🎧🍌 The Untold Story of the Browser Company with Josh Miller
🎧🍌 The Untold Story of the Browser Company with Josh Miller
Obama's favorite web browser, why Thrive Capital gave so much equity to the founders, how to build a great team, the history of web browsers, Arc Search, and betting big on YouTube for growth
Josh Miller is the Co-founder and CEO of The Browser Company, maker of the popular web browser, Arc. We have a wide ranging conversation going deep on the very early days of the company, Josh’s tactics for recruiting and team building, and the pros and cons of building the company in public on YouTube.
If you don’t have time to listen or read the transcript below, my biggest takeaways:
The Browser Company was originally incubated inside of Thrive Capital. Josh was an EIR at Thrive and initially helped start the business, but didn’t initially plan on being the CEO.
As he was leaving Thrive to work on the company full-time, Josh Kushner gave Josh and his Co-founder Hursh a large chunk of Thrive’s equity, almost as if it would have been had they created the company independently and came to Thrive for funding in a more traditional VC round as opposed to an incubation.
When it comes to hiring a great team, you have to REALLY care. Josh spends so much time on recruiting. And he also realized he’s good at it, which leads into my next big takeaway.
As a second time founder, he’s learned to really lean into the things he knows he’s good at. Josh knows he’s not the best at everything, and he’s OK with that.
Another lesson on team building I learned from Josh was the importance of publicly praising your team. If you scroll through his Twitter, and even through the course of our conversation, he always gives public credit for people’s contributions to the team.
Arc still doesn’t make money. It’s an important problem they don’t have an answer to yet, but Josh’s way of thinking about it is that the economy essentially runs on the internet. And the way most people access the internet is through the web browser.
He actually thinks their existential problem today is figuring out distribution. They don’t have the same built-in advantages as Google and Chrome, or Apple and Safari, so cracking a growth flywheel is a big short-term goal.
It’s latest product, Arc Search, just may help kickstart that flywheel. It’s a lightweight mobile product that’s “the fastest way to Search on your phone”, that could eventually help them get more desktop-based browser users as well.
Timestamps to jump in:
02:35 Working for Barack Obama
03:55 Giving up 8-figures in Meta stock
08:23 Obama’s favorite web browser
09:02 Why Arc released a mobile browser
10:05 Becoming an EIR at Thrive Capital
12:10 How The Browser Company got started
15:53 Why they named it The Browser Company
18:50 Pivoting to consumer when COVID hit
20:37 Leaving Thrive to join as a Co-founder in February, 2020
21:05 Why COVID made browsers relevant
22:42 How to hire a great team
26:52 The biggest difference between Josh as a first-time and second-time founder
28:46 Learning to delegate
33:09 The story of Thrive giving double-digit equity back to the founders
40:52 Why build a web browser
42:29 Inverting best practices
45:20 This history of browsers
48:50 The reasons people use Arc
52:57 How Arc will make money
56:03 Why Josh’s existential question is getting people to care about their browser
59:33 The story behind Arc Search and its potential as a growth flywheel
1:05:40 Why Arc bet big on building in public on YouTube
1:11:33 Why praising your team publicly is so important
Referenced:
The Browser Company’s website
Try Arc!
Arc’sYouTube
Find Josh on Twitter and LinkedIn
Transcript
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak:
Josh, how's it going? Welcome to the show.
Josh Miller:
Good. Thank you for having me Turner.
Turner Novak:
You have a super interesting background. I think the most interesting thing for the audience, pre-Browser Company that you've done, you were the Head of Product for the Obama administration. I didn't even know that that type of role could exist. What does that even mean, Head of Product for a president?
Josh Miller:
It was a very fun role, but the title definitely sounds more grandiose than it was. Basically a mentor of mine and the board member of my first company got hired by President Obama to essentially create this new office in the White House called Office of Digital Strategy. And within that, they put anything on the internet, everything from the website and the social media accounts, all the way to citizen services that Americans rely on every day through the internet to get what they need from the government. And that was a lot of products. And my old boss came to me and said... actually, I think I may have even gotten him and been like “got an internship? got a job?” and he was gracious enough to create this position.
I was essentially responsible for the sort of things that you think a product manager would do in the private sector, but thinking about it from the perspective of the White House and the US government really. It ended up being a lot of really little, big projects across these different properties and products, but it was just so cool to be in the physical White House for the last two years of the administration so that was definitely the coolest bit.
Turner Novak:
Our mutual friend, Antoine Martin from Zenly, Amo, he said that you gave up a very significant amount to do that. I think it was unvested stock in your previous employer to make the jump in, so that's a pretty crucial decision.
How did you decide to make that? Why did you do it?
Josh Miller:
I respect this about our government and the White House. They have a really strict ethics policy, so I had a lot from our acquisition. And the government makes you sell it so you don't have any biases or public stock. And I would do it again in a heartbeat. It really was for the life experience.
I got to go to Camp David, I got to be on the South Lawn when the Pope came. Just these priceless life experiences and to be around the people I got to be.
In retrospect, it's definitely going to go down as the most dumb financial decision I will have ever made in my life. And I feel, again, a lot of privilege to know that coming out of the White House, I felt confident that I was going to be able to get a well-paying job. And so I was fortunate in that so not complaining. But it definitely was not a wise, purely financial decision, but the life experiences were fantastic.
Turner Novak:
And were you still in your twenties, late twenties?
Josh Miller:
Early twenties actually. I'm 33 now. And at the time we sold the company when we were 22, so I was probably 25, 24. Again, Head of Product, Director of Product… made up title. I was very, very early in my career.
Turner Novak:
Maybe you can think about it as an MBA? It was a learning experience. You gave up a lot, but it was once in a lifetime, in your twenties. Very few people probably got that experience at that point in their life.
Josh Miller:
And in many ways I think of it almost like it was a liberal arts education in a lot of ways. At that point I'd been blasted into this tech world while still in college and didn't really know anything else. And all of a sudden I was working on an affordable diaper program that was all about distribution to low-income communities of diapers without markups at local bodegas. All the way to the opioid epidemic task force and around people that had only spent their lives in income education policy.
And so for me it was, I wouldn't really call it an MBA as much as breaking out of the tech world and being around people that were inspired by and motivated by and experts on all these topics that I only got to read about in the newspaper.
It really changed my career in a lot of ways for that reason. Up until that point I thought of myself, to Antoine as a consumer social media guy. That's what my identity was. And of course I was 22, 23, 24, I didn't know really who I was. And the White House experience really reminded me that at my core, I'm not really a tech guy. I'm much more interested in the people behind all of this.
So the White House was almost not only learning about these topics from these people, but also learning about myself in that way of, wait a minute, what do I actually care about at the end of the day?
Turner Novak:
What do you think you learned about yourself?
Josh Miller:
The thing that at the time was very... concerning is a strong word, but definitely challenged my own conception of what I wanted, especially professionally and later was really freeing was, at that point I thought my mission in life was social media. I was this very idealistic and ignorant kid who thought I wanted to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or whatever, as embarrassed as I'm to say that now.
And that experience at the White House taught me that I really wasn't sure what I wanted to do and I wasn't really sure what topic or theme I wanted to work on. And in fact, I was having just as much fun working on the Opioid Epidemic task force as I was the Affordable Diaper Program, as I was the IRS and the way that we pay taxes digitally. And there was basically no commonality between those themes or projects. So it actually made me leave the White House with basically no sense of what I wanted.
Did I want to work in tech at all? If within tech did I want to make a company? Did I want to serve? It really discombobulated this trajectory I thought I was on, this path I thought I was on. Which actually is what led me to my job after that at Thrive Capital, was this lack of any understanding professionally what the heck I wanted from my career. Which was in retrospect, very empowering and led me to where I am today. But in the moment it knocked me off this path that I thought I was on and this sense of who I was that I thought I had.
