Episode 105
· 42:19
People who are perceived as visionaries, it's often like revisionist history. Yeah. Like, I imagine that Patrick Collison, when he started Stripe, didn't feel like a visionary. He was like, we're just gonna make payments work online. Yeah.
Paul Klein:And then like Yeah. Increasing the GDP of the Internet. Like, I think that probably came a little bit after they started solving the problem.
Jack Bridger:I think most of us have someone in our life who every time we speak to them, we feel like we really should raise our game. For me that might be Paul, today's guest. Paul sold his first company to Marks, the video API in 2021 and worked at Twilio in the really early days as well as Marks after the acquisition. And Paul founded Browserbase in January 2024, which was also the same time that I met Paul when he was writing his first lines of code for Browserbase. Browserbase is a browser automation dev tool, so for all the people building agents, they need infrastructure for their agents to be able to go around and do stuff on the web and they've grown like crazy.
Jack Bridger:In June of this year, 2024, they announced that they raised 6 and a half $1,000,000 and the other crazy thing is that every time I spoke to a VC, they would say that the company they were most excited about was Browserbase. So they really struck this chord and a lot of people are excited about Browserbase. So the obvious question is how has Paul been able to go from 0 to where they're at now so quickly? As well as how they've been able to create that excitement especially around investors. We also talk about how to hire, including how to hire your friends.
Jack Bridger:We talk about what to look for in your hires for dev tools. One thing to stick around for that I think is the most interesting part of the conversation is how Paul prioritizes things and some of the things that he doesn't prioritize. Not many people are willing to talk about that, so I find that really interesting. It's a really cool episode. Enjoy.
Paul Klein:You know, you you saw Browserbase day negative 10, I would say. Yeah. Very, very early days, so it's kinda cool to have come full circle and now be on the pod. I'm excited.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And it's it's kind of crazy because I I remember, like, I think when we first met, I was like, I've I've made this, like, little script that would, like, book badminton calls for me, and it was, like, surprising how, like, how annoying it is to work with browsers and and so
Paul Klein:Yeah. That's a canon event. Right? Like, every developer early on in their life cycle actually wants to automate some sort of task that they do. Yeah.
Paul Klein:And it means they have to go out into this rogue Internet and load a web page, click a button, fill in a form, and they use Beautiful Soup. They're writing some hard coded stuff. And then as soon as they wanna, like, deploy that, they can close their application and run. Yeah. We'll always work on your machine.
Paul Klein:Right? Doesn't work on Amazon for some reason. That's something that I think is just so core to every developer's experience, and that's where Broadspace comes in because we make it so you can deploy these browser automation scripts to the cloud and have them run reliably without having to replicate everything that happens on your local dev environment.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. It's it's very, very cool. And, I guess you you already felt this was like a thing. Right? And then I it seems like it was like seeing the rise of agents as kind of like was that like your was that like an moment where you're like this, I have to build this?
Paul Klein:Well, I always knew that this particular piece of infrastructure was a painful thing because I had spent my time as CTO of my last company Yeah. Just nights nights nights digging through old Stack Overflow questions
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Paul Klein:Learning how to find the right font driver to make emojis work or why, you know, certain things weren't working in the browser for this version of Chrome Yeah. But they work in this version. So I felt that pain, and I was just really unhappy with the tools that existed out there for running this kind of stuff. And then it kinda became more clear to me this would be valuable because I I made a small SaaS application, during, like, 2023 or so, which was actually, like, logging in and helping Airbnb hosts automate their messages. Not many people know this story, but kind of like a nights and weekends project, I built this business called Guest Guru, which was a, like, Airbnb chatbot.
Paul Klein:It was super early on in, like, chat gpt, and part of that workflow required, like, logging in to Airbnb and responding to messages because there was no messaging API we could have access to. So from that, I pulled out my old, you know, browser automation knowledge combined with an LLM, and it kinda clicked for me. Like, oh, this is actually gonna be a really common primitive Yes. For other people who are building AI applications or AI agents. And from then, I just did a bunch of other conversations with other people who are building, and this something it was something that always came up as, like, a top three pain pain point for them.
Paul Klein:So it felt really clear to go start the company. I quit my job on the same day someone told me, hey. I would pay money for this right now. Right. Sounds good.
Paul Klein:I'll walk back into the office. I think they were having a board meeting that day, which is a tough time to quit. But they're very grateful about it, and they're supportive for me to go start this company. I always said that the only company I would start again would be a headless browser company. That's all I know about from my time at Stream Club, and that's the one I'm starting now.
Jack Bridger:That's very cool. And if you had to put your finger on, like, how you've been able to, like, kind of grow so fast in the 1st 8 months of browser base, like, why that's been. Okay. Quick announcement. WorkOS are hosting a one day conference dedicated to enterprise software.
Jack Bridger:It's called the Enterprise Ready Conf, and it's taking place on October 30th in San Francisco. They have got the founder and CEO of Vanta, Christina, speaking, as well as the head of product for ChatGPT. Yes. ChatGPT, Brit. So if you've got questions for them, go along.
Jack Bridger:And they've got the founder of Work OS, of course, Michael Grenich, who's been on the show twice. And you know how much he knows about enterprise software. So if you're kind of thinking about, you know, selling enterprise software or you already do it, you should definitely check out this conference. Go to enterprise hyphen ready.com or click the link in the show notes.
