Acquired - The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave)

0:00Dude, I cannot believe that in recording this we asked the chief architect of Netscape to restart his browser to see if that fixed the problem Welcome to this special episode of acquired the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund PSL Ventures. And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco. And we are your hosts. Today's episode is a mashup between one of the newest things on the internet and the oldest things on the internet. Our guest today is Brendanike CEO of the Brave Browser, an application right at the heart of the rapidly emerging Web 3 world.

1:04It is arguably the single largest blockchain based app with over 50 million monthly users. However, Brendan is no new kid on the block. He holds the credential of inventing JavaScript, a source of much joy and also much pain for many of you out there. And Brendan was the chief architect of Netscape and eventually became the CEO of Mozilla, the makers of Firefox. So you're saying 50 million MAUs is nice, but Brendan wants this to go a lot higher. It's crypto nice, but it's not browser nice yet yet Yes, but it is rapidly growing we had a wide-ranging conversation with Brendan that you'll hear today that bridge this old world and the new in some really fun ways All right listeners now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on acquired LaGora

1:57the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work. Yup, it's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. LaGora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry? So the founders did exactly what great founders do, operate with obsessive customer focus.

2:26They embedded inside a massive law firm for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done. And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review, where you drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with.

2:44Lagora's bed here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work and do higher value work, and this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.

2:58And they recently launched LaGora agent, offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required. And LaGora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early LaGora numbers essentially speak for themselves when they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor they win 70% of the time. Legora now has over a hundred thousand lawyers on the platform from 1200 legal teams in 50 countries and crazily they went from one million to a hundred million in ARR in about 18 months. Truly insane numbers and that is the real test.

3:50Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time, or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client. If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in house at a company, you can learn more at logora.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Well, if you want to hang out with us and discuss this episode, you should do that.

4:16we will all be there at acquired.fm slash slack. And if you want to go deeper behind these topics, especially crypto, you should come check out the LP show. It is deeper, nerdier, and covers a lot of more up and coming topics. It includes interviews with people like Roniel Runberg, who have built audios, Joseph Gordon Levitt on the startup hit record.

4:38Who else did we do in the LP show recently? We talked with some of Solana and FTX's earlier investors from race capital. That's our newest LP show episode. You can find that in any podcast player by searching acquired LP show. And of course, become an LP if you want to get super early access two weeks before everyone else and talk with us on Zoom calls every month or two. All right. As you know, none of this is investment advice. Do your own research. And now on to our interview with Brendan Eich.

5:08Brendan Eich, welcome to acquired. Hi, thanks for having me. Great to have you here. We've been big fans of your work for a long time, grew up using Firefox and the Mozilla browser for that and Netscape before that. And God knows I use plenty of JavaScript every day and all facets of my life. So my life would not be what it is without your work over the years. And of course we are talking on Brave right now. That's great. Your JavaScript use keeps me in T-shirts.

5:36Well, we're going to go back and tell some of the story of what led to Brave, but I wanted to get it in your words first. What is the Brave browser? So Brave is a faster browser because it blocks all of the trackers, many of which Google or its publishers or ad buyers depend on. And it's based on Chrome, the Chromium open source code.

6:02So, if you're using Google Chrome, which kind of swept the market up to 70%, let's say, a more market share, 2.65 billion users, they say, you should get off Chrome and you should use Brave. We tried to make something that's easy to switch to, but that's much more protective of your privacy. And this is an ongoing commitment on our part because it requires a lot of research and development. It requires fighting new kinds of tracking and fingerprinting that emerge. It also involves something we...

6:32Talked about from the beginning and we prototype in Bitcoin and that's the basic attention token system for users who choose to participating in private ads that are anonymous but that pay them 70% of the revenue and that let them support their creators directly through the basic attention token and that was something we wanted to do because we saw the privacy protection which is I think every user is right and good and necessary.

7:01as nevertheless harmful to the current system of add tech that publishers do depend on. So we wanted to get our users an option that wasn't privacy invading, let them participate in funding creators. And if you don't want the private ads, you can still fund creators out of your own wallet. We wanted that feature too. So it's kind of a three-sided system, which is why we use the equilateral triangle for the bat basic attention token logo.

7:27We're trying to connect users, advertisers, and creators, flexibly, along all three legs of the triangle. Users who don't like ads can turn off the private ads. Users who want to earn from the private ads can then give it all back. Some users just earn and keep it. That's their right, too. The problem that Brave solves is the tracking ads, the privacy invasion, because it has all sorts of bad effects I can get into. Users feel it right away. They feel the clutter, they feel the annoyance, they feel the page load delay, sometimes the mobile page is never load. And there's sort of correlates of the page load problem, which are too much battery use and too much data plan used by all the ad scripts and the waterfall of programmatic advertising that daisy chains from hidden third party to hidden third party before an ad can show up. We block all that with brave. But once you're in brave, there's a whole new world of economics that's user centric. And this is the really big idea of brave. It's a

8:25user first platform and therefore it's built from your browser on your device out that's for all your data feeds originate all of them, not just the ones Google sees through its search engine or it's many trackers around the web. I think it was an important realization that you had when starting brave that all or virtually all activity stems from interacting between a user and a browser and that is because of the tremendous rise of web apps.

8:52in large part unfortunately to the detriment of native apps that run on the desktop operating system but that is enabled because of the ecosystem that was built around JavaScript on the other side of things the entire advertising and ad tracking and digital advertising ecosystem also is built on JavaScript and so I think there's an unbelievable arc to everything that you've built over the years in deciding to approach this problem the way that you have now at this point in your career. I was part of it.

9:21project at Netscape that made the browser mass market. It made it commercially safe. Before Netscape, there wasn't a way to trust your credit card number flying across the wire. Netscape did so-called secure sockets later. Yeah, SSL. So Netscape was working on making the web safe for a commerce and useful for the site you went to. We didn't think about the third party problem. And that's where even in Before I joined, there was a way to embed images in the browser. That was actually in Mosaic in 1993. And then in 1994, in Escape 1, there was the cookie, which led people associate a bit of storage in the browser with their site. And that applied not only to the banker or, you know, game site you're visiting, it also applied to every one of those images. And that created a tracking vector because the image server could be keeping track of you through a cookie that

10:14gets bounced into the browser from each site, the image is embedded in. And that's why you still hear the term pixel used in ad tech for a tracking element, even though it can be an invisible script now, it used to be a one-by-one little transparent image. When did you start to realize that this was a problem? So I think even in 1996, some of us, Luma and Tully at Netscape did the cookie and there was a concern that it was being used for a third-party tracking or could be used.

10:43But the genie was out of the bottle and the thing about the web is Mark Andreessen said this to me even when they were doing mosaic and they were only like 80 servers hosting content they cared about not breaking they would just keep backwards compatibility in all the quirks of Eric being his HTML parser and even precursor progenitor HTML processors older browsers because the content wouldn't work properly so this is strong evolutionary Force is gradient, forcing compatibility on the web. This is something a lot of people in computer science, especially programming languages, just hate because it means you really can't make incompatible changes except very slowly or through new runtimes that you can download. But JavaScript was the only byte at the Apple for that kind of runtime. Java failed and Flash eventually failed.

11:32But in the 90s, we were too busy making the first party experience good and we couldn't break the web so even the Lou Montoulli wanted to do twinkies and somehow I think they were going to solve several problems he wanted to solve. That's an evolution of cookies. Bigger, more storage. I think cookies were only 1,024 bites or something teeny in the 90s. And I think you wanted to do them only for first party sites. I don't think this would have killed cookies for third party tracking. I forget the details because his boss said no.

11:59No more, no more cookies or twinkies or ding-dongs. And we stayed at the cookie. And by late 90s, you can still find them on the web archive. There were sites diagramming tracking, the rise of tracking, the company that Google acquired as double click in 2008 was operating in 1990. I think it made the Dart ad server. Well, I want to go way back to the beginning of your career. Even before Netscape, before JavaScript, You joined Silicon Graphics and I think that's or SGI as it's called and we've talked on many episodes about the unbelievable incredible talent nexus that was SGI. Did you know when you were joining that that was the center of talent that would go on to do so many things. Yes, so I was a grad student at UIUC which was may still be top five CS school in the country out in the middle of Illinois and.

12:57I was not going to do a PhD. At some point I realized that our research team had been hijacked by IBM and this was a great disgrace in my view, but the professors couldn't fight back. And we became sort of a QA team for IBM's failed attempt to get a little laptop computer, Motorola 68,000-based computer they developed. You know, repackaged as a workstation, a Unix workstation because Unix workstations were super hot. Well, guess who came by UIUC to give a talk? Jim Clark.

13:26about Silicon Graphics doing Unix workstations with the OSI 3D graphics. That was the whole company and I almost right away said I'm gonna work for Jim. I interviewed at Sun. I was interested in programming language so I interviewed on the compiler team. I wasn't experienced enough for them to hire. I liked the manager Steve Munchnik. I met Eric Schmidt briefly. He was like director of software at the time at Sun.

13:50The night of your SGI, and I signed on the bottom line, and it was great. SGI was super hot. IPOed after I joined it for a long time had the best graphics, but that eventually got shrunk from VLSI to GPU and now to system on a chip. By 92, it had gotten big and divisional, and I said, I've got to get some more experience doing other things. I left. I was bored. It was political and divisional. Was this before or after Jim left?

