Mihail Eric: No, no, no… This will be soon. But it’s a really interesting thought experiment, and again, one that is closer than I think we believe. This idea of what happens when the bulk of these datasets are actually generated by systems. And I can see some positive effects and some that you would be like “Okay, this might be a questionable downside.”

On the positive side, these models, like the generative ones, especially of the language variety, are like very good. I mean, grammatically correct. They’re like very semantically good in terms of what they output. Does this mean that now the bulk of the data that it’s being trained on is just going to be like way higher quality writing than you would typically find in a typical Reddit post, or something just in the deepest corners of the web? And then after training on data that’s significantly better, you have this compounding effect of like “Well, now the data I’m training on is better”, so the model is only getting even better at writing of some kind, and then we mix it in with some other more diverse writing… And then it’s going to continue to compound on itself in terms of quality?

The downside - I mean, one you could hypothesize is that these models are only able to generate certain kinds of distributions of data, right? Only certain kinds of things they can write about or talk about. So now, when you’re injecting all these training sets with like a very skewed distribution of topics, of ideas on these topics etc. How do you ensure that actually you’re still giving your model enough of a versatility and what it sees is next generations that have been trained on these datasets, to ensure that it’s still a general-purpose model? What if 90% of the content that’s put out there is just really bad marketing copy? Facebook ads, or something.

Daniel Whitenack: Not as of yet, although… So I help them with some marketing and Facebook ads stuff, and obviously, in advertising it is interesting to come from the AI perspective, because you see certain things, like in Facebook ads, where it’s talking about optimization and learning… As you kick off the ad, there’s a learning phase, where it’s figuring out how to optimize the placements, and the cost, and all that… So it’s interesting to think about it from that perspective, for sure.

Daniel Whitenack: Yeah, sure. I think if we look a little bit back over the years, there’s been certain industries that have always been involved in data science in some sense. If we look at insurance companies or other companies like that that are interested in assessing risk of a person based on things that have happened to them, and other things like that. So that’s been going on for a while, and then there was this time when people learned, “Oh, we can target certain types of people with advertising”, so for a while there a lot of the data science job postings were advertising-related. Now I think it would be fair to say that data science - again, I’m calling data science this process of creating data-driven insights - is really permeating pretty much every level of businesses. A lot of data scientists now are working to inform even internal business people, not even necessarily to make a company more money directly; they might be concerned about intelligently monitoring outages in their infrastructure, right?

Then it goes from that kind of lowest level all the way to the directly applicable processes to the money side of things, having to do with marketing, improving your ads and all of that. So I think from the very lowest level in the backend processes, all the way up to marketing yourselves to the outside world, I think you’re seeing data science permeate all of that. I think the idea is really that data scientists now, when you’re employed and you’re coming into a company, the idea is not necessarily to say “I’m gonna come in and I’m gonna optimize ads” or “I’m gonna come in and I’m going to predict risk, predict fraud” or whatever it is. A lot of companies are building data science teams and even embedding data science teams across the organization to, say, “How do we make our processes at each level of our organization data-driven?”

Jerod Santo: [16:30] One great example - I got back to this all the time - is Instagram ads specifically, and the visceral reaction that Instagram users have had to those ads, so much so that people believe that Instagram/Facebook is listening to their conversations… Because the ads were getting good enough to where they will suggest something to you that you don’t think you’ve google-searched, you don’t think you’ve put into Amazon… You think you were just talking about it with your friend or your significant other, and all of a sudden they’re advertising it to you, and you have no idea why…

So people are convinced that Facebook is listening to them, like actually turning on their microphone. In fact, there was a great Reply All episode all about that, about whether or not it’s actually happening… And it’s not. They’re not doing that. But they’re applying AI and different other fuzzy techniques in order to make their ads so good - they’re getting very well targeted - that it creeps you out because you don’t know how they came to that distinction.

Now, if I go to Instagram’s head of marketing and say “Your ads are actually making people despise you and your advertisers because they’re so creepy, but if you were transparent about how you came to those conclusions…”, if here’s your ad and I think “Oh, how do they know I even needed toothpaste…?”

