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

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/8dd809299e393ab2

Dude.
I cannot believe that in recording this we asked the chief architect of Netscape to restart his browser to see if that fixed the problem.
Is it you, is it you, is it you
Who got the truth now?
Is it you, is it you, is it you
Me down
Another story
Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them.
I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co founder and managing director of Seattle based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.
And I'm David Rosenthal and I'm an angel investor based
In San Francisco.
And we are your hosts.
Today's episode is a mashup between one of the newest things on the internet
in the oldest things on the internet. Our guest today is Brendan Ike, CEO of The Brave Browser, an application right at the heart of the rapidly emerging web three world.
It is arguably the single largest blockchain based app with over
Fifty million monthly users.
However.
Brendan is no new kid on the block. He holds the credential of inventing JavaScript.
A source of much joy and also much pain for many of you out there. And Brendan was the chief architect of Netscape and eventually became the CEO of Mozilla, the makers of Firefox.
So you're saying fifty million
M A Us is nice, but
Brendan wants this to go a lot higher.
It's crypto nice, but it's not browser nice.
Yet. Yet.
Yes.
But it is rapidly growing.
We had a uh
wide ranging conversation with Brendan that you'll hear today that bridge this old world and the new in some really fun ways.
All right listeners.
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Yep. It's sort of obvious that AI is gonna completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. Ligora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry?
So the founders did exactly what great founders do.
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They embedded inside a massive law firm for months.
They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done.
And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review, where you drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Lagora's Bet Here is interesting, since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work.
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The early Lagora numbers essentially
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And crazily, they went from one million

In about.
Eighteen months.

truly insane numbers. And that is the real test.
Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reach for it during crunch time, or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client.
If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in house at a company,
You can learn more at Lagora.com slash acquired
And just tell'em that Ben and David sent you.
Well
If uh you want to hang out with us and discuss this episode, you should do that. We will all be there at acquired.fm slash slack.
And if you want to go deeper behind these topics especially crypto.
you should come check out the LP show. It is deeper, nerdier, and covers a lot of more up and coming topics.
It includes interviews with people like Rone Runberg, who have built Audio, Joseph Gordon Leavitt.
on the start up hit record.
Who what else did we do on the LP show recently? Uh we talked with some of Solana and FTX's earlier investors from Race Capital. That's our newest LP show episode. You can find that in any podcast player.
By searching.
acquired LP show and of course become an LP if you want to get
super early access two weeks before everyone else and uh talk with us on zoom calls every month or two.
All right, as you know, none of this is investment advice. Do your own research and now.
on to our interview with Brendan Ike.
Brendan Ike, welcome to Acquired.
Hi, thanks for having me.
Great to have you here. We've been big fans of your work for a long time.
grew up using
Firefox and
The Mozilla browser before that and Netscape before that and
God knows I use plenty of JavaScript every day in all facets of my life, so
My life would not be what it is without your work over the years.
And of course we are talking
On Brave right now.
That's great.
Your JavaScript use keeps me in T shirts.
Well we're gonna go back and tell
some of the story of what led to Brave, but I wanted to get it in your words first. What is the Brave browser?
So brave
Is
A faster browser because it
blocks all the trackers, many of which Google or its publishers or ad
Buyers depend on
And
It's based on Chrome, the Chromium open source code.
So if you were using Google Chrome, which kind of swept the market up to seventy percent, let's say or more.
Market share.
uh two point six five billion users, they say.
You should get off Chrome and you should use Brave. We tried to make something
That's easy to switch to, but that's much more protective of your privacy. And this is
an ongoing commitment on our part because it requires a lot of research and development.
It requires finding new kinds of tracking and fingerprinting that emerge. It
Also involves something we
Talked about from the beginning and we prototyped in Bitcoin and that's
The basic attention token system for
Users who choose to
Participating in
private ads that are anonymous but that pay them seventy percent of the revenue
And that let them support their creators directly through
the basic attention token and
That was something we wanted to do because we saw the privacy protection which is
I think
Every user's right.
And good and necessary.
As nevertheless.
harmful to the current
system of ad tech that publishers do depend on. So we wanted to get
our users an option that wasn't privacy invading that let them
Participate in funding
Creators.
And if you don't want the private ads, you can still fund creators out of your own wallet. We wanted that feature too. So it's kind of a three sided system, which is why we use the equilateral triangle for the bat.
Basic attention token logo.
We're trying to connect users, advertisers, and creators.
flexibly along all three legs of the triangle. Users who don't like ads can turn off the private ads. Users who want to earn from the private ads can then give it all back.
Some users just earn and keep it. That's their right to.
The problem that Brave solves is the tracking ads, the privacy invasion, because it has all sorts of bad effects I can get into.
And users feel it right away. They feel the
clutter. They feel the annoyance. They feel the
Page load delay. Sometimes the mobile pages never load.
And there's
sort of correlates of the page.
Load problem with art.
Too much battery use and too much data plan used.
by all the ad scripts and the waterfall of programmatic advertising that Daisy chains from
hidden third party to hidden third party before an ad can show up. We block all that with Brave.
But once you're in Brave, there's a whole new world of economics that's user centric. And this is the really big idea of Brave. It's a
User first platform.
And therefore it's built from your browser on your device out. That's where all your data feeds originate. All of them. The not just the ones Google sees through its search engine or its
Many
trackers around the web.
I think it was an important realization that you had when starting Brave that
All or virtually all activity.
stems from interacting between a user and a browser.
And that is because of the tremendous rise of web apps.
in large part, unfortunately, to the detriment of native apps that run on a desktop operating system, but that is enabled because of the ecosystem that was built around JavaScript.
On the other side of things.
The entire
advertising and ad tracking and digital advertising ecosystem also is built on JavaScript. And so I think there's an unbelievable arc to everything that you've built over the years in deciding to
approach this problem the way that you have now at this point in your career.
No, I was part of a project
At Netscape that
Made the browser mass market. It made it commercially safe.
Before Netscape there wasn't a way to
trust your credit card number flying across the wire.
Netscape did.
So called secure socket slayer. Yeah.
SSL.
So
Netscape was
working on making the web safe for e commerce and useful for the site you went to.
We didn't think about the third party problem and that's where
Even in
before I joined, there was a way to embed images in the browser. That was actually in Mosaic in nineteen ninety three.
And then in nineteen ninety four, Netscape One, there was the cookie, which let people associate
a bit of storage in the browser with their site.
And that applied not only to the banker or you know game site you were visiting, it also applied to every one of those images.
And that created a tracking vector because the image server could be
keeping track of you through a cookie.
Yeah.
gets bounced into the browser from each site the image is embedded in.
And that's why you still hear the term pixel used in ad tech for a tracking element, even though it can be an invisible script now. It used to be a one by one little
Transparent.
Image.
When did you start to realize
That this
was a problem.
So I think
Even in nineteen ninety six, some of us Lumontuly at Netscape did the cookie and
There was the concern that it was being used for third party tracking or could be used.
But the genie was out of the bottle. And the thing about the web is Mark Andreason said this to me, even when they were doing Mosaic and there were only like 80 servers.
hosting content they cared about not breaking, they would just keep backwards compatibility in
all the quirks of Eric being his HTML parser.
And
Even
Precursor, progenitor
HTML.
processors older browsers because the content
wouldn't work properly. So this is strong evolutionary
force this gradient forcing compatibility on the web. This is something a lot of people in computer science, especially programming languages, just
hate because it means you really can't
making compatible changes except very slowly
Or through new run times that you can download.
But
JavaScript was the only byte at the Apple for that kind of runtime. Java failed and Flash eventually failed.
But in the nineties, we were too busy making the first party experience good and we couldn't break the web. So even though Lou
Montuly wanted to do Twinkies and somehow I think they were gonna solve several problems he wanted to solve. That's an evolution of cookies? Bigger s more storage. I think cookies were only
one thousand twenty four bytes or something teeny in the nineties.
And I think he wanted to do them only for first party sites. I don't think this would have killed cookies for third party tracking. I forget the details because it
His boss said no.
No more. No more cookies or twinkies or ding dongs.
And we stayed at the cookie.
Yeah.
And by late nineties
You can still find them in the web archive. There were sites diagraming tracking
The rise of tracking. The company that
Google acquired as double click in two thousand eight. Yeah.
Was
operating in ninety nine, I think it made the Dart ad server.
Well, I want to go way back to the beginning of your career, even before Netscape, before JavaScript.
You joined Silicon Graphics.
And I think that's or SGI as it's called. And we've talked on many episodes about the unbelievable, incredible
Talent Nexus that was SGI.
Did you know when you were joining
That that was
the center of talent that would go on to do so many things.
Yes. So I was a grad student at UIUC, which was may still be top five C S school in the country.
out in the middle of Illinois and
I was not gonna do a PhD. At some point I realized that our research team had been hijacked by IBM and this was uh
A great disgrace in my view, but the professors couldn't fight back.
And we became sort of a QA team for
I DMs
Failed attempt to get a little bit
Laptop computers, Motorola sixty eight thousand based computer they developed.
Yeah, repackage as a work station, a Unix workstation, because Unix workstations were super hot.
Well guess who came by UI U C to give a talk? Jim Clark.
about Silicon Graphics, doing Unix workstations with the L S I
Three D graphics.
That was the whole company.
And
I almost right away said, I'm gonna work for Jim.
I interviewed at Sun.
Yeah.
I was interested in programming language, so I interviewed on the compiler team.
I wasn't experienced enough for them to hire I like the manager, Steve Muchnik.
I met Eric Schmidt briefly. He was like director of software at the time at Sun.
Then I interviewed SGI and I signed on the bottom line and it was great. SGI was super hot. It IPO'd after I joined it.
For a long time had
the best graphics, but
That eventually got shrunk.
from VLSI to, you know, GPU.
And now the system on a chip.
And
By ninety two it'd gotten big and divisional and I said I've got a
get some more experience doing other things. So I I left. I was kinda bored. It was
Political and divisional. Was this before or after Jim left?
It was before I think because
Early on Jim realized he wasn't CEO, so Ed McCracken was running it.
And Jim was on the board. But I think at some point Jim had trouble
As founder keeping control as usual with due to dilution.
And so by ninety four
Jim was
starting Netscape and
paired with Mark Andreessen. And I knew about that'cause all my f S Gi friends
And SGI did the graphics for
Jurassic Park, right? Jurassic Park. I know this. This is a Unix system.
And and they're not looking at a command line. They're looking at
The SGI file system visualizer.
