Josh Miller

We really focus on one key metric as it relates to tracking our growth or how we are doing. We call it D5, D7. A lot of other companies call it L5, L7. But the human explanation for that is how many people turn to Arc at least five days a week? That is all we obsess over from a metrics perspective, because for us it captures retention, engagement, and growth in a single metric.

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 product and get out of their way and they will do remarkable work.

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 Craft details. For other people, it may be achieving double the performance with a quarter of the engineering headcount. Everyone has something, but they show up with this heartfelt intensity.

Our goal of interviews is to convince people not to join The Browser Company. If I have an interview with someone, I don't pitch them and say, 'What do you want to ask me? Anything you want? I'll be super honest, most people shouldn't want to work here.'

We have another value of, start by asking, 'What could be?', which is pushing ourselves to be as aspirational, ambitious as possible.

What we do at The Browser Company is we talk about optimizing feelings. 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 it 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?

We want to hire mutts. For example, there's a woman in a company named Rebecca. Rebecca was a data scientist we use at Cora. She got her PhD in MIT in I think behavioral psychology or something. I'm probably going to misquote that. But, got some crazy degree at MIT, and then was a software engineer at Stripe.

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 surprise 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, et cetera.

Whenever we ship something, we go out of our way to celebrate the people that worked on it publicly. I think there's a CEO-hero worship sometimes in Silicon Valley. I do very little at the company. Or sorry. I do very little as it relates to the thing people fall in love with Arc.

Building in public showing you our meetings, 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've had our trust broken again and again?