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## How the browser company crafts quality products
Welcome Josh! Why are you trying to reinvent the browser?
It's not the most sexy category, but we’re doing this because:
* You spend a lot of time in the rectangle that’s your browser.
* Nobody wants to talk about what browser they use.
It feels wrong that you spend so much time in this rectangle yet don’t care about it.
That’s why our goal is to reinvent how people use the internet.
It's like how I use Comcast for internet but feel no loyalty towards the company.
Exactly. I barely remember the 1st flip phone that I used in middle school.
But I adore my iPhone and run my life on it. That's the delta that we want to bridge with our Arc browser.
It's clear that Arc has been crafted with alot of care. Can you talk about some of the core values that have guided your team in building this product?
One of our values is to show up with heartfelt intensity.
We hire people who have a burning desire to leave their mark on something they make. The best craftspeople have that pride to pay attention to the details.
It seems like hiring great people is one of your superpowers. Your design team includes both Charlie, the ex-designer of Apple Safari, and Nate, who has never been a designer before. How do you find and recruit these people?
I wish I had a clear answer — but I just know an original when I see one. I’ll share how we recruited Charlie and Nate:
* Charlie always worked on side projects for fun, like an app about moon phases that reached 9M users. It was gorgeous and had the detail that you only get from someone who does this with a meticulous eye.
* Nate was making quirky, creative web browsers for fun despite never having held the designer title. I hired him because he has a personal website that looks like a slot machine gamifying social media.
There's personality and soul in both their work even though their resumes look very different. We gravitate towards people with an authenticity that's unmistakably them.
You can tell if someone is just trying to make a product really great or if they’re doing it for some ulterior motive (e.g., resume building).
Exactly. If you really want to stand out as a job candidate, do something special.
A woman recently sent me a prototype as part of her application. It was more of a slide deck than a real prototype, but I could tell that she put thought and effort into it.
For us, it’s less about your resume and more about whether you’re showing up with that heartfelt intensity.
How do you work with Arc users to build new features?
I sold my 1st company to Facebook and worked there for a few years.
I couldn’t get over how under-appreciated the user researchers at Facebook were.
They had psychology degrees from top universities and talked to Facebook users every day. I remember thinking that they should be deciding what to build instead of PMs.
So, when we started the Browser Company, we flipped the hierarchy. We created the Membership team, which includes customer support, user research, and everything in between. We gave them a seat at the table next to engineering, design, and product.
We cannot build a better browser unless the people we're building for are at its core.
Our success so far is largely due to the collaborative process between our team and the people we serve.
How does the team talk to the users? Do you stick to specific channels?
We're arguably too open-minded in how we talk to customers.
This product started with us onboarding the first 5,000 people over Zoom one by one. I recorded welcome videos on my iPhone for the first 100 people.
Many of our early users are now our friends. We use whatever channel is required — surveys, UXR sessions, DMs, and even text messages.
There shouldn’t be a barrier to talk to users for anyone in the company.
I love that. Many companies get too opinionated about only allowing specific employees or channels to talk to customers.
Yes, there's no one right way to run a company. For us, we would not be successful if we did not build in conjunction with the people using our product every day.
## Building Arc Search to use AI to browse for you
Let’s talk about Arc Search. You know, mobile browsing is a pain with ads, pop-ups, and paywalls. Can you explain how Arc Search started?
Arc Search started as a side project. As you said, visiting mobile websites sucks. So last November, we decided to prototype a mobile browser for fun. 
We started by asking:
What is the absolute fastest way to look something up on your phone?
We started with small things like:
* Having the keyboard up so you can launch right into typing
* Getting rid of ads, trackers, and pop-ups
But then we realized that we could go a step further. You still had to open tabs, wait for webpages to load, and scroll down to find the info that you wanted.
What if we did all that for you?
That's how we came up with the Browse for Me feature. You tell us what you’re looking for and we use AI to summarize the top search results for you.
So it sounds like you decided to only focus on helping users find information fast. How did you decide to prioritize solving this problem vs. something else?
I'll be really honest.
Arc on desktop today, while I'm proud of it, feels like we've made many small improvements rather than focusing on a singular purpose. So with Arc Search, we wanted to start by turning a singular value proposition up to 100.
The way we picked the "fastest way to get what you need" was more from an intuitive sense of what each of us really wanted from a mobile browser.
I love that saying "turn it up to 100." You can make three okay features or you can just make one feature that knocks it out of the park.
Yes, the thing is — turning it up to 100 feels risky. 
But since we approached Arc Search as a side project there was less pressure. I'm very excited to take that attitude back to the core product.
“Turn it up to 100” is probably also a great pitch to find and hire talent.
Yes, that’s the pitch at its core. I cannot promise you will make more money and you’ll probably have a worse title.
I cannot promise you anything other than we are all trying to do the work that will define our careers. It may fail, but we're going for it. If we succeed, it will define all of our careers. 
You can lead a bigger team and have a bigger title elsewhere.  But very few places will have the same level of ambition and intentionality that we do here, for better or worse.
Back in April you tweeted that you only have 12 to 24 months to win. Why did you do this?
I was skeptical of LLMs until I prototyped with it myself. Now I believe it will upend everything we do on computers.
With platform shifts, there's a tiny window to grab a seat at the table. AI makes the window even tighter since big companies are better positioned than they were for previous shifts like mobile.
For the browser layer specifically, I view us as having 12-24 months to earn the top spot for how we use computers in this next era. After that, it will likely be too late.
I have to be honest with you - I really hope this works; it seems to be working, and I hope our best days are ahead. But it's now or never — that’s the message I wanted to get across.
I love that. I remember your Act II of Arc announcement - it started with a Steve Jobs style keynote before turning into something very authentic.
That video gets at how we generally like to do things in the browser. We're very interested, conceptually, in inverting what you expect and surprising people. We think surprise, awe, wonder, and the unexpected are really helpful and worthwhile levers, whether in building product experiences, marketing, or communications. 
Our industry has gotten into the habit of copying and pasting, reductive experiences and practices. Obviously, you don't always want to reinvent the wheel, but when it comes to talking about who we are, what we believe in, and how we do it, it's been really fun to try to invert things.
How do you balance this craft and attention to detail with delivering on time and building something that users care about?
We do it by building alongside the people that we serve.
There was a beta (TestFlight) for select users a week after we started working on Arc Search.
We were actively changing how it worked and looked based on that feedback. 
A high bar for excellence doesn't mean no one can see it until it's actually released. Those two things aren't in conflict.
I think you really need to do both to succeed.
How do you balance vision and strategy with user feedback and iteration?
I'm really interested in the far ends of the spectrum.
On the decade scale, we’re betting on macro trends like AI that are unlikely to change.
Day-to-day, we focus on taking one step at a time to build things people love.
If you build things people love while moving in the right direction, have faith that the rest will follow.
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Peter (00:01.21)
All right, Josh, welcome. Super glad to have you here.
 
