Venture Capital Ate The Browser Company

Josh Miller:

So when people ask how venture capital influenced us — or why we didn’t just charge for Arc and run a profitable business — I get it. They’re fair questions. But to me, they miss the forest for the trees. If the goal was to build a small, profitable company with a great team and loyal customers, we wouldn’t have chosen to try and build the successor to the web browser – the most ubiquitous piece of software there is. The point of this was always bigger for us: to build good, cared for software that could have an impact for people at real scale.

I think it's Miller who is missing the forrest for the trees. A small profitable company sounds nice to me. They should have taken the Superhuman approach: charge power users a premium price for a power user premium experience.

That will never scale to billions of users, but it's a sustainable business.

When The Browser Company announced they were killing pausing sunsetting "not actively developing" Arc back in late 2024, another lifetime ago in AI eras, perhaps they had a shot to build an AI browser. And perhaps back in late 2024, that was indeed a novel idea.

But it's hard to imagine Dia can compete against OpenAI or Perplexity now, you know, the actual AI companies building their own browsers. And then there's Chrome, presumably doing the same thing with Gemini.

And just yesterday from Alex Heath:

...this week served as a wake-up call for the many startups building businesses on the backs of AI models; if you are successful enough, you run the risk of being copied by your model provider.

I recall listening to a Decoder episode late last year with Miller in which he described having an AI browser seamlessly transfer text from one browser tab to another, like a list of students in a classroom, or a shopping list, and I thought, well, that does sound genuinely useful.

But Dia today doesn't seem capable of even that. I could be wrong, but I don't think I can have Dia transfer my shopping list from Apple Reminders to Target, something that I do once or twice a week, and that annoys the heck out of me, and that I genuinely would love to have automated. But Dia doesn't do that.

I'll still give Dia a shot, and I'll eat my words if I'm wrong, but I don't see how Browser Company nails the landing on this one. If there's a forest and trees, Miller and the Browser Company seem lost in the thicket.

What do you think of Dia? Let me know in the comments below or on BlueSky.