Paul Klein:Yeah. I think the growth to like, the majority of our customers are actually people who built this on their own. Like, we we've really tapped into the pain point. Like, people who have built and maintained this stack on their own, and they're like, screw this. I don't want to.
Paul Klein:Or they use a competitor who really they haven't really innovated on that side. Is that
Jack Bridger:because it's more for, like, testing rather?
Paul Klein:Yeah. I think a lot of the tooling is built around testing. I also think that, like, generally, the people who've played in the space have been more bootstrapped companies or people who've been, like, one of our biggest competitors is run by a single guy with a bunch of contractors. And the dashboard really hasn't changed since, like, 2019. I was a customer of theirs until I got browser based.
Paul Klein:So I think that they were just kinda dissatisfied with they had this complex piece of infrastructure. They wanted a Vercel or Clerk like experience for managing this, but no one had really stepped up to build a product level that would match that. And I'm really lucky that I I was building for me, so I knew exactly the features I wanted to. Like, our first our road map to this data is still the stuff that I think that we should have had on day 1. Yeah.
Paul Klein:We just haven't had time to build yet. Yeah. And by delivering on that and also, like, evangelizing the problem a little bit, I think that we've been able to win over the trust of quite a few customers, especially startups. And I remember when I was CTO in my startup, the way I decided about buying SaaS or infra, I'd ask other CTOs, what are you using? So this year, I really focused on making sure that I was talking to all of the SF AI agent builders and Yes.
Paul Klein:The application builders and making sure that they knew about us and they were choosing us. And if you win SF, I think you win a lot in AI right now. So Yeah. It's lucky I've been here for 10 years. So I already know where all of them everyone hangs out.
Paul Klein:Southern Pacific Brewery. That's the right. Yeah. That's the only spot.
Jack Bridger:Maybe that's a good aside. It's like it's funny how the marketing in SF is almost like kind of like small town marketing in the sense of, like, people have billboards, and it's very, like, event driven in this not in a technical sense and, like, literally running events and meetups and stuff like that.
Paul Klein:Yeah. Everyone knows each other here Yeah. Which is really it's like it feels like Twitter is a lot bigger than it actually is, but Yeah. At one point, you start ending up on market maps next to people who you know the other founders, and you you send it to them like, hey. Look.
Paul Klein:Good to see you. You know? Or someone will say, hey. Watch out for this list of companies. And I'm like, no.
Paul Klein:These are all people I know. Right?
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Paul Klein:It's it's a small town, and, like, I think it also means that your reputation here carries with you and Yeah. You have to be mindful of how you treat your employees, how you treat your competitors, your customers, because people don't forget that stuff here. And I've really prided us at Browserbase on being, like, just really good to our team and really transparent to our customers. And, you know, we do things like we had a, like, a short window of, you know, decreased performance, and we set the company like a Slack blast to everybody.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. For
Paul Klein:something that I think a lot of the people who just swallowed and not talked about. Like, we're trying to be super transparent about what doesn't work because that's really frustrating as a dev when the thing isn't working. You don't know if it's your code or the vendor's code. From day 1, we wanna try and be really transparent about what's going on on our side and what's going on on your side and helping people figure out why is this thing not working.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And what what kind of stuff were you saying and, like, not not in specifics, but, like, when you sort of, like, decrease you said decrease performance?
Paul Klein:Yeah. So, like, there was, like, a 6 minute window where session creation was slowed down, and we said, hey. Like, here's what happened. This is the start time. This is the end time.
Paul Klein:This is what would you would have seen. It's resolved now, and we're post morting it. So
Jack Bridger:And you kinda put that in the, like, the community Slack Yeah.
Paul Klein:We send it to everybody. Yeah. Yeah. Just because we wanna be, like I think you could have just put that in a status page and hope no one noticed it, but we wanna be really, like, explicit with communication.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That's really cool. Okay. So you're you're growing very fast, and you're building the road map of, you know, the what what you wanted, basically. The other thing that I think that you've been doing is, like, I think there's this you know, people talk about, like, hot companies, and I think browser based is definitely very, very,
Paul Klein:like We definitely have VC market
Jack Bridger:fit Yeah.
Paul Klein:For sure. Yeah. That's that's true.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And I was kind of, like, reflecting on, like, why, like, from an outside perspective and trying to, like, think a lot about this. So I kind of wanted to ask you that as well. Like, because I think it's it's always, like, kind of two sides to this. Right?
Jack Bridger:It's like pleasing customers and then also, like, being able to raise the capital that you need to grow the business. What do you think you've done really well on this?
Paul Klein:Yeah. I I think we just had a really clear narrative. Like, we always knew we always knew what we're gonna do from day 1. Yeah. I even wrote about I wrote, like, a 3,000 word long form memo around, like, here's what the problem is.
Paul Klein:Here's how we intend to solve it. Here are the risks. Here's the bets that we're taking. Yeah. And I published that 3 months before we even started the company.
Paul Klein:Yeah. And I think my story really aligns with the company. You know, I I started my career at Twilio. I was actually an intern during the IPO. Great.
