Programming Throwdown - 131: Supporting your Favorite Creators with Brave with Jimmy Secretan

Episode Date: April 11, 2022

I've been a big fan of Brave Browser ever since attending a presentation from Brandon Eich back in 2017.  Brave was one of the first browsers to aggressively block the ability for websites to share information on your computer without your consent (i.e. third party cookies).  I'm so excited to sit down with Jimmy Secretan, VP of Ads and Premium Services of Brave, and talk about all things Brave, from the Browser to the other products to the way Brave takes privacy on the internet to a whole new level, while also empowering content creators and advertisers who depend on ads for income and to promote their businesses.00:00:15 Introduction00:00:44 Introducing Jimmy Secretan00:01:10 How Brave started00:09:33 Brave and internet advertising00:21:13 Local machine learning00:32:07 What is BAT (Brave Attention Tokens) 00:42:59 Cross-platform data synchronization 00:44:28 Chromium00:50:22 Public and Private key encryption and authentication00:54:27 Brave for Content Creators00:59:03 Where is Brave now and what is its trajectory01:05:40 Opportunities in Brave01:13:10 FarewellsResources mentioned in this episode:Jimmy Secretan, VP of Ads and Premium Services:Twitter: https://twitter.com/jsecretanLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimmysecretan/ Brave:Website: https://brave.com/Brave Careers: https://brave.com/careers/Twitter: https://twitter.com/braveLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/brave-software/If you’ve enjoyed this episode, you can listen to more on Programming Throwdown’s website: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/ Reach out to us via email: [e-mail] You can also follow Programming Throwdown on Facebook | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Player.FM  Join the discussion on our DiscordHelp support Programming Throwdown through our Patreon ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

programming throwdown episode 131 supporting your favorite creators with brave with jimmy secretan take it away jason hey everybody um so you know as most of you know patrick and i are huge fans of brave um we love the browser i recently switched to the search engine which uh is working really well i'm a big fan of that um i love the sort of ethos around brave and i've uh 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. 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. 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. Brave was started by Brendan Eich and Brian Bondy. And Brendan Eich, who a lot of you will know from Mozilla, the inventor of JavaScript. And they set out to create this private by design browser, most secure, most private experience on you know, on the web. I joined, I joined actually a little over three years ago, you know, and one of the things, you know, one of the things that's really interesting about Brave, and if you haven't tried it out, please go to brave.com, you know, you can download it for a desktop,

for, you know, Android, for iOS, for, you know, for whatever you're using. You know, easy to install, easy to try out. The experience is, if you're, you know, if you use Chrome, the experience is a lot like that, except, you know, incredibly aggressive about blocking out these, you know, third-party ads and trackers that, you know, in, in, in incredibly aggressive about blocking out these, you know, third, third party ads and trackers that, you know, sort of, uh, you know, choke the internet experience and, you know, make it less private, you know, and so brave is, is this, you know, an incredibly

fast, incredibly, uh, you know, lightweight way to, you know, enjoy the web. How did you get, you know, what, tell us a little bit about the path that, that you followed, you know, 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? Yeah, so I met Brendan Eich back when I 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 Ph.D. in privacy preserving machine learning, you know, at UCF, you know, 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 there, because I think, you know, that was probably, what, like 2010 or so. And I don't

