Competing with Giants:
How Arc Builds Product

Josh Miller

CEO & Co-Founder, The Browser Company
(makers of Arc)

MAR 19 2023

Core Philosophy

Optimize for
Feelings, Not Metrics

"What do you think Walt Disney was optimizing for when he crafted Disneyland? Not rides-per-hour. He was imagining how to make people feel magic."

Ask "how do we want this person to feel?" before setting any metric
Nike, Apple, Disney, the most beloved brands optimized for emotional connection, not graphs
Metrics are a honesty check, not the goal, use them as a tool, not a compass
Pick the right feeling and the metric you care about usually follows automatically

Framework

The 5 Arc Values: Written as a Road Trip, Not a Corporate Slide

days/week, their one north-star metric

10%

week-over-week growth sustained 8 months

30s

D5/D7 retention cohorts (and improving)

"We hated corporate values. Then after 2 years of 1:1s we realized, these things were already happening. We just needed to name them."

1, Heartfelt Intensity

Hire people with fire in their belly, something to prove. Give them an ambitious prompt and get out of their way. This one value explains everything.

2, Assume You Don't Know

Even Chrome's co-creator shows up with beginner's mind. The follow-up rule: "So we've got to get going." Default to action over deliberation.

3, Ask "What Could Be?"

Push as aspirational as possible. Peek didn't just fix context-switching, it blurred the line between native and web software entirely.

4 & 5, Swarm + Make Them Feel Something

Drop everything for the crew when needed. And always return to: what emotion does this create in the person on the other side of the screen?

Playbook

The Team IS the Product: Josh's Hiring & Trust Playbook

Start with people, not product: Josh and Hursh picked the browser category to attract the dream team, not because they cared about browsers. The company is the product Arc is building.
Convince candidates NOT to join: Arc interviews are open "ask me anything" sessions. Josh's explicit goal is to talk people out of it. What they ask, and how they follow up, reveals who they really are.
Hire mutts, not archetypes: Chrome's co-creator. Tumblr's first designer (7 years, then SVP at Slack). Paper by 53 team member (then SVP at Vimeo). All joined as individual contributors.
Celebrate ICs publicly, not the CEO: Every hire is a product launch. Every shipped feature credits the maker by name on Twitter. Intentionally breaks the CEO hero-worship cycle endemic to Silicon Valley.

"Darren co-created Chrome, ran it for 16 years, had hundreds of reports, and joined us as an IC. That's the tumbleweed. Once you get one person like that, more follow."

Building in Public = Radical Trust-Building

Arc has your most personal and professional data. Josh films board meetings. Posts design reviews running over schedule. The hypothesis: if you get to know us as imperfect humans, you'll trust our product. Not radical transparency, radical trust-building. The podcast medium itself is the inspiration: Lenny's listeners feel they know him before they've met.

The Internet Computer Vision

Everything is moving to URLs. Devices are becoming empty shells. Arc's real play: be the iPhone of the internet, replace your default browser the way the iPhone replaced your cell phone, then build a developer platform on top. Google and Apple have perverse incentives to keep the web worse than native. Arc doesn't.

Tactics

Tactical Moves Worth Stealing

Name things weirdly on purpose. "Storytelling team" not "marketing." New names shed inherited assumptions and force first-principles thinking about what you're actually trying to do.
Remove the founder from product reviews. The highest-leverage change Josh made in 2023: getting himself out of the day-to-day product process entirely.
One metric, not many. D5/D7 captures retention + engagement + growth in a single number you can't game. No separate DAU, WAU, MAU obsession, just: do they use it 5 days a week?
Ship your values, don't announce them. Values should emerge organically from how your team already behaves, then be named, not invented. Three months to write theirs as a road-trip essay.
The one interview question: "What would you like to ask me?" What candidates ask reveals far more than any structured PM interview question ever could.

The 3-Person Storytelling Team A filmmaker, a 7-year Snap marketing veteran, and a poet-editor. Radically different archetypes. One shared belief: software should make people feel something. Airbnb's video team had the same structure.

Contrarian

Myths About Building Great Consumer Products

✗ Metrics-driven teams build the best products INSTEAD → ✓ Metrics keep you honest at the check-in, but at the moment of creation, the only question worth asking is: how do we want this person to feel? Walt Disney, Phil Knight, and Steve Jobs weren't staring at dashboards when they created their most iconic work.

✗ A great mission attracts great people INSTEAD → ✓ Great people attract other great people. Josh and Hursh picked the browser category specifically as the right stage to recruit their dream team. The company is the product. Once one remarkable IC joins, the tumbleweed rolls.

✗ You can't beat Google in the browser market INSTEAD → ✓ Google doesn't actually want the web to be as good as native apps, it would hurt search indexing. Apple doesn't want great web apps, it hurts the App Store. Both incumbents have conflicted incentives. That gap is the opportunity.

✗ Every scaled product company needs a PM org INSTEAD → ✓ You need the verbs of a PM, not the title or org structure. Hire people who say "I make things, tell me what I need to do to make it." Snap said never. Stripe waited years. Prototyping is valid. Knowing when to stop is wisdom.

Optimize forFeelings, Not Metrics

The 5 Arc Values: Written as a Road Trip, Not a Corporate Slide

The Team IS the Product: Josh's Hiring & Trust Playbook

Tactical Moves Worth Stealing

Myths About Building Great Consumer Products

Optimize for
Feelings, Not Metrics