The Exchanges

Q You mentioned your entry there, and I always go off schedule. I don't quite expect to go off this early, but you mentioned the entry there being at that kind of critical time in the excitement of 99, 2000. And it means you saw the bust of 2002 1001, and then 2008. How did that impact your mindset, really building DuckDuckGo today, having seen that hard time?

A Well, I tried to raise money right at the bust, and that obviously failed. So I couldn't raise money, although that company didn't deserve probably to raise any money. So that's one thing. And I started the next company in kind of that bust. I just never even thought about really raising money again. So the next company, we actually sold that company, but never had any investors or employees, actually. It was just Me and a partner throughout the whole time, and then 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.

AI assessment note: “when I started DuckDuckGo, I just had that mentality, and so also bootstrapped that”

Q Yeah, no, I do agree. In terms of kind of the duopoly, there is kind of a wide variety of channels that people can and do deploy on. In terms of like channel performance, I guess, how do you think about the importance of diversification of channel, especially for you in the early days with DuckDuckGo?

A So I have a bit of a counterintuitive view here, and it's written up in the book you mentioned, but I think when you look back, So for any kind of marketing stage of a company, you're really looking to achieve some kind of growth milestone, right? Be it some kind of number of users or revenue target or something like that, that really is an inflection point for the company. 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 strategies. It happens, but it's rare. Usually there's a dominance And so my view is you do experimentation in all these different channels to kind of unlock that dominant strategy. Now to do that, you actually have to run a bunch of experiments. So effectively you're doing a diversification play, but then once you find out what's working, you really double down on that. And to this earlier point about the duopoly, oftentimes that ends up being a creative solution. So even online, you know, there's this Andrew Chen coined this term I wrote in the book called the law of shitty click throughs. And basically he's saying that over time channels saturate And click-through rates go down. And when it started, search advertising, click-through rates were like 30%…

AI assessment note: “when you look back at achieving that... it's often one channel really drove the bulk”

Q Yeah. What would you advise founders, given the mistakes that you've made, given the successes that you've had in the structure, and just benefit of hindsight, For those now, a lot of people found in starting out two people starting thinking, hey, we should build a remote team. What would you advise them?

A So with a remote team, I would get it all organized. And in particular, it gets really tactical. So I won't go into super detail, but like the long and short of it is put everything in one place that everyone can see. And so it's effectively like if you were in the same room and you had a big whiteboard of all your objectives, make that a place where everyone can go at all times. And that's kind of where they're working on. We use Asana for that. And so there's a big Asana view that everyone lives on called our current objectives, and it lists all of our different objectives that the company's working on very explicitly, all the projects underneath them, and anyone can follow along with any of those projects, and each of them has an owner and a role and responsibility for updating the rest of the company. And with those processes in place, it all works very smoothly without having a lot of synchronous meetings.

AI assessment note: “put everything in one place that everyone can see. We use Asana for that.”

Q You mentioned your entry there, and I always go off schedule. I don't quite expect to go off this early, but you mentioned the entry there being at that kind of critical time in the excitement of 99, 2000. And it means you saw the bust of 2002 1001, and then 2008. How did that impact your mindset, really building DuckDuckGo today, having seen that hard time?

A Well, I tried to raise money right at the bust, and that obviously failed. So I couldn't raise money, although that company didn't deserve probably to raise any money. So that's one thing. And I started the next company in kind of that bust. I just never even thought about really raising money again. So the next company, we actually sold that company, but never had any investors or employees, actually. It was just Me and a partner throughout the whole time, and then 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.

AI assessment note: “when I started DuckDuckGo, I just had that mentality, and so also bootstrapped”

Q Yeah. What would you advise founders, given the mistakes that you've made, given the successes that you've had in the structure, and just benefit of hindsight, For those now, a lot of people found in starting out two people starting thinking, hey, we should build a remote team. What would you advise them?

