The transcript of AI & I with Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal from The Browser Company is below. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Timestamps
- Introduction: 00:01:13
- The story of how Dan might’ve been the CEO of The Browser Company: 00:02:47
- The moment Josh and Hursh knew they had to walk away from Arc: 00:09:42
- How to handle the weight of the unknown in a pivot: 00:17:08
- The prototype-driven culture that kept The Browser Company alive: 00:23:31
- Why having a product loved by millions of users isn’t enough :00:25:42
- The architectural decisions underlying how Dia was built: 00:33:29
- How Dia almost shipped without its best feature: 00:47:12
- The best ways people are using Dia in the wild: 00:51:18
- How Josh and Hursh think about competing with incumbents: 01:07:55
- How romanticism informs the product decisions behind Dia: 01:17:04
Transcript
(00:00:00)
Dan Shipper
Josh. Hursh. Welcome to the show.
Hursh Agrawal
It’s good to be here.
Josh Miller
Thanks for having us.
Dan Shipper
Yeah, of course. So good to have you. So for people who don't know you are the co-founders of The Browser Company, the makers of Arc and now Dia. And I'm psyched to talk to you about Dia, and about the journey to get there. As you can see if you're watching the show, me and Hursh are together. We’re in upstate New York in a little cabin. So we've been friends for a long time and I think one thing that people should know coming into this is, we have been sort of on parallel journeys together. As you started The Browser Company, I started Every around the same time as you guys started, and we've been close for a long time. So it's been really fun to get to watch the journey from afar and I'm just really excited to get to talk to you about it, so thanks for coming.
Josh Miller
Well, I'm just going to say for the record, I'm not here—because I didn't get the invite. So we're not that close, Dan. I'll say I'm kidding. No, it's awesome to be here.
Hursh Agrawal
Honored to be here. We’ve listened to so many of the podcasts, and obviously we have so much history.
Dan Shipper
Yeah. So a couple other disclaimers. I'm a small investor in The Browser Company, so people should know that. I also spoke at your wedding so we'll put up a little picture of me speaking there. And another really interesting little bit of history that is fun for me to remember now is there was a point at which you guys were considering me to be the CEO of The Browser Company, which is crazy to think about now because you had come up with the idea to incubate at the time. It was Superhuman for browsers, as I remember. And I was working on Superorganizers, which is a little newsletter which would become Every.
Josh Miller
Oh, did that turn into Every. I didn't even realize that. Wow.
Dan Shipper
Yeah. And so there was a moment in time where we were discussing working together on this. So it's really fun to come full circle five and a half years later and be like, wow. We're all so much older. We have so many more wrinkles. I have a big beard. I think I was pretty clean shaven when we were doing that, so yeah, that was a crazy moment.
Josh Miller
Wow. Super Organizers are your Arc. Well, I hope your Dia goes as well as Every. Fingers crossed. I’m into it.
Dan Shipper
Thank you. I think we all have a lot to learn from each other. So I think the first thing I want to talk about is I watched this pivot from Arc to Dia. I think we were in Thailand together years ago when you were first starting to get really psyched about AI. And I just watched Hursh's eyes—he had this spark. It was a sparkle. It was, oh my god, this is crazy. And I was, yes. I was a little on his shoulder being like, guys, you get it?
Josh Miller
Oh, it's your fault, Dan. I always wondered where that came from.
Dan Shipper
And what's been really interesting to me to see is I've obviously been watching this journey from Arc to Dia and watched the decision happen to be like, we're not going to do Arc anymore. And then watched the public reaction, which was so negative. I think people just loved Arc so much and then watched you guys have to bear that while you were building Dia. And I just want to know what that was like?
Hursh Agrawal
Honestly it was a little unexpected. I don't think we had predicted the reaction that we got when we announced that, especially because we had been in this head space for quite a while. We've been trying to, all throughout 2023 or so, trying to figure out how we get from early adopters to the mass market with Arc. And Arc had this problem, which we call the novelty tax, where there's so much new stuff in it, which really attracted early adopters, but made a lot of the mass market sort of more hesitant to try Arc because it just took a lot to get to learn and use. And so, I mean, Josh can probably say more, we tried so many things to figure out, okay, how do we make Arc sort of approachable to the mass market and then simultaneously AI had been taking off and I think Josh had this video last year of act two. We had this realization that browsers are actually going to change pretty dramatically. And how we use computers is going to change pretty dramatically from a user computer interface point of view, where we're going to talk to our computers, they're going to do stuff because this new Play-Doh allows you to speak in English and they can use tools and suddenly computers are something completely different. And so we went through our own evolution over many months to be like, how do we nudge Arc in that direction? And for a while we called it Arc 2.0 and we were, okay, how do we evolve it? And we just ran into a lot of problems internally too, where we loved Arc so much that we were hesitant to change it. The internal discussions about what we do with the sidebar was, at the wrong level when we have this new Play-Doh, we really had to start from scratch. And so maybe I'm curious for your take Josh actually on, how do you feel about the external messaging? Because for us it was over such a long period of time and so obvious that we had to, okay, we have to start from scratch if we're going to build this thing from the ground up to use AI and to be accessible to the mass market. But I think it was probably a shock to the external folks that, oh my god, we're building a whole new browser.
Josh Miller
Yeah, I mean, the thing I would say is you're catching us two weeks after we really released Dia to this private beta, and I'd say in terms of Hursh and my hopes and expectations, I don't think the first two weeks could have gone better. We feel so proud and so I think I felt an adrenaline release and I think it's safe to say last year sucked. It really did. And I think it's one of those things, many things that I think are most fulfilling and rewarding in life, that if you knew what you knew now, would you have done it? And yet at the same time, in retrospect, it's so obviously the right call. But I think a thing for especially listeners to know, and you alluded to this, Hursh, I've never made software really without Hursh. I met Hursh when I was 20 years old. We both left university barely knowing each other to start a company together. I think flash forward over a decade now, if I'm being really honest, I think it felt so obvious to me and Hursh intellectually, emotionally, the thing I think we both underappreciated was not just me and him anymore. And I mean, I mean, we knew that, but at every moment that Hursh and I looked across a proverbial table and said, hey, should we do this? Should we make this thing? It was me and him. And we share value. we, it's just a different relationship. We were running a company with 70 people and millions of people using the product every month. And we definitely underappreciated the public reaction. I mean, when we started this company, Dan, I when we, when we were trying to recruit you to be the CEO, one of the questions like, how do you get anyone to care about their desktop web browser? In fact, I've never even thought about my desktop web browser before, let alone have an opinion on what we saw the most. So I think we were very surprised by the reaction for sure, and would've done some things differently. But then maybe more importantly, definitely more importantly is our team showing up to a company where at that point in the company's evolution, people came because they loved Arc themselves. They joined Arc more than The Browser Company. Hey, that thing we poured our hearts into for years, I. Now we're starting over. Oh, cool. What are we doing? We don't really know, but it'll be great. We're just going to go that way. Sounds like a great plan. It was a winding journey, but very proud at this point.
(00:10:00)
Dan Shipper
There's a lot here I really want to go into. Tell me about the initial moment where you guys were coming to the decision of like wow, there's something totally new here. And not only is Arc maybe not working in the way that we want it to, but like there's something new that we need to go play with that we can't even really describe what it is. What was that like? How did that whole thing come together?
