Best of the Pod: Would You Shut Down Your Most Successful Product? The Arc to Dia Story

Last year sucked. We were running a company with 70 people, millions of people using the product every month. Nope. We're starting over. Oh, cool.

What are we doing? We don't really know.

We have this realization that all of software needs to be rewritten for this new world because primary interfaces we have with computers are gonna change.

Josh, Hirsch, welcome to the show. Good to be here.

Thanks for having us.

Of course. So good to have you. So for people who don't know, you are the co founders of the browser company. You are the makers of Arc and now Dia.

Mhmm.

And I'm psyched to talk to you about Dia, talk to you about the journey to get there. As you can see if you're watching the show, me and Hirsch are together. We're in Upstate New York in Cabin. A We've been friends for a long time. 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, yeah, I'm just really excited to get to talk to you about it. So thanks for coming on.

Well, I'm just gonna say for the record, I'm not there because I didn't get the invite. We're not that close, Dan, I will say. I'm I'm kidding. No. It's awesome to be here.

I didn't organize. You can you gotta blame Paulina Hirsch's wife. Yeah.

Honored to be here. Excited to do this. We've listened to so many of your podcasts. And, obviously, you have so much history.

Yeah. Yeah. So another a couple other disclaimers. I'm a small investor in the browser company. So people should know that.

I also spoke at your wedding. Yeah. So we'll we'll put up a little picture of me speaking there. And another like really interesting little bit of history that that is fun for me to remember now is I actually like there was a point at which I was considering or you guys were considering me to be the CEO of the browser company, which is crazy to think about that now because, you know, you had come up with the idea to to incubate. At the time, it was superhuman for browsers was the pitch, I remember.

And I was working on super organizers, is a little newsletter, would become Every. Oh,

did that turn into Every? I didn't even realize that was wow. Yeah.

And so there was there was a moment in time where where we were we were discussing working together on on this. So it's really fun to come full circle five and a half years later and be like, wow. I'm we're both we're all so much older. We we have so much so many more wrinkles. I have a I have a big beard.

I think I was pretty clean shaven when when when we were doing that. So, yeah, that was a crazy moment.

Wow. So super organizers is like your arc.

Yes.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I hope Dia goes as well as every. I'm like, fingers crossed. Like, I'm into it.

Thank you. I think we all have a lot to learn from each other. So I think the the first thing I wanna talk about is I watched this pivot from ARC to Dia. I think we were in Thailand together when you were

first starting

to get really psyched about AI. And I just watched Hirsch's eyes just like he had this spark. It was like a sparkle. It was like, oh my god. This is crazy.

And I was like, yes. I was like, little bell on his shoulder being like, yes. You get it.

Oh, it's your fault, Dan. I always wondered where that came from.

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, okay, we're not gonna 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 like bear that while you were building Dia. And I just wanna know, like, what was that like?

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 headspace for quite a while. You know, we've been trying to all throughout 2023 or so trying to figure out how do 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 don't 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 has this video last year of act two. We had this realization that actually browsers are gonna change pretty dramatically, how we use computers are gonna change pretty dramatically from a user computer interface point of view. You know, where we're gonna talk to our computers, they're gonna do stuff because this new PLAY DOH allows you to, like, 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 two point o, and we were like, 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.

You know? Like, the the internal discussions about, like, oh, what do we do with the sidebar? Was, like, at the wrong level, you know, when we have this new Play Doh. We had we really had to start from from scratch. And so maybe I you know, I'd I'd be curious for your take, Josh, actually, on, like, how do you feel about the external messaging?

Because for us, it was over such a long period of time. And so obvious, you know, that we had to okay. We have to start from scratch if we're gonna 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.

Yeah. I mean, I think I think 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 Hirsch and my hopes and expectations, I don't think the first two weeks could have gone better. We feel so so proud. And so I think I felt an adrenaline release.

And I think it's safe to say last year sucked. Like it it really did and I think it's one of those things like many things that I 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 so obviously was the right call. But I think a thing for especially listeners to know, you alluded to this, Hirsch and I, I've never made software really without Hirsch. I met Hirsch 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 Hirsch. Intellectually, emotionally, the thing I think we both underappreciated was it's not just me and him anymore.

Right.

Exactly. I mean I mean we knew that, but at every moment that Hirsch and I looked across the proverbial table and said, should we should we do this? Should we make this thing? It was me and him. Right?

And we we we share value. Like, we it's just a different relationship. We were running a company with 70 people, know, millions of people using the product every month. And we definitely, I think, underappreciated the public reaction. I mean, we started this company, Dan, I you know, 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 it was the the what we saw the most. So I think we were very surprised by the reaction for sure and wanted do 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 for Arc more than the browser company.

Be like, that thing we poured our hearts into for years, nah, we're starting over. Oh cool, what are we doing? We don't really know. But it'll be great. We're just gonna go that way.

Right? Sounds like a great plan. Right? You know, like so. It was a it was a winding journey, but very proud at this point.

That's yeah. Okay. There's a lot here. I really wanna go into, tell me about the initial moment where you guys were coming to the decision of like, oh wow, there's something totally new here. And not only is ARC maybe not working in the way that we want it to, but 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?

Yeah. And one of the things I think I wanna be more forthright about here, I don't think we've really said publicly before, is I almost think blaming Arc is a scapegoat. Right? If if really Hirsch 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. You know, it wasn't it's it's easy in retrospect to be, oh, it's growing literally the novelty tax.