A So with a remote team, I would get it all organized. And in particular, it gets really tactical. So I won't go into super detail, but like the long and short of it is put everything in one place that everyone can see. And so it's effectively like if you were in the same room and you had a big whiteboard of all your objectives, make that a place where everyone can go at all times. And that's kind of where they're working on. We use Asana for that. And so there's a big Asana view that everyone lives on called our current objectives, and it lists all of our different objectives that the company's working on very explicitly, all the projects underneath them, and anyone can follow along with any of those projects, and each of them has an owner and a role and responsibility for updating the rest of the company. And with those processes in place, it all works very smoothly without having a lot of synchronous meetings.

AI assessment note: “put everything in one place that everyone can see”

Q Yeah, no, I do agree. In terms of kind of the duopoly, there is kind of a wide variety of channels that people can and do deploy on. In terms of like channel performance, I guess, how do you think about the importance of diversification of channel, especially for you in the early days with DuckDuckGo?

A So I have a bit of a counterintuitive view here, and it's written up in the book you mentioned, but I think when you look back, So for any kind of marketing stage of a company, you're really looking to achieve some kind of growth milestone, right? Be it some kind of number of users or revenue target or something like that, that really is an inflection point for the company. 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 strategies. It happens, but it's rare. Usually there's a dominance And so my view is you do experimentation in all these different channels to kind of unlock that dominant strategy. Now to do that, you actually have to run a bunch of experiments. So effectively you're doing a diversification play, but then once you find out what's working, you really double down on that. And to this earlier point about the duopoly, oftentimes that ends up being a creative solution. So even online, you know, there's this Andrew Chen coined this term I wrote in the book called the law of shitty click throughs. And basically he's saying that over time channels saturate And click-through rates go down. And when it started, search advertising, click-through rates were like 30%…

AI assessment note: “effectively you're doing a diversification play, but then once you find out what's working”

Q Sorry, granular one before the quickfire, but I have to ask it. I'm super nerdy when it comes to postmortems. How do you structure and think about effective postmortem analysis?

A So first, we have postmortem for every single project, regardless of if it's successful or not. And that means that there's no stigma of having a postmortem. And in fact, postmortems for good projects are often better than bad projects, because on a good project, there's no even tension about, like, blame or anything like that. And people can really open up and say, what could have made this even better? What processes can change? Or just in, like, a better frame of mind. So that's one thing. The second is, we have relatively evolved postmortem and other templates that we used And we run that through, so there's like a timeline in the postmortem, what went well, what didn't go well. Action items are kind of the main sections, and everybody kind of sticks to the template, and as people are very used to it, and they're used to the format, then they're used to really engaging with it over time.

AI assessment note: “there's like a timeline in the postmortem, what went well, what didn't go well”

Q Why did you decide that was the right time to raise the money that you did, and why then is that critical junction?

A So I am, despite being my entire career doing startups and Seemingly taking big, bold risks. I'm relatively risk averse as a person, especially with capital, and I've realized this doing angel investing, that I'm not the best investor because of that, and that's understatement. But in any case, I realized that I was really onto something with DuckDuckGo, that people really want and need privacy. This was back in the early pre-Snowden, but I could really see that the world was heading into more and more data collection, and there was no accounting balancing force. And I was sitting on something in a major market in DuckDuckGo and Search, where people were really starting to switch to it. At the same point, it was literally just me for four years. So I wrote every line of code. I did all this customer support. I did all the marketing. And you can tell that's kind of crazy. And I can tell that it was capitally starving the opportunity. I had enough money to put in to start building on a team, but this is still the risk averse and also kind of the wife test. It was also risk averse. Wasn't as interested in that. And so 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.

AI assessment note: “set out to raise money just to give us some buffer, basically.”

Q Yeah, no, I do totally agree in terms of that willingness to go back to the experimentation phase. We had Josh Barkley on the show from Mino Games who said on the show that every five million dollars you spend, your payback period doubles. Does that align with your experiences, and would you agree with that in terms of the payback period associated with the dollar amount invested?

