Joey DeBruin

Samo's Law of Funding: The more money an organization is supposed to give out, the less likely it is to fund unusual people.

To those who say, “Well, wouldn’t it be better if the person with good ideas had been the one to get fabulously wealthy instead?” – sure, but in the same way that a founder wants to focus on building their company, not being an investor, sometimes “idea operator” types aren’t the same people who have eight-to-ten-figure startup outcomes. In this wo... See more

Great ideas tend to come from a single mind and leadership is a requirement for effective human collaboration. Hierarchies are well-optimised to enable strong leaders to achieve strong outcomes. DAOs do not get around this fact. Hierarchies work because they enable leaders to synthesise the contributions of a group.

This is one of the fundamental errors of tech thinking. For a certain class of problems caused by technology (e.g., climate change, traffic accidents, electrical fires), yes, the solution is more technology. But for tech-induced human problems like loneliness, anxiety,… Show more

DAOs are a generating system for discovery, with people and information as its parts.

Defined broadly, ‘ads’ are pieces of paid, targeted media meant to drive user behavior in a specific direction .... Web 3 marketing will be radically different in ways that are hard to imagine now (though we’ll try in a moment), which is why it’s key to get the attribution system right first. With the media cash register in place, the budding web 3... See more

The fact that there is a newthing has come to feel like a certainty, even as we cannot fully perceive it. This will spark a search for underlying structures, analogs, and ways of being that feel natural to this newthing.

Does the newthing exist in this context or some other one?

Is it a newthing that’s meant to run all the time or is it more seasonal... See more

Early-stage venture capital investments take a long time to come to fruition. These or other YC companies from after Graham’s tenure may yet prove to be economically and culturally important like their forerunners. The evidence so far, however, suggests that their impact is well below that of earlier YC companies of similar age, in spite of their h... See more

A genuine interest in something is a very powerful motivator — for some people, the most powerful motivator of all. [3] Which is why it's what Jessica and I look for in founders.