Jack Bridger:So I'm
Paul Klein:gonna see, like, a best in class info company start there. Yeah. I did Stream Club where I learned about headless browsers. Yeah. We sold that to Mux who was another just amazing info company with great info founders.
Paul Klein:Yeah. And from all of that, there's, like, this really cohesive story that, like, I should go build an infra company. I've been at 2 of them. Yeah. I was CTO of a company that had a lot of relevant experience with headless browsers.
Paul Klein:And it's just a problem that, like, really aligned with my story, and I think people also saw the same, you know, world playing out that I did. Yes. Like Yeah. You know, the future of software isn't just software making you faster at what you do. It's software doing the work for you.
Paul Klein:And if software is doing the work for you, it means that you're gonna have software go out and browse websites using a web browser just like we do when we're doing work. And if we can help power that in some way, I think that's just a really powerful place to be in the future of software. And to me, that future seems really clear.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And the because it was kind of funny we were talking before, and I I was kind of putting you in this bucket with, I would say, like, Michael from Work OS is really good at that as well of having this, like, vision. And then you were like, really? Like, I I see myself as, like, the anti visionary. And we were talking about it, and it seems like it's like you don't see it as, like, a vision.
Jack Bridger:It's like you believe this thing. You believe you have a worldview on the future, and you don't see it as, like, vision. It's like you you believe that or you know in your mind that
Paul Klein:Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Agents is gonna be are gonna be like a very disruptive.
Paul Klein:I I think it's like people who call themselves or people who are perceived as visionaries, it's often like revisionist history. Yeah. Like, I I imagine that Patrick Carlson, when he started Stripe, didn't feel like a visionary. He was like, we're just gonna make payments work online. Yeah.
Paul Klein:And then, like Yeah. The creating increasing the GDP of the Internet. Like, I think that probably came a little bit after they started solving the problem, but he probably looks like a visionary now. I mean, he's an amazing founder. I think same thing with Jeff Lawson.
Paul Klein:He's like, these telephony APIs don't exist or they're painful, and I wanna send a text. And, like, that would be really helpful. Like, I think there's always, like, this aspirational vision, but I try not to, like, get too distracted from what we're doing. Like Yeah. We're solving this, like, immediate problem.
Paul Klein:We have ambitions to continue to solve it in better ways and make it easier for developers. And to me, that's like an endless, like, optimization game. Like, we can infinitely make the infrastructure better, more affordable. We can actually move up the stack and solve the customer's problems in a more reliable way at the SDK layer, maybe even higher than that. So it's just more of a pursuit of solving a problem to perfection, than it is, like, I wanna become Elon Musk in, like, in this vision.
Paul Klein:You know? Like, I just really love the problem we're solving, and I think it has a place in the world.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. It's it's it's really, really cool. It's, yeah. For me, if I wanted to go the v series, like, I would want to feel as, like, sure on a problem as you are. It's like if you just wanted to write, like, a count a function that calculates something, it's like
Paul Klein:Too easy. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:But then as soon as you bring in, like, it has to go get some number from, from from some website.
Paul Klein:If I wanna download my bank statements
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Paul Klein:I have to go buy Plaid or integrate with Plaid. I can't log in to my own bank account to click the button. Wells Fargo does have an API I can use very easily. But I should be able to just log in my bank account and do all those things in an automated way without, like, going through this whole rigmarole. Yeah.
Paul Klein:So, yeah, I think that, like, what's really excited me about BrowserBase is that we have a chance to be a category defining company, which means, like, we are early to a category that is going to be more important in the future, and we can be in front of that category. Yeah. And that's the best type of infrastructure business to build because you get to kind of pave the way a little bit. Yeah. And there will be people who copy what we do or, you know, compete with us.
Paul Klein:And I think that's fine. Like, that's a really big market. I actually don't. Think anybody who worries about competitors before $10,000,000 of ARR, they're probably gonna lose for other reasons. Yeah.
Paul Klein:They can't get to 10. So Yeah. It's not something that keeps you up at night. But for us, I'm excited about, like, using our firsthand knowledge of dev tools and Infra and the stuff the things that we love to use on other systems. Yeah.
Paul Klein:And how do we apply those same principles to browser automation and automating the web? I just love to give developers, like, more sophisticated primitives to use and more sophisticated tools. So programming becomes just an expressive thing. Yeah. So with browser based, I think we're doing that by, like, letting people write code that controls the Internet.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. It's it's really cool. And so okay. So you're at Twilio, and then you spelled StreamClub, a a dev tool, mux, a dev tool. Browserbase is building tools for developers, but I guess in particular, it's like AI engineers would be like one categorization.
Jack Bridger:One of the questions I have for you is, like, is it do you feel like it's different, the audience that you're building browser based for versus the audience that you are kind of like, the type of developers that you're building browser based for versus, your previous experiences?
Paul Klein:You know, it's it's actually it turns out engineers buying AWS and engineers buying browser base have the same questions. Right? Like, will this infrastructure work? Like, how much is it gonna cost? How reliable is it?
Paul Klein:How does it scale? You know? So it's it's very much like an infrastructure business. And right now, our one of our target segments are, like, these new AI companies because we know that they need help right now to get to market faster to launch their thing, so they're willing to adopt and and use browser base. There's a huge category developers who aren't doing AI that actually also need browser base and headless browsers for a variety of data retrieval tasks, browser testing, just traditional RPA that doesn't use any AI at all.