A Not as a hard or fast rule, but I think as a general trend, there are different things that saturate channels, right? There are some channels that are way above your scale, and so maybe you could put a hundred million dollars into it, but there are other channels that Kind of max out at smaller scales, and we've seen that at our scale now because we're trying to really get the next wave of tens of millions or even hundred million consumers to use DuckDuckGo. And so there's not a lot of channels that we can deploy lots of amount of capital into before the prices start to rise. And so it really depends on kind of like what your goal is and how big that channel is in terms of inventory.

AI assessment note: “Not as a hard or fast rule, but I think as a general trend”

Q Can I ask, how do you think about channel mortality? We said there about their diversity, Capitalization. And when one pops, it really pops, but you can't rest on your laurels and sit on it for too long. How do you think about that agility to move between channel in the awareness that channel mortality does happen often sooner than you think?

A It's constant measurement. Like you can be looking at the first and second derivative of what you're doing and seeing if it's reaching diminishing returns. And while you're doing that, there's a function, a constant experimentation to kind of understand what that next channel is going to be. What I hesitate to do or advise against is like really spreading yourself too thin because when something's working, you really want to optimize it and you can often get a lot more out of it if you really focus on that. So the way I think of it is you're doing a lot of experiments up front to figure out that channel double down on. Then you really focus most of your energy double down on it, but really paying attention to diminishing returns. And as it starts to diminish, you then switch back more and more to experimenting with new channels.

AI assessment note: “It's constant measurement. Like you can be looking at the first and second derivative”

Q I'm so glad that it's not just me. Speaking of the kind of the structure, though, that you applied there with Asana, I am interested, because in terms of team structures, it's pretty unconventional in that way, too, with no traditional org structure or hierarchy. So why is this, and why do you have that deliberate structure in place?

A So there's kind of two concepts that explain this. One is called resonant frequency, which is a physics concept that you're probably used to when people sing and glass breaks. What that is, is you're hitting just the right note where the glass is absorbing energy and it gets bigger and bigger in amplitude. Now, hopefully this metaphor falls down because I don't want people to break, but what you want is you want to give people the exact right role where they're so motivated and passionate that they're resonating with it. And if you can do that, people can do amazing things. Effectively. And teams are even better. If you can get the team organized into resonant frequency, a small team can produce amazing results. And that's kind of what a startup is. As you get bigger, you want all your teams to be doing that. So what I found is for that to work, that's really dependent on what objectives you're working on and who's exactly right for the skill set for each objective. And so we want to constantly be moving people around a little fluidly to break down and build up teams so that they can hit resonant frequencies. Now the flip side of that, the other concept I mentioned is there's a lot of people reason people leave jobs, but two of the biggest are they don't like their manager or they feel stuck in what they're working on. And if you have a hierarchy and kind of a strict set of tea…

AI assessment note: “if you have a hierarchy and kind of a strict set of team and role responsibilities”

Q terms of the progression of consumer education around privacy. I do want to kind of go back to the element of traction, though, and actually apply it to the element of fundraising, which we said earlier, because you said once that traction trumps everything when it comes to Fundraising. What did you mean by this? And how can founders know what the right metrics, I guess, are to shoot for?

A Metrics depend a bit on what business you're in. But generally, if you have highly engaged users and a business model, you're going to attract investors in some way. And what I meant by that generally attraction trumps everything is fundraising, as you know, is kind of believing and telling a narrative, right? Here someone's coming to you and they're doing storytelling. And if you have no traction, no numbers to back up what you're doing, It's all storytelling. It's all narrative. On the other end, if you have the most amazing numbers in the world, you can be almost a crappy storyteller, and people might piece it together for you and come after you, which is, you know, what you see people going outbound to really go after certain people, even though they might have a lack of storytelling. And so as you get down that traction curve, that's why I mean it trumps everything, because you can just be done in your own business, and if you have enough traction, you will get fundraising interest.

