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Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

cnbc.com

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Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#281

Post by numbsafari »

anon191928 wrote: post #240
darth_avocado wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some businesses that are simply not viable without losing money first. SpaceX cannot generate revenue until it first employs hundreds of people for a few years (maybe a decade) where they focus on building what will eventually bring revenue. Software has those problems too.

yeah and what makes them different compared to half baked fraud startups with no revenue ? most of the world would not believe that they will bring revenue in years?

Pedigree of the team and a believable project plan.

Often times money will be raised at certain valuation and terms, but the cash is held in escrow (effectively) until milestones are hit.

The investors will do their due diligence on the feasibility. It’s a high stakes, high return game (if you succeed). Look around you… any physical device you see is basically funded the same way.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#282

Post by taminka »

Pfhortune wrote: post #273
taminka wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> having managed to get their swift-centric development working on _Windows_. That's a huge and difficult undertaking! im not a swift expert, but building your project for one of the officially supported targets shouldn't be considered a "phenomenal" achievent? lol

Ah, fair enough. Showing my ignorance on that one. I know little about their tech stack and was under the impression they had some secret sauce.

i mean they did have some really cool designs, but technically they just had relatively advanced chrome fork...

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#283

Post by dblohm7 »

hbn wrote: post #46

I've been trying to find a Chrome replacement since they finally cut the cord on manifest v2. I know Firefox is the "right" option, and I'm fully in favour of chipping away at Chromium marketshare (even if the EU is determined to solidify it further with demands of Apple to allow non-Safari rendering in iOS) but I've used it in the past, and even if it's fine 99% of the time, there is that occasional website that has…

This calls for a plug for https://webcompat.com/

Report compatibility issues and they'll either try to work with the websites or browser vendors to mitigate the issue.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#284

Post by darth_avocado »

anon191928 wrote: post #240
darth_avocado wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some businesses that are simply not viable without losing money first. SpaceX cannot generate revenue until it first employs hundreds of people for a few years (maybe a decade) where they focus on building what will eventually bring revenue. Software has those problems too.

yeah and what makes them different compared to half baked fraud startups with no revenue ? most of the world would not believe that they will bring revenue in years?

That’s like the point of venture capitalism and to a certain extent all entrepreneurial endeavors. You could start a T-shirt printing company (a completely viable business) and not see any revenue come in for months.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#285

Post by hinkley »

immibis wrote: post #244
turnsout wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean this with no snark: I would love to see the investor deck that explains how an AI-powered browser is going to make any multiple of $610M.

More charitably by selling the only browser that's actually usable in a few years. The AI will be used to cancel out the effect of other people's AI.

There have been a few extremely popular remastered games the last few years and the internet is full of people cranky because folks are posting replies to five year old internet threads about the game.

Well what do you expect people to do when the only non slop result on page 1 is a 5 to 8 year old thread? It’s the top link. You’re still relevant whether you want to be or not. Fuckin deal.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#286

Post by darth_avocado »

echelon wrote: post #245
darth_avocado wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some businesses that are simply not viable without losing money first. SpaceX cannot generate revenue until it first employs hundreds of people for a few years (maybe a decade) where they focus on building what will eventually bring revenue. Software has those problems too.

I can't tell you how many designers I interviewed who told me they used the Arc browser. It was at least a dozen. I'd never heard of the damned thing before. I don't know why, but it appears to be popular with some creative demographics. The browser is an essential pane of glass to platformization and taxing the web. Anyone who wins a browser with significant market share has a huge opportunity to capitalize on. Not…

I use Arc for two reasons:

Tabs on the side nav and the ability to have 3 different AWS accounts open at the same time

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#287

Post by julianozen »

afavour wrote: post #100
julianozen wrote: post #77

Lots of respect to Josh Miller, the CEO. TBC got to a difficult place. They built a product that was very very good, but evidently not good enough to support the capital they raised or the workforce they hired. I wish they had managed to keep Arc around. It's a product I'd glad pay for, and it seems like maybe there are enough fans that subscriptions could've supported a smaller team. Hopefully Atlassian doesn't kill…

> Lots of respect to Josh Miller, the CEO. TBC got to a difficult place. They built a product that was very very good, but evidently not good enough to support the capital they raised or the workforce they hired. Was this not predictable from day one? There's no money in making a web browser. That ought to be obvious to anyone, let alone a superstar CEO. That they would end up selling the company seemed like a forego…

I understand your point... but you can predict that every start-up will fail and probably be mostly right.

They built a product that many people liked. That's part of why so many people are angry about shutting down Arc. How does one tell during the rapid growth phase that things will level off and that actually even though a lot of people will like your product it won’t be enough to be a mass market success? They took a big swing, and they got a lot further than I thought they would.

And it seems like maybe he managed to swing an okay outcome for investors and hopefully employees too.

Edited:

> Was this not predictable from day one? There's no money in making a web browser.

And to this point, before Google no one had cracked monetizing search. Before Facebook, no one had monetized social. No one had monetized online video before Youtube... this is what start ups do... they make people like and figure out how to monetize it

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#288

Post by cpach »

Illniyar wrote: post #192

Isn't Atlassian where products go to die? :) Is this is an acquihire? Atlassian does not seem to have strategic overlap with making a browser in any meaningful way I can think of.

I think Atlassian is kind of trying to be the Lotus Notes of the 20s. If so, I can see why their upper management approved this acquisition.

Will anything good come out of it…? I could be wrong, but I seriously doubt it.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#289

Post by yrcyrc »

Been an Atlassian consultant for a while and I just left (Rather I was let go) from an established Atlassian partner, and I can only feel relief. I was always more of a data center on prem person and all this cloud nonsense has been going nowhere, except for them. Those acquisitions are always half baked and you *might see some of it somewhere in a product. All I can say is I’m happy I’m no longer doing Atlassian consulting.

Re: Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company

#290

Post by weaksauce »

Waraqa wrote: post #177
jshchnz wrote: post #141

$610M, all cash??? How were they worth that much... all they seemed to ever do was rebrand

"Arc isn’t just a Chromium fork. It runs on custom infrastructure we call ADK — the Arc Development Kit. Think of it as an internal SDK for building browsers (especially those with imaginative interfaces). That’s our secret sauce. It lets ex-iOS engineers prototype native browser UI quickly, without touching C++." https://open.substack.com/pub/browsercompany/p/letter-to-arc...

that's kinda funny since that's basically exactly how firefox does it with the chrome of the browser being javascript and html and css itself.
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