Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO)

Silicon Valley at least the most modern version of Silicon Valley has this obsession with graphs and has this obsession with numbers and metrics I mean you saw me in the previous answer I'm talking about D5 B7 what's a D5 B7 and it is an incredibly effective way to achieve certain outcomes to focus on numbers because it's it's very quantitative it's objective you can see the graph go up or go down or stay flat depending on what you want but what we found is that optimizing for metrics leaves a lot on the table and it misses a lot and so what we do at the browser companies we talk about optimizing feelings how does the software how do we want to make someone feel on the other end of our software do we want to make them feel Joy do we want to make them feel fast do we want to make them feel organized do we want to make them feel focused what is the feeling we are trying to evoke and whatever we're doing

on a specific project or a specific feature or specific piece of Storytelling content and I I can imagine what's going through the heads of of your listeners right now which is probably a number of things but among others that sounds really damn romantic because they're like okay you're optimizing for feelings welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products today my guest is Josh Miller Josh is the CEO and co-founder of a company called the browser company which makes a product called Arc which has quickly become my default web browser I fell in love with this product as soon as I started using it and wanted to get a glimpse into how Josh and his team approached the craft of product there's this kind of cohort of companies like the browser company linear cron few

others that are just laser focused on building the best possible user experience almost above all else and I wanted to spend some time exploring this trend with Josh we cover how he thinks about prioritization team building storytelling company values metrics shipping building in public so much more Josh is such an Earnest genuine and humble human and it was such a pleasure getting to learn from him and just to be clear I'm not an investor in the browser company and I barely knew anything about the company before I chatted with Josh so I'm just a fan and as a special surprise Arc is normally invite only but if you're listening to this now check the show notes for a special link that'll get you right in to use the browser if you want to play with it yourself with that I bring you Josh Miller after a short word from our select sponsors this episode is brought to you by writer how much hype have you been hearing

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Josh welcome to the podcast thank you so much for having me Lenny it's absolutely my pleasure you are the CEO and co-founder of the browser company which builds a product called Arc can you just talk about what is the browser company what is Arc and then whatever you can share about just like the scale of Arc at this point that'd be really interesting to hear sure I hope you don't mind me doing this I'm curious I hear that you may may or may not use ARC how would you describe Arc to somebody like the simple explanation is it's just a the best web browser that I've used so to me it's a browser I know that you have a bigger Vision than that but that's like the the way I see it as a lay person who hasn't seen the full the full vision awesome I think we can go home now that's great that's awesome there we go no I to be totally honest

with you and your listeners we have a really hard time describing Arc which is something I'm not proud of but it is objectively a replacement for your default web browser and people who try it seem to really love it and most people seem to have a hard time using the internet in the old way so that may sound like I'm being Coy but we have workshopped many a one-liners and we we the words have escaped us so far so to be honest it is honored to-do list to get sharper about that and then in terms of our scale I'll give us since we have a lot of product managers listening I'll give you uh the PM answer to that question which is we really focus on one key metric as it relates to tracking our growth or how we're doing we call it D5 D7 a lot of other companies call it L5 L7 but the human explanation for that is how many people turn to Arc at least five days a week that is all we obsess over from a

metrics perspective because for us it captures retention engagement and growth in a single metric you can't game it right so from a retention perspective it's not just opening it X definitely once a week you need to open a tab on a day in order to count as an active bird day but so it tracks retention it tracks engagement because five days a week is no joke there are very few apps or pieces of software you actively use five days a week and then obviously it attracts growth because if we track the count so that is what we track and then we also don't obsess over absolute numbers because if we're successful if you zoom out and out and out any point in time will be inconsequential and small so what we really look is growth rate week over week so you know relative to last week what is our growth rate and for the past eight months or so we've been growing over 10 percent every single week so very very thrilled with

that do not think that will continue if anyone is listening I I would be shocked if we continue like that for another eight months but yeah we obsess over how many humans use our five out of seven days a week and we really want that number to grow as fast as possible every single day I love that we're already talking about metrics and return mentioned this is off ticket start you got it there's an audience Letty we're going to talk about just like how public you are about everything but would you be up for sharing your retention actual numbers like the D5 and D7 you just mentioned yes with the asterisk that I didn't prepare for that so uh Rebecca correct me on Twitter after this is this as well um so once again we don't look at Dau retention we don't look at weekly active user retention we really just look at D5 D7 retention depending on the cohort that's somewhere between low to mid 30s

and low 40s so really really fantastic again not going to continue if there is anyone on this call that is going to check this in a year it will be lower I'm sure but so far we're really thrilled with it and most importantly in the same way we don't look at Absolute gross growth number we don't look at retention in this moment we look at is it improving cohort by cohort and so what I I think I'm most proud of is that if you go back a year by all means our retention curve we were really proud of it and I think one of the best in our category of software but what I'm really proud of is 12 months later we've been inching it up and up and up despite getting further away from the earliest most passionate adopters so our retention curve going up and up a little bit which is all right if you haven't shared that that'd be cool to share on Twitter Someday I'm a retained user I'm gonna wait and you can share this clip we'll

share this clip okay okay I love it we're just ready we got the marketing strategy together so I told you this

ahead of the chat but the reason I wanted to have you on this podcast even though as folks may know and as I've told you I try to actually avoid Founders and CEOs in this podcast to give other folks a platform who aren't often invited on podcasts but the reason I wanted to have you on is I just feel like Arc is a remarkable product it blew me away the first time I used it I don't know if you saw it tweeted like as soon as I signed up like I had to share like how awesome it was of course I thought it made my day okay great and also as an outside Observer it just feels like you're building a remarkable culture and team that's really unique and so I just want to selfishly learn from how you think about product and team building and all the things that go into it so it keeps you saying that way what a cool way to kick off and anyway absolutely first question I have along those lines is you mentioned at some point that your

product building philosophy is kind of a reaction to the traditional Silicon Valley Way of building products I'm curious to hear what led you down that road like why did you feel like you had to react to it and then how would you just describe your product building philosophy at the browser company I'll share this caveat once and never again in this interview but I want anyone listening to know I'm someone who doesn't believe there is a single right way to do things so what I'm sharing today is truly just what we have found works for us in this moment for what we are doing but I remember when I was earlier in my career I'd listen to podcasts like this and take it as Dogma because there were these people that had done it I respected what they had built so if any of this sounds like better than now it's not intended to this is just what we found works for us and what we care about no okay so earlier in my career started a

company also with Hirsch my current co-founder and CTO and we were fortunate enough to have that company acquired or acquired by Facebook and spent a number of years working at Facebook and remarkable organization one of probably the best executing I've ever seen at that period of time and by the way I'd never been a PM before so I'm not complimenting myself I was just learning for the first time but what struck me at Facebook and call it 2014 and I've seen through to this day is Silicon Valley at least the most modern version of Silicon Valley has this obsession with graphs and has this obsession with numbers and metrics I mean you saw me in the previous answer I'm talking about D5 B7 what's a D5 B7 and it is an incredibly effective way to achieve certain outcomes to focus on numbers because it's it's very quantitative it's objective you can see the graph go up or go down or stay flat depending on what

you want but what we found is that optimizing for metrics leaves a lot on the table and it misses a lot and so what we do at the browser companies we talk about optimizing feelings how does the software how do we want to make someone feel on the other end of our software do we want to make them feel Joy do we want to make them feel fast do we want to make them feel organized do we want to make them feel focused what is the feeling we are trying to evoke and whatever we're doing on a specific project or a specific feature or specific piece of Storytelling content and I I can imagine what's going through the heads of of your listeners right now which is probably a number of things but among others that sounds really damn romantic because they're like okay you're optimizing for feelings but I just if you if you allow me I would posit that actually this Modern Way of optimizing for numbers and graphs

