Arc Had Millions of Users. Why They Left It Behind for Dia. | Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal, cofounders of The Browser Company

If you had millions of people using a product you spent years building, would you kill it? That’s exactly what The Browser Company did with Arc. The internet backlash was intense, but cofounders Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal saw that AI was about to make the web something you talk to, not just click into. The best home for that assistant was the thing that's already between you and the internet—the browser. And they realized they couldn’t just duct-tape it on to Arc. One year of heads-down work later, the team launched Dia in beta, and people are raving about it. Dia is a sleek, fast, browser with AI at its core—it gets better with every tab you open, becoming more and more helpful with time. And even though it’s still early, Josh and Hursh’s big pivot looks like one for the ages. This week on AI & I, Josh and Hursh joined me for their first full-length podcast about their pivot from Arc to Dia. We talk through their decision-making process, the very public backlash the company faced, and the grit it took to stay the course. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free. To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper Sponsor: Attio: Go to⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://attio.com/every⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and get 15% off your first year on your AI-powered CRM. Timestamps: Introduction: 00:01:13 The story of how Dan might’ve been the CEO of The Browser Company: 00:02:47 The moment Josh and Hursh knew they had to walk away from Arc: 00:09:42 How to handle the weight of the unknown in a pivot: 00:17:08 The prototype-driven culture that kept The Browser Company alive: 00:23:31 Why having a product loved by millions of users isn’t enough :00:25:42 The architectural decisions underlying how Dia was built: 00:33:29 How Dia almost shipped without its best feature: 00:47:12 The best ways people are using Dia in the wild: 00:51:18 How Josh and Hursh think about competing with incumbents: 01:07:55 How romanticism informs the product decisions behind Dia: 01:17:04 Links to resources mentioned in the episode: Hursh Agrawal: @hursh Josh Miller: @joshm More about Dia: https://www.diabrowser.com/ Writer and investor M. G. Siegler’s essay about the AI browser wars: https://spyglass.org/ai-browser-wars/

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're catching us two weeks after we really released Dia to this private beta. I don't think the first two weeks could have gone better. We feel so, so proud. And so I think I felt an adrenaline release. And I think it's safe to say, last year sucked. Like, it, it really did. We were running a company with 70 people, millions of people using the product every month. Now, we're starting over. Oh, cool. What are we doing? We don't really know, but it'll be great.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  We had this realization that all of software needs to be rewritten for this new world because primary interfaces we have with computers are going to change.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  What feels like your computer in five or 10 years is actually going to be this layer that sits across all of your devices. This is the internet computer, but you're not turning to it for the tabs. You're not even turning to it for the desktop part. What you're turning to it for is this personal intelligence layer that is a wild invention in humanity that's going to help you do all sorts of things. And it's going to be miraculous. But don't forget, the browser is just the enabling technology underneath.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  Josh Hirsch, welcome to the show.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Good to be here.

• 1:17Speaker 00

  Thanks for having us. Of course. So good to have you. So for people who don't know, you are the co-founders of The Browser Company. You are the makers of ARC and now Dia. And I'm psyched to talk to you about Dia, talk to you about the journey to get there.

• 1:35Speaker 00

  As, as you can see, if you're watching the show, me and Hirsch are together. We're, we're in upstate New York in a little, in a little cabin. We've been friends for a long time. And I think one thing that people should know coming into this is like, we have been sort of like on parallel journeys together as you've started The Browser Company. I started every, around the same time as you guys started. And we've been close for a long time. So it's, it's been really fun to get to watch the journey from afar. And yeah, I'm just really excited to get to talk to you about it. So thanks for coming on. Well, I'm just going to say for the record, I'm not there because I didn't get the invite. So we're not that close, Dan, I'll say.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  I'm kidding. No, it's awesome to be here.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  I didn't organize. You can, you gotta blame Paulina, Hirsch's wife.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, honored to be here. I'm excited to do this. We've listened to so many of your podcasts and obviously you have so much history.

• 2:30Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. Yeah. So another, a couple of other disclaimers. I'm a small investor in the browser company.

• 2:39Dan Shipper?

  So people should know that. I also spoke at your wedding. So we'll put up a little picture of me speaking there.

• 2:47Dan Shipper?

  And another like really interesting little bit of history that that is fun for me to remember now is I actually like there was a point at which I was considering, or you guys were considering me to be the CEO of the browser company, which is crazy to think about that now. Because you know, you'd come up with the idea to incubate. At the time, it was superhuman for browsers was the pitch, as I remember. And I was working on super organizers, which is a little newsletter, which would become every.

• 3:19Speaker 00

  Oh, did that turn into every? I didn't even realize that was, wow.

• 3:22Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. And so there was, there was a moment in time where, where we were, we were discussing working together on this. So it's really fun to come full circle five and a half years later and be like, wow, I'm, we're both, we're all so much older. We have so much, so many more wrinkles. I have, I have a big beard. I think I was pretty clean shaven when, when, when we were doing that. So yeah, that was a crazy moment.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  Wow. So super organizers is like your arc.

• 3:52Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

• 3:53Speaker 00

  Well, I hope Dia goes as well as every. I'm like, fingers crossed. Like I'm into it.

• 4:00Dan Shipper?

  Thank you. I think we all have a lot to learn from each other. So I think the first thing I want to talk about is I watched this pivot from Arc to Dia. I think we were in Thailand together when you were first starting to get like really psyched about AI. And I just watched Hursh's eyes, just like, he had this like spark. It was like a sparkle. It was like, oh my God, this is crazy. And I was like, yes. I was like the little devil on his shoulder being like, yes, you get it.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  Oh, it's your fault, Dan. I always wondered where that came from.

• 4:39Dan Shipper?

  And what's been really interesting to me to see is I've obviously been watching this journey from Arc to Dia and watched the decision happen to be like, okay, we're not going to do Arc anymore. And then watched the public reaction, which was so negative. I think people just loved Arc so much. And then watched you guys have to like bear that while you were building Dia. And I just want to know, like, what was that like?

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Honestly, it was a little unexpected. I don't think we had predicted the reaction that we got when we announced that, especially because we had been in this headspace for quite a while. You know, we'd been trying to all throughout 2023 or so, trying to figure out, how do we get from early adopters to the mass market with Arc? And Arc had this problem, which we call the novelty tax, where there's so much new stuff in it, which really attracted early adopters, but made a lot of the mass market sort of more hesitant to try Arc, because it just took a lot to get to learn and use. And so, I mean, Josh can probably say more. We tried so many things to figure out, okay, how do we make Arc sort of approachable to the mass market? And then simultaneously, AI had been taking off.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  And I think Josh has this video last year of Act Two. We had this realization that actually browsers are going to change pretty dramatically and how we use computers are going to change pretty dramatically from a user computer interface point of view. You know, we're going to talk to our computers, they're going to do stuff, because this new Play-Doh allows you to like, speak in English, and they can use tools. And suddenly, computers are something completely different. And so, we went through our own evolution over many months to be like, how do we nudge Arc in that direction? And for a while, we called it Arc 2.0. And we were like, okay, how do we evolve it? And we just ran into a lot of problems internally, too, where we loved Arc so much, that we were hesitant to change it. You know, like, the internal discussions about like, what do we do with the sidebar?

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Was like, at the wrong level, you know, when you have this new Play-Doh. We really had to start from scratch. And so, maybe, you know, I'd be curious for your take, Josh, actually, on like, how do you feel about the external messaging? Because for us, it was over such a long period of time. And so, obvious, you know, that we had to, okay, we have to start from scratch if we're going to build this thing from the ground up, to use AI and to be accessible to the mass market. But I think it was probably a shock to the external.

• 7:05Speaker 00

  Folks, oh my God, we're building a whole new browser. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think the thing I would say is you're catching us two weeks after we really released Dia to this private beta. And I'd say, in terms of Hursh and my hopes and expectations, I don't think the first two weeks could have gone better. We feel so, so proud. And so I think I felt an adrenaline release. And I think it's safe to say, last year sucked. Like, it, it really did. And I think it's one of those things, like many things that I, I think are most fulfilling and rewarding in life, that if you knew what you knew, now would you have done it? And yet, at the same time, in retrospect, it so obviously was the right call.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  But I think a thing for especially listeners to know, and you alluded to this, Hursh and I, I've never made software really without Hursh. I met Hursh when I was 20 years old. We both left university, barely knowing each other, to start a company together. I think flash forward over a decade now. If I'm being really honest, I think it felt so obvious to me and Hursh. Intellectually, emotionally. The thing I think we both underappreciated was it's not just me and him anymore. Right. And I mean, I mean, we knew that, but at every moment that Hursh and I looked across a proverbial table and said, hey, should we, should we do this? Should we make this thing? It was me and him. Right?

