Joey DeBruin
@joeydebruin
Helping communities build public knowledge online. Founder @withBackdrop. Past/current product/advisory roles @Benchling @ResearchGate @Forefront__ @SeedClub
Joey DeBruin
The Great Pharma Wasteland
genengnews.com
The best lead generation companies usually have some combination of a distinguished and highly trusted brand and a proprietary channel or value proposition they use to acquire customers that competitors cannot replicate. These companies typically have staying power and defensibility, are highly differentiated, and immensely more valuable than... See more
Marketplaces, Lead Generation, and Brokerages
How to de-risk building a social network
The components that have the most engineering scope tend to be wholly reusable—such as the friendfinder & invite system. The fastest way to arrive at an app that resonates is to run rapid experiments by only changing the interaction model
If you’re trying to replicate DARPA’s success, most of the structural bits are a distraction. They’re certainly useful, but if you don’t get the agentic program leader piece right, nothing else matters.
Ben Reinhardt • The ARPA Model isn't what you think it is
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.
The trick is to collide your mental model with the outside world as often as possible. This is what exploring does.
Henrik Karlsson • Almost Everyone I’ve Met Would Be Well-Served Thinking More About What to Focus On
Learning loops and Focus
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.
Nadia Asparouhova • Idea Machines
Why do some people achieve so many of the things they want, and others not? Do people have a fixed budget of things they can achieve in a lifetime? It doesn’t seem so. Rather, it seems like our achievement budget is a function of the number of priorities we have. Interestingly, it seems to be a nonlinear function. Meaning that if you go from 4... See more
Henrik Karlsson • Almost Everyone I’ve Met Would Be Well-Served Thinking More About What to Focus On
A central thesis is that all products are asking things of their customers: to do things in a certain way, to think of themselves in a certain way — and usually that means changing what one does or how one does it; it often means changing how one thinks of oneself.