Joey DeBruin

Leaders with differing ideas naturally surface in groups of people, and it is equally natural for people to follow leaders and causes they believe in. Rather than replacing hierarchies, DAOs create a mechanism through which a single organisation can allow many hierarchical teams to explore different directions simultaneously.

This is great, though it still acts primarily as a sort of summer camp for entrepreneurship hopefuls, with a tight deadline in which they need to form teams, crack ideas and go to work. Goal orientedness is kind of the name of the game and the grant itself is de minimis .

If the program was ostensibly longer and/or more diverse in its intake this... See more

We are an exceptional software development team. But, we now also need be an excellent customer development team. That’s why, in the first section of this doc, I said “build a customer base” rather than “gain market share”: the nature of the task is different, and we will work together to understand, anticipate and better serve the people who trust... See more

Similarly, in a mature DAO, individuals will be able to understand a part of the network (local context), but they will not be able to appreciate it as a whole (global context). Individuals will interpret the DAO in their own way, and explore directions that affect their local context without having to consider the context of the whole. As they... See more

Just as much as our job is to build something genuinely useful, something which really does make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive, our job is also to understand what people think they want and then translate the value of Slack into their terms.

On the internet, websites are like buildings, hyperlinks are like roads, traffic comes in the form of people and information. It is a complex system with many interacting parts.

I suspect we humans do better with constraints; the Internet stripped away the constraint of physical distribution, and now AI is removing the constraint of needing to actually produce content. That this is spoiling the Internet is perhaps the best hope for finding our way back to what is real. Let the virtual world be one of customized content for... See more

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 that it... See more