Paul Klein:RPA, robotic process automation. It's like, you know, automate something to play right. So the customers are very different. I think that what we've done is just really tried to serve these startups that are just getting started because this is when they're making their Yeah. Fundamental infrastructure choices.
Paul Klein:And what I think about is, like, every time we add a cohort of new customers, how are they how is their revenue gonna grow over the next 12 months? Right? Yeah. And what's nice is, like, maybe, like, the first couple weeks, not gonna be huge customer. Right?
Paul Klein:They're just building their thing. They're getting started. They're gonna launch. But as they grow in finding product market fit, we get to grow with them Yeah. Which is the most beautiful part of Infra Businesses is that you win when your customers win.
Paul Klein:So I try and do a lot. Like, I'm reviewing YC apps of some of our customers right now. Right? Like, doing everything I can to help them move along, as well as, like, from from our larger customers. Like, how do I help them navigate the procurement process so they can get to buy browsers faster and get their internal project they're trying to build to prod sooner?
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And how are you spending your time right now? Because you're also that's another thing is that you're a solo founder,
Paul Klein:which is yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That was a visceral reaction to that. Yeah.
Paul Klein:Well, I'm I'm I'm happily married, so I I cofounder for life. Julia does a lot for me, so I would not be able to do this without an amazing spouse. I've also just been able to hire, like, really great people. Like, my first manager at Twilio is now our head of engineering. Really?
Paul Klein:Yeah. That's
Jack Bridger:super cool. So cool.
Paul Klein:One of the people I work with at Mux, on the browser stuff I did, actually, that works for us. We just hired our designer who worked with me at StreamClub. So we're reassembling the dream team. Like, it's a lot of people I worked with before who I wanna work with again, and we're able to get them to come join us. Being a solo founder, I mean, I spent the 1st third of browser base building the product.
Paul Klein:I built the whole product with some great, you know, contractors we brought in to help us as well. The second third was, you know, really kind of putting the team together, and we built this amazing core team of infrastructure engineers. Mhmm. And then the current third that we're in is really scaling the company
Jack Bridger:Mhmm.
Paul Klein:And preparing for I think 2025 is gonna be a really big year for us.
Jack Bridger:And I
Paul Klein:think we're starting to see signs of that, especially as foundational models become better and better. Cloud 3 5 Sonnet has unlocked a lot of really interesting use cases. Yeah. And I think we'll see that more with an evolution of foundational models. So we're really thinking about how do we prepare to scale the company.
Paul Klein:And, like, that's like, we have a PTO policy now. Like, you know, like, what does it mean to take time off? Like, we have an expense policy. Like, I'm not the only person managing all our expenses anymore. So we're trying to hire and and really put in place the things the things we need to scale the company Yeah.
Paul Klein:So I can kind of move into this place where I can actually do the highest leverage things. Like, it's probably not the best use of my time right now to, like, take our Amazon bill and put it into ramp. You know? Yeah. It's probably a better use of my time for me to be, like, really nitty gritty in the product docs and, like, giving feedback on how this feature should work
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Paul Klein:And hopping into customer fires and helping support them when the team is busy. Mhmm. Like, that's the best use of my time is, like, making the product better and helping customers. So I'm trying to hire more great people to help us scale browser base. And for this, that means, like, building out a team on the go to market side.
Paul Klein:Like, we have our 1st sales engineer starting. Sophie's gonna come in, and she's gonna get on all the customer calls and help support them. So I can maybe skip a few customer calls in the future, and that'll be okay because she's gonna do a great job.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That's that's super, super cool. How how is it, like, hiring your friends? Is it, like, do you have any tips for people that are like, I wanna hire my friend?
Paul Klein:Yeah. I don't know. I think, hopefully, your friends like you. You know? I think salary negotiation with friends is tough.
Paul Klein:Thankfully, like, we've always kind of had, like, compensation bans. So, like, we've been able to, like, say, this is like what everyone else is gonna be making. So we have to stay within this to make the conversation better. That's smart. And then just, like, working with friends is all about being transparent.
Paul Klein:Yeah. You know, sharing candid feedback, setting expectations appropriately. I wanna be friends at the front of my company. Like, this is, like, one of the biggest reasons why I'm a founder is actually this idea of building, like, a good company. Yeah.
Paul Klein:And to me, that means a company where everyone is actually viewing this job as the best job they ever have.
Jack Bridger:Yes.
Paul Klein:And I actually get more fulfilled fulfillment from that personally than, like, you know, becoming the biggest company in the world. I'd rather we have a company where everyone actually leaves their job, leaves their day super energized and is going home and is excited about the work they're doing. Yeah. And if we do our jobs right, hopefully, we can make them generationally wealthy too so that impacts their family and their kids and their grandkids. So that all starts with, like, making sure the team is really aligned with what we're doing and excited about it and keeping them engaged by giving them the opportunities for them to grow too.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That that's really cool. And are there any, like, things that you would recommend if someone's, like, hiring, like, their first people in terms of just, like, you know, like, making sure that people are energized when they leave the office or you know?
