Josh Miller
CEO at The Browser Company
CEO of The Browser Company building Arc, the browser reimagined around tabs and workspaces, known for his heartfelt intensity in hiring, obsessive product craft, tracking D5/D7 as the core usage metric, and a transparent building-in-public approach to company culture.
Dimension Profile
Key Themes
Episode Summary
Josh Miller shares the story of building Arc at The Browser Company, revealing that their core metric is D5/D7 (five to seven days per week usage) because for a daily-use product like a browser, anything less means failure. He discusses hiring for heartfelt intensity over raw skill, the challenge of describing a new product category that makes distribution inherently difficult, and how building in public creates both community and accountability.
Leadership Principles
- → Hire for heartfelt intensity — you want people who care deeply, not just people who are skilled, because caring is what drives the extra mile on craft
- → Track D5/D7 (five or seven days per week usage) as the north star metric — for a daily-use product like a browser, anything less than near-daily usage means you haven't won
- → If you can't describe your product easily, you have a distribution problem — Arc struggled because reimagined browsers are hard to explain, and that's a real business constraint
Notable Quotes
"We hire for heartfelt intensity. You want people who care deeply, not just people who are skilled."
— On The Browser Company's hiring philosophy
"We track D5 and D7 — are people using Arc five or seven days a week. For a browser, anything less than near-daily usage means we haven't won."
— On the core metric that defines success for Arc
"If you can't describe your product easily, you have a distribution problem. That's been one of our biggest challenges with Arc."
— On the difficulty of marketing a reimagined product category
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