Brendan Eich: belief

Transcript context

…All right. I want to move on to our grading section here. Even though this isn't a traditional Acquired episode or even necessarily where we've told the whole history and done our tear-down analysis the way we typically do, Brendan, I am curious about your take. What does A+ look like for Brave, let's just say, three years from now? In some ways, it's an epoch away, and other ways, it'll be here as soon as we know it. What does success look like for the company? If we keep doubling or better, 3 years is 8 times 50, so it's 400 million users. Once you get to that scale, you start to get distribution opportunities like being on phones. Pre-installs aren't really happening outside of the apps from the OS superpower like Android, Google, or iOS Apple. But Samsung's out there and there are new phones coming up in the world. There's always a lower end of the market that's getting better and thanks to the hardware getting better and trickling down. I would like to see us get to that scale because then, I think, distribution could go in directions that right now is harder to do organically and will cost you a lot if you have to pay for it, but that's kind of a mundane business thing. I think if you get anywhere near 400 million monthly users, you have enormous clout, especially if the lead users, still in standards. Standards matter still because a lot of businesses want to not only compete, but cooperate, the coopetition model. Web standard, in spite of Google's dominance and somewhat strong-arm tactics, you still get standards evolution. Crypto is—for each blockchain—its own set of standards, often run by a core team. But there's, as I said earlier, greater de facto standardization on things like EVM compatible chains, smart contract systems, or things you can do with compilers and interpreters, even if you don't have an EVM worker-like in your node, in your network. When we get to the scale toward 400 million more users, we will have opportunities to do things—including with Basic Attention Token—that we couldn't have done out of the box earlier and that would look like having something more competitive with Google that's decentralized. We're not just aiming at Google. That's like driving by looking in the rearview mirror. Google is a 100-year company, so was General Electric, but it ended up a tax dodger and a subprime lender. This is not a good ending. Thomas Edison is spinning in his barrow. Google may end up that way sooner or later, but we're looking at a world where users are sovereign. That's the vision I mentioned earlier. You have these machines. Without being a burden sysadmin, you should have say over them, you should have benefits from them. It's not just economics in some money-grubbing way. Economics really, the Greek word, means something about home economics, at the home, or the scale of human life where you live most of your life. Things have become very fraught and dehumanized at larger scales. But if we can get people operating better at smaller scales, then I do believe this will be good for the world. I'm not just talking pie in the sky, Hobbits in The Shire stuff here. I see this with the creator economy. I see this with the YouTubers, the other creators, and with NFTs for all the clowning that goes on with NFTs. Actually, we will be looking into NFT as a basis for further tokenomics for creators in this new year. ith the YouTubers, the other creators, and with NFTs for all the clowning that goes on with NFTs. Actually, we will be looking into NFT as a basis for further tokenomics for creators in this new year. We want to see fans and creators directly connect and we want to see them do it without being demonetized or interfered with, censored, and all that stuff. If this can be scaled up, it forms all these little networks that have these logistic curves that have their exponential phases that everyone loves. People should want this for good business reasons, but you can't rate it through ad tech or tracking. You have to have a better platform and better network for it. You have to have crypto in both senses, Moxie's cryptography and cryptocurrency or blockchain. I think Brave at 400 million, we can actually make this real. We have 1.3 million creators verified. We would have tens of millions of creators.…

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