From 500 Rejections to a $300M Company: Paul Klein IV on Solo Founding Browserbase

I applied to 500 internships to get my first internship at Twilio. I got rejected from 498, and we've now surpassed some of the market cap. I do think I am a 5-tool founder where I can do soup to nuts everything you need to do. You can play all the roles you need to build a company before hiring for them.

You said that you don't think that anybody who's a first-time founder should be a solo founder.

I still 100% believe that, mostly because I was so dumb as a first-time founder. I mean, you make so many mistakes, you shoot so many of your own foot guns. Being a solo founder is not worth it. You're going to get fat. You're not going to see your friends. You're going to have no life whatsoever, and you're start-up probably won't work out statistically. I did not choose to be a solo founder. I was a solo founder because no one wanted to be my co-founder. If your co-founder is way richer than you, it kind of sucks. Your economic outcomes might not be the same if you decide to sell the company or not. Like, they might be so wealthy, they're like, ah, we don't need to sell for $10 million. And you might be a broke college student. There's one decision maker, and decisiveness drives highly effective companies. If you can make quick decisions, you can move faster than other people. Next company I start, if I do it again, I got to watch that.

It's really awesome to be talking with you. You've spoken to ODF before, you're an ODF alum yourself, but we've never really spoken specifically about solo founding. And I think it's just a really interesting topic. You've been a co-founder before, you're solo founding Browserbase. So I think if we could just jump into it and talk about that, that would be really interesting. The first thing that kind of comes to mind is you tweeted at one point, you said that you don't think that anybody who's a first-time founder should be a solo founder. So maybe we could jump off with that.

Oh yeah, I still 100% I can't believe that. Mostly because I was so dumb as a first-time founder. I mean, you make so many mistakes, you shoot so many of your own footguns, and having somebody who can cover for you and have your back and be in it with you is extremely important. I think it's very rare to have first-time founders be solo founders that succeed. And it just kind of makes sense to me because like the journey of first-time founding is a journey of many mistakes. And if your business is so strong, your market is so good, your first company may do extremely well. Like, it turns out that like bad execution in amazing markets is good enough. Like, just pick great markets. But if you're in a very competitive market like this day and age with AI, every market is extremely competitive. It's the most competitive I've ever seen startups ever in my life. That means you have to be on your A-game. And it means having a co-founder that can complement you in some skills or even just give you more space to make less mistakes or recover from those mistakes. But as a second-time founder, um, I've made a lot of painful mistakes and I remember those things. They're burned into my memory. Uh, ways I could have fundraised better, uh, things I've learned from hiring and firing and growing a team, engineering decisions I've made. Don't use this database, use that database, right? All of those things I've learned firsthand and it allows me to move much faster the second time. I think that the first time I had a co-founder back me up so we could still move just as fast but have a lot more coverage across the two of us.

For your first company, you weren't the CEO, you were the CTO, right? How did you end up deciding who was going to be leading the company and sort of the dynamic of who would be doing what?

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I was certainly the right person to be the CTO. I was the most like technical, like backend developer of the gang. And, you know, I had two other co-founders, me, Lan, and Jun. Jun was just the most brilliant designer I've ever met in my entire life. Programming with Jun was just so intoxicating. It was just so fun. Like I'd do the backend, he'd build the frontend. It was just so great. So he was obviously gonna run product and design. And then Lan was just like the growth machine. Like he helped us go viral. He had the best Twitter account. So he had to be the CEO, obviously best Twitter account. He was so much more than that, you know, just super smart, incepted the idea, incepted the pivot, did a lot of the fundraising, like was the right person to kind of be the face of the company more broadly. And that setup was really great for us. Honestly, I was very happy with it.

And that first company, you know, you started off essentially because it kind of, the product and the business almost got pulled out of you, right? You were building this and you all of a sudden you kind of had a company, right? Can you say a little bit more about that and maybe juxtapose to Browserbase?

Yeah. The founding story of Streamclub, which is the first company I started with, um, Lampage and Jun Hong, um, was really about like, we, I can't remember, I don't forget it. I came home from work. on a Friday and I was just super pissed off. Like something had happened at work where like my pull request got a lot of comments or I just couldn't do something I wanted to. I was just really pissed. And somehow Lan had coincidentally messaged me like, hey, do you want to hack on this project with us? We're gonna, we're building this thing. And I was like, yeah, that sounds really cool. I'd love to hack on something. And the next 72 hours was just like a coding binge to build the first version of Stream Club. Uh, we launched on Product Hunt on Monday and it became the number one product of the day. And it was a virtual event software during COVID Like, very obvious in hindsight, but we were kind of early on it. We were like March 2020, and then a lot of stuff followed on. So I kind of told the guys, like, if we get in the YC or if we raise money, I'll quit my job. And we raised some money, and I was like, all right, cool, I'll quit my job. And we started StreamClub together. And it really was more like we built something, it got traction, and it became clear it should be a startup. That's the way I think a lot of first-time founders do it. It's like, they have something that's working and they're like, this is going to be worth it. And they like de-risked it and go. Whereas the second time it was much more, you know, with Browserbase, it was much more intentional. It's like, I believe this market is like well positioned to grow. I think I have a good background to go do it. Um, and I wrote a lot about this space and the opportunity here. I will go validate this thing, um, very carefully and calculated and then prove that it is worth to build a company in, then go interview people. Then raise money, then start company. So much more like intentional the second time. And I think it's hard to do that the first time unless you're really disciplined. And I think everybody needs to have like, everyone has a first time company who just kind of jumps into it, often has a pivot anyways. The pivot rates are much higher for first time companies than second time companies. And that to me just feels like the, I have no regrets about the way I started my first company. It's where I got to today. And oftentimes I give advice to founders about their first company, not to try and dissuade them, because I've actually realized that like as much advice as you give to founders, you have to live that experience to learn it, right? Like you could read every Paul Graham blog post, watch every startup school talk, and still hire slow and fire slow. And no matter what, you have to like feel those experiences to learn the lessons. And, um, I just kind of tell my story to add more color to it, but when I angel invest in companies, I know that they're going to have to learn the hard lessons on their own. And all I can do is just be supportive of them and be the person they come to and help them reflect and learn lessons themselves. That's the most important part of my participation in the startup ecosystem is helping people reflect and learn the lessons that they've experienced.

