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

We sit down with perhaps the only person besides Marc Andreessen who’s had a major influence on each of the Web 1, 2 and 3 eras: Brave Browser CEO (and former Netscape + Mozilla Chief Architect) Brendan Eich. In true Acquired fashion we cover both a huge amount of both internet history AND internet future in one awesome conversation. Big thank you to Brendan for making this so special — tune in! *Links:* - Brave: https://brave.com *Carve Outs:* - Project Hail Mary: https://www.amazon.com/Project-Hail-Mary-Andy-Weir-ebook/dp/B08FHBV4ZX - Open: https://www.amazon.com/Open-Andre-Agassi-ebook/dp/B003062GEE/ - San Fransicko: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08SMFSL5M/ - Dynamic Economics: ****https://www.amazon.com/Dynamic-Economics-Burton-H-Klein/dp/0674218663 *More Acquired:* - Get email updates https://www.acquired.fm/email and vote on future episodes! - Join the Slack http://acquired.fm/slack - Check out the latest swag in the ACQ Merch Store https://www.acquired.fm/store! ‍_Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions._

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ben Gilbert?

  Dude, 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.

• 0:27Ben Gilbert?

  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 am the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

• 0:41David Rosenthal?

  And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

• 0:46Ben Gilbert?

  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 Brendan Icke, CEO of The Brave Browser, an application right at the heart of the rapidly emerging Web 3 world. It 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.

• 1:28David Rosenthal?

  So you're saying 50 million M A Us is nice, but Brendan wants this to go a lot higher.

• 1:34Ben Gilbert?

  It's crypto-nice, but it's not browser-nice.

• 1:36David Rosenthal?

  Yet, yet.

• 1:38Ben Gilbert?

  Yes, but it is rapidly growing. We had a wide-ranging conversation with Brendan that you'll hear today that bridged this old world and the new in some really fun ways. 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. It used to be that you proved that you were secure once a year on audit or a static PDF, then everyone would nod and you're done. But in an AI-first world, that doesn't hold up anymore.

• 2:08David Rosenthal?

  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. Vanta's own research found that around 70% of companies have this quote-unquote "shadow AI" running with no security review at all.

• 2:29Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 2:51David Rosenthal?

  In half, which 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.

• 3:09Ben Gilbert?

  And that's the real value. Trust 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/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. Well, if you want to hang out with us and discuss this episode, you should do that. We 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.

• 3:51Ben Gilbert?

  It is deeper, nerdier, and covers a lot of more up-and-coming topics. It includes interviews with people like Ronel Runberg, who have built Audius, Joseph Gordon-Levitt on the startup HitRecord. Who, what else did we do on 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 Icke. Brendan Icke, welcome to Acquired.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Hi, thanks for having me.

• 4:37Ben Gilbert?

  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 before that and Netscape before that. And God knows, I use plenty of JavaScript every day in all facets of my life. So my life would not be what it is without your work over the years.

• 4:55David Rosenthal?

  And of course, we are talking on Brave right now.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  That's great. Your JavaScript use keeps me in T-shirts.

• 5:01Ben Gilbert?

  Well, 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?

• 5:10Speaker 02

  So Brave is a faster browser because it blocks all 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. So if you're using Google Chrome, which kind of swept the market up to 70%, let's say, or more of 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.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  It also involves something we talked about from the beginning and we prototyped in Bitcoin. And that's the basic attention token system for users to 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's right. And good and necessary as nevertheless harmful to the current system of ad tech that publishers do depend on. So we wanted to get our users an option that wasn't privacy invading, let them

• 6:36Speaker 02

  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. We'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. And users feel it right away. They feel the clutter,

• 7:18Speaker 02

  they feel the annoyance, they feel the page load delay. Sometimes the mobile pages 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 user first platform, and therefore it's built from your browser on your device out. That's where all your data feeds originate, all of them, not just the ones Google sees through its search engine or its many trackers around the web.

• 8:03Ben Gilbert?

  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, in large part, unfortunately, to the detriment of native apps that run on a 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.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  You know, I was part of a project 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.

• 9:00David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, SSL.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  So Netscape was working on making the web safe for e-commerce and useful for the site you went to. We didn't think about the third-party problem. And that's where, even before I joined, there was a way to embed images in the browser. That was actually in Mosaic in 1993. And then in 1994, Netscape 1, there was the cookie, which let 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 were 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 gets 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.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Even though it can be an invisible script now, it used to be a one-by-one little transparent image.

• 9:52David Rosenthal?

  When did you start to realize that this was a problem?

• 9:58Speaker 02

  So I think even in 1996, some of us, Lou Montulli at Netscape did the cookie. And there was a concern that it was being used for a third-party tracker or could be used. But the genie was out of the bottle. And the thing about the web is, Marc Andreessen said this to me, even when they were doing Mosaic and there were only like 80 servers hosting content they cared about not breaking, they would just keep backwards compatibility in all the quirks of Eric Bean's HTML parser and even precursor, progenitor, HTML processors, older browsers, because the content wouldn't work properly. So this is strong evolutionary force, this gradient forcing compatibility on the web. This is something a lot of people in computer science, especially programming languages, just hate

• 10:41Speaker 02

  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. But in the 90s, we were too busy making the first party experience good and we couldn't break the web. So even though Lou Montulli wanted to do Twinkies, and somehow I think they were going to solve several problems he wanted to solve.

• 11:08Ben Gilbert?

  That's an evolution of cookies?

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Bigger, more storage. I think cookies were only 1,024 bytes or something teeny in the 90s. And I think he 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, no more, no more cookies or Twinkies or Ding Dongs. And we stayed at the cookie. And by late 90s, you can still find them in the web archive. There were sites diagramming tracking, the rise of tracking. The company that Google acquired as DoubleClick in 2008.

• 11:42Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Was operating in 99. I think it made the Dart Ad Server.

• 11:48Ben Gilbert?

  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?

• 12:12Speaker 02

  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 I 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 computers, Motorola 68000 based computer they developed. You know, repackage as a workstation, a Unix workstation, because Unix workstations were super hot. Well, guess who came by UIUC to give a talk? Jim Clark about Silicon Graphics, doing Unix workstations with VLSI 3D graphics. That was the whole company.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  And I almost right away said, I'm going to work for Jim. I interviewed at Sun. I was interested in programming languages. I interviewed on the compiler team. I wasn't experienced enough for them to hire. I liked the manager, Steve Muchnick. I met Eric Schmidt briefly. He was like director of software at the time at Sun. Then I interviewed at SGI and I signed on the bottom line and it was great. SGI was super hot. It IPOed after I joined. It for a long time had the best graphics, but that eventually got shrunk from VLSI to, you know, GPU and now a system on a chip. And by 92, it had gotten big and divisional. And I said, I've got to get some more experience doing other things. So I left. I was kind of bored. It was political and divisional.

• 13:42David Rosenthal?

  Was this before or after Jim left?

• 13:45Speaker 02

  It was before, I think, because early on, Jim realized he wasn't CEO. So Edmund Kraken 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 dilution. And so by 94, Jim was starting Netscape and paired with Marc Andreessen. And I knew about that because all my SGI friends.

• 14:07David Rosenthal?

  And SGI did the graphics for Jurassic Park, right?

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Jurassic Park. I know this. This is a Unix 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.

• 14:27Ben Gilbert?

  Okay. So how did you find your way to Netscape then?

• 14:30Speaker 02

  So a friend from SGI who'd come in from a team at IBM, Jeff Weinstein, had gone ahead of me to a company called MicroUnity. And 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.

• 15:02Ben Gilbert?

  And there's only one thing that I actually knew about micro unity coming into this. Wasn't the chief architect at micro unity, the same person as both MIPS and next with Steve Jobs?

• 15:13Speaker 02

  Craig Hanson might have been at next. Yeah. Now you remind me, Craig definitely was at MIPS. He did the floating point unit, the MIPS floating point unit. So he was the full architect at micro unity. So micro unity 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 chip. 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 bass band. 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 in 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.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  He wanted to be the new Howard Hughes in some ways. He did make a lot of money off the patents.

• 16:02Ben Gilbert?

  Okay. So did a big crew of those folks leave to go to Netscape or was that you on your own?

• 16:07Speaker 02

  Well, it was Jeff Weinstein and I jumped to Netscape within the same week. We're still young and naive. We should have made a company and sold it. We would have gotten four times the options. Just as 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 of 1995, on April 3, I think, and the 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 Netscape just went on forward speculation and forward multiples and was not profitable. But

• 16:50Speaker 02

  That was the 90s and that started it all.

• 16:53David Rosenthal?

  But there was real revenue there.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Well, so the browser was charged for in commercial settings and Netscape used the IPO to buy a bunch of server side companies and projects. The LDAP team from University of Michigan, Tim Howes and company, the Kiva App Server, a bunch of Java investments, even started building a Java jittering runtime to rival HotSpot, which Sun had bought Animorphic to build. The Netscape version was called Electrical Fire and it was being developed by this super brain from MIT, Waldemar Horwath. But Netscape couldn't pull it off and Sun was going to win with HotSpot. So I rescued Waldemar to take over JavaScript in late 97 and I went off to found Mozilla.org after I'd standardized JavaScript.

• 17:36David Rosenthal?

  So AOL comes in, they buy Netscape. All those guys you just mentioned, most of them, they go to LoudCloud. You go in the Mozilla direction.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. My CV is 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 bundling IE, which it copied and it sort of acquired pieces of through Spyglass.

• 17:57David Rosenthal?

  Which bought Mosaic.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  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 why 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 Compaq with revocation of the Windows license if Compaq shipped Netscape as the default

• 18:43Speaker 02

  browser was illegal and they got convicted for it. But it was too late to save Netscape. And yet, a few executives, Mark and Eric Hahn and others, wanted to save something through open source. Commercial open source in 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 Zawinski 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 of people and a couple of tools people who helped us build things that are now taken for granted or now standard on GitHub. And we realized there was this amazing synergy doing something

• 19:26Speaker 02

  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 was in like 96 and prefigured everything that came after in HTML and Ajax.

• 19:40David Rosenthal?

  It was pretty cool that you guys were doing this in open source, right?

• 19:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, initially Netscape was closed. When we opened it up, we threw this tar ball out there. But as we worked on these tools, it got better. We couldn't drag the Mail News team out. They'd been sort of messing up Netscape for Mail 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 was all the rage then. We called ours Zul, X U L, after Ghostbusters.

• 20:08Ben Gilbert?

  Which became the way that you would write the original browser plugins for Firefox and presumably the Mozilla browser before that.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  Yes. And the Mozilla suite 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 bought Netscape and started festooning Netscape with ICQ buttons and AIM buttons and things like that.

• 20:33Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, it's like when I go in to make a new meeting now and I'm 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.

• 20:43David Rosenthal?

  No, not what I mean.

• 20:46Ben Gilbert?

  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 from, hey, we're going to take an open source version of the browser that Microsoft illegally killed and turn into this thing that sort of breathed new life into the browser ecosystem?

• 21:12Speaker 02

  We had this idea, and Eric Khan and Mark had this idea that there would be an escape pod containing the browser code and it would somehow land on Tatooine and the message would get through and things would come back later. But no one knew how. And 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 Mozilla suite. Because like I said, the 90s had a lot of sweets. 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

• 21:52Speaker 02

  took the Netscape 2 and 3, Mail Reader and News Reader, which Jamie and Terry Weisman, 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 groupware 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? And 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

• 22:37Speaker 02

  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 I mentioned, took their place. But it didn't go well for Mozilla. It 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 in open source, especially in Linux, to work on the code and send patches or get CVS commit writes. 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 counterveil the Netscape employees, who were not all top-notch at that point. And after a year, nothing much changed. And

• 23:22Speaker 02

  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. 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, too. A lot of open source projects said, there's the code. Build it yourself.

• 23:45Ben Gilbert?

  Right. Which of course, like 99% of people who could use the software are immediately out right away because they're not gonna

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 23:52Ben Gilbert?

  Yes, compile on their local machines.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  And of course, once you build the software and 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 the 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 there was going to be curtains for the Netscape division. And through an enormous stroke of luck,

• 24:37Speaker 02

  Mitch Kapor, who founded Lotus 123 and has his own experience with Microsoft's tricks, was friends with Ted Leonis, one of the AOL executives. Ted's a very nice guy, not technical, owns the Capitals, or did. Right, right. Another sports team, I think. And they ran into each other at the very first DE conference, like Walt Mossberg, right?

• 24:56Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, wow.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  And Ted said, hey Mitch, I've got this thing, Mozilla. 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 fired undercover of a 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, the tech leadership. So You know, the Netscape management that tried to get rid of her were grinding their teeth

• 25:41Speaker 02

  at this point. They couldn't kill Mozilla, they couldn't decapitate it as the Netscape division had its head taken off annually. But when we learned AOL was going to shut down Netscape, Ted, to his credit, asked Mitch what to do. And Mitch had hired Mitchell Baker, who'd been the Mozilla manager from about eight months into the founding up till she was laid off. And that was just huge, you know, good fortune because Mitch then told Ted what to do. And in spite of some sniping by a VP at AOL, nobody liked, who really wanted to stick the knife in and twist it, Ted did the right thing and gave us 2 million over two years to spin out the Mozilla project. And I think Mitchell wanted to do it as a nonprofit. They thought there'd be some good basis for the ant. Mitch himself,

• 26:26Speaker 02

  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 in 2003 summer because Firefox had already started in 2001, if you can believe it. But it became known as Phoenix by 2002.

• 26:42David Rosenthal?

  And Firefox was completely rebuilt from the ground up, right?

• 26:46Speaker 02

  Well, it was based on the Zul 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, custom toolbars, even the native menu bar on the macOS of 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 you 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 suite unbadged of all the ICQ junk, we still had sort of too many functions, like it's a Swiss army knife. Do you really need to browse the web while you compose an email? And you had rich text editing and manage

• 27:27Speaker 02

  your address book. So we came up with a vision. Dave Hyatt and I wrote the roadmap update for Mozilla 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. And 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 carried on. And they did for a good long time. But Firefox was originally Mozilla's last browser in 2001. It was just a small pirate ship within Netscape.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  It was Blake Ross and Dave Hyatt and a few others.

• 28:16Ben Gilbert?

  Joe Hewitt, right?

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Joe Hewitt did the autocomplete satchel. He eventually did Firebug, which was awesome.

• 28:22Ben Gilbert?

  He then got hired by Facebook and built the original Facebook app.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt founded 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 and making it really sing on Windows. Because that's the other thing 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 GNOME or forgotten other ones? But they didn't care about Windows.

• 28:56Ben Gilbert?

  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 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 seize if you had the right team where there was no legitimate challenger anymore to IE and so you could make a real run at it. Is that sort of how you think about it?

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Yes. And the way you described it was almost like fractal structure because the core team was like a pirate ship kind of sassing Netscape management for their foolish bloated suite and also making great tools and things that Hewitt 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 in early I think it was early 2004 and then 0.9 especially when we could see the rocket ready to launch, the whole lead user cohort of the web was just charged up. And at that point, we'd, I'd made contact with Sergey 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

• 30:24Speaker 02

  team, the gin 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 back market share, even though Firefox already had a few million users and was growing rapidly. And this did convince some people who worked with us at the time, like Bart de Crem, to go try a commercial fork of Firefox. That was Flock. Didn't work. Raised a bunch of EC, got sold to Zynga, and then shut down in 2011.

• 30:54Ben Gilbert?

  There was other forks too. I mean, there was, I used Camino on the Mac.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  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. And Dave works for Apple. He went there in 2001, I believe. He kind of made Safari because he knew how to make the KHTML 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, that led to WebKit being forked from KHTML 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,

• 31:36Speaker 02

  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 Longhorn, or when the iPhone launched, eight months after, actually, because the initial app model for the iPhone was web apps.

• 31:56Ben Gilbert?

  The sweet solution.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  But native apps had to be there because of games being ported. And then native apps got privileges and got App Store affordances that the web didn't. And it's the same thing every 10 years or so. You just get people holding the web back. Usually, it's a monopoly power or a market power. And then the upstart comes because people still use the web. The value in the web is so great. And, you know, there's embedded web views in 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.

• 32:29David Rosenthal?

  It feels kind of similar to me in terms of narrative and market perception to silicon and to semiconductors. Like, you know, a couple of years ago, people were like, ah, semiconductor, that's so boring. Like, you know, it's not like all the innovations, you know, way, way, way up the stack from that. Well, like, actually, it turns out that semiconductors are pretty freaking important. And DSMC is like, you know, a very, very, very important company and 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, people in the world spend the majority of their days on it.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 33:30Ben Gilbert?

  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, there'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 Rockmelt that have not worked.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Rockmelt. So yeah, the Flock was doing social or web 2.0, aiming at 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 technorati web 2.0 people. So Flock failed. Rockmelt was, 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, and I haven't talked to Tim Howes about this, I think it was just aimed at trying to sell it to Zuck. Well, Zuck doesn't want a browser. He's got a browser. He's very happy with the Facebook web app

• 34:41Speaker 02

  on desktop. And then he was at that point already aiming at mobile because the iPhone was out and he wanted. Full native apps on mobile. So he was never going to buy Rockmilk. So Rockmilk failed. Dolphin did well because I think they had this, I 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 through Android. Android kind of double started that G1. What was it called? It was the first Android device.

• 35:12David Rosenthal?

  It was the T-Mobile G1.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  It was not good. I talked to Andy Rubin at Google in 2006.

• 35:17David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  But Android took a while to get anywhere near decent and I still can't use it, even though I've got many complaints about Apple.

• 35:25David Rosenthal?

  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 like people were starting to think about this.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  Everybody's doing that now. They're putting privacy perfume on without taking a shower in some cases.

• 35:42David Rosenthal?

  Oh, I love it.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  But one of the big browsers that succeeded in Asia besides Dolphin was UC Web. And UC Web 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 UC Web 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.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  I have to say, there was probably some implicit concern about the Google Search partnership. And what would be the effect on that?

• 36:33David Rosenthal?

  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.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it really was the one big trick for funding Mozilla and it was good while 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 it became 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 Maciej Stokowick and others at Apple had said, let's stop patch bombing KHTML. 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 Chrome.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  So there was a gleam in Larry Page's eyes when last I saw him, 2005, he was saying, yeah, WebKit's 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 were at that point pulling people off Firefox and that some of the people I'd worked with at AOL or at Mozilla were working on the prototype. And it took them a while to get it out. Chrome came out in September 1st, 2008. And 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 that when it crashes in a tab, it doesn't drag your whole browser down.

• 38:04Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it had everything. It had Lars Bach about VA. It had Darren Fisher, who I'd worked with at AOL. But at some point, I don't know when, I've heard this from 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 just, 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 ad exchange and data collection system with a carve out for Google Analytics. It's not clear how much Google Analytics is private anymore.

• 38:55Speaker 02

  And Chrome, if you sign into the browser, which was 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. We'll just sign you in across all the tabs and we'll track you.

• 39:22David Rosenthal?

  Oh, wow.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  If you don't like it, you can opt out in the Google account settings.

• 39:25David Rosenthal?

  Yeah, right. But nobody's going to do that.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  And I do.

• 39:28David Rosenthal?

  I mean, you'll do that, but.

• 39:30Speaker 02

  I used to do talks at conferences, ask how many people were using Chrome, how many people knew this, how many people opted out and the hands, you know, were numerous and then they started falling and then there were red faces 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 I think Sergey 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.

• 40:01David Rosenthal?

  Oops.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  Well, it changed.

• 40:03Ben Gilbert?

  Well, the definition of evil shifts depends on how large the incentives are.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. And going public also just puts a fiduciary duty to your shareholders on you that is hard to resist. And this is kind of the, you know, the animal, the blind voracious beast of capitalism. So when I was thinking about Brave, I realized not only had Mozilla become captured by its search partner and 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 on a Windows. They were kind of tying it and I would say it's gotten worse. Windows 10 and 11 have gotten even more aggressive, though they backed off on one particular thing recently where it's almost like back to the antitrust case. They're

• 40:51Speaker 02

  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 too. 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've done a little growth hacking. So, and they never got big on mobile.

• 41:15David Rosenthal?

  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?

• 41:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, people, sometimes if they're savvy, they'll remember Richelieu's epigram. I don't know if it really came from him. You know, give me six sentences from the most honest man and I'll find a way to hang him. Right? Snowden changed 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 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,

• 42:15Speaker 02

  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 Experian. We didn't know this was happening. I 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. Experian 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

• 42:58Speaker 02

  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 geo fencing. That's possible with ads and it's been done probably by malicious actors. There's spy stuff going on. People realized that this was a bigger problem than just, oh, something 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 100 servers or 1,000 servers and you won't know where it is or to what. Bad uses will be put. So meanwhile, privacy law was coming up in Europe that in its own abstract ways, sometimes without defining its terms, did use sort of common sense notions about how we interact, which Steve Jobs himself once talked to Mossberg about in

• 43:42Speaker 02

  very plain terms, which is privacy means you don't get my data unless I know I'm giving it to you for a 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 nonsense, I'm not defending them. And GDPR, like all regulations, is full of unintended consequences. What they're trying to do is say, do you consent to let 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 a first party, you're giving it data

• 44:23Speaker 02

  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

• 45:08Speaker 02

  and D I mentioned, which made us fast and efficient. And you're seeing others jump in with DuckDuckGo always had a more private sort of search front end on Bing. It's pretty much Bing still for the. Keyword search, they had mobile browsers. Now they're 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 rests itself in privacy with some justice. And now even Google's 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.

• 45:49Ben Gilbert?

  Let me ask David's question a little bit more specifically. Why is a private computing experience important to you personally?

• 45:58Speaker 02

  Yes. So I mentioned this rising consciousness of privacy, how privacy is sort of multi-sided and involves different degrees and kinds of threats. So that, those matter 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 of 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 shorn 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

• 46:43Speaker 02

  transact without giving up their privacy, while still giving authentic attribution or confirmation of, you know, ads viewed or purchases. So what matters to the marketers, if you get them in, you know, their best day is not that they 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 if they can do performance and growth marketing with pseudoscience, mostly regression, logistical regression, mostly, you know, very simple statistics to see this campaign's working, this one's not, I'm going to spend

• 47:27Speaker 02

  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 Ublock Origin on Chrome, and now they're using Brave. And I can't get to them through my usual. You know, media channels and advertising methods. So I'm going to put a little money on Brave. And that's how we built up the private ad business as 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 going to get killed by Google. I think every executive thought this at Mozilla. I'm not breaching any NDAs to say this. It was something that maybe can't be solved without really doing

• 48:09Speaker 02

  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 Hewitt as well. And it would have been a webkit based Mozilla 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. So, you know, maybe Mozilla is trapped, but I didn't want Brave to be trapped. And I certainly didn't want myself or my children to be trapped because these monopolies can last a lot longer than they should and they can really keep shearing those sheep until 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. Demonetization of YouTubers in 2015 started and it wasn't

• 48:54Speaker 02

  just, you know, over atrocious content that should be censored because otherwise you're going to just have people after you and you're going to lose viewers. It was over all sorts of things that nobody could understand and they were just losing money as YouTube creators. Like, these were just creators who were talking about their hobbies and they, they found their ad revenue going down.

• 49:11David Rosenthal?

  Oh, totally. Google changes YouTube algorithms, Facebook changes, Instagram or Facebook algorithms and like, it completely wipes the table of whole, you know, sectors of creators.

• 49:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. In the UK, there were actual regulatory cases involving this search algorithm, SEO sort of change. Matt Cuts, when he was at Google, 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, 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 in the old days of computing where you were the system administrator of your department's mini computer or your lab's mini computer, or you were your PC's 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.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  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. That's what Brave calls them. Through the power in your pocket, which is the supercomputer, you know, the micro unity, super scaler 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 eight meg RAM to 16 meg RAM. I mean, just ridiculous, small amount of memory. And yet the software was getting bloated, X Windows and motif and all this garbage. So software has not gotten better. It's in some ways gotten worse.

• 50:52Speaker 02

  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 and accumulate wealth. But if the users can fight back, they can have, let's say, other options like cryptocurrencies and tokens and smart contract systems.

• 51:18David Rosenthal?

  Well, I was gonna say, you know, maybe for the majority of people out there, when you were starting Brave, yeah, like, oh, 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?

• 51:31Speaker 02

  Wasn't our pitch. Our pitch was private, fast, you know, low battery use. And we actually, at Mobile World Congress 2019, this Green Spectre 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 research team's 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.

• 51:59David Rosenthal?

  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.

• 52:06Speaker 02

  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 a longer way for them. It isn't like we're trying to make people rich or we're doing a pump and dub. We're trying to make users get 70% of the revenue of a growing business. That if you look at ad 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?

• 52:45Ben Gilbert?

  So 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.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  Yes, though 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 ad, the image or webpage or video that's in an edge cache somewhere. We don't consider it 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. And 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-phishing 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

• 53:50Speaker 02

  will track you on the front side and take all your data even before they've decided what ad 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 ad matching.

• 54:08Ben Gilbert?

  I 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.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 54:21Ben Gilbert?

  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 on the highway?

• 54:40Speaker 02

  Yes. So we're big enough now, and 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 Latonya Sweeney said in the US, if someone's birthdate, gender, and zip code are known, they can be individually identified, re-identified. So obviously, 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 coarsely segment it so you can address those segments. And some of those keywords in the catalog express those segments. They're basically segmented identifiers. And separately, the machine learning in the browser develops

• 55:22Speaker 02

  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. So we'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 supercomputer 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

• 56:04Speaker 02

  the right decision to be a mutable environment. It's global environment. All the standard objects and the document objects are mutable. You can overwrite them. You can mock up look-alikes, 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 security 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 overwrite 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

• 56:45Speaker 02

  paid the ad revenue because the ad buyer didn't cross-check the publisher's ID 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. It misaligns the interests again. It's a conflict of interests.

• 57:09Ben Gilbert?

  All right, listeners. Now 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.

• 57:23David Rosenthal?

  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.

• 57:37Ben Gilbert?

  Exactly. 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.

• 57:47David Rosenthal?

  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.

• 58:04Ben Gilbert?

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

• 58:20David Rosenthal?

  ServiceNow already runs more than 100 billion 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.

• 58:37Ben Gilbert?

  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?

• 58:46David Rosenthal?

  So 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/acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you.

• 58:57Ben Gilbert?

  Okay, so there's a variety of value propositions here. There's privacy, there's 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 a compounding rate 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. What 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?

• 59:34Speaker 02

  Well, some of the stuff was early mistakes you make when you're a small startup. You choose to use a shortcut. We used the Electron framework when we switched from a private version based on Mozilla's 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 lion icon for 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.

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  It's got Chrome 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 chromey. And yet, I think it's worth it because that helped us get users off 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. So, we switched to a more complete Chrome fork, like a lot of browsers use. I think Vivaldi is an exception. They have a React native front end, and they've sunk the cost to stabilize the middleware.

• 1:00:58David Rosenthal?

  Which is so interesting, right? Like, if any upstart browser team and leader were going to build your own stack, it would be you.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  It takes a big team.

• 1:01:06David Rosenthal?

  And you've chosen not to.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  I have 10 people in the first seed round of Brave. What am I going to do? I knew how to do 10 people out of AOL with the Netscape Mozilla codebase because I'd worked on that codebase 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. And until we got the search deal in 2004, I couldn't really hire more people. We were burning down the $2 million from AOL. Well, similar sort of situation with founding Brave. I had to take 10 people. I had to use some existing code base.

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  And we did start with Mozilla Gecko in a multi-process sandboxed framework called Graphene that was part of Firefox OS, which I'd worked on. But 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 closed source. It was bad, but you have to have it. People, not just Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, et cetera. So what are we going to do? Well, Google's giving it out, but they're really only giving it out for Chromium-based browsers. And so we did that.

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  And there were just 100 other paper cuts or major issues like that. Gecko was never big on mobile because Mozilla was never big on mobile. We needed all the mobile web kit 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 to 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 Brave Carve-based browser, which is our maintainable version of Chromium Blink and our own front end still close to Google's. And that was very popular and all the extensions worked and we started growing faster.

• 1:03:17Speaker 02

  We've doubled for five years in a row, so, or more than doubled some years.

• 1:03:21Ben Gilbert?

  So 50 million users. That seems like the largest self-custodied crypto wallet application in the world. And that'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.

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:03:35Ben Gilbert?

  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?

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  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. It was sort of hiding itself in the OS. It was kind of creepy. What matters in browsers, and you mentioned it earlier, is sort of a... Every 10 years is a change in the garden. There's this rapid evolution and there's this sort of lead user effect. Eric von Hippel of MIT has described this, right? Lead users invented the plumbing toolkit. They were homemade by machinists, plumbers, and they became standardized and big tools companies built them.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  Lead users invented fiberglass surfboards, a lot of hot rodding like Tom Wolfe described, windsurfing, 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. They're 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, somewhat controversial, are working on crypto projects, blockchain projects. They're working on decentralization.

• 1:04:56David Rosenthal?

  That's not going to be controversial on this podcast.

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  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 needlessly ideological.

• 1:05:15David Rosenthal?

  Yes, not a controversial statement unacquired, that the most interesting founders, technologists, et cetera, are by and large focusing on Web3 and crypto right now.

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz wrote this essay about Ethereum the other year and talked about how he saw the developer, you know, 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, Avalanche's C chain is an EVM compatible, like the Unix system call table being copied into different flavors of Unix. Sort of design DNA spreads easier than code DNA because code has hard requirements, not all of which are known or tested for, but design can be copied. And in this case,

• 1:06:04Speaker 02

  even with the EVM compatibles, the code can be tested to interoperation, just like we had different NFS servers that had different code lineages interoperating and different TCP IP stacks interoperating. So I think 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 compatibles on other chains.

• 1:06:34Ben Gilbert?

  It seems like your strategy with embracing not just the blockchain, but becoming an economic player in the blockchain ecosystem has been initially, there was the basic attention token. And I don't think that those were actually deposited on chain into Ethereum wallets. Is that correct?

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  In our system, because of regulations, not just in the US, if we send an ad revenue share to some unknown self custody wallet, we're going to get in trouble, including big trouble if it's, you know, somebody named Osama bin Laden, right? So there's not just FinCen, which looks at money laundering carefully. People 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. But 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

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  noobs also think, well, I should just go on chain and then I'm anonymous. No, you're going to get reidentified through blockchain forensics, right?

• 1:07:44Ben Gilbert?

  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 de-anonymizer and be like, oh, I know who this is.

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  Right. So for our system with users getting ad revenue share and publishers then getting creators on YouTube, getting, you know, 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 a 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 would fingerprint the user. And the answer in the long run is zero knowledge proof. So our next generation ad system, which is aiming at Solana, is called Themis. It uses a black box accumulator in the browser to build up an authentic,

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

  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. By verifying it, you can believe the truth claims. And we're trying to move on-chain with that very soon with Solana, 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 of 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, 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.

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  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 there are problems if you want privacy right now and you want to comply with these regulations, which have pernicious 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's a Ponzi to, oh, my blockchain's great. And family offices and companies are into crypto. The old big tech guard aren't though. Facebook tried with Libra, now DM, but really got hurt. Politicians didn't like Facebook and it wasn't really clear why you'd want it, you know,

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  instead of another existing crypto.

• 1:10:10Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 1:10:19Speaker 02

  But you wouldn't. As a user, you could still be anonymous.

• 1:10:22Ben Gilbert?

  But it seems like now you've moved to, you first forked MetaMask 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 going to do that for a long time. So you're going to be the first browser with a native, secure, on-chain wallet, hot wallet, directly baked into the browser.

• 1:10:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:10:54Ben Gilbert?

  No way. Opera has a wallet. That's so crazy.

• 1:10:58Speaker 02

  We were worried because they came out with a self custody wallet and a DApp store in 2018. And Brave's been growing, so I had to get more people to do the wallet or I had to get my co-founder to go to lead the wallet effort. But in 2018, it wasn't going to happen. On the other 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, you know, I think Opera will always be there, kind of like Brave, even though it's now Chinese-owned, a little less trustworthy, just in Western eyes. I'm 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.

• 1:11:39Speaker 02

  Because it took 25 years to train people to use username and 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 UBI key. That'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're, you've lost. Whereas if you lose your pass, forget your password and lose your UBI 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. Getting things to be useful, getting the basic attention token to be useful,

• 1:12:23Speaker 02

  including that virtual kind you earn without KYCing because you're going to send it back to your creators who do have to KYC for these AML and OFAC 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 Solana. We agreed to make it the default for multi-chain dApps where they don't express a 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, and DuckDuckGo and others, Yandex, do search deals with browsers,

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  even if they're not the default, they'll pay for traffic.

• 1:13:09David Rosenthal?

  But even still, like a lot of people are going to get wallets for the first time. This is pretty awesome.

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  It 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 would guess. I've not got a good figure right now. Most of those users don't have a hardware private 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 Hacks fan and they were wondering why we're, you know, why the Hacks founder was feuding with us because he's kind of a nut. 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 MetaMask, right?

• 1:14:00Speaker 02

  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 going to lose it all, right?

• 1:14:06Ben Gilbert?

  Well, sure, you can recover access to the wallet, but like, 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.

• 1:14:20Speaker 02

  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 in a weaker footing than a native app by design. Then, you know, we see this all the time. If you tweet and you mention MetaMask, I joked the mask that is meta, 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 you know, go to this Google forum 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 forum and right above the fine print from Google that says, "Don't enter any personal, private data or passwords in this form," is a field saying,

• 1:15:05Speaker 02

  "Give us your 12 words, your funny words." So these fraudsters just swarm onto this.

• 1:15:10Ben Gilbert?

  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, you know, local self-custodied wallet into our thing. And I've seen this on Coinbase, but I know there are others. We 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 username that you can type in anywhere. And it's completely defeating the purpose of that as security.

• 1:15:44Speaker 02

  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. But QR codes are also used, especially in crypto, for spelling a 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 are trying to collect these things or passwords in email. There were services over the years, there still are, that will say, hey, we'll read your email for you. In fact, DuckDuckGo is building one, but I think they're keeping it clean, right? 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

• 1:16:25Speaker 02

  messages at all. And so in Brave, if you use webmail like Gmail, we block those trackers at the endpoint 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, maybe 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 the wrong address? You probably want these things to be more like a phone, something that's more useful to you in your digital life. You 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

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  Brave. We can make your built-in wallet a positive-sum game. It can collect non-pump-and-dump yield opportunities from DeFi 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 phished? Did I lose my PIN or my passwords?

• 1:17:33Ben Gilbert?

  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 tradFi ecosystem, and my 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, or 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

• 1:18:12Ben Gilbert?

  Assets, they 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

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  Be unbanked. Yeah.

• 1:18:43Ben Gilbert?

  Yes. Also be a bank. And it is a brutal thing to have to manage all this stuff right now.

• 1:18:49Speaker 02

  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. So 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, will take a lot of work to develop because design is still an art. It absolutely is an art, right? You can, the space is too large to do sort of A B testing in any credible timeframe. You have to call some shots, get some users telling you what to do, collaborate with those lead users I mentioned earlier.

• 1:19:32Speaker 02

  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 customer 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 MasterCard 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, then 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

• 1:20:17Speaker 02

  an option where you can use something like a virtual credit card that could even be topped up with crypto or draw on crypto.

• 1:20:24Ben Gilbert?

  I've got one question for you as it pertains to this decentralization versus user experience topic. Moxie Marlin Spike pointed out in his recent post that, and this is a quote, "To make these technologies usable, the space is consolidating around platforms. Again, people who will run servers for you and iterate on that functionality that emerges in Fiera, OpenSea, Coinbase, EtherScan." 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 chokepoints no matter what generation of the web we're on?

• 1:21:03Speaker 02

  So it's hard to beat 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 EtherScan or something like it. And if EtherScan has trackers or bad ad tech in it, I'm going to use Brave and block those. But it's hard to beat a server sometimes. And I agree with Moxie, right? I like Moxie a lot. I met him once at Mozilla in the old 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 number as identifier, but how will they help you find your friends without reading your address book, which is a privacy problem?

• 1:21:46Speaker 02

  And the way they did it used Chom 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 at Brave. So I agree with Moxie's essay. There's a larger toolkit from cryptography, the original crypto, which some of my cryptography friends are still mad is crypto's been an X by crypto currency. But there's a larger toolkit and it works on servers, on centralized systems as well as in decentralized systems. And decentralized systems, even Solana, there's always a trade-off. 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 the network to that server to be provisioned a certain way. So there's no free lunch and there's a larger universe

• 1:22:29Speaker 02

  in which I think blockchains and networks, peer-to-peer networks make sense. Also servers will endure. That's why I get annoyed when people think that web two, you know, oh, Braves to web two. Well, web three is not going to replace web two. 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 and torture web two, but that's far in the future. In 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 EtherScan or a proxy farm like Inferno 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

• 1:23:12Speaker 02

  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 raiding 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, you know, cryptography broadly construed. So I liked Moxie's essay quite a bit.

• 1:23:39Ben Gilbert?

  All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, Logora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work.

• 1:23:52David Rosenthal?

  Yep. 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. Logora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry?

• 1:24:08Ben Gilbert?

  So the founders did exactly what great founders do, operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done.

• 1:24:24David Rosenthal?

  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. Legora's bet 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.

• 1:24:47Ben Gilbert?

  And they recently launched Legora 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.

• 1:25:06David Rosenthal?

  And Legora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early Legora 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 100,000 lawyers on the platform from 1,200 legal teams in 50 countries. And crazily, they went from 1 million to 100 million in ARR in about 18 months.

• 1:25:37Ben Gilbert?

  Truly insane numbers. And that is the real test. Plenty 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 legora.com/acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

• 1:26:02Ben Gilbert?

  All right, well, I want to move on to our grading section here. And even though this isn't a sort of traditional acquired episode, or you've necessarily told the whole history and done our teardown analysis the way we typically do. Brendan, I am curious your take. What does A+ look like for Brave? Let's just say three years from now. In some ways, it's an epoch away. In other ways, it'll be here as soon as we know it. What does success look like for the company?

• 1:26:24Speaker 02

  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 superpower 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.

• 1:27:06Speaker 02

  I think if you get anywhere near 400 million monthly users, you have enormous clout, especially if they're lead users still, in standards. And standards matter still because a lot of businesses want to not only compete but sort of cooperate, the co-opetition model. So you get ongoing, you know, web standards still, in spite of Google's dominance and somewhat strong armed tactics, you still get standards evolution. Crypto is for each blockchain, its own set of standards, often run by a core team. But there's, as I said earlier, greater sort of de facto standardization on things like EVM compatible chains or smart contract systems or things you can do with compilers

• 1:27:45Speaker 02

  and interpreters, even if you don't have an EVM work alike in your node, in 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 you couldn't have done out of the box earlier and that would look like having a, 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 rearview 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 barrow. Google may end up that way sooner or later, but we're looking at a world where users are sovereign.

• 1:28:30Speaker 02

  That's the vision I mentioned earlier. You have these machines without being a burdened sysadmin, you should have say over them, you should have benefits from them. And it's not just economics in some, you know, money grabbing way. Economics, really, the Greek word, right, means something about.

• 1:28:47Speaker 02

  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. It is 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, you know, being demonetized

• 1:29:29Speaker 02

  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 phases 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 cryptocurrency or blockchain. And 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.

• 1:30:04Ben Gilbert?

  And that means people who have KYC'd themselves so that they can receive tokens?

• 1:30:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Or if enough people have self custody, maybe we'll hang the self custody wallets on the creator's side and you can just do an on-chain send 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, you know, direct on-chain. And I looked at it. And even with our Bitcoin prototype, it was too expensive. I talked to people like Balaji of 21.co, which Bitcoin bought. I talked to the Open Bazaar founder who'd actually DM'd 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.