Nick Janetakis: Yeah. I don’t know if you wanna look at the site now - you probably don’t have to, but… I do have a courses link in the nav bar, and then it just gives you a listing of all my courses. But of course, if I do write a blog post that’s relevant to Docker, let’s say, there is like a call-to-action at the top that says “Hey, by the way, look who has a Docker course!”

But yeah, I feel like developers – we’re both developers ourselves… I don’t know, I’m basically immune to advertising, entirely. Of course, I run AdBlock. I would never even think to do paid ads. But even like any marketing stuff, like - really? You’re gonna put pop-ups on your page? Unless your content is unbelievably amazing, I’m just gonna immediately close… So it’s very hard to find ways to market to developers, and that’s also something I’ve been struggling with for a while. But I just keep powering through, create video content, text content… I don’t try to word my blog posts to be sales pitches; I just write about the thing naturally. I don’t know if it’s the most effective thing in the world. It works okay, but I’m sure there’s way to improve, and it’s an interesting thing, I think.

Brendan Eich: We don’t know. That’s a great question. I think among the early adopters, lead users, yes they get it. A lot of them are outraged by the malvertising stories that broke this spring. And it was really great for us, because we had the late March malware on the front page of New York Times, then we had on 7th April… I woke up and there’s a letter from The Newspaper Association of America, counsels us to cease and desist, but we haven’t anything yet to actually cease and desist; those words don’t occur in the body, but it’s full of threats and crazy legal theories, including that these Newspaper Association of America members own the copyright on those ads that we would be blocking. How could they own that, because it’s malware from Russia, or whatever? They don’t own the copyright; those ads are injected by JavaScript in your browser, running on your page, communicating with third party sites with ad exchanges. Nothing to do with New York Times. There’s no creative work, ensemble work that has the ads.

I think the lawyers - it’s generally the associate GCs that join these trade groups, like Newspaper Association of America, now called The News Media Association… Newspapers have been in decades long of decline, but they view the ads as ink on paper. It’s like we’re sneaking up to grandma’s porch and we’re facing the ads that they printed on the Sunday New York Times and we’re pasting up our own ads to trick grandma into transacting with our advertisers and us getting a piece of that action.

First of all, we didn’t do any such thing. We only talked about how it can be better if we did something like that. Second of all, there’s no ink on page ad the New York Times owns. The ads are third party, they’re placed with JavaScript. Another one of my guilty legacies with JavaScript is how it’s used for third party ads.

[51:02] There’s really a deep topic here. Will people appreciate it? I think mainly people appreciate speed in browsers, they appreciate safety, and we’re leading with those. Safety is a broad term, but I include privacy. People say, “Oh, you can’t market privacy”, but you can. Snapchat built up a good cohort doing disappearing messages. People care about things like secure communications. WhatsApp’s doing end-to-end encryption.

People care after a crisis. Snowden changed things for a lot of people. I think as things evolve, we’ll have more concern about privacy. It’s often driven by crises and revelations. People just didn’t know they had a problem until they had one. So we don’t need to get too detailed on the economics, but I wanted to paint a picture because there is a lot of money exchanging hands here, a lot of middle players taking big cuts, very little for the publisher.

Brave cares about users first, and we think user attention is not fairly priced. We care about publishers, too. If you can’t keep a website a going concern, the web’s in trouble, so we’d like to see publishers get paid better. That’s where we think, if we get the right experiments done with user opt-in and publisher opt-in, we could build a better (I almost wanna call it) promotion system. The idea with advertising online now – Joe Marchese, founder of TrueX (I think Fox owns it now) said this: “You’re shotgunning people’s attention across ten thousand pages.” That means you’re wasting a lot of money, because first of all a lot of people guessed wrong, they didn’t go to that site. Then you’re retargeting them, which bugs them. You cross the line and they get an ad blocker. They’re lost to you. What if you could just get the right information at the right time, in the right place, to the person who’s likely to actually benefit from it and be happy with that marketing information? That’s the ideal model for advertising.

It solves what’s called “Wanamaker’s dilemma.” There’s this guy Jude Wanamaker who had a chain of department stores in Philly a hundred years ago, and he is alleged to have said - at least if I can get the quote right; it’s not clear if he actually said this - “My problem with advertising is half my advertising budget is wasted, I just don’t know which half.” Even then, he was shotgunning newspapers or catalog ads, and some of them missed the target.