I'm excited to reflect on some of the decisions that you've made, and maybe you could share a little bit more about how it came to be that you decided to build Browserbase. I know you've said in the past that starting a company should almost be a last resort, but also this idea of how you decided to make the decisions early on, right? So for instance, being a solo founder or when to raise money or when to hire, I think that a lot of these early decisions that people make with companies ultimately really affect the trajectory of the company overall. So, you know, these decisions might— maybe some of them weren't that hard to make at the time, but ultimately I think they define the company in a lot of ways. I mean, we're sitting here talking about solo founders. And I think that it was really funny. I was listening to a bunch of prior podcasts and things you've recorded, and one, one of your own investors, you know, erroneously referred to you as a co-founder of Browserbase. And it's just because that is just such a normal thing to think, right? So I'm just really curious, you know, these early decisions, how you made them, how you thought through them at the time.

And there's like two things that are different about Browserbase. One is my second company, and it's also my first time being a solo founder, right? So those two different elements really change a lot of the calculus for what goes into it, right? Because the second time, my bar is so much higher to start this company, right? Like the first time you start a company, there's things that you learn just by starting a company, like how to incorporate, like what is, what is Delaware franchise tax like, like how to hire, how to fundraise. Those are like net positives. Even if the company doesn't work out, you've learned new skills. The second time you don't get those same net new skills. Like, I don't relearn how to fundraise. Maybe I fundraise a little better, or the incorporation process is still the same, right? So the second time you kind of do it, you need it to work because that's where you have to get further than your first one. That's where the lessons come in, right? So my bar to start something was just much, much higher. I'll also add that like being solo was a bit of an intentional choice, but also not because I did do a bunch of co-founder dating. I had several people I've asked to be my co-founder of BrowserBase. I actually, in the early days, gave out the co-founder. I was like, you could be the co-founder. And people still say we no. So I'm a solo founder, not by choice, but I've really embraced it because it turns out to be the right thing for us. And the journey of BrowserBase is quite simple, right? Like I was 2 years into an acquisition and I had been writing every single month about startups I cared about, mostly because it was just a fun exercise. I love talking about startups. I love DevTools and infrastructure. I did this memo. It was called An Internet Browser for AI. I did 3,000 words about how my experience with headless browsers, and I saw this opportunity that like AI needs a way to interact with the internet. AI needs to use a browser. Someone should build the browser tool for AI, and that could be a whole company in itself. With that blog post, I sent it to a bunch of people and they said, wow, this is really, really good. And from there it gave me confidence that maybe I could build a company in this space. And I started to do more interviews. I started to do more kind of customer conversations and figure out, you know, if this is something that's worth building in. And when customers started like saying they wanted to angel invest in the company, that's how I knew there was something special there. From then I went on and raised a pre-seed round and I didn't have a co-founder. I was so nervous about that. I was like, oh, no one's going to want to invest in this if I don't have a co-founder. But I knew in my heart that I had all the tools I needed to start this company. Right? Like I knew how to grow and talk about product. I knew how to like get on Twitter. I knew how to build the product. I knew how to sell. I knew how to fundraise. I knew how to do stuff like payroll because I had done that at my last company. Right? That some people have talked about the 5-tool founder thing. It almost reminds me of like the scene from Moneyball, the 5-tool baseball player. I do think I am a 5-tool founder where I can do, you know, soup to nuts everything you need to do. You can play all the roles you need to build a company. Before hiring for them. And that enabled me to be a solo founder and feel really comfortable jumping in and starting Browserbase as one person, you know, with, you know, a small pre-seed in the bank and then go on 2 years later to be almost a 50-person company, you know, a Series B company and really growing on a trajectory that could make us a really category-defining infrastructure company.

It feels like most of the people who are solo founders will be coming in the future, right? Like there aren't that many solo founders in the past. So, so the majority of people who start companies have yet to start them. Them, right? As solo founders. So part of the reason that we're recording these conversations is for people to get a sense of what it was like when you did it. Um, what were the things that you did maybe differently than when you had co-founders? One of the big things, of course, when you have co-founders is you effectively have, you know, people who can build with you. But if you're a solo founder, you start off and it's just you. What was it like when you went and sort of thought about adding people to the team? Like adding the first person?

Yeah, you know, when you are a solo founder, you have to hire much more rapidly, right? And within, within the first month or two, I had some contractors working for us. Some of those contractors still work for us to this day, which is fantastic, almost 2 years later. And within the first 3, 4 months, you know, we had our founding team members that had joined. And yes, as a solo founder, you are single-threaded by default, right? You must get multi-threaded. You must be able to have someone building the product while you're hiring, right? And You have to have someone selling the product while you're hiring and doing that as soon as possible and doing it as well as possible because nothing's worse than having a team that's like takes more than your time, more of your time than less. So hiring really well is important. That's something I prioritized in the early days, but I also had to get enough traction to convince people to work for us, right? So by the time I raised my seed round, I didn't have any employees. I raised a pre-seed and a seed. I still don't have any employees. I didn't have really much customers, but I had a product. The product worked pretty well for what the time like we had it. I spent like the first 90 days really hacking on the product to really connect what we were building with people who wanted to join, prospective customers, and really trying to give people evidence that this will be something real. You should come work on this thing. You should come work with me. It really helped. And thankfully, with some great investors behind me, it was possible to get somebody to come work on this thing and prove that wasn't crazy. There's this like great scene of this guy dancing at a music festival on his own and like he's dancing alone and no one was dancing with him. And then like the first follower comes and dances with him and then there's like a whole crowd that forms. I do think, you know, the founding engineer, which in our case is Dom, is one of the most important roles that someone can take. And I'm super thankful to have him on our team and still have him here, you know, almost 2 years later. And that first person, that first employee is just super special and always be like one of the most special roles that we have.

It feels like oftentimes people discount the idea of working with contractors early on. And I know that you've done it successfully and you even raised your two rounds of funding before you actually had a full-time teammate. Magic School is another company where they've just grown tremendously. They're the fastest growing education company of all time, and they built their first product with just the founder who was non-technical doing all the product advice for it, and then a contractor over a weekend, and it had thousands of people using it within a week, you know. It seems like contractors could be a really good way of building, even if you are technical, you were a CTO of your last company. Can you share a little bit more about your philosophy around working with contractors?

