The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave)

1. 0:00 – 1:38

   Brendan Eich and Brave: why this browser matters now

   1. BGBen Gilbert0:00

      Dude, [chuckles] I cannot believe that in recording this, we asked the chief architect of Netscape to restart his browser to see if that fixed the problem. [laughing]

   2. SPSpeaker0:11

      Who got the truth? [upbeat music] Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down, say it straight. Another story on the way. Who got the truth?

   3. BGBen Gilbert0:28

      Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs, and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

   4. DRDavid Rosenthal0:42

      And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Fransicko.

   5. BGBen Gilbert0:47

      And we are your hosts. Today's episode is a mashup between one of the newest things on the internet and the oldest things on the internet.

   6. DRDavid Rosenthal0:55

      [laughing]

   7. BGBen Gilbert0:56

      Our guest today is Brendan Eich, CEO of the Brave Browser, an application right at the heart of the rapidly emerging Web3 world. It is arguably the single largest blockchain-based app, with over fifty million monthly users. However, Brendan 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 Brendan was the chief architect of Netscape, and eventually became the CEO of Mozilla, the makers of Firefox.

   8. DRDavid Rosenthal1:28

      So you're saying fifty million MAUs is nice, but Brendan wants this to go a lot higher. [chuckles]

   9. BGBen Gilbert1:34

      It's crypto nice, but it's not browser nice.

   10. DRDavid Rosenthal1:37

       Yet. Yet!

2. 1:38 – 5:50

   Sponsor + ecosystem context: Solana and Serum’s on-chain order books

   1. BGBen Gilbert1:38

      Yes, but it is rapidly growing. We had a, uh, wide-ranging conversation with Brendan that you'll hear today, that bridged this old world and the new in some really fun ways. And speaking of the new, we are so excited to announce our presenting sponsor for all of these special episodes, the Solana Foundation.

   2. DRDavid Rosenthal2:00

      Yes, so pumped!

   3. BGBen Gilbert2:02

      I know. Well, for listeners who have been living under a rock, uh, Solana is a global state machine, and the world's most performant blockchain, and you'll hear about them on this episode. Now, what does that mean? It means that developers can build applications with super low transaction fees and low latency, without compromising composability, since it's all on one single chain with a global state. Solana is capable of processing tens of thousands of smart contracts at once, and by proof of history, a distributed clock that unlocks low latency, sub-second finality. It has a really clever mechanism. It does all this stuff really fast. It's very, very cool.

   4. DRDavid Rosenthal2:42

      You can hear all about it on our episode with founder and CEO, Anatoly.

   5. BGBen Gilbert2:47

      But we are gonna talk, in true decentralized fashion, to some of the folks building the protocols and decentralized applications on top of Solana. So we have with us today Jay, a developer at Project Serum. So Jay, what is Project Serum?

   6. SPSpeaker3:04

      Serum is a central limit order book-based exchange on the Solana blockchain. In the past, crypto traders would use centralized exchanges that lacked composability, and also gave centralized entities unilateral control of their funds. Eventually, traders moved on-chain in the form of decentralized finance, using new crypto primitives, such as AMMs. These primitives lacked the same capital efficiency that traders were used to on centralized exchanges. Serum now brings the central limit order book on-chain. It leverages Solana's parallel architecture to offer thousands of markets that operate concurrently, giving traders the low-latency experience they're used to in traditional financial markets. This enables things like spot, spot margin, perpetuals, and dated futures to be traded on-chain in a completely composable manner through applications such as Mango Markets, which are protocols built on top of Serum.

   7. BGBen Gilbert4:00

      Thanks, Jay. Longtime listeners will remember Serum coming up in the interview with Sam Bankman-Fried, and also our interview with Anatoly, where they discussed how the speed, efficiency, and low transaction costs wouldn't be possible without Solana's innovations. Our thanks to Solana and Serum. If you are considering developing on Solana, head over to solana.com/developers, or just click the link in the show notes. Well, if, uh, you wanna hang out with us and discuss this episode, you should do that. We will all be there at acquired.fm/slack. And if you wanna go deeper behind these topics, especially crypto, you should come check out the LP Show. It is deeper, nerdier, and covers a lot of more up-and-coming topics, and includes interviews with people like Roniel Runberg, who have built Audius, Joseph Gordon-Levitt on the startup HitRecord. Who... What else did we do on the LP Show recently? Uh, we talked with some of Solana and FTX's earlier investors from Race Capital. That's our newest LP Show episode. You can find that in any podcast player by searching Acquired LP Show, and of course, become an LP if you wanna get super early access, two weeks before everyone else, and, uh, talk with us on Zoom calls every month or two. All right, as you know, none of this is investment advice. Do your own research, and now on to our interview with Brendan Eich. Brendan Eich, welcome to Acquired.

   8. SPSpeaker5:25

      Hi, thanks for having me.

   9. BGBen Gilbert5:26

      Great to have you here. We've been big fans of your work for a long time. Grew up using Firefox and the Mozilla browser before that, and Netscape before that, and God knows I use plenty of JavaScript every day in all facets of my life, so my life would not be what it is without your work over the years.

   10. DRDavid Rosenthal5:44

       And of course, we are talking on Brave right now.

   11. SPSpeaker5:47

       That's great. Your JavaScript use keeps me in T-shirts.

3. 5:50 – 9:34

   What Brave is: privacy-first Chrome-compatible browser + BAT economics

   1. BGBen Gilbert5:50

      Well, we're gonna go back and tell some of the story of what led to Brave, but I wanted to get it in your words first. What is the Brave Browser?

   2. SPSpeaker6:00

      So Brave is a faster browser because it-

   3. BEBrendan Eich6:04

      ... blocks all the trackers, many of which Google or its publishers or ad buyers depend on, and it's based on Chrome, the Chromium open source code. So if you're using Google Chrome, which kind of swept the market up to seventy percent, let's say, or more of market share, uh, two point six five billion users, they say, you should get off Chrome, and you should use Brave. We tried to make something that's easy to switch to, but that's much more protective of your privacy, and this is an ongoing commitment on our part because it requires a lot of research and development. It requires fighting new kinds of tracking and fingerprinting that emerge. It also involves something we talked about from the beginning, and we prototyped in Bitcoin, and that's the Basic Attention Token system for users who choose to participating in private ads that are anonymous, but that pay them 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's right and good and necessary, as nevertheless harmful to the current system of ad tech that publishers do depend on. So we wanted to get our users an option that wasn't privacy-invading, that let them participate in funding creators. And if you don't want the private ads, you can still fund creators out of your own wallet. We wanted that feature, too. So it's kind of a three-sided system, which is why we use the equilateral triangle for the BAT, Basic Attention Token, logo. We're trying to connect users, advertisers, and creators 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 ads can then give it all back. Some users just earn and keep it. That's their right, too. The problem that Brave solves is the tracking ads, the privacy invasion, because it has all sorts of bad effects I can get into, and users feel it right away. They feel the, the clutter, they feel the annoyance, they feel the page load delay. Sometimes the mobile pages never load, and there's sort of correlates 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 daisy chains from hidden third party to hidden third party before an ad can show up. We block all 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 feeds originate, all of them, the-- not just the ones Google sees through its search engine or its many trackers around the web.

   4. BGBen Gilbert8:53

      I think it 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 a desktop operating system. But that is enabled because of the ecosystem that was built around JavaScript. On the other side of things, the entire advertising and ad tracking and digital advertising ecosystem also is built on JavaScript. 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.

4. 9:34 – 12:37

   The web’s original sin: cookies, pixels, and third-party tracking emerge

   1. BEBrendan Eich9:34

      You know, I was part of a project at Netscape that made the browser mass market. It made it commercially safe. Before Netscape, there wasn't a way to trust your credit card number flying across the wire. Netscape did so-called secure sockets layer.

   2. DRDavid Rosenthal9:49

      Yeah, SSL.

   3. BEBrendan Eich9:51

      So Netscape was working on making the web safe for e-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 the browser. That was actually in Mosaic in nineteen ninety-three. And then in nineteen ninety-four, in Netscape One, there was the cookie, which let people associate a bit of storage in the browser with their site, and that applied not only to the banker or, you know, game site you were 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, the browser from each site the image is embedded in. And that's why you still hear the term pixel used in ad tech for a tracking element. Even though it can be an invisible script now, it used to be a one-by-one little transparent image.

   4. DRDavid Rosenthal10:42

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

   5. BEBrendan Eich10:47

      So [chuckles] I think even in nineteen ninety-six, some of us... Lou Montulli at Netscape did the cookie, and there was a concern that it was being used for third-party tracking or could be used, but the genie was out of the bottle. And the thing about the web is, Marc Andreessen said this to me, even when they were doing Mosaic, and there were only, like, eighty servers hosting content they cared about not breaking, they would just keep backwards compatibility in all the quirks of Eric Biehn's HTML parser and even precursor, progenitor HTML processors, older browsers, because the content wouldn't work properly. So there's this strong evolutionary force, this gradient, forcing compatibility on the web. This is something a lot of people in computer science, especially programming languages, just hate because it means you really can't make incompatible changes, except very slowly or through new runtimes that you can download. But JavaScript was the only bite at the apple for that kind of runtime. Java failed, and Flash eventually failed. But in the nineties, we were too busy making the first-party experience good, and we couldn't break the web, so even though Lou Montulli wanted to do Twinkies, [chuckles] and somehow I think they were gonna solve several problems he wanted to solve-

   6. BGBen Gilbert11:58

      That's an evolution of cookies?

   7. BEBrendan Eich12:00

      Bigger, s- more storage. I think cookies were only one thousand twenty-four bytes or something teeny in the nineties.... and I think he wanted to do them only for first-party sites. I don't think this would've killed cookies for third-party tracking. I forget the details because h- his boss said, "No, [chuckles] no more. No more cookies, or Twinkies, or Ding Dongs."

   8. BGBen Gilbert12:18

      [laughing]

   9. BEBrendan Eich12:18

      And we stayed at the cookie. And by late '90s, you can still find them in the web archive, there were sites diagramming tracking, the rise of tracking. The company that Google acquired as DoubleClick in 2008-

   10. BGBen Gilbert12:32

       Yeah

   11. BEBrendan Eich12:32

       ... was operating in '99, and I think it made the DART ad server.

5. 12:37 – 16:57

   Before Netscape: UIUC, SGI, and lessons from ambitious hardware bets

   1. BGBen Gilbert12:37

      Well, I wanna go way back to the beginning of your career. Even before Netscape, before JavaScript, you joined Silicon Graphics, and I think that's, or SGI, as it's called, and we've talked on many episodes about the unbelievable, incredible talent nexus that was SGI. Did you know when you were joining that that was the center of talent that would go on to do so many things?

   2. BEBrendan Eich13:02

      Yes, so I was a grad student at UIUC, which was, may still be, top five CS school in the country, out in the middle of Illinois, and I was not gonna do a PhD. At some point, I realized that our research team had been hijacked by IBM, and this was, uh, a great disgrace in my view, but the professors couldn't fight back. And we became sort of a QA team for IBM's failed attempt to get a little laptop computer, Motorola 68000-based computer they developed, you know, repackaged as a workstation, a Unix workstation, because Unix workstations were super hot. Well, guess who came by UIUC to give a talk? Jim Clark about Silicon Graphics, doing Unix workstations with VLSI 3D graphics. That was the whole company, and I almost right away said, "I'm gonna work for Jim." I interviewed at Sun. I- I was interested in programming language, so I interviewed on the compiler team. I wasn't experienced enough for them to hire. I liked the manager, Steve Muchnick. I met Eric Schmidt briefly. [chuckles] He was, like, director of software at the time at Sun. Then I interviewed at SGI, and I signed on the bottom line, and it was great. SGI was super hot. It IPO'd after I joined. It, for a long time, had the best graphics, but that eventually got shrunk from VLSI to, you know, GPU and now the system on a chip, and by '92, it had gotten big and divisional, and I said, "I've gotta get some more experience doing other things," so I, I left. I was kind of bored. It was political and divisional.