Turner Novak:
I definitely want to lead into that the next thing that you did, but I didn't want to miss this question because it was a highly requested question from our friend Freia Lobo.
Josh Miller:
Oh, Freia.
Turner Novak:
Freia said, "What browser do you think Barack Obama uses?"
Josh Miller:
Freia… definitely not Arc unfortunately. That'd be really awesome. But he definitely does not use Arc, not a sidebar guy. I would guess Safari. He's a cool, classy, sophisticated, privacy minded individual so my bet is Safari and probably on his phone. I wonder if President Obama touches a laptop these days. I hope not, but my bet is Safari wherever he is.
Turner Novak:
Is that a status thing? Not having to use a laptop means you've made it in life?
Josh Miller:
As someone who runs a desktop web browser company, I hope not.
But to be honest, we just recently released this, our first real mobile browser. And one of the reasons we did that is we had this realization that none of us on the team used Arc at all on vacations or the weekends. At all is strong language, but effectively when we didn't need to be at work, we didn't ourselves want to touch our computer. Especially as streaming services have moved to, or TVs are now mostly smart and have Netflix apps on them and for certain people, iPads have become an entertainment device system. We just weren't really using our laptops.
I imagine, I have this image of President Obama flying around the world and meeting world leaders and playing golf and hanging with his family and not on a multi-screen set-up with Arc loaded up, but who knows.
Turner Novak:
That's fair. You touched on the thing that you did next after Obama's administration. What was that? And it's a unique transition. How did that come about?
Josh Miller:
Again, the White House was an experience of working on a broad portfolio of projects where there are lots of really talented experts. And I would come in and try to play this really tiny role as it related to technology. And one of those projects was a recidivism project with the Department of Justice. Which was essentially once people are incarcerated in the federal prison system, there's actually a really high rate of those individuals coming back into the prison system.
And so the project was what sort of skills and education or programming can we provide to inmates through the internet while they're in prison to prevent recidivism. Which is a topic that is near and dear to Josh Kushner's heart because his father spent some time in prison and Josh does a lot of nonprofit advocacy work. And so I worked with him on a project in the Obama White House related to recidivism.
And I was a political appointee, which means whoever won, I was going to be out of a job at the end of the administration. And Josh reached out, I think probably sensing that I had no idea what I wanted to do, saying, why don't you come hang out at Thrive for a year? We can make up a title, we'll give you a little bit of a salary so you don't have to worry about it. And why don't you just spend a year shadowing board meetings, shadowing our partner meetings, meeting with people you find interesting. Just take your time and if you come out starting a nonprofit, fantastic.
At the time I had this idea of doing a Y Combinator for nonprofits and civic technology organizations so that was my spiel at the time. And so it was like, whether you do that, that's great. If you start another company, that's great. If you want to be an investor, that could be great too, we do that at Thrive and had this generous offer. Came up with an EIR title, Entrepreneur Resonance which was, I guess, silly titles is a part of my career path so far.
Turner Novak:
We all make titles to-
Josh Miller:
No, you're totally right. The title, it inflates our senses. As you go on, you realize it doesn't matter. But I had a blast spending a year at Thrive just again trying to replicate what I had in the White House of learning about a bunch of different things at once, but at Thrive.
Turner Novak:
Then how did The Browser Company come about? You were at Thrive when you incubated it, is that a fair thing to say? How did it come about? And then I'm super curious just how Thrive incubates companies, is that a common thing, one off?
Josh Miller:
One twist to the story is I was an entrepreneur in residence for one year, and the idea was at the end of that year, I would know what I wanted to do with my career. And that year came due and I had even less idea of what I wanted to do. Nothing panned out and I was less... if the White House was going downhill, it was going downhill at the end of the one year at Thrive in terms of my sense of what I wanted to do with my career.
And Josh made the pitch of, maybe you should just be an investor here. And his appeal was we invest in companies and we invest in companies across stages, but we also start companies. We incubated Oscar Health, as you mentioned, and others. By joining Thrive, you can keep your options open in terms of starting companies and investing companies, even if the way you start them is a little bit different.
And so I actually joined Thrive as a full-time investor and I was there for two years. And towards the end of my tenure there, it was a period in our industry that you'll remember where everyone was talking about Notion and Airtable and Figma and GitHub. Thrive when I was there, led Airtables, I believe it was Series B. And what was so fascinating to me at the time was my career had started in this era of mobile social. Mobile social even, I hate to say it, remember mobile, social, local? That was the beginning of my career.
And so to be at this top tier investment fund looking at the hottest deals, in air quotes, in Silicon Valley, and they were all desktop web apps for work was bizarre. Especially because I remember the first time... that's not true. The first time I saw Notion, I thought it was just hipster Google Docs, and I didn't get what the fuss was about, but maybe the third or fourth time I really gave it a shot. I hadn't been that inspired by the blocks and nested pages since I used Snapchat for the first time.
And so that's when this idea clicked for me personally which was, there's this gravity towards the web and the web browser. I noticed that my wife wouldn't leave Chrome all day, even though she wasn't in the tech world, she wouldn't leave Chrome all day because even now in the tech world, all the tools she needed were in the web browser.
And so combining watching my wife use Chrome on her laptop with at work seeing that the up and coming next generation companies were all web apps in the browser, had this insight of, well, what about the web browser itself? That Chrome thing, that shell around it hasn't changed in a long time.
The idea was let's incubate the company at Thrive. This is going to be a business productivity tool, and I'm not a business productivity tool person. So we'll go find co-founders and we'll give them the business capital and we'll help it get off the ground and then it'll be off like any other company.
And so I called my former co-founder and a CTO Hursh because again, it was like, if I'm going to do this, I should do it with people I love and I should give this idea to someone I love. Hursh agreed to be the co-founder and CTO. We started looking for a CEO and co-founder and then COVID hit and everything changed after that.
But that essentially was the trajectory from working at Thrive, investing at Thrive, noticing this trend, having the idea for The Browser Company, having the idea for a browser for work and for enterprises. Not for me, but I'll go give it to my friend and then COVID changes everything.
Turner Novak:
Wow. There's a lot of different directions we can go based on what you just said. I think the one I don't want to miss is it's called The Browser Company of New York. That is the name of the company. I think it's the top five coolest company names ever. I tweeted this a couple of weeks ago. I was like, this is just an awesome name just because it's so unique and bold and long and it's just different.
What's the story of the name?
Josh Miller:
I really want there to be a cool story, and I know that the other people that were there will remember it and I'm sure it is cool. I can't remember, but I do remember why we picked it. I cannot remember who came up with it, when they came up with it, what the motivation was.
But I remember the reason we picked it was at the time in Silicon Valley, it felt like everyone was coming up with these words, like these names like Notion, Airtable, they were perfect and they were smart and they were trying to be their own phrases. It was good naming. And if you think about a lot of things even we do today, it's about inversion. And it's about not doing what you expect from a web browser, which is boring and you don't think of it as a consumer piece of software, et cetera, et cetera.
And so I know regardless of the origin story of it, but why we picked it was that it's not what you expect from a Silicon Valley startup and that it doesn't take itself too seriously. It's absolutely patently absurd because it also takes itself kind of seriously if you think about what it's referential to.
But at the end of the day, we were this group of people in New York City that were proud to be in New York City. It was that combination of inversion and not taking itself too seriously combined with the fact that we were just really proud to be building the company in New York.
Turner Novak:
And I think you officially have part of it italicized in this special font?
