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 tr... See more

My point in sharing all of this is that sometimes I feel like we get too caught up in the words, and forget to disregard them. Especially (in the context of this essay) as builders of new technology products.“How will I describe this to an investor, or at a dinner party with friends?”"What’s the one-liner that describes why this will be better?”“Wh... See more

Defined broadly, ‘ads’ are pieces of paid, targeted media meant to drive user behavior in a specific direction .... Web 3 marketing will be radically different in ways that are hard to imagine now (though we’ll try in a moment), which is why it’s key to get the attribution system right first. With the media cash register in place, the budding web 3... See more

Let's take a moment to compare the beginning and the end of our 336 year journey:... It's hard to ignore that they are shockingly similar. (see image in article of publication from 1700s and today)

just as in physical territory, online territory starts out as default autocratic, then only can become democratic through revolt, revolution, and reform. 

The Web of the future however will be about individual creators, their creative, and their audiences. It will also be about brands and developers, and their direct relationships with users and consumers. It will not be about gated publisher platforms, ad networks, and middle-men data brokers. That lot will (hopefully) be replaced by open protocols ... See more

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

Belief in oneself and one’s vision for how the world could be different is what fosters a cult — or what I like to call the “atomic unit of human coordination.”