• 8:32Speaker 00

  And we, we, we share value, like we, it's just a different relationship. We were running a company with 70 people, you know, millions of people using the product every month. And we definitely, I think, underappreciated the public reaction. I mean, when we started this company, Dan, I, you know, when we, when we were trying to recruit you to be the CEO, one of the questions, like, how do you get anyone to care about their desktop web browser? In fact, I've never even thought about my desktop web browser before, let alone have an opinion on it, was the, the, what we saw the most. So I think we were very surprised by the reaction, for sure, and would have done some things differently. But then maybe more importantly, definitely more importantly is our team. Showing up to a company where at that point in the company's evolution, people

• 9:15Speaker 00

  Came because they loved ARC themselves. They joined for ARC more than the browser company. Like, hey, that thing we poured our hearts into for years, nope, we're starting over. Oh, cool. What are we doing? We don't really know, but it'll be great. We're just gonna go that way, right? Sounds like a great plan, right? You know, like, so, oh, it was a, it was a winding journey, but very proud at this point.

• 9:37Dan Shipper?

  That's, yeah, okay, this is, there's a lot here. I really want to go into, tell me about the initial moment where you guys were coming to the decision of like, oh, wow, there's something totally new here. And not only is ARC maybe not working in the way that we want it to, but like, there's something new that we need to go play with, that we can't even really describe what it is. Like, what, what was that like? Like, how did that whole thing come together?

• 10:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, and one of the things I think I want to be more forthright about here, I don't think we've really said publicly before is, I almost think blaming ARC is a scapegoat, right? If, if, if really Hirsch originally, and then myself, didn't get so inspired by this new material that are LLMs, we would not have pivoted ARC to something else. You know, it wasn't, it's, it's easy in retrospect, but oh, it's growing literally the Nalva detox. I a hundred percent agree with Hirsch that that is true. But our first instinct was actually just to make ARC better. So I, I really think the origin story here was that like, you can't stop thinking about it. You're staying up till 3 a.m. Every bone in your body is just like, this is why we got into software.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  But I, I really got to credit Hirsch. I think I have this part of me that is very anti-Silicon Valley hype, which honestly, for people that follow me on Twitter or something, they're probably like, I think of you as like a hypey dude. And, and yeah, let's have a therapy session later about that. But for me, I just, the crypto wave was the one that came before. And just for me, it just, it felt icky to me, even, even though I agreed with the idealism. So here comes around AI, and my knee jerk reaction is like, this is a bunch of hot air. But really, like, when I think about, I didn't, not thinking about this interview before we came in, you know, when you just said that with the origin story, I think of a conversation I had with Hirsch in San Francisco, that to me was the like, oh, we gotta do this thing.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  So, I mean, Hirsch, when you, you really were first to see this world that was coming and, and feel it in your bones. Like, do you remember even for you where it came from and when?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  He's giving me a lot of credit. I think it was probably, I came at it from my own perspective. I think realizing, and part of it was excitement about the Play-Doh, but part of it also was the realization that like, if, if we don't go this route, I think, you know, we're going to get obviated. You know, all of software needs to be rewritten for this new world because again, the, the primary interfaces we have with computers are going to change. But I think a lot of it also came from your experimentation with Arc Search, right? And like actually playing with LMS and realizing, oh, we can build something cool here. This is Play-Doh we're really good at using.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  Arc was extremely popular amongst the kind of limited corner of the world that knew about it. And the number one request for Arc was, I need a mobile app. But the browser is very different on mobile than it is on desktop. So we said, okay, let's just build a companion app. You can have your spaces and your tabs on your phone. And I'll, you know, in the backdrop of launching this kind of Arc mobile app is when all these kind of AI tools started popping up. And there is much as we wanted, or I wanted to resist the hype. I'm an intellectually curious guy that loves new technology. And so there was some part of me, especially driven by Hirsch, that was like,

• 12:51Speaker 00

  okay, but if you really just tried to make the best kind of AI browser experience you could, what would it look like? But it would have been a huge distraction for the team to do that on desktop. So I, we actually hired a contractor externally. I was living in Paris at the time and kind of hired him to this Skunk Works project. It was like, hey, just for funsies, it's not going to be a big deal. What if we build a mobile browser that only does one thing? Again, we had a little bit of the like PTSD from Arc already, but it only does one thing really well. And it has something to do with AI at its core, just to prototype and learn. And so the idea was what if in this mobile browser,

• 13:35Speaker 00

  instead of pulling back links, we made you the perfect webpage. So instead of typing in a query and trying to find the right link from the world wide web that is the closest approximation to what you're asking for, but not exactly what you're asking for. Let's understand the intent of your query and just make a webpage on the fly for that thing. Just a very simple idea. And it was so not a big deal or meant to be a big deal. I tweeted it on a Sunday.

• 14:03Speaker 00

  Before boarding a flight, which for our company is not how you launch new products, and it just exploded, more than anything we've made so far. And so, you know, we had a number of takeaways from that, but one of them that really influenced Dia was what Hirsch is referencing as the novelty budget. Keep it extremely simple, extremely focused, change one thing, and have that one thing be the thing you talk about, which I realize in retrospect is like, yeah, duh, welcome to like making consumer products for real human beings, but is the antithesis of Arc, as you know, in terms of the product philosophy.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  I think Arc Search also gave us sort of a strategic realization, which is if you think about what a browser is, it has sort of a desktop browser, especially it has two components. One is it's sort of a funnel for intent. You know, the OmniBox is where you type in all your search queries, and if you have a certain intent, it goes to search and then you can go find that thing. And secondly, it's an application platform. And so you run all your web apps and it's sort of the web 1.0 and 2.0 sort of portions of what a browser does. And both, I think, Arc Search made us realize that the intent portion is going to be drastically changed by AI, because a lot of our intent is going to go to these models that get a bunch of data and then, you know, spit out the actual answer. And because AI can use tools and the browser

• 15:21Speaker 01

  has access to all your apps, it can also really support the application component. And so I think Arc Search was our first foray into realizing browsers are going to change, you know, and so we need to rethink what our strategy is because the entire ecosystem has changed. And the browser's place in that ecosystem is going to change drastically. And so that was sort of our first moment of like, oh, we got to rethink, you know, what this product is.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  And I think the bit about search is really key here that came to influence Dia's, you know, keep in mind, our kind of approach to building Arc was really as much about, you know, urban planning and interior design as software. And our recognition was you spend hours a day in this rectangle in the space, and people don't have any feelings about it? Could we change that? And so the sort of conversations we had is like, okay, can we enumerate where those minutes and hours are spent? And arguably, the core action in a browser is and was search. But up until Arc Search, we sort of said, you can't touch that. You know, we're not Google. Even though search, opening a new chat, I mean, the command T text box is the most popular text box on your desktop computer,

• 16:32Speaker 00

  according to Apple, and I'm sure Microsoft as well. But we kind of said, no, we're not a search company. We couldn't possibly do anything with that. You know, that's Google's domain. Look, even Microsoft threw tens of billions over many years and Bing sucks. So what are we going to do? So I think it also opened Pandora's box of saying, oh, wait, as Hirsch said, this is, this is the choke point for the internet. This little box routes you to places. And does that mean we can now route you to new places and new things? So that was also the big, like, eye opening moment from Arc Search, which was not the intention at all at the time we started the project.

• 17:07Dan Shipper?

  So, so take me from that moment from like, okay, you make some realizations around Arc Search to probably, okay, we're going to do Arc 2.0, but actually, maybe this is a totally new product. Like, what happened in between there?

• 17:24Speaker 00

  I've, I've never said this before. I think indecision and a lack of, you know, excellent leadership, on at least I'll say my part, in that I think Hirsch and I knew deep down in that moment, what we had to do. Whether it was from the Arc perspective of like, Arc Search feels so simple and clean and resonant with people. I mean, that was the first time we had people telling us that like, hey, I, I really don't like Arc on desktop. Sorry, I just like too much, don't get it, but I love Arc Search. So I think the combination of Hirsch and then my kind of increasing conviction that this was going to change all of software, as bombastic as that sounded, combined with the bottoms up resonance and simplicity and focus of Arc Search. Hirsch and I, I think in a heart of hearts, knew what we had to do.

• 18:07Speaker 00

  But what happened next was, that was in probably February of last year, and it was in June at a company-wide offsite that we said, we're going to build something new. But then even then, it was like, it's going to be Arc 2.0. Like, we don't even know, like TBD. So I think it probably wasn't until September-ish of last year that we made the call to say, it is a completely new product, called something completely different, with no connectivity to Arc. And, you know, I, I am so proud of actually a lot of what Hirsch and I have done over the past year or two as leaders, especially in this moment. But I'd say that period is the one that I regret the most in terms of just like, not calling a spade a spade and just like ripping the cord, you know?

• 18:49Dan Shipper?

  And to our point earlier, especially with a team that large and a team that joined post product market fit, you know, like getting the teams buy in and get aligning with everybody and figuring out what are we doing? And it took a little while.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  Dan, one thing I'll add too is like, you know, I, I love every one of my favorite publications. Not an investor, wish, wish I was an investor, but it's, it's fantastic. And one of the things that is remarkable, actually even reading your coverage is keep in mind where AI was 14 months ago, you know, it was, you know, chat GPT was, you know, long in the market and, and, and I think for most people paying attention, you could kind of pull the curve forward, but there was also a lot of technology macro risk at the time as well, which is like, are the scaling laws really going to continue? Like, are we going to figure out hallucinations? You know, even this concept of memory, which is core to what we're doing. I, I mean, I can't remember the timestamps, but I don't

• 19:44Speaker 00

  think was part of the conversation and now is like arguably the most central idea behind it. And so, yeah, it's easy in retrospect, I think, to be a little like, you know, self deprecating. And it was not obvious to everybody or anyone. And I do remember we put out a video that was like, we think AI browsers are the future. And everyone's like, what are you talking about? Like, like you're being a hype boy. What are you talking about? And, you know, literally today, there was a, you know, MG Seagull last night wrote this whole article that's like, yeah, AI browsers are definitely going to be a thing and everyone's definitely going to build them. Like, Apple's going to make one, OpenAI is going to make one. And so I don't say that's a gloat. It's actually, you know, competition that we have to wrestle with. But in the moment in which I'm like, oh, the indecision, there were so

• 20:26Speaker 00

  many reasons why you would not do what we did. So it was not that clear.

