The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave)
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Dude, I cannot believe that in recording this, we asked the chief architect of netscape to restart his browser to see if that fixes the problem.

who? Get true. get. Easy, you see me down story. No.

welcome to this special episode of acquired the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm been gilbert and I am the cofounder and managing director of seattle based pioneer square labs and our venture fund psl ventures.

And i'm David rose bell, and I am an Angel investor based in separate .

us go and we are your hosts. Today's episode is a match up between one of the newest things on the internet and the oldest things on the internet. Our guest today is brender nike CEO of the brave browser, an application right at the heart of the rapidly emerging web three world.

IT is arguably the single largest blockchain based APP with over fifty million monthly users. However, brendon is no new kid on the block. He holds the credential of inventing javascript, a source of much joy and also much pain for many of you out there.

And brendon was the chief architect of netscape and eventually became the C. E. O of mozilla, the makers of firefox.

So you're saying fifty million M. A use is nice, but branding wants this to go a lot higher.

It's script down nice, but it's not browse or nice yet yet, yes, but IT is rapidly growing. We had A A wide ranging conversation with brendon that you're here today that bridged this old world and the new in some really fun ways. okay. Listeners, now is a great time to tell you about long time friend of the show service now.

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And if you want to go deeper behind these topics, especially the crypto, you should come check out the L P O IT is deeper, nerdy er and covers a lot of more upon coming topics and includes interviews with people like ronie runners g who have built odd as Joseph godden leve IT on the start of hit record who what else did do we do in the lp o recently? Uh, we talked with some of salona and F T X is earlier investors from race capital. That's our newest lp show, epsom.

You can find that in any podcast player by searching acquired lp show, and of course, become an L P. If you want to get super early access two weeks before everyone else and talk with us on zoom calls every month or two. All right.

As you know, none of this is investment advice to your own research. And now on to our view with brender nike Brandon eke, welcome to acquired. hi.

Thanks for having great to have you here. We've been big fans of your work for a long time. Grew up using firefox and the mozilla browse for that and netscape before that. And god knows, I use plenty of java script every day in all facets of my life. So my life would not be what IT is without your work over the years.

And of course, we are talking on brave ver right now.

That's great. Your javascript use keeps me in t shirts.

Well, we're going to 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?

So brave is a faster browser, because IT blocks all the tractors, many of which google earth publishers are at buyers depend on. And it's based on chrome, the chromium open source code. So if you are using google chrome, which kind of shot the market after seventy percent, let's say, or more of market chair, a two point six five billion users, they say you should get off chrome and you should use brave.

We tried to make something it's easy to switch to, but that 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 involve something we talked about in the beginning, and we prototype in big coin. And that's the basic attention token system for users who choose to participating in private ads that are anonyme but that pay them seventy percent 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 is 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, you can still fund traders out of your own wallet.

We want to that feature, too. So it's kind of a three slide system, which is why we use the equatorial triggers for the bat basic attention token logo. We're trying to connect users, advertisers and flexibly along all three legs of the triangle.

Users who don't like ads can turn off the private ads. Users who want to earn from the private eads can then give you all back. Some users just earn and keep IT.

That's the right to. The problem that brave solve is the tracking at is the privacy invasion. Because he has all sort of bad effects I can get into. And users feel IT right away, they feel the clutch, they feel the annoyance, they feel the page low delay.

Sometimes the mobile pages never load, and this sort of correlated ts of the page load problem, which are too much battery use and too much data plan used by all the ad scripts and the waterfall of programmatic advertising that daily chains from hidden third party to hide third party before an action shop. We block that with brave. But once you're in brave, there's a whole new world of economics that's user centric.

And this is the really big idea of brave. It's a user first platform and therefore, it's built from your browser on your device out. That's where all your data feed originate, all of them, but not just the ones google sees through its search engine or its many track kers around the web.

I think that was an important realization that you had when starting brave that all or virtually all activity stems from interacting between a user and a browser. And that is because of the tremendous rise of web apps, in large part, unfortunately, to the detriment of native apps that run on the test of Operating system. But that is enabled because of the ecosystem that was built around java script. On the other side of things, the entire advertising and add tracking and digital advertising ecosystem also is built on java script. And so I think there's an unbelievable arc to everything that you've built over the years in deciding to approach this problem the way that you have now at this point in your career.

I was part of a project at the scape that made the browser mass market and made a commercially safe before netscape. There wasn't a way to trust your credit card number of flying across the wire. Netscape did so called secure sockets layer.

Yeah, S, S, L.

So net cape was working on making the web safe, free commerce and useful for the site you went to. We didn't think about the third party problem. And that's where even before I joined, there was a way to embed images in browser that was actually in one one thousand nine hundred and ninety three and then in one thousand and eighty four and let's cape one, there was the cookie, which let people a bit of storage in the browser with their site.

And that applied not only to the banker or, you know, game site you are visiting, IT also applied to every one of those images. And that created a tracking vector because the image server could be keeping track of you through a cookie that gets bounced in the browser from each side, the images embedded in. And that's why you still hear the term pixel used an attack for a tracking element, even though IT can be an invisible script. Now IT used to be a one by one little .

transparent image. When did you start to realize that this was a problem?

So I think even in thousand and eighty six, some of us, lemon tulit escaped to the cookie n. There was a concern that he was being used for a third party tracking, or could be used. But the genie was out of the bottle.

And the thing about the web is mark and jury said this to me, even when they were doing music, and they are writing like eighty servers hosting content they cared about not breaking, they would just keep backwards compatibility in all the corks of eric bean as h gm l parsi and even precursor progenitor H D L processors, older browsers, because the content wouldn't work properly. So this is strong evolutionary force, is gradients forcing compatibility on the web. This is something a lot of people in computer science, especially program language, is just hate, because that means you really can't making compatible changes, except very slowly or through new run times that you can download.

But java script was the only bite at the apple for that kind of run time. Java failed and flat eventually failed. But in the nineties, we were too busy making the first part experience good, and we couldn't break the web. So even the law, monti wanted to do twinkies, and somehow I think they were going to solve several problems he wanted to solve.

That's an evolution of cookies.

bigger, more storage. I think cookies is rarely one thousand and twenty four bites for something tiny in the nineties, and I think you wanted to do them only for the first party sites. I don't think this would have killed cookies for third party tracking.

I forget the details because. His boss said, no, no more, no more. Cookies are twenty years or dingdong gs, and we stayed at a cookie.

And by late nineties you can still find them. On the web archive. There were a sites diagrammed tracking the rise of tracking the company that google acquired as double click in two thousand and eight.

Yeah, was Operating in ninety, ninety. And I think I made the dark ad. serbs.

Well, I want to go way back to the beginning of your career, even before nets cape. Before java script, you join silicon graphics. And I think that's or S G I as it's called. And we've talked on many episodes about the unbelievable, incredible talent nexus that was S G I. Did you know, when you were joining that, that was the center of talent that would go on to do so many things?

yes. So I was a great student. That UIUC, which was makes to be top five C.

S. School in the country, out the middle, annoy. And I was not going to do A P. H. D. At some point, I realized that our research team had been hijack by IBM, and this was a great disGrace, in my view. But the professors couldn't fight back.

And we became sort of A Q A team for IBM failed attempt to get a little laptop computer, motorola, sixty eight thousand based computer they developed. Every package is a workstation, the unique workstation, because unix workstations were super hot. Well, guess you came by.

You are you see to give a talk, jim Clark, about silk graphics doing unix workstations with p si 3d graphics。 That was the whole company. And I almost right ways that i'm going going to work for jim.

I interviewed this son like I was interested in programing languages. So I interviewed on the compiler team. I wasn't experiences enough for them to hire.

I like the manager, Steve much, nick, and that they exit briefly. He was like director of software at the time at son. Then I, A, A, S, G, I and I sign on the bottom line.

And IT was great. Sti was a super hot IT. IPO. Ed, after I joined IT for a long time, had the best graphics, but that eventually got drunk from visi to GPU.

And now a system on a chip, and by ninety two had gotten big individual. And I said, I got ta get some more experience during other thing. So I left. I was kind of bored. IT was political and divisional .

was this before. After jim .

left was before, I think, because early on, jim realized he wasn't city now. So emc crackin was running IT and jim was on the board. But I think at some point jim had trouble as founder, keeping control as usual to the illusion. And so by ninety four, jim was starting netscape and pared with mark and Jason and I knew about that as all my S, G, I.

Friends and st. I did the graphics for .

Jessica park, right? Jurassic park. I know this. This is a unique system, and they're not looking at a command, and they are looking at the S.

G, I file system. visualizer. But I got bored and I left, and actually I got bigger, kind of boring. I could see why Clark left when I heard he was doing netscape.

okay. So how did you find your way to netscape then?

So a friend for rest, I who had come in from a team at IBM, jeff weinstein, had gone ahead of me to a company called micro unity. And micro unity, you've probably haven't heard of, but it's got a lot of pants. And IT successfully litigated them from twenty years ago, maybe ten years ago, I friend, when they ran out of steam, I think just made a ton of money off showing everybody IBM motor, a qual com broker, everybody because Michael unity wanted to create a software program able set top box. And there's only .

one thing that I actually knew about micro unity coming into this IT wasn't the chief architect at mro unity the same person as both MIPS and next with Steve jobs, craig hands and might about the next yeah.

not your mi. Craig g definitely was a MIPS. He did the flooding point unit, the myth floating point unit, so he was the full architect at microsoft.