14:20It was before I think because early on Jim realized he wasn't CEO so Ed McCracken was running it and Jim was on the board but I think at some point Jim had trouble as founder keeping control as usual with due to delusion and so by 94 Jim was starting Netscape and paired with Mark Andreessen and I knew about that because all my SGI friends and STI did the graphics for Jurassic Park, right? Jurassic Park. I know this. This is a unique system. And they're not looking at a command line. They're looking at the SGI file system visualizer. But I got bored and I left. And SGI got big and kind of boring. And I could see why Clark left when I heard he was doing Netscape. Okay. So how did you find your way to Netscape then? So a friend from SGI who'd come in from a team at IBM, Jeff Weinstein, had gone

15:11ahead of me to a company called Microunity. Microunity, you probably haven't heard of, but it's got a lot of patents and it successfully litigated them from 20 years ago to maybe 10 years ago. I forget when they ran out of steam. I think it just made a ton of money off suing everybody. IBM, Motorola Qualcomm, Broadcom, everybody. Because Microunity wanted to create a software programmable set-top box. There's only one thing that I actually knew about microunity coming into this. It wasn't the chief architect at microunity, the same person as both MIPS and next with Steve Jobs. Craig Hansen might have been a next. Yeah, now you run me. Craig definitely was at MIPS. He did the floating point unit, the MIPS floating point unit. So he was the full architect at microunity. So microunity was like practical grad school for me, because it didn't go anywhere. It was way too ambitious, right? It was doing a new chip, new semiconductor process, new

16:08Chip, do we analog and digital on the same chip, I should say? It was doing basically everything except the radio front end that mixes down the baseband it was doing in software. So all this stuff has come true over time, but trying to do all at once, you just run into the multiplication principle and your odds of success go to one and a billion or 10 billion. And they could have used the fab to make SRAMs, but I think it was too boring. I think Moose was really ambitious. He wanted to change the world. He wanted to be the new Howard Hughes in some ways. And he did make a lot of money off the patents.

16:38Okay, so did a big crew of those folks leave to go to Netscape or was that you on your own? Well, it was Jeff Weinstein and I jumped to Netscape within the same week. We're still on the night. We should have made a company and sold it. We were gotten four times the options. This is where we arrived. We saw some other teams doing that and they weren't as good. But I can't complain. I mean, it was always the case when you're coming into these systems that you don't know exactly what's going on with the company, but I got there in April 1995 on April 3rd, I think.

17:07the IPO was sometime in August so you know it was a huge rocket and it was to me a little bit scandalous because in the eighties SGI had to have three profitable quarters before it could IPO whereas net scape just went on forward speculation and forward multiples and it was not profitable but that was the nineties net started all but there was real revenue there well so the browser was charged for in commercial settings and net scape used the IPO to buy a bunch of server side companies and projects, the LDAP team from University of Michigan, Tim Housen company, the Kiva app server, a bunch of Java investments, even started building a Java jitting runtime to rival hotspot, which Sun had bought anamorphic to build. The Netscape version was called electrical fire, and it was being developed by this super brain from MIT, Watermore, Horwatt. But Netscape couldn't pull it off, and Sun was going to win with hotspots.

18:04I rescued Wal-Tamore to take over JavaScript in late 97 and I went off to found those all of that org after I standardized JavaScript. So AOL comes in and by Netscape, all those guys you just met are most of them. They go to Loud Cloud. You go in the Mozilla direction. Yeah. My CV's really short and I tend to stick with things and the thing was the browser was not done yet. Microsoft had simply killed Netscape by.

18:28bundling i.e. which it copied and sort of acquired pieces of through spyglass, which bought Bosaic. And it sort of kept iterating like it does. So the first version was not real. And the second version was kind of a joke. And the third version was starting to tell you where it could get to. And the fourth version was quite good on Windows, pretty much only on Windows. And meanwhile, they were bundling it with Windows 95 and then 98. And they got convicted in the USU Microsoft case for this because it's not illegal to acquire monopoly through Let's say merit or a sweetheart deal with IBM to be the OS for the PC. I don't know. IBM gave Microsoft that it's a little suspect, but whatever they had the Windows monopoly, but what they did in tying the browser to it and threatening compact with revocation of the Windows license if compact ship Netscape as the default browser was illegal and they got convicted for it, but it was too late to save Netscape.

19:23And yet a few executives Mark and Eric Han and others wanted to save something through open source. Commercial open source in the form of Linux was up and Red Hat was up and running. People were excited about the idea of doing a commercial open source project out of the remains of Netscape, at least in the browser team. So Jamie's Winsky kind of led it definitionally and spiritually and as the community manager. And I did the tech side and we had a bunch of IT.

19:52people in a couple of tools people who helped us build things that are now taking for granted or now standard on GitHub. And we realized there was this amazing synergy doing something like a dynamic language on the server to generate HTML that has JavaScript automating it. All that stuff was super slick to do in sort of a full stack way. And this wasn't like 96 and prefigured everything that came after in DHTML and Ajax. It was pretty cool that you guys were doing this in open source, right?

20:19Yeah, I mean, initially, Netscape was closed. When we opened it up, we threw this tarball out there. But as we worked on these tools, it got better. We couldn't drag the male news team out. They'd been sort of messing up Netscape four male news and they didn't like open source. But eventually it all got rewritten and redone. We even created a portable front end stack using XML, which is all the rage then. We called our Zool XUL after Ghostbusters.

20:44which became the way that you would write the original browser plugins for Firefox and presumably the Mozilla browser before that. Yes, and those all sweet was pretty much the un-netscape to use un-googled as an analogy, the un-netscape version of the code. And this actually started winning users because AOL botnetscape started festooning Netscape with iCQ buttons and aim buttons and things like that.

21:08Yeah, it's like when I go into make a new meeting now and about to add a zoom invite, but Google's like, wait, wait, wait, don't you mean Google meet? And you're like, not, that's not why I'm using your tools. No, not what I mean. Okay, so we're now at this point where you're on your own with Mozilla, you've taken the code out of Netscape. It's being developed in the open Firefox at some point became gosh over a quarter of the browser market share. So how did it evolve?

21:36from, hey, we're going to take an open source version of the browser that Microsoft illegally killed and turn into this thing with that sort of breathe new life into the browser ecosystem. We had this idea and Eric Conn and Marka had this idea that there would be an escape pod containing the browser code and what somehow, you know, land on Tatooine and the message would get through and things would come back later, but no one knew how.

22:02The conventional wisdom from 1998 on in the Valley was, oh, the browser is done. IE is it forever. Give up. Just like today or a couple of years ago with Chrome, right? It goes in cycles. But we also had this sort of boat anchor of the Mosula suite because like I said, the 90s had a lot of suites. I think Netscape made a mistake in 96 when they bought a company to go after Lotus Notes because it didn't work. And they took the Netscape 2 and 3.

22:30a mail reader and newsreader which Jamie and Terry Weissman who I've mentioned worked on and did a pretty good job on in very short time and they threw it away or kind of threw most of it away and did a Windows only group where sort of version that was late and delayed all of Netscape 4 and that really hurt and they were the people who didn't want to do open source either but that did not help Netscape. It did not take down Lotus Notes and Mozilla had to figure out are we doing a suite? Do we want this Albatross of 90s suiteware?

23:00And it took a while, because like I said, we were underfunded at first. And in fact, as AOL ingested Netscape, which at first didn't involve any digestive enzymes, it was like arm's length, they started wondering what they bought and why. And so for the first two years, I think 99 and 2000, the head of Netscape division was decapitated. And somebody I liked, a nice guy mentioned, took their place, but it didn't go well for Mozilla.

23:27It meant Mozilla was considered the enemy because most of the employees initially were the contributors and it was rare to find outside contributors. Chris Blizzard at Red Hat was a contributor. We encouraged people at an open source, especially in the Linux, to work on the code and send patches or get CVS commit rights. We tried to give those away. So a lot of the job in the early days was trying to build up the mostly volunteer community to countervail the Netscape employees who were not all top-notch at that point. And after a year, Nothing much changed and Jamie said I give up. I consider it a failure. He wrote an essay. You can still find so he quit but we kept going and Even though we had to be the basis for this suite because we stripped out the ICQ and aim buttons Mozilla Got popular we were doing releases binaries because we wanted testers That was a big change to a lot of open source projects said there's the code build it yourself

24:20Right. Which of course, like 99% of people who could use the software are immediately out right away because they're not going to. Yes. Yes. Compile on their local machines. And of course, once you build a software release it, you're getting people who don't know which end of the internet is which. But they give you good feedback. And there's a whole sort of layers of the onion from your lead users or your actual hackers who do know software out to, let's say, web savvy, but less experienced folks out to the average people who don't know.

24:49the difference between a search engine and a browser. And so we started growing Mozilla even before Firefox in a way that I think kind of shamed and threatened Netscape. But Netscape was also getting these annual decapitations. And so by 2003, we learned through our IBM friends that it was going to be curtains for the Netscape division. And through an enormous stroke of luck, Mitch Kepor, who founded Lotus123 and has his own experience with Microsoft's tricks was friends with Ted Leoncis, one of the AOL executives, Ted's very nice guy, not technical owns the capitals we did. Right, right. And the other sports team, I think. And they ran into each other at the very first de-conference, right? Walt Mossberg, right? Oh, wow. And Ted said, hey, Mitch, I've got this thing. Well, so I don't know what to do with. And it turned out Mitch was doing something called the open source application foundation. And he had hired Mitchell Baker, who had been

25:45fired under Coverville layoff. I'll say it in 2000 by Netscape management because they didn't like Mozilla. It was a thorn in their side. Maybe Mitchell was, Mitchell was expensive. So they had a layoff and suddenly Mitchell was gone and I was on the phone saying, did you quit? And she said, no, this was not my choice. And yet the next week on the Mozilla community call, there was Mitchell doing the governance leadership. Why did the tech leadership? So, you know, the Netscape management that tried to get rid of her were grinding their teeth at this point. They couldn't kill Mozilla. They couldn't decapitate it as the escape division had its head taken off annually. But when we learned AOL was going to shut down that escape, Ted to his credit asked Mitch what to do. And Mitch had hired Mitchell Baker, who'd been the Mozilla manager for about eight months into the founding up till she was laid off. And that was just huge, you know, good fortune because

26:41Mitch then told Ted what to do and in spite of some sniping by a VP at all nobody liked who really wanted to stick the knife in and twisted Ted did the right thing and gave us two million over two years to spin out the Mozilla Project and I think Mitch all wanted to do it as a non-profit. They thought there'd be some good basis for them. Mitch himself I didn't want to do VC funding and didn't want to do a commercial thing. I just went along to try to keep the code alive and we knew what to do.

27:09in 2003 summer because Firefox had already started in 2001 if you can believe it, but it became known as Phoenix by 2002. And Firefox was completely rebuilt from the ground up, right? Well, it was based on this dual work that I mentioned that Dave Hyatt and others had done to make a programmable front-end stack on what looks like the web. It's XML and JavaScript and CSS.