I 100% agree with Hirsch that that is true. But our first instinct was actually just to make Arc better. So I I really think the origin story here was that like, you can't stop thinking about it. You're staying up till 3AM. Every bone in your body is just like, this is why we got into software.

But I I really gotta credit Hirsch. 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 and yeah, let's have a therapy session later about that. But for me, I just the crypto wave was the one that came before.

And just for me, it just it felt icky to me even even though I agreed with idealism. So here comes around AI and my knee jerk reaction is like this is a bunch of hot air. But really like when I think about, I didn't, not thinking about this interview before we came in, you know when you just said that with the origin story, I think of a conversation I had with Hirsch in San Francisco that to me was like, oh, we gotta do this thing. I mean, Hirsch, when you you really were first to see this world that was coming and and feel it in your bones. Like, do you remember even for you where it came from and when?

He's giving me a lot of credit. I think it was probably I came at it from my own perspective. Think realizing and part of it was excitement about the Play Doh, but part of it also was the realization that like, if if we don't go this route, I think, you know, we're gonna get obviated. You know? All of software needs to be rewritten for this new world because, again, the the primary interfaces we have with computers are gonna change.

But I think a lot of it also came from your experimentation with ArcSearch. Right? And, like, actually playing with LMs and realizing, oh, we can build something cool here. This is Play Doh we're really good at using.

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's 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 you know, in the backdrop of launching this kind of Arc mobile app is when all these kind 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 Hirsch that was like, okay. 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 have been a huge distraction for the team to do that on desktop.

So I we actually hired a contractor externally. I was living in Paris at the time. And kinda hired him to do this Skunk Works project. He like, hey, just for funsies, it's not gonna 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. It 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 back links, we made you the perfect web page. So instead of typing in a query and trying to find the right link from the world wide 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 web page 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, you know, we had a number of takeaways from from that, but one of them that really influenced Dia was what Hirsch 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 like, yeah, duh.

Welcome to like making consumer products for real human beings. But is the antithesis of ARC, as you know, in terms of the product philosophy.

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 a funnel for intent. You know? The 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 and secondly, it's an application platform.

And so you run all your web apps, and it's sort of the web one point o and two point o sort portions of whatever browser does. And both, I think, ArcSearch made us realize that the intent portion is gonna 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, you know, 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 ArcSearch was our first foray into realizing browsers are gonna change. Right.

You know? 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 gonna change drastically.

Mhmm.

And so that was sort of our first moment of like, oh, we gotta rethink, you know, what's product is.

And I think the bit about search is really key here that came to influence Dia's. You know, keep in mind, our kind of approach to building Arc was really as much about, you know, urban planning and interior design as software. And that our our recognition was you spend hours a day in this rectangle in this space and people don't have any feelings about it. Could we change that? And so the sort of conversations we had is like, 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. You know, we're not Google. Even though search, opening a new 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 kinda said, no, we're we're not a search company.

We couldn't possibly do anything with that. Know, that's Google's domain. Look, even Microsoft threw tens of billions over many years and Bing sucks, so what are we gonna do? So I think it also opened Pandora's box of saying, oh wait, as Hirsch 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 the big eye opening moment from ArcSearch, which was not the intention at all at the time we started the project.

Take me from that moment from like, okay, you've made some realizations around ArcSearch to probably, okay, we're gonna do Arc two point zero, but actually, maybe this is a totally new product. Like what happened in

between there? I've I've never said this before. I think indecision and a lack of, you know, excellent leadership on, at least I'll say my part, in that I think Hirsch and I knew deep down in that moment what we had to do. Whether it was from the Arc perspective of like ArcSearch feels so simple and clean and resonant with people. I mean that was the first time we had people telling us like, hey, I I really don't like Arc on desktop.

Sorry. I I just like too much don't get it, but I love Arc Search. So I think the combination of Hirsch and then my kind of increasing conviction that this was gonna change all of software, as bombastic as that sounded, combined with the bottoms up resonance and simplicity and focus of Arc Search. Hirsch and I, I think in our heart of hearts, knew what we had to do. But what happened next was that was in probably February, and it was in June at a company wide off-site that we said, we're gonna build something new.

But then even then it was like, it's gonna be Arc two point o. Like, we don't even know. Like, TBD. So I think it probably wasn't until September that we made the call to say, it is a completely new product called something completely different with no connectivity to ARC. And you know, I I am so proud of actually a lot of what Hirsch 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 like not calling a spade a spade and just like ripping the cord. You know?

And to our point earlier, especially with a team that large and a team that joined post product market fit, you know, like getting the teams buy in and get aligning with everybody and figuring out what are we doing. And took a little while.

Dan, one thing I'll add too is like, you know, I I love Every, one of my favorite publications. Not an investor, wish wish I was an investor, but it's it's fantastic. And one of the things that is remarkable, actually even reading your coverage is, keep in mind where AI was fourteen months ago. You know, was, you know, ChatGPT was, you know, long in the market and and and I think for most people paying attention, you could kinda pull the curve forward. But there was also a lot of technology macro risk at the time as well, which is like, are the scaling laws really gonna continue?

Like, are we gonna figure out hallucinations? You know, even this concept of memory, is core to what we're doing, I I mean, I I can't remember the time stamps, but I don't think was part of the conversation and now is like arguably the most central idea behind Dia. And so, yeah, it's easy in retrospect I think to be a little like, you know, self deprecating. Was not obvious to And everybody or I do remember we put out a video that was like, we think AI browsers are the future. And everyone's like, what are you talking about?