I view them as you can hire anybody, right? Like, but sometimes it's risky to have someone quit their job and join you or commit to you full-time exclusively. It's like dating, right? And for a contractor, it's like a very low-stakes way to trial out. I would refer to contractors and work trials, very similar, like, uh, contracts are just really longer-term work trials sometimes, right? I think it's become more and more common. And if you look at like YC companies, you can see a lot of people are doing contracting and it's useful for the person doing contracting to figure out like, do they wanna work at this company or not? Right? So I think it's mutually beneficial. Um, of course, like over time, like if they're gonna contract for a very long time, there needs to be more sustainable structure there. Is it like hourly or is it a stipend situation? Like how do they manage their work? You know, what's the rules and regulations based on where they're, where they live. These are all things that come into play longer term. But I guess like the point on contractors for solo founding in the earliest days is that it turns out you can just DM someone you like on Twitter and say, can I pay you a bunch of money to come work with me for a couple weeks? And if they do it, you have a good chance of convincing them to work with you for the duration of the company. And it's like contracting to convince someone to work for you is a pretty good way to get your foot in the door. Especially if you're high conviction on who that person is.

That's really cool. And when you thought about— when you thought about like raising money and things like that, I know that, you know, there's all sorts of philosophies about when to raise money, how to raise money. You have a pretty unique one in that you essentially have had these relationships. You built relationships with people long before, you know, you want to fundraise or you didn't even really need to fundraise. It was almost more of like a people already knew you and they knew what you were working on. So the money kind of came probably a little bit more organically. But can you speak a little bit more to that philosophy and that style? Because, you know, somebody is thinking about fundraising now, like that they're listening to what we're talking about, that obviously that's no good because it's too late. It's too late. But you played the long game in terms of these relationships, which I think is what tech is all about.

Yeah. And it's a little troublesome because I think I'm out of relationships right now for my Series C. Like, I really only knew early-stage people, so I got to start all over again, right? But I guess that something happens where sometimes people will try and shotgun marry their investor, right? They're gonna go, I'm gonna run a process, I'm gonna run a really tight process and, and do the best price. And it turns out if you are trying to do the best price, you end up probably not prioritizing the best partner or the best relationship for you. And with fundraising ever, I always prioritize the relationship with the partner. This person owns a serious amount of your company. This person will be meaningful to the duration of your company, and you want to make sure that you love working with them and you believe in them. So my hot take on fundraising is actually don't run a tight process. We're in a really slow and loose process. Take your time, build relationships, and actually the fundraising will happen inevitably. It will happen when you need it to. And it starts with a conversation like the best way you can ever raise money is tell someone a year in advance, hey, I'm going to go do this thing, I'm going to go hit this much ARR, I'm going to go hire these people, etc. And then you actually do that and come back to them and say, hey, I did this thing. That's like so trust building. And fundraising is an exercise of like, do I trust this person to give them billions of dollars? And that takes time. So for me, I always felt like the traditional, like, let's go run a tight process is actually against the best interests of a lot of people who are fundraising. However, it is necessary because sometimes people are on a tight timeline. They have a certain amount of runway or some market moving— market thing is happening they have to go chase down. In the end, you have to do what your circumstances allows you to. And that might mean a more traditional fundraising process. But if you have time, time is always a luxury. Find the people that you think are the best investors in your space that you admire. Try and find a way to go to an event they're hosting and introduce yourself and then send them a memo you write or a blog post you write. That's very interesting. Follow them on Twitter and reply to their tweets. Build that relationship up.

This is far in advance of a time that you would actually be raising money.

Yeah, potentially. Yeah. I mean, and if you want to compress it, I mean, even 3 months ahead of a round is appropriate. Like, it doesn't have to be 10 years ago I went to Stanford and it turns out Bucky Moore was there, right? Like, no, it actually could be like, hey, yeah, 3 months ago I saw that somebody tweeted this thing. I went to an event to mention that tweet. We— I said, can we get a coffee? Very casually, low stakes. Took forever to schedule it. It happened that that person— and then you kept in contact for them up until your round was ready and they already knew you. Like, maybe a goal should be having 3 touchpoints with a potential investor before you start a round process is a good rule for how often you should know somebody before you raise money from them. It's kind of like if you're dating a friend that you're introduced to, like you want to like meet them 3 times before you get exclusive. Fundraising is like dating in a lot of ways. I'd really kind of compare the two.

And, you know, I think that there's something really interesting about kind of culture when it comes to companies that are started by solo founders, because in many ways, you know, roles and responsibilities change over time with co-founders. Some co-founders, maybe they continue to be the CTO, but as a company scales, maybe they become more of an IC. In the case of that happening, as long as the co-founders are at the company, they still have this sort of like halo of influence. Sort of cultural carriers. And I'm curious how you think about kind of carrying the culture of a company and sort of being around and present as one person compared to, you know, having that sort of spread across, you know, 2 or 3 people.