So microfinance was like practical grad school for me, because I didn't go anywhere. IT was way too ambitious, right? IT was doing a new chip, new section, ductor process, new chip.

Do we analog and digital on the same chip? I should say IT was doing basically everything except the radio front end that mixes down the base band that was doing in software. So all this stuff has come true over time.

But trying to do all once you just run into the multiplication principle and your odds of success go to one in a billion or ten billion, and that could have used the file to make s RAM. But I think he was too boring. I think move was really ambitious.

He wanted to change the world. He wanted do be the new Howard views. In some ways, he didn't make a lot of money of the petts.

okay. So did a big crew of those folks leave to go to netscape? Or was at you on your own?

Well, IT was jeff once, and I jumped to netscape within the same week. We're still Young night. If we should have made a company and sold that, we have got ten, four times the options this we arrive.

We saw some other teams doing that. And then one is good, but I can't complain me IT was all was the case when you're coming into these systems that you don't know exactly what's going on with the the company. But I got there in April of one thousand nine hundred and ninety five, on April thirty, I think, and the IPO was sometime in August.

So you IT was a huge rocket and IT was to me, a little bit scandalous because in the eighty S I had to have three provable quarters before I could IPO. Where's net cape? Just went on forward speculation and forward multiple. And I was not profile, but that was the night that started at all.

But there was real revenue there.

Well so the brothers was charged for in commercial settings and let's gave use the IPO to buy a bunch of service cide companies and projects um the L P team from university michigan, tim house and company, the keva observer, a bunch of java investments uh even started building a java getting running time to rival hot spot which had bought animal pi C2Build.

The next eight version was called electoral fire and I was being developed by the super brain of MIT auto but next cake couldn't pull IT off and sun was gone to win with hot spot. So I rescued automatic to take over java script in late ninety seven. And I went off to find those old at org after I standardized java script.

So A O comes in, the finance gave all those guys. You just meet a muslim. They go to loud cloud. You go in the mozilla direction.

Yes, my cvv is really short, and I tend to stick with things. And the thing was, the browser was not done yet. Microsoft simply killed nescafe by bungling ie, which had copied in a sort of acquired pieces of through spyglass, which boat buz IT sort of kept in a rain like IT does.

So the first version was not real in. The second version was kind of a joke, and the third version was starting, tell you where could get to in. The fourth version was quite good on windows, pretty much only on windows. And meanwhile they were button with windows uh, ninety five and ninety eight and they are convicted in the U. S U.

Microscope for this because it's not illegal to requirement apply through but say merit or a sweet deal IBM to be the O S for the PC I on the IBM gave microsoft that is a suspect but whatever they had the windows and up ly, but what they did in tie the brother to IT and threatening compact with revocation of the windows license, if compact shift netscape as the default browser was illegal and the convicted for. But IT was too late to save netscape. And yet a few executives, ves a mark, erkin and others, wanted to save something through open source, commercial open source and form of linux was up, and red hat was up and running.

People were excited about the idea of doing a commercial open source project out of the remains of netscape, at least in the browser team. So jami's windspeed kind of let IT definitively, spiritually. And as the community manager.

And I did the taxi, and we had a bunch of I T of people in a couple of tools, people who helped us build things that are now taking for granted, or now standard on github. And we realized there was an amazing, cynical gy doing something like a dynamic language on the server to generate HTML that has java script automating IT. All that stuff was super slick to do and sort of a full stack way.

And this wasn't n't ninety six that prefigured everything that came after an D H. M. On a jx.

It's pretty cool that you guys were doing this in open source, right? yeah.

I mean, initially, netscape was closed when we opened IT up. We threw this tarbill out there. But as we worked on these tools that got Better, we couldn't drag the male news team out.

They'd ve been sort of messing up nets cape four male news, and they didn't like open source, but eventually at all, got. We're written in redone. We even created a portable front end stack using XML, which is all the rage then we call our zoo xu l. After ghost busters.

which became the way that you would write the original broster plugins for firefox and presumably the mozilla broza before that.

yes, and there was always sweet, was pretty much the unnecessary pe. To use ungoodly le as an analogy, the unnecessary version of the code. And this actually started winning users because A L button netscape, and started for tuning netscape with ICU buttons and aim buttons and the things like that.

Yeah, it's like when I go to make a new meeting now and about to add a zoom invite for google. Like, way, wait way. Do you mean google meet you? Like, that's not why i'm using your tools.

No, not what I mean. okay.

So we're now at this point where you're on your own with mozilla, you've taken the code out of nets cape, but being developed in the open firefox at some point became cash over a quarter of the browser market share. So how did they evolve from? Hey, we're going to take an open source version of the browser that microsoft illegally killed and turn into this thing that sort of breathe new life .

into the brows er ecosystem. We had this idea, and iron and marka, I had decided there would be an escape pod containing the browser code, and would somehow you land on tattoo in, and the message will get through and and things will come back later. But no one knew how. And convention of wisdom from nineteen ninety eight on in the valley was, oh, the browse was done. I is IT forever give up.

just like today or or a couple years ago. Who is? Grow right?

Go and cycles. But we also had this sort of boat anchor of the most little sweet, because, like I said, the nineties had a lot of sweets. I think netscape made a mistake in ninety six when they bought a company to go after lotus notes because IT didn't work and they took the net.

Cape two and three male reader, a newsreader, which James and tary wiseman, who have mentioned, worked on and did a pretty job on in very short time. And they threw IT away or kind of threw most of IT away and did a windows only group where sort of version that was late and delayed all of its eight, four. And that really hurt.

And they were the people who didn't want to do open source either. But that did not help nescafe, but did not take down lotus notes. And mozilla had to figure out, are we doing a sweet? Do we want this albatross of ninety sweet? And IT took a while because, like I said, we were under funded at first.

And in fact, as a well in justo nescafe, which I first didn't involve any digestive enzymes, IT was like arms length. They started wondering what they bought and why. And so for the first two years, ninety nine and two thousand, the head of netscape division was decapitated.

Somebody liked the nice guy. Merchant took their place. But I didn't go off from mozilla. IT meant mozilla was considered the enemy because most of the employees initially were the contributors, and IT was rare to find outside contributors. Chris blizzard, red hat was a contributor.

We encourage people in open source, especially in the linux, to work on the code and send patches or get cvs commit rights. We tried to give those away. So a lot of the job in the early days was trying to build up the mostly volunteer community to countervail.

And lets give employees who were not all top, not to that point. And after a year, nothing much changed. And Jamie said, I give up. I consider a failure you, a essay you can still find. So he quit, but we kept going.

And even though we had to be the basis for the sweet because we stripped out the ICQ and aim buttons got popular, we were doing releases binaries because we wanted testers. That was a big change to a lot of options, project said. There's the code do at yourself.

right? Which of course, like ninety nine percent of people who could use the software are immediately out right away because there are no yes component local machines.

And of course, once you build the suffer and release that, you're getting people who don't know which to the internet is which, but they d give you good feedback. And there's a whole sort of slayers of the onion from your lead users are your actual hackers who do know software out to what's a web, sadly, but less experiences folks out to the average people who don't know the difference tween a search engine in a browser.

And so we started growing moza even before firefox, in a way that I think kind of shamed and and threatened nescafe. But that cape was also getting these annual decapitates. And so by two thousand and three, we learn through our IBM friends that there was going to be curtains for the escape division and through an enormous stroke of luck.

Mch caper, who found a lost one, two, three and has his own experience with microsoft tricks, was friends with teddy osi, one of the ail executives. Tez for ice sky, not technical, owns the capitals, who did no sports team. I, and they ran each other at the very first d conference.

Like, what? Moser, right? Oh, wow. And ted said, I much, I got this thing. I don't know what to do with. And IT turned out mitch was doing something called the open source application foundation and he had hired Michael Baker, who had been fired under cover ful layoff, i'll say IT, uh, in two thousand by escape management because they didn't like me. I was a thorn their side maybe Mitchell was mitchill was expensive, so they had a way off.

And suddenly mitchill was gone, and I was on the phone saying, did you quit? SHE said, no, this was not my choice. And yet the next week on the mule community call, there was michell doing the governance leadership by the detect leadership.

So, you know, the the the scape management that try to get rid of her were gramma their teeth at this point. They couldn't q moo. They couldn't decapitate IT as that keep division had IT had taken off annually.

But when we learned air well, was gonna ut on the scape ted, to his credit, as match what to do. And match had hired mitchill Baker, who had been the muscle manager from about eight months into the founding, but told he was laid off. And that was just huge, you know, good fortune, because mitch then told ted what to do and spied some snipping by a VP.

Nobody liked you really wanted to stick the knife and and twisted at ted. Did the right gave us two million over two years to spin out the mozilla project. And I think mitchel wanted to do IT as a non profit.

They thought there would be some good basis for they MIT himself. I didn't want to do VC funding and didn't want to do a commercial thing. I just want to want to try to keep the coal alive. And we know what to do in two thousand and three summer, because firefox have already started in two thousand and one, if you can believe. But IT became known as phoenix by two thousand and two.

and firefox was completely rebuilt from the ground up, right?

