The Exchanges

Q inside of Netscape at AOL had sort of lost the fire. AOL at first thought this was a strategic asset, now realized it wasn't going anywhere. And so you had this sort of moment to seize if you had the right team where there was no legitimate challenger anymore to IE, and so you could make a real run at it. Is that sort of how you think about it?

A Yes. And the way you described it was almost like fractal structure because the core team was like a pirate ship Kind of sassing Netscape management for their foolish bloated suite, and also making great tools and things that Hewitt worked on, Firebug and the autocomplete stuff, and that led to early adopters loving it so much more than all the other browsers, so that when Firefox was at 0.8 in early, I think it was early 2004, and then 0.9 especially, when we could see the rocket ready to launch, the whole lead user cohort of the web was just charged up. And at that point, we, I'd made contact with Sergey Brin through somebody he sent my way named Fritz Schneider, and we'd gotten the search deal going in 0.9, but we'd also gotten Fritz's team, the gin team at Google helping Firefox. So they were working on browsers before Chrome, and the browser to work on was Firefox. Nobody thought it could be done. The conventional wisdom still was that you're never going to take back market share, even though Firefox already had a few million users and was growing rapidly. Uh, and this did convince some people who worked with us at the time, like Bart DeCreme, to go try a commercial fork of Firefox. That was Flock. Didn't work. Raised a bunch of EC.

AI assessment note: “Yes. And the way you described it was almost like fractal structure”

Q 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?

A 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 70%, let's say, or more of market share, uh, 2.65 billion users, they say, You should get off Chrome and you should use Brave. We tried to make something that's easy to switch to, but that's much more protective of your privacy. And this is an ongoing commitment on our part because it requires a lot of research and development. It requires fighting new kinds of tracking and fingerprinting that emerge. 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 70% of the revenue and that let them support their creators directly through the basic attention token. And that was something we wanted to do because we saw the privacy protection, which is I think every user's right and good and necessary as nevertheless harmful to the current system of ad tech that publishers do depend on. So we wanted to get Our users an option that wasn't privacy invading, let them participate in funding creators. And if you don't want the private ads, you can still fund creators out…

AI assessment note: “Brave is a faster browser because it blocks all the trackers”

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

A Craig Hanson might have been at Next, Yeah, now you remind me. Craig definitely was at MIPS. He did the floating point unit, the MIPS floating point unit. So he was the full architect at MicroUnity. So MicroUnity 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 analog and digital on the same chip, I should say. It was doing basically everything except the radio front end that mixes down the bass band, it was doing in software. So all this stuff has come true over time, but trying to do all at once, you just run into the multiplication principle and your odds of success go to one in a billion or ten billion. And they could have used the fab to make SRAMs, but I think it was too boring. I think Moose was really ambitious. He wanted to change the world. He wanted to be the new Howard Hughes in some ways. And he did make a lot of money off the patents.

AI assessment note: “Craig Hanson might have been at Next... Craig definitely was at MIPS.”

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

A No. So, you know, we're trying to get people off of Chrome and that's a matter of getting people to see that it's easy to migrate. You can even co-browse for a while. You don't lose anything. And then you can cut the cord with Chrome. People switch from Firefox. That happens over time because it's going down and people can see it and sort of, there are problems there. We can get people off Safari, but Safari is still privileged in Apple's OS's and kind of tied. So that's hard. Edge is somewhat privileged in Windows, which is a little hard on us. We're competing, I think, for thought leadership with other privacy firms. So there's Jumbo Privacy, which isn't really doing a browser, but it's, it's coming up with stuff. It's another, you know, venture funded thing. Duck That Go has been out there a long time and they've built up quite a 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 Joe. The worst case to me would be, you know, duck and brave start blooding each other in some mixed martial arts match to cl…

AI assessment note: “we're trying to get people off of Chrome... Duck That Go... gotta be considered a competitor”

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

A 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 talked to people like Balaji of TwentyOne.co, which Bitcoin bought. I talked to the Open Bazaar founder who'd actually DM'd me first. He said, we're thinking about adding bat. And I said, aren't you Bitcoin without a fee? Why do you need bat? And he said, well, nobody wants to send Bitcoin. They want to hodl it. 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, or 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 …

AI assessment note: “Yeah, or if enough people have self-custody, maybe we'll hang the self-custody wallets”

Q 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?

A 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 when we switched from a private version based on Mozilla's Gecko engine to Chromium Blink, and using Electron was a mistake. It wasn't designed for a browser. It turned off the sandbox. That was horrifying to discover, and it's kind of bloated and replaced a lot of middleware files in the Chromium code that Google was Breaking through internal API shifts, and we finally got onto a proper, well-maintained Chromium fork, including the front end. Now, the downside of this is we look a lot like Chrome. We have the brave lion icon for shields. We have the triangle for bat. We have our own look for the tabs, but it still looks a little 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 com…

AI assessment note: “I think it's worth it because that helped us get users off Chrome.”