Infrastructure for AI Browsers with Paul Klein, Founder + CEO of 🅱️ Browserbase

The future of software is software doing work on your behalf. If you think about the work that we do, we're doing this work in a web browser. I go to this website, I check the information, I do something with it. In the future, software is going to have like a button. You're going to press that button and it's going to go out and use other software for you. It's agentic. You hear a lot of talk about like AI agents and stuff, right? But what that really is is just smarter software that can use other pieces of software.

Is that a definition of AI agent?

I would say my definition of AI agent— I'm not even going to say the word. AI, like I, let's, it's so controversial, right? Like, uh, yeah. My definition of like agents is like software that uses other software. That's, that's agentic. And, and if software is using other software, guess what? A lot of software lives within a web browser on websites. So the thing about BrowserBase is like, there are so many different use cases. Literally anything you can do on the internet, you can automate with BrowserBase because it's a web browser that's controlled by an LLM that's gonna click buttons, go to pages, fill out forms just like you would.

Welcome to the peel. I'm your host, Turner Novak, founder of Banana Capital. Today's guest is Paul Klein IV, founder and CEO of Browserbase, building infrastructure for AI browsers.

Here's the cheat code: use a real web browser.

Our conversation gets into the future of software and AI agents and why he didn't want to start another company.

I think that you should do a startup as a last resort.

We talked through why authentication is a huge problem in AI, how the best infrastructure companies become product companies, and the memo he wrote that convinced him to build Browserbase.

And by like the 50th conversation, it became abundantly clear that there was a need for headless browser infrastructure.

A year ago, Paul was a relatively unknown commodity who didn't want to start another company and definitely did not want to raise venture capital again. He shares how he went from zero to raising $27 million in 9 months. In his words, as a non-famous person, you're supposed to never talk to VCs.

Talking to VCs is like talking to the cops.

Talking to the cops.

He's like, they're going to pull out their little notepad and everything you say is going in the record. I have a rap sheet, I guess, because I'll talk to— I'll talk to people. I feel like a whole Palantir database on Paul's opinions.

I love this conversation with Paul. He's currently in the arena sharing lessons as he's processing them, like what he thinks will unlock better agents, why you should like your own tweets, and how Browserbase competes with incumbents.

Customer support is our biggest differentiator.

Before we talk to Paul, thank you to Zach Hargett, Alana Goyle, Jack McClelland, Rahul Sunwalker, Chris Klaasik, Jason and Anirudh at Browserbase, and prior guest of the show, Joseph Nelson, for introducing us. A reminder, I publish new episodes of Appeal every week exploring the world's greatest startup stories just like this one. Let's talk to Paul. Paul, welcome to the show.

Thanks, man. I'm super happy to be here.

I'm excited to have you too. Really quick before we really get going, what is BrowserBase for people who just don't know?

Sure. Yeah. BrowserBase is an infrastructure platform. We make it really easy to run web browsers like the one that runs on our laptop on a server in the cloud. So we run thousands of web browsers that, you know, many AI applications use to go out and go to websites on your behalf, click buttons, fill in forms, and take actions.

Why is that a big deal?

Yeah. You know, for the longest time, if you wanted to automate something online, you probably had to write a script that was like this one-off script. You wrote one script for one website. I remember one of the first things I did as a programmer was go out and try and like automate a thing in my life, right? But often times—

Do you remember what that was?

You know what? It was something super dumb. It was like check my school website for my sports schedule. You know, when's practice this week?

Yep.

Because I have to go check my website on my own and see. So I tried to build something And does this happen a lot?

Like just if I'm not a programmer and I have no idea how this works, like under the hood, are a lot of people automating a lot of things on the internet?

I think, I think, you know, the web is one of the most important resources of all information out there. And oftentimes people are using APIs, but there are websites that don't have APIs. You have to go to the website and actually parse the web data and take action on it. Right. And this kind of like, it's, it's a super hard thing to do because like one, You write these scripts that work for one single website, but then if the website changes, your script breaks. You know, you say click the calendar button and they maybe change the button from calendar to say schedule. Well, your code's looking for the calendar button. It doesn't work anymore. Right.

So it's not really even automation because you have to keep fixing things. You can't really automate this.

It's super deterministic, right? Rewriting deterministic code for a non-deterministic internet. And you know, kind of like, why is it important now? Well, all of a sudden LLMs make it possible to generate code on the fly. And you can ask an LLM like, hey, on this website, where is the schedule? I'm trying to figure out when I have practice. And it can help you find, you know, what your sports schedule is, or it can help you find the item that you want to add to your cart. It can help you look for the flight or see an available slot for your yoga class. And this is all because LLMs can generate code on the fly while looking at, you know, a website.

So you can truly make it automated because you can just say, oh, there's this little thing that changed. Instead of Paul having to spend 20 minutes fixing it once a day, the LLM just does it.

And you can write applications, you can build applications that actually can work on websites that you've never seen before. You know?

Oh, interesting. How, how could that play out?

Well, in the, in the past, let's say you wanted to write a, an application that booked a demo call on a website. Let's say you're a VC and you're trying to book a demo call on all these websites, right?

Just go, hey, Browserbase, book a demo with every company. Company that is announcing Series A.

Exactly right. Like you'd have to write a script for every one of those websites. But with AI you could say, here's 100 URLs, go to these websites, book a demo call please. And that's just way powerful. You have to write one script versus 100. And what Browseways is, is we're the runtime for these automation scripts. You know, we are the browser that's actually being acted upon by the LLM to accomplish these things on your behalf.

So why is it a good time to do this right now?

You know, I've actually been working on this specific problem, headless browser infrastructures for quite a while now. Um, I know a lot about the browser. The browser's super hard to run in a server environment. I mean, imagine running when you run Chrome on your laptop, like it's, it basically nukes your laptop right now. Imagine running that on a server, which is like not as powerful as a MacBook Pro. It's, it's often much less. It's like a Lambda. Yeah. Most like serverless functions are maybe one or two. CPUs, your M3 is a beefy thing, you know? It's pretty intense. And what's really hard is like running these browsers in the cloud is actually a very complex infrastructural problem. Developers have to spend a bunch of time on this, but it's not really helping them build their application. It's just something they have to do. They rather would spend more time building the features, not making the infrastructure work. So that's kind of where we come in. But really the rise of large language models and the ability for us to now generate code has made the need for infrastructure like BrowserBase, you know, more than ever because it's so— there's new capabilities. You can now generate automations of these websites on the fly and you're no longer limited by how many scripts a developer can write. You're limited by how much code AI can generate. And that really means for us being an infrastructure company, there's just a lot new, a lot more possibilities that have been unlocked and, um, we're really excited to service them.

So what is an example of a way that someone might be using it today? Like if I'm a browser-based developer, any case studies or like maybe favorite, I mean, podcast gotta make this exciting for people. Like what are some really interesting things people are doing with it right now? Just to give people an idea of like what's kind of going on.

Yeah. Like I think what I think about the use cases of browser-based, there's all the obvious ones that come to mind, right? Like Hey, can you go on my LinkedIn and send a message to somebody? Or, hey, can you book a flight for me? But where I get more excited is all of the super esoteric use cases, right? Like, hey, I want you to go upload this receipt on this legacy website because they don't have an API. There's all these use cases in enterprise where, hey, I need you to go to this court website and pull the court schedule for the day and tell me if this judge has a case like this. Like these are all tasks that people have had to do in the past.

So these are like a lot of manual one-off, uh, maybe non-recurring, maybe they're recurring type of tasks that a human would probably be doing on their own manually, could not be automated as of today.

Yeah. You know, like the future of software is software doing work on your behalf. And if you think about the work that we do, we're doing this work in a web browser. I go to this website, I check the information, I do something with it. In the future, software's gonna have like a, there's a piece of software you're gonna use that's gonna have a button. You're gonna press that button and it's gonna go out and use other software for you. It's agentic. You hear a lot of talk about like AI agents and stuff, right?

Yeah.

But what that really is is just smarter software that can use other pieces of software.

Um, is that a definition of AI agent?

I would, I would say my definition of AI agent, it, I'm not even gonna say the word AI. Like I, let's, it's so controversial, right? Like, uh, yeah. My definition of like agents is like software That's, that's agentic. And, and if software is using other software, guess what? A lot of software lives within a web browser on websites. So the thing about BrowserBase is like, there are so many different use cases. Literally anything you can do on the internet, you can automate with BrowserBase because it's a web browser that's controlled by an LLM that's gonna click buttons, go to pages, fill out forms just like you would.

So what are some ways that the internet is probably going to change that Maybe some of these are obvious, maybe some ways where it's like, oh, that actually is not that obvious.

Yeah. I mean, if AI is going out and using the internet, what does that mean for the internet? Is the internet dead? Are people going to paywall their content? I think a lot of people have talked about AI web crawling and how that's being fed into things like Perplexity or OpenAI. I think we're in this kind of weird period where right now the capabilities of AI has really kind of outpaced the internet that it's kind of using, right?

Really?

The internet hasn't caught up with the way that AI's gonna grow out and use it. Yeah, I mean, like, listen, there's still a lot of things that need to improve for AI to be effective to replace people and to do work, but there's already a lot of promising stuff that's happening.

And what's the biggest example of just like the internet needs to get better to, to like upgrade for AI?

Yeah, I, I think for me, Right now we need to think about authentication. How can AI log into a website on your behalf? Right now it's pretty janky. Right now there's a lot of credential sharing. The most secure way is you share your login cookie with your AI agent, then it authenticates as you. We're lucky to have Okta Ventures, Colin from Clerk, Reed from Stitch, all these great identity people are investors in Browserbase. And I've spent a lot of time with them talking about how can we make it so AI agents can log into websites on your behalf in a secure way. And I think that's the next big thing that's going to change because right now, you giving, you know, your AI agent your Netflix password probably isn't the most secure thing. You know, it probably needs to be able to log in and say, "Hey Paul, can I log into your Netflix?" It needs a push notification and then you say, "Yeah, go ahead AI agent, you can go check my list and let me know what's leaving Netflix soon." You know, it's just like, authentication is the next pillar to fall to make AI agents a reality in this world.

And you are not a newcomer to authentication, right? Like you've been working on authentication for a while.

Yeah.

When did you first get started with it?

How did you find— you're like the— how did you find that out? It must have looked at my LinkedIn or something crazy. You know, I've been, I've been in the authentication space for a while. I started my career actually on the login team at Twilio. So I was in charge of Twilio, which is a text API company, an infrastructure company. I was in charge of their login, signup flows. And I've really kind of been on the other side of this, which is like preventing bots from logging into websites, which is what I did at Twilio. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I've seen that in my background in identity and access management has, and really my time at Twilio was really formative for the work we're doing now at Browserbase, having been at like an infrastructure company in the early days.

Plus you probably knew how to, uh, navigate, you know, people not wanting you to access.

Yeah. I mean, absolutely. I mean, I think that when you look, look into, um, anti-bot, what it really is, is like, does this web browser look like a real web browser? And I think the— here's the cheat code. Use a real web browser, you know, don't do any weird tricks. Like don't say something you're not like if you're, you know, our BrowseSpace browsers are very recognizable. We're not saying we're a Windows computer where we're saying we're running on Amazon, we're in a cloud environment, you know, and just by not lying, you end up being more trustworthy. I think it's just a good strategy in life as well as like in anti-bots, coincidentally enough, just be as transparent as possible.

And so what happened on your first day at Twilio?

Yeah, so I joined Twilio in like 2016. I was actually an intern and I come in to, you know, our all-hands meeting and Jeff Lawson, the CEO, calls up all of the interns and we do our fun fact. It's like a normal thing, like, hey, where you're from, what team you're on, what's your fun fact?

Yep.

And like, you know, immediately after our fun fact, we sit down. I'm like, holy crap, I just presented to the whole company. That's so scary. Jeff comes out and he's like, oh yeah, and one more thing. Here's our S-1. We're going to go IPO in like 3 weeks. And I'm like, what? This is crazy. And everyone's celebrating and everyone's getting rich in this room. And interns don't have any equity, which is fine, but I was so stoked. I was like, wow, this is happening. And Yeah, I'll never forget, like, I just turned 21 and that was like my first open bar ever was at the Twilio IPO party. So it was really like a crazy way to start off a career in technology. And for me, I told myself that wouldn't be the last one. And ever since then I've been thinking about like, how can I build my own company and really kind of be a category-defining company like Twilio has been for the telephony space?