know if privacy, I mean, 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. No, you're absolutely right. Because when my advisor came to me and said, oh, okay, well, I have this really interesting area.'s like you know privacy and data mining and i'm like what are you know what what are all those things like why does you know anybody need all that stuff and uh you know but but got into this you know really interesting area of you know because of all you know had that that data background it's like oh well this is like a really you know like there are these really interesting ways that people can share data that, you know, 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, you know, out of my, was with a company that was just doing just that. We're saying like, Hey, you know, like great. There's all this, this advertising stuff that, you know, helps, helps power these, these publishers and, you know, keep this great content free. But we should make it more private by design and, you know, really got into that stuff. And yeah, this was, this is like 2010, 2011. And we just sort of, you know, we're like, this is, this is privacy's moment, you know, everybody's, you know, like Safari, 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, was, was, 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, you still want all the services you're accustomed to, which, you know, you don't want your data everywhere. And, and, you know, then at the time, it was sort of like, okay, people are interested. And then, you know, they say, Oh, that's, that's interesting. And doing, you know, building things that are private by design is, it's, it's, 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. I think fast forward 10 or so years later, and. And, and now, you know, things are really reaching fever pitch, like, you know, people realize that, that, you know, okay, look, even if we, you know, even if we trust these companies, and, you know, we don't always like how they're using our data, you know, they can be breached, you know, all these things can can happen with this data or be used in ways that we don't intend that, you know, it's, it felt like, you know, all these things can can happen with this data or be used in ways that we don't intend that, you know, it's it felt like, you know, feels like, look, this is really the time to start to, you know, push on these really private by design systems and make them work for, you know, for real. Yeah, I mean, one of the things we talked about in back in episode 109, we had Kevin Ruttia 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, you know, they put their marketing hat on and they did that and they were able to provide a ton of value to people. Right. And so folks out there, you know, you're going to be building projects and there's going to be, you know, you're going to be building projects and there's

going to be, you know, an audience that really wants to consume that project, but it's not, it's not trivial to connect yourself to those people and add that value. And that is where, you know, that's, that's, that's where something like, you know, 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 six foot six or whatever. It's like, you know, buy this broccoli supplement or whatever.

Save money on your car insurance, right? Like this one weird trick and like, you know, you two could get a PhD, you know, and it's like, okay. But, but, 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. Like how did that possibly happen? So it's kind of, you see the ends of the spectrum and it's important for people to realize like in

between there, you know, there's a ton of value and there's the grease that keeps like our entire economy and our entire economy of knowledge and of ideas, you know, functioning. Yeah, that 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, 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,

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 you know, help fund it. And then there's the there's the creators who are creating this, you know, great and interesting content that people want to go see. And they all, you know, 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, I said, Hey, I've, I've got background and experience this, you know, making these systems sort of private by design and, and being, you know, good and transparent and above board.

And, and, and let's, let's do this. Let's make this a part of it. Um, because yeah, to your point, um, you know, if, if you've tried to visit, um, you know, uh, any, any publisher site recently, you know, with, with, without brave or other, you know, comparable protections, right. Like, you know, open up, you know, without Brave or other, you know, comparable protections, right? Like, you know, open up, you know, do yourself a favor. It's like, you know, open up 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 sharing data about you in different ways and transferring it between systems. And again, all these things that you don't necessarily expect. 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, you know, little like, like invisible things that, that your, your browser will load. And they'll like, you know, set, set this cookie, set this little piece of information saying like, great, here's, here's, 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 this was this was

you know same same person who was on that uh 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 it's not that people always object to being advertised to, but they're like, how did you know this? Where did you get this? 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 uh pixels that they put

on other people's sites at least the whole third party cookies thing and so what can happen is you're getting back to the kayak example i mean i definitely get got asked this a lot in the past like like you know is is is my phone listening to me 24 7 and somehow doing some asr 24 7 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've 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 persons, you know, you know, if you have a real life connection and a Facebook connection, 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, some evil magic going on. And, and really what we need is, is to your point is we just need to be able to silo things, you know, and, and I think the blocking of the third-party cookies, that's a relatively recent thing, right? I mean, Brave has pretty aggressive protections, I think, from day one. But yeah, a lot of them, you know, it's, it's, you know, Google Chrome is, is trying to, you know, do away with these, you know, sort of third party cookies by default. Yeah, they're feeling not just from like users and lawmakers and people like that, but from, you 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. Yeah, that makes sense. So from like a, a tech standpoint, can you kind of walk folks through, you know, 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 uh 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 um um um for this for this uh kind of like a

product that anyways it's kind of like a product that, anyways, it's kind of a technical thing, but I thought, oh, this is really cool. I could probably use this. And so that's the kind of thing that you want. And so, you know, how does, you know, 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? Sure thing. I mean, and look, let me caveat by saying I am not the expert in Brave's various protections. There are people who are great at it at Brave. And they can speak to you at length about the numerous, numerous fine-grained protections that Brave offers, all the way from sort of blocking these requests as far upstream as you can to preventing fingerprinting, which is when

advertisers sort of use unique information about your device, even when they can't set cookies. There's these numerous protections they can write books for you on, you know, but I mean, 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 sort of your, whatever you're doing there, your preferences on that are then being pulled back into this ad tech provider's kind of infrastructure, right? And then, and it is a third party request.