Theoretically, with a very private system like Brave where your data is kept on device - we don’t see it on our servers, we use zero-knowledge proofs to transact things like payments for donations or ad impression counts in aggregate; theoretically, you could keep that data secure; you could keep your own Facebook, your own Google, you could do your own ad business. It would be a very personal ad business; it would be a “right information at the right time” business. It would not be replacing one-for-one all those indirect ads that we block. It might even be using a different channel, like a full-screen video channel or a set-aside personal mall; some people might prefer to get an email once a week with promotions. These would be really well targeted, they wouldn’t annoy you, they would give you a deep discount, because the marketing side wouldn’t have to spend for those 10,000 ads, half of which or more (maybe 90% or more) miss the target.

[54:03] That’s the big idea with Brave. It goes to search too, because when you search with Google and Google does that great result - they’re better than Bing, as I said; they’ll probably always be better. They have the oldest data set, they have the oldest machine learning that’s co-evolved with it. But what about your keywords that you type in? That’s your data. Again, Brave’s point of view is you own your own data. Not just your browsing history, what’s visible, how you open the tab from another, where you are scrolling, but also your keyword queries to search engines. And that’s a very hot data set that you should benefit from and we should protect on your device. So we’re looking at the whole picture. And when I say anti-Google, I don’t mean that in a hostile way, I mean somebody needs to build this. In a coming world where AI is everywhere, do you really need the cloud superpowers owning all your data? From your house, your cat, your own body monitors… I think there are scale advantages to the cloud and to clustering AI calculations there, but a lot of it is personal, a lot of it could be done in your home server, or even on your phone. So there should be tiers of AI and machine learning and tiers of data, where some of that data doesn’t even leave your device. Maybe only abstracted summaries or anonymised summaries leave your device. That’s the really big vision here, and I think people will build this. I see more signs startups are doing this. Instead of building some surveillance device based on cookies or search or everything in the cloud, they’re doing local computation and doing things that can be defensively secured in your pocket or in your house. That’s where Brave gets in.

Suju Rajan: Seriously, right? [laughter] No mechanical turkers to fly out to Botswana. But over there, my thesis was on knowledge transfer, because you kind of wanted to learn from seasonal data to some extent, so you can extrapolate to satellite images in the future. Also, from related geographic regions as well… Basically, to bring down the cost of annotation, while maintaining good performance. So that was what I did; I had a very fun time.

[08:08] I converted into an internship at Yahoo. Yahoo Labs, Yahoo Research, lots of different names… But it was a fantastic nine years as an individual contributor/applied machine learning scientist, call it what you will, but got to work on a whole bunch of different machine learning applications, and I think it was right at the point where ML was kind of taking off, big data was taking off. MapReduce was starting to come in, but when I started we didn’t have it yet. In the beginning it was still all of the single models that you would build to build classifiers, better keyword clustering for sponsored search, targeting for advertisements and whatnot. So I had a lot of fun.

Eventually, it became larger and larger data, and we had to do news clustering within a few hundred milliseconds, and so on and so forth. We had to have all of these models that were tens of twenties milliseconds to be able to figure out if someone’s going to convert for an ad, or read a news article, and so on. So I had a lot of fun doing that.

I eventually switched into managing a group that worked on, again, personalization across a whole bunch of Yahoo products. This was on the apps, on video recommendation, news recommendation… I really got a good sense for what would work as a consumer-facing machine learning product; how do we measure interactions… Following which I went to Criteo, where I headed the Criteo AI lab. This was my full deep dive into computational advertising.

Now, if you talk to anyone about machine learning for advertising, they immediately think of CTR prediction… And hey, it’s kind of done, it’s sort of already there; there’s nothing interesting going on in that space… But given the amount of money that is spent on advertising, there is a lot more that’s got to do with the causality of the models, because the people who are funding these campaigns want to know that something useful is coming for that money that they are spending… So how do we show that our models actually work was an interesting phenomenon.