Yeah, I mean, like every great company becomes a solo-founded company at one point. Like you often think of Jobs and not Wozniak, right? You think of Gates and not Paul Allen. Um, you think of Drew Houston, uh, you think of Zuck, and you don't really think of Dustin Moskovitz, right? Like, but now he's at Asana and you think of Dustin and not whoever else is co-founding it there, right? So it seems like many great companies do personify one single founder to be the founder. Even Anthropic, Dario is one I think people would more often recognize than the other co-founders, or Sam Altman, even though there were other co-founders of OpenAI. Right? So it's funny, like I think like solo founding is a thing. Um, but in the end there's like a CEO needs to lead the company from the front and that person is going to set the tone. It's very rare that there's businesses that are 50/50 co-founder split. I think the Instagram founders like Kevin Systrom, um, and, and Mike, uh, I forget his last name. Mike Isaac, I think, or Krieger. Uh, Mike Krieger. Thank you. Right? Like, so those two were pretty equal split co-founders. That's very rare, I'd say. Um, so I don't know, I look to like great executives and great founders often have like a one person leads the charge from the front type of mentality. And at Browserbase, yeah, I don't have somebody else to help cover and build culture, but we have a bunch of amazing people who are here that aren't founders that are just as influential on the culture of the company and what we're building here. And that's, that's why like as a solo founder, the culture of the team is just extremely important for you to build. It's extremely important to solidify. And that means like you have to hire great leaders, you have to help grow people into leaders. You need to have the team really grow around the values that you support and start to represent them yourself. You know, you've done it right when the team calls you out that you're not acting against the values you've set as a founder. That's a huge sign. People often say that your company becomes a mirror of your flaws as a founder. That's totally true. When I'm having a bad day, I know that reflects some things that happen within the company. So all in all, I think it just requires a degree of very high self-awareness to build a culture as a solo founder. But it's also really beautiful because it's so direct. It's you to the company. There's only one layer of alignment. When you have co-founders, you have to be aligned to your co-founder and then the co-founder and you need to be aligned to the company. That's much more complex and a little bit more muddled. You don't know which person is feeling insecure. Therefore, the company is feeling insecure about a feature. I know if I'm feeling insecure about something, the company will pick that up and I'll see that in some, you know, way that we're investing or some hedge that someone's doing. I can't hide my emotions and the company picks on that vibe. So I think it's really beautiful. I think it actually allows you to build stronger cultures when you have a solo founder because the clarity is there. The clarity alignment is there all the time, every single day.

You know, Celine Hallywaugh, who's the founder of Loyal, you might have met through ODF, but You know, she talks about sort of how solo-founded companies seem to really reflect both the positives and also the maybe the bad habits of the solo founder. And then John Andrew, who's another solo founder of Wander, he talks a lot about how Wander is sort of his soul as expressed by a company. And both of those things kind of speak in what you were talking about, kind of speak to this idea of authorship where people talk about ownership and they say, oh, well, if you're a solo founder, you own 100% of the company. Of course, until you have investors, until you have teammates that you're giving equity to for all of their hard work. So but the thing that I think that startups have a lot more, solo-founded startups have a lot more, is that this authorship level, almost like a film director or something like that. And I'm curious what your thoughts are around authorship. And sort of the good parts of it, the challenges that you might have around authorship with, of course, the understanding that there's a lot more people that make a movie than a director.

Yeah.

So it's not to say or to trivialize all these incredible contributions that other people make.

Yeah, maybe my take on authorship is actually you, you need to put people in a spotlight more. And I think at Browserbase we do a good job of building brands. Like you go on Twitter and there are people that have the little B next to their name that have their own independent brands. And that's a very intentional choice. If you come work at this company, one of the things we want to give you is brand equity, and we're going to help you build your brand as an individual. And I hope one day you build a great company and you worked at BrowseBase before it. That's great for us. Hey, BrowseBase is a place where the next billion-dollar company was spun out of as an incubation. That's really compelling. And my job is to make the most of the time that you're here, hopefully keep you here for a long time. But if you go leave, I know that you're, you know, you're legacy afterwards is going to show other people what it's like when you work at BrowseBase and it's very transformative. So I kind of view like that authorship is not only just authoring the future of this company, it's authoring the future of everybody's lives who works here. I think that's a much bigger meaning actually. And there's nothing more powerful. Like I can show you who currently works here. I can show you who used to work here and what cool stuff they're doing now too. Yeah. Right. I think that's super meaningful that this is just one stop and I, I'm very transparent to admit like I hope this is the last place you ever work. I hope if we're successful, it's the last job you'd ever need to have. But if you do have to go somewhere else, I am understanding of that. And I hope you do amazing things, 'cause that will look great for our company that this was a place that you worked on and then you went to do amazing things. So that authorship that I think about is like not only having pride in the craft of the products we're building, in the brand we're building, but the team we're building and the identities of all those people and how we tie that together to some greater culture where if you meet someone, you'd be like, they're a great fit for Browserbase. Like, if people in the world are saying that, that means they understand our culture and our values. And that's just something I could be very proud of.

So I believe that Twilio was your first professional sort of startup experience, though I guess they were pretty much— they announced that they were going to IPO right when you got there. What did you learn from Twilio? Because it feels like they have a really great alumni network, people who have started companies after. And clearly, I think that, you know, if Browserbase isn't the last company someone works at, hopefully there will be so many amazing people who are starting great companies out of Browserbase, just like many started great companies out of Twilio.

Yeah, I mean, Twilio, it was 800 people when I joined and I left when it was like 3,000. I think it's now north of 8,000, maybe 10,000, maybe more. And what I learned from Twilio was, was really like a few things that like I saw an amazing founder up close. I think Jeff Lawson is one of the best infrastructure founders that has ever been out there. He's defined things like usage-based pricing, being a multi-product company in infra, being able to build amazing partnerships, being an API company for SMS globally means you're a partnerships machine. To get all these partnerships with every telecom is extremely challenging. They did that really well. And they ran a financially sound business. It's funny, while I was at Twilio, the whole WeWork drama happened. And I was so shocked, 'cause like, wait, in the all-hands every month, we talk about all these deep, deep financial metrics. We knew the business very well. We knew all the pros and cons. And you're telling me this company's like bleeding money and raised all this valuation. And it was just so surprising to me. I thought all companies were run like Twilio was. I took it for granted up until that point. So seeing a sophisticated leadership team, that's George Hu, who was COO, who did an amazing go-to-market playbook on Twilio while I was there. Lee Kilpatrick, who is one of the best CFOs I've ever seen in infra as well. And a bunch of other amazing players that were there. Uh, and by the way, I'm like, I'm name dropping these people. I don't know them. I've never met them in my life. Yeah. I was just like this engineer sitting in the all hands taking notes because most of my net worth was in Twilio stock and I was trying to make sure it was gonna go up or if I should sell it. Um, every earnings call I sat there listening like I was an analyst because my entire wealth was in this company's stock and I was gonna try to go day trade. Like, do I get rid of it at the vest or not? It was, it was so cool. I got to see the effects of the work and the effects of running a great business up close. And they were so transparent with the way they run the company. And I always say that I got my MBA in business at like at Twilio in those all hands learning about, hey, infrastructure businesses are cool because they start to compound in growth really nicely. Net revenue retention is built in. Like when you sell infrastructure, people build on you and their businesses will naturally grow. Your revenue from them will naturally grow. There's all these interesting things I saw. I saw a lot of culture that's really cool. I saw in-person was very effective there. I saw what a great office culture was like, what great engineers were like. I didn't learn much about startups because it was later stage. I learned a lot about great infrastructure businesses at scale. And I've taken that and really applied that here. I mean, our logo is red. I don't know. That's kind of unintentional, but I have to imagine red logos are kind of a bold thing to do. And every infra company I've worked at has had a red logo, both Twilio and Mux. But we made it a red logo more for the emoji. It's another story.