But I got bored and I left.
And SGI got big and kind of boring.
I could see why Clark left when I heard he was doing Netscape.
Okay, so how did you find your way to Netscape then?
So a friend from SGI who'd come in from a team at IBM, Jeff Weinstein

ahead of me to a company called MicroUnity. And MicroUnity you probably haven't heard of, but it's got a lot of patents.
And it successfully litigated them.
from twenty years ago to maybe ten years ago. I forget when they ran out of steam. I think it
just made a ton of money off suing everybody. IBM
Motorola Qualcomm.
Broadcom everybody.
Because MicroUnity wanted to create a
Software programmable.
Set up box.
And there's only one thing that
I actually knew about Micro Unity coming into this. Wasn't the chief architect at Micro Unity the same person as uh
Both MIPS and Next with Steve Jobs.
Craig Hansen might have been at next. Yeah, now you remind me. Craig definitely was at MIPS. He did the floating point unit, the MIPS floating point unit. So he was
the full architect at MicroUnity
So MicroUn was like practical grad school for me because it didn't go anywhere. It was way too ambitious.
Right. It was doing a new
Chip.
New semiconductor process, new
Chip do we analog and digital on the same chip, I should say. It was doing basically everything except the radio front end that mixes down the baseband, it was doing in software.
So all this stuff has come true over time, but trying to do all at once
You just run into the multiplication principle and your odds of success go to one in a billion or ten billion.
And they could have used the Fab to make S RAMs, but I think it was too boring. I think Moose was really ambitious. He wanted to change the world. He wanted to be the new Howard Hughes in some ways. And he did make a lot of money off the patents.
Okay, so did a big crew of those folks leave to go to Netscape or was that you on your own? Well, it was Jeff Weinstein and I jumped to Netscape within the same week.
We're still young and naive. We should have made a company and sold it, we would have gotten four times the options. Just as we arrived, we saw some other teams doing that.
And they weren't as good.
But
I can't complain. I mean it was always the case when you're coming into these systems that you don't know exactly what's going on with the the company, but
I got there in April of nineteen ninety five, on April third, I think, and
The IPO was sometime in August. So, you know, it was a huge rocket and it was
To me a little bit
Scandalous'cause in the eighties s S. G. I had to have three profitable quarters before it could IPO.
Whereas Netscape just went on forward.
Speculation and forward multiples.
And it was not profitable.
But
Uh that was the nineties and that started it all.
But there was real revenue there.
Well, so the browser was charged for in commercial settings.
And
Netscape used the IPO to buy a bunch of server side
Companies and projects.
Um, the LDAP team from University of Michigan, Tim Howes and Company.
The Kiva app server, a bunch of Java investments.
Uh, even sort of building a Java
Jitting runtime.
To rival Hotspot, which Sun had bought Anamorphic to build.
the Netscape version was called Electrical Fire and
It was being developed by this super brain from MIT, Waltermore Horwat.
But that's c
Couldn't pull it off and sun was gonna win with hotspots, so
I rescued Waltimore to take over JavaScript in late ninety seven and I went off to found Mozilla.org after I'd standardized JavaScript.
So AOL comes in, they buy Netscape. All those guys you just mentioned, most of them, they go to Loud Cloud.
You go in the Mozilla direction.
Yeah.
My C V's really short and I tend to stick with things.
And the the thing was the browser was not done yet. Microsoft had simply
Killed Netscape by
Bundling I which it copied and sort of acquired pieces of through spyglass. Which bot Mosaic.
Kept iterating like it does. So the first version was not real and the second version was kind of a joke. And the third version was starting to
tell you where it could get to. And the fourth version was quite good on Windows.
Pretty much only on Windows. And
Meanwhile they were bundling it with Windows, uh ninety five and then ninety eight, and
They got convicted in the US V Microsoft case for this because
It's not illegal to acquire monopoly through
Let's say merit.
Or
A sweetheart deal with IBM to be the OS for the PC. I don't know why IBM gave Microsoft that. It's a little suspect.
But whatever. If they had the Windows monopoly.
But what they did.
in tying the browser to it and threatening compac with revocation of the Windows license if Compaq shift Netscape as the default browser.
was illegal and they got convicted for it.
But it was too late to save Netscape.
And yet a few executives, uh Mark and Eric Hahn and others, wanted to
save something through open source. Commercial open source in the form of Linux was up and Red Hat was up and running.
People were excited about
the idea of doing a commercial open source project out of
The remains of Netscape.
At least in the browser team. So Jamie Zwinski kind of
Let it
definitionally and spiritually and as the community manager and
I did the tech side.
And we had a bunch of IT of
People in uh
couple of tools people who helped us build things that are now taken for granted or now standard on GitHub.
And we realized there was this amazing synergy doing something like a dynamic language on the server to generate HTML that has JavaScript automating it.
All that stuff was super slick to do in sort of a full stack way. And this was in like ninety six, and it prefigured everything that came after in DHTML and Ajax.
It was pretty cool that you guys were
Doing this in open source, right?
Yeah, I mean initially Netscape was closed. When we opened it up, we threw this tarball out there, but as we worked on these tools, it got better.
We couldn't drag the mail.
news team out. They'd been sort of
Messing up Netscape four mail news and they they didn't like open source.
But eventually it all got rewritten and redone. We even created a portable front end stack using XML, which was all the rage then.
We call it our Zool X U L after Ghostbusters.
Which became the way that you would write the original browser plugins for Firefox and presumably the Mozilla browser before that.
Yes, and the suite was pretty much
the un Netscaped to use ungoogled.
That's an analogy. The un unnetscaped version of the code
And this actually started winning users because AOL button Netscape and started festooning Netscape with ICQ buttons and aim buttons and
And things like that.
Yeah, it's like when I go in to make a new meeting now and
I'm about to add a Zoom invite, but Google's like, Wait, wait, wait, don't you mean Google Meet? And then you're like, Nah, that's not why I'm using your tools.
No, not what I mean.
Okay, so we're now at this point where you're on your own with Mozilla, you've taken the code out of Netscape, it's being developed in the open.
Firefox at some point became
Gosh, over a quarter of the browser market share. So how did it evolve?
From
Hey, we're gonna take an open source version of the browser that Microsoft illegally killed.
and turn into this thing that sort of breathed new life into the browser ecosystem.
We had this idea and Ericahn and Mark I had this idea that there would be an escape pod
containing the browser code and it would somehow
you know, land on tattooing and and and the message would get through and and things would come back later.
But no one knew how.
And
Conventional wisdom f from nineteen ninety eight on in the valley was oh, the browser's done.
I is it forever.
Give up.
Just like today or or a couple of years ago with Chrome, right?
It goes in cycles. But we also had this
sort of boat anchor of the Mozilla suite because like I said, the the nineties had a lot of suites.
I think Netscape made a mistake in ninety six when they bought a company to go after Lotus Notes because it didn't work.
And they took the
Netscape two and three.
A mail reader, a news reader, which Jamie
And Terry Weissman, who I've mentioned, worked on and did a pretty good job on in very short time.
And they threw it away or kind of threw most of it away and did a Windows only
groupware sort of version that was late and delayed all of Netscape four.
And that really hurt. And they were the people who didn't want to do open source either.
But that did not help Netscape. It did not take down Lotus Notes.
And Mozilla had to figure out, are we doing a suite?
Do we want this albatros of ninety sweetwear?
And it took a while.
'Cause like I said, we were underfunded at first, and in fact
As AOL
Ingested.
Netscape, which at first didn't involve any
Digestive enzymes. It was like arm's length.
Uh they started wondering what they bought and why. And so
For the first two years, I think ninety nine and two thousand
the head of the Netscape division was decapitated.
And
Somebody I like, the nice guy I mentioned, took their place, but it didn't go well for Mozilla.
It meant Mozilla was considered the enemy because most of the employees initially
were the contributors and it was rare to find outside contributors.
Chris Blizzard at Red Hat was a contributor. We encourage people at uh in open source, especially in Linux, to work on the code and send
Yeah.
patches or get CVS commit rights. We tried to give those away. So a lot of the job in the early days was trying to build up the
Mostly volunteer community to countervail the Netscape employees who were not all top notch at that point.
And after a year.
Nothing much changed and Jamie said, I give up. I consider it a failure. He wrote an essay you can still find
So he quit.
But we kept going and
Even though we had the be the basis for the suite.
Because we stripped out the ICQ and aim buttons.
More so uh
got popular. We were doing
releases, binaries, because we wanted testers. That was a big change too. A lot of open source projects said
There's the code. Build it yourself.
Right. Which of course, like ninety nine percent of people who could use the software are immediately out right away because they're not gonna compile on their local machines.
And of course once you build the software and release it, you're getting people who don't know which
end of the internet is which, but they give you good feedback and there's a whole sort of
layers of the onion from your lead users or your actual hackers who do know software.
out to
Let's say web savvy but less experienced folks out to the average people who don't know
the difference between a search engine and a browser.
And so
We started growing Mozilla even before Firefox in a way that I think
kind of shamed and and threatened Netscape.
But Netscape was also
getting these annual decapitations. And so by two thousand three
We learn through our IBM friends that
There was going to be curtains for the Netscape Division.
And through a enormous stroke of luck.
Mitch Kapor, who founded Lotus One Two Three and has
His own experience with Microsoft's tricks was friends with Ted Leonsis, one of the AOL executives. Ted's very nice guy.
Not technical, owns the capitals or did it's another sports team, I think.
And they ran into each other at the very first D conference, right? Walt Mouthberg, right?
Oh wow. And Ted said, Hey Mitch, I've got this thing most of all I don't know what to do with.
And it turns out Mitch was doing something called the Open Source Application Foundation.
And he had hired
Mitchell Baker, who had been
Fired under cover of a layoff, I'll say it.
Uh in two thousand by
Netscape management because they didn't like Mozilla. It was a thorn in their side. Maybe Mitchell was. Mitchell was expensive.
So they had a layoff and suddenly Mitchell was gone and I was on the phone saying, Did you quit?
And she said no.
This was not my choice.
And yet, the next week on the Mozilla community call
There was Mitchell doing the governance leadership by the the tech leadership.
So
You know the the Netscape
management that tried to get rid of her were grinding their teeth at this point. They they couldn't
Kill Mozilla, they couldn't decapitate it.
as s you know the Netscape division had its head taken off annually. But when we learned AOL was gonna shut down Netscape, Ted, to his credit, asked Mitch what to do. And Mitch
had hired Mitchell Baker.
who'd been the Mozilla manager from about eight months into the founding.