Well, IT was based on the zoo work that I mentioned that dave higher and others had done to make a program front end stack on what looks like the web, text, email and javascript t and customer toolbars, even the native menu bar on the mac s at the time, all that could be integrated through exam IT was declarative. IT was fast enough with enough work. IT allowed all these extensions you mentioned.

We called them ads. That was the first brothers extension ecosystem, way ahead of chrome. And IT was the way part fox s got built because once we had the sweet unbagged ed of all the ICQ junk, we still have sort of too many functions like the swiss army knife.

Do you really need to browse the web while you compose an email and a rich text editing and the manager address book? So we came with the vision theyve heighten, wrote the road map update from us all in two thousand and three. That said, let's make one APP, do one thing well, will build them all on a common front and tall kit, give them extensions so that we can simplify the U.

S, but not drive the advanced sers away to Opera, which always had too many options built in. And that road map you can still find even almost all, I think, a certain the website, and was a pretty good romp. And my pending, because IT got the project moving toward not only firefox, but thunder bird and even the old sweet.

The volunteers wanted to call sea monkey Carried on, and they did for a good long time. But firefox was version mozilla less browser two thousand one. IT was just a small fireship within netscape. IT was Blake ross and dave higher and few others.

Joe hewit, right? Joe huit did .

the the auto complete satur and eventually did firebug, which was awesome.

He then got higher by facebook and built the original facebook APP bick rosson.

Joe hue had found a paracel and sold out to facebook. That's how that happened. But we lost black to stanford, either recruit and google of net scape to take over for Blake. And that went from firefox zero point six one to one o and ended a lot of the important work on ads search, immigration and making IT really singing on windows because that's the open open source, didn't do open source at that point, was still sao IT works on linux, while which flavor of linux, kd, e or no forgotten other ones, but they didn't care about windows.

IT seems to me that the community always needs in I S. A. Community is a very broad community. It's all people who use browsers, and maybe even more general than that, but they always need some exciting chAllenger that's fighting the man.

And IT seemed like firefox was right place, right time, with the right group of people who were actually passionate about this, whether everyone who was stuck inside of netscape, A O, L, sort of lost the fire. A O L at first thought this was a strategic asset, now realized I wasn't going anywhere. And so you had this sort of moment to see if you had the right team where there was no legitimate chAllenger anymore to I, E. And so you could make a real run at IT. Is that sort of how you think about IT?

yes. And the way you describe that was almost like fracked all structure because the court team was like a para chip kind of sassy netscape management for their foolish, bloated, sweet and also making great tools and things that he had worked on firebug in and the out of complete stuff, and that LED to early adopters, loving that so much more than all other browsers.

So that when firefox was at zero point eight and early, I think was early two thousand and four and then zero point nine, especially when we could see the rocket ready to launch, the whole league user code of the web was just charged up. At that point. I'd made contact with surgery brain through somebody.

He sent my way in the first tinder, and we gotten the search still going in zero point nine, but we d also gotten fittis team, the gin team of google, helping firefox. So they were working on browsers before chrome and the browser work on the firefox. Nobody thought I could be done.

The commissioned m still was that you're never going to take that market chair even though firefox already had a few million users and was growing rapidly. And this did commit some people who worked with us at the time like part to cram to go try a commercial. Four of five recept was flock didn't work, raised a bunch of VC, got sold to zinger and then shut down two thousand eleven.

There was other forks too. I mean, there was, I used comino on the map that was stay high.

Its other brothers, the'd wrote prolifically. He wrote a lot of code. So he wrote a Michael s only browser to learn the coco, I think IT was, took kit and they works.

Rapper, he went there in two thousand and one I believe he kind of made so far because he knew how to make the cage demange and web compatible. And IT was from unix and IT wasn't battle tested in the field against mass market users. So IT didn't load websites properly.

Eventually LED to way we can get being forked from cage to million in two thousand and five. but. Getting David apple was quite a queue for don melton h the managed time as far who was also x netscape.

But there was just this real effective, restarting the market, assessing your boss, showing up I um showing the world a Better tool for something that people used every day, right? People will discount the browser. There was like, oh, fat apps back on the desktop, windows long hord or when the iphone launched h eight months after actually because the initiative APP model, the iphone was web apps, the sweet solution.

But native apps had to be there because of games being ported IT. And then native apps got privileges and got APP store afford ces that the web didn't and at same thing every ten years. So you just get people holding the way back, usually at some monopoly power or a market power.

And then the upstart comes because people still use the web. The value in the web is is so great. And you know this embedded b use in all these apps and embedded trackers and all these apps, by the way, we're blocking those two with our partnership with guardian IOS firewall. The V P N IT feels kind of similar .

to me in terms of narrative market perception to silicon and december conductor like a couple years of like us and I can have some boring like not like all the innovations you know way, way, way up the stack from that. Well, IT actually turned to the same conduction prety frequent, important. And T, S, M C is like, you know, a very, very, very important company in one of the top ten was valuable in the world. The brothers feels similar to me, like it's so easy to discount IT. And the majority of like people in the world spend the majority of their days on IT yeah.

it's in the mortal APP. It's the universe APP. The bigger of the screen and the Better the input then with the more you live in the browser and you don't want to install some, you know, even slack, we have a lot of our users of slack, a brave use the browser to load slack as a web APP instead of loading the ploy electron APP. That slack has been slowly maintaining. There's a real trade off there that I think is part of the browsers in mortality, but the web content is also sticky and a creative, and that's important too.

Yeah, i'll someone all up. In one sense, firefox did really, really well and gained a huge market chair. And then when chrome launched, it's been slowly echt away every year by chrome now and it's down around something like three percent.

So I want a fast for and all the way to the moment where you're starting to think about brave. And yet there's been all these attempts to start a new upstart browser that has a different take on things. On thinking of dolphin, i'm thinking of rock melt that have not worked.

no. So other flock was doing social or web two point o iming at the very center of firefox's growing market. And that's not a good growth strategy because you have to get people on firefox and then somehow beat them on the on the outer rings of growth.

And firefox was already going faster there, and you were going to get too many defector ies from the inner most nerdy hacker technology web. Two point of old people flocked field rock melt was when after chrome came out and was based on the chrome fork of web kit, which wasn't its own thing really then, and tried to add social. I think he was just I haven't talked to house about this.

I think he was just aimed to trying to sell IT this uck. Well, zc doesn't want a brother. He's got a broster. He's very happy with the facebook web of on desktop.

And then he was at that point already iming at mobile because the iphone was out and he wanted for native apps on mobile. So he was never going to buy rock milk. So rock never failed.

Dolphin did well because I think they had this affordable name. He was a great marketer. He got all these distribution and growth hack deals going in various asian countries.

And they did a credible job on making IT a good mobile browser as mobile came up to android. Android kind of double started that. G one was IT call. IT was the first android device.

IT was the team mobile.

G one IT was not good. I have talked to any ruba google in two thousand and six yeah, but android took a while to get anywhere in near decent and I still get you 是 even though I got many complaints about apple。

Am I remembering right the dolphin at some point? I don't think originally, but maybe later it's life pivoted to be like, oh, where privacy focused people .

starting to think about the in vacation perfume on take a shower in some cases.

H, I love IT.

but one of the big browsers succeeded in asia besides dolphin, was you see what and you see what grew against cho in indonesia and balian india in some in indian states that had more share than chrome. And one of the things we noticed the issue have did was IT blocked at. So having done firefox and been in the situation where we we didn't even have the best privacy features, it's kind embarrassing, but it's too mas.

So what did not lead on privacy as well as Steve jobs to the apple? The very first safari had private windows. IT had a third party cookie blocker.

Need of these things were in firefox at the time. Private windows came in quickly. We never shift a third party cookie blocker. In my time there, there was always concerned about rocking the boat. I have to say there was probably some implicit concern about the google search partnership and what would be the effect on that because.

of course, the vast majority of most of those revenue comes from the google search deal to use google as the development get paid one hundred millions of hours from google.

yeah. IT really was the one big trick for funding mozilla. And IT was google lasting, but IT also for told google doing its own browser, right? We could see this coming to.

We didn't want to take so much revenue in in the deal that IT became cheaper for them to do crime. So we tried to adjust that. But always there was differ.

Chrome, maybe a few months a year at most, IT often. Clearly, we deferred to all because by two thousand and five, dave higher and marches to o apple had said, let's stop patch bombing cage to ml. Let's make our own little mini mozilla.

It'll be run by apple, but it'll be web to work. You will be a proper open source project and good for them. They did IT, and that became the basis for not only what they put in safar, but for chrome.

So there was a glee and Larry pages eyes when at last I saw him two thousand and five years say, yeah, I get so clean and my never go to your own brother. Er, it's fine. Don't worry about firefox.

You should do your own brother. Er so we knew in two thousand and six, they were doing IT. We knew that they were that point pulling people off firefox.

And at some of the people I worked with the aol or musa, we're working on the prototype and took a lot to get IT out scrunch mounts september first, two thousand and eight. And IT wasn't really, at first, clearly about fast java script. All the stuff that people think of. IT was more about isolated the flash player so that when he crashes in a tab, IT doesn't drag .

your whole browser down. He has, yes.

And that comic that they shipped was just freaking brilliant as a marketing strategy for the nerds out there, they would really appreciate process isolated tabs.

Yeah, I had everything. I had large book about va. I had their own Fisher who had worked with A A L. But some point I don't know.