AI assessment note: “if you have enough traction, you will get fundraising interest”

Q Why did you decide that was the right time to raise the money that you did, and why then is that critical junction?

A So I am, despite being my entire career doing startups and Seemingly taking big, bold risks. I'm relatively risk averse as a person, especially with capital, and I've realized this doing angel investing, that I'm not the best investor because of that, and that's understatement. But in any case, I realized that I was really onto something with DuckDuckGo, that people really want and need privacy. This was back in the early pre-Snowden, but I could really see that the world was heading into more and more data collection, and there was no accounting balancing force. And I was sitting on something in a major market in DuckDuckGo and Search, where people were really starting to switch to it. At the same point, it was literally just me for four years. So I wrote every line of code. I did all this customer support. I did all the marketing. And you can tell that's kind of crazy. And I can tell that it was capitally starving the opportunity. I had enough money to put in to start building on a team, but this is still the risk averse and also kind of the wife test. It was also risk averse. Wasn't as interested in that. And so 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.

AI assessment note: “it was capitally starving the opportunity. I had enough money to put in to start building”

Q Can I ask, does that make total sense? Because a lot of investors that I speak to and a lot of my friends in the investor community are very concerned by the amount of secondaries that we see getting done. Do you think it does make total sense given that?

A I think it depends on the person, but from my perspective, I think it definitely makes sense because Some of these founders, and, you know, myself included, have a lot of their net worth tied up into the company, and people are going after big visions, like, I'm already 12 years into DuckDuckCo, right, and we're just, it feels like we're getting started, and it makes sense from a diversification point of view to take some money off the table, and it's a good deal for the other side, because they can get in and see the rest of the growth, and so I think if you have that opportunity, I really personally think that, but maybe that is just me, again, coming from a more risk-averse Attitude. A more kind of financially prudent attitude, but I think if you come from that attitude and you do that, then it kind of opens up your ability to take more risks because you've kind of put aside everything that you wanted to put aside.

AI assessment note: “from my perspective, I think it definitely makes sense because”

Q Can I ask, how do you think about channel mortality? We said there about their diversity, Capitalization. And when one pops, it really pops, but you can't rest on your laurels and sit on it for too long. How do you think about that agility to move between channel in the awareness that channel mortality does happen often sooner than you think?

A It's constant measurement. Like you can be looking at the first and second derivative of what you're doing and seeing if it's reaching diminishing returns. And while you're doing that, there's a function, a constant experimentation to kind of understand what that next channel is going to be. What I hesitate to do or advise against is like really spreading yourself too thin because when something's working, you really want to optimize it and you can often get a lot more out of it if you really focus on that. So the way I think of it is you're doing a lot of experiments up front to figure out that channel double down on. Then you really focus most of your energy double down on it, but really paying attention to diminishing returns. And as it starts to diminish, you then switch back more and more to experimenting with new channels.

AI assessment note: “It's constant measurement. Like you can be looking at the first and second derivative”

Q Yeah, no, I do totally agree in terms of that willingness to go back to the experimentation phase. We had Josh Barkley on the show from Mino Games who said on the show that every five million dollars you spend, your payback period doubles. Does that align with your experiences, and would you agree with that in terms of the payback period associated with the dollar amount invested?

A Not as a hard or fast rule, but I think as a general trend, there are different things that saturate channels, right? There are some channels that are way above your scale, and so maybe you could put a hundred million dollars into it, but there are other channels that Kind of max out at smaller scales, and we've seen that at our scale now because we're trying to really get the next wave of tens of millions or even hundred million consumers to use DuckDuckGo. And so there's not a lot of channels that we can deploy lots of amount of capital into before the prices start to rise. And so it really depends on kind of like what your goal is and how big that channel is in terms of inventory.

AI assessment note: “Not as a hard or fast rule, but I think as a general trend”

Q terms of the progression of consumer education around privacy. I do want to kind of go back to the element of traction, though, and actually apply it to the element of fundraising, which we said earlier, because you said once that traction trumps everything when it comes to Fundraising. What did you mean by this? And how can founders know what the right metrics, I guess, are to shoot for?