If you're on travelwhatever.com, this is to, you know, goes to ad tech provider.com. But, you know, 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 new 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, you know, I know they're interested in travel, you know, I know they've looked up some new cars, you know, whatever it is, and then say, and I, you know, and have those ads to give you right there. But, you know, and uh you know and to your point it's like look you you want stuff to be relevant sometimes and sometimes you like like as as jaded as we can become about you know advertising on the internet it's like oh that's that's a cool thing like i didn't not like that's great why didn't you tell me that existed like now i want that you know and so 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? That's right. 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, uh, of, of, of, of commerce, right? Yeah. And if you're, you know, and if you're a publisher, right. And, and that's, and, 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, 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 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, we're fine, 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 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 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 how much do you want to spend? And then for users who opt in to what we call, it's a 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 for your region of all, all the stuff that advertisers, you know, are you going to show you. And then as you browse along, we're using what you know, 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, they, they never get sent to, they never get sent to Brave. They never get sent to anybody else. All that stuff happened, 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 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 of 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, you know, across, you know, the tab page. But, you know, for the notification ones, you know, those are put, you know, those are made relevant for you, right? And so it's like, okay, great. We know that we've got like a, uh, you know, exactly what they're looking for.

Um, let's show this, let's show this to them. Right. And then what we do is this, this really interesting process from there. Um, we have, it's, it's, it's called a two-phase blinded token process, basically. 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. This starts with the right customer data strategy, as well as the right foundation to solve the challenges that typically inhibit success such as data quality, data governance, and connectivity. mParticle is your real-time customer data infrastructure that helps accelerate your data strategy by cleansing, visualizing, and integrating your

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mean actually we could yeah let's spend a little bit of time on that i mean you have to um so so you know to backtrack a little bit so you know the way i guess you know old ad tech would work is they would they would take in, you know, so that that company you said would see, oh, you know, this person went to this travel website. And so they would have a row somewhere in some database somewhere saying, you know, Jimmy Secerton 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 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, and, and know that it's working. Yeah. And it is very challenging to, to put together and run, but it's, it's, it's powerful when it works, you know? So, right. Exactly. To your point, if this were traditional ad tech, you know, the, the request would go out, you know, I'd be on some new site. The request would go out to, you know, travel site or, you know, to adtechprovider.com.

And yeah, I, you know, I, my user ID there would represent, you know, hundreds, thousands of rows in that database that, you know, covers literally everything that I, you know, might have ever shown interest in, you know, or at least since I, you know, last, last cleared my cookies. Right. And so, right. It could be like, okay, well we got laptops and, you know, we got this travel. Even then there's the fingerprinting thing. We should definitely talk about that too. I'd love to learn more about that. 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 fine. They can't use this ID to look up stuff about me. What some of these systems can then do is they say, well, okay, 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, 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 can even go to the point where it's like how your GPU renders stuff, you know, and that can be like, like you can, you can sort of read back those like can pixels in the canvas and like different,

different configured computers and browsers will like render things in different ways. Like it, it, it gets, you know, it gets extreme and it's, and it's a, you know, it's, it's an arms race in some, in some ways, right. Of like, okay, you know, it gets extreme and it's, and it's a, 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, 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. 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 browser doesn't 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 some like pretty unique number. I mean, yeah, there's all sorts of things you could do, right? 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, um, you know, there's, there are systems out there that, that help, that helps her reconnect that and say like, oh, okay, actually I thought this was somebody new, but I took this, this, and this, and I pulled all this in and it's like, okay, now I've got, and it's like, now I've got, you know, their, their, their travel interests, their, their, you know, laptop interests, you know, all this other stuff. And, you know, the worst part about that is then some, some of that stuff starts to make it to where like, it's hard to even find what, you know, for, 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, or 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, you know, upping the game of, you know, measures and countermeasures? Or do we want to like start over, you know, build something interesting from scratch that, you know, meets the privacy requirements, meets the user requirements, rewards them as part of it, you know, for their attention and gets the advertisers