Josh (00:04.238)
Thank you for having me.
 
Peter (00:05.914)
Yeah. So why don't we start with this. Why are you trying to reinvent the browser? Let's start with that.
 
Josh (00:13.646)
Yeah, it is. It's not the most sexy category of software of them all, but we ultimately got excited about working on a web browser or what we hope is a successor to the web browser because you spend a lot of time in it. You spend a lot of time in this rectangle that is your web browser. Some people spend more waking hours in their web browser than anywhere in the physical world for better or for worse. And so got really excited about the fact that when you tell someone,
 
you're working on a desktop web browser, you ask them what browser they use, they could not care less. They think it's like the most boring thing to talk about if they're even aware of what browser they use. And the fact that you spend that many hours every single day in this rectangle, yet you don't care. And then you think about the kind of love you have for your favorite products or your favorite physical spaces in the real world where you spend a lot of time or the things you use a lot. The delta between those two facts got us really excited.
 
Combined with a lot of kind of macro trends happening in the technology industry at the time that got us excited about what the browser would look like in the future. But I think at its core it was, we spend a lot of time in these rectangles, they don't inspire us, they don't feel great. That feels wrong.
 
Peter (01:25.274)
Yeah, it's like, it's like, you know, I use Comcast for my internet, but I don't feel any loyalty towards that company because I'm forced to. Yeah.
 
Josh (01:32.75)
Yeah, and I remember the first little phone I got when I was in middle school just to call my mom that I was ready for pick up after and I played Snake on. I liked it, I liked my calculator too. And then you think about how I feel about the iPhone today and what it means to me. That's the delta, we wanna bridge with the browser. We wanna be to the browser what the iPhone was to the cell phone. So we're not there yet, but that's the idea.
 
Peter (01:48.282)
Mm.
 
Peter (01:56.922)
Got it, so I've been playing with the Arc browser and the reason I'm really excited to talk to you is like, it's very clear that it's been crafted with a lot of care and like the people who made this clearly like gave a shit about the product. So maybe can you talk about some of the core values at Arc and like how that guided you and your team to build products?
 
Josh (02:19.758)
Sure. So we have five values and I won't bore you with all of them, but one of them, which you reference, is show up with heartfelt intensity. So what essentially that means is we hire people that have this innate motivation, this kind of burning desire, almost artistic desire to express themselves and express their craft and almost like leave their mark on something that they make, not in a selfish way, but in a way of the pride that you feel, just like the best craftspeople.
 
feel pride over something. I think so. The reason, thank you for the compliment, I think Arc feels, some people say soulful or well -crafted or like there's beauty and attention to detail is honestly because not because of some product management strategy or some company, you know, take on the market. It's really just we hire people who care really deeply about their work and the impact it has on people's lives. And that shows up in other states.
 
transitions and attention to detail, but it comes from the value of higher people that just have this innate heartfelt intensity that they bring to the office every day. Something motivates them beyond just what we say here, and that I think shines through.
 
Peter (03:32.794)
And I think you mentioned that's like one of your superpowers, right? Just like hiring great people. And you know, you've hired both like, I think you hired the ex designer of Safari, but also I think you hired someone called Nate who has never been a designer, like officially been a designer before. So like, how do you, how do you find these people and how do you like bring them on board? You know? Yeah.
 
Josh (03:53.614)
Yeah, so I mean, as you're referencing, we've hired people that have resumes that will intimidate you and make me wonder if I can lead them because they have done such remarkable things that I feel like I should be reporting to someone that reports to them that reports to them. And we have people that were a couple of years out of school that have made a tremendous impact here. And I wish I had a clean answer other than to say, you know an original and you see.
 
I don't know, there's just, if you look at the work that they've done, the things that they've done in their life, the way they, you just kind of know. And so for example, Charlie, who's the Safari designer you referenced that again has that resume that is intimidating. I overlapped with him at a previous employer and he was always working on these really interesting side projects that weren't gonna make any money. They were almost more like artistic projects. He had this app.
 
that showed you the current state of the moon. That's all it did. You open the app and you see the moon or a representation of the moon, and it was gorgeous. The lighting was gorgeous. And it's like the sort of person that just does that for fun and does it with that attention to artistic detail. And then you think that, you know, you also mentioned Nate. Nate had never held the title of designer before we hired him as a designer. He was a couple of years out of college. But here is this kid that was making web browsers for fun after hour.
 
and doing it in a really kind of quirky, creative way. You know, you had a personal website that was like a slot machine, gamified, kind of making fun of the social media environment. There's just this personality and the soul in both Charlie and Nate's work that even though their resumes are very different, you can't not feel that kind of unique spirit in them. And so I know that probably if you're listening to this and you're wondering how to get a job at a browser...
 