Yeah, interesting. So I think that there are all these decisions you can make and they're all personal decisions. And honestly, you know, I think that if we hadn't been 7 years into ODF, I might have thought that there were more or very much fewer permutations that would work for startups. We've seen so many startups be successful by doing things in completely different ways. We've seen solo founders, we've seen people who have the co-founders live in one city, but the entire team is remote other than the co-founders. We have, you know, co-founders who live on different continents like we have. We have extremely intense workplace environments that are all in-person. There's all these different permutations. That's only talking about mostly sort of the geo stuff. But what were some of the decisions that you've made that are personal decisions for you that you thought would be really good for how you wanted to build Browserbase?

Yeah, there's a few. I mean, the obvious stuff is in-person in San Francisco. That was important for me because I wanted to build a company where I could come to work every day and hang out with everybody. And that made life a lot harder convincing people to move here. We've had many people move here. I think over 25% of the company's moved to San Francisco for this job. Um, that's obviously challenging, but that is personal to me. I don't think in-person work is better than remote work. I think they're just two different working styles. I think hybrid is probably really challenging, uh, of, of the two. But there's companies like Railway that pull off remote really well. I, I admire them. The company I could run was in person. I think the thing that I definitely was most intentional about was the culture we wanted to build and the vibe I wanted to feel at our company, which is this closeness and like connectedness. I didn't want to feel like it was cold. I didn't want like a revolving door performance culture where you just would not give people a second chance. We're big on second chances here, and that's because I had a second chance. Like, I didn't go to a great school. As a good name brand. Someone tweeted today, actually, Jonathan from Brex, actually, he tweeted, how come no good founders have come out of SF State? And then someone tagged me in the comments like, Paul, don't let the slander happen.

So I was just reading about this. Yeah, I was totally not true, by the way.

Jonathan, founder of Arista Networks, went to SF State.

So but I was curious about that because, you know, of course, like we look at, we look at all the— I went to music school. So yeah, so, so I also didn't come from necessarily a traditional place. Juilliard, right?

Julie went to Juilliard?

No, no, nothing quite that good. But I think that the thing that's really interesting is like, yeah, like that is uncommon. You know, obviously there are some success stories from it, but what's your take on that? Like you said something about second chances there too.

Well, so the way I applied to 500 internships to get my first internship at Twilio, I got rejected from 498. Wow. And then the last— I'm not— that's not like— I have a spreadsheet still that shows all the companies I got rejected from, and we've now surpassed some of the market cap, which is cool, right? So, but the two I got into, I got into Amazon and Twilio. And the tech lead at Twilio, when I spoke with him, he's like, yeah, I like picked your name out of the pile and the local guy sounds kind of interesting. And he gave me a chance. It was pretty much random. Like, I would not pass any of their filters or bars. I just got lucky and I made it a point, like at that internship I was surrounded by people who went to amazing schools that are much more well known. You know, when I used to apply for internships, they'd have like a dropdown which would list like, you know, these great schools that I hire from now, like Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Columbia, CMU, and then there'd be other. And I was always under the other category. And I've made it a point that when somebody wants to work here, I love non-traditional backgrounds. I think it's actually where you find a ton of alpha. In people, especially technology. And we have a plethora of people here who never went to college. And they're not like fancy dropouts that went to like Stanford and left. It's like, no, they just didn't go to college or they went to like some state school and then like got a job and started working or they started their own business right out of high school or even in high school. They maybe they don't even have like a CS degree or they worked in a completely different industry. I love this idea of giving people a chance to work at a company and, and seeing what they're capable of. Because that's where you can build loyalty. That's where you can see really, really unique outcomes happen. And then when they're on the job, you can't just like hire people with a chip on their shoulder or non-traditional background and like just dump them in and say, good luck. Like, you have to develop people. And one of our values is, you know, thrive through growth and embrace your mistakes. And that is true. Like, people here mess up. They will make mistakes. I make mistakes all the time. If you don't have a culture where people can make mistakes, they're never going to grow and you're never going to be able to take risks on talent.

Or they hide them or they don't acknowledge them.

Exactly. Yeah. And like that, you know, actually less common. Like, I think it's rare to hire— like, it's easy to hire, like, high-integrity people like that. You can screen for— it's harder to hire people who are willing to take risks and, like, be wrong and then try again and learn from that. Like, I screen for, like, high agency and taste and, like, capability. But that's mostly covered in other interviews. My interview is mostly high agency and taste. So, like, there's, like, this growth aspect of the company. There's this, you know, chip on the shoulder, second chance, like non-traditional background aspect. And this like final aspect of our culture, which I think is actually one that I think people really like, is this idea of like we're an emotionally vulnerable company. And have you ever had like a Zoom call where you got kind of pissed off and then you have like end the Zoom call, you close your laptop, what happens?

You're like, fuck that person.

