YouSaid · the spoken record

Josh Miller

lines on the record: 107
first: 2023-03-19
most recent: 2023-03-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The most impressive thing to me about how Facebook built product was their user research to you. Shout out to Loe and Jane. I don't know why you would be listening to this podcast, but you deeply inspired me when we were at Facebook together. They had the most incredible team of user researchers.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the other things that hopefully you're picking up in this interview so far is we are a very prototype driven culture. It goes back to the assume you don't know ethos. We try a lot of experiments and we try them related to product features, related to how we work together, related to the stories we tell. So this isn't the category of I'm not sure it's going to work, but we're trying it and it seems to be working so far, at least for us. What Lenny's referencing is we have a handful of teams. I'll pick two just as an example. We have a membership team and we have a storytelling team. And though you probably recognize or obviously familiar with those terms, those aren't historically startup orgs or startup disciplines and teams. And let me tell you about the intention behind both membership. Membership was when I was at Facebook.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't even think we've maybe DM'd briefly, maybe five messages exchange, but I feel like I know you, and that makes me trust you. And so in many ways, this podcast at a meta level is an inspiration for it.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't done podcast interviews. I haven't done this. I really like you. I really like the feeling of your conversations, the intentions behind them, the warmth, even your intro music is a friendly jig. And so, I mean, it's a great example where I think it's one of the most wonderful things about the podcasting medium is I have, I've had you in my ear for a year and the people on your show and you feel a sense of trust in you and your intentions here. and your intentions both in this interview in terms of what you're trying to do for listeners. And to some extent, your show and the warmth that you bring to it and the perception I have as you as a human being, we've never met.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And at first, honestly, I felt a bit of anger. Like, who was this person on a Thursday just saying we're doing X and Y? And then I realized, you know what, I'd have the same feeling because of the experiences I've had with technology in the past, you know, five to ten years and so. The intention with the building and public experiments are radical trust building. Not radical transparency. We can't share everything, but radical trust building. You get to know us as humans. And I worry that we'll regret that and that it could potentially turn into, oh, there try to be internet celebrities that, you know, they're so important they should share everything because, you know, thank you them for gracing us with their opinions. It's not the intention. And it feels like it feels worth taking that risk. But that's the intentionality behind it.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, even if I think about it, I haven't done interviews like this because I worry that if you don't know me, I'd come off the wrong way. You know, a lot of people tend to. I've noticed a lot of friends in my life that I know them behind the scenes, but the way that people perceive them publicly here don't know them, they interpret it the other way because there's not that trust. And so our bet is that if you get to know us, Nash, Dina, me, Hirsch, and you really feel like you get to know us this person, all of our imperfections. We're average looking, we're average to all that stuff, then when you see that we're asking for a permission, you might trust it is because we want to make you feel a certain way that's better. And if not, you know, I'll say someone tweeted something yesterday, who apparently we didn't earn the trust yet and they haven't gone to know us. And their interpretation of what we were doing was the worst possible interpretation you can.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Uncomfortably so is an act in if we were them, why should they trust us? Why should anyone trust us? We have your most sensitive personal data. We have your most sensitive professional data. Why should you trust us if we have had our trust broken again and again? And I think our hypothesis in this prototype, in this experiment, is we can have the best privacy policy in the world, but at the end of the day, again, it's just people behind the screen.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as part of that, I would view Ark and the Browser Company as an experiment in can we can do it better as possible. And as we were thinking about better as possible, rediscovering what we love and believe and deep down and trying to express it in the world, one of it related to trust. I remember when I was a teenager using the internet for the first time and early on to college, just the hopefulness of what was possible and the belief that these people building these tools, they were like heroes to me. Not just the leaders, but the teams, the companies, the brands. And somewhere along the way, I'm not blaming a single company. I'm not even saying that anyone did anything wrong, but culturally I was a sociology major. Culturally, we have lost trust in tech companies and in tech brands. And so building and public, showing you our meetings.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I and we another thing that defines people that have joined the browser company in addition to wanting to do the work that defines their careers is I would characterize it as a little bit of hopelessness maybe feeling jaded questioning this industry that they've worked on or products that they've worked on and wanting to rediscover but at the end of the day we are a group of idealists of optimists wanting to rediscover what we fell in love with when we were kids Whether it's the part of our craft or the potential of technology, the internet and software.