Yeah, it's interesting. Like the IPO should be. I don't wanna say it's the ending, 'cause like you get, it's a long journey, but like it should be like, you know, maybe closer to the not beginning of someone's journey, but in first day, interesting to kind of experience that right away.

Yeah. And I, and I think what was especially cool was to see just like how proud the team was and the team that took Twilio to IPO had, had grown a lot alongside the company. And to me, the most important thing with building BrowseBase is that I wanna build a company that enables people to grow more than they could anywhere else. Like, I want someone to choose to work here, like, oh, you know, this company, it's gonna be hard. They seem like they're gonna succeed, but I know for sure I'm gonna grow more here than anywhere else. If as long as that's the reason why people are working for us, I think we're gonna be very successful.

Any other big lessons from Twilio?

Yeah, you know, I think Jeff, it's like Twilio and Stripe were really like the two companies I've looked up to the most in the infrastructure world. And specifically with Twilio, having been there, I thought that they did an amazing job of making every all-hands super— like you were going to get your MBA in Twilio working at Twilio. Like you'd go to the all-hands meetings and you knew what net revenue retention was. You knew about like dollar-based expansion. You cared a lot about diversity of revenue. And I don't think like I never took that for granted. And leaving that experience, I knew a lot about the economics of you know, cloud infrastructure businesses and why, hey, you probably want to have a diversified customer base because if one person churns like WhatsApp did or Uber did, it's going to take the stock price. So like the power laws of distribution of usage of cloud infrastructure, it's, it's super interesting in being able to learn that firsthand in a very transparent environment like Twilio all hands. I thought that was like foundational for me and I keep that up within our team where I share really as much as I can, pretty much everything about the business and try and teach everyone why the things we're doing are working and why there's things that aren't working and how we improve them.

Is there ever a risk of oversharing, like you share too much? And maybe an example, things might be going well, really easy to be like, yeah, we're crushing it. Like, what if it's like a bad day? It's like revenue dropped this month or like, you know, our biggest customer is not happy. Like, how do you navigate maybe sharing the not so good things?

Yeah, I mean, like I've We've encountered that, and I think you just share it. When we had a big customer churn and that really sucked, and it was a wake-up call. I was like, "Hey everyone, this customer's churned," and the data's all there. Everyone can see all the charts of the usage. We have that published weekly, if not monthly, in Slack.

Oh, you actually publish every customer?

Yeah, everyone knows every customer. Interesting. It's all there. And when somebody— when this big customer churned, it was a really important lesson for us to kind of look back and say like, well, why did they churn? Okay, well, like our product wasn't really servicing them this well in this way. Do we want to service people like this? Should we have a different product strategy? And it was a combination of like execution and strategy that we really kind of took as a lesson and eventually have won similar customers to them at larger volumes since then. But every churn is a lesson. If you just ignore it, you're missing out on like a ton of valuable insights.

After Twilio, you did start a company. It was StreamClub.

Yes. StreamClub.

Yeah. How did that come about?

I remember it very fondly. I just had a really tough day at work and I came home and I got a very convenient Instagram DM from my future co-founder. He's like, "Hey, what are you doing this weekend?" And I was like, "Nothing much. Upset at work." He's like, "Well, do you want to hack on something with me?" and I was like, sure, let's do it. So like me, Lan, and June all hacked on this thing, which was like a virtual, virtual event software.

Uh, virtual what software?

Virtual events software.

Oh, events. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like right early in COVID. We were like, let's make it easy for yoga teachers to charge for their online Zoom yoga classes.

Okay.

Like classic April 2020 startup idea. All right. Like we were, we were pretty early. All right. So we hacked on this thing. We launched it, got to the top 3 on Product Hunt, and I was like, oh my God, this is awesome. We built something that works. And I think I had been feeling a lot like I was like a small cog in a big tech machine. And this was the first experience where I was like, wow, like I actually have agency over what can happen. Like if I work on my own company, I can see what I'm truly capable of. And with Lane and June, I knew I had the complements of like a very, like an insanely good designer, an insanely good growth person, and I could bring all like the engineering side. Let's all work together and do this thing. And, um, that's when we kind of, I left my job to start Stream Club and we, uh, were off to the races.

Did you do it for the right reasons? Like, are those all like, what are, what are the right reasons to start a company?

Yeah. Like, I mean, like, I think, well, once again, I wanted to start the company because I was like, oh my God, I don't like my job. And I feel like I'm not, I wasn't finding like my meaning, but I don't think we started Stream Club because it was the best idea or the best market. Like I think that we were able to come to some conclusions about like why this is a good opportunity. Like someone is gonna build great virtual event software in COVID and there's going to be a shift to this creator economy and the future of work is online. Um, I think a lot of Twitter was like talking about the creator economy back then too.

There's a lot. I feel like it's, it's sort of coming back again.

It's coming back.

Yeah.

It's coming. I'm, I'm still bullish on the creator economy. I think we just, we got a little crazy there in 2021. All right. Yeah.

Um, I think my, my general way I approach these is I think usually like the discourse, the things people are talking about, the context of it is generally correct, but the timing is often not correct. So I mean, you can just look at like the dot-com bubble. We were like, oh, we're going to get 15-minute grocery delivery in 1998 or whatever. Like we did get it, but it was 20 years later, you know, crypto, everyone's going to be buying NFTs and like making all their purchases on NFTs and like couple months or whatever. Maybe NFTs is a good example. Yeah. I don't know if that one's ever going to—

Yeah. Tulips were really valuable and they were going to be even more valuable in 20 years, I promise. Right?

Yeah. So, well, it's kind of one of those things where I think all the logic that goes into these things and the technology is probably going to benefit society in some way, but the timing of when it happens and how you actually make money from it, I don't think we get that right very often. I think it's helpful.

Do you think that's the case with AI then?

I actually think AI's tricky because it's probably the most use cases. It's very clear today, it's actually doing things. I think probably the tricky part was it was really expensive originally. So there's a lot of capital that went in that got burned. That would probably be my one sentence takeaway. Probably built the wrong stuff.

Well, there was an old wave of neural net company startups that were like, oh my God, AI is happening. 5 to 10 years ago. And this is not the first AI wave. So I would say that actually aligns with your thesis, which is like there's a big spike and then sometime later there's actually true innovation, which I think you're right. You've seen with the creator economy, I think there's a lot of really interesting stuff happening now too. Yeah.

And I think even if you go back to just throughout human history, I only have maybe like 100 or 200 years, but there was a point where I forget the exact number, but it was something like 10% of UK's GDP was invested in railroads in like a certain year or something. It was like, it was like double digits of their entire GDP that they invested to build railroads. And again, I forget the exact stat, but like the returns were atrocious. But railroads like significantly changed the economy and like you could say objectively made the world more efficient, better, saved lives, things happen faster. So again, it's like one of those things is AI like railroads, right? Where it's like very clear, going to make the world a better place. But how, how much and where is the money going to be made? I don't know. And I think probably you'd say like today is probably like a good time to be like investing in AI versus maybe like the peak.

I don't know.

I'm kind of like a— I would not say I'm like pessimistic, but I'm very like cautious person where when I see there being a the most exciting hyped up category, I kind of get this like allergic, a little bit of like a maybe we should pause and just like make sure we're accurately assessing and not like, you know, moving too quickly into things. But there's usually a reason for it.

Yeah. I mean, and it's also for my business, there needs to be healthy competition at the like AI lab level. And I think like I'm surprised at how that's actually panned out. And there really is, I mean, if you asked me back in 2022 if there would be, or 2023, if OpenAI would be the only lab, I would've said yes. I was like, oh, who's going to keep up with them? But now we have healthy competition from OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepseek just came out. We have all these interesting open source plays, Gemini. There is a lot of competition at the model level. Which means that developers are switching between models as they get better.

And it's amazing if you're using them.

And it's amazing if you're an infrastructure company, because as a developer, you want to have infrastructure that comes along with your prompt choice. Like, you know, it's really easy to switch out a model, but are you going to bring your whole database, like port it over to, okay, if I switch from the OpenAI, you know, model to the Anthropic model, am I porting my embeddings over? No, I'm going to have my embeddings in a separate database. And just switched the model out underneath, which I think it shows that you can have healthy model-level competition, introduces the opportunity for infrastructure providers to decouple themselves from the models and really play a separate game where like, how do we enable these models to be more powerful and do more things? Well, with us, we give them browsers that they can use to control the web. You can use, you know, 3.5 SONNET or O1, either of them work. They have their pros and cons, but they both need browsers.

Yeah, I think it's probably what is there a customer or a use case that needs to be solved that like isn't being solved yet by someone who has like a built product yet. So it's like if you're building the 8th competitor in a space or funding the 9th or 10th competitor in a space and it doesn't do anything unique, maybe not a good idea. But if it's like there's this clear use case that's not being solved, it's going to save a bunch of people time, people are going to pay you for it, you know, etc., etc. Maybe there's an opportunity there. Yeah, I think, um, there— I feel like there's some interesting analogies maybe with, um, when you talk about like what's my opinion on like the hypeness and like the sustainability of maybe AI is like a wave or cycle. I just kind of think of if you compare with crypto. So I feel like with crypto there's like a— there's almost like a— I don't know how similar, but there was like a— there's a sense of like we need to be doing this. So if you just take like a, like a corporate entity, like let's just say Facebook, like let's say like the Facebook board or like, or even like a mid-level tech company, like you're like a $5 billion public tech company and you're like, you know, crypto is a thing. We need to have like an NFT strategy.

It's—

I think there's a pretty rational case. You can just as like a CEO or like, you know, management team, you can kind of talk to the board, talk to the investors. Maybe you say there's a case for it. There's probably like a ton of cases you can say like, this actually doesn't make sense for us. We don't need a crypto strategy. Like, here's why it doesn't make sense. But I feel like with AI, it really is just like a part of all software. So I think it's actually harder to go to your board or your, your team and say like, we don't need to do anything with generative AI or large language models. Like it's not going to affect us at all. So I feel like it's just much more applicable. So I think it, it, it probably comes down to like a timing. That's how I would think about it is like the cost and then like the effectiveness, like, does this actually, does it actually work yet? And then, or, and then like a timing of like in 9 months or in 18 months, will it be good enough? Or is it maybe like, we actually don't know yet. Like it might be 5 years still. Um, I feel like that's where, where it like kind of breaks, but you still hit a point where like you gotta be working. In it. So it's like the excitement level I think is justified because it does work.

Well, I think there is some magical moments here where you can build something using AI. And I think with our customers, what I see is, especially somebody who isn't a software company, but they come to us because they maybe hear about us via one of our investors or something and say, hey, we have this workflow that people do all the time. Can you help us build something to automate that? And we say, well, we won't build it for you, but here's all the tools that we have. We have Stagehand, which is our open source browsing framework. And what they do is with a few simple prompts, all of a sudden they have this little AI application that's going to a website, filling in a form, and then clicking submit. And they're like, wow, I had to do that on my own. The moment of magic is so tangible with these little AI web automation applications. And I think that's what's so special about this moment is that people can tangibly see the results right away. And sure, do we have a desire for it to be better in the future and do more? Absolutely. I think it's what's so funny about technology is when you see something do something badly, you were like, oh, well, I needed to do the really good thing. You see a shitty robot and you're like, well, it's a shitty robot, but it's running around and jumping on blocks. You're like, well, it's not, doing surgery yet. Yeah, it's not doing backflips yet. I think it's the same thing with AI. We've taken for granted that we have a chatbox that we can ask things and it gets a pretty good job of responding. And that's why there's actually tangible utility within the first couple years, which is super rare for technology. So I think maybe going back to a question way earlier, what are people using BrowseBase for? I think the same answer with what are people using LLMs for? There's just so much stuff you can do. It's really mind-blowing. And what we try and do, and we want to do a better job of this, is showing people the primitives and letting them use those primitives to kind of create powerful applications that help them do something in their day-to-day life.