You're just sitting here pissed off, right? You're like, oh man, I'm sorry. You can't really get away with that in person, right? Like if you have a meeting and you're like mad at that person in the meeting, will you just walk out of the room and you just remain mad? Like, if you're two sitting next to each other at your desk, like, you're probably gonna have to hash it out, right? And I think that the way you hash it out is by saying, I'm pissed off at you, and just having a conversation about that and respecting that, like, people are gonna be irrational in their emotions. Like, we're not rational. We're, like, mostly rational, but sometimes we'll have feelings. We have ego over our code. We have ego over decisions that we made. And the sooner that we can acknowledge that I feel some type of way about something you did, it might not be rational or not, but it feel that way. And someone else can recognize that and say, I see where you're coming from there. That's not my intent, but I recognize it. Let's work together to make it better. You just solve so many more problems and you avoid so much politics. And politics come from grudges and grudges come from misunderstanding and inefficiency comes from bureaucracy, which comes from politics, right? We stem that at the source by saying, we're gonna be emotionally vulnerable. We're gonna sit down and settle these conflicts. If you have beef with somebody else at this company, we're dealing with that beef. We're not gonna let the beef go on. We're not gonna like move you around. We're gonna address it. And that kind of came from me seeing or hearing about company cultures that become very toxic over time because people can't have the hard conversations that require some admittance that, okay, I'm upset about something that doesn't really matter. But it really matters to me and no one's listening. No one takes the time to really sit with that. So I spent a lot of time on that here. I've been to people's like personal apartments to hear them out when they're like upset about something. I've stayed here late at night to talk through someone who's like just upset about something and they can't really connect with the feeling. And that's one of the things I care a lot about. Cause I want everyone to, once again, I want this to be their best job they ever have. And that means that when they're here, they need to feel like it's really worthwhile and that they're doing their best work and they're very understood and heard.

I asked Erica, who's a teammate of yours, you know, she's great. Yeah, she is great. What I should ask you, and she said that I should ask you about trust and developing your executive team and just how you've thought about sort of, sort of passing along that trust to other people. And I think that maybe this also ties into that idea of sort of that progression of being the quarterback to other aspects of of the business. So maybe you can speak to that as well.

Yeah, I mean, BrowseBase has had like 3 phases, right? Like Phase 1 was like Jan 2024 to probably like September or maybe like the first year was Phase 1. And that was like I was a quarterback, like I was in there writing code, I was hiring, I was selling, I was doing everything. And there was a team, there's some people around me, some engineers I was throwing the ball to. We're doing some running plays, but like I was in there every single day. And Phase 2, you're more like the head coach. So now you have a bigger team. You're probably not doing as much work in terms of like literally like IC, like writing code or on the sales call or customer support tickets, but you're coaching the people who are. You're giving advice on how to, how to write that code a little better, how to pitch it a little differently, how to fix the issues faster. And that was kind of the second phase up until we're probably about like 30-ish people. And then more recently, I've become more like a GM. And sports analogy goes pretty far, but like what that means is like, okay, You're sitting in the skybox and you're telling your, you know, your offensive coordinator, hey, make sure you're putting this person in, or hey, I'm bringing in new people for you, or I'm figuring out new opportunities, seeing the grand strategy, but you're not calling the plays as much anymore. And what I found is that like, as much as you— if you hire great leaders and empower them to do good things, you got to get out of their way. And I'll give advice and develop them, but leaders tend to have their own styles and letting them make decisions and see the impacts of their decisions improves their iteration loop and makes them much more effective. When I hire somebody at Browserbase, I by default trust them. It's one of our values, dare to trust. Like, I trust this person. And if they make a mistake, that's okay, as long as they admit it and they don't make it a second time. And that's good, right? Like, we don't make the same mistakes twice here very often. So with our leadership team, it's nascent. And this is like the first full leadership team we have, but I'm super stoked about it. It's just like a bunch of amazing people. and I'm proud of them. I can learn from each of them, and I do learn from them every single day.

It feels like the biggest risk maybe for solo founders at maybe the stage before yours or even the stage you're at now is that level of trust. And it's not something that maybe you had to hand off like you did if you had co-founders, because co-founders, you're automatically already in theory, if you have a healthy relationship with your co-founders, handing off trust a lot earlier.

Eric and Kareem ran things. They ran Ramp for forever without like a head of engineering, right? Like I think Kareem ran it to like hundreds of engineers so they could get much further without like a leadership team. I asked one of the smartest VCs I know, this guy Davis Trebig at Innovation Endeavors. I was like, what's like the— what's my biggest risk factor? He's like, you'll probably burn out if you don't build a good leadership team. I think it's 100% true. I think every— maybe this is— I'll speak for myself. I shouldn't, but I probably get like 2 years of working as hard as I possibly can before I'm like out of gas. And if we didn't get to PMF in 2 years, you can only pull like an all-nighter every other week for 2 years until like you just like, you're permanently messed up, right? I think every human being can work very hard for 2 years. So by the 2-year milestone, hopefully you've raised a Series A, found some PMF, have a leadership team in place. That's like a good, like, emotional runway amount is 2 years for most people. So for solo founders out there who are starting, like, you probably don't need a leadership team right away. You don't need, like, maybe you don't need a head manager right away. But yeah, like 18 months in, if the company is now 25 people and you're still managing everybody, it's probably time to find some, some people to help there so you can focus on the bigger picture things that get you to the next 2 years.

And on your end, did you get to a point where you looked around, you said, geez, I am— I have way too many people who are reporting to me before you did it?

Or is that—

was Was that a learning sort of as you went, or did you kind of, because you'd already started a company, kind of had the sense of like, this is the way to do it? I'm curious what lessons you've learned when it comes to bringing people on and sort of making that shift from quarterback. Yeah.

Yeah, it was certainly something I knew about and was aware of. I'd also add that I recently ran all of our engineering team for 3 months. I wanted to get in founder mode and get in the weeds there. And that was, you know, I had like 35 direct reports for Q3. So certainly had a lot of people that were reporting to me and I realized how challenging that is. And I'm just a bad manager when I have more than 10 people reporting to me. I can't give them as much attention. I'm much better as a CEO when I have a smaller direct report team, but I can airdrop into certain areas where I want to spend more time. Like this quarter, I'm all in on sales. Spent a lot of time there. Last quarter was engineering. So I think that like, yes, managers are good. Surprisingly, like managers are good. Like Jensen's awesome. I love his 80 direct report thing. Most people aren't Jensen. Like you can't pull that off. Hiring people to run functions is amazing and empowering them to run them and hopefully hiring people who can teach you something and complement your skill set. That's going to set your business up for even more success than it currently has.

So I want to get to sort of the case for and against solo founding. But maybe before we do that, just quickly, I think it would be really interesting for people to hear and learn a little bit about sort of how you do management, how you do communications, how you set goals as a team, and how that's changed. Because I think that, you know, ultimately it's not to say that everybody should mimic your way of doing things. They should find the way that works for them. But I think it would be really cool because we're trying to get a good sample from a bunch of different solo founders who are obviously doing things their own way, just so people have that array of, of various, you know, experiences that people are going through and making decisions. In this way. So maybe you could share a little bit more about kind of how you've thought about managing, how you've thought about setting goals for a team and all of that.