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's one where I'm reacting, it's like a reaction video in classic YouTube form to MKBHD talking about our product for the first time. And I honestly watched it right before this again. And I was like, What can I do? What are we doing? Why am I trying to become a YouTuber? So, to be totally honest, I don't regret anything yet, but I wonder if we could take this too far. So if anything, if anyone's listening, if you see us starting to take this too far, especially as it relates to me, we want to hear about it because that's keeping me up. But I do think the intentions are pure and earnest, which are”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why don't I start with the regret? It's not yet a regret, but the thing that I wonder, because this is very much, you know, I may have hopefully spoken with a lot of earnest passion to some of the questions before. This is one that I would really characterize as a prototype. We really have a prototype German culture, and this is one that I'd put high on the list of maybe we'll regret this later. And specifically what I hope is that I'm uncomfortable putting myself too central in our story. But naturally, when you're doing storytelling publicly, there's a gravitational pull for the CEO and the founders to be at the center of that. And so sometimes I, even this morning, we had our best performing YouTube video ever. The first one that really kind of broke out of people that already follow us.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That ladder up to that principle I got so excited about, but are as simple as like, oh, you know, someone tweets about some animation. They're like, whoa, this was fun. Tag Sherry. Sherry made that. Sherry's incredible. And you don't see that that much in Silicon Valley. You see corporate blog posts and the CEO more than anyone else. That's probably why you don't have CEOs on the podcast because you don't want you know this.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“worked on it publicly. You know, I think there's a CEO hero worship sometimes in Silicon Valley. I do very little at the company. And I do, oh, sorry, I do very little as it relates to the thing people fall in love with art. I do a lot for the browser company, but I don't make ARC. I didn't make P and again, that's just who we are, which is Alexandroid, she killed it. Look at how cool this is because it's earnest and it's honest to who we are. And then I think it creates this reinforcing cycle of you're someone that's done something credible, which is I'm going to be celebrated. They truly want me here. I'm going to be recognized for the work that I do. It's not going to just accrue to this CEO figurehead who everyone thinks is some genius visionary. And so again, by no means are we perfect? By no means do I think we get it right all the time. But because it's such an authentic expression of who we are and what we are trying to do, I think we do little micro implementations like that.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the other thing I want to add loaning is again myself and a listener, I imagine a lot of what I just said probably sounded a little bit, could come off if you don't know me and you don't think, you know, as a little bombastic or a little like, again, romantic, very tactically, I'll give you something that was not, was just sort of who we are, but I think has helped contribute to this tumbleweed. From the very first person we hired, we celebrated them publicly. The fact that they joined. And in a very heartfelt way telling about them as a person what they did long before we had anyone that anyone would have heard of before working at the browser company, just because we were, it was Ernest. We were really proud. Again, if you think of our original mandate as building the companies, the product, when our first designer joins, we want to tell everyone about it. That's a product launch. That is the product launch. And then whenever we ship something, we go out of our way to celebrate the people.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where I'm going to finally do the equivalent of building the iPhone. And we all know we probably won't. But there is that I want to give it one more shot. I want to give it one. I want to go for it. And that trickle, that just tumbleweeds, I think, to some point.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In order for people like that to join and to show up for that, there are a number of things you have to promise and provide them that make folks like that gravitate with the intention of doing their work or their career, ranging from an incredible ambitious aspiration, really empowerment to do kind of to act on the prompts that they're given on behalf of the team and the way that they see fit and truly trusting and empowering them, a very kind culture. I think if you've been doing this for a decade plus, your tolerance for bullshit is very, very low. And so by no means do I think we're perfect. I don't think everyone shows up the browser company saying, if I'm not on the equivalent of the early iPhone team, I'm going to be bummed. But I think generally speaking, Hersch and I and everyone that was on the early team showed up with this aspiration of making the browser company the product. And I think that's carried forward to this tumbleweed of people saying, Woo, that.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Though that sounds like I bragging the thing that was really interesting and perplexing to us was these are people that have made a lot of money, that have had really fancy titles, that have worked on transformative projects. Why are they joining this team? And I think something that people show up to the browser company with is, in addition to heartfelt intensity, this aspiration that their work at the browser company will come to define their careers. And that's coming from people that have done really remarkable things by all accounts. And I think more than anything, we've realized that.