And more than anything else, I was working at this company which was sort of like a demand-side platform… So you’re kind of listening to all of these publishers who want to put ads on their different pages, and you have all these advertisers that you’re synchronizing with… But if you ever had a deep dive into that world, there are so many players; there’s this waterfall model that they have. The first party publishes the first dibs. If they cannot do it, then it goes to the exchanges, and so on and so forth. But all of that entails a very, very, very tiny window in which you need to make that bid, and then assemble the ad unit to be shown, and so on and so forth.

So it was a very interesting time, where I learned quite a bit about the real-world constraints. It’s not as much about the technical complexity of the model, but hey, can it work in this specific constraints, in terms of the latency in which you have to operate.

Okay, so that was Criteo AI lab… I also got to show that there were lots of cool problems in computational lab that I see, so we established the lab as a pretty strong presence in Europe.

And of late, a little over a year now, I’ve been at LinkedIn, where I head what we call Enterprise AI. So think of all the business-facing applications LinkedIn has, one of which is talent solutions. This is where recruiters come to LinkedIn to look for candidates, and we also have all of our members who are trying to find the right jobs… So how do we make sure that this marketplace works well. That’s one aspect of it. Of course, there’s the advertising aspect of it, the sales navigating ocean where folks who want to pitch their cool new products and services to LinkedIn members - how do we make sure that it’s relevant and there is value on both sides? So these are some of the NAI for all of these different business-facing applications is what I’m working on right now.

Adam Stacoviak: So that’s one. Two, I think that the style of ad that we do produce was cut from the same cloth that I was cutting Founders Talk and other things from. It was that rather than – I mean, I really just hated reading scripts. I think that’s what it came down to. I was just so – I wasn’t even thinking about the listener, really, at first. I don’t think. I think I was being a little selfish. And I said “I just can’t read one more crappy script this marketing team gives me.” Not because they’re not good at it, it’s just like they don’t know how to talk to our audience. So it’s not their fault… So I was like “I’ve got to change this.” And we started going into the cut, into the scene, talking to CEOs, CTOs, VPs, product engineering, you name it, and we’re peeling back the layers.

So I think our ads have morphed into many interviews, which they very much have… And so now the line - not that we’re not drawing it clearly, but the style of the content you’re getting is so similar that maybe that’s what makes it feel like an ad. Because when we do ads, it feels like content. I don’t know. That was my thought.

Erez Zukerman: It’s a good question. So I like to read. I started with Seth Godin, who talks a lot about permission marketing, and all that. Then there’s this denim, this jean maker in the UK called H.I.U.T. That’s the company. The guy’s name is David Hyatt. I’m probably mispronouncing his last name… And he’s been doing some really interesting things around marketing, and he wrote a book called “Do Open”, which is a book about email marketing. And before that, I spent years working on an email marketing product. I used to be a developer for Mad Mimi and then GoDaddy, and that kind of exposed me to the power of email marketing, which is really all the marketing we do, that one email a month. And that email carries the company in terms of like outreach, let’s say. Obviously, there’s other forums, like the support I mentioned, but in terms of like us telling people about what we do, it’s that email.

As an individual, I can be somewhat picky. I have opinions. So a lot of our marketing practices and non-practices are me expressing my emotions productively, shall we say. If something makes me mad or I disagree with – like, I don’t love being inundated with ads. I don’t love watching videos online, trying to decide if I want to buy something, and not knowing if the person talking was paid to say what they’re saying, because not everybody discloses.

Chris Wanstrath: I will say though, right now a lot of the emphasis and thinking is around the alpha and getting out a browser. There’s a world where when this is released, we are thinking about marketing, and we’re thinking about positioning, and we’re thinking about maybe not what the default features are, but what’s the mode you turn on, or what’s the premier extension? A lot of times an extension is almost like a killer app; a reason to switch to something. And for me, the privacy stuff is super-important. I think it’s only gonna get worse in the sort of LLM world that we’re in right now, and the tracking… And so I think people are going to gravitate towards whatever keeps them private. And selfishly, that’s what I want. I’m happy – in terms of ads and stuff like that, I pay for YouTube premium. I might be one of the only people on the planet. I pay for Apple Music. I’m happy to pay to turn off ads. But the general searching of the web and the tracking and the fingerprinting and things like that - it’s just awful. So if we can offer a private mode or something different than incognito mode, that you could opt into… Apple recently did this with the private relay, where “Do you want to turn this on? We’re going to run all your traffic through our servers and anonymize it”, and that sort of thing. What you’re going to get is a little bit slower browsing experience.

