 Hello, everyone. Hello, Slush. This place is wild. This is awesome. Yes, absolutely. I'm Anna. I'm the head of program at Slush. And I'm so excited to be moderating the co-founder and CEO of the browser company, Josh. Josh, huge thank you for doing this with me. It's going to be a great conversation here. So to kick it off, I think it's quite unusual to fall in love with your browser. It's really not something that you many people think about. However, the ARC is not only my personal opinion, really incredible, but this is true for many, many others as well. It's truly the browser that we have all been waiting for. Only found in 2019, your user base has really grown exponentially, just showing the immense impact of well-built and thought out products in even one of the most competitive and even a little bit of boring kind of industries. However, I think ARC, the browser company, have uniquely made this industry colorful and fun again. So it really needs a true visionary to change it. So to kick it off, I think everybody is really intrigued to know what was wrong with the browsers. Why and how did you get the idea to build a new one? Well, thank you all for being here. I think we can all agree that a desktop web browser is probably one of the most boring things that anyone could work on. And if you had told me that I was going to work on a desktop web browser a decade ago, I probably would have asked what went wrong in my career for that to be true. But the thing that we realized was there are very few products in your life that if you walked into a dinner party, everybody, including yourself, uses one of them and uses them for hours and hours every single day across all different parts of your life. There are very few products like that. And yet if you talk to someone about a desktop web browser, they would be so bored. And so I think part of what we were so inspired by was that dissonance, because I'm sure at some point people felt that way about shoes. Who cares about shoes? They're just shoes. And then a company like Nike comes around, and I'm so proud and excited by my shoes, or AirPods even. If I think back a decade ago, I didn't really care about my headphones. And now I love my AirPods. And so what we saw was there was this opportunity for this tool that was so essential in your life, so essential in everyone's life. And yet you didn't care. How could we create a product and brand that was such a core to the fabric of your life that you actually cared about, let alone made you faster, and so on and so forth? So it was kind of a twist in turn. We didn't ever think we'd be here, but we find ourselves getting more and more inspired by what we can do with the Surface every day. Yeah. Well, what was actually kind of the first version of it? Like how did you start rethinking it? Like you realized that this is something that everybody is using, but how did you actually start reimagining to be anything different? The truth is we kind of broke the rules in a bunch of ways. So as you know, when you start a company, you're supposed to have a problem statement and a way you want to solve it. And truly the way the company started was with that observation I just shared of, man, we don't care, but we should care. So we just started prototyping. I think we built something like 50 different versions of where the tab bar could go and what it could look like and what features it could have and just kind of relentlessly paid attention to the way that we were using the internet every day. And over time, over six, seven, eight months of trying a lot of things, at some point, things started to click in like, oh, it's a lot cleaner to have the tabs on the left because the computer, there's more screen real estate this way. And you add just a little bit of color and it feels kind of nice and a border around it and it looks beautiful. So there are these little touches after trying a lot of things over many, many months. Yeah. Well, you've described the vision of internet computers as the kind of vision for ARC beyond even the browsers. So can you actually elaborate what does these internet computers mean? Yeah. So the idea is really simple. If you, the phone that you have in your hand or the laptop you have in your bag, if you just stepped on it right now, you'd feel bummed that you lost a lot of money in the value of the hardware, but you actually wouldn't lose anything. If you went to Apple Store, you got a new Android phone and you kind of got it all set up, you'd have everything you needed right back on it. And that's because there's not actually much on our devices anymore. Computing's changed pretty profoundly in that way. All of our stuff that matters to us is actually out there in the cloud, out there in a number of servers all over the world. That's actually a pretty powerful concept and change that I don't think we've really woven into the fabric of how we use technology yet. So imagine we're back at Slush in five years. This is the short version of what we think internet computers will be. In five years, all of us will be back here at Slush, hopefully, and there'll be some device over there and we'll walk up to that device and it'll scan our face or we'll touch our finger on it and whoosh all of our applications and data and people and tools will come down from the cloud right there to that device in front of us. And to be honest, this is already how it kind of works today with things like iCloud on new