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Best of the Pod: Would You Shut Down Your Most Successful Product? The Arc to Dia Story

Overview

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Best of the Pod: Would You Shut Down Your Most Successful Product? The Arc to Dia Story

AI & I

4 DAYS AGO
AI & I

AI & I

4 DAYS AGO
OverviewShownoteHighlightsTranscriptChaptersPins

Shownote

If you had millions of people using a product you spent years building, would you kill it? That’s exactly what The Browser Company did with Arc. Originally recorded in July before The Browser Company’s acquisition by software giant Atlassian earlier this...

Highlights

In an era of rapid technological transformation, few decisions test a company's vision like walking away from a beloved product. For The Browser Company, that moment came when they chose to sunset their successful browser, Arc, in favor of something entirely new.
02:22
We realized browsers and computer use would change dramatically due to AI.
14:52
Search is a choke-point for the Internet
19:37
The concept of AI browsers was once widely doubted but is now gaining mainstream acceptance.
23:29
Prototyping first allows rapid validation of new ideas and builds team confidence.
30:26
Dia is fast and has AI features that open up a new way of using web pages
34:45
The real value is a personal assistant, not the browser itself.
48:34
Users can sense the latent possibilities while using the product
53:22
The browser should feel like your home on the Internet
1:12:19
AI's value will shift from benchmarks to emotional and subjective intelligence
1:17:21
The most valuable AI interface in 24 months will be the one people have an emotional connection to

Chapters

Start
00:00
Introduction
00:48
The story of how Dan might've been the CEO of The Browser Company
02:22
The moment Josh and Hursh knew they had to walk away from Arc
09:40
How to handle the weight of the unknown in a pivot
16:59
The prototype-driven culture that kept The Browser Company alive
23:24
Why having a product loved by millions of users isn't enough
25:06
The architectural decisions underlying how Dia was built
32:12
How Dia almost shipped without its best feature
46:04
The best ways people are using Dia in the wild
50:45
How Josh and Hursh think about competing with incumbents
1:07:27
How romanticism informs the product decisions behind Dia
1:17:13

Transcript

Josh Miller: Last year sucked. We were running a company with 70 people, millions of people using the product every month. Now we're starting over, Oh, cool. What are we doing? We don't really know. Hursh Agrawal: We have this realization that all of soft...