the outcome that they want and then makes it so those users can go and, you know, contribute those earnings back to their favorite creators, like keep the web running. Like, and that seems, you know, that's the alternative that,

you know, we put in a lot of effort to and, you know, that's what we think is going to be important in the future. Yeah, that makes sense. I love the the way that that Brave works on this sort of spectrum where on one end of the spectrum, you know, you can donate some of your, you know, some of your some of your mind and some of your time to 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 spend, you can actually, you know, you know, spend, you know, you can, you can get bats, you can get these brave attention tokens, you know, just by spending, 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 wall at once for the entire internet. And Brave will also handle, you know, it 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 a much more elegant way of doing things. Yeah. And you did a great job describing it, right? Because when you sign up for these brave rewards, and if you're seeing these privacy preserving ads, you'll get your payout at the end of the month. And then yeah, all the way,

you can even say like, oh, look, I love this article. I love this tweet. And you can just go give somebody a bat. Like, oh, great. Great work. Keep up the good work. Or like you're saying, say, okay, look, of what I've earned and taken in, I want you to contribute X amount of bat to the sites that I love. Or you can say, look, I don't want to do any of this stuff entirely, ads in whatever form annoys me, but I do want to support my favorite creators. Great. I'm going to put some bat into the system. I'm going to send it to my favorite creators and support them that way. Right. And we, you know, we want to make sure that, that, you know, there's, there's room for all those different ways of doing

it. 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, you know, had a deep dive into Ethereum and these kinds 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? Yeah, absolutely. So right, BAT is called like an ERC-20 token, you know, on this Ethereum network. And that really just describes a set of sort of standard interfaces for this token that like, you know, it works in a lot of the ways you expected. You can trade it around, send it, you know, all that other stuff. But yeah, there are many different places. Now you can go to different, you know, these different providers on the web, go say like,

great, 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, it's so, and, and, and, and look, I will again, caveat by saying, you know, I, I never came into too brave as, as the crypto expert and, and I still, still would not claim to be, but, you know, 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, but no, I mean,

you've explained it really well. Definitely. Yeah. I'm starting to paint a bigger, better picture here. Yeah. I mean, and what makes it, you know, really exciting, right. It's like, look, the way this came about and, and I think what, 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, no different, you know, it's like, okay, well look look, we're minting all these, you know, these new coins and, you know, people can and they did, you know, support the future of Brave, you know. You know, when the Brave team sort of put, you know, put that out there and said, look, here's 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 it's such a cool grassroots way of supporting projects that you love. And of course, I will not name names, but there are also plenty of coin offerings out there. I've heard about some sketchy ICOs. But this is, I mean, I think from the beginning, it was clear that this is a real business, a real product. Some of the ICOs are just, it was in January, I think we paid out something like

eight and a half million Brave users in the form of BAT. And so it's, what I love about Brave, and there are again, a lot of companies, like you're saying out there that are, sort of consider themselves in the crypto space and work with it. And we are very much not just like crypto for crypto's sake. It's like, look, this is obviously like Brave super appeals, 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, 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 to bridge that you know the the the sort of blockchains aren't always ready and there's still like a ton of development and like every year it's it's different yeah actually kind of a question there is is why uh and this is maybe a dumb question but why are there different coins so like like specifically with Brave, like why not use Ethereum or Bitcoin or one of these things? Like what's the advantage in making a new form of currency? Yeah, absolutely. And look, the early versions of, you know, Brave that did this, you know, did this with Bitcoin, right?