devices. So the idea of an internet computer isn't that Ark our product will be the only version of that. It's that where we think computing is already heading and already on its way to is this idea that these devices are gonna be everywhere. Your car is a computer, their computer is everywhere. What our real computer is is our stuff and our stuff is out there and so the future computer will be the thing, the software that brings our stuff from out there down to whatever device we're using in the moment. That's the idea of an internet computer. And how did this kind of vision develop for you? Like, was it always behind when you started the browser company? Was it always behind when you started building the actual browser Ark or did it only develop while you were building and you had this moment of like, uh-huh, this is actually the future? It was always part of the motivation to be totally honest. I wouldn't quite describe it as a vision. I don't think I'm a visionary. That word makes me a little bit uncomfortable but it was definitely part of the motivation. So my prior job is I worked for President Obama in the White House for two years and after the election I was really, really bummed personally by the outcome and really questioning the role that technology and software I had worked on played in getting President Trump elected. And I had this conversational conversation with my boss where we realized that if you care about how we as society use technology, our culture around technology, the real way to impact that for the better hopefully is if you have an operating system, if you run a platform, that really changes and shapes how we as a technology, as a society use technology. And you saw that actually a few years later with Facebook and ATT that even the mighty Facebook, if Apple wants to say, nah, that's really creepy, you're not gonna do that anymore, they can do that. And that's powerful. And so at the time after leaving the White House, I said, you know what, I don't wanna just build an app and I don't know anything about operating systems or making devices like Carl and nothing who's speaking here tomorrow. You should go hear him talk, he's fucking fantastic. Oh, he's fantastic. But I kind of said, okay, I only really want to build a new company if there's an opportunity to truly build an operating system that we think can make the way we use the internet and technology better. But I don't know how to make a device. Flash forward a few years later, I was working at a venture capital firm called Thrive and we just kept seeing the most innovative, creative, fast growing companies coming through our doors and they were all building web apps. Notion, Figma, I mean like right now, it's like of course Notion, Figma, GitHub, but at the time it was desktop web apps and that was the moment that it clicked that wait a minute, there is a new platform shift on the horizon. There is a new operating system on the horizon. It's just not what we thought it was. It's a web browser because all this innovative software is now in the web browser. And so it was always behind it in that way, but the timing was many years later. Well, to be a bit more concrete, of course to reach this ultimate goal of internet computers and actually making everything on the browser and truly kind of change the browser market, you've had to earn the consumer's trust and love and you've done this by focusing on creating the user experience that feel better for the user. I know you've also very intentionally chosen to have less of this metric driven product building approach, but more of this what you want the user to feel and kind of that kind of approach in product building. So can you walk us through like, what does this actually mean in like how you've built Arc this feeling approach? Yeah, so the idea is that we like to say we optimize for feelings where a lot of companies optimize for metrics. And I can imagine what a lot of you're thinking right now, like that sounds kind of hippie and romantic and what is he talking about? But we actually think it's pretty normal and it's weird that we have now kind of changed as an industry to optimize for metrics. Metrics are numbers. They are ways to measure how you're doing. And so the way we like to think about it is at the end of the day, we are building a commodity. Right, and so put aside feelings and the romance around it, we are in a commodity market, right? And in commodity markets, the products that win are the brands that make you feel something that you have a personal connection to. Like my Nike shoes or my Apple Air Pods, they stand for something, they make you feel something. And so in terms of the ambition of what we wanna do, we asked ourselves, when Disneyland was being created, what do you think the team at Disney was thinking about? Were they thinking about metrics and numbers and KPIs or was it something else? When the original team behind Air Jordan at Nike was thinking about how to break through in this market, create a new market, what were they thinking about? We don't think they were thinking about numbers. Did it with Steve Jobs and the team at Apple and the iPhone. And so for us, this idea of, hey, first and foremost, make people feel something in care when they use your product and think about your product is actually, I think, a very traditional way of thinking about product and brand building, but for whatever reason in our industry specifically, we've