WEBVTT 0:00:15.600 --> 0:00:23.840 Programming throwdown episode 131 supporting your favorite creators with Brave with Jimmy Secretan. Take it away, Jason. 0:00:25.690 --> 0:01:03.920 Hey, everybody. So, you know, as most of you know, Patrick and I are huge fans of Brave. We love the browser. I recently switched to the search engine, which is working really well. I'm a big fan of that. I love the sort of ethos around Brave and I've been a big fan for a long time. I'm super excited that we have Jimmy Seckerton here, who's the VP of ads and premium services to talk about Brave. And we're going to dive through really how it works, where it came from, the inspiration and what they're doing next. Really excited to have you on the show, Jimmy. 0:01:06.800 --> 0:02:41.220 Well, thanks, it's great to be here. Yeah, really excited. So, yeah, let me start by, I can tell the audience a little bit about Brave. You know, Brave was started by Brendan Eich and Brian Bondi and Brendan Eich, who a lot of you will know from Mozilla, the inventor and the inventor of JavaScript. And they set out to create this private by design browser, most secure, most private experience on the web. I joined actually a little over three years ago. And one of the things, one of the things that's really interesting about Brave and if you haven't tried it out, please go to brave.com you can download it for desktop, for Android, for iOS, for whatever you're using. Easy to install, easy to try out the experiences. If you use Chrome, the experience is a lot like that except, you know, incredibly aggressive about blocking out these third party ads and trackers that sort of choke the Internet experience and make it less private. And so Brave is this incredibly fast, incredibly lightweight way to Brave. 0:02:41.220 --> 0:02:52.310 How did you get, you know what, tell us a little bit about the path that you followed, you know, kind of your kind of career. Like, what was the path that kind of led you to working on Brave? 0:02:52.310 --> 0:03:37.870 Yeah, so I met Brendan Eich back when I was working at an ad tech company called Snobby and you know, we had started to talk about, you know, okay, well, if you wanted to make these very private by design ad systems, you know, how would you, you know, how would you go about doing that? And because my background, I did my PhD in privacy preserving machine learning, you know, at UCF here in Orlando. So, you know, always had this like real strong interest in privacy and then got actually into, you know, advertising technology, you know, all that stuff that, you know, powers these ads. And. But there was a lot of foresight. 0:03:37.870 --> 0:03:51.690 There because I Think, you know, that was probably what, like 2010 or so. And I don't know if privacy, definitely privacy wasn't as big as it is now. And in general I don't feel like it was in the zeitgeist back then. So that's very forward thinking. 0:03:51.930 --> 0:06:39.560 No, you're absolutely right, you know, because you know, when my advisor came to me, you know, and said, okay, well I have this really interesting area. It's like, you know, privacy and data mining. And I'm like, what, you know, basically what are all those things? Why does, you know, anybody need all that stuff? And you know, but, but got into this, you know, really interesting area of, you know, because of, you know, had that, that data background. It's like, oh, well, this is like a really you. You know, like there are these really interesting ways that people can share data that you know, but, but still remain private by design, but sort of get still what they want out of those systems and you know, sort of this interesting kind of upcoming area. And actually my first job out of my PhD was with a company that was just doing just that was saying like, hey, great, there's all this advertising stuff that helps power these publishers and keep this great content free, but we should make it more private by design. And really got into that stuff. And yeah, this is like 2010, 2011. And we just sort of, you know, we're like, this is privacy's moment. You know, everybody's, you know, like Safari had, you know, started, you know, blocking you know, third party cookies and like, you know, really, you know, cleaning things up. And you know, everybody was starting to, you know, kind of talk about this like, okay, like there's this very privacy sensitive future where you know, you still want all the services you're accustomed to, which, you know, you don't want your data everywhere. And, and then at the time it was sort of like, okay, people are interested. And then they say, oh, that's interesting. And doing building things that are private by design. It's a lot of work. You really have to start to think about things differently and structure things differently. But we put the effort into it and it was just kind of like, yeah, it was interesting to people, but it wasn't quite the time. But I think fast forward 10 or so years later, right? And, and now things are really reaching fever pitch. Like people realize that, okay, look, even if we trust these companies and we don't always like how they're using our data, they can be breached, all these things can happen with this data or be used in ways that we don't intend that it felt like, it feels like, look, this is really the time to start to push on these really private by design systems and make them work. For real? 0:06:40.280 --> 0:08:45.940 Yeah. I mean one of the things we talked about back in episode 109, we had Kevin Rutia on the show and he talked about digital marketing and it blew my mind when he went through so many different use cases of advertising and marketing and I didn't even realize that I was being being marketed to. So I'll give you one example. Have you ever looked up, you know, get data from, you know, I don't know, pagerduty into Google Cloud or like, you know, something like that, or get data from Google Cloud into S3. So, so this company Zapier, you know, basically bought domains and did a ton of SEO so that anytime you put, you know, get X from Y into Z, you know, they've, they've covered, they've enumerated all of those and they're the first search result. And it just seems like, wow, Zapier does everything. And so that's, that's marketing and it's brilliant. And it, you know, when Zapier started, they had that idea of they wanted to be the company to do that. But you know, if, if I, you know, technologist who has zero marketing advertising experience had that idea, I would just build it and put it on GitHub and probably no one would even know it was there. But Zapier, they put their marketing hat on and they did that and they were able to provide a ton of value to people. And so folks out there, you're going to be building projects and there's going to be an audience that really wants to consume that project. But it's not trivial to connect yourself to those people and add that value. And that is where, that's where something like you need to have some arbitrator that knows, you know, who's looking for what and who's providing that and connects those people together. It's super, super important. So, you know, when a lot of people see ads, they see, they immediately like, think of the worst things. Like look at like, like look what this mom feeds her kids and her kids are 6 foot 6 or whatever. It's like, you know, buy this broccoli. 0:08:45.940 --> 0:08:49.540 Supplement or whatever to save money on your car insurance. Right? 0:08:49.540 --> 0:09:29.160 Yeah, like this one weird trick and like, you know, you two could get a PhD, you know, and it's like, okay, but no, I mean that, you know, that, you know, there's Also, I mean, and then on the other side of it, there's people who say, okay, there's something sinister going on here because I talked about going kayaking and the next week I'm getting a kayaking ad. How did that possibly happen? So kind of you see the ends of the spectrum and it's important for Bill to realize, like in between there, you know, there's a ton of value and there's, there's, there's some, there's, there's the grease that keeps like our entire economy and our entire economy of knowledge and of ideas, you know, functioning. 