27:32custom toolbars, even the native menu bar on the macOS at the time, all of that could be integrated through XML. It was declarative. It was fast enough with enough work. It allowed all these extensions we mentioned. We called them add-ons. That was the first browser extension ecosystem way ahead of Chrome's. And it was the way Firefox got built. Because once we had the sweet, un-badged of all the ICQ junk, we still have sort of too many...

27:56functions, like the Swiss Army knife, you really need to browse the web while you compose an email and you had rich text editing and manage your address book. So we came up with a vision. Dave Heitner wrote the roadmap update from Azul in 2003 that said, let's make one app do one thing well. We'll build them all in a common front end toolkit, give them extensions so that we can simplify the UX, but not drive the advanced users away to Opera, which always had too many options built in.

28:24And that roadmap, you can still find even on Mozilla. I think it's certainly in the web archive. It was a pretty good roadmap in my opinion because it got the project moving toward not only Firefox, but Thunderbird. And even the old suite, the volunteers wanted to call it sea monkey and carry it on. And they did for a good long time. But Firefox was originally Mozilla slash browser in 2001. It was just a small pirate ship within Netscape. It was Blake Ross and Dave Hyatt and a few others. Joe Hewitt, right?

28:52Joe Hewitt did the auto complete satchel and eventually did firebug which was awesome. He then got hired by Facebook and built the original Facebook app. Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt found a parakeet and sold that to Facebook. That's how that happened. But we lost Blake to Stanford. I had to recruit Ben Goodger out of Netscape to take over for Blake and that went from Firefox 0.6 on to 1.0 and Ben did a lot of the important work on add-ons and search integration.

29:19making it really sing on windows because that's the open source didn't do open source at that point was still saying oh it works on linux well which flavor of linux kde or no more forgotten other ones but they didn't care about windows it seems to me that the community always needs and i say the community it's a very broad community it's all people who use browsers and maybe even more general than that but yet they always need some exciting challenger that's fighting the man And it seemed like Firefox was right place, right time with the right group of people who were actually passionate about this. Whereas everyone who was stuck inside of Netscape at AOL had sort of lost the fire AOL. At first thought this was a strategic asset. Now realized it wasn't going anywhere. And so you had this sort of moment to see is if you had the right team where there was no legitimate challenger anymore to i.e. And so you could make a real run at it. Is that sort of how you think about it?

30:16Yes, and the way you describe it was almost like fractal structure because the core team was like a pirate ship kind of sassing that escape management for their foolish bloated suite and also making great tools and things that you had worked on firebug and the autocomplete stuff and that led to early adopters loving it so much more than all the other browsers so that when Firefox was at 0.8 and early I think it was early 2004 and then 0.9 especially when we could see the rocket.

30:45ready to launch. The whole lead user cohort of the web was just charged up. At that point, I'd made contact with Sergei Brin through somebody he sent my way, named Fritz Schneider, and we'd gotten the search deal going in 0.9, but we'd also gotten Fritz's team, the Jin team at Google helping Firefox. So they were working on browsers before Chrome, and the browser to work on was Firefox. Nobody thought it could be done. The conventional wisdom still was that you're never going to take that market share, even though Firefox already had a few million users and was growing rapidly.

31:15And this did commit some people who worked with us at the time like Bart de Kram to go try a commercial forko Firefox. That was flock didn't work raised a bunch of EC got sold to Zinga and then shut down in 2011. There was other forks too. I mean there was I used Camino on the map. That was Dave Hyatt's other browser. Dave wrote prolifically he wrote a lot of code. So he wrote a macOS only browser to learn the cocoa. I think it was toolkit.

31:41And Dave works for Apple. He went there in 2001, I believe. He kind of made Safari because he knew how to make the KHDML engine web compatible. And it was from Linux and it wasn't battle tested in the field against mass market users. So it didn't load websites properly. Eventually, it led to WebKit being forked from KHDML in 2005. But getting David Apple was quite a coup for Don Melton, the manager at the time of Safari, who was also ex-netscape. But there was just this fractal effect of restarting the market, you know, sassing your boss, showing up IE, showing the world a better tool for something that people used every day, right? People would discount the browser. There was like, oh, fat apps are back on the desktop, Windows, LongHort, or when the iPhone launched, a month after actually, because the initial app model for the iPhone was web apps. A sweet solution. But native apps had to be there because of games being ported. And then native apps got privileges and got app store affordances that

32:40the web didn't. And it's at same thing every 10 years. So you just get people holding the web back. Usually it's an monopoly power or market power. And then the upstart comes because people still use the web. The value in the web is so great. And you know, this embedded web views and all these apps. And there's embedded trackers in all these apps. By the way, we're blocking those too with our partnership with Guardian, iOS firewall, the VPN. It feels kind of similar to me in terms of narrative and market perception to Silicon and to semiconductors. Like, you know, a couple years ago, you're like, ah, semiconductor. So boring. Like, you know, it's not like all the innovations, you know, way, way, way up the stack from that. Well, it actually turns out that semiconductor connections are pretty freaking important. And DSMC is like, you know, a very, very, very important company in one of the top 10 most valuable in the world. The browser feels similar to me. Like, it's so easy to discount it. And yet, the majority of like

33:32people in the world spend the majority of their days on it. Yeah, it's an immortal app. It's the universal app. The bigger the screen and the better the input bandwidth, the more you live in the browser and you don't want to install some, you know, even Slack. We have a lot of our users of Slack at Brave use the browser to load Slack as a web app instead of loading this bloated electron app that Slack has been slowly maintaining. There's a real trade off there that I think is part of the browser's immortality, but The web content is also sticky and accretive, and that's important too. Yeah. I'll sum it all up in one sentence. Firefox did really, really well and gained a huge market share. And then when Chrome launched, it's been slowly etched away every year by Chrome now and it's down around something like 3%. So I want to fast forward all the way to the moment where you're starting to think about Brave and yet.

34:26There's been all these attempts to start a new upstart browser that has a different take on things. I'm thinking of dolphin. I'm thinking of rock melt that have not worked. So yeah, the flock was doing social or web 2.0 in the very center of Firefox's growing market and that's not a good growth strategy because you have to get people off Firefox and then somehow beat them on the on the outer rings of growth and Firefox was already going faster there and you weren't going to get too many defectors from the innermost nerdy hacker, technoroddy, web 2.0 people. So, flock failed. Rock melt was when after Chrome came out and was based on the Chrome fork of WebKit, which wasn't its own thing, really, then, and tried to add social. I think it was just, I haven't talked to Tim Howes about this. I think it was just aimed at trying to sell it to Zach. Well, Zach doesn't want a browser. He's got a browser. He's very happy with the Facebook web app on desktop. And then he was at that point, already aiming at mobile.

35:20because the iPhone was out and he wanted full native apps on mobile. So he was never going to buy rock melt. So rock melt failed. Dolphin did well because I think they had to forget her name. She was a great marketer. She got all these distribution and growth hack deals going in various Asian countries. And they did a credible job on making it a good mobile browser as mobile came up to Android. Android kind of double started that G1. What was it called? It was the first Android device.

35:48The T-Mobile G1. It was not good. I talked to Andy Rubin at Google in 2006. Yeah. But Android took a while to get anywhere in your decent and I still can't use it even though I've got many complaints about Apple. Am I remembering right that Dolphin at some point? I don't think originally, but maybe later in its life pivoted to be like, oh, we're privacy focused, right? So people were starting to think about this. Everybody's doing that now. They're putting privacy perfume on without taking a shower in some cases.

36:16I love it. But one of the big browsers that succeeded in Asia besides Dolphin was UCWeb. And UCWeb grew against Chrome in Indonesia and Bangladesh and India. In some Indian states, it had more share than Chrome. And one of the things we noticed that UCWeb did was it blocked ads. So having done Firefox and been in the situation where we didn't even have the best privacy features, it's kind of embarrassing, but it's true Mozilla did not lead on privacy as well as Steve Jobs did at Apple. The very first Safari had private windows, it had a third party cookie blocker. Neither of these things were in Firefox at the time. Private windows came in quickly. We never shipped a third party cookie blocker in my time there. There was always concern about rocking the boat. I have to say there was probably some...

37:03implicit concern about the Google search partnership. And what would be the effect on that? Because of course the vast majority of Mozilla's revenue comes from the Google search deal to use Google as the default and get paid hundreds of millions of dollars from Google. Yeah, it really was the one big trick for funding Mozilla and it was, you know, Google it lasted, but it also foretold Google doing its own browser, right? We could see this coming too. We didn't want to take so much revenue in the deal that If it came cheaper for them to do Chrome, so we tried to adjust that. But all we did was defer Chrome, maybe a few months, a year at most. It wasn't clear we deferred it at all because by 2005, Dave Hyatt and Mach Asterkoviak and others at Apple had said, let's stop patch bombing cage. Let's make our own little mini Mozilla. It'll be run by Apple, but it'll be webkit.org and it'll be a proper open source project. And good for them. They did it. And that became the basis for not only what they put in Safari, but for

37:59Chrome. So there was a gleam in Larry Page's eyes when last I saw him, 2005, he was saying, yeah, what I've got so clean. I'm like, Larry, go do your own browser. It's fine. Don't worry about Firefox. You should do your own browser. So we knew in 2006, they were doing it. We knew that they weren't at that point pulling people off Firefox. And some of the people I've worked with at AOL or at the Mozilla were working on the prototype. And took a lot to get it out. It's Krunking Mountain September 1st, 2008.

38:27And it wasn't really, at first, clearly about fast JavaScript or all the stuff that people think of. It was more about isolating the flash player so the way it crashes in a tab, it doesn't drag your old browser down. Yes. Yes. And that comic that they shipped was just freaking brilliant as a marketing strategy for the nerds out there that would really appreciate process isolated tabs. Yeah, it had everything. It had Lars Bach about V8. It had Darren Fisher who had worked with it, AOL. But at some point, I don't know when I heard this.

38:57from a friend who was at Google, Larry sat up and said, wait, we're running a search advertising business and Chrome isn't tracking our users. What are we doing wrong? And so in 2016, Google's privacy policy changed. This was after I started Brave, but I'll tell the full story of Brave by starting there because at that point, ProPublica noticed the Guardian republished their piece. They sort of said, Google's crossed the Rubicon. They've connected all their data into one big addicts change and data collection system.