• 20:31Dan Shipper?

  I totally, I totally remember all of those things, like how, uh, if you're really using those tools every day, you're like, wow, there's something here. But if, if you weren't, you were like, this stuff is like, not good. No serious person could ever use this for their work. Um, and that has completely shifted, at least for, for a lot of people over the last like 18 months. And, um,

• 20:55Speaker 00

  I would even say six months, Dan. Like, one of the things that I remember in the moment was, again, it's almost like, it sounds like a love story or a relationship, like me and Hirsch in quiet moments together and the conversations we would have about this.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Candlelit, you know.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, like looking each other's eyes, glistening about our future intelligence or whatever.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  But keep in mind, like I, Herschel and I are both people that, you know, really care about the people in our lives outside of work and put a lot of effort into those relationships. I'm really close to my family and the people in my life in that moment were not into the idea of AI. You know, keep in mind the discourse that was, that was peak, this thing's going to ruin humanity and it's stealing artistic works and all that stuff, which I'm not saying doesn't have merit. But you go to the dinner table, you know, with my family showing a demo of this chat GPT thing that I'm staying up till 3am and just finding deep inspiration in it. And they're like, what are you talking about? And so that's just like another moment where you're like, okay, the story of Ark at that point was great. You made a great product for tech people.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  Anyone that's in the software industry loves what you did, or at least respects it. But your problem is you didn't build something fundamentally mass market and essential for everyone that uses their laptop. And so to the extent we were going to build a new product, it was only if we thought we could achieve our original mission of changing the way the average laptop person uses the internet. In a moment where the dinner table conversations with the people we deeply love and care about were often saying, you are too in the tech world, man. You're telling me that like the thing that comes after Ark is this like AI nonsense that's spitting out gibberish? So it's a real act of like introspection to say, am I, have I lost it? Have I become disconnected? Or are we, do we just see what other people don't see because of what we're doing?

• 22:44Speaker 00

  And at least for me was this constant back and forth in my own head and with Herschel, like, what is reality? I don't know.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, not only for our friends, but also employees, you know? So that was, that was tough.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, what was that like?

• 23:00Speaker 00

  When you had that company meeting and you're like, hey, this is a new product.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Do you remember, Josh? Was that at the offsite?

• 23:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I will say, since narratives get kind of added in retrospect, it really was more of a gradual evolution. So there were some key moments. There was this offsite in Montreal where we definitively said, we're at least going to try to build the second product, whether or not it's Arc 2.0 or not. There was a moment where we said it is going to be a second thing, but it was obviously more gradual. I think one of the saving graces, and I do not think we could have done this with a different company in a different moment, was that, you know, really to Hirsch's credit, we founded this company with some core values that we really live by. And one of them is assume you don't know. So we have this culture of no one has any idea what they're talking about, and we'll have no idea until we try it, right? And so that's why we have such a prototype-driven culture,

• 23:57Speaker 00

  experimental culture for better, for good and bad reasons. And so I think in general, at the browser company, if anyone says, I got this wacky idea and I'm really excited about it. I'm not, you know, let's try it. People's first reaction is like, cool, prototype it and let's talk about it after that. And so I think that was one of our saving graces is that we could just sort of frame it as what it was at the time, an inclination, a hunch. And again, I think as you built more and more things, I think it became clear to more and more people over time. And I also think we just built up a lot of trust. Right at that point, we'd been building Arc for a number of years. People loved it. People had joined the company because they loved it. And I think, you know, we had added some trust points to our bank account

• 24:42Speaker 00

  and Hirsch and I drew them down to maybe a negative balance, you know, up until Dia got further along. But, you know, credit to the team, you know, it's not like there was an organ rejection. There were people that had their own concerns and anxieties. As is normal, it was a big call that was existential for the company. But in general, we had this culture of like, all right, let's see, you know?

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, and one thing I'll add is we also built the capabilities over time. So as we were prototyping, we were getting a better sense of like both where the value is here, but also like what are the things we need to get better at? Like evals, fine tuning, you know, from a technical perspective, from a design perspective, how like, how do chat interfaces work? Our chat interface is the right mechanism, all of that. And so again, as we gradually built that capability, our confidence grew.

• 25:31Dan Shipper?

  What do you say to people? Cause I think this is probably on someone's mind if they're listening to this.

• 25:38Dan Shipper?

  And it certainly was like, it was a thing I was thinking, which is, okay, I totally understand that maybe it's not going to be like this gigantic, or it's just not going to be this gigantic mass market consumer product or whatever, but like it had millions of users. That's pretty good. And isn't like VC distorting your, like what you count as good? And aren't you kind of like killing something that so many people love? Just because it's not like billions of users and like, talk to me about that. Cause yeah, I want to understand how you think about it.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  Well, Dan, actually it relates to origin story when we asked you to be the CEO. So the origin of the browser company was I was working at a venture capital firm and I was just shocked that all of the coolest, fastest growing Silicon Valley companies that were coming across our desks were all of a sudden desktop web apps. And they're desktop web apps for work. I mean, you started a newsletter called super organizers. This was the moment of productivity software, right? And so the idea was like, let's make a enterprise browser for work. And as you said, take the superhuman, the notion, the Figma playbook and, and run it. And so, uh, Hirsch was going to be the founder and we were looking for a co-founder CEO. And the first, he's like, I'd call Danny's my best friend. He does this newsletter called super organizers. It's perfect.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  And maybe it would have been perfect. Maybe we'd be having a different podcast about how wildly profitable ARC is.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  But the reason I say that is because the reason I ended up joining the browser company CEO, in addition to really just wanting to work with Hirsch again, was this aha moment that actually the browser is arguably the most consumer piece of software in the world. Like there are very few pieces of software that your mom and your second cousin and your partner all use. Like four billion people use Chrome every month and nobody cares about it. And most people don't have like a second browser for Netflix and shopping. And so if you care about what I personally have always cared the most about, which is how we as a society broadly use technology.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  Then the motivation for me, and I think the origins of the company was to build something at that level of ambition, even if that's not the idea that we pitched to you initially. And so. That was never part of the calculation, honestly, for me and Hirsch. When we talked about like, oh, do we want to build a product with millions of people? We, I would have, we would have capitalized this company completely differently if that was the goal. We would have done so many things differently. So I think the idea of like, why wouldn't you be okay with a, you know, couple million people browser that, you know, makes decent money? It just comes back to why I personally got into software and what motivates me and Hirsch. So I will say, hopefully, you know, people have heard. There are a lot of things that were hard. There are a lot of things that were unclear.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  The why are we here? Why did we start this company? Has been consistent and unwavering from our perspective.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  I also like, again, we're sort of fixating on Arc. But the reason for this was, was not just what do we do with Arc? And how do we grow it? It was also how do we meet this moment, you know? And like, we were just so inspired by, oh my God. Like it's this platform shift is happening and what software is and can be is, can be so different and so much more capable and look very different. And, and we have a specific skillset and team that's capable of building that interface future. And so I think part of it was also just a deep inspiration for what's possible. And again, we didn't start with the idea, we would start from scratch. We started with this idea, we would evolve Arc in that direction. And then that ended up being much more difficult than we thought. And so we started with DIA.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  And I also think as Hershed, it's like, as the technology was evolving, as we were getting more familiar with it, it was getting more clear to other people, what was valuable about it and where the points of leverage were. We also started to realize that the browser layer was going to be very central.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:37Speaker 00

  You know, at first it was sort of like, wait, we don't want to be that company that's, just because we got inspired, doesn't mean you should pivot your company, right? They're inspiring things I see all the time. I'm not like, hey, let's go start like an indie film company, right? So the thing that really did it was, okay, it feels really disconnected from everything I'm doing every day. I'm spending a lot of time copying and pasting and context switching and exporting tabs as PDFs and weird stuff like that. So being able to meet people where they are. Again, the idea of memory and context, like people didn't say context was king a year ago. Maybe you did, but most people didn't.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, there you go. This is why you gotta subscribe to Ever. You would have been a year early. But you know, starting to realize that, okay, the more that you tell these models, the more useful and personal they get. And I'm spending hours a day in this thing. And then as Hursh said too, hey, we don't know anything about agents. This is sort of out of our wheelhouse at the time at which was coming up. But it seems like the big promise is they're gonna do some things and tools for you. But wait a minute, that's not useful unless they're your tools with your authentication and we have your cookies. So it was also, again, to Hursh's point of inspiration, realizing that structurally, it honestly felt like we had like, you know, been at the end of the rainbow before the rainbow came and all of a sudden like a pot of gold appeared. And so it was sort of like, all right, I feel like we should probably try to open this

• 30:57Speaker 00

  pot. Like, this feels like the thing to do, you know?

• 31:00Dan Shipper?

  Well, let's, let's talk about what you found when you opened the pot. Like, you guys made DIA. And I will say, and I think this is, this is an interesting testimonial, given my, my relationship to both of you and my relationship as an investor is like, I, I was always an ARC user, but it was never my default browser. Safari was always my default browser. And DIA is now my default browser. I switched from Safari.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  Hey.

• 31:27Dan Shipper?

  Which, like, and that's not like, I love both of you, but like, a browser is too personal for me to switch my browser because I like you.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  Clearly, Dan.

• 31:42Dan Shipper?

  So this is, this is totally not for podcast purposes or anything like that. Like, I just switched to it because I think the, and this is maybe gets to your point, one of your points about ARC is like, I used ARC for certain like heavy research tasks and for podcasting, specifically because like Riverside doesn't work in Safari. You have to use a Chromium browser, and I'd rather use ARC than Chrome. But Safari is so lightweight and fast. And ARC was never like that. And, and DIA is so fast. And I was like, this is really good. And then it has the AI stuff in it, which.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  It opens up a whole new way of using webpages for me that I really love. So it's like, it's coming, it's definitely, I think a lot of what you're saying is coming through for me.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  And it's been really cool to see it like get launched and get the reception it's gotten.

• 32:37Dan Shipper?

  This episode is brought to you by Atio, the AI native CRM built for the next era of companies. With Atio, setup takes minutes. Connect your email and calendar and it instantly builds a CRM that mirrors your business with every contact enriched and organized from the start. From there, Atio's AI goes to work. It gives you real time intelligence during calls. It prospects leads with research agents and it automates your team's most complex workflows. Industry leaders like Union Square Ventures, Flatfile and Modal are already building the future of customer relationships on Atio. Go to attio.com/evry and get 15% off your first year. That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash every. And now, back to the show.

• 33:19Dan Shipper?

  Well, Hershey, it's honestly, it's worth talking about the architectural decisions because that was a whole nother thing. We decided to just be like, why don't we do this completely differently too?

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, we really had a, so ARC was really built around how to be prototype as fast as possible. And we made some shortcuts in the architecture to enable that, which had some performance impact.

• 33:37Dan Shipper?

  Interesting.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  And so we were really optimizing for how do we prototype and build new features?

• 33:44Speaker 01

  And in a way that we can do them quickly.

• 33:46Dan Shipper?

  What was the, just quickly, what was the architectural?

• 33:49Speaker 01

  It used a kind of Redux type state driven architecture, which is a little crazy for a desktop app, but allowed us to move really quickly. Over time, it became really complex to manage, which was an issue, but also the performance was a big concern.

• 34:03Dan Shipper?

  And Redux is like the meta like React framework or way of thinking about how to pass information from a UI layer to the back to the server and all that kind of stuff.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And so, you know, we had a real choice last summer on when we're building DIA. Do we build it on same architecture or do we build something new that's really fast? And I think part of the, I mean, certainly the engineering team was really excited about an architecture that we were excited about that fixed a lot of performance problems, the DIA that ARC had. But also it was core to the strategy. You know, if the strategy was a mass market browser that people would ideally use irrespective of the AI features, then it had to be fast and it had to be, you know, just be a really, really good browser. What did you figure out about how to make something performant? Um, I honestly, a lot of it has been Swift.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Swift has this new structured concurrency mechanism that allows you to just move a lot of stuff off the main thread. So just leaning really heavily into that has been helpful. And then shout out to some of our incredible architects, Max and Adam, who built this entirely new architecture that allows us to move faster than ARC, but also deals with a lot of the performance problems. So.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  Oh, so you figured out a way to still do prototyping quickly?

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, exactly.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  And the reason I think it's relevant is one of the ways I think we got the team really on board is we sort of went to a bunch of our best, most creative people and said, hey, you got a blank page too. So, you know, this had been a topic that sees architectural challenges and latency. These have been themes we talked forever. So we just sort of went person to person and said, hey, start over. You got to do your most, be your most abundant self. Dream, come on. What are the things that you always regret? This is the moment to do like, you know, so I will say, once the ball started rolling, people were able to find their kind of corners and pockets of what we were trying to do to either fix mistakes we made with ARC

• 36:03Speaker 00

  or do that thing they always wanted to do. You know, you can, you can feel it in Dia. There are parts of it that there, I hope there's some kernels of the browser company that are consistent across it. But there are also some things where I think you can feel a group of people that said, no, we're really going to flex on this one. And we're not going to flex on this one in a way that's like ARC coded, but in a way that is what this should be right now. So I think you can feel that intentionality personally in the product relative to ARC.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  And one discussion we had when we were building this out also was, it's funny seeing M G Siegler's post now about how the eyebrows are going to take off and we're like sort of kicking off this race. But that was a discussion we had about the architecture, which is like, We have so much conviction in this route that when we launch this, if we are the first ones, we're going to kick off a race. And so how do we build an architecture from the ground up that allows us to move quickly in that race by the time we launch this? And so that was a lot of the input as well. Yeah.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  Hursh and I had a very seminal conversation, for us at least, on that San Francisco trip I mentioned. And Hursh flew out the next day before me and sent me this long, long essay, in a way that, you know, I don't get long, long essays from Hursh, you know. And one of the things that Hursh had the foresight to see in this new world was that it's not about the browser. The browser is almost incidental, right? The real opportunity, and I think the language Hursh used at the time was this truly personal assistant. I think all of us right now are grasping for what the right nouns are for the work that we're doing. But Hursh had the foresight to say, hey, it's not really about the browser part. That is necessary. But that's not what the, where the value is going to come from. That's what's going to enable the thing you're turning

• 37:44Speaker 00

  to it for. Almost like the iPhone isn't really a cellphone. I mean, it is, and you get that utility out of it, but that's not why the iPhone is so powerful. And I think in the moment, for me, I was like, seems a little far-fetched, but I hope he's right. And as time has gone on, I think his instincts were, in retrospect, absolutely correct. You know, even the original vision video we put out for ARC talked about this idea of an internet computer. And we very much shared, we have no idea what that means, but based on the trend lines in our industry, it seems absolutely certain that what feels like your computer in five or 10 years is actually going to be this layer that sits across all of your devices, of all shapes and sizes, because

• 38:28Speaker 00

  all of your apps and files are on the web now. And so I didn't really connect it at the time, but what Hursh was saying was essentially, this is the internet computer. You're going to have desktop browsers and mobile apps and all sorts of things. And on top of it is going to be this personal assistant or this intelligence for you. And it's going to benefit from the fact that it can intercept your queries on the new tab page and that it sees the docs you're writing in your browser tabs, and it remembers the things you did last week. But you're not turning to it for the tabs. You're not even turning to it for the desktop part. What you're turning to it for is this personal intelligence layer that is a wild invention in humanity that's going to help you do all sorts of things, and it's going to be miraculous. But don't forget,

• 39:09Speaker 00

  The browser is just the enabling technology underneath. It's not the main event. So you can imagine how getting in front of the browser company of New York's employees, makers of a popular web browser called Arc that helps you with tab management in novel ways, couldn't really nail that messaging in the moment. But in retrospect, I think that long email he sent me was extremely prescient regardless of if we win this race, if it's even zero sum, but it, he had the foresight of connecting it to the internet computer idea that kind of underpinned Arc.

• 39:41Dan Shipper?

  That's, that's a couple of things that I think are interesting here about like lessons that seems like you guys have learned about building the future. And, and some things that I've definitely seen at every, uh, like trying to do the same thing is, one, when GPT three was first a thing, everyone was like, this is going to be an incumbent enabling technology. Like Google and Microsoft, they're just going to like, put a chat bot, put a chat box on the, on the right side of Chrome. And like, they're going to put it in Google Docs and like, everything is just going to be like for the incumbents. And I think one of the things you were saying earlier is just getting to go to people at Arc and be, or people at the browser company and be like, you have a blank page.

• 40:21Dan Shipper?

  The, the level of creativity that you get there is so high and the level of power that you get is so high that it's actually, I think, impossible for most incumbents, unless they're starting from scratch, which is really hard to do, to just like slap AI onto this and actually build that layer that you're talking about. And another thing that I think is really interesting that I've definitely found as both a builder and a writer is,

• 40:47Dan Shipper?

  it can be really hard to pitch the future, to talk about the future in a way that anyone understands. You have to build it. You have to like prototype it. You have to like feel it and see it. And that's the only way that, that then you can talk about it in a way that people understand. And it sounds like that's, that's sort of what you found is you had this sense that you could express, but any way you expressed it, everyone was like, you're crazy. But then, once you started to actually like prototype it, that's How you found a way to talk about it in a way that people can understand.

• 41:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, and two stories actually that come to mind that are very relevant. So Hursh and I, our first company was Aqua hired by Facebook when we were, I don't know, 22 or something. And I'll never forget this all internal.

