The Internet Is Becoming More Centralized. Here's Why It Matters | Ajit Varma, Firefox

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Speaker C: If I just like, look, long term is the Internet has to be free, it has to be open. It can't be controlled by anyone. And that's really what motivates me and why I really, like, think that it's important for Firefox to be successful. Firefox is building the best browser in order to preserve an open Internet. Like an open Internet means it's an Internet that's not controlled by anybody. And you can see a lot of them pushing kind of their own AI standards, whereas we are, uh, very much pushing open standards and that, uh, can switch any AI that you want.

Speaker D: Being model agnostic is just smart. If I'm using a browser that is only using one model, and then one day they experience an outage or something like that, my entire business falls apart.

Speaker C: Exactly. And there's also a big question on.

Speaker D: Ajit, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker C: Hi, nice to meet you and thanks, uh, for having me on.

Speaker D: It's an absolute pleasure. Um, I want to start off broad. So Firefox is one of those major browsers that's not controlled by Apple, Google, Microsoft. So I'm curious, for someone who's maybe not thought about Firefox in a couple years, how do you describe what Firefox is today?

Speaker C: Um, Firefox is what our mission is. We're building the best browser in order to preserve an open Internet. What that means to us is an open Internet means it's an Internet that's not controlled by anybody. It's built on open standards. Any developer can build those standards, and anyone can build a browser or a browser engine that can, uh, render and meet those standards. And our engine is called Gecko. A lot of the other competitors are built on either Chromium which is what Microsoft and Google are built on. And then um, Apple Safari is built on something called WebKit. And people often don't really think about like what is a browser engine. But the reason why it's so important is because these open standards make sure that there aren't gatekeepers that define how you can access and connect with all the other billions of people in the world. Um, most platforms aren't like that. It's like very special. So if you look at a platform like a mobile platform, another mobile operating system is almost impossible to create today because Android has all its own standards, iOS has all its own standards and developers are not going to invest so much money to build for another platform. So you have this entrenchment and that allows things like the stores in order to create gateways and charge uh, access fees and charge commissions. And so that's why for us the open Internet is such an important thing. And that's kind of the mission of Firefox and why we were created is to make sure that there aren't gatekeepers and that we preserve access, uh, to this great resource called uh, Internet.

Speaker D: Awesome. I love the mission. I want to understand more about the engine part of this. I think when people think about browsers, they just think Safari and Chrome works because Safari and Chrome works and Mozilla and Firefox work because they work. So explain how the engine intersects with the browser and how they work together and what that actually means.

Speaker C: Yeah, so the engine, you can kind of think it is everything that's inside the frame. And um, say if you go to a website, you type a URL into your address bar. And if you go to um, ah, any site out there, but let's say you go to Google Docs or something then now within that frame that is rendering the code that say Google Docs has built or Maps or anything like that, the browser is then also encompasses things that are around that frame as well. So things like the ability to do split tab, vertical tabs, the ability to look at your history, uh, save your passwords, a VPN which we recently launched. And the engine is what makes more powerful sites and web apps possible. And I'll rewind a little bit of history. So Firefox is based upon on originally, um, a company called Netscape and this was like one of the first successful browsers out there. Um, it was acquired and then it spun off into an open source project which is kind of the genesis of Firefox. Around that time you actually saw stagnation in development. Of the browser engine. And so, um, for people who remember those web 1.0 days, it was all static kind of sites. It's like, here's some context and you tap a link and you get some more context. Um, but rich apps were really not possible. And so Firefox, when it came in like Internet Explorer, kind of had stagnated because Microsoft didn't really have an incentive to create a better Internet. Um, it actually moved most of its people off of the browser onto other projects because they wanted people to install applications because that helps the operating system. And so what Firefox, originally with a gecko engine, started building all these rich features, and that's what made all these, like, apps like Google Maps, Gmail or some of the original ones possible. And so people I'm thinking about today, but, like, the ability to, like, drag a map, like, and have things like render and have JavaScript power, all those things are more possible. And so now people sometimes ask, well, isn't it all done? Like, what is there left to build? But surprisingly, there's like, so many standards, uh, that are continuously, like, being pushed. Um, and so some of the exciting ones that we're building are just, how do you create, like, richer and richer, like, applications that feel faster, that are more powerful? Um, and ultimately it's that, uh, hopefully all web apps can compete with any natively downloaded app in terms of, like, performance