Josh Miller:
We leaned into it. We're just like, let's just make it feel like one day there'll be a marble office tower with gargoyles on it. What would that version of the logo be? Just own it.
And so a gentleman named Willem came up with the actual logo itself. And to be honest, he did it once. We haven't changed it since. And it just was one of those things that it just felt right when you saw it.
Turner Novak:
Those are the best. My logo for Banana Capital for the podcast, my website, I did them once, never changed them. Maybe that's not the right move, I probably should. When I look at my website, you would objectively say that is a very, I don't know if bad is the right word, but there's room to improve. I like clinging to tradition, just keeping the thing that you started with.
Josh Miller:
For sure. And I think that authenticity stands out and it feels fresh, I think at least now. Or at least that's how even we try to approach the YouTube stuff is, what do you expect from corporate comms and then how do we invert it? So you'll see that pattern a lot with the things that we do.
Turner Novak:
And that's a really, really interesting point, the YouTube thing. We're going to hit on that in a second for sure. I think that you guys did a really interesting job with that.
But you mentioned COVID hit. I think this was roughly based on LinkedIn six months into officially starting this. What happened when COVID hit?
Josh Miller:
Well, again, I think there were almost like two start dates.
There was when we incubated the company when it was just Hursh and it was really an R&D project. It was how does one build a browser technically, just really understanding the market and starting to build out the founding team. And that was in call it August or September of 2019.
And then as Hursh and the first engineer Samir started prototyping, that's when we realized, wait, this is actually a consumer product. Because at the time we'd been thinking of it as almost enterprise software, as work productivity software we'd sell to companies. And then we realized, well actually the web browser is one of the most consumer pieces of software, maybe the most in that if you were to think about the software that your mom, your niece, and you use, what's at the middle of the Venn diagram, there's not a ton.
Your mom probably doesn't use the social media tools that your niece uses. Your niece probably doesn't use the calendar. And so certain messaging apps, depending the country you're in, the camera app, web browser is one of the most consumer pieces of software and you need it across your work and personal life. But people don't think of it like that and didn't think about it like that. And we didn't think about it like that.
And so the moment that we realized from prototyping we're going to use this across our entire life, that's when I started to get really excited about it personally. And started to get a little jealous that they got to work on it every day and I had to go to these pitch meetings with founders at the time.
That was when the idea of maybe do I come as a co-founder started, and that's January of 2020-ish, around February decide to join. And then two weeks before the COVID lockdowns in New York happened, I joined as an official co-founder, had left Thrive. We had an office space one floor under Thrive in the same building. The founding team was together and then poof, The Browser Company of New York became a remote company, distributed company, and we've really been ever since.
Turner Novak:
Is that probably the biggest impact that COVID had was just forcing you to be remote from the founding date?
Josh Miller:
The biggest impact that COVID had was it pulled forward people's understanding why the browser was important and broken. Keep in mind, even to this day, the question we tend to get is, why should I care about my browser? Do I care about my browser? What is my browser? Why is my browser not fine? People don't really have an opinion about it in the way they might have an opinion about their iPhone versus an Android, for example.
COVID changed that. It was like a quintessential tailwinds you got lucky, which were all of a sudden everybody's office was Chrome and a bunch of tabs. Because they weren't in person and they weren't in a meeting room and they were on Zoom and they were in their existential, are we going to do a fig jam dance? And that was in their web browser.
And so I think actually that that was the biggest impact of COVID was culturally almost... I think we talked about it internally, is what would stand-up comedians make fun of in a skit? We should build software and features for those moments on the internet.
I think a stand-up comedian never would have made fun of browser tabs or browsers before COVID. And then that became the butt of almost all the jokes. Browsers, Zoom, how horrible it was, how disturbing it was. That cultural impact is probably the biggest thing from COVID. I think the second thing that's worth noting is in retrospect, I think if you were to ask 10 people in our industry about The Browser Company, one of the first three things and not the first thing they'd say is, they've built an amazing team. I don't think everyone likes their product, I don't think everyone gets their business model. I think there are a lot of things people would have varying degrees of confidence or clarity on.
But I think most people would say, wow, they built an all-star crew. In retrospect, we would've not been able to build that high quality of a team if we weren't distributed and we wouldn't have been distributed. So that was a total accident. Again, we were planning on just being in New York. But if you look at who are the people on our team that have had a huge impact on this company, a lot are in New York because that's where we got started, but a lot are in Montreal and India and Warsaw and all over the world.
Turner Novak:
One big point I really wanted to dig into is you built a really good team, like you said.
How? Everyone wants to. Easier said than done.
Josh Miller:
Two things come to mind.
One is to really, really care. Keep in mind this was my second company. I'd had some professional success up until that point. And the main reason actually that I wanted to join The Browser Company as an official co-founder was to work with Hursh again. And I think I'd realized, again, remember I'd been soul-searching for what is the idea I want to work on, what industry and I had no luck and I had been declining luck.
And so really what it was, was okay if I just accept there are a lot of things that make me excited and interested and so it's hard to pick, why don't I just follow the humans? Because that actually is, when I look back on what I was most nostalgic for previous periods in my career, it was actually the crew I was with and certain individuals.
And so the founding story of The Browser Company, it was really wanting to work with Hursh and that carried through to the first 10 people we hired. Was we tended to hire people that one of us had collected or picked up at some point in our career and just always said, ah, if I ever get to work with them again, I'll be so happy. I think the first, it sounds cheesy and cliche, but it's true, it's just really, really caring about the team and building the team. I don't know how to... That's just very authentic to us. I think the second thing, I just had lunch with someone actually, and they said something pretty funny. Out of nowhere, they were talking about how much tennis they play. I was like, "Oh, I'd love to play tennis. I'm not that good." And he's like, "I'm really good."
And I just giggled because most people wouldn't just be like, "Yeah, I'm really good at tennis." And what he says is, look, I think it's weird when people are falsely humble if they know that they're good at something. Just as a heads-up, I'm good at tennis, I think I'm good at hiring, I think I'm good at spotting talent. I think I'm horrible at a lot of things, but one of the things I've just always had a knack for is identifying people that have something special.
A great example of this is someone like Josh Lee, who I think a lot of people probably think of The Browser Company's videos or storytelling and it's a team and Nash runs it. It's a lot of people, but at least when it comes to video products, this video editor named Josh Lee is really at the core.
Josh Lee was a design intern at Facebook when I was there. He DM'd me to go on a walk and get a coffee when he was probably a sophomore in college doing design. And just from that 30 minute walk I was like, this kid is something special. He came to intern for me at the White House as a designer and then later at The Browser Company.
But that started with just feeling like, all right, I don't know, this UPenn undergrad who's 19 years old, I don't know why, I'm just pulled to him. Again, I'm not perfect, it's not all about me. And I think at this point I have very little to do with how incredible our hiring is. But in the foundational days since a lot of people on podcast are probably early stage founders, really caring. And then just really trusting your taste and intuition for people who are special and ignoring traditional credentials in a lot of ways, I think.
Turner Novak:
So really care, find the people that you think are very talented regardless of prior experience.
Josh Miller:
And I think the other thing about... I realize now just owning that I think I'm really good and have good taste for the recruiting is, be honest if you don't and compliment yourself.
When I think about Hursh as a two-time co-founder, I think the biggest difference between me as a second-time co-founder and a first-time co-founder is being comfortable in my own skin. And just being really self-aware about what am I exceptional at and own it and run towards it and what am I not and really overcompensate and hire and delegate for those things. Because a first time founder, especially a young founder, you feel like you need to be Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, these mythical characters, which you're just not. I think that would be my advice.