I think there's also a, uh, just from an investment standpoint, there's a question of like, does it make more sense in terms of like early stage startups? Like, should the funding be going and solving problems or whatever? Like very early stage? Is it better to do it more in the growth stage? Or are you going to make more money in the public market? Like I think that is an interesting part of the equation you should probably think about as an investor. So I think, I mean, with a lot of technology, you can work across the board, but you can also say like, man, Facebook's business model is you hook up a credit card and it just buys ads if Facebook can guarantee people will click on them. What is generative AI going to do to Facebook's ad system? Well, it's just going to like run all the ads automatically and Facebook's going to like make a trillion dollars. In market cap because of it. So it's like, can you do anything related to what Facebook is going to capture the value in? Probably not. Like, probably, probably don't do something related to generative AI and ads unless you have— you're capturing like a new, um, consumer demand, like consumer eyeballs and attention span. Um, so that's kind of another way I sort of think about it, is just like, what is too far in the strike zone? I mean, I feel like this is like a common I'm thinking people say is like, if your product's on OpenAI's roadmap, might not be the best thing. Like try to find things that they're not going to do. I don't think that's always like the right case.

Yeah. And I totally depends on like, I think you're talking to an investor, but if you're talking to like a founder, I think founders should be taking a lot of shots on goal right now. Like there is a lot of asymmetric upside to starting a company. It's actually funny. The thing I lose candidates to the most, if I'm trying to hire someone at Browserbase, my number one competitor, they start their own company. Like, it's, it's so brutal. Like, I'll meet like an amazing engineer. I'm like, oh yeah, you should come work here. And then by the time we're done with it, they got into YC and I'm like, the YC 4 batches a year has screwed my hiring pipeline because I used to like, I'd only have to worry about it 2 times a year. Now, like, I'm— there's always a YC app I'm competing with every 3 months. Yeah, it's, it's brutal. And then I have to kind of wait for them to go through their company and if they figure it out, hopefully I may put a check in and I can get the upside with an angel investment. Yeah, but if not, I have to wait a year or two until they run out of capital and come back. So yeah, I, I love working with second-time or former founders because I think they end up having a much better attitude towards startups because now that Browserbase has product-market fit, you can really just come in and execute. Like there's so much low-hanging fruit that we need to pick. We need people who are like ready to come in and just execute and go, hustle. And when you're, you know, especially when you're a technical founder at a startup, you want to execute so badly. But early-stage startups are so much more like product-market fit to be discovered, and you can't really execute your way into PMF. You have to really have, you know, an earned secret, as my buddy Zach Hargett loves to say. Like, you have to know something about a space that nobody else knows and then be able to execute on the smallest version of that to validate it. And then get into the right hands of people and do it in a repeatable way. And that's super hard. So these founders who can't figure that out or they, you know, it's just they can't figure it out in time. When they come to Browserbase, they end up being just amazing team members because they're, they have so much expertise and like an appreciation for like, oh my God, product market fit is amazing. Like, let's go take advantage of that. Um, and they're ready to come in and just execute, which is fantastic.

Yeah. And well, it's kind of funny because you told me that you actually didn't really want to start a company in the first place.

Oh yeah.

Like, how did it kind of come about where you went from exited the last company, starting Browserbase?

There's several text messages that will eventually be leaked where it says, I say, quote me on this, I will never start another startup. There's actually another one from earlier this year, like, I will never raise a round of venture capital. And I'm like, shoot, like what happened, right? But like, I think I couldn't even have predicted you know, just how right we were going to be about our early theses around browser-based, right? Like I knew so much about headless browsers from being CTO of StreamClub, the startup I talked about. And I spent some time really like digging into this. And in late 2023, I kept getting hit up by people saying, hey, you know a lot about headless browsers, can you help us with something? I was like, yeah, sure, I got nothing going on. Let's just chat. And by like the 50th conversation, it became abundantly clear that there was a need for headless browser infrastructure.

And was this other founders?

Other founders. Yeah. People building like early stage AI products. It was the bleeding edge. Like people were like, well, what if we had AI control the web browser? That'd be cool. And like they came to me and talked to me about it.

Yeah.

You know, like for what it's worth, like I was planning to like kind of leave my job and I was going to travel the world for like 9 months before my wedding. My wife and I had it all planned out. It was going to be super amazing. And one night I kind of sat down and I wrote this 3,000-word essay about why there needs to be a company that exists like this. It's called An Internet Browser for AI.

We'll link it in the show notes if people want to read it.

Please. I lay out my everything about our plan and I kind of showed it to my wife and I said, "What do you think of this?" And she's like, "I think you need to go do this thing." And that's when it became real that I was, this is the only company I could ever start now. I'm done after this one. Like there's, hang me. I'm like, I'm a one-trick pony and that trick is headless browsers. Um, but you know, I just became so clear to me that there needs to be this thing that's solved and I could actually do a good job of it.

And so why did you not want to do it?

I think that, you know, going back to the question earlier about like, well, was I starting a startup for the wrong reasons for the last one? I think that you should do a startup as a last resort, as a means of last resort, because startups are so hard. They're probably the worst way to make money. You end up getting all these weird health issues most of the time. You lose your hair, you get stressed out. It's generally a net negative on your life unless it works really well. However, it is still the thing that has caused the most amount of growth for me in my life. Because it puts you in front of challenges where you really have to rise to the occasion. And the only reason to kind of take on all of this effort is if you have a high, hopefully a somewhat higher likelihood of success. And that means really thinking through the category you're entering into. Are you building something that's directly on OpenAI's roadmap? Yeah, you're right. Do you want to waste 2 years of that, of your life on that? I don't know if that's the best use of your time. The opportunity cost of your time is so high you really have to make sure you're doing a startup for the right reasons. I think a lot of engineers, they want to go start companies, especially after working in big tech, because they want to see what they're capable of. And I admire that. I was that engineer at my last, my first company.

So are you maybe not careful enough or you're just like a little bit too gung-ho about just doing anything versus the right thing?

I've never talked somebody out of starting a company. So like, successfully. And I think that's because like being naive is actually what makes first-time founders once in a while, like insanely successful because like no one can talk them out of doing the crazy thing that actually works.

Yeah.

You know, and I think the second time, like sometimes I see this thing like I'm a fourth time founder and I'm like, damn, good for you. But like you really only have like one, one shot per decade, I think, to build a great company.

Really?

Yeah. Or maybe like, I guess decade for me, I mean, like from 20 to 30, 30, 40. Like, I don't think you can like you can't brute force it, I think, you know, like sometimes I see things where people are like, oh, I'm going to do a whiteboard full of startup ideas and pick one. I don't think that's how you can build a successful company. I think the way you build a successful company is having deep experience with a problem, deep insight about an industry, and then really doing something to push forward that industry in a way that's valuable and defensible as a business, which is like good startup ideas are objectively rare. And, um, If you're lucky enough to find one, you got to jump on that as hard as you can.

So it sounds like in maybe 20 years, let's just say browser base is, maybe you're still involved or whatever, but we're talking about headless browsers, browser infrastructure. There's another idea. You might actually start another company then if there's another opportunity.

In 20 years, there's going to be like AI clone. My AI clone will start a company. I'm good.

That's a good way to cover that. You don't have a co-founder. How did you kind of navigate starting a company? Like, did you think about, I want to bring on a co-founder, I'm going to hire some people? How did that all come about?

Yeah, like, I mean, as much as I said earlier that like, I didn't want to do this and like, I wouldn't raise venture, like in the end, there was a lot of like intention around like, okay, well, if I do this, here's how I would do it. And for me, you know, I'm really lucky that I have an engineering background and I've been, you know, a co-founder of a startup before. I felt capable enough to like start the company and get everything together on my own. And I felt like I knew enough people who would probably want to come join the team that I could get away with doing it on my own. And honestly, this time around I'm married. Being married and having a startup is great because like my wife is like, she's my rock. Like I can share everything with her. When I did my first company, I was single and I had co-founders. So like, I mean, you say you're married to your co-founders. If you don't want a co-founder, just get married. Yeah. Then you'll have, you know, like she shares some upside in the equity, right? We're married. So that's true. I guess.

Technically she might own like 50% or 60% or however you do this.

We own the whole thing, right? Like family business. But no, when I started it, being a solo founder was a choice 'cause it allowed us to move faster. When you have co-founders, you constantly need to get in alignment. There's like the co-founder meeting where you like talk to each other and then you have the team meeting where you talk to everybody. And it's really important that co-founders present as a unified front because, you know, at some companies there'll be like, oh, everyone has their favorite co-founder and like, oh, I got to get something done. I don't want to talk to Steve, I'll talk to Bob, and then Bob will help me convince Steve to do the thing. I just think that dynamic is like actually slows companies down. For us, I felt like, and this is very much maybe it's for me, but like I felt like having one person be able to make these kind of shock calls without having any buy-in from a co-founder team allows us to move a lot faster. And maybe like now that I have a board of directors, I have two people on my board, Bucky and Reed, amazing guys. Like I have to keep them informed of what's going on. But in the end, it's— I get to call the shots. And for that reason, we can move really, really fast.

So what do you think is the most important thing when hiring? You have to bring people on, obviously, if you're a solo founder. How do you just generally approach and think about that?

Yeah, I mean, the first hiring, the first person was the hardest challenge I think I faced as a startup yet. Like, you're a solo founder working on a company and you have to hire the first non-founder person. Who in their right mind would do that, right?

Yeah.

But I think—

So why is that? Why do you say that?

I think it's crazy. I think it's crazy to— if you're a person wanting to join a company and you would choose— of all the options you choose, there's a company of one and you're the first non-founder employee. I think that's just a really hard dynamic and you have to be a very special person who's low ego, who sees the value in the business, believes in it deeply. And for us, Dom was someone who's actually I'd known for like, you know, about a year and he just genuinely believed in what we were doing. He was so excited to work at a startup. He, he wanted to be employee one. And I think there's very few people who want to be employee one and will wear that as like a badge of pride. And that's Dom. And I'm like, could not be happier that he was the first person because that was the thing that really got the ball rolling. Because once you have an employee one and Dom is there, it's a much more convincing sell. Like employee, the time from zero to employee one was like, you know, a month, a few months. And then from employee one to two was like a few weeks. So like, it just like the ball really started rolling on hiring after we found the person who said, you know what, I, I'm ready to go do this.

So how does it change? Is there like social pressure or do you like free up time or?

Well, I think the most important thing as a solo founder is to become multi-threaded as soon as possible. And what was nice is that like I had a lot of contractors that I had hired before Dom. So Dom was, you know, full-time equity-owning employee one, but you know, several people had worked for Browserbase beforehand. So when I started the company, the first thing I did was I raised a small pre-seed round, $1.9 million or so. Alana Goyle from Basecase led the round. She's amazing. Some great investors as well that joined. and I did that so I can go hire contractors and become multi-threaded. Because if you're the solo founder and you're building the product, then also selling it, then also recruiting, like you just kind of get nothing done. And if I, I still did build product, I still did recruit, I still did sell, but at least if I could have the product continue to be built, you know, while I was recruiting, it'd move things forward. And I'm lucky that I met someone like Jason Howmans who, you know, was our first contractor. Understood the problem, loved it, and he was able to kind of keep working on the dashboard while I was out talking to people. And as a result of that, like, we moved really quickly, even before hiring our first, like, real employee.

So when you were fundraising, did you say, I'm going to hire contractors? And like, was that part of the pitch or was it kind of like, don't worry about this, I'm hiring some people?

I think I said I was going to hire— I think like the first— I was going to hire a team. That's why I said in the pre-seed. And then we raised the seed a few months later and I still hadn't yet hired like a full-time equity-owning employee. Um, but I had like a, I called it like a contractor army and like we had like a bunch of people and we had a product and we had some people using it.

How many people?

How many contractors?

Yeah. Like how big was the contractor team?

I think it was like 9 at its biggest.

Oh wow. And you said never, like, did you do that on purpose?

