Joey DeBruin

genius is about caring about something more than a reasonable person cares about anything; actualized genius is the product of obsessive patterns of thought, coupled with raw intellectual power, carried through a lifetime.

Non consensus approaches to picking businesses

With an intake process that emphasizes past accomplishments and interviews rather than bureaucratic credentials, and with an ethos of taking chances on those who show promise rather than weeding out those who might fail, YC has been able to select charismatic and energetic candidates for its program. The three-month program serves as the foundation... See more

Web 3 will have ads too. It already does in fact, they’re called NFT or token drops (essentially, giveaways that exploit the ability to send to any wallet). Not only do we have ads, we have ads fraud. When Optimism, a Level 2 chain that tries to make transacting cheaper, announced their token drop, thousands of fake users signed up to ‘farm’ the dr... See more

As we see base models continue to proliferate, and fine-tuned models begin to sit on top of them, our hypothesis is that these “thin layer” products should focus on having a clear opinion of how they form the output or how they shape the human to AI interaction layer. Put simply, the maximally viable product in AI is likely not where the vast major... See more

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

By analogy, it should act like a Google search, in that users can ask questions of any part of the scientific record. However, it should be unlike a Google search in that it synthesises information across all search results to produce a systems-level understanding of the search query, accessible to the user through many kinds of rich, dynamic repre... See more

I’m personally much more interested in machine intelligence as human augmentation rather than the oft-hyped AI assistant as a separate embodiment.

The modern Idea Machine better reflects how people self-organize today. They are decentralized, more closely intertwined with public dialogue, and work symbiotically with a community that anyone can join: many individual nodes operating in a loosely-organized network, instead of a monolithic organization.