Like like, you're being a hype boy. What are you talking about? And you know, literally today, there was a you know, MG Siegler last night write this whole article that's like, yeah, AI browsers are definitely gonna be a thing and everyone's definitely gonna build them. Like, Apple's gonna make one, OpenAI's gonna make one. And so I don't say that's a gloat.

It's actually, you know, competition that we have to wrestle with. But in the moment at which I'm like, oh, the indecision, there were so many reasons why you would not do what we did. So it was not that clear.

I totally I totally remember all of those things. Like how If you're really using these tools every day, you're 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 eighteen months.

I would even say six months, Dan. One of the things that I remember in the moment was, again, it's almost like, it sounds like a love story or a relationship. Like, me and Hirsch in quiet moments together and the conversations we would have about this.

Candle it, you know.

Yeah. Like, looking each other's eyes, glistening about our our future intelligence or whatever. But keep in mind like I, Hirsch and I are are both people that you know, 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 in that moment were not into the idea of AI. You know, keep in mind the discourse.

That was that was peak, this thing's gonna 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, you know, with my family showing a demo of this chatty bitty thing that I'm staying up till 3AM and just finding deep inspiration in, and they're like, what are you talking about? And so that's just like another moment where you're like, okay, the 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 gonna 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 were often saying, you are too in the tech world, man. You're telling me that like the thing that comes after ARC is this like AI nonsense that's spitting out gibberish? So it's a real act of like introspection to say, am I have I lost it? Have I become disconnected?

Or are we 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 Hirsch of like, what is reality? I don't know.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, not only from our friends, but also employees. You know? So that was that was tough.

Yeah. What was that like when you had that company meeting and you're like, hey, this is a new product.

Do you remember Josh? Was that at the off-site?

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 off-site in Montreal where we definitively said we're at least gonna try to build the second product whether or not it's Arc two point o or not. There was a moment when we said it is gonna 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, you know, really to Hersh'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. Right? 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 got this wacky idea and I'm really excited about it, I'm not, you know, let's try it.

The people's first reaction is like 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 sorta frame it as what it was at the time, an inclination, a hunch. And again, think as you built more and more things, I think it became 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, you know, we had added some trust points to our bank account. And Hirsch and I drew them down to maybe a negative balance, you know, up until Dia got further along. But you know, credit to the team.

You know, 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 like, alright. Let's see, you know.

Yeah. And that 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 like both where the value is here, but also like what are the things we need to get better at. Eval's fine tuning, you know, from a technical perspective, from a design perspective, how do do chat interfaces work? Are chat interfaces the right mechanism?

LLMs, all of that. And so, again, as we gradually built that capability, our our confidence grew.

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 like it was a thing I was thinking, which is, okay, I totally understand that maybe it's not gonna be like this gigantic ARGUS is just not gonna be this gigantic mass market consumer product or whatever, but it had millions of users. That's pretty good. And isn't VC distorting what you count as good, and aren't you killing something that so many people love just because it's not billions of users? Talk to me about that.

Because yeah, I wanna understand how you think about it.

Well, Dan, actually it relates to origin story when we asked you to be the CEO. So the origin of the browser company was I was working in 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 they're desktop web apps for work. I mean, started a newsletter called Super Organizers. This was the moment of productivity software.

Right? And so the idea was like, let's make a enterprise browser for work. And as you said, take the superhuman, the notion, the Figma playbook and and run it. And so Hirsch was gonna be the founder and we were looking for a co founder CEO. And the first person, he's like, I had to call Danny.

He's my best friend. He does this newsletter called Super Organizers. It's perfect. And maybe it would have 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's CEO, in addition to really just wanting to work with Hirsch again, was this moment that actually the browser is arguably the most consumer piece of software in the world. Like there are very few pieces of software that your mom and your second cousin and your partner all use. Like 4,000,000,000 people use Chrome every month and nobody cares about it. And most people don't have like 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 Hirsch when we talked about like, oh, do we wanna build a product with millions of people? We, I would've, we would've capitalized this 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, you know, couple million people browser that, you know, makes decent money, just comes back to why I personally got into software, and what motivates me and Hirsch. So I will say, hopefully, you know, people have heard, there are a lot of things that were hard.

There are a lot of things that were unclear. The why are we here? Why did we start this company? Has been consistent and unwavering from our perspective.

I also, like, again, we're sort of fixating on ARC, but the reason for this was was not just what do we do with ARC and how do we grow it. It was also how do we meet this moment. You know? And, like, we were just so inspired by, oh my god. Like, it's this platform shift is happening, and what software is and can be is can be so different and so much more capable and look very different.

And and we have a specific skill set and team that's capable of building that interface 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. And so we started with Dia.

And I also think as Hirshed, it's like, as the technology was evolving, as we were getting more familiar with it, 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 gonna be very central.

Yeah.

You know, at first it was sort of like, wait, don't wanna be that company that's just because we got inspired doesn't mean you should pivot your company. Right? They're inspiring things I see all the time. I'm not like, hey, let's go start like an indie film company. Right?

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 copy 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. Like, people didn't say context was king a year ago.

Maybe you did, but most people did.

I did. Yeah.

There you go. This is why you gotta subscribe to Every. It would've been a year early. But, you know, 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 in this thing.

And then as Hirsch said 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 gonna do some things and tools for you. 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 Hersha's point of inspiration, realizing that structurally and honestly felt like we had, like, you know, been at the end of the rainbow before the rainbow came and all of a sudden like a pot of gold appeared. And so it was sort of like, alright. I feel like we should probably try to open this pot. Like, this feels like the thing to do. You know?

Well, let's let's talk about what what you found when you opened the pot. Like, you guys made dia. And I will say, and I think this is an interesting testimonial given 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.

