Inside The Browser Company: Why They Killed Arc to Build Dia

Tl;dr: It’s nearing the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., so we’re republishing one of our favorite episodes from our podcast AI & I. Dan Shipper went in-depth with Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal, cofounders of The Browser Company, which created the popular web browser Arc and, more recently, Dia. It follows Rhea Purohit’s piece about which AI browsers the team is using; Dia made the grade for several of our engineers. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Here’s a link to the episode transcript.

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Sometimes, building the future means grieving what you love—and following a hunch into the unknown.

For Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal, cofounders of The Browser Company, that meant shifting focus away from Arc, a web browser with millions of users beloved in the tech community. Arc wasn’t broken. But as they explored the potential of AI, it became clear that retrofitting the browser with the technology wasn’t enough. They needed to start over. And that meant walking away from a product they’d spent years obsessing over, all for an idea they couldn’t clearly define yet.

Earlier this year, they launched Dia. Dia is a browser that makes simple internet tasks easier with AI. Instead of switching between tabs to see which Airbnb is closest to the beach, you can ask Dia to check. Or, rather than jumping between the tabs you have open for research and Google Docs, you can tell Dia to draft a consolidated summary. Dia is, by default, up to speed on everything you have going on—and helps you work with it.

In this episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper sat down with Miller and Agrawal to talk about the “arc” of Arc: what it really means to pivot your company into the future. They get into their indecision as leaders, the very public backlash to their announcement about the pivot, the quiet conviction that kept them going, and how the shift to AI was about meeting the moment before everyone else could see it, not chasing hype.

You can check out their full conversation here:

If you want a quick summary, here are some of the themes they touch on: