Arc Had Millions of Users. Why They Left It Behind for Dia. | Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal, cofounders of The Browser Company

AI and I

If you had millions of people using a product you spent years building, would you kill it?

That’s exactly what The Browser Company did with Arc.

The internet backlash was intense, but cofounders Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal saw that AI was about to make the web something you talk to, not just click into. The best home for that assistant was the thing that's already between you and the internet—the browser. And they realized they couldn’t just duct-tape it on to Arc.

One year of heads-down work later, the team launched Dia in beta, and people are raving about it. Dia is a sleek, fast, browser with AI at its core—it gets better with every tab you open, becoming more and more helpful with time.

And even though it’s still early, Josh and Hursh’s big pivot looks like one for the ages.

This week on AI & I, Josh and Hursh joined me for their first full-length podcast about their pivot from Arc to Dia. We talk through their decision-making process, the very public backlash the company faced, and the grit it took to stay the course.

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Timestamps for Spotify:

1. Introduction: 00:01:13

2. The story of how Dan might’ve been the CEO of The Browser Company: 00:02:47

3. The moment Josh and Hursh knew they had to walk away from Arc: 00:09:42

4. How to handle the weight of the unknown in a pivot: 00:17:08

5. The prototype-driven culture that kept The Browser Company alive: 00:23:31

6. Why having a product loved by millions of users isn’t enough :00:25:42

7. The architectural decisions underlying how Dia was built: 00:33:29

8. How Dia almost shipped without its best feature: 00:47:12

9. The best ways people are using Dia in the wild: 00:51:18

10. How Josh and Hursh think about competing with incumbents: 01:07:55

11. How romanticism informs the product decisions behind Dia: 01:17:04

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Hursh Agrawal: @hursh

• Josh Miller: @joshm

• More about Dia: https://www.diabrowser.com/

• Writer and investor M.G. Siegler’s essay about the AI browser wars: https://spyglass.org/ai-browser-wars/