   3. BGBen Gilbert14:32

      Was this before or after Jim left?

   4. BEBrendan Eich14:34

      It was before, I think, because early on, Jim realized he wasn't CEO, so Ed McCracken was running it, and Jim was on the board. But I think at some point, Jim had trouble, as founder, keeping control, as usual, with due to dilution, and so by '94, Jim was starting Netscape and paired with Marc Andreessen, and I knew about that 'cause all my SGI friends-

   5. BGBen Gilbert14:57

      And SGI did the graphics for Jurassic Park, right?

   6. BEBrendan Eich15:00

      [chuckles] Jurassic Park. I know this. This is a Unix system, and, and they're not looking at a command line, they're looking at the SGI file system visualizer. [laughing] But I got bored, and I left, and SGI got big and kind of boring. I could see why Clark left when I heard he was doing Netscape.

   7. BGBen Gilbert15:17

      Okay, so how did you find your way to Netscape then?

   8. BEBrendan Eich15:20

      So a friend from SGI, who'd come in from a team at IBM, Jeff Weinstein, had gone ahead of me to a company called MicroUnity, and MicroUnity you probably haven't heard of, but it's got a lot of patents, and it successfully litigated them from 20 years ago to maybe to 10 years ago. I forget when they ran out of steam. I think it just made a ton of money off suing everybody: IBM, Motorola, Qualcomm, Broadcom, everybody, because MicroUnity wanted to create a software-programmable set-top box.

   9. BGBen Gilbert15:51

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

   10. BEBrendan Eich16:03

       Craig Hansen might have been at NeXT. Yeah, now you remind me. Craig definitely was at MIPS. He did the floating point unit, the MIPS floating point unit, so he was the full architect at MicroUnity. So MicroUnity was like practical grad school for me because it didn't go anywhere. It was way too ambitious, right? It was doing a new chip, new semiconductor process, new chip, do analog and digital on the same chip, I should say. It was doing basically everything except the radio front end that mixes down the baseband, it was doing in software. So all this stuff has come true over time, but trying to do all at once, you just run into the multiplication principle, and your odds of success go to one in a billion or 10 billion, and they could have used the fab to make SRAMs, but I think it was too boring. I think Moose was really ambitious. He wanted to change the world. He wanted to be the new Howard Hughes in some ways, [chuckles] and he did make a lot of money off the patents.

   11. BGBen Gilbert16:52

       Okay, so did a big crew of those folks leave to go to Netscape, or was that you on your own?

6. 16:57 – 18:26

   Netscape’s rocket ride and Microsoft’s bundling shockwave

   1. BEBrendan Eich16:57

      Well, it was Jeff Weinstein and I jumped to Netscape within the same week. We're still young and naive. We should have made a company and sold it. We would've gotten four times the options.

   2. BGBen Gilbert17:05

      [laughing]

   3. BEBrendan Eich17:05

      Just as we arrived, we saw some other teams doing that, and they weren't as good. [laughing] But I can't complain. I mean, it was always 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 1995, on April 3rd, I think, and the IPO was sometime in August. So, you know, it was a huge rocket, and it was, to me, a little bit scandalous, 'cause in the '80s, SGI had to have three profitable quarters before it could IPO, whereas Netscape just went on forward speculation and forward multiples, and it was not profitable. But, uh, that was the '90s, and that started it all.

   4. BGBen Gilbert17:42

      But there was real revenue there.

   5. BEBrendan Eich17:44

      Well, so the browser was charged for in commercial settings, and Netscape used the IPO to buy a bunch of server-side companies and projects, um, the LDAP team from University of Michigan, Tim Howes and company, the Kiva app server, a bunch of Java investments, uh, even started building a Java JITting runtime to rival HotSpot, which Sun had bought Animorphic to build. The Netscape version was called Electrical Fire, and it was being developed by this super brain from MIT, Waldemar Horwat. But Netscape couldn't pull it off, and Sun was gonna win with HotSpot, so-... I rescued Waldemar to take over JavaScript in late '97, and I went off to found mozilla.org after I'd standardized JavaScript.

7. 18:26 – 21:35

   Mozilla’s “escape pod”: open-sourcing the browser and rebuilding trust

   1. DRDavid Rosenthal18:26

      So AOL comes in, they buy Netscape. All those guys you just mentioned, most of them, they go to Loudcloud. You go in the Mozilla direction. [chuckles]

   2. BEBrendan Eich18:33

      Yeah. My CV is really short, and I tend to stick with things, and the thing was, the browser was not done yet. Microsoft had simply killed Netscape by bundling IE, which it copied and sort of acquired pieces of through Spyglass.

   3. DRDavid Rosenthal18:47

      Which bought Mosaic.

   4. BEBrendan Eich18:48

      And it sort of kept iterating like it does. So the first version was not real, and the second version was kind of a joke, and the third version was starting to tell you where it could get to, and the fourth version was quite good on Windows. Pretty much only on Windows. And meanwhile, they were bundling it with Windows, uh, '95 and then '98, and they got convicted in the US v. Microsoft case for this because it's not illegal to acquire a monopoly through, let's say, merit or a sweetheart deal with IBM to be the OS for the PC. I don't know why IBM gave Microsoft that. It's a little suspect, but whatever. They had the Windows monopoly, but what they did in tying the browser to it and threatening Compaq with revocation of the Windows license if Compaq shipped Netscape as the default browser, was illegal, and they got convicted for it, but it was too late to save Netscape. And yet, a few executives, uh, Marc and Eric Hahn and others, wanted to save something through open source. Commercial open source in the 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 Jamie Zawinski kind of led it definitionally and spiritually and as the community manager, and I did the tech side, and we had a bunch of IT of people and a couple of tools people who helped us build things that are now taken for granted, are now standard on GitHub. And we realized there was this, this amazing synergy doing something like a dynamic language on the server to generate HTML that has JavaScript automating it. All that stuff was super slick to do in sort of a full stack way, and this was in, like, '96, and it prefigured everything that came after in DHTML and Ajax.

   5. DRDavid Rosenthal20:30

      It was pretty cool that you guys were doing this in open source, right?

   6. BEBrendan Eich20:33

      Yeah. I mean, initially, Netscape was closed. When we opened it up, we threw this tarball out there, but as we worked on these tools, it got better. We couldn't drag the mail news team out. They'd been sort of messing up Netscape for mail news, and they, they didn't like open source. But eventually it all got rewritten and redone. We even created a portable front-end stack using XML, which was all the rage then. We called ours XUL, X-U-L, after Ghostbusters.

   7. BGBen Gilbert20:58

      Which became the way that you would write the original browser plugins for Firefox and presumably the Mozilla browser before that.

   8. BEBrendan Eich21:05

      Yes, and the Mozilla Suite was pretty much the un-Netscaped, to use un-Googled as an analogy, the un-N- un-Netscaped version of the code. And this actually started winning users because AOL bought Netscape and started festooning Netscape with ICQ buttons and AIM buttons and, you know, things like that.

   9. BGBen Gilbert21:22

      Yeah, it's like when I go in to make a new meeting now, and I'm about to add a Zoom invite, but Google's like: "Wait, wait, wait! Don't you mean Google Meet?" [chuckles] And you're like: "Not-- That's not why I'm using your tools."

   10. DRDavid Rosenthal21:33

       No, not what I mean. [chuckles]

8. 21:35 – 33:19

   Firefox is born: XUL, extensions, and the challenger energy returns

   1. BGBen Gilbert21:35

      Okay, so we're now at this point where you're on your own with Mozilla. You've taken the code out of Netscape. It's being developed in the open. Firefox, at some point, became, gosh, over a quarter of the browser market share. So how did it evolve from, "Hey, we're gonna take an open source version of the browser that Microsoft illegally killed," and turn into this thing that sort of breathed new life into the browser ecosystem?

   2. BEBrendan Eich22:01

      We had this idea, and Eric Hahn and Marc had this idea that there would be an escape pod containing the browser code, and it would somehow, you know, land on Tatooine, and, and, and the message would get through, and, and things would come back later. But no one knew how. And conventional wisdom from 1998 on in the Valley was, "Oh, the browser is done. IE is it forever. Give up."

   3. DRDavid Rosenthal22:24

      Just like [chuckles] today or, or a couple years ago with Chrome, right?

   4. BEBrendan Eich22:27

      It goes in cycles, but we also had this sort of boat anchor of the Mozilla Suite because, like I said, the, the '90s had a lot of suites. I think Netscape made a mistake in '96 when they bought a company to go after Lotus Notes because it didn't work, and they took the Netscape two and three mail reader and news reader, which Jamie and Terry Weissman, who I've mentioned, worked on and did a pretty good job on in a very short time, and they threw it away or kind of threw most of it away and did a Windows-only groupware sort of version that was late and delayed all of Netscape four, and that really hurt. And they were the people who didn't want to do open source either. But that did not help Netscape. It did not take down Lotus Notes, and Mozilla had to figure out, are we doing a suite? Do we want this albatross of '90s suite ware? And it took a while because, like I said, we were underfunded at first, and in fact, as AOL ingested Netscape, which at first didn't involve any digestive enzymes, it was like arm's length, uh, they started wondering what they bought and why. And so for the first two years, I think '99 and 2000, the head of Netscape division was decapitated, [chuckles] and somebody I liked, a nice guy I mentioned, took their place, but it didn't go well for 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 at Red Hat was a contributor. We encouraged people at, uh, in open source, especially in the Linux, to work on the code and send, you know, 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 the Netscape employees, who were not all top-notch at that point. And after a year, nothing much changed, and Jamie said: "I give up. I consider it a failure." He wrote an essay you can still find. So he quit, but we kept going, and-... even though we had the, be the basis for this suite, because we stripped out the ICQ and AIM buttons, Mozilla got popular. We were doing releases, binaries, because we wanted testers. That was a big change, too. A lot of open source projects said, "There's the code, build it yourself."

   5. BGBen Gilbert24:34

      Right, which, of course, like 99% of people who could use the software are immediately out right away because they're not gonna-

   6. BEBrendan Eich24:41

      Yes.

   7. BGBen Gilbert24:41

      Yes, compile on their local machines.

   8. BEBrendan Eich24:43

      And, of course, once you build the software and release it, you're getting people who don't know which end of the internet is which, but they'd give you good feedback, and there's a whole sort of layers of the onion from your lead users or your actual hackers who do know software, out to, let's say, web-savvy but less experienced folks, out to the average people who don't know the difference between a search engine and a browser. And so we started growing Mozilla even before Firefox in a way that I think kind of shamed and, and threatened Netscape, but Netscape was also getting these annual decapitations. And so by 2003, we learned through our IBM friends that it was gonna be curtains for the Netscape division. And through a, an enormous stroke of luck, Mitch Kapor, who founded Lotus 1-2-3 and has his own experience with Microsoft's tricks, was friends with Ted Leonsis, one of the AOL executives. Ted's a very nice guy, not technical, owns the Capitals, or did.