Up till she was laid off.
And
That was just huge, you know, good fortune because
Mitch then told Ted what to do and in spite of some sniping by a
VP at AL nobody liked, who really wanted to
Stick the knife in and twist it.
Ted did the right thing, gave us two million over two years to spin out the Mozilla
project. And I think Mitchell
wanted to do it as a nonprofit. They thought there'd be some good basis for the Mitch himself.
I didn't want to do V C funding and didn't want to do a commercial
Thing.
I just went along to try to keep the code alive and w we knew what to do in two thousand three summer because Firefox had already started in two thousand one, if you can believe it.
But it became known as Phoenix by two thousand two. And Firefox was completely
Uh rebuilt from the ground up, right?
Well, it was based on the Zool work that I mentioned that Dave Hyatt and others had done to make a programmable
front end stack on what looks like the web. It's XML and JavaScript and CSS.
Custom toolbars, even menu the native menu bar on the Mac OS of the time.
All that could be integrated through XML. It was declarative. It was fast enough with enough work.
Uh it allowed all these extensions you mentioned we called them add ons.
That was the first browser extension ecosystem way ahead of Chrome's.
And
It was the way Firefox got built because once we had the suite unbadged of all the ICQ junk.
We still have sort of too many.
Functions. Like it's a Swiss Army knife. Do you really
need to browse the web while you compose an email and yeah, rich text editing and manage your address book.
So we came up with a vision. Dave Hyatt and I wrote the roadmap update from Azola in two thousand three.
That said let's
Make one app do one thing well.
We'll build them all on a common front end toolkit.
Give'em extensions so that we can simplify the UX, but not
Drive the advanced users.
a way to opera, which always had too many options built in.
And that roadmap you can still find even on Mozilla, I think it's certainly in the web archive. It was a pretty good roadmap in my opinion, because it
Got the project moving.
Toward not only Firefox, but Thunderbird. And even the old suite.
Volunteers wanted to call it Sea Monkey and carry it on and they did for a good long time.
But Firefox was originally
Well Zulus last browser in two thousand one.
It was just a small
Pirate ship within Netscape. It was
Blake Ross and Dave Hyatt and
Few others.
Joe Hewitt, right?
Joe Hewitt did the s the autocomplete satchel and eventually did Firebug, which was awesome.
He then got hired by Facebook and built the original Facebook app.
Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt found a parakey and sold that to Facebook. That's how that happened.
But we lost Blake to Stanford. I had to recruit Ben Goodger out of Netscape to take over for Blake and
That went from Firefox zero point six on to one oh and Ben did a lot of the important work on
add-ons and search integration and
Making it really sing on Windows.
Because that's the other thing open source didn't do. Open source at that point was still saying, Oh, it works on Linux. Well, which flavor of Linux? KDE or Gnome or
Forgotten other ones.
But they didn't care about windows.
It seems to me that the community
always needs and when I say the community, it's a very broad community. It's all people who use browsers and maybe even more general than that, but
Y they always need some
Exciting.
challenger that's fighting the man.
And it seemed like Firefox was
Right place, right time.
with the right group of people who were actually passionate about this.
Whereas everyone who was stuck inside of Netscape at AOL had sort of lost the fire. AOL at first thought this was a strategic asset, now realized it wasn't going anywhere. And so you had this sort of
moment to seize if you had the right team.
where there was no legitimate challenger anymore to IE and so you could make a real run at it.
Is that sort of how you th think about it?
Yes. And the way you described it was almost like fractal structure because
The core team was like a pirate ship.
kind of sassing Netscape management for their foolish bloated suite.
And also making great tools and things that Hewitt worked on.
Firebug and and the autocomplete stuff. And that led to early adopters loving it so much more than all the other browsers. So that when f Firefox was at zero point eight in early
I think it was early two thousand four. And then zero point nine especially when we could see the rocket.
ready to like launch. The whole lead user cohort of the web was just charged up.
At that point we'd I'd made contact with Sergey Bryn through somebody he sent my way named Fritz Schneider.
And we'd gotten the search still going in zero point nine, but we'd also gotten
Fritz's team, the gin team at Google helping Firefox. So they were working on browsers before Chrome.
And it w the browser to work on was Firefox. Nobody thought it could be done.
the conventional wisdom still was that you're never gonna take back market share, even though Firefox
already had a few million users and was growing rapidly.
Uh, and this did convince some people who worked with us at the time, like Bart De Creme, to go try a commercial forka Firefox. That was Flock.
Didn't work.
Raised a bunch of V C.
Got sold to Zinga and then shut down.
Two thousand eleven.
There was other forks too. I mean there was um I used Camino on the Mac. That was Dave Hyatt's other browser. Dave wrote
Prolifically. He wrote a lot of code. So he wrote
A Mac OS only browser to learn the Coco, I think it was toolkit.
And Dave works for Apple. He went there in two thousand one, I believe. He kind of made Safari because he knew how to make the K HTML engine web
compatible and
It was from Linux and it wasn't battle tested the field against mass market users, so it
didn't load websites properly. Eventually that led to WebKit being forked from K H to ML in two thousand five, but
Getting David Apple was quite a coup for um
Don Melton, uh the manager at the time of Safari who was also ex Netscape
But there was just this fractal effect of
Restarting the market.
You know, sassing your boss, showing up, i.e.
Um showing the world a better tool.
for something that people used every day, right? People will discount the browser. There was like
Oh, fat apps are back on the desktop. Windows long hort or when the iPhone launched, uh eight months after actually, because the initial app model
For the iPhone was web apps. The sweet solution.
But native apps had to be there because of games being ported.
And then native apps got privileges and got app store affordances that
The web didn't.
And
It's uh same thing every ten years or so. You just get people holding the web back. Usually it's a monopoly.
power or a market power.
And then the the upstart comes because people still
use the web. The value in the web is is so great. And you know, there's embedded web views in all these apps and there's embedded trackers in all these apps, by the way. We're we're blocking those too with our
partnership with Guardian IOS firewall.
The VPN.
It feels kinda similar to me in terms of
narrative and market perception to silicon into semiconductors. Like you know, a couple of years ago people were like, ah, semiconductor, that's so boring. Like, you know, it's not like all the innovations
You know, way, way, way up the stack from that.
Well, like actually it turns out the semiconductors pretty freaking important and TSM C is like, you know, a very, very, very important company and one of the top ten most valuable in the world. The browser feels similar to me. Like it's so easy to discount it and yet
the majority of like people in the world spend the majority of their days on it. Yeah. It it's an immortal app. It's the universal app. The bigger the screen and the better the input and bandwidth the more you live in the browser and you don't want to install some
You know.
Even Slack. We have a lot of our users of Slack at Brave use the browser to load Slack.
As a web app, instead of loading this loaded electron app that Slack has been slowly
Maintaining. There's a real trade off there that I think is part of the browser's immortality.
But
the the web content is also sticky and
A creative. And that's important too.
Yeah.
I'll sum it all up in one sentence. Firefox did really, really well and gained a huge p uh market share. And then when Chrome launched, it's been slowly etched away every year by Chrome now and it's down around something like three percent. So I want to fast forward all the way to the moment where you're starting to think about Brave.
And
Yet.
There's been all these attempts to start a new upstart browser that has a different take on things. I'm thinking of Dolphin, I'm thinking of Rock Melt that have not worked. Yeah, Rock Melt. So yeah, the flock was doing social or web two point oh make at the very center of Firefox's growing market.
And that's not a good growth strategy'cause you have to get people off Firefox and then somehow
beat them on the on the outer rings of growth. And Firefox was
Already
going faster there and you weren't gonna
get too many defectors from the innermost nerdy hacker technaroti web two point oh people.
So flock failed.
Rockmelt was well after Chrome came out and was based on the Chrome
Fork of WebKit.
Which wasn't its own thing really then. And
Tried to add social I think
It was just and I haven't talked to Tim House about this. I think it was just aimed at trying to sell it to Zuck. Well, Zuck doesn't want a browser. He's got a browser. He's very happy with the Facebook web app on desktop and then he was at that point already aiming at mobile
'cause the iPhone was out and he wanted
full native apps on mobile. So he was never gonna buy Rock Milk. So Rock Milk failed.
Dolphin did well because I think they had this I forget her name. She was a great marketer. She got all these
distribution and growth hack deals going in various Asian countries.
And they did a credible job on making it a good mobile browser as mobile came up through Android.
Android kinda double started. It had that G one, what was it called? It was the first Android device. It was
The T Mobile G one. It was not good.
I talked to Andy Rubin at Google in two thousand six.
Yeah.
But Android took a while to get
Anywhere near decent and I still can't use it.
Even though I've got
Many complaints about Apple. Am I remembering right that Dolphin at some point I don't think originally, but maybe later in its life pivoted to be like, Oh, we're privacy focused, right? So like
People were starting to think about this. Everybody's doing that now. They're putting privacy perfume on without taking a shower in some cases.


Oh I love it.
But one of the big browsers that succeeded in Asia besides Dolphin was UC Web. And UC Web grew against Chrome in in Indonesia and Bangladesh and India. In some s Indian states it had more share than Chrome.
And one of the things we noticed that EC Web did was it blocked ads.
So
Having
Done Firefox and been in the situation where we we didn't even have the best privacy features. It's kind of embarrassing, but it's true. Mozilla did not
Lead on privacy as well as Steve Jobs did at Apple.
The very first Safari had private windows, it had a third party cookie blocker.
Neither of these things were in Firefox at the time. Private windows came in quickly.
We never shipped a third party cookie blocker in my time there.
There was always concern about rocking the boat.
I have to say there was probably some
Implicit concern about the Google search partnership and what would the be the effect on that.
Because of course the vast majority of Mozilla's revenue comes from the Google search deal to use Google as the default and get paid hundreds of millions of dollars from Google.
Yeah, it really was the one big trick for funding Mozilla and it was you know, good while it lasted, but it also foretold Google doing its own
Browser, right? We we could see this coming too. We didn't want to take so much revenue in the sh in the deal that
it became cheaper for them to do Chrome.
So we tried to adjust that.
But
Defer Chrome.
Maybe a few months, a year at most. It it wasn't clear we deferred it at all. Because by two thousand five
Dave Hyatt and uh Marche Stakovic and others at Apple had said let's stop
Patch bombing K HTML. Let's make our own little mini Mozilla. It'll be run by Apple, but it'll be WebKit.org and it'll be a proper open source project.