especially for what we all do every day which is make things and put in the world is what's fairly odd because if you if you just to yourself daydream about what are your favorite products or product companies and brands while it may sound cliche for me Nike Nike was one of the first companies that at a very deep level resonate with me as a child Disney Disney same thing Apple before I was a professional in an industry these were the brands and the products that they made that really made me love something that was ostensibly a commercial product I could buy what do you think Walt Disney was optimizing for when he was crafting Disneyland what do you think Phil Knight was thinking about when he made that first version of the Nike running shoe what do you think Steve Jobs was imagining and daydreaming about when thinking about the iPhone or the Macintosh by all means numbers are a fantastic way to be honest with yourself

about whether or not you are achieving what you aim to do but at the at the moment of creation at the stages product people wondering what should we do and why and how we think it's much more important for us to think about the human the person at the other end and how we really want to make them feel I think one one example of that one tangible example of that is when I was at Facebook I joined in the midst of Snapchat's ascendancy and there was a lot of feelings about how are we doing should we be worried and the way that we would have that conversation would be how many times per week do people share on Facebook do they post something we even had an acronym obps it's like seared into my memory oh but what is obps and how is it trending over time well I think we should have been asking and what we at least would ask at the browser company in our way of product development is do we think people feel

closer to their friends and family or something of that nature I think that's what Snapchat got so right they weren't obsessing about something like how many people put an image into the composer and hit the plus button and the number of times per week means success they were they were thinking about something much more human and essential so that is what we paired through the browser companies don't optimize for metrics don't optimize for graphs use that as a way to keep you honest and use it as a tool in your tool grid but fundamentally none of us are here for that we're there to make people feel something as you pointed out I think a lot of people are listening are like I love that I wish I could do that I want to optimize for feelings but then I gotta drive the business forward I got goals to hit I want to keep people accountable I'm curious how you operationalize this approach just like how do you actually

implement this idea like do you I imagine you still have goals and metrics and you guys you know you talked about retention and things like that yeah obviously it's difficult to do that in the abstract for another company and it may not work for every company and every product but you know for example one of the reasons we found this to be so effective so far is if you pick the right feeling it typically tracks pretty closely with the metric you care about so for example we don't have a growth team and we have no semblance of growth projects however in many of the new features that we put out into the world we want people to feel surprised or Joy or or an emotion like that guess what when people feel that way they go oh my God what was that and they start telling their friends and family about it and they start dropping a screenshot in slack Etc so there's one example on the consumer side I've never built kind of

traditional Enterprise software selling to cios Etc but I can imagine maybe a someone in the I.T Department of a large Enterprise wants to feel smart or wants to feel ahead of the curve or wants to feel secure and ease at what they're doing I think sometimes we just forget that whoever your buyer is or whatever your kind of business objective is at the end of the day where a bunch of people in a bunch of rooms at the other side of these screens and just thinking about that person it could be a buyer it could be a customer but I think the truth is the answer to the question Lenny is when I was earlier in my career I was searching for the answers or the way to do things the right the wrong the binary I think anyone that's been doing this or anything for a while learns that it's all nuanced it's a spectrum it depends sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't but I think the true answer Lenny is

just like optimizing for metrics so purely is deeply flawed in my opinion optimizing for feelings so purely is flawed as well and it depends on what you are doing what the project is and a lot of other things but I think the reason we come out so strongly is I do think Silicon Valley has tended so far towards optimizing for graphs and metrics that if we can reel it back in a little bit at least as just one company I think that will be good but the truth is it's both we need you know we need to use all the tools we can get but I think hopefully that's one way that people can operationalize I'm curious just like to poke out a little bit uh how you actually Implement that so maybe as an example you recently launched this like Peak feature where you don't you mess over I think a link in it opens up in a little browser that doesn't last do you put together a little speck of some sort of like we're trying to create

surprise and maybe here's a metric we think about it like what's kind of the actual day-to-day operational approach to like a new feature in terms of you know feelings versus metrics yeah the truth is I don't think we've operationalized it as formally as we should one day and we'll probably need to one day the lucky thing is we are a very tight small group of individuals that have now worked together for a lot for for a long time so it's not so foremost there's a PRD at the top of it we list out the emotions it's much more you know with that project get been in a room and whoever else is working on it and say all right so here's what we're trying to do for people here's the problem we're trying to solve or the way we fit in their day and in that moment people want to which feel very light and Airy you know so for the peak feature we won't use referencing the use cases you're on Hacker News and you wanna

probably pretty quick succession check out a five to seven URLs and you're not really sure which one you're going to spend time on but but you're gonna open a bunch of stuff really quickly and Peak allows you to effortlessly just like peek into it without leaving Hacker News and context switching to this whole new tab and going back and forth so in that scenario the conversation was how do we make it feel really Airy and effortless to just pop it up pop it back down lightness airiness speed agility so again it's not that we have a what is the number one feeling the number one number two feeling it is much more conversational at this stage but I can I'm actually really excited hopefully we've got the privilege one day to have such a large team that we have to figure out a way to do it so that's an example of how we think about it it's a good segue to a question I wanted to touch on so I asked uh Scott belski what I should

ask you he's a big fan of yours I don't know if he's an investor but he's just like I love Josh and asked him what should I ask Josh and one of his questions was about you guys ship very quickly like your shipping meaningful features every Friday and you also close the loop really well with customers when I come ask for something you're like hey we did it what is it that you do and what can people learn from the way you all operate that allows you to ship quickly well first off thank you Scott if you're listening uh it's it's somewhat of an awkward question in Midgley because of course as the T it's sort of like someone complimenting you about your product it's always impossible to really take and accept the cob likes you see all the blemishes of course we see all these ways in which we don't ship fast enough and could be doing a better job listening and building with members but at risk of sounding a bit cliche

I really think we ship our values so we thought a lot about our values as a company you can read about them online and I think if you if you examine those values and then you look at your compliment or Scott's compliment you can see them in one to one so the first and I really think the most important is we hire people that show up with heartfelt intensity and a lot of companies I think obsess over craft details you know they'll be a value like we obsess over the details what we say is we want people that show up to our company with some some fire in their belly something that they are out to do and for each person it's a little bit different for some people it may be UI craft details for other people it may be achieving double the performance with a quarter of the engineering head down everyone has something but they show up with this heartfelt intensity and I think even relative to everything else I'm going to

say that's it if you have a team that has heartfelt intensity and is there for a purpose and something to prove you get it you give them a very exciting ambitious promise and get out of their way and they will do remarkable work so showing up with heartfelt intensity that our second value is assume you don't know assume you don't know and the value assume you don't know is even if you know even if you're a subject matter expert we have somewhere in our company that literally built the first version of Chrome and ran it for 16 years but he more than anyone embodies this beginner's mind of I have no idea how this should work or what will happen and the follow-up to that value is so we got to get going it's like dropping in a new city you just gotta walk out the door of your Airbnb turn left and maybe you'll turn right and then you'll hop on the subway but you just gotta get going and see what you find and so we have this

attitude of you're showing up with this hard shelf intensity but you start by saying I have no idea what I'm doing I have no idea what's going to happen so we just got to get going and that that biases in a default to action we have another value of start by asking what could be which is pushing ourselves to be as aspirationally ambitious as possible so the peak feature that you mentioned we just didn't want to solve the problem context switching we wanted to almost blur the line between native and web software and make it feel like a sheet of paper you know and and really pushing ourselves to be as ambitious as we can be which is the consequence of blowing back around and more deeply motivating the people working on it so I mean I could keep going we have a value you're on the hook for the team about a collective uh about you know you're doing it for the crew and you gotta swarm when you got a swarm and we have a

value of make them feel something but I think what it all adds up to is a team that has a lot of heart has a lot of intrinsic motivation and a it's the first day of my career I wonder what's gonna happen attitude and I think all of those things add up to a culture which is let's get something out there let's see what happens how did you come