When I heard this from a friend who was a google, Larry set up and said, weight, we're running a search advertising business and chromium and tracking our users. what? What are we doing wrong? And so in two thousand and sixteen, google's privacy policy change, this was after a started brave.

But I just, I tell the full story of brave by starting there, because at that point, republican notice, the guardian republish their peace. They sort of say that google cross the rubicon, and they've connected all their data into one big add exchange and data collection system with a car ball for google analytic tics. It's not clear how much google analytics is private anymore and crime.

If you sign into the browser, which was a separate feature in the upper right corner using your google account, then you're track for ad targeting google's business. But love, people didn't know this, and some people will didn't sign into the browser. Well, in two thousand and eight september, google said, gosh, donate. People aren't signing into the browser enough. We're going to whenever you sign in to gmail or youtube in a tab, we'll just sign you and across all the tabs and will track you oh wow, if you don't like IT, you can opt out in the google count settings.

Yeah.

every noone he's going to do that. And I do.

Yeah, you'll do that.

I used to do talks to conference as as many people were using chrome. How many people knew there? How many people opted out in the hands? numerous.

And they started following. And then there were red faces constantly. This is not just google. I pick on them because they became the biggest and buying double click wasn't earlier sort of bu icon.

They crossed because I think sergey told a friend of man in two thousand and three. Oh, we would never do like tracking for ads on publish your pages that tighten your search at. We would never track across the way that would be evil. Well, IT changed the .

definition of of evil shifts depends on how large the incentives are.

Yeah and going public also just puts a virtually duty to your shareholders on you that is hard to resist. This is kind of the the, the animal, the blind, precious beast of capitalism. So when I was thinking about brave, I realized not only had also become captured by a search partner, and was probably onna die, because IT couldn't compete not just on chrome intrinsic qualities, but on distribution, which really matters at scale.

You have to pay for IT, right? Microsoft had walked up and was doing I, E. And finally, edge.

And this is before they switched edge to be based on chromium. They were certainly still distributing on a windows. They were kind of tying IT. And I would say it's gotten worse.

Windows ten and eleven have gotten even more aggressive that they back up one particularly thing recently where it's almost like back to the anti trust case, they're saying, hey, you're not using edge leave noticed. Would you like to use edge or books? We reset your defauts Brown edge that happens to and this is the problem for google.

So google has to pay the dirigible chrome was so he doesn't have the resources to do this. Our growth with firefox when I was there was completely organic, I think, and it's probably was mostly organic after I left. They might have done a little growth hacking. So and I never got big on mobile. I'd love your explanation.

And again, I don't ask this because I don't have thoughts myself, but I wanna AR from you.

Why is .

IT bad to be tracked?

Yeah people sometimes that there's savy that remember rich lose ephah. M, I don't know, really came for him, you know, give me six sentences from the most honest man and i'll find a way to hang him. right? Snowden, change things.

People realized way a minute these violations of federal law here. Google engineers who been using techno dark fiber without encysted their backbone traffic were outraged, I think, and data breaches bother people. And the third party problem I mentioned, those embedded taxes and all those embedded ript.

You don't know where your date is going. It's not just that. It's tracking you to give you a Better deal or to make your ads more personalized on a website.

That data is flying up the window and it's going into stuff that is available to the not only the dark web, but just available publicly the horrifying story. Name names. We have a vender brave that has information on people IT shared that with experience.

We didn't know this was happening. I don't know there's a privacy well that was breached. We believe their privacy policy was breached by their own action or they're setting up this as a default that we didn't know we had to opt out of. Experience is just breach city, right? These are jokes to .

criminal off is a literally criminal, but that feels criminal.

right? So consciousness of privacy as something where you're unsafe if you trapped grew initially, was like, I don't care. Trap me.

I have no privacy, just make my experience what personal and then IT became, wait a minute, there's some third party or seventh party, seven degrees of Kevin bake. And there's somebody in russia who's tracking me. That's no good.

There's somebody playing games to trap me around physical world using geo fencing that's possible with ads. And it's been done probably by malicious actors. There are spy stuff going on. People realized that this was a bigger problem than just, oh, something somewhere has some doc a on me because once you have a doc on a server, it's very likely it's going to get copy or leaked and it's going to be one hundred services or a thousand service and you won't know where IT is or to what bad use as we put.

So meanwhile, privacy while was coming up in europe that in its own abstract way, and then without defining its terms, did use so our common sense notions about how we interact, which Steve jobs himself wants to talk to osburgh about, very plain terms, which is, privacy means you don't get my data unless I am giving IT to you for a specific purpose that benefits me. And they're sort of a quid pro. And that's what the GDP are tries to do with purpose limitation or purpose specificity.

So when you can send to those cookie dialogues, which are all misread later, mismanaged nonsense, not defending them, and GDP r like all regulations, is full of unintended consequences, what they're trying to do is say, you can send to let a track cookie be set, let's say, for some essential or innocentium reason on. And there are carbon for essential reasons. When you go to a search engine, it's a first party, you giving a data to get Better results.

So there's an essential purpose there that they can justify some kind of data in progress. IT isn't a story tracking because it's only at that certain. But when you're dealing with all these sites, throw this cookie consents, cook here to learn more, and there's three hundred vendors.

And if you want to opt out, you have to go click on them. And often there's no page there. There's a four or four H D P response.

There's no phone number, there's no way to opt out. So it's a complete fraud that you can opt out of this easily. And that's also against the law.

In many places in the world, not just europe, a lot of these privacy laws are coming up around the world. And this was a sort concurrent with the rise of brave, but the conscious ness about privacy is still growing. And that's helping us because we were at the forefront and doing this, R N D, I mentioned, which made us fast and efficient.

And you see others jump in with that. That goal always had a more private sort of search front on being it's pretty much being still for the keyword search. They have mobile browsers adding test top browsers and other products.

And I can mentioned the apple gets fair credit for privacy concerns that I think came directly from Steve jobs in safari, private windows and third party copy blocking. And apple rests self and privacy with some justice. And now even google is trying to claim to invent the privacy sandbox to save its business, I mean, to save the world, sorry, and ramma through standardization and into other browsers.

Let me be ask David question a little bit more specifically. Why is a private computing experience important to you personally? yes. So I mentioned this .

rising questions as a privacy, how privacy is sort of multi cited and involves different degrees and kinds of threats, so that those matter to me, no doubt. But I also think the user has to have privacy for economic advantage, otherwise we have no way of collective bargaining with the network powers.

And any network is going to have power center is just got the network affects and know whether they collect much data or just become a successful business, they will have economic power, market power. And the users may just be these sort of shake to be shown of their wall. That is the model for attack.

But if users can guard their data, they can demand a higher Price. They can demand Better terms. They can use cypher graphic protocols to transact without giving up their privacy, while also giving authentic attribution or confirmation of ads viewed or purchases.

So what matters to the marketers, if you get them, you know their best day is not the day, track you individually, they wouldn't know what to do with these tracking databases is usually vendors. They have to do IT uh or google, facebook console. But they want to know what audience they can address and they want to know how well that audience or cohorts within IT convert.

They want to segment that audience and sea. They can do performance and growth marketing with super science, mostly progression or just the progression, mostly know very civil statistics to see this campaigns working, this ones not i'm going to spend more money on this and less on that, and we're going to try this new paid media approach. I'm going to try this new brave browser private ad system because there are some users there that are off the reservation.

They are not reachable ble addressable. They used u block origin and on chrome and using brave, and I can get them through my usual, you know, media channels and advertising methods. So i'm gonna put a little money on brave, and that's how we built up the private ad business is part of brave words, uses the basic attention token.

And that matters to me, too, because I always thought about economics. I was interested in IT from a Young age, but I also in mozel, I thought we're gonna killed by google. I think every executive thought this, that most of i'm not breaching any ideas to say this.

IT was something that maybe can be solved without really doing a second browser in marketing IT as a companion to firefox. And I actually talked, uh, one point, what they've hide about doing this. But I couldn't recruit away from apple.

And I tried to get huit as well. And I would have been a web kit based most liberal ser. But I was too risky.

I couldn't get the talent I needed. IT would undermine firefox at some point, and I would have been Better. So, you know, maybe most all is trap, but I didn't want me to be trapped.

I certainly didn't want myself for my children to be trapped, because these monopoly last little older than they should, and they can really keep sharing those sheep until sheep were starving. And that happened. I think that so we're headed with all the censorship and the heavy handed interference in sort of search results.

The modernization of youtube s in two thousand and fifteen started and IT wasn't just, you know, over atrocious content that should be censure because of the wise you going to just have people after in your lose viewers. IT was over all sorts of things that nobody can understand and they were just losing money as as youtube craters like these were just craters who we're talking about, their hobby. And they they found their ad revenue going down.

Totally get google changes, youtube bagger. Those facebook changes instagram, facebook algorithms and like IT completely wipes the table of whole. You do sectors of crate. Yeah.

in the U. K, there were actual regulate cases involving this, a search algorithm. O sort of change. Matt cuts when he was a google used to blog, and he tried to be transparent about IT.

But I was clear google had a lot of power and there sort of A A black box that they are Operating inside of. And it's a casino. The house always wins.

So I wanted to use something that we knew about the old days computing, where you are the system administrator of your department's mini computer, or you are labs mini computer, or you are your PC administrator. You had to get the city wrong. You had to installed.