Josh Miller
One of the things I think I want to be more forthright about here, I don't think we've really said publicly before, is I almost think blaming Arc is a scapegoat. If really Hursh originally and then myself didn't get so inspired by this new material that are LLMs, we would not have pivoted Arc to something else. It's easy in retrospect being it's growing literally the novelty tax. And I 100 percent agree with Hursh that is true. But our first instinct was actually just to make Arc better. So I really think that the origin story here was like, you can't stop thinking about it. You're staying up until 3:00 a.m. Every bone in your body is just, this is why we got into software. But I really gotta credit Hursh. I think I have this part of me that is very anti-Silicon Valley hype, which honestly for people that follow me on Twitter or something, they're probably like, I think of you as like a hype-y dude. And yeah, let's have a therapy session later about that. But for me, the crypto wave was the one that came before And just for me, it felt icky to me, even though I agreed with idealism. So here comes around AI and my knee jerk reaction is, this is a bunch of hot air. But really when I think about it, not thinking about this interview before we came in. When you just said that with the origin story, I think of a conversation I had with Hursh in San Francisco that to me was like we've got to do this thing. So I mean, Hursh, when you really were first to see this world that was coming and feel it in your bones. Do you even remember where it came from and when?
Hursh Agrawal
He's giving me a lot of credit. I came at it from my own perspective. I think realizing part of it was excitement about the Play-Doh, but part of it also was the realization that like, if we don't go this route, I think we're going to get obviated. All software needs to be rewritten for this new world because again, the primary interfaces we have with computers are going to change. But I think a lot of it also came from your experimentation with Arc search. And actually playing with LLMs and realizing we can build something cool here. This is Play-Doh.
Josh Miller
Arc was extremely popular amongst the kind of limited corner of the world that knew about it. And the number one request for Arc was, I need a mobile app. But the browser is very different on mobile than it is on desktop. So we said, okay, let's just build a companion app. You can have your spaces and your tabs on your phone, and I'll in the backdrop of launching this kind of Arc mobile app is when all these kinds of AI tools started popping up and there as much as we wanted. Or I wanted to resist the hype. I'm an intellectually curious guy that loves new technology, and so there was some part of me, especially driven by Hursh that was. But if you really just tried to make the best kind of AI browser experience you could, what would it look like? But it would've been a huge distraction for the team to do that on desktop. So we actually hired a contractor externally. I was living in Paris at the time and kind of hired him for the Skunkworks project. Hey, just for funsies, it's not going to be a big deal. What if we build a mobile browser that only does one thing? Again, we had a little bit of the PTSD from Arc already, which only does one thing really well, and it has something to do with AI at its core, just to prototype and learn. And so the idea was, what if in this mobile browser, instead of pulling backlinks, we made you the perfect webpage. So instead of typing in a query and trying to find the right link from the worldwide web, that is the closest approximation to what you're asking for, but not exactly what you're asking for. Let's understand the intent of your query and just make a webpage on the fly for that thing. Just a very simple idea and it was so not a big deal or meant to be a big deal. I tweeted it on a Sunday before boarding a flight, which for our company is not how you launch new products. And it just exploded more than anything we've made so far. And so we had a number of takeaways from that, but one of them that really influenced Dia was what Hursh is referencing as the novelty budget. Keep it extremely simple, extremely focused. Change one thing and have that one thing be the thing you talk about, which I realize in retrospect is doubt. Welcome to making consumer products for real human beings, but is the antithesis of Arc as in terms of the product philosophy.
Hursh Agrawal
I think Arc search also gave us sort of a strategic realization, which is, if you think about what a browser is, it has sort of a desktop browser especially, it has two components. One is it's sort of a funnel for intent. The omnibox is where you type in all your search queries, and if you have a certain intent it goes to search and then you can go find that thing. And secondly, it's an application platform. And so you run all your web apps in it, sort of the web 1.0 and 2.0 sort of portions of whatever browser does. And both, I think Arc search made us realize that the intent portion is going to be drastically changed by AI because a lot of our intent is going to go to these models that get a bunch of data and then spit out the actual answer. And because AI can use tools and the browser has access to all your apps, it can also really support the application component. And so I think Arc search was our first foray into realizing browsers are going to change. And so we need to rethink what our strategy is because the entire ecosystem has changed. And the browser's place in that ecosystem is going to change drastically. And so that was sort of our first moment of like we've got to rethink what this product is.
Josh Miller
And I think the bit about search is really key here. That came to influence Dia. Keep in mind our kind of approach to building Arc was really as much about urban planning and interior design as software. And that our recognition was you spend hours a day in this rectangle in space and people don't have any feelings about it. Could we change that? And so the sort of conversations we had is, okay, can we enumerate where those minutes and hours are spent? And arguably the core action in a browser is, and was, search. But up until Arc search we sort of said, you can't touch that. We’re not Google. We are there, even though search opens a new chat, I mean the command-T text box is the most popular text box on your desktop computer according to Apple. And I'm sure Microsoft as well. But we kind of said, no, we are, we're not a search company. We couldn't possibly do anything with that. That's Google's domain. Look, even Microsoft through tens of billions over many years and Bing sucks. So what are we going to do? So I think it also opened Pandora's box of saying, oh wait, as Hursh said this is, this is the choke point for the internet. This little box routes you to places and does that mean we can now route you to new places and new things? So that was also a big eye-opening moment from Arc search, which was not the intention at all at the time we started the project.
Dan Shipper
So take me from that moment, from, okay, you've made some realizations from around Arc search to probably, okay, we're going to do Arc 2.0, but actually maybe this is a totally new product. What happened in between there?
Josh Miller
I've never said this before. I think indecision and a lack of excellent leadership on, at least I'll say my part in that. I think Hursh and I knew deep down in that moment what we had to do, whether it was from the Arc perspective or like, Arc search feels so simple and clean and resonant with people. I mean, that was the first time we had people telling us that, hey, I really don't like Arc on desktop. But I love Arc search. So I think the combination of Hursh and then my kind of increasing conviction that this was going to change all of software, as bombastic as that sounded combined with the bottoms up resonance and simplicity and focus of our search. Hursh and I think in our heart of hearts, knew what we had to do, but what happened next was. That was probably in February of last year, and it was in June at a company-wide offsite that we said, we're going to build something new. But then even then it was, it's going to be Arc 2.0, we don't even know, TBD. So I think it probably wasn't until September-ish of last year that we made the call to say it is a completely new product called something completely different with no connectivity to Arc. And I'm so proud of actually a lot of what Hursh and I have done over the past year or two as leaders, especially in this moment. But I'd say that period is the one that I regret the most in terms of just not calling a spade a spade and just ripping the cord.
(00:20:00)
Hursh Agrawal
And to our point earlier, especially with a team that large and the team that joined post product-market fit like getting the team's buy-in and getting aligned with everybody and figuring out what we are doing? And it took a little while.
Josh Miller
Dan, one thing I'll add too is I love Every, one of my favorite publications, not an investor, which is I wish I was an investor, but it's fantastic. And one of the things that is remarkable actually even reading your coverage is keep in mind where AI was 14 months ago. ChatGPT was long in the market and I think for most people paying attention, you could kind of pull the curve forward, but there was also a lot of technology. Macro-risk at the time as well, which is, are the scaling laws really going to continue? Are we going to figure out hallucinations? Even this concept of memory, which is core to what we're doing. I mean, I can't remember the timestamps, but I don't think it was part of the conversation and now is part, arguably the most central idea behind the idea. And so, yeah, it's easy in retrospect to be a little self-deprecating. And it was not obvious to everybody or anyone. And I do remember we put out a video that was, we think AI browsers are the future. And everyone's like, what are you talking about? you're being a hype boy, what are you talking about? And literally today, M. G. Siegler last night wrote this whole article tha AI browsers are definitely going to be a thing and everyone is definitely going to build them. Apple's going to make one, OpenAI's going to make one. And so I don't say that's gloat, it's actually a competition that we have to wrestle with. But at the moment I'm indecisive. There were so many reasons why you would not do what we did, so it was not that clear.
Dan Shipper
I totally remember all of those things, how if you're really using those tools every day, you were like, wow, there's something here. But if you weren't, you were like, this stuff is not good. No serious person could ever use this for their work. And that has completely shifted, at least for a lot of people over the last like 18 months.