up with these about like what was the process to come up with company values because I know a lot of companies are like we should we should come up with these how do you do that the secret is I hate corporate values I've never resonated with them and I'm fortunate we're fortunate enough to have a lot of really spectacular experience leaders in our corner and I got hammered for the first year two years and Josh where are your values how can your team operate without values and I just I always experienced them on the other end as almost like corporate propaganda he's like cliche fortune cookie Panda Express like you should care about the detail I just it didn't I didn't didn't resonate with me and the thing that clicked was maybe a year and a half two years and it working I just kept hearing the same things from the team and you know I would do things like a year into someone joining how's it going what's going well

what's not and I realized that there are some traits that Define our team extremely organically and naturally no one told people what our values were again because I was this naive ignorant you know 31 year old being like values or a corporate cat late stage capitalism creation and you know and just very very hard-headed and it was really special two years in hearing from the team why they love the browser company why they think we're doing so just the passion there and then we challenged ourselves to what became a value well if something about the five one-liner is on the corporate web page feels off start by asking what could be in dream a little bit and what I realized was all of the statements people would say about what they loved about the browser company what they thought to find the way we work they reminded me of how I like to take road trips I'm a big traveler I'm a big fan of dropping in somewhere new it's just

exploring and so we just had this aha moment um let's instead of having a corporate landing page with five value titles and subtitles let's tell let's write a manual for how to take a road trip so we wrote an essay called notes on road trips that use this that uses this semi-biographical but mostly fictional story about a person and their father taking a road trip when they're a teenager to tell the story of how we do things at the browser company and share these values but in a way that hopefully won't feel so propaganda-y and feel a little more you're reading an essay so I say that again not to say there's anything wrong with Traditional Values I'm actually sure I'm going to get an earful for a lot of people that coach me and give me advice that I sounded too indignant on this uh podcast but I'm I'm pretty proud of that story because uh it was a great example of assuming you don't know we were sure that corporate

values were not for us and then very organically without trying it turned out wait they're pretty they run through this company in a pretty profound way we should put some words around it because it's happening whether or not we like it or say it is or not that's awesome I have the page here and it's quite beautiful and uh we'll link to it in the show notes just like very briefly and tactically they just sit down and start writing this thing and then people kind of gave you feedback like how long did this process take just for folks that maybe you want to go down this road yeah warning downside of this press is that it takes a lot longer than we thought it would uh because we put so much hurt into it so what it started with was again in my kind of natural one-year check-in type conversation starting to notice these patterns and then we actually very uh comprehensively we're like okay let's sit down and

interview everyone at the browser company one one but no survey one by one talking to people asking questions and then we pulled out those words so actually what's really cool about these values if my memory serves me I believe every single one with the exception of maybe a word or two was something that someone on our team said so we interviewed the entire team and then these are meant to be a mirror the putting it in road trip essay form that took a long time that that was a lot of but yeah I don't I don't recommend the way that we did that but um how long how long is long probably three months oh that does not sound that long okay yeah maybe this goes back to Scott's comment that maybe maybe our our bar to how quickly we should ship stuff including values is nice I don't know but yeah it felt a long time and and I I this was not just me just for anyone listening this was not CEO in a corner writing a

missive this was a team effort there's a woman Abby on our team that did did so much work on this project the words themselves came from our team so it has my name I think somewhere on that web page but by no means was this me writing this essay in a corner with the fireplace on or anything like that okay awesome that was really that was really helpful as you also saw I asked on Twitter what to ask you and I got a ton of ton of questions people have a lot of

questions for how you all do stuff the most common question turned out was from Shahed Khan who had the most likes of all the questions that people asked you and is around hiring that basically been able to convince some of the most amazing people in the world to join the browser company like you just mentioned you hired like the guy that built Chrome basically to work on Arc now what is it that you do that convinces amazing people to join because everyone wants to learn from you and copy you and do that themselves thank you for that question for all the legs I will admit this is also a fairly awkward one to ask I actually just came from an interview uh with a candidate and they asked me a fairly similar question and I said you know what you should go ask the people that work here and not me I don't know why they ultimately join but what I will tell you is the intentionality which is another secret sharing a lot of Secrets

this one will probably get me in trouble I don't care about web browsers I've never cared about web browsers I never wanted to build a web browser if you had told me a decade ago that I'd be working on a desktop first web browser at 32 I'd say what in my career went horribly wrong the origin story of this company was Hirsch who I met when I was 20. we started a company together lots of mistakes a lot of successes a lot of growing pains and figuring out who we are and a decade later we were still friends we went to each other's weddings we'd worked in all these different Industries and different stage companies and and we just realized you know there were a lot of ideas that get us really excited there are a lot of shapes and sizes but as we you know we're kind of nostalgic for looking back on the decade prior it was groups of people and moments in time with those people that were our best memories and so what Hersh

and I decided long before the company started was we want to build a company but we want to build a company or we feel like we can hire whoever we want and I don't mean whoever we want in terms of who would dare say no but we want to work on something where the greatest Minds in our industry and adjacent would want to work on that prompt in a hypothetical sense and then build an organization build a team where we can work in the way that after a decade of trying on a bunch of hats and ways of doing things the metrics this and that we could we could do what was right for us and so where we went to with a new web browser let alone a web browser is a new form of computing which is our true aspiration to build an internet computer can look up the internet computer YouTube video on our on our browser Company YouTube page but we our ambition is even higher than a web browser the intention of that is we just want to go

hire our favorite people that we know and don't know and build a team that will never get bored working with this crew because of how incredible they are and how humble they are and so when you think about it like that I is the CEO as notionally the head of product I view our product as our team and I know a lot of companies say that I actually think they probably all need it I don't think anyone's being disingenuous but we really mean it it is the Genesis of this company it is not a new web browser it is let's build the Dream Team our Dream Team and let's build a way of working that is really fun for us and really speaks to our values and let's go find people that resonate with that and that trickles down to everything we do whether it's our policy about this or the way we do that I'll give you one example our goal of interviews is to convince people not to join the browser company we don't if

I have an interview with someone I don't pitch them I say what do you want to ask me anything you want I'll be super honest most people shouldn't want to work here um so I think it all starts with us viewing our products as the company as the team not Arc itself and then I think you know being self-aware that that's how I think that's how we think but you know again playing back things that I've heard we've we have been fortunate we've hired a lot of really remarkable people especially on paper and especially off I mean all around um you know I'll just give a couple examples to share one thing that I've heard uh a few recent hires we hired someone named Darren who as I mentioned he co-created the first prototype of chrome and then ran it for 16 years I think you know hundreds if not thousands of people reported him he joined the browser company as an IC uh we just hired a woman named Tara she was on the

original uh paper by 53 team one of my most inspiring products at the beginning of my career most recently she was actually I believe senior SVP of product at Vimeo and a senior director of engineering she joined her engineering team as an IC we just hired someone named Peter vidani when I was 20 building consumer social software he was like the coolest most impressive person he was the first designer at Tumblr ran the design team at Tumblr for seven years and the most recently was SVP of design at slack join the team as an IC designer and though that sounds like I'm bragging the the thing that was really interesting and perplexing to us was these are people that have made a lot of money that have had really fancy titles that have worked on transformative projects why are they joining this team and I think something that people show up to the browser company with is in addition to heartfelt intensity this aspiration

that their work at the browser company will come to Define their careers and that's coming from people that have done really remarkable things by all accounts and I think more than anything we've realized that in order for people like that to join and to show up that there are a number of things you have to promise and provide them that that make folks like that gravitate with the intention of doing their work with their career ranging from an incredible ambitious aspiration really empowerment to do what you know kind of to act on the prompts that they're given on behalf of the team and the way that they see fit and truly trusting and empowering them a very kind culture I think if you've been doing this for a decade plus Yuri tolerance for is very very low and so by no means do I think we're perfect I don't think everyone shows up the browser company saying if I'm not on the equivalent of the early iPhone team I'm

