Josh Miller: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. Well, I'll say first, I love those products, or many of those products you mentioned. There's some I haven't really used. But, 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. They've invested in Slack and GitHub and 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. It 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, Hursch 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'd notice 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. If you ask someone in the street, "What's your web browser? What do you think?" They either won't know or they won't care, "[inaudible 01:09:15]. I don't know." But what pieces of software do your parents, do your little nieces and nephews and you use? What's at the center of that Venn diagram? Your parents hopefully don't use TikTok 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 a calendar. And a web browser's 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 and 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 or we want it 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're 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. arginal 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, the attributes 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 want. We want to create emotional connection 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. In many ways 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 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. And, because we knew that this is who we are, and if we were building cybersecurity software that you sell to government agencies, they are not going to give a shit about rounded edges, or what color the button is, or how surprised you feel with every member update. So, we didn't build cybersecurity software to sell to the government. So, I hope that more people build things at the craft bar of something like Linear, but that's how we think about it, is less of a "this versus that," and more "could we pick something we're going 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 especially, experience is a differentiator. 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 an obsession with the experience is a really smart strategy. If you get that right, people use it and continue to use it and you win.…

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