DuckDuckGo

“We're seeing 90% plus actual decent education concern rates about basic online privacy things, and about 30% in the U.S. And other major markets are people who have actually tried to take some significant action to protect themselves online.”

“We don't hold people accountable for results in that way. We hold people accountable for running good experiments, running good projects, running a good postmortem process, which we have for every project.”

“Over the last 12 years, Gabe has scaled DuckDuckGo to doing over 1.6 billion searches every month, a team of 83 fully remote full-time employees, and also raising funding from some of the best in the business, USV, and also, most importantly, being a profitabl…”

“We actually spent time, and I personally, drafting a do not track legislation last year, and that's an example of what I think is a very simple but effective mechanism to help address the data monopoly issue, and what that is is, in every browser right now, th…”

“And when you look back at achieving that and like what got you there, it's often one channel really drove the bulk of that. And it just has to do with like effectiveness at any given time. Usually the winning strategy, you often don't have equally effective st…”

“So first, we have postmortem for every single project, regardless of if it's successful or not.”

“That said, we're in an interesting position that we can't really track our users. That's our privacy policy. And so we don't have great ways to measure these standard user metrics that other companies do.”

“We kind of stole that concept from Apple, this directly responsible individual, but we have gone into it a hundred percent. So everything has an owner from the top objective down to the little task.”

“DuckDuckGo itself has raised its brand awareness to approximately 30% in major markets.”

“I was one of the first, if not the first Reddit advertiser back in the day, like click-through rates can be through the roof.”

“When I started DuckDuckGo, I just had that mentality, and so also bootstrapped that for the first four years, and, you know, really didn't take venture until our series A, which was in 2011, so 11 years into my whole startup career.”

“We set out to raise money just to give us some buffer, basically. Ended up being that we became profitable pretty quickly and didn't really use any of the money that we ever raised, but it really helped free up the mentality that we could take bigger risks.”

“Now, a lot of those processes get developed as you're a much bigger company and you hear about companies who are 50 to a hundred to a 150 employees kind of breaking down in communication and having to start all over and develop those bigger company processes. …”