0:09:29.720 --> 0:12:31.060 Yeah, that's absolutely right. That you know, and Brave stance, which, you know, I really love, is that it's like, look, you know, seeing, you know, this advertising and marketing and, you know, right. And of course, supporting your favorite creators and publishers, you know, that like, that's, that's actually an important part of what keeps the web going. And so, you know, yes, Brave is aggressive at blocking out these sort of third party ads and trackers and things that are doing stuff that users just don't expect or understand or, you know, sharing in a way. But it's, it's not because we're unfriendly to the Internet advertising model and quite the opposite. Like, we know, it's, you know, that like, core to, you know, like when Brave was founded, it's like, okay, here's the important triangle, right? Like, there's the user, you know, the user is this most important part of keeping the Internet going. There's the advertisers who, you know, help fund it. And then there's the, there's the creators who are creating this great and interesting content that people want to go see and they all interact importantly, you know, so, and that's what, you know, and that's what really brought me to Brave and was, you know, really interesting to me. And I, you know, I said, hey, I've got background and experience this, you know, making these systems sort of private by design and being, you know, good and transparent and above board. And let's, let's do this, let's make this a part of it. Because, yeah, to your point, you know, if you've tried to visit, you know, any publisher site recently, you know, without Brave or other, you know, comparable protections, right, like, know, open up, you know, do yourself a favor. It's like, you know, open up that, that inspector, like look at the network tab and, you know, see all of the requests that come along with just reading an article or, you know, going through something and it can be dozens or hundreds of these requests that are, you know, sharing data about you in different ways and transferring it between systems. And again, all these things that you don't necessarily expect. Like if you are on for instance, a car site. Right. Well, typically on all those car sites there are these, they call them pixels in the background. They're just little invisible things that your browser will load and they'll set this cookie, set this little piece of information saying, great, here's somebody, and they've gone to a car site and then you'll be on some other unrelated site, they'll make a similar request from that same provider and say like, oh yeah, yeah, this was, this was, you know, same same person who was on that, you know, on that car site and sort of this, this data can, you know, follow you everywhere and, and you know, get processed in other systems. And then, you know, people are like, you know, it's not that people always object to being advertised to, but they're like, look at, how did you know this? Where did you get this? 0:12:31.300 --> 0:14:10.190 Yeah, and then once you introduce the social graph. So I think Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn to a lesser extent, TikTok, I mean, all these sites have similar kind of pixels that they put on other people's sites. This is the whole third party cookies thing. And so what can happen is getting back to the kayak example, I mean, I definitely got asked this a lot in the past. Like, you know, is, is, is my phone listening to me 247 and somehow doing some ASR 247 and then pulling out AdWords. It'd be extremely intractable from a tech perspective. But, but what's actually happening there is, you know, you might have talked about kayaking to somebody and then that person went on the web and looked up a bunch of kayaking stuff. And because you and that person are such close friends now, both of you are impacted by what that person did. And so, and so, so anytime you have a dialogue, that other person's, you know, you know, if you have a real life connection and a Facebook connection, then you know, you're going to close the loop there. And so, but, but to your point, I mean, all of that feels extremely creepy. And because the data is coming from so many different places and it's not siloed, you know, it feels like there's something sinister, you know, some evil magic going on. And really what we need is, to your point is we just need to be able to silo things, you know, and I think the blocking of the third party cookies is That's a relatively recent thing. Right. 0:14:12.190 --> 0:14:30.730 I mean, you know, Brave has a pretty aggressive protections from, you know, I think from day one. But yeah, a lot of them, you know, a lot of these browsers and then, but, but right. What you might be alluding to, right, is that, you know, it's, you know, Google Chrome is trying to, you know, do away with these, you know, sort of third party cookies by default. 0:14:30.730 --> 0:14:32.690 Yeah, they're feeling the pressure from the. 0:14:33.410 --> 0:15:06.150 That's right. Of like your data being used these unexpected ways. So, you know, I think there's sort of, especially now, more than there's ever been like a push, you know, not just from like users and lawmakers and people like that, but from, know, from industry, from like people who want to advertise stuff. They're like, okay, well this, this is fine if we have to find a more private way to do it. But like we, we, we got to get started. You know, we, we've got to, you know, we've got to start using these, these better ways of doing it or we're going to, you know, lose access to, you know, to our audiences. 0:15:06.950 --> 0:15:49.630 Yeah, that makes sense. So from like a, a tech standpoint, can you kind of walk folks what are sort of third party cookies and then, and what does Brave do? And how is, how is that different? Like what, what Actually, you know, at the end of the day, you still want to learn people's interests, right? Like, I don't want to see ads for, I don't know, knitting or something like that. Like, I'd rather see something that, that is going to be relevant to me. That, that is. I saw an ad recently for, for this, for this kind of like product that. Anyways, it's kind of a technical thing, but I thought, oh, this is really cool. I could probably use this. 0:15:50.990 --> 0:15:51.350 Right? 0:15:51.350 --> 0:16:05.070 That's the kind of thing that you want. And so, you know, how do you, how does, you know what is, what was the state of things before Brave and what is Brave doing? And how do you kind of can you get the best of both worlds or how do you deal with that dialectic? 0:16:06.270 --> 0:18:23.030 Sure thing. I mean, and look, let me caveat by saying I am, I am not the expert in Brave's various protections. There are people who are great at it at Brave and they, they can speak to you at length about the, you know, like the numerous, numerous, like fine grain protections, you know, that Brave offers, you know, all the, all the way from sort of like, you know, blocking these requests as far upstream as you can to preventing fingerprinting which is when, you know, advertisers sort of use unique information about your device even when they can't set cookies. You know, there's these like numerous protections they can write books for you on, you know, but yeah, what it comes down to is like different ways of, you know, protecting your information from getting, you know, shared like across sites, across sessions, across things that you do. So in that example that I talked about, you know, where you are, you know, like I said, on a car site, right. Or on a travel site and you know, you know, sort of your, whatever you're doing there and your preferences on that are, you know, then being pulled back into, you know, this, this ad tech providers kind of, kind of infrastructure. Right. And then, and you know, it is a, is a third party request. You know, if you're on, you know, travel, travel, whatever.com, this is to, you know, goes to, you know, adtechprovider.com but they know it's coming from that travel site. And so you know, then you can, you know, if you are on, at some later point, you're on a news site, right? And that news site wants to serve you ads, all it has to do is say, make a request to, you know, adtechprovider.com it says, oh, actually this is somebody I recognize. Like somebody I recognize. And I know they've done some interesting and relevant. I know they're interested in travel, I know they've looked up some cars, whatever it is, and then say and have those ads to give you right there. But you know, and you know, and to your point, it's like, look, you want stuff to be relevant and sometimes you like, as jaded as we can become about, you know, advertising on the Internet, it's like, oh, that's a cool thing. Like, I didn't know. Like, that's great. Why didn't you tell me that existed? Like now I want that, you know, and so. 0:18:23.270 --> 0:18:31.590 Right. And put yourself on the other side of it. I mean, if you build something, you know, how are you going to tell someone halfway across the world about your thing? 0:18:32.070 --> 0:18:32.430 That's right. 0:18:32.430 --> 0:18:41.430 And there's really no other other way to do it. I mean that's, that's what people have done since, since the dawn of, of of of of commerce. Right? 