Key Safari designer departs Apple to join 'The Browser Company' | Hacker News Reader

Key Safari designer departs Apple to join 'The Browser Company'

9to5mac.com

7 pointskelthuzad8 comments

Something that they can do because they raised $50m last month. But how are they going to repay that investment? Their FAQ makes the business plan sound like a work in progress, which is unusual when you've raised that much money.

I tried Arc but found myself less productive with it because I had over twenty years of experience with the existing products. I would have to use it consistently for months to realize an uncertain pay off.

"Raised $50 million at a $550 million valuation" and "Arc has added an array of AI-focused features recently" raises huge red flags for me as a user, after all the enshittification of VC funded products, services and platforms over the last few years. I'm not a user, but after reading that I'm not inclined to become one any time soon.

Makes sense to me. They're a browser that you have to sign up for an account to use - they were never going to replace any major browser. At first they marketed as that - a browser with some additional features on top. They, as a browser, even had and still have a huge waitlist. But their recent direction into turning this into a product just makes a lot more sense. They still pretend like they can replace Chrome even though you need an account & they will likely add all these paid features which will just narrow down their audience, but that marketing will probably change. Adding new features and becoming less of this pseudo generalized but locked-down browser is a good thing for their product, IMO.

Grandparent comment originally said, "But how are they going to repay that investment?". LOL, investors don't want repayment, they're gambling for a shot at a dump truck full of money. If they don't get that, thanks for playing the VC lottery, take care, bye.

Which begs the question, how is The Browser Company going to live up to the 550 million dollar valuation? I'm not fluent in VC-speak, but I think the math is something like this: you need $R in revenue annually to be valued at $V, where the difference between R and V is some multiple M, usually 10-50ish. Let's say 50, so R = $550/50 = $11 million/yr in revenue or a more conservative 20 multiple, R = $550/20 = $27.5 million/yr in revenue.

If they charge $10/month, then they need ~91k users, that gets them to $11 million in revenue from users directly. If they need to hit 27.5 million, then they need ~229k users paying $10 month.

Not the worst investment after you do the math, maybe it's theoretically a sustainable business.

But startups don't raise money at these numbers to become sustainable ten-million dollar-per-year businesses. Investors want that unicorn status most of the time. At that point, I don't know if the math makes sense because to be a unicorn you need like $50-100+ million in revenue per year. That's easily 3x or more users, you're approaching 500k-1 million monthly active users.

That's a lot of users for something Apple, Samsung, Mozilla and Google give away for free on all OSs already.

Edit: I just looked up their funding raising information. 137 million raised, and they're series A/B'ish right now. That's a lot of money, they definitely have big ambitions.

I am a user, and Arc's implementation is one of the very few that I've actually found useful.

I often use it to ask a question about a page's content, especially if there are no obvious keywords to find what I'm looking for that don't appear dozens of times. It's great for technical documentation.

Arc also "unships" things pretty regularly. If the features aren't being used, in not too long someone will suggest removing them and they'll end up being removed.

I do hope they make something great. I'm not hoping for their demise. More competition will push other browsers to be better and challenge their market share.

I just am weary of the sustainability of these business models long term and how they'll live up to such lofty goals and expectations. Too often we've seen great things become less great overtime as other revenue extraction means are introduced to the overall detriment of what make that thing so great.

I love Arc but I'd like to see a path to sustainable monetization. I hope it's not another 9.99$ a month subscription on the horizon, though.

I rather take a subscription over ads

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