Joey DeBruin

For example, say you’re building a product for a niche market worth “only” $50 million. Who will invest in you?- VCs won’t touch you because the math doesn’t work out — they need investments that have a shot at returning the portfolio.- Banks won’t touch you because they only know how to underwrite going concerns — businesses with operating... See more

The idea to split us all into mini-Medicis through platforms like Patreon, if anything, has only further diluted the actual value. It's not just about the fact that they financially support you (that's called a customer, or a customer who tips generously), but that they actually help grow your potential by using their status and name and resources... 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.

From my POV some people innately have more conviction than others, sure, but most people don’t even try to build any of their own because they’re so used to blindly adopting the opinions of others

Why is Twitter—our global public square where tastes are made, people canceled, and heads of state threaten each other with nuclear hellfire—worth so little a billionaire can scrape together the cash to outright buy it? How is it possible that the upstream media source to everything bought or voted on is worth a pittance compared to Google or... See more

The reality is that there have been successful ARPA programs all over the spectrum. JCR Licklider “just” spelled out an extraordinary vision, found people who were aligned with it, and gave them resources. Only a few years later, Lawrence Roberts ran the ARPAnet program almost like a CEO: giving different people and groups parts of a broader... See more

Still, as Baszucki made clear, the goal is still actual social networking: surely that will always be better than interacting with an AI! Or will it? It seems to me that perhaps the most important constraint on the web — to actually interact with people as if they are, well, people — disappeared a long time ago.

The hard part about figuring out what customers want is figuring out that you need to figure it out