And the second bit is if you have good taste in people, and you know if you do, and if you're good at getting people really excited about what you're excited about, then lean into that. And if you're not, get someone on your founding team who is, because it is essential and the best at it are really good at it and you want somebody who's the best at it on your team, whether it's you or someone else. And so I had to compensate for my weaknesses in other ways, but I think recruiting talent has always been a strength of mine.
Turner Novak:
And that's true, when you think about just those two examples, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Sheryl Sandberg did a lot on the business side, the revenue model, all that kind of stuff. And with Steve Jobs, he didn't set up the supply chain to build all these phones, that wasn't him. And you need people that know how to do that.
Josh Miller:
Yes, the Macintosh was Steve Wozniak in many ways that's what you learn. When you're at the beginning of your career, you read the bio and you see the social network. And then anyone that has some experience, you realize, everybody's imperfect, everyone's got strengths and weaknesses. Anything great happened with a team, and not because you're supposed to say that, but because it's true.
And so I think you just get more comfortable. I'd say if I could tell my 20-year-old first time founder self something, it'd be relax, it's okay to be bad at things. It's okay to be spiky. It's just try to just be more honest with yourself about who you are and what you're exceptional at and not, and that's great. And just compliment yourself in the ways that you're not fantastic and just be self-aware.
Turner Novak:
Was there a certain moment when you realized you went from this, I need to do it all, I need to be good at everything, fill all these roles, to maybe I should let go of some things, learn to delegate, trust other people?
Josh Miller:
I don't think there was a moment, but I think one of the big... Keep in mind, I was a sociology major with a C grade average that was hopping around internships each summer in college and then accidentally found myself in tech because of a sociology professor and then accidentally ended up starting a company because of a summer hackathon. And I didn't know what a hackathon was. It was all like I just found myself in this industry as a founder.
And then I got to Facebook when they acquired or acquired our first company. And Facebook at the time was exceptionally staffed and executed... this was at peak Facebook when we joined in terms of the perception of the industry, where the top talent went, how the company was doing. And I did not fit in with the other PMs. I wasn't and just cut from a different cloth than Facebook product managers. And that was an eye-opening experience because at that point I was probably a little bit too confident about my own sensibilities or gifts as a product person.
Turner Novak:
Because you were just acquired by Facebook.
Josh Miller:
I was acquired by Facebook and I was 22 years old. And again, I have a lot of PTSD from the way I held myself at that period in my career. But I was at least showing up at Facebook feeling like I have something to offer, something unique to offer. And then looking around at this company, it was the top of the top. I definitely was like, I have a lot to learn. And it was so diametrically opposed to how I thought about the world. I think that experience really taught me at the very least, there is not a single way to do things.
And I think that is also a progression in my career and just life in general is, think about things very binary at the beginning of your career. If there's a right or a wrong way, if I just listen to Turner's podcast, I'll know exactly how to do it. And I think you should listen to Turner's podcast. But the further you get and the more people you listen to, you'll be like, man, everyone's got a lot of ideas about how to do things and they're all really successful. And I actually found that very empowering and eye-opening.
Turner Novak:
I think some of the team building, you spend so much time with your team, it reminds me of the way you talked about the browser. You spend all your time in the browser, it's with the teams. You spend all your time building the company with the team. You spend eight hours, 10, 12, 16 hours a day with those people, it's the most important thing.
Josh Miller:
It's funny, Turner, I had never made that connection, but I think you're spot on about it. I'm embarrassed, I never thought about that. But I do think actually this has been on my mind.
My godfather, who unfortunately just passed away was very dear to me. He was a urban planner, he was among other things, director of urban planning for Los Angeles and city manager of Culver City. And I grew up getting driven around Los Angeles by him and him waxing poetic about the streets and the neighborhoods and the parks and the zoning that is where we actually live our lives and is our perception of our world. And was very formative in me wanting to go work on the internet and for software.
And I do think there's a through line there of whether it was my upbringing with him who's been on my mind a lot recently, to wanting to focus on who I spend my time with more than what I do, to being interested in this category of software because we spend so much time at it. There's probably a quality of life and maybe a selfishness in terms of just living my life in the way that I want.
But there's some through line there that I had never thought about that you're absolutely right in terms of time spent and quality of life and ensuring that we really try the best. I don't know. I'll have to think about that. That really struck me.
Turner Novak:
Awesome. Glad I could contribute something out of this. The one takeaway from this whole thing.
Josh Miller:
I didn't think the Banana Podcast was going to get all existential, but now I'm feeling very emotional, so it's great.
Turner Novak:
Hey, well, I’ve got to differentiate somehow. This is my job to be done. This is what I stand for.
Well, so another really interesting thing just in terms of building the team, setting the company up for success, one thing that Antoine Martin said, I got to have you talk about. He said that, you were incubating the company at Thrive. Obviously then you joined full-time as CEO. The cap tables typically look different based off if someone incubates a company versus co-founders come together and then raise money. You did some interesting things during that transition with the cap table. What exactly was that?
Josh Miller:
For your listeners, I'm generalizing, but essentially if you think about on one end of the spectrum is, you and co-founders come up with an idea, build something and then go fundraise, and the amount of equity you give up to investors there. Or sorry, the % of equity of the business you hold in that situation.
And on the other end of the spectrum is an existing company hires you as an employee. Incubations were right in between in terms of the equity that you get as a founder. Because there's a VC firm coming to you or someone coming to you and saying, "Hey, we have an idea, we fundraise, now we just need founders."
And so that was the situation with The Browser Company. And then out of nowhere as I was leaving Thrive, very prematurely, very out of nowhere, the point is a situation where if you thrive, you should typically be pretty mad with me.
Josh Kushner, the founder, came to me and said, you know what, we're giving you back double-digit equity of Thrive's just because it feels like the right thing to do. Because if you had started this company with Hursh and you had come into us with this idea, you would've owned this amount of the company and it only feels right that you would own that amount of the company.
I will never forget it because it wasn't even on my mind to ask. Because it would've felt unfair for me to go to Thrive, hey, give me back those shares. No. And so it was quite a legendary move in my book to do that. And never asked for anything in return. There was no catch. He's never talked about it publicly. It was just the right thing to do. He thought it was the right thing.
Turner Novak:
It definitely stood out. If I'm an investor, my general thinking is probably I'm trying to make as much money as I can. That's a very odd intuitive thing. It's very bad for me, for my businesses to just give, sounds like a very large chunk of their stake, just give it away so that says a lot.
Josh Miller:
I think at the same time, I think Josh did that because of his values and his kindness as a human. And I think that even if you put on a capitalist hat, I think Josh, I know Josh is building Thrive to be a long-term institution, an institution that is a larger deal when he's 80 as it is today.
And if you think about it, we're talking about this on your podcast. We're not going to talk about probably any other investors on this podcast. And I tell every founder that calls for a reference check on Thrive, that story. And along the way, as you know, in every incremental fundraiser round, there's a question of pro-rata, there's a question of your inside investors.
You better believe, I feel loyalty to Thrive that I don't to everybody on our cap table. And you better believe that if I ever start another company, I will go to Thrive first because of the way they treated me. Again, I think Josh did it out of the kindness of his heart, but I also think it's a very true savvy move if you think about the long-term loyalty and brand and trusted agendas.
Turner Novak:
Well, even in the short term or the medium term, just so people understand if they maybe don't quite fully get the situation, why was that a good tactical thing to do? Why did that set the company up for success versus Thrive just continuing to hold their stake?
Josh Miller:
Let's keep the numbers simple. These are fake numbers, just to make a point. Let's say that Thrive gave us back 10% of the company, 10% of nothing is nothing. 10% of, let's say, the company sells for a billion dollars, what Instagram sold for, that's a hundred million dollars. And there's dilutions, and maybe it's less, but let's just keep it simple. It's a hundred million dollars.
