Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO)

**Josh Miller** (0:00)
Silicon Valley, at least the most modern version of Silicon Valley, has this obsession with graphs, and has this obsession with numbers and metrics. I mean, you saw me in the previous answer. I'm talking about D5, B7. What's a D5, B7? And it is an incredibly effective way to achieve certain outcomes, to focus on numbers, because it's very quantitative, it's objective. You can see the graph go up or go down, or stay flat, depending on what you want.
But what we found is that optimizing for metrics leaves a lot on the table and it misses a lot. And so what we do at the browser companies, we talk about optimizing feelings.
How does the software, 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 the feeling we are trying to evoke in whatever we are doing on a specific project or a specific feature or a specific piece of storytelling content?
And I can imagine what's going through the heads of your listeners right now, which is probably a number of things. But among others, that sounds really damn romantic. You think like, okay, you're optimizing for feelings.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:17)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Josh Miller. Josh is the CEO and co-founder of a company called The Browser Company, which makes a product called ARK, which has quickly become my default web browser. I fell in love with this product as soon as I started using it and wanted to get a glimpse into how Josh and his team approached the craft of product. There's this kind of cohort of companies like The Browser Company, Linear, Cron, and a few others that are just laser focused on building the best possible user experience almost above all else, and I wanted to spend some time exploring this trend with Josh. We cover how he thinks about prioritization, team building, storytelling, company values, metrics, shipping, building in public, so much more. Josh is such an earnest, genuine, and humble human, and it was such a pleasure getting to learn from him. And just to be clear, I'm not an investor in The Browser Company, and I barely knew anything about the company before I chatted with Josh, so I'm just a fan, and as a special surprise, ARK is normally invite only, but if you're listening to this now, check the show notes for a special link that'll get you right in to use the browser if you want to play with it yourself. With that, I bring you Josh Miller, after a short word from our select sponsors.
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