Paul Klein:Yeah. I think for us, like, I just really wanted to make sure everyone wanted to work here, and I told them all the reasons why they shouldn't. I was really clear. Like, I was trying to convince people not to work in browser based. Like, I mean, obviously, I think the first half of the conversation is me selling browser based and why it's so great and what the upsides are.
Paul Klein:But at some point in the conversation, they also need to want you. I think as a founder, especially a solo founder, your first few hires, you're like, I need this person. If I don't get them, we're screwed. I can't move forward. That just results in people having not the right expectations aligned.
Paul Klein:So I always try and start with the sell of, like, why you should work in browser base? This is like, here's the opportunity, here's the world we see. And then I end with, here's all the reasons you shouldn't. Like, hey, like, we sometimes work out of core hours. That's that's okay to explain.
Paul Klein:Like, that doesn't mean you have to be working at the office for this core outside the core hours, but just know that it's gonna happen. And we're there's a lot of work here. It's gonna be kinda hard and stressful sometimes. There's fires. Like, we're running around.
Paul Klein:We're reprioritizing. It's very dynamic. Like, the more that I can, like, lay it all out so they have that choice, I think it results in us having a higher a higher, comma, higher success rate. You know? And for us, that's the most important thing is, like, making sure people come and are successful in the role when they join.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That that's really cool. And what were you like looking for in people that you were bringing in? Was there, like, stuff because I guess you worked with a lot of people within DevTools. Mhmm.
Jack Bridger:And you probably have, like, you know, probably have, like, some kind of mental, like, stack rank.
Paul Klein:My hit list.
Jack Bridger:I would want yeah. This one. Your
Paul Klein:top 5. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah.
Paul Klein:No. I I didn't have any sort of, like, CRM. I actually, like we we hired someone who came inbound from us on Twitter who saw one of our, like, videos I put out. He said, this looks great. I'd love to work
Jack Bridger:with you. That was,
Paul Klein:like, an awesome hire. A great signal.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Paul Klein:Well, I mean, we hired from all different channels. Like, we had a recruiter for 1 person. I met somebody at a hackathon. We hired them, an old coworker of
Jack Bridger:mine, people who came inbound. Like, we've really used, like, every channel we can to hire good people. And is there some stuff that you like you're like, oh, this like, you know, they they do something, they say something you like, or you see some sort of specific type of work, and you're like, yes. Like, this is the
Paul Klein:kind of
Jack Bridger:person that I'm not
Paul Klein:I I I think I now have a pretty good nose for Engh talent. I cannot distill that down into why. It's pretty crazy, but I've hired a lot, like, across, like, 3, 4 companies now. It's it's weird. Like, I actually can assess any challenge pretty reliably in the first conversation without even seeing any code.
Paul Klein:Yeah. I think it in the end, what I was looking for with browser bases, I'd always ask this question, which is now ruined after this podcast, which is, like, what what's your favorite dev tool? Okay. And tell me about, like, the tools and infrastructure that you love and why do you love it? Yeah.
Paul Klein:And what don't you like? Yeah. And from that, it actually it can be in a conversational setting where now I'm hearing about this person's product preferences, like, what their expectations are, the things they work with. And for working at a, you know, infrastructure company, you probably should have some opinions around infrastructure. Like, if someone says Stripe is amazing, like, oh, yeah.
Paul Klein:I like Stripe. I see that. And then they say, usage based billing of Stripe is really poorly built. I'm like, oh, okay. Cool.
Paul Klein:They really know what they're talking about. But if they say the Amazon console is really the pinnacle of developer tools, it may be a red flag, and you wanna reconsider. You know? So Yeah.
Jack Bridger:It is what it is. That's that's actually a really good point because I felt like this is it's like there's this skill that's not doesn't kind of show up on, like, resumes traditionally about, like, you know, a API design or, like, me like, having something that just feels, like, feels good. You know? Like, when you use it, like, it using it, this API, it feels good. Like you know?
Jack Bridger:And some people are really good at kind of getting to that, whereas others, I feel like it's like it is something that probably is quite difficult to Yeah. Kind of
Paul Klein:I I have a crazy analogy here.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Paul Klein:Okay. So buying a dev tool is like buying a jacket. Interesting. Okay. When's the last time you bought a jacket?
Jack Bridger:Yeah. I bought a jacket just before I came.
Paul Klein:Okay. It's like
Jack Bridger:so I get a Patagonia one just
Paul Klein:to fit in. Well, okay. Well, that's that's easy buy. When you buy a jacket, maybe you see it at the store and you're like, okay. Yeah.
Paul Klein:That's a jacket. It's got sleeves. Yeah. It's got pockets. It looks nice.
Paul Klein:If you're buying linear, it's got gradients all over the place. But you still gotta before you buy the jacket, you gotta try it on. You know? You gotta, like, okay, the pockets are here. The sleeves feel right.
Paul Klein:It's cozy inside. I think it's the same way as, like, buying a dev tool. Like, no matter how sexy the landing page is and, like, has all the features, developers need to try the thing right before they buy it. And, yeah, look at that jacket. Right?