It may not feel as actionable or tactical as you would like from a podcast, but I wanted to be honest that just we I gravitate and we gravitate towards people that have an authenticity and have a Character that they're really there. They they show up with that's just unmistakably then and unmistakably original
 
Peter (06:06.682)
I think it's actually pretty actionable. I mean, you can kind of tell if someone is doing something to get promoted or like to get more money or someone's just building something because they want to make something really good. Right. And it sounds like both examples. Yeah.
 
Josh (06:18.254)
Yeah, and I will say, I get emails, look, this is where mileage may vary, and I know this is not true at all companies. I get emails and DMs and texts all the time from people that want a job here, and I feel really grateful that we built a company that is true, that wasn't always true. And it's really interesting, I wish I could tell them, I don't care where you worked. I don't care the name of the noun that's in your email. And then, you know, versus someone.
 
This woman sent me this prototype the other day of something she did for fun. And prototypes of drawing, it wasn't coded. The form factor was almost like this slide deck. But it was just, the thought was original, the effort was original. And so for us, it's less about where you've practiced or how good your resume is and more, what are you showing up with in terms of that originality, either in thought or in craft or personality, and then letting that shine.
 
Peter (07:16.41)
Yeah, I love that, because that eliminates all the gatekeepers, right? Then you're just kind of like, you have your own destiny under your control. Yeah. So you also have like a super passionate community of users who love ARK, right? And do you kind of work with these users when you're building new features? Or like, how do you work with them?
 
//
 
Josh (07:36.27)
Yeah, so my first company was sold to Facebook and Hirschdheim, my now second time co -vendor, I worked at Facebook for a number of years. And the thing that impressed me the most about Facebook at the time, which at the time, you know, it was known for having some of the top talent and top craftspeople were the user researchers. They were amazing. You know, they were, they had doctors, you know, they were doctors and...
 
psychology and sociology from the top universities. It was just wild that there were these researchers that were there to just help us understand these people we were building for and the ways in which they would help us understand the ways that people were hacking the product and using the product to defy what we intended and defy what we used it for. And it was striking at Facebook, they were totally underappreciated at the time. It was like they were used by PMs to validate what they wanted to do. And they looked, the researchers said this. And I just remember thinking at the time,
 
these people should be deciding what we build. Like these people, because these people are the ones that are channeling the people we actually serve, the people that use Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp every day. So when we started the browser company, one of the things we did intentionally was we wanted to flip that hierarchy. So we created a team called the membership team, which rolls up anything that touches the people we serve, who we call members, whether that's customer support and success at other companies, to user research and everything in between. If you're someone that uses our product,
 
the membership team is responsible for your end -to -end relationship. And we put them right up there with engineering and design, all the other disciplines, as a seat at the product building table. And so, yeah, since day one, the hypothesis of the company is you use the browser for hours every day. It's the only product that your mom and your little niece and you all share in common, other than like texting and maybe video calls. So we cannot build a better product unless at its core are the people we're building for, and that's part of our product.
 
Peter (09:25.658)
Mm -hmm.
 
Josh (09:32.398)
process. So now that doesn't mean we like do a poll and build whatever people say, but to the extent we've had any success so far, it's been because it's been a collaborative process with the people we're building for. Thanks in large part to our membership team.
 
Peter (09:46.906)
And how do they talk to the customers? Do they have different channels they use or like, you know, how frequently do they do this?
 
Josh (09:52.43)
Yes, we're, we're arguably too open -minded in how we talk. Anyway, I mean, I messaged threads with certain members, you know, cause keep in mind, we, you know, this product started, you know, I, we hand onboarded the first probably 5 ,000 people over zoom one by one, you know, a handful of us, you know, I recorded welcome videos on my iPhone for the first and texted them to the first, you know, a couple dozen people, maybe hundreds. And so, you know, for some early, early members were.
 
friends now, we're texting, DMing. We often do more mass surveys and polls. We do very structured user research sessions over Zoom and third -party tools. We do it all. We do it all. And our approach has been like, let's actually lower the barrier. You let us know how it was good for you, and it's our job to abstract away that complexity for us and figure it out. But.
 
We've actually tried to be approachable on probably too many channels. It's probably something we have to be better at.
 
Peter (10:56.218)
Yeah, I mean, like, I think too many companies are like really opinionated for some reason about like, hey, only these people can talk to customers or you have to use this official channel. And like, you know, like customers are doing you a favor, man, by talking to you. So why not just like, do whatever is easy for them, right? So yeah.
 
Josh (11:11.982)
Yes. Yeah. And look, I think, I think a theme I feel at the stage of my career is there's no one right way to run a company. Every company has different goals and values and founders, but yeah, for us and how we do things, it's, it's, I, we would not be successful at what we do if we did not build in conjunction with the people that are using our product every day.
 
Peter (11:32.25)
Got it. so let's talk about like a specific product that you built. so, you know, mobile, mobile browsing, like the browser on a web is mediocre, but on a mobile is like really terrible, man. Like, you know, it's incredible amount of, ads pop -ups, paywalls, and all this SEO optimized stuff. And, you, you recently, a few months ago, you launched the arc search. So maybe walk me through like kind of ideation to launch like the high level, how, how this came to be. Yeah.
 
Josh (12:01.102)
Yeah, so the idea for architecture was actually a side project, which it's hard to imagine now because it has become so successful and now a core part of our strategy and our portfolio of products. But at the time it was a, look, it's been a long year. We've wanted to build the default mobile browser, but haven't had a good strategic reason to do it. We just had a company wide offsite in November. Let's give ourselves until January to just prototype a default mobile browser for fun.
 
But if we're going to do that, since it's not strategically beneficial to us, let's be really ambitious. And so our ambition was to pick one value proposition. So not to build a better mobile browser, but to pick a value prop within a mobile browser and then do it to 100. Just go wild with it because it was kind of a freebie project. And so what we decided was, look, on our phones, as you say, mobile browsers you use all the time.
 