• 41:28Dan Shipper?

  RIP branch.

• 41:30Speaker 00

  RIP branch, RIP branch.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  For the real ones out there that remember.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  I will never forget this internal all hands at Facebook where Zuckerberg stood up and had this whole presentation about how in five years, everything was going to be video. Social media was going to be video and I thought he was nuts. I was like, this disconnected billionaire, does he know how slow it is to watch a video on your phone? And then like, even if you could fix the buffering issues, why would you pick a tiny little screen in your pocket? Like, what is he thinking? And in retrospect, that proclamation and honestly, others that he made, even if he didn't capitalize on it. He was right. You know, I remember five years later, it's like, yep, TikTok's definitely a thing.

• 42:19Speaker 00

  And so I think part of what Hursh and I took from that experience in different ways and similar experiences, like, hey, if you're going to start a company, one of the, you mentioned branch, me and Hursh's first company. The origin story was a hackathon prototype. And my takeaway from that and that experience was like, if you start a company based on a prototype, you don't have a kind of fundamental internal guidepost when inevitably your prototype is going to fail. And so the intention, the browser company inspired by our experience with branch, observations of Zuckerberg at Facebook was, don't pretend like you have all the answers, but even just directionally, are you headed, you're in LA, you're going on a road trip, you're going to New York or Miami? You may not know how you're going to get there and you may hate Miami and Miami might be not be as cool as you think, but pick a destination

• 43:04Speaker 00

  that is five, 10 years out and run towards it. And so the internet computer idea was that for us. And was pretty central, I think, to our ability then with DIA as well to to kind of just go for it.

• 43:18Dan Shipper?

  What I think is interesting too about that is just to, just to push on it a little bit because I think there's a thing that if you're a builder listening to this, you might take away that I don't know is actually what you actually mean. Is that you can see the future in front of you and you're just going to go figure out how to build it. And yeah, you don't know the route, but like you know, you're going to San Francisco or you know, you're going to New York or whatever. But I think what's interesting about. The internet computer idea is what the internet computer meant changed.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:49Dan Shipper?

  And so you're you're sort of you have this broad sense that there is going to be a different way of interacting with computers. And that you wanted to build that. But what you thought that was going to be is actually very different than the thing that you ended up building. Because you had no idea that AI was going to be such a thing when when you started five and a half years ago. And I think that's really interesting, too. And that's definitely been consistent with my feeling about every. You know, like when we were when we were talking about super organizers. I was like, I want to build this newsletter and then I'm going to like launch products to the newsletter. We're doing the same thing now, but it looks so different.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:32Dan Shipper?

  And and why it works is so different because of AI. And I think that's a really interesting thing is to watch that vision unfold and fill in the the details of what that actually means as the world evolves and your product evolves and you learn new things.

• 44:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that that that point applies to that video story that I told you where at the moment Zuckerberg was saying, you're going to share the same types of personal vulnerable updates that you do today in video now. And while there's some of that, I remember I the the moment I made the connection back to what Zuckerberg said of the all hands and even realized that video had become a thing was I had the opportunity to meet Evan Spiegel from Snapchat. I think it was like 2019. And I was like, I got to ask him one question. So my question for him was like, what's one thing that's really inspiring you right now?

• 45:28Speaker 00

  And he told me about this app from China or called TikTok, which again, it was pretty popular at the time, but I hadn't really come across it. And I was like, oh, why is it inspiring? He's like, it made it so anyone can be a celebrity for a day. And I remember being confused by the description, but you can kind of see that he was right and kind of capturing what was unique about TikTok. That was very different than what Zuckerberg said. That is not friends sharing intimate videos with each other in a newsfeed. And so the point of being able to say where the world is going directionally is definitely not, you know, the details. But it's still, I think, you know, really important. And it's tricky. One of the things, especially in our media cycle is, you know, we built ARC in public, but we also built it with

• 46:12Speaker 00

  prototypes and, you know, sharing everything. And so when we shared the Internet Computer video, I also remember people internally being like, man, this seems kind of like, why are we adding this branding? What exactly does it mean? But at least we had built a little bit of trust to say, for people to say like, okay, I like the things they're putting out. So I don't know, maybe they know it. At the time with DIA, it was even more of a kind of high conviction bet on where the future was going. But we did not have an audience that wanted any proclamations from us about AI. And again, ourselves sort of questioned like, you know, were we right? And so one of the interesting things about DIA was there was a larger disconnect developing it than ARC between the internal feelings and beliefs that we had and like what we

• 46:54Speaker 00

  could say publicly. And so that was also kind of an interesting part of building DIA versus, versus ARC.

• 47:02Dan Shipper?

  What made it trickier also was because we bet on the scaling laws and the curves. And so a lot of our conviction wasn't even possible last year, you know? And so.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. GPT-4O made DIA work. Like when we started working on DIA, I might get my dates slightly off, but I distinctly remember messaging our person at OpenAI and being like, this model made our thing happen.

• 47:29Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, it's crazy. Like, we've had that same thing where you're, you're working on something, you're trying to build something, it's not working, you're doing all this prompting, you're doing all this like architecting to like spring string different models together. And then we had this happen with Autopus 4 recently, like. It just worked.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:45Dan Shipper?

  And it was like, okay, we can throw out three months of work because now it's just like, it's just one shot.

• 47:49Speaker 00

  It. Yeah, I mean, I really, a really, a great example of that from Dia is, you know, to me, the core idea of Dia is this idea that it should get better with every tab you open. Just like every time you swipe a video on TikTok, it feels like it's getting to know you and it's more useful to you. That's how Dia should get feel and get better with age. And Hirsch had the foresight to know that context and memory and personalization were going to be the thing that ended up differentiating. When all of the models and intelligence commoditized or looked that way, it was going to be the thing that was the most personal. So Hirsch and a team worked on memory for nine months. And at some point, we killed the project. We just tossed it away. We're like, guess it's not going to have memory.

• 48:34Speaker 00

  And then six weeks before launch, it was like, wait a minute. I think the fact that you had this context window over here, like, well, no, no, no, let's try this approach. Let's do memory one more time. Oh, my God, that was a thing to deal with internally, that project that we just tossed away after nine months, having this high, like, top down conviction. Like, we're going to do it again, right before this big launch we've been working for for a year. And again, I don't want to say it's worked because it's too early, but like, it's looking pretty prescient again from Hirsch.

• 49:04Speaker 00

  But, but again, that was enabled by, in a span of six months, the fundamental building blocks changed enough in our understanding of how to wield them. That a thing that we, smart people banged against for nine months didn't happen. And then it happened pretty much overnight.

• 49:19Dan Shipper?

  And tossed and latency and, you know, all that stuff.

• 49:23Dan Shipper?

  Tell me about, yeah, you've gotten it out in the wild. You have this thesis that it's going to get better with every tab you open, which I love. I think that's such a clean way. That's such a Josh, like, Joshism, like, perfect. I love it.

• 49:38Speaker 00

  Means a lot coming from you.

• 49:41Dan Shipper?

  What are people using it for that has surprised your or, you know, what have you, what have you learned getting it out in the wild that you didn't know?

• 49:51Dan Shipper?

  Here's your take, Josh.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  I think I am surprised that people see what we see as quickly as they did.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  I thought this was going to be a really painful moment for us. And I prepped and Hursh and I prepped the team for that. Hey, it's going to be a somewhat tricky, brutal summer. Because DIA is so basic. Because again, keep in mind, the idea of DIA is not the browser bit. It's not the tab management. It's not the things you can see. It's all of these capabilities that Hursh and the team have built under the hood. They're like, oh, if we just like then piece them together, we can build this application platform for AI. But that wasn't what we released two weeks ago. You know, we released the building blocks under the hood, but that was pretty basic. And we thought it was useful, but we thought it was going to just get trolled.

• 50:37Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, I kept asking Hursh for access and he was like, oh, like later, like soon, soon.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  And he didn't get out for a little worth. We got absolutely trapped.

• 50:46Speaker 00

  My friends and family were so nervous about me because my style of, of friendship and working on what I do is I enthusiastically want them on early and their feedback. Admission, my wife, who I've been with for, you know, over a decade, didn't try DIA until launch.

• 51:01Dan Shipper?

  That makes me feel so much better because I was like, Hursh is just like, I don't know what's going on, but like, are we growing apart?

• 51:08Speaker 00

  And, and that shows you, I actually felt like an artist, not in terms of an artist, in terms of our, you know, quality or, but just like the nerves to put this like personal work on. So the biggest surprise is people got it right away, despite in its biggest, in its current state, in terms of what it's useful for.

• 51:25Dan Shipper?

  What do you think they get?

• 51:27Speaker 00

  I think MG's post really captures it, which is you can sort of feel the new latent possibilities underneath the surface by fusing these things together. Like really what Hursh and the team did is they broke apart the browser and they rebuilt it, put the pieces back together with models in every core part. And so you can't visually see that, but as you start using the product, like this morning, actually, I saw someone shared that they're, they'd clearly been using DIA for a couple of weeks. So people like discover like these little Easter eggs like, oh, I can do this. And what they found is when they look up songs on YouTube, they can ask it for the tab chords. So they can play it on their guitar.

