Solving the Productivity & Security Problems of Web Browsers with Mazy Dar

Flip to browsers, right? And I would say all the exact same problems and all the exact same reasons that drove the entire world to start using tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams. All of those exact same problems exist for browsers, right? And so you can start with security and compliance, right? I don't have, you know, in Slack, you know, I have my work colleagues, right? My mom and my cousins and my friends aren't sort of in the chat list where I might accidentally chat the wrong thing. This is SaaS scaled, the podcast where data meets action with host Arman Shrakhi. Each week Armen will be sitting down with CEOs and industry leaders from the technology sector, giving you the insight to innovate without reinforcement. Inventing the wheel. They'll discuss challenges, best practices and how to identify the right metrics. So if you want to get to market faster and in a way that matters, then subscribe and join us every week as we discuss SaaS Scale. This episode is brought to you by Curve, A the modern no code analytics solution. The tools you need to take action with your data on a platform built for maximum scalability, security and cost efficiencies. If you're ready to reduce complexity and dramatically lower costs, then contact us today@crave.com that's Q R V Y.com. Welcome to another episode of SAS Scaled. I'm here with a guest that is going to talk about a topic that you would not guess. It's something you work with it every day but you never thought about it. Mazi, welcome to this episode and thank you for joining us. Would you please introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about your company and also yourself. Yeah, Armand, thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. So my name is Mazi. I run a company called Here and we provide a browser that's purpose built for work. I co founded the company with Chuck door now about 16 years ago and we've been on this journey. Actually the through line starts far before that but it's really culminated in the current era that we're in with AI where this has become even more relevant today than it's been even in the last several years. Fantastic. And the reason I said, you know, a topic that you would not think about it but you are using it every day because we are going to talk about browser, the web browser. It's something that probably most people would think, well, hasn't changed really for the last 20 something years. But I'm using works but I never question if it's the perfect tool for me or not, especially in the context of now, you know, enterprises, companies, businesses are demanding a better security, sometimes a better interaction between apps. Sometimes in the age of AI, they are thinking about everything is changing because we are leveraging these new technologies. Why not browsers? So you are the expert in that domain and we are relying on you, Mazi, today to educate us and tell us about, you know, what you have taught about this topic and you have done and bring us to kind of to the point that we can open our mind to some of these options that may be available but we didn't know about. Yeah, well, look, it's amazing to think I was in university when, you know, Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer came out and I started using those browsers when I started working. This is in the late 90s, by and large, browsers really haven't changed very much since way back when. It's been almost 30 years. And browsers work in almost the exact same way. Tabs going across the top. Everybody's familiar with tab overload and switching in and out of tabs all day long to get from this app to that app. And that's a problem that we saw several years ago. And we work with most of the big banks. It's a problem that they identified themselves as really hampering productivity. But now, as you said with AI, our fundamental thesis is that humans still matter. They're not going away for many jobs and many of the most critical jobs and the browser in that context is the interaction layer between humans and the apps and the AI that they're using and really the control plane. And so it's really important that the browser be purpose built for that task. As you said, there's security concerns, there's productivity concerns. How do you make the human dramatically better at their job and do that safely? And so, yeah, it's a very, very interesting time right now in that space. And we think there's a major, major technology shift that's happening in the browser space right now that we're right in the middle of. And is it true to say that you are talking about banks and most of your customers or most important customers might be financial institutes and banks because you are in New York City, if you were in Washington D.C. probably you would have told me now that hey, government agencies are majority of my customers. And if you were maybe some other cities, maybe some other kind of category of market, is it true? Because this can apply to many different segments, not just to financial institutes. Or you think that for some particular reasons really Even if you were somewhere else still, you would have thought about financial industry as your prime kind of audience. Yeah, look, from very early on, we knew that the problem we were solving was not