A Metrics depend a bit on what business you're in. But generally, if you have highly engaged users and a business model, you're going to attract investors in some way. And what I meant by that generally attraction trumps everything is fundraising, as you know, is kind of believing and telling a narrative, right? Here someone's coming to you and they're doing storytelling. And if you have no traction, no numbers to back up what you're doing, It's all storytelling. It's all narrative. On the other end, if you have the most amazing numbers in the world, you can be almost a crappy storyteller, and people might piece it together for you and come after you, which is, you know, what you see people going outbound to really go after certain people, even though they might have a lack of storytelling. And so as you get down that traction curve, that's why I mean it trumps everything, because you can just be done in your own business, and if you have enough traction, you will get fundraising interest.

AI assessment note: “what I meant by that generally attraction trumps everything is fundraising”

Q I'm so glad that it's not just me. Speaking of the kind of the structure, though, that you applied there with Asana, I am interested, because in terms of team structures, it's pretty unconventional in that way, too, with no traditional org structure or hierarchy. So why is this, and why do you have that deliberate structure in place?

A So there's kind of two concepts that explain this. One is called resonant frequency, which is a physics concept that you're probably used to when people sing and glass breaks. What that is, is you're hitting just the right note where the glass is absorbing energy and it gets bigger and bigger in amplitude. Now, hopefully this metaphor falls down because I don't want people to break, but what you want is you want to give people the exact right role where they're so motivated and passionate that they're resonating with it. And if you can do that, people can do amazing things. Effectively. And teams are even better. If you can get the team organized into resonant frequency, a small team can produce amazing results. And that's kind of what a startup is. As you get bigger, you want all your teams to be doing that. So what I found is for that to work, that's really dependent on what objectives you're working on and who's exactly right for the skill set for each objective. And so we want to constantly be moving people around a little fluidly to break down and build up teams so that they can hit resonant frequencies. Now the flip side of that, the other concept I mentioned is there's a lot of people reason people leave jobs, but two of the biggest are they don't like their manager or they feel stuck in what they're working on. And if you have a hierarchy and kind of a strict set of tea…

AI assessment note: “So there's kind of two concepts that explain this. One is called resonant frequency”

Q Could have done in many junctions in the company's life. Many people always think that kind of growth and capital injection are two levers. Do you think that there are odds? And how do you think about kind of the relationship between the two? Because most would say, you know, without the capital injection, the growth reduces. How do you think about the kind of the correlation between the two?

A I mean, at the end, you're talking about converting capital into growth, right? And so you have to be able to spend that capital in some way efficiently, whether that's develop a new product and launch it, hire a bunch of people, Or put it into some kind of marketing channel. We were kind of profitable enough where we could grow the team and product investments at an item. We're not constrained by that in terms of that. Potentially, if we could unlock it, you know, find some marketing channels to put a large chunk of capital in. And I'm certainly not opposed to that, but hadn't really found those that required a lot of capital. A lot of the marketing we've done was less capital intensive.

AI assessment note: “you're talking about converting capital into growth, right? And so you have to be able to spend that capital”

Q Sorry, granular one before the quickfire, but I have to ask it. I'm super nerdy when it comes to postmortems. How do you structure and think about effective postmortem analysis?

A So first, we have postmortem for every single project, regardless of if it's successful or not. And that means that there's no stigma of having a postmortem. And in fact, postmortems for good projects are often better than bad projects, because on a good project, there's no even tension about, like, blame or anything like that. And people can really open up and say, what could have made this even better? What processes can change? Or just in, like, a better frame of mind. So that's one thing. The second is, we have relatively evolved postmortem and other templates that we used And we run that through, so there's like a timeline in the postmortem, what went well, what didn't go well. Action items are kind of the main sections, and everybody kind of sticks to the template, and as people are very used to it, and they're used to the format, then they're used to really engaging with it over time.

