Why Browser Company at $610M is cheap | Hacker News Reader

Why Browser Company at $610M is cheap

bigtechpr.substack.com

15 pointsmeshugaas17 comments

https://x.com/adamwathan/status/1963709979363258560 | https://nitter.poast.org/adamwathan/status/19637099793632585...

> Are there any other open source apps we could fork and move the tabs to the side then sell for $610m?

I enjoy using the Arc browser, but after receiving an email from the company about being acquired - where they said “Arc and Arc Search will continue to exist; we’ll share a long-term plan soon”. To me, that sounds like they don’t have a plan and the browser will be shut down. I guess it’s time to start considering alternatives.

BrowserOS isn’t bad - it has agentic flows, and doesn’t have complete feature parity with Arc, but it’s decent.

Zen browser is a Mozilla based clone of Arc browser...

It's a good/possible alternative

What “AI” are they getting here? It’s not like browser company is training foundation models. They’re making browser with agent harness. Atlassian already had a bunch of teams doing agent stuff.

I’m happy for folks at TBC because I think 600M is a nice premium but their only business plan seemed to be “get acquired”

The browser company is probably the worst buisness idea I have come across in a long time.

Who is going to pay for a closed-source reskinned chromium that only works on Apple products? The entire feature set could be replicated by a few plugins.

Unfortunately, it turned out to be a very lucrative business idea.

Yeah the article seems to not cover it, possibly to remain as negative as possible, but I guess it's only the investors that made out with mostly break even. The founders would still have plenty of stock to make a fortune on this - maybe they'll have trouble with getting investment in the future, but if even Adam can do it then anyone can.

> coding assistant: cursor, claude code, codex, etc. write some code, have an intern-level chatbot write some more code, realize you hate doing code review, ship shitty unreviewed intern code that never improves, get mad, stop using it, get fired from coinbase

I feel like poster might have a bit of a history with Coinbase.. I'm assuming this was something along the lines of 'We want you to use AI to be more productive(tm)', the poster didn't, and then Coinbase got rid of them because they were 'not getting work done fast enough'

Edit: Just to clarify, I'm on the side of the poster on this, being forced to use AI tooling when it isn't helpful is very annoying

Not at all:

"News reports indicate that Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong fired several engineers in August 2025 who refused to use AI tools [...] Armstrong has strongly pushed for the adoption of AI at the company, giving engineers a short deadline to start using AI coding assistants."

it’s a dig at this https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/22/coinbase-ceo-explains-why-...

From the title and URL I thought the substack was "Big Tech Public Relations"

If the infamous Dropbox comment was a blog post in 2025.

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)

Further confirming (in my eyes) that this was not an acquisition, but a bailout.

This was a confusing read but author's TLDR seems to be that Atlassian acquired a questionably great product team out of this which is what makes the $610M worth it, who _might_ be able to build the "next big AI idea" when it comes up and Dia is not in the interest of Atlassian? Don't suppose I agree with that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com