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

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!

11. 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.

12. DRDavid Rosenthal2:00

    Yes, so pumped!

13. 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.

14. DRDavid Rosenthal2:42

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

15. 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?

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. SPSpeaker5:25

    Hi, thanks for having me.

19. 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.

20. DRDavid Rosenthal5:44

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

21. SPSpeaker5:47

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

22. 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?

23. SPSpeaker6:00

    So Brave is a faster browser because it-

24. 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.

25. 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.

26. 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.

27. DRDavid Rosenthal9:49

    Yeah, SSL.

28. 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.

29. DRDavid Rosenthal10:42

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

30. 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-

Episode duration: 1:43:40