   9. BGBen Gilbert25:39

      Right, right.

   10. BEBrendan Eich25:40

       Owns another sports team, I think. And they ran into each other at the very first D Conference, right? Walt Mossberg, right?

   11. BGBen Gilbert25:46

       Oh, wow!

   12. BEBrendan Eich25:46

       And Ted said, "Hey, Mitch, I've got this thing, Mozilla, I don't k- know what to do with." And it turned out Mitch was doing something called the Open Source Application Foundation, and he had hired Mitchell Baker, who had been fired under cover of a layoff, I'll say it, uh, in 2000 by Netscape management because they didn't like Mozilla. It was a thorn in their side. Maybe Mitchell was, Mitchell was expensive. So they had a layoff, and suddenly Mitchell was gone, and I was on the phone saying, "Did you quit?" [chuckles] And she said, "No, this was not my choice." And yet, the next week on the Mozilla community call, there was Mitchell doing the governance leadership via the tech leadership. So, you know, the, the Netscape management that tried to get rid of her were grinding their teeth at this point. They, they couldn't kill Mozilla. They couldn't decapitate it, as s- [chuckles] you know, the Netscape division had its head taken off annually. But when we learned AOL was gonna shut down Netscape, Ted, to his credit, asked Mitch what to do, and Mitch had hired Mitchell Baker, who'd been the Mozilla manager from about eight months into the founding up till she was laid off. And that was just huge, you know, good fortune because Mitch then told Ted what to do, and in spite of some sniping by a VP at AOL nobody liked, who really wanted to stick the knife in and twist it, Ted did the right thing and gave us two million over two years to spin out the Mozilla project. And I think Mitchell wanted to do it as a nonprofit. They thought there'd be some good basis for that. Mitch himself, "I didn't want to do VC funding and didn't want to do a commercial thing." I just went along to try to keep the code alive, and w- we knew what to do in 2003 summer because Firefox had already started in 2001, if you can believe it, but it became known as Phoenix by 2002.

   13. BGBen Gilbert27:32

       And Firefox was completely r- rebuilt from the ground up, right?

   14. BEBrendan Eich27:36

       Well, it was based on the XUL work that I mentioned, that Dave Hyatt and others had done to make a programmable front-end stack on what looks like the web. It's XML and JavaScript and CSS. Custom toolbars, even menu... The native menu bar on the macOS at the time, all that could be integrated through XML. It was declarative. It was fast enough, with enough work. Uh, it allowed all these extensions, you mentioned. We called them add-ons. That was the first browser extension ecosystem, way ahead of Chrome's. And it was the way Firefox got built, because once we had the suite unbadged of all the ICQ junk, we still had sort of too many functions, like it's a Swiss Army knife. Do you really need to browse the web while you compose an email? And you had rich text editing and manage your address book. So we came up with a vision. Dave Hyatt and I wrote the roadmap update for Mozilla in 2003 that said, "Let's make one app do one thing well. We'll build them all on a common front-end toolkit, give them extensions so that we can simplify the UX, but not drive the advanced users away to Opera," which always had too many options built in. And that roadmap, you can still find even on Mozilla, I think. It's certainly in the web archive, and it was a pretty good roadmap, in my opinion, because it got the project moving toward not only Firefox, but Thunderbird. And even the old suite, the volunteers wanted to call it SeaMonkey and carry it on, and they did for a good long time. But Firefox was originally Mozilla/Browser in 2001. It was just a small pirate ship within Netscape. It was Blake Ross and Dave Hyatt and a few others.

   15. BGBen Gilbert29:05

       Joe Hewitt, right?

   16. BEBrendan Eich29:07

       Joe Hewitt did the s- the autocomplete Satchel, and he eventually did Firebug, which was awesome.

   17. BGBen Gilbert29:12

       He then got hired by Facebook and built the original Facebook app.

   18. BEBrendan Eich29:16

       Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt founded Parakey and sold that to Facebook. That's how that happened. But we lost Blake to Stanford. I had to recruit Ben Goodger out of Netscape to take over for Blake, and that went from Firefox 0.6 on to 1.0, and Ben did a lot of the important work on add-ons and search integration and making it really sing on Windows. Because that's the other thing open source didn't do. Open source, at that point, was still saying, "Oh, it works on Linux." Well, which flavor of Linux? KDE or Gnome or forgotten other ones? But they didn't care about Windows.

   19. BGBen Gilbert29:45

       It seems to me that the community always needs... And I, I say the community, it's a very broad community. It's all people who use browsers and maybe even more general than that, but y- 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. Whereas everyone who was stuck inside of Netscape at AOL had sort of lost the fire. AOL at first thought this was a strategic asset, now realized it wasn't going anywhere. And so you had this sort of-... moment to seize if you had the right team, where there was no legitimate challenger anymore to IE, and so you could make a real run at it. Is that sort of how you th- think about it?

   20. BEBrendan Eich30:31

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

   21. BGBen Gilbert31:38

       Oh, yeah

   22. BEBrendan Eich31:39

       ... got sold to Zynga, and then shut down in 2011.

   23. BGBen Gilbert31:43

       There was other forks, too. I mean, there was, um, I used Camino on the Mac.

   24. BEBrendan Eich31:47

       That was Dave Hyatt's other browser. Dave wrote prolifically. He wrote a lot of code. So he wrote a macOS-only browser to learn the Cocoa, I think it was, toolkit. And Dave works for Apple. He went there in 2001, I believe. He kinda made Safari because he knew how to make the KHTML engine web compatible, and it was from Linux, and it wasn't battle-tested in the field against mass market users, so it didn't load websites properly. Eventually, that led to WebKit being forked from KHTML in 2005, but getting Dave at Apple was quite a coup for, um, Don Melton, uh, the manager at the time of Safari, who was also ex-Netscape. But there was just this fractal effect of restarting the market, you know, sassing your boss, showing up IE, um, showing the world a better tool for something that people used every day, right? People would discount the browser. There was like, "Oh, fat apps are back on the desktop," Windows Longhorn, or when the iPhone launched, uh, eight months after, actually, because the initial app model for the iPhone was web apps.

   25. BGBen Gilbert32:45

       The suite solution.

   26. BEBrendan Eich32:46

       But native apps had to be there because of games being ported, and then native apps got privileges and got app store affordances that the web didn't, and it's, uh, same thing every 10 years or so. You just get people holding the web back. Usually, it's a monopoly power or a market power, and then the, the upstart comes because people still use the web. The value in the web is, is so great. And, you know, there's embedded web views in all these apps, and there's embedded trackers in all these apps, by the way. W- we're, we're blocking those, too, with our partnership with Guardian iOS Firewall, the VPN.

9. 33:19 – 34:19

   Browsers as an ‘immortal app’: why web cycles keep coming back

   1. DRDavid Rosenthal33:19

      It feels kind of similar to me in terms of narrative and market perception to silicon and to semiconductors. Like, you know, a couple of years ago, people were like, "Ah, semiconductors, that's so boring!" Like, you know, it's not... Like, all the innovation's, you know, way, way, way up the stack from that. Well, like, actually, [chuckles] it turns out semiconductors are pretty freaking important, and TSMC is like, you know, a very, very, very important company and one of the top 10 most valuable in the world. The browser feels similar to me. Like, it's so easy to discount it, and yet the majority of, like, people in the world spend the majority of their days on it.

   2. BEBrendan Eich33:49

      Yeah. It, it's an immortal app. It's the universal app. The bigger the screen and the better the input bandwidth, uh, 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 at Brave use the browser to load Slack as a web app instead of loading this bloated Electron app that Slack has been slowly maintaining. [laughing]

   3. DRDavid Rosenthal34:10

      [laughing]

   4. BEBrendan Eich34:11

      There's a real trade-off there that I think is part of the browser's immortality, but the web content is also sticky and accretive, and that's important, too.

10. 34:19 – 42:05

    Why Brave succeeded where others failed: privacy, ad-blocking, and timing

    1. BGBen Gilbert34:19

       Yeah. I'll sum it all up in one sentence. Firefox did really, really well and gained a huge par, uh, market share, and then when Chrome launched, it's been slowly etched away every year by Chrome now, and it's down around something like three percent. So I wanna fast-forward 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. I'm thinking of Dolphin, I'm thinking of RockMelt, that have not worked.

    2. BEBrendan Eich34:49

       [chuckles] Yeah, RockMelt. So yeah, the Flock was doing social or Web 2.0. It made it the very center of Firefox's growing market, and that's not a good growth strategy 'cause you have to get people off Firefox and then somehow beat them on the, on the outer rings of growth, and Firefox was already going faster there, and you weren't gonna get too many defectors from the innermost, nerdy, hacker, technorati, Web 2.0 people. So Flock failed. RockMelt was- went after Chrome came out and was based on the Chrome fork of WebKit, which wasn't its own thing really then, and tried to add social. I think it was just, and I haven't talked to Tim Howes about this, I think it was just aimed at trying to sell it to Zuck. Well, Zuck doesn't want a browser. He's got a browser. He's very happy with the Facebook web app on desktop, and then he was, at that point, already aiming at mobile because the iPhone was out, and he wanted full native apps on mobile. So he was never gonna buy RockMelt, so RockMelt failed. Dolphin did well because I think they had this... I forget her name. She was a great marketer. She got all these distribution and growth-hack deals going in various Asian countries, and they did a incredible job on making it a good mobile browser as mobile came up through Android. Android kinda double started. [chuckles] It had that G1, what was it called? It was the first Android device. It was- [chuckles]

    3. BGBen Gilbert36:02

       The T-Mobile G1.

    4. BEBrendan Eich36:03

       [chuckles] Yeah, it was not good. I talked to Andy Rubin at Google in 2006.

    5. BGBen Gilbert36:07

       Yeah.

    6. BEBrendan Eich36:08

       But Android took a while to get anywhere near decent, and I still can't use it, [chuckles] even though I've got many complaints about Apple.

    7. DRDavid Rosenthal36:14

       Am I remembering right that Dolphin, at some point, I don't think originally, but maybe later in its life, pivoted to be like, "Oh, we're privacy-focused," right? So, like, people were starting to think about this.

    8. BEBrendan Eich36:23

       Everybody's doing that now. They're putting privacy perfume on without taking a shower, in some cases. [chuckles]

    9. DRDavid Rosenthal36:29

       [laughing] Oh, I love it.

    10. BEBrendan Eich36:32

        But one of the big browsers that succeeded in Asia, besides Dolphin, was UCWeb, and UCWeb grew against Chrome in Indonesia and Bangladesh and India. In some s- Indian states, it had more share than Chrome. And one of the things we noticed that UCWeb did was it blocked ads. So having done Firefox and been in the situation where we, we didn't even have the best privacy features, it's kind of embarrassing, but it's true. Mozilla did not lead on privacy as well as Steve Jobs did at Apple. The very first Safari had private windows. It had a third-party cookie blocker. Neither of these things were in Firefox at the time. Private windows came in quickly. We never shipped a third-party cookie blocker in my time there. There was always concern about rocking the boat. I have to say, there was probably some implicit concern about the Google search partnership and what would the, be the effect on that.

    11. BGBen Gilbert37:22

        Because, of course, the vast majority of Mozilla's revenue comes from the Google search deal, to use Google as the default and get paid hundreds of millions of dollars from Google.