Like, were you thinking like, yeah, I was like, I was like, well, so I always wanted to build an in-person company in San Francisco and it's really hard to, to do that. I think especially like it's hard to hire employee one and then it's hard to like, you add all these extra constraints. Like they must be, you know, their first employee, they must go to an office 5 days a week and work in person, and they have to have this really specialized skillset of like understanding great frameworks and developer tools. I think I narrowed that down to like 5 people in San Francisco and I found one of my 5. But in the meanwhile, I had like a bunch of people on Twitter that I just really loved their work. And I said, hey, like, do you want to come do some work for us? I can pay you money. And they were down. And I think balancing working with consultants or contractors versus building a full-time team, you have to always think about, okay, what do I need right now? And I think that we've had contractors that started with us in the very beginning, are still working with us to this day, and they're amazing. And as soon as they moved to San Francisco, I would gladly switch them to a full-time employee and they can work in our office. But you have to also have your values. And for us, 5 days a week in office. That's how we build our full-time team. Because that's really the long-term mission of Browserbase, you know.

The long-term mission is have an in-person team.

I, I, let's say long-term cultural thing is like, I want to build an in-person company.

So that was really the tipping point on not specifically having full-time employees and having more contractors because like you could not get in-person in San Francisco.

Yeah.

That sounds okay.

It took time. I mean, like I, I wanted to, I didn't want to compromise on my value of I want to build an in-person company. Because that's so, so important to me. I just think it's going to work really well. And we now have, you know, 15 people in person in SF and it's fantastic. The vibes are so good. I didn't want to compromise on that. And I also wanted to accomplish our goals. Like the best way to recruit people is to have a great product. So I think there's a hedge there and it's, it's not me saying I choose to be in person, not because I think being remote doesn't work or being remote is bad. It's just my personal choice of what I want to build for a company. Like I think a company that does remote super well is this company called Railway. They're an infrastructure company. They, they're fully remote. They work, I think, completely in Discord and it's an amazing team. They do an amazing job. So I don't think it's one versus the other, remote versus an office. It's really just like, what kind of culture do you want? We had 2 new people start on Monday and the energy in that room was like, you could feel it. It was like the first day of school vibes. It was like, everyone's like, whoa, like haven't seen you in a little while. How you been? It was really fun.

It was like back to school. Like my, Kids went back to school on Monday.

Yeah, same thing with us at our office. Like, we went back to office because we took some time off. And I, I think that's just— it makes being in person makes the features that we ship feel more real. Because I can see when Garrett has been grinding on something for like 2 weeks. I, I, when I see Garrett is like the last person to leave and the first one in building this feature, and then all of a sudden it ships, it just feels like such a bigger accomplishment versus like if you're like in a fully remote company and there's an all-hands meeting and like, oh, we shipped, you know, cheaper pricing. Everyone's like, yay, clap reacts. Like it doesn't, it doesn't like really hit as hard as like, I saw Garrett pouring his soul into this feature and now it's live and it's working. Let's go. Like it energizes you.

So it seems like it's kind of summarizing what you said. You probably as a founder, founding team, what do you prefer? What do you get the most energy from?

Yeah.

How do you work better? And whether that's remote, in-person, hybrid, in San Francisco, in New York, in Bali, like some people—

Wherever. Yeah.

Bali. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. That's a good way to think about it. Um, and then you've like hired people from Hacker News before. You like, do you DM them or is it you posting? Like, how do you do that?

I, I love, I love weird sourcing ways. Like I love trying to find people in all these different areas. Like, um, yeah, like, I mean, you know, Hacker News. And I'm going to out myself here. It is the best place to find great engineers, you know? And like, you could do this in two ways. One, they have like regular hiring threads where they say like, you post like, hey, I'm hiring. Sometimes the opposite side of that, who wants to be hired? And there's a lot of like diamonds in the rough there. Yeah, I'll spend like hours like scrolling through and reading each person's profile and going to their personal website. And like, you know, like there were just some fantastic engineers who just throwing their name out there.

And, um, and What is the thinking usually of one of those people? Is it like a big tech engineer who's underutilized and they're just like, I want to try something new? Is it like somebody who hates their job? Is it like college kids? What does the pool of talent usually look like that participate in those?

The funny thing, it's all over the place. It is like there's people who've worked in big tech. There's people who are like career technologists. There's people who go to Burning Man a lot. There's people who never leave their house, right? You get a full spectrum of people who are like, really at the end, in the end, passionate about technology. And like the other way I'll do things is like I'll try and find Hacker News conversations that are relevant to our space and I'm gonna try and find the people who have the spiciest takes and I'm gonna email them and say, hey, like I saw your comment on this, I agree or I disagree. Do you wanna have a chat? What do you do? Where do you work? Do you wanna come work for us? You know?

Yeah. Would you ever hire someone that disagreed with like browser-based? Like they're like, this is not gonna work. I, Don't like the architecture or bad idea?

No, I wouldn't hire someone who disagrees with the vision of the company. I would hire someone who disagrees with me. I mean, it happens all the time. I constantly get in disagreements with the team and that's how we have good decisions. We're not a culture of we all agree with each other all the time. So I actually like people who have strong opinions. Ideally, they're loosely held and if we can disagree and commit and build something together, It's good. But if someone like does not believe in Browserbase being a company that will be successful, then you probably don't want to, like, I wouldn't hire, I don't want you to come work for us. If you really want to work here, like, it'd be such a weird thing. Like, I, I hate you, but I want to work for you. Might be kind of toxic.

I don't know. I feel like you get some of that with some of the really big tech companies when you're crossing like hundreds of thousands of employees where they like don't like the company.

Right. Like, well, yeah, we don't pay well enough, I guess, to get those problems yet. Maybe if we were paying millions of dollars, be like, fine, I'll do it.

Yeah.

Uh, But no, thankfully we are still a humble small business, as they call it.

And so I want to actually touch base on the contractors again, because it seems kind of like, how do you get good quality out of contractors? And maybe contractors is like a scary word, part-time. I don't know the best way to say it that's like not, you know, derogative, or you maybe think like lower quality work. Like, can you get good work? Yeah.

Oh, I mean, like, I don't think it's lower So maybe defining, what is a contractor? A contractor is somebody who I pay generally on an hourly basis, sometimes on a weekly or monthly basis, who gets to choose their own hours. They get to work when they want and they can leave at any time and we can part ways anytime. How is that different from a full-time employee? Well, I think it's just a different relationship where they can say, "Hey Paul, I'm going to go to Ecuador for 6 weeks. I'm like, sick, sounds good. I'll, I'll take care of it. Don't worry about it. Like an employee, they need to let me know. We need to plan. Is this more of a permanent relationship there? Um, now how do you hire good ones? Well, that position in the description is pretty high trust. So ideally, you know, you're only working with people, um, as a consultant or a contractor that you trust, and you trust them to go off on their own and build something. Um, and, and generally You'll know within the first few weeks of working with someone who's a contractor that they're super high trust, high integrity, and care. So I think that more often than not, people end up hiring contractors. We've hired people who are contractors the full time before. It's a great strategy. And I think it's just something that you have to take some risk. And ideally, you're hiring people you know to be contractors or people you've heard good things about.

Yeah. And you said you don't really like hiring mercenaries.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like going back to like, would I hire the person who doesn't believe in browser-based who's really good?

No.

Like I think that to do good work at our company, not only do you have to be like highly skilled, but you have to kind of believe in what we're doing. Like we just had our monthly all hands on Monday. And the thing I kind of left everyone with was like, for us, optimism is a force multiplier. If you believe in what we're doing at Browserbase, it's going to enable the work you do to be more successful. If you've ever done something before and you're half a believer in it, the quality just goes way down. So we have to have everyone on our team really believe that we're doing this thing and it's going to work. Otherwise, we're not going to be able to endure all the hard parts of building a startup.

Yeah. So you're saying there's an unlock of productivity or skill or quality where you're just like, if you're really into it, you really enjoy it overall, do a better job.

I mean, like the placebo effect, right? Like if you actually believe, if you took a pill and it said you're going to, you know, be better at your job and like, you don't know if it does or not, but you believe in it, you actually end up doing better. I think same thing. Like if you're optimistic about the outcome of this thing, you're going to end up taking little micro actions that will result in you making the company more successful. Maybe you'll push a little bit harder or maybe you'll make, you'll say something you think is risky, but you think it's really important. Those are the kind of conversations that define a company.

Yeah, that's true. Because you might be like, you might have a really, I don't know, different or difficult to voice or share opinion. That's pretty important. But like, you still kind of want to keep making $200 grand a year and you don't want to have to look for a new job. So you might just kind of be like, I don't know, I'm not going to say anything about this. But if you really care about it, you're really important or it's really important to you. And maybe you not only get the courage to say it, but you actually, because you're so into it, you can like phrase it better and you just put more into how you pitch people on it or something like that, or share the opinion. I can see that too.

We are an emotional, emotionally vulnerable company. And what that means is that like we talk about the hard things. I think when you're in person, you can pick up when someone's having a bad day. You can just sense that. You notice that their body language, the way they kind of handle themselves. And like, it's on us to really try and like, one, dare to trust each other. Like, it's risky to trust somebody, right? Like, if you trust somebody, they let you down, then like, yeah, it's— you have to do this bold thing of trusting somebody. And then you have to actually kind of share vulnerably and own your mistakes. Like, if someone trusts you and you make a mistake, you better like, you know, earn that trust back by admitting, hey, here's what I messed up. And we really kind of focus on like, how do we make sure we're communicating and creating an environment where people can, you know, say these hard things like, hey, I actually maybe disagree with the direction of this product right now. Let's have a conversation about it. And I think having everyone talk about it will actually result in like better outcomes. We do this thing where whenever we like are discussing a new big feature, we do like a request for comment. It's called an RFC and everyone kind of comes in and comments on it and listen, like we pepper this thing with comments, you know, we're like, we're really getting into the weeds about this thing.

Like good, bad, like just pull back?

Yeah, like why would you name this thing this way? And like, it's your job to like remove your ego from the work and like also like look at the thing and really criticize it. And that's how you create great work. But that's super hard. I mean, people put a lot of effort into something and for others to come in and say why, what's bad about it, calling your baby ugly, you have to have a level of trust that these people behind the scenes really deeply care about you and trust you to be able to take criticism. So we start with building that baseline belief that, hey, like Garrett actually really cares about me. He likes me. He's going to rip my work to shreds, but that's because he wants us to be better.

He just loves me.

Yeah, because he cares. Like, it's like if the coach stops coaching you at practice because he's given up on you, that's not something you want. You know, you want someone who actually cares enough about yourself to really get into it.

Okay, so question then. People caring about your stuff. How do you get people to care about Browserbase and maybe developer tools in general? Like, what have you found works best there?

Yeah, I'm really lucky that we've gotten to a place with our brand that I'm starting to see the results of like people recognizing it outside of me, like putting it in their timeline.

And it's the bee, the bee emoji.

The bee emoji. I mean, that was the first growth decision of like, What's your logo gonna be? And I think when I was talking with, you know, uh, Zach Hargett, who's like I said, one of my buddies who helped me on the brand, we were looking at what are the brands that we love right now? And like LangChain, their original logo was the chain emoji and a parrot. Did you know that?

It was like, I didn't know that was the original.

It was the original.

It was like kind of their logo.

Yeah. It's kind of, well, hey, like, I mean, it still looks like the bee emoji, right?

You know?

Yeah. Like, I think like the, this, you start with like a simple thing, like, well, let's just make an emoji for our logo. We gotta keep building. And that's kind of what we needed in the very beginning. Um, but I think, and I forget who it was, but someone talked about like owning the emoji. Like if you can own an emoji, it ends up being like a really powerful growth thing because your logo is in everyone's pocket.

Yeah. And it might've been, I mean, I've heard Austin Reef talk about that with Morning Brew, with coffee mug. People have said that I've done that with banana, which like, I mean, I thought about it for sure. I was like, oh, this is like kind of interesting. It wasn't the reason, but it is, it works. Yeah. Just having an emoji.

I think, I think like owning an emoji is very powerful. I think for me, I liked the name Browserbase because it was, uh, easy to search. We could get the.com and I thought the SEO would be good.

I really, when I, what was the SEO like?