39:26With a carve out for Google Analytics, it's not clear how much Google Analytics is private anymore. And Chrome, if you sign into the browser, which is a separate feature in the upper right corner, using your Google account, then you're trapped for ad targeting. It's Google's business. But a lot of people didn't know this and some people didn't sign into the browser. Well, in 2018, September, Google said, gosh darn it, people aren't signing into the browser enough. We're going to just do it whenever you sign in to Gmail or YouTube in a tab.

39:54We'll just sign you in across all the tabs and we'll track you. Oh wow. If you don't like it, you can opt out in the Google account settings. Yeah, right. But nobody's going to do that. And I do. I mean, yeah, you'll do that. But I used to do talks at conferences, asking people were using Chrome. How many people knew this? How many people opted out in the hands? You know, we're manumerous and then they started falling and then there were red faces and consternation. This is not just Google. I pick on them because they became the biggest but and buying double click was an earlier sort of Rubicon they crossed because

40:24I think Sergei told a friend of mine in 2003, oh, we would never do, like, tracking for ads on publisher pages that tied into our search ads. We would never track across the web. That would be evil. Oops. Well, it changed. Well, the definition of evil shifts depends on how large the incentives are. Yeah. And going public also just puts a fidgetary duty to your shareholders on you that is hard to resist. And this is kind of the animal, the blind, voracious beast of capitalism.

40:54When I was thinking about Brave, I realized not only had Mozilla become captured by its search partner, it was probably going to die because it couldn't compete. Not just on Chrome intrinsic qualities, but on distribution, which really matters at scale. You have to pay for it, right? Microsoft had woken up and was doing IE and finally did Edge, and this is before they switched Edge to be based on Chromium. They were certainly still distributing in a Windows.

41:18Kind of tying it and I would say it's gotten worse Windows 10 and 11 have gotten even more aggressive though They backed up on one particular thing recently where it's almost like back to the antitrust case They're saying hey, you're not using edge. We've noticed would you like to use edge or oops? We reset your default browser to edge that happens to and this is a problem for Google so Google has to pay to distribute Chrome Mozilla doesn't have the resources to do this our growth with Firefox when I was there was Completely organic I think and it probably was mostly organic after I left they might have done a little growth hacking So and they never got big on mobile. I'd love your explanation And again, I don't ask this because I don't have thoughts myself, but I want to hear from you. Why is it bad to be tracked? Yeah, people sometimes that they're savvy. They'll remember Richie lose epigram. I don't know if it really came from him

42:11You know give me six sentences from the most honest man and I'll find a way to hang him right Snowden change things people realized wait a minute there's violations of federal law here Google engineers who've been using telco dark fiber without encrypting their backbone traffic were outraged I think and Data breaches bother people and the third party problem I mentioned those embedded in pixels and all those embedded scripts You don't know where your data is going. It's not just that it's trapping you to give you a better deal or to make your ads more personalized on a website. That data is flying out the window and it's going into stuff that is available to the not only the dark web, but just available publicly. A horrifying story. I won't name names. We have a vendor at Brave that has information on people. It shared it with experience. We didn't know this was happening.

43:04I don't know if there's a privacy law that was breached. We believe their privacy policy was breached by their own action or their setting of this as a default that we didn't know we had to opt out of. Experience is just breach city, right? These are jokes. It's criminal. I don't know if it's literally criminal, but it feels criminal. Right, so consciousness of privacy as something where you're unsafe if you're trapped grew. Initially, it was like, I don't care, trap me. I have no privacy. Just make my experience more personal. And then it became, wait a minute, there's some third party or seventh party, seven degrees of Kevin Bacon. There's somebody in, you know, Russia who's tracking me. That's no good. There's somebody playing games to trap me around physical world using geofencing. That's possible with ads. And it's been done probably by malicious actors. There's spy stuff going on. People realize that this was a bigger problem than just

43:52something somewhere has some dossier on me because once you have a dossier on a server it's very likely it's going to get copied or leaked and it's going to be in hundred servers or a thousand servers and you won't know where it is or to what bad uses will be put so meanwhile privacy law is coming up in Europe that in its own abstract way sometimes without defining its terms did use sort of common sense notions about how we interact which Steve Jobs himself wants to talk to Mossberg about in very plain terms which is privacy means You don't get my data unless I know I'm giving it to you for specific purpose that benefits me and there's sort of a quid pro quo. And that's what the GDPR tries to do with purpose limitation or purpose specificity. So when you consent to those cookie dialogues, which are all misregulated, mismanaged, and nonsense, not defending them. And GDPR, like all regulations, is full of unintended consequences. What they're trying to do is say you consent to

44:47Let a tracking cookie be set. Let's say for some Essential or inessential reason and there are carve outs for essential reasons when you go to a search engine It's the first party. You're giving it data to get better results. So there's an essential purpose there that can justify some kind of Data being processed. It isn't necessarily tracking because it's only at that search engine But when you're dealing with all these sites that throw these cookie consents, you know, click here to learn more and there's 300 vendors and if you want to opt out you have to go click on them and Often, there's no page there. There's a 404, HTTP response. There's no phone number. There's no way to opt out. So it's a complete fraud that you can opt out of this easily. And that's also against the law in many places in the world, not just Europe. A lot of these privacy laws are coming up around the world. And this was sort of concurrent with the rise of brave. But the consciousness about privacy is still growing. And that's helping us because we were at the forefront and doing this R&D, I mentioned, which made us fast and efficient.

45:46And you're seeing others jump in with duck that go always had a more private sort of search for an unknown being. It's pretty much being still for the keyword search. They had mobile browsers and other adding desktop browsers and other products. And like I mentioned, Apple gets fair credit for privacy concerns that I think came directly from Steve Jobs in Safari, private windows and third party cookie blocking and Apple wraps itself in privacy with some justice.

46:12And now even Google is trying to claim to invent the privacy sandbox to save its business. I mean, to save the world. Sorry. You know, and ram it through standardization and into other browsers. Let me ask David's question a little bit more specifically. Why is a private computing experience important to you personally? Yes. So I mentioned this rising cost is a privacy. How privacy is sort of multi-sided and involves different.

46:39Degrees and kinds of threats so that those mattered to me no doubt but I also think the user has to have Privacy for economic advantage otherwise we have no way of Collective bargaining with the network powers and any network is going to have power centers It's just because the network effects and you know whether they collect much data or just become a successful business They will have economic power market power and the users may just be these sort of sheep to be sure of their wool That is the model for ad tech. But if users can guard their data, they can demand a higher price. They can demand better terms. They can use cryptographic protocols to transact without giving up their privacy while still giving authentic attribution or confirmation of ads viewed or purchases. So what matters to the marketer is if you get them in their best day is

47:32Not the day track you individually, they wouldn't know what to do with these tracking databases. It's usually vendors that hire that do it, or Google, Facebook and so on. But they want to know what audience they can address. And they want to know how well that audience or cohorts within it convert. They want to segment that audience and see they can do performance and growth marketing with pseudoscience, mostly regression, logistical regression, mostly very simple statistics to see This campaign's working. This one's not. I'm going to spend more money on this and less on that. And I'm going to try this new, you know, paid media approach. I'm going to try this new Brave browser private ad system because there are some users there that are off the reservation. They are not reachable, addressable. They used you block origin on Chrome and now they're using Brave and I can't get to them through my usual.

48:20media channels and advertising methods so I'm gonna put a little money on brave and that's how we built up the private ad business that's part of Brave Rewards uses the basic attention token and that matters to me too because I always thought about economics I was interested in it from a young age but I also and Mozilla thought we're gonna get killed by Google I think everybody executive thought this at Mozilla I'm not reaching any end to you guys to say this it was something that maybe can't be solved without really doing a second browser and marketing it as a companion to Firefox And I actually talked at one point with Dave Hyde about doing this, but I couldn't recruit him away from Apple and I tried to get Huey as well. And it would have been a WebKit based most of the browser, but it was too risky. I couldn't get the talent I needed. It would undermine Firefox at some point. And it would have been bad for morale.

49:06You know, maybe Mozilla is trapped, but I didn't want Bray to be trapped. And I certainly didn't want myself or my children to be trapped because these monopolies can last a little longer than they should, and they can really keep shearing those sheep until the sheep are starving. And that's happened. I think that's where we're headed with all the censorship and the heavy-handed interference in sort of search results.

49:26demonetization of youtubers in 2015 started and it wasn't just, you know, over atrocious content that should be censored because otherwise you're going to just have people after you and your lose viewers. It was all of our all sorts of things that nobody can understand and they were just losing money as YouTube creators. Like these were just creators who were talking about their hobbies and they found their ad revenue going down. Totally. Yeah. Google changes YouTube algorithms, Facebook changes, Instagram or Facebook algorithms and like, it completely wipes the table of whole, you know, sectors of creators. Yeah, in the UK there were actual regulatory cases involving this search algorithm, SEO sort of change. Matt cuts when he was a Google, he used to blog, and he tried to be transparent about it, but it was clear Google had a lot of power and there's sort of a black box that they're operating inside of. And it's a casino. The house always wins. So I wanted to use something that we knew about the old days computing where you were the system administrator of your

50:23Departments mini computer or your labs mini computer or you were your PCs administrator you had to get the CD rom you had to install it. That was a total pain. It was a tax but You could keep your data there you could make sure that you knew what was going on your system had in many ways more integrity than our modern day connected devices do Where they can be updated behind your back and things can go wrong or sideways and there's all this third party tracking so I wanted to get back to the user having power through privacy, through shields, is what Brave calls them, through the power in your pocket, which is the supercomputer, you know, the microunity, super scalar architecture, from the 90s. And yet it's kind of underutilized. Software is not 10,000 times better, even though the processes are that much faster. Something's gone wrong. Because even in the early 90s, Silicon Graphics operating system was getting bloated. And we're talking about going from 8 Meg RAM to 16 Meg RAM.

51:18I mean, just ridiculous small amount of memory, and yet the software was getting bloated, X windows and motif and all this garbage. So software is not gotten better. It's in some ways gotten worse. And I wanted Brave to wave the flag of better software, tighter software, software that defends your privacy because it gives you economic bargaining power, a chance at changing the topology of the network where, again, there's always going to be central powers that come and go.