• 52:09Dan Shipper?

  That's sick. I want you to use that. I actually do this all the time where I like send YouTube videos to Gemini and then have it tell me the like, the transcribe the piano. So I'm gonna have to, I'm for that.

• 52:22Speaker 00

  And so I think people finding the like, it's subtle, but it's so much more convenient and so much more powerful to do it when the one plus one equals three. The big surprise on the product side was sort of that observation taken to its extreme, which you would never put, hey, you know what you can do in DIA on our website? You can look up the tab chords for the guitar when you're watching a video on YouTube. It's so personal. It's so, the TAM of that is tiny. And a couple of weeks before launch, because our big vision for DIA is that actually it's this kind of application platform that people will build things on top of was like, we should gesture at that just a little bit, right? So let's, we have this concept of skills, which are effectively AI apps. We have a couple that are first party, but they're really basic.

• 53:05Dan Shipper?

  Just for people who are listening that that haven't used it, like what is a skill in DIA?

• 53:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, a skill in DIA is the equivalent of an, or we hope will be the equivalent of an application on an iPhone or on a, on a computer. But in this kind of AI world, what it is, is it's a, a system prompt, a model or number of models, tool use, and stringing those things together to do something for you. So someone might make a skill that is my job is to do sales and I look at leads on the internet every day. And when I see a lead, I have to look up X information about them and extract Y information and consider Z framework. And they kind of put that logic and framework and tool use into a skill to kind of aid them in what they do every day.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  But in the current version of the product that we released, the, the platform is still extremely limited. And so we weren't going to let anyone make their own because we were waiting till later this summer when we could actually expose those, the really cool building blocks, reasoning models, memory and the like. But we're like, okay, we gotta gesture at it because that's why we're here. We work this big internal memo about the app strategy. And so we expose the ability to make the most basic custom skills possible that are basically just little prompts and.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  Added a week before launch.

• 54:22Speaker 00

  It has exploded in terms of what people are doing and is now essentially the whole company is just building out the skills platform now. And the reason that that relates to the tab cord example is that one of the things we used to say with ARC was that, you know, no one cares about their browser, but they spend hours a day in it. It should feel like your home on the internet. Why do we all live in these like drab hotel rooms online where all of ours look the same, run by Google? It should feel as cozy as this background you're in right now. And you're seeing that principle play out, whether it's the first party features, like chatting with your tabs and people finding use cases that are new and very personal to them. To people be like, wait a minute,

• 55:04Speaker 00

  you're saying I can make my own one of these that like when I'm doing my workflow for my job can do exactly what I wanted to do. It's almost like the normie, and I'm saying that for myself. I'm a sociology major that does know how to code. Like, everyone's looking around and seeing Cursor and REPLIT and Lovable and these companies just ex- wow, you can make new things. And there are people like me being like, I want to make new things. And I think we're tapping into something there of like, almost like handmade software, like people wanting to make things for themselves like me that I literally had to hound Hirsch at a hackathon in New York when I was 20 and beg him to make something with me because it was the only way I could express my ideas in software was to hope that someone like Hirsch would like, want to make something with me. And so I think, I think it's

• 55:47Speaker 00

  starting to tap into that nerve. And while that observation is old, did not expect that this early in the product development, since we felt like that was like to come and to be revealed.

• 56:00Speaker 01

  This was an amazing insight by Josh, actually, that AI enables sort of a new class of software, where rather than us thinking about what a software we can create that is useful for a large TAM, instead, we can build software that allows people to make their niche software just in time, you know, whenever they need it. And so it's just a different way of thinking about what software can be, and that's because of AI.

• 56:25Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, I think there's a couple of other examples of, I mean, chat GPT is maybe a good example. Where Excel is a good example, maybe Notion, where it's not one big use case. It's not one job to be done. It's like millions of tiny little ones.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:41Dan Shipper?

  Which makes it a little bit less like a traditional, like even like SaaS product where you're like, well, we solve this particular problem for a user. And a little bit more like creating a language where you're creating building blocks. And then anyone can use the words and the language to express whatever they want and whatever situation they have. And that's like, A, a uniquely powerful type of product. And also, B, it's a uniquely challenging type of product because getting that language right and then communicating it to people. But you can speak in this language is really hard.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we're particularly excited about it. A, because we love human computer interaction problems and design problems. And B, the browser just knows so much about you.

• 57:24Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  It's such a personal piece of software. And if we're building this memory system and it's getting more and more personalized to you, it can help you with that.

• 57:31Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 57:31Speaker 00

  Dan, it's funny you say that. I'm looking at my phone because late last night Dustin, our head of design. The, the, he basically, he was so inspired by these custom skills being created. Dustin's an extremely humble, soft spoken Canadian. He doesn't do things. He turned to me a week ago. He's like, Josh, I need a week alone to prototype. I know what to do. And that sounds like something I would say. That's not something that Dustin says. So when he said that, I was like, uh, yeah, okay, cool, go. And he texted me last night about what he's been prototyping and kind of showed me. And I sent him a text back. I said, actually, I would have written it differently if I knew it was going to be a podcast. But Dustin, you're legit inventing a new programming language.

• 58:17Speaker 00

  Non-technical people like me want to feel technical. I aspire to know Swift. I don't. Give me a language to learn. And I don't mean language like complicated. Anyways, it keeps going, but. So I guess that's the surprise. The idea that AI and the power of it is when it's going to be extremely personal to you. With very minimal work was the idea of Dia. And this idea that actually the applications or agents, whatever we call them, but the tools that sit on top of the base are going to be more powerful than the base itself. That was consistent.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  The idea it's going to be skills and it's going to be really jumped to kind of the third party, not first party, and it's going to actually require this kind of new programming language thing. It's not programming like it's kind of like the internet computer. We struggle with the words, but the sensation is so obvious, which goes back to what we've said before. It's like one of those moments again, where it's like, okay, entire company, we're going that way. A hundred percent. Come on a podcast. Like, what, what is this skill? What are you talking about? Is it's like, I don't know if the listeners are like, what are they like, these guys are crazy, but like in my bones right now, it's like, that is so clearly where the world's going. So like, let's try our best to run that way.

• 59:29Dan Shipper?

  And I will say, we thought this was six or 12 months away, a while away. And because of this launch and just with the incredibly basic version we have in there and how people are using it, I think we've been inspired. I want to get down into like, I think we've, we've traced the whole, for lack of a better word, arc of, of the company. So thus far, which is like, do arc, big success, but maybe not the kind of success that you guys were looking for. Announced that you're pivoting like a year of just pretty much hell was maybe.

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  Getting punched in the face.

• 1:00:08Dan Shipper?

  Maybe a good description. And now you're like, we're, we're back, baby. We're so back.

• 1:00:14Speaker 00

  There are a lot of problems too, but yeah.

• 1:00:18Dan Shipper?

  And I just want you guys to get as real as possible with me as if there was no camera and no mic here, like the way that we would if we were just hanging out about, yeah, what that, what that has been like, like I've watched you, Hursh, like, and sitting down with you and you're like, there's like dark circles around your eyes and you're just like, oh, like, what did I do? But, but even in that moment, being very like, but I know that this is right, but also this sucks and I hate this. Um, yeah. Tell me about what has that been like? Like I've seen, I've seen a lot of the ups and downs. I've seen, I think people probably don't realize how much, for example, when you're pouring your

• 1:01:02Dan Shipper?

  life into something and everyone on Twitter and maybe people internally are like, you're making the absolute wrong decision. You're, this is awful. Like, and on the flip side, now everyone's like, this is amazing. Like what, what?

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  That all been like, uh, it's tough. I think Josh said it best. You, it really feels like you're getting punched in the face a lot. And it's this weird dichotomy because as you said, we kind of like, at every moment, we were like, no, the strategy feels correct. You know, it feels right and everything that's going on in the industry and as we are making progress, we're like making good time on it. But yeah, when your family and your friends and the outside world and your employees are, are maybe less than enthused about the direction, it's really difficult to sort of manage the two. I think there's probably two aspects to it. There's one, just the, the head game

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  of being like, okay, as founders, we have conviction here. And to credit all of, you know, so many of our employees were on board and excited as well. But like, a lot of it was just trust in us. And that dichotomy of like, are we crazy? You know, are we just like completely full of it?

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  I mean, you are, but you're right about this.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  And then there's just like the day to day tactical stuff where it just hurts a lot, you know? I think press and then managing morale, people leaving and attrition, you know, hiring becomes way more difficult. And so it just feels like you're on very hard mode during that, that transition.

• 1:02:38Speaker 00

  And you had a kid a year ago.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, and Josh had two kids, so I, it's just on no sleep. So that's been, I, you're just, yeah, it's, it's a meditative exercise to stay present. Just get through every day, I think.

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. I, I will say there is a one session I had with my coach where he was asking me something about the product strategy. Oh, no, he, he asked me how I was doing and I gave him one of these kind of excited, genuine takes on this, whatever the equivalent of the Dustin prototype was, which was earnest. We said, no, Josh, how are you doing? How do you feel? And I was like, I've been waking up every morning with a pit in my stomach. And, and he was like that, let's talk about that. And so this year professionally was by far the heaviest I felt like in my body.

