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Comment by idoh | Hacker News Reader

What's the story around getting into YC in 2019 and then launching in '24? I'm guessing there were some interesting pivots along the way ...

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You are right. We came in letting hosts open experience stores in Airbnbs (try on an Oculus at a hosts home). Difficult to attribute our sales so we moved on.

COVID hit and we had the itch to look at the browser in a different light. Building a browser seemed intimidating...but it was quarantine. Long story short, built a few different ideas and here we are :)

Building a browser does seem intimidating! What technical considerations made you finally take it seriously? Any advice for folks trying to do the same or taking on another intimidating project?

Started just by building Chromium and Brave and poking around in there and making small changes.

Chromium is huge but has terrific documentation (once you find the current copy) and Google hosted code search. Digging through crbug.com often helped point us in the right direction.

2 unlocks that made us confident to pursue this project:

1) Repeatable way of patching Chromium and keeping up with upstream changes 2) Writing UI in web technology instead of C++ Views toolkit.

any interest in pointing someone curious about those repeatable patches in the right direction?

Brave's system for patching Chromium is great. https://github.com/brave/brave-browser

This is incredible, 5 years of not giving up, kudos. How big is your team and how did you make your money go this long?

Team is a handful, fluctuated over the years but never more than 8.

We’ve always treated everything we do as an experiment. We’re not trying to keep anything alive for the sake of it.

thanks, good job, respect the hustle.

You can actually check out all the material from the pivots inside the app. There's a walkthrough in the Getting Started space when you first set up.

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