That was a total pain. That was attacks. But you could keep your data there. You could make sure that you knew what was going on your system head. In many ways, more integrity than our modern day connected devices do, where they can be updated behind your back and things can go wrong or sideways. And there's all the third party tracking.

So I wanted to get back to the user having power through privacy, through shields, what brave calls them through the power in your pocket, which is the supercomputer, you know, the micron ity super scale architecture from the nineties. And yet it's kind of until til zed software is not ten thousand times, is Better, even though the processes that much faster, something gone wrong. Because even in the early nineties, silk graphics Operating system was getting bloated, and we're talking about going from eight mag RAM to sixteen mag RAM.

I mean, just ridiculous smallmouth memory. And yet the software was getting bloated x windows and motive and all this garbage. So software is not gotten Better. It's in some ways gotten worse. And I wanted brave to waive the flag of Better software, title software, software that defends your privacy because IT gives you economic bargaining power a chance at changing the topology, the network, where again, there's always gave the central powers that come and go and accumulate wealth. But if the users can fight back, they can have the save other options like the currencies and tokens and smart contract systems.

Well, I was going to say, you know, maybe for the majority of people out there, when you are starting brave yeah like a economic power, I get in the google, facebook, they would get power. But how on earth would I ever, as an individual.

have economic power? Wasn't our pitch. Our pitch was private, fast, low battery use.

And we actually a mobile congress, twenty thousand. And this Green spector company from the U. K.

Came by and said, yeah, we have measured you're you're the least power hungry. Browse their own android IT was awesome because they confirmed their own research teams results. But you have to sell with what people feel every day. What they feel is that page load leg, they feel that battery being drained. They feel the data plan, even though they may be on unlimited data plan, there are still ways they perceive IT.

But now, I mean, I imagined feels real to people that, yeah, I can make money with my attention on the internet like that feels very real to people.

It's so funny because we have different tears of ad rate card around the world because it's is you to get ad buyers in the U. S. And paying the most in the U.

K. In europe after and so on. And so we have a lot of fans around the world who are in lower tear regions and they aren't make me much, but IT may go longer way for them.

IT isn't like we're trying to make people right or doing a pumping up. We're trying to make users get seventy percent of the revenue of a growing business that if you look at add online and dial advertising, it's still three inter billion plus a year. That's a huge business. If we just get you know, one percent of that and we share seventy percent that with our users at two point one billion, right? So to be super .

crisp to picture listeners understanding an ad is displayed to me. And this is an add that's purchased through the brave ad network where the advertiser is willing to say, look, I know that this isn't going to do a bunch of crazy targeting stuff just going on to the brave add network, a user use that ad. And then seventy percent of the revenue from that add shows up in the users wallet IT in the form of the basic attention token.

yes. So when you say network, people think tracking because networks have lots of ways to track. So what we do instead, as we put all the ads into a catalogue through a link to the creative for the the image with page video that's in an edge cash somewhere.

We don't consider an adversary the link to the ad and some keywords about the ad going to a catalogue. And the catalog gets updated to a large number people in each region and IT gets updated several times a day, the same way for everyone. So you are not identified by downloading the catalogue.

It's kind getting safe, a anti fishing list or a safe browsing list, anti mour site list. And that's how we solve the problem of add networks that today in conventional attack will track you on the front side and take all your data even before they've decided what add to show you. We do the decision ing in the browser based on this catalogue. So all the machine learning on the mother's data feed I mentioned earlier is in browser. It's only on if you up into the system, by the way, it's not turned down Normally and that's what does the .

ad matching I see. yes. I'm wondering how I mean, I was definitely buying some ads on facebook for startups I was involved with in twenty fifteen, sixteen and IT was on freaking real.

The level of targeting, I think you can target one person. yes. And as an advertiser here like this is magic, I can acquire exactly the customers that I want.

Of course, that's at the expense of the users. And facebook walked back a lot of them. I made IT more broad. Is there some measure of an advertiser being able to tell you, hey, these are the types of customers I want or is IT like buying a billboard in the highway?

yes. So we're big enough now. And even even when we started, we were big enough that we can do some very good segmentation, which does not let people be identified because is the problem with the targeting systems you mentioned is they can, like you said, target one person.

I think the tony sweeney said in the us, of someone's birthday, gender and zip code are known. They can be individually identified. We identified.

So obviously, we're not going to give out any information to advertisers ahead of time, but we do have ways of sampling our audience to very quarterly ly segmented so you can address those segments and some of those keywords in. Catalogue express those segments. They are basically segment and fires.

And separately, the machine learning in the browser developed an opinion about you from your your search queries. You're clicking what pages you visit, all that stuff about what segments you might fall into and then the matching occurs. So we're using no support Victor machines and basic on sort of fairly simple stuff doesn't burn your battery.

We don't need TensorFlow or a cloud supercomputer to do this kind of machine learning. And that is a pretty good job. A lot of attack is not as precise.

You think facebook said they could target that person and they could often, but sometimes they were product actors, not so much on their native apps, but on publisher pages. There's a ton of fraud in online digital advertising because java script is used on these publisher pages and I design javascript t on purpose. This was very intentional.

I think that was the right decision to be a mutual environment, its global environment. All the standard objects and the document objects are mutimer. You can overwrite them, you can mock up local likes, and you can forward something that looks like the next year's version of a standard object.

So jobs's commute ability was a huge boom, would finally want to survival without IT. But IT also means there's no security property called integrity. IT means that when the publisher is loading all these third party tags from google and others, they can fight each other, they can overwrite each other, they cookie stack, they, they cheat.

And what's worse, you can take the whole publisher contents scraped into a fake environment in a bot, and the boat pretends to be the user clicking on the ad, and you get paid the ad revenue because the ad buyer didn't cross check the troubles. Shares ID in google add change, which is a fraud Operator against the true new york times at ID. It's bad and that google still gets the fee on this advertising money is stolen by fraudsters, makes google complicit with fraudsters to some degree in missiles the interest, again, it's a conflict of interest.

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There is privacy, their speed, which IT sounds like speed was the first one there, is make money from your attention on the internet. You're rolling out a bunch more features in brave sort of at a compounding rate now that it's turning in the much more than everything you've described so far with its own search engine, with its own native wallet capability. You read this unbelievable milestone now of having accomplished fifty million monthly active users. What was one or two with the tipping points along the way where you realized, oh, this particular value prop really resonates and accelerated the growth?

Well, some of the stuff was early mistakes you make when you're a small start up, you choose to use a shortcut. We use the electron framework can. We switched from a private version based on was always gecc engine to premium blink.

And using electronic was a mistake. IT wasn't designed for a browser. IT turned off the sandbox that was orrible ed to discover it's kind of bloated and replaced a lot of middle files in the premium code that google was breaking through internal API shifts.

And we finally got onto a proper well maintained crime and fork, including the front and up. The downside of this is we look a lot like chrome. We have the brave lion icon ference shields.

We have the trying over bat. We have our own look for the tabs. But I still looks all I creme.

It's tabs on top. It's got creme extensions, which can be loaded if they don't use the google consistent. I mention for that we disabled, but you know it's still a little bit to chrome.

And yet I think it's worth because that helped us get users off from until we really did that rebasing on the front end of chrome, we were paying a growing maintenance cost on all this electron footage, and our users were suffering because IT wasn't fully crowd there, extensions needed to be manually supported, reported and things weren't working right. So we switch to a more complete fork like a lot of browsers use. I think the bodies and exception, they have a uh react different and and they've sunk the cost to stabilize the middle are which .

is so it's just a great like if any upside browser team and leader, we're going to build your own stack IT would be yet IT takes a big team. And you've been that .

I have ten people in first year round of great. What am I going to I knew how to do ten people out of L L. With the nescafe of most oco base because i'd worked on that cobs with hundreds of engineers at that's well, and those people were still working on IT for A A while.

A well did lay off a lot of them, but kept some on. Others went to IBM. And even though we had to shrink the workforce, but IT was bigger than the ten people I had at mozilla in two thousand and three when we spent out.

And until we got the search deal in two thousand and four, I couldn't hire more people. We were burning down the two million dollars with a similar sort of situation. With funding brave, I had to take ten people.

I had to use some existing code base. And we did start with with mozilla o in a multiprocessing box uh framework called graphing that was part of firefox O S, which I had worked. But IT just lost on this big bread sheet we did when we d just score ted against crime and blink.

And IT just lost on too many rows. IT was, what are we going to do for D. R. M? Oh, at the time firefox has a customer dobe deal, we can protect that even if we use the echo source.

You know, we have to go get google wide vine, which google made free, as in beer, even though the arms close source IT was bad. But you have to have a people, not just netflix, amazed me, who love at that. So what are we going to do? Well, google giving in out, but they're really only giving in out for chromium based browsers.

And so we did that and there were just one hundred other paper cuts or major issues like that. Geta was never big on mobile customer sol was never begun mobile. We needed all the mobile web kit lineages that goes into crimea, blink, that still used on mobile web stuff that preceded standards.

So IT was just at the end of two thousand and fifteen. We just had got a switch, and that's when we switch to electron, but that had its own costs. And yet as a small team, we couldn't do the four crime.

And as we grew, we did. And so I think he was under twenty eighteen, we came out with the brave core base browser, which is our maintainable version of chromium blank, and our own front end still close to google s and that was very popular. And all the extensions worked. And we started growing faster with doubles for five years in a row, so or more than double some years.

