Joey DeBruin

The downside of lead generation businesses is that they can be a race to the bottom if they're in a crowded and competitive market. The barriers to entry are essentially aggregating supply (i.e. buyers of leads or businesses willing to pay for new customers) so there is little in the way of defensibility. The other downside is that they are very... See more

I don’t think ‘public utility’ is the most useful metaphor to understand what Twitter and its peers actually are.Public utilities make sense when the product is a simple commodity, essential for everyday life, and delivered through a set of pipes that are incredibly expensive to install and maintain.

One of our theories is to seek out opportunities where there’s a major change. Major dislocation in the way things are. Wherever there’s turmoil, there's indecision. And wherever there’s indecision, there’s opportunity. So we look for the confusion when the big companies are confused. When the other venture groups are confused. That’s the time to... See more

The beginning is not with an idea but with the feeling towards an idea. Something you feel but do not know. It makes you anxious and gives you somersaults inside if you try to explain.

If you ignore this feeling it will go away, finding another soul open to its directions.

If you pay too much attention it will also go away, being made nervous by such... See more

What we need is the YC of talent identification and encouragement. We either need Thiel to step up and 100x his fellowship, or a 100 other billionaires to step up and stop whining about talent.

When I was younger, I was never this lucky. It is partly because I was less skilled. But it is also partly because I would interrupt the nonconscious processing back then. Unintentionally, I would tell my brain to focus on something else—a conflict in a TV series I was watching, for instance. I would watch an episode before bed, and the cliffhanger... See more

Focus accelerates the accumulation of skills and accurate world models. In open-ended domains, such as writing, relationships, or business, there is nearly endless room for skill growth.

If you think about it though, the one piece of core Web 2 infrastructure where the blockchain is actually the most natural way to engineer things is … attribution. What else is a company like Branch Metrics (my former employer) or the internal attribution system at giants like Facebook, but a large, distributed, semi-private ledger of online events... See more

When token go up is no longer a law of physics and money is no longer free, the challenge of number go up—where the numbers are users or revenue—becomes much harder to solve. Right now, Web 3 companies are at pains to even measure those numbers, much less manipulate the few levers they have to make sure they do go up.