It was just like, so when I, when I was at Mux, uh, the company before Browserbase that I was working at, um, I was helping out with SEO and I always would lose to a company. Mux is a video API. Um, and they help developers like store videos and play them back. Um, and I would always be losing in SEO to this startup called api.video. And I, no matter what I did, I could not beat them because they had— because their name was video in the domain. The company name was freaking video. So I was like, I'm, I'm browser-based and I'm going to win. Got my browser, my name, and I can beat you now. And yeah, that, that, um, that's proven to work because it's a base for your browser. It's a very simple name. Maybe we'll have to rebrand in 5 years, whatever. But for now, like the way that we've gotten distribution is really by trying to like communicate this like esoteric thing, which is like a headless web browser. These are like things that people don't think about. It's like a very unloved tech stack, but we've kind of just become— I wanted to become the browser guy, the headless browser guy of San Francisco. Like if everyone in San Francisco knew that Paul was the person to talk to if you had problems with headless browsers, I believe that we would win 2024. And exiting the year, I feel like we've really accomplished that. We did that through a series of really great landing pages, good launch videos, compelling tweets and compelling demos that really all came together to really show, hey, it's possible for AI to use a web browser to do things on your behalf. Browser-based is the first thing you want to use when you do that. We make that decision. So it all kind of comes down to focusing on geography, focusing on a problem, and just really owning something, building a reputation for owning something.

So when you talk about you did a couple landing pages videos, any examples that stand out of, of like the greatest hits, like maybe the things that got the first customers, the thing that got you like the biggest, just like move the needle the most.

There's 3 videos that basically have made Browserbase what it is today. Uh, the first one was one I shot, um, in Solaris, uh, which is a coworking space in San Francisco.

Okay.

And this video was hilarious. It was like me talking at a camera. It was the first time I ever did like a startup launch video.

Okay.

And I just did my pre-seed and behind me is a whiteboard that says secret plan. I got an American flag on my right. There's a lot of little Easter eggs.

American dynamism.

Yeah. It was, it was, it was right when all the, like the gundo boys were coming out. Right. So I was like, all right, like—

People probably got their likes in their region.

Exactly. I was like, hey, I'm, you know, we're engineers, you know, this blue collar, engineering is blue collar, you know, we're engineering some stuff.

We're, we're working in the code.

Yeah, exactly. So threw up the American flag and had the secret plan behind me. And I just kind of like talked about the problem to a camera. And in hindsight, the video was like kind of cringe, but like, I think it channeled the right elements of like, it was like slightly produced and edited. Uh, my buddy Austin shot it and edited it for us and looked good. And the messaging was clear, which is like, Hey, I'm planting my flag and building this thing. I'm calling my shot. If you want to come join me, come join me. And then we hired somebody off of that video and we got a bunch of customers off of that video. We got 100K views on Twitter, which I thought was, I was pretty happy about. And that then we all of a sudden I realized like every launch that's major we should do, we should have a video. So the second video was a kind of like a montage of like short clips. I think Antimetal did this first really well when they did like this like launch video where they had like all these clips Another company recently did it too, but it's like this theme where you see people doing launch videos that are like TikTok edited, where it's like clips from TV shows that are all kind of stacking on top of each other.

Moves really fast-paced. There's like a narration over top.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that, that was, that was our Seed announcement where like, uh, the opening scene was like the, a scene from I, Robot and it's like, you know, why has AI not lived up to its hype? And then the second scene is like Roombas crashing into each other and it's like, you know, AI's let us down. And there's like an Alexa, like, I'm sorry, I cannot do that. And it was like a very meme-y video. And that one got like 250K views announcing our seed. And then the Series A video, which I think was like our best one, we actually went all out for. We had like someone produce it. We hired an actor who's this AI enge guy we found to do there. And he's sitting there and you can hear like Elon Musk in the background, like AI is going to be the most powerful thing that happens in this decade. And like he's building a startup with Browserbase and the startup goes viral. And you see the story of like, What will you build? The next billion-dollar company will be powered by BrowserBase. And I think we've gotten a lot better at storytelling for a category that's not necessarily known for storytelling.

Yep. Browsers or infrastructure.

Dev tools and infra. However, I'll contradict myself. Contradict myself. I think Vercel and Guillermo is fantastic at storytelling. And I think developers are choosing tools because the story resonates with them. And for me, I wanted people who are starting their own companies to use Browserbase as a core part of their infrastructure. And that's why we made that last video. So it's really been about how do we storytell for, um, our category and our problem, because it's not something that people really know about. And, um, I think we've done a good job of really representing it.

And then you, uh, these were all on Twitter. So like, was Twitter pretty important? Like, what's the power of Twitter? Developer tools or for a founder in general?

Yeah, it's the only platform that I've been able to crack so far. Have you tried other platforms? I'm so bad at posting on Hacker News. I don't know if I'm shadowbanned or what happened, but I've never cracked Hacker News in terms of posting. I've cracked it for hiring, but not for posting.

Let's talk to Joseph at Roboflow who introduced us.

He's amazing at Hacker News. I am super jealous. I think, I don't know what it is. That's something I haven't cracked. I, we, because we're a dev tool, I haven't found that like short-form video on like contents like Reels, YouTube Shorts, or TikTok is worthwhile yet. I think some people have, have really cracked that as a channel, but I think you kind of have to pick a channel and just own it for a while. Like if you try and go multi-distribution channel too early, you end up kind of being bad at all of them, I think.

Yeah, I could see that.

But if you pick one and crush it, then I think you really win. Um, and that's just kind of been X for us.

So do you, is there a risk to being too overreliant on it, you think?

Or I think that we haven't tapped out the, um, I don't think we've tapped out the TAM of X developers yet. Cause I think once again, we're selling to startup founders, we're selling to the decision makers, right? Like who's picking, who's deciding to buy Browserbase. It's probably like the CTO, the CEO, head of engineering. Or like a, like an early-stage founder. And oftentimes, like, people in the startup ecosystem are on, you know, X. Now, like, if I go sell to JPMorgan, like, I don't think Jamie Dimon is going to follow, see my X launch video. Like, I may have to go like on a, you know, Madison Square Garden ad on the side of the building or something, right?

Like, I bet he has a burner, maybe, right? Like, that's, that's the thing I've found is like the most unexpected people will follow me or like reach out to me, email me.

So, and I think we just haven't tapped out that category yet. Like I think at one point I'm excited for us to like start doing more video content on YouTube and like more like how to build this thing. And like one of our partners, Theo Brown, he does this amazing job with these like videos that walks through the pros and cons of technology. And we've been lucky to sponsor some of those videos. I'd love for us to have our own in-house video team producing stuff for developers because video content is just like super great to consume on a technical level.

Yeah, Joseph again, that was one of the first things I think they did. I mean, they do like a couple a week, a couple of YouTube videos a week, I think, for RoboFlow. So another—

hey, they're a Series B company. All right, come here, break. All right. We're a level behind them.

He's doing it. No, you're right.

No, Joseph is a much better founder than me. I won't deny that.

He also connected us. Just we'll give him a shout out for—

yeah, shout out.

Because when I had him on a couple of weeks ago, I was just like, I ask most people, I'm just like, Anyone else think I should have on? And he mentioned you. So I was like, holy shit.

It's amazing to, I think one of the biggest hacks that we did in the early days of BrowseBase is actually sharing offices with other great companies. And Joseph knows this, but I always wanted to share an office with him because to me he's one layer ahead of us, one level ahead of us. And being able to see how that team operates as they just announced their Series B, it's just really fantastic to see great founders and try and learn from them. I surround myself with great founders all the time as much as I can. Um, that's where I learned most about how to do this job.

So is that— that to me sounds like an interesting hack of like, uh, solo founder, share an office with maybe other solo founders.

Ideally someone ahead of you, like a little bit further along because like, I think sometimes, especially in the early days, you'll get trapped in like, you only perform as well as your expectations. And if you see another startup crushing it, you're gonna wanna do better. This is actually a great story. When we were doing StreamClub, we had an office. It's actually funny. This is now Jack Altman's new office. It was my old office for some reason. And it's in the Mission. And it was us. And then we sublet to another company called Hightouch. You've heard of Hightouch maybe? Yeah. Well, back then we were about the same size. You know, we're both like kind of early stage pre-seed, seed companies. And something happened where like Hightouch started like multiplying. Like they started, they took up another desk. Then they took up another desk and then all of a sudden, like, there was more high-touch people than StreamClub people. And then all of a sudden, like, it was the high-touch office and StreamClub was subleasing from them. And I was just like showing up to work every day. I was like, why are we not growing like this? And I think working with other talented founders and seeing how it happens up close— Tejas and Cash are still great friends of mine. I think they've crushed it since then. But it was a big motivator for us to work harder and seeing when things are working. It is really clear, clearly different from when things aren't working. And you want to see things are working with your company relative to others as much as you can.

So this was when you talked about Alana at Base Case. She, one thing she actually asked me, told me to ask you, did you learn anything from your parents in terms of sales?

Yeah. You know, I realized you're the Nardwaur of tech podcasts.

I actually don't even know who he is.

You don't know Nardwaur?

I've heard people mention him before.

I've never— He does like these rap interviews and he finds like these like really deep cut questions that require inside information.

I mean, we gotta build unique content. I know if I've learned anything about media companies or anything media related, you need unique content.

You kind of look like him a little bit too, actually.

Okay, I gotta—

Yeah, you gotta look it up. You asked—

What did you learn from your parents about sales?

Exactly. So I'm, as a founder, as a CEO, you're always selling, right? Like you're selling customers, you're also selling candidates. And I'm lucky that both my parents are fantastic salespeople. My mom has a background in pharmaceutical sales. My dad, he did semiconductor sales. So—

Nvidia?

It was not Nvidia. Aero Electronics.

Oh, Aero Electronics.

Space.

Interesting. Never heard of that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they sell semiconductors. And both of them, I kind of grew up being around salespeople. And I think I probably was being sold to my whole life. Like, oh my God, you're going to love the Olive Garden we're going to. It's the best breadsticks you'll ever have.

Right?

Such a great line. Like, it's like subconsciously got used to being sold things and then like reusing that. And I think that it wasn't as much like active learning, but I certainly imagine that like, I personally loved computers. I was very introverted. I just wanted to play video games all day long. And having two extroverted sales manager parents probably rubbed off and created me who I am today, which is like, you know, I'm extroverted, love to talk to people, but I really deeply love technology and I can talk to you all day about headless browsers. So it's a weird—

Deadly combination.

I know, weird hybrid, right? And I think that's what's made me really happy to be in the position I am, which is being able to run this company and balance my love for technology, but also the need to share that story and really rally people around it.

What video games did you play growing up?

Oh, everything. German, top.

Couple like most time spent?

Top, top, most time spent, um, StarCraft. I got really good at StarCraft II.

Okay.

I raided in WoW. I was actually running a guild for a little bit. Okay. RuneScape. I did so much RuneScape. I did some RuneScape botting actually, which actually I think they taught me a lot about like botting.

How is that different or, or the same? Like, is it, is there like scraping and stuff like that or is it more automation?

Very similar. I think back then RuneScape botting, you had to download like a sketchy exe file and run it on your computer.

Okay.

And I think I got so good at computers cuz I definitely like infected my family computer like 50 times.

Okay.

And learned everything about like how to fix, you know, yeah, yeah. When you're, you know, uh, a RuneScape virus. Yeah. We have a rootkit. Like you learn a lot about the command line cuz you're like, mom's coming home in 30 minutes and I gotta like remove this keylogger. And so all the popups that are popping up on the computer, right? Yeah. The RuneScape virus. So I mean, like, I think I've always loved games where you're setting up systems, um, and then you're seeing systems work. So like Civilization, Yeah, it's been a big part of me. I haven't gamed that much. I really want to get a PS5. That's like my— I haven't had a console in years.

So yeah, I played a lot. I played a lot of Civilization. Was when Civilization 3, I think that's one it is. I beat it on the hardest difficulty level. I don't know if you ever played it on deity.

Never.