kind of lost the plot a little bit and I think at times lost the soul and just kind of like just optimized for the graph which we think is a trailing indicator. Yeah, can you give it like a very specific example like offer a feature or a product that you have done it through this approach? Yeah, I think one of the first, when we really started taking off, it actually wasn't for a browser feature at all. It was an onboarding flow. And if you think about that, I had never used an onboarding flow in software that I liked. Actually like my favorite onboarding flows were no onboarding flows, drop me in the product, I'll play around to let you know if I like it. And then we thought, wait, man, we love film trailers, right? We love music, like we love things that kind of hype you up and get you going. When you download a piece of software, what if, what do we want you to feel that first moment you try ARC? Because you've been using Chrome or Safari for decades, we really gotta make an impression. And so we spoke a lot and in the first 30 seconds with our product, what do we want you to feel? And that, you know, we have this, I don't wanna ruin it if anyone hasn't tried it, but let's just say we really surprised you with what happens in your first 30 seconds of using ARC and it was the first thing that made our growth start going exponential. And that's kind of what I mean about it. It's not that we ignore numbers, we very much, we're very data driven, we're very keen on paying attention to the data, but we see it as a trailing indicator of doing things like wowing you in your first 30 seconds. What kind of challenges then there are with this approach compared to the metric driven approach that has been adopted by many other companies? What kind of unique challenges you have faced with this unique product building approach? I think our, the challenge with it, I think there are challenges with any approach. That's the thing is, you know, my perspective isn't that that's right or right for everyone. I think it's right for our business and our market. I think for our team, the hardest bit is not always knowing if you're doing a good job, right? Because in some ways it's, I get why we rely on metrics. It's easier to AB test five things and say, oh, this one was the best, let's ship that. And so I think at times making decisions when you're really kind of relying on your intuition, but you know your intuition's wrong a lot is the biggest challenge, I think. But there are challenges within your approach you take. Yeah. Well, just about two months ago, you and your team released ARC Max. Congratulations about that. So the AI extension to ARC. First, what was the moment that you actually realized that AI is something that you guys have to implement as well? And what did you start to think about what are the first things to implement there? Yeah, I'll be honest, we were behind. We didn't have that moment, but we are a company that really, really builds alongside the people that use our product. If any of you are here, thank you very much. And what we do is we listen to them and we really are driven by their feedback and their questions and their ideas. And we just kept hearing like, hey, team, AI, it's changing everything, what are you doing, where is it? And so honestly, kind of reluctantly, we trusted the people we were building for and even though we were skeptical about the quality of AI, the cost, the speed, it all just felt really not ready to us. But we kind of went with the flow because it's what members wanted. And we were pleasantly surprised if you kind of remove the AI moniker and focus on what do things people do every day on the internet. What is annoying, what is cumbersome? And is there anywhere we can remove a couple steps, remove a couple clicks, save them some time? When we started thinking about AI in that regard, we actually stumbled across a couple things that are very humble in their ambition, but once you use them, you're like, damn, I feel faster, this is great. And so ArcMax turned into this bundle of kind of actually five really, really seemingly small features that just, we think, elegantly find their way into your daily workflows. And when there's the opportunity, just save you a click or just make something look a little cleaner for you. And we're pleasantly surprised by what we found. Yeah, are these features gonna stay as kind of these enhancing your experience or are they gonna be at some point like very core of Arc and take a bigger role in the browser? I guess I'm saying this for the first time. I think they're gonna be really central. And we were surprised. So one of the features we rolled out is now our most popular feature we've ever built. And that was not really part of the plan. And so we're actually feeling newly emboldened that, all right, we were actually, all of you or whoever uses Arc out here, you all were right, like, this technology is actually further along than we think. And if we take the view of how do we save you time, there is actually a lot more we can do. So it's gonna be a big beginning of the year for us. So the product is not changing, the promise is not changing, but we are realizing that the technology is getting better so rapidly that if we really go all out on using this new technology to save people time and make them faster, there is a lot more we can do. And so more coming very early in the new year. Yeah, absolutely. Then can you actually just