    12. BEBrendan Eich37:30

        Yeah, it really was the one big trick for funding Mozilla, and it was... You know, good while it lasted, but it also foretold Google doing its own browser, right? We, we could see this coming, too. We didn't want to take so much revenue in the sh- in the deal that it became cheaper for them to do Chrome, so we tried to adjust that. But all we did was defer Chrome maybe a few months, a year at most. It, it wasn't clear we deferred it at all, because by 2005, Dave Hyatt and, uh, Maciej Stachowiak and others at Apple had said, "Let's stop patch bombing HTML. Let's make our own little mini Mozilla. It'll be run by Apple, but it'll be webkit.org, and it'll 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 Safari, but for Chrome. So there was a gleam in Larry Page's eyes when I last I saw him, 2005. He was saying, "Yeah, WebKit's so clean," and I'm like, "Larry, go do your own browser. It's fine. Don't worry about Firefox. You should do your own browser." So we knew in 2006 they were doing it. We knew that they were, at that point, pulling people off Firefox, and that some of the people I'd worked with at AOL or at Mozilla were working on a prototype. And took them a while to get it out. Chrome came out in September 1st, 2008, and it wasn't really in- at first, clearly about fast JavaScript or all the stuff that people think of. It was more about isolating the Flash player, so that when it crashes in a tab, [chuckles] it doesn't drag your whole browser down.

    13. DRDavid Rosenthal38:53

        Yes, yes!

    14. BGBen Gilbert38:55

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

    15. BEBrendan Eich39:03

        Yeah, it, it had everything. It had Lars Bak about V8. It had Darin Fisher, who I'd worked with at AOL. But at some point, I don't know when, I heard this from a friend who was at Google, Larry sat up and said, "Wait, we're running a search advertising business, and Chrome isn't tracking our users? What, what are we doing wrong?" And so in 2016, Google's privacy policy changed.

    16. DRDavid Rosenthal39:23

        [chuckles]

    17. BEBrendan Eich39:23

        This was after I started Brave, but I just- I'll tell the full story of Brave by starting there because, at that point, ProPublica noticed, The Guardian republished their piece. They sort of said, "Google has crossed the Rubicon. They've connected all their data into one big ad exchange and data collection system." With a carve-out for Google Analytics, it's not clear how much Google Analytics is private anymore. And Chrome, if you sign into the browser, which is a separate feature in the upper-right corner, using your Google account, then you're tracked for ad targeting. It's Google's business. But a lot of people didn't know this, and some people didn't sign into the browser. Well, in 2018, September, Google said, "Gosh, darn it, people aren't signing into the browser enough. We're gonna just do it whenever you sign in to Gmail or YouTube in a tab. We'll just sign you in across all the tabs, and we'll track you."

    18. BGBen Gilbert40:11

        Oh, wow!

    19. BEBrendan Eich40:12

        If you don't like it, you can opt out in the Google account settings.

    20. DRDavid Rosenthal40:15

        Yeah, right, but nobody's gonna do that.

    21. BEBrendan Eich40:16

        And I do.

    22. DRDavid Rosenthal40:17

        I mean, yeah, you'll do that, but like [laughs] ...

    23. BEBrendan Eich40:20

        I used to do talks at conferences, ask how many people were using Chrome, how many people knew this, how many people opted out, and the hands, you know, were numerous, and then they started falling, and then there were red faces [chuckles] and consternation. This is not just Google. I pick on them because they became the biggest, but... And buying DoubleClick was an earlier sort of Rubicon they crossed because I think Sergey told a friend of mine in 2003, "Oh, we would never do, like, tracking for ads on publisher pages that tied into our search ads. We, we would never track across the web. That would be evil." [laughing]

    24. DRDavid Rosenthal40:50

        [laughing] Oops.

    25. BEBrendan Eich40:51

        Well, it changed.

    26. BGBen Gilbert40:52

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

    27. BEBrendan Eich40:57

        Yeah, and going public also just puts a fiduciary duty to your shareholders on you that is hard to resist, and this is kind of the, you know, the, the animal, the blind, voracious beast of capitalism. So when I was thinking about Brave, I realized not only had Mozilla become captured by its search partner and was probably gonna 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 woken up and was doing IE and finally did Edge, and this was before they switched Edge to be based on Chromium. They were certainly still distributing it on Windows. They were kind of tying it, and I would say it's gotten worse. Windows 10 and 11 have gotten even more aggressive, though they backed off on one particular thing recently, where it's almost like back to the antitrust case. They're saying, "Hey, you're not using Edge. We've noticed. [chuckles] Would you like to use Edge?" Or, "Oops, we reset your default browser to Edge." That happens, too.

    28. DRDavid Rosenthal41:48

        [laughing]

    29. BEBrendan Eich41:49

        And this is a problem for Google. So Google has to pay to distribute Chrome. Mozilla doesn't have the resources to do this. Our growth with Firefox, when I was there, was completely organic, I think, and it probably was mostly organic after I left. They might have done a little growth hacking. So... And they never got big on mobile.

11. 42:05 – 53:34

    The case against tracking: security, breaches, coercion, and power imbalance

    1. DRDavid Rosenthal42:05

       I'd love your explanation, uh, and again, I don't ask this because I don't have thoughts myself, but I wanna hear from you. Why is it bad to be tracked?

    2. BEBrendan Eich42:18

       [laughs] Yeah, people sometimes, if they're savvy, they'll remember Richelieu's epigram. I don't know if it really came from him. You know, "Give me six sentences from the most honest man, and I'll find a way to hang him."... right? Snowden changed things. People realized, "Wait a minute, there's violations of federal law here." Google engineers who'd been using telco dark fiber without encrypting their backbone traffic were outraged, I think. And data breaches bother people, and the third-party problem I mentioned, those embedded pixels and all those embedded scripts, you don't know where your data 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 out the window, and it's going into stuff that is available to the, not only the dark web, but just available publicly. A horrifying story, I won't name names, we have a vendor at Brave that has information on people. It shared it with Experian! We didn't know this was happening. I don't know if there's a privacy law that was breached. We believe their privacy policy was breached by their own action or their setting of this as a default that we didn't know we had to opt out of. Experian is just breach city, right? These are jokes.

    3. BGBen Gilbert43:29

       It's criminal. I don't know if it's literally criminal, but it feels criminal.

    4. BEBrendan Eich43:32

       Right, so consciousness of privacy as something where you're unsafe if you're tracked, grew. Initially, it was like, "I don't care. Track me. I have no privacy. Just make my experience more personal." And then it became, "Wait a minute, there's some third party or seventh party, seven degrees of Kevin Bacon. There's somebody in, you know, Russia who's tracking me. That's no good. There's somebody playing games to track me around physical world using geofencing." That's possible with ads, and it's been done, probably by malicious actors. There's spy stuff going on. It... People realized that this was a bigger problem than just, "Oh, something somewhere has some dossier on me," because once you have a dossier on a server, it's very likely it's gonna get copied or leaked, and it's gonna be in a hundred servers or a thousand servers, and you won't know where it is or to what bad uses it'll be put. So meanwhile, privacy law was coming up in Europe that, in its own abstract way, sometimes without defining its terms, did use sort of common sense notions about how we interact, which Steve Jobs himself once talked to Mossberg about in very plain terms, which is, "Privacy means you don't get my data unless I know I'm giving it to you for a specific purpose that benefits me, and there's sort of a quid pro quo." And that's what the GDPR tries to do with purpose limitation or purpose specificity. So when you consent to those cookie dialogues, which are all misregulated, mismanaged, and nonsense, I- I'm not defending them, and GDPR, like all regulations, is full of unintended consequences. What they're trying to do is say, "Do you consent to let a tracking cookie be set, let's say, for some essential or inessential reason?" And there are carve-outs for essential reasons. When you go to a search engine, it's a first party. You're giving it data to get better results, so there's an essential purpose there that, that can justify some kind of data being processed. It isn't necessarily tracking, 'cause it's only at that search engine. But when you're dealing with all these sites that throw these cookie consents, you know, "Click 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 404 HTTP 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, uh, sort of concurrent with the rise of Brave. But the consciousness about privacy is still growing, and that's helping us because we were at the forefront and doing this R&D I mentioned, which made us fast and efficient, and you're seeing others jump in with... DuckDuckGo always had a more private sort of search front-end on Bing. It's pretty much Bing still for the keyword search. They had mobile browsers. Now they're adding desktop browsers and other products. And like I mentioned, Apple gets fair credit for privacy concerns that I think came directly from Steve Jobs in Safari private windows and third-party cookie blocking, and Apple wraps itself in privacy with some justice. And now even Google's trying to claim to s- invent the privacy sandbox to save its business... I mean, to save the world. Sorry. Uh, you know, and ram it through standardization and, uh, into other browsers.

    5. BGBen Gilbert46:38

       Let me ask David's question a little bit more specifically. Why is a private computing experience important to you personally?

    6. BEBrendan Eich46:47

       Yes, so I mentioned this rising consciousness of privacy, how privacy is sort of multi-sided 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 gonna have power centers. It's just 'cause of network effects. And, you know, whether they collect much data or just be- become a successful business, they will have economic power, market power, and the users may just be these sort of sheep to be shorn of their wool. That is the model for ad tech. But if users can guard their data, they can demand a higher price. They can demand better terms. They can use cryptographic protocols to transact without giving up their privacy, while still giving authentic attribution or confirmation of, you know, ads viewed or, or purchases. So what matters to the marketer is if you get them in a, you know, their best day, is not that they track you individually. They wouldn't know what to do with these tracking databases. It's usually vendors they hire that do it, uh, or Google, uh, Facebook, and so on. 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 see if they can do performance and growth marketing with pseudoscience, mostly regression, logistical regression. Mostly, you know, very simple statistics to see, "This campaign's working. This one's not. I'm gonna spend more money on this and less on that, and I'm gonna try this new, you know, paid media approach. I'm gonna try this new Brave Browser private ad system, because there are some users there that are off the reservation. They are not reachable, addressable. They used uBlock Origin on Chrome, and now they're using Brave, and I can't get to 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 as part of Brave Rewards 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, at Mozilla, thought we're gonna get killed by Google. I think every executive thought this at Mozilla. I'm not breaching any NDAs to say this. It was something that maybe can't be solved without really doing a second browser and marketing it as a companion to Firefox, and I actually talked, uh, at one point with Dave Hyde about doing this, but I couldn't recruit him away from Apple, and I tried to get Hewitt as well, and it would've been a WebKit-based Mozilla browser, but it was too risky. I couldn't get the talent I needed. It would undermine Firefox at some point, and it would've been bad for morale. So, you know, maybe Mozilla is trapped, but I didn't want Brave to be trapped, and I certainly didn't want myself or my children to be trapped because these monopolies can last a lot longer than they should, and they can really keep shearing those sheep until [chuckles] the sheep are starving, and that's happened. I think that's where we're headed with all the censorship and the heavy-handed interference in sort of search results. Demonetization of YouTubers in 2015 started, and it wasn't just, you know, over atrocious content that should be censored because otherwise you're gonna just have people after you, and you're gonna lose viewers. It was over all sorts of things that nobody could understand, and they were just losing money as, as YouTube creators. Like, these were just creators who were talking about their hobbies, and they, they found their ad revenue going down.

    7. DRDavid Rosenthal50:01

       Oh, totally. Yeah, Google changes YouTube algorithms, Facebook changes Instagram or Facebook algorithms, and like, it completely wipes the table of whole, you know, sectors of creators.