It's probably one of your top five apps in terms of opens, but they're kind of atrocious and at the very least they're all the same. And what we realized is like, look, when we use our mobile browser, we're almost always looking something up. We're on the go, we're with friends, and we just gotta look something up really quickly. And so we said, let's turn it up to 100. What is the absolute fastest way to look something up on your phone?
 
And don't worry about, are you a browser or are you a search engine or are you an AI? Don't think about it from a human perspective. They want to get this random fact super quick. And that's how we got to our kind of tent pole feature, which was, which is called browse for me, which is, look, we, you know, we did small things like, all right, let's have the keyboard up so you can just launch into typing. Let's get rid of block ads and trackers and cookie pop -ups. So there's no BS in the way. So we did kind of small things around the edges, but then when we realized, no, it's really time consuming.
 
opening a tab in the search results page, waiting for it to load, scrolling down the page, realizing it doesn't have what you want or you need more information, going back to the Google result, opening a new page. Wait, wait, wait a minute. What if we just had the product do all of that for you? So you tell it what you're looking for. It goes to open six different webpages, reads them all, and then creates the perfect web page for you for what you're looking for without you doing anything.
 
Josh (14:19.918)
And that has now called Browse for me has become the defining feature of Arc Search because you can do these kind of complex browsing sessions to find an answer to something or find information without doing the work yourself. But it stemmed from the place of what is the fastest way to look something up on your phone, not how do we build a better mobile browser. And of course, now we do think we've built the best mobile browser, but it's stemmed from the place of fastest way to look something up.
 
Peter (14:20.058)
Mm -hmm.
 
Peter (14:47.578)
Got it. So it sounds like really focused on the primary value prop of finding something, finding information fast, right? And like, how do you guys just like a little bit more detail, how do you guys land on this? You brainstorm a bunch of different things and you kind of, yeah.
 
Josh (14:59.63)
Yeah, I got, I'll be really honest. I'll be really honest with you. This is, we were really, we've been bad at that with our core product arc. So arc for desktop, we sort of did the opposite thing. We made a secular bet that the browser layer was what you want was the most interesting pieces of software and part of the software stack to bet on for the next decade. But we didn't have a problem statement. We didn't have the value proper, just like it's already important today, but it sucks. And it's going to be even more important tomorrow and suck even more if someone doesn't change it.
 
Peter (15:07.034)
Mm -hmm.
 
Josh (15:29.806)
Let's go figure out how to make it better. And Arc today, though I'm really proud of it on desktop, and I think it's the best browser, you can feel that in the product and that we've made a bunch of things a little bit better to hopefully create a better cohesive whole, but it's not focused and it's not singular in its purpose. And so going again to the origins of Arc Search, it was a freebie project. It was an end of the year, almost morale boost. So what we did is we said, not only let's like take it to 100 and have fun with it,
 
Peter (15:41.082)
Mm -hmm.
 
Josh (15:57.07)
let's also try to push ourselves in product development and trying a different way of building products. And so the reason we decided to pick a singular value proposition was because we actually didn't do that with our desktop product arc. And we wanted to, again, we have this, one of our other values is assume you don't know, which is literally what the value set. Like no matter how smart you are, no matter what you've done in your career, no matter how sure you think you are, you must proceed with the assumption that you have no fucking idea.
 
excuse my language. And this was sort of that test of let's try a product development strategy that we've never tried before and just see what happens. And so the way that we picked the fastest way to get what you need was it was more kind of from an intuitive sense of what do we, the five of us want the most or what do we use the browser and search on our phone for the most. But really it was more about testing that.
 
Peter (16:27.61)
Yeah.
 
Josh (16:55.502)
to product development, not making sure we got that value prop correct because it was a freebie project. And I think there's a good lesson in there that it resonated, it has resonated in a way. You know, I thought Arc on desktop, I felt great about our success with Arc on desktop. And then Arc searches come out and in the first three months I've been like, whoa, man, the bar is even high. Like it has been, and I think it is a good lesson for me and us that when we were just having fun with it and being really focused, uncomfortably focused.
 
Peter (17:11.034)
Mm.
 
Josh (17:25.102)
around not what our company strategy was, but around what does a person need that it resonates at even deeper level than this other product we have, but it's also been successful and is successful in some ways. So easy to extrapolate too much, but it was a surprise.
 
Peter (17:38.266)
Yeah.
 
 
Peter (17:43.098)
I love that saying, turn up to 100, right? Cause like you can make like three features 50, but we'll just make one thing 100. And maybe like those people saw their minds that like they start, word of mouth and like all those positive things start happening, right?
 
Josh (17:57.198)
Well, and this is a good lesson too, is like, you know, I didn't take my own advice before this project. You know why? Cause turning up to a hundred feels risky, you know, and it feels, how are you going to know? You better pick right. Because if you turn up to a hundred, it's going to take a lot of extra work and it's going to be really risky. It might not work. And it adds all this like intensity and anxiety to it.
 
Peter (18:03.258)
Mm.
 
Peter (18:06.842)
Hmm.
 
Josh (18:21.23)
And then when you think it's a freebie project, have fun with it, what do you want to build? This isn't our core strategy. Yeah, let's go for it. When you have that state of abundant mindset, yeah, it's like, wow, people want 100s and you can do it. And I don't even think it's 100 yet. I think that was the attitude, but we have a lot more work to do to really make it 100, but that intentionality of like, we don't want to make a better mobile browser.
 
Peter (18:21.754)
Mm -hmm.
 
Peter (18:43.13)
Mm -hmm.
 
Josh (18:49.87)
We want to redefine how you do something with this device. It's a different attitude. And I'm very excited to take that attitude back to the core product.
 
Peter (19:01.05)
Yeah, I mean, this is probably why you also attract really great talent, because you want to redefine things. Yeah.
 
Josh (19:07.054)
I mean, that's the pitch at its core is I cannot promise you will make more money. I cannot promise you that you will have a better title. You actually will probably have a worse title. I cannot promise you anything other than we are all trying to do the work that will define our careers. And it may fail, but we're going for it. And if we succeed, it will define your career and it will define all of our careers. So that's kind of the vibe of the people that come here is you can make more.
 