Because the, you know, the ICO hadn't happened yet. And then that was definitely before my time. But, you know, the thing is, like, you know, what gives rise to like so many of these different coins is that, like, you know, one, Ethereum is like very cool and interesting because, you know, of things like they call, you know, smart contracts, right? Where it's like on the blockchain, you can sort of put code on the blockchain that will like, that will execute you could do all these, you know, really interesting things with it. And I think the Brave team, you know, at the time knew that, like, look, have having, you know, sort of your own token, one gave you this, like, you know, a lot of these

really interesting things that you could start to do in the future, like you start to make these, you know, these sort of really, you know, smart things around it that are imposed, you know, by the blockchain, and that future is like really appealing. And two, you know, a really important part of the ICO is this, you know, the team allocated a bunch of tokens for what they called the user growth pool, right? And so the idea was like, hey, look, we are going to use, we're allocating a certain amount of this to help bootstrap these, you know, this system, right? And make it, you know, interesting for users and creators and like, you know to to get that going and and you know so those kinds of things i think tend to be like really you know really important for projects like

this to help get off the ground you know oh that makes sense that makes sense so by creating sort of a separate token you're creating um like a unique like a like a 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 money in a well, and who knows what would really have happened. Yeah. And like we said, we can do stuff, you know, some of our systems help, you know, handle the parts that are still maturing, you know, on Web3. 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, 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 sort of obvious and more straightforward things that people did for a while was like, hey, look, great, I'm gonna put 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, or, or, you know, uh, Bitcoin. And, you know, it's like, and so what, 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 gap, you know, that Brave helped to bridge was saying like, okay,

look, you can actually, you know, you can actually give, you know, sort of these, you know, you can contribute to your favorite creators with these tokens, our systems will actually help keep, you know, keep the fees 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. So we know that, you know, the same user has done this, right? Our system sort of helped to keep those votes and contributions anonymous and reduce the fees on things. And then ultimately, then they will later in aggregate get, what they say, settled on chain, actually sent to a crypto address to try to keep this practical. So now, in the Brave system, you can go and you can say, great 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

say, great, 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 bat last time. You know, this was good earned, you know, five or six bucks in bat 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, find 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 that means like $1 per 1000 of them. So it's like, you know, CPM. And that, that means like a dollar per thousand of them. So it's like, you know, versus like, oh, okay, well, hey, I, I saw ads and I contributed to, you know, to your page, right? Like, or, you know, like that, that's the good idea. Like that might only be, you know, 0.3 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, want to make contributions and have a good low friction way to do it, like, you know, that can be worth actually like quite a few ads, you know, seen on a site. 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 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. That's right. Yeah, absolutely. Very cool. So, you know, one of the things that, that, you know know i really liked uh back in i guess 2009 or something when google started really pushing chrome and 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 and brave i actually don't don't honestly don't know the answer to this question but but is there kind of went everywhere. And so is that kind of stuff possible in Brave? I actually honestly don't know the answer to this question, 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're not logging in when you install Brave? Jason, I'm so glad that you asked. I mean, if it's true, I need to set it up because currently it's not synchronized. I feel like it gave me a real softball here. So that's great.

I thought the answer was going to be no. So I thought that. One of the things that my team works on is BraveSync. Or, you know, yeah. So it's interesting. You know, Brave is based on Chromium, which for, you know, for, for, for anybody that doesn't know, like that's, 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?

Yeah. Actually, do you know anything? I'm really curious about the history of that. Like, like, like, do you know, do you or Brandon or other folks in your circles know really how Chrome came about to be an open source thing and what went on there? Oh, that's a good question. No, I'm sure they would know the history of it. I don't, but it's sort of been, been, you know, been that way as long as I can remember. And, you know, and it's, 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 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, our pull request and, you know, everybody, everybody benefits. Right. And so, but, but yeah, so it's 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, 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 solve, you can solve these compatibility issues, but still get a lot of the protections that you want. But interestingly enough, like, so, you know, 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 source. And so we had had this legacy sort of sync system actually before 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, you know, 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, a lot of the browser engineers kind of dug into it and sort of made a, you know, wire compatible, you know,