Josh Miller
I would even say six months, Dan, one of the things that I remember in the moment was, again, it sounds like a love story or a relationship like me and Hursh in quiet moments together and the conversations we would have about this handle it. looking at each other's eyes glistening about our future intelligence or whatever. But keep in mind, Hursh and I are both people who really care about the people in our lives outside of work and put a lot of effort into those relationships. I'm really close with my family and the people in my life at that moment were not into the idea of AI. Keep in mind the discourse that was, that was peak. This thing's going to ruin humanity and it's stealing artistic works and all that stuff, which I'm not saying doesn't have merit, but you go to the dinner table with my family showing a demo of this ChatGPT thing that I'm staying up until 3:00 a.m. and just finding deep inspiration in it. And they're like, what are you talking about? And so that's just another moment where you're like, okay, this story of Arc at that point was great. You made a great product for tech people. Anyone that's in the software industry loves what you did or at least respects it. But your problem is you didn't build something fundamentally mass market and essential for everyone that uses their laptop. And so to the extent we were going to build a new product, it was only if we thought we could achieve our original mission of changing the way the average laptop person uses the internet in a moment where the dinner table conversations with the people we deeply love and care about, we're often saying, you are too in the tech world, man, you're telling me that the thing that comes after Arc is this AI nonsense that's spitting out gibberish. So it's a real act of introspection to say, have I lost it? Have I become disconnected? Or do we just see what other people don't see because of what we're doing? And at least for me was this constant back and forth in my own head and with Hursh of like, what is reality?
Hursh Agrawal
I mean, not only from our friends, but also from our employees. So that was tough.
Dan Shipper
What was that when you had that company meeting and you were, hey, this is a new product.
Hursh Agrawal
Do you remember Josh? Was that at the off-site?
Josh Miller
Yeah. I will say since narratives get kind of added in retrospect, it really was more of a gradual evolution. So there were some key moments. There was this offsite in Montreal where we definitively said, we're at least going to try to build the second product, whether or not it's Arc 2.0 or not. There was a moment when we said it is going to be a second thing, but it was obviously more gradual. I think one of the saving graces, and I do not think we could have done this with a different company in a different moment, was that really to Hursh's credit, we founded this company with some core values that we really live by, and one of them is assume you don't know. So we have this culture of no one has any idea what they're talking about, and we'll have no idea until we try it. And so that's why we have such a prototype driven culture, experimental culture, for better, for good and bad reasons. And so I think in general, at The Browser Company, if anyone says, I’ve got this wacky idea and I'm really excited about it, let's try it. The people's first reaction is, cool, prototype it and let's talk about it after that. And so I think that was one of our saving graces is that we could just sort of frame it as what it was at the time and inclination a hunch. And again, I think as you build more and more things, I think it becomes clear to more and more people over time. And I also think we just built up a lot of trust. Right at that point we'd been building Arc for a number of years. People loved it. People joined the company because they loved it. And I think we had added some trust points to our bank account and Hursh and I drew them down to maybe a negative balance up until Dia got further along. But credit to the team it's not like there was an organ rejection. There were people that had their own concerns and anxieties as is normal. It was a big call that was existential for the company. But in general, we had this culture of all right, let's see.
Hursh Agrawal
One thing I'll add is we also built the capabilities over time. So as we were prototyping, we were getting a better sense of both where the value is here, but also like what are the things we need to get better at, evals, fine tuning from a technical perspective, from a design perspective. How do chat interfaces work? Our chat interface is the right mechanism, LLMs, all of that. And so again, as we gradually built that capability, our confidence grew.
Dan Shipper
What do you say to people? Because I think this is probably on someone's mind if they're listening to this. And it certainly was, it was a thing I was thinking, which is okay, I totally understand that maybe it's not going to be like this gigantic Arc is just not going to be this gigantic mass market consumer product or whatever. But it had millions of users. yeah, that's pretty fucking good. And it isn't like VC distorting what you count as good and aren't you kind of killing something that so many people love just because it's not like billions of users. Talk to me about that.
Josh Miller
Well, how you think about it, well, Dan actually, it relates to the origin story when we asked you to be the CEO. So the origin of The Browser Company was, I was working at a venture capital firm and I was just shocked that all of the coolest, fastest growing Silicon Valley companies that were coming across our desks were all of a sudden desktop web apps and there are desktop web apps for work. I mean, you started a newsletter called Superorganizers. This was the moment of productivity software. And so the idea was, let's make an enterprise browser for work. As you said, take the Superhuman, the Notion, the Figma playbook and run it. And so Hursh was going to be the founder and we were looking for a co-founder, CEO. And the first, he's like, I'd call Dan. He's my best friend. He does this newsletter called Superorganizers. It's perfect. And maybe it would've been perfect, maybe we'd be having a different podcast about how wildly profitable Arc is. But the reason I say that is because the reason I ended up joining The Browser Company as CEO in addition to really just wanting to work with Hursh again, was this aha moment that actually the browser is arguably the most consumer piece of software in the world. There are very few pieces of software that your mom and your second cousin and your partner all use. 4 billion people use Chrome every month and nobody cares about it. And most people don't have a second browser for Netflix and shopping. And so if you care about what I personally have always cared the most about, which is how we as a society broadly use technology, then the motivation for me, and I think the origins of the company was to build something at that level of ambition, even if that's not the idea that we pitched to you initially. And so that was never part of the calculation, honestly for me and Hursh when we talked about how we want to build a product with millions of people? We would've capitalized as a company completely differently. If that was the goal, we would've done so many things differently. So I think the idea of like, why wouldn't you be okay with a couple million people browsing that makes decent money? It just comes back to why I personally got into software and what motivates me and hurts. So I will say hopefully people have heard there are a lot of things that were hard. There are a lot of things that are unclear. Why are we here? Why did we start? This company has been consistent and unwavering from our perspective.
(00:30:00)
Hursh Agrawal
Again, we're sort of fixating on Arc, but the reason for this was not just what we do with Arc and how we grow it was also how we meet this moment. And we were just so inspired by, oh my god, this platform shift is happening and what software is and can be can be so different and so much more capable and look very different. And we have a specific skill set and team that's capable of building that interface in the future. And so I think part of it was also just a deep inspiration for what's possible. And again, we didn't start with the idea, we would start from scratch. We started with this idea, we would evolve Arc in that direction, and then that ended up being much more difficult than we thought.
Josh Miller
Well. I also think as the technology was evolving, as we were getting more familiar with it was getting more clear to other people what was valuable about it and where the points of leverage were. We also started to realize that the browser layer was going to be very central. At first it was sort of like, wait, we don't want to be that company. That's just because we got inspired doesn't mean you should pivot your company. They're inspiring things I see all the time. I'm not like, hey, let's go start like an indie film company. So the thing that really did it was okay. It feels really disconnected from everything I'm doing every day. I'm spending a lot of time copying and pasting and context switching and exporting tabs as PDFs and weird stuff like that. So being able to meet people where they are. Again, the idea of memory and context. people didn't say context was king a year ago. Maybe you did, but most people didn't say this is why you've got to subscribe to Every, you would've been a year early. But starting to realize that okay, the more that you tell these models, the more useful and personal they get. And I'm spending hours a day on this thing. And then as hers shed too, hey, we don't know anything about agents. This is sort of out of our wheelhouse at the time at which it was coming up. But it seems like the big promise is they're going to do some things and tools for you, but wait a minute, that's not useful unless they're your tools with your authentication and we have your cookies. So it was also, again, to Hursh's point of inspiration, realizing that structurally and honestly felt like we had been at the end of the rainbow before the rainbow came and all of a sudden a pot of gold appeared. And so it was sort of like, all right, I feel like we should probably try to open this pot. This feels like the thing to do.