0:18:41.510 --> 0:22:45.090 Yeah. And if you're, you know, and if you're a publisher, right. And, and that's, and that's, you know, very much part of the conversation. Like you actually want, you know, that's, that's how in a ton of cases you're, you're funding, you know, that the content that you're putting together, like, yeah, you know, people are paywalling stuff more but like the, you know, sort of the easiest way to get, get things out there. And, and the reason why, you know, a lot of small creators can exist is, is that, you know, ability to advertise and, and, and, and get, you know, sort of get rewarded for, for what they do. Right. And so, you know, that's, that's an important component of it or you know, or find, you know. Right. It's important that they find ways that they can, you know, in a, in a low friction way get, you know, get support from their community. And it's, you know, people aren't always into, you know, okay, well pull out, you know, my, my credit card and you know, put, put in 10 bucks there. And you know, that's, it's, it's sometimes that's very high friction for them to do. And so, you know, that's, that's like I said, another piece of that. And so the, the alternative that, you know, Brave has put in a lot of effort to, you know, looks, looks a lot like this. Right? So we work, you know, we work with advertisers also, right. And so we say, you know, they come to us and they say, yeah, we've got this great new project. We, you know, we want to get this, you know, in front of people, you know, all that other good stuff. Okay, well we have an interface where they can put in and you know, call it trafficking a campaign. But it's basically saying okay, what do you want to tell them? Where do you want to send them? And you know, how much do you want to spend? And then for users who opt in to what we call, it's our Brave rewards program. And the part that I work on is Brave ads. And so users opt into this, they decide to do this, they say yes, want to do this. And the great part about it is they're rewarded for their attention. They get 70% of the ads. Revenue that we take in is paid out directly to them in the form of our basic attention token. It's Ethereum based crypto token that can transfer value. It's got real worth. And so you opt into this program and then what's happening in the background is this. Your browser then goes out, fetches this catalog of ads, free region, like all the stuff that advertisers are eager to show you. And then as you browse along, we're using what we call it Local machine learning. So that means that everything stays on device, right? Like, you know, your history, your visits, your searches, they, they never get sent to, they never get sent to Brave, they never get sent to anybody else. All that stuff happen, happens with you. But we can still make stuff relevant by saying, oh, okay, well you know, the browser itself saying like, okay, well what are they interested in? All right, well they've been browsing these, you know, like they're looking for a new laptop. Like, okay, great. Like we can, you know, you can recognize that and you never have to communicate that, you know, to, to Brave or anybody else's systems. But then your browser said, okay, actually I'm looking in this big list of ads and there's something like, exactly, there's like a great deal on a new laptop, right? And then we, right now, in a couple different forms, either you'll see a little notification pop up at the side. We have some that come up in a newsreader and some across the new tab page. But for, for the notification ones, those are put, those are made relevant for you, right? And so it's like, okay, great, we know that we've got exactly what they're looking for. Let's show this to them, right? And then what we do is this really interesting process. From there we have, it's called a, like a two phase blinded token process. Basically. 0:22:49.230 --> 0:23:56.590 Sponsor for today's show is Imparticle. At the end of the day, your customer has to be at the center of everything you do. 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Right, because you're building something that you can't observe. And so that seems really, really hard. I mean actually we could, yeah, spend a little bit of time on that. I mean you have to, so, you know, to backtrack a little bit. So the way I guess old ad tech would work is they would take in. So that company you said would see, oh, this person went to this travel website and so they would have a row somewhere in some database somewhere saying, you know, Jimmy Secherton went to travel website at this time on this day. And then they have a ton of these rows and then they can do a bunch of machine learning on that. And then they can ask like little hypotheticals, like, okay, what do I think Jimmy is really interested in now? And it would come back and say laptops. And they say, okay, well that looks like it makes sense because I have this whole database. In your case though, you know, it's all blind. Right. So, so how do you build something? It just seems like wild to be able to build something like that and know that it's working. 0:25:10.050 --> 0:25:52.010 Yeah. And it is very challenging to put together and run, but it's powerful when it works, you know, so. Right, exactly to your point, if this were traditional ad tech, you know, the request would go out, you know, I'd be on, I'd be on some news site, the request would go out to, you know, travel site or, you know, to adtech provider.com, and yeah, my user ID there would represent hundreds, thousands of rows in that database that covers literally everything that I might have ever shown interest in or at least since I last cleared my cookies. It could be like, okay, we got laptops, we got this travel. 0:25:52.010 --> 0:25:57.090 Even then there's the fingerprinting thing. We should definitely talk about that too. I'd love to learn more about that. 0:25:57.380 --> 0:27:19.900 That's right. And so even, you know, it's like, even when, you know, you know, and I say like, okay, great, I'm going to solve this. I've blocked out third party cookies like this Great. It is, you know, it is, it is fine. They can't use this ID to look up, you know, stuff about me. What some of these systems can then do, right, is they say like, well, okay, you know, we know historically that it's like, you know, your IP address hangs around for, you know, x amount of time and your user agent has, is, you know, sort of this identifiable. It's either this or something you've recently upgraded and it can get wild, you know, and I don't know how common these are out there, but like it could even go to the point where it's like how your GPU renders stuff, you know, and that can be like, you can sort of read back those like pixels in the canvas and like different, different configured computers and browsers will like render things in different ways. Like, it, it gets, you know, it gets extreme and it's, and it's, you know, it's an arms race in some, in some ways. Right. Of like, okay, you know, somebody will introduce some protection against this type of, you know, re identification or fingerprinting and then, you know, somebody will come out with something even more sophisticated to, you know, to get around it. Right. 0:27:20.310 --> 0:27:41.510 Wow, that's wild. Yeah. I mean, now that I'm, you know, taking the time to think about it, I mean, a lot of people, you know, their browser doesn't occupy, they're not full screen. Like, the browsers occupy the whole window. And so they've probably just resized it, you know, months ago and it's just that size. And so it's, it's some, it's some like, pretty unique number. I mean, yeah, there's all sorts of things you could do. Right? 0:27:41.510 --> 0:28:07.270 That's right. And each little bit of information that you have gives you a little bit more to help you, you know, identify that. So it's, even if you can't set the cookies that you want to, you know, there are, there are systems out there that, that help, that help to reconnect that and say like, okay, actually I thought this was somebody new, but I took this, this and this and I've pulled all this in and it's like, okay, now I've got, it's like now I've got, you know, their travel interests, their, their, you know, laptop interests, you know, all this. 0:28:07.270 --> 0:28:07.750 Wow. 0:28:08.550 --> 0:29:27.770 And you know, the worst part about that is then some of that stuff starts to make it to where like, it's hard to even find what, you know, for, for all of, you know, third party cookies, you know, fault. Sometimes you can at least go like, you know, the provider has to give you some sort of lookup. Usually where you say like, okay, well what do you know about me? But you know, this, this, this can be a lot, you know, a lot harder to see and a lot more hidden. And, and so, you know, and really it gets to the point of like, well, look, what do we want to keep building? Do we want to keep having this, like, arms race with, you know, ad tech providers and browser makers where we're just constantly upping the game of measures and countermeasures, or do we want to start over, build something interesting from scratch that meets the privacy requirements, meets the user requirements, rewards them as part of it for their attention, and gets the advertisers the outcome that they want and then makes it so those users can go and contribute those earnings back to their favorite creators, like keep the web running. And that seems that's the alternative that we put in a lot of effort to and that's what we think is going to be important in the future. 