Hey. And 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.

Clearly, Dan.

So this is this is totally not for podcast purposes or anything like that. Like, I just switched to it because I think the and this maybe gets to your point. One of your points about Arc is I used Arc for certain heavy research tasks and for podcasting specifically because Riverside doesn't work in Safari. You have to use a Chromium 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 it opens up a whole new way of using web pages for me that I really love. So it's like, 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 like, get launched and get the reception it's gotten.

Well, Hersh, it's honestly it's worth talking about the architectural decisions because that was a whole another thing. We decided to just be like, why don't we do this completely differently too while we're at it?

Like Yeah. We really had a 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. Interesting. And so we were really optimizing for how do we prototype and build new features and in a way that we can do them quickly and

What was it? Just quickly, what was the architecture like?

It used a kind of Redux type state driven architecture, which was 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.

And re Redux is like the the meta, like, React Exactly. Framework or

way of thinking

about how to pass information from a UI layer to to the back of the server and all that kind stuff.

Exactly. Exactly. And so, you know, we had a a real choice last summer on when we're building DI. 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, 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 core to strategy. You know, if the strategy was a mass market browser that people would ideally use irrespective of the AI features, that it had

to be fast and it had to be, you know, just be a really, really good browser. Why don't you figure out about how to make something performant?

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. Oh, so

you figured out a way to still do prototyping quickly.

Yes.

Yeah.

Exactly.

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, you know, this had been a topic that sees 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 gotta do your most be your most abundant self.

Dream. Come on. What are the things that you always regret? This is the moment to do. Like, you know.

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. Know, you can feel it in Dia. Are parts of it that there I hope there's some kernels of the browser company that are consistent across it. But there are also some things, Rick, I think you can feel a group of people that said, no, we're really gonna flex on this one. And we're not gonna flex on this one in a way that's like 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.

And one discussion we had when we were building this out also was it's it's funny seeing MGC Glitter's post now about how the eyebrows are gonna take off and we're less sort of kicking off this race. But that was a discussion we had about the architecture, which is like, we have so much conviction in this route that when we launch this, if we are the first ones, we're gonna 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?

Yeah.

And so that was a lot of the input as well. Yeah.

Hirsch and I had a very seminal conversation for us, at least, on that San Francisco trip I mentioned. And Hirsch flew out the next day before me and sent me this long, long essay in a way that, you know, I don't get long, long essays from Hirsch, you know. And one of the things that Hirsch had the foresight to see in this new world was that it's not about the browser. The browser is almost incidental. Right?

The real opportunity and I I think the language Hersh used at the time was this truly personal assistant. I think all of us right now are grasping for what the right nouns are for the work that we're doing. But Hersh 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 gonna come from.

That's what's gonna enable the thing you're turning to it for. Almost like 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 like, seems a little far fetched, but hope he's right. And as time has gone on, I think his his his instincts were, in retrospect, absolutely correct.

You know, 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 ten years is actually gonna 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 Hirsch was saying was essentially this is the internet computer. You're gonna have desktop browsers and mobile apps and all sorts of things. And on top of it is gonna be this personal assistant or this intelligence for you.

And it's gonna 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. What you're turning to it for is this personal intelligence layer that is a wild dimension in humanity that's gonna help you do all sorts of things and it's gonna be miraculous. But don't forget, the browser's just the enabling technology underneath that's not the main event.

So you can imagine how getting in front of the browser company of New York's 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 Hirsch at me was extremely prescient regardless of if we win this race, if it's even zero sum, but it it it he had the foresight of connecting it to the Internet computer idea that kinda underpinned Arc.

That's that's a couple things that I think are interesting here about, like, lessons that it seems like you guys have learned about building the future and and some things that I've definitely seen at every trying to do the same thing is, one, when GPT-three was first a thing, everyone was like, this is gonna be an incumbent enabling technology. Like Google and Microsoft, they're just gonna like put a chat bot put a chat box on the on the right side of Chrome and like, they're gonna put it in Google Docs and like everything is just gonna 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, I think 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 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 then 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 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.

Yeah. And two stories actually that come to mind that are very relevant. So Hirsch and I, our first company was acquihired by Facebook when we were, I don't know, 22 or something. And I'll never forget this all internal RIP branch. RIP branch.

RIP branch. For the real ones out there that remember. I will never forget this internal all hands at Facebook where Zuckerberg stood up and had this whole presentation about how in five years everything was gonna be video. Social media was gonna be video. And I thought he was nuts.

I was like 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? Like, 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. You know, remember five years later, was like, yep, TikTok's definitely a thing.

And so I think part of what Hirsch and I took from that experience in different ways and similar experiences, hey, if you're gonna start a company, one of the you mentioned Branch, mean Hirsch's first company. The origin story was a hackathon prototype. And my takeaway from that and that experience was like, you start a company based on a prototype, you don't have a kind of fundamental internal guidepost when inevitably your prototype's gonna fail. And so the intention of the browser company inspired by or experienced with Branch, observations of Zuckerberg at Facebook was don't pretend like you have all the answers, but even just directionally. Are you heading?

You're in LA, you're going on a road trip, you're to New York or Miami. You may not know how you're gonna get there and you may hate Miami. And Miami might be not be as cool as you think. But pick a destination that is five, ten years out 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 to kinda just go for it. What I think is interesting too about that is just to 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 gonna go figure out how to build it. And, yeah, you don't know the route, like, you know 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 changed. Yeah. And so you're 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 gonna be such a thing when you started five and half years ago. And I think that's really interesting too. And that's definitely been consistent with my feeling about Every. When we were talking about super organizers, I was like, I wanna build this newsletter and then I'm gonna launch products to the newsletter.