Dan Shipper
Well, let's talk about what you found when you opened the pot. You guys made Dia and I will say, and this is an interesting testimonial given my my relationship to both of you and my relationship as an investor is, I was always an Arc user, but it was never my default browser. Safari was always my default browser and Dia is now my default browser. I switched from Safari, which I like, and that's not like I love both of you, but a browser is too personal for me to switch my browser because I like you.
So this is, this is totally not for podcast purposes or anything like that. I just switched to it because I think the, and this is maybe one of your points about Arc is, I used Arc for certain heavy research tasks and for podcasting specifically, because like Riverside doesn't work in Safari, you have to use a Chrome browser and I'd rather use Arc than Chrome. But Safari is so lightweight and fast, and Arc was never like that. And Dia is so fast, and I was like, this is really good. And then it has the AI stuff in it, which opens up a whole new way of using webpages for me that I really love. So it's coming. It's definitely, I think a lot of what you're saying is coming through for me. And it's been really cool to see it get launched and get the reception in.
Josh Miller
Hursh, it's honestly worth talking about the architectural decisions because that was another whole thing we decided to just be like, why don't we do this completely differently too while we're at it?
Hursh Agrawal
Yeah, so Arc was really built around how do we prototype as fast as possible and we made some shortcuts in the architecture to enable that, which had some performance impact. And so we were really optimizing for how we prototype and build new features. And in a way that we can do them quickly. It used a kind of redux type state driven architecture, which is a little crazy for a desktop app, but allowed us to move really quickly over time. It became really complex to manage which was an issue, but also performance was a big concern.
Dan Shipper
And re redux is the meta-like react framework. Or of thinking about how to pass information from UI layer to back to the server room and all that kind of stuff.
Hursh Agrawal
And so we had a real choice last summer when we were building Dia. Do we build it on the same architecture or do we build something new? That's really fast. And I think part of the, I mean, certainly the engineering team was really excited about an architecture that we were excited about that fixed a lot of performance problems that Arc had. But also it was the core of the strategy. If the strategy was a mass market browser that people would ideally use irrespective of the AI features then it had to be fast and it had to be just a really, really good browser.
Dan Shipper
What did you figure out about how to make something performant?
Hursh Agrawal
Honestly, a lot of it has been Swift. Swift has this new structured concurrency mechanism that allows you to just move a lot of stuff off the main thread. So just leaning really heavily into that has been helpful. And then shout out to some of our incredible architects, Max and Adam, who built this entirely new architecture that allows us to move faster than Arc, but also deals with a lot of performance problems. So, and the reason I still do prototyping quickly.
Josh Miller
And the reason I think it's relevant is, one of the ways I think we got the team really on board is we sort of went to a bunch of our best, most creative people and said, hey, you get a blank page too. So this has been a topic that's these architectural challenges and latency, these have been themes. We talk forever. So we just sort of went person to person and said, hey, start over. you've got to do your best to be your most abundant self dream. Come on. What are the things that you always regret? This is the moment to do it. So I will say once the ball started rolling, people were able to find their kind of corners and pockets of what we were trying to do. To either fix mistakes we made with Arc or do that thing they always wanted to do. you can, you can feel it in Dia. There are parts of it that there, I hope there's some kernels at The Browser Company that are consistent across it. But there are also some things where you, I think you can feel a group of people that said, no, we're really going to flex on this one and we're not going to flex on this one in a way that's Arc coded, but in a way that is what this should be right now. so I think you can feel that intentionality personally in the product relative to Arc.
Hursh Agrawal
And one discussion we had when we were building this out also was, it's funny seeing Sigler's post now about how eyebrows are going to take off and we're sort of kicking off this race. But that was a discussion we had about the architecture, which is, we have so much conviction in this route that when we launch this, if we are the first ones, we're going to kick off a race. And so how do we build an Architecture from the ground up that allows us to move quickly in that race by the time we launch this.
Josh Miller
Hursh and I had a very seminal conversation for, from, for us, at least on that San Francisco trip I mentioned. And Hursh flew out the next day before me and sent me this long, long essay in a way that I don't get long, long essays from Hursh. And one of the things that Hursh had the foresight to see in this new world was that it's not about the browser. The browser is almost incidental. The real opportunity— And I think the language Hursh used at the time was this truly personal assistant. And I think all of us right now are grasping for what the right nouns are for the work that we're doing. But Hursh had the foresight to say, hey, it's not really about the browser part that is necessary, but that's not what the, where the value's going to come from. That's what's going to enable the thing you're turning to for almost the iPhone isn't really a cell phone. I mean, it is, and you get that utility out of it, but that's not why the iPhone is so powerful. And I think in the moment for me, I was, seems a little far fetched, but hope he is right. And as time has gone on, I think his, his, his instincts were in retrospect absolutely correct. even the original vision video we put out for Arc talked about this idea of an internet computer and we very much said, we have no idea what that means, but based on the trend lines in our industry, it seems absolutely certain that what feels like your computer in five or 10 years is actually going to be this layer that sits across all of your devices of all shapes and sizes, because all of your apps and files are on the web now. And so I didn't really connect it at the time, but what Hursh was saying was essentially, this is the internet computer.
You're going to have desktop browsers and mobile apps and all sorts of things. On top of it is going to be this personal assistant or this intelligence for you. And it's going to benefit from the fact that it can intercept your queries on the new tab page and that it sees the docs you're writing in your browser tabs, and it remembers the things you did last week, but you're not turning to it for the tabs. You're not even turning to it for the desktop part. Where you're turning to it for is this personal intelligence layer that is a wild dimension of humanity that's going to help you do all sorts of things and it's going to be miraculous. But don't forget the browser is just the enabling technology underneath, that's not the main event. So you can imagine how getting in front of The Browser Company’s New York employees, makers of a popular web browser called Arc that helps you with tab management in novel ways, couldn't really nail that messaging in the moment. But in retrospect, I think that long email she sent me was extremely prescient, regardless of if we win this race, if it's even zero-sum. But he had the foresight of connecting it to the internet computer idea that was kind of underpinned by Arc.
(00:40:00)
Dan Shipper
That's a couple things that I think are interesting here about like lessons that seems like you guys have learned about building the future and some things that I've definitely seen at Every, and some things that I've definitely seen, some things that I've definitely seen at every like trying to do the same thing is one when GPT-3 was first a thing, everyone was like, this is going to be an incumbent-enabling technology. Google and Microsoft, they're just going to put a chatbot on the right side of Chrome and they're going to put it in Google Docs and everything is just going to be like for the incumbents. And I think one of the things you were saying earlier is just getting to go to people at Arc and be, or people at The Browser Company and be like, you have a blank page, the level of creativity that you get there is so high and the level of power that you get is so high that— It’s actually impossible for most incumbents unless they're starting from scratch, which is really hard to do, to just slap AI onto this and actually build that layer that you're talking about. And another thing that I think is really interesting that I've definitely found as both a builder and a writer is it can be really hard to pitch the future, to talk about the future in a way that anyone understands. you have to build it, you have to prototype it. You have to feel it and see it. And that's the only way that you can talk about it in a way that people understand. And it sounds like that's sort of what you found is you had this sense that you could express, but any way you express it, everyone was like, you're fucking crazy but then once you started to actually like prototype it, that's how you found a way to talk about it in a way that people can understand.
Josh Miller
And two stories actually that come to mind that are very relevant. So, Hursh and I, our first company was acqui-hired by Facebook when we were, I don't know, 22 or something. And I'll never forget this—
Dan Shipper
RIP Branch.