sync protocol that we could then, you know, open source and like run on our servers. And a key difference is that it's, it's kind of a little known mode, but Chrome actually has a locally encrypted by default mode for, for your sync. And so that's actually what, what we are saying, but it's, it's not a default. It's like, it's like a, you know, obscure setting. But in contrast, we said, okay, like 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? Like you sign up to your, you say like, okay, I want to enable BraveSync. You get this, you know, key that, you know, it's one of those, you know, sets of words that, you know, makes actually a local encryption key. All that bookmark data,

everything you choose to sync is locally encrypted with that key. We do not, you know, Brave never gets that key. You know, we do not have it anything like that you locally encrypt your stuff like on your on your computer and then you you send it up to to the brave servers like encrypted so um oh it's similar to like a proton mail or something where where it's uh you it's end-to-end encryption so you have the encryption on your phone and then it goes to so you are actually holding you know the people's bookmarks but just encrypted somewhere on a on a server now when someone comes in with their desktop um but then i guess like what's the user id then because there's no account right yeah so so it it's um it's it's sort of very you of very reminiscent of crypto because your quote unquote ID is just the public key of this and you encrypt stuff with the private key of this.

Oh, I see. So you have some database where given a public key, here's all of your data. And so I see. So anybody can get jimmy's data it's just encrypted because they can't actually decrypt it no correction there like you actually have to sign and prove that you own the private key to even request it right and so it's like so it's still oh i see 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. You never receive this private key with us. And then only, only you using your private key can decrypt this, you know? So, so right. We've 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. Got it. Yeah. One of these uh we should get someone on the show

who knows because you know that that the signing part i still don't quite understand uh um like i understand how you can go in one direction but i didn't but but yeah i'm sure it's possible i just don't know how uh like how you can uh so if you have if you have the private and public key how how can someone else know that you're you um i guess i guess maybe you encrypt oh patrick uh maybe you want to jump in you seem to know a lot more crypto that's right 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 right so the 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 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 time stamp 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 it and make 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 uh that way that you can sort of perform this this uh 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 yeah that makes sense and that way like if if there is a person in the middle who has your public key you know they see that you passed the challenge but that doesn't really you know that's not a security issue i mean 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. Oh, right. Okay, cool.

That is awesome. So, okay, so circling back here, so you don't even get, I mean, not that, you know, I mean, the public key is very, or 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 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 be encrypted you know and only the private key holder would be able to decrypt it and so so uh um got it and so so, okay, that makes sense. So, 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, you know, with all the cloud stuff out there, they make it so easy to scale. And look, the good news is now, you know, if you go, our sync server code, it's done in Golang. And, you know, you can see it on our GitHub. It uses DynamoDB for any of you AWS fans. Oh, nice. You know, backend storage, which has been real helpful, real scalable. No, right.

It's big, but I think our users seem to enjoy it, and that's what matters. 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, but one last thing is if you are a content creator, you know, you have, um, you know, 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, you know, like how do you sort of sign up and get that going? Yes, super simple. Go to creators.brave.com. And, 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, you know, either own the site or the, you know, the account or whatever it is. But it's interesting, you can sign up with it,

you know, for a lot of different platforms, too, right? So yeah, not only can you 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 user, you can let people contribute to you when they thought you did a great job. Cool, that makes sense. Yeah, because there's probably a lot of trickery there. There's youtube.com,

but then there's m.youtube.com if you're on mobile. And so by providing an easy way, you kind of handle all that complexity. Yeah, right. I mean, I mean, it's, it can, it gets complex under the hood, you know, the rewards team that works on this, right. You know, we're constantly sort of, you know, working along with, with, you know, things that can break on those sites too, but, you know,