I think that in the future that’s definitely a conversation we can have, about what to offer, what sort of packages that there are, what sort of extensions we promote, and how we distinguish ourself in the market towards regular consumers. And for me, I’m definitely going to push to at least have privacy extensions developed, and made premium, and kept up to date, because that’s what I want.

Daniel Stenberg: And how do you get the business to – I mean, how do you get a business in there really focused without sacrificing something? I mean, you’re not going to see anyone wanting to add ads in there. But the businesses – I mean, sure, you can get some kind of marketing value of being there, and everything… But as the network is growing, it’s going to be more and more expensive for everyone involved. So somewhere, someone has to get money in there.

Bryan Cantrill: And I’m like, “Let’s upload it to YouTube.” So we upload this video to YouTube, and thinking like “This will get like 1,000 views. It’ll be kind of fun. We’ll kind of show some of the things we’ve done in terms of the storage appliance.” I mean, I believe that thing has got like 4 million views at this point. The views are kind of crazy… And every so often it gets another like huge wave of views as it starts – the YouTube recommendation algorithm recommends it to people.

[00:12:19.20] So it’s a video that’s endured, and it was seen – so this is when we were at Sun Microsystems together… That video has been watched more than any other marketing material that Sun put together, that Sun developed. If you take the next, I believe, 10 put together, that video has been viewed more than they have been. It’s only Sun’s Super Bowl ads – Sun had some very ill-advised Super Bowl ads. The Sun Super Bowl ads - two Super Bowl ads - were viewed obviously by more people, but… And you know, Sun was the kind of company where it didn’t even occur to me to like ask permission before we did that… And fortunately, the marketing folks were pretty forgiving. They were like “One thing we do wish though is like – you didn’t actually mention the name Sun Microsystems at all.” I’m like “Oh, did we forget –” Like, no company name, no logo… It’s like “Oh, sorry about that. We’ve just mentioned Fishworks.”

Daniel Whitenack: Well, I guess it’s e-commerce, but also like web content development… It’s a very multi-modal thing, right? Like, you’ve got these product descriptions. That’s part of it. You’ve got product imagery, you’ve got website layout, you’ve got potentially ads, and integration with like other platforms… Talk a little bit about - like, within that space, because as you mentioned, there’s so many tasks to address within that space… As Shopify kind of looks at the merchant experience, how have you narrowed down on the particular problem sets that merchants really want to hand off, versus like those things – I know also from just being in it, marketing teams love to get in there and tweak things, and be part of the process… But they also really don’t want to do certain things too, or things that are just kind of grunt work, essentially…

Zach Lloyd: [46:02] But if you can get to a point where you have a really high NPS, like what we have, it just makes everything easier; it’s a really good indication of customer satisfaction. So that’s like a reason for me to believe “Oh, if we just made more people aware of it, people really dig it, we’ll get more users.” And so in the journey of a life of a startup, if you have a product people don’t like and they don’t retain, there’s just zero point in trying to grow it. I think we’re past the point of that. We have a product that people – at least not everyone, but some set of people really, really love. And so for us, to some extent, it’s more of a problem actually of awareness, marketing, can we build sort of like viral loops… Because for instance, most of our growth at work comes from people telling their friends about it, which is, again, where you want to be. We don’t really do paid marketing; we do like an occasional sponsorship, or work with influencers… There’s various things we’ve tried, but we’re not plowing money into Google, or Instagram ads, or something like that.

So for us, it’s how do we increase awareness, get more people to try it, and then how do we continue to make it so that when people try it, the likelihood of them sticking just goes up? So in very broad strokes, that’s how I think of it. We don’t have bulletin boards up of “Let’s crush Terminal”, or something like that… But yeah, we want people displacing the terminal, for sure.