Josh Miller
RIP Branch, for the real ones out there who remember. I'll never forget this internal all hands at Facebook where Zuckerberg stood up and had this whole presentation about how in five years everything was going to be video, social media was going to be video. And I thought he was nuts, this disconnected billionaire. Does he know how slow it is to watch a video on your phone? And then like, even if you could fix the buffering issues, why would you pick a tiny little screen in your pocket? What is he thinking? And in retrospect, that proclamation and honestly others that he made, even if he didn't capitalize on it. He was right. I remember five years later it's, yep, TikTok's definitely a thing. And so I think part of what Hursh and I took from that experience in different ways and similar experiences like, hey, if you're going to start a company, one of the, you mentioned Branch, me and Hursh's first company, the origin story was a hackathon prototype. And my takeaway from that, and that experience was if you start a company based on a prototype, you don't have a kind of fundamental internal guidepost when inevitably your prototype's going to fail. And so the intention of The Browser Company inspired by our experience with branch observations of Zuckerberg at Facebook was, don't pretend like you have all the answers, but even just directionally are you headed? You're in la you're going on a road trip, you're going to New York or Miami, you may not know how you're going to get there and you may hate Miami. And Miami might be, not as cool as you think, but pick a destination that is five, 10 years down and run towards it. And so the internet computer idea was that for us and was pretty central, I think to our ability then with Dia as well to kind of just go for it.
Dan Shipper
What I think is interesting too, about that is just to push on it a little bit because I think there's a thing that if you're a builder listening to this you might take away that, I don't know, is actually what you actually mean is that you can see the future in front of you and you're just going to go figure out how to build it and you don't know the route, but you're going to San Francisco or you know you're going to New York or whatever. But I think what's interesting about the internet computer idea is what the internet computer meant. And so you're sort of, you have this broad sense that there's going to be a different way of interacting with computers and that you wanted to build that, but what you thought that was going to be is actually very different than the thing that you ended up building because you had no idea that AI was going to be such a thing when you started five and a half years ago. And I think that's really interesting too. And that's definitely been consistent with my feeling about everything when we were, when we were talking about Superorganizers, I was like, I want to build this newsletter and then I'm going to launch products for the newsletter. We're doing the same thing now, but it looks so different and why it works is so different because of AI. And I think that's a really interesting thing is to watch that vision unfold and fill in the details of what it, what the, what that actually means as the world evolves and your product evolves and you learn new things.
Josh Miller
Yeah. And I think that point applies to that video story that I told you where at the moment Zuckerberg was saying, you are going to share the same types of personal vulnerable updates that you do today in video now. And while there's some of that. I remember the moment I made the connection back to what Zuckerberg said of the all hands and even realized that video had become a thing, as I had the opportunity to meet Evan Spiegel from Snapchat. I think it was in 2019. And I was, all right, I've got to ask him one question. So my question for him was, what's one thing that's really inspiring you right now? And he told me about this app from China called TikTok, which again, it was pretty popular at the time, but I hadn't really come across it. And I was why is it inspiring? He is like, it made it so anyone can be a celebrity for a day. And I remember being confused by the description, but you can kind of see that he was right. And kind of capturing what was unique about TikTok that was very different from what Zuckerberg said. That is not friends sharing intimate videos with each other in a newsfeed. And so the point of being able to say where the world is going directionally is definitely not the details. but it's still, I think, really important and it's tricky. One of the things, especially in our media cycle is we built Arc in public, but we also built it with prototypes and built sharing everything. And so when we shared the internet computer video, I honestly remember people internally being like, man, this seems kind of like, why are we adding this branding? What exactly does it mean? But at least we had built a little bit of trust to say for people to say like, okay, I like the things they're putting out. So I don't know, maybe they know it. At the time with Dia, it was even more of a kind of high conviction bet on where the future was going. But we did not have an audience that wanted any proclamations from us about AI. And again, ourselves sort of question. Were we right? And so one of the interesting things about Dia was there was a larger disconnect developing than Arc between the internal feelings and beliefs that we had and what we could say publicly. And so that was also kind of an interesting part of building Dia vs. Arc.
Hursh Agrawal
What made it trickier also was because we bet on the scaling laws and the curves. And so a lot of our conviction wasn't even possible last year.
Josh Miller
Oh yeah. GPT-4 made Dia work. When we started working on Dia, I might get my dates slightly off, but I distinctly remember messaging our person at Open AI and being like, this model made our thing happen.
Dan Shipper
So, yeah, it's crazy. We've had that same thing where. you're working on something, you're trying to build something, it's not working. You're doing all this prompting, you're doing all this Architecting to spring string different models together. And then we had this happen with Claude Opus 4 recently. It just worked and it was, okay, we can throw out three months of work. because now it's just one shot.
Josh Miller
Yeah, I mean I really, really, a great example of that from Dia is to me the core idea of Dia is this idea that it should get better with every tab you open. just every time you swipe a video in TikTok, it feels like it's getting to know you and it's more useful to you. That's how I should get, feel and get better with age. And Hursh had the foresight to know that context and memory and personalization were going to be the thing that ended up differentiating. When all of the models and intelligence commoditized or looked that way, it was going to be the thing that was most personal. So Hursh and a team worked on memory for nine months and at some point we killed the project. We just tossed it away. We’re like, it's not going to have memory. And then six weeks before launch, it was like, wait a minute. I think the fact that I had this context window over here like wait, no, let's try this project. Let's remember one more time. And oh my god, that was a thing to deal with internally. That project that we just tossed away after nine months, having this high like top down conviction, we're going to do it again right before this big launch we've been working on for a year. I don't want to say it's work because it's too early, but like it's looking pretty prescient again from Hursh. but again, that was enabled by, in a span of six months, the fundamental building blocks changed enough and our understanding of how to wield them, that a thing that we smart people banged against for nine months didn't happen. And then it happened pretty much overnight.
(00:50:00)
Dan Shipper
And cost latency—all that stuff. Tell me about it. You've gotten it out in the wild. You have this thesis that it's going to get better with every tab you open, which I love. I think that's such a clean way. That's such a Josh-ism. Perfect.
Josh Miller
Awesome. Means a lot coming from you.
Dan Shipper
Every essay dropping soon? I know what are people using it for that has surprised you, or what have you, what have you learned getting it out in the wild that you didn't know here's fair or take Josh?
Josh Miller
I am surprised that people see what we see as quickly as they did. I thought this was going to be a really painful moment for us. I prepped and Hursh and I prepped the team for that. Hey, it's going to be a somewhat tricky, brutal summer because Dia is so basic. Because again, keep in mind the idea of Dia is not the browser, it's not the tab management, it's not the things you can see. It's all of these capabilities that Hursh and the team have built under the hood that we're if we just then piece them together, we can build this application platform for ai. But that wasn't what we released two weeks ago. We released the building blocks under the hood, but the hood was pretty basic and we thought it was useful, but we thought it was going to just get trolled.
Dan Shipper
I kept asking Hursh for access and he was like, oh, later, soon.
Josh Miller
My friends and family were so nervous about me. because my style of friendship and working on what I do is I enthusiastically want them to be early in their feedback, admission. My wife, who I've been with for over a decade, didn't try Dia until launch.
Dan Shipper
Because I was so much better because I was like, Hursh, I don't know what's going on. Are we growing apart?
Josh Miller
And that shows you, I actually felt like an artist, not in terms of an artist in terms of our quality or per, but just the nerves to put this personal workout in the world. So the biggest surprise is people got it right away despite its biggest, in its current state, in terms of what it's useful for.
Dan Shipper
What do they get? What do you think they get?
Josh Miller
I think M.G.'s post really captures it, which is that you can sort of feel the new latent possibilities underneath the surface by fusing these things together. really what Hursh and the team did is they broke apart the browser and they rebuilt it, put the pieces back together with models in every core part. And so you can't visually see that, but as you start using the product, this morning actually I saw someone share that there. They've clearly been using Dia for a couple weeks. So people like to discover these little Easter eggs. Ooh, I can do this. And what they found is that when they look up songs on YouTube, they can ask for the tab chords so they can play them on their guitar.
Dan Shipper
That's sick. I wouldn't need to use that. I actually do this all the time where I like to send YouTube videos to Gemini and then have it tell me to transcribe the piano.