0:29:28.090 --> 0:30:47.150 Yeah, that makes sense. I love the way that Brave works on this sort of spectrum where on one end of the spectrum you can donate some of your mind and some of your time to look at some other opportunities and then you will actually get some of those attention tokens and then the website that you're on will get some of those attention tokens and that supports the content creators that are producing that content. And then alternatively on the other end of the spectrum you can actually get bats. You can get these Brave attention tokens just by spending USD or whatever your local currency is. You can get these tokens and then you can give them directly to these content creators, these websites. And you don't even have to manually manage all of that or subscribe to a paywall and do all of that. You just set up the Brave wallet once for the entire Internet. And Brave will also handle, you know, it has some, has some different policies of how you want to distribute that. You could do it, you know, manually, but they also have some automatic policies. And so that whole thing I think is, yeah, much more elegant way of doing things. 0:30:47.710 --> 0:31:49.860 Yeah. And you, you, and you just, you did a great job describing it. Right. Because, right. When you sign up for this, these Brave rewards and you'll, you know, if you're seeing these privacy preserving ads, you'll get your payout at the end of the month and then yeah, you know, all the way. You can, you can, you know, say like, oh look, I love this article, I love this tweet. And you can just go give, you know, go give somebody a bet, you know, like, like, oh great, you know, great work, you know, keep up the good work. Or like you're saying, say okay, look, I of what I've earned and taken in, I want you to contribute, you know, X amount of Bat to, you know, to the sites that, you know, I love. Or you can say, look, I don't want to do any of this stuff entirely, you know, ads in whatever form annoys me but I do want to support, you know, support, support my favorite creators. Great. I'm going to put some, you know, bad into the system. I'm going to, you know, send it to my favorite creators and you know, support them that way. Right. And we, you Know, we want to make sure that, you know, there's room for all those different ways of doing it. 0:31:50.650 --> 0:32:16.330 Cool. Yeah, we've had a couple of, over the years, we've had a couple of cryptocurrency type folks, but I don't think we've really had a deep dive into Ethereum and these kind of things. And so maybe just at a high level, what is BAT and how do people get it? Can people turn it into their local fiat currency? How does that whole thing work? 0:32:17.500 --> 0:33:13.780 Yeah, absolutely. Right. BAT is called an ERC20 token on this Ethereum network. And that really just describes a set of sort of standard interfaces for this token, that it works in a lot of the ways you expected. You can trade it around, send it all that other stuff. But yeah, there are many different places now you can go, you know, you can go to different, you know, these different providers on the web, go, say like, great, I, you know, I want to buy 100 bat. I, you know, I'm really interested in this. And then it, you know, it's compatible with our ecosystem. And, you know, so. And look, I will again caveat by saying, you know, I never came into Brave as the crypto expert and I still, still would not claim to be. 0:33:13.780 --> 0:33:30.220 But I feel confident, you know, more than me. Patrick actually is a crypto. I don't know if he's a secret crypto guru, but he just in general seems to know more than I do. But no, I mean, you've explained it really well. Definitely. I'm starting to paint a bigger, better picture here. 0:33:30.300 --> 0:34:45.530 Yeah. I mean, and what makes it really exciting, right, is like, look the way this came about. And I think what's so cool about, you know, coins like this, you know, they, they have these, like, these ICOs, these initial coin offerings. And, And Brave was no different. You know, it's like, okay, well, look, we're, we're, we're minting all these, you know, these, these new coins. And, you know, people can, People can. And, and they did, you know, support the future of brave. You know, you know, when, when, when, when the BRAVE team sort of put, put, you know, put that out there and said, look, here's. They, they put out the white paper. They said, here's what we really want to do. Here's how we want to, you know, reshape the economics of the Internet. We think this is the right way to do it. You know, here's the team that we're forming and building to, to do just that. And people went in and they said, okay, well, like, I think there's value, you know, there's value in this future. I want to buy some of this token. And, you know, I, you know, and that's just. It's like such a cool, you know, grassroots way of. Of, you know, supporting projects that you love, you know, and, And. And of course, there's, you know, I will. I will not name names, but there are also plenty of coin offerings out there that, you know, are, you know. 0:34:46.010 --> 0:34:49.570 Oh, yeah, I've heard about some sketchy ICOs. Yeah. 0:34:49.570 --> 0:34:50.810 You know, but this is. 0:34:50.810 --> 0:34:58.379 I mean, I think from the beginning it was clear that this is a real business, a real product. Some. Some of the ICOs are just. It was clear that there's nothing really there. 0:34:58.379 --> 0:36:17.200 Absolutely. You know, and. And we have, you know, I think it was, you know, I think it was in January. I think we. We paid out something like eight and a half million Brave users, you know, in the form of Bat. And, you know, so. So it's, you know, what I, What I love about Brave, you know, and, you know, there are, again, a lot of companies, like you're saying out there that are, you know, sort of consider themselves in the crypto space and work with it, and, you know, we are very much not just like crypto for crypto's sake. It's like, look, this is a, you know, obviously, like, like Brave super appeals to. To, you know, crypto savvy users. There are, you know, I have been lucky to work with, you know, some of the most, like, brilliant crypto people that, that, you know, I've ever, ever met, you know. You know, here. Here at Brave and people who, like, really understand these things inside and out. But more than anything, it's like, look, we know that this is an important tool to a, you know, to a vibrant future, right? Because, you know, like. And look, and there's some systems that you kind of need to bridge that, you know, the sort of blockchains aren't always ready, and there's still like, a ton of development and like, every year it's different. 0:36:17.520 --> 0:36:36.410 Yeah, actually kind of a question there is why? And this is maybe a dumb question, but why are there different coins? So specifically with Brave, why not use Ethereum or Bitcoin or one of these things? What's the advantage in making a new form of currency? 0:36:37.210 --> 0:38:12.490 Yeah, absolutely. And look, the early versions of Brave that did this, did this with Bitcoin, right? Because the ICO hadn't happened yet, and that was definitely before my time. But the thing is, what gives rise to so many of these different coins is that one, Ethereum is very cool and interesting because of things like they call smart contracts, where it's on the blockchain, you can put code on the blockchain that will execute and you can do all these really interesting things with it. And I think the Brave team at the time knew that. Look, having your own token, one gave you this, a lot of these really interesting things that you could start to do in the future. You could start to make these really smart things around it that are imposed by the blockchain. And that future is really appealing. And two, a really important part of the ICO is this. You know, the team allocated a bunch of tokens for what they called it the user growth pool, right? And so the idea was like, hey, look, we are going to use, we're allocating a certain, certain amount of this to, to help bootstrap these, you know, this system, right? And, and, and make it, you know, interesting, you know, for, for users and creators and like, you know, to, to, to get that going. And, and, you know, so, so those kinds of things, I think, tend to be like, really, you know, really important for people, projects like this, to help get off the ground. 