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Co created the first prototype of Chrome and then ran it for 16 years. I think hundreds if not thousands of people reported to him. He joined the browser company as an IC. We just hired a woman named Tara. She was on the original paper by 53 team. One of my most inspiring products at the beginning of my career. Most recently she was actually, I believe, senior SVP of product at Vimeo and a senior director of engineering. She joined her engineering team as an IC. We just hired someone named Peter Vidani. When I was 20 building consumer social software, he was like the coolest, most impressive person he was the first designer at Tumblr, ran the design team at Tumblr for seven years. And the most recently was SVP design at Slack, joined the team as an IC designer.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, you know, being self aware, that's how I think. That's how we think. But, you know, again, flaying back things that I've heard, we have been fortunate. We've hired a lot of really remarkable people, especially on paper and especially off, I mean, all around. You know, I'll just give a couple examples to share one thing that I've heard. A few recent hires we hired someone named Darren who, as I mentioned, he”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think anyone's being just ingenuous, but we really need it. It is the genesis of this company. It is not a new web browser. It is, let's build the dream team, our dream team, and let's build a way of working that is really fun for us and really speaks to our values. And let's go find people that resonate with that. And that trickles down to everything we do, whether it's our policy about this or the way we do that. I'll give you one example. Our goal of interviews is to convince people not to join the browser company. We don't. If I have an interview with someone, I don't pitch them. I say, what do you want to ask me? Anything you want, I'll be super honest. Most people shouldn't want to work here. So I think it all starts with us viewing our product as the company, as the team, not Arc itself.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then build an organization, build a team where we can work in the way that after a decade of trying on a bunch of hats and ways of doing things and metrics, this and that, we could do what was right for us. And so where we went to with a new web browser, let alone a web browser is a new form of computing, which is our Turet aspiration to build an internet. You can look up the internet computer YouTube video on our browser company YouTube page. But our ambition is even higher than a web browser. The intention of that is We just want to go higher our favorite people that we know and don't know and build a team that will never get bored working with this crew because of how incredible they are and how humble they are. And so when you think about it like that, I is the CEO, as notionally the head of product, I view our product as our team. And I know a lot of companies say that. I actually think they probably all meet it.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company We want to build a company, or we feel like we can hire whoever we want. And I don't mean whoever we want in terms of who would dare to say no, but we want to work on something where the greatest”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another secret, sharing a lot of secrets. This one will probably get me in trouble You don't care about web browsers. I've never cared about web browsers. I never wanted to build a web browser. If you had told me a decade ago that I'd be working on a desktop first web browser at 32, I'd say, what in my career went horribly wrong? The origin story of this company was Hirsch, who I met when I was twenty. We started a company together lots of mistakes, a lot of successes, a lot of growing pains and figuring out who we are. And a decade later, we were still friends. We went to each other's weddings. We'd worked in all these different industries and different stage companies. And we just realized, you know, there were a lot of ideas that get us really excited. There are a lot of shapes and sizes. But as we, you know, we're kind of nostalgic for looking back on the decade prior, it was groups of people and moments in time with those people that were our best memories. And so what Hersch and I decided long before the company started was we want to build a”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you for that question and for all the legs. I will admit this is also a fairly awkward one to ask. I actually just came from an interview with a candidate and they asked me a fairly similar question. And I said, you know what? You should go ask the people that work here, not me. I don't know why they ultimately joined. But what I will tell you is the intentionality, which is”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, maybe this goes back to Scott's comment that maybe our bar to how quickly we should ship stuff, including values is. I don't know, but yeah, it felt like a long time. And this was not just me, just for anyone listening. This was not CEO in a corner writing a missive. This was a team effort. There's a woman Abby on her team that did so much work on this project. The words themselves came from our team. So it has my name. I think somewhere on that webpage, but by no means was this me writing this essay in a corner with the fireplace on or anything like that.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The putting it in road essay form, that took a long time. That was a lot of that, yeah. I don't, I don't recommend the way that we did that, but”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, warning downside of this process is that it takes a lot longer than we thought it would because we put so much hurt into it. So what it started with was, again, in my kind of natural one year check-in type conversation, starting to notice these patterns. And then we actually very comprehensively were like, okay, let's sit down and review everyone at the browser company, but no survey one by one talking to people, asking questions, and then we pulled out those words. And so actually what's really cool about these values, if my memory serves me, I believe every single one, with the exception of maybe a word or two, was something that someone on our team said. So we interviewed the entire team and then these were meant to be a mirror.