• 1:30:46Speaker 02

  Which is very true and which at the time it would have been a good strategy. Just sit on it. Don't shave those Bitcoins to send something, send 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 sends is still challenging for the UX reasons we mentioned. The usability, the security, the sort of familiarity on the both the sender and the creator who receives it. But with 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.

• 1:31:26Speaker 02

  Now, like I said, if you're worried about, you know, law enforcement, which you shouldn't be if you're, unless the government's gone bad. Then blockchain forensics and exiting on a regulated exchange will still let the law enforcement do what they need to do. You 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.

• 1:32:04Ben Gilbert?

  Makes total sense. I'm sure you've thought more about the success case, but what's the failure case? What are the existential risks at this point?

• 1:32:11Speaker 02

  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 partaking 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. I think there are risks with big tech. Big tech could still misbehave and it has, still has even political power though. It's been getting beaten up more and more by both parties as time goes on, but that's a risk.

• 1:32:44David Rosenthal?

  Do you think that Facebook or Google or, or any of the others could ship a wallet in Chrome? For instance, or like actually really embrace this?

• 1:32:53Speaker 02

  I bet there's somebody at Google who's looked at this. I know Google had a wallet or 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, you know, building the, 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. The old world is back there. The ancien regime, you know, kind of corrupt, unwilling to innovate.

• 1:33:38Speaker 02

  Maybe they stole the gold, but their banks then stole it from them through compound interest.

• 1:33:42David Rosenthal?

  I love it. You're the sans culottes.

• 1:33:45Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. The Fugger family made out, the Hofsburgs 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.

• 1:33:54Ben Gilbert?

  Can you imagine the default switching from sign in with your Google account to authenticate with your in browser wallet? There's just no way.

• 1:34:03Speaker 02

  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 innovator's 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 it's competition's good. We learn from each other. There'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, other good properties.

• 1:34:43David Rosenthal?

  Who do you consider your competitors? So is it, would it be like Square Block or MetaMask?

• 1:34:49Speaker 02

  No. So, you know, we're trying to get people off of Chrome and that's a matter of getting people to see that it's easy to migrate. You can even co-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 is in kind of tied. So that's hard. Edge is somewhat privileged in Windows, which is a little hard on us. We'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. DuckDuckGo has been out there a long time and they've built up quite a reputation and brand name. You see their signs in airports.

• 1:35:33Speaker 02

  So they've done sort of a marketing first approach and gotten to a reasonable annual turnover, from what I understand. And 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 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. And so some of that will have to happen. It's just going to have to happen for marketing reasons.

• 1:36:19Ben Gilbert?

  All right. Lightning round of carve outs. David, give us your first one and you know, I'll go first and then we'll kick it to Brendan so he can think on his.

• 1:36:25David Rosenthal?

  I'm going to make it easy. My carve out 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, Andy Weir. So good. Really enjoying it so far.

• 1:36:36Ben Gilbert?

  So good. It makes me think about everything from scientific principles when I look around in the world.

• 1:36:40Speaker 02

  I don't know that book. What's it about?

• 1:36:42Ben Gilbert?

  It's Andy Weir who wrote The Martian. This is his newest novel.

• 1:36:46Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:36:47Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 1:36:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, The Martian was good. Cool.

• 1:36:56David Rosenthal?

  All right, Ben, what to get?

• 1:36:57Ben Gilbert?

  My quick one is the second book that I read on vacation, which is Open by Andre Agassi. His co-writer or ghostwriter, I don't know the right term, but it's the same Pulitzer Prize winning writer who helped Phil Knight with Shoe Dog. And it is written in that same page turning thriller style. And Andre Agassi had an unbelievable career, ups, downs. Shout out to friends of the show, Jeremy over at Tiny and David Perle, who at Capital Camp recommended the book to me, but it was just awesome. Highly recommend it.

• 1:37:29Speaker 02

  So I've not been reading enough and I owe a friend at Apple a read of his new book, which is his first novel, but I.

• 1:37:39Speaker 02

  This 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 have been, because it ain't good. I remember much better decades in San Francisco and hope come back somehow, but Mike diagnoses it 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 LibGen, you can get it. It's called Dynamic Economics by Burton Klein. You've never heard of Burton Klein? Burton Klein looked at how firms grow and how they start sometimes the skunkworks projects. He actually looked at Kelly Martin's team. He looked at the Trader's Aid at Fairchild.

• 1:38:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:38:58Ben Gilbert?

  Brendan, 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?

• 1:39:05Speaker 02

  So brave.com, five-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, Friends of Matt Groening, Simpsons creator. He's put them in Simpsons, 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 Icke. I'm on Reddit as Brendan Icke Brave. Easy to find, brendanike.com. I haven't updated in a while. That was a historic blog post, but some of them are still relevant to do with trust but verify, also WebAssembly, JavaScript stuff. And on Twitter, the Brave handle is called @Brave. It seems to be search banned for some reason. I'm not sure why that is.

• 1:39:48Speaker 02

  We have Attention Token, that's another Twitter handle. We have Brave Support if you need support. You can always tag me, Brendan Icke.

• 1:39:55Ben Gilbert?

  Awesome. Brendan, thank you so much.

• 1:39:57Speaker 02

  Thanks. It's fun.

• 1:40:00Ben Gilbert?

  David, that was super fun. Brendan is such an internet legend.

• 1:40:03David Rosenthal?

  Oh my gosh, what a man for all seasons, literally.

• 1:40:09Ben Gilbert?

  Yep.

• 1:40:10David Rosenthal?

  All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig.

• 1:40:16Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 1:40:27David Rosenthal?

  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 what changes actually created value for customers and how fast you can use that signal to guide what you ship next.

• 1:40:48Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 1:41:00David Rosenthal?

  So 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/acquired to get started.

• 1:41:11Ben Gilbert?

  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. Come discuss this and hang out in the Slack, acquired.fm/slashSlack. 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 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/jobs, find your next dream job. And we will see you next time.

• 1:41:54David Rosenthal?

  We'll see you next time.