51:43accumulate wealth but if the users can fight back they can have let's say other options like cryptocurrencies and tokens and smart contract systems. I was going to say you know maybe for the majority of people out there when you were starting brave.

51:59Yeah, like economic power. I get it like Google Facebook. They've got power. But how on earth would I ever as an individual have economic power? Wasn't our pitch our pitch was private fast, you know, low battery use. And we actually at Mobile World Congress 2019 this green specter company from the UK came by and said, yeah, we've measured you're the you're the least power hungry browser on Android. It was awesome because it confirmed our own.

52:22research teams results but you have to sell with what people feel every day what they feel is that page load lag they feel that battery being drained they feel the data plan even though they may be on an unlimited data plan there's still ways they perceive it but now i mean i imagine it feels real to people that like yeah i can make money with my attention on the internet like it feels very real to people it's so funny because we have different tiers of ad rate card around the world because it's easier to get ad buyers in the us and paying the most in the UK and Europe after and so on. And so we have a lot of fans around the world who are in lower tier regions and they aren't making as much but it may go longer away for them. It isn't like we're trying to make people rich or doing a pump and dump. We're trying to make users get 70% of the revenue of a growing business that if you look at add online and digital advertising, it's still 300 billion plus a year. That's a huge business. If we just get, you know, 1% of that and we share 70% of that with our users, is that 2.1 billion, right?

53:20So to be super crisp to make sure listeners understand it. An ad is displayed to me and this is an ad that's purchased through the Brave ad network where the advertiser is willing to say, look, I know that this isn't going to do a bunch of crazy targeting stuff. This is just going on to the Brave ad network. A user views that ad and then 70% of the revenue from that ad shows up in the user's wallet in the form of the basic attention token.

53:43Yes, so when you say network people think tracking because networks have lots of ways to track. So what we do instead is we put all the ads into a catalog through a link to the creative for the add the image or web page or video that's in an edge cache somewhere we don't consider an adversary. The link to the ad and some keywords about the ad go into a catalog and the catalog gets updated to a large number of people in each region.

54:08And it gets updated several times a day the same way for everyone. So you are not identified by downloading that catalog. It's kind of like getting a safe anti-fishing list or a safe browsing list, anti-malware site list. And that's how we solve the problem of ad networks that today in conventional ad tech.

54:26We'll trap you on the front side and take all your data even before they've decided what add to show you. We do the decisioning in the browser based on this catalog. So all the machine learning on the mother of all data feeds I mentioned earlier is in browser. It's only on if you opt into the system, by the way, it's not turned on normally. And that's what does the add matching.

54:43I see yeah, so I'm wondering how I mean I was definitely buying some ads on Facebook for startups I was involved with in 2015 16 and it was Unfreaking real the level of targeting. I mean you could target one person Yes, and as an advertiser you're like this is magic I can acquire exactly the customers that I want of course that's at the expense of the users and Facebook has walked back a lot of this and made it more broad is there some measure of An advertiser being able to tell you hey these are the types of customers I want or is it like buying a billboard in the highway? Yes, so we're big enough now and even even when we started we were big enough that we can do some very coarse segmentation which does not let people be re-identified because the problem with the targeting systems you mentioned is they can like you said target one person I think Latanya Swini said in the US if someone's birth date gender and zip code are known they can be individually identified re-identified so

55:38Obviously, we're not going to give out any information to advertisers ahead of time, but we do have ways of sampling our audience to very closely segment it, so you can address those segments. And some of those keywords in the catalog express those segments. They're basically segment editifiers, and separately, the machine learning in the browser develops an opinion about you from your search queries, your clicking, what pages you visit, all that stuff about what segments you might fall into, and then the matching occurs.

56:07We're using support vector machines and Bayesian sort of fairly simple stuff. It doesn't burn your battery. We don't need TensorFlow or a cloud super computer to do this kind of machine learning. And that does a pretty good job. A lot of ad tech is not as precise as you think. Facebook said they could target that person and they could often, but sometimes there were fraud actors, not so much on their native apps, but on publisher pages. There's a ton of fraud in online digital advertising because JavaScript is used on these publisher pages, and I designed JavaScript on purpose. This was very intentional. I think it was the right decision to be a mutable environment. It's global environment, all the standard objects and the document objects are mutable. You can override them. You can mock up local likes and you can forward load something that looks like the next year's version of a standard object. So JavaScript's mutability was a huge boon. It probably wouldn't have survived without it, but it also means there's no.

56:59security property called integrity. It means that when the publisher is loading all these third-party tags from Google and others, they can fight each other. They can override each other. They cookie stack. They cheat. And what's worse, you can take the whole publisher content, scrape it into a fake environment in a bot. And the bot pretends to be a user clicking on the ad. And you get paid the ad revenue because the ad buyer didn't cross-check the publishers.

57:26ID in Google's ad exchange, which is a fraud operator against the true New York Times ad ID. It's bad. And that Google still gets the fee when this advertising money is stolen by fraudsters makes Google complicit with the fraudsters to some degree and misaligns the interest again. It's a conflict of interest. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to tell you about a longtime friend of the show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture.

57:53It used to be that you proved that you were secure once a year on audit or a static PDF, then everyone would not, and you're done. But in an AI first world, that doesn't hold up anymore. Yep, your risk surface changes every week now. A vendor turns on an AI feature or someone writes in a new model without telling IT, and your posture is different than it was last week, let alone at your last audit.

58:16Vanta's own research found that around 70% of companies have this quote-unquote shadow AI running with no security review at all. Right. And that's where Vanta comes in. They're the leading-agentic trust platform, meaning they've built the thing that closes the gap. And the way that they close that gap is Vanta agent. Think of it as a GRC engineer, that's governance, risk, and compliance, except that it's software and it doesn't sleep. It finds the issues drafts the fixes and cuts the time that you'd spend on vendor assessments in half. In half!

58:47Which is exactly why more than 16,000 companies today run on Vanta companies like ramp cursor and snowflake all stay audit ready and catch the risks that crop up between audits across every vendor every AI tool the whole environment and that's the real value.

59:06Trust has to be continuous now, which is why Vanta automates your security, your compliance, and the work to earn and prove trust. We're huge fans of Vanta over here and literally hundreds of acquired listeners have become Vanta customers at their companies over the years. So you can get $1,000 off Vanta at Vanta.com slash acquired. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash acquired for $1,000 off and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. Okay, so there's a variety of value propositions here. There's privacy, their speed which it sounds like speed was the first one there's make money from your attention on the internet you're rolling out a bunch more features in brave sort of at compounding right now that it's turning into much more than everything you've described so far with its own search engine with its own native wallet capability you're at this unbelievable milestone now of having accomplished 50 million monthly active users

1:00:00What was one or two of the tipping points along the way where you realized oh this particular value prop really resonates and accelerated the growth well some of the stuff was early mistakes you make when you're a small startup you choose to use a shortcut we use the electron framework when we switched from a private version based on those all this gecko engine to chromium blink and using electron was a mistake it wasn't designed for a browser it turned off the sandbox that was horrifying to discover and it's kind of bloated and replaced a lot of middleware files in the Chromium code that Google was breaking through internal API shifts. And we finally got onto a proper well maintained Chromium fork, including the front end. Now the downside of this is we look a lot like Chrome. We have the brave line icon for the shields. We have the triangle for bat. We have our own look for the tabs, but it still looks a lot like Chrome. It's tabs on top. It's got

1:00:55Chrome extensions, which can be loaded if they don't use the Google account system I mentioned that's for tracking that we disable. But, you know, it's still a little bit too crummy. And yet, I think it's worth it, because that helped us get users off of Chrome until we really did that rebasing on the front end of Chrome. We were paying a growing maintenance cost on all this electron forkage, and our users were suffering because it wasn't fully Chrome. There were extensions needed to be manually supported or ported, and things weren't working right.

1:01:22We switched to a more complete Chrome fork, like a lot of browsers use. I think the Volodies in exception, they have a React Native front end, and they've sunk the cost to stabilize the middleware. Which is so interesting. Great. Like, if any upstart browser team and leader were going to build your own stack, it would be you. It takes a big team. And you've chosen not to. I have 10 people in the first seed round of Bray. What am I going to do? I knew how to do 10 people out of ALL with the Netscape Mozilla code base because I'd worked on that code base with hundreds of engineers at Netscape AOL. And those people were still working on it for a while. AOL did lay off a lot of them, but kept some on. Others went to IBM. And even though we had to shrink the workforce, it was bigger than the 10 people I had at Mozilla in 2003 when we spun out.

1:02:14Until we got the search deal in 2004, I couldn't really hire more people. We were burning down the $2 million from AOL. Well, a similar sort of situation with founding Brave. I had to take 10 people. I had to use some existing code base. And we did start with with Mozilla Gecko in a multi-process sandboxed framework called Graphene that was part of Firefox OS, which I'd worked on.

1:02:33But it just lost on this big spreadsheet we did where we just scored it against Chromium Blink, and it just lost on too many rows. It was, you know, what are we going to do for DRM? Oh, at the time Firefox has a custom Adobe deal. We can't partake of that even if we use the Gecko source. You know, we have to go get Google Widevine, which Google made free as in beer, even though DRM is a close source. It was bad, but...

1:02:56You have to have it. People, not just Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, et cetera. So what are we going to do? Google is giving it out, but they're really only giving it out for Chromium-based browsers. And so we did that. And there were just a hundred other paper cuts or major issues like that. Gecko was never big on mobile, because Mosul was never big on mobile. We needed all the mobile WebKit lineage that goes into Chromium Blink that's still used on the mobile web. Stuff that preceded standards. So it was just at the end of 2015, we just said, got a switch. And that's when we switched to electron, but that had its own costs. And yet as a small team, we couldn't do the full chromium fork. As we grew, we did. And so by, I think it was end of 2018, we came out with the Brave Core based browser, which is our maintainable version of chromium blink and our own front end still close to Google's. And

1:03:48That was very popular and all the extensions worked and we started growing faster. We've doubled for five years in a row, so or more than doubled some years. So 50 million users, that seems like the largest self-custodied crypto wallet application in the world.