going to be bummed but I think generally speaking kirsh and I and everyone that was on the early team showed up with this aspiration of making the browser company the products and I think that's carried forward to this Tumbleweed of people saying wait that's where I'm gonna finally do the equivalent of building the iPhone and we all know we probably won't but there is that I want to give it one more shot uh I want to give it one I want to go for it and that's that trickle that that just tumbleweeds I think just at some point that Tumbleweed is I think a big part of it is like once you get amazing people more amazing people want to join so I think that's very much uh helpful something else this resonates a lot with is just like the mission of a company such a powerful tool for pulling people in the best people I've seen that a lot with Founders like if they have a meaningful Mission it's so much easier to hire

versus not and clearly you're really good at sharing that vision and Mission and then you also have a really interesting Mission Envision I think there's also like you're just a charismatic founder and that helps a lot too and you're a great Storyteller well the other thing I want to add learning is again putting myself in a listener I imagine a lot of what I just said probably sounded a little bit could come off if you don't know me and you don't think you know as a little bombastic or a little like again romantic very tactically I'll give you something that was not was just sort of who we are but I think has helped contribute to this tumbleweed from the very first person we hired we celebrated them publicly the fact that they join and in a very like heartfelt way telling you about them as a person what they did long before we had anyone that anyone would have heard of before working at the browser company

just because we were it was Earnest we were really proud it was all you know again if you if you think of our original mandate as building the companies the product when our first designer joins we want to tell everyone about it that's a product launch that is the product launch and then whenever we ship something we go out of our way to celebrate the people that worked on it publicly you know I think there's a CEO hero worship sometimes in Silicon Valley I do very little at the company and I do oh sorry I do very little as it relates to the thing people fall in love with art I do a lot for the browser company but I don't make Arc I didn't make Peak and again that's just who we are which is Alexandrite she kills it look at how cool this is because it's Earnest and it's honest to who we are and that I think it creates this reinforcing cycle of you're someone that's done something incredible which is I'm gonna be

celebrated I'm they truly want me here I'm gonna be recognized for the work that I do it's not going to just accrue to this like CEO figurehead who everyone thinks is some genius Visionary and so again by no means are we Perfect by no means do I think we get it right all the time but because it's such an authentic expression of who we are and what we are trying to do I think we do little micro implementations like that that ladder up to that principle I got so excited about but are as simple as like oh you know someone tweets about some animation they're like oh this was fun tag Sherry Sherry made that Sherry is incredible and you don't see that that much in Silicon Valley you see corporate blog posts and the CEOs more than anyone else that's probably why you don't have CEOs on the podcast because you know what you know this Letty that is why that's your policy you don't want to hear from the

CEOs they're not the ones built the product if you want to hear from the people actually doing it that's why I love this podcast that's right that's right thank you I'd say just hearing

everything you're saying uh the browser company sounds like an incredible place to work I can see why people want to go work uh it's pretty simple you touched on being public and sharing everything that's going on and that's uh that's another area I wanted to spend a little time on you guys are very transparent about what's going on inside the company you bring cameras into the board meetings I watched like a half hour meeting you had with your head of design talking about a project that's behind schedule and you're trying to like figure out how do we get this out the door you just like share like actual things you all are doing within the company publicly and I'm curious just why did you start doing that what have you seen as a good or bad that has come from that is there anything you've shared that maybe you regret like oh maybe you just want to put that out there what's been your experience with that

why don't I start with the regret my it's not yet a regret but the thing that I wonder because this is very much you know I may uh hopefully spoken with a lot of earnest passion to some of the questions before this is one that I would really characterize as a prototype we really have a prototype German culture and this is one that I'd put high on the list though maybe we'll regret this later and specifically what I hope is that I'm uncomfortable putting myself too Central in our story but naturally when you're doing storytelling publicly there's a gravitational pull for the CEO and the founders to be at the center of that and so sometimes I even this morning we had our best performing YouTube video ever the first one that really kind of broke out of people that already follow us and it's one where I'm reacting it's like a reaction video in classic YouTube form to MKBHD uh talking about our product

for the first time and I honestly watched it right before this again I was like what can I do what are we doing why like am I trying to become a YouTube so to be totally honest I don't regret anything yet but I wonder if we could take this too far so if anything if anyone's listening if you see us starting to take this too far especially as it relates to me we want to hear about it because that's keeping me up but I do think the intentions are are pure and Earnest which are I and we another thing that defines people to join the browser company in addition to wanting to do the work that defines their careers is I would characterize it as a little bit of hopelessness maybe feeling jaded questioning this industry that they've worked on or products that they've worked on and wanting to ReDiscover but at the end of the day we are a group of idealists of optimists wanting to ReDiscover what we fell in love with

when we were kids whether it's the part of our craft or the potential of Technology the internet and software and as part of that I would view Arc in the browser company as an experiment in can we can do it better is possible and as we were thinking about better as possible you know rediscovering what we love and believe in deep down and try and express it in the world one of it related to trust I remember when I was a teenager using the internet for the first time and early on to college just the hopefulness of what was possible and the belief that these people building these tools they were like Heroes to me not just the the leaders but the teams the companies the brands and somewhere along the way I'm not blaming a single company I'm not even saying that anyone did anything wrong but culturally I was a sociology major culturally we have lost trust in tech companies and in Tech Brands and so

building in public showing you our meetings uncomfortably so is an act in if we were them why should they trust us why should anyone trust us we have your most sensitive personal data we have your most sensitive professional data why should you trust us if we have had our trust broken again and again and I think our hypothesis in this prototype in this experiment is we can have the best privacy policy in the world but at the end of the day again it's just people behind the screen and so even if I think about I haven't done interviews like this because I worry that if you don't know me I'd come off the wrong way you know a lot of people tend to I've noticed a lot of friends in my life that I know them behind the scenes but the way that people perceive them publicly who don't know them they interpret it the other way because there's not that trust and so our bet is that if you get to know us

Nash Dina me Hersh and you really feel like you get to know as this person and all of our imperfections we're average looking we're average to all that stuff then when you see that we're asking for a permission you might trust it is because we want to make you feel a certain way that's better and if not you know I'll say someone tweeted something yesterday um who apparently we didn't earn the trust yet and they haven't gotten to know us and their interpretation of what we were doing was the worst possible interpretation you could and at first honestly I felt a bit of anger like who is this person on a Thursday just saying we're doing X and Y and then I realized you know what I'd have the same feeling because of the experiences I've had with technology in the past you know five to ten years and so the intention with these built the building and public experiments are radical trust building now radical

transparency we can't share everything but radical trust building you get to know us as humans and I worry that we'll regret that and that it could potentially turn into oh they're trying to be internet celebrities that you know have they're so important they should share everything because you know thank you them for gracing us with their opinions it's not the intention and it feels if he was worth taking that risk but that's the intentionality behind it that is a really interesting Insight it makes a lot of sense for a browser to find that so important to build that trust I haven't done podcast interviews I haven't I haven't done this I really like you I really like the feeling of your conversations the intentions behind them the words even your intro music is a friendly jig and so I mean it's it's a great example where I think it's one of the most wonderful things about the podcasting

medium is I have I've had you in my ear for a year and the people on your show and you feel a sense of trust in you and your intentions here and your intentions both in this interview in terms of what you're trying to do for listeners it to some extent your show and the warmth that you bring to it and the perception I have is you as a human being we've never met I don't even think we've maybe dm'd briefly maybe five messages exchanged but I feel like I know you and that makes me trust you and so in many ways this podcast at a mental level of inspiration for it I feel the same way in Reverse you made this point about being worried about being like two front and center for your company I have the same exact feeling even though my newsletter is called Lenny's newsletter like I only named it that because that was the default recommendation when I was signing for substack like I didn't I don't want to be this like I know it all

