Joey DeBruin

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

This realization made several things click:

1. All program managers are program leaders but not all program leaders are managers. Licklider and many other PMs did not manage but they did lead (even if the ideas were not their own). (As such, I think the term “program leader” is much more accurate and I’ve started using it to describe the position

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This is the overall promise of your startup. Expert level performance through appropriate use of your software to speed up a defined part of a businesses’ key workflow.

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

Let’s say Farcaster, or other Web 3 social media like it, wants to run ads for the free version of the product. Rather than going out and building an entire ads system (as Facebook and every other social media publisher had to), they can use the composability and permissionlessness of Web 3 to spin up monetization quickly. Assuming an attribution... 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.

The federal regulation of foundations didn’t mean the death of idea machines, however. It just meant that that foundations were no longer the best place to house them. It’d be like if the government decided to heavily regulate Delaware C Corps: if it were bad enough, founders would stop using them for startups, but they’d eventually find some other... See more

By the mid-20th century, foundations had reached the height of their power and influence, triggering a congressional investigation into whether foundations were manipulating public opinion and thought. The lawyer Rene Wormser, who wrote the final report, described foundations as a “cartel” that threatened to direct our entire intellectual and... See more