John Spurlock: Right. And I don’t know if you’ve been following the – there was a big to-do in the podcast world last week. In Bloomberg there was an article about now that all these systems exist, they are gameable. So there’s apps that will have a third-party library that will ingest podcasts, or download podcasts effectively to get coins in a particular game. So you can get 1,000 coins by listening to 30 seconds of a podcast. Why is it 30 seconds? Because that is the Certified IAB download that triggers all of the “Oh, this is an authentic download. All the ads were fired.” And so that’s problematic, obviously. And I’m not against ads either, and I think actually some of these channels are legitimate marketing channels, but if you don’t know that going into an ad deal, let’s say, and now all of a sudden you get all this very cut-rate traffic, then that becomes extremely problematic.

So I think what OP3 is going to do is it’s going to hopefully identify the traffic, so you can slice and dice and see, “Oh, this show actually 50% of it is so-called rewarded traffic. So that’s interesting. We’re not going to throw it out, but we’ll show you… Maybe the CPMs for this should not be what they are.”

Jessica Kerr: …put it in their index, and somebody could find it, but they’d probably have to be pretty darn specific… Because your Google ranking depends on how many people link there, and nobody links there. There’s degrees of public; it’s technically out there and somebody could find it if they tried, versus it’s being advertised.

Honeycomb, in DevRel, I’m in the marketing department, which – I mean, DevRel is… Who knows where to put it; nobody does. But what I like about that is I get to see the process of the marketing people drawing lines between stuff the engineers make, either code or posts that we write, or content that we make. The marketing people are out there, drawing lines between people who might need to see it.

We’ve got SDRs, sales development reps out there, emailing people who’ve shown interest in Honeycomb, being like, “Hey, this resource might be interesting to you.” And we’ve got Google ads, and we’ve got LinkedIn ads, and social media… And all this stuff just draws the line between people who might actually use it and the stuff you’ve made. And I don’t think most developers appreciate that if you put something out there, you might as well not have, approximately, other than that you can go test it and feel good about it… [laughs]

Daniel Whitenack: I’m struck by the scenario that’s talked about in this article from Erik. He talks about a sort of mid-stage startup around 10 million… So that’s about the size that my wife’s business is, and looking at her marketing and sales/customer service department - if you think about that early stage, like you were talking about, it was basically her, she built up a ton of expertise and internal knowledge in terms of what was working and what was driving sales, and that basically boosted the company to mostly where it’s at. But then you start thinking “Okay, well it’s at a size where we’re hiring in marketing people, or people that are supposed to be driving sales.” Is it reasonable to assume that each of those people are going to have both the ownership over the business and the drive to build up that level of internal knowledge, and there’s gonna be appropriate knowledge transfer between all of these people coming in? It’s just not the case.

Like you say, you hit this wall where “Now how do we be creative, how do we try new things, and how do we make sure that we’re driving new sales, and growing?” It has to be data-driven at that point. But the culture wasn’t sort of set up that way organically. Not because they weren’t wanting to be that way, but because it just sort of organically grew into this department where they’re doing the things that, like you say, they know worked to some degree, and they felt like were still working… So I think now, in her company, they’re doing a lot of thinking about “How do they drive that data-driven culture in marketing?” And some of it is just the very simple stuff that even Erik talked about in his article, like “Do people understand how UTM codes and website traffic works?” There needs to be some knowledge sharing there, and then there needs to be common data gathering, like “Okay, we’ve got this stuff over here in Facebook Pixel, and this stuff over here in Google Analytics, and this stuff over here in Shopify, and this stuff over here in these random places…” No one can really coalesce around anything if all of that is fragmented out, so there needs to be data aggregation together, there needs to be a common way to look at it…

[28:20] And then, you know, building that culture - it’s also about people’s motivation. You have to think about “If I’m gonna show something to this marketing person, how are they motivated by that?” I mean, it could be like commissions, or something. If you make this much off of Facebook ads, then you get this commission or this incentive. Well, pretty quickly they’re gonna wanna know how much they’re making off of Facebook ads, and if they’re not setting up their UTMs right and they’re not using the common systems where data is coming in, then they’re not gonna be able to know