1:04:04That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is it's this tiny fraction of the overall browser market share. Yes. I haven't heard anyone talk about the browser wars and market share in a while. Do you know what that sort of looks like today? I mentioned Chrome is alleged to have 2.65 billion users. Now, some of these users have gone away. I uninstalled Chrome. I found that there was a secret installer called Keystone that was messing my system up. Somebody wrote a blog post about this. Google denies it, but just phenomenologically life got better when I ripped all that out.

1:04:32It was sort of hiding itself in the OS. It was kind of creepy. What matters in browsers, and you mentioned earlier, is sort of every 10 years as a change in the garden, there's this rapid evolution, and there's this sort of lead user effect. Eric von Hippel of MIT, he's described this, right? Lead users invented the plumbing toolkit. They were homemade by machinist plumbers, and they became standardized and big tools companies built them. Lead users invented fiberglass surfboards, a lot of hot rotting, like Tom Wolf described.

1:05:00When surfing user generated in some ways, Bill Bowerman, Nike, lead users. These are people who are not just creating something to go make a buck and seeing a need in the market, making a widget. There are users of their own products. They love the product and they understand what it's doing or what it needs to do. And having those lead users favor Firefox in its day or Brave Now is super important. And the lead users that I see that are very generative.

1:05:26Some controversial are working on crypto projects, blockchain projects. They're working on decentralization. That's not going to be controversial on this podcast. Yeah, I mean, people are exaggerating how much energy Bitcoin uses and also not aware of how Bitcoin can use energy that otherwise goes to waste. But we're not Bitcoin based anyway, and there are new blockchains that are much more efficient. So the whole thing is to me kind of a need to see ideological. Yes, not a controversial statement on acquired that the most interesting Founders, technologists, et cetera are by and large focusing on web-during crypto right now. Chris Dixon of injuries and horror, what's wrote this essay about Ethereum the other year and talked about how he saw the developer animal spirits just rallying around it. And it's true. And then Ethereum got slow and the fees were too high. But in some ways it's like Unix, the Ethereum virtual machine now, the bytecode and the smart contract system with some transportation cost if it's not directly portable, is supported on other chains. Polygon, obviously.

1:06:22Avalanche's C chain is an EVM compatible, like the Unix system call table being copied into different flavors of Unix. The sort of design DNA spreads easier than code DNA because code has hard requirements, not all of what you're known or tested for, but design can be copied. And in this case, even with the EVM compatible, the code can be tested to interoperation. So it's like we had different NFS servers that had different code lineages interoperating and different TCPIP stacks interoperating. So I think they Dixon's essay was on point, even though people decry Ethereum's slowness and high gas fees. And the new chains are just super exciting to the extent that you can port your code. There are EVM cross compiler and interpreter solutions on Solana, and there's the C chain other direct EVM compatible on other chains. It seems like your strategy with embracing not just the blockchain, but becoming an economic player in the blockchain ecosystem has been

1:07:19Initially, there was the basic attention token, and I don't think that those were actually deposited on chain into Ethereum wallets. Is that correct? In our system, because of regulations, not just in the US, if we send a ad revenue share to someone known self-custody wallet, we're going to get in trouble, including big trouble if it's somebody named Osama bin Laden, right? So there's not just Fincen, which looks at money laundering carefully.

1:07:47People grumble about KYC. Know your customer. Why am I identifying myself with a custodian in order to get my basic attention token? Well, it isn't KYC for its own sake, and it's not just a one and done. They have to sometimes check again. In fact, there's a problem right now where they're making some people in Europe fill out a survey to do more diligence. The KYC serves as a means to an end. The end is anti-money laundering. It's identifying all these flows. And you know, some of the crypto Nubes also think well, I should just go on chain and I'm anonymous. No, you're going to get reidentified through blockchain forensics, right? In the same way that it's not hard based on a zip code and a gender and a birth date or whatever to singly identify you. At some point, someone will be able to just run your wallet or wallets. And it already happens today through some deanonymizer and be like, Oh, I know who this is. Right. So for our system with users getting ad revenue share and publishers and getting

1:08:39creators on YouTube getting tips or recurring donations, just 10 of those or so could fingerprint you as a user, right? If there are a few bits each, that's enough bits to fingerprint you. It's an unique identifier that can count everybody in the world. And if you have enough observation points around, you can, and side channels, you can put things together. So we realized that we couldn't go on chain, not just because it was too costly, but because it was fingerprint the user. And the answer in the long run is zero knowledge proof. So our next generation ad system, which is aiming at Salana is called themus.

1:09:09It uses a black box accumulator in the browser to build up an authentic cryptographically secure ad performance set of numbers that can then be put into a zero knowledge proof system directly on chain, and the ad buyer can verify for themselves from the terms of the proof that the ad performed. That's the magic of zero knowledge proofs.

1:09:30Verifying it you can believe the truth claims and we're trying to move on chain with that very soon with Solano which is exciting but we're still burdened by the regulations that require not only the anti money laundering but also the anti the office is a foreign asset controls in the US don't send to a self-custody wallet That's owned by some somebody on the FBI's top 10 list, right? Or you'll do federal time for that. So, you know, people get mad at me like, why must I KYC? And they think I'm some kind of, you know, crypto hater. No, I love on chain direct. I've done it. I've paid one of the auditors for our smart contracts for the basic attention token got paid on chain. And it was great. Much better than sending a bank wire. But...

1:10:09There are problems if you want privacy right now and you want to comply with these regulations, which have funitious penalties. So we're working toward a more decentralized future and we'll have to see how it goes. The great thing about crypto is I see a lot of now banks, you know, Jamie Dimon did a heel turn from saying Bitcoin is a Ponzi to, oh my blockchains great. And family offices and companies are into crypto. The old big tech guard aren't the Facebook tried with Libra now DM, but really got hurt.

1:10:38politicians didn't like Facebook and it wasn't really clear why you'd want it, you know, instead of another existing crypto. So the initial thing you did was introduce the basic attention token and you could accumulate that without going through any KYC, but if you were going to then send it to a creator, they would need to have a KYC wallet. But you wouldn't as a user, you could still be anonymous. But it seems like now you've moved to, you first forked Metamass to make a brave wallet. Now you're building your own native brave wallet directly into the browser, which is totally a thing that Safari could do that chrome could do and it doesn't seem like they're gonna do that for a long time so you're gonna be the first browser with a native secure On-chain wallet hot wallet directly baked into the browser to refrain from the early days of Firefox opera had it first and you can say that again because opera did have a wallet in 2018

1:11:29No way. Opera has a lot of that. That's so good. We were worried because they came out with a self-custody wallet and adapt store in 2018 and Bray's been growing. So I had to get more people to do the wallet or I had to get my co-founder to go lead the wallet effort. But in 2018, it wasn't going to happen. On their hand, crypto winter happened. And I think that took the steam out of opera a little bit. But opera still has crypto. And they're talking about a polygon deal they pre-announced. And I think opera will always be their kind of like brave, even though it's now Chinese owned.

1:11:58a little less trustworthy, just in westernized, not saying anything personal here. And yet, opera will be innovative, but Brave's going to go faster, and we're going to do things that cut across the self-custody versus custodial usability trade-off space. Because it took 25 years to train people to use, usually in password logins, and maybe for real banks and Coinbase, and so on, you have to have a second factor authenticator app, or something like that, or a UB key.

1:12:27That's almost as hard as self-custody. It's a little bit safer in that if you lose your private key, your word list, your backup, your crypto steal with self-custody, you've lost. Whereas if you lose your password and lose your UB key, lose your authenticator app or the phone it's on, you can probably convince Coinbase you're you and they can reset your password for you. So it's complex enough now though. I think self-custody has a shot.

1:12:54getting things to be useful, getting the basic attention token to be useful, including that virtual kind you earn without KYC, because you're going to send it back to your creators who do have to KYC for these AML. In fact, reasons that we can work on with the wallet. So we're going to make the wallet sort of blend with the Brave Reward system as much as we can. We're going to make it multi-chain. We don't have any religion about blockchain. We like Salana. We agreed to make it the default for multi-chain dApps where they don't expressive preference for default and the user doesn't. And that choice of default, the browser can make, that's important. That's how search deals get done. That's why Google only pays for default because they're king of the hill and they figure they'll get the traffic anyway. That's what they say. Whereas Bing does induct a go and others in Yandex do search deals with browsers. Even if they're not the default, they'll pay for traffic. But even still like a lot of people are going to get wallets for the first time. This is pretty awesome.

1:13:50It is. It's exciting. It's also, you know, you've seen what happened with Metamask. They took off very cleverly at the time Uniswap did its V3, I guess it was. And just started getting a lot of swap action that made them a lot of money. And that was from people using Metamask and self custody. I guess I've not got a good figure right now. Most of those users don't have a hardware.

1:14:11Private key device like a ledger or a treasure and so they're keeping that wordless safe in some safe place I hope I talked to somebody an anonymous user of brave in Africa who was a hex fan and they're wondering why we're you know why the hex founder was feuding with us because he's kind of not but that all blew over but this user I said how do you use it? He said oh I've been buying crypto for five years I use met a mask right or four years I guess it was and I said oh do you have a ledger or a treasure no I'm really afraid I'm gonna lose it all right Well, sure, you can recover access to the wallet, but that still means you're piling up wealth in a browser extension, which are known to be hackable, or at least not as secure as if it was in a browser itself. And on top of all this, it's always connected to the internet. The extension is just weaker, both in terms of its powers, but also its security model. If it's doing its own secure store for a private key, it's just a weaker footing than a native app by design. Then we see this all the time.

1:15:09and you mentioned Metamask. I joked the mask that is metta because I didn't want to say it. You'll get all these phishing support accounts pretending to be your buddy impersonating my friend David Walsh who was at Mozilla and now is at Metamask. And they'll try to say DM me or go to this Google form and we'll help you get your key recovered. And sometimes the topic wasn't even about lost funds. And you go to the Google form and right above the fine print from Google that says don't enter any personal private data or passwords in this form.

1:15:38is a field saying, give us your 12 words, 20 words. So these fraudsters just swarm under this. There are bad actor companies in the ecosystem right now that are trying to tell you, hey, for a nice experience to have all of your wallets aggregated here, type in your secret phrase from your local self-custodied wallet into our thing. And I've seen this on Coinbase, but I know there are others.