AI assessment note: “timeline in the postmortem, what went well, what didn't go well. Action items”

Q Can I ask, you mentioned the power of the duopoly, and I was chatting about this the other day with a friend of mine. And he strongly advocated for the breaking up of those powers. I'm intrigued. How do you think about that? And do you think that is the right situation given their prominence today?

A I think there needs to be something to be done about the data monopolies that underlie the duopoly. And unless something is done to kind of deconstruct that data monopoly, then this will persist ad infinitum because of the network effects involved. There are many ways to get at that data monopoly, and we've suggested a lot. I think some of the approaches Are less thought out than others. 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, there's generally a do not track setting, but unbeknownst to most people, it pretty much does nothing because it's voluntary, and it's putting some teeth to that, so consumers who opt in to this do not track setting would not be allowed to be tracked by third parties as they browse the web. And that would open up this ability for those consumers, and we think it's about 30% of people who opted in here, to not be subject to that duopoly, and they'd have to be served by contextual advertising. And that opens up advertising market to all sorts of other firms to compete in a contextual advertising market. So I'm hopeful that something like that would help address the underlying data monopolies.

AI assessment note: “I think there needs to be something to be done about the data monopolies”

Q Can I ask, you mentioned the power of the duopoly, and I was chatting about this the other day with a friend of mine. And he strongly advocated for the breaking up of those powers. I'm intrigued. How do you think about that? And do you think that is the right situation given their prominence today?

A I think there needs to be something to be done about the data monopolies that underlie the duopoly. And unless something is done to kind of deconstruct that data monopoly, then this will persist ad infinitum because of the network effects involved. There are many ways to get at that data monopoly, and we've suggested a lot. I think some of the approaches Are less thought out than others. 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, there's generally a do not track setting, but unbeknownst to most people, it pretty much does nothing because it's voluntary, and it's putting some teeth to that, so consumers who opt in to this do not track setting would not be allowed to be tracked by third parties as they browse the web. And that would open up this ability for those consumers, and we think it's about 30% of people who opted in here, to not be subject to that duopoly, and they'd have to be served by contextual advertising. And that opens up advertising market to all sorts of other firms to compete in a contextual advertising market. So I'm hopeful that something like that would help address the underlying data monopolies.

AI assessment note: “I think there needs to be something to be done about the data monopolies”

Q Can I ask, does that make total sense? Because a lot of investors that I speak to and a lot of my friends in the investor community are very concerned by the amount of secondaries that we see getting done. Do you think it does make total sense given that?

A I think it depends on the person, but from my perspective, I think it definitely makes sense because Some of these founders, and, you know, myself included, have a lot of their net worth tied up into the company, and people are going after big visions, like, I'm already 12 years into DuckDuckCo, right, and we're just, it feels like we're getting started, and it makes sense from a diversification point of view to take some money off the table, and it's a good deal for the other side, because they can get in and see the rest of the growth, and so I think if you have that opportunity, I really personally think that, but maybe that is just me, again, coming from a more risk-averse Attitude. A more kind of financially prudent attitude, but I think if you come from that attitude and you do that, then it kind of opens up your ability to take more risks because you've kind of put aside everything that you wanted to put aside.

AI assessment note: “I think it definitely makes sense because Some of these founders, and, you know, myself”

Q Could have done in many junctions in the company's life. Many people always think that kind of growth and capital injection are two levers. Do you think that there are odds? And how do you think about kind of the relationship between the two? Because most would say, you know, without the capital injection, the growth reduces. How do you think about the kind of the correlation between the two?

A I mean, at the end, you're talking about converting capital into growth, right? And so you have to be able to spend that capital in some way efficiently, whether that's develop a new product and launch it, hire a bunch of people, Or put it into some kind of marketing channel. We were kind of profitable enough where we could grow the team and product investments at an item. We're not constrained by that in terms of that. Potentially, if we could unlock it, you know, find some marketing channels to put a large chunk of capital in. And I'm certainly not opposed to that, but hadn't really found those that required a lot of capital. A lot of the marketing we've done was less capital intensive.