    8. BEBrendan Eich50:12

       Yeah. In, in the UK, there were actual regulatory cases involving this, uh, search algorithm, SEO sort of change. Matt Cutts, when he was at Google, used to blog, and he tried to be transparent about it, but it was clear Google had a lot of power, and there's sort of a, a black box that they're operating inside of, and it's a casino. The house always wins. So [chuckles] I wanted to use something that we knew about in the old days of computing, where you were the system administrator of your department's mini computer or your lab's mini computer, or you were your PC's administrator. You had to get the CD-ROM. You had to install it. That was a total pain. It was a tax, but you could keep your data there. You could make sure that you knew what was going on. Your system had, 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 this third-party tracking. So I wanted to get back to the user having power through privacy, through shields, is what Brave calls them, through the power in your pocket, which is the super computer, you know, the micro-unity, super scalar architecture from the '90s, and yet it's kind of underutilized. Software is not 10,000 times better, even though the processors are that much faster. Something's gone wrong because even in the early '90s, Silicon Graphics operating system was getting bloated, and we're talking about going from eight meg RAM to 16 meg RAM. I mean, just ridiculous small amount of memory, and yet the software was getting bloated, X Windows, and Motif, and all this garbage. So software has not gotten better. It's in some ways gotten worse, and I wanted Brave to wave the flag of better software, tighter software, software that defends your privacy because it gives you economic bargaining power, a chance at changing the topology of the network, where, again, there's always gonna be central powers that come and go and accumulate wealth, but if the users can fight back, they can have, let's say, other options, like cryptocurrencies and tokens and smart contract systems.

    9. DRDavid Rosenthal52:07

       Well, I was gonna say, you know, maybe for the majority of people out there when you were starting Brave, yeah, like, "Oh, economic power, I get it. Like Google, Facebook, they've got power, but how on earth would I ever, as an individual, have economic power?"

    10. BEBrendan Eich52:21

        Wasn't our pitch. Our pitch was private, fast, you know, low battery use, and we actually, at Mobile World Congress 2019, this Green Specter company from the UK came by and said, "Yeah, we've measured. You're the, you're the least power-hungry browser on Android." It was awesome because it confirmed our own research team's results. But y- you have to sell with what people feel every day. What they feel is that page load lag. They feel that battery being drained. They feel the data plan. Even though they may be on an unlimited data plan, there's still ways they perceive it.

    11. DRDavid Rosenthal52:48

        But now, I mean, I imagine it feels real to people that like, "Yeah, I can make money with my attention on the internet." [chuckles] Like, it feels very real to people.

    12. BEBrendan Eich52:56

        It's so funny because we have different tiers of ad rate card around the world because it's easier to get ad buyers in the US and paying the most in the UK and Europe after, and so on. And so we have a lot of fans around the world who are in lower-tier regions, and they aren't making as much, but it may go a longer way for them. It isn't like we're trying to make people rich or we're doing a pump and dump. We're trying to make users get seventy percent of the revenue of a growing business, that if you look at ad, online and digital advertising, it's still three hundred billion-plus a year. That's a huge business. If we just get, you know, one percent of that, and we share seventy percent of that with our users, what's that? Two point one billion, right?

12. 53:34 – 1:00:25

    Brave Ads mechanics: on-device matching, coarse segments, and fraud critique

    1. BGBen Gilbert53:34

       So to be super crisp, to make sure listeners understand it, an ad is displayed to me, and this is an ad that's purchased through the Brave ad network, where the advertiser is willing to say, "Look, I know that this isn't gonna do a bunch of crazy targeting stuff. This is just going onto the Brave ad network." A user views that ad, and then seventy percent of the revenue from that ad shows up in the user's wallet in the form of the Basic Attention Token.

    2. BEBrendan Eich53:58

       Yes. So when you say network, people think tracking, because networks have lots of ways to track. So what we do instead is we put all the ads into a catalog through a link to the creative for the ad, the image, or a webpage, or video that's in an edge cache somewhere. We don't consider that an adversary. The link to the ad and some keywords about the ad go into a catalog, and the catalog gets updated to a large number of people in each region, and it gets updated several times a day t- the same way for everyone. So you are not identified by downloading that catalog. It's kind of like getting a safe-... an anti-phishing list or a safe browsing list, an anti-malware site list. And that's how we solve the problem of ad networks that today, in conventional ad tech, will track you on the front side and take all your data even before they've decided what ad to show you. We do the decisioning in the browser based on this catalog. So all the machine learning on the mother of all data feeds I mentioned earlier is in-browser. It's only on if you opt into the system, by the way, it's not turned on normally, and that's what does the ad matching.

    3. BGBen Gilbert54:58

       I see. Yeah, so 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 unfreaking real, the level of targeting. I mean, you could target one person.

    4. BEBrendan Eich55:10

       Yes.

    5. BGBen Gilbert55:11

       And as an advertiser, you're 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 has walked back a lot of this and 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 on the highway?

    6. BEBrendan Eich55:30

       Yes. So we're big enough now, and even, even when we started, we were big enough, that we can do some very core segmentation, which does not let people be re-identified. Because the problem with the targeting systems you mentioned is they can, like you said, target one person. I think Latanya Sweeney said, in the US, if someone's birth date, gender, and ZIP code are known, they can be individually identified, re-identified. So obviously, we're not gonna give out any information to advertisers ahead of time, but we do have ways of sampling our audience to very coarsely segment it, so you can address those segments. And some of those keywords in the catalog express those segments. They're basically segment identifiers. And separately, the machine learning in the browser develops an opinion about you from your, your search queries, your clicking, what pages you visit, all that stuff, about what segments you might fall into, and then the matching occurs. So we're using, you know, support vector machines and Bayesian sort of fairly simple stuff. It doesn't burn your battery. We don't need TensorFlow or a cloud supercomputer to do this kind of machine learning, and that does a pretty good job. A lot of ad tech is not as precise as you think. Facebook said they could target that person, and they could often, but sometimes there were fraud actors, not so much on their native apps, but on publisher pages. There's a ton of fraud in, in online digital advertising because JavaScript is used on these publisher pages, and I designed JavaScript on purpose, this was very intentional, I think it was the right decision, to be a mutable environment. It's global environment, all the standard objects and the document objects are mutable. You can overwrite them, you can mock up lookalikes, and you can forward load something that looks like the next year's version of a standard object. So JavaScript's mutability was a huge boon. It probably wouldn't have survived 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 content, scrape it into a fake environment in a bot, and the bot pretends to be a, a user clicking on the ad, and you get paid the ad revenue because the ad buyer didn't cross-check the publisher's ID in Google's Ad Exchange, which is a fraud operator, against the true New York Times ad ID. It's bad. And that Google still gets the fee when this advertising money is stolen by fraudsters makes Google complicit with the fraudsters to some degree. It misaligns the interests again. It's a conflict of interest.

    7. DRDavid Rosenthal57:58

       All right, listeners, for our second sponsor of the episode, we are so excited. They are back, back again, one of our favorite, favorite companies of all time in the Acquired community, Modern Treasury, the worldwide leader in payment operations. You know them. We've talked about them many, many times on this show. They've been on the LP show. We've been interviewed by them. Their payment operations platform is legitimately the fastest way to build products that move money, which is basically any type of product you would want to build these days.

    8. BGBen Gilbert58:36

       Marketplaces, you know, prop tech things, fintech things, a lot of these things involve moving money around.

    9. DRDavid Rosenthal58:42

       If you want payments in your software product, the Modern Treasury APIs make it super, super simple to do things like initiate payments, monitor payments, reconcile payments, all the stuff that was done manually by finance teams and software teams before Modern Treasury.

    10. BGBen Gilbert59:01

        I mean, imagine all in one place. You get-- The finance team sees a version of it, the developers can see a version of it, the PMs see a version of it, payment ops people see a version of it, but it's all in the application, so it's all single source of truth. It's pretty cool.

    11. DRDavid Rosenthal59:14

        So great. So great. They have direct integrations with just about every major commercial bank out there. They abstract all the complexity of integrating those rails, and you can automate the money movement that you wanna do with your applications super easily just via their APIs and web app. And because they don't sit in the flow of funds, payments settle literally up to two X faster than before [chuckles] , which is crazy. We talked about on the Bitcoin episode. You know, you just send off these ACHs, and you're like: "Well, I don't know what happened," but Modern Treasury makes that at least a little bit better. They are used by fast-growing companies in all of the economy's most important sectors, like Gusto, Marqeta, TripActions, ClassPass, BlockFi. They all use Modern Treasury for money movement use cases like automatic payouts, direct debits, incoming payment reconciliation, digital wallets, and more. When you build money movement apps with Modern Treasury, your product engineering and finance teams can focus more on the core product instead of figuring out all of those nuances. And you can learn more by going to moderntreasury.com/acquired, and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

13. 1:00:25 – 1:08:05

    Scaling the product: Chromium pivot, Electron misstep, and “Brave Core” growth

    1. BGBen Gilbert1:00:25

       Thanks, Modern Treasury. Okay, so there's a variety of value propositions here. There's privacy-... There's speed, which it sounds like speed was the first one. There's 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 into much more than everything you've described so far, with its own search engine, with its own native wallet capability. You're at this unbelievable milestone now of having accomplished fifty million monthly active users. What was one or two of the tipping points along the way where you realized, "Oh, this particular value prop really resonates," and accelerated the growth?

    2. BEBrendan Eich1:01:05

       Well, some of the stuff was early mistakes you make when you're a small startup. You choose to use a shortcut. We used the Electron framework when we switched from a private version based on Mozilla's Gecko engine to Chromium Blink, and using Electron was a mistake. It wasn't designed for a browser. It turned off the sandbox. [chuckles] That was horrifying to discover, and it's kind of bloated and replaced a lot of middleware files in the Chromium code that Google was breaking through internal API shifts. And we finally got onto a proper, well-maintained Chromium fork, including the front end. Now, the downside of this is we look a lot like Chrome. We have the Brave lion icon for shields. We have the triangle for bat. We have our own look for the tabs, but it still looks a lot like Chrome. It's tabs on top. It's got Chrome extensions, which can be loaded if they don't use the Google account system I mentioned that's for tracking, that we disable, but, you know, it's still a little bit too Chrome-y. And yet, I think it's worth it because that helped us get users off Chrome. Until we really did that rebasing on the front end of Chrome, we were paying a growing maintenance cost on all this Electron forkage, and our users were suffering because it wasn't fully Chrome. There were extensions needed to be manually supported or ported, and things weren't working right. So we switched to a more complete Chrome fork, like a lot of browsers use. I think Vivaldi is an exception. They have a, a React native front end, uh, and they've sunk the cost to stabilize the middleware.

    3. DRDavid Rosenthal1:02:29

       Which is so interesting, right? Like, if any upstart browser team and leader were going to build your own stack, it would be you.

    4. BEBrendan Eich1:02:36

       It takes a big team.