And good for them, they did it.
And that
became the basis for
Not only
what they put in Safari, but for
Chrome.
So
There was a gleam in Larry Page's eyes when I last I saw him two thousand five. He was saying, Yeah, WebKit's so clean and I'm like
Mary
Go to your own browser.
It's fine. Don't worry about Firefox. You should do your own browser. So
We knew that in two thousand six they were doing it.
We knew that they were at that point pulling people off Firefox. And that some of the people I've worked with at AOL or at Mozilla
We're working on the prototype.
And took him a while to get it out. Scrum came out on September first, two thousand eight.
And it wasn't really in at first clearly about fast JavaScript or all the stuff that people think of. It was more about
Isolating the flash player so that when it crashes in a tab, it doesn't drag your whole browser down.
Yes.
Yes. And that comic that they shipped was just freaking brilliant as a marketing strategy for the nerds out there that would really appreciate process isolated tabs.
Yeah, it it had everything. It had Lars Bach about V8. It had
Darren Fisher, who I've worked with at AOL
But some point, I don't know when, I've heard this
From a friend who was at Google.
Larry sat up and said, Wait.
We're running a search.
advertising business and Chrome isn't tracking our users? What what are we doing wrong?
And so in two thousand sixteen, Google's privacy policy
Change. This was after I started Brave, but I just I'll tell the full story of Brave

At that point
ProPublica noticed, the Guardian re published their piece.
They sort of said Google's crossed the Rubicon. They've connected all their data
into one big ad exchange and data collection system.
with a carve out for Google Analytics, it's not clear how much Google Analytics is private anymore.
And chrome.
If you sign into the browser.
Which is it?
Separate feature in the upper right corner.
Using your Google account, then you're trapped.
For Ed.
Targeting.
Google's business.
But a lot of people didn't know this and some people didn't sign into the browser.
Well in two thousand eighteen September Google said, gosh darn it, people aren't signing into the browser enough. We're gonna just do it whenever you sign in to Gmail or YouTube in a tab.
We'll just sign you in across all the tabs and we'll track you. Oh wow. If you don't like it, you can opt out in the Google account settings.
Yeah, right, but nobody's gonna do that. And
I do. I mean yeah, you'll do that. I used to do talks at conferences, ask how many people were using Chrome, how many people knew this, how many people opted out, and the hands
you know, were min numerous and then they started falling and then there were red faces and consternation. This is not just Google. I pick on them because they became the biggest, but
And buying double click was an earlier sort of Rubicon they crossed.
Because
I think Sergey told a friend of mine in two thousand three, Oh, we would never do like
tracking for ads on publisher pages that tied into our
Search ads. We we would never track across the web. That would be evil.

Oops. Well, it changed. Well the definition of of evil shifts depends on how large the incentives are. Yeah, and going public also just puts a fiduciary duty
And this is kind of the
Yeah, the the animal, the blind.
voracious beast of capitalism. So
When I was thinking about Brave I realized not only had
Mostly become captured by its search partner and was probably gonna die.
Because it couldn't compete.
Not just on Chrome intrinsic qualities, but on distribution, which really matters at scale. You have to pay for it, right? Microsoft had woken up and was doing IE and finally did edge.
And this is before they switched Edge to be based on Chromium.
They were
Certainly still distributing it on Windows. They were
Kind of tying it. And I would say it's gotten worse. Windows ten and eleven have gotten even more aggressive, though they backed off on one particular thing recently.
Where it's almost like back to the antitrust case. They're saying
Hey, you're not using Edge. We've noticed. Would you like to use Edge? Or
Oops, we reset your default browser to Edge, that happens too. And this is a problem for Google. So Google has to pay to distribute Chrome. Mozilla doesn't have the resources to do this.
Our growth with Firefox when I was there was
completely organic, I think. And it's probably was mostly organic after I left. They might have done a little growth hacking.
So and they never got big on mobile.
I'd love gear.
Explanation.
And again, I don't ask this because I don't
have thoughts myself, but I want to hear from you.
Why?
Is it
Bad.
To be tracked.
Yeah, people sometimes if they're savvy, they'll remember Richelieu's epigram. I don't know if it really came from him.
You know, give me six sentences from the most honest man and I'll find a way to hang him.
Right.
Snowden changed things. People realized, wait a minute.
There's violations of federal law here.
Google engineers who've d been using telco dark fiber without
encrypting their tr backbone traffic.
We're outraged, I think.
And
Data breaches bother people. And the third party problem I mentioned, those embedded in pixels and all those embedded scripts.
You don't know where your data is going. It's not just that it's
tracking you to give you a better deal or to make your ads more personalized on a website.
That data is flying out the window and
It's going
Into
Stuff that is available to the not only the dark web, but
Just available publicly.
The horrifying story, I won't name names.
We have a vendor at Brave that has
information on people.
It shared it with Experian. We didn't know this was happening.
I don't know if there's a privacy law that was breached. We believe their privacy policy was breached by their own action or their setting of this as a default that we didn't know we had to opt out of.
Experience is just breach city, right? These are jokes. Criminal.
I don't know if it's literally criminal, but it feels criminal. Right. So consciousness of privacy as
Something
where you're unsafe if you're trapped grew. Initially it was like, I don't care, trap me. I have no privacy. Just make my experience more personal.
And then it became Wait a minute.
There's some third party or
Seventh party, seven degrees of Kevin Bacon. There's somebody in
No, Russia who's tracking me. That's no good.
There's somebody playing games to trap me around physical world using geofencing. That's possible with ads. And it's been done probably by malicious actors.
There's spy stuff going on.
realized that this was a bigger problem than just
Oh, something somewhere has some dossier on me. Because once you have a dossier on a server, it's very likely it's gonna get copied or leaked and it's gonna be in a hundred servers or a thousand servers and you won't know where it is or to what
Bad uses that we put.
So
Meanwhile, privacy law was coming up in Europe that
in its own abstract way, sometimes without defining its terms, did use
sort of common sense notions about how we interact, which Steve Jobs himself once talked to Mossberg about in very plain terms, which is privacy means
You don't get my data unless I know I'm giving it to you for a specific purpose.
That
benefits me and there's sort of a quid pro quo.
And that's what the GDPR tries to do with purpose limitation or purpose specificity. So
When you consent to those cookie dialogues, which are all misregulated, mismanaged, and nonsense, I'm not defending them. And GDPR, like all regulations, is full of unintended consequences. What they're trying to do is say, Do you consent
To
Let a trapping cookie be set, let's say, for some
Essential or inessential reason. And there are carve outs for essential reasons. When you go to a search engine, it's a first party, you're giving it data to get
Better results.
So there's an essential purpose there that that can justify s some kind of
Data being
processed. It isn't necessarily tracking because it's only at that search engine.
But when you're dealing with all these sites that throw these cookie consents, you know, click here to learn more and there's three hundred vendors.
And
If you wanna opt out you have to go
Click on them and
Often there's no
page there. There's a four oh four HTP response. There's no phone number. There's no way to opt out. So it's a complete fraud that you can opt out of this easily.
And that's also against the law in many places in the world, not just Europe. A lot of these privacy laws are coming up around the world.
And this was
Uh sort of concurrent with the rise of brave.
But the consciousness about privacy is still growing
And that's helping us
Because
the forefront and doing this R and D I mention, which made us fast and efficient.
And you're seeing others in with DuckDuck Go always had a more private
sort of search for an end on Bing. It's pretty much Bing still for the
Keyword search.
They had mobile browsers now, they're adding desktop browsers and other products.
And like I mentioned, Apple f gets fair credit for privacy concerns that I think came directly from Steve Jobs in Safari private windows and third party cookie blocking.
And Apple wraps itself in privacy.
With some justice.
And now even Google's trying to claim to s invent the privacy sandbox to save its business. Oh I mean, to save the world.
Sorry. Uh you know, and ram it through standardization and uh into other browsers.
Let me ask David's
Question a little bit more specifically.
Why is a private
computing experience important to you personally?
Yes. So I mentioned this rising constraints of privacy, how privacy is sort of multi sided and involves different
degrees and kinds of threats. So that those matter to me, no doubt.
But I also think the user.
Has to have
privacy for economic advantage. Otherwise we have no way of
collective bargaining with the network powers. And any network is gonna have power centers. It's just because the network effects
And
you know, whether they collect much data or just become a successful business
They will have economic power, market power, and the users may just be these
Sort of sheep to be shorn of their wool.
That is the model for Adtec.
But
If users can guard their data, they can demand a higher price. They can demand better terms. They can
use cryptographic protocols to transact without giving up their privacy
While still giving authentic attribution or confirmation of, you know, ads viewed or or purchases. So what matters to the marketer is if you get them in a
You know, their best day is
Not that they track you individually. They wouldn't know what to do with these tracking databases. It's usually vendors they hire that do it.
Uh or Google.
uh Facebook and so on. But they want to know what audience
they can address and they want to know how well that audience
Court.
Cohorts within it convert.
They want to segment that audience and see if they can do performance and growth marketing.
with pseudoscience, mostly regression, logistical regression. Mostly, you know, very simple statistics to see
This campaign's working, this one's not. I'm gonna spend more money on this and less on that.
And I'm gonna try this new, you know.
Paid media approach. I'm gonna try this new Brave Browser private ad system because
There are some users there that are off the reservation. They are not reachable, addressable.
They used UBlock Origin on Chrome and now they're using Brave, and I can't get to them through my usual
you know, media channels and advertising methods. So
I'm gonna put a little money on Brave. And that's how we built up the private ad business that's part of Brave Rewards that uses the basic attention token. And that matters to me too, because I always thought about economics. I was interested in it from a young age, but I also and Mozilla thought
We're gonna get killed by Google. I think every executive thought this at Mosullah. I'm not breaching any NDAs to say this. It was something that
maybe can't be solved.
without really doing a second browser and marketing it.
As a companion to Firefox.
And
I actually talked uh at one point with Dave Hyatt about doing this.
But I couldn't recruit him away from Apple and I tried to get Hewitt as well.
And it would have been a webkit based Mozilla browser, but
It was too risky. I couldn't get the talent I needed.
It would undermine Firefox at some point.
And it would have been bad for morale.
So
You know, maybe Mozilla's trapped, but I didn't want Bray to be trapped, and I certainly didn't want myself or my children to be trapped because
These monopolies can last a lot longer than they should, and they can really
Keep shearing those sheep.
Until the sheep were starving.