So fifty million users, that seems like the largest self custody crypto wallet application in the world. And that's one way to look at. The other way to look at IT is it's this tiny fraction of the overall browser market share. Yes, I ve been heard anyone talk about the browser wars and market share in a while. Do you know what that's looks like today?

I mentioned chrome is left to have two point six five billion users. Now some of these users have gone away. I am installed chrome.

I found that there was a secret installed calkey stone messing my system up. Somebody won a blog post about this. Google denied IT, but just phenomenal.

Gc, ally left, got Better when I ripped all that out. IT was sort of hiding itself in the U. S.

Was kind of creepy. What matters in browsers and eventually earlier, a sort of a every ten years as a changing the guard. And there's a rapid evolution and there's a sort of league user effect area.

Phone hip of its described this right delete users invented the coming tool kit. They were home made by machinist plummers, and they became standardized, and big tools companies built them. League users invented by our glass sir f fords, a lot of hot roding like tubes described.

Wind surfing user, generated in some ways, bill barman, nike lead users. These are people who are not just creating something to go make a buck and seeing need in the market, making a widget. There are users of their own products.

They love the product and they understand what it's to doing or what IT needs to do. And having those league users favor, you know, firefox in its day or brave now is super important. And the league users that I see that are very generous, some of controversial are working on cypher projects, blockchain projects. They're working on the centralization .

that's not going to be controversial on this broadcast.

Yeah I mean, people are are exaggerating much energy bitcoin uses and also not aware of how bit clinton. Use energy that otherwise goes to waste. But we're not bitcoin based anyway. And there are a new block chains that are much more efficient. So the whole thing is, to me, kind of I need to see ideological yes.

not a controversial statement required that the most interesting founders, technologists that that are by a large focusing on what drop cristin .

s wrote this S A about a year and the other year talked about developer your animal spirits just rallying around IT and it's true and then the theory um got slow in the fees were too high. But in some ways it's like unique the a three virtual machine. Now the byo de in the smart contract system with some transportation cost, if it's not directly portable, is supported on other change polygon.

Obviously, a avalanche c chain is an evm compatible like the unique system called table being copy in the different flavors of unix. The sort of design DNA spreads easier than code DNA because code as hard requirements, not all what you're known or tested for, uh, but design can be copied. And in this case, even with the E V M compatible, the code can be tested to interpretation. Like we had different nfs servers that had different code lines, es interrogating and different tc we have he stacks interrogating. So I think the dixons essay was on point, even though people decry a theory um slowness and high gas fees and the new chains are just super exciting to the extent that you can port your code uh the E V M cross compiler and interpret solutions on sona and there's the sea chain other direct vm compatibles .

on other chains IT seems like you're strategy with embracing not just the blockchain but becoming an economic player in the blockchain ecosystem. Has been initially, there was a basic attention token, and I don't think that those were actually deposited on gene in syrian wall.

That is that correct in our system because of regulations, not just in the us. If we send a ad revenue share to some unknown self custody while IT, we're gonna get in trouble, including big trouble. If it's you, somebody needs to some have been law, right? So there's not just um fin in which looks at money launder ing carefully.

People rumble about, K, Y, C, know your custom. Why am I identifying myself with a custody in order to get my basic attention to token? Well, IT doesn't key.

Y, see for its own sick. And it's not just a one and done. They have to sometimes check again.

In fact, there's a problem right now where they are making some people in europe feel out of survey to do more diligence. K, Y, C, serves as a means to an end. The end is entire money launching. It's identifying all these flows. And of some of the cypher news also think, well, I just go on chain and a anonymous no, you're gonna identified through block chain forensic .

right in the same way that it's not hard based on a zipp code and a gender and birthday or singly identify you. At some point someone will be able to just run your wallet or wallets or and that happens today through some d anonymizing. And like I know this is right.

So far, our system, with users getting ad revenue to share and publishers and getting craters on youtube, getting no tips or recurring donations, just ten of those or so could fingerprint you as a user, right? If there are few bits each, that's enough bits to fingerprint. You need identifier that can count everybody in the world.

And if you have enough observation points around, you can inside channels, you can put things together. So we realized that that we could not go on chain, not just because I was too costly, but because of the fingerprint, the user. And the answer, in the long run, is zero nod's proof. Our next generation ad system, which is aiming at salon, is called theus.

IT uses a black box accumulator in the browser to build up an authentic, crito, graphically secure add performance set of numbers that can then be put into a zero ost proof system directly on chain, and the ad buyer can verify for themselves from the terms of the proof that the ad performed, that the magic of your knowledge of by verifying that you can believe the truth claims. And we're trying to move on chain with that very soon with lona, which is exciting. But we're still burden by the regulations that require not only the anti money laundry ing but also the anti um the office of foreign asset controls in the U S.

Don't send to a self custody world that owned by somebody on the F, P, S top ten list, right? You'll do a federal time for that. So you know, people get mad at me like why I must do K Y, C, and they think i'm some kind of cypher hater I I love.

On chain direct, i've done IT. I've paid one of the auditors for our smart contracts for the basic attention token can got paid on chain. And IT was great, much Better than sending a bank wire. But there are problems if you want privacy right now and you want to comply with these regulations, which have finishes h penalties.

So we're working toward more decentralized future and will have to see how the ghost the great thing about crypto is I see a lot of a now banks, you know, Jamie diamond did a turn from same bitcoins of planted to, oh, my block changed great. And family officers and companies are into cypher, the old big tech guard. Aren't the facebook tried with libra now dim, but really got hurt of politicians, didn't like facebook and IT wasn't really clear why you want IT um you know instead of another existing cypher. So the initial thing you .

did was introduced the basic attention token and you could accumulate that without going through any K Y C. But if you were going to then send IT to a creator, they would need to have A K, Y.

C. wallet. But you would, as a use, you be anonymous.

But that seems like now you've moved to your first fork to media as to make a brave wall. Now you're building your own native brave wallet directly into the browser, which is totally a thing that safari could do, that chrome could do. And IT doesn't seem like they're going to do that for a long time. So you're going to be the first browser with a native secure uh, on chain wallet, hot wallet directly baked into the browser.

Refrain from the of firefox Opera had at first. And you can say that again because opa did have a well in two thousand nine way that's that's .

so we were worried because making out with the south .

custody walled in adapt or two thousand eighteen and brace been growing, so had to get more people to do the wall or had to get the cofounder to go lead the wall and effort. But into that eighteen I wasn't to happen. Another hand crypto winter happen.

And I think that took steam out of Opera a little bit, but Opera still has clipped on. They are talking about a polygon deal. They prancing ced.

And you know, I think Opera will always be there, kind of like brave, even though it's now chinese owned and a little less trustful. They just in western ize, not saying anything personal here. And yet Opera will be innovative, but brakes going to go faster.

And we're going to do things that cut across the self custody versus custodio usability trade off space because they took twenty five years to train people to use using their own password logging and maybe for real banks and coin base. And so and you have to have a second factor authenticator APP or something like that or a ube key that's almost as hard as self custody. It's a little bit safer.

And that if you lose your private key, your word list, you're back up your crypto to deal, will sell cost to your eve lost. Whereas if you lose your past, get your password and lose your ube key, lose your authenticator rapper, the phone is on, you can probably comment coin base for you and they can reset your past work for you. So it's complex enough now though, I think self custody as a shot, getting things to be useful, getting the basic attention token to be useful, including that virtual kind you earn without k because you onna send IT back to your traders who do have to K Y C for these aml l fact reasons that we can work on with the wallets.

And we're going to make the wallet sort of blend with the brave rewards system as much as we can. We're going to make a multi chain. We don't have any religion about blockchain.

We like salona. We agreed to make IT the default for multi chain dbs where they don't express a preference for default and the user doesn't and that choice of default the browser can make. That's important.

That's how search deals get done. That's fly. Google only pays for defauts because they are king of the hill and they think you'll get the traffic anyway that they say whether being does and decca and others index do search deals with browsers. Even if they not the defauts.

they will pay for traffic. But even it's still like a lot of people are gonna get wallets for the first time.

This pretty awesome IT is exciting. It's also you've seen what happen with you. I took off very cleverly at the time you swap did IT v three.

I guess I was and just started getting a lot of swap action that made them a lot of money and that was from people using metal mask and self custody. I would guess i've not got a good figure right now. Most of those users don't have a hardware private key device like a leger treasure.

And so they're keeping that wordless safe and some safe place. I hope I talk to somebody, an anonymous user of brave in africa, who was hacks fan, and they were wondering, why were you know why the hacks found there was feeling with us? Because he's kind of that.

But that all blew over. But this user, I said, how do you use that? He said, i've been buying crypto for five years. I used metal mask, right for four years. I guess I was and I said, oh, you have a ledger or tester and no, i'm really afraid i'm going to lose at all, right?

Well, sure, you can recover access to the wallet. But like that still means you're piling up wealth in a browser extension, which are known to be hackable or at least not as secure as if I was in a browser itself. And on top of this is always connected to the internet.

Extension is just weaker, both in terms of its powers but also its security model. If it's doing its own secure store for a private key, it's just in a weaker footing than a native APP by design. Then you know, we see this all the time.