That's basically like Thrive said. Here is a hundred million dollars back to you founders just because it's the right thing to do. By the way, it could be a lot more than that if the company is... if it sells... well WhatsApp sold for $21 billion.
It's a billion dollars, more than a billion dollars. And so it was a huge deal to me and Hursh because we're even more incentivized to make this company succeed because it is tough. There are some dark days and existential days and days where you need that extra... I've been feeling like really a true co-founder and full owner definitely pushes us through, which I think is part of what made it really savvy for Thrive. Probably part of their motivation, which is like, look, wow, this is a tall task going against Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple. We want Hursh and Josh and the team in those days that it's tough to really feel ownership of it. I think it was really savvy for them, but nine out of 10 investors would not do that. 99 out of a 100 wouldn't do that, I think.
Turner Novak:
I'm not going to lie, I don't know if I could do that. You'd like to think that you could. Man it's a bold move.
When you talk about dark days, you said COVID was scary. It was probably dark, certain parts of it for every startup. How did you go from starting, COVID hits, launching? Can you take us inside what those next couple months were like?
Josh Miller:
COVID was every bit existential and discombobulating at a personal level, I think, at an emotional level as for us as it was for anyone else. I think professionally it was deeply inspiring. It was deeply clarifying. It was almost this refuge during the pandemic to pour ourselves into the details of this prototyping.
It was such a, what do we want to be when we grow up? What are we going to find around the corner? What is possible, period? Almost like the most fun period of a company's life. And then at a time when everyone we were isolated with and catching up with we're all lamenting, oh, I finally get why you wanted to quit your job to work on a web browser. I hate my web browser. We weren't getting that reaction before COVID.
Turner Novak:
Really?
Josh Miller:
No. People were like, a desktop web browser? What are you talking about? No one got it. Truly no one got it.
And I think what I remember about that period was trying, prototyping and onboarding a person or two by hand every day on Zoom. Adena, especially on our team, legitimately walking people through how to use this thing because it was barely put together. It was almost this, I think COVID brought this sense of, we have nothing to lose, let's just go have fun with it and mess around. And that energy I think led to a lot of the creative differences that you see in Arc today.
But I think there was something about that period that gave us a, just go for it energy that I think has persisted to this day. And then I think unlike other companies, we always had a product out in the world since the first day. Which is ironic because a lot of people think of browser companies having this wait list.
But the reason we had an actual wait list was only because we had to take things like security a lot more seriously in performance, et cetera, because we're a web browser. It's really privileged access to your life and your information. And so for a bunch of reasons, we had a wait list, but we were onboarding dozens and hundreds and thousands of people every week pretty much since day one.
And so I think COVID, the beginning of COVID, I think of this prototyping phase, and then it's just sort of a blur to where we are today with these milestones of getting rid of the wait list or starting to go to Windows. But otherwise it's just been this gradual transition to where we're today.
Turner Novak:
I don't actually know if we've talked about this yet, but why a browser? And then what was the very first thing that you launched?
I know it's just a little bit, but you didn't have a specific product thesis. It was a little bit larger and a little bit maybe abstract. But specifically why a browser and then what was the first thing you came out with?
Josh Miller:
It's what you said before, which is we just noticed that people in our lives, including us, were spending eight hours a day in web browsers. And Hursh and I sold our first company to Facebook where the main metric that everyone at the company obsessed over was time spent.
And it was time spent because the company knew that whether it was you spending time with its products or distributing your attention to other products or other services, the most valuable thing you could get someone to do is vote with their time and give you their time.
Now, Facebook used it in ways that we didn't necessarily feel great about at the end of our tenure there. But we recognized that the value in that, and so when we saw these rectangles that everyone was spending eight hours a day and that hadn't changed in two decades. And then you learn the reason they hadn't changed were business model incentives from Google as it related to search ads.
It had this one, two, three of, all right, I don't know what should come next, but I know that this is probably the greatest arbitrage in consumer software because no one thinks it's consumer software. And you spend more time in a web browser than any other piece of consumer software. As much as we're obsessing over messaging apps or social networks. It hasn't changed in two decades, unlike consumer social where there's a new app every month and there's a really efficient market for competition and change.
And the reason it hasn't changed for two decades isn't for some structural natural law reason, it's because Google just makes a boatload of money and people think browsers are boring and they're really hard to build so no one's changed. It was actually a real leap of faith because we broke all of the startup rules. Which again goes back to what we started at the beginning with inversion.
One of the reasons inversion is so core to our company is because The Browser Company approach itself was inverting what you're supposed to do. We did not have a problem statement. It was almost impossible to build an MVP because it's a web browser, it's a gnarly technical piece of software. The company broke the rules from day one. Knowing that it may have been our demise and may still be our demise, who knows? But that was the motivation was that's a lot of time, that's a lot.
Even today, someone sent me a screenshot of their screen time in MacOS settings. And it was Arc 31 hours, 31.9 hours. And again, it's wow but if you work on the internet, if your livelihood's on the internet and you work a 40, 50 hour a week, it checks out. That's a lot of your waking hours in a web browser. That was really the fundamental observation.
Turner Novak:
And I think I've heard you mention this before where trying to get someone to try a new product, it's very, very difficult. Especially if it fits within the mold of existing rails and you just built an entirely new set of rails.
It's like, don't just change this one small behavior, shift your entire 40 hours a week of work, whatever, or 31 hours in the browser, shift it all over. And then it's not like you're trying to grab a certain workflow or a certain thread, it's all of it. And it's a new operating system. It's full control, full immersion, a lot you can do with it.
Josh Miller:
Exactly. The book would say what we should have done was we should have picked a very specific vertical like salespeople or engineers, and then we should have siphoned off one little part of their workflow. Code reviews, and then we should have built an MVP in the hackiest quickest way to do it. A Chrome extension, not a full-fledged web browser placement for Chrome. And so we would've made a way for engineers to be 10X faster with their code reviews in the form of a Chrome extension.
And by the way, that might be a really great company that probably would make a bunch of money. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, I'm just saying that we broke the formula in all three of those ways.
And that we were, for everybody, at least everyone whose livelihood is on the internet, we're going to fully, fully replace your default web browser. And it's going to take a long time to do that, build that. And we don't actually really know why you're going to like it or it's going to be better. But it's been a couple decades since it's really changed so I'm sure we can find some ideas along the way. Kind of insane, now that I say it out loud.
Turner Novak:
I'm trying to think of why was the web browser just a rectangle thing that didn't change? It's probably just because the internet wasn't that fast, wasn't that powerful. You need to make it as simple as possible to just deliver text basically was what it was originally.
Josh Miller:
And actually, in fact, if you were to go back to, for example, AOL. Web browsers actually had a lot. They were the original super app in many ways. Marc Andreessen and his first web browser had a place where you could discover content, it was like a for you page for TikTok, way back.
Browsers have actually gotten less powerful over time in many ways as it relates to what you turn to a browser for and what it can do for you. The reason that it was a relatively simple rectangle at the time in which it really got popularized was because the web was, you turned to it as a utility. It was not the main application or anywhere close on your computer. You went to it to quickly look up a piece of information on Google or go to Yahoo or to a discussion board.
But it was a very brief moment in your day, almost like a calculator app or a note-taking app. And so you didn't need it for that many things. And as you said, your computer, it didn't even have tabs, browsers didn't have tabs. You could only go to one thing at a time because that's all a browser could handle. And then there were a couple see changing moments in a browser.