Just one. It's impossible. Okay, all the sliders for like the computer tweaked like all the way over. They like just destroy you, but I've beaten it on that level before. It was like the most accomplished, like, fulfilling accomplishment I've ever had. And then I played a lot of, uh, Halo 3 and then Call of Duty 4. Yeah, I went to a Halo 3 tournament actually, uh, when I was in college. It was after my freshman year. Um, I got to the highest level in the, like, the hardest playlist in Halo 3. There's this thing called Major League Gaming, MLG. Yeah, it's like professional league back in the 2000s. Uh, and yeah, they did these like in-person tournaments and I got to like the highest level in the MLG playlist in Halo 3, and I was like, cool, I beat the game. I should probably focus on college because it was freshman year. And then a kid in one of my classes was like, oh, you're wearing this like MLG hoodie. We started playing together and like, dude, you're so good. We got to like go to some of these tournaments. And so it was kind of like maybe like you, you leave retirement kind of a thing. It was maybe like what you did where you're like, I'm never, I'm never playing again. And we went to this tournament and we just got absolutely destroyed. Yeah, we, it was like double elimination bracket. We just lost every match, got knocked out the first day. Um, yeah. And then I, most recently, uh, I got, I used to play NCAA football with my brothers a bunch. Did you ever play that one?

I did. Yeah.

So they, they re— so the game, the last one they made was 2014 and they made a '25. I don't know if you—

the '25 just came out.

I know it just came out.

It's been fantastic.

Yeah.

I don't play it, but I've, I've heard good things.

Yeah. So I actually, I got, it was the first, it's like been the first video game I've really played much in like a decade, is very nostalgic. Anyways, yeah. And that one, I don't know. I don't know if it's like a systems thing. It kind of is though. I don't know.

Yeah. I mean, like you're running plays, you're making decisions that have outcomes and then like making better decisions in the future. There's some mechanics of course, but like in the end you have to make the right calls.

I do the dynasty mode too, where you're like recruiting the team. I usually pick the worst, like I did Ball State and I took them and was like winning the national—

Very VC of you. Yeah. You're on the board of your NCAA team. LPs, check, check out his team. If he didn't, uh, win the championship, I wouldn't invest personally. Um, but like, it makes it similarly, I think people who love video games, like, to me, the startup is a video game in a lot of ways. Like, it's a system and we, we kind of constantly get to look at how we improve. And there's some skill here. Like, you have to like get good at writing code, but you have to grind too. Yeah.

Oh, it's, you just do the same thing over and over again.

Yeah. And, and I think You know, for us, like the grind is definitely part of it. And I, I had this rule, like I would never ask someone to do something that I wouldn't do. And I think the founder always has to be the hardest working person in the company. And I try and set that bar. Like I, I work a lot and, but I love that. And I think like the grind is very fulfilling for me because you get to kind of see incremental progress. Like on Friday, I spent all this time investigating this little tiny bug that was impacting like this one customer on this one specific website. And I found out what it was. And that was worth the whole day of finding that bug and be like, hey, I found the bug. I felt like a hero. And I think if you don't enjoy those little moments, then a startup's just going to be such a hard experience because you have to take joy in the little tiny grind achievements. It was like I got level 5 in fletching in RuneScape and I was like, let's go.

I just had a really interesting recent example. My friend, his name is Antoine Martin. He has a company called Zenly. He sold it to Snap. I started a new one, same thing. It's like a social map. It's like Find My Friends, but way better. I showed him this one thing. I was like, I'm getting this bug. Here's a screenshot. Constantly texting me about it. And I'm like, fuck, I feel so bad. I'm not just retesting the app and seeing if it's working. And he's sending me the Slack screenshots of everyone debugging it and their logs and they're trying to figure out what's going wrong with it. And I take 5 hours to get back with them. I was like, yep, I tried it. It still didn't work. Just constantly giving me like the feedback on like how to get through. And then I think it took us basically 2 days to fix it. And it was probably because I would— it was always for me taking a while to like, like re-download that app from the App Store and try it again. But I feel like you gotta just really enjoy doing that stuff.

So you have to have no shame as a founder too. I mean, when we launched Stream Club on Product Hunt, I texted pretty much everybody I knew. Like I went on Facebook and it was back when like Facebook Messenger would show green dots next to people who were online. And I like everyone who had a green dot, I messaged them on Facebook saying, hey, we're on Product Hunt right now. Would you mind upvoting us? I know you're online because I see your green dot, so it would just be super helpful. I texted like high school ex-girlfriends, like everybody, everybody that would maybe try and do it. You have to be so shameless with your social capital as a founder.

Yeah.

And I think if you can do that, then you can actually like hustle to get your startup out there and like get people to talk about it.

So how do you get by or get past— like, that's really cringe, you know?

So cringe.

How do you go from, man, this just feels so cringy to like actually doing all that stuff, putting yourself out there? Like, I'm sure that first video you shot with the secret master plan, there's probably people that saw that and thought like, what a loser or something like that. How do you get past the like putting all this stuff out there to now you're at the point where like It's worked. It's awesome. I'm doing it again. I'm like, I'm being super shameless. Like, cause that's like a common question I get about Twitter is like, you know, I'll say something that's just dumb and just, you know, or I'll see the wrong thing or like people will make fun of you or they'll judge you or whatever. Like, is there a barrier? And like, how do you get past that?

I think it's like deeply feels like psychological, right? Like you have to accept One, like you are an imperfect person. I'm an imperfect person. I'm gonna say something wrong. I'm sure I've said something wrong in this podcast, but like I make mistakes and like I own that. Like, and at the same time, like I try and be as authentic to myself as possible so that like if I say something, as long as I'm being truthful, always, I'm consistent, you know? And I think like it's when you try and like act as someone you're not, publicly, it becomes a lot of pressure to keep that up. And I think you have to actually like yourself as you are in an authentic way to be able to put yourself out there on a stage and say like, here's, here's who I am. Like, I made a joke on Twitter about like, like I tweeted a picture of an In-N-Out Burger and it was like having my daily dose of microplastics. And then people were like, yeah. And I was like, I still ate the burger. It's fantastic. And like, you're like, oh my God, the seed oils, what are you doing? Or like, in like just like people on the internet are crazy. And like, as long as you like, like the stuff that you're doing, like everything I post is for me. Like I, I genuinely like my own tweets. If I, I don't think I actually click the button. I might be able to start doing that.

You actually should. No one can see 'em.

Great.

Just should get the social proof of like, there's already one like this.

I'm gonna start doing that because like, I, I won't tweet something that I don't like.

Yeah.

And like, that's actually a way that you can be comfortable if somebody says this is bad and you're like, well, I don't care what you think as much cuz I like it.

Yeah.

It removes the pressure of doing things for others. Now it's tricky 'cause as a founder you have to produce content that resonates with others and like you have to actually have like outcomes from the things that you do. Like if I put out a launch video, it needs to have views and stuff, right? Um, and I think in the end that requires you to take feedback from the environment, feedback from the people who consume your content and then like take, you know, take a lesson. Like if I do a music video for Browserbase and people say, oh my God, this is so cringe and I love it. Well, I don't know if a music video is landing in terms of like something that I want to do to promote our content. And I should maybe reconsider that medium next time.

Yeah. And one, one thing that resonates with me when you talk about like the joke about the microplastics in the burger, that might've been a joke you would've made in the group chat that like 10 people would've seen, but you just put it on Twitter and I don't know, maybe a couple thousand views, whatever, depending on how like that could get a million views. Right. And you could get like 10 new customers for, or a new Someone who wants to work at BrowserBase from that. So it's kind of, it's hard to quantify the benefits, but also like if you're doing something that you maybe already are doing anyways, or you already enjoy doing and you get fulfillment out of it, it's not that difficult. I guess you kind of just have to train your, train your, uh, your psyche and your, your mind and workflow around it.

Yeah. And there's hacks and techniques, right? Like I did this thread about like Here's all the things. I had a list of learnings I had from the last year. At the end of every investor update, I share a lesson I learned and I put that list on X. Yeah, I kind of formatted it so you have to click the show more button. I know the algorithm would prioritize that because people spend more time looking at that tweet and therefore it was spread. Yeah, 2 minutes.

People spend at least 2 minutes on a piece of content. It tips it in the algo.

Exactly. So yes, there is some strategy to it, but I think I also was just like, oh, I'm really happy I wrote all these things down and share them. And like, I think there's a blend of authenticity and execution that need to come together to create good messaging that people actually resonate with.

So I, I guess segueing a little bit, but like maybe related to just like the internet being always on, um, how important is customer support, customer service, especially as a startup?

Yeah. And I mean, especially as an infrastructure company too, right? Like, our customers build features that depend on our thing being online. And that's a high bar, like being online, doors open 100% of the time, even if you're sleeping. Um, we really need to make sure our stuff works well. And it's also complex because like our customers use BrowserBase to go browse the entire internet and websites on the internet also might, maybe less reliable than us. And if someone goes to a website Online and they're like, hey, how come this random website's not working? Is it browser-based or is it the random website? We've had instances where the random website is down. There are some health insurance portals that just stop working in like late at night, you know?

Really?

Yeah. They just turn, they just shut it down for like maintenance. Like if you want to go file an insurance claim for Aetna at like 3:00 AM Pacific time, I'm sorry, dog. Like it's down for maintenance, you know? And like. People will wonder if it's our fault or their fault. So what I've learned from the great founders out there is that customer support is the biggest differentiator you can have. People have chosen to work with us because they have my cell phone number and can get on a call and they can come talk to me. And I think I've really tried to put that into our team. I read this interesting thing about Supabase recently. It's a database company. At the top of every offer letter, they say, "Customer support is your number one responsibility." Really? Every single offer letter. Guillermo from Vercel, he says, you know, he says like, customer support is our biggest differentiator. And I think like, it's not, not a mistake that like each of these great infrastructure companies make that a priority because developers are counting on you. You know, it's, it's similar to like, we all know how bad airline customer support is and we all feel so screwed because we have to get home on that plane. We have no other options. Like if your feature's not working because your provider is down, you feel like things are out of your hands as a developer. So I think that's why we try and be as transparent as possible. We have like a status page where we like post, hey, if we go down, here's why we went down. I mean, remember when OpenAI, they had a big outage recently and I think there's a lot of stuff they can improve from that. But the postmortem that they posted, they said, here's exactly what went wrong with our system. And that was— that helped them earn more trust back from the engineering community because we all been in a place where In this case with OpenAI, they had a runaway Kubernetes cluster and this configuration change broke it. Many engineers feel empathy because we've had that happen for us too. So above all else, it's trying to be transparent, trying to be available, set expectations accordingly. I mean, we closed our biggest sales deal, which involved me supporting a customer the day before my wedding this year. And like, I got a call from Sophie on our team like, hey, Paul, can you take a look at this? I know you're about to get married tomorrow, but like, just it's kind of important. And I'm like, absolutely, this is super exciting. And like, sometimes we have to like make sacrifices to meet our customers where they are. But, you know, just because stuff is happening in our life doesn't mean that their lives are stopping. And we should do our best to prioritize them because they're taking a big bet on us. So I'm just like super grateful for them.

Yeah, I think another interesting topic when if I, if I Google you or search you on YouTube, I look at some of these other podcast conversations you've done. It seems like a lot of people are really excited about like, this guy's a great fundraiser. $0 to $27 million raised in 9 months, I think is like the headline. Yeah, I think you kind of described it to me before as like fundraising as a non-famous person. I think that's those— those like, oh yeah, you're, you're phrasing like, how do you fundraise as a non-famous person?

Yeah, I am not Ilya. I'm not Elon Musk.

Maybe you're famous now because of those headlines.

Yeah, I think it's definitely a good clickbaity title, right? I mean, for what it's worth, we've raised a lot of venture capital in a very short amount of time. We raised 3 rounds across 9 months, $27.5 million in a $2 million seed, $12.5 million— sorry, $2 million pre-seed, $12.5 million seed. And $21 million Series A. You don't do that that fast without like learning how to fundraise. And I think the lesson I've learned with fundraising is actually like build relationships before you fundraise. You know, like I've been lucky to have had— I'm a one-time failed entrepreneur, so, you know, second time founder, one time failed. And since the first time I've gotten to know a lot of investors and I've spent time like talking to them about my ideas. I was talking to a founder recently And he said, oh, you're supposed to never talk to VCs. Talking to VCs is like talking to the cops.

