Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…I've seen this with a lot of ... And COVID is, I'm sure everyone listening, has a lot of the remote-work collaboration tools. A lot of them obsess, to their credit, over really interesting design details and product feature concepts that were imaginative and brought people together in new ways. And then the latency of the video of the audio 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 of this ... One of my favorite products these days, but past years is Tuple. It's ostensibly a paired programming tool that just lives in your menu bar. I'm not 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, based in Lyon, France, is incredible. 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 going to 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 and picking a market that the ones that you want to excel at and work on, are key to that. And also how much better you need to be. Like, if there's 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 something else. I'm just going to have all these problems." So, you got to be significantly better. And that's a high bar for consumer products. Final question I wanted to touch on. You talked about the big vision for Arc and The Browser Company. And you mentioned this idea of the internet computer. And this is another question Scott Belsky suggested. By the way, Scott is the CPO of Adobe and just an awesome product-thinker person. And he just wanted to make sure that we touch on this, because I think there's a big idea here that maybe people don't realize. So, if you could just give us a brief overview of, what is just the actual vision and plan for The Browser Company and Arc, long term 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 view Arc as a replacement for your default web browser, but we're hoping it will be much more. And so, to start at the highest level and bring it down to reality, one of the things that I've done many times in my career already is underestimate pretty foundational changes in how we use technology. I've appreciated them but underestimated them. Great example is mobile. I think me and Hursh's first company would've been much more successful if we really appreciated the tidal wave that was mobile. And I think one of those macro trends we're underestimating right now is the shift to cloud computing. The shift to the internet, which may sound weird because every big public company mentions Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services. You hear about cloud, cloud, cloud and cloud. But again, that's this business term. What I mean by the shift to cloud computing is, everything in our technology, in our computing lives is moving to the internet. It has been moving, but it's going to move 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 air quote "PDF," but that PDF is probably out on Dropbox somewhere and you're accessing it as a URL. 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 get 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 and a cost of replacing it, you would not lose any of your stuff. So, imagine in five years our entire computing 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?…

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