But I think the big one that unlocked where we are today and why there's a moment for companies like ours, is when web applications became things. When the internet or the web shifted from text-based media consumption environments to interactive applications that weren't run on your desktop, they were run from the cloud, that's when web browsers had a see change caused by Chrome. Because Chrome was the first browser that made using the internet really fast.
If you use things like Google Docs or Facebook or anything that, I mean really, basically everything you use today is a web application pretty much. And those didn't even really exist before Chrome made them newly possible and fast. Now, the reason they haven't changed since then is because Chrome just cared about doing that, and they're only motivated to make browsers better so that you would end up doing more Google searches. And so they really view their product and you can see it in the product. It's basically one big... if you really squint your eyes, Chrome just has this really large search box at the top they call a URL Bar, but basically just by default sends you to Google.
Turner Novak:
That's true. And you think about what is probably the thing you do the most in Chrome, it's probably open a new tab. It's a Google search. That's a pretty good workflow to capture.
Josh Miller:
That was one of the really interesting things from our user research before we built a product is you talk to people about Chrome and you say, "Hey, explain to me your bookmarks." And most people actually don't have any bookmarks other than the defaults or their bookmarks are out of date. They might have one that they click on, but they'd have seven or nine and they're like, "I added that seven years ago when I was in college and I haven't cleaned it up."
Really the default, the behavior in Chrome is command T, command T, command T, new tab, new tab, new tab. At some point declare bankruptcy, open a new window, quit your browser, start over again. And that's the behavior, and that's the behavior because that's what the product tells you to do.
Turner Novak:
I think one of the big things that people would probably describe the current product, the current Arc browser, or maybe as it evolved over time, I think actually specifically we'll talk about YouTube in a second, but there's one YouTube video where you're reacting to people who are viewing the product. And the guy reviewing it is like, "It sorts my tabs nice and that's why I like it." It's like, it's kind of an insignificant thing. But is that a big reason that people use it because it organizes the tabs? Just for someone who's never used it before and unfamiliar?
Josh Miller:
Honestly, Turner, this is the question where some nights I'm like, we've invented the future, and some nights I'm like, we have to start all over, it's all screwed. Because we have a very, very dedicated, passionate group of people that use our product. Our retention has been fantastic since day one.
And nobody, including me, can describe why they like the product in a sentence that sounds compelling or coherent in any way. And the reason is, it's almost like if you think back to when you first used the iPhone. And I don't mean to compare Arc to the iPhone. Again, I just said this, the whole thing may explode and may be a sham. The comparison I'm making though is that the iPhone was not a single feature. Again, breaking the rules, it was not a single feature why the iPhone was better than my Blackberry. It was all these little details and these little touches and these little innovations that added up to a cohesive experience that made it better.
And so the person that primarily used their cell phone for work might've really liked the iPhone's dialer. Whereas the person that was in college and using BBM might've really liked the messaging experience and the chat bubbles and the colors and the keyboard. But it was different for each person, depending on how they use their cell phone, what they did for a living or their livelihood, how they spent their days or sensibilities. But there's something in there for everyone.
And so yes, some people would say, I love Arc because it makes me so organized and it cleans up my tabs and I got my folders and my spaces and my labels and it just feels so organized. Other people would say, I love Arc because I can go into this no Chrome focus mode and fly around the internet with keyboard shortcuts and it feels super fast and speed is the value prop.
They have other people that are like, it's just prettier and more beautiful and I tried it at some point and now I like their split screen feature so split screen's pretty chill. And I don't know... what we've said so far is we've justified it as, well look, our retention's fantastic. We have these really passionate people who use our products. We love using it every day. I guess marketing is going to be hard, but hopefully marketing is hard for the iPhone and Snapchat. And maybe one day we'll live up to the same category.
And other days it's like this is all going to tumble because I still go to a party and someone's like, "What do you do for a living?" I'm like, "I don't know, don't ask me. It's not interesting." Because I just don't know. I'm a relatively good communicator and I still do not know how to tell you what my product is so good sign or bad sign.
Turner Novak:
You can maybe just say it's, I don't even know if this is true, an internet native web browser. It's a better way to use the internet, but that's what a browser is. A browser isn't internet.
Josh Miller:
A really successful angel investor in our cap table that runs one of the biggest companies in the tech industry. And they texted me the other day with this passion pitch for how we should be framing and positioning the browser. And it was like, the way they talked about it was like, "If you're a knowledge worker that uses SaaS tools, this is the browser for you." And I get what they were going for and I think they're right but boy does that not roll off the tongue.
I think what I would say is there's a certain type of person who's an Arc person and it's probably the people that listen to this podcast in terms of what they do for a living and where on the internet they spend their time. But we don't have a single crisp value proposition like speed or organization or focus or beauty.
I'd like to think we have all of those and different people resonate with different parts of it, but it definitely makes it hard to market. People are really passionate. People are very passionate about Arc in a way that I think is odd for a browser as much as it benefits us. And I almost think it comes from the the fact it's hard to explain. Almost I think to some extent engenders a little bit of, we know this secret. I don't know, you could talk yourself in a circle about whether that's good or bad or what it means for the future.
Turner Novak:
When you think about, Google's business model is they control the browser. You can argue that whatever. Their business model is get you to click on ads. You obviously don't have that incentive.
One of the questions that Lenny Rachitsky, I know you were on this podcast, a couple months ago?
Josh Miller:
Maybe a year ago or so.
Turner Novak:
I asked him, I was like, "What do you wish you asked Josh? Or what's something I need to ask him?" He's like, "How are they going to make money?" And it seems like that seems to be a common question from more of the investor community is, how do you make money with this thing?
How do you usually answer that question when people ask or how do you think about it? And then maybe how does that flow into product decisions? Because it's so much different. That you're taking the anti-business model approach are the incumbents?
Josh Miller:
So interesting. You've done your research because you're asking all of the questions that don't have easy answers. But because of who I know your audience of this podcast is, I'm going to give you the inside baseball answer.
We've gone through a journey with this one because the inside baseball answer is, if you look at where web browsers enterprise value comes from. And I guess what I mean by that to demystify that phrase, industry buzzword is, why does a company like Apple, Microsoft, Google, why do they care about a web browser? What strategic value does it provide them?
You would simplify it down to the fact that everybody that uses a computer needs a web browser. The addressable audience is pretty much everyone that needs the internet or uses the internet.
Turner Novak:
That's an incredible TAM. Everyone.
Josh Miller:
It is the largest TAM imaginable in terms of number of individuals. And then you're to say, okay, but everyone needs a notes app, or a lot of people use notes apps. How long do people spend or what do people do in these web browsers that everyone in the world needs? Well, they spend 32 hours a week. They buy things, they research things, they make big life decisions in them. They do work, they do personal life, they do school. Actually, in fact, their entire lives are in these things.
I don't mean this in a condescending way, but when you talk... when we're feeling ourselves angsty, existential about our business model, we go to interview people that have run browser companies, operate and understand the stuff. They go, what? Do not spend a second worrying about this. Web browsers are unbelievably lucrative and strategic. This is why they're all owned by the trillion-dollar companies. Nobody is really wondering why browsers are valuable or how they can derive value.
Every major business model in our industry passes through their web browser. Are you interested in FinTech and payments and shopping and e-commerce? Guess where it all flows through? The web browser. Are you interested in SaaS and productivity? Guess where all those subscriptions in SaaS... Where do you think people use Salesforce? Not on a local Mac application, in the web browser. The list goes on, my friend. Do not spend a second worrying about how a browser is valuable.
Your existential question, the main thing you need to focus on is how do you get anyone to care? Because the way the browsers have grown historically has been through these inorganic artificial means that you do not have access to. You buy a MacBook, Safari comes pre-installed. You buy an iPhone, Safari comes pre-installed. You buy an Android phone, Chrome comes pre-installed. You buy a Microsoft or a Windows machine, Edge comes pre-installed.