a financial problem. It's a horizontal product. And you know, the. Any industry, including government, including insurance, healthcare, you name it. You know, any industry where security and compliance really matter, like regulated industries in particular, but also where productivity really matters, you know, suffers from these pain points. Everybody uses web browsers for work and they have all of these problems. You know, a few years ago we, we met IQT in Q Tel. I'm not sure if you're familiar with them, but they started off as the VC arm of the CIA and they found us and they said, hey, you know, these problems that you're solving, we have all of these problems in the national security space. And so we started working with them. They made an investment in our company, and through that relationship, we started getting a lot of exposure in D.C. and you know, two agencies, and we found all the exact same problems. You know, within the finance space, you know, a lot of the goal is how do you, how do you make money? How do you reduce risk? In the national security context, it's, you know, how do you reduce, you know, how do you save taxpayer dollars, how do you save lives? In the healthcare space, it's, you know, it's got its own key goals, but across all of these verticals, you know, the, the productivity problems and security problems that are raised by using your typical web browser are really, really critical. And, and those, those problems have just been magnified in, in the AI era. Yeah. You mentioned something to me when we spoke before this episode starts that you said people have that distinction in messaging system. Like for example, you use a Slack for work, but you use WhatsApp for messaging your friends, for example, and family members. But that distinction hasn't happened yet in the browser world. You use the same browser to visit something for work and then you jump in another website to read the news from CNN or do something on the personal side. And probably that's something that it didn't happen. Not because it couldn't happen or it should not happen. It just didn't happen. Probably because it was convenient for people and just open the tab and just jump somewhere else. And maybe it was as simple as that. Right. So it didn't really force them to use. How do you think it can change and why it should change? What are the benefits of, of really having a browser designed for work versus the browser that we use personally for our Personal stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Look, I love the Slack analogy. It really informs how I think about what's happening right now. As you said, I think that same revolution that happened with the separation of personal messaging and work messaging is now happening in the browser category as well. When I started working just to spend a few minutes on the instant messaging side of things. So when I started working at SBC Warburg Swiss Bank Corporation, they had built an internal messaging application that did many of the things that Slack does today. Okay, this was in 1997, 1998, right. The capabilities were already there. But for more than a decade after that, people in banks and hedge funds commonly used AOL Messenger, Yahoo messenger, other public Internet messaging systems for work. And I remember when Slack came along and there were other platforms, Hipchat was another one that El Asean bought. And I remember I asked my co founder, I said, well, they expect us to pay for chat. I mean it was, you know, I thought it was a ridiculous proposition. Who is going to pay for this thing that's supposed to be free? And then, you know, fast forward, you know, almost 15 years from that point and the idea that you would run anything that's mission critical or in any regulated environment, that you would run your work messaging on a public chat network like a WhatsApp or a Facebook messenger, you name it, I mean, you'd get fired. Nobody does that. Now flip to browsers, right? And I would say all the exact same problems and all the exact same reasons that drove the entire world to start using tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams. All of those exact same problems exist for browsers, right? And so you can start with security and compliance, right. I don't have in Slack, I have my work colleagues, my mom and my cousins and my friends aren't sort of in the chat list where I might accidentally chat the wrong thing, right? Well, in browsers, what do we have? We have mission critical apps with sensitive data in them and the exact same browser. The ability to go to public Internet sites that could be trusted or untrusted could be compromised. Right. And just the mixing of those two things is the first part of the security threat. Right. They need to be isolated. But you know, beyond that, the audit trails around that, the access controls around it, right? So the ability to say, well, the data is too sensitive. I don't want to the end user to be copying and pasting or screen sharing or screenshotting any of this data. Right. Those aren't, those aren't capabilities that are, you know, typically available in web browsers, but they're needed in the work context. Right. But then if you move into, like, productivity, when people think about tab overload, everybody's experienced this, right? Switching in and out of tabs, you know, you have so many