fixing them back up to make sure that, that, you know, okay, like we, we know a creator, you know, we, we, you know, we know where we should send the bat for sure that that you know okay like we we know a creator you know we you know we know where we should send the bat for this basically you know right right very cool yeah so if you're out there and you uh create content on on on um on the internet i guess i mean pretty much anything is uh you know check this out and uh it's a really good opportunity what about um did you have like a badge or something where people can can put a little badge on their website saying letting other people know that they take the brave token like how does the discoverability part work 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 um a little little bat triangle that will show a checkmark to say, like, oh, you're a verified creator. So it's a little bit part of the Brave experience. And of course, creators who want to proudly, that they love brave. I think, um, I think our, actually our, um, our site, if you go to brave.com, there's a bunch of brand assets there that I think they're, they're able to use. So, uh, um, so yeah, it's, it's, it, the browser will know it. And then of course you are, you know, welcome to, to proclaim it. Yeah. So, so, you know, just to recap, you know, brave, um, 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. Is it like the... I know some IT policies flag it because it's got like a tor component that you can get or whatever oh i wish it was that complicated i think it's literally uh you know here's a list of programs you can use and uh 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 um oh but but yeah so i had to use firefox and uh uh 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 uh 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? Like, where is Brave now? And what's been that trajectory like? Yeah, you know, so I think around when I joined, I forgot the numbers back then, but it was,

you know, well, I actually remember when I first started talking, you know, to the Brave team, you know, actually years before, you know, we'd had a lot of interaction, I think it was like, few few 100,000 users, then, you know, this is this was years ago. And, you know, and, but I, I immediately loved it started started using it, you know, and, you know, 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, it was in January, we had, 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, all, all those different, you know, platforms and, you know, and it's just, it's just a, 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, we work on this rewards program and, and on, you know, some of the ads already. But, you know, I came in and kind of help, helped 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 was, you know, for the, you know, who'd sign up, who were like really interested, you know, has grown into millions. And, you know, and, and now it's like, you hear about it in, you know, all sorts of different, different venues, you know, and now it's like you hear about it in, you know, all sorts of different venues, you know, and it's like, okay, like 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 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, you know, sort of smaller things. And this is, you know, it doesn't, you know, it doesn't take too many more kind of like doublings of our user base to start to become, you know, a significant portion of browsing and, you know, really, you know, a juggernaut. So it's like, you know, so that's very exciting, you know, but, you know, what I'd also say is that it like, you know, you see Brendan, Brendan Eich, 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 when, when people don't like things and people complain about stuff where they think it should be different, you know, if, 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, uh, like our user, you know, the people who are passionate about us and support us, like they're, they're out there and about us and support us, they're out there and they're complaining about this. This drives them nuts or they wish we were working on this. What's the order of magnitude?

When Brendan comes to the companies, how many engineers are we talking about? Is it tens of engineers, hundreds, thousands of engineers? We're definitely not in the thousands. I don't have an updated count, but we're certainly over 100 or so right now. Wow, that's cool. Yeah, it's exciting. And now we're working and like, yeah, now we're, we're, we're working on some, you know, really interesting pieces. Cause probably as you saw, like, you know, Brave acquired a search engine, right.

And, and, 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've, um, you know, you can already get the VPN and iOS and you can, um, you know, you can get this premium brave talk, this, this zoom competitor, that's like, um, you know, real easy to join and, and anonymous and private, you know, again, by design. You know, that's a really interesting project, too, because, you know, Talk, which is based on open source Jitsi, and we work

with, you know, the team that runs that now, too. You know, again, like, both really private by design, like we don't keep, you know, metadata about your calls or anything, you know, like that. You use these like 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, you know, really cool functionality to get privacy. Like we want users to have both, you know, like cool functionality to get privacy. Like we want, we want users to have both, you know, like, like what we love about Brave Talk is, you know, it's like you can generate a link and then just join it in your browser. Like so many, you know, so many of these like, like, you know, video conferencing kind of providers, you know, they like, they take

the experience outside of 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? 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 you know it's just so frustrating 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 um 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 show up. Like my nightmare always is like, oh, you're supposed to join this meeting. And like, oh, okay, there's a five-minute BlueJeans install that has to happen before you can do anything. You wake up at 5 a.m. with a cold sweat. It's like, what was that nightmare? Oh, it was I have had to use blue jeans again. Yeah. VC is, is the bane of, of so many, uh, people's existence. I mean, everyone really complains about VC. I haven't tried, uh, tried brave talk yet. I'm going to, I'm going to give it a shot. Um, what about like, uh, in terms of positions,