come to me welcome to my know it all Place uh like I really dislike that and that's why I created this community that kind of lives along the side where people can help each other because I'm not gonna have all the answers and so I've kind of had to lean into that like all right people they want like one they want a person to like help them understand what's going on like learn about and I in your videos you do a great job highlighting other people like I was watching your board meeting video and just like here's all the team members coming along here they come with you how you doing so anyway all that to say you're doing great job finding the balance oh thank you you as well I appreciate it you talked about storytelling and you mentioned that you have like a whole bunch of odd teams at the Bowser company one of them is a storytelling team and that actually explains I think how you're so good at making these really

amazing videos because making great videos is hard can you just talk about some of these odd teams that you have that uh that probably other companies don't one of the other things that hopefully you're picking up in this interview so far is we are a very prototype driven culture you know it goes back to the assume you don't know ethos we try a lot of experiments and we try them related to product features related to how we work together related to the stories we tell so this isn't a category of I'm not sure it's gonna work but we're trying it and it seems to be working so far at least for us what Lenny's referencing is we have a handful of teams I'll pick two just as an

example we have a membership team and we have a storytelling team and though you probably recognize or obviously familiar with those terms those aren't historically startup orgs or startup disciplines and teams and let me tell you about the intention behind both membership membership was when I was at Facebook the most impressive thing to me about how Facebook built product was their user research to you shout out to Loey and Jane I don't know why you'd be listening to this podcast but you deeply inspired me when we were at Facebook together they had the most incredible team of user researchers and it always felt odd to me and this isn't Louis and Jane's fault actually in fact you know they suffered from this that user research almost felt like a service organization relative to product engineering design there'd be a PM the PM would get assigned a researcher and the PM got to decide how to use research

and ask them what to do and ask them questions but seeing the potential for when you really get to know the people that you are building for that you're serving at a really deep way it is extraordinary how do you build product any other way and so we took that to the extreme at the browse company which we said let's not think of it as customer support customer service customer success user research those are just those are just business terms those are just industry terms at the end of the day what we're saying is if there is a human being from the moment they touch our software or our products for the first time see if they have it last we need to have a deep genuine ongoing relationship with them and on day one that may be air quote customer success how do I use this thing on day 37 that might be I have a bug do you mind helping me fix it and on day 58 that may be hey we're shipping the

mobile app soon what do you want from mobile what do you want on your phone other companies view that as different Origins but we view that as there are a bunch of people the other end of this that we are serving from the moment they touch our product for the first time let's own that relationship full stack and think about it holistically and so that's the membership team

on the storytelling side very similar different type of person again we're a humanistic company so the theme Here is the people on the company the people at the other end so if the membership team takes people from the moment they touch our products for the first set of the last the storytelling team is about people we don't have the privilege of serving yet they don't use ARC they don't know what Arc is that could be an investor air quote investor relations that could be members of the Press air quote PR that could be just people out in the world air quote marketing you know and one day sales but at the end of the day it's telling our story to people it's telling our story to people and thinking about that holistically full stack so that's how we think about teams is we don't we we start with first principles asking what could be what are we really trying to do here and what is the most direct way to

manifest that even if it's not how other people do it in practice one of the benefits of that is I do think it leads to certain pieces of content for example the people go oh wow how do you know I've never seen that before but again it's it's not I think anyone's capable of this I think we have an extraordinarily talented storytelling team and membership team but I really think it's as simple as the intentionality what is the team what are their incentives what are the disciplines on the team uh you know even hiring a video editor for example is a small company but the video editor not having just like make a tick tock account go viral but think about it more holistically in terms of the people so again there's a lot that breaks down there's a lot that's not going well about it I have no idea how the scales the 500 people and yeah so this is not me saying this experiment is ultimately going to be a huge success a rate for

everyone or even us at different times but that was the intentionality of the membership team the storytelling team and others and even product management we don't have PMS at the company but I'm my you know my title at Facebook was proud of measure I love product management but we view it not as a team we view it as a leader a role on a project on an effort and depending on the projects different types of people should be a PM so we have a performance related project going on where of course an infrastructure engineer should be that air quote PM we have a you know a product project where actually I think someone from membership should be the PM because ultimately yes we're building software product but it is really about serving our members in a specific way so we should have someone for membership via PM again as you can imagine as is going through the heads of ever and listening that must break down in 18

ways oh it definitely does and so you know I'm not promising one day it won't change but again continuous through the company is assume you don't know start by asking what could be and let's just try some things and see what happens start with what could be I love that value this episode is brought to you by linear let's be honest the issue tracker that you're using today isn't very helpful why is it that it always seems to be working against you instead of working for you why does it feel like such a chore to use well linear is different it's incredibly fast beautifully designed and it comes with powerful workflows that streamline your entire product development process from issue tracking all the way to managing product roadmaps linear is designed for the way modern software teams work what users love about linear are the powerful keyboard shortcuts efficient GitHub Integrations cycles that actually create

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so I was going to ask you actually you talked about why you don't have PMS do you think you'll hire PMS in the future you know having a PM background do you think you'll get there or do you think you'll try to stick to this people do the PM roll depending on the project yeah we've we're increasingly hiring people that at other companies may have a PM title um I'd say we have tutor three right now that could have a PM title at another company I don't think we will have a PM org or a PM role because again we believe depending on the if you look if you unpack the verbs that a PM does I think those are those are verbs that anyone that we hire could do and it really depends on what is the project and what are we trying to do I think the thing that will become that will be unwavering is we like to hire mutts and I haven't yet figured out a term that comes off as more endearing because it's meant to be

very endearing but for example there's a woman in a company named Rebecca Rebecca was a data scientist leaves at quora she got her PhD at MIT and I think behavioral psychology or something I'm probably gonna mix quote that but it's got some crazy degree at MIT uh and then was a software engineer at stripe I'm talking about Rebecca through her resume she's a much more you know there's so much about Rebecca she plays effectively a PM role right now she is effectively gaming our multi effectively or multiplayer Team but what was so awesome about meeting Rebecca is her and other people at this company have the mindset of I make things and I will do what I need to do to make what I want to make whatever that verb is whatever that discipline is and that requires people that are multi-disciplinary in practice and multi-disciplinary in uh approach to their work it's not that we don't hire PMS but we want to hire people who kind

of have a multi-disciplinary approach and view things as I like to make things tell me how I contribute to making it and sometimes they may play the verbs of a PM and sometimes it may be something

else this can be a really interesting story to follow I've seen this journey a few times at different companies what I find is a lot of times uh like people that are good at other things like engineering or design for a while they're like yep wait on epms I'll do the PM job and then eventually they're like this sucks I don't I hate doing this stuff why do I want to design leave me alone I don't want to sit on a song all day I don't want to be in meetings So eventually turns out they're like okay let's find someone to do this thing that loves it and so that's one thing that happens the other thing I find is like you I'm sure you've seen this a lot of people are we or eopms they come in and they're like here's what we're doing and they're just adults process complexity what I find is those are just bad PMS like if you have an awesome PM everything just gets better everyone's happier things

move faster so I think companies often get to that stage and then also there's just like Career Development stuff you know eventually as you scale it's like one of my career path and I'm like all right well we gotta go one road or another it's hard to stay this kind of hybrid role but I super respect the first principles approach of like let's just and for what's with Lenny I think you're almost definitely right I think it will almost definitely happen with us and again this goes back to the assume you don't know the assume you don't know is try a prototype and then assume it's not gonna work so even in my own experience I remember uh getting to know Evan from Snapchat just a little enough to know how he's talked about PMS and it was we're never going to hire PMS it's that everyone's a designer and you know I have no relationship with them anymore but you can look there are a lot of PMS in Snapchat so I know from my own

