Joey DeBruin

With a more decentralized structure, modern idea machines can “arm the rebels” right where they are, instead of hiring them into a foundation. The popularity of so-called regrantor programs (i.e. scout programs) reflects this trend, where talented individuals are given funding to make grants on behalf of the grantmaking organization.

Pen and paper took us as far as the moon. It's about time we went to the stars.

The best example of this alternative product is Indie.VC, run by Bryce Roberts. Over the course of 6 years, Indie invested in 40 companies. It held the two key components of limited fund size and gave equity optionality through redemption clauses or equity buybacks. The results are encouraging, with a 51% IRR and 4.3x TVPI, while 87% of the... See more

I think there are a few entrepreneurs that come out that have had protected their generative drive, protected their curiosity, their creativity as they manifest their aggressive drive, and they didn't let their pleasures and their enjoyment of success corrupt them in a way that took their eye off the ball.

But I think those three different drives... See more

Everyday, we land on the internet without a map. Instead, search is the dominant wayfinding paradigm. It is the information equivalent of exploring the local area at ground level. A search is a hypothesis, an instance of trial and error. With enough searches, we can usually get where we're going. However, we lack the overall context of how... See more

Consider vacuum tubes. It was obvious to nobody that they would enable the first computers. This only became clear after vacuum tubes and associated computing discoveries had been made, so that someone could make the connection. If you had set out to build a computer in the 1800s (as Charles Babbage did), it’s unlikely that you would have drawn... See more

There may be good reason to be optimistic about non-'scientists' taking part in science....Innocentive creates prizes to incentivise a distributed global network to solve specific problems for organisations who can't solve those problems in-house. Problems can be highly technical (see image below), and span across many domains. I will reuse... See more