Talking to the cops.

He's like, they're gonna pull out their little notepad and everything you say is going in the record. And I was like, yeah, I could, I can see that. I guess I was like, I, I, that I am, I have a rap sheet, I guess. Cause I, I'll talk to, I'll talk to people.

I'll end up like a whole Palantir database.

Yeah. On Paul's, Paul's opinions. Is there in the rap sheet. Um, but no, I completely disagree with that. It's not like the cops. It's—

but isn't it a waste of time? Like, don't people say it's a waste of time?

I feel like people ask me interesting questions that help me, helps me think better. When I wrote the original memo for Browserbase, I sent it to a few investors that I trusted and said like, hey, tell me everything that you would criticize about this.

Because wasn't it kind of, it was like sort of also like a request for startups almost.

Yeah. And the original memo was like, uh, someone should build this.

Yeah.

Someone was very clearly me. I was employed when I published that, so I didn't want to say, "I'm starting this company," and call my boss the next day, "Hey, by the way, I just published this." I think I still had to come to terms with it. But yeah, when I published it, it was like a request for startups, and I think I had to convince myself that I was the right person. But in the end, I think investors, just like founders, are people too. I— you should not be afraid to talk to them. And oftentimes they will ask you interesting questions that make you think about things.

So, so how did you— let's say I'm assuming the, the very first round you raised is probably— there probably wasn't a whole lot yet.

Yeah.

Second one, I think it was $12 million was the number you said.

$4.5 for the second one. And there also still wasn't a lot. We had a product, we had a lot. We'd validated the initial hypotheses so that, well, maybe I'll tell it step by step. The pre-seed was really reputation-based. You know, like I had gotten to know Alana. She really understood deeply my vision for this company. She'd seen me execute at the current job I was at, which I had done a good job at my job. And I think she really believed in what I wanted to do and said, hey, like, I see your vision here, go do it. And then, you know, for the seed round, Bucky Moore, who's on our board now at Kleiner Perkins, he really got to kind of see like, hey, when I talked to Alana in January, here's what I said I wanted to figure out. Here's all the evidence that this is actually happening that we've seen the last 4 months. We need to double down. Let's go do it. And he was like, all right. And thankfully, I had met Bucky for like a random walk 2 years before. So like we'd gotten a chance to get to know each other. And like then when I did the Series A, Reed Christian, who's from CRV, who's also now on our board, I'd had a chance to hang out with him a year and a half before because I just said, "Hey, I like your stuff on Twitter. You're investing in Vercel. I love Vercel.

Can we talk?" And it's that simple.

I think for all of these things, there's a combination of you're not trying to get someone to invest the first time you've met them. There's some time between that. You've actually built a relationship with them. And you also have somewhat of a good idea that's related to a thesis that they have. All these investors have invested in great dev tools and infrastructure companies. I'm building a category-defining infrastructure company, and I've taken the time to get them to trust me because I've tried to get to know them. And I wrote about dev tools for a year on my own personal blog, and I sent it to them before I even started the company.

So all these people you had sent the thesis to before?

I had sent several. I had a whole Substack that I was doing I was publishing every other week for a year before I started BrowserBase. And a lot of people had seen some of them. I had a couple memos that really popped off. I had one called, it was a Next.js versus the world that talks about how components are the new API. I had one about the rise of product engineers and how important they are for building good companies.

That one sounds familiar.

Yeah, I mean, that one got a bunch of views. And I had one called Death to the Backend talking about how I think people writing backend code We'll just be using infrastructure in the future.

The backend code's probably going to get—

Yeah, Convex or Supabase or Clerk, all these backend as a service companies or companies that provide infrastructural components. I think you don't need a user's table anymore. You just use Clerk.

And the engineers or PMs or other people on the team can just use their products instead of having a backend engineer. Yeah, exactly. One person that manages the products or something.

If you can generate your frontend with AI and you can just plug that into a backend that's run by some third-party company, You don't have to maintain a lot of stuff anymore, which I think is quite cool. And that's like, I mean, some people want to, we can go into this super deeply, but maybe the point of all this was like, I was writing about technology and about my industry, which is infrastructure, because I cared about it a lot. And people had, someone says a lot like timestamp thoughts, you know?

Yep. Yeah.

These were all timestamp thoughts that I've had. And it became a lot easier to kind of diligence me and say like, wow, Paul's really thought about this for a long time. When I raised the pre-seed for Browserbase, the second slide of the deck is a link to a YouTube video of me talking about headless browsers in 2021, 2 years before. So you have clear evidence that I've thought about this for a long time and a pretty valid direction to go in. And I think that's all investors look for. Tell me if I'm wrong here as you are an investor, but from my perspective, They want to know why now, why this, why you. And if you can very clearly articulate why is now the right time for this thing, why are you building this thing, and why are you the right person to build it, I think you have a compelling case for building a good company.

Yeah, I think that's right. Another thing I think about is just, will you make money? Like, will, will, if I give you money, will you make me more money? And that is big. You're, that's, simplest form of answering what you just said. So it's like, I mean, one of my friends, she's like, her framing is, do I think this founder is going to be a billionaire? I'm like, okay, that answers the question because like I get a part of your company, you make a shit ton of money and I also make money because I invest it. And that, but that comes down to like, what's the product? What's the market? Is it the right team? I think one thing I've changed a little bit is like, less and less on like me being super analytical or like things like that I think I'm smart about with like the market or the product and more so about just like the founder and the team and just like ability to execute. I think actually one company I'm looking at investing in, I know nothing about the market at all. I just think the founders are really good.

So yeah, I mean, for early stage, I, I, I do like a little bit of angel investing and like the biggest miss I've ever had. The founder came to me and said, hey, Paul, I really want you to invest. I think you'll— and I just didn't like the company. I was like, oh, this company doesn't seem very good, but you're awesome. So good luck. And then they pivoted, of course, because the company wasn't very good and their new company is fucking awesome and they're crushing it. And I'm like, oh my God, how did I miss out on that? And since then, if there's a founder that's really, really good, even if they don't have the right idea, I'm still going to like, I'm going to tell them it's not the right deal, but I'm going to tell them I'm betting on them and hopefully they figure it out, you know?

Yeah, I actually have done that before where I've said I am not sold on this, but I'm going to give you money because I believe in you.

Right.

And I'm like, I think I say this a couple of times on the podcast, but there's been a lot of times where, you know, somebody comes to you with a pitch deck, it says all this stuff, whatever. What is exactly in the pitch deck is never the thing that like works and creates enterprise value or whatever. Maybe they got the general customer right. Maybe they got the general market right. Maybe all those things. I had one pivoted from the most B2C possible thing you could imagine to the most B2B possible thing. Like complete 180. Like I would call it like a 540, like literally like full 360 and like back another 180.

Like it was just— They're dizzy after that.

Yeah. But when I was investing, I was like, I really like this idea. I just don't even think it's going to work because I just like, I think it's impossible. But I think he might be able to figure it out. But if he pivots to B2B, do I just like trust him with the money? And like, do I think that they're going to do like build stuff with it and like make a company with it? So I don't know. That's like one way I've been kind of just framing it in my head is just like, do I think these that this team is going to make a company that does something?

Yeah, I think like the best founders that I've met are like relentless. Like they just will not give up. And like, as much as they, you know, startups are unpredictable, like if things are going the way of the pitch deck and it's working, like that's super special. I think we're lucky that like app browser base, it's been pretty much to plan the whole year and that's been just super lucky.

Does that scare you at all? That it's like going exactly how you thought? Or—

I think it's going better than I thought. I thought that like hitting a million-dollar run rate in our first year was like the stretch goal. And we crushed that. And like, I think I underestimated how well it could work, like the upside. And I think that's why if you go back to like, well, Paul said he wasn't going to raise venture. Paul said he wasn't going to start a company. Why would I trust what this guy says? I think I try and be conservative on how successful things can be. And I focus more about what could go wrong and making sure I really understand the things that go wrong super well. I'd be happy if I misread the upside and we're up a lot bigger than we actually are. But I would be less happy if I misread the downside and actually there's some structural problems with this business that we just invested a bunch of time and money into.

So you don't feel like there's structural issues with like the business model or like product or anything?

I, at least from, from my perspective, like I'm okay with any of the ones that exist, you know, like I think that it's really hard for a hyperscaler company to build a company like Browserbase. Like I think if Amazon launched a headless browser infrastructure product, I don't think they would win against us. I think that it would be one, there's like some problems that they'd have to overcome with like dealing with anti-bot. That's really difficult for a company like Amazon to do.

But they're like the biggest company in the world. Don't they have the resources?

Yeah, but I also think that they have a lot of risk. And like, would Amazon— imagine this New York Times headline: Amazon Web Services solves CAPTCHAs. It's this kind of— looks bad. Browser-based solves CAPTCHA. They're like, who's browser-based? It doesn't matter. Like, there's no— yeah, it's a terrible headline, right? But like, Andy Jassy, the bot master. Like, I could come up with like 50 of these that like would cost Amazon more in market cap of a risk for the stock than it's worth it to build that business. But for us, like, we can take risks. We're a small startup. And I think that like we're doing something that's like on this new edge where people are still figuring out the rules of the internet. They're still figuring out how AI can go online. And CAPTCHAs exist because they're, they're kind of one size fits all. It's like a CAPTCHA exists to prove that this is a bot. But now there are like good bots and bad bots.

Yeah, there's lots of bots on the internet.

There's different types. And like CAPTCHAs are kind of like, oh, it's a bot. I, I don't know if it's good or bad.

Yeah.

And I would love to make browser-based the arbiter of good bots one year, one day where like if a browser-based browser comes in, you know it's a good bot and you wanna let it in cuz it's gonna go buy something. It's gonna come like help your customer do something. It's gonna actually add more usage of the downstream product. Um, but I think we have a ways to go before the internet catches up to what's happening with AI. And, um, yeah, it's going to be interesting to see. But I think it's really hard for a company like Amazon or Cloudflare to really kind of compete in that space because it's so high risk.

And there's a couple other, like, doesn't Microsoft have one?

They have, they have a framework. They have a framework called Playwright. Uh, and that's like the open source framework. Google has one too. It's called Puppeteer. And those, those are more like control planes. So you use Playwright to write code that controls a browser. Okay. The browser in this instance would be like Google Chrome. So Playwright controls Google Chrome. So Playwright's the framework, the browser is the browser, and the Playwrights control the framework.

And then if you were to say use BrowserBase instead because it can do this.

So you would use Playwright to control a browser that's running within BrowserBase. So BrowserBase is the infrastructure. It's kind of like, think about a database company. Like you use, you write SQL code to talk to a database and there's many different types of databases, Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB. Playwright is to SQL as the browser is to a database. So Playwright controls the browser. But if you want to run like 50 or 100 browsers, it's actually quite hard to do that. And browser-based makes it so you can like, you can spin up 1,000 browsers like this, like super easy. And they have all this cool features. Like we show you what happened in the browser. We have a recording, we have all those logs and stuff. So Playwright can talk to many browsers within browser base and we handle all those infrastructural challenges.

So what do you, are there any big product decisions that you think you got right or that you specifically like thought about over the past year or two, three years? Yeah.

I mean, for me, if you're building great infrastructure, you also need to have a great framework. And I think what Vercel did, they had this kind of concept of framework-defined infrastructure. Where, you know, you build a great framework and you build the infrastructure around it. The browser-based infrastructure exists really to power our own framework, which is comparable to Playwright. It's called Stagehand. Um, like, you know, like an actor, because there's playwrights, there's puppeteers, and there's stagehands.

I gotcha.

It's the fact that you have to explain the name is that means it's a bad name, but we're stuck with it. So it's called Stagehand and stagehand.dev, and it is a AI web browsing framework. So instead of in the old world, you would have to say, hey, this specific button, click this specific button. It probably has a bunch of like, it's the 5th div on the page. It's 2 links below or 2 links to the right of the other link. It's very specific to the page.

Okay.