    5. DRDavid Rosenthal1:02:37

       And you've chosen not to. [chuckles]

    6. BEBrendan Eich1:02:38

       I have ten people in the first seed round of Brave. What am I gonna do? I knew how to do ten people out of AOL with the Netscape, uh, Mozilla code base because I'd worked on that code base with hundreds of engineers at, you know, Netscape, AOL, and those people were still working on it for a while. AOL did lay off a lot of them but kept some on. Others went to IBM, and even though we, 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 spun out. And until we got the search deal in two thousand and four, I couldn't really hire more people. We were burning down the two million dollars from AOL. Well, it's a similar sort of situation with founding Brave. I had to take ten people. I had to use some existing code base, and we did start with, with Mozilla Gecko in a multiprocess sandboxed, uh, framework called Graphene that was part of Firefox OS, which I'd worked on, but it just lost on this big spreadsheet we did, where we just scored it against Chromium Blink, and it just lost on too many rows. It was, you know, "What are we gonna do for DRM?" Oh, at the time, Firefox has a custom Adobe deal. We can't partake of that, even if we use the Gecko source. You know, we have to go get Google Widevine, which Google made free, as in beer, even though DRM is a closed source. It was bad, but you have to have it, and people... Not just Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, et cetera. So what are we gonna do? Well, G- Google is giving it out, but they're really only giving it out for Chromium-based browsers, and so we did that. And there were just a hundred other paper cuts or major issues like that. Gecko was never big on mobile because Mozilla was never big on mobile. We needed all the mobile WebKit lineage that goes into Chromium Blink that's still used on the mobile web, stuff that preceded standards. So it was just at the end of two thousand and fifteen, we just said, "Gotta switch," and that's when we switched to Electron, but that had its own costs, and yet, as a small team, we couldn't do the full Chromium fork. As we grew, we did, and so by, I think it was end of twenty eighteen, we came out with a Brave core-based browser, which is our maintainable version of Chromium Blink 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. We've doubled for five years in a row, so... or more than doubled some years.

    7. BGBen Gilbert1:04:51

       So fifty million users, that seems like the largest self-custodied crypto wallet application in the world, and that's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is it's this tiny fraction of the overall browser market share.

    8. BEBrendan Eich1:05:05

       Yes.

    9. BGBen Gilbert1:05:05

       I haven't heard anyone talk about the browser wars and market share in a while. Do you know what that sort of looks like today?

    10. BEBrendan Eich1:05:10

        I mentioned Chrome is alleged to have two point six five billion users. Now, some of these users have gone away. I uninstalled Chrome. I found that there was a secret installer called Keystone that was messing my system up. Somebody wrote a blog post about this. Google denies it, but just phenomenologically, life got better when I ripped all that out, and it was sort of hiding itself in the OS. It was kind of creepy.

    11. BGBen Gilbert1:05:30

        [chuckles]

    12. BEBrendan Eich1:05:31

        What matters in browsers, and you mentioned it earlier, is sort of a, every ten years is a changing of the guard, and there's this rapid evolution, and there's this sort of lead user effect. Eric von Hippel of MIT has described this, right? The lead users invented the plumbing toolkit. They were homemade by machinist plumbers, and they became standardized, and big tools companies built them. Lead users invented fiberglass surfboards, a lot of hot rodding, like Tom Wolfe described. Windsurfing, user-generated in some ways, Bill Bowerman, Nike. Lead users, these are people who are not just creating something to go make a buck and seeing a, a need in the market and making a widget. They're users of their own products. They love the product, and they understand what it's doing or what it needs to do, and having those lead users favor, you know, Firefox in its day or Brave now, is super important, and the lead users that I see that are very generative, somewhat controversial, are working on crypto projects, blockchain projects. They're working on decentralization.

    13. DRDavid Rosenthal1:06:27

        That's not gonna be controversial [chuckles] on, on this podcast.

    14. BEBrendan Eich1:06:30

        Yeah, I mean, people are, are exaggerating how much energy Bitcoin uses and also not aware of how Bitcoin can use energy that other- otherwise goes to waste, but-...we're not Bitcoin-based anyway, and there are new blockchains that are much more efficient. So the whole thing is, to me, kind of a needlessly ideological.

    15. SPSpeaker1:06:46

        Yes, not a controversial statement on Acquired that the most interesting founders, technologists, et cetera, are by and large, focusing on Web3 and crypto right now.

    16. BEBrendan Eich1:06:54

        Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz wrote this essay about Ethereum the other year, and talked about how he saw the developer, you know, animal spirits just rallying around it, and it's true. And then Ethereum got slow, and the fees were too high, but in some ways it's like Unix. The Ethereum virtual machine now, the bytecode and the smart contract system, with some transportation cost if it's not directly portable, is supported on other chains: Polygon, obviously, uh, Avalanche's C-Chain is an EVM-compatible. Like the Unix system call table being copied into different flavors of Unix, the sort of design DNA spreads easier than code DNA, because code has hard requirements, not all of which are known or tested for. Uh, but design can be copied, and in this case, even with the EVM compatibles, the code can be tested to interoperation. Just like we had different NFS servers that had different code lineages interoperating, and different TCP/IP stacks interoperating. So I think the... Dixon's essay was on point, even though people decry Ethereum's slowness and high gas fees, and the new chains are just super exciting to the extent that you can port your code. Uh, there are EVM cross-compiler and interpreter solutions on Solana, and there's the C-Chain and other direct EVM compatibles on other chains.

14. 1:08:05 – 1:21:55

    Crypto inside the browser: wallets, UX/security trade-offs, and Themis ZK roadmap

    1. BGBen Gilbert1:08:05

       It seems like your strategy with embracing not just the blockchain, but becoming an economic player in the blockchain ecosystem, has been initially there was the Basic Attention Token, and I don't think that those were actually deposited on chain into Ethereum wallets. Is that correct?

    2. BEBrendan Eich1:08:24

       In our system, because of regulations, not just in the US, if we send a ad revenue share to some unknown self-custody wallet, we're gonna get in trouble, including big trouble if it's, you know, somebody named Osama Bin Laden, right? So there's not just, um, FinCEN, which looks at money laundering carefully. People grumble about KYC, know your customer. "Why am I identifying myself with a custodian in order to get my Basic Attention Token?" Well, it isn't KYC for its own sake, 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're making some people in Europe fill out a survey to do more diligence. KYC serves as a means to an end. The end is anti-money laundering. It's identifying all these flows. And, you know, some of the crypto noobs also think, "Well, I should just go on chain, and then I'm, I'm anonymous." No, [chuckles] you're gonna get re-identified through blockchain forensics, right?

    3. BGBen Gilbert1:09:15

       In the same way that it's not hard, based on a zip code, and a gender, and a birth date, or whatever, to singly identify you, at some point, someone will be able to just run your wallet or wallets, and it already happens today, through some de-anonymizer and be like, "Oh, I know who this is."

    4. BEBrendan Eich1:09:30

       Right. So for our system, with users getting ad revenue share, and publishers then getting... creators on YouTube getting, you know, tips or recurring donations, just ten of those or so could fingerprint you as a user, right? If they're a few bits each, that's enough bits to fingerprint you. It's a unique identifier that can count everybody in the world, and if you have enough observation points around, you can- and side channels, you can put things together. So we realized that we couldn't go on chain, not just because it was too costly, but because it would fingerprint the user. And the answer, in the long run, is zero-knowledge proof. So our next generation ad system, which is aiming at Solana, is called Themis, and it uses a black box accumulator in the browser to build up an authentic, cryptographically secure ad performance set of numbers that can then be put into a zero-knowledge proof system directly on chain, and the ad buyer can verify for themselves from the terms of the proof that the ad performed. That's the magic of zero-knowledge proofs. By verifying it, you can believe the truth claims, and we're trying to move on chain with that very soon with Solana, which is exciting. But we're still burdened by the regulations that require not only the, you know, anti-money laundering, but also the anti- uh, the Office of Foreign Asset Controls in the US. Don't send to a self-custody wallet that's owned by some- somebody on the FBI's top 10 list, right? Or you'll go- you'll do federal time for that. So, you know, people get mad at me, like, "Why must I KYC?" And they think I'm some kind of, you know, crypto hater. No, 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, 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 [chuckles] with these regulations, which have pernicious, uh, penalties. So we're working toward a more decentralized future, and we'll have to see how it goes. The great thing about crypto is I see a lot of, uh, now banks... You know, Jamie Dimon did a heel turn from saying Bitcoin's a Ponzi to, "Oh, my blockchain's great." [chuckles] And family offices and companies are into crypto. The old big tech guard aren't, though. Facebook tried with Libra, now Diem, but really got hurt. Uh, politicians didn't like Facebook, and it wasn't really clear why you'd want it, um, you know, instead of another existing crypto.

    5. BGBen Gilbert1:11:41

       So the initial thing you did was introduce the Basic Attention Token, and you could accumulate that without going through any KYC, but if you were gonna then send it to a creator, they would need to have a KYC'd wallet.

    6. BEBrendan Eich1:11:49

       But you wouldn't. As a user, you could still be anonymous.

    7. BGBen Gilbert1:11:52

       But it seems like now you've moved to... You first forked MetaMask to make a Brave wallet. 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 gonna do that for a long time. So you're gonna be the first browser with a native, secure, uh, on-chain wallet, hot wallet, directly baked into the browser.

    8. BEBrendan Eich1:12:18

       It's a refrain from the early days of Firefox: Opera had it first. And you can say that again, because Opera did have a wallet in 2018. [laughing]

    9. BGBen Gilbert1:12:25

       No way! [chuckles] Opera has a wallet... [laughing] That's- that's so good.

    10. BEBrendan Eich1:12:29

        We were worried, 'cause they came out with a self-custody wallet and a dApp store in 2018, and Brave's been growing, so I had to get more people to do the wallet, or I had to get my co-founder to go lead the wallet effort. But in 2018, it wasn't gonna happen. On the other hand, crypto winter happened, and I think that took the steam out of Opera a little bit. But Opera still has crypto, and they're talking about a Polygon deal they've pre-announced. 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 trustworthy, just in Western eyes. Um, not saying anything personal here. And yet, Opera will be innovative, but Brave's gonna go faster, and we're gonna do things that cut across the self-custody versus-... custodial usability trade-off space, because it took twenty-five years to train people to use username and password logins, and maybe for real banks and Coinbase and so on, you have to have a second factor authenticator app or something like that, or a YubiKey. That's almost as hard as self-custody. It's a little bit safer in that if you lose your private key, your word list, your backup, your crypto steel with self-custody, you're-- you've lost. Whereas if you lose your pass-- forget your password and lose your YubiKey, lose your authenticator app or the phone it's on, you can probably convince Coinbase you're you, and they can reset your password for you. So it's complex enough now, though, I think self-custody has a shot. Getting things to be useful, getting the basic attention token to be useful, including that virtual kind you earn without KYC-ing, 'cause you're gonna send it back to your creators who do have to KYC for these AML and OFAC reasons, that we can work on with the wallet. So we're gonna make the wallet sort of blend with the Brave reward system as much as we can. We're going to make it multi-chain. We don't have any, you know, religion about blockchain. We like Solana. We agreed to make it the default for multi-chain dapps, 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 why Google only pays for default, because they're king of the hill, and they figure they'll get the traffic anyway. That's what they say. Whereas Bing does, and DuckDuckGo, and others, and Yandex, do search deals with browsers. Uh, even if they're not the default, they'll pay for traffic.

    11. BGBen Gilbert1:14:40

        But even still, like, a lot of people are gonna get wallets for the first time. This is pretty awesome.

