Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

Lots of respect to Josh Miller, the CEO. TBC got to a difficult place. They built a product that was very very good, but evidently not good enough to support the capital they raised or the workforce they hired.

I wish they had managed to keep Arc around. It's a product I'd glad pay for, and it seems like maybe there are enough fans that subscriptions could've supported a smaller team. Hopefully Atlassian doesn't kill it after 5 months

I know it's not fashionable to blame founders, but I genuinely don't understand this. What has he done to deserve "lots of respect" in the context of this conversation? TBC got to a difficult place because of their choices. Rugpulling users by creating a product nobody asked for, squandering investor money, cashing out by selling to a company antithetical to all the marketing copy TBC had produced to that point.

If you live by the rule that you only judge leaders by their actions and not by their words, TBC was a failure as soon as they abandoned Arc, and arguably when they couldn't provide a business case for Arc in the first place.

> Lots of respect to Josh Miller, the CEO. TBC got to a difficult place. They built a product that was very very good, but evidently not good enough to support the capital they raised or the workforce they hired.

Was this not predictable from day one? There's no money in making a web browser. That ought to be obvious to anyone, let alone a superstar CEO. That they would end up selling the company seemed like a foregone conclusion.

I don't mean to disrespect the guy but I don't see much to credit here either. He had a problem, used VC cash to ignore it, then sold the company. Hardly uncommon in the tech world.

Scuttlebutt is Josh Miller is pretty unpleasant to work with and believes Dia is like a holy revelation or something (rather than a chrome extension that calls ChatGPT for you).

What respect does delusions of grandeur and crashing out at Atlassian deserve?

Curious what you’ve heard.

I certainly enjoyed working with him and Hurst in the early days at Obvious 2.0 when we were incubating Branch.

A bunch of Medium & Obvious 2.0 alumni I respect work or worked at TBC (Dustin, DanB, Connor, Cemre, maybe others).

I understand your point... but you can predict that every start-up will fail and probably be mostly right.

They built a product that many people liked. That's part of why so many people are angry about shutting down Arc. How does one tell during the rapid growth phase that things will level off and that actually even though a lot of people will like your product it won’t be enough to be a mass market success? They took a big swing, and they got a lot further than I thought they would.

And it seems like maybe he managed to swing an okay outcome for investors and hopefully employees too.

Edited:

> Was this not predictable from day one? There's no money in making a web browser.

And to this point, before Google no one had cracked monetizing search. Before Facebook, no one had monetized social. No one had monetized online video before Youtube... this is what start ups do... they make people like and figure out how to monetize it

I've heard when things got tight, empathy vanished. When things were great he was great, if a bit overzealous about Dia. When things got hard, you better hope you were the kind of person he liked or you'd find yourself out the door quickly, no matter what your output was.