Yeah, it's, it's funny cuz like once you set up the system, hopefully you don't have to revisit it very often. And it's not as fresh for me cuz it's been, we've been running the same system for almost a whole year now, which is, I call it the cadence, right? So you have, you know, a yearly goal setting that you do. You have a quarterly, you know, um, board meeting that's driving a lot of the metrics you have. You have monthly all-hands, weekly company syncs, and a daily team standup. So that like yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily structure really drives a lot of the execution at Browserbase. So every team has a daily standup for the most part. Um, we have a weekly company sync where each team presents an update to the whole company. These are short updates, which is like, hey, this is what we shipped, or here's the deals we closed.

Is it written? Is it presentation?

It's like a Notion doc that everyone like talks through. So like we like meet for 30 minutes. And even, you know, at like 50 people now, we can still bang through it in 30 minutes. And it's really informative. And the thing I was mostly surprised by, and it's easy to forget this as a CEO founder, is that like most people in your company don't have as much context as you. Opportunities for people to present what they're working on to the whole company is so important for like cross-organizational alignment. So the weekly company sync is great. The monthly all hands is an extension of that. Generally replaces one of those weeks. We go a little deeper on like a couple strategic topics. Like I started to preview our 2026 plan, say here's what we're thinking we're going to do next year. We talk about how we do like quarterly, like planning for engineering work and roadmaps. And then the board meeting happens once a quarter. That's a great driver for progress. A lot of that gets trickled down back into the all-hands conversations. A lot of that gets shared with leaders in our company. They're informing those plans as well. My board is informed by like what we did the quarter, what we're doing next quarter. And then we have the yearly goals and like those hopefully don't change very often other than like maybe increasing them if you're doing very well. We increased our goals this year, so doing very well. And I think that like by having that cadence, you have this predictable heartbeat of the company where everyone comes in and like maybe somebody somewhere is getting a little lost in alignment. Well, we have every, a daily meeting for them to be pulled back in, a weekly meeting for them to be pulled in on the company level, and a monthly meeting to go even deeper on some sort of cultural topic or important thing that we have to talk about and spend more time on than 30 minutes. And that cadence is just super useful for keeping us all in alignment. My goal is to keep us marching in the same direction every single day. And we built the system to do that. And like, in terms of my management style, I've talked about the culture we built. It's an emotionally vulnerable culture. How I tend to be, I'm pretty technical. I'm 5 tools. I can move around and talk about every function. So I tend to just, hear people out and talk to them and try to understand what's on their mind and how I can help. But the system of just these many touchpoints with their team and their team members does a pretty good job of everyone knowing what they want to do.

You're also in a lot of these things. You're kind of popping around and jumping into Slack, I think you've said in the past.

Yeah, less and less so over time. Remember becoming that GM? I'm moving a little bit higher, so less and less so. But what's interesting is that I always used to end our standups back when we were 10 people. Does everyone know what they have to do today? That was the question I asked. And I was serious. I was like, does everyone know what they need to do today? Because I think in the early days, that's a question. It's like, we're a startup. What are we doing today? What's the priority? Alignment is often around prioritization of what's important. And then it's like direction. And then it's like mission. So there's some degree of like setting those things up so that your team knows where we're headed to, how we're going to get there, and what's the sequence. And if they can know that and everyone's on the same page about that, we're going to be in a really good spot and we're gonna keep moving to our goals.

So maybe we could, maybe we can round this out with sort of the case for solo founding and maybe the case against it. Maybe we start with the case against it. So I think that you said that one of the reasons that you shouldn't be a solo founder is you're going to make all of these mistakes. And, and it's, and it's probably better to be a solo founder once you've gone through that process of building a company or at least trying to build a company your first time. But could you say maybe a few other reasons that you would sort of maybe discourage somebody from being a solo founder? I think another thing you said was it's almost the inverse of the Blueprint Longevity Protocol or something. So maybe, so maybe, so maybe give like the, the bear case for solo founding before we get to the positives.

Can I look into the camera while I give you a big kiss?

Okay.

Hello there, founder. You shouldn't do this thing. Really, being a solo founder is not worth it. You're going to get fat. You're not going to see your friends. You're going to have no life whatsoever. And your startup probably won't work out statistically. It's kind of a raw deal, right? You can't really tell many people about your company because they don't have all the context that you have. So every time you have something that's on your mind that's hard, it's hard to get someone to actually like empathize. They'll just say, man, that sucks. It's hard. The other thing that's really challenging about being a solo founder that I would recommend is that it's all on you. You can't take a sick day. If you don't show up for work, the company stops moving. You can't hide anywhere. It's all on you. So that pressure can be something that's really, really meaningful for anybody building a company. So if you, if you wanna do this thing, you know, you have so much you have to overcome. Um, but starting a company is a means of last resort. If you're doing this thing, it's because you have no other options. You have no other ways to solve this mission. If you can't find a co-founder, but you have to build this company, then this is your only route. But once again, don't recommend.

Okay.

That, that's actually a message for me. Like next company I start, if I do it again, I gotta watch that.

Okay. That's great. So, So I mean, maybe more about that, which is, which is you should— it is good to have great co-founders. Like, I don't think either of us would say that not having an amazing co-founder isn't, isn't a great potential situation. I think the reality, though, if you actually look at the numbers, of course, is that a lot of these co-founder relationships don't turn out to be so great and they end up failing. And so ultimately you have to be— I think that one of the main reasons that I'm such a big fan of the idea of solo as a valid path and telling people that they should at least consider it is that if we can eliminate this idea of co-founders of convenience, co-founders that people get because they think that in order for them to actually build a company or be taken seriously, that they need to have a co-founder, and then they just go and they find somebody to plug in and they do it somewhat haphazardly, or they don't start their company at all because they think that they need to have a co-founder. And, and it's if they don't have one, that it's not even worth doing. That's sort of the main thing that I think we're trying to get up against. I'm curious, like, for the people who are sort of looking for co-founders or thinking about it other than, you know, things like ODF or whatnot, I'm curious, like, what are things that you felt you got right about your co-founder relationships, you know, with your co-founders for StreamClub?