And that's happened. I think that's where we're headed with all the censorship and the heavy handed
interference in sort of search results.
demonetization of YouTubers in two thousand fifteen started and it wasn't just
You know, over atrocious content that should be
Censure because otherwise you're gonna just have people after you and you're lose viewers. It was over all sorts of things that
nobody could understand and they were just losing money as as YouTube creators. Like these were just creators who were talking about their hobbies and they they found their ad revenue going down. Oh totally. Yeah, Google changes YouTube algorithms, Facebook changes.
Instagram or Facebook algorithms and like
It completely wipes the table of
whole you know sectors of
Creators.
Yeah, in in the UK there were actual regulatory cases involving this uh search algorithm, SEO sort of change. Matt Cutz, when he was at Google, used to blog.
And he tried to be transparent about it, but it was clear Google had a lot of power and there's sort of a
A black box that they're operating inside of
And it's a casino. The house always wins. So I wanted to use
something that we knew about in the old days of computing, where you were the system administrator of your
department's mini computer or your lab's mini computer or you or your PC's administrator.
You had to get the CD ROM, you had to install it. That was a total pain. It was
Attacks.
But
you could keep your data there. You could make sure that you knew what was going on. Your system had
In many ways more integrity.
Then
our modern day connected devices do.
Where they can be updated behind your back and things can go wrong or sideways and there's all this third party tracking. So
I wanted to get back to the user having power
Through privacy, through shields, is what Brave calls them.
through the power in your pocket, which is the supercomputer
you know, the micro unity super scalar architecture.
From the nineties.
And yet it's kind of underutilised. Software is not
Ten thousand times better, even though the processes are that much faster.
Something's gone wrong.
Because even in the early nineties, Silicon Graphics operating system was getting bloated. And we're talking about going from eight meg
Ram to sixteen Ram.
I mean just ridiculous small amount of memory.
And yet the software was getting bloated X Windows and Motif and all this garbage. So software has not gotten better. It's in some ways gotten worse.
And I wanted Bra to wave the flag of better software.
Tighter software software that defend your privacy because it gives you economic bargaining power.
A chance at changing
The topology of the network where
Again, there's always gonna be central powers that come and go and
accumulate wealth, but
If the users can fight back, they can have
Let's say other options like
cryptocurrencies and tokens and smart contract systems.
Well, I was gonna say, you know, maybe
For the majority of people out there when you were starting Brave
Yeah, like oh economic power. I get it. Like Google, Facebook, they've got power. But how on earth would I ever as an individual have economic power?
Wasn't our pitch. Our pitch was private, fast, you know, low battery use.
And we actually at Mobile World Congress twenty nineteen, this green specter company from the UK came by and said, Yeah, we've measured. You're the you're the least power hungry browser on Android. It was awesome because it confirmed our own
Research team's results.
But y you have to sell with what people feel every day. What they feel is that page load lag. They feel that
batter being drained. They feel the data plan. Even though they may be on an unlimited data plan, they're still
Ways they perceive it.
But now I mean I imagine it feels real to people that like
Yeah, I can make money with my attention on the internet. Like it feels very real to people. It's so funny because we have different

Rate card around the world because it's easier to get
Add buyers in the US and paying the most in the UK and
Europe after and so on. And so we have a lot of fans around the world who are in lower tier regions and they aren't making as much, but
it may go a longer way for them. It isn't like we're trying to make people rich or doing a pump and dump. We're trying to make users get seventy percent of the revenue of a growing business
That
If you look at add
Online and digital advertising, it's still three hundred billion plus a year.
That's a huge business. If we just get, you know
one percent of that and we share seventy percent that with our users
It's that two point one billion, right?
So to be super crisp to make sure listeners understand it, an ad is displayed to me and this is an ad that's purchased through the Brave Ad network where the advertiser is willing to say, look, I know that this isn't gonna do a bunch of crazy targeting stuff. This is just
going on to the brave ad network.
a user views that ad, and then 70% of the revenue from that ad shows up in the user's wallet in the form of the basic attention token.
Yes. So when you say network, people think tracking because networks have lots of ways to track. So what we do instead is we put all the ads
into a catalogue through
A link to the creative for the ad the image or

That's in an edge cache somewhere. We don't consider that an adversary.
the link to the ad and some keywords about the ad go into a catalog and the catalog gets updated to a large number of people in each region
And it gets updated several times a day to the same way for everyone. So you are not identified by downloading that catalog. It's kind of like getting a
Safe.
Anti fishing
list or a safe browsing list, uh anti malware site list.
And
That's how we solve the problem of ad networks that today in conventional ad tech
will track you on the front side and take all your data even before they've decided what ad to show you.
We do the decisioning in the browser based on this catalog. So all the machine learning on the mother of all data feeds I mentioned earlier is in browser. It's only on if you opt into the system, by the way, it's not turned on normally.
And that's what does the ad matching.
I see.
Yeah, so I'm wondering how I mean, I was definitely buying some ads on Facebook for startups I was involved with in twenty fifteen, sixteen, and it was unfreaking real the level of targeting. I mean, you could target one person. Yes.
And as an advertiser, you're like, This is magic. I can acquire exactly the customers that I want. Of course that's at the expense of the users, and Facebook has walked back a lot of this and made it more broad. Is there some measure of
An advertiser being able to tell you, hey, these are the types of customers I want, or is it like buying a billboard on the highway?
Yes.
So we're big enough now, and even even when we started we were big enough that we can do some very coarse segmentation, which
does not let people be re identified. Because the problem with the targeting systems you mentioned is they can
Like you said, target one person. I think Latanya Sweeney said in the US if someone's
Birth date, gender, and
zip code are known, they can be individually identified. Re identified. So
Obviously we're not gonna give out any information to advertisers
ahead of time, but we do have ways of sampling our
Audience to
Very coarsely segmented. So you can address those segments. And some of those keywords in the catalogue
express those segments. They're basically segment identifiers. And separately the machine learning in the browser develops an opinion about you from your
Your search queries, your clicking, what pages you visit, all that stuff.
about what segments you might fall into and then the matching occurs.
So
We're using you know support vector machines and Bayesian sort of fairly simple stuff. It doesn't burn your battery. We don't need TensorFlow or a cloud supercomputer to do this kind of machine learning.
And
That does a pretty good job. A lot of ad tech is not as precise as you think.
Facebook said they could target that person and they could often, but sometimes there were fraud actors.
Not so much on their native apps, but on publisher pages.
There's a ton of fraud in in online.
digital advertising because
JavaScript is used on these publisher pages and I designed JavaScript on purpose. This was very intentional. I think it was the right decision.
to be a mutable environment. It's global environment. All the standard objects and the document objects are mutable. You can overwrite them, you can mock up look alike and r you can forward
load something that looks like the next year's version of a standard object.
So JavaScript's mutability was a huge boon. It probably wouldn't have survived without it, but it also means there's no
security property called integrity. It means that when the publisher
Is loading all these third party
Tags from Google and others.
they can fight each other. They can overwrite each other. They cookie stack. They they cheat. And what's worse, you can take the whole publisher content, scrape it into a fake environment in a bot.
And the bot pretends to be a a user clicking on the ad and
You get paid the ad revenue because
The ad buyer didn't cross check the publisher's
ID in Google's Ad Exchange, which is a fraud operator.
Against the true New York Times at ID.
It's bad. And that Google still gets the fee when this
Advertising money is stolen by fraudsters.
makes Google complicit with the fraudsters to some degree.
It misaligns the interests again. It's a conflict of interests.
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Okay, so there's a variety of value propositions here. There's privacy
There's Speed, which it sounds like Speed was the first one. There's Make Money from your attention on the internet.
You're rolling out a bunch more features in Brave, sort of at a compounding rate now that it's turning into much more than
everything you've described so far, with its own search engine, with its own native wallet capability.
You're at this unbelievable milestone now of having accomplished fifty million monthly active users.
What was one or two of the tipping points along the way where you realized, oh, this particular value prop really resonates and accelerated the growth?
Well some of the stuff was early.
Mistakes you make when you're a small startup, you
choose to use a shortcut. We use the electron
Framework and we
switched from a private version based on Mozolas Gecko engine to Chromium Blink.
And using electron was a mistake. It wasn't designed for
A browser it
Turned off the sandbox. That was horrifying to discover. And it's
kinda bloated and replaced a lot of middleware files in the Chromium code that
Google was
breaking through internal API shifts.
And we finally got onto a proper
Well maintained Chromium fork, including the front end. Now the downside of this is we look a lot like Chrome. We have
The brave
Lion icon for shields we have the
Triangle.
We have our own look for the tabs, but it still looks all like Chrome. It's tabs on top. It's got Chrome extensions, which can be loaded if they don't use the Google account system I mentioned that's for tracking that we disable.
But
You know it's still.
A little bit too chromey. And yet I think it's worth it because that helped us get users off Chrome until we really did that rebasing on
the front end of Chrome. We were paying a growing maintenance cost on all this electron forkage.
And our users were suffering because it wasn't fully chrome. There were extensions needed to be manually
supported or ported and things weren't working right. So
We switched to a more complete Chrome fork like a lot of browsers use. I think Vivaldi's an exception. They have a
uh React Native front end. Uh and they've sunk the cost to stabilize the middleware.
Which is so interesting, right? Like if any upstart browser
Team and leader were going to build your own stack, it would be you. It takes a big team. And you've chosen not to.
I have ten people in the first seed round of Bray, what am I gonna do?
I knew how to
Dude, ten people out of AOL with the Netscape.
Uh Mozilla code base because
I'd worked on that code base with hundreds of engineers at
Yeah, Netscape AOL.
And those people were still
Working on it for a while, AOL did lay off a lot of them
But kept some on. Others went to IBM.
And even though we we had to shrink the workforce
But it was bigger than the ten people I had at
Mozilla in two thousand three when we spun out.
And
Until we got the search deal in two thousand four, I couldn't really hire more people. We were burning down the two million dollars from AOL. Well, similar sort of situation with founding brave. I had to take ten people, I had to use some existing code base.
And we did start with with Mozilla Echo in a multiprocess sandboxed uh framework called graphene that
was part of Firefox OS, which I'd worked on.
But it just lost on this big spreadsheet we did where we just scored it against Chromium Blink, and it just lost on too many rows. It was
You know, what are we gonna do for DRM? Oh, at the time Firefox has a custom Adobe deal.
We can't partake of that even if we use the Gecko source.
You know, we have to go get Google Wide Vine, which Google made free as in beer.
Even though DRM is a close source.