1:16:02We are not yet trained on what these secret phrases mean in the way that we're trained about passwords and it took 20 years and it took 20 years to train on credit cards and so we're telling people, hey, this is like a user name that you can type in anywhere and it's completely defeating the purpose of that as secure. Same thing for QR codes. QR codes have become shorthands for links. I go to my neighborhood pool and I can scan a QR code with my iPhone and then sign in on the web form.

1:16:29QR codes are also used especially in crypto for spelling and private key and you should not be putting them on paper for somebody to scan ever and you're right there are let's say bad or sketchy actors who will trying to collect these things or passwords and email there were services over the years.

1:16:46There still are that will say, hey, we'll read your email for you. In fact, that goes building one, but I think they're keeping it clean. It would blow them up if they cheated. They're just trying to strip trackers from your email, and you get a duck address if you want it. But better if it didn't have the clear text of your email messages at all. And so in Brave, if you use webmail like Gmail, we block those trackers at the end point where the secure session, the TLS session terminates. But this whole thing about dual models, something's a public key or a public link, something's a private key, and they're both getting forced through the same UX metaphors is a problem. And training users may be getting to a better state of play with hardware wallets where they aren't just this anxiety-producing dongle that you're worried. Did it break? Did I forget my pin? Did I forget my, you know, did I send it wrong address? You probably want these things to be more like a phone, something that's more useful to you in your digital life.

1:17:37You don't want to have anxiety every time you transact. You want to have the sense of security and that you're winning. And that's the other thing I would say about brave. We can make your built-in wallet a positive sum game. It can collect non-pump and dump yield opportunities from D5. If you want to put some assets in, it can collect bat revenue share. That's another positive sum game we already have. So we're trying to make crypto be part of your daily life in a way that doesn't provoke anxiety. Am I being fished that I lose my pen or my passphrase. You bring up this just ever present trade-off in computing, which is security versus user experience. And I frequently think that when I'm doing something in crypto versus I'm doing something in the regular bank tradify ecosystem and

1:18:23My bank for better or for worse has taken a lot of the headache away, and I have a pretty good user experience. It's not confusing. I know what I'm doing when I'm wiring money from one place to the other, making a transfer from one account to the other. I lose some of my liberties because they have the option to, you know, remove my assets if they determine that I've done something illegal. Even though I'm like, well, hey, I didn't do something illegal. If they determine that I did, they could seize my assets.

1:18:48They can make a profit on me. They can arbitrage the cost of capital to their returns when they take my deposits and deploy them elsewhere. I should be getting all that economic upside. But what I've gotten in exchange for giving up my liberties and my economic opportunity is a pretty good user experience. And we're at this place in crypto right now where we've taken a hard left. And we've said, I want to own everything. I want to be hyper secure. I want to have all my privacy. And what we're left with is...

1:19:18Yes, also be a bank and it is a brutal thing to have to manage all this stuff right now. Yes. This calendar year is going to be big because not only adding more chains, I think I agree with Vitalik, we're not going to do complex multi-chain transactional models. So people are working on those using threshold signatures. I think the main thing is we'll have the chains people want to use and the yield farmers go where the returns are good and the users follow.

1:19:43So we'll make that all as automatic and convenient, but you'll still have to turn it on and we'll have safeties on it. And that UX will take a lot of work to develop because design is still an art. You absolutely is an art, right? You can, the space is too large to do sort of A, B testing in any credible time frame. You have to call some shots, get some users telling you what to do, collaborate with those lead users I mentioned earlier. And then I think at the end of this year, we'll have a wallet that will be super awesome, not only for using crypto and, you know, DeFi and so on, but also if we do it right, some of our custodial partners can virtualize your plastic from your wallet so they can give you like privacy.com does like the Apple card does. They can give you a master card number from a block that they allocate from that isn't your number. So your security is better. It's like the generated email addresses that Apple and others are doing. And if we virtualize the credit card,

1:20:39Then we can actually put e-commerce in the browser. We can deconstruct Amazon every site without having to change its merchant JavaScript, which is not going to happen easily. Can have an option where you can use something like a virtual credit card that could even be topped up with crypto or draw on crypto.

1:20:59I've got one question for you as it pertains to this decentralization versus user experience topic. Maxi Marlin's bike pointed out in his recent post that this is a quote, to make these technologies usable, the spaces consolidating around platforms. Again, people who will run servers for you and iterate on that functionality that emerges in Fira OpenSea Coinbase ether skin. And my question for you is, do you think it is the case that The user experience that users want and the developer experience and sort of ecosystem speed that programmers want necessitates these centralized choke points no matter what generation of the web we're on. So it's hard to be a server when you want to do something like index, Ethereum's history into a database with multiple ways of querying it. So I'm not going to do that on my machines. I'm going to use either scan or something like it. And if either scan has trackers or bad ad tech in it.

1:21:54I'm gonna use brave and block those, but it's hard to be a server sometimes and I agree with Moxie right? I like Moxie a lot. I met him once at Mozilla Neal Days. He and colleagues did this blind context matching system contacts. I should say like your address book contacts for signal because they had this problem that your friends are on signal signal uses the phone numbers identifier, but how will they help you find your friends without reading your address book which is a privacy problem and the way they did it used child blind signatures and hashing and so on and it's clever and it runs in a secure enclave on the server which is something we're also using a brave so I agree with moxie's essay there's a larger toolkit from

1:22:35cryptography, the original crypto, which some of my cryptographer friends are still mad as crypto has been an expert cryptocurrency. But there's a larger toolkit and it works on servers on centralized systems as well as in decentralized systems. And decentralized systems, even Salana, there's always a tradeoff. If you really want, you know, certain guarantees and certain latency, you're going to want a server and you're going to want even in the network to that server to be provisioned a certain way. So there's no free lunch and there's a larger universe in which I think blockchains and networks, peer-to-peer networks make sense, but also servers will endure. That's why, again, annoying when people think that Web 2, you know, oh, Braves 2, Web 2. Well, Web 3 is not going to replace Web 2. It's going to extend it in a way that eventually, perhaps, if it's like McLuhan's laws of media, it's going to mock.

1:23:24and torture web too. But that's far in the future. And the meantime, it's going to be extending it so that we can get users using it. And there are ways that users will want to use it that are going to be like ether scan or a proxy farm, like inferior runs or bison trails, or there'll be servers you'll want to go to. But if you have these cryptographic protocols, if you have strong muscular clients like Brave, If you have that market power as a small user through essentially unionizing with other users of that client, then you should be able to get better privacy, better security properties out of the server. It shouldn't just be rating your data. It shouldn't be just betraying you in some way while it's whispering in your ear. It should be a fairer deal. And that can be done with cryptography, broadly construed. So I liked Moxie's essay quite a bit. All right, listeners.

1:24:15Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show, ServiceNow. If you are running a large enterprise, AI agents are likely spread across every team and deploying them is no longer the hard part. Yeah. The hard part is knowing what permissions they have, what employees are using them for, or what decisions AI is making. AI security for an enterprise at scale is not a small concern. Like the risks are real.

1:24:41Exactly, and the challenge with AI is governing it, securing it, measuring it, and making sure that it actually delivers value. That is why ServiceNow built the AI Control Tower. Yep, AI Control Tower gives enterprises a single place to see, manage, govern, and optimize AI across the entire business. And it works with any AI, not just theirs. Every device on your network, every permission across every system, every AI agent, visible and secure in one place.

1:25:09And ServiceNow can do this because they've spent more than 20 years building the operational backbone of the enterprise. The workflows, governance, approval, security controls, and institutional knowledge that power how work actually gets done across IT, HR, customer service, finance, and security. ServiceNow already runs more than 100.

1:25:28billion workflows annually, and trillions of transactions for more than 85% of the Fortune 500. So when companies need a place to govern AI at enterprise scale, they're building on a platform at the center of how their business already operates. And in a future that isn't going to be one AI, it's going to be thousands of AI agents working across every function of the company. But the question is, who's managing them all?

1:25:51So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely at scale, go check out servicenow.com slash acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you. All right. Well, I want to move into our grading section here. And even though this isn't a sort of traditional acquired episode or even necessarily told the whole history and done our tear down analysis the way we typically do, Brendan, I am curious. You're take what is a plus look like for brave?

1:26:16Let'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, three years is eight times 50. So it's 400 million users. And 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 super power like Android, Google, or iOS, Apple, but Samsung's out there and there are new phones coming up in the world and there's always a lower end of the market that's getting better thanks to the hardware getting better and sort of trickling down. And so 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 for a million monthly users,

1:27:09You have enormous cloud, especially if their lead users are still in standards. And standards matter still because a lot of businesses want to not only compete but sort of cooperate, the qualification model. So you get ongoing web standards still 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.

1:27:35But there's as I said earlier, greater sort of de facto standardization on things like EVM compatible chains or smart contract systems or things you can do with compilers and interpreters, even if you don't have an EVM work alike in your node and your network. So when we get to the scale of toward 400 million or more users, we will have opportunities to do things, including with the 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. And, you know, we're not just aiming at Google. That's like sort of driving by looking in the rear view mirror. Google's 100 year company, so was general electric, but ended up a tax dodger and a subprime lender, right? This is not a good ending. Thomas Edison was spinning in his barrel. 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

1:28:33machines without being a burdened system in you should have say over them you should have benefits from them and it's not just economics and some money-grubbing way economics really the Greek word right means something about home economics or about the home or you know the scale of human life where you live most of your life and 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. And I'm not just talking, you know, pie in the sky, you know, hobbits in the shire stuff here. I see this with the creator economy. I see this with the YouTubers and the other creators. And he's with NFTs for all the clowning that goes on with NFTs. And actually, we'll be looking into NFT as a basis for further, you know, sort of tokenomics for our creators in this new year. We want to see fans and creators directly connect and we want to see them do it without

1:29:28you know, being demonetized or interfered with censored all that stuff. And if this can be scaled up, it forms all these little networks that have these logistic curves that have their exponential faces that everyone loves. So 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 sort of network for it. You have to have crypto in both senses, Moxie's cryptography and crypto currency or blockchain.