If you tweet and you mention the mask, I joked the mask, that is matter. I didn't want to say you get all these fishing support accounts pretending to be your buddy and personating my friend David wall shoe was at mozel annos that maim. And I ll try to say, D M, or you go to this google form and will help you get your your key recover. And if the topic wasn't even about last funds and you got to the google form and write above the fine print from google that just don't enter any personal private data passwords in this form is a field saying, give us your twelve words, you twenty words. So these fruits are just swarm under this.

There are bad actor companies in the ecosystem right now that are trying to tell you, hey, for a nice experience to have all of your wallets aggregated here, type in your secret phrase from your, you know, local self custody wall IT into our thing. And i've seen this on coin base, but I know there are others. We are not yet trained on what these secret phrases mean in the way that we're trained about passwords.

And IT took twenty years and IT took twenty years to train on credit. And so we're telling people, hey, this is like a user name that you can type in anywhere. And it's completely defeating the purpose of that.

A secure same thing for Q R codes, Q R coats to become short hands for links. I go to my neighbor pool and I can scan A Q R co with my iphone and then then sign in on the web form. But Q R codes are also used, specially encysted for spelling in private key, and you should not be putting them on paper for somebody to sand ever.

And you're right there, let's say, bad or sketchy actors who are trying to collect these things or passwords and email. There were services over the years. There are still are that will say, hey, we'll read your email for in fact, deficit goes building one.

But I think they're keeping a clean IT would blow them up if they cheated. They're just trying to be tracked ers from your email and you get a ducks address if you want IT, but you Better if you didn't have the clear text of your email messes at all. And so in brave, if you use with mail like gmail, we block those tracks.

Ers, at the end point where the secure session, the T, L, S session, terminates. But this whole thing about dual models, somethings a public key or a public link, something a private key, and they're both getting forced to the same U X, metaphors is a problem. And training users, maybe getting to a Better state of play with harvard wallets, where they aren't just this anxiety cruising dongle that you were.

Did a break? Did I forget my pin? Did I forget my? Did I send the wrong address?

You probably want these things to be more like a phone, something that's more useful to you in your digital life. You don't want to have an anxiety every time you transact. You want to have the sense of security and that you're winning.

And that's the other thing I would say about break. We can make your building wallet applausive some gaming. I can collect non pumping dump yield opportunities from d five. If you want to put some assets in IT can collect bad revenue share. That's another positive some game we already have. So we're trying to make clipt to be part of your daily life in a way that doesn't provoke anxiety and I being fished that I lose my pen or my past race.

you bring up this just ever present trade off in computing, which is security versus user experience. And I frequently think that when i'm doing something encrypt versus i'm doing something in the regular bank trade fy ecosystem. And my bank, for Better for worse, has taken a lot of a headache away.

And I have a pretty good user experience. It's not confusing. I know what i'm doing, what i'm wiring money from one place, the other, making a transfer from one account to the other.

I lose some of my liberties because they have the option, you know, remove my assets if they determine that i've done something illegal even though i'm like, well, hey, I didn't do something illegal. If they determine that I did, they could cease my assets. They can make a profit on me.

They can arbiters the cost of capital to their returns. When they take my deposits and to play them elsewhere, I should be getting all that economic upside. But what i've gotten exchange for, giving up my liberties and my economic opportunity, is a pretty good user experience.

And we're at this place in cyp to right now where we've taken a hard left and we've said, I want to own everything. I want to be hyper secure. I want to have all my privacy.

And what we're left with is be a bank. yeah. Yes, also be a bank. And IT is a brutal thing to have to manage all the stuff right now.

Yes, this calendar is going to be big because we're not only adding more chains, and I think I agree with the valiant, we're not going to do complex multiple in uh, transactional model. So people are working on those using threshold signature. I think the maintain is will have the chains people want to use and the yellow farmers go where the returns are good and the users follow.

So we'll make that all as automatic and convenient, but you'll still have to turn IT on and will have safety on IT. And that U. X.

Will will take a lot of work to develop because design is still in art, absolutely. And art, right? You can, the space is too large to do sort A B testing in any credible time frame. You have to call some shots, get some users, tell you what to do, collaborate with those lead users I mentioned earlier.

And then I think at the end of this year, we'll have a wallet that will be super awesome, not only for using cyp to, you know, defi and so on, but also, if we do IT right, some of our custody partners can virtualize your plastic from your wallet so they can give you, like privacy account does, like the apple card does. I can give you, uh, a master card number from a block they allocate from. That isn't your number.

So your security is Better. It's like the generated email addresses that apple and others are doing. And if we virtualization the credit card, then we can actually put e commerce in the browser. We can deconstruct amazon every site without having to change its merchant java script, which which is not gonna en easily, can have an option where you can use something like a virtual credit card that could even be topped up with crypto or draw and cypher.

I've got one question for you as a pertains to this decentralized versus user experience topic. Maxi maryland, Spike pointed out in his recent post that this is a quote to make these technologies usable, the spaces consoler dating around platforms. Again, people who will run server for you and iterate on that functionality that emerges in fea open sea coin basic either scan. And my question for you is, do you think this is the case that the user experience the users want and the developer experience and sort of ecosystem speed that programmer want necessiate the centralized choke points no matter what generation of the web we're on.

So it's hard to beat the server when you want to do something like index theory um history into a data abase with motor boys acquiring IT. So i'm not going to do that on my machines. I'm going to use either scan or something like that.

And if either scan has tracking ers or bad attack in IT, i'm going to use brave and block those, but it's hard to be to server sometimes. And I agree with moxy. I like moxy a lot in many once at muzle, in the old days, in colleagues that this blind context matching system contacts, I should say, like you are a dress book, contacts for signal, because they had this problem, that your friends are on signal.

Signal uses the phone numbers identifier. But how will they help you find your friends without reading your address book, which is a privacy problem? And the way they did IT used charm, blind signal atures and hashing on, and it's clever.

And IT runs in a secure on claim on the server, which is something we are also using a brave. So I agree with moxy essay. There's a larger tool kit from cryptography, the original crypto, which some of my photos, her friends are still mad as crypt has been an next cyp to currency.

But there's a larger tooker. And IT works on servers, on centralized systems as well as in decentralize stems and decentralize systems, even salona. There's always a trade off if you really want, you know, certain guarantees and certain lent.

Cy, you're gonna want to server and you gonna want, even in the network to the server to be provision a certain way. There's no free lunch. And there's a larger universe in which I think block chains and that works prepared, that works make sense, but also services will endure.

That's why I get to know you when people think that web to, you know of braves two, web two, well, web three is not going to replace web two. It's going to extended in a way that eventually crafts. If it's like michaud's laws of media, it's gonna mock and torture web two, but that's far in the future.

And the meantime, it's going to be extending IT so that we can get users using IT. And our ways that users will want to use IT that are gonna be like either scan or a proxy farm, a computer runs or bacon trails or there will be servers you'll want to go to. But if you have descriptive protocols, if you have strong muscular clients like brave, if you have that market power as a small user through a sexually union zing with other users of that client, then you should be able to get Better privacy, Better security properties out of the server.

IT shouldn't just be writing your data, shouldn't be just betraying you in some way while it's whispering in your ear. IT should be a fair deal. And that can be done with, you know, photography product can do that. So I like moxy s say a quite a IT.

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Yeah, fanta is the perfect example of the quote that we talk about all the time here and acquired. Jeff bases his idea that the company should only focus on what actually makes your beer taste Better. I E spend your time and resources only on what's actually gonna, move the needle for your product and your customers, and outsource everything else that doesn't.

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Slash acquired. I well, I want know, we want to our grading section here. And even though this is in a lot of traditional acquired episode or even necessarily told the whole history and on our tear down analysis the way we typically do brand, and I am curious your take, what is a plus look like for brave? Let's just say, three years from now, in some ways it's an apart. Another way is it'll be here soon as we know IT. What does success look like for the .

company if we keep doubling or Better three years as eight times fifty? So it's four million users. And once you get to that scale, you start to get distribution opportunities like being on phones. Print stalls aren't really happening outside of the apps from the OS super power like android, google or IOS apple, but samsung out there and their new phones coming up in, in the world and there's always a low end of the market is getting Better thanks to the harbor ginning veterans sort of trickling down.

And so I would like to see us get to that scale because then I think distribution to go in directions that right now is harder to do organically and will cost you a lot if you have to pay for IT. But that kind of a monae business thing. I think if you get anywhere near four million monthly users, you have enormous cloud, especially the league users, still in standards.

And standards matter still because a lot of businesses want to not only compete, but sort CoOperate, the competition model, so you get ongoing, you know, web standards still, in spite of google's dominance and somewhat strong arms tactics, you still get standards evolution cyp to is fridge blockchain, its own set of standards, often run by a court team. But there's as a earlier, greater sort of defect generation of things like E V M compatible chains or a smart contract systems or things you can do with compilers and interpreters, even if you don't have an e bm work alike in your node, in your network. So when we get to the scale of four, four million or more users, we will have opportunities to do things, including with basic attention token that you we couldn't done out of the box earlier.

And that would look like having something more competitive with google that's decentralized. And you know, we're not just aiming a google, let's like sort of driving by looking in the review mirror and google one hundred year company. So was general electric, but ended up a tax dodger in a supreme lender, right? This is not a good ending.

Thomas Edison was spinning in his barrel. Google may end up that way sooner or later, but we're looking at a world where users are sober. N that's the vision I mentioned earlier.

