Joey DeBruin
@joeydebruin
Helping communities build public knowledge online. Founder @withBackdrop. Past/current product/advisory roles @Benchling @ResearchGate @Forefront__ @SeedClub
Joey DeBruin
Vertical integration is typically the dominant strategy when industries are in their early stages or undergoing significant transformation, when market structures are unclear, supply chains are underdeveloped, and new technologies are emerging. Companies that can control more of the value chain can introduce new products that the market needs faste... See more
Packy McCormick • Vertical Integrators: Part II
Web 3 will have ads too. It already does in fact, they’re called NFT or token drops (essentially, giveaways that exploit the ability to send to any wallet). Not only do we have ads, we have ads fraud. When Optimism, a Level 2 chain that tries to make transacting cheaper, announced their token drop, thousands of fake users signed up to ‘farm’ the dr... See more
Antonio Garcia Martinez • Everything is an ad network
Feeling like you’re worth listening to is a byproduct of making hard decisions and teasing out of them cohesive and convincing personal stories that help you make sense of the world.
Molly Mielke • confidence
If philanthropy is pluralistic – and, like any idea marketplace, that is one of its virtues – then there is no single school of thought that can “solve” complex social questions, because everyone has a different vision for the world. If you’re pro-pluralism in startups, you should also be pro-pluralism in philanthropy.
Nadia Asparouhova • Idea Machines
So what’s the alternative? Well, novelty search is a form of non-objective search. Instead of following the stepping stones that appear to lead to the objective, simply collect stepping stones that lead in interesting directions. Focus on newness, regardless of where it leads.
Oliver Hunt • DAOs as novelty search engines
what would federalism look like on Twitter—could the network be split into regions that have some degree of local autonomy?
every.to • Twitter as a City-State
Correct attribution in Web3 isn’t some horrible intrusion of skeumorphic Web 2 machinery, it’s a way to correctly credit a digital asset (and ultimately its owner) with the revenue they produced, in whatever downstream form. It’s the causal link that joins a human interacting with virtual goods and the very real revenue they eventually generate.
Antonio Garcia Martinez • Attribution rules the world (and it'll rule Web3 too)
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 h... See more
Software is expensive to create. You have to pay people to create it, maintain it, and distribute it. Because software is expensive to create, it has to make money. And we pay for it–software licenses, SaaS, per seat pricing, etc. Software margins have historically been an architectural envy–90+% margins and zero marginal cost of distribution.
Software is expensive because developers are expensive. They are skilled translators–they translate human language into computer language and vice-versa. LLMs have proven themselves to be remarkably efficient at this and will drive the cost of creating software to zero. What happens when software no longer has to make money? We will experience a Cambrian explosion of software, the same way we did with content.