1:29:56And I think Brave, at 400 million, we can actually make this real. We have 1.3 million creators verified. We would have tens or millions of creators. And that means people who have KYC themselves so that they can receive tokens. Yeah, or if enough people have self-custody, maybe we'll hang the self-custody wallets on the creator side and you can just do an on-chain sand on a fast chain with low fees. And you don't have to go through KYC at either end. Now, that was always what people told us to do. You should only do direct on-chain.

1:30:25I looked at it and even with a Bitcoin prototype, it was too expensive. I talked to people like Bology of 21.co which Bitcoin bought. I talked to the open bizarre founder who'd actually deemed me first. He said, we're thinking about adding bat and I said, aren't you Bitcoin without a fee? Why do you need bat? And he said, well, nobody wants to send Bitcoin. They want to hodl it.

1:30:45which is very true in which at the time it would have been a good strategy. Just sit on it. Don't shave those bitcoins to send something since scraps to your favorite YouTuber. And, you know, people will send Bitcoin. People are using Lightning More Jack and so on are all excited about it, whatever. There's lots of options for this, but getting people to do direct on-chain sense is still challenging. For the UX reasons, we mentioned the usability, the security, the sort of familiarity on both the sender and the creator who receives it. But...

1:31:14With brave at 400 million, we can hang self-custody on all sides of our ecosystem, even the advertiser side, the full triangle, and people can go peer to peer. They don't have to go through custodians if they don't want to. Now, like I said, if you're worried about law enforcement, which you shouldn't be, unless the government's gone bad, then blockchain forensics and exiting on a regular exchange will still let the law enforcement do what they need to do.

1:31:40you know, we're not trying to stand in the way of law enforcement doing what it should do. But this idea of getting to a big system of direct on-chain sends by starting there and limiting it to only those cases or limiting it only to lightning, which I was told to use before it was ready, years before it was ready, doesn't make sense. We've gone the other way, we're pragmatists, but as we grow and as we keep the custodial options going, we'll add the self-custody options and see what wins. Makes total sense.

1:32:06I'm sure you've thought more about the success case, but what's the failure case? What are the existential risks at this point? So there's always risks of some bad macro event or some bad crypto event, you know, crypto gets banned in the US or something like that. Don't think it's going to happen. One of the reasons is because I do see too many rich people for taking through their family offices and so on. But I do think there's a risk there, and I can't quantify it too easily. So we're just trying to carry on. It's hard to hedge anyway.

1:32:33I think there are risks with big tech. Big tech could still misbehave, and it still has even political power, though. It's been getting beaten up more and more by both parties. This time goes on. But that's a risk. Do you think that Facebook or Google or any of the others could ship a wallet in Chrome, for instance, or like actually really embrace this? I bet there's somebody Google who's looked at this. I know Google had a wallet, or it may even have a wallet team that does some outward bound stuff and They never connected it with Chrome. They never put it together. You know, PayPal is going to do their own stablecoin or whatever. You're going to see more wallets and maybe you'll see them in big browsers. But I don't know if they're going to get into the system that we're getting into early, which is the frontier. And that means they may just be stuck in the old world. It's very much like the age of discovery. We're going to be building the Wild West and then the lights will come in and the streets will get better paved and we'll be there already and we'll be selling pickaxes and shovels.

1:33:32the old world is back there in the ASEAN regime, you know, kind of corrupt. I'm willing to innovate. Maybe they stole the gold, but their banks then stole it from them through compound interest. I love it. You're the son's good. Lots. Oh, you know, the Fugure family made out the Habsburgs did not. So, you know, Google may have a wallet, but it might just be a me too. And it might be kind of weak when they do. Can you imagine the default switching from sign in with your Google account to authenticate with your in browser wallet?

1:34:02There's just no way. It really is hard for Google to innovate. They're just a big company and these big companies have their own problems, not just the innovators dilemma, but at least that much. And I just don't think they're going to be a huge threat, but they could use strong arm tactics to hurt us for sure. All the bigs could. And then there's our own execution risk and our own sort of competition with the growing new wave of privacy products, where I think we have to just compete. And its competition is good. We learn from each other.

1:34:30There's a marketing component as you grow across the chasm where you're trying to convince people who don't know, again, a search engine from a browser that your product is more private. It is faster. It's more trustworthy. It's got other good properties. Who do you consider your competitors? So is it would it be like square block or metamasker? No, so you know, we're trying to get people off of Chrome.

1:34:52And that's a matter of getting people to see that it's easy to migrate. You can even code browse for a while. You don't lose anything. And then you can cut the cord with Chrome. People switch from Firefox. That happens over time because it's going down and people can see it and sort of there are problems there. We can get people off Safari, but Safari is still privileged in Apple's OS and kind of tied. So that's hard. Edge is somewhat privileged in Windows, which is a little hard on this.

1:35:17We're competing, I think, for thought leadership with other privacy firms, so there's jumbo privacy, which isn't really doing a browser, but it's coming up with stuff. It's another venture-funded thing. Duff that goes been out there a long time, and they've built up quite a reputation and brand name. You see their signs and airports. They've done marketing first approach and gotten to a reasonable annual turnover from what I understand. That's got to be considered a competitor because they're doing desktop browsers on top of mobile now. But we look at the pie that we're dividing up as very large. If you're taking users from Chrome, we could both take and not really interfere with Joe. The worst case to me would be, you know, duck and brave start blooding each other in some mixed martial arts match to claim the privacy mantle prematurely. That seems needlessly destructive, but it is difficult marketing across the chasm. You have to say, we are more private or we are better or you should use us because we're faster or more complete. We block these threats that the other guy doesn't.

1:36:14And so some of that will have to happen. It's just going to have to happen for marketing reasons. All right. Lightning Round of Carvouts. David, give us your first one and you know I'll go first and we'll kick it to Brennan so you can think on his. I'm going to make it easy. My Carvout is a book. I'm about halfway through that I started reading because I saw you tweeting about it while you were in Hawaii. Project Hail Mary anywhere. It's so good. Really enjoying it so far. So good. It makes me think about everything from scientific principles when I look around in the world. I don't know that book. What's it about?

1:36:42It's Andy Weir, who wrote the Martian. This is his newest novel. Okay. And is story told in such a way that it's really fun to let it surprise you as you read the book so I don't want to spoil it. Yeah, the Martian was good. Cool. I've been what you got. My quick one is the second book that I read on vacation, which is open by Andre Agassi. His co-writer or ghost writer, I don't know the right term, but it's the same Pulitzer Prize winning writer who helped fill night with Shudog.

1:37:12and it is written in that same page turning thriller style. And Andre Agassi had an unbelievable career upstounds, shout out to friends of the show, Jeremy over at Tiny and David Parall, who at Capital Camp recommended the book to me, but it was just awesome. I highly recommend it. So I've not been reading enough and I owe a friend of Apple a read of his new book, which is his first novel. But I.

1:37:39This is kind of negative, but I think it's important. Mike Schellenberger's San Francisco is worth reading if you're from the Bay Area a long time like I've been, because it ain't good. I remember much better decades in San Francisco, and I hope come back somehow, but Mike Diagnosis is pretty directly. I also would recommend an old book that a friend who only reads old books recommended to me, which you can find free copy of online, like Lib Jam, you can get it. It's called Dynamic Economics by Burton Klein.

1:38:07and you've never heard of Burton Klein. Burton Klein looked at how firms grow and how they start, sometimes the Skunk Works projects. He actually looked at Kelly Martin's team. He looked at the Traderus A at Fairchild. He looked at the China Lake Sidewinder, the first practical heat seeking missile development. And he made some killer observations about structure, sort of sociology, anthropology, hierarchy, about how firms go from innovation to rent seeking to outright vampiric badness. And he had four kinds of firms. So anyway, Burton Klein, dynamic economics, it's an oldie, but underappreciated and still very much relevant. I wonder if I should give Elon Musk a pointer. Brandon, thank you so much for the time. We're going to let you run. Where can listeners find you on the internet and brave on the internet? So brave.com.

1:39:07five letter English word domain name. We got it in 2015. We got it from the nuclear Polka combo, Brave Combo. It's a Texas band, the Friends of Mac Raining, Simpson's creator. He's put them in Simpson's season 17. And they were honest musicians and we gave them BraveCombo.com and paid a reasonable price. So Brave.com is it. I'm on Twitter as Brendan Ike. I'm on Reddit as Brendan Ike Brave.

1:39:30I'm easy to find. Brennanike.com. I haven't updated in a while. That was a historic blog post, but some of them were still relevant to do with Trust with Verify, also WebAssembly, JavaScript stuff. And on Twitter, the Brave handle is called at Brave. It seems to be search bands for some reason, I'm not sure why that is. We have attention token. That's another Twitter handle. We have Brave support if you need support. You can always tag me, Brendan. Awesome. Brendan, thank you so much. Thanks. It's fun.

1:40:00David, that was super fun. Brandon is such an internet legend. Oh my gosh. What a man for all seasons, literally. Yep. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig. Yes. There is a reason why the best product teams rely on Statsig, whether they are iterating on their core product features or shipping AI powered experiences at scale. Yep. In the crazy speed of today's AI world. Shipping fast is just table stakes now. It's basically trivial to build and deploy your app constantly. The real advantage is how quickly you learn.

1:40:41what changes actually created value for customers, and how fast you can use that signal to guide what you shipped next. This is where Statsig comes in. It brings experimentation, feature flags, and product analytics into one unified system so teams can ship safely, test rigorously, and directly link what they changed to how users actually behaved.

1:41:00So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences or just evolving your existing core product, go to statsig.com slash acquired to get started. Well, listeners, thanks for being on the journey with us another fun episode. As always, if you want to check out more and you're like, I need more acquired right now and there's not any new episodes yet, and you want to go deeper, go check out the LP show search acquired LP show wherever you get your podcasts.

1:41:27Come discuss this and hang out in the slack acquired.fm slash slack. We got a job board. You're looking for your next thing. You're part of the great resignation. Maybe you're thinking about being part of the great resignation. And you are thinking about, you know, you want to, you want to float your name for something, but you don't know what that something is yet. We also have that feature on the job board. So go to acquired.fm slash jobs. Find your next dream job. And we will see you next time. See you next time.

1:41:55Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now?