    12. BEBrendan Eich1:14:45

        It is. It's exciting. It's also... You know, you've seen what happened with MetaMask. They took off very cleverly. At the time, Uniswap did its, uh, V3, I guess it was, and just started getting a lot of swap action that made them a lot of money, and that was from people using MetaMask 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 Ledger or a Trezor, and so they're keeping that word list safe in some safe place, I hope. I talked to somebody, an anonymous user of Brave in Africa, who was a Hex fan, and they were wondering why we're, you know, why the Hex founder was feuding with us, 'cause he's kind of a nut, but that all blew over. But this user, I said: "How do you use it?" He said, "Oh, I've been buying crypto for five years. I use MetaMask," [chuckles] right? Or four years, I guess it was. And I said: "Oh, do you have a Ledger or a Trezor?" "No. [chuckles] I'm really afraid I'm gonna lose it all, right?"

    13. BGBen Gilbert1:15:37

        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 it was in a browser itself, and on top of all this, it's always connected to the internet.

    14. BEBrendan Eich1:15:50

        The 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 MetaMask, I, I joked, the mask that is meta, 'cause I didn't want to say it, you'll get all these phishing support accounts pretending to be your buddy, impersonating my friend David Walsh, who was at Mozilla, now is at MetaMask, and they'll try to say: "DM me, or, you know, go to this Google Form, and we'll help you get your, your key recovered." And sometimes the topic wasn't even about lost funds. And you go to the Google Form, and right above the fine print from Google that says, "Don't enter any personal, private data or passwords in this form," is a field saying, "Give us your twelve words, [chuckles] your twenty words." So these fraudsters just swarm onto this.

    15. BGBen Gilbert1:16:41

        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-custodied wallet into our thing," and I've seen this on Coinbase, 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 cards. And so we're telling people, "Hey, this is like a username that you can type in anywhere," and it's completely defeating the purpose of that as security.

    16. BEBrendan Eich1:17:15

        Same thing for QR codes. QR codes have become shorthands for links. I go to my neighborhood pool, and I can scan a QR code with my iPhone, and then sign in on the web form. But QR codes are also used, especially in crypto, for spelling a private key, and you should not be putting them on paper for somebody to scan, [laughing] ever. And you're right, there are, 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 still are, that will say, "Hey, we'll read your email for you." In fact, DuckDuckGo's building one, but I think they're keeping it clean, right? It would blow them up if they cheated. They're just trying to strip trackers from your email, and you get a duck address if you want it, but better if it didn't have the clear text of your email messages at all. And so in Brave, if you use web mail, like Gmail, we block those trackers at the endpoint, where the secure session, the TLS session, terminates. But this whole thing about dual models, something's a public key or a public link, something's a private key, and they're both getting forced through the same UX metaphors, is a problem. And training users, maybe getting to a better state of play with hardware wallets, where they aren't just this anxiety-producing dongle that you're worried, "Did it break? Did I forget my PIN? Did I forget my... You know, did I send to 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 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 Brave. We can make your built-in wallet a positive-sum game. It can collect non-pump and dump yield opportunities from DeFi if you want to put some assets in. It can collect bat revenue share. That's another positive-sum game we already have. So we're trying to make crypto be part of your daily life in a way that doesn't provoke anxiety. Am I being phished? Did I lose my PIN or my passphrase?

    17. BGBen Gilbert1:19:03

        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 in crypto versus I'm doing something in the regular bank TradFi ecosystem, and my bank, for better or for worse, has taken a lot of the headache away, and I have a pretty good user experience. It's not confusing. I know what I'm doing when I'm wiring money from one place to the other, or making a transfer from one account to the other. I lose some of my liberties because they have the option to, 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 seize my assets. They can make a profit on me. They can arbitrage the cost of capital to their returns when they take my deposits and deploy them elsewhere. I should be getting all that economic upside, but what I've gotten in exchange for giving up my liberties and my economic opportunity is a pretty good user experience. And we're at this place in crypto right now, where we've taken a hard left, and we've said, "I wanna own everything. I wanna be hyper secure. I wanna have all my privacy," and what we're left with is-

    18. BEBrendan Eich1:20:12

        Be unbanked. Yeah.

    19. BGBen Gilbert1:20:14

        Yes, also be a bank. [chuckles] And it is a brutal thing to have to manage all this stuff right now.

    20. BEBrendan Eich1:20:20

        Yes. This calendar year is gonna be big because not only adding more chains... And I think I agree with Vitalik, we're not gonna do complex, multi-chain, uh, transactional models, though people are working on those using threshold signatures. I think the main thing is we'll have the chains people want to use, and the yield farmers go where the returns are good, and the users follow. So w- we'll make that all as automatic and convenient, but you'll still have to turn it on, and we'll have safeties on it. And that UX will, will take a lot of work to develop because design is still an art, absolutely is an art, right? You can-- The space is too large to do sort of A/B testing in any credible timeframe. You have to call some shots, get some users telling 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 crypto and, you know, DeFi and so on, but also, if we do it right, some of our custodial partners can virtualize your plastic from your wallet. So they can give you, like privacy.com does, like the Apple Card does, they can give you a, a MasterCard number from a block that 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 virtualize 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 JavaScript, [chuckles] which is not gonna happen easily, can have an option where you can use something like a virtual credit card that could even be topped up with crypto or drawn crypto.

15. 1:21:55 – 1:38:41

    Web3 realism: centralization pressures, distribution goals, and Brave’s 3-year A+ vision

    1. BGBen Gilbert1:21:55

       I've got one question for you as it pertains to this decentralization versus user experience topic. Moxie Marlinspike pointed out in his recent post that, uh, and this is a quote: "To make these technologies usable, the space is consolidating around platforms. Again, people who will run servers for you and iterate on that functionality that emerges, Infura, OpenSea, Coinbase, Etherscan." And my question for you is: Do you think it is the case that the user experience that users want, and the developer experience, and sort of ecosystem speed that programmers want, necessitates these centralized choke points, no matter what generation of the web we're on?

    2. BEBrendan Eich1:22:34

       So it's hard to beat a server when you want to do something like index Ethereum's history into a database with multiple ways of querying it. So I'm not gonna do that on my machines. I'm gonna use Etherscan or something like it, and if Etherscan has trackers or bad ad tech in it, I'm gonna use Brave and block those. But it's hard to beat a server sometimes, and I agree with Moxie, right? I, I like Moxie a lot. I met him once at Mozilla in the old days. He and colleagues did this blind context matching system, contacts, I should say, like your address book contacts for Signal because they had this problem that your friends are on Signal, Signal uses the phone number as 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 Chaum blind signatures and hashing and so on, and it's clever, and it runs in a secure enclave on the server, which is something we're also using at Brave. So I agree with Moxie's essay. There's a larger toolkit from cryptography, the original crypto, which some of my cryptographer friends are still mad as- [chuckles] ... crypto's been an ex by cryptocurrency. But there's a larger toolkit, and it works on servers, on centralized systems, as well as in decentralized systems. And decentralized systems, even Solana, there's always a trade-off. If you really want, you know, certain guarantees and certain latency, you're gonna want a server, and you're gonna want even the network to that server to be provisioned a certain way. So there's no free lunch, and there's a larger universe in which I think blockchains and networks, peer-to-peer networks, make sense, but also servers will endure. That's why, again, annoying when people think that Web 2, you know... Oh, Brave's too Web 2. Well, Web 3 is not going to replace Web 2. It's going to extend it in a way that eventually, perhaps, [chuckles] if it's like McLuhan's Laws of Media, it's gonna mock [chuckles] and torture Web 2, but that's far in the future. In the meantime, it's going to be extending it so that we can get users using it, and there are ways that users will want to use it that are gonna be like Etherscan or a proxy farm, like Infura runs or Bison Trails, or there'll be servers you'll want to go to. But if you have these cryptographic protocols, if you have strong, muscular clients like Brave, if you have that market power as a small user through, uh, essentially unionizing 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 raiding your data. It shouldn't be just betraying you in some way while it's whispering in your ear. It should be a fairer deal, and that can be done with, you know, cryptography broadly construed. So I, I liked Moxie's essay quite a bit.

    3. BGBen Gilbert1:25:09

       ... All right, for our final sponsor of the episode, we have a very special company to tell you about that is near and dear to the Acquired community's heart, Mystery! Well, last we left our plucky heroes at Mystery... You can tell David wrote this copy, ladies and gentlemen. [chuckles]

    4. DRDavid Rosenthal1:25:25

       They're the definition of plucky.

    5. BGBen Gilbert1:25:27

       [laughing]

    6. DRDavid Rosenthal1:25:27

       I don't think- we've, we first said that about Snapchat. I, I don't think you can call Snapchat plucky anymore. Mystery-

    7. BGBen Gilbert1:25:31

       I don't think so

    8. DRDavid Rosenthal1:25:32

       ... are the new plucky heroes.

    9. BGBen Gilbert1:25:33

       Even if Mystery was Snap's size, I don't think they would shake their plucky-ness.

    10. DRDavid Rosenthal1:25:38

        Absolutely not. [chuckles]

    11. BGBen Gilbert1:25:40

        [chuckles] All right, so last we left Mystery, they had just come on the LP show to talk about pivoting from, you know, facilitating these magical nights out for consumers before COVID, to magical virtual experiences in the home while everyone was stuck in lockdown. And for folks who need even more of a memory jog, this is when David and I had a two-person Acquired Christmas party a few years ago. We used Mystery to have the party, and we ended up in a fencing match. We will link to a photo in the show notes. It was a blast. This was Mystery V1.

    12. DRDavid Rosenthal1:26:10

        And the amazing thing is that that pre- presaged everything that was to come for the now, I think, final iteration of Mystery.

    13. BGBen Gilbert1:26:19

        [chuckles]

    14. DRDavid Rosenthal1:26:19

        Ben, do you wanna tell everybody what Mystery is now?

    15. BGBen Gilbert1:26:22

        I would love to do that. Well, it turns out a bunch of consumers who did these virtual in-home experiences in April of 2020 also worked at places like Amazon, and Microsoft, and Apple, and McKinsey, and Uber, and Twitter, and Autodesk. The list goes on. And while virtual experiences with their friends was fine, you know, what really needed upgrading was the virtual experiences for their teams, and their happy hours, and their workplace. And when after 17 times of already logging on to Zoom together that day, everyone was supposed to, like, have fun and not strangle each other in their 18th Zoom, you know, it, it, it can be tricky. So enter Mystery. Mystery takes over every aspect of those terrible team happy hours, from scheduling, to planning, to executing, to not even tracking the engagement and employee retention that theoretically they're helping afterwards, and it makes them, in David Rosenthal's parlance here in the, in the ad copy, 100% not suck. So take that to the bank. Flash forward to today from April 2020, they've executed literally tens of thousands of events for not just those huge companies mentioned above, but companies of all sizes, including Modern Treasury, Convoy, other friends of Acquired. So we are so excited for them. It's been a crazy ride along their journey.

    16. DRDavid Rosenthal1:27:42

        They have gone through three pivots now. They have executed tens of thousands [chuckles] of these... Like, all those companies we mentioned, Amazon, Microsoft, these are major customers. Like, this story is just... It's incredible. We are so happy for these guys.

    17. BGBen Gilbert1:27:56

        You should have more fun at your company, and Mystery can help you have that. I don't know if that's their tagline. I'm making that their tagline. If your company could use someone to take all the headache of events off your plate, I know there's somebody at your company who's not supposed to be planning the events, but is, you should check it out. Try mystery.com/acquired. You can click the link in the show notes. Our thanks to Shane, Brennan, everyone on the team there, a big Acquired thank you, and go check 'em out.

    18. DRDavid Rosenthal1:28:22

        Definitely.