0:38:13.210 --> 0:38:41.360 Oh, that makes sense. That makes sense. So by creating sort of a separate token, you're creating a unique siloed risk profile. So basically you could give a bunch of Brave tokens to folks and then they have an incentive now to keep the Brave ecosystem healthy versus if you just gave Ethereum to random people, then that's just, that's just money in a well, and who knows what would really have happened? 0:38:41.760 --> 0:42:11.700 Yeah, and like we said, we can do stuff, you know, some of our systems help, you know, handle, handle the parts that are still maturing, you know, on Web three. And so for instance, like, when you want to send, you'll hear people in like crypto complain about, you know, gas fees and really it's just like these, like, high transaction costs and you know, for instance, a lot of what Brave has, has, you know, tried to work on. So it's, you know, it's like, if you think about trying to contribute a creator, right, like, to a creator, one of the, one of the, one of the sort of obvious and more straightforward things that people did for a while is like, hey, look great, I'm gonna, I'm gonna put my, my ETH address on here and whenever you'd like, you can, you can send me, you know, send me like, like do it or, you know, Bitcoin. And, you know, it's like, and so, but you know, Ethereum fees, like transaction fees have been like really high. So it's like, okay, you know, if I have to pay 10 or $15 to send somebody a dollar, that doesn't work very well. Right? And so a lot of the, the, the, the gap, you know, that that Brave helped to bridge was saying like okay look, you can actually, you know, you can actually give you know, sort of these, these, you know, you can contribute to your favorite creators with these, these tokens. Our systems will actually help keep, you know, keep the fees to, to basically, you know, keep the fees minimal, make it anonymous in the way you contribute to it. Right? So we actually don't know that it's coming from, you know. Okay, well it's, we've, you know, we've tracked, you know, we've tracked the contributions of this Ethereum address and we know that you know, the same user has done this, right? Like our system sort of help to keep those, those you know, votes and contributions anonymous and you know, reduce the, the fees on things. And then ultimately, you know, ultimately then they will later in aggregate get what they say settled on chain like actually you know, sent to you know, to a crypto address like to try to, you know, to try to keep this practical. So now like in the Brave system, right, you can go and you can set and you say great, I want to, I want to send, I love this tweet. Here's a dollar and it's like this easy low friction way or you know, I love this article. Like I really want to support this, this creator. Like great, the super low friction way. Like hey, I earned you know, five or six bucks in bet last time. You know, this was good reporting. You know, here's, here's, here's a dollar. And it's funny that, that you know, interestingly enough, you know, if you're, if you're a creator with a sort of ads driven site, you know, like getting a direct and low friction contribution of a dollar, you know, can be you know, in aggregate big because you know, sometimes those, you know, fine, you've loaded an article and a typical, you know, they call it like programmatic impression on a, you know, on like some publisher site, maybe a dollar, you know, cpm. And that means like a dollar per thousand of them. So it's like you know, versus like okay, well hey, I, I saw ads and I contributed to you know, to your page, right? Like, or you know, like that's the good idea. Like that might only be you know,.3 cents you know, whereas if, you know, a few interested people, you know, want to make contributions and have a good, low friction way to do it, like, you know, that, that can, that can be worth actually like quite, quite a few ads, you know, seen on a site. 0:42:12.500 --> 0:42:55.010 Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Totally makes sense, I think. Plus, you know, it allows people to, you know, to really tangibly clearly see, you know, how much value they are creating. I think that, I mean, anything with donations, you know, there's a ton of psychology around donations and how that all works. But, but I mean, clearly there's a correlation between how much donation, how many donations you're going to get and the value that you're providing. And so you can, you can measure that and you can ultimately, you know, most people who are producing content, they are ultimately, they're trying to provide the best possible service. And so this gives them a nice measuring stick. 0:42:55.490 --> 0:42:57.090 That's right. Yeah, absolutely. 0:42:57.570 --> 0:43:36.310 Very cool. So, you know, one of the things that, that, you know, I really liked back In, I guess, 2009 or something, when Google started really pushing Chrome and you know, logging into Chrome and you're having your sort of identity, you know, attached to the browser was just the fact that like, you know, your bookmarks kind of went everywhere you did. Your history kind of went everywhere. And so is that kind of stuff possible in Brave? I actually don't, honestly don't know the answer to this question. But, but is there a way to sort of sync your bookmarks and your history and all of that, given that there really is? No, you know, you're not logging in when you, when you install Brave. 0:43:36.630 --> 0:43:38.710 Jason, I'm so glad that you asked. 0:43:39.990 --> 0:43:43.830 I mean, if it's true, I need to set, set it up because currently it's not synchronized. 0:43:44.550 --> 0:43:47.990 I feel, I feel like, I feel like it gave me a real softball here. So that's, that's great. 0:43:48.150 --> 0:43:52.630 So I thought the answer is going to be no. So I thought that one of the. 0:43:52.630 --> 0:44:16.500 Things that my team works on is, is Brave Sync or, you know. Yeah, so it's interesting, you know, Brave is based on Chromium, which for, you know, for anybody in the audience doesn't know. Like, that's the same sort of open source core that is in, you know, Google Chrome that like, you know, everybody's familiar with. Right? 0:44:16.500 --> 0:44:34.180 Yeah. Actually, do you know anything? I'm really curious about the history of that. Like, do you know, do you or Brandon or other folks in your circles know, really like how Chrome came about to be an open source thing and what the what went on there? 0:44:34.820 --> 0:48:12.150 Oh, that's a good question. No, I'm sure they would know the history of it. Like, you know, I don't, but it's sort of been, you know, been that way as long as I can remember. And you know, and it's good because it does give, you know, now projects like ours of course can sort of say like, okay, look, we're taking the, we're taking the core of that, but we want to bring it in this direction, you know, and I, and look, I think it's paid off for them too, right? Like our team, you know, quote unquote upstream stuff all the time where we say like, oh actually we found this, found this problem in, you know, core Chromium. Like, and you know, they pull in our pull request and you know, everybody, everybody benefits. Right. And so, but, but yeah, so it, it's for, for, for at least the last, you know, three years. It's based on, yeah, Chromium, I think a little bit before that. Like it used to be based on this, this fork of Electron, you know, like, but now based on chromium. And, and, and of course it's like, if you base on chromium, the good part is like a bunch of stuff is sort of done there for you and there's, you know, you saw you can solve these compatible, still get a lot of the protections that you want. But you know, interestingly enough, like, so, you know, right, Google has a sync. You can turn on sync, sync your bookmarks and all that other stuff. Right? And because the client side code, like the stuff that talks to the server is open source, right? That's, we can use that too. But the server side of Google Sync is not open sourced. And so you know, we had, had this, this legacy sort of sync system actually before that, that, that we kind of carried through. And after the switch to Chromium, we said, okay, well look, if you know, we want to make this, we want to give everybody the stuff that they're used to. Exactly like you're saying, it's like, you know, we want a way to give people, you know, like great bookmarks, sync and you know, password sync and sync their tabs and all that other stuff. You know, how do we do that? Like, how do we do that in the lightest way possible. And so what we did in the end was we sort of, you know, the team here, you know, and a lot of the browser, you know, engineers kind of dug into it and sort of made a wire compatible sync protocol that we could then you Know, open source and like run on our servers. And, and a key difference is that it's kind of a little known mode, but Chrome actually has a locally encrypted by default mode for your sync. And so that's actually what we. Sorry, but it's not a default. It's like a obscure setting. But in contrast, we said, okay, ours is going to be locally encrypted by default. So you get this system that's kind of like the best of both worlds, right? You sign up to your, you say like, okay, I want to enable Brave Sync. You get this key that. It's one of those sets of words that makes actually a local encryption key. All that bookmark data, everything you choose to sync is locally encrypted with that key. We do not. Brave never gets that key. We do not have it anything like that. You locally encrypt your stuff on your computer and then you send it up to the Brave servers. Like encrypted. 