You have these machines without being a burden. This man, you should have say over them. You should have benefits from them. And it's not just economics in some, you know, money grabbing way. Economics really, at the greek word right, means something about home.

Economics are about the home or you know the scale of human life where you live most of your life, and things that become very fraught and dehumanized at larger scales. But if we can get people Operating Better at smaller scales, then I I do believe this good for the world. And i'm not just talking, you know playing the sky, you know habits and the shire stuff here I see this with the creative economy.

I see this with the youtube r and the other creators. So he's with nf for all the the planning that goes on with N F T and actually will be looking into N F T as a basis for further you know sort of economics for our creators in this new year. Uh, we want to see fans and creators directly connect, and we want to see them do IT without, you know, being demonized, door interfered, red with censored, all that stuff.

And if this can be scaled up, IT forms all these little networks that have these logistics curves that have their expansible faces that everyone loves. So people should want this for good business reasons. But you can't rate IT through attacker tracking.

You have to have a Better platform and Better so network for you have to have crypto in both senses boxes, cryo graphs and crypto currency block chain. And I think brave at four million, we can actually make this real. We have at one point three million creators verified. We would have tens of millions of created.

and that means people who have K Y seed themselves so that they can receive tokens.

yeah. Or if not, people are self custody, maybe will hang self custody walks. On the creative side, you can just do an on chain sand on a fast chain, low fees, and you don't have to go through K, Y, C.

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 look at IT. And even with a bit line prototyped IT was too expensive. I talk to people like the logy of twenty one doc, which picking boat.

I talk to the open, bizarre founder who would actually died me first. He said, we're thinking about adding battle. He said, aren't you bitcoin without a fee? Why do you need bad? He said, well, nobody wants to send bitcoin.

They won to hold IT. Very true, in which at the time, that would have been a good strategy. Just sit on IT.

Don't shave those bitcoins to send something since S C R, P, S, S, your favorite youtube. E. R.

And you know people will simpkin. People are using lighting more and jack. And so we are all excited about that. whatever.

There's lots of options for this, but getting people to do direct on chain sense is still chAllenging ing for the U. S. reasons. We mention the usability, the security, the sort of familiarity on the both the center and the crater who receives IT.

But with private four or million, we can hang self custody on all sides of our ecosystem, even the advertiser side, the full triangle. And people can go peer to peer. They don't have to go through custodians. They don't want to. Now like I said, if you worry about you law enforcement, which you shouldn't be, if you're unless the governments come bad, then block change forensics and exciting on every good exchange will still let the law enforcement do what they need to do. We're not trying to stand in the way of the enforcement doing what I should do.

But this idea of getting to a big system of direct on chain scenes by starting there in limiting IT to only those cases, or limiting IT only to lightning, which I was told to use before I was ready, years before I was ready, doesn't make sense. We've gone the other way or pragmatic. Tis but as we grow and as we keep the custody options going will add to self custody options and see .

what wins makes total sense. I'm sure you've thought more about the success case, but what's the failure case?

What are the existent al risks at this point? Risk of bad mo vad crypto v no cyp to gets banned uh in the U S. Or something like that.

Don't think it's gonna en one of the this because I do see too many rich people far taking through their family offices and so on. But I do think there is a risk there, and I can't quantify to easily. So we're just Carry on.

It's hard to hedge anyway. I think there are risks with big tech. Big tech could still misbehave in IT has still has even political power votes been getting beaten up more and more by both parties as time goes on. But that's a risk.

Do you think that facebook or google or or any the others could ship a wallet in rome, for instance, are like, actually really embraced this?

I bet that somebody google has looked at this, I know google had a wallet, or may even have a wallet team that does some outward bound stuff, and they never connected IT with chrome, and they never put IT together. You know paypal w's going to do their own stable coin or whatever.

You're going to see more wallets and maybe you will see them in big browsers, but I don't know if they're going to get into the system that we're getting into early, which is the frontier, and that means they may just be stuck in the old world. It's very much like the age of discovery. We're going to be you building the wild west and then the lights will come in and the streets will get Better paved.

And we'll be there already, and we will be selling pick access and shovels. The old world is back there. The oceana regime kind of corrupt. I'm willing to innovate. Maybe they stole the gold, but their banks then stolen from them through compound interest.

The songs good lots.

you know, the sugar family made out the housework. G did not. So, you know, google may have a wallet, but IT might just be a me too, and IT might be kind of weak when they do.

Can you imagine the default? Switching from sign in with your google account to authenticate with your embassy wallet is just no way he really is .

hard for google innovates. There are just a big company and these big companies have their own problems, uh, not just the innovators delima, but at least that much. And I just don't think they're gonna be a huge thread, but they could use strong ARM tactics to hurt us for sure.

All the bigs could. And then there's our own execution risk in our own sort of competition with the growing new wave of privacy products. Well, I think we have to just compete and it's competitions good.

We learn from each other. Uh, there's a marketing component as you grow across the cases where you are trying to convince. People who don't know again, a search changes from a browser that the ork product is more private. IT is is faster, it's more trustworthy, it's other good properties.

Who do you consider your competitors? So is that would be like square black or damash?

no. So we're trying to get people off of chrome, and that's a matter of getting people to see this easy to migrate. You can even cope brows for a while.

You don't lose anything. And then you can cut the core 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 safe. I but says I is still privilege in apples.

OS is and kind of tired. So that's hard add just somewhat privilege and windows, which is little hard on this. 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 fund thing goes spent out there a long time and they built up quite a uh reputation, brand name, their science in airports. So we've done sort of a marketing first approach and gotten to a reasonable annual turnover ver from to understand.

And that's got to be considered competitive because you're doing this top on top of mobile now. But we look at the pie that we're dividing up as very large. If you're taking users and chrome, we could both take and not really interference to the worst case to me would be duck and grave start blooding each other in some mix.

March arts matched to claim the privacy mental premature that seems neetly destructive. But IT is difficult marketing across the cases. M, you have to say we are more private or we are Better or we should use us because we're faster or more complete.

We block these threads that the other I doesn't. And so some of that will have to happen. It's just gonna to happen for marketing reasons.

Are right? Lightning round of car bouts. David, give us your first one and you know .

go kick and i'm bad halfway through that. I started reading because I saw you're tweet about IT while you are in hawaii project tail mary or anywhere so really enjoying its super er so good .

and make me think about everything from scientific principles when I look around in the world I don't know what what about it's anywhere who wrote the Martin? This is his newest novel, OK, and his story told in such a way that it's really fun to let IT surprise you as you read the books.

So I don't want to say.

call. I mean, to get my quick .

one is the second book that I read on vacation, which is open by Andrea acy, his co writer, or go strider, or on another right term, but it's the same pillar prize winning writer who helped fill light with show dog and IT is written in that same page turning thriller style. And Andrea acy had an unbelievable career up down shout out to friends of the show, jeremy over at tiny, and David perl, who at capital can recommended the book to me, but I was just awesome, highly recommend.

I've not been reading enough, and I own a friend at apple or read of his new book, which is his first novel. But I this is kind of negative, but I think it's important. Mike shelling burger, sanford sicko is worth reading if you're in the bay area a long time, like I ve been, because IT in good, remember, much Better decades in cement, disco and help come back somehow.

But my diagnoses that pretty recent, I also would recommend an old book that a friend who only really books recommended to me, which you can find free copy of online, like lib. Jen, you can get IT. It's called dynamic economics by burton cline.

And you've never heard a burton kine. Burton kline looked at how firms grow and how they start, sometimes as gunk works. Projects actually looked at Kelly Martins team.

He looked at the trade is aid fairchild. He looked at the china lake sidelines first, practically, he seeking missile development. And he made some killer observations about structure sort of sociology antipope gy herky about how firms go from innovation to rent seeking to outright vamp ic badness.

And he had four kinds of firms. So anyway, burton kline dynamic economics is an only but uh underappreciated um and still very much relevant. I wonder if I should give you on moscow pointer.

Frendon, thank you so much for the time where to let you run? Where can listeners find you on the internet and brave on the internet?

So brave. A com five letter english word doma name. We got IT in twenty fifteen. We got IT from the nuclear toka combo, great combo. It's a texas span. And the friends of mac raining simple strata, he's put them in sympathises and they were onest musicians, and we gave them brave come a com and paid a reason Price.

So brave 点 com is that i'm on twitter brender I am on red das brender ic brave easy to find brand and actor com I haven't updated in the while。 That was a historic blog post, but some of them were still relevant to do with trust, but verify also what assembly java script stuff. And on twitter, the brave handle is called that brave IT seems to be searched, banned for some reason and another ivan is, uh, we have attention token. That's another twitter handle. Uh, we have brave support if you need support, can always tag me .

like awesome print and take you so much.

Thanks fun.

David. That was super fun. Brandon is such an internet legend.

Oh my guess what a man for all seasons, literally.

Yep, but the listener is thanks for being on the journey with us. Another fun episode as always. If you want to check out more and you're like, I need more required right now and there's not any new episodes yet.

Do you want to go deeper? Go check out the L P show. Search acquired L P show whereever you get your podcast.

Come discuss this and hang out in the slack. Acquire dot slash, slack. You get a job board. You're looking for your next thing. You're part of the great resignation.

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next time.

Easy, you busy, you busy, you who? We got a true.