give us like a overview of these two months with Arc Max, like what kind of challenges, what kind of learnings you already mentioned, the kind of most used feature, what have people been liked? Yeah, I think the biggest surprise in terms of what people have been using is this feature that we call five second previews. And the idea is really simple, is you do a Google search, or I don't know, I don't think anyone does Bing searches, but you do a search of some sort, and then in the results page, let's say you wanna know the reviews of a restaurant you're going to dinner tonight. You can really quickly read five reviews without clicking through the pages themselves. You just hover over the link and we'll show you a little, we'll have AI go read the page for you, pull out the summary, and then show you that little summary. So in the time that you would usually take to read one review, you can actually read five, six, seven. This feature has been really, really popular with folks because it really either lets you do more, it lets you do more in less time, and actually pretty fundamentally changes your workflow for how you browse the internet, which hasn't changed if you think about the way that you use search, it hasn't changed in a long time. So even just this subtle ability to save you a couple clicks or read something faster, we're seeing that behavior is so different, was not part of the plan, really expensive. Very expensive. That's the biggest challenge we have right now is AI is still at the stage where it costs a lot of money. And so the thing we're balancing and the thing we're thinking very intentionally about is how do we package, can we package up enough of these and save you enough time that people would pay for it? And if not, or in addition to you, well, how can we be creative about getting costs down? And so we've been able to do that. We got costs down by 40% over the last couple months, which is very significant. But the biggest surprise was the way that these really subtle changes have altered people's behavior of using the internet. And the biggest surprise on the downside has been it costs more money than we thought it would. Yeah, absolutely. I can definitely imagine it being very costly. That actually brings the question of, I mean, you have a lot of big competitors in the market as well. Are you two kind of afraid that they will just adopt these, whether it's AI or just generally your features and how do you kind of think about the defensibility there? How are you going to defend the arc from that? Yeah, I'd be lying if it wasn't scary. Of course it is. But I think what we were always motivated by this prompt is, it's crazy what we're trying to do. I mean, we are really trying to compete with Apple, Microsoft, and Google on their home turf. But that was always the idea is, to be honest, the real origin story of this company was my now second time co-founder and I, we wanna do assemble our dream team, the dream team. We've always, if we look back at where we've been in our career, gotten the most energy from the people that we've worked with and the certain teams at certain moments. And so the idea was, can we try to do something so ambitious that we could go higher whoever we want? And our people, the best people, the most lovely people. And the thing about that is, those people, they wanna work on something bold. They wanna try to be on the next iPhone team. They wanna really, really go for it. And so what we are doing in many respects, including the question you just asked, are incredibly scary, almost definitely going to fail and don't make a ton of sense. But that is also oddly, I think, what attracts people to our company, whether it is employees or customers or someone else. So yeah, on the AI front, there's no reason that these companies can't copy a lot of the features. However, with our very specific competitors, it will be hard for them because of money. So we know, for example, Google Chrome obviously dominates the market, but Safari and Firefox and Edge have very similar incentives, which is they make their money from search ads. And so they really, really, really want you to do as many searches as possible. And part of the reason browsers haven't changed is because they don't really think about them as browsers as much as big search boxes in the URL bar and they wanna funnel you there. And so the challenge for an organization like Chrome, we know the guy who ran Chrome for 16 years now works at our company, is the challenge is now that Alphabet's a public company and they make so much money from Chrome because it's how they get people to do Google searches, they gotta A-B test, if we add this feature, this new AI feature that people love, will people do fewer searches? The answer is always yes, because you added something that distracted them from that search box. And so it will be challenging, at least for some period of time, for the big browser companies to copy for financial reasons. But at the end of the day, what we're doing is kind of wild and probably gonna fail, if we're being intellectually honest, but that's also what makes it so thrilling and exhilarating is that we're really going for it. Yeah, actually going into a little bit of a tactical advice here, since you're doing a lot of things that are scary and maybe something that you're doubting all the time a little bit, is this the right thing that we are doing, how do you actually tackle that as a