What is Brave?
Private, fast, lower battery use, based on Chrome
BAT token system – user opt-in to support creators directly
3 sided system – connecting users, advertisers, and creators
Brave solves tracking and privacy invasion
Brendan created Javascript too
Back in Netscape days, didn’t foresee the 3rd party tracking problem
Idea of twinkies (better form of cookies) but didn’t happen
Was Grad student at UIUC
Jim Clark visited, and Brendan knew he wanted to work with him
Joined Silicon Graphics (SGI)
by 1994, Jim started Netscape w/ pmarca
Brendan joined in 1995, IPO that year, was a huge rocket, not profitable
by 1998, most thought browser was done, Microsoft IE won
after Netscape lost browser war to Microsoft (and was acquired by AOL), an internal team started to open source browser codebase through Mozilla – a small pirate ship inside Netscape
by 2003, AOL shut Netscape down
gave $2M to spin out Mozilla project
early adopters loved Firefox, mostly organic growth, good time as no major competitors to IE
“showing world a better tool”
some tried commercial forks of Firefox but failed
Browser is immortal universal app
Web content is sticky and accretive
2008, Chrome (fork of webkit) launched and steadily took share from Firefox
Other competitors like Rockmelt, UCWeb
In 2016, Google privacy policy changed – started tracking users in Chrome, began to “cross the rubicon”
Going public put different pressure on Google, voracious beast of capitalism
It’s not just that you’re being tracked, but you don’t know where that data is going – eg, data is shared with Experian
Growing public concerns about tracking and data privacy
Apple does better job than most with privacy
These monopolies can last a long time, censorship, network control, tracker
It’s a casino where the house always wins
Growing audience using ad blockers, ublock, Brave, etc that aren’t being tracked
So slowly Brave building its own private ad network – without all the crazy targeting and tracking
Giving power back to users, changing topology of the network
Giving 70% of revenues back to users
If birthdate, gender, and zip code are known, user can be identified (!)
Ton of fraud in digital ads, Google is complicit to some degree (conflict of interest)
Brave benefits: Privacy, speed, make money for creators
Brave has 50M MAUs now (Chrome has 2.6B users)
1.3M verified creators
Mistake – in 2015 used Electron initially, by 2018 finally moved to well maintained Chromium fork
However, still looks too Chrome-y
Brendan thinks most interesting users and builders are in crypto / web3
Easy today to de-anonymize on-chain data
Part of reason why Brave is off-chain – but zero knowledge proofs can help fix this
Institutional investors, banks, coming in now – but not old big tech guard (web2 players)
Forked Metamask to build Brave wallet
Now building native wallet in-browser
Opera had a wallet + dapp store in 2018, but crypto winter happened and lost momentum
Solana will be default for multichain dapps – default settings are important
Browser extensions are weaker security than native apps
QR codes have become shorthands for links – but can also be shorthand for your private key (!)
Hardware wallets should work more like phones – less anxiety and complexity
Web3 will not replace but EXTEND web2
If you have crypto protocols, and strong clients like Brave, you *should* be able to get better privacy, a fairer deal
Standards are important because businesses still want some cooperation – coopetition
As you get bigger – eg 400M users – you can help set more standards for browsers, their BAT token, advertisers, etc
Really hard for Google and these big cos to innovate
Could use strong-arm tech to hurt Brave and other web3 / crypto
Likely they’ll just do weak me-too products that aren’t threat and are too late
Duck Duck Go did marketing first approach – doing well
Carveouts
David – Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Ben – Agassi new book Open, same ghostwriter as Shoe Dog
Brendan – Dynamic Economics by Burton Klein