Peter (19:31.322)
Yeah.
 
Josh (19:34.766)
more money, expect value returns somewhere else. You can lead a bigger team, have a bigger title, have more chance of success on paper, but no one's gonna have, you know, very few places will have the same level of ambition and intentionality that we do here. For better or for worse, we're gonna find out.
 
Peter (19:53.146)
Yeah, you know, speaking of which, I think back in April, you probably tweeted saying that you only have like 12 to 24 months to win. And can you give some more context about this or like why you tweet this stuff out? You know, do you remember doing this? Yeah. Yeah.
 
Josh (20:10.766)
Yeah, I mean, there are two, yeah, of course, of course. I still feel that energy. I mean, there are two parts of that question, right? One is, what did I mean? And the second is, why did I share it publicly? Is there one that you're more curious about or?
 
Peter (20:17.146)
Mm.
 
Peter (20:25.53)
I think kind of these internetters, maybe we can talk about both. Yeah.
 
Josh (20:30.062)
Sure.
 
I wonder how to say this that doesn't. So I was a pretty big skeptic of the LLM transformer stuff maybe eight months ago. I'm just in general wary of hype. Until I play with something myself, excuse me, until I play with something myself, I don't really buy it. And I played with all these technologies in these prototypes and forms and it felt slow and.
 
Peter (20:42.618)
Yeah.
 
Peter (20:56.41)
Hmm.
 
Josh (21:01.838)
expensive and unreliable and just like it felt like another crypto thing.
 
And after prototyping with the technology more, anyways, I'm gonna get to the punchline, because everyone knows where this is going. I truly think that the transformer innovation and everything that's come out of it and will come out of it is going to upend everything we do on computers, whether they're in our pockets or on our desks or on our wrists. And I think there's a very tiny window in time with any one of these big changes, platform changes, whatever you want to call it.
 
where there's a window where the tables are flipped and someone can grab a seat. And I think the dynamics of AI specifically mean that there's an even tighter window because I think the incumbent large companies are better positioned for AI than they were for kind of mobile application development, for example. And I think specifically where the browser layer sits and who we're competing with and for what.
 
It means that even after those tiny, tiny windows, it gets even tinier. And so IVUS is having 12 months to earn a seat at the table, if not the seat at the table, as it relates to how we use our computers of all sizes in this next era. And I think if 12 to 24 months, I think it'll be too late. And so that is the attitude that I have and we have at this company.
 
Peter (22:14.33)
Mm.
 
Josh (22:24.526)
which is like, it's now or never. We built four years of foundations. We got so lucky and fortunate that we were riding a wave that is about to become that large, but it's gonna crash at some point and we gotta go. And the reason we said that publicly was, or I said that publicly was, that's what we do. Our approach to building things has always been be honest, be transparent, be open about who we are and what we're doing for a range of reasons. And so I think one of the things I promised,
 
Peter (22:52.058)
Yep.
 
Josh (22:54.062)
publicly when we first started putting out YouTube videos and tweeting and being open was, I will be honest and open with all of you when things are going really well. I will proudly tweet our prototypes and brag about our hires and feel proud of our graphs when they're going the right way. And I will also be honest with you when we get bad news and when the crash for user rate is not what it should be and we have to apologize. And so I thought this was part of that. I'm like, yeah, I got to be honest with you. I really hope this works. It seems to be working. I hope our best days are ahead of us.
 
but it's now or never and we're going for it and I don't know what's gonna happen and you should know. So maybe we'll look back in a few years and be like, why did we think that was a good thing to do? But it's felt authentic to us that we were continuing.
 
Peter (23:36.218)
I, yeah, I love that. I remember watching your act to arc announcement and then in the first few minutes you were like the Steve jobs character, right? Wearing all black. I was like, who is this guy? It's gonna be Steve jobs. And then it became like very down to earth, authentic in the streets of New York. And I thought that was great. And I think that feels like consisting all your messaging, right? Yeah.
 
Josh (23:59.054)
Yeah, what Peter's referencing, or anyone that's seen it, is we kind of unveiled our belief about what we want to do over the next four years, because we hit our four -year mark at the company. And so this is a video about Act 2 for the company. And we kick off the video, and it makes you think that it's a Steve Jobs keynote presentation. And then it turns out that was sort of a bait and switch, and we were making fun of it. And I think what that gets at is how we generally like to do things in the browser, because we're very interested, conceptually, in inverting.
 
Peter (24:22.138)
Mm -hmm.
 
Josh (24:28.302)
what you expect, surprising people, we think surprise and awe and wonder and the unexpected is a lever that's really helpful and really worthwhile, whether it's in building product experiences or marketing or communications. And so just in general, we're really interested conceptually in inverting what is expected because we've gotten into this like habit in our industry of copy and paste and reductive experiences and reductive practices. And obviously you don't want to always reinvent the wheel, but when it comes to
 
talking about who we are, what we believe in, and how we do it, it's been really fun to try to infer things.
 
Peter (25:03.45)
Yeah, no, I think it gives the brand a ton of personality. So I think it's great. So here's kind of the crux of things, right? Like, you know, you talk about you have 12, 24 months, but at the same time, you really care about craft and building really good products. And we've seen some of these other companies, I won't mention names, but like, you know, they take all this time crafting really great and they launch it after like a couple of years and then it just kind of falls flat. So how do you balance this kind of like desire for high quality with...
 
to assume you don't know. Yeah.
 
Josh (25:34.67)
I mean, this goes back to what we spoke about before. This is why we have a membership team. This is why we build alongside the people that we serve. So this is why we have the assume you don't know mentality. So, you know, very, very, very tactically, Arc Search. I think if you go download Arc Search today, you may not like it, but you will believe it's one of the best crafted iOS apps you've ever used. And I say that with humility. You may hate it. It may not be that. It may not be a good product.
 