you 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? Yeah, I'm like very glad you asked. So I definitely encourage everybody to head to the careers page, brave.com slash careers, because we're definitely hiring specifically for my team. Like we have four or five roles for my team. And I'm, you know, one of many teams here that, you know, has open roles. You know, we're always looking for great people to help us,

you know, run and scale these systems. And, you know, work-wise, we're actually, you know, we're very much remote first, you know, even pre-pandemic, you know. So, you know, there's an office in San Francisco, there's an office in Grand Cayman. Wait, there's an office in San Francisco, there's an office in Grand Cayman. Um, and, uh, there's an office in Grand Cayman. Like I think there's like eight or nine people there now. I mean, it's like, you know, and they even, you know, like, like, you know, hiring a lot of people locally and like, um, you know, people really like the life out there and we got it we have to double click on this so so how did that get started was this somebody who uh 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 and grand cayman or something i i i'm probably i can't tell you the gen i don't know the genesis of it but but I've known that 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 palm trees and everything. I bet it makes you jealous if you're in a meeting with them. It's gorgeous. And a lot of, you know, no, yeah. And no, it's like a wonderful office. And, you know, like a lot of awesome people out there. And so that is amazing. 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 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, fly out to see each other. Like when we were actually doing a lot of this work on sync, we were, you know, 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 and, you know, and around Phoenix, right, and just had had a good time. So cool. No, it's, it's great. Like, you know we we hire all over the world i that's definitely the case for you know everybody uh you know on my team we span a number of time zones um and i think we've gotten you know pretty used to to working remotely and you know we're reasonably reasonably good at it i think cool that's awesome yeah very nice so

so folks check out cruise oh Oh, about internships. Do you do internships? Or is it full time only? 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'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. Cool. And what sort of skills are you looking for? 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, you know, I think is looking for people who are like,

one well versed in the browser, right? It's like this whole, you know, ecosystem, you know, unto itself. And, you know, I, and, and definitely for our team, you know, people who are, you know, great at, you know, scaling all this infrastructure, and, you know, keeping it reliable and cost effective, and all that other good stuff, because all these services are growing up and scaling and we want to make sure that we're still providing great service to our users. So if you're great at that, we're definitely always hiring for that. Let's see, what else? I 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, but look, great, great engineers, you know, great engineers overall who care about, you know, care about privacy and care about making the, you know, the best possible web, you know, we're happy to talk to you. Yeah, that makes sense. You know, this is actually a really good point. I think if you're out there and you've built something, a 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, Mame Hub 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 know, the, the public cloud services, um, and, and, and all of them are kind of learning from each other. So, so, so they, there's a whole ecosystem there that you could take some time to learn and, uh, and, and build some skills that are really, really in demand right now. Yeah, absolutely. Like we, we, um, we, we use AWS for a lot of different things.

Um, uh, you know, and look as, as, as an engineer, like I'm just a huge S3 fan, you know, We use AWS for a lot of different things. And look, as an engineer, I'm just a huge S3 fan. Diehard S3 fan. It is so useful in so many different ways. Yeah, I don't think we've had an episode on cloud file systems. We need to have you back, Jimmy, to talk about that. I'm sure there's people plenty more expertise there but okay cool hey it was um amazing to have you on the show i think um you know brave is an amazing browser i've used it for years it has never let me down um i've i've

been a diehard fan um i don't know when brave started actually just really quick when did the when did the Brave project start in the sense that it was launched to the public? Oh, let's see. That's a good question. I should better know my Brave history. 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 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, you know, a ton of a whole breadth of opportunity here. Awesome. Well, thanks for having me. This is great. Yeah. Thank you for coming on the show. We'll catch y'all later. music by eric barno programming throwdown is 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 a liking time.