of them, you don't even know which tab is which. Right. And I never open more than 90 tabs. Right. No, just kidding. It's impossible. Right? I mean, like, everybody experiences this problem and, you know, so you start to think about, well, what's a better way? Right. And so as an example, in our product, in here, we've created something called a Super Tab. So Super Tab is the ability to combine multiple apps, multiple tabs, into a single dashboard. Okay. So now when I'm doing a task, whether that's research or HR or you name it, I can pull up a Super Tab, has all the apps I need instantly available to me, so I can see all the information that I want at the same time. Right. Also, the apps can talk to each other. So when I'm focused on a particular client or a particular employee, I type that into one app. All the other apps can update automatically to show me information for that individual. And now how do you weave AI into that workflow as well? So we actually learned about all of this working with the biggest banks in the world. They were the ones who told us, hey, we need productivity. And these are the differences in how we need the experience to work to get that productivity. And so that starts to become a very, very different product than your typical web browser in terms of the interaction, in terms of the security, in terms of the capabilities. And it's different in very much the same way as Slack is different from messages on my iPhone. Right. It's both texting, it's both messaging. But there's all these other capabilities in Slack that I need for work that I don't need when I'm messaging my friends. Yeah. And as you mentioned, you know, we have this big magnifier accelerator now named AI that can magnify, you know, act as a magnifier, essentially. Now, if you have the browser and now you have AI in the AI age, what kind of changes do you envision to happen related to the browser? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are. There are so many, and they. They're changing every day. But let me hit on some that are just very topical right now. Sure. So I think a lot of where folks, you know, even in the past six months had been focused was on using AI to replace humans. Okay. And there's obvious ROI in that. As terrible as that might be, and a lot of people were focused on that. But I think what people are realizing now is that, yeah, there are certain kinds of tasks where the AI can do a better job than the human, but there are many, many roles, and I would argue right now, most of them where it's not quite that simple to replace the human. And you might not want to replace the human for a variety of reasons. You need judgment, you need creativity, you need strategy, ethics. There's all kinds of things that reasons why that human still really matters. And as long as humans matter. And my own view is that that's going to be the case for sometime to come. In fact, you know, I'm at this Gartner conference right now where they're predicting that, you know, that, you know, even by 2030, most of the SaaS apps that humans use are still going to be used in all the same firms as they are right now. You know, so as long as, as long as those humans are there, they need to use those apps in a controlled way, but where ideally the AI is making them better at their job. And that's where we see the browser as the interaction layer between the human and the AI and the control plane where you're ensuring that that's happening in a safe way. Um, but you know, that is that, that's something that virtually every firm we work with right now is grappling with. Right? How do they, how do they do that? A lot of people are, you know, looking at, well, we gotta, the first thing we gotta do is like lock down AI entirely, right? Cause they're, they're, they're petrified of a catastrophic problem happening. And those risks are absolutely there. But you know, simply locking down AI is, you know, that, that, that doesn't make you better and it doesn't help anybody, right? To just lock down AI. You want to lock it down, but you also want to improve the overall experience. So the AI is coming to the end user and making them better as part of their workflow. That's, and that's really where we're focused there. There, there are other opportunities with AI that you, you know, you know, are about automating tasks and replacing the humans. But we're very focused on making the humans better. Yeah, no, that, that makes perfect sense now with all this agentic AI and you know, everything that is going on. And in a way, some of these changes may not happen within that time frame, even if it's going to happen at one point or happen in a different way. I do remember when I attended Gartner in 2004 in Chicago and that was analytics. And still I have some slides from those kind of days that Gartner said in two, three years this will happen and this will improve. Hasn't happened yet. We are still waiting. Everyone knows this will happen, but still we need to see when. And it's 22 years after that. But some of these changes take time. And it doesn't take time because technology cannot do it. It takes time because also we as human need to, you know, just adapt those technologies and also adopt to those environments that are being created. Then that takes time. Having said that, when it comes to really this kind of agentic AI and digital