Josh Miller
And so I think people find that it's subtle, but it's so much more convenient and so much more powerful to do it when the one plus one equals three. The big surprise on the product side was sort of that observation taken to its extreme, which you would never put, hey, you know what you can do in Dia on our website, you can look up the tab chords for the guitar when you're watching a video on YouTube. It's so personal. It's so the team is tiny and a couple weeks before launch, because our big vision for Dia is that actually it's this kind of application platform that people will build things on top of, we should gesture at that just a little bit. So let's have this concept of skills, which are effectively AI apps. We have a couple that are first parties, but they're really basic.
Dan Shipper
So just for people who are listening that haven't used it, what is a skill in Dia?
Josh Miller
Yeah. A skill in Dia is the equivalent of—or we hope will be the equivalent of an application on an iPhone or on a computer. But in this kind of AI world, what it is it's a system that prompts a model or number of models to use and stringing those things together to do something for you. So someone might make a skill that is my job is to do sales, and I look at leads on the internet every day. And when I see a lead, I have to look up X information about them and extract Y information and consider Z framework. And they kind of put that logic and framework and tool use into a skill to kind of aid them in what they do every day. But in the current version of the product that we released, the platform is still extremely limited. And so we weren't going to let anyone make their own because we were waiting until later in the summer when we could actually expose those, the really cool building blocks, reasoning models, memory, and the like. But we're, okay, we've got to gesture at it because that's why we're here. We wrote this big internal memo about the app strategy. And so we expose the ability to make the most basic custom skills possible that are basically just little prompts. And it has X before launch, it has exploded in terms of what people are doing and is now essentially the whole company is just building out the skills platform now.
And the reason that relates to the tab cord example is that one of the things we used to say with Arc was that no one cares about their browser, but they spend hours a day in it. It should feel like your home on the internet. Why do we all live in these drab hotel rooms online where all of ours look the same run by Google. It should feel as cozy as this background you're in right now. And you're seeing that principle play out, whether it's the first party features, chatting with your tabs and people finding use cases that are new and very personal to them, to people being like, wait a minute, you're saying I can make my own one of these that when I'm doing my workflow for my job can do exactly what I want it to do. It's almost the normie, and I'm saying that for myself. I'm a sociology major that doesn't know how to code. Everyone's looking around and saying cursor and rept and lovable, and these companies just exp wow. You can make new things. And there are people like me who want to make new things. And I think we're tapping into something there of like, I. almost handmade software, people wanting to make things for themselves like me that I literally had to hound Hursh at a hackathon in New York when I was 20 and beg him to make something with me because it was the only way I could express my ideas in software was to hope that someone like Hursh would like to make something with me. And so I think it's starting to tap into that nerve. And while that observation is old, I did not expect that this early in the product development since we felt like that was to come and to be revealed.
Hursh Agrawal
This was an amazing insight by Josh actually, that AI enables sort of a new class of software where rather than us thinking about what software that we can create that is useful for a large team. Instead, we can build software that allows people to make their niche software just in time whenever they need it. And so it's just a different way of thinking about what software can be. And that's because of AI.
Dan Shipper
Yeah. I think there's a couple of other examples of, I mean, ChatGPT is maybe a good example. where Excel is a good example, maybe a Notion where it's not one big use case, it's not one job to be done. it's millions of tiny little ones which makes it a little bit less like a traditional, even like SaaS product where you're like, well, we solve this particular problem for a user. And a little bit more creating a language where, yeah, you're creating building blocks and then anyone can use the words and the language to express whatever they want in whatever situation they have. And that’s a uniquely powerful type of product. And also, it's a uniquely challenging type of product. because getting that language right and then communicating it to people that you can speak in this language is really hard.
Hursh Agrawal
I think we're particularly excited about it. a.) because we love human computer interaction problems. Yeah. And design problems, and b.) the browser just knows so much about you It's such a personal piece of software. And if we're building this memory system and it's getting more and more personalized to you, it can help you with that.
Josh Miller
Yeah. Dan, It’s funny you say that. I'm looking at my phone because late last night Dustin, our head of design, basically was so inspired by these custom skills being created. Dustin's an extremely humble, soft-spoken Canadian. He turned to me a week ago. He is like, Josh, I need a week alone to prototype. I know what to do. And that sounds like something I would say. That's not something that Dustin says. So when he said that, I was yeah. cool. Go. And he texted me last night. About what he's been prototyping and kind of showed me. And I sent him a text back. I said, actually, I would've written it differently if I knew it was going to be a podcast. But Dustin, you're legit inventing a new programming language. Non-technical people like me want to feel technical. I aspire to know Swift. I don't give it a language to learn, and I don't mean language like complicated. Anyways, it keeps going. But, so I guess that's the surprise. The idea that AI and the power of it is when it's going to be extremely personal to you. With very minimal work was the idea of Dia and this idea that actually the applications or agents, whatever we call them, but the tools that sit on top of the base are going to be more powerful than the base itself. That was consistent. The idea it's going to be skills and it's going to be really jumped to kind of the third party, not first party. And it's going to actually require this kind of new programming language thing. It's not programming like, it's kind of like the internet computer. We struggle with the words, but the sensation is so obvious, which goes back to what we've said before. It’s one of those moments again where it's, okay, entire company, we're going that way. A hundred percent come on a podcast. what? What is this skill? What are you talking about? I don't know if the listeners are like, these guys are crazy. But like, in my bones right now, it's so clearly where the world's going. So, let's try our best to run that way.
(01:00:00)
Hursh Agrawal
And I will say we thought this was six or 12 months away. Because of this launch and just with the incredibly basic version we have in there and how people are using it, I think we've been inspired.
Dan Shipper
I think we've traced the whole, for lack of a better word, arc of the company so far, which is Arc big success, but maybe not the kind of success that you guys were looking for, announcing that you're pivoting like a year of just pretty much hell was I think—
Josh Miller
Getting punched in the face, maybe a good description.
Dan Shipper
And now you're like, we're back baby. We're so back.
Josh Miller
There are a lot of problems too. But yeah.
Dan Shipper
And I just want you guys to get as real as possible with me as if there were no camera and no mic here. The way that we would if we were just hanging out about what that has been. I've watched you Hursh and sitting down with you and you're like, there's like dark circles around your eyes and you're just, what did I do? But even in that moment. Being very liked, but I know that this is right. But also this sucks and I hate this. Tell me about what that has been emotionally for you guys over the last five years of running this company. What has that been? I've seen a lot of the ups and downs I've seen. I think people probably don't realize how much. For example, when you're pouring your life into something and everyone on Twitter and maybe people internally are like, you're making the absolute wrong decision. This is awful. And on the flip side now everyone's like, this is amazing. What has that all been?
Hursh Agrawal
It’s tough. I think Josh said it best. It really feels like you're getting punched in the face a lot. And it's this weird dichotomy because as you said, at every moment we were like, no, the strategy feels correct. It feels right and everything that's going on in the industry and as we are making progress, we're making good time on it. But when your family and your friends in the outside world and your employees are maybe less than enthused about the direction, it's really difficult to sort of manage the two. I think there's probably two aspects to it. There's one just the head game of being like, okay, as as founders, we have conviction here. And to credit, so many of our employees were on board and excited as well. But a lot of it was just trust in us. And that dichotomy of like, are we crazy? Are we just completely full of it?
Dan Shipper
I mean, you are, but you're right about this.
Hursh Agrawal
And then there's just the day-to-day tactical stuff where it just hurts a lot. I think pressuring and then managing morale, people leaving and attrition hiring becomes way more difficult and so it just feels like you're in very hard mode during that transition.
Dan Shipper
And you had a kid a year ago.
Hursh Agrawal
And Josh has had two kids, So no sleep. So it's a meditative exercise to stay present, just get through every day.