Um, with Stagehand, you can just say, hey, click the checkout button and we will codegen the right code to find out where that checkout button is and click it for you. So Stagehand is this product decision we made to like build a framework and own a framework that we actually think is the right framework to use when building applications that can interact with the internet.

And, and that makes it easier for people to adopt kind of like—

it's, it's, it's much easier to build workflows now that go out and automate something online because you actually have a framework that's designed for that. These other frameworks, Selenium, Playwright, Puppeteer, these were all built for testing. They're all built to like test your web app. Like as a developer, you would use Playwright because you want to have it go through the login flow 10 times and make sure it doesn't break. But now there's a framework, Stagehand, which is built for like, as a developer, I want to build some software that's going to go to the IRS website and find the tax code for some random state and investigate whether or not farmers should get taxed for the corn they throw away. I just made that up. But like, I mean, that's, it's an interesting thing. You have to write that for every single state. That's 50 different scripts. Um, what if you were to write one script that uses AI to like say, okay, this customer's in California. I will scroll on this list until I find California and click into that, you know? And no, California doesn't tax the farmers for the corn.

Are there any things that like doesn't work for yet or like it's not good at yet or Or maybe the things you're excited about, about, yeah, I think next year we're going to get there.

I think that the biggest thing holding us back for building reliable web agents, a web agent is like a, you know, AI that can navigate the web on its own, is actually step planning and long-term thinking. So like for workflows that take less than 50 steps, I think it's actually pretty, it's getting there. But like if you have like a pretty esoteric long workflow, it's going to be really hard. Like if you needed to navigate the— what would be especially hard here?

What about with like the tax revenue with the corn? Would you like doing something with that then also?

I think like if you wanted to go through your TurboTax and complete all of the tax steps for you, that's probably too hard for a web agent right now. There's just so many steps. And if like, you know, you think about like how an agent works, you often give it like a high-level goal, like do my taxes. And then how does it, what does it do next? Well, then it has like a planning step where it says like, okay, what do I have to do to plan, do your taxes? Step 1, go to turbotax.com. And like you hand that off to your web agent, which will go to turbotax.com. Step 2, click start taxes. And you just kind of repeat this over and over and over again that the planning step becomes so long, it will often get caught in a loop where it's like, oh, okay, I need to see if I'm married or not. Go check my marriage certificate. It's like at one point when you're building these agents that are long-running, because there's so many steps, the prompt becomes less effective. It's because it's too much context in the prompt for it to be really reliable.

Interesting. And how do you think it's going to get better?

I mean, we've already seen how post-training is making models more powerful. We saw these benchmarks, O3, right? From OpenAI. I think that step planning and really thinking, being interesting thinking to large language models is going to result in them being able to handle more and more complex tasks. You're going to be able to ask it, "Do my taxes," and it actually can think about all the steps it has to do to really reliably do your taxes. Now, does this happen next year or the year after? I don't know. But all I'm saying is that it seems like we've really started to master the click this button on this website workflows. And we're starting to see more progress on the do this complex workflow of multiple actions. It seems inevitable that soon you can give AI a high-level task and they can just iterate over and over again until it finds out what to do. If you've tried using Devin yet, the AI programmer that you kind of use, it's not great, but you can see it doing this planning step where it plans how it's going to attack a problem. It does that, it then reflects on its plan, it does it over again. It gets stuck sometimes, It takes like hours sometimes, but that agent loop is something we're gonna see more and more of in the next year.

Interesting. Yeah, probably one of my, I say favorite, but it's also really frustrating when you're using like ChatGPT or something. You're like, hey, did you like finish this yet? And it's like, no, I'm not. I, I'm still working on it. And you're like, it's been like an hour.

Yeah.

What are you doing? Yeah.

But, and that's, and that's the problem. Like, I mean, like imagine because models right now, like they may have such a small context window that like an hour's worth of reflection might not fit into the context. So they have chunk it up and that means you're losing information. Larger contexts, more accurate models that are trained on more data will result in more powerful agents and it's just going to take some time.

So if I'm building a tech company that's in AI, AI is changing all the time. Is there a lot of, I don't know, tech debt where you basically built something and then the models all get better and this context changes and you had all this stuff built for this world of shorter context windows? Is this something you've been running into?

I think things change so damn fast, especially for our customers, that it's hard to keep up sometimes. You may build a state-of-the-art AI feature and then all of a sudden, 3 months later, like, oh my God, you aren't re-ranking your chunks? What a boomer. And I think that the techniques are changing so, so much that yeah, Things are constantly changing. And hey, maybe AI will help us keep up to date with the best way to use AI, right? What if Devin was self-improving where it's like, oh, I learned how to actually improve my code gen abilities and it's self-improving. I think it'll be a while until we see that. However, it is hard to keep up with things. And that's why we've really invested in great evals for our AI features at BrowserBase. So we know, is something performing well? If it's performing well enough, we don't necessarily have to change it that much, unless we're trying to cost optimize. Starting with the eval and then working backwards to the feature has allowed us to build AI functionality that tends to work well and last.

Another question related a little bit to what we talked about earlier, being an infrastructure company versus a product company. There's some that only do one of each. Some that started, I feel like you probably started infrastructure and then also moved to product. Is that a good idea? Is an infrastructure company in terms of defensibility of business model? Is it too complicated? How do you think about that?

Yeah, I had a really interesting conversation recently with one of our engineers. They were like, what do you think of v0, which is Vercel's AI website generator? And I was like, I think it's one of the smartest strategic moves that we've seen in infra yet. Yeah, here's why. So what is Vercel? Vercel, they host your website, your Next.js application. Next.js is the framework they built. So they're the hosting platform for this framework they built. Well, what's happening? More and more code is being generated by AI. If you are the framework company, the hosting company, you want that code to be generated using your framework. So what do you do? You build the best damn website generating website, V0. So V0 only generates Next.js code and Next.js code runs best on Vercel. And I think that's just so smart that As an infrastructure company, you're building the best product that generates products that use your infrastructure. That's mind-blowing to me. So I'm coming back to that and saying like, how can I build, you know, the thing for Browserbase that generates the Stagehand code that runs on Browserbase? And another analogy here is like what ChatGPT did for OpenAI, you know, like ChatGPT was the application layer and then OpenAI APIs were like the infrastructure. And I think that's just a really, really smart way to go launch something. And it really ensures that, you know, your infrastructure can be enduring. If someone builds the best company in the world on top of you and you don't capture the revenue because they just switch off of you, I think there's a lot of infrastructure builders are thinking about how do they have their own v0s right now. So it's, it's super insightful to see a new strategy.

And you look at like, what are some of the most valuable technology companies, they're basically both like Amazon AWS and the website, like the, the commerce portion. Maybe that's not quite the same, but like Google owns the infrastructure and the distribution. Microsoft, the infrastructure. They also have the hardware, also all the applications and the operating system. Like it feels like the more fuller stack you go, I like order of operations, right? Like, what do you do at what point? But like, it's, they're all like trillion-dollar companies.

Yeah. I mean, it's certainly order operations. Like Microsoft didn't touch a lot of the other stuff until the operating system was really good. Amazon had to make e-commerce great before they even consider AWS. And there's so many e-commerce things moving back to it. It's, it's, I mean, it's decades too, right? Like I think that, um, I don't think about that too much right now because we just got to get to the point where were Amazon the great e-commerce website or like, you know, before you even think about that. Yeah, exactly. So maybe you're a best bookstore online.

Maybe you're starting to be like, all right, maybe we add like CDs or something. I think one last question I want to ask you was you have this concept called the sine wave concept. What is that?

You got to stop talking to my employees. I don't know what you're doing over there. But yeah, you know, internally I think about the effort that we put in at work as a bit of a sine wave where like we will have moments that we're peaking and we have a lot of high intensity. And after that, you have to follow with some low intensity. It's the only way that I see work happening sustainably. And those kind of high-energy moments where we're working really, really hard, that's when great work happens. You do need to have those moments where we're pushing before a big launch, we're supporting a customer, where we have all hands on deck and we're working extremely hard. Uh, but if you don't also have those moments of recovery where people are taking time off, people are like working a little bit less hard, you can't reach the peaks that are necessary to really do hard things. Like if you're always at the top, you burn out. If you never push hard, you never do great things. And if you kind of sit in the middle, you're kind of in a place of just like average. So I think what I've discovered is that like, and it's actually crazy if you look at like our GitHub commit charts, you can literally see the sine wave happening. You can see like, oh my God, we really pushed hard. And now we, even our fundraising, we pushed really hard for our first self-service launch in June and then we raised in September. We launched that then. So I think that's proved to work really well for us. And it's just all about being strategic about when you push and when you recover.

What's a good way to know when to push, when to recover?

Well, I think something, you don't really know, you'll, if you're at a company that's product-market fit, you won't get to know when to push, you just have to push, you know? The pressures will result in you being pushed. And then oftentimes you have to make sure you're being aware of how hard the team is pushing and for how long so you can come up for air. And I mean, like an example for us is like, hey, we have to hit a really big ambitious goal this quarter. We need to work really hard to get this feature out the door. Or we've had a customer come in and say, I want this thing. And we as a team say, we want to get this customer, let's push really hard to make this feature work. So I think those have been moments that external factors have resulted in a push. And then after that, we just took our first team holiday where between Christmas and New Year's, everyone was off. And I stayed online, I'm on call, I was handling customer questions. I'm going to take my holiday in a few weeks, take some time for myself, but like, that was great because everyone just got to like relax and not look at their Slack for a week. And then like, we all came back energized and I think that's going to lead for us having a really solid January as we push really hard again.

So it sounds like you, you don't get to choose when you push, but you, when that happens, you then have to be like, all right, we need to like make sure we ease back a little bit and recover and take advantage.

And not even a little, like it has to feel like noticeably different.

Like, I mean, really? Okay.

Yeah. Like I think you have to like, like tell everyone to go home, you can go chill for an afternoon or like, hey, let's make sure we have a really great team dinner and spend some money on it. You know, in these recovery weeks, it's important. It's like your body, like if you push at the gym every single day, you get injured. You got to have a rest day. I think the same is true for startups.

Yeah. Speaking of the gym, I did leg day 2 days in a row the past 2 days and getting up from the plane, sitting here for like 5 hours, I was like, my God, why did I do that to myself? Oh, top of mind.

I wish I could go to the gym. Damn, must be nice. VCs.

You got it. You got to weave that in. You can't say that because there's tons of founders like the Gundo guys are like benching in their office.

I've never seen a founder that has PMF and raises Series A with a six-pack.

Yeah, that's fair. I definitely do not have a six-pack.

I've heard secondhand that like a very famous VC has told his investors If someone raises their Series A and doesn't get fat afterwards, then they're not going to make it.

What?

I, I'm not going to quote that, but it's something I heard because like at that point you're so stressed that you have to go like, you have to go all in on your company. And I've gained like 20 pounds in the first year of Browser Race. I'm not proud of that. And like, I'm, I'm getting back after the gym actually. So yeah, I'm, it's going to happen. But I think at one point, like, you do only have so much willpower per week. And if I just wanted to maintain my fitness, you know, but like, I think if I was going, you know, spending, you know, an hour per day, 5 days a week in the gym, 5 hours doesn't seem like much, but like the amount of like time that cuts into, um, it's a lot. And I think it's super, super hard. And I'm a guy, I've done like an Ironman. I've done 3 marathons. Like I'm a pretty fit, I did 1,000 Pound Club. I'm a fit guy. And even I couldn't like hang onto the gym while I was building a company that has BMF. I just think it's like, it's a hard expectation to put on yourself to do both.

Yeah, man, that's fair. Um, well, this is a really interesting conversation. A lot of fun.

Thanks, man.

Thanks for doing it.

Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

And thank you for listening. If you missed it, make sure to check out last week's episode with Robinhood co-founder, Baiju Bhatt, and tune in next week for a friend who went from illegal immigrant to raising his first $160 million venture fund. If you like this episode, please leave a quick review or comment wherever you're listening or watching. Check the show notes for more on the topics mentioned throughout the conversation. And if you don't wanna miss a future episode, subscribe to my newsletter, The Split, to get each episode plus a transcript emailed directly to your inbox every week. Thanks again for listening. See you in the next episode. Hey everyone, Eric here.

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