workers and they are kind of, you know, trying to, as you said, at least on easier stuff, I'm not saying they are there yet and they can do everything we do as humans, but at least on some of these more repeatable and more tasks that takes time and it's redundant and human even doesn't like to do it. And humans want to outsource it to AI. In fact, they appreciate many of those tasks to be automated. Then this agentic AI is kind of getting more common, gradually getting there. And more and more agents we see are being hired more digital workers, at least for simple tasks. And as they kind of go to browsers and they get the job done like we do as human. And sometimes even I watch them and they really go one path and they think and they go to the other path and it exactly like a human that thinks that maybe I should try this and then learn and try something else. And sometimes creativity, try this option what happens. Right. So you mentioned that, you know, monitoring, auditing, understanding, analyzing the behavior, it's just are going to be more needed because it's not just us in the future using it. And you need to see, you know, what happened, when happened. Maybe this is the agent did it, maybe I did it. So that becomes more required in the future. Anything else that you may say? Well, if AI agents are using the browsers also think about these, think about other things. Is there anything else that comes to your mind that we should be aware or we should think about it within that context? Yeah, and look, you just use the word context. And that's in a way that's maybe the most important concept in AI. If you got the right context, you can get the best answers. And the simple insight is that the context that the AI needs when they're trying to help the human, it's all right there in the browser. It's all right there in the apps that they have open in the specific pages they're on, the records, they're looking at whether that's a patient record in a hospital or it's a high net worth client for a wealth advisor. So all that context is right there. So one of the first things you need is, well, how does AI get to that context? It just lives in the browser. It's not running on a server somewhere, it's not already in your system somewhere. So how does it get to that context? The way we approach that is we say, look, whatever AI system you've set up within your company, it could be cloud enterprise, it could be ChatGPT Enterprise or something you've built yourself, whatever that is, be able to plug that directly into the browser. Now when the user prompts, the AI can see what the user sees and has all the context available that, that the, that the user has access to. That's the first thing. The second thing is the AI may decide, I want to take an action of some kind. But you know, many of the actions that are important are, you know, require a human in the loop, require somebody to exercise some judgment just to make sure, hey, we're not going to make a catastrophic error right now. Right? And so, you know, I've used Claude for Chrome and I've watched it clicking on things. I mean, it's like genuinely frightening. I was looking for the cancel button when I saw what it was doing just on my email inbox. But just now, imagine you're talking about executing a trade, right? You know, finalizing an amputation. Right. I mean, there's all kinds of things where it's like, you're not just going to have an AI go do that on its own. So, you know, what if you could get the AI to invoke the application automatically that the human needs, right? Pre fills out all the fields that the human might otherwise have to fill out, but still allows the human to review, inspect, and then say, okay, right. So these are simple capabilities, but that's when we think about how do you make the human better, right? And you know, you still need them there, but how do you make them just better at their job? Those are a couple of the examples for how you do that within the browser that they're already working in. I'm going to ask you a random question, has nothing to do with this discussion. You have been in different cities and I wanted to know if you wanted to tell me, Armand, you need to really go to this place and if you have two Weeks to spend. It will be very nice. I enjoyed it when I was there and very relaxing. Very nice city. What city and which city would you would suggest? So a city that you've. I guess I've probably not been to. That jumped in my mind when you said that is a city called Feline Valdarno. It's in the Chianti region. It's not, you know, it's not on the typical sort of, you know, tourist map. But I happen to know it because my uncle went to move there and lived there for 40 years, maybe more. Yeah. So I've. So it's a place I've visited a lot and it's a beautiful town and it has all of the charm that you would expect from a small town in the Chianti region. Fantastic. That's great. I appreciate it. Now back to a general question on the software industry. Now this again, going out of kind of specific questions regarding browser or something. It's more general. If you wanted to start a software company today, you just graduated from your university and you just came out of Cornell University. Now you are searching for a job or you are searching maybe thinking, should I start a company? And then you say, you know, maybe I