Josh Miller
I will say there was one session I had with my coach where he was asking me something about the product strategy. He asked me how I was doing, and I gave him one of these kinds of excited, genuine takes on this, whatever the equivalent of the Dustin prototype, which was earnest. He said, no, Josh, how are you doing? How do you feel? And I was, I've been waking up every morning with a pit in my stomach. And he was like, let's talk about that. And so this year professionally was by far the heaviest I felt in my body. And I think the things that get you through it are both Hursh and I have—We're really close with our partners and our families and each other. I think one of the things that Hursh and I have this dynamic is we both go through funks and highs, and we both have the things that trigger us. And we've now worked together long enough where I think there are these moments where like, I'm really low. People may not know it, but Hursh knows the telltale signs and he knows how to pull me out of it. And I'd like to think the same is true, vice versa with him, but no, it's not fun at all. Obviously there are things that keep you going and I think for me it has really been just trying to stay present and quiet and focused on the internal. There is something in there that is making you get punched that you're okay getting punched in the face. And so, it was a year of constant doubt and ups and downs. Because I think the other thing people miss is The Browser Company had a Cinderella story the first few years. We basically had no, I mean, it didn't feel like this at the moment. But in retrospect, our biggest challenge was at one point Arc was so popular and so taking off that we had these performance and reliability issues where it was crashing and that was the hardest thing we had. We were sort of this darling in terms of people in our industry raving about it. The guy who ran Chrome for 16 years came to work for us as an IC. It was just a storybook. And so it was also after three-ish years of the experience of The Browser Company feeling like not a runaway success. We had our challenges, and I'm sure you remember them, Dan, but it did sort of feel almost our divine right, that it was going to go this well. And so I think all of a sudden having it so clearly feel different and never, almost a never ending to the, every morning there were some new things someone was leaving or some competitor this or whatever. Yeah, it's tough. I will say it makes, part of the reason I think I feel so elated right now is not because we're out of the woodwork in many ways. We are the most competitively challenged market in the world. There's a lot still ahead of us, but part of what it is this—vindication might be a strong word, but like we were right. So if anything, I don't think that will ever happen to me again professionally. Not that I won't have tough moments, but it's almost like my dad told me that one thing about getting older is, you get to build your intuition because every time something happens, you can look back and say, okay, was I right or wrong? What was I right about? What was I wrong about? And you gain that confidence. So right now, I'm not that confident that Dia is going to be the next Chrome, but I know that what me and Hursh felt in our bones was correct. And so I'm excited. In 20 years, if I ever started another company with Hursh, that moment I'll be like, okay, we're going to get punched in the face. But , don't waiver. I definitely had a lot of moments of doubt internally, privately with Hursh throughout the year that manifested in all sorts of ways. but I'm grateful for the life experience of what it has taught me. regardless of what happens next.
Dan Shipper
I feel you. I mean, I've had not quite the same kind of thing, but a couple moments where the company just almost fell apart and it was I could just stop and it could just be like, things are just not working. And I was, no, I think I'm going to keep going. In retrospect now that things have seemed like they're going through big self-trust moments where you're like, there's something inside of me that I can listen to. And that I think as a leader is really, really important. And it's something you only win by unless you're delusional. You only win by like, going through that like, oh my god, things are about to fall apart, but I'm kind of doing it anyway. And then being like it worked.
Hursh Agrawal
Doing it anyway really feels true. Some days you just wake up and you have to play the part of getting through the day. You just get through it.
Dan Shipper
Josh, you mentioned the competitive environment. What are you guys thinking about? We’ve got some validation. People are excited about this. It's still really early and now there's a big target on our back. Everyone is starting to figure out the browser might be a really important layer to be competing at. I'll say, if you've been reading Every, I've been talking about that for a couple years. But if you're not reading every one it feels like now people are sort of really starting to start to wake up to it. Perplexity, I think, has a browser or they're at least working on one. There's rumors that a couple of the big AI labs are really paying attention to this. So how are you thinking about how to win as a still relatively small company compared to the big incumbents? and then compared to other startups. What do you think about winning?
Josh Miller
On most podcasts, I'd give you the answer that I would give a VC personally. It’s, okay, we think memory is going to lock in this way and our application platform. I think the truth is we had the same questions with Arc and we've been in this industry long enough, whether it's naive enough. I just feel like we have a clarity of thought and perspective that to me, from what I've seen from other companies and heard, feels somewhat unique. And I think we have a sensibility that we just have to run as fast as we can, but not frantically and not out of the scarcity of beating competitors. But if we can stay locked into just being like, yeah, that most energetic, this is what we believe sells. That's the truth of how I think we're going to compete and how we've completed so far since the beginning of the company. Again, I don't want to diminish all the thought we've put into the ways in which like, okay, if someone clones our brows or pixel for pixel, what can we do? But I think at the end of the day, I think one of the things we're grappling with as an industry is what are the moats anymore?
(01:10:00)
I think so many of the traditional moats for products so much about this moment are questioning these dogmas that I had just taken as natural law of how our industry works in products and competition. So that, I don't know, maybe I'm feeling a little bit too hippie-dippy right now, but it's all noise. It was just noise before and it's noise. It's just a distraction if anything, I regret spending so much damn time this past, you're thinking about things outside of our company instead of just putting our hat down and having fun with it. And I think everything that has resonated so far were parts of the product or the strategy. We're just, can I curse? Fuck it. Let's just have some fun with it. If we're going to get punched in the face, let's just go and do the damn thing. Let's just be unapologetic. And the places where we did that. People can feel it. There's like a character to it. And the places that were very top-down, not even top-down just let's get ready for the HBS case study. You feel it's just bullshit. I think or maybe that's a weakness of me as a leader and, but I think that the answer is, Dan, we're going to do our thing. We’ve been doing our thing, my learning from the last year is when we do our thing. At least some people resonate with it and we've got some foresight.
Dan Shipper
I'm excited to see the other vibes in the moat. And you'll figure out the rest, which I actually love. I think that's totally right.
Josh Miller
Here's the thing that I've thought a lot about. I am a DAU. I love ChatGPT. I love that product. There are some things I would personally do differently, but like I love that product. Remember this conversation with OpenAI like a year or two ago? Now everyone’s like we got it. Google's coming in. it's you that uses those products and they feel derivative. They feel like someone said we've got to go like that. Yeah, that's the feature. Let's go do that thing too, from an intellectual perspective. But you can feel whether or not you like it or not, you can feel this is a research lab that decided they were going to make their life's mission to do this a long time ago. And now their conviction is building and those intuitions building for what matters. And I'm not saying that ChatGPT is going to be the end all be all, or there won't be other things. But I wonder what Sam Altman would have said? I'm not comparing myself to Sam Altman, but two years ago when it's, all right, now what? It's a simple product. And it's, why has ChatGPT continued to be the fastest growing company of all time? What's their moat?
Hursh Agrawal
Vibes is definitely one. I also think there's some systemic things about our company that I am excited for in this new race. One is, I think the, assume you don't know, I think we've built so much of our culture and how we build products to build entirely new things, which is very different from sort of copying or seeing what's in the market and sort of taking inspiration perhaps. And so I'm excited that we have sort of the machinery and the muscle and the people and the inspiration to like, in this entirely new world, figure out what works. And then I think the second is taste. I think like our Josh and our designers I'm just blown away by what they come up with on a weekly basis.