0:48:13.750 --> 0:48:38.730 Oh, similar to like a protonmail or something where it's end to end encryption. So you have the encryption on your phone and then it goes to. So you are actually holding the people's bookmarks, but just encrypted somewhere on a server. But now when someone comes in with their desktop. But then I guess like, what's the user ID then? Because there's no account. Right? 0:48:39.130 --> 0:48:53.210 Yeah, so, so it, it's, it's, it's sort of very, you know, very reminiscent of crypto because like your, you know, quote unquote ID is just the public key of this. And you, you encrypt stuff with the private key of this, you know. 0:48:53.290 --> 0:49:10.400 Oh, I see. So you have some database where you know, the given a public key, oh, here's all of your data. And so. And so, and so I see. So, so anybody can, anybody can get Jimmy's data. It's just encrypted because they can't actually decrypt it. 0:49:10.560 --> 0:49:18.320 No, correction there. Like you actually have to sign and prove that you own the private key to even request it. Right? It's so, it's like, so it's still. 0:49:18.320 --> 0:49:19.040 Oh, I see. 0:49:19.040 --> 0:50:01.580 It's still protected. It's still, you know, like, you know, nobody with just your public. Like even though you don't really share your public key with anybody, nobody with just your public key could, could go get your data. Like it's. Your request still has to be signed with your private key and then we know that you're authorized to do it. You never share your private key with us. And then only, only you, using your private key, can decrypt this. You know, so, so right. We never received this private key. And you know, so, right, only you can request it. And even if somehow somebody did get access to that data, they would have. It would be useless to them because they would not have your private key and it would just be encrypted blobs. 0:50:01.900 --> 0:50:36.500 Got it. Yeah. One of these days we should get someone on the show who knows, because the signing part I still don't quite understand. Like, I understand how you can go in one direction, but I didn't. But, yeah, I'm sure it's possible. I just don't know how, like, how you can. So if you have, if you have the private and public key, how can someone else know that you're you? I guess maybe you encrypt. Oh, Patrick, maybe you want to jump in. You seem to know a lot more about crypto. 0:50:37.140 --> 0:50:47.490 So, I mean, I think the difference is like most people think in terms of symmetric key cryptography, and in symmetric key, the same key will encode something and decode something. 0:50:47.970 --> 0:50:48.330 Right? 0:50:48.330 --> 0:52:21.110 So the key with public key cryptography. Oh, I said key twice. Is you have one asymmetric. So if somebody uses the public key, the one you share, then only the private key will undo that encryption. But the nice thing is that because of how it's designed, taking a message. So just say it's your name, Jason, and I use. You use your private key to sign it. If I take your public key and apply it to that and I get back out Jason, then I know. Only Jason could have done Jason. If the public key I have is Jason's public key, which. Knowing whose key it is is a whole separate topic. And like, how do you have a root of trust for knowing that the public key is the person. But if you have, you're still trusting a server to say that, like, the server is going to send you a challenge, right? The challenge is the current timestamp plus some random number or whatever. And then you need to put your private key into the algorithm to encrypt that. That information. If someone intercepted it, if whatever, they can't do anything with it, it goes up to the server. The server takes its knowledge of your public key and decodes and makes sure that you are the one who signed that challenge, that bit of information. And no one else could have done it, because if they did, they had your private key and you're already screwed. So that way that you can sort of perform this, this, you can prove who you are, and you prove who you are by doing something with your private key that only the private key could have done. 0:52:21.189 --> 0:52:30.790 Yeah, that makes sense. And that way, like, if there is a person in the middle who has your public key, they see that you passed the challenge, but that doesn't really, you know, that's not a security issue. I mean. 0:52:30.940 --> 0:52:44.420 Yeah, so like Replay Attack or them getting in the middle of you would be a separate issue. So they wouldn't send you a clear text of the challenge. They would send you their encrypted version of the challenge, and that way someone in the middle couldn't intercept it. 0:52:44.420 --> 0:53:07.570 Right. Right. Okay, cool. That is awesome. So, okay, so. So circling back here, so, so you don't even get. I mean, not that, you know, I mean, the public key is very. Or the, the key in general is very hard to break, but you don't even have to worry about that because you can't get the data to where then you could just, you know, thrash away at it. Unless you can prove yourself first. 0:53:08.530 --> 0:53:19.170 Yeah, that's. That's right. That's right. Even, even if you, you know, even if you did get access to that data. Right. It would, it would be encrypted, you know, and only the private key holder would be able to decrypt it. 0:53:19.410 --> 0:53:45.900 And so. So got it. And so. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, that's a really cool service. I think it must be a pretty large database. I mean, I'm just thinking, like, that's wild. But I guess with all the cloud stuff out there, they make it so easy to scale. 0:53:46.300 --> 0:54:03.110 And look, the good news is now if you go our sync server code, it's done in golang and, you know, you can see it on our GitHub and it uses. Uses DynamoDB for any of you AWS fans. 0:54:03.270 --> 0:54:03.990 Oh, nice. 0:54:04.310 --> 0:54:20.790 You know, backend storage, which has been, you know, real helpful, real scalable and, you know, yeah, it's. No. Right. It's big. But I think our users, you know, our users seem to enjoy it and, and that's what matters. 0:54:20.870 --> 0:54:44.550 Cool. So maybe we'll touch on one last thing and then I want to talk about Brave, the company. I want to make sure we leave time for that. But one last thing is if you are a content creator, you have jimmy.com and you produce a bunch of blogs and it's really popular and you want to be a part of this and you want to receive support from Brave folks. How do you sign up and get that going? 0:54:45.120 --> 0:55:30.120 Yes, super simple. Go to creators.brave.com and you can sign up and there's a bunch of, you know, so basically what you do in that is sort of you prove that you either own the site or the account or whatever it is. But it's interesting. You can sign up with it for a lot of different platforms too. Right. So, yeah, not only can you put. Put your site on there, if you have a, you know, YouTube channel, if you have a Twitter handle, you know, there's. There's a, you know, like Reddit now or, you know, even if you are a, you know, prolific Reddit user, like, you can, you know, you can let. Let people, you know, contribute to you when, when they thought you did a great job. 0:55:30.840 --> 0:55:43.580 Cool, that makes sense. Yeah, because there's probably a lot of trickery there. Like, there's, you know, YouTube.com but there's m.YouTube.com if you're on mobile. And so by providing an easy way, you kind of handle all that complexity. 0:55:44.380 --> 0:56:09.750 Yeah, right. I mean, it gets complex under the hood. The rewards team that works on this. Right. Are constantly sort of working along with things that can break on those sites, but fixing them back up to make sure that, okay, we know a creator, we know where we should send the bat for this, basically. 