have this idea what would be that kind of company that you start. And you know, what kind of things you would do or you would not do doesn't have to be about a particular idea. You may say, Armand, if I were to start a company, a venture, a job, these are the things I would do in this age. This is the thing I would not do. Based on everything I learned, I'm not going to do this. I'm going to do this or I'm going to start such a company. Anything aligned that from someone with some experience, but going to a time machine, putting himself in a time machine and then going back and then say, with all the experience. Now I'm back to being 20 something years old and I wanted to do this. Yeah. So. So. And, and the question is, what, what would I do? What would I do today? What you would do or what you would not do or what kind of company you would start, if any. Just interesting, kind of. I wanted this to be random. I didn't tell you about this question at all. You don't know anything about it. I just want your kind of immediate response that comes to your mind. And this is what something I would do in this age. And that's. Some people will resonate to it. Right. So resonate with it. And they would say, okay, that's great. Because I'm especially my son or myself, I'm at that age and I want to start something that might be a good idea for someone or might be a good guideline for some. Yeah. So look, the, the first thing I'll say before telling you what, what I might consider doing is I'm a, I'm a big believer and I think, you know, this is, you know, entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs in general mostly have had the same experiences that, you know, I'm a big believer in, you know, understand, like deeply understanding the pain points that you're trying to solve. Right. Having experienced those pain points yourself, understanding that space really well because, you know, there's, there's lots of ideas out there and there are things that might look interesting. But if you don't deeply understand the pain points and you don't have the domain experience, then it kind of doesn't really matter what you're doing. It's going to be really, really hard. I mean, it's going to be a lot of on the job learning. My last question for you, Mazi, would be about book. If there is any book that you would recommend to the audience that professionally or personally, you like it. Yeah, definitely. So I think it was in 2004, the, the CEO of the last company that I was at gave me the book Blue Ocean Strategy. And I remember reading it and I guess in a way for the first time understood the strategy of the last company that I was at. Why were we doing the things that we were doing? And it all made perfect sense, but it's amazing how well it holds up, you know, more than 20 years later. I forget exactly when the book was written, but I read it in 2004 that, that the lessons in that book are as valid today as they were way back when. And the basic, the basic idea is that, you know, like in entrepreneurship, you know, you don't want to, you know, create a like, for, like, product that's competing in a red ocean with, with everybody else. Right. You want to, you know, create new categories for the product that, you know, that, that differentiate it in, in important, like, useful ways where you're not down to, we've got all the same features and capabilities and now let's just compete on price. And so, yeah, so that, that's very much informed how we've approached things at here in the browser world. One of the trends you'll see for anybody who knows something about enterprise browsers is nearly everybody who is familiar with that term understands it as a security, like a more secure browser. Right. And we looked at that and said just based on our experience working with the customers we work with, that, yeah, of course security matters. Security is table stakes. If it's not secure, it can't be used in a regulated environment. But that's not the only thing that matters. Productivity matters too. AI and AI enablement matters too. And so the browser for work actually needs to do all of these things. It can't simply be more secure. And so that's informed our strategy. And that's why today we have a product that's very differentiated from your other enterprise browsers that are out in the market. Fantastic. It was great speaking with you. Thank you again for joining us today and we definitely, I definitely will follow you and you know, hope to see you again in this podcast maybe, you know, a couple of years from now and see what the has happened and just hear more about the browser world and the changes that have happened. Thank you so much, Armand. Really, really enjoyed this discussion. Thank you for having me. Thank you for listening to SAS Scaled with Arman Eshragi. For show notes and any resources mentioned in today's episode, go to saskale.com if you're enjoying our show. Give us a five star review and share on LinkedIn. And be sure to subscribe for any updates on future episodes. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Curve, A the modern no code analytics solution. The tools you need to take action with your data on a platform built for maximum scalability, security and cost efficiencies. If you're ready to reduce complexity and dramatically lower costs, then contact us today@crave.com that's Q R V E Y dot com.