But boy, those transitions are juicy. And it just, we really sweated the details.
 
And that showed up in the way that after we released it, it was sort of like an immediate hit. There was a test flight to people not at our company a week after we started that product. And secretly behind closed doors, there were dozens and dozens of people that don't work at our company and are not investors or advisors or anything like that. They were actively testing the product and we were actively changing how it worked and what it looked like based on that feedback. And so it's not, it's not, it's not perfect. I can't comment on what other companies do, but our belief that.
 
like we have this bar for excellence in our craft and we are maniacal about passing that bar, that doesn't mean that no one can see it or that we can't test our assumptions or build in public and air quotes until it's actually released. Those two things aren't in conflict, but they often are. By the way, it doesn't mean we don't miss the mark. We miss the mark all the time. We ship things before we should have shipped them and they were never any good and we...
 
hold on too late and we polish something that actually was just lipstick on a pig. So we don't get it right, but I actually think the reason, I don't actually think they need to be in conflict. And if they are, it's because whoever's building it, deep down really actually cares about getting one of the two. I think it's more likely that you find you're someone that kind of believes in more of the lean start at methodology. If it's great, then it can be ugly and imperfect and the market will pull it out of you. Or they believe that like, you know, it's Steve Jobs or bust and.
 
Peter (27:29.978)
Mm.
 
Josh (27:33.71)
we can go away for five years and that's fine. And I think really you need both and that's really hard and I'm not sure we get it right, but I don't think they're.
 
Peter (27:36.793)
Yeah.
 
Peter (27:43.898)
Yeah, so basically you had people building this ARC Search product with you from very early days till when you launched it, right? And yeah, got it. Okay.
 
Josh (27:50.99)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, Arc for Windows just launched last week. We had hundreds of thousands of people create an account in the launch week. People were using it for months before then. It may have been the launch day. Now, anyone can make it. But we, how do you think, we don't know how to build it except with other people. So at all, but again, this is why I used to be so down on the concept of company values and how I've so understood and internalized where they're.
 
Peter (28:01.69)
Mm.
 
Peter (28:13.178)
Yeah.
 
Josh (28:20.686)
because it all comes back to assume you don't know. Right? If you believe you need to have an unwavering craft bar and love and attention to detail, but you assume you don't know when you're going to get there or how you're going to get there, the only way to combine those things is to do it with other people.
 
Peter (28:40.602)
And how do you think about the vision and the strategy versus kind of iterating with these users and tinkering and making it a bit better? How do you think about this? Yeah.
 
Josh (28:54.094)
Yeah, I mean, this is one that I'm not sure I can speak to because I don't know if we're going to be successful in the long run, right? So I can tell you what we're doing. And I guess we'll find out together if it works.
 
Josh (29:07.022)
I'm really interested in the far ends of the spectrum, where I think what we practice are the far ends of the spectrum. And so I spent two years at a venture capital firm, which I don't think I'll ever work at again, but I actually had a wonderful experience when I was there. And what was so interesting about working there is you really think in terms of decades, in terms of the bets that you make when you invest in companies, especially at the early, this firm tends to invest in earlier stage companies. And the browser company was a bet on macro trade.
 
secular shifts, big, big, big hypotheses about how society would change the way we continue on certain trend lines over the course of many, many years, if not decades. And so our strategic bet on the company was you want to go that way. You want to hang around that hoop and you want to hang around that hoop for these structural reasons that are unlikely to change. In fact, they're only likely to accelerate. And then if we're betting on that,
 
to hang around that hoop over there, then the question is just like, survive. Like just get, not even survive, just get over there, however you can. And so that is focusing on the, okay, what do we have to do today? What do I have to do next week? What do I have to do next month? One foot in front of the other, as long as we're directionally going towards that hoop or hanging around that hoop, I guess the hoop metaphor is not quite right. But you get what I'm saying, it's like.
 
Peter (30:19.13)
Mm -hmm.
 
Josh (30:34.35)
At the 10 ,000 foot view, make sure you're making the right bet and otherwise just focusing on building things that people love. And if you focus on things that building, building things that people love in the direction of those, of that big bet, bet that it will be okay. Which I don't know if it'll work for every product and every company and every type of software in every market. It probably definitely doesn't. I'm not sure it'll work for ours, but that was our bet was that if we can build.
 
Peter (30:51.002)
Yeah.
 
Josh (31:02.638)
what replaces the default browser, or we can be effectively, technically someone's default browser. That is just so valuable in so many fronts and strategically sound that great, now we gotta go build the best rectangle use for five hours a day to render web pages and nothing else matters and we'll figure out the rest later.
 
Peter (31:22.554)
Got it. I mean, in some ways you are already the best product, the best default browser for thousands or tens of thousands. I don't know how many people love the browser, but people love it, right? People who use it love it. Yeah. Yeah.
 
Josh (31:32.846)
More than that, but yeah, we're a blip in the grand scheme of things, but yeah.
 
Peter (31:38.106)
Okay, so let me ask you kind of like two hard questions, right? So like the first one is around monetization, right? So, you know, like for example, like a perplexity is trying to do something similar around search, but they're actually charging a subscription. So I'm curious why you haven't monetized or is that on the horizon? Yeah.
 
Josh (31:58.254)
Yeah, so I think it's worth separating out Arc Search, which again was this side project that's become no bigger deal. It's a very different answer than our core product, which is Arc. So Arc is a browser. I can wax poetic about an operating system for the internet or what we're going to do that's different. Let's just take it as it is. It is a web browser. It's a desktop web browser. And what's unique about a web browser is it's effectively a consumer product. Everyone that uses the internet needs a browser.
 
every shape and size, every country, every socioeconomic, like everyone needs a browser. And you spend hours a day in your browser across all these demographics and across all parts of their life, work, personal, they buy things, they look up information. And when you look at products that have those characteristics, they are unbelievably valuable because of the distribution potential to other things, right? So if you think about even like a browser itself,
 
How does Safari make money? Safari makes $20 billion a year because it has decided that it's going to distribute that attention to Google and gets a check from Google. And that's why browsers have monetized via search engines the most. But really, the enterprise value from a browser doesn't come from the search engine relationship. That's just one way to distribute. It comes from the fact that you have this rectangle that everyone in the world spends hours and hours, not everyone, but a large majority of people spend hours and hours in across all parts of their life. And that means.
 