0:56:10.070 --> 0:56:36.370 Right, Very cool. Yeah. So if you're out there and you create content on the Internet, I guess, I mean, pretty much anything is. Check this out, and it's a really good opportunity. What about. Do you have, like a badge or something where people can put a little badge on their website saying. Letting other people know that they take the Brave token. How does the discoverability part work? 0:56:36.930 --> 0:57:19.230 Yeah, so, so look, if you are. Well, one, if, if you're doing this in Brave, you'll see that there's a little, a little, little bat triangle that will show, you know, a check mark to say, like, oh, you're. You're a verified creator. So it's, it's a little bit part of the Brave experience. And of course, creators who want to, you know, proudly proclaim, you know, you know, that they. That they love Brave, I think, I think actually our site, if you go to brave.com, there's a bunch of brand assets there that I think they're able to use. So, yeah, the browser will know it. And then, of course, you are welcome to proclaim it. 0:57:21.230 --> 0:57:37.240 Yeah. So just to recap Brave, I've used it for a long time, actually, at work. We are not allowed to use Brave, which makes me very sad. But to be fair to them, we're not allowed to use Almost anything. They're very strict on it. 0:57:38.040 --> 0:57:47.640 Is it like the, Yeah, I know some like IT policies flag it because it's got like a Tor component that you can get or whatever, right? 0:57:47.640 --> 0:59:07.460 Oh, I wish it was that complicated. I think it's literally, you know, here's a list of programs you can use. And you know, we actually, I mean, to be fair, like most of us are logging into the data center and doing everything there and over there we have root access and we can do anything we want. But, but, oh, but, but, yeah, so I had to use Firefox and, and even the, you know, installing the ad blocker, it doesn't totally work all the time. And I feel like some of these ad blockers are kind of compromised in the sense that, you know, they have deals with certain advertisers, they say, oh, this is like a good ad and so we're going to keep this one. And so Brave is the only thing I've used recently which just works just, you install it, you don't have to do any plugins or anything. It just wipes all the ads that you don't like right off the face of the earth, which is amazing. Definitely, folks should check it out. Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of features I didn't even know about, so I'm really excited about that. I'm going to turn on the sync later today and try that out. Try out those features. Definitely use Brave. We're huge fans and let's dive into the company here. So you joined a few years ago and so what is sort of the growth of the company? Where is Brave now and what's been that trajectory like? 0:59:08.580 --> 1:02:13.300 Yeah, so I think around when I joined, I forgot the numbers back then, but it was. Well, I actually remember when I first started talking to the Brave team. Team, you know, actually years before, you know, we, we'd had a lot of interaction. I think it was like, you know, a few, few hundred thousand users. Then, you know, this is, this was years ago and you know, and, but I, I, I immediately loved it, started, started using it, you know, and you know, the, the old Electron based version. But you know, yeah, it's, it's, it's grown just tremendously, you know, in the meantime. Like, you know, I think it was, I think it was in January we had, you know, over over 50 million monthly active users, you know, across, you know, all those different, you know, platforms and you know, and it's just, it's just, you know, enormous. And yeah, you know, it's, it's it's been such. Such an interesting trajectory because. Yeah, when. So even when I joined, you know, there's. There's been like, an incredible amount of growth since then. And. And, you know, actually this. The team had done a lot of. Of, you know, work on this rewards program and on, you know, some of the ads already. But, you know, I came in and kind of helped help sort of launch and, you know, grow it. And, you know, what started as just, you know, like, okay, you know, a few thousand users who is, you know, for the. You know, who'd sign up, who were, like, really interested, you know, has grown into. Into millions. And, you know, and now it's like, you hear about it in, you know, all sorts of different. Different venues, you know, and it's like, okay, like, you. You open up real periodicals. Like, you look in Forbes and it's like, oh, they're talking about Brave. And, you know, it's. It's like, it's such a cool thing, you know, because I sort of, you know, I either got used to working at companies where you didn't really. They were sort of, you know, B2B things. You didn't really hear people, you know, mention much or. Or sort of smaller things. And this is, you know, it doesn't take too many more kind of like, doublings of our user base to start to become a significant portion of browsing and really a juggernaut. So it's like. So that's very exciting. But what I'd also say is that it, like, you know, you see Brendan, Brendan Ike, CEO, like, engage with people on Twitter, like, every day, you know, and he's. He's, like, very famous for it and, you know, keeps. Keeps, like, very close to, you know, all those users, right? Like, Pete, when. When people don't like things and people complain about stuff or they think it should be different, you know, if the idea is good, you know, it doesn't. Doesn't matter sort of who or where it came from. You know, Brendan brings it to us and it's like, yeah, this is. This is. This is what we should do. You know, this is like our user. You know, the people who are, you know, passionate about us and support us, like, they're. They're out there and this is. This is. They're complaining about this. This drives them nuts. Or they wish we were, you know, working on this. And so what's the. 1:02:13.300 --> 1:02:23.140 What's the order of magnitude, you know, when Brendan comes to. Comes to the companies? Is it like, how many engineers are we talking about? Is it like tens of engineers? Hundreds, thousands of engineers? 1:02:24.260 --> 1:02:33.530 No, let's. We're definitely not. We're definitely not in the thousands. You know, I don't have an updated count, but we're certainly over 100 or so right now. 1:02:34.170 --> 1:02:35.290 Wow, that's cool. 1:02:35.610 --> 1:02:45.370 Yeah, you know, we are so. So, yeah, it's. It's. No, it's exciting. And now we're working and like, yeah, now we're. 1:02:45.370 --> 1:02:45.690 We're. 1:02:45.690 --> 1:04:32.990 We're working on some, you know, really interesting pieces because probably, as you saw, like, you know, Brave acquired a search engine, right, and an associated team. And yeah, like I said, I love Brave Search. You know, it's. It's that that team just constantly amazes me and, like, the growth has been, like, incredible there. You know, we're putting out sort of, you know, like, premium sort of products, right? Like, you, you know, you can already get the VPN and iOS and you can, you know, you can get this premium Brave Talk, this, the Zoom competitor that's like, you know, real easy to join and anonymous and private, you know, again, by design. Design, you know that. That's a really interesting project too, because, you know, Talk, which is based on open source Jitsi, and we work with the team that runs that now too. You know, again, like, both really private by design. Like, we don't keep metadata about your calls or anything like that. You use these anonymous credentials essentially to join things. But I think what it is also showed is that, like. And in a lot of what we do, like, you don't have to sacrifice really cool functionality to get privacy. We want users to have both. What we love about Brave Talk is it's like you can generate a link and then just join it in your browser. So many of these video conferencing kind of provide, you know, they take the experience outside the browser. And like, we want to make it a really good experience in the browser because, like, that's what people are using day in and day out, like 10 hours a day, you know. 1:04:32.990 --> 1:04:51.930 Yeah. My biggest pet peeve is when these video conferences, I've seen several do it, so it's not any particular one. At fault is where they'll give you a deep link that will take you to a browser just so that they can then open the desktop app. It's like they couldn't even use like a desktop protocol deep link. It's just so frustrating. 1:04:52.410 --> 1:05:17.930 Yeah, that's right. And so we want to make it just like. Like, we, you know, we. When we do engineering interviews, like, we, we. We do that too. You know, we just, we give them a talk link to join and it's like, and it's easy and they are able to, you know, show up. Like my, like my nightmare always is like, oh, you're supposed to join this meeting. And like, oh, okay, there's, there's a five minute blue jeans install that has to happen before you can do anything right. 