage what’s already been made. And there’s something hard to really price about getting to create the primitive that other people eventually build on. That motivation to keep finding the next crazy thing has kept me playing the long game.

The beauty of building on the frontier is there’s reward on both ends.

There’s a reward while you’re making the thing, especially when it’s hard enough that you don’t know if you can and important enough that people care that you figure it out. Then there’s the thing you’ve brought to life. Over time, the artifacts add up to a body of work. And the body of work becomes part of the reward.

The long-term version of this is pretty simple. Once people make one thing they’re proud of, they tend to want to make another. And it’s nice when the people you spend all day making stuff with feel like your kind of people, and you admire them. You admire how they think, how they approach their craft, their values and standards, their taste.

An underappreciated part of choosing where you work is choosing who you want to become more like.

The pay should still be good. But by then, it’s not the only thing keeping you there. A place where you keep getting to make things you’re proud of, surrounded by people you respect, becomes a place you want to stay.

Mercenaries want money. Missionaries want purpose. Makers want to make. They may want money and purpose too, but they want them by way of what they create. Makers want something they’re proud to have made, with people they’re proud to have made it with. Something they hope stays standing when the work is done.

Something to show for it.