Think about the percentage of commerce that is passing through the browser. Think about the SaaS economy that's passing through the browser. Think about the search that's passing through the browser and the ads that are passing through the browser. And so those businesses tend to be incredibly easy to monetize, if not lucrative and monetize, in a bunch of different ways. The risk is can you get to scale? Scale is typically the hardest thing. And so our approach has been our enterprise value comes from the time spent.
 
Peter (33:45.914)
Mm -hmm.
 
Josh (33:55.694)
the TAM from the number of people it addresses, and then the distribution potential, if you can get those two things. And so we need to get to scale as quickly as possible to then monetize that attention and distribution in some other way. Which begs the question, okay, how? Great, thank you for that long spiel. How are you gonna do it? And I guess my point is twofold. One, there are so many ways it is the wrong question to be asking. The right question to be asking is,
 
Peter (34:13.466)
Yeah.
 
Josh (34:21.102)
How the heck are you going to get hundreds of millions, if not billions of people using your product every day when you don't have structural advantages like Google? Because if you can, we're going to make a lot of money. The second answer to the question was, if I had to guess, I think there's something really interesting around commerce and payments and shopping. If you think about how much money literally exchanges hands in the context of a web browser and all of the parts of the experience that you can make better or more efficient or more reliable.
 
in that experience at scale, or, and or, the web is a development platform. It is an app platform. And really the browser in the world of web apps has become an app platform. And I think there's a lot of interesting proven ways that you can monetize application platforms and distribution mechanisms as well. So again, not to mention search and advertising in the way that other browsers monetize, but I really like to think about,
 
I guess the short version would be, the real question is like right now, what is the most existential risk to the browser company? It is not can we make money from a web browser that people spend hours and every day across work and personal life and buy things and look things up, et cetera. The existential risk is can you get to scale as effectively a consumer product when you don't have any structural advantages?
 
Peter (35:41.05)
Got it. Got it. Yeah, OK. So I guess it's a different strategy, right? Because if you look at, for example, you just look at superhuman versus Gmail, right? Their strategy is like, well, everyone uses Gmail, but the people who actually get a ton of emails or really want a great experience pay us $30 a month or something. But it sounds like your strategy is just to get your scale, just to actually get the better product. Yeah.
 
Josh (36:01.71)
Yeah, I think that's a great example. I'm a superhuman customer. I've been a superhuman customer for years. It's one of the only tech products my wife loves. So I am a number one superhuman fan. We are taking a radically different approach to our category. So our equivalent would be to say, you know what's really valuable? Gmail has billions of people, and a large percentage of their lives are passing through your inbox. It is like the router for people's lives in many ways.
 
Peter (36:10.842)
Yeah.
 
Peter (36:28.09)
Mm -hmm.
 
Josh (36:29.742)
That is very strict. Like, can you beat Gmail getting to a billion people? Not, can you monetize $30 a month off of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people? Both can be successful. Both have different risk -reward profiles. We have not gone the superhuman route. We've gone the Gmail or bust route, except we're going even higher in that we're doing the operating system that Gmail sits on top of. So, you know, there are many different approaches to a category of software and there are many, you know, there's a company called the Island Browser.
 
Peter (36:42.33)
Mm -hmm.
 
Josh (36:57.518)
that is building an enterprise browser for banks and health insurance companies with HIPAA compliance. And there are many different, and it's been very successful and will be very successful, there are different types of ways you can approach your market, whether it's email and browser. And ours has been go for the largest TAM, even though it's most likely to fail. And that is, can you get to scale? Again, WhatsApp, how's WhatsApp gonna monetize? It's still a question that people are asking today.
 
It's an incredibly valuable asset for Meta. Ditto with Instagram.
 
Peter (37:30.618)
Makes sense. OK, so then one more tough question. So I think when you launched Browse for Me and Arc Search, there was a bunch of publishers, advertisers, journalists who were like, what about the publishers? What about the advertisers? How are they going to? You're like this intermediate in them, right? So I guess what's your response for these folks? I mean, like to kind of do it. Yeah.
 
Josh (37:51.694)
Yeah, I mean, that is a tricky question that I don't know the answer to. But not that I haven't thought about it, but more like, yeah, we got to figure that out. Like, collectively, we got to figure that out. And what that is is the economic model for how people get paid to publish on the internet. So from an ARC search perspective, we tried to go above and beyond and did even more after we got this criticism to really aggressively link back.
 
Peter (37:58.234)
Yeah.
 
Josh (38:17.934)
make it clear where this information is coming from and try to encourage you to say, hey, if you find this interesting, go deeper and read where it came from. So for example, pretty quickly after the product launch, well actually when the product launched, we wouldn't let you see the results until we told you the six webpages it came from and then link to those webpages multiple places on the page after. And actually since people said, hey, this is a really tricky problem, we changed the experience again to actually put the webpages themselves at the very top.
 
first thing on the page to encourage you to click through. So I think the first thing is we're trying to be as good citizens of the web as we can be with the lens of we're a browser, we represent the user, the user agent, we're their user agent. And so how do we provide value to them while also being good stewards to the other players in the web ecosystem? However, it does break the economic model and it's an economic model that was already strained and is gonna be even more strained. And so...
 
What is the economic model that replaces digital ads for publishing content? I don't know. I mean, I got, you know, I'm a creative, I like to think I'm a creative generative product person, but, and I got ideas, but I think it's a broader ecosystem question that we have to grapple with. I think for better or worth, it's inevitable because this technology is, like it is objectively a more valuable experience for everyone that uses the internet.
 