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  And I think the things that get you through it are both Hursh and I have, we're really close with our partners and our families and each other. I think one of the things that Hursh and I have this dynamic is we both go through funks and highs and we both have the things that trigger us. And we've now worked together long enough where I think there are these moments where like I'm really low. And people may not know it, but Hursh, Hursh knows the telltale signs and he knows how to pull me out of it. And, and I'd like to think the same is true with him, but. And vice versa. Yeah. No, it's not fun at all. I, I, I, obviously there are things that keep you going. And I, I think for me, it has really been just trying to stay present and quiet and focused on the, on the internal.

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  There is something in there is making you get punched, that you're okay getting punched in the face. And so, but no, it was a year of constant doubt and, and ups and downs. Because I think the other thing people miss is the browser company had a Cinderella story first few years. We basically had no, I mean, didn't feel like this in the moment, but in retrospect, our biggest challenge was at one point, Arc was so popular and so taking off that we had these performance and reliability issues where it was crashing. And if, and that was like the hardest thing we had. We were sort of like this darling in terms of people in our industry raving about it. The guy who ran Chrome for 16 years came to work for us as an IC, like it was just a storybook.

• 1:04:57Speaker 00

  And so it was also after three-ish years of the experience of the browser company feeling like a, not a runaway success. We had our challenges and I'm sure you remember them, Dan, but it did sort of feel almost like our divine right that it was going to go this well. And so I think all of a sudden, having it so clearly feel different and never, almost a never ending to the, every morning there was some new thing. Someone was leaving or some competitor this or whatever.

• 1:05:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's tough. I will say it makes, part of the reason I think I feel so elated right now is not because we're out of the woodwork. And anyway, we are in the most competitive, the challenged market in the world, right? Like there's a lot is still ahead of us, but part of what it is, is this sort of vindication might be a strong word, but like, oh. We were right. So if anything, I don't think that will ever happen to me again professionally. Not that I won't have tough moments, but it's almost like taught me, my dad told me the one thing about getting older is like, you get to like build your intuition because every time something happens, you can look back and say, okay, was I right or wrong? What was I right about? What was I wrong about? And you gain that confidence. So right now, I'm not this, I'm not this confident that

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  Dee is going to be the next Chrome, but I know that what me and Hirsch felt in our bones was correct. And so I'm, I'm almost excited for in 20 years, if I ever started another company with Hirsch, that moment will be like, okay, we're going to get punched in the face, but like, don't let, don't waver. I definitely had a lot of moments of doubt internally, privately with Hirsch throughout the year that manifested in all sorts of ways. But I'm grateful for the life experience of like what it has taught me, regardless of what happens next, honestly.

• 1:06:37Dan Shipper?

  I feel you. I mean, I've had not quite the same kind of thing, but a couple of moments where the company just like almost fell apart. And it was like, I could just stop and it could just be like, things are just not working. And I was like, no, I think I'm going to keep going. And those definitely have been the, in retrospect, now that things have seemed like they're going well, like big self-trust moments where you're like, there's something inside of me that I can listen to. And that I think as a leader is really, really important. And it's only win by, unless you're delusional, you only win by like going through that like,

• 1:07:21Dan Shipper?

  oh my God, things are about to fall apart, but I'm kind of like doing it anyway. And then being like, oh, it worked.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  The doing it anyway is really feels true. You know, some days you just wake up and you have to play the part. Get through the day and yeah, you just get through it.

• 1:07:41Dan Shipper?

  I want to talk now about just like Josh, you mentioned the competitive environment. How are you guys thinking about, okay, we've got some validation. People are excited about this. It's still really early and now there's a big target on our back. Like everyone is starting to figure out, oh, the browser might be a really important layer to be competing at. I will say, if you've been reading every, I've been talking about that for a couple of years. But, uh, but if you're not reading every, uh, it feels like now people are sort of really starting to like, starting to wake up to it. Perplexity, I think, has a browser or they're at least working on one. There's rumors that a couple of the big AI labs are really paying attention to this.

• 1:08:20Dan Shipper?

  So how are you thinking about how to win as a still relatively small company compared to the big incumbents? And then compared to other startups like, yeah, how do you think about winning?

• 1:08:33Speaker 00

  On most podcasts, I'd give you the answer that I would give a VC personally. You know, it's like, okay, we think memory is going to lock you in this way and our application platform and our design. I think the truth is we had the same questions with Arc and I, we, you, we've been in this industry long enough. Like whether it's naive or enough, I just feel like we have a clarity of thought and perspective that to me, from what I've seen from other companies and heard, feels somewhat unique. I think we have a sensibility that like, we just got to run as fast as we can, but not frantically and not out of scarcity of beating competitors. But if we can stay locked into just being like, yeah, that most energetic, like this is what we believe selves.

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  Like that's the truth of how I think we're going to compete and how we've competed so far since the beginning of the company. Again, I don't want to like diminish all the thought we've put into the ways in which like, okay, if someone clones our browser pixel for pixel, what can we do? And, but I think at the end of the day, I think one of the things we're grappling with is an industry is what are the moats anymore? I think so many of the traditional moats for product, so much about this moment is questioning these dogmas that I had just taken as natural law of how our industry works and products and competition. So that, I don't know, maybe I'm feeling a little bit too hippie dippy right now, but I'm sort of just like, it's all noise. It is all noise, just like it was noise before and it's noise. It's just a distraction. Like, if anything, I regret spending so much time this

• 1:10:03Speaker 00

  past year thinking about things outside of our company, instead of just like putting our hat down and having fun with it. And I think everything that has resonated so far, we're parts of the product and the strategy, we're just like, can I curse? Like, [BLEEP] it. Like, let's just have some fun with it. If we're gonna have punch in the face, let's just go and do the thing. Let's just be unapologetic. And the places where we did that are what people can feel it. There's like a character to it. And the places that were very like, like, top down, and not even top down, just like, you know, let's, let's business, let's get ready for the HBS case study. Just like, you feel it.

• 1:10:38Dan Shipper?

  Here's how I should do this.

• 1:10:40Speaker 00

  It's just, I think, you know, or maybe that's, maybe that's a weakness as me as a leader and, but I, the answer is like, Dan, we're gonna do our thing. Like, we've been doing our thing. My learning from the last year is when we do our thing, like, at least some people resonate with it, and we've got some foresight. So, yeah, I'm excited to see the other.

• 1:11:00Dan Shipper?

  I think what you're saying is vibes is the moat. And you'll figure out the rest, which I actually love. I think that that's totally right.

• 1:11:08Speaker 00

  I mean, here's the thing that I've thought a lot about. I am a DAU. I love ChatGPT. I love that product. There are some things I would personally do differently, but like, I love that product. Remember this conversation with OpenAI like a year or two ago? Oh, now like every, you know, we got it. Google's coming in. It's like, you use those products and they feel derivative. They feel like someone said, oh, we gotta go like that. Yeah, that's the feature. Let's go do that thing too, from an intellectual perspective. But you can feel, whether or not you like it or not, you can feel this is a research lab that like decided they were gonna make their life's mission to do this a long time ago. And now their conviction is building and those intuitions building for what matters.

• 1:11:52Speaker 00

  And I'm not saying that ChatGPT is going to be the end all be all, or there won't be other things. But I think what would Sam Altman have said, you know, I'm not comparing myself to Sam Altman. But two years ago, when it's like, all right, now what? It's a simple product. It's just chat. Google has all the TPUs. And it's like, why has ChatGPT continue to be the fastest growing company of all time? What's their moat?

• 1:12:14Speaker 00

  So I don't know. Yeah.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  Bobs is definitely one. I also think there's some systemic things about our company that I am excited for in this new race. One is, I think the assume you don't know. I think we've built so much of our culture and how we build products to build entirely new things, which is very different from copying or, you know, seeing what's in the market and sort of like taking, taking inspiration perhaps. And so I'm excited that we have sort of the machinery and the muscle and the people and the inspiration to like, in this entirely new world, figure out what works. And then I think the second is taste, you know? I think like our Josh and our designers, I'm just like blown away by what they come up with on a weekly basis.

• 1:13:01Speaker 00

  I would also say for the, for the every audience, I think there is a, there are conversations we have a lot internally that I would be shocked if the perplexity team or whoever else talks about this in the context of the browser, which is when I see things from other companies in this space, and I can say this because this is where we started too. It's like, it's very engineering tech forward. Hey, there's some new computer use model and we're going to go have it do a bunch of tasks for you. And you're going to like, we're going to book that thing for you. And it's like, it's, it's, we, we started that, like, I get it. I totally get it. What I've found is I'm having this like very interesting, I was sociology major and I, and I'm sure you've seen this too, Dan, where I, I find myself talking to people not in tech.

• 1:13:43Speaker 00

  It'll be at like a party on the weekend. I'll meet someone, somehow it'll come, AI will come up, ChatGPT. And almost to a person, everyone's like, Yeah, like it's kind of weird. I think it's weird. I'm kind of feel weird talking about it. But like, I'm like asking it for advice or like, I got its help with this like health thing. And like, I don't know if it was right, but I felt better at the end of it. And there are people, there's like an emotional intelligence to these models that because of the origins of what the research labs and the sorts of people that are at the forefront right now, that are more driven, I think, by the benchmarks and the raw IQ, which again is spectacular. We're, we're really excited about going back to this home on the internet. Like, okay, if we have, we know what you do every day personally, professionally.