experience with people that I respect from a product perspective that were indignant they would never hire PMS their organizations now have PMS that's probably for a really good reason I would say also on our team if any of our designers are listening they'll tell you these PL whatever you want to call it these verbs are taking up a lot of my time and I do not have as much time to think and dream and design and do user research and so we're already feeling and breaking in our company I think the intentionality whatever comes next whether it's we hire a PA you know whatever it is is leaders of the project should be picked for the project not because they're in a certain or at our company and if we ever hire people to do the PM role we want them to think of themselves as people who make things and have lots of different disciplines and tools in their toolkit not just the PM discipline and of course even that could be wrong

and maybe in a year you know we gave it you know I got it totally wrong we got it totally wrong so we'll see but I I would also admit that of all the things I shared on this podcast so far this is probably the one I'll come crawling back to your podcast in a couple years big lady you were right it all blew up but it's a fun experiment and snap is a good example Stripes another where they waited a long time to hire their first PMs and I think it's because they're designers or Engineers were just like incredibly good at that element and it was also like very design forward or very end forward so they didn't need as much VM skill initially if I had to predict I would I would predict that the next if we found that we were missing this discipline as a team I think we would evolve Rebecca's team which is technically the data team and and do something closer to a technical PM or data plus TBD again it's it's all live

but the thought has even crossed their minds recently that we may be wrong and what what org might we create if we need folks to have more of a background of debris like this I'm excited for the video of this discussion that might

happen it's also interesting your PM that you mentioned Rebecca is very data oriented and then the initial discussion we had around you know focus on feelings and that sort of thing so that's cool that you have this really interesting balance of people that are very data focused and then this like okay but let's not obsessed with that like what what are the feelings we're trying to create yeah and because again the point of optimizing for feelings is not hire people who make feelings it's higher than like Rebecca's title is data leads she runs our data team but Rebecca is one of the most humanistic people I know you meet her and you feel the warmth that you feel when you talk to you and you ask her what she does outside the board and so it's not that data doesn't have a role actually I'd say uh For Better or Worse data is part of our practice it's more about like what's that top level intentionality

what are we trying to do here but we yeah we we have a lot of people that uh you know data is either a a noun they've had in their resume or it's been a part of their practice a lot in the past awesome one very tactical question with

the storytelling team makes me think about airbnb's video team A lot of people are joking internally for years and years that the videos are being be put out in the early days was like accounts for like half their market cap because they're so good and you're just like oh my God I want to go on an Airbnb they just make you feel so much and they're soulmate and so it what is like the makeup of your storytelling team because imagine some companies may be listening like maybe we should do something like this in our team yeah we have a three-person storytelling team it's run by a woman named Nash there is a gentleman named Ellis who is a background starters reporter at the verge maybe there was a publication before that but I met him when he was a reporter at The Verge covering social media and then he ran marketing strategy for Snapchat for seven years and then we have a person named Josh Lee

who actually met as an inter he was an intern at Facebook as a designer that an intern for me at the White House when I worked at the White House and then decided that he was over product design and over design and totally just jumped and be like I'm gonna be a filmmaker that has been making really fascinating kind of indie films for a few years now and he's our he's a video editor on the team and so the three of them uh and it's so interesting you know Nash's background she had a briefed in a MVC but again you get to know her and she writes poems after hours and her dream is to write a fictional book and just as I mean anyone that knows Nash especially who's listening he's just a force a force and the three of them what's so interesting about them which also relates to our design team we like one of the things I also found at Facebook is there was a tendency toward homogeneity as you know there's sort of

a stereotype of a Facebook PM for example or a Google pm the contrast between them and the way they work and one of the things we also have purposely done on the story Channel even otherwise let's hire a radically different archetypes Ellis cannot be more different than Nash Nas could not be more different than Josh there's some shared values there's some shared beliefs but they're very different ditto on the design team our design team is there all over the place in terms of who they are what they've done their sensibilities their aspirations and all whether it's the storytelling team or the design team that can be hard sometimes just to be honest it's a lot easier to say hey we're the we're the akumiko storytelling team where the acmeco design team we hire designers like this and storytellers like that we hire we hire people all over the place we have extremely diverse team but in all senses

the word but again like the no PM thing it's not without flaws I can see why a lot of large companies over time tend to like it's a Facebook way or or no way you know or you're not good for here yeah it's actually I think exact makeup with Airbnb video video team I forget what they're called they didn't have a cool name like the storytelling team I think but it was a videographer editor and then they're a producer basically yeah I mean I remember going to airbnb's offices early in my career and seeing the storyboards lining the walls and just being I want to work here uh so I I actually am not familiar with the I mean I'm familiar with airbnb's videos and brain marketing it's fantastic excuse my language but yeah I I remember just walking around that office being like Oh my goodness are they making a movie or something here why do you say that and for folks that want to find that we'll link to in

the show notes but if you Google Snow White Airbnb you'll actually see these storyboards they're they basically I've hired a Pixar storyboard artist to draw out keyframes of the Journey of a host and a guest and that became a central element of the strategy of like let's make each of these moments as amazing as possible it was based on the movie Snow White you can read about it if what it's

what this is a great moment to share all of the beliefs that I've shared here on behalf of our team these aren't things that we just originally came up with they're moments like when I went to airbnb's office early in my career and saw these Snow White storyboard lighting the walls like that that had an impact on me even the idea that you would think in terms of that moment you can actually see the lineage to well how do you want that person to feel when they open that door for the first time so it's just a great moment to shout out that this is uh We've accumulated a lot of doses of inspiration like that day at Airbnb that trickle down to us talking about optimizing for feelings but that didn't come into vacuum that is not that way that's that's our expression of what we've seen in the industry this is building on the backs of so many people and companies that we've been fortunate to see and now the trickling is

happening from your your lessons and experience and your unique approach I

hope there's a documentary that I highly recommend uh called General Magic and it's one of the best pieces of media I've seen related to technology industry and it's really interesting I think there are two types of people it's just very there are people that watch that and view it as wow what a missed opportunity or almost like a sad story and I view it as if only I we could be so lucky to assemble that type of that a group of people like that but and the thing about that documentary for anyone that hasn't listened to it is essentially was the iPhone before the iPhone with the most legendary group of technologists working there and it totally failed completely failed by all traditional business uh definitions but what stuck with me from the document is how proud and nostalgic and passionate those group of those individuals were in and reminiscing about their time there and then what they all went on to create

and the fact that even today on this podcast I'm sitting here talking about General magic so I mean to your point of hopefully browser company will have Ripple effects I that to me is the ultimate goal for me personally like a very emotional level like if we could only be so lucky like that that that that to me seems like success in many ways yeah what's cool is you're getting a lot of footage that will be very useful for a future documentary on the history of the browser I didn't think about it like that for better or worse one last

thought I was going to mention in terms of the storytelling movie making elements of Airbnb uh fun fact there's a period where product managers were actually called producers because one of the founders was like we just we don't want to manage product we want to produce beautiful experiences and like a movie producer and so that was like a year and a half maybe of airbnb's History where product managers or producers the problem is we got a lot of job applicants from like emmy-winning producers and they're like oh I want to work at Airbnb actually one I know this podcast is about very tactical advice so one one tactical piece of advice I'll give is whether or not you like the idea of the storytelling team or something else a byproduct of some of these experiments that we found works really well is when you give something a new name it sheds a lot of preconceived notions of what the thing should be we found

