Josh Miller: commitment

Transcript context

…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? Why don't I start with the regret. It's not yet a regret, but the thing that I wonder ... Because this is very much ... I may have 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-driven culture. And this is one that I'd put high on the list of, "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 even this morning, we had our best-performing YouTube video ever. The first one that really broke out of people that already follow us. And it's a reaction video in classic YouTube form to MKBHD talking about our product for the first time. And I honestly watched it right before this again, and I was like, "What the fuck am I doing? What are we doing? Why am I trying to become a YouTuber?" So, to be totally honest, I don't regret anything yet. But I wonder if we could take this too far? So 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 pure and earnest, which are ... And another thing that defines people that have joined 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 and the Browser Company as an experiment in we can do it. Better is possible. And as we were thinking about better as possible, rediscovering what we love and believe in deep down and trying to 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 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. ings, 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've 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 come off the wrong way. 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 here 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 Hursch, and you really feel like you get to know us as 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 ... I'll say someone tweeted something yesterday, who apparently we didn't earn the trust yet and they haven't gone to know us. And their interpretation of what we were doing was the worst possible interpretation you could [inaudible 00:42:40]. And, at first honestly, I felt a bit of anger, like, "Who was 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 five to 10 years." And so, the intention with these the building and public experiments are radical trust building. Not 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 they're so important, they should share everything because ... Thank you, them, for gracing us with their opinions." It's not the intention and it feels worth taking that risk. But that's the intentionality behind it.…

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