CEO, as a leader, how do you lead your team out of this fear innocence and really go for the things that you wanna build? I don't know, I honestly don't know how to answer that question, but I think the thing that we always, I'll say last night I got to meet for the first time this gentleman, Carl, who runs a company called Nothing, that again, I highly recommend you hear him talk. And it was so damn inspiring to hear him talk about what they're trying to do at Nothing and just the ambition and the creativity and the going for it. And I left dinner last night more fired up by what I'm doing after talking to him. And I think the thing that I always have to remind myself and the team is to be our most ambitious selves. One of my mentors once told me it's just as hard to build to make a small idea successful or a small business successful, maybe even harder as it is a really big idea. So just go for it, just go for it. And I even like last night have to be reminded of that. So it's hard for me to answer that question because I don't know if I do a particularly good job or what I do to keep people motivated, but I know we do try to surround ourselves at the company around the team with people and ideas that just get that spark going because we all need it sometimes. Because there is, of course you faced out an uncertainty, but yeah, just trying to find those sparks of inspiration when you can. Yeah, absolutely. The power of inspiration really goes a long way. So I can definitely see that. And we take a lot of inspiration, I'd say, from other industries. So that, you know, I realize the point of this conference is what are kind of tactical, constructive things that all of you can potentially take back to your work. We take a lot of inspiration from other industries. So really look at fashion or film or the automotive industry, like what can we learn from people that are not in tech? So that's probably the one practical thing I would suggest. Yeah, well, what about on the AI side? I mean, you're kind of like an early-stage company, you're just implemented AI, it's been only two months. What kind of tactical advice can you give the early-stage founders here that are also considering to implement AI into their products? What are the approaches that they can take? Okay, I'd say three things. The first is, forget the phrase AI and think about how are you gonna make this human beings day better. And start with that, always start with that. The second is, yeah, thank you for the clap. The second is, and this is actually the hardest-learned secret, we each prototype, I think, like 30 different AI-powered features. The tiniest, tiniest interface details can transform how powerful a feature is. So that three-second preview summary card that I told you about, we actually were using that for weeks and no one really cared. And then one of our designers had this idea is if you change the summaries from paragraphs to bullet points, and you change literally the bullet point itself from a little dot to an icon that represents what the bullet point is about, it transformed the experience and made it valuable. A bullet point, a bullet point, that's all it was. It was an AI, there was no robots, no agents, it was a bullet point. But that's actually, I think, really exciting, because I'm not an AI ML engineer, I don't know how these systems work, but I love interfaces, and interfaces are a lot more approachable. So I'd say focus on the tiniest interface and interaction details, they really can make it sing. And then I think the final thing is just, don't overthink it, it's just new Play-Doh. No one including me has any idea how to use this stuff or how it's gonna work. And that can be a little bit scary or intimidating. I think it's super empowering. How lucky are we that all of us in this room happen to be born and in this room at the time where maybe the generational shift in computing's coming? And by the way, there are absolutely fantastic APIs off the shelf that any of you can start building stuff right away. So don't overthink it, no one knows what they're doing, just go have fun with it. And yeah, oh, one last really tactical tip. I think function calling, this one aspect of OpenAI's GPT-4 API is the most under discussed, underutilized part of what they offer. So go mess around with function calling specifically, it's gonna power a lot of what we're bringing in early 2024. Okay, we have less than a minute to go and I wanna ask few quick fire questions, I'll just ask a few. Okay, what do you now know that you wish you'd know when you started the company? Be more ambitious, be more ambitious, be more ambitious. What has been your biggest inspiration recently? Ooh, I just moved to Paris actually and it is just such an aesthetically beautiful city but I think specifically, oh my God, I'm gonna say this right, I'm still learning my French, the Maisons or the idea in these kind of fresh fashion houses that they have all these very distinct brands within the same organization that all are very opinionated takes but somehow come together in this cohesive organization. I really wanna study how the LVMHs and carers of the world organize themselves. Okay, last question, where is the browser company in 10 years? Hopefully back at Slush. Hopefully like I'm still getting invited here, this is awesome. That's amazing, that's a great way to end. Thank you so much Josh for joining us on stage. Thank you, thank you everybody for coming.