that even with products so if you say you're building a browser history feature then people that the benefit is everyone knows what you're talking about and the downside is everyone knows what you're talking about and you show up with these preconceived notions of what it has to be and so if you go back again to our value ask what could be in many ways the point of calling the team the storytelling team or the membership team or not having PMS is an org all of this stuff isn't meant to be novelty for novelty's sake it's meant to almost be a rhetorical tactic to make people think truly first principles about what are we trying to do here and again if at the end producers are called PMS that's fine but I assume when it was called a producer a much more intentionality was given to communicating and talking about discussing what does a producer do was there a relationship design because no one knew what the heck a producer was

and so ultimately that may have been a failure in other ways but that's one of the things we found tacked to be really helpful is whether it's a product feature or a team or whatever give it a made-up name just to really get to the root of what you're trying to do they are not borrowed too much from wherever you work before or whatever you've seen popular media or whatever I love that and it's very undoable like you're gonna do it you know it was like it's exactly it's a two-way door and uh I like the the just the vision the value you have just prototyping things and whatever it didn't work let's let's go back to what

everyone else is doing you mentioned great products and there was something I definitely wanted to chat a bit about which is just there's kind of this like group of companies who are just building like focused on let's just build the most amazing product experience companies like and I feel like the browser company is at the Forefront a lot of this but it's like you guys linear raycast is this product uh cron there's probably a few more and I'd love to actually hear if there's others that I'm not thinking about that are just like obsessed with the user experience and less focused on Drive metrics Drive Revenue and I'm curious just where do you think this goes what's your take on this trend like why isn't every company thinking this way or is this just like uh we don't know if this is a good idea in the end so what's your take on this just like group of com this cohort of just like we're just

gonna build the best possible product and hope it all works out yeah well I'll say first I love those products or many of those products you mentioned there are some I haven't really used for example our company runs on linear and has run on linear since day one so I'm a big fan of that so the way that we think about it is so I actually spent two years at a venture capital firm as an investor called Thrive capital and they've invested in slack and GitHub and a lot of a lot of really transformative companies but I was an investor there I was a venture capitalist it even feels weird to say that and I learned a lot a lot a lot a lot from that experience that has made me I think a better CEO and a better product leader and one of the things I learned is different ideas product ideas business ideas company ideas come with different attributes and things that will matter to their success and so when thinking about starting the

browser company and picking this category of software Hirsch and I were incredibly intentional about what that would mean for what would need to matter for our company and so if you think about the web browser category traditionally I'm not saying forward-facing I'm not saying it is what we are doing but if you were to look backwards and take the browser company out of it and look at the web browser category you noticed a few things the first is it's actually one of the most consumer pieces of software out there people forget that that's the opportunity to us so you ask someone on the street what's your web browser what do you think theater won't know or they won't care I don't know but what pieces of software do your parents your little nieces and nephews and you use what's at the center of that Venn diagram your parents hopefully don't use tick tock and Instagram or probably don't your nieces and nephews I hope

don't have a reason for email at the tender age of 16 or you know a calendar and a web browser is one of the few things in the middle so it's an incredibly Universal piece of software consumer unlike very few other things outside of a smartphone and messaging and maybe video calling in 2023 in a web browser so it's very consumer very Universal the second attribute is it's a commodity I'm not saying that Arc is a commodity where we want to be but objectively web browsers are interchangeable they all do the same thing increasingly they're literally just carbon copies of the exact same code chromium with little tweaks little tweaks around the edges so they're all the same it's a commodity Market and they're unbelievably lucrative browsers print cash there is a reason why they are owned primarily by Google Apple and Microsoft they're incredibly high margin they're incredibly lucrative low marginal costs the cost of Revenue

is incredibly low et cetera et cetera so we have a product that everyone in the world uses where they're all identical essentially interchangeable commodities and if you can get people to use it you're going to print money so that attributes of those business of that business and that product category mean you have to win on how much do people love your product and feel an emotional connection to it and choose your brand your product over the other almost not rationally but emotionally and so if you tie that back to everything I've said before Bingo that is what we want to work on that's what we wanted we want to create emotional connections with people we're creating that emotional connection with as many people as possible and delighting them with surprises and animations is the way you win it's not romantic it is practical it is in many ways it's you know it's capitalistic this is how we win this

Market if you want to think about it that way so the reason I hesitate to answer your question directly is I don't think that applies to every category of software and to be totally honest I don't know enough about the ticketing space or the calendaring space or the whatever other space to know honestly off the cuff if like that approach is good for those Industries as a human being at the other end I'm really grateful that they picked some reason to do it whether or not it is part of their business strategy or not it's a really wonderful Trend as a human at the other end that cares about feelings but I would say we actually think about it not as a we're focusing on the user experience over revenue or growth we in fact picked a category of software we're focusing on brand and user experience is how you get growth and revenue uh and because we knew that this is who we are and if we were building cyber security

software that you sell to government agencies they are not going to give a about rounded engines or what color the button is or how surprised you feel with every member update so we didn't build cyber security software to sell to the government so I hope that more people build things at the craft bar or something like linear but that's how we think about it is less of a this versus that and more could we pick something to work on where that's how you win

I think that's a really powerful Insight that for Consumer software especially and for commoditized Consumer software specially experience as a differentiator you need some reason to give people or you need to give people a reason to even try it and then end up sticking with it when there's awesome Alternatives and so just like an obsession with the experience is a really smart strategy like if you get that right people use it and continue to use it and you win I've seen this with a lot of um you know in Covetous I'm sure everyone listening has a lot of the kind of remote work collaboration tools a lot of them obsessed to their credit over really interesting design details and product feature Concepts that were imaginative and brought people together in new ways and the latency of the video the auto audio was horrible because they relied on some third-party API that was significantly worse than zoom and so

that's a great example where in that market that category software you better nail latency I think a great example this one of my favorite products these days but past years is Tuple it's uh ostensibly impaired programming tool that just lives in your menu bar but we I use it I'm not a paired program with anyone it is the fastest way to talk to someone at your company and they have an unbelievably simple user experience the designer basically owned France is is uh incredible it's it's a beautifully designed product and it is the best audio quality I have ever experienced in a communication tool better than Zoom so that exact same product with all their craft details sand latency not gonna do it but also Tuple wouldn't have beat a lot of the other competitors for me if it wasn't unbelievably beautiful and easy and simple to use as well so again I think it's like what are the attributes you need to win when picking a market

that the ones that you want to excel at and work on are are key to that and also

how much better you need to be like you know if there's like a 20 better than Chrome product people are just going that's fine I don't need to learn something new and everyone's using everyone's using something else I'm just gonna have all these problems so you got to be significantly better and that's that's a high bar for Consumer products final question I wanted to touch on you talked about kind of the big vision for Arc and the browser company and you mentioned this idea of the internet computer and this is another question Scott belski suggested by the way Scott is the CPO of adobe and just like awesome product thinker person and he just wanted to make sure that we touched on this because I think there's a big idea here that maybe people don't realize so if you could just give us you know a brief overview what is just like the actual vision and plan for the browser company in Arc long term as as a

final question yeah so we call it the browser Company of New York almost as a misdirection because as you know from the intro we don't we view Arc as a replacement for your default web browser but we're hoping it will be much more and so to kind of start at the highest level and bring it down to reality one of the things that I've done many times in my career ready is underestimate pretty foundational changes in how we use technology I've appreciated them by underestimating them a great example is mobile I think our me and Hershey's first company would have been much more successful if we really appreciate the title way that was mobile I think one of those macro Trends we're underestimating right now is the ship to cloud computing the shift to the internet which may sound weird because every big public company mentions Microsoft Azure or you know Amazon web servers you hear about cloud cloud and

