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By on

Omacom Foundation welcomes Brian Armstrong and Yunjie Dai

The Omacom Foundation keeps compounding! Two more Founding Patrons have joined our mission with $1 million each, taking our treasury chest to $12 million: Brian Armstrong and Yunjie Dai.

Brian Armstrong is cofounder and CEO of Coinbase, which was born using Ruby on Rails, and grew into the top spot for crypto with over a hundred million users. Brian was also early to say no to political nonsense at work when he declared Coinbase a mission-focused company back in 2020. He took a ton of heat for that stance at the time, but has since been thoroughly vindicated (a true man of the Night’s Watch!).

And on crypto, well, I changed my mind years ago. With Brian on board, we’re going to make Omarchy a great place for crypto. Because we can fix everything!

Yunjie Dai is a games entrepreneur from China who runs TapTap, one of the country’s largest game discovery and distribution platforms. One that takes no revenue share from developers. But I’ll let him introduce himself, because the letter he sent was wonderful:

21 years ago, in 2005, I had just graduated from college when I watched your video building a blog with Ruby on Rails and TextMate on Mac OS X in about 15 minutes. I bought a white MacBook soon after, left Windows behind, bought TextMate, and started learning Ruby. It dramatically changed how much I enjoyed coding.

I’m a games entrepreneur from China, and my family and I now live in the U.S. We build games, and we also run TapTap… Unlike the App Store or Google Play, we take no revenue share from developers, while still operating at meaningful scale and profitably. That instinct feels close to what I’ve always admired about 37signals: stay independent, earn your keep, don’t extract rent just because you can, and build something useful enough that people choose to stay.

20 years ago, Apple made the coolest software in the world. Today, that sense of ambition feels largely gone. I think a lot of us are waiting for an operating system that feels exciting again — modern, opinionated, and truly made for developers. And now, with AI making software increasingly malleable, openness matters more than ever: the system itself should be something we can understand, change, and make our own. Omarchy feels like it could be that.

When Steve Jobs was building the Mac, he saw his team as pirates — they even flew a pirate flag over their building. “Better to be a pirate than join the navy.” Omarchy gives me a little of that same feeling. Maybe it’s time for the pirates again. 🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️

Couldn’t have said it better. Welcome aboard, Brian and Yunjie. Hoist that rebel flag and let’s set sail for fulfilling the prophecy!