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  And these models are, can be subjective and think and give advice and joke. At least give the perception of it brainstorm. What are things you can do at the intersection of yes, you got it, you have a job. You don't want a browser that's your therapist. No one wants that. That's not what I'm saying. But actually, I think, okay, when you think about the tasks and the workflows that have high economic value that you get paid for, that are on your to do list. There is a component that's clicking buttons for sure. And we should click those buttons for you. But the hard part about it is not checking out. That's a minor nuisance that yes, computers should solve and are on their way to solving. The thing is, all right, I'm going upstate with my family to where you guys are at the end of August. Which town do I go to? Which one would we like? What's kid friendly?

• 1:15:06Speaker 00

  Like, we don't really want something fancy fancy, but also like, I'm kind of like, don't want to sleep in a tent, you know, for this vacation. And those kind of qualitative, subjective reasoning, in our opinion, is actually where a lot of it, like if the value is going to keep going up the stack and like Maslow's hierarchy, I guess is another way to say it. So if we're just going to assume we have this like cheap intelligence commoditized across models accessible, can click buttons, can do things for you. That's important. But where's the value going to be then? I think it can keep moving up to some of this more emotional intelligence stuff. And so I, I'd be surprised if the other AI browsers have that so central to their North Star versus the like, you're going to have these agents that are going to go do these things for you.

• 1:15:50Speaker 00

  And that, that's important, but its task is missing the forest for the trees a little bit.

• 1:15:53Dan Shipper?

  On that sort of like emotional intelligence and sociology point, I had Nash on this podcast maybe a year ago, who's your head of storytelling, who is incredible. And one of the things that I really loved about her perspective, which I assume Josh, you, you share in, in this approach is we were talking about how she, how you guys came up with like the laptop class and how you think about marketing and. It was very like, well, I was like, listening to this like Janus Joplin record and I was thinking about like that era of of music and and the social change that was happening. And so it was very kind of rooted in what are what are historical examples of of moments that are

• 1:16:35Dan Shipper?

  kind of like this, but also thinking about moments and technology and music and art as being part of a conversation and being the next turn in a conversation. One thing that I know is true about your approach is you're always taking inspiration from really diverse, weird, interesting artistic sources to help inform the product direction, how you think about things. And I'm curious what those are right now for Dia and for the features that you're thinking about building.

• 1:17:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think you're right that we've always drawn inspiration as much from places and moments outside of technology industry and today. One of the things that's interesting at the time of recording this podcast is I think just like every week, it feels like there's new breakthroughs in the AI space from a technology perspective. I feel like our own intuition and understanding is and conception of what we have in front of us is changing as well. But I'd say the things on my mind right now, I'm going on vacation next week. So what am I going to read about and think about? I had this conversation with my closest friend, my Dan Shipper, best man in my wedding, who is just, he's not in tech, but he's always been the one that was like, hey, the Snapchat thing is going to be huge. So if I ever started a VC fund, like I'm hiring this guy just to be

• 1:17:49Speaker 00

  like the mystic who's there. And he was the first one, again, not a tech industry guy, that was like, there's not a thing in my life I do, Josh, that is an important project for work or my personal life that I'm not working with AI, getting advice. I forget the word he is, advice, collaborating with. So to what I said before, that feels like the profound shift in the world that I see outside of the industry is happening. And so that sort of new relationship with technology and with this intelligence makes me want to read about, honestly, romanticism. I wish I could go back to college and like,

• 1:18:30Speaker 00

  you know, yeah, my, my, someone I work with, Abby, actually dropped a bunch of books on my desk for this vacation with little notes. They're all romanticism related and what I should, what chapters I should look at. So I'm really excited to understand how in the past, what that, when, when your relationship changed with technology and even what it was and was possible, how did society and art and culture react? And then the second thing I'm really excited to spend more time thinking about, or what are the objects or places in your life that, given the centrality, that importance, if you're doing every, every project in your personal and professional life, how do you build comfort and a sense of safety in those spaces, even when maybe there aren't as comfortable as you wish they

• 1:19:13Speaker 00

  were, or not as safe as you wish they were? How do they feel like yours? How do they, you know, this is really squishy stuff to some, but, you know, I played the percussions and drums growing up. And I remember, you know, I got a really cheap drum set. I was a kid. And at some point I was considering getting a new one. But it was like, man, the way that you wear in the snare and like, again, I know this sounds kind of like, or as a baseball player, like the mitt, I think these, those sort of references are a little overdone, honestly. So I'm excited to go like a click deeper on that. You know, I picked up Christopher Alexander as like stereotypical as it is, like I'm gonna go, I'm going back to Christopher Alexander. So to me, that, that is gonna be, whether it's us or someone else, I want

• 1:19:55Speaker 00

  a timestamp. In 24 months, I predict that the AI interface that people feel the deepest affinity and value from will be the one that they actually have the deepest kind of emotional connection to. And not in a way that they're like having with the bot or anything like that, but actually just from the perspective of this like intangible feeling. In the same way, I guess, you know, iPhone versus the Android at this point, there's not a good reason, I don't know. So anyways, you can kind of hear the answers kind of all over the place, but that's honestly how we kind of do it at the browser company.

• 1:20:29Dan Shipper?

  I think this is great. I mean, I'm very, very also into romanticism. And for people who are, who are listening and they're like romance novels, it's, the reason I like romanticism, and I think it's relevant, and I'm curious what your take is, is like, romanticism was a movement. In the 19th century, that was a response to enlightenment rationalism, basically from the 17th and 18th and 19th centuries, where physics was so successful that it sort of took over the rest of culture. And we can still sort of see that in a lot of ways, but starting with, you know, Galileo and Newton and that revolution.

• 1:21:11Dan Shipper?

  There was a push to reduce everything in our life and our experience to things that we could explain in physics, more or less. Which is still the case. And Romanticism was a 19th century movement to be like, actually, there's a lot about human experience that is more like vibes based.

• 1:21:27Speaker 00

  Intangible.

• 1:21:28Dan Shipper?

  Intangible. And that that's actually like one of the best parts of of human experience. And so there's a lot of art and and work from from that period in Europe and in the United States that are that that touches on that. And I think language models are a weirdly romantic coded technology because they are so squishy. It's the first example of software we've ever had that you can't reduce to like rules in the same way that you can regular software. And you have to work with on on vibes. And I think that's a huge shift for software and for culture generally.

• 1:22:06Speaker 00

  And and does it sound familiar? You know, if you if someone was listening to what you just described, it sort of describes the world today in a lot of ways. And it's one of the things I still feel a love hate relationship with this kind of AI industry, if you want to call it. It's extremely rational, extremely mechanical, extremely the benchmarks and the capabilities. But you know, reviewing these on every, you can you can see the sweet benchmark and then you can feel it. And there's a difference there. And then it's also, I think, very relevant in terms of the like. There's what it can like intellectually do and how powerful it is. But what do you want? I think that's what we're going to be grappling with as a society in the next five years is these sort of like almost things that sound philosophical or like you should be in university talking about them.

• 1:22:51Speaker 00

  But I think it's going to be really important again for us for the first time in a long time, like what, what do we want from this life? And I know when I've heard podcasts and people talk about that, I'm like, oh my God, I gotta turn this thing off. So hopefully people don't stop listening right now. But I will say I, I would encourage people, even if you're just going to chat GPT or D or whatever, like do a couple queries about romanticism and find and replace some of the nouns with where we are today. And to me, when Abby kind of reminded me of this, it just was, I can't unsee it. So I'm excited. I'm gonna go do like a romanticism 101 class for the next week in the mountains and, you know, sorry for everyone at our all hands on the Monday I get back. You're gonna get like a lecture about, you know, awe and magic or.

• 1:23:39Dan Shipper?

  I love it. If you, if you wanna.

• 1:23:41Speaker 00

  Maybe that's what our every essay should be about. Maybe we ran a romanticism essay.

• 1:23:44Dan Shipper?

  That would be great. I love that idea.

• 1:23:46Speaker 00

  How do we do that?

• 1:23:48Dan Shipper?

  Well, Josh Hirsch, this is amazing. Thank you so much for, for coming on and talking to us and good luck with Dia. We are, we're so back.

• 1:23:56Speaker 00

  We're back.

• 1:23:59Dan Shipper?

  Thank you for having us.

• 1:23:59Speaker 00

  We're back. Thanks for having us, Dan.

• 1:24:09Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh, folks, you absolutely positively have to smash that like button and subscribe to AI and I. Why? Because this show is the epitome of awesomeness. It's like finding a treasure chest in your backyard, but instead of gold, it's filled with pure unadulterated knowledge bombs about chat GPT. Every episode is a roller coaster of emotions, insights and laughter that will leave you on the edge of your seat craving for more. It's not just a show, it's a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship. So do yourself a favor, hit like, smash subscribe and strap in for the ride of your life. And now, without any further ado, let me just say, Dan, I'm absolutely hopelessly in love with you.