Peter (39:24.89)
Yeah.
 
Josh (39:46.638)
to have a computer read dozens of articles for them to get the answers that they want across a bunch of sources. Like that is not gonna go away. And so I think solving this economic question is a big one and an important one, but even more important and big, because it's inevitable. So we're just trying to be good stewards along the way and do our part, but it's intimidating, honestly, because it really does feel like a societal shift in many ways. I would also note that what is new here is the scale.
 
And that is both clarifying and scary in that the web has always been about summarizing and linking out to things. Like I remember when I was coming up in the industry, there is all that outrage around blogging, how bloggers and blogs would kind of quote articles and link to things. And was that taking away from the original source? And so I think the story of the web that we kind of forget sometimes, even tech meme, which has been partially an inspiration for me, it's like I read stuff on tech meme all the time and never.
 
Peter (40:33.05)
Hmm.
 
Josh (40:44.302)
through and then sometimes they click through like this is the this is the public web and the open internet is putting content out there and remixing and linking and quoting. Now I think the thing that is new and what is unfair about that characterization is before someone manually had to do that by hand. So yeah they did a pull quote or they wrote a summary and link back to it but it was done with maybe more intentionality or in a different context. Now the difference is you can have infinite tech memes for anything whenever you want always with greater precision and fidelity.
 
Peter (40:45.306)
Mm.
 
Josh (41:14.414)
That is pretty wild and that has some second order consequences. But I also think it's a, I think these words like AI are a little bit heightened right now because actually this economic model has already been strained and this is just accelerating it unfortunately. So I don't know the answer and we got to figure it out, but yeah, this is a tricky one.
 
Peter (41:33.434)
Yeah. I mean, everyone else has to follow the users, right? The users will just do whatever is most convenient for them. But on the other hand, you have probably the most successful economic model ever, right? Like Google Search is like. So it's definitely an interesting space to building, for sure. Yeah.
 
Josh (41:52.782)
Yeah, and I think the thing I really just come back to is I've been on the board of Patreon for over five years and having, you know, seen up close, at least with a certain type of creator, the ad -based model is not working. I think anyone can go to a mobile web page and see all the pop -up banners and the trackers and the... It's just not... It's not like we're trying to protect something that's working. It's working... It's been fading for a bit. So that doesn't justify doing whatever you want.
 
Peter (42:17.626)
Yeah.
 
Josh (42:20.974)
saying, but I do think, I actually find it very exciting that I think a lot of really interesting experiments in as early as the media companies, even like yourself in some ways, will come out of this period. And I don't know what those are and we want to be good citizens, but yeah.
 
Peter (42:35.382)
So let's wrap up with this. My audience is a bunch of tech professionals, right? Many of them are working in big companies trying to improve some metric by 3 % or something. So what's your advice for these people who maybe are like, they want to build something really good, really important. They want to build something they feel proud of. Do you have any closing words of advice for folks like this?
 
Josh (43:05.87)
The tricky thing about this is I remember the things that I deeply believe now just sound like fortune cookies or something. Like if I had heard someone say one of these things that I might say when I, you know, on the other end, I'd be like, God, that sounds so cliche, but I will revert back to authenticity. The truth will set you free. I think just focusing on being really, really proud and fulfilled of what you.
 
do at work every day and using that as your guiding light is the most important thing. And most people don't even have the privilege of doing that. I think if you're listening to this podcast, there's a better chance that you do. But if you have, you know, like just doing something that you, if not maybe love is a strong word, just like find pride and joy. Again, think about the value that we care about, show up with heartfelt intensity, doing it whatever it is in a way that makes you very proud and fulfilled, almost taking that very personal lens to it.
 
Peter (43:57.978)
Mm -hmm.
 
Josh (44:04.462)
But that comes from a place of privilege and it doesn't work for everybody and it's not the value system of everybody. But I don't know, I think my career has taken the most fulfilling turns when I've at the end of the day just said, like, trusted my own gut and instinct for what makes me really happy and what makes me energized inside, even if it's not the same for other people. And I think the browser company is a great example of that. I'm sure people are listening to this and a couple things I've probably said, like,
 
wow, that doesn't feel as structured an answer as I would have expected or doesn't really sound like they've thought that one through. And I promise you, we've thought about whatever that was a lot. What we may have done is optimized for what has felt right to us for what we want to do in the world. And that may not be optimizing for the same things that everyone's optimizing for. So I think as long as your heart's singing and as cliche as that sounds, I think that's all that matters. But that's my value system maybe being placed on.
 
Peter (44:41.006)
Yeah.
 
Josh (45:03.182)
some mileage.
 
Peter (45:05.306)
No, I don't have to copy that. I think that's a very noble thing to aim for. Like, you know, you're taking big swings and who knows what will happen, but like you're true to yourself, right? You're doing what you want to do. So yeah.
 
Josh (45:16.334)
Yeah, but okay, I'm actually glad you said that. And this is probably my real answer. That, you're right that I don't need a caveat. But I think that the reason I'm caveating is like, that's my answer is that I remember a decade ago, trying to figure out the answer to these things. How should I do that? And I wish I just kind of shut out the noise and say like, what do I want? What am I trying to do? Like, what do I want my life to be? So in some ways, my caveat is not, I'm not proud of my answer for my, it's more just like, I don't know you. I don't know your listener. They don't know me.
 
Peter (45:35.354)
Hmm.
 
Josh (45:46.254)
They shouldn't listen to me, they should listen to themselves. So again, listen to yourself, but I don't know. I'll have to figure out of a quipier, more actual fortune cookie way of saying that, but just that like trusting that inner inner inner motivation, that own heartfelt intensity more than what I think or anyone else.
 
Peter (46:04.826)
Alright man, that's amazing. Yeah, I think that's a great time to close on. Let me stop.
 
Josh (46:10.382)
Awesome, thank you.
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