Joey DeBruin

I think that cycle sometimes happens, but I think it’s more common for a community not to be ruined by sociopaths, but rather too many mops, whose mere presence taints the community and the brand for everyone else.

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.

There should be Retroactive Public Goods Funding for those founders crazy enough to try something truly new that failed as a business but succeeded in creating useful mutations, maybe even ticker tape parades, and certainly not derision.

Venture capital actually does a pretty great job here (the beauty of the model is a subject for a future piece, ... See more

Let’s say Farcaster, or other Web 3 social media like it, wants to run ads for the free version of the product. Rather than going out and building an entire ads system (as Facebook and every other social media publisher had to), they can use the composability and permissionlessness of Web 3 to spin up monetization quickly. Assuming an attribution s... See more

The importance of agentic program managers to the success of the ARPA model isn’t surprising or new. The “aha” was that the only way to cut through the paradox of inconsistent process leading to consistent success was that the agentic program leader may be the only thing that’s important to get right; everything else may be cargo-culting.

After many years of building and tens of millions of users, Notion now describes itself this way: “Every department’s work. In one tool.”  You can almost feel their internal struggle with language—the search for the right words. How can you describe something that is genuinely novel? What happens when something is so fundamentally different th... See more