Open Operator, Serverless Browsers and the Future of Computer-Using Agents

**Alessio** (0:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by Michael Swyx, founder of Small AI.

**Swyx** (0:13)
Hey, and today we are very blessed to have our friend Paul Klein for the fourth.

**Paul Klein** (0:19)
The fourth.

**Swyx** (0:20)
CEO of Browserbase, welcome.

**Paul Klein** (0:21)
Thanks, guys. Yeah, I'm happy to be here. I've been lucky to know both of you for like a couple years now, I think. So it's just like we're hanging out, you know.
We're just hanging out with three ginormous microphones in front of our face. It's a totally normal hangout.

**Swyx** (0:34)
Yeah. We've actually mentioned you on the podcast, I think, more often than any other Solaris tenant, just because like you're one of the best performing, I think, LLM tool companies that have started up in the last couple years.

**Paul Klein** (0:50)
Yeah. I mean, it's been a whirlwind of a year. Like Browserbase is actually pretty close to our first birthday.
So, we are one years old and going from starting a company as a solo founder to having a team of 20 people, a Series A, but also being able to support hundreds of AI companies that are building AI applications that go out and automate the web. It's just been like really cool. It's been happening a little too fast. I think like collectively as an AI industry, let's just take a week off together. I took my first vacation actually two weeks ago and operator came out on the first day and then a week later, DeepSeat came out. And I'm like on vacation trying to chill. I'm like, we got to build with this stuff. So it's been a breakneck year, but I'm super happy to be here and talk more about all the stuff we're seeing. And I'd love to hear what you guys are excited about too and share with it.

**Swyx** (1:40)
Where to start? So people, you've done a bunch of podcasts. I think I strongly recommend Jack Bridger's Scaling DevTools as well as Turner Novak's The Peel. And I'm sure there's others. So you covered your Twilio story in the past. Talk about StreamClub, you got to acquire to Mux, and then you left to start Browserbase. So maybe we just start with what is Browserbase?

**Paul Klein** (1:59)
Yeah. So Browserbase is the web browser for your AI. We're building headless browser infrastructure, which are browsers that run in a server environment, that's accessible to developers via APIs and SDKs. It's really hard to run a web browser in the cloud. You guys are probably running Chrome on your computers, and that's using a lot of resources, right? So if you want to run a web browser or thousands of web browsers, you can't just spin up a bunch of lambdas. You actually need to use a secure containerized environment. You have to scale it up and down. It's a stateful system, and that infrastructure is like super painful. And I know that firsthand because at my last company, StreamClub, I was CTO and I was building our own internal headless browser infrastructure. That's actually why we sold the company is because Mux really wanted to buy our headless browser infrastructure that we'd built. And it's just a super hard problem.
And I actually told my co-founders, I would never start another company unless it was a browser infrastructure company. And turns out that's really necessary in the age of AI when AI can actually go out and interact with websites, click on buttons, fill in forms. You need AI to do all of that work in an actual browser running somewhere on a server. And Browserbase powers that.

**Swyx** (3:08)
While you're talking about it, it occurred to me, not that you're going to be acquired or anything, but it occurred to me that would be really funny if you became like the Nikita Beer of headless browser companies. You just have one trick and you make browser companies that get acquired.

**Paul Klein** (3:23)
I truly do only have one trick. I'm screwed if it's not for headless browsers, you know? I'm not a go programmer.
I'm in AI grant. Browsers is an AI grant. But we were the only company in that AI grant batch that used zero dollars on AI spend. We're purely an infrastructure company. So as much as people want to ask me about reinforcement learning, I might not be the best guy to talk about that. But if you want to ask about headless browser infrastructure at scale, I can talk your ear off. So that's really my area of expertise. And it's a pretty niche thing. Like nobody has done what we're doing at scale before. So we're happy to be the experts.