And so you can't do that. And the reason that you have to do that is because no one cares about their web browser. They don't think like that. No one gives a shit.
Your big challenge is there is a, air quote, graveyard of startups that try to build web browsers with these really compelling pitches for the time. Remember Rockmelt, the social browser and the social era, there are many of these. And they all end up plateauing because they can't figure out distribution. And none of them go out of business because they can't figure out their business model.
That's the inside baseball true answer is, our existential question and every startup has one, is distribution. How do we get to scale when we don't have the unfair advantages of browser companies of yesteryear.
On the other hand, we're definitely getting to the point as a company where I think it's hurting us from our perspective of distribution and branding that the fact that we are so anti-Google in many ways we're putting ourselves as an inversion of the old internet dominated by Google. And saying we're an inversion because the way their business model gets in the way of your experience without saying what our business model is, is really hurting us at this point.
My answer is we will probably monetize this year in some form. Not because we or I believe that is actually how... that's not where most of our revenues can be generated these days, but just to put people at ease. But look, we're going to be able to at least cover our costs. You can extrapolate how this may not be the most lucrative business you've ever seen, but I can believe that they can keep the lights on if they do it this way. But it's been this really tricky balance of, again, do we have a dinner party one sentence answer to this question versus what we believe the truth is?
Because, your previous question about why people love Arc? There's the truth in the retention data and in the brand love. And then I still don't have a one sentence answer for you. And so the business model is another fantastic version of that question, which is, we've done our homework, it's not the most important question for us as a company right now, existentially or anytime soon. And people ask it a lot and deserve an answer and we don't have an answer. You really did hit on actually two of the core things for 2024 for The Browser Company.
Turner Novak:
I would summarize it as your answer to the question is almost the economy runs on the internet and we are the way that people access the internet. If you're controlling or if you're someone's rails to participating in the economy, there are ways to make money and I don't think you have to have that figured out yet.
Josh Miller:
And then you layer in things like if you believe... everyone can have their own opinions, but for those that believe that AI and LLMs are going to transform software categories, guess where those are going to be distributed from for the foreseeable future? They're all in the web browser, they're all applications or Chrome extensions in the web browser. ChatGPT is a tab. It all comes through the web. It doesn't mean we don't have to figure it out, but it's not if this company fails, it won't be because we didn't figure out our business model.
Turner Novak:
I think there's an interesting story here. I don't actually know it, but Antoine said I’ve got to ask you. Arc Search, it was very different 45 days before it launched to when it actually launched. What's the story there?
Josh Miller:
Yes. The story of Arc Search was our team... One of the fun parts about working on a web browser is you use it every day. And so it's one of those rare products where you're spending all day using the product that you're building, and so you get to empathize with it or sympathize with the experience in a way that's pretty distinct from other software I've worked on.
The number one request from our team, going back to something we spoke about previously was, I want to use Arc on the weekend, on my phone, on vacation. Or I just want my mobile web experience to have that same Arc flare. And we almost as an end of year experiment, morale boost, just why not vibes, we took two people and gave them two months and said, okay, you can finally make a default web browser that our team's going to love and people will love.
But you have to have the world's most narrow focused value proposition and then you've got to alongside of it, try to do something so bold that we'll learn something about growth because we're in this period of focusing on scaling. It's almost like symbolically. All right, we'll finally do it, but keep it really tight and focused in there, uncomfortably narrow and at least try some really bold growth things so we can learn from it culturally.
And what we started with was that first part, which was the original motivations. Let's make the best default web browser and was focused on speed. Because on your phone, your web browser is the same thing as a search engine. In a way it's not a desktop. It's basically a quick look on that. You're hanging out with some friends, you want to know something, you open your browser and really you open the search engine, hit enter, and then you get an answer.
And so we started designing these little details. We open up the keyboards up by default so you can just start typing. And we had these really flowy animations and just try to make a really focused fast way to look something up. But that was only the first part of the plot because that's not enough to get you to switch.
And so one person on our team came up with this idea of, if it's a value prompt with a default mobile browser, the quick lookup tool was you just want to get an answer to something. On mobile, you got to fumble. We added an ad blocker because the ads are annoying and a GDPR blocker because the pop-ups are annoying.
But even after that it's like, man, the websites themselves still got to check a bunch of them a lot. You got to wade through SEO and it's like even if we remove the ads and we put the keyboard up, it still doesn't feel fast because the mobile web is just so hard to navigate on your phone and is so SEO optimized.
And so someone on our team had this idea of what if you just made the one perfect tap. When you're looking something up, when you want to know why they serve blueberry juice on Finnish Air? Which is an example I now use too much. I need a new example. But it was the first time I used this prototype, I was like, oh, I get it. Was I landed in Helsinki and I was like, why did this airline serve me free blueberry juice but tea cost $6?
And this prototype was like, I'm going to make you a webpage with no SEO content after reading six that answers that question very precisely with some images. And I was like, this feels fast, now I feel fast. It actually felt like that quintessential TenEx experience where up until that point, the Arc Search app just felt like best default browser but by 20%, just barely.
But it was a very last minute addition. And even from there, it was actually just a ranking quality tweak. A week before we were set to release it actually made it good enough that I think it really sung. But it was a two-month project. Two people worked on it full-time, a couple of people part-time at different ports.
A good lesson for us in having a focused... actually the opposite of so much of what we spoke about so far, very focused value prop, a very narrow build. I guess we're a Frankenstein company. But one of our values is assume you don't know. And so we do always try to mix it up and challenge our assumptions.
Turner Novak:
I was going to say last night, there's this guy, he's this really good NBA or college basketball player. He's a sophomore, six foot 10, but he plays like a point guard. He's a center that's really fast and can pass. And I was just like, who is this guy? I Arc searched him and I got the full scoop from... I think it summarized five different sites. And I was like, man, I probably just saved five minutes because I got it all. All the relevant stuff and I didn't have to jump Wikipedia, ESPN. I know what he looks like. I didn't have to go to the images tab. It was very elegantly laid out and it was just you're creating the new rails where people spend their time and you're saving them time too.
Josh Miller:
And one of our bets, Turner, by the way, is that can we actually get people to start... Almost like Apple had its iPod moment. The Macintosh was actually a very niche computer. It was not a huge, huge success relative to the PC. The thing that really catapulted Apple to the Apple that we think of today wasn't the iPhone, it was the iPod.
The iPod was this very focused device that had actually Apple's sensibility to its core. And then people started buying Macintosh computers because they wanted to connect the iPod because it worked really well with iTunes and iTunes worked best on the Macintosh. It was like the original blue bubble. And so one of the ideas of Arc Search is can we make our iPod? Look, it's a tall task to ask you to switch to this desktop Arc browser that no one can tell me what it's for, but yet everyone that uses it raves about it annoyingly.
Can we build this really focused mobile app that everyone can get and everyone would be like, whoa, this is awesome. Feel that attention in craft and detail what's possible. And then hope, hey, that page you found about that NBA player or the college basketball player, you want it on your desktop because you're about to roll up to your laptop. Press this button, sync it to desktop. Wait desktop, they have an Arc browser? In theory, that's how it should work. In practice, it might all explode.
Turner Novak:
I wanted to close the conversation on, it sounds like getting distribution, super important, high priority right now at Arc. It seems like one thing you guys have cracked is this building in public concept. And you've also done on YouTube. Which is a counterintuitive move in 2023 when you started doing it. Not many people are doing that. Maybe that's why you did it. But how has it been going and why are you doing it, the strategy behind it all?