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know, we were sure that corporate values were not for us and then very organically without trying it turned out, wait, they're pretty. They run through this company in a pretty profound way. We should put some words around it because it's happening whether or not we like it or say it is or not.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we just had this aha moment of let's, instead of having a corporate landing page with five value titles and subtitles, let's tell, let's write a manual for how to take a road trip. So we wrote an essay called Notes on Road Trips that use this, that uses this semi-biographical but mostly fictional story about a person and their father taking a roadship when they're a teenager to tell the story of how we do things at the browser company and share these values, but in a way that hopefully won't feel so propaganda-y and feel a little more you're reading an essay. I say that again not to say there's anything wrong with traditional values. I'm actually sure I'm going to get an earful for a lot of people that coach me and give me advice then I sounded too indignant on this podcast, but I'm pretty proud of that story because it was a great example of assuming.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are some traits that define our team, extremely organically and naturally no one told people what our values were, again, because I was as naive, ignorant, you know, 31 year old being like values are a cork written cat late stage capitalism creation and it's very, very hard headed. And it was really special two years in hearing from the team why they love the browser company, why they think we're doing so, just the passion there. And then we challenged ourselves to what became a value. Well, if something about the five one-liner is on the corporate webpage feels off, start by asking what could be in dream a little bit. And what I realized was all of the statements people would say about what they love about the browser company, what they thought to find the way we work, they reminded me of how I like to take road trips. I'm a big traveler, I'm a big fan of dropping in somewhere new and just exploring.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The secret is I hate corporate values. I've never resonated with them. And unfortunate we're fortunate enough to have a lot of really spectacular experienced leaders in our corner. And I got hammered to the first year, two years on Josh, where are your values? How can your team operate without values? And I just, I always experience them on the other end as almost like corporate propaganda. These like cliche fortune cookie panda express like, you should care about the detail. I just, it didn't, I didn't resonate with me. And the thing that clicked was maybe a year and a half, two years into working, I just kept hearing the same things from the team. And, you know, I would do things like a year into someone joining. How's it going? What's going well? What's not. And I realized that.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Solve the problem of context switching. We wanted to almost blur the line between native and web software and make it feel like a sheet of paper and really pushing ourselves to be as ambitious as we can be, which is the consequence of blowing back around and more deeply motivating the people working on it. So, I mean, I could keep going. We have a value, you're on the hook for the team about a collective A team that has a lot of heart, has a lot of intrinsic motivation, and it's the first day of my career. I wonder what's going to happen attitude. And I think all of those things add up to a culture, which is, let's get something out there. Let's see what happens.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Value assume you don't know is even if you know, even if you're a subject matter expert, we have somewhere in our company that literally built the first version of Chrome and ran it for 16 years, but he more than anyone embodies this beginner's mind of I have no idea how this should work or what will happen. And the follow-up to that value is, so we got to get going. It's like dropping in a new city. You just got to walk out the door of your Airbnb, turn left, and maybe you'll turn right and then you'll open the subway, but you just got to get going and see what you find. And so we have this attitude of you're showing up with this heart sheltered intensity, but you start by saying, I've no idea what I'm doing. I have no idea what's going to happen. So we just got to get going. And that biases and a default to action. We have another value of start by asking what could be, which is pushing ourselves to be as aspirationally ambitious as possible. So the peak feature that you mentioned, we just didn't want to.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the first, and I really think the most important is we hire people that show up with heartfelt intensity. And a lot of companies, I think, obsess over craft details. You know, there'll be a value like we obsess over the details. What we say is we want people that show up to our company with some fire in their belly, something that they are out to do. And for each person, it's a little bit different for some people. It may be UI crafty details. For other people, it may be achieving double the performance with a quarter of the engineering head down. Everyone has something, but they show up with this heartfelt intensity. And I think even relative to everything else I'm going to say, that's it. If you have a team that has heartfelt intensity and is there for a purpose and something to prove, you get it. You give them a very exciting, ambitious prompt and get out of their way and they will do remarkable work. So showing up with heartfelt intensity, that our second value is assume you don't know. Assume you don't know.