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Hi friends 👋,

Happy Monday! After a hectic start to the year, we’re back in the Monday slot hitting your inbox with 12k words to kick off the workweek and it feels good.

Back in September, I asked Twitter for their most magical tech experiences of the past year. In second place, sandwiched between generative art and crypto wallets, two topics I’ve written a bunch about, was the product I use more than any other: Arc by The Browser Company (you can skip the waitlist with that link, btw).

After I saw the poll results, and wrote a little bit about Arc in Indistinguishable from Magic, I knew I wanted to write a full piece about the company. Originally, the main question I had in mind was: why would such a talented team with the ability to craft such a delightful product waste their prime years building a browser? Chrome has the market on lock. I viewed their efforts as an amazing contribution to consumer surplus. 

But when The Browser Company’s CEO Josh Miller reached out to thank me for the kind words about Arc and offering to explain the company’s big vision, I took him up on it, and about three minutes into our call (a good, old fashioned phone call), I knew this piece was going to be much bigger than Arc. 

Since the launch of the first modern browser, Mosaic, thirty years ago, the browser has been the turf on which some of tech’s biggest battles have been fought. Given its place in the tech stack as the window between the user and the World Wide Web, it’s a powerful demand traffic controller and a unique beneficiary of all of the innovation that goes on beneath its surface. And even when the Wars seem won, when Chrome seems locked in as Internet Explorer did before it and Netscape Navigator did before that, something shifts in the internet landscape and opens the door for new competitors with a fresh approach. 

I think we might be in one of those moments right now. With AI as a catalyst, the giants are signaling their intent to do battle in the browser once more. But I, of course, am rooting for the underdog with the freshest product: The Browser Company. Theirs is the Internet Computer I hope everyone is using when the dust settles. 

This is not a Sponsored Deep Dive, the Browser Company isn’t paying me, and I’m (sadly) not an investor; I just genuinely love the product and think that the Third Browser War is one of the most interesting stories in tech that not enough people are talking about. It reveals the giants’ strategies - their strengths and weaknesses, packages up the history of the internet, and hints at the way billions of people will spend hours every day in the near future. 

Let’s get to it.

Today’s Not Boring is brought to you by… Masterworks

As we’ll cover today, everything is moving to the cloud. That’s true of obvious things like apps and data, but it’s true of less obvious, more beautiful things, too… like art. 

I don’t own much great physical art, other than a set of vibrant Takashi Murakami prints that a friend gave to me. I can’t afford the good stuff. But on the internet, I own paintings by Basquiat, Haring, Warhol, and even Picasso. Well, I own shares in those paintings at least, thanks to Masterworks.

I’ve been working with Masterworks for years, and personally investing with them the entire time. In the beginning, before they’d sold any of the pieces they’d purchased, I just thought it was a really cool way to access an inaccessible and less correlated asset class while beautifying my portfolio. Over the past year, though, they’ve begun selling works in the portfolio for a gain. In fact, every single one of Masterworks’ 11 exits to date has returned a profit to their investors, totaling more than $30 million in payouts. 

A majority of those sales weren’t in the go-go era of “everything goes up”, meme stocks, and bitcoin at 60k… but while inflation soared to decade highs, and financial markets plummeted. They’re proving out their thesis: that art can perform well even when other assets don’t. 

New offerings are launching every week, and tend to sell out fast. But as a longtime partner I’ve secured some VIP passes to skip their waitlist at the Not Boring link:

Explore Masterworks

See important Regulation A disclosures here.

Internet Computers

There may be no application better positioned to benefit from the rush of rapid innovation we’re swimming in than the humble browser.

I say humble, because admit it: you take your browser for granted. The browser has become so synonymous with the internet, and the internet has become so enmeshed with our lives, that it’s become like the water in that David Foster Wallace speech:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” 

And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

What the hell is browser? Like a surfer who paddles with the strength of the gods, the browser has both created and ridden the biggest technological wave in history.  

A stunning 5.3 billion people use browsers to access the wonders of the World Wide Web, an enormous number that has grown 24% since 2019. One-third of the Earth’s population, 2.7 billion people, are yet to come online. When they do, rest assured, they’ll access it through a browser, whether on their phone, their desktop, or some futuristic hardware.

This is a piece about which browser they might use, and how. 

Browser usage is a relatively recent phenomenon, a decade more recent than Excel. When Marc Andreessen launched Mosaic in January 1993, less than 1% of the tiny number of netizens used a browser. Six months in, 100,000 people connected to the internet through Mosaic. By December of that year, Mosaic counted 1 million nerds as its earliest users. By the time Andreessen’s next browser company, Netscape, IPO’d in 1995, there were 16 million people online. Nine years later, Facebook debuted to an internet audience of 745 million. The next year, in 2005, the internet crossed the 1 billion mark. Now, 5.3 billion of us live online.

Over that same period, the time we spend in browsers has increased with the browser’s capabilities. I just braved my Screen Time Report and discovered that each week, I spend roughly one day’s worth of hours in my browser. I have an especially online job, and it’s hard to find broad browser usage data to back up my personal anecdata, but one way to ballpark it is by thinking about all the things that browsers can do today that they couldn’t before. 