Cloud but again that's kind of this business term what I mean by the shift to cloud computing is everything in our in our technology in our Computing lives is moving to the internet it has been moving but it's going to move it even more and what I mean by that is your applications are almost all today web-based internet-based applications and they will all be soon there's very very few pieces of truly local only software or even local first software left all of our files are moving to the internet if they're not all already there so if you really think about your files today and again you ignore the word files the stuff you need for work in your personal life they're not sitting on your desktop they're all urls it may be an airport PDF but that PDF is probably out on Dropbox somewhere and you're accessing it as a URL your photos your photos may seem like they're on your iPhone they're not on your iPhone they're on some

iCloud server somewhere when you've got a new iPhone they'll be right there the manifestation of that actually is if you smash your device that you're listening to this on right now whether it's a phone or computer other than being sad that you lost the resale value and there's a chore of replacing it in a cost of replacing it you would not lose any of your stuff so there is Imagine in five years our entire Computing life's lives are not on our devices on our computers on our phones they're out there somewhere they're out in the internet they're out in the cloud which begs the question I remember when I was 10 and I got my first computer it was a see-through iMac and I wonder my son is two when he's 10 what will his computer be and I mean computer not in the technical again going back to words and the words that we use I don't mean computer in the literal sense of my MacBook Air but computer in the human sense of what you

need from your computer your stuff your applications and tools that people where is that going to be where is his computer going to be I think I think it's obvious at this point that we're going to have Airco computers everywhere we already do my car has car play my TV is a computer my my laptop is a computer I think that's going to be even more true in five years where Hardware is commoditizing and it will commoditize even more they're becoming empty shells that don't have anything on it they are just vessels they're just interfaces to viewing our real computer which is out there on the internet somewhere and so our view is that what we are building at the browser company is an internet computer it is a air quilt computer for this this world where the move to the internet and move to the cloud accelerates and continues the tsunami as much as we think it will and the way we we represent that is we

say we want to be to the web browser what the iPhone was to the cell phone yes the iPhone replaced your cell phone but it really was something much more and so we want Arc to be the iPhone for the internet and that yes it replaces your default compute your default browser but whether or not we call it an internet computer or something else it really is that interface this new type of computer if you play that one step forward then what we're building today is we're building our equivalent of multi-touch gestures and the first party Notes app but on any new computer any computer or Computing device the developer platform itself is much more interesting and lucrative and uh world changing than the first party computer itself and so we have no doubt that in the next decade if we're successful if we still exist Arc is a development platform is going to be much more Central to what we're doing

building on top of these internet computers ours and others than anything else so to bring that down from reality if you think about it the internet the web is really the best development platform out there in many ways it is accessible on every single device it doesn't matter who makes it or the shape and size it is free to access for individuals you don't need money to access it it's free for developers you don't have to pay a license to use it you don't have to there's no 30 tax on what you make and it's it's Democratic the best Frameworks can win and so in many ways if you were to say hey in this future we want to see what is the platform that we want to do we should be developing on top of what has the best attributes the web has that and that's why you're seeing today why do you think figma is in the web browser why do you think figma's blog post was meet us in the web browser because as the

development platform developers cross-platform in one click there's no tax everyone should want to and wants to make for the web the challenge though is there's an experience Gap native software feels better to people for whatever reason and the problem is the people that control our interfaces to this development platform that is the web that is the internet have incentives to keep it from being as good as local software unfortunately native immersive software Apple they don't want you making web apps or applications for the web they want you making them for the mac and the iPhone so they can tax you when you do it through the App Store and also surprisingly Google doesn't want you making stuff Nate more native and immersive for the air quote web because they want it to be indexed by their search engine so there's a reason that the Chrome extension platform is one of the most under utilized opportunities

they view it as a loss leader they built Chrome extensions just so they could you know have parity with Firefox they don't want you making extensions because you have some immersive extension experience that's not something that you can index in Google and that's taking away from doing searches and so I think we look at this and say everything is heading to the end internet which means we need interfaces to the internet that are truly more robust than a browser than more of a computer and if we do that then the most interesting opportunity on top of that is actually the develop the things other people were built on top of this development platform and if you look at this development platform which exists today the World Wide Web the open internet what is missing is an interface and a set of capabilities and apis that make web app basic web-based experiences as immersive and Rich and Powerful as native

experiences which require the interface to the internet to provide those and our interfaces to the internet today other web browser companies they have perverse business model incentives as big public companies that have lost the soul of the founders that they don't want to do that they don't want to do that so I doesn't mean we're going to do it and in fact one of them may win and I actually think that this is something we're unstuck in the internet computer I'm not trying to sell we're not trying to sell anyone in our vision I've we feel fully confident they're gonna be many types of Internet computers and Arc may or may not be one of them but we feel very confident that that is the future and the development platform on top of the web and the internet and these new interfaces will be the most exciting opportunity my next question was going to be how do you make money with a browser which uh people

give for free really well and now it

makes a lot more sense where you all are going and so with that we have reached our very exciting lightning round I've got six questions for you are you ready ready okay that's already uh what are two or three books that you recommend most to other people Harold on the Purple Crayon seeing is forgetting the name of fate of the thing one sees which is a book about Robert and that's my number one PM book so if you're asking from the perspective of the disciplines of people listening that book is absolutely fantastic and then God saved Texas by Lawrence Wright who's one of my favorite authors if you're interested in road trips politics food culture so three very different types of books what's a favorite recent movie or TV show the first TV show episode I've cried at cried from in recent memories episode three of The Last of Us I was just I thought I was watching like a zombie violence thing and I just was

sitting there bawling so that one and then I've been re-watching all of the Adam Curtis documentaries on YouTube I'm a huge Adam Curtis fan I have not heard of Adam Curtis I will have to go check that out hybrid normalization is my favorite and I would view his work as less non-fictional documentaries and more video art there's been a meme of everyone saying White Lotus is the show to watch and I feel like it's about to transition to last of us and so we will see how that goes and I get it first was I the first guest to say I think you might be actually I forget but I think yeah all right well I'll say episode three specifically yeah yeah absolutely people love that one uh but every episode is awesome next question favorite interview question you like to ask people when you're interviewing them what would you like to ask me well it seems like a non-answer but my my interview are all ask me anything and I find what

people ask and how they follow up is As revealing about who they are and what they care about then um anything I could ask them what is it that you look for in an answer that tells you okay this is this is a good candidate authenticity probably more than anything else do they really believe what they they're saying awesome what are uh some SAS products that your company uses and loves other than I don't know if you consider our excess but probably not so yeah I want to plug Tuple I think I'm gonna put everything on Tuple relative to you know we we run on notion we love notion we love linear but I'd say the one the the closet hit that I just cannot believe is not a hundred times larger company is uh Tuple it is ostensibly a paired programming tool but don't don't go in with that mindset go in with the I need to talk to a colleague right now or a couple colleagues right now and to do some work

together and it is absolutely fantastic I love it I love these products I've never heard of that are super cool we will link to that next question what's something relatively minor you've changed in how you build product that has had a significant impact in your team's ability to ship and execute this past January a couple months ago we have started removing me from a lot of the product development process which seems to be really healthy uh so that that that has been the big ship this year that's a big transition I I went through that with Airbnb and it's great it's great for everyone um final question best pro tip for using Arc that people maybe not be aware of try your best to not think of it as a browser and have a beginner's mind about how it works and how you might use the internet whoa big idea yeah big takeaway from this conversation we got to get much better describe it what the heck we

built and why it's good for you so I'm not proud of my first or last answer but uh it is what it is uh and we're actually I'll mention this in the intro and if you listen to this already you probably heard it already but we're gonna Link in the show notes we'll have a link to actually get into art because right now it's wait listed and we have this link that will get you straight into Arc and so go check it out Josh you've shown up with heartfelt intensity I feel like I want to go apply for a job at the browser company now but you're not hiring product managers so I'm not going to do that um thank you so much for being here for being so genuine and insightful and warm and um thank you thank you so much Lenny I really enjoyed this thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a

review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode