This Week in Startups - Facebook’s new name + DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg: the privacy search engine | E1315

Episode Date: October 29, 2021

Facebook changed its name to Meta. In the news segment, Jason shares 10 highlights from the keynote and reacts to the name change (1:57). Then DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg joins (36:22) to discuss his search engine's continued growth, surviving Google's monopoly (41:57), how they differentiate with privacy (48:30), and all the updates they've made since he was last on the show 10 years ago!

Okay, everybody, we've got an amazing guest in the second half of today's show. It is Gabriel Weinberg. He has joined us again 10 years after his first appearance on this week in startups. That's right. We're in year 11. He is running the search engine duck, dot go and the browser, and he cares about user privacy more than almost anybody in our industry. And he has figured out how to build a competitive search engine to Google,

a competitive browser to Chrome, and how to protect consumers' privacy. and I talked to him about partnering with Apple and if he would consider selling to Apple and why Apple hasn't bought his search engine and kicked Google out. But first, we're going to talk about the absolutely insane presentation that Mark Zuckerberg did,

rebranding Facebook into meta and how they want to take over the next platform for humanity, which most people believe will be AR and VR, and VR, augmented reality, virtual reality, and the metaverse. and I have some strong feelings on it as you may suspect. This week in startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters.

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business, visit Stripe.com to learn more about how Stripe can support your business today. Okay, Facebook announced today at their Connect conference, that's the name of their conference, that they're changing their name to meta and that they are going all in on AR and VR, and VR, aka the Metaverse. Here is 48 seconds with Mark Zuckerberg announcing the change. I'll talk to you on the other side. I believe the Metaverse is the next chapter for the internet. And it's the next chapter for our company, too.

Facebook is one of the most used products in the history of the world. It is an iconic social media brand, but increasingly, it just doesn't encompass everything that we do. We just announced that we are making a fundamental change to our company. We're now looking at and reporting on our business as two different segments, one for our family of apps and one for our work on future platforms. And as part of this, it is time for us to adopt a new company brand to encompass everything that we do.

To reflect who we are and what we hope to build, I am proud to announce that starting today, our company is now meta. It's almost like an SNL skit. I mean, he's so terrible on camera. I will say he's getting 10% better each time, but he's just so awkward on camera that him doing these discussions really is just,

he's no Steve Jobs, so leave it at that. But sure, he can call the company meta. What's really important here is that the company is all in, and we talked about this in previous episodes of this being sourced. The company is all in on virtual reality and augmented reality. And today, you really got to see that I think Zuckerberg shares my philosophy and I think Tim Cooks that virtual reality is a nice waypoint, a great stepping stone. But really the future is going to be A.R. VR is oppressive. These things over your face are heavy,

not being able to see the real world sucks. It's a very niche product. All due respect to the Oculus team and people who are into VR. I believe that VR is appealing to no more than 10% of consumers, and I think AR will be appealing to 90% of consumers or more. And the overlap will be, you know, there's 10% of people who just don't like either mitigating their world. but AR is clearly the big win.

If you want to know why, with AR, you see the real world and virtual objects are projected into it. In other words, you can turn it on and off and you're going to be wearing very light spectacles, like the ones that Snapchat came out with, or the sort of 0.01 version of AR glasses that Zuckerberg came out with recently with Rayban, which are just a direct knockoff of what Evan Stiegel did five years ago. another great job of Zuckerberg stealing other people's ideas, those glasses that just simply record. That's just a small milestone on the way there. It's obviously going to take the miniaturization of your smartphone into your glasses.

Now, hold your smartphone in your hand, feel the weight of it, hold the sunglasses in your hand. Now imagine adding even more than your smartphone in terms of batteries or maybe not batteries, but other processing chips and lenses to project. There may be some things you strip out, of course, maybe a little bit of the battery and a lot of the screen. Point is, there's a long way to go. Probably five years of miniaturization, perhaps 10,

for you to have sunglasses that would be chunky, that can do AR properly. If you want to understand where we are on this timeline, simply look at Microsoft's HoloLens. They're big, they're clunky, and they feel more like a VR headset, and they have to be because there's a lot of compute power

in there for them to work and not give you motion sickness, you need to have very high resolution screens. Plus, you need a massive processor and a lot of bandwidth to make the stuff work without there being jumpiness. When there's jumpiness, what happens? You hurl, you puke, you vomit, you get motion sickness, and then you take the thing off and you throw it against the wall and say, this is stupid. That's the main issue with all these products, is the size of the headset and the compute

that's necessary. as compute costs go down and get miniaturized in the process and become lighter, then the headsets get lighter, and then this issue goes away. So if you want to lower people's motion sickness and make it feel a higher fidelity, you just put more processing power in. What happens when you put more processing power in? You need more energy.

What happens when you need more energy? More batteries. Or you need to tether it to something. And when you tether these things, it sucks. Like the early Oculus were amazingly inspiring, but people were tripping over their computers and on the cables. So just aesthetically looking at this conference, I would say this is Zuck's best performance,

and it's also the most scary. In no way is it in society's best interest to let Zuck own the Metaverse or to make him a player in it. In fact, I think anybody who is in this space needs to fight Zuckerberg and Facebook from winning the Metaverse, and you can see already he's co-opting it. He's using the term meta. he's stealing the term from the open source community and from science fiction before that

and trying to make it his own. And this entire conference was a list of other people's innovations and take and being credit for those by the Facebook team. Truly disgusting and absolutely abhorrent. But that's what Zuck has always been. He's an absolute expert in stealing other people's ideas and then scaling them. And when you don't have to come up with the original ideas, if all you do is steal them, well, then you get to spend all your time executing and on growth.

it's one of the great secrets of Zuckerberg's success. Don't come up with original ideas. Let other people do that hard work in the laboratory and do that creativity. Just steal them the second they're ready to go into the wider populace and just spend your time on growth. It is essential for humanity and for our industry to stop Zuck and to boycott meta. We'll get into that some more. The performance was Zuck's best.

I give him credit for that. The production value was their best. He's not charismatic. He's stiff. But he kind of added a bunch of jokes and corny jokes at that to kind of make fun of himself in relation to he's kind of self-aware that he's terrible on camera and he wears too much sunscreen. So here are two of the cornier jokes in this 12-second clip. Stick with us. I'll be there on the other side.

Boss, is that you? Of course it's me. You know I had to be the robot, man. I thought I was supposed to be the robot. You want to go get? Maybe later. I'm going to need a lot more sunscreen, though. Okay, so Zach knows he's a meme.

He knows when he had all that sunscreen on. People are like ridiculous. He knows he's a robot or he comes across his robotic. So the self-deprecating thing is, you know, it's great. Credit to him for doing that. There was a little Easter egg barbecue sauce on there. So somebody internally in Combs is doing a fantastic job of trying to humanize him. Somebody has the absolutely a thankless job of trying to make him a better presenter.

and congratulations, he has reached the level of bad. He was horrible. He was uncomfortable, it was difficult to watch him, and now Zuckerberg is just bad at presenting. I think he might actually in another 10 years just be absolutely okay and passable as a presenter. I don't mean to be cruel, but since he's making one of himself,

I thought it was a good line. I thought I was supposed to be the robot. Good, well played. Before we get into the ad, I just want you to go to LinkedIn.com slash twist right now, LinkedIn.com slash twist and post your first job for free. What a deal. Incredibly supportive of you, LinkedIn, to give that free job to our listeners. And you know, small business owners are busier than ever. The time spent searching for and interviewing wrong candidates,

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So they talked about their VR battle royale shooter population one. which is a Fortnite rip-off. This is what Zuck does. He steals everybody else's ideas, and he even mentions Epic games right before it. Here's a 20-second clip. And major platforms like Epic are working to build out the Metaverse,

starting with gaming. Have you played Population One? I mean, yeah, I love the game so much. For those who haven't, Population One is a thrilling Battle Royale that is only possible in VR. Since its launch at Connect last year, it has become one of the highest-learning games on Quest,

and the biggest multiplayer FPS on the platform. You can have up to 24 people in at once for a match. Okay, so here he is stealing Fortnite. This is one of the many moments in which he will steal other people's ideas and kind of take credit for them. And then he also talked about, hey, he wants to bring one of the greatest games ever,

Grand Theft Auto, or he is bringing Grand Theft Auto there. So you'll be able to mass murder civilians in the most immersive way, Wow. Sounds like a great version of society. 31 seconds. See you on the side. There's one project that I'm really looking forward to. Yeah, this is one of the all-time greats. And we've been working for years to bring it to Quest. I'm excited to announce that the Rockstar Games classic Grand Theft Auto, San Andreas, is in development for Quest 2.

This new version of what I think is one of the greatest games ever made will offer players an entirely new way to experience this iconic open world in virtual reality. That's it, Mark. I'm moving to the Metaverse. All right. Thanks, Deb. This is going to be amazing. Oh my God, Deb. This is going to be amazing. You're going to be able to go into Grand Theft Auto and run people over and beat up Malamins. And I mean, somebody should supercut this. If you're a fan of the show, Supercut. Absolutely, Zuckerberg's excitement with this with the horrible, disgusting, sociopathic stuff that you actually do in Grand Theft Auto. Does Zuckerberg realize that he is just telling everybody in the middle of a scandal of their influence over young people and what terrible stewards of society they are,

that they now want to take our children and everybody else and throw them into the dystopian world of crime and violence that is Grand Theft Auto. Really? Is anybody thinking in Facebook's communication group? I mean, you guys are so incompetent or you're trolling us. If it's the latter, kudos to you. Because who reviewed the deck and said, I have a great idea. While we're being investigated for young women having body issues and getting anorexia and bulimia and depression and anxiety from Instagram, I have a great idea to christen our new product.

Let's get young men to be influenced by living in a virtual world version of Grand Theft Auto. where you murder and beat people and run them over with stolen cars. Are you people insane? The answer is they're not insane. They are capitalists and they are just absolutely interested in the stock price going up and to the right. They do not care about society. They are liars. They care about making money.

And let's face it, grand theft auto where you get to be in an immersive world and beat people up and murder them and drive over them is going to be the dystopian insane running. man future that will print money. That's why they're doing it. And somebody over there in comms needs to be fired for not sitting ducked down and saying, are you fucking crazy? You literally want to tell people when we're launching this new vision that Grand Theft Auto is a key piece of it and you think this is the best idea? Would Tim Cook do this? Would Jeff Bezos do this? Would Steve Jobs do this? No. They would literally say,

We're trying to make people think this is good for society. Grand Theft Auto is a parent's nightmare. Why on earth would we feature that? And you notice they didn't show any highlights from GTA because it would have been somebody like literally beating up a postman or running over a baby carriage. Oh my lord. I mean, you can't make this stuff up.

Zuck also talked about open standards in the Metaverse. which is even more funny to me, because he has been on a jihad for decades to reverse all open standards and to steal and close off and destroy open source and open standards by forcing people to use his login and by not supporting open standards. Here's 51 seconds of an absolutely delusional and unself-aware, clueless Zuckerberg explaining open standards to us the industry that was built on open standards, who absolutely hates and despises what Zuckerberg has done to open standards. Play the 51 seconds. Teleporting around the Metaverse is going to be like clicking a link on the internet.

It's an open standard. In order to unlock the potential of the Metaverse, there needs to be interoperability. And that goes beyond just taking your avatar and digital items across different apps and experiences, which we are already building an API to support. You want to know that when you buy something or create something, that your items will be useful in a lot of contexts and you're not going to be locked into one world or platform. You want to know that you own your items, not a platform.

The Metaverse isn't something we're building so much as it's something we're building for. Across the industry, we need to bring that same imagination and commitment to building for interoperability, openness, safety and privacy, as we do for all the other product aspects. aspects of the Metaverse. These have to be fundamental building blocks. Oh my God. It's so ridiculous. This is like the guy, like, who just robbed your house telling you, you don't need to lock your door. Are you people crazy? You literally

stole everybody's data. You then let Cambridge Analytic and everybody else on the inside use that data. You pulled the rug out from under people who bought pages and spent money building their follower account, and then you deprecated their follower account. You made people use your own cryptocurrencies. You deprecate your own e-coins back in the day, mana in games. And then you had an app developer program which you shut off and screwed all these app developers. Do you think we don't remember what you did to app developers for the first five years with

the Facebook platform? Can somebody please pull up the videos of Zuckerberg saying this exact thing and then pull up the headlines after that point and do a supercut of all the developers he destroyed Zenga and everybody else who he put the screws to and screwed if you partner with Zuckerberg you will get screwed do not believe him and if he was absolutely

committed to this why isn't he doing it in Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp right now? Why are those not open source? Why is your data not portable? Why are the login systems not standard? He's a liar. Basically he's a liar and he is now trying to

convince us that this time it will be different when somebody shows you who they are believe them. That's that simple. He has screwed over every partner he has worked with, and even the people he bought companies from, and he made billionaires, hate him. Instagram founders, WhatsApp founders,

the list goes on and on. They all despise Zuckerberg. Can you imagine making people billionaires and making them tens of billions of dollars, and they still hate you? There's a reason people don't trust Zuckerberg is because he has not earned trust. And then he's here telling us

that this time it's going to be different, and this time the metaverse is going to be open. Sorry. You can say you had some big giant come-to-Jesus moment about open standards, and now he's trying to flip the script and kind of say, Apple is the closed system. This is all like a high-level, leveling game of poker that Zuckerberg's just not good at.

We all see what you're doing, Zuckerberg. You're trying to put these digs into Apple for charging a whole bunch because they blocked you from tracking users, and you can't make as much money with app installs. We see it from a mile away. If the Metaverse is going to be the next platform, it's essential that Facebook not control it. If you're a developer, you should not support this.

If you're a user, you should not support this. If you're an entrepreneur, you should not work for his platform. Davy should only support open standards in this regard. And I think this is the area where cryptocurrency distributed systems and Dow's and other non-controlled open source communities with financial incentives built into them can really shine. if this is in fact the future, which is a big question, we can't let Zuck win.

We need to hashtag boycott meta at all costs. And if you're a developer, why would you work to make Zuckerberg richer when you could work on the open source projects, own the cryptocurrencies, own the real estate, own the NFTs, if you do believe this is going to happen, and that's not guaranteed?

Why would you go work and be a peasant to Zuckerberg's $50 billion when you could go make $10 million being an open source developer and just picking which currencies and real estate you want to buy in the Metaverse. It's a terrible decision for any developer to go to work for Zuckerberg as opposed to an open Metaverse project. Don't you wish you could hire a ringer to help scale out your marketing team?

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goes through a rigorous vetting process with industry experts, freelancers from Marketer Hire have been hired at over 1,500 companies, including top brands like Netflix, Allbirds, and Lambda School. You're going to get $500 off your first hire at Marketerhire.com slash twist. Again, Marketer, M-A-R-K-E-T-E-R-H-I-R-E-H-I-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-S-T-T-E-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-E-L-S-T-T-E. Get that $5-Hundee right now, and you'll also get a free consultation on who to hire based on your needs and your goals. Again, five hundred right now, a marketer hire.com slash twist. And they have the audacity to put Facebook's global affairs at Nick Clegg in these discussions.

And him coming on and telling us that this time it's going to be different after what they're going with the Facebook papers and how poorly they've acted and how many fines they've gotten just shows that Nick Clegg has no soul and is just, there's a giant money grab for him. he is just making tens of millions of dollars in all of this. I'm sure, I'm guessing, but I would be surprised if he makes less than $25 to $50 million working, which is a lot for a PR communications person. Really, like a PR communications person, no offense, making $25 or $50 million. I'm going to guess that's the minimum he makes in a decade or two there. He sold a soul to then try to get Zuckerberg polished up. So we fall for it again.

Do not fall for it. It's the key. The key here is developers do not. work at Meta and do not go to work for this dystopian vision where this maniac gets to control the future if we in fact believe this to future. So here is a 65 second clip of Zuckerberg realizing that he is going to get sued all over again and nobody trusts him. So he's trying to do this preemptive thing. Like, I'm sorry, this time will be different. This is like listening to like BP oil after they just poured oil all over through the Gulf and that like we should let them

drill oil again. No. Here's 65 seconds. I'll see you on the other side. Privacy and safety need to be built into the Metaverse from day one. You'll get to decide when you want to be with other people, when you want to block someone from appearing in your space, or when you want to take a break and teleport to a private bubble to be alone. With all big technological advances, there are inevitably going to be in all sorts of challenges and uncertainties. And I know you've talked about this a bit already,

but people want to know how we're going to do all this in a responsible way, and especially that we play our part in helping to keep people safe, safe and protect their privacy online. Yeah, that's right. This is incredibly important. The way I look at it is that in the past, the speed that new technologies emerge sometimes left policymakers and regulators playing catch-up.

So on the one hand, companies get accused of charging ahead too quickly, and on the other, tech people feel that progress can't afford to wait for the slower pace of regulation. And I really think that it doesn't have to be the case this time round. Because we have years until the meta-level verse we envision is fully realized. So this is the start of the journey, not the end. I mean, are these people, do they think we're stupid? You literally have them saying that we care

about privacy and they've done nothing to protect people's privacy over the last couple of decades. And here they are telling us this time it will be different. This is like watching a serial killer and their defense attorney telling us like, let this guy out of jail. He won't murder. and eat another three people. No, he is, whatever happened before with the serial killing, not relevant. He's not a serial killer anymore. I'm telling you, this time,

we're going to take care of your privacy. You're going to be in control this time. Really? Privacy. You're going to take care of our privacy? You can have the most refined English accent, but you are so loathsome and horrible for selling your soul

so that this person can acquire more power over the next giant platform of computing, we are not falling for it. If you're a developer, do not sell your company to Zuckerberg. Oculus never should have sold to them. That gave them a big head start, and nobody should join this,

use it, and build for it. And really, it's up to the developers to pick other platforms to develop for and to build this as open source. So that the Metaverse, if it does happen, looks more like the open web and the internet. Do we want the open web and internet which Facebook tried to compromise and build wall gardens,

do we want to fight that when we see him doing it again, or do we want to let him run him up? That is the key issue here. I implore you, developers, do not build or participate or go to work or meta, Facebook, whatever they want to call it. They're working on some new hardware. They have a luxury AR headset called a Cambria. This is when you know they're serious.

When they're putting $10 billion into this, They're spending Apple and Microsoft hardware level dollars on this. They are going for it, which means the open source community and the other platforms have to go for it as well. We cannot let them win this. Check out this 50 second clip on their new headset. Cambria will be a completely new, advanced, and high-end product, and it'll be at the higher end of the price spectrum too. Your avatar will be able to make natural eye contact and reflect your facial expressions in real time. What about unlocking more mixed reality experiences?

I mean, imagine working at your virtual desk with multiple screens while seeing your real desk so clearly that you can pick up a pen and write notes without taking your headset off. Or, you know, you're doing a workout with a virtual instructor in your living room. We'll be taking this to the next level with high-resolution, colored mixed-reality pass-through. We essentially combine an array of sensors with reconstruction algorithms to represent your physical world in the head.

headset with a sense of depth and perspective. Now, we're still ways away from exactly matching what I see in the physical world. So wait, great. New headsets, mixed reality. You get the idea that this is, you know, where they're going is exactly what Microsoft showed. I think, I don't know, six, seven years ago with HoloLens. Like, they're literally just stealing the HoloLens presentation of multiple desktops, etc. He also talked about this project, Nazar.

which is Facebook's version of AR glasses, 42-second clips, see on the other side. I want to show you an experience that we've been working on for Project Nazare, which is the code name for our first full augmented reality glasses. Here, you'll see you're chatting with friends on WhatsApp and planning a game night. You can select a game, and then, as you walk over to your kitchen, you can easily just put your game onto the table and you're off. That's the kind of experience that augmented reality will unlock. There's a lot of technical work to get this form factor and experience right.

We have to fit hologram displays, projectors, batteries, radios, custom silicon chips, cameras, speakers, sensors to map the world around you, and more into glasses that are about five millimeters thick. So we still have a ways to go with Nazaree, but we are making good progress. Yeah, I mean, the amount of hand moving in that club is it is just a huge tell that he wants to control us. I mean, that is some serious stage hypnotist stuff. I don't know what Nazare stands for.

Somebody look it up for me. But yeah, this is spectacles. This is what Apple is actually working on. Apple is going to skip VR and go right to this. That's why you see AR kit and all their AR games. They believe AR is the winner. So they're going straight to AR. They're not going to stop.

I guess Nazare is Portuguese for Nazareth, which would be where Jesus was born? Is that, do I have my religion correct? So are they saying that they are going to be? birth, they're going to be the place where Jesus is born. Is that where we're going for here? Is that, uh, is that sucks? Project naming strategy.

Uh, so Apple will get there first. I hope we can only hope that they get there. And that's where this is going to get very difficult. What the big tech companies have learned is own the hardware and own the whole experience. So if you're, um, when Amazon was making the bookstore, they didn't just sell digital books. They wanted to have the Kindle. Apple makes the phone and the app store.

Google realized they needed to make products like phones, and then you had Microsoft start to make Surface, and then they did Xbox. You know, it's not enough in today's world to not control the whole stack. It doesn't work as well. So when you see somebody trying to build the whole stack, that means open source is going to have a problem. What we really need is open source standard for building AR glasses and VR glasses,

and that would be an open source hardware project where if anybody could build these things to an open source operating system, that would be a huge win. If the open source development community can work on that, I would actually invest in a company that was working on the open source hardware spec and the operating system for these. I wonder if that exists already for AR or VR.

If it does and those standards exist, I would love to hear about it. And if somebody wants to create the WordPress.com of the WordPress.org, we have an open source project, but a commercial project sitting next to it to help expedite it. I'm into that.

But I hope that it happens as a crypto project where people just fund it with coins and you don't need venture capitalist and investors like me. So they're going to also mention they're going to have a workaround between business accounts and AR accounts because they learn from their stealing Slack, another theft by Zuckerberg. When they stole Slack, they also created like a Facebook for business or something, but you had to use your same handle. Zuckerberg has this very weird dystopian view that there's no difference between your private life

in your work life because he has no life. The rest of us might want to separate those things out a bit. Just to give some quick reactions, Toby from Shopify thought it was hugely inspiring. I'll take the opposite side of that. Seriously, this is one of the most profound and approachable articulations of how the metaphor is possibly come together. You have to watch it. Yes, I do think it's convincing.

I think he took together everybody else's innovations and made a just spectacular presentation, Toby. But he's a thief who stole all of this and he's a last person. I think you would agree that we want in charge of this. And you have to wonder here, like, why don't they have Clegg and like Zuck in GTA playing Grand Theft Auto?

And they could be like, hey, Clegg, hand me that AK-47. Let me, can you kill that family over there? Great. Yeah, can you steal that Cadillac and let me drive over that, you know, a bunch of school kids? Like, just own it, guys.

If you're going to go there, you should totally do it. What we're watched today, feels like a black mirror episode to me. Don't be fooled by the glossiness of it. Don't be fooled by Zuckerberg's vision that he stole and basically stole from dozens of people and is now taking credit for.

And you judge people by what they've done. And based on what he's done, nobody should trust him. He should have no partners involved in this. And if you are part of creating the future, just ask yourself, do you want to give him more power over society? or do you want society to have more power over people like him?

Just ask yourself that if you're a developer, if you're an entrepreneur. And it's a really serious question I'm asking. Would you like to take your work product? Would you like to take your creativity and have it create more power for Facebook and specifically Zuckerberg? Or would you like to take your creativity, your skills, and would you like to see that power be put in the hands of individuals and the open source community,

which is a brighter future for humanity. Please take a moment and think about that if you're a developer. If you get that offer from Facebook and they offer you the extra $50,000, $200,000 in RSUs, just stop for a second and think about playing the long game. Because every line of code you write for Zuckerberg, every day you give him more power and every day you participate in his operating system and his platforms is more. power accruing to him and more and less power accruing to the people. And then you,

as a creator, as an entrepreneur, to make the quick buck are putting him in charge of the future of the internet. How has he done so far as a steward of power? Objectively, how is he done? Has he been a net positive for society? I think we can all agree that this is a company that has not been a net. positive for society and the way they operate is that poor. And that's why they've received the largest fines. I'm not saying startups have to be perfect, but they are so far from perfect. And they have done such a poor job that they should not be given one more ounce of power or control over the future. And it really comes down to every line of code and every startup

that's created. And every startup line of code that goes towards the open source community and that goes towards a decentralized version of the metaverse is going to be better for society than that person having any more control than he already has. And speaking of open source and a better future, here is my interview with Gabriel Weinberg of Duck DuckGo, which actually cares about your privacy. If you're a startup founder,

you know that your early decisions can be the difference between success and failure. One decision that thousands of successful founders have made is choosing Stripe as their payments platform. We all know Stripe. CEO Patrick Carlson was on episode 723 back in April of 2017, and over the past decade, Stripe has made processing payments simple and borderless.

They've enabled businesses like Shopify, Postmates, and Kickstarter to grow revenue and expand to new markets quickly and easily. By using Stripe, Kickstarter can now accept payments from 195 countries. I didn't even know they were 195 countries. And Postmates scaled revenue to over $70 million after increasing payment authorization rates. Stripe has engineered the world's most powerful and easy to use APIs so you can get up and running in minutes, not days or weeks. And you can free up employees to focus on other parts of your business. You need that time, right?

Your resource constrained as a startup. If you're looking for a no-code solution, Stripe recently launched payment links, which generates links that you can share with companies. customers to get paid fast and no coding is required. So visit stripe.com to learn more about how Stripe can support your business. Whether you're an online or in-person retailer, a SaaS platform, or a marketplace, head to Stripe.com and get started today. All right, the craziest thing you could do in the last decade or so would be to create a search engine and take on Google. How do I know this? I tried with Mahalo. It didn't work out. My idea was to do human-powered search.

I should kind of combine Wikipedia with the search engine. It did well for a while, but, you know, it was just too tough. Well, somebody who apparently has figured it out is Gabriel Weinberg. He is the CEO and founder of Duck, Duck, Duck, Go. You can go to Duck, Duck, Go.com. If you haven't heard of it and you haven't been around for the last, I don't know, 12, 13 years. He was last on This Week in Startups.

I kid you not, in August of 2010, in episode number 72. So he's one of the founders who was in the first 100 episode, here we are, 1,200 episodes into the show. And I thought, what a great time to figure out what went so right with Duck. Go, welcome back to the program. Over a decade later, Gabriel. Great to be back. You were just a young pup at that time.

How old were you now and how old were you 11 years ago? I'm getting old enough where it's hard to remember my age. I am 41. Okay. Yeah. So you were 30 years old when you were last on the program. I was 39, I guess. Tell everybody what has gone well for Duck, Duck Go.

And how is the business doing in terms of what percentage of search do you have here in the United States? How many people use it every day or month? What's the revenue like? How many employees? Where has the business I've gotten to in the last 11 years? Yeah, give us the update. Okay, decade-long update. In a few words.

So we are beyond search now. We started off as private search, but our vision is wider. It's really to be the easy button for privacy online. So our current Juktoco product app and extension is the search engine plus all the features you need to have private browsing. So track or blocker, encryption, the mobile app is a full browser. And on desktop, you can get it as your browser extension and your favorite browsers. And together, it adds up to, you know, ads not following you around the internet,

private search, you know, filter bubble going away, all the benefits you get for privacy. So that's product-wise, kind of come a long way there. We've been growing pretty much exponentially since we talked about 50, 60% a year. And that, you know, we don't track our users. So we don't have like, here's our MAUs. But what we do nowadays is do national survey. understanding how many people are using Duk2. Go every month.

So you literally don't have on your servers the number of searches that come in or the number of users or you just don't disclose it. We don't have users, so we don't have any search histories on Duk.com. And so when we survey the U.S., we find about 10% of the population uses Duk. Go in some way during the month. They're not all full-time users. And so when you add up, or they're often full-time on one like browser, like mobile or desktop. And so when you add up actual search percentages, we're between two and three percent right now of the full kind of search market by volume. How do you make money?

We make money. Hasn't changed in 10 years. Contextual ads. So private search ads. So on Google and the ads that follow you around the internet, those are behavioral ads. They're about you as a person, you know, like you search for furniture, furniture follows you around or whatever based on your interests and demographics and what they think they know about you. On duck. Go, you type in furniture, you just get furniture ad based on that one search.

Yeah. Just that search results page. There's no search history. And that's really it. You know, all of our money really comes from contextual advertising. And so if a criminal organization or let's say just a criminal, criminal was typing in, you know, how to do something horrible in the world. And the FBI came to you or, and said, hey, give us your search logs. Give us the IP addresses. We know that this person uses

Duck, dot go. And they typed in how to build a bomb and they blew up the Oklahoma City building. You don't actually have that data. You don't store that data. You couldn't help the FBI out in that classic 24 television show instance, correct? Yeah. So just the thing is that back, We think privacy is just for mainstream people wanting to not be manipulated online. So, you know, we have on the order of maybe 100 million people across the world using it. So it's definitely for anyone and everyone. That said, yes, we've never received any formal warrant of any kind for search histories because we don't have any search histories.

So if anyone kind of reached out to us and say, hey, could you help us here? We just reply, like, we don't have any IP addresses with searches or anything like that. So there's no way we can really help you. And that sets people away. And that was a key innovation. I remember when we first talked of how you architected the system. You don't know my IP address. If I type in an adult search, if I type in I have cancer, if I type in, I have depression,

there's no way for you to know that this person, Jane Doe, John Doe, has depression or was, you know, considering suicide, whatever it is. Those IP addresses are not there. The searches are not saved. So then I guess that next begs the question, how do you make the search results better? Because Google's claim has always been, hey, we get that data and we can tailor your searches. And to a certain extent, that is true. When I do a search on Google, they know that I've searched for certain things before. They're going to surface them higher.

They know that whatever. If I'm into poker and I type in a certain poker term, maybe they'll customize that to me, right? they obviously know my location, which I think, do you know people's location as well? Because that's an important vector. Yeah. So, first of all, like, we've come a long way in search, and our search is used by mainstream people as all the results you need. We think the quality is on par. And partly, that's because most of what people think they need from personalization is really just localization, like you said at the end, just like local results, local weather, local restaurants, that kind of

stuff. We can do that in the same exact way. Like your location gets sent across. automatically when you use the internet, and we just don't save any history of that, or really save location at all. But we can use it in that one search to give you the information you need. In terms of good results, the other thing has changed in the last 10 years

in terms of search is, you know, search is a lot more than the links nowadays. It's got 20 different modules on it. Yes. That was my original idea with Mahalo, was to me, comprehensive search. Yeah, I got there, just couldn't figure out the model. And each of those modules now are big,

Big companies have vertical great data sources there, you know, like, say, TripAdvisor and local and Yelp, that kind of thing. And so we work with those companies, and we think the aggregation of those can actually be better than what Google has, whereas Google, you know, basically decided to dominate and use their own stuff in every category. So they went up to Google places instead of Yelp. So if I type in Raman near me, I will see results that come. I'll see Apple Maps is your default Maps partner, I guess.

And then I will see a bunch of places that are provided for me by Yelp, I'm assuming, TripAdvisor, some, obviously use TripAdvisor as your default. Yeah, but the interesting about search is because it's, as you know, it's all sorts of different things. We've had to create a lot of search technology. So where we can get it with the best partner, we will. But like for something like local, we've had to do our own calling, use Apple, use TripAdvisor. use different things in different countries.

How do you make the decision to use TripAdvisor, not Yelp, or make that a setting I can make? How does you come to that decision? Is that just a partnership decision? Or does Yelp not agree with your privacy concerns or do they want money? How do you come to that? Is it just a business decision? Yeah, in each case, it could be all the above, but it's generally trying to find the best partner who's willing to kind of work with us on privacy, who also has really good results.

That's kind of what I come to. down to. And then do you get paid by TripAdvisor for using theirs and featuring them? Each vertical is kind of different. I mean, the local is different from sports or, you know, movies and because of the way the data is and if it's a monopoly in that situation, you know, all the dynamics can change. But generally, you know, we have a lot of people coming to Duck Echo. So it's, you know, brands like to work, want to work with us because we're showcasing their content. Got it. So all things being equal, if TripAdvisor pays you, more than Yelp, that's a revenue stream for you.

I mean, it could be. I mean, our revenue mainly comes from the regular contextual ads. We're on these type of partnerships, we're focused on result quality. So like, we're generally focused on making Ducknet Go a good search engine. And then how would you then look at something like, say, travel? That's where Google has decided to be incredibly sharp elbowed. And they're just like, we're going to monetize the heck out of it. You do a travel search now.

You know, you see on the bottom like partnership, partnership, partnership. I mean, they are monetizing every click above the fold, it seems. How many organic results does Google actually give you today in a travel search? I don't above the fold, maybe none, maybe one. So what's your philosophy of that? Because there is a thinking, well, if people are willing to pay, then they're going to have a really good product. But then there's also, you know, some people maybe who think differently. How do you think about that, especially specifically in travel?

Yeah, I mean, we're like super user-centric, right? So search is arguably the biggest market on the internet. Obviously, Google makes over $100 billion on it. And we make a lot less, but because it's so profitable, we can be profitable without like squeezing everything out of the user. So our goal is user first. So we don't have a lot of ads. We have some, but not a lot.

It seems like you go with two maybe. I don't know if I've seen three before. Do you have a general philosophy, one, two, or three? Yeah, pretty much. And we don't even do three. I don't think we do three. Really, just one or two. I mean, to your point, if you go too much more,

you take up the whole screen with ads and then it's all ads. Now, ads can be useful. I mean, it's certain situations where there's a lot of spammy content and brands of pain to be there. And that can be a good signal. And that's generally our line is like we try to prioritize a number of ads based on how good

they are on the page. Was the reason to do the browser because Google's Chrome became so you ubiquitous that the idea of protecting somebody's privacy just, you know, Google decided we're not just going to collect your data in your

search results and from your visit. We're going to monitor you everywhere you go even if it's not on our sites. Is that what Google's doing with their Chrome browser. They're basically building my profile based on everything I do. They are, not just Chrome. It's YouTube and even more important. It's all the trackers. They have embedded it millions of websites. So we run kind of the best tracker blocker now by crawling the web and understanding the universe of trackers out there. And Google is on about 85%

of pages that people visit, just lurking in the background. So not even going to Google. These are just like, you know, retailers, newspapers. Yeah. Those web pages, the retailer has to decided, I want to use Google Analytics for free. They use Google Analytics. Google gets that data and they get to make decisions based on it. Is that what's happening most often? Yeah, these different data collection points are coming back into a big profile of view, which then can be used both for the ads of all you around, but also for the filter

bubble on Google Search, YouTube, et cetera. And so the reason to go to the browser is we want to build a more comprehensive privacy solution, right? So private search is just one part of protected privacy online. But if you really want to stop like the filter bubble on the web and ads falling you around, you have to hit all three collection points. That's search website tracking and encryption, you know, or the lack of encryption going across the internet. And so our app and browser hits all three of those. And together in one package, then you can actually stop those privacy harms. So you're not blocking ads on a third-party site, but you are blocking the trackers if the users want to block those trackers.

Yeah, we are explicitly a tracker blocker that has the result of blocking a lot of ads because a lot of ads require tracking to work, but not all ads. I mean, there are still ads you will see. On our general philosophy there is, you know, ad advertising in and of itself isn't bad, like a we have private contextual ads on our website. It's all the tracking that has come with behavioral advertising in the last 10 years. And so on a legal basis, and neither of us, I don't believe you're a lawyer. I don't think either of us are lawyers.

I'm not a lawyer. Not a lawyer, but we can pretend to be one here on the pod. If I, this is my interpretation of it, and the one I've heard seems the most reasonable, if I choose to use and I call your website down, I pull the data down, it's my choice how I render that data in my browser. Therefore, if I don't want to be tracked, I can block it and if that includes blocking ads, there's never been, it seems, any legal issues with this concept. I know that there was some, you know, saber rattling, let's say, about it,

but it only seems to have gotten to 10 to 20% of users or blocking ads on the web. Is that about right? And do you think there's some tipping point in the sort of legal framework where Google says, you know what, if you use an ad blocker, we're not going to let you use our website? I think what happened with ad blocking is that it was a quick and dirty solution. And to be clear, ad blockers don't always actually stop the tracking, right? They just maybe cosmetically block the ads and don't maybe say block Google Analytics and things like that that are doing most of the tracking.

And so our view is to get more of a nuanced, you know, come in with a more nuanced solution that can work more long term, which is what people really care about is, tracking online and invasive advertising that's following them around. And so we're we're hoping to draw that line and not. We think that has legal backing. In fact, more and more of these things are being built into laws, which we've been been a part of helping to write like CCPA and CPR. And CCPA, this is the California Consumer Protection Act. And then there's the European one. And so we have a state here in the United States. We have a collection of countries in Europe that are saying, hey, we should have comprehensive protection for people's privacy.

But the United States doesn't have that. Are we ever going to have a comprehensive nationwide privacy act for users in the United States? I believe so. It might come with antitrust in some kind of hybrid type of situation. But building on CCPA, we think that there is a need. And we founded something in our browser or founding member of a standard called Global Privacy Control, which is a signal that you can send automatically as default on with Duck.como to automatically opt out of the sale of your personal information in California. So you know, there's links you can click on

and see if you use Duck. Go, it'll automatically opt you out. We think something like that should exist in the federal law and would be an easy thing for consumers to opt into to then stop that first party tracking that's happening on websites. Yeah, and when you look at Apple seems to have been tracking duck, dot, go over the years and watching what you're doing, they now have

essentially a VPN or a relay, I guess it's more of a relay, right? Maybe you could explain what Apple is doing with their relay, which feels a little bit more like the Tor network than say just a classic VPN or maybe it's like putting two VPN together. So maybe you can talk about Safari's new relay server, and do you have that feature? And what do you think about that as an option in terms of search? Because they're doing that to you

and it doesn't seem to have affected your business. Yeah, I mean, Apple's been a partner of ours since they put us in Safari as an option in 2014. And in fact, we produce privacy technology that's built into Apple's tracking products. So if you look at the privacy report, you get in Safari and you click on more info, it'll say, trackers identified by Duck. Go. Oh, very nice. And that's like our tracker blocking technology we're talking about identifying trackers.

They've been leaning into privacy more and more. They introduced an email protection product, and we also recently introduced email protection product that's available across all platforms. The proxy that they have is another kind of network protection product, similar to the encryption one that we provide. The idea is to try to protect more of your information that's going across

the wire so that network snoopers can't see it. And I'm happy to get more and more technical with it, but that's basically the idea. So basically I put in a search, let's say I'm feeling depressed or I'm feeling suicidal. Let's just use depression. Maybe people have a little bit of privacy concerns. You know, hey, I'm feeling depressed. I take that search into Google. Now Google is going to put that in my profile. They're going to show me ads all across the web. I'm going start seeing depression-related ads on YouTube, etc. Which could be pernicious.

It could just make you more depressed because you're being, you know, who knows what the algorithm. And that's kind of what the face, some of the, it totally is. And that's somewhat it's related to Facebook too. I mean,

that's the Facebook trackers and the, and the stuff on the hill recently about girls seeing, you know, things over and over again related to maybe searching for diet or something like that. The inspiration, you know, all this, like, pernicious stuff,

send you down this rabbit hole. It probably shouldn't be going down. So you do that search with, let's say, safaris, they will then fire up another browser somewhere virtually in their cloud system, ask the search engine for that, use their IP address, and then send you the result back. Is that kind of what's happening? Is that a description of it?

Not exactly. And I don't want to misspeak on Apple's product because it seems kind of complicated. But in general, I think they're trying to help protect your IP address. from when you go to websites. That's one method of tracking. Unfortunately, to be fully protected, you really need tracker blocker as well. Because, you know, there's a lot of ways to get fingerprinted

when you load up a website. This is a critically important concept. My understanding is your screen resolution, your monitor setup, your memory, a lot of other pieces to do with your browser. and your desktop or your phone can be sent to build a profile of you. Explain how they build these modern day profiles if they don't have your IP address. Yeah, it's a bit counterintuitive, but it's true.

Your computer is pretty unique, is really what it is. Like the fonts you have installed and the combination of what version you're using and kind of exactly what model it is and what the screen size is, when you add up all those little pieces and say you put it together in one long number, your number is often unique to you. And so you can use that as a fingerprint, which means that they could turn it into an ID, kind of like an IP address, and follow you around with that.

Or even easier, you know, you can just drop, make up a unique number and drop it as a cookie. But like what happens is, is as long as these scripts can load these trackers, like, say, like Google Analytics, they're going to find a way to fingerprint you. And so the key is actually blocking them from loading on the websites you visit. You need that extreme level of blocking. And that's what a good, like, tracker blocker like ours, that component will do, versus just like when you hear all this talk about, we're just restricting cookies or, you know, we're just putting restrictions on these trackers.

That's not going to go far enough to actually stop the harm. Like, they'll still be able to track you. Okay, so Apple has been doing tons of these privacy things. You've been doing a ton of privacy things, brave browser, a lot of people, VPNs, NordVPN, Tunnel Bear, everybody's really getting in on this, trying to really protect people's privacy. And I think your timing was great. You were too early at the beginning. And now it seems like consumers are catching up to this concept because of data leaks,

because of regulations, and just all kinds of bad actors and what they're seeing in the world. People seem to care about that. What percentage of people would you say are concerned enough about privacy to take initiative, get a VPN, use one of these browsers, versus people who maybe are more passive about it? Where are we at today in 2021? Yeah, that's a great way to put it. That's exactly how we look at our market. We call it the care and act on privacy group.

So you don't just say you care, but you actually took some action. That is actually just cross 50% of the U.S. of people who are attempting to do something like you said, some action. So it's a lot. I think the gap there is in the quality of the software. And so it's our job to make that simple and seamless. And that is our real goal is to be that easy button. So when people are looking, they can just download our product on any platform and get that basic protection.

So here's a candid question. Apple, duck, go, you're perfectly in line. You're some pot-a-co. You share the same vision. Yet, Apple gets $15 billion a year from Google to make them the default search engine. It's a nice chunk of change. It's a pretty penny. You purposely monetize at a lower level than Google.

Google makes about 30 cents a search, I think. I'm guessing you make 10% of that. Am I in the ballpark here that you monetize? We definitely make a lot less. We'll just go with that. 80% less, something like that because you just are not flooding the top with 20 links there and you're flooding it with two. You're putting one or two.

They're putting 20. So I'm just, I'm going to say 10%, maybe you make three cents per search on average to their 30 cents. Pick it a number out there. Apple, if they made you the default, it means they would go from $15 billion a year and you might generate $1.5 billion if you had all those Apple consumers. or let's say you do really good, you double that. They don't need that incremental $10 billion, I don't think. Why don't they just make you the default search engine?

And there's been rumors and advocacy around them buying Duck, Duck, Doe. What are your thoughts on a potential deeper collaboration with HACP? I mean, we've been pushing for a third option, you know, both to partners, but also just in a regulatory manner, which is, you know, that deal is a deal of a default deal that Google is kind of locked up, not just an Apple, but basically all defaults on most phones and basically all of Android through all of the handset deals. And so what we'd actually like is instead of that is for there to be what we call a preference menu when you install the device or open up even Chrome for the first time, you're

presented with an option to pick the search engine. So most people are using Google now never made a choice. They just got Google. And that's what they've gotten for the last, you know, 20 years. But we think that if people really understood that there was another option and would be easily able to check it out, like our percentage would go up overnight. And so from Apple's perspective or anyone's, it's more, we think of more from the consumer perspective of giving users a choice that want it, you know, anyone who really wants privacy,

make it easy. This is a brilliant framing of the issue because what you're saying is let consumers choose. And what Google has done is, because they are willing to compromise people's privacy at the highest level, they then have the budget to pay off partners at the highest level. Because you do the right thing, you make three cents a search. I'm saying that. I'm making it up to my estimate.

They make 30 cents. Therefore, you could never offer an Android headset maker, Apple, whoever, the same deal that Google, that Google could. So we've created an incentive structure here, which means the more you invade people's privacy, the more you build a profile of them that they clearly don't want, even somebody like Apple, who has made it their mission in the last two or three years to protect people's privacy, even they can't say no to the massive buckets and wheelbarrows and just dumb trucks, dumb trucks going from Mountain View to Cupertino, these garbage trucks of $100 bills being dumped in front of the Apple campus.

Isn't that what's happening here? I think that speaks to why the market is broken there. It's really a monopoly issue, and it needs an antitrust remedy of getting rid of these search defaults and letting consumers choose. That would be our call. Even Firefox was making, I believe, I don't know if you know what the number was at the peak

because they did I'm the order of 400 million per year from Google year. This was an incredible thing for people who don't know the history of this. NetScape had an open source project Mozilla.

Mozilla then spun out of AOL. AOL made this incredible browser. It got huge market share. Basically Google knifed him in the middle of the night and did a secret Chrome project. But Google bought all that search traffic and they were making 400 million a year from it.

Which then gives them a really a hard decision to make. They're a nonprofit. They have no other way to make money. So Mozilla has lost massive market share. They still make hundreds of millions of dollars, I guess, from these deals. But they can't care about privacy, can they? If they're taking that kind of money. It's hard the way these deals have kind of captured the market to your point.

And the incentive structure is a line for. Google just to keep being the default everywhere. And so that really needs to be broken up. You know, we do think there's progress here. So, you know, there are bills moving in the House and Senate right now. So literally like last week, the American hit a voice innovation and choice online act. That's a mouthful. Was introduced.

And part of it makes Google self-preferencing illegal. It has wide bipartisan support in the Senate. And if that were to pass, this default relationship, at least on Android and Chrome would go away. It's not everywhere, but that would be a big chunk right there. I mean, half of the U.S. uses Android as their phone. And then Google could say, well, we're just not going to provide Google to handset manufacturers anymore. That would be their response, right?

We just don't get Google. We're going to charge you for Android. You can get it for free. We're the search engine and we get our apps. If you don't, we want $25 a handset because that's what we've been playing for your searchers. in Europe, right? And so over the last four or five years, yeah, so there's a preference venue in Europe that we've been working on

and that debate has been playing out. I mean, the reality is, is that, you know, there are monopoly profits here from your point about, from privacy violations. And so people have to make less money, a little bit less money, and exploit people less. But that said, all the money. Or make it a different way.

I mean, if Google said, listen, if you want free, Android. If you want free, then you just give us your search traffic as a default. You can change it, but we get the default. And if you want the Android license, it's going to be 20 bucks a year.

Do you sell a handset for a thousand bucks? Forty bucks goes to us or whatever. Every year, the consumer or you have to pay us 20 bucks. So if you want to put it into the cost of your phone. And that would be just like buying any other software, Microsoft office, whatever. That's how Windows worked for decades. I still does.

Yeah. And then additionally, there could be rev share deals that you get mandated by the regulation as well. So if you have the preference menu, you know, many people will select Google and that's fine. And that could be rev share back to the back to the Antshad makers. How many people work at the company now? And I know you raised a $100 million around at some point. You see all these SPACs going on. You know, you've obviously committed to making this a long-term independent strong company. You see all these people going public. seems to me like your position perfectly to do a SPAC, to become a public company, to do a direct listing. What are you thinking when you're seeing all these companies go public around you? Yeah, I mean, we have, we've been profitable to 2014, so we've had no real pressure to do anything. We don't need to raise the money, say, at the public market, but to your point, we could go public, be a SPAC or direct listing. We're about 100, cares your other questions, we're about 150 people-ish. and, you know, we are definitely big enough both company size and revenue size to be a public company.

So it's just more a matter of whether we kind of, the pros of cons to doing that and whether we really want to be public or stay private. Are you too conservative as a founder in terms of building this, being profitable in a time when there's free money everywhere, you know, not going public, keeping the company at 150? Do you need to be more bold, given the opportunity that's going on here? I definitely think initially, like when we first talked, I was being too conservative. Over the past few years, I've tried to change that. Yeah. And so we have grown very rapidly since then, both company size, product vision, what we're trying to execute on.

We've been very rapidly trying to raise our brand awareness and be the household name for privacy. So we're spending tens of millions in, you know, just regular like billboard radio. advertising this year to do that. What about VPN? Do you provide VPN? So we instead, for network protection, decided to make a better encryption technology. If you're familiar with HDPS everywhere, an extension that EFF made a long time ago, we went in that direction and basically made that 10 times better and bigger by crawling the web. And the reason we did that is because you still get a, you get kind of the 80, 20 of the network

protection that you would get from VPN, but it doesn't slow you down. It doesn't break things. Got it. But people will pay for a VPN. There's tons of VPN providers out there. You're a big company. You can buy one of the existing VPN companies out there where you could build your own. You're very good at building stuff. It seems to me that adding the VPN layer would just make this, you know, some people would, I sacrifice a little bit of speed for my VPN when I'm on the road. You were right. I mean, I think we were headed there. I mean, so this year we launched a bit of email protection. We're launching app tracking protection

in a few weeks, and we're working on a desktop version of our app. I think VPN could be next. I mean, I think higher level, though, like, we've gravitated towards free products because we think it gets in the hands of more people. Yeah, but you could do a free VPN. That would be, I mean,

it would cost a little bit. You could keep it only to a certain number of users in the beta or whatever. But I think the person who has the business model like you do and then puts a VPN for free on top of it could do, tremendous business. I mean, yeah, it's a good point. And that may be where we're headed. It's like when you dig into VPN, a lot of it is used to watch video in kind of non-DRM ways. And so we would want to do it just for privacy reasons at that point because the video is very expensive.