Mitch Wainer: So I’m 36 years old, and when I was in high school and when I was even in college, fortunately there were no classes on internet marketing. If you grew up with AOL, getting those CDs in the mail in the mid-to-late ‘90s, with the dial-up internet sound, which we all remember, basically it was the Wild Wild West. The internet was so new. Internet commerce, and sites like eBay… Basically, just learning the ropes of how to write HTML, and I taught myself Photoshop and how to design images graphically using Photoshop, building websites on my own from the ground-up, so learning some basic frontend code… And just teaching myself everything. Again, there wasn’t courses in school to take. Everything from a marketing perspective was fairly high-level and generic, basically pulling from traditional marketing principles… Which are valuable; it’s not like they’re not valuable. The 4 P’s of marketing: Positioning, Price, Place, Promotion. Those things will always stick out from my marketing courses, and they are definitely helpful as building blocks… But at the end of the day, when I was in college or when I was in high school, I was just always a tinkerer, a builder, just building online businesses, building websites, consulting, building websites for other companies, clients… And basically just doing that from age 13 till when I graduated school at age 21-22.

[04:25] After college, I dove into an integrated marketing firm, a digital marketing firm where I learned branding, digital marketing, PR, brand… So the full stack of marketing I was exposed to after I graduated. So I came to the table with a ton of knowledge from age 13 to 22. Basically, almost ten years of experience, teaching myself how to code, how to build websites, how to run ads online, how to sell on eBay, to then learning everything about the world of marketing, working at an ad agency with clients that were Fortune 100 clients, so TD Ameritrade, McKesson, big names. So I was teaching them how to leverage social media to drive more business, I was teaching them how to leverage SEO to drive more organic traffic to their website… And I was doing this at age 22 to age 25, and basically just kind of hit a wall where I was like “I’ve not equity in this agency.” I joined the company in 2008, right before the market crashed, and we basically laid off 90% of the staff at the agency, because marketing budgets are the first budgets to get slashed when the economy tanks… So I was one of the last people standing at this business, just kind of getting by, making a decent salary, like 90k a year. I didn’t have any equity, I wasn’t learning, I was still teaching myself everything… And I just basically hit a wall.

I remember when this happened, I just started to reach out for basically advice and help… And I cold-emailed Jason Calacanis, who runs This Week in Startups, another great podcast show… And I asked him, “Hey, I have all this talent, I’m lost. Can you give me some career advice here? Where should I go from here?” And I came in on an Ask Jason segment. During this time I also started to apply for many other open positions on CareerBuilder at the time, on Indeed… I don’t know if Indeed was up, but all the different job sites.

Jerod Santo: We talk about that a lot on our shows, as things grow up, even though open source, how that is only icky if you do it icky… Like, marketing or sales is really just providing value and just showing people that value, and either convincing them of it, or just showing it to them… But a lot of the real either not good or insincere marketing that goes on is very unattractive, and lack of sincerity is something that I don’t appreciate, and I think a lot of our community also doesn’t… So I think an ad-free offering for those who do want a more direct relationship, but really is just sick of the ads - why not give that option? Why not?

[12:23] Well, the reason why not is because it was gonna be a lot of work… That was the reason why not. So we were talking about how we’re kind of late at this point… We had been thinking about rebooting the membership program for a while, but we’ve just prioritized other things. And a lot of that just has to do with the effort involved, don’t you think? Did you have other reservations besides pulling it together? We’ve had a notion card for over a year with details on how we would do this…

Mike McCourt: Yeah, absolutely. As I mentioned, we do – well, the core of Invoca is call tracking, so you can attribute a phone call to an ad… That would allow you to see which ads were driving the most calls. But really, as a marketer, what you wanna understand is what’s driving revenue. And that requires understanding what actually happened on each of the calls. So you don’t wanna just optimize for a marketing campaign to drive more calls, you wanna optimize for one that drives more calls of people who actually go on and buy something.

Eric Holscher: [16:21] Totally, yeah. And we let people opt out of advertising if they’ve contributed code, or if you’re a library that we’re using in our stuff… Obviously, we’ll just be like “Yeah, sure.” We just won’t put ads on it.

The other thing is we let people opt out of paid advertising. This is kind of a cool program that we call Community Ads. So any of our projects can say “We don’t want paid advertising”, so instead what we’ll do is we’ll show ads for community projects. A lot of conferences that don’t have a marketing budget, a lot of that kind of stuff.

