Nate Parrott, Arc's designer, has left for Anthropic
Is this the end of Browser Company of New York?
personal news: i joined anthropic last week to work on making claude ~the most useful little helper who lives in your computer~
plz say hi if you're here! i'll be in the nyc office
Replies
Yes. It's almost like $50M for a browser without a business model was a bad idea.
Product Hunt
@steveb Lots of startup ideas look bad in hindsight, but I'm still pulling for them. If they succeed in making a better browser that gets traction, though that's a big "if", browsers are so fundamental to how we operate on the internet - it's a potentially huge impact
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@rajiv_ayyangar I'm with you that it'd be awfully nice if it worked out. What truly sucks is that Chrome's business model is to sell your data which effectively prices out anyone from building a browser that does not sell your data.
@rajiv_ayyangar Arc certainly had/has cachet with a certain cohort of very valuable users (I help moderate their 53K member subreddit)... but clearly anything less than 100M users won't cut it for Josh. He might be right from a business perspective, but by mothballing Arc and switching to Dia, he burned a lot of community good will and traction.
Today Weather
@steveb Burnnnnn....
Today Weather
@chrismessina There was likely a much better way to do this...I follow the Subreddit occasionally and the sentiment seems to be they won't trust them again. And as you know, they had raving, obsessive fans.
Product Hunt
Interesting. I've been wondering what Arc's next play is going to be. It's so rare to create a product as beloved as Arc. I imagine we'll see anybody who leaves going on to do great things. But also, with a team that talented, we could see exciting next play!
@rajiv_ayyangar they already announced it — it's an agentive browser called Dia:
But they risk getting upstaged by the likes of Perplexity with Comet.
If he copies everything from Arc to Anthropic, I won't mind using a Claude browser.
@pixelsushirobot IMO this is the most likely outcome.
Gamamia
Curious: why do you think a person leaving The Browser Company could mean the end of the company?
@mbavio because he's responsible for a lot of Arc's personality and design; he's a rapid experimenter, including with AI and agents. He's probably going to focus on doing that for Claude directly now, rather than attempting to build up momentum on a new browser.
Time will tell, but it feels as if Arc Browser OG is not getting as much TLC. Could be isolated to me, but as of recent Arc has crashed on me routinely and sync hasn’t been working on my new Mac Mini.
Today Weather
@lewis502 They announced a while ago they won't be doing anything for Arc and it will be going into maintenance mode for "Dia" (linked above). The maintenance mode is even worse than expected though...just Chromium updates. 🤦♂️
Visla
I hope not, love both the mobile app and Mac app.