Paul Klein:And, for us, we actually try and when you finish our sign up flow, you're actually dumped in, like, an IDE in the web browser where you can click run, and you can see code being run on a browser. You can edit that code and play with it. And, like, you immediately see where browser base is used for and how it works within the first, like, 5 seconds.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Paul Klein:And that allows us to kinda move forward that try on period, the moment of magic is what some people call it, as early in the sign up flow as possible. Because we're building kinda complex and previously niche infrastructure. Like, I mean, I don't think a lot of people know the in-depth parts of the Chrome DevTools protocol and Chromium or even Playwright. But when they see code runs here, browser does this, it kinda clicks. And that's like when I see that the the session recordings of people doing that, I'm like, oh, yeah.
Paul Klein:They get it because now they're typing in it, and they are editing this thing live. And now they know how they can build their thing using BrowserBase.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That's that makes total sense. And, I was speaking to Colin from Clerk, and one of the things that he was talking about was, like, they want to get people not to use a sign up component. They found that, like, sign up and log in component, people weren't really, like, getting the value of Clerk. They had to, like, get further and add, like, the profile component.
Jack Bridger:Mhmm. And then, like, then they would suddenly see, like, oh, I get this gives you more than just, like, the, you know, the stuff that I had previously. Is it like do you kinda is that part of it? It's like you're trying to get people to do a specific thing once they log in to BrowserBase. And if they do that, they're very likely to actually, you know, try that to, like, use it properly.
Paul Klein:Yeah. For for us, it's like, do they run the sample code that's Yeah. Generally, sample code, you have to, like, use your terminal and get clone and then run this SDK or IDE or whatever. But our sample code is in the dashboard, and it's a fully functioning IDE. So, like Yeah.
Paul Klein:If they run the sample code and they modify it, they're in. They get it. They understand, like, how this works.
Jack Bridger:And I
Paul Klein:think we're doing a pretty terrible job with this right now. I'd give us a c plus.
Jack Bridger:Okay.
Paul Klein:But it's also been 8 months. So, like, you know
Jack Bridger:Seems like that's better than almost every
Paul Klein:When it's still it's still working. You know? Like, our conversion rates for post sign up to upgrade are, like, above market, and I'm I'm happy about it. It's not the brightest burning fire. But it's it's one where, like I think you asked, like, how do we move so quickly?
Paul Klein:I I do regret the the quality of some of the things we have at Browserbase. Like, I think I look at our docs, I think they'd be way better. Like, our SDKs, I I wanna make our SDKs 10 times better. Mhmm. And maybe that's just, like, every founder says that about their products, but, like, being okay with quality for now while you focus on more important things, so we focus a lot on infrastructure scalability.
Paul Klein:Mhmm. Like, in July, we actually just, like, could not add more browsers. We had reached scaling limits that we didn't think we'd reached until the end of the year.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Paul Klein:So we had to kind of say, we need to make sure this infra can Yeah. Go, you know, for the next 100,000 concurrent browsers. We put all of our efforts on that. And because of that, we're a small team, you know. Yeah.
Paul Klein:We haven't focused on anything. So being a founder means constantly prioritizing different things. And for us, like, making sure it works great and works reliably was more important than making sure the docs are, like, the top tier docs. Like, I wanna move the proxy session section outside of the subsection and make it into the sidebar thing and, like, rewrite this whole thing and rate limits need to be clearer. Like, all that stuff just kind of sits in RAM in my brain and, like Yeah.
Paul Klein:But that's okay because the team is gonna keep chugging through all that stuff.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. I actually I actually really believe like, agree with you, and I feel like it's kind of it's actually not necessarily, like, something that is like, I hear people say, like, you know, the docs are, like, the most important thing and all sort of stuff. But, like, when you look at OpenAI, they massively deprioritised kind of docs, SDK, and stuff. And people were still queuing out the door to use it just because it was so good, the core product. And I feel like that's kind of what you're describing.
Jack Bridger:It's like, if someone is supposed to run a browser session for a very specific important thing and it doesn't work, that's, like, that's that's gonna cause them actually a lot more pain. They might they'll probably bear with you and just, like, send a support message. And if you reply to them, that docs thing is, like, not an issue. But if if things don't run reliably, it's like that is an issue for people to run their core business with you.
Paul Klein:It's the most important thing. It's, like, reliability of the infrastructure. It's been our number one focus is, like, making sure how many nines can we get and doing that from day 1. And I think we can tolerate docs being a little bit there's a grammatical mistake or something, but we can't tolerate the info not working. And that's that's been where we shift our priorities.
Paul Klein:And the reason why I'm saying all of this is, like, I, I think a lot of founders don't talk about the things that they have to that they're not proud of. Yeah. Exactly. And, like, it's I've listened to some conversations and I'm like, oh, wow. These guys are crushing it all over the place.
Jack Bridger:I'm anthropic ing.
Paul Klein:Yeah. And like, I think you opened it. Like, Cloudways is crushing it. Like, it's a hot company. Like, even a hot company has things that we wanna improve.
Paul Klein:And I think that's okay.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Paul Klein:Like, if you don't as a founder, especially a solo founder, if you don't accept that there are gonna be fires burning
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Paul Klein:You'll never actually do the most important work because you're gonna run around like a chicken with your head cut. Yeah. So Yeah. For us, we focus on the most important thing, which is reliability. We work with great people to help us out when we can't have capacity.
Paul Klein:Shout out Charlie who wrote all of our docs. I know hope you're watching. Like, you know, it's Oh,
Jack Bridger:is that Charlie from,
Paul Klein:Charlie from Charlie. Yeah. Defer. Charlie. Yeah.
Paul Klein:Defer. One of my favorite dev tool companies. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:He's right.
Paul Klein:He's so good. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:I love Charlie.
Paul Klein:But, yeah, like, I think that's where we work with other people to help kind of, like, move our product along when we can't focus on it. But in the end, like, every product has its little things you wanna make better.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Paul Klein:And as long as long as you know about them, then you're in a good place. Yeah. But the worst thing is if we don't know what's bad about your own product, that's, like, the scariest thing because then you have no idea what you need to go fix.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. That that that makes total sense. And I think it's a really good point about, like, knowing what you don't prioritize. And I I because I I do try to ask this.
Jack Bridger:It's just like it's some a lot of people, you know, aren't necessarily in the habit of, like, talking publicly about, like, oh, okay. These things were not so good. But it's always like if you really, really care about like, there's probably a few things within every company that they really, really care about and they're really, really good at, hopefully, the things they care about. But you can't yeah. It's really hard to, like, care about everything and focus on everything because e like, at start ups, I feel like it is for better or worse, like, you can try and make people, like, give them agency, but there's still, like, so much that's, like, if Paul doesn't care about it, then it's gonna be really hard for you to be, like, exceptional at that thing.
Paul Klein:Yeah. It's I think self awareness is the first step before self improvement. Yeah. So for us, if I know what I wanna improve, then we can go improve that. But if if you're like, if you publicly say, yeah, everything is so great about our product, and then someone's your docs and it's like, this section, it's unclear about burst versus sustain rate limits that's in your brain.
Paul Klein:Like, I don't know. It just feels like the the most important thing with infrastructure companies is that we're building trust. Yeah. Like, our customers are trusting us with mission critical workflows, and they have to believe us. And if you lie to your customers, they're not gonna trust you.
Paul Klein:If you do that repeatedly, you lose customers. Yeah. So I think we bias to being more authentic and transparent where possible just so that, like, they know that we have their we're gonna tell them when things aren't gonna work. You don't wanna promise something that you can't deliver on, and then Yeah. Somebody else is gonna be screwed over by that.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That's really cool. No. I that makes complete sense.
Paul Klein:It should be the default, I think. It makes sense because it's like, oh, cool. Being honest with your customers, that sounds like a good idea. But, like, I think there's a lot of Yeah. Startup knowledge, which has been like sell first, build later.
Paul Klein:And, yes, there is some of that that you should do, but I think oftentimes if you sell the moon and you can't deliver on it, I think it just burns a lot of credibility. Well,
Jack Bridger:I guess what's because there is that is a good point as well. It's like there is often this talk about, like, you know I mean, especially on, like, Twitter and stuff right now, there's a lot of talk about, like, scale and, like, how, you know, you don't actually need to worry about this stuff.
Paul Klein:Oh, the v v p s Yeah. Levels IO. Stuff. Right.
Jack Bridger:Like, it's kind of like so it seems like there is some kind of nuance there of, like, when you should and shouldn't care about, you know, scalability, for instance.
Paul Klein:Yeah. I think if you can run your whole app on a VPS and it works great all the time, you should do that. I I fully believe that. If you if you wanna run your own browsers, I I support that. And I'll tell you exactly how we do ours.
Paul Klein:Yeah. But my bet and the reason why I build this business is that it's actually really annoying to do that. Like, I've done it myself. Like, it's I I wouldn't have started this company if I didn't think we had sufficient 0 to 1 maintenance pain. Like, it's hard to get started to run, let's say, a a 1000 concurrent web browsers in a cloud environment in a secure way.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Paul Klein:That's hard to do 0 to a 1000 concurrent browsers. But then it's also hard to maintain that fleet of browsers and, like, deal with things like Chrome updates that are very important for security reasons. You have to roll the whole fleet. Or you wanna support file downloads, which means that you have to synchronize each browser's download folder to some s three bucket and then map that for your downstream customers to download. And then, like, you just, like, it's a death by a 1,000 cuts on, like, improving that thing.
Paul Klein:Yeah.
Jack Bridger:So you become a full time job Yeah. For, like, a small start up.
Paul Klein:Yeah. Like, sure. Just run your own post res. Yeah. Oh, but you want a nice UI?
Paul Klein:Okay. You gotta go buy Postico and then, oh, wait. You wanna do a replica? Okay. You gotta figure that out.
Paul Klein:You want backups? Like, or just use Supabase.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. You
Paul Klein:know, I I I choose to use Supabase and I like that.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. The very cool guys.
Paul Klein:Very cool guys. Yeah. The other Paul.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. The other Paul.
Paul Klein:That was Paul's.
Jack Bridger:It's, we've got Paul from,
Paul Klein:Jam JamSocket? Paul Butler? Yeah. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. He's also a browser guy.
Paul Klein:Yeah. So Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a there's a there's a Paul army building here.
Paul Klein:Watch out. Maybe that's why we had VC markets. Paul Paul's dev tool founder is is the move.
