Joey DeBruin

What happens when you add personality or an opinionated aesthetic to a given AI tool is you create a community that feels allegiance to your product in a deeper way than just ROI, perhaps allowing for products to compete with larger, more general purpose models, or just better-funded organizations.

An Idea Machine is a self-sustaining organism that contains all the parts needed to turn ideas into outcomes:- It starts with a distinct ideology, which becomes a memetic engine that drives the formation of a community- The community’s members start generating ideas amongst themselvesEventually, they form an agenda, which articulates how the... 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

What if investors could directly fund product R&D within existing companies, taking risk in exchange for a future share of revenue?

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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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

If philanthropy is pluralistic – and, like any idea marketplace, that is one of its virtues – then there is no single school of thought that can “solve” complex social questions, because everyone has a different vision for the world. If you’re pro-pluralism in startups, you should also be pro-pluralism in philanthropy.