We're doing the same thing now, but it looks so different. Yeah. 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 deep the details of what that actually means as the world evolves and your product evolves and you learn new things.

Yeah. I I think that that that point applies to that video story that I told you where at the moment Zuckerberg was saying, you're gonna share the same types of personal vulnerable updates that you do today in video now. And while there's some of that, I remember I the the moment I made the connection back to what Zuckerberg said at the all hands and even realized that video had become a thing was I had the opportunity to meet Evan Spiegel from Snapchat. I think it was in like 2019. And I was like, alright.

I gotta ask him one question. So my question for him was like, what's one thing that's really inspiring you right now? And he told me about this app from China or called TikTok, which again, it was pretty popular at the time, but I hadn't really come across it. And I was like, oh, why is it inspiring? He's like, it made it so anyone can be a celebrity for a day.

And I remember being confused by the description, but you can kinda see that he was right and and kind of capturing what was unique about TikTok. That was very different than what Zuckerberg said. That is not friends sharing intimate videos with each other in a news feed. And so the point of being able to say where the world is going directionally is definitely not you know 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 sharing everything. And so when we shared the internet computer video, I honestly remember people internally being like, man this seems kinda 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 questioned like, know, were we right? And so one of the interesting things about was there was a larger disconnect developing it than Arc between the internal feelings and beliefs that we had and like what we could say publicly.

So And that was also kind of an interesting part of building Dia versus versus Arc.

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. Mhmm. You know? And so.

Oh, yeah. GPT four o made Dia work. Like, when we started working on Dia, I might get my dates slightly off, but I distinctly remember messaging our person at OpenAI and being like, this model made our thing happen.

Yeah. It's crazy. Like, we we've had that same thing where you're 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 like architecting to like string string different models And then we had this happen with Autopus four recently. Like, it just worked. Yeah.

And it was like, okay, we can throw out three months of work because now it just like, it just Yeah. One shots

I mean, really a great example of that from Dia is, you know, to me the core idea of Dia is this idea that it should get better with every tab you open. Just like every time you swipe a video on TikTok, it feels like it's getting to know you and it's more useful to you. That's how Dia should get feel and get better with age. And Hirsch had the foresight to know that context and memory and personalization were gonna be the thing that ended up differentiating when all the models and intelligence commoditized or looked that way. It was gonna be the thing that was most personal.

So Hirsch 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, guess it's not gonna have memory. And then six weeks before launch, was like, wait a minute. I think the fact that it had this context window over here, like, what?

No. No. Try Let's this approach. Like, let's do memory one more time. And, 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. Like, we're gonna do it again right before this big launch we've been working for for a year. And, again, I don't wanna say it's work because it's too early, but like it's looking pretty prescient again from Hirsch. But but again, that was enabled by in a span of six months, the fundamental building blocks changed enough in our understanding of how to wield them that a thing that smart people banged against for nine months didn't happen,

and then

it happened pretty much overnight.

And cost and latency and all that stuff.

Tell me about, yeah, you've gotten it out in the wild. You have this thesis that it's gonna get better with every tab you open, which I love. I think that's such a clean way. That's such a Josh, like Joshism. Like, perfect.

I love it. Means a lot coming from you.

What are people using it for that has surprised your or, you know, what have you what have you learned getting it out in the wild that you didn't know?

Here's your take, Josh.

I think I am surprised that people see what we see as quickly as they did. I thought this was gonna be a really painful moment for us. And I prepped, and Hirsch and I prepped the team for that. Hey, it's gonna be a somewhat tricky, brutal summer because Dia is so basic. Because again, keep in mind, the idea of Dia is not the browser bit.

It's not the tab management. It's not the things you can see. It's all of these capabilities that Hirsch and the team have built under the hood. They were like, oh, if we just like 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 that was pretty basic. And we thought it was useful, but we thought it was gonna just get trolled.

Yeah. Kept asking Hirsch for access and he was like, oh, like later, like soon, soon. And he did it the outfit for what

it's worth. We got absolutely trapped.

My friends and family were so nervous about me because my style of of of friendship and working on what I do is I enthusiastically want them on early in their feedback. Admission, my wife, who I've been with for, you know, over a decade, didn't try Dia until launch.

That makes me feel so much better because I was like, Hersha's just like, I don't know what's going on, but like, are we growing apart?

And and that shows you, I actually felt like an artist, not in terms of an artist in terms of our, you know, quality or per but just like the nerves to put this like personal work on the work. So the biggest surprise is people got it right away despite in its biggest in its current state in terms of what it's useful for.

What do you think they get? I think

MG's post really captures it, which is you can sort of feel the new latent possibilities underneath the surface by fusing these things together. Like really what Hirsch 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 like this morning actually, I saw someone shared that their they clearly been using Dia for a couple weeks. So people like discover, like these little Easter eggs. Like, oh, I can do this.

And what they found is when they look up songs on YouTube, they can ask it for the tab chords so they can play it on their guitar.

That's sick. I don't need to use that. I I actually do this all the time where I send YouTube videos to Gemini and then have it tell me the transcribe the piano. So I'm gonna have to I'm for that.

So I think people finding that like 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, you would never put, hey, you know what you can do in 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 tam of that 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, was like we should gesture at that just a little bit. Right? So let's we have this concept of skills, which are effectively AI apps. We have a couple that are first party, but they're really basic.

Just for people who are listening that haven't used it, what is a skill in Dia?