If you offer it for free. But yeah, I think you're right. From our privacy perspective, if you're just using it to browse the web, I think we could offer that additional. As we get close to wrapping here, just thinking about it. Facebook and what we've seen from these leaked papers and thinking about algorithms. Algorithms have made certain things delightful, the Netflix algorithm telling us what movie to watch, you know, Spotify surfacing, the next singer-songwriter that I'm going to fall in love with, Amazon telling me products like these. These are incredibly awesome algorithms that make life delightful and awesome and efficient. How do you view Facebook's algorithm?

because there seems to be this, I don't want to say double standard, but there seems to be people believe that their algorithm isn't providing delight for consumers, it's providing, you know, the way they've implemented it,

providing, you know, strife, anger, people being irate, and then people look at YouTube's algorithm, and they also kind of feel maybe that's a little less harmful than Facebook's and Instagrams, but still harmful because you watch one,

you know, I've remectin, and then you go to a hoax vaccine video, and, you know, you can just basically go down that rabbit hold, whether it's the alt-right, whether it's racism, whether it's extremism. So talk to me about the algorithms from those two companies, those two products, three products, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, and why they're so different than the ones from, that we all know and love from a Spotify, from a Netflix. Yeah. I mean, I think there's two large kind of fundamental different.

is one is they're based on a surveillance advertising business model. You know, the data collection is used to power these ads that have both, you know, commercial kind of exploitation, but also shown to be discrimination, like in housing and job ads and just creepy following you around. And so that's one thing. It's like, it's tied to this business model where the other ones aren't. The second one is maybe a little harder to. see, but I think potentially more important is like, you know, what those algorithms do is put

you in a filter bubble, right? So you're not seeing the same results as everyone else. It happens on Google search, too, whereas like different people may see, you know, links and news articles more attuned to their political meanings, and that creates polarization over time. Super helpful. Not helpful, Google. Not helpful. And so, you know, it's the context, right? So, like if you're on a Google search, you're expecting to get more unbiased information. If you search for a YouTube video, you know, you're expecting to get kind of the most popular videos there. It's kind of the difference of if you search, whereas then if you're, you know, you're searching on Netflix or Amazon, it's very much more clear that that is, you know, that is, is it a completely different non-information context?

more of an entertainment or shopping context and also more clear that it's related to your history. Yeah. And all of our collective history. Listen, if you, I would say the algorithm at Amazon has caused me tremendous problems in my personal life because I just have many, too many boxes coming here because when they say buy all three, man, I wondered why they had buy all three there. And now I'm just frequently like, buy all three. Let's go. I'll get those other two things to go with it. Listen, continued success on the company.

It's great that you're out there fighting this good fight. You're hiring. I'm curious, AI seems to be what Google believes their big advantage is. You're a much smaller company. They've got more people at a deep mind than, they've got 10 times as many people at deep mind than you have at your entire company.

Can you compete against that? And how big is AI playing into search, or is that overblown? I don't think it's overblown in the sense I think it is. very important. But the way that we compete, as we were talking at the beginning, is by working with, you know, other companies who are investing kind of vertically in those players. So

if you think of the wider Duckto-Go team slash universe, it kind of includes, say, all-A-Trip advisor, you know, if you say... Yeah, you have their AI people. Right, exactly. And so we have our own, obviously not close to as many as Google, but you really, it's like the sum

of all of our partners. But just to circle back on that, yeah, duct-Dego, has become way more than search now. So if you want to just protect your privacy generally, that's what we're trying to do. Download the app, download the browser, just type dot.com into your app store. And that's, I'm guessing, mobile 60% of your consumption these days,

something like that, 70? Yeah, I think it's about 6040, similar to Google. You know, yeah. So you're basically an app company now. You have to just mail the app. We're actually the number two downloaded browser. on mobile. And number one on Android

because Chrome is already there. So Chrome is number one on iOS. Yeah. We've had a, since we redid our apps and extensions and the mobile app became a full browser with all the pricing components, it's been downloaded 100 million times.

Wow. That's a game changer for the company. Yes. And you believe in free. So the idea that people would pay you for a premium service, just not in your wheelhouse, really? I mean, it's more that like, as we were talking about, if the service

has real marginal costs, so we really need to charge for it, that's fine, but we would opt to make it free if we could. It's not, because it's not just the U.S., right? We're talking about the whole world and the ability for certain countries to pay is much less. Do you have a lot of Chinese

users using the service? I know they care deeply about privacy, and do you index the Chinese web? So, interestingly, it does work in China as a you can search, but we've been banned in China, I think, since 2013. Right. If you're using a VPN, assume. Yeah, we have, still have Chinese usage via VPNs, but because of that like wholesale ban, you know, there's kind of a max you can kind of get, get to from China. Yeah, millions of users or something, but do, yeah, are they, are they,

uh, but do you index the Chinese web as well? And how do you think about authoritarian countries and participating, you know, there's a lot of people seem to be working around them, knowing that those countries are kind of soft allowing VPNs or, you know, maybe they're not putting people in gulags all the time for using a VPN, just for selling them. Yeah, I mean, our, our approach has not to engage with any kind of authoritarian government in any way. So, you know, for that, you know, we're not focused on that market. But not indexing the Chinese internet. You know, we use, it'll work, but I think in that case, we're relying on kind of Microsoft's index, whatever they're doing there.

But we're not personally putting any focus on China. All right. I know you're hiring. So is there a careers page or what are you hiring for? What's the most acute need at dot.com? To your point about being not aggressive enough, we are hiring in every area. So if you're kind of at all interested in this, you should. you should come apply, reach out.

Yeah, we have a careers page, but basically engineering, design, product, business, anything. Yeah, on behalf of your investors, please don't make a profit. Just keep that extra 10% of growth. Burn some money, gave. Burn some money, Gabriel.

All right, listen, continued success. Everybody out there, if you don't know about duck, go, this is your decade refresher. But you know what? I think you speak on so many great topics. Can we book you for a year from now and maybe we just cut the 10 years down to every year you come on the phone. Would that be okay?

Sounds good. Nice to come back sooner. All right. Continued success. Thank you for doing the work sincerely. I think it's great. And everybody go check out their career page and go work on good stuff. If you're working at Google or Facebook right now and selling your soul, you know, maybe you

can do your penance and maybe make duck, dot go even more successful. That would be a nice thing for you to do. And just think what your family is going to think about you when you show up for Christmas or the holidays, Thanksgiving, you show up for July 4th, you're a Facebook employee and now you work for Duck, Duck, Duck, Go. It's going to be a nice story arc, isn't it? Thank you, Jason. All right.

We'll see you all next time, and this week starts. Bye-bye.