AI assessment note: “you're talking about converting capital into growth, right? And so you have to be able to spend”

Q though to hear. DuckDuckGo is obviously incredibly prominent within maybe slightly more Technical crowds and definitely more privacy conscious crowds. How do you think about expanding it to the billion users and the two billion users and those that are completely unaware of technology circles and kind of privacy interests? How do you think about that very next phase of customer acquisition for you in terms of that next segment?

A Well, this last couple of years has really been just an explosion of privacy interest following Cambridge Analytica, and so 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. Now, often that's an action that may not help them, like using private browsing or do not track, but these are people who are not just say they care, but they're actually acting on privacy. So the market right now is actually pretty large. In that same vein, DuckDuckGo itself has raised its brand awareness to approximately 30% in major markets. And so it's already crossed that chasm point, and now we're really focused on really helping people. Our vision is broad. It's raised the standard of trust online, and to do that effectively, we think we need to effectively be the consumer privacy brand. So people, when they want to protect themselves, they turn to DuckDuckGo, and that's what we're focused on.

AI assessment note: “we think we need to effectively be the consumer privacy brand.”

Q Can I ask, how did you align everyone so nicely across, you know, as I said, a team of 80 now?

A Well, it sounds simple in retrospect, but it is hard in practice, and what really spurred me in a system I had adopted was a, um, it's going to answer your question later about what book I like, called The Advantage by Patrick Leonsoni, and what it is, is it's just running the company on a tight set of objectives. It's a little different than OKRs, because they don't have to have metrics associated with it in quarterly or annual kind of reporting, but it's basically staying really Focus as to what objectives you're working on, and not steering from that, and writing those down extremely explicitly, and that's kind of the long and short of it, and there's a lot of stuff to, like, organize around that, and make it all transparent, and work in a distributed team, but it's effectively writing down, and being very clear at what the objective is.

AI assessment note: “running the company on a tight set of objectives”

Q Can I ask, how did you align everyone so nicely across, you know, as I said, a team of 80 now?

A Well, it sounds simple in retrospect, but it is hard in practice, and what really spurred me in a system I had adopted was a, um, it's going to answer your question later about what book I like, called The Advantage by Patrick Leonsoni, and what it is, is it's just running the company on a tight set of objectives. It's a little different than OKRs, because they don't have to have metrics associated with it in quarterly or annual kind of reporting, but it's basically staying really Focus as to what objectives you're working on, and not steering from that, and writing those down extremely explicitly, and that's kind of the long and short of it, and there's a lot of stuff to, like, organize around that, and make it all transparent, and work in a distributed team, but it's effectively writing down, and being very clear at what the objective is.

AI assessment note: “a system I had adopted was... called The Advantage by Patrick Leonsoni”

Q though to hear. DuckDuckGo is obviously incredibly prominent within maybe slightly more Technical crowds and definitely more privacy conscious crowds. How do you think about expanding it to the billion users and the two billion users and those that are completely unaware of technology circles and kind of privacy interests? How do you think about that very next phase of customer acquisition for you in terms of that next segment?

A Well, this last couple of years has really been just an explosion of privacy interest following Cambridge Analytica, and so 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. Now, often that's an action that may not help them, like using private browsing or do not track, but these are people who are not just say they care, but they're actually acting on privacy. So the market right now is actually pretty large. In that same vein, DuckDuckGo itself has raised its brand awareness to approximately 30% in major markets. And so it's already crossed that chasm point, and now we're really focused on really helping people. Our vision is broad. It's raised the standard of trust online, and to do that effectively, we think we need to effectively be the consumer privacy brand. So people, when they want to protect themselves, they turn to DuckDuckGo, and that's what we're focused on.

AI assessment note: “So the market right now is actually pretty large.”