    19. BGBen Gilbert1:28:24

        All right, well, I want to move on to our grading section here, and even though this isn't a sort of traditional Acquired episode, or we've necessarily told the whole history and done our teardown analysis the way we typically do, Brendan, I am curious your take. What does A+ look like for Brave, let's just say, three years from now? In some ways, it's an epoch away. In other ways, it'll be here as soon as we know it. What does success look like for the company?

    20. BEBrendan Eich1:28:47

        If we keep doubling or better, three years is eight times 50, so it's 400 million users. And once you get to that scale, you start to get distribution opportunities, like being on phones. Pre-installs aren't really happening outside of the apps from the OS superpower like Android, Google, or iOS, Apple. But Samsung's out there, and there are new phones coming up in, in the world, and there's always a lower end of the market that's getting better, thanks to the hardware getting better and sort of trickling down. And so I, I would like to see us get to that scale because then I think distribution could 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's kind of a mundane business thing. I think if you get anywhere near [chuckles] 400 million monthly users, you have enormous clout, especially if they're lead users still, in standards, and standards matter still because a lot of businesses want to not only compete, but sort of cooperate, the coopetition model. So you get ongoing, you know, web standards still, in spite of Google's dominance and somewhat strong-arm tactics, you still get standards evolution. Crypto is, for each blockchain, its own set of standards, often run by a core team, but there's, as I said earlier, greater sort of de facto standardization on things like EVM-compatible chains, or, uh, smart contract systems, or things you can do with compilers and interpreters, even if you don't have an EVM work-alike in your node, in your network. So when we get to the scale of toward 400 million or more users, we will s- have opportunities to do things, including with the Basic Attention Token, that you couldn't have done out of the box earlier, and that would look like having a, a, something more competitive with Google that's decentralized. And, you know, we're not just aiming at Google. That's like sort of driving by looking in the rearview mirror. Google's a hundred-year company. So was General Electric, but [chuckles] it ended up a tax dodger and a subprime lender, right? This is not a good ending. Thomas Edison was spinning in hisbarrow. Google may end up that way sooner or later, but we're looking at a world where users are sovereign. That's the, the vision I mentioned earlier. You have these machines. Without being a burdened sysadmin, you should have say over them. You should have benefits from them, and it's not just economics in some, you know, money-grubbing way. Economics, really, the Greek word, right, means something about-... home economics, or about the home, or you know, the scale of human life where you live most of your life. And things have 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 will be good for the world. And I'm not just talking, you know, pie in the sky, you know, hobbits in the Shire stuff here. I see this with the creator economy. I see this with the YouTubers and the other creators. I see this with NFTs, for all the, the clowning that goes on with NFTs, and actually, we- we'll be looking into NFT as a basis for further, you know, sort of tokenomics 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 demonetized or interfered with, censored, all that stuff. And if this can be scaled up, it forms all these little networks that have these logistic curves, that have their exponential phases that everyone loves. So people should want this for good business reasons, but you can't rate it through ad tech or tracking. You have to have a better platform and better sort of network for it. You have to have crypto in both senses, Moxie's cryptography and cryptocurrency or blockchain, and I think Brave, at 400 million, we can actually make this real. We have, uh, 1.3 million creators verified. We would have tens of millions of creators.

    21. BGBen Gilbert1:32:26

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

    22. BEBrendan Eich1:32:30

        Yeah, or if enough people have self-custody, maybe we'll hang the self-custody wallets on the creator side, and you can just do an on-chain send on a fast chain with low fees, and you don't have to go through KYC at either end. Now, that, that was always what people told us to do. "You should only do, you know, direct on-chain." And I looked at it, and even with our Bitcoin prototype, it was too expensive. I talked to people like Balaji of twentyone.co, which Bitcoin bought. I talked to the Open Bazaar founder, who'd actually DM'd me first. He said, "Uh, we're thinking about adding BAT." And I said, "Aren't you Bitcoin without a fee? Why do you need BAT?" And he said, "Well, nobody wants to send Bitcoin. They wanna HODL it." [laughing]

    23. BGBen Gilbert1:33:08

        [laughing]

    24. SPSpeaker1:33:08

        [laughing]

    25. BEBrendan Eich1:33:08

        ... Which is very true, and which, at the time, it would've been a good s- strategy. Just sit on it.

    26. SPSpeaker1:33:12

        [chuckles]

    27. BEBrendan Eich1:33:12

        Don't shave those bitcoins to send something, send scraps to your favorite YouTuber. And, you know, people will send Bitcoin. People are using Lightning more. Jack and so on are all excited about it, whatever. There's lots of options for this, but getting people to do direct on-chain sends is still challenging for the UX reasons we mentioned, the usability, the security, the sort of familiarity on the, both the sender and the creator who receives it. But with Brave at 400 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 if they don't want to. Now, like I said, if you're worried about, you know, law enforcement, which you shouldn't be, if you're, unless the government's gone bad, then blockchain forensics and exiting on a regulated exchange will still let the law enforcement do what they need to do. You know, we're not trying to stand in the way of law enforcement doing what it should do. But this idea of getting to a big system of direct on-chain sends, by starting there and limiting it to only those cases or limiting it only to Lightning, which I was told to use before it was ready, years before it was ready, doesn't make sense. We've gone the other way. We're pragmatists. But as we grow, and as we keep the custodial options going, we'll add the self-custody options and see what wins.

    28. BGBen Gilbert1:34:27

        Makes total sense. I'm sure you've thought more about the success case, but what's the failure case? What are the existential risks at this point?

    29. BEBrendan Eich1:34:33

        So there's always risks of some bad macro event or some bad crypto event, you know, crypto gets banned, uh, in the US or something like that. Don't think it's gonna happen. One of the [chuckles] reasons is 'cause I do see too many rich people partaking through their family offices and so on. But I do think there's a risk there, and I can't quantify it too easily, so we're just trying to carry on. It's hard to hedge anyway. I think there are risks with big tech. Big tech could still misbehave, and it has, still has even political power, though it's, it's been getting beaten up more and more by both parties as time goes on, but that's a risk.

    30. SPSpeaker1:35:07

        Do you think that Facebook or Google or, or any of the others could ship a wallet in Chrome, for instance, or, like, actually really embrace this?
16. 1:38:41 – 1:43:40

    Wrap-up: carve-outs (books), where to find Brave, and closing credits

    1. BGBen Gilbert1:38:41

       All right, lightning round of carve-outs. David, give us your first one, and you and I will go first, and then we'll kick it to, to Brendan so he can think on his.

    2. DRDavid Rosenthal1:38:47

       I'm gonna make it easy. My carve-out is a book I'm about halfway through that I started reading because I saw you tweeting about it while you were in Hawaii, Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir. It's so good. Really enjoying it so far.

    3. BGBen Gilbert1:38:58

       So good. It makes me think about everything from scientific principles when I look around in the world.

    4. BEBrendan Eich1:39:03

       I don't know that book. What's it about?

    5. BGBen Gilbert1:39:04

       It's Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian. This is his newest novel.

    6. BEBrendan Eich1:39:09

       Okay.

    7. BGBen Gilbert1:39:09

       And his story told in such a way that it's really fun to let it surprise you as you read the book, so I don't wanna spoil it.

    8. BEBrendan Eich1:39:16

       Okay. Yeah, the, The Martian was good. Cool.

    9. DRDavid Rosenthal1:39:18

       All right, Ben, what you got?

    10. BGBen Gilbert1:39:20

        My quick one is the second book that I read on vacation, which is Open by Andre Agassi. His co-writer or ghostwriter, I don't know the right term, but it's the same Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who helped Phil Knight with Shoe Dog, and it is written in that same page-turning thriller style. And Andre Agassi had an unbelievable career, ups, downs. Shout-out to friends of the show, Jeremy over at Tiny and David Perell, who at Capital Camp recommended the book to me, but it was just awesome. Highly recommend it.

    11. BEBrendan Eich1:39:51

        So [chuckles] I've not been reading enough, and I owe a friend at Apple a read of his new book, which is his first novel. But I [chuckles] this is kind of negative, but I think it's important. Mike Shellenberger's San Fransicko is worth reading if you're from the Bay Area a long time like I've been, 'cause it ain't good. I remember much better decades in San Francisco, and I hope to come back somehow, but Mike diagnoses it pretty directly. I also would recommend an old book that a friend who only reads old books recommended to me, which you can find free copy of online, like LibGen, you can get it. It's called Dynamic Economics by Burton Klein. You've never heard of Burton Klein. Burton Klein looked at how firms grow and how they start, sometimes the skunkworks projects. He actually looked at Kelly Martin's team. He looked at the Traderus aid at Fairchild. He looked at the China Lake Sidewinder, the first practical heat-seeking missile development. And he made some killer observations about structure, sort of sociology, anthropology, hierarchy, about how firms go from innovation to rent-seeking to outright vampiric badness. [chuckles] And he had four kinds of firms. So anyway, Burton Klein, Dynamic Economics. It's an oldie, but, uh, underappreciated, um, and still very much relevant. I wonder if I should give Elon Musk a pointer. [laughing]

    12. BGBen Gilbert1:41:20

        [chuckles] Brendan, thank you so much for the time. We're gonna let you run. Where can listeners find you on the internet and Brave on the internet?

    13. BEBrendan Eich1:41:27

        So brave.com, five-letter English word domain name. We got it in 2015. We got it from the nuclear polka combo, Brave Combo. It's a Texas band, friends of Matt Groening, The Simpsons creator. He's put them in Simpsons season 17, and they were honest musicians, and we gave them bravecombo.com and paid a reasonable price. So brave.com is it. I'm on Twitter as brendaneich. I'm on Reddit as brendaneichbrave. I'm easy to find, brendaneich.com. I haven't updated in a while. That was, uh, historic blog post, but some of them are still relevant to do with trust but verify, also WebAssembly, JavaScript stuff. And on Twitter, the Brave handle is called @Brave. It seems to be search-banned for some reason. I'm not sure why that is. Uh, we have Attention Token. That's another Twitter handle. Uh, we have Brave Support. If you need support, you can always tag me, Brendan Eich.

    14. BGBen Gilbert1:42:17

        Awesome. Brendan, thank you so much.

    15. BEBrendan Eich1:42:19

        Thanks. It's fun.

    16. BGBen Gilbert1:42:22

        David, that was super fun. Brendan is such an internet legend.

    17. DRDavid Rosenthal1:42:26

        Oh, my gosh, what a- a man for all seasons, literally.

    18. BGBen Gilbert1:42:29

        [chuckles] Yep. Well, listeners, thanks for being on the journey with us, another fun episode. As always, if you wanna check out more, and you're like, "I need more Acquired right now," and there's not any new episodes yet, and you wanna go deeper, go check out The LP Show. Search Acquired LP Show wherever you get your podcasts. Come, uh, discuss this and hang out in the Slack, acquired.fm/slack. We got a job board. You're looking for your next thing, you're part of the Great Resignation, uh, maybe you're thinking about being part of the Great Resignation, and you are thinking about, uh, you know, you wanna, you wanna float your name for something, but you don't know what that something is yet, we also have that feature on the job board. So go to acquired.fm/jobs. Find your next dream job. With that, our thanks to the Solana Foundation, Modern Treasury, and Mystery, and we will see you next time.

    19. DRDavid Rosenthal1:43:19

        We'll see you next time.

    20. SPSpeaker1:43:20

        Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Uh. [singing]

Episode duration: 1:43:40