It was bad but
You have to have it. People not just Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, et cetera. So
What are we gonna do? Well we're gonna Google's giving it out, but they're really only giving it out for Chromium based browsers.
And so we did that. And there were just a hundred other paper cuts or major issues like that.
Gecko was never big on mobile because Mosulla was never big on mobile.
We needed
All the mobile web kit.
lineage that goes into Chromium Blink.
That's still used on the mobile web.
Stuff that preceded standards. So
It was just at the end of
Two thousand fifteen we just said, Gotta switch. And that's when we switched to Electron, but that
At its own costs.
And yet
as a small team, we couldn't do the full Chromium for as we grew, we did. And so by
think it was end of twenty eighteen, we came out with the Brave Core based browser, which is
Or
maintainable version of Chromium Blink and our own front end still
Close to Google's
And
That was very popular and all the extensions worked and we started growing faster. We've doubled for five years in a row, so or more than doubled some years. So fifty million users. That seems like the largest
self custodied crypto wallet application in the world.
And
That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is it's this tiny fraction of the overall browser market share. I haven't heard anyone talk about the browser wars and market share in a while. Do you know what that sort of looks like today? I mentioned Chrome is alleged to have two point six five billion users.
Now you some of these users have gone away. I uninstalled Chrome. I found that there was a secret installer
called Keystone that was messing my system up. Somebody wrote a blog post about this. Google denies it, but
Just
phenomenologically life got better when I ripped all that out.
It was sort of hiding itself in the OS. It was kind of creepy. What matters in browsers, and you mentioned earlier, is sort of a
Every ten years is a changing of the guard and there's this rapid evolution and there's a sort of lead user effect.
Eric von Hippel of MIT's described this, right? The lead users invented
The plumbing tool kit. They were
Homemade by machinist plumbers.
And they became standardized and big tools companies built them.
League users invented fiberglass surfboards.
A lot of hot rodding like Tom Wolf described.
Windsurfing user generated in some ways.
Bill Bowerman, Nike.
lead users. These are people who are not just
creating something to go make a buck and seeing a a need in the market, making a widget. They're users of their own products. They
love the product and they understand that what it's doing or what it needs to do.
And having those lead users favor, you know, Firefox in its day or Brave Now is super important.
And the lead users that I see that are
Very generative.
Some of the controversial are working on crypto projects, blockchain projects. They're working on decentralization. That's not gonna be controversial on on this podcast. Yeah, I mean people are are exaggerating how much energy Bitcoin uses and also not aware of how Bitcoin can use energy that otherwise goes to waste, but
We're not Bitcoin based anyway, and there are new blockchains that are much more efficient. So the whole thing is to me kind of
Needle to the ideological.
Yes. Not a controversial statement on acquired that the most interesting
founders, technologists, et cetera, are by and large focusing on web three and crypto right now. Chris Dixon of Interest in Horwitz wrote this essay about Ethereum the other year and talked about how he saw the developer
you know, animal spirits just rallying around it.
And it's true. And then Ethereum got slow and the fees were too high, but
In some ways it's like Unix, the Ethereum virtual machine now, the bytecode and the smart contract
System with some
transportation cost if it's not directly portable is supported on other
Chains. Polygon obviously uh
Avalanche's C chain is an EVM compatible.
Like the Unix system call table being copied into different flavors of Unix.
the sort of design DNA spreads easier than code DNA because code has hard requirements.
Not all of which are known or tested for
Uh but design can be copied and
In this case, even with the EVM compatibles, the the code can be tested to interoperation. Just like we had different NFS servers that had different code lineages interoperating and different T C IP stacks interoperating. So
I think they
Dixon's essay was on point, even though people decry Ethereum's slowness and high gas fees.
And the new chains are just super exciting to the extent that you can port your code.
Uh there are EVM
cross compiler and interpreter solutions on Solana.
And there's the C chain other direct EVM compatibles on other chains.
It seems like your strategy with embracing
not just the blockchain, but becoming an economic player in the blockchain ecosystem has been
Initially there was the basic attention token.
And I don't think that those were actually deposited on chain into
Ethereum wallets, is that correct?
In our system because of regulations, not just in the US
If we send a ad revenue share to some unknown self custody wallet, we're
gonna get in trouble, including big trouble if it's, you know, somebody named Osama bin Laden, right? So there's not just um
Finnson which looks at money laundering carefully.
People grumble about KYC, know your customer. Why am I identifying myself with a custodian in order to get my basic attention token.
Well,
It isn't KYC for its own sake and it's not just a one and done. They have to sometimes check again. In fact there's a problem right now where they're
making some people in Europe fill out a survey.
To do more diligence.
KYC serves as a means to an end. The end is anti-money laundering. It's identifying all these flows.
And you know some of the crypto
Noobs also think, well, I should just go on chain and then I'm I'm anonymous. No, you're gonna get reidentified through blockchain forensics, right?
In the same way that it's not hard based on a zip code and a gender and a birthdate or whatever to singly identify you.
At some point someone will be able to just run your wallet or wallets or and it already happens today through some de anonymizer and be like, Oh, I know who this is.
Right. So for our system with users getting ad revenue share and
Publishers then getting creators on YouTube getting, you know, tips or recurring donations, just ten of those or so could fingerprint you as a user.
Right. If they're a few bits each, that's enough bits to fingerprint you with the unique identifier that can count everybody in the world.
And if you have enough observation points around you can
And side channels. You can put things together. So we
realized that we couldn't go on chain not just because it was too costly, but because it would fingerprint the user.
And the answer in the long run is zero knowledge proof. So our next generation ad system, which is aiming at Solana, is called Themis.
It uses a black box accumulator in the browser.
To build up an authentic, cryptographically secure
Add performance.
Set of numbers.
That can then be
put into a zero knowledge proof system directly on chain.
And the ad buyer can verify for themselves.
From the terms of the proof that the ad performed.
That's the magic of zero knowledge proof by
verifying it and you can believe the truth claims. And we're trying to move on chain with that very soon with Solana, which is exciting, but we're still burdened by the regulations that require not only the
Yeah, anti money laundering, but also the anti uh the office of foreign asset controls in the US. Don't send
To a self custody wallet.
that's owned by some somebody on the FBI's top ten list. Right. Or you'll go you'll do federal time for that. So
You know, people get mad at me, like well, I must I KYC and they think I'm some kind of, you know, crypto hater. No, I I love on chain direct. I've done
one of the auditors for our smart contract for the basic attention token got paid on chain and it was great.
Much better than sending a bank wire.
But
There are problems if you want privacy right now and you want to comply with these regulations which have pernicious uh penalties. So we're working toward a more decentralized future and we'll have to see how it goes.
The great thing about crypto is I see a lot of uh now banks, you know, Jamie Diamond did a heel turn.
From saying Bitcoin's a Ponti to oh my blockchain's great and family offices and companies are into crypto.
The old big tech guard aren't though. Facebook tried with Libra now DM.
But
really got hurt. Uh politicians didn't like Facebook and it wasn't really clear
why you'd want it, um, you know, instead of another existing crypto.
So the initial thing you did was introduce the basic attention token and you could accumulate that without going through any KYC, but if you were gonna then send it to a creator, they would need to have a KYC wallet. But you wouldn't as a user you could still be anonymous.
But it seems like now you've moved to you first forked MetaMask to make a Brave Wallet. Now you're building your own native Brave Wallet directly into the browser, which is
Totally a thing.
That
Safari could do, that Chrome could do, and it doesn't seem like they're gonna do that for a long time. So you're gonna be the first browser with a
native secure
uh on chain wallet
Hot wallet.
directly baked into the browser. Opera had it first.
And you can say that again because Opera did have a wallet in two thousand eighteen. No way. Opera has a wallet. We were worried'cause they came out with a self custody wallet and a Dap Store in two thousand eighteen and Bray's been growing, so I had to get more people to do the wallet or I had to get my co founder to go lead the wallet effort.
But in two thousand eighteen it wasn't gonna happen. On the other hand, crypto winter happened and I think that took
the steam out of opera a little bit. But Opera still has crypto and they're talking about a Polygon deal they pre announced. And you know, I think Opera will always be there kind of like Brave, even though it's now Chinese owned.
Um
A little less trustworthy just in Western eyes, um not saying anything personal here.
And
Yet opera will be innovative, but
Brave's gonna go faster and we're gonna do things that cut across the
Self custody versus
Custodial usability trade off space because
It took twenty five years to train people to use username and password logins and maybe
For real banks and Coinbase and so on, you have to have a second factor
authenticator app or something like that, or a UB key.
That's almost as hard as
Self custody. It's a little bit.
Safer in that if you lose your
private key, your word list, your backup.
Your crypto steel with self custody, you're
You've lost.
Whereas if you lose your pass forget your password and lose your UB key.
lose your authenticator app or the phone it's on.
You can probably convince Coinbase you're you and they can reset your password for you.
So
It's complex enough now though. I think self custody has a shot.
Getting things to be useful, getting the basic attention token to be useful
Including that
virtual kind you earn without KYCing because you're going to send it back to your creators who do have to KYC for these AML and OFAC reasons.
That we can work on with the wallet. So we're gonna make the wallet sort of blend with the brave reward system as much as we can. We're going to make it multi-chain.
We don't have any, you know, religion about blockchain. We like Solana. We agreed to make it the default for
multi-chain DAPs where they don't
express a preference for default and the user doesn't.
And that
choice of default the browser can make. That's important. That's how search deals get done. That's why
Google only pays for default because they're king of the hill and they figure they'll get the traffic anyway. That's what they say. Whereas Bing does and DuftDuck Go and others and Yandex do search deals with browsers.
Uh, even if they're not the default, they'll pay for traffic.
But even still like a lot of people.
Are gonna get wallets for the first time.
This is pretty awesome. It is. It's exciting. It's also, you know, you've seen what happened with MetaMask. They took off
Very cleverly at the time Uniswap did its uh V three, I guess it was
And
Just started
getting a lot of swap action that made them a lot of money.
And that was from people using MetaMask and self custody, I would guess. I've
Not got a good figure right now.
Most of those users don't have a hardware
private key device like a ledger or a treasure.
And so they're keeping that
Wordless safe in some safe place, I hope I talked to somebody an anonymous user of Brave in Africa who was
A Hex fan and they were wondering why we were
You know, why the Hex founder was feuding with us'cause he's kind of a nut.