Josh Miller
I would also say for the Every audience, there are conversations we have a lot internally that would be shocked if the Perplexity team or whoever else talks about this in the context of the browser, which is when I see things from other companies in this space, and I can say this because this is where we started. It's very engineering tech forward. Hey, there's some new computer use model and we're going to have it do a bunch of tasks for you, and you're going to like it, we're going to book that thing for you. And we started that. I totally get it. What I found is. I'm having this very, very interesting. I was a sociology major, and I'm sure you've seen this too, Dan, where I find myself talking to people not in tech. It'll be like a party on the weekend. I'll meet someone somehow. AI will come up to GPT and almost to a person, everyone's like it's kind of weird. I think it's weird. I kind of feel weird talking about it, but I'm like asking it for advice or like, I got its help with this health thing and it's like, I don't know if it was right, but I felt better at the end of it. And there are people, there's like an emotional intelligence to these models. That is because of the origins of what the research labs and the sorts of people that are at the forefront right now that are more driven, I think by the benchmarks and the raw IQ, which again is spectacular. We were really excited about going back to this home on the internet. If we know what you do every day personally and professionally, and these models are, can be subjective and think and give advice and joke and at least give the perception of it. Brainstorm, what are things you can do at the intersection of yes, you've got to, you have a job, you don't want to browse, that's your therapist. No one wants that. That's not what I'm saying. But actually I think, okay. When you think about the tasks and the workflows that have high economic value that you get paid for that are on your to-do list, there's a component that's clicking buttons for sure and we should click those buttons for you. But the hard part about it is not checking out. That's a minor nuisance that yes, computers should solve and are on their way to solving. The thing is, all right, I'm going upstate with my family to where you guys are at the end of August. Which town do I go to? Which one would we like? What's kid-friendly? We don't really want something fancy, but also I don't want to sleep in a tent for this vacation and those kinds of qualitative subjective. Reasoning in our opinion, is actually where a lot of the value's going to keep going up the stack in Maslow's hierarchy, I guess is another way to say it. So if we're just going to assume we have this cheap intelligence commoditized across models, accessible, can click buttons, can do things for you, that's important, but where's the value going to be then? I think it's going to keep moving up to some of this more emotional intelligence stuff. And so I'd be surprised if the other AI browsers have that so central to their North star vs. you're going to have these agents that are going to go do these things for you and that's important, but it's missing the force for the trees.
Dan Shipper
A little bit on that sort of emotional intelligence and sociology point. I had Nash on this podcast maybe a year ago, who's your head of storytelling, who is incredible. And one of the things that I really loved about her perspective, which I assume Josh, you share in this approach is. We were talking about how she, how you guys came up with the laptop class and how you think about marketing. And it was very like, well, I was listening to this Janis Joplin record and I was thinking about the era of music and the social change that was happening. And, so it was very kind of rooted in what are historical examples of moments that are kind of this, but also thinking about moments in technology and music and art as being part of a conversation and being the next turn in a conversation. One thing that I know is true about your approach and sort of going off of the, if we go off of the sorry. If we go off of the kind of emotional intelligence and the socio sociology major Arc that you're talking about. one thing that I know is true about your approach is you're always taking inspiration from really diverse, weird, interesting artistic sources to help inform the product direction, how you think about things. And I'm curious what those are right now for Dia and for the features that you're thinking about building.
(01:20:00)
Josh Miller
Yeah, I think you're right that we've always drawn inspiration as much from places and moments outside of the technology industry and today. One of the things that's interesting at the time we're recording this podcast is I think just every week it feels like there's new breakthroughs in the AI space from a technology perspective. I feel like our own intuition and understanding is, and the conception of what we have in front of us is changing as well. But I'd say the things on my mind right now, I'm going on vacation next week, so what am I going to read about and think about? I had this conversation with my closest friend, Dan Shipper, the best man at my wedding . He's not tech, but he has always been the one that was, hey, this Snapchat thing's going to be huge. So if I ever start a VC fund, I'm hiring this guy just to be like the mystic soothsayer. And he was the first one, again, not a tech industry guy that was, there's not a thing in my life. That is an important project for work or my personal life that I'm not working with, getting advice, collaborating with what I said before, that feels like the profound shift in the world that I see outside of the industry is happening. And so that sort of new relationship with technology and with this intelligence makes me want to read about honestly, romanticism. I wish I could go back to college and, yes, my someone I work with, Abby actually dropped a bunch of books on my desk for this vacation with little notes. They're all romanticism related and what chapters I should look at. So I'm really excited to understand how in the past, when your relationship changed with technology and even what it was and what was possible, how did society and art and culture react And then the second thing I'm really excited to spend more time thinking about or what are the objects or places in your life that given the centrality that importance, if you're doing every project in your personal professional life, how do you build comfort, a sense of safety in those spaces, even when maybe there aren't as comfortable as you wish they were or not as safe as you wish they were? How do they feel like yours? This is really squishy stuff to some, but I played the percussion and drums growing up, and I remember I got a really cheap drum set. I was a kid and at some point I was considering getting a new one, but it was, man, the way that you wear a snare. As a baseball player, I think these sorts of references are a little overdone, honestly. So I'm excited to go like a click deeper on that. I picked Christopher Alexander as stereotypical as it is. I'm going to go, I'm going back to Christopher Alexander. So to me that is going to be, whether it's us or someone else, I want a timestamp in 24 months. I predict that the AI interface that people feel the deepest affinity and value from will be the one that they actually have the deepest kind of emotional connection to And not in a way that they're like having sex with the bot or anything like that. But actually just from the perspective of this intangible feeling in the same way, I guess iPhone vs. the Android at this point, there's not a good read. So anyways, you can kind of hear the answers kind of all over the place, but that's honestly how we kind of do it at The Browser Company.
Dan Shipper
I think this is great. I'm very also into romanticism and for people who are listening and they're like romance novels it's the reason I like romanticism, I think it's relevant and I'm curious what your take is romanticism was a movement in the 19th century that was a response to Enlightenment rationalism, basically from the 17th and 19th centuries where physics was so successful that it sort of took over the rest of culture. And it, we can still sort of see that in a lot of ways, but starting with Galileo and Newton and that re revolution there was a push to reduce everything in our life and our experience to things that we could explain in physics more or less which is still the case. And Romanticism was a 19th century movement to be like, actually there's a lot about human experience that is more vibes-based. And that's actually like one of the best parts of human experience. And so there's a lot of art and work from that period in Europe and in the United States that touches on that. And I think language models are weirdly romantic coded. Technology because they are so squishy. It's the first example of software we've ever had that you can't reduce to rules in the same way that you can with regular software. And you have to work with vibes. And I think that's a huge shift for software and for culture generally.
Josh Miller
And does it sound familiar? If someone was listening to what you just described, it sort of describes the world today in a lot of ways. And it's one of the things I still feel a love-hate relationship with this kind of AI industry, if you want to call it that. It's extremely rational, extremely mechanical, extremely the benchmarks in the capabilities. But reviewing these on Every, you can see the SWE benchmark and then you can feel it And there's a difference there. And then it's also very relevant in terms of what it can intellectually do and how powerful it is, but what do you want? I think that's what we're going to be grappling with as a society in the next five years is these sort of almost things that sound philosophical or like you should be in university talking about them. But I think it's going to be really important again for us for the first time in a long time. What do we want from this life? And I know when I've heard podcasts and people talk about that, I'm like, oh my god, I've got to turn this thing off. So hopefully people don't stop listening right now. But I would encourage people, even if you're just going to ChatGPT, or dear whatever, do a couple queries about romanticism and find and replace some of the nouns with where we are today. And to me, when Abby. Kind of reminded me of this. It just was, I can't unsee it, so I'm excited. I'm going to go do something like a Romanticism 101 class for next week in the mountains. And sorry for everyone at our all hands on the Monday I get back, you're going to get a lecture about awe and magic. Maybe that's what our Every essay should be about. Maybe we run a romantic essay.
Dan Shipper
I love that idea. I would read that. Well, Josh, Hursh, this is amazing. Thank you so much for coming on and talking to us. And good luck with Dia. We are so back.
Josh Miller
We’re back. We're back. Thanks for having us, Dan.
Thanks to Scott Nover for editorial support.
Dan Shipper is the cofounder and CEO of Every, where he writes the Chain of Thought column and hosts the podcast AI & I. You can follow him on X at @danshipper and on LinkedIn, and Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.
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