Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO)

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

Lenny Rachitsky

Technology, Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2023

⏱️ 89 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Brought to you by Writer—Generative AI for the enterprise | Dovetail—Bring your customer into every decision | Linear—The new standard for modern software development

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Josh Miller is the CEO and co-founder of The Browser Company, where he helped build Arc, my go-to web browser. In today’s episode, we get an inside look at the unique structure and values of The Browser Company and how their company culture has helped them land some of the best talent in tech. Josh shares ways that his company embraces experimentation, including their “optimizing for feelings” approach to building, and explains why extreme transparency is at the forefront of everything they do.

Special invite link to skip the waitlist: https://arc.net/gift/lenny

Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/competing-with-giants-an-inside-look-at-how-the-browser-company-builds-product-josh-miller-ceo/#transcript

Where to find Josh Miller:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/joshm

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-miller-b31259106/

Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

Referenced:

• Early access to Arc: https://arc.net/gift/lenny

• The Browser Company: https://thebrowser.company/

• Arc: https://arc.net/

• Hursh Agrawal on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hurshagrawal/

• Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/

• Scott Belsky on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottbelsky/

• Notes on Roadtrips: https://thebrowser.company/values/

• Shahed Khan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/_shahedk

• Paper by FiftyThree: https://www.hellobrio.com/blog/digital-drawing-paper-fiftythree

• Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/

• Peter Vidani on Twitter: https://twitter.com/pter

• The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/

• Ellis Hamburger on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ellishamburger/

• Airbnb’s Snow White project: https://uxdesign.cc/how-airbnb-proved-that-storytelling-is-the-most-important-skill-in-design-15d04ac71039

• General Magic: https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com/

• Linear: https://linear.app/

• Raycast: https://www.raycast.com/

• Cron: https://cron.com/

• Thrive Capital: https://thrivecap.com/

• Tuple: https://tuple.app/

• Figma: https://www.figma.com/

• Harold and the Purple Crayon: https://www.amazon.com/Harold-Purple-Crayon-Crockett-Johnson/dp/0062086529

• Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Forgetting-Name-Thing-Sees/dp/0520256093/

• God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State: https://www.amazon.com/God-Save-Texas-Journey-State/dp/0525520104

• The Last of Us on HBO: https://www.hbo.com/the-last-of-us

• Adam Curtis documentaries on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLStWlBRkr0N_aYjPmbrrjm_rsstpkUBLc

• Notion: https://www.notion.so/

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Josh’s background

(03:56) Arc and the metrics they use to track growth

(04:42) Arc’s retention numbers

(08:22) Josh’s product-building philosophy and why he believes in optimizing for feelings

(18:57) How The Browser Company’s values create a culture that allows them to ship so quickly

(22:46) The “Notes on Roadtrips” doc about values

(27:48) How Josh is able to hire such amazing talent

(37:29) The good and bad of building in public

(45:16) Some of the odd teams at The Browser Company and why Josh calls it a prototype-driven culture

(46:01) The membership team

(48:07) The storytelling team

(52:00) Why The Browser Company doesn’t have traditional PMs

(54:07) A case for adding PMs

(57:32) The role of data, even in a company that optimizes for feelings

(58:30) Airbnb’s Snow White project

(1:02:14) How impactful moments in Josh’s life influenced values at The Browser Company

(1:03:08) How the film General Magic has inspired Josh

(1:04:32) The value of novel names

(1:06:50) Why The Browser Company’s approach works for Arc

(1:12:47) Why you need to nail latency and why Josh loves Tupl

(1:14:33) The shift to cloud computing and the ultimate vision at The Browser Company

(1:23:15) Lightning round

Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Silicon Valley, at least the most modern version of Silicon Valley, has this obsession with
0:04.5	graphs and has this obsession with numbers and metrics.
0:08.3	I mean, you saw me in the previous answer.
0:09.9	I'm talking about D5B7.
0:11.6	What's a D5B7? And it is an incredibly effective way to achieve certain outcomes to focus on numbers
0:20.9	because it's very quantitative, it it's objective you can see the
0:24.1	graph go up or go down or stay flat depending on what you want but what we've
0:28.6	found is that optimizing for metrics leaves a lot on the table and it misses a lot and so what we do at the
0:35.6	browser companies we talk about optimizing feelings how does the software
0:40.8	how do we want to make someone feel on the other end of our software? Do we want to make
0:46.3	them feel joy? Do we want to make them feel fast? Do we want to make them feel organized? Do we want to make
0:51.8	them feel focused? What is the feeling we are trying to
0:55.7	evoke in whatever we're doing on a specific project or a specific feature or specific piece of
1:00.6	storytelling content.
1:02.7	And I can imagine what's going through the heads
1:05.0	of your listeners right now, which is probably a number of things.
1:08.6	But among others, that sounds really damn romantic.
1:11.6	They're like, okay, you're optimizing for feelings.
1:17.0	Welcome to Lenny's podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts
1:22.0	to learn from their hard-won experiences
1:24.0	building and growing today's most successful products.
1:27.0	Today my guest is Josh Miller.
	...

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