This isn’t criticism or sarcasm — I’m genuinely impressed, but also very curious about the rationale behind it.
All told, probably worth 610M.
https://browsercompany.substack.com/p/letter-to-arc-members-...
I've found it just as good AND it's open source https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop
I'd never heard of the damned thing before.
I don't know why, but it appears to be popular with some creative demographics.
The browser is an essential pane of glass to platformization and taxing the web. Anyone who wins a browser with significant market share has a huge opportunity to capitalize on.
Not sure if Arc is that browser, but lots of teams are trying.
Chrome is shitty on purpose because it is designed to sell ads. Other browsers can sell AI or other things to fund their development.
It's a shame we don't have a good open source browser with decent leadership anymore. I'm sure they'd be killing it. I could swear Mozilla is led by a revolving door of paid off Google plants.
- no company generates revenue in its first second. Even if you start a lemonade stand tomorrow, you'll have to buy some lemons first. The time-to-revenue might be very short, but it's never zero. Therefore, making no revenue for 1 day or for 10 years is not a step change, but simply a point on a curve.
- Capitalism is basically a long history of creating vehicles with increasing sophistication to bridge that gap: provide funding for ventures that have returns in the future. This is intrinsically difficult, and it's easy to waste money, but it can work immensely. This started with the Dutch inventing limited liability corporations to fund ship expeditions, and today's VC is essentially an extension of that.
- It has worked well in the past to bet on companies that don't optimize for time-to-revenue, but something else – famous examples being e.g. Amazon, Google, Meta, who all lost lots of money initially.
Hence there can be companies that make no money for quite a while. And it can even turn out that the vast majority of the companies that make no money for a while never make any money. Accepting this risk is a feature, not a bug.
Explaining why they're successful and I'm not.
I think you will eventually have to switch because it will lack behind given that it's not their priority anymore. Zen browser seems like viable alternative but I haven't used it enough yet to know how well polished it is.
Often times money will be raised at certain valuation and terms, but the cash is held in escrow (effectively) until milestones are hit.
The investors will do their due diligence on the feasibility. It’s a high stakes, high return game (if you succeed). Look around you… any physical device you see is basically funded the same way.
Well what do you expect people to do when the only non slop result on page 1 is a 5 to 8 year old thread? It’s the top link. You’re still relevant whether you want to be or not. Fuckin deal.
Tabs on the side nav and the ability to have 3 different AWS accounts open at the same time
Yea, it's called investment. If you want to get rich overnight play lottery or start gambling.
I guess you could argue (as TBC did) it’s actually not rapidly evolving, and that gives it staying power. But eventually someone will reach parity and eventually eclipse the original product.
Hopefully Zen does that. I’m just tired of moving the same data to the effectively the same product run by a different team for no good reason.
Of course, you need to have other ingredients too, but hundreds of millions, if not even billions of people have those skills too. Who win more among them is pure luck.
And in that, of course a ton of predetermined parameters, like where you born, who your parents are, what your skin color is, etc.
I have a friend who is worse in almost every skills which matter in our work. Not much worse, he is still awesome in his job. But I’m better. Every single person who saw us work in comparable environments would tell you the same thing. His career is still better than mine. And the single reason is that he born in wealth. He had the opportunity to live without income for years, and kick off a startup, and try to start some others, and simply try out, and risk things which I couldn’t do. Nothing else. Pure luck.
The browser features are _much_ worse than Arc (no sidebar, bookmarks are a dropdown, ...) and most of the time the AI can't even "see" or "read" what's on the page I'm viewing, so it's just worse than using Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini.
I'm still using Arc and will probably continue until there's another browser that copies its UI/UX improvements.
A bus factor of 1 is still a bit red flag on something as involved as browser maintenance. Hopefully a community can emerge around the project.
ref: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/graphs/contributors
But how many other people had similar luck and did nothing with it?
Luck is another word for opportunity. Some people are really good at leveraging opportunity for all it's worth. Most of us (myself very much included) are not.
Case in point: I'm the same age as Mark Zuckerberg. Many people say his age is why he was able to be at the right place at the right time to create Facebook. Much like they say about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and every other "self-made" billionaire.
But he still had to choose to do all the right things that I chose not to do in order to be able to experience that kind of luck.
At some point we gotta own up to our own role in guiding our lives.
* For example, I get a lot of value from renaming my tabs and even replacing their favicons with emojis of my choice. Zen appears to have limited support for this.
Looking at their frontpage the design is outright horrible if you have a > 7-8 inch screen. I guess in a way its good to have an example of what not to do.
> I'm sure they'd be killing it
Why, though? I mean the niche is pretty small, most people don't care much about open source or even what browser they are using at all.
Considering the overwhelming majority of Mozilla's funding is coming from Google and in no way could it survive without it being run by Google's plants is not that surprising.
Looking at Zen, I really don't understand how Mozilla fail to capitalise on their browser, and build up a similar experimental project based on Firefox like it. It seems that many of these small QoL improvements could make a big difference. They have such a huge budget, and they waste it on inane things. Their fancy search deal with Google has made them complacent, and neglect one of the few things that ever had any real worth. Curious to see how it develops with the recent Google ruling. And to be fair, it does seem like Firefox development has picked up a bit lately—maybe even due to Zen's competition, who knows.
it's sort of like banks vs vc funds. both lend money to companies, but still they are not competing against each other.
Anecdotally, everyone I put onto Arc and the person who put me on still uses it.
I’ve been using Arc for the last two years and was genuinely sad on its discontinuation. I now don’t really know what I’ll do when it goes away.
As far as I know, Dia just calls OpenAI’s API. I’m sure their employees know a lot about using AI at this point, but so does everyone else who’s built an OpenAI wrapper.