Yeah. A skill in Dia is the equivalent of an or we hope will be the equivalent of an application on an iPhone or on computer. But in this kind of AI world, what it is is it's a system prompt, a model or a number of models, tool 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, 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 the platform is still extremely limited. And And so we weren't gonna let anyone make their own because we were waiting till later this summer when we could actually expose those the really cool building blocks. Reasoning models, memory, and the like. But we're like, okay, we gotta gesture at it because that's why we're here.

We work 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

Added a week 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 that relates to the tab cord example is that one the things we used to say with Arc was that, you know, no one cares about their browser but they spend hours a day in it. It should feel like you are 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 like chatting with your tabs and people finding use cases that are new and very personal to them. To people be like, wait a minute, you're saying I can make my own one of these that like when I'm doing my workflow for my job can do exactly what I want it to do? It's almost like the normie, and I'm saying that for myself, I'm a sociology major that doesn't know how to code. Like everyone's looking around and seeing Cursor and Replit and Lovable and these companies just explode. Wow, you can make new things.

And there are people like me being like, wait, I wanna make new things. And I think we're tapping into something there of like, almost like handmade software. Like people wanting to make things for themselves like me that I I literally had to hound Hirsch 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 Hirsch would like wanna make something with me. So I think I think it's starting to tap into that nerve.

And while that observation is old, did not expect that this early in the product development since we felt like that was like to come and to be revealed.

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 is software we can create that is useful for a large TAM, instead we can build software that allows people to make their niche software just in time, you know, 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.

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 Notion where it's not one big use case. It's not one job to be done. It's like millions of tiny little ones. Yeah.

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 like creating a language where 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, a uniquely powerful type of product. And also, b, 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.

Yeah. I 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. Yeah.

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. Yeah.

Dan, it's funny you say that. I'm I'm looking at my phone because late last night, Dustin, our head of design, the the basically, he was so inspired by these custom skills being created. Dustin's an extremely humble, soft spoken Canadian. He doesn't do things. He turned to me a week ago.

I was 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 like, yeah.

Okay. Cool. Go. And he texted me last night about what he's been prototyping and and kind of show me and and I sent him a text back. I said actually, I would have written it differently if I knew it was gonna a podcast.

But Dustin, you're legit inventing a new programming language. Non technical people like me wanna feel technical. I aspire to know Swift. I don't. Give me a language to learn.

And I don't mean language like complicate 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 gonna 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 the tools that sit on top of the base are are gonna be more powerful than the base itself. That was consistent. The idea it's gonna be skills and it's gonna be really jumped to kind of the third party, not first party.

And it's gonna actually require this kind of new programming language thing. It's not programming like it's kinda 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 like one of those moments again where it's like, okay, entire company, we're going that way.

A 100%. Come on a podcast, like what what is this skill? What are you talking about? Is it it's like, I don't know if the listeners are like, what are they like, these guys are crazy. But like in my bones right now, it's like, that is so clearly where the world's going.

So like, let's try our best to run that way.

And I will say, we thought this was six or twelve months away, a while away. And 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. I wanna get down into, like, I think we've we've traced the whole, for lack of a better word, ARC of of the company so thus far, which is like, do ARC big success, but maybe not the kind of success that you guys were looking for. Announced that you're pivoting, like a year of just pretty much hell was maybe Getting punched in the face. A good description. And now you're like, we're we're back, baby.

We're so back.

There were a lot of problems too, but yeah.

And I just want you guys to get as real as possible with me as if there was no camera and no mic here, like the way that we would if we were just hanging out about, yeah, what that what that has been like. Like, I've watched you, Hirsch, like, I'm sitting down with you, and you're like, there's like dark circles around your eyes, and you're just like, oh, like, what did I do? But but even in that moment, being very like, but I know that this is right, but also this sucks, and I hate this. Yeah. Tell me about what has that been like?

Like, I've seen 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. Yeah. You're this is awful. And on the flip side, now everyone's like, This is amazing.

What has that all been like?

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, we kinda like, 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 yeah, when your family and your friends 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 founders, we have conviction here. 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 are we crazy? Are we just completely full of that?

I mean you are, but you're right about this.

And then there's just like the day to day tactical stuff where it just hurts a lot. Know? I think press and then managing morale, people leaving and attrition, hiring becomes way more difficult. And so it just feels like you're on very hard mode during that transition.

And you

had a kid a year ago.

Yeah. Mean, Josh had two kids. So I Yeah. So it's just And on no sleep. Yeah.

So that's been I you're just yeah. It's it's a meditative exercise to stay present and just get through every day, I think.

Yeah. I I will say there is one session I had with my coach where he was asking me something about the product strategy. Oh, no. He he asked me how I was doing, and I gave him one of these kind of excited, genuine takes on this whatever the equivalent of the Dustin prototype was, which was earnest. We said, no, Josh.

How are you doing? How do you feel? And I was like, I've been waking up every morning with a pit in my stomach. And he was like, that, let's talk about that. And so this year professionally was by far the heaviest I felt like in my body.

And I think the things that get you through it are both Hirsch and I have, we're really close with our partners and our families and each other. I think one of the things that Hirsch 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 not worked together long enough where I think there are these moments where like, I'm really low, and people may not know it, but Hersh Hersh knows the telltale signs, and he knows how to pull me out of it. And and I'd like to think the same is true with him. But

And vice versa. Yeah.