1:05:18.140 --> 1:06:02.650 Know you wake up at you know, 5am with like a cold sweat. It's like, what was your, what was that nightmare? Oh, it was, it was. I had to use blue jeans again. Yeah, VC is, is the bane of, of so many people's existence. I mean everyone really complains about vc. I haven't tried tried Brave Talk yet. I'm gonna, I'm gonna give it a shot. What about like in terms of positions? We have a lot of folks who are, you know, starting college, finishing college and so they're looking for everything from, you know, internships over the summer all the way to, you know, full time positions. And we have people all over the world. So you know, what are sort of the opportunities and what are the sort of locales there? 1:06:03.530 --> 1:06:44.270 Yeah, I'm, I'm like very glad you asked. So I definitely encourage everybody to head to the careers page, brave.com careers because we're definitely hiring specifically for my team. Like we have four or five roles for my team and I'm one of many teams here that has open roles. We're always looking for great people to help us run and scale these systems and work wise. We're actually, we're very much remote first, even pre pandemic. So you know, there's there's an office in San Francisco, there's an office in Grand Cayman. 1:06:46.030 --> 1:06:49.270 And there's an office in Grand Cayman. Like there is, there is. 1:06:49.270 --> 1:07:02.470 And I think there's like eight or nine people there now. I mean it's like, wow, you know, and they've been, you know, like, like, you know, hiring a lot of people locally and like, you know, people really like the life out there and we got it. 1:07:02.470 --> 1:07:20.320 We have to double click on this. So, so how did that get started? Was this somebody who had a bunch of bitcoin. So when I think of Grand Cayman, I think of people trying to escape things. I don't know, I don't know if maybe I've watched too many movies, but is this like bitcoin millionaires in Grand Cayman or something? 1:07:20.320 --> 1:07:37.090 Well, look, I, and probably I can't tell you the, I, I don't know the genesis of it, but I I've known that since, since I've joined. You know, it was there and it's real, you know. Right. It's like. Yeah, people, People, you know, really love it. They really go out there and, and you know, like in the background there's. 1:07:37.090 --> 1:07:40.890 Palm trees and everything. I bet it makes you jealous if you're in a meeting with them. 1:07:41.530 --> 1:07:53.690 It's. It's. It's gorgeous. And a lot of, you know. No, yeah. And no, it's like, like a wonderful office and, and you know, like a lot of awesome people out there. And so. 1:07:53.690 --> 1:07:54.570 That is amazing. 1:07:55.210 --> 1:08:42.040 Yeah. And so, you know, San Francisco to, you know, and, and. But, but for instance, a lot of us work remotely. Right. I'm. I'm right outside of. Of Orlando and have been. And then you know, we usually, we'll usually get together for, you know, certainly pre pandemic, we would do these, these like all hands. And now, now again very soon, you know, hopefully. And you know, or, or we just, you know, FL. Fly out to see each other. Like when, when we were actually doing a lot of this work on sync, we were, you know, we, we actually flew out to like Arizona because there were a couple of the engineers there and we just like, we had a few days in. In, you know, in around Phoenix. Right. And just had. Had a good time. So. 1:08:42.040 --> 1:08:42.520 Cool. 1:08:42.760 --> 1:08:58.880 No, it's, it's. It's great. Like, you know, we, we. We hire all over the world. I. That's definitely the case for, you know, everybody, you know. On my team. We span a number of time zones and I think we've gotten, you know, pretty used to working remotely and you know, we're reasonably. Reasonably good at it, I think. 1:08:59.520 --> 1:09:07.520 Cool. That's awesome. Yeah. Very nice. So folks, check out Cruise. Oh, about internships. Do you do internships or is it full time only? 1:09:07.920 --> 1:09:26.090 Yeah, we definitely have internships open and I think this is like right about the time for it. And so I think we're, you know, we, we've we're close to, to bringing on some, some interns here. So. So, you know, definitely if you know, send, send your information my way if you're. If you're interested. 1:09:26.250 --> 1:09:29.530 Cool. And what sort of skills are. Are you looking for? 1:09:30.570 --> 1:10:42.420 Yeah, I mean, and, and, and there's. There's tons of different positions, you know, across. You know, there's like BD and design and engineering and. But you know, look definitely like brave always I think is looking for people who are one well versed in the browser. Right. It's like this whole ecosystem unto itself and definitely for our team, people who are great at scaling all this infrastructure and keeping it reliable and cost effective and all that other good stuff. Because we're. All these services are growing up and scaling and we, you know, we want to make sure that we're still providing great service to our users. So if you're great at that, like, we are definitely always hiring for that. Let's see what else. You know, I'm specifically looking for, you know, some, some great data engineers. So if you, you do that like, like, please, you know, please hit me up, you know, on Twitter. But yeah, you know, but look great, great engineers, you know, great engineers overall who care about, you know, care about privacy and good. Care about making the best possible web. We're happy to talk to you. 1:10:42.660 --> 1:11:57.110 Yeah, that makes sense. This is actually a really good point. I think if you're out there and you've built something website or even something that has some kind of server component, take a little bit of time and get it to run on aws. I'm kind of frugal to a fault and I didn't use public cloud stuff for a really long time because I didn't want to pay the 16 cents a month or whatever it was that was not good. So don't do that. Basically learn public cloud. Get your stuff on aws. For one, if you lose your hard drive, it's not a big deal. Then you still have your site number. Two, you're not going to tax your own personal computer and your own personal Internet. I'd have issues where my home Internet would go down for a day and I'd get people emailing me. Mamehub is down and all these other things are down and it's like, ah. But most importantly, you're going to build skills that are extremely, extremely important. I mean, the public cloud services and all of them are kind of learning from each other. So there's a whole ecosystem there that you could take some time to learn and build some skills that are really, really in demand right now. 1:11:57.750 --> 1:12:15.500 Yeah, absolutely. We use AWS for a lot of different things, you know, and look, as, as, as an engineer, like, I'm just a huge S3 fan, you know, like, yeah, die hard S3 fan. Like, it just so, it is so useful in so many different ways. 1:12:16.620 --> 1:12:22.780 Yeah. I don't think we've had an episode on cloud file systems. Maybe we need to have you back, Jimmy, to, to talk about that. 1:12:24.540 --> 1:12:27.820 I'm sure, I'm sure there's plenty more expertise there, but. 1:12:28.790 --> 1:12:48.390 Okay, cool. Hey, it was amazing to have you on the show. I think. You know, Brave is an amazing browser. I've used it for years. It has never let me down. I've. I've been a die hard fan. I don't know when Brave started. Actually, just really quick. When did, when did the Brave project start in the sense that it was, you know, launched to the public? 1:12:48.870 --> 1:12:49.630 Oh, let's see. 1:12:49.630 --> 1:12:49.990 That's a. 1:12:49.990 --> 1:12:52.710 That's a good question. I should, I should better know my Brave history. 1:12:52.950 --> 1:13:28.660 I've been using it for at least a few years now. We made it tool of the show maybe three, four years ago and ever since then, I'm using it right now to record this. So it's an amazing piece of technology. Highly recommend it. And if you're producing content on the web, check out this whole bat system. Be a creator on Brave. And if you are looking for some cool stuff to do this summer, check out the summer internships. There's also full time positions, a whole breadth of opportunity here. Awesome. 1:13:28.660 --> 1:13:30.180 Well, thanks for having me. This is great. 1:13:30.660 --> 1:13:33.140 Yeah. Thank you for coming on the show. We'll catch you all later. 1:13:46.020 --> 1:13:50.860 Music by Eric Barndale Programming throwdown is. 1:13:50.860 --> 1:14:05.790 Distributed under a Creative Commons attribution Share alike 2.0 license. You're free to share, copy, distribute, transmit the work, to remix, adapt the work. But you must provide an attribution to Patrick and I and share alike in time.