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first off, thank you, Scott. If you're listening, it's somewhat of an awkward question in Midgeley because, of course, as the team, it's sort of like someone complimenting you about your product. It's always impossible to really take and accept the compliment because you see all the blemishes. Of course, we see all these ways in which we don't ship fast enough and could be doing a better job listening and building with members. At risk of sounding a bit cliche, I really think we ship our values, so we thought a lot about our values as a company. You can read about them online. And I think if you examine those values and then you look at your complement or Scott's complement, you can see them one-to-one.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To this whole new tab and going back and forth. So, in that scenario, the conversation was how do we make it feel really airy and effortless to just pop it up, pop it back down, lightness, airiness, speed, agility. So again, it's not that we have a, what is the number one feeling and the number one number two feeling? It is much more conversational at this stage. But I can, I am actually really excited. Hopefully we get the privilege one day to have such a large team that we have to figure out a way to do it. So that's an example of how we think about it.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the truth is, I don't think we've operationalized it as formally as we should one day and we'll probably need to one day. The lucky thing is we are a very tight small group of individuals that have now worked together for a long time. So it's not so formal as there's a PRD at the top of it. We list out the emotions. It's much more, you know, with that project, get Ben in a room and whoever else is working on it and say, all right, so here's what we're trying to do for people. Here's the problem we're trying to solve or the way we fit in their day. And in that moment, people want to, we should feel very light and airy, you know, so for the peak feature world he's referencing, the use cases, you're on hacker news and you want to probably in pretty quick succession check out a five to seven URLs and you're not really sure which one you're going to spend time on, but you're going to open a bunch of stuff for the quickly. And Peak allows you to effortlessly just like peek into it without leaving hacker news and context switching.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think the reason we come out so strongly is I do think Silicon Valley has tended so far towards optimizing for graphs and metrics that if we can reel it back in a little bit, at least as just one company, I think that will be good. But the truth is it's both. We need to use all the tools we can get. But I think hopefully that's one way that people can operationalize.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The curve or wants to feel secure and ease at what they're doing. I think sometimes we just forget that whoever your buyer is or whatever your kind of business objective is, at the end of the day, we're a bunch of people in a bunch of rooms at the other side of these screens and just thinking about that person. It could be a buyer. It could be a customer. But I think the truth is to answer the question, Lenny, is when I was earlier in my career, I was searching for the answers or the way to do things, the right, the wrong, the binary. I think anyone that's been doing this or anything for a while learns that it's all nuanced. It's a spectrum. It depends. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. But I think the true answer, Lenny, is just like optimizing for metrics so purely is deeply flawed in my opinion. Optimizing for feelings so purely is flawed as well. And it depends on what you are doing, what the project is, and a lot of other things.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, obviously, it's difficult to do that in the abstract for another company, and it may not work for every company and every product. If you pick the right feeling, it typically tracks pretty closely with the metric you care about. So for example, we don't have a growth team and we have no semblance of growth projects. However, in many of the new features that we put out into the world, we want people to feel surprised or joy or an emotion like that. Guess what? When people feel that way, they go, oh my God, what was that? And they start telling their friends and family about it and they start dropping a screenshot in Slack, etc. So there's one example on the consumer side. I've never built kind of traditional enterprise software selling to CIOs, etc. But I can imagine maybe someone in the IT department of a large enterprise wants to feel smart or wants to feel ahead of.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They weren't obsessing about something like how many people put an image into the composer and hit the plus button and the number of times per week means success. They were thinking about something much more human and essential. So that is what we carried through the browser companies. Don't optimize for metrics. Don't optimize for graphs. Use that as a way to keep you honest and use it as a tool in your toolkit. But fundamentally, none of us are here. For that, we're there to make people feel something.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have that conversation would be how many times per week do people share on Facebook? Do they post something? We even had an acronym OBPS. It's like seared into my memory. What is OBPS and how is it trending over time? Well, I think we should have been asking and what we at least would ask at the browser company in our way of product development is do we think people feel closer to their friends and family or something of that nature? That's what Snapchat got so right.