Jack Bridger:Wait a second.
Paul Klein:Yeah. If you rename your change your name to Paul, and you may you're in the group chat now, so watch out. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:That's that's incredible. So this is, like, the second time around that you're going on, like, building a dev tool. Are there things that you're doing differently this time consciously that we haven't covered so far?
Paul Klein:Yeah. I mean, solo founder is one of them. I think I love my cofounders. One of my cofounders actually became a customer today, which is pretty cool. Yeah.
Paul Klein:It's awesome. Shout out, Liam. But I think being a solo founder allows us to move a lot more speed because there's no alignment needed. Like, it's me. When you have a cofounder, it's like you and your cofounder getting aligned.
Paul Klein:Mhmm. And then the you you the cofound the founders with the team being aligned. Like, when it's just me, it's just one step or move. And I think being aligned is the most important thing for a start up, and we can make that a lot faster with just me. I also think that, like, we're working fully in person all the time.
Paul Klein:Yeah. 5 days a week in San Francisco. We just got a new office. And Very cool. That's been great.
Paul Klein:I mean, it's so hard because I meet so many amazing devs that I wanna hire that I can't because they don't wanna move from where they're at. And I totally respect that. I don't think one is better than the other.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Paul Klein:Like, I think what Jake is doing at Railway, fully remote, is, like, really impressive. And Yeah. The way they pull it off, I think, is, like Yeah. So cool. And they do a really good job of it.
Paul Klein:So it's not like a choice of what's better or worse, but, like, we all opted into this culture of being in person and going to the office every single day. And we need to honor that because as soon as we we break that, then it's like, why did we all agree to this in the first place? Yeah. We're building an in person company, and that's been, like, a very, like, conscious and sometimes painful decision. Yeah.
Paul Klein:But, you know
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. What would you say are, like, the biggest benefits of being in person?
Paul Klein:Yeah. It's it's hard to put it into words, but I think, like, there's this more contagious energy. Mhmm. You get to see a lot more of, like, when someone is, like, really struggling and, like, they're putting in a lot of work into something and it's really hard. So I think it makes the celebrations of big achievements much grander.
Paul Klein:Yeah. Because you like I think when someone is remote, at least for me, it's hard to gauge the effort they put into something. Yeah. Where I know Dom is at the office, like, putting a ton of work on this new browser pooling feature Yeah. And it ships.
Paul Klein:I'm like, that's so awesome. Like, I know how hard you work on that, and I literally saw you there Congratulations. Before I got there and after I left, like, for weeks straight. Yeah. You know?
Paul Klein:So it feels like everything becomes a lot more tangible with the work that's being put in. And it's just fun. Like, we we go out to lunch and dinner all the time. Like, we hang out. Like, it makes it really easy to have impromptu things happen Yeah.
Paul Klein:Which is a lot harder when you're remote.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. I was actually talking to someone who was working in your office, and I was like, oh, fuck. What's the name of the place that you were working out for?
Paul Klein:Solaris. Solaris. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And he was I was like, oh, do you know Paul? And he was like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:It was funny because there was, like, there was just Paul in the office, and then there were, like, more, and then there were, like, even more. And suddenly, there were, like, all these people in this, like, little office, another god, I think.
Paul Klein:Yeah. We we we've had, like, 3 or 4 offices. I remember I got the first one. It was just me and 3 desks. It's like, this is so much space.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Paul Klein:And then we have 5 people and 3 desks, and then we got a bigger office. And then we ran we we've run out of desks way too often, actually. Even our current office, at our current hiring plan, we'll run out of desks the next couple months. So I'm gonna give up my desk probably in, like, November, and then I'll work from a couch or something.
Jack Bridger:Has it been harder to scale desks
Paul Klein:or browser sessions? Oh, it's it's easier I mean, I don't know. It depends on if you're in US West 2 or not. I think it's been easier to scale browser sessions than desks these days. It's harder to get more desks.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Exactly. Wow. That's actually crazy. Okay.
Jack Bridger:Paul, I think that was, like, pretty much what we had time for. Was there anything else that you wanted to talk about before?
Paul Klein:No. I I I was just gonna add that it's really great to have, you know, this podcast. And I think that it is a small community of infrastructure builders and and dev tools builders. And the more that we can kinda get together and share the the pros and cons and the pains and the stuff we're going through, I actually think that it makes the whole infra community much better. So I'm happy for you to put us together.
Paul Klein:I appreciate it.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. I know. Thank you. And, it's so cool to actually, like I think this is, yeah, one of the very few dev tools I've seen, like, at the earliest stages Yeah. Going, like and it's been so cool.
Jack Bridger:So, I've learned a ton from you just, like, watching how you do things and stuff. So it's really cool to, like, actually have time to ask you the questions that I had. So, yeah, thank you very much for all.
Paul Klein:It's fair. Good to be here.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. I'm expecting the you know, a huge IPO in a few years, and then you'll be back on the same page.
Paul Klein:10 year review 1. Yeah. I'll have no hair.
Jack Bridger:I've already got no hair.
Paul Klein:There we go. Perfect. I'll match. I'll grow a beard again. It'll be a good one.
Paul Klein:Yeah. Okay. Dude, that was fun. Yeah. Thank you.
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