No. It's not fun at all. I I I obviously, there are things that keep you going, and I I think for me it has really been just trying to stay present and quiet and focused on the 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 but no, was a year of constant doubt and and ups and downs. Because I think the other thing people miss is the browser company had a Cinderella story first few years. We basically had no I mean, didn't feel like this in 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. That was like the hardest thing we had. We were sort of like this darling in terms of people in our industry raving about it.

The guy who ran Chrome for sixteen years came to work for us as an IC. Like it was just a storybook. And so it was also after three ish years of the experience of the browser company feeling like a, not a runaway success. We had our challenges, and I'm sure you remember them, Dan. But it did sort of feel almost like our divine right that it was gonna go this well.

And so I think all of a sudden having it so clearly feel different, a never, almost a never ending to the every morning there was some new thing. Someone was leaving or some competitor this or whatever. Yeah. It's it's 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 in the most competitively challenged market in the world. Right? Like there's a lot is still ahead of us, but part of what it is is this sort of vindication might be a strong word, but like, oh, 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 taught me my dad told me that one thing about getting older is like you get to like 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 this I'm not this confident that Dia's gonna be the next Chrome, but I know that what me and Hirsch felt in our bones was correct.

And so I'm ex I'm almost excited for in twenty years if I ever started another company with Hirsch. That moment, I'm like, okay. We're gonna get punched in the face, but like don't let don't waver. I definitely had a lot of moments of doubt internally, privately with Hirsch throughout the year that manifested in all sorts of ways. But I'm grateful as though for the life experience of like what it has taught me, regardless of what happens next honestly.

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 like, I could just stop. And it could just be like things are just not working. And I was like, no, I think I'm gonna keep going. And those definitely have been the, in retrospect, now that things seem like they're going well, 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. It's something you only win by, unless you're delusional, you only win by 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, oh

it worked. The doing it anyway really feels true. Some days you just wake up and you have to play the part. Get through the day. And yeah, you just get through it.

I wanna talk now about just like Josh, you mentioned the competitive environment. How are you guys thinking about, okay, 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. Like everyone is starting to figure out, oh, the browser might be a really important layer to be competing at. I will say if you've been reading Every, I've been talking about that for a couple years. But if you're not reading Every, it feels like now people are really starting 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 like yeah. How how do think about winning?

On most podcasts, I'd give you the answer that I would give a VC, personally. You know, it's like, okay, we think memory is gonna lock you in in this way and our application platform and our design. I think the truth is we had the same questions with Arc. And I we you we've been in this industry long enough. Like, whether it's naive or 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.

I think we have a sensibility that like we just gotta run as fast as we can, but not frantically and not out of scarcity of beating competitors. But if we can stay locked in to just being like, yeah, that most energetic, like, this is what we believe sells. Like, that's the truth of how I think we're gonna compete and how we've competed so far since the beginning of the company. Again, I don't wanna like diminish all the thought we've put into the ways in which like, okay, if someone clones our browser 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?

I think so many of the traditional moats for product so much about this moment is 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 hippy dippy right now, but I'm sort of just like, it's all noise. It is all noise. Just like it was noise before, and it's no it's just a distraction.

Yeah.

Like, if anything, I regret spending so much time this past year thinking about things outside of our company instead of just like putting our head down and having fun with it. And I think everything that has resonated so far were parts of the product and the strategy. We're just like, can I curse? Like, fuck it. Like, let's just have some fun with it.

If we're gonna get punched in the face, let's just go and do the thing. Let's just be unapologetic. And the places where we did that are what are people can feel it. There's like a character to it. And the places that were very like like top down and and and and not even top down, just like, you know, let's let's business let's get ready for the h p e HBS case study.

Just like and you should feel it.

Here's how I should do this.

It's just I think. You know? Or maybe that's maybe that's a weakness as me as a leader and but I the the answer is like, Dan, we're gonna do our thing. Like, we've been doing our thing. My learning from the last year is when we do our thing, like, at least some people resonate with it, and we've got some foresight.

So, yeah, I'm excited to see the other.

I think what you're saying is vibes is the moat. And you'll figure out the rest, which I I actually love. I think

that that's totally right. I mean, here's the thing that I've thought a lot about. I am a DAU. I love ChatGeeBT. I love that product.

There are things some things I would personally do differently, but like I love that product. Remember this conversation with OpenAI like a year or two ago? Oh, now like every know, we got it. Google's coming in. It's like you use those products and they feel derivative.

They feel like someone said, uh-oh, we gotta 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 gonna make their life's mission to do this a long time ago. And now their conviction is building and those intuition's building for what matters.

And I'm not saying that chat GBT is gonna be the end all be all or there won't be other things, but I think what would Sam Altman have said, you know, I'm not comparing myself to Sam Altman, but two years ago when it's like, alright, now what? It's a simple product. It's just chat. Google has all the TPUs and it's like, why has ChatGPT continued to be the fastest growing company of all time? What's their moat?

So I don't know.

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 built so much of our culture and how we build products to build entirely new things, which is very different from copying or, you know, seeing what's in the market and sort of, like, taking 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. You know? I think like our Josh and our designers, I'm just like blown away by what they come up with on a weekly basis.

I would also say for the for the every audience, I think there is a there are conversations we have a lot internally that I 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 too, it's like, it's very engineering tech forward. Hey there's some new computer use model and we're gonna go have it do a bunch of tasks for you. And you're gonna like, we're gonna book that thing for you. And it's like it's, we started it, like I get it, I totally get it. What I found is I'm having this, like, very interesting I was a sociology major, and I and I'm sure you've seen this too, Dan, where I I find myself talking to people not in tech.