Josh Miller:
I think the origins of this work. In many ways Browser Company is a reflection of PTSD that Hursh and I have from things we messed up with our first company. And one of the things that I will say I messed up in our co-founder equation with the first company was I was really restless, I was really impatient.
I was that classic founder joke where it's like, if it doesn't work in the first two weeks after launch, you go onto the next idea. And really what you learn from people who have been successful is it's just the relentless iteration, grinding on the details, until something really clicks and there's like 2% improvements of finding about, but I was bad at that. And so The Browser Company in many ways are these almost secular long-term bets where we say, here's where we think the world's going to go in five years.
And it may seem really silly right now and it may be really risky to guarantee our success at that time horizon, but let's just have conviction where the world's going. And so when we started to think about really not distribution, but how do we want to show up in the world from the perception of marketing, comms, PR, just traditional storytelling is what we call it, how you talk to the public. But we said we decided to make the secular bet that we think video is going to be the future. To us, see that's the thing, you said it was ahead of the curve or I forget the way you phrased it, but to us it was of course it's going to be video, it's everywhere you look is video.
And not only is it's going to be video, it's going to be video on your computer or your internet connected device. And honestly, it's going to be on YouTube because TikTok is going to be a thing, but it really seems like YouTube is getting channels and it was clear to us that it was going to be video and it was going to be YouTube. And then if we focus on building and compounding our presence and distribution on YouTube with video, that would be a long-term bet just like betting on the browser that we'd be happy that we made.
Turner Novak:
Well, I was going to say, it's almost like you don't know what was going to work. You just knew five years looking back, oh, this was the right direction to go in. And it's just how do you get there?
Josh Miller:
And the wonderful thing about YouTube is you can see that in our videos. If you go back and look at the very first one, it was me on a summer vacation in front of my laptop leaning and just talking to the camera. And then we start to do some product tutorials with the team. You can actually see our live product iteration in the video history up until this day. There's this public record of that. Not sure what this is for, figuring it out. And so that was the bet on the medium and the distribution channel.
And then from, okay, well what sort of videos do we want to make? This was honestly less of a distribution perspective and more from a brand perspective than a trust perspective, which was technology companies don't have the best brands. People are skeptical of them these days and they don't really want to believe. And for really good reasons that we all relate to.
And so given what's happened in the past decade or two in public sentiment, we says, okay, what would make us really trust a company with 31 hours of our time? We're making payments in it, we're looking at vulnerable questions. And to us it's like, well, everyone's imperfect. You can't trust anyone in some respects or you have to believe that everyone's going to make mistakes and every company's going to make mistakes. But if we knew the integrity of the people, if we knew the values of the people, I felt like we knew them.
It's not a perfect analogy to a company, but the goal with YouTube and building in public, as you say, was if people can get to know us as humans or try to, and we can try to be as authentic and open as possible, by all means we're not perfect and we were going to regret it at some point because we said something in the wrong way. But for people that really follow along or the corpus of the videos we put out, we believe... I have this cheesy sticker on my desk is “the truth will set you free”.
It's like a fortune cookie, I know, but it's just really... I always turn to it. And I think we are who we are. I'd like to think we're well-meaning, good individuals at this company that are really trying our best for the right reasons. And I know we'll screw up, but if we can really put out authentically who we are, and we think the truth is good, then it's also a bet that in moments where we need a little of that trust, we need a little bit of that generosity, it will show up.
And I think one of those actually happened recently with Arc Search where the Arc Search happened, the phenomena. It really ticked off a lot of people, especially in the publisher world, that don't know the company or have that trust with the company. By the way, and I think they were valid in a lot of ways, they brought up these really philosophical points I've been grappling with and honestly hadn't thought about as much as I should have.
But I was also really touched by the way in which our members and the people that use our product really had our back. And not had our back in that they, again, themselves didn't agree with the criticism or were like, reply boys just angrily replying these. That's not what I'm saying. But there was just this level of no reaction in some ways from the people that use their product that was interesting in relation to the controversy in every sub corners of the internet. And to me, at least the narrative I've told myself is that's a reflection. I think people that have been following along know that we're trying really hard to do the right thing. And this is a moment where some people may think we missed the mark in certain ways, but I think there's some embedded trust through things like the videos that our hearts and our intentions are in the right place, even if everyone's going to get it wrong in some moments.
Turner Novak:
And talking about just authenticity and trust, one thing I think you do really good tying back to team building is I've just noticed you do a very good job as a company as a whole, but even as the CEO, praising the team. I just noticed you elevate the people who contributed to certain things and give them credit publicly. I feel like a lot of founders, it's something that we could all do better. Anyone can do that better, is praising the team.
Josh Miller:
I appreciate you saying that. And again, it comes from me messing that up in the first company. I think with the first company I had watched the social network and I had this, I don't want to say God complex, and people that knew me at that time say I give myself too hard of a time. But the thing on the spectrum of things, I saw myself as this founder, CEO.
And again, you learn that for a bunch of reasons that's just not true, that's not how the world works, it's not a good look. But more importantly, it's just not how the things are built. I do very little at the browser companies. When people like Arc Search, I do very little on that.
It's like to me, you end up, again, if you're in the same part of me and this company that is willing to say, yeah, I'm not good at that thing, I need to compensate and delegate, it's that part of me that says, if someone's asking me about Arc Search or I'm talking about Arc Search, how could I not give credit to the people that actually built it, which are not me?
So I appreciate it, but I also feel like, if anything, it's one of those... Again to the like, of course, YouTube and video is where you should go in the moment and feeling that dissonance. There's a why would I not tag the people that built the thing that I'm talking about instead of taking credit myself when I didn't do anything. Again, probably learning from my immature 20-year-old self.
Turner Novak:
I really respect, I think it's a good strategy. And it's interesting as a VC, my job is I take credit, that's what the VCs do. It's like, look how amazing I am. Everything I touch and invest in turns to gold. It's really hard navigating that as someone who I'm probably like, I'm pretty bad at taking credit for those things, but that's what I'm supposed to do as a VC. So it's trying to find what's the happy medium so I like the strategy.
Josh Miller:
In the spirit of that, I would love to end this with a shout-out to one person who it sounds like you spoke to about this podcast, Freia. And one of the best hires I've ever made in my career, and one of the most special people I've ever worked with in my career was our first design hire, a gentleman by the name of Nate Parrott. And Nate was someone we hired to be a first designer and had never been a designer before. And we hired him because Freia one day... because I was trying to recruit Freia.
And Freia one day was like, "I don't want to work on your dumb browser project, but there is this person named Nate Parrott, who is the most creative person I've maybe ever met, and he just builds web browsers for fun on the side. Do you want to meet him?" And I met Nate and just kind of like Josh Lee was just flabbergasted by him and his creativity and his authenticity the first time I met him.
And he's actually the person that came up with the browse for me feature in Arc Search that we spoke about earlier when I was sitting on the plane in Finland and was like, why is this blueberry juice here? And I was wowed. It was because Nate came up with that idea. Not only credit to Nate for the feature that you loved using with a basketball player, but shout-out to Freia for introducing me to Nate in week three of the company and really changing the trajectory forever, so thank you, Freia.
Turner Novak:
I think that's actually how I first found The Browser Company too, was I think I followed Nate on Twitter because he was a designer or PM or whatever at Snapchat for a very long time.
Josh Miller:
Oh no, he's a prototyping engineer.
Turner Novak:
Okay. So that's how I became familiar with The Browser Company in the first place was from the team so talk about distribution. There's different ways to do it.
Well, this is an awesome conversation. Thank you so much for coming on.
Josh Miller:
Thanks for having me on, Turner. It was great.
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