But that all blew over. But this user, I said, How do you use it? He said, Oh, I've been buying crypto for five years. I use MetaMask, right? Or four years, I guess it was. And I said, Oh, do you have a ledger or a treasure? No. I'm really afraid I'm gonna lose it all, right?
Well, sure, you can recover access to the wallet, but like
That still means you're piling up wealth in a browser extension, which are known to be
hackable or at least not as secure as if it was in a browser itself. And on top of all this, it's always connected to the internet. The extension is just weaker
Both in terms of its powers, but also its security model.
If it's doing its own secure store for a private key
It's just in a weaker footing than a native app by design.
Then you know.
We see this all the time. If you tweet and you mention MetaMask, I I joked the mask that is Meta because I didn't want to say it.
You'll get all these fishing support accounts pretending to be your buddy, impersonating my friend
David Walsh w was at Mozilla and now was at MetaMask.
And they'll try to say, DM me or you know, go to this Google form and we'll help you get your your key recovered. And sometimes the topic wasn't even about lost funds.
And
You go to the Google form and right above the fine frame from Google it says don't enter any
personal private data or passwords in this form.
is a field saying, Give us your twelve words, your twenty words.
So these fraudsters just swarm onto this.
There are bad actor companies in the ecosystem right now that are trying to tell you, hey, for a nice experience to have all of your wallets aggregated here, type in your secret phrase from your
you know, local self custodied wallet into our thing.
And I've seen this on Coinbase, but I know there are others.
We are not yet trained on what these secret phrases mean in the way that we're trained about passwords and it took twenty years and it took twenty years to train on credit cards. And so we're telling people
Hey, this is like a username that you can type in anywhere.
And it's completely defeating the purpose of that as security. Same thing for QR codes. QR codes have become shorthands for links.
I go to the neighborhood pool and I can scan a QR code with my iPhone and then then
sign in on the web form.
But
Cure codes are also used especially in crypto for spelling a private key and you should not be putting them on paper.
For somebody to scan ever.
And you're right. There are
Let's say bad or
sketchy actors who are trying to collect these things or
passwords and email. There were services over the years
There still are that will say, Hey, we'll read your email for you. In fact, the go's building one, but I think they're keeping it clean.
Right, it would blow them up if they cheated. They're just trying to strip trackers from your email.
And you get a duck address if you want it. But better if it didn't have the clear text of your email messages at all. And so in Brave, if you use webmail like Gmail, we block those trackers at the end point where the
secure session, the TLS session terminates. But
This whole thing about dual models, something's a public key or a public link, something's a private key.
And they're betting
forced through the same UX metaphors is a problem.
And training users maybe
Getting to a better state of play with hardware wallets where they aren't just this
anxiety producing dongle that you're worried, did it break? Did I forget my pin? Did I forget my, you know, did I send to the wrong address? You probably want these things to be more like a phone
something that's more useful to you all in your digital life.
You don't wanna have anxiety every time you transact. You wanna have the sense of
Security and that you're winning. And that's the other thing I would say about Brave. We can make
your built in wallet, a positive sum game, it can collect
Non pump and dump.
Yield.
Opportunities from DeFi if you want to put some assets in.
It can collect that.
Revenue share, that's another positive system game we already have. So we're trying to make crypto be part of your daily life in a way that doesn't provoke anxiety. Am I being fished?
Did I lose my pen or my passphrase? You bring up this
Just
ever present trade off in competing, which is
security versus user experience.
And I frequently think that
When I'm doing something in crypto versus I'm doing something in the regular bank Trad Fi ecosystem.
And
My bank, for better or for worse, has taken a lot of the headache away and I have a pretty good user experience. It's not confusing. I know what I'm doing when I'm wiring money from one place to the other or making a transfer from one account to the other.
I lose some of my liberties.
because they have the option to, you know, remove my assets if they determine that I've done something illegal, even though I'm like, well, hey, I didn't do something illegal. If they determine that I did, they could seize my assets.
they can make a profit on me. They can
arbitrage the cost of capital to their returns when they take my deposits and deploy them elsewhere. I should be getting all that economic upside.
But
What I've gotten in exchange for giving up my liberties and my economic opportunity is a pretty good user experience. And we're at this place in crypto right now where we've
Taken a hard left.
And we've said, I wanna own everything, I wanna be hyper secure, I wanna have all my privacy
And
What we're left with is
Be unbanked.
Yeah. Yes, also be a bank. And it is a
Brutal.
thing to have to manage all this stuff right now.
Yes, this calendar year is gonna be big because not only adding more chains
Yeah, I think I agree with Vitalik. We're not gonna do complex multi-chain uh transactional models, though people are working on those using
Thresh signatures. I think the main thing is we'll f have w the chains people want to use
And the yield farmers go where the returns are good and the users follow.
So we'll we'll make that all as automatic and convenient, but you'll still have to turn it on and we'll have safeties on it.
And that UX will will take a lot of work to develop because design is still an art. It absolutely is an art, right? You can
I the space is too large to do sort of A B testing in any credible time frame.
You have to call some shots, get some users telling you what to do.
collaborate with those lead users I mentioned earlier. And then
I think at the end of this year we'll have a wallet.
that will be super awesome, not only for using crypto and you know DeFi and so on, but also
If we do it right, some of our custodial partners can virtualize your plastic from your wallet. So they can give you
Like privacy.com does like the Apple card does. They can give you a
The master card number.
From a block.
that they allocate from the
Isn't your number. So your security is better.
It's like the generated email addresses that Apple and others are doing. And
If we virtualize the credit card
Then we can actually
put e commerce in the browser. We can deconstruct Amazon, every site without having to change its merchant.
JavaScript, which is not gonna happen easily.
Can have
An option where you can use something like a virtual credit card that could even be topped up with crypto or draw on crypto.
I've got one question for you as it pertains to this decentralization versus user experience topic. Moxie Marlin Spike pointed out in his recent post that
And this is a quote, to make these technologies usable, the space is consolidating around platforms.
Again, the
people who will run servers for you and iterate on that functionality that emerges. In Fira OpenC Coinbase EtherScan.
And my question for you is
Do you think it is the case that
the user experience that users want and the developer experience and sort of ecosystem speed that programmers want.
necessitates these centralized choke points no matter what generation of the web we're on.
So it's hard to beat a server when you want to do something like index Ethereum's history into a database with multiple ways of querying it. So
I'm not gonna do that on my machines. I'm gonna use Ether scan or something like it.

has trackers or bad ad tech in it.
I'm gonna use brave and block those.
But it's hard to beat a server sometimes. And I agree with Moxie, right? I I like Moxie a lot. I met him once at Mozilla in the old days. He and colleagues did this blind context matching system contacts, I should say, like your address book contacts.
Four signal.
Because they had this problem that your friends are on Signal, Signal uses the phone number's identifier.
But how will they help you find your friends without
Reading your address book, which is a privacy problem.
And the way they did it used chown blind signatures and hashing and so on. And it's clever and it runs in a secure enclone on the server, which is something we're also using at Brave.
So
I agree with
Moxie's essay, there's a larger toolkit
From
cryptography, the original crypto, which some of my cryptographer friends are still mad as crypto's been annexed by cryptocurrency. But there's a larger toolkit and it works on servers.
On centralized systems as well as in decentralized systems. And decentralized systems, even Solana, there's always a trade off. If you really want
You know, certain guarantees.
And certain latency.
you're gonna want a server and you're gonna want even the network to that server to be provisioned a certain way. So there's no free lunch and there's a larger universe in which I think blockchains and networks
Peer to peer networks make sense, but
also servers will endure. That's why I get annoyed when people think that web two, you know, oh Braves to Web Two. Well
Web three is not going to replace web two. It's going to extend it in a way
But eventually, perhaps if it's like McLuhan's laws of media, it's gonna mock
And Torture Web 2.
But that's far in the future. And in the meantime, it's going to be extending it.
So that we can get users using it. And there are ways that users will want to use it that are going to be like EtherScan or a proxy farm like Infura Runs or Bison Trails or
There'll be servers you'll want to go to, but if you have these cryptographic protocols, if you have strong muscular clients like Brave,
If you have that market power as a small user through uh essentially unionizing with other users of that client,
Then you should be able to
Yeah.
Better privacy, better
security properties out of the server. It shouldn't just be raiding your data. It shouldn't be just betraying you in some way while it's whispering in your ear.
It should be a fairer deal.
And that
can be done with, you know, cryptography broadly construed. So I I liked Moxie's essay quite a bit.
All right listeners.
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Alright, well, I want to move on to our grading section here, and even though this isn't a sort of traditional acquired episode where we've necessarily told the whole history and done our
tear down analysis the way we typically do.
Brendan, I am curious your take.
What does A plus look like for brave
Let's just say three years from now. In some ways it's an epoch away, in other ways it'll be here as soon as we know it.
What does success look like for the company? If we keep doubling or better, three years is eight times fifty. So it's 400 million users.
And once you get to that scale.
you start to get distribution opportunities like being on
Phones. Preinstalls aren't really happening outside of the apps from the OS superpower like Android, Google, or
IOS Apple.
But Samsung's out there and there are new phones coming up in in the world and there's always a lower end of the market that's getting better thanks to the hardware getting
better and sort of trickling down.
And
So I I would like to see us get to that scale because then I think distribution
could go in directions that right now
it's harder to do organically and will cost you a lot if you have to pay for it.
But that's kind of a mundane business thing. I think if you get anywhere near four hundred million monthly users
You have enormous clout, especially if they're lead users still.
in standards. And standards matter still because a lot of businesses
want to not only compete but sort of cooperate, the co opetition model. So you get
ongoing, you know, web standards still in spite of Google's dominance and somewhat strong arm tactics.
You still get standards evolution. Crypto is for each blockchain its own set of standards, often run by a core team.
But there's as I said earlier, greater
sort of f de facto standardization on things like EVM compatible chains or
uh smart contract systems or things you can do with compilers and interpreters, even if you don't have
an EVM work alike in your
node in your network. So when we get to the scale of forward four hundred million or more users
We will have opportunities to do things
including with the basic attention token.
that we couldn't have done out of the box earlier and that would look like having a a
something more competitive with Google that's decentralized.
And
You know, we're not just aiming at Google. That's like sort of driving by looking in the rear view mirror. Google's
A hundred year company. So was General Electric, but ended up a a tax dodger and a subprime lender, right? This is not a good ending. Thomas Edison was spinning in his barrow. Google may end up that way sooner or later.
But
We're looking at a world where users are sovereign. That's the the vision I mentioned earlier. You have these
Machines without being a burdened sysadmin.