Yeah, I mean, there's an interesting comment by the guy from Sequoia, Roloff, recently where he said that like we are spread thin on talent, like there's more startups than there is talent. Right now. Um, and I kind of understand that, like, everyone's trying to start a company right now. Everyone's out there, like, starting things. And I think it's very challenging to find early stage talent, which is why I understand the desire to find a co-founder. It's, it's potentially easier to find a co-founder than your first engineer, your founding engineer, or your founding team members. And there's like this, a lot of reasons why, like, the risk reward ratio is off. Um, I think the question was about like finding a good co-founder, right? I'm lucky that I had two amazing co-founders at my first company. And the reason they were amazing was that they were extremely supportive of me. We, we got through everything together. We were very complementary in skill sets. We had shared responsibility and we picked a bad market. So that's why the company didn't work out. And I would have so gladly had a co-founder for this company, someone who's complementary for me, someone who I could like, despite anything, get through the hard things with. I think a co-founder pair I really admire right now has to be Hanby and Han from Mitlify. Like those two just really jive super well and I see their complementary skill sets. I think it's like the definition of a good co-founder is co-founders is Hanby and Han. But then for me, I think it was really hard. I tried to find a CTO for Browserbase or like a technical co-founder. Despite the fact that I'm technical, I wanted to find someone who could spend more time innovating. And yeah, I like had two people that I wanted to do it and they couldn't get there. Then I went the other way. I tried to have somebody else be the CEO. So I'd like one or two people was like, maybe you could be CTO, be CTO, a CEO, and I'll be CTO. And one of them went to business school. So I don't know, like finding people who you think are great that you've known for a long time, that you can accurately predict the trajectory of their emotions and their career in life, and you can see a trajectory matching yours. That's really important. One, like, probably the most important note on co-founders I've learned is that you kind of want them to be as rich as you. Like, if your co-founder is way richer than you, it kind of sucks. Like, like your economic outcomes might not be the same if you decide to sell the company or not. Like, they might be so wealthy, they're like, we don't need to sell for $10 million. And you might be a broke college student. So you kind of want them to be in the same period of life of you and is like equal financial like situation as you. I think if you could do that, a lot of like co-founder problems tend to go away. Because oftentimes it's like time horizons are conflicting or like willingness to spend or risk adversity is conflicting. So my advice to someone trying to find a co-founder is find someone same age or relative same age or in relative family, same like family situation as well as like financial situation. Those three things matching, you'll have a better outcome and a healthy co-founder dynamic.

Now, I promise we won't clip the, the, the case for solo founders and not include all of the you know, the caveats and all of these other things that you've said, because I think they're really important for people to consider. But what would you say is the case for solo founders, the things that you've enjoyed about it, the things that, that have ultimately helped the company? I'd be really curious to hear.

Yeah, being a solo founder is amazing. I did not choose to be a solo founder. I was a solo founder because no one wanted to be my co-founder. So having gone through that and now I'm here, I've accepted my situation. And I went all in on it and I said, you know what? This will be so much more efficient. There's one decision maker and decisiveness drives highly effective companies. If you can make quick decisions, you can move faster than other people. So having me just be the arbiter of browser base, uh, has allowed us to move really, really quickly. It also allows me to communicate my vision much more clearly. I don't have to re-explain stuff too often because it's just, from my word out to the company. I really feel empowered by it. I feel like I can choose my day and go where I need to go. And I actually think it creates more room for our team to grow. More people on our team can step up and complement what we're doing, complement me, and they can see the slack that I'm leaving behind because I can't cover everywhere and they can pick it up. So for being a solo founder, it's actually enabled my team to do more. It's enabled me to be more in alignment with them. All in all, for me, it's the right thing.

That's amazing. Thank you so much for doing this. I guess the last question that I'll have on this is— and I think it's a really good way to end— is this concept of becoming known for something. I think that too often, people are sometimes really focused on people thinking that they do a lot of things. You really did a great job of brand building for yourself, which is essentially what it is at the start. It's just you or you and your co-founders, if you have co-founders, as being like the experts or the people to talk to for blank, right? In your case, headless browsers. But I'm curious, like, what are some reflections you've had about building that sort of brand and sort of that distribution? It's slightly different than distribution, but just people knowing that, hey, like, we have to tag him, you know, when something comes up that's relevant. I'm curious how you think about that and what advice you might impart to other people.

Yeah, I'd say that brand is one of the most important aspects of, of building a great company that has durability, right? People recognizing your company, what they do, who they are and what they stand for is super meaningful. And I really like Lulu Chang with Cervi's, you know, going direct philosophy where the founder should lead brand, the founder should be one. The founder, especially solo founders, can be tied to the company even more because they don't have to share. You know, it's like This is Paul. Paul is Browserbase. Browserbase is Paul. Like, they were interchangeable in some ways. And by really leaning into that, it's allowed me to build more recognition, but also like be a big advocate for what we're doing at Browserbase. And I started small. My goal was just to go to every event in San Francisco and be the headless browser guy of San Francisco. I was just gonna just tackle San Francisco and, and make sure people knew about Browserbase there. From there, it became more about like, well, how do we make sure people know about Browserbase in the right communities online about AI? So that's Twitter. That might be Discord, that might be some group chats on WhatsApp, whatever. And then beyond that, it's like, how do we help amplify our brand through other people, you know, at the company being a part of that whole thing? So I've invested from that from the beginning. It took a lot of time and effort. But the thing I've learned about really building my brand is just being authentic to who I am, taking my time, meeting other people, and the relationships you make. Like word of mouth is actually the most important type of brand building you can do. Like as much as Twitter followers are cool and like LinkedIn likes get you a lot of views and engagement and going viral on YouTube is awesome. The biggest driver of Browserbase's growth has always been far and beyond word of mouth. And that's the type of brand building where you're doing something so meaningful that next time somebody encounters a problem, like someone needs to let their AI browse the web, their friend might say, well, have you heard of Browserbase before? I saw them on Twitter. That word of mouth growth is invaluable. And that's the barometer I have for building successful brand and, and becoming something that people will remember and mention in the future.

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for doing this. I think this is going to be extremely valuable for everybody who listens or watches.

Thank you.