If one of the most remarkable things about Excel is that it’s thrived despite the unbundling of its peripheral functionality into hundreds of specialized apps… 

… then perhaps the most incredible thing about the browser is how much of our digital activity it’s been able to inhale. 

In fact, as Excel and other desktop applications have gotten unbundled and turned into cloud-based SaaS products, the browser has been a major beneficiary. The biggest tech acquisition of the past year – Adobe’s now-contested $20 billion acquisition of Figma – is a win for the browser. All of the “Figma for X” companies that followed in its wake are a win for the browser. Products like Replit that bring the IDE online are a win for the browser. 

Any time an application moves from your dock to a tab, that’s a win for the browser.

The browser is this incredible application that seems to only get stronger with each new tech cycle. When the vast majority of users interact with web3, they do it through the browser. AI has been an unmitigated boon for the browser, one that will only accelerate as intelligence moves up a layer, from walled apps to the browser itself. 

As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella put it at the Bing AI reveal event in February, “We’re going to have this notion of a co-pilot that’s going to be there across every application canvas, inside of an operating system shell, in a browser.”

An “operating system shell” is a technical term. The shell is the part of the OS that users interact with, on top of the hardware and kernel and below applications. But as Nadella, the CEO of the company that has made more money from operating systems than any other in world history, hints, the OS itself is becoming an empty shell. The action is moving to the browser.

This idea – that we’ll no longer need traditional operating systems, that we’ll just access cloud software through the browser on whichever screen is closest at hand – is what The Browser Company CEO Josh Miller calls ✨ Internet Computers ✨. 

Josh Miller @joshm

At @browsercompany, we believe that the successor to the Personal Computer will be... ✨ Internet Computers ✨ Here's an early version of our dream for Arc (and the internet!) that we shared with our members last week:

youtube.comvideofile_ : the internet computerAugust 18th, 2022First came the business computer, then the personal computer. Hear more about what comes next from Josh — and the role...

2:42 PM ∙ Aug 22, 2022

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544Likes40Retweets

In Internet Computer World, you don’t need to download apps on your desktop or your phone. They all live in the browser, and the browser becomes the OS. And unlike Chrome, the world’s most popular browser, the Internet Computer stays in sync across all of your devices. Across any device. 

If you want to present on the nearest TV screen, you just log into your Internet Computer and pull up the presentation tab. 

If you start a Not Boring essay on your computer and you have to go to work, you can pick up right where you left off on your phone. 

The device itself is relatively unimportant in Internet Computer World – it’s commoditized. Anything with a screen and an internet connection will do. “If you smash the computer in front of you right now,” Josh told me, “you wouldn’t lose anything.” The hardware itself becomes the empty shell for the browser; the browser is how you pull all your stuff down from the cloud. 

The browser has had an unparalleled thirty year run. While Excel Never Dies, the Browser Keeps Getting Stronger. And now, the stars are aligned for browsers to wipe out traditional operating systems once and for all. 

In Differentiation, I wrote:

Things like Replit, Urbit, APIs, and generative AI are only going to accelerate the ease with which people can build something, and exacerbate the challenges for startups building undifferentiated products. Fleshing out where value accrues in this world probably deserves its own post.

This is classic Clayton Christensen stuff, namely The Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits: “The law states that when modularity and commoditization cause attractive profits to disappear at one stage in the value chain, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products will usually emerge at an adjacent stage.”

I think the value from the app battle will emerge at two stages: below and above. Fierce competition at the app layer will create value that can be captured at the infrastructure layer (below) and interface layer (above). 

We’ll talk about the infrastructure layer in another post – think chips, cloud providers, APIs, and protocols – and we’ll focus on the interface layer (above) in this one. “He who controls the interface, controls the universe.” 

Just who gets to control the Browser du Jour is another question: The Browser Wars have been fought across decades, in software and courtrooms, among tech’s biggest players. Today, Google Chrome dominates the space, with an absurd 65.7% market share. But every ten years or so, a new Browser War begins, and Nadella’s renewed interest in the browser – Microsoft Edge is a name I’d heard maybe twice in the past five years until a month ago – signifies the beginning of a new Browser War. 

The Browser Wars are not for the faint of heart. To win, you need to compete against a three-headed monster of the world’s largest and most powerful tech companies. 

The battlefield is littered with smaller foes: Mosaic, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, Flock. The Browser Company is the latest in a long line of hopefuls. 

The new Browser War is such a compelling topic because it hits so many rich veins:

• Storied Past: The history of the browser is the history of the internet 

• Surfing Waves: The browser gains strength from each new tech trend, and the latest, AI, is pulling more activity into it. 

• Commoditizing Complements: As the battles beneath the browser intensify, it (literally) sits above the fray. 

• Tech Giant Strategy: Each giant has its obvious strengths and weaknesses that are ripe for Counter Positioning. 

• An Even Brighter Future: With a new business model, the Internet Computer is potentially the most valuable place in the digital value chain.

There are two big questions to ask here: 

• Are Internet Computers the Future? 

• Who Will Build the Winning Internet Computers? 

We’ll dive into all of this and more. To read on, click the link:

Read Internet Computers on the Internet

Thanks to Josh and Darin for your input, and to Dan for editing!

That’s all for today! We’ll be back in your podcast feeds this week and your inbox on Friday for that Weekly Dose of Optimism.

Thanks for reading,

Packy