It'll be at, a party on the weekend. I'll meet someone. Somehow, it'll come AI will come up to IGBT. And almost to a person, everyone's like, yeah. Like, it's kinda we I think it's weird.

I kinda feel weird talking about it, but, like, I'm, like, asking it for advice or, like, I gotta tell with this, like, health thing. And, 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 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 and the and the raw IQ, which again is is spectacular. We're really excited about going back to this home on the internet. Like okay, we know what you do every day personally and professionally, and these models can be subjective and think and give advice and joke, at least give the perception of it, brainstorm.

What are things you can do at the intersection of yes, you got it, you have a job. You don't want a browser 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, alright, I'm going upstate with my family to where you guys are at the August. Which town do I go to? Which one would we like?

What's kid friendly? Like, we don't really want something fancy fancy, but also like I'm kinda like don't wanna sleep in a tent, you know, for this vacation. And those kind of qualitative subjective reasoning, in our opinion, is actually where a lot of like, if the value's gonna keep going up the stack in like Maslow's hierarchy, I guess is another way to say it. So if we're just gonna assume we have this like cheap intelligence commoditized across models, accessible, can click buttons, can do things for you. That's important.

But where's the value gonna be then? I think it's gonna keep moving up to some of this more emotional intelligence stuff. And so I I'd be surprised if the other AI browsers have that so central to their north star versus the like, you're gonna have these agents that are gonna go do these things for you. And that that's important, but it's to us is missing the forest for the trees a little bit.

On that sort of like 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, share in this approach is we were talking about how how you guys came up with the laptop class and how you think about marketing. It was very like, well, I was listening to this Janis Joplin record and I was thinking about that era of music and the social change that was happening. And so it was very rooted in what are historical examples of moments that are like this, but also thinking about moments and 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 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.

Yeah. I think you're right that we've always drawn inspiration as much from places and moments outside of technology industry and today. One of the things that's interesting at the time we're recording this podcast is I think just like 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 and 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 gonna read about and think about?

I had this conversation with my closest friend, my Dan Chipper, best man in my wedding, who is just he's not in tech, but he's always been the one that was like, hey, the Snapchat thing's gonna be huge. So if ever start a VC fund, like I'm hiring this guy just to be like the the mystics you'd say. And he was the first one, again, not a tech industry guy, that was like, there's not a thing in my life I do, Josh, that is an important project for work or my personal life that I'm not working with AI. Getting advice, I forget the word to use, advice collaborating with. So to 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 wanna read about, honestly, romanticism. I wish I could go back to college and that Yeah. I, know 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 I should What chapters I should look at. So I'm really excited to understand how in the past, what that when 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 are what are the objects or places in your life that given the centrality, that importance, if you're doing every every project in your personal professional life, how do you build comfort and sense of safety in those spaces even when maybe they aren't as comfortable as you wish they were or not as safe as you wish they were? How do they feel like yours? How do they you know, this is really squishy stuff to some, but, you know, I I played the percussions and drums growing up. And I remember, you know, I got a really cheap drum set. I was a kid.

And at some point, I was, like, considering getting a new one. But it was like, man, the way that you wear in the snare and like again, I know this sounds kinda like or as a baseball player, like the mitt. I think these those sort of references are a little overdone, honestly. So I'm excited to go like a click deeper on that. You know, picked up Christopher Alexander as like stereotypical as it is.

Like I'm gonna go I'm going back to Christopher Alexander. So to me that that is gonna be whether it's us or someone else, I want a time stamp. In twenty four 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 with the bot or anything like that, but actually just from the perspective of this like intangible feeling.

In the same way, I guess, you know, iPhone versus the Android at this point, there's not a good reason. I don't know. So anyways, you can kinda hear the answers kinda all the place, but that's honestly how we kinda do it at The Browser Company.

I think this is great. I mean, I'm very, very also into romanticism, and and for you who are 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, is like romanticism was a movement in the nineteenth century that was a response to enlightenment rationalism, basically, from the seventeenth and eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where physics was so successful that it sort of took over the rest of culture. And we can still sort of see that in lot of ways, but starting with, you know, Galileo and Newton and that 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 nineteenth century movement to be like, actually, there's a lot about human experience that is more like vibes based Intangible. Intangible, and that that's actually 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. I think language models are a 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 regular software and you have to work with on vibes, and I think that's a huge shift for software and for culture generally.

And

and does it sound familiar? You know, if you 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 things I still feel a love hate relationship with this kind of AI industry if you wanna call it. It's extremely rational, extremely mechanical, extremely the benchmarks and the capabilities, but you know 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 I think very relevant in terms of the like, there's what it can like intellectually do and how powerful it is. But what do you want? I think that's what we're gonna be grappling with as a society in the next five years is these sort of like almost things that sound philosophical or like you should be in university talking about them. But think it's gonna be really important again for us for the first time in a long time, like what what do we want from this life? And I know when I've heard podcasts and people talk about that, I'm like, my god, I gotta turn this thing off.

Hopefully people don't stop listening right now. But I I will say I it I would encourage people even if you're just going to chatty bitty or deer or whatever, like 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. Gonna do like a romanticism one zero one class for the next week in the mountains and you know, sorry for everyone at our all hands on the Monday I get back.

You're gonna get like a lecture about, you know, awe and magic or I

love it. If you wanna

Maybe that's what our every essay should be about. Maybe we write a romanticism essay.

That would be great. I love that idea. I would read that. Well, Josh, Hirsch, this is amazing. Thank you so much for coming on and talking to us, and good luck with Dia.

We're so back.

We're back. We're back. Thanks for having us, Dan.

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