Joey DeBruin

Early-stage venture capital investments take a long time to come to fruition. These or other YC companies from after Graham’s tenure may yet prove to be economically and culturally important like their forerunners. The evidence so far, however, suggests that their impact is well below that of earlier YC companies of similar age, in spite of their... See more

This is never how it actually happens, but you get the idea. Startups should receive risk capital to literally derisk certain aspects of the business.

However, over the last decade or so, something shifted. Traditional venture funds that specialized in early-stage risk started to add buckets of “growth equity” that were supposed to be utilized for... See more

Idea machines are not new, but the form in which they appear is changing. For most of the 20th century, the home for idea machines was foundations, first popularized by John D. Rockefeller in the 1910s.

DAOs are a generating system for discovery, with people and information as its parts.

We are unlikely to be able to sell “a group chat system” very well: there are just not enough people shopping for group chat system (and, as pointed out elsewhere, our current fax machine works fine).

That’s why what we’re selling is organizational transformation

The importance of agentic program managers to the success of the ARPA model isn’t surprising or new. The “aha” was that the only way to cut through the paradox of inconsistent process leading to consistent success was that the agentic program leader may be the only thing that’s important to get right; everything else may be cargo-culting.

Because foundations can exist into perpetuity [4], they can even be usurped and weaponized towards other goals.

I think that cycle sometimes happens, but I think it’s more common for a community not to be ruined by sociopaths, but rather too many mops, whose mere presence taints the community and the brand for everyone else.