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do you think Walt Disney was optimizing for when he was crafting Disneyland? What do you think Phil Knight was thinking about when he made that first version of the Nike running shoe? What do you think Steve Jobs was imagining and daydreaming about when thinking about the iPhone or the Macintosh? By all means, numbers are a fantastic way to be honest with yourself about whether or not you are achieving what you aim to do. But at the moment of creation, at the stage as product people wondering what should we do and why and how, we think it's much more important for us to think about the human, the person at the other end, and how we really want to make them feel. I think one example of that, one tangible example of that is when I was at Facebook, I joined in the midst of Snapchat's ascendancy. And there was a lot of feelings about how are we doing should we be worried? And the way that we would”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I just, if you allow me, I would posit that actually this modern way of optimizing for numbers and graphs, especially for what we all do every day, which is make things and put in the world, is what's fairly odd. Because if you just to yourself daydream about what are your favorite products or product companies and brands, while it may sound cliche for me, Nike, Nike was one of the first companies at a very deep level resonated with me as a child. Disney, Disney, same thing, Apple. Before I was a professional in an industry, these were the brands and the products that they made that really made me love something that was ostensibly a commercial product I could buy.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How does the software, how do we want to make someone feel on the other end of our software? Do we want to make them feel joy? Do we want to make them feel fast? Do we want to make them feel organized? Do we want to make them feel focused? What is the feeling we are trying to evoke in whatever we're doing on a specific project or a specific feature or a specific piece of storytelling content? And I can imagine what's going through the heads of your listeners right now, which is. Probably a number of things, but among others, that sounds really damn romantic. It's like, okay, you're optimizing for feelings.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Learning for the first time. But what struck me at Facebook and call it 2014, and I've seen through to this day, is Silicon Valley, at least the most modern version of Silicon Valley, has this obsession with graphs and has this obsession with numbers and metrics. I mean, you saw me in the previous answer. I'm talking about B5 and B7. What's a D5 B7? And it is an incredibly effective way to achieve certain outcomes to focus on numbers because it's very quantitative. It's objective. You can see the graph go up or go down or stay flat depending on what you want. But what we found is that optimizing for metrics leaves a lot on the table and it misses a lot. And so what we do at the browser companies, we talk about optimizing feelings.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll share this caveat once and never again in this interview, but I want anyone listening to know I'm someone who doesn't believe there is a single right way to do things. So what I'm sharing today is truly just what we have found works for us in this moment, for what we are doing. But I remember when I was earlier in my career, I'd listen to podcasts like this and take it as dogma because there were these people that had done it and I respected what they had built. So if any of this sounds like better than now, it's not intended to. This is just what we found works for us and what we care about. Okay. So earlier in my career, started a company also with Hirsch, my current co-founder and CTO. We were fortunate enough to have that company acquired or acquired by Facebook and spent a number of years working at Facebook. And a remarkable organization. Probably the best executing I've ever seen at that period of time. And by the way, I'd never been to PM before, so I'm not complimenting myself. I was just.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, really, really fantastic. Again, not going to continue if there is anyone on this call that is going to check this in a year. It will be lower, I'm sure, but so far we're really thrilled with it. And most importantly, in the same way we don't look at absolute gross growth number, we don't look at retention in this moment. We look at is it improving cohort by cohort? And so what I think I'm most proud of is that if you go back a year, by all means our retention curve, we were really proud of it. And I think one of the best in our category of software, but what I'm really proud of is 12 months later, we've been inching it up and up and up despite getting further away from the earliest, most passionate adopters. So our retention curve going up and up a little bit, which is”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is listening, I would be shocked if we continue like that for another eighth month. But yeah, we obsess over how many humans use our five out of seven days a week, and we really want that number to grow as fast as possible every single. I love that we're already talking about metrics and retention. This is off to a good start. You got to know your audience, Letty. We're going to talk about just how public you are about everything, but would you be up for sharing your retention actual numbers, like the D5 and D7 you just mentioned? Yes, with the asters that I didn't prepare for that. Rebecca, correct me on Twitter after this if this is wrong. So once again, we don't look at DAU retention. We don't look at weekly active user retention.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Captures retention, engagement, and growth in a single metric. You can't game it, right? So from retention perspective, it's not just opening it accidentally once a week. You need to open a tab on a day in order to count as an active for a day. But so it tracks retention. It tracks engagement because five days a week is no joke. There are very few apps or pieces of software you actively use five days a week. And then obviously it tracks growth because if we track the count. So that is what we track. And then we also don't obsess over absolute numbers because if we're successful, if you zoom out and out and out, any point in time will be inconsequential and small. So what we really look is growth rate week over week. So, you know, relative to last week, what is our growth rate? And for the past eight months or so, we've been growing over 10% every single week. So very, very thrilled with that. Do not think that will continue if anyone.”
2023-03-19 · Lenny's Podcast · Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source