Brian Bondy: Yeah, I don’t think that probably our biggest marketing point is that we’re a privacy-based browser; not everyone really understands privacy or the need for privacy, but people do understand speed, so when you’re just not loading more than 50% of an average web page, you can really see the difference in speed, and people understand speed pretty easily.

There’s also the point that people are kind of tired of Google and Facebook, so just being the anti-Google browser, that gives you the same kind of functionality kind of speaks for itself. Then there’s also the cohort that wants to try out the user private ads, and wants to basically make money for giving out their attention, which they give for free today.

Jerod Santo: Well, that’s fine. That’s all well and good. But the naming is what I care about. You’re targeting alcohol at technical people, basically. Isn’t that like a small cross-section of the world? Are you limited in your –

Beyang Liu: It’s absolutely a challenge and it’s something that has slowed us down a bit. The in-editor experience, I think, we’ve had a bit more challenge in pushing that forward than we would have… Like, we ideally would have liked to move faster on the in-editor UX, but because we’re targeting a variety of different editors and deployment constraints, that has constrained what we’ve been able to do there, to a certain extent. But I think now we’re at the point where we’ve kind of figured out all the most important parts for how to deliver this into large-scale organizations… And so now revisiting the core UX, I think we feel pretty good about the degree to which we can implement all the things that people want in terms of AI code generation and agentic automation within the editor. But it does remain an ongoing challenge. It’s not a trivial problem by any stretch to solve, and it’s something that a lot of the upstart people trying to do things with like code plus AI they have not solved yet, and I think will take some time for them to solve.

Phillip Carter: Surprisingly, pretty well. So at the time, Miguel - he’s now a good friend; shout-out to Miguel. You should talk to him sometime. He’s amazing. He was the lead of the Mono project, he founded it when it started, and then helped create Xamarin with Nat, who has since became CEO of GitHub, and all that… But they were very much set out to focusing their runtime on making it work as well on client libraries as much as they could. Once mobile hit, Miguel was attached to it, and he’s like “I love this form factor, but I want to use C#. That’s just the way it’s going to be.” And when you make a lot of optimizations for a mobile form factor - which is great - unfortunately, that can often come at the expense of really good performance server-side for… The constraints are just fundamentally different, when you have a backend service where GC pressure really matters when you have a couple million requests per second or something like that. It’s just fundamental behavior of the garbage collector that needs to work a certain way compared to how you would want it to work in a battery-constrained device doing certain things.

Obviously, lots of similarities. There’s elements of systems programming going on here, where there’s good code written in both places… But very often, when you would try to host a monoservice somewhere, it would just fall over, and you’d be like “Oh, is this a joke?’ It’s like “No, it’s not, actually. It was just made for something completely different.” So we have this kind of complex relationship - this was before the acquisition of Xamarin - when we were building our own thing and targeting the backend with ASP.NET apps, and saying, “Okay, we want to make this – a Go developer should be able to pick up our stack and be like “Oh, great. This has the same perf that I care about.” That was sort of like the target we were going for.

[00:20:04.25] But on the Xamarin client side, we’re like “Okay, this is just a fundamentally different runtime, and actually even different set of libraries.” And then we worked with them to start unifying some of the library layer. Because there’s just all the different utilities in the .NET standard library that - it really doesn’t matter where it runs… But they had their own version of this, and we had our own version of this, and we’re like “Okay, this is–” Regardless of what degree we work together on, we all agree this should just be a standard that we all consume. And who owns the code? We’ll figure that out. It’s an open source project all around anyways, and so there’s actually a lot of collaboration on that side of things… And then eventually, strategically, I think they were probably aiming for this at some point. We acquired Xamarin, at which point we were able to unify significantly more… And then we actually were able to go on a very big technical project where we unified the runtimes entirely, and were able to actually do that quite successfully, to the point where it’s actually the same singular runtime that can run on a client device, or on the backend. And they have excellent performance characteristics, and it’s actually - different parts of the runtime will activate depending on the deployment environment, and the garbage collector has 5 or 6 different modes that it can operate under… And it’ll have different behaviors depending on the kind of thing that it’s packaged into, and stuff. And this is all something that was architected and designed for. It’s pretty wild.