Josh Miller: evaluation

Transcript context

…That tumbleweed is, I think a big part of it is, once you get amazing people, more amazing people want to join. So I think that's very much helpful. Something else this resonates a lot with is, just the mission of a company is such a powerful tool for pulling people in, the best people. I've seen that a lot with founders. 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 and vision. I think there's also, 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 Lenny is, again putting myself in the 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, as a little bombastic or a little again romantic. Very tactically, I'll give you something that was just 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 joined. And in a very heartfelt way, telling you about them as a person and what they did. Long before we had anyone that anyone would've heard of before working at The Browser Company, just because it was earnest, we were really proud. Again, 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. I think there's a CEO-hero worship sometimes in Silicon Valley. I do very little at the company. Or sorry. I do very little as it relates to the thing people fall in love with Arc. I do a lot for The Browser Company, but I don't make Arc. I didn't make Peek. And again, that's just who we are, which is, "Alexandre. She killed me! Look at how cool this is!" because it's earnest and it's honest to who we are. And then I think it creates this reinforcing cycle of you're someone that's done something incredible, which is, "I'm going to be celebrated. They truly want me here. I'm going to 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 were 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 someone tweets about some animation. They're like, "Woo! This was fun." Tag Sherry. Sherry made that, Sherry's 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 don't want ... You know this Lenny. That is why that's your policy. You don't want to hear from the CEOs. They're not the ones building the product. 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, The Browser Company sounds like an incredible place to work. I could see why people want to go work. It's pretty simple. You touched on being public and sharing everything that's going on. And that's another area I wanted to spend a little time on. You guys are very transparent about what's going on and inside the company. You bring cameras into the board meetings. I watched a half-hour meeting you had with your head of design talking about a project that's behind scheduling. You're trying to figure out how do we get this out the door. You just share 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 we shouldn't have put that out there." What's been your experience with that?…

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