You should have say over them, you should have benefits from them. And it's not just economics and some
in a money grubbing way. Economics really the Greek word, right? Means something about
home economics or about the home or
You know, the scale of human life where you
live most of your life. And
Things have become very fraught and dehumanized at larger scales, but if we can get people
operat at smaller scales, then I I do believe this will be good for the world. And I'm not just talking, you know, pie in the sky, you know, hobbits in the Shire stuff here.
I see this with the creator economy. I see this with the YouTubers and the
other creators. For all the the clowning that goes on with NFTs
And actually we we'll be looking into NFT
as a basis for
further, you know, sort of tokenomics for our creators in this new year. Uh we want to see
Fans and creators directly connect, and we want to see them do it without
you know, being demonetized or interfered with
Censored, all that stuff.
And
If this can be scaled up, it forms all these little networks that have these logistic curves that have their exponential phases that everyone loves. So
people should want this for good business reasons, but you can't rate it through ad tech or tracking. You have to have a better platform and better sort of network for it. You have to have
Crypto in both senses Moxie's
cryptography and cryptocurrency or blockchain.
And I think Brave at four hundred million, we can actually make this real. We have uh one point three million creators verified.
We would have tens or millions of creators. And that means people who have KYC themselves so that they can receive tokens. Yeah, or if enough people have self custody, maybe we'll hang the self custody wallets on the creator side and you can just do an on chain send on a fast chain with low fees.
And you don't have to go through KYC at either end.
Now that that was always what people told us to do. You should only do, you know, direct on chain
And
I looked at it and even with our Bitcoin prototype, it was too expensive.
I talk to people like Bology of twenty one.co, which Bitcoin bought. I talked to
The Open Bazaar founder who actually DMed me first
He said, Uh we're thinking about adding bat. And I said, Aren't you bitcoin without a fee? Why do you need bat? And he said, Well
Nobody wants to send Bitcoin. They want to hodl it.
Which is very true and which at the time it would have been a good strategy. Just sit on it. Don't shave those bitcoins to send something
Send scraps to your favorite YouTuber.
And you know, people will send Bitcoin. People are using Lightning more. Jack and so on are all excited about it. Whatever. There's lots of options for this, but
Getting people to do direct on-chain sends is still challenging for the UX reasons we mentioned, the usability, the security, the sort of familiarity on the both the sender and the creator who receives it.
But
With Brave at four hundred million, we can hang self custody on all sides of our ecosystem, even the advertiser side.
The full triangle.
And people can go
Peer to peer.
They don't have to go through custodians if they don't want to.
Now, like I said, if you're worried about, you know, law enforcement, which you shouldn't be, if you're
Unless the government's gone bad.
then blockchain forensics and exiting on a regulated exchange will still let
the law enforcement do what they need to do.
you know, we're not trying to stand in the way of law enforcement doing what it should do. But this idea of getting to a big system of
direct on chain sends.
by starting there and limiting it to only those cases, or limiting it only to lightning, which I was told to use before it was ready, years before it was ready, doesn't make sense. We've gone the other way, we're pragmatists, but as we grow and as we keep the custodial options going,
We'll add the self custody options and see what wins. Makes total sense.
I'm sure you've thought more about the success case, but what's the failure case? What are the existential risks at this point? So there's always risks of some bad macro event or some bad crypto event.
You know, crypto gets banned uh in the US or something like that.
Don't think it's gonna happen. One of the reasons is'cause I do see too many rich people
partaking through their family offices and so on. But I do think there's a risk there, and I can't quantify it too easily, so we're just trying to carry on.
It's hard to hedge anyway.
I think there are risks with big tech. Big tech could still misbehave and it has
Still has
Even political power though, it's it's been getting beaten up more and more.
by both parties as time goes on. But that's a risk.
Do you think that Facebook or Google or or any of the others
Could
Ship a wallet in Chrome.
For instance, or like actually really embrace this?
I bet there's somebody at Google who's looked at this. I know
Google had a wallet or may even have a wallet team.
That does
Some outward bound stuff and
They never connected it with Chrome. They never put it together. You know, PayPal's gonna do their own stablecoin or whatever.
You're gonna see more wallets, and maybe you'll see them in big browsers.
But
I
Don't know if they're gonna
Get into the
system that we're getting into early, which is the frontier.
And that means they may just be stuck in the old world. It's very much like the age of discovery. We're gonna be
You know, building the the wild west and then the lights will come in and the streets will get better paved.
And we'll be there already.
And we'll be sewing pickaxes and shovels.
No.
Old world is back there in the Ancien regime.
You know, kinda corrupt.
I'm willing to innovate.
Maybe they stole the gold, but the banks then stole it from them through compound interest. I love it. You're the sons culates. Oh, you know, the Fuger family made out, the Hobbsburg's did not.
So you know Google may have a wallet, but it might just be a me too.
And it might be kind of weak.
When they do.
Can you imagine the default switching from sign in with your Google account to authenticate with your in browser wallet? There's just no way.
It really is hard for Google to innovate. They're just a big company and these big companies have their own
problems, uh not just the innovator's dilemma, but at least that much. And
I just don't think they're gonna be a huge threat, but they could
Use strong arm tactics to hurt us for sure.
All the bigs could.
And then there's our own execution risk and our own sort of competition
with the growing new wave of privacy products.
Where I think we have to just compete and it's competition's good. We learn from each other.
Uh there's a marketing component as you
grow across the chasm where you're trying to convince
People who don't know again a search engine from a browser that
Your product is more private, it is faster, it's more trustworthy, it's got other good properties. Who do you consider your competitors? So is it would it be like Square Block or MetaMask or
No, so you know, we're trying to get people off of Chrome.
And that's a matter of getting people to see that it's easy to migrate. You can even co browse for a while. You don't lose anything.
And then you can cut the cord with chrome.
People switch from Firefox, that happens over time'cause it's going down and people can see it and sort of there are problems there.
We can get people off Safari, but Safari is still
privileged in Apple's OSs and kind of tied.
So that's hard. Edge is somewhat privileged in Windows, which is
A little harmless.
We're competing, I think, for thought leadership with other privacy firms, so there's
Jumbo privacy, which isn't really doing a browser, but it's it's coming up with stuff. It's another, you know, venture funded thing. Deft the go's been out there a long time.
And they've built up quite a uh reputation and brand name. You see their signs in airports.
So they've done sort of a marketing first approach and gotten to a reasonable annual turnover from what I understand.
And that's gotta be considered a competitor because they're doing desktop browsers on top of mobile now.
But we look at the pie
that we're dividing up as very large. If you're taking users from Chrome.
We could both take and not really
interfere with you. The worst case to me would be, you know, Doc and Brave start
blooding each other in some mixed martial arts match to claim the privacy mantle prematurely. That seems
Neally destructive.
But it is difficult marketing across the chasm. You have to say
We are more private, or we are better, or you should use us because we're faster, we're more complete. We block these threats that the other guy doesn't.
And so some of that will have to happen.
It's just gonna have to happen for marketing reasons.
All right, lightning round of carve outs. David, give us your first one and you and I'll go first and then we'll kick it to to Brennan so he can think on his.
I'm gonna make it easy. My carve out is a book.
About halfway through.
I started reading because I saw you tweeting about it while you were in Hawaii.
Project Tail Mary.
Anywhere.
So good. Really enjoying it so far.
So good. It makes me think about everything from scientific principles when I look around in the world.
I don't know that book. What's it about?
It's Andy Weir who wrote The Martian. This is his newest novel.
Okay.
And
is story told in such a way that
It's really fun to let it surprise you as you read the book, so I don't want to spoil it.
Yeah, the the Martian was good. Cool.
I Ben went to get.
My
quick one is the second book that I read on vacation, which is Open by Andre Agassi.
his co writer or ghostwriter, I don't know the right term, but it's the same
Pillitzer Prize winning.
writer who helped
Phil Knight with Shoe Dog.
And it is written in that same
page turning thriller style and Andre Agassi had an unbelievable career ups downs
Shout out to friends of the show.
Jeremy over at Tiny
And David Perrell, who at Capital Camp recommended the book to me, but it was just awesome. Highly recommend it. So
I've not been reading enough and I owe a friend an Apple a read of his
New book which is
His first novel.
But I
This is kinda negative, but I think it's important.
Mike Schellenberger's San Francisco is worth reading if you're from the Bay Area a long time like I have been,'cause it ain't good.
I remember much better decades in San Francisco and helped
Come back somehow, but
Mike diagnoses it pretty directly.
I also would recommend an old book that a friend who only reads old books recommended to me, which you can find free copy of online.
Like LibGen, you can get it. It's called Dynamic Economics by Bur Klein.
You've never heard of Burton Klein.
Burton Klein
looked at how firms grow and how they start
Sometimes the skunk works projects. He actually looked at
Kelly Martins.
Yeah.
He looked at
The traitoress aid at Fairchild he looked at
The China Lake Sidewinder.
first practical heat seeking missile development.
And he made some killer observations about
structure, sort of sociology, anthropology, hierarchy.
About
How firms go from
Innovation to
Rent seeking to
Outright vampiric badness.
And he had four kinds of firms. So anyway, Burton Klein dynamic economics. It's an oldie.
But uh underappreciated.
Um and still
Very much relevant.
Wonder if I I should
Give Elon Musk a pointer.
Brendan.
Thank you so much for the time. We're gonna let you run. Where can listeners find you on the internet and Brave on the Internet?
So
Brave.com
Five letter English word domain name. We got it in twenty fifteen.
We got it from the nuclear polka combo, brave combo.
It's a Texas fan the friends of Matt Groening, Simpson trader. He's put them in Simpsons
Season seventeen.
And they were honest musicians and we gave them brave combo.com
and paid a reasonable price. So Brave.com is it. I'm on Twitter as Brendan Ike. I'm on Reddit as Brendan Ike Brave.
Um, easy to find. Brendan Ike.com. I haven't updated in a while. That was historic blog posts, but some of them are still relevant to do with
Trust but verify, also WebAssembly, JavaScript stuff.
And on Twitter, the Brave handle is called at Brave.
It seems to be search band for some reason. I'm not sure why that is.
Uh we have attention token. That's another Twitter handle. Uh we have brave support if you need support.
You can always tag me, Brent Ike.
Awesome.
Brendan, thank you so much.
Thanks.
It's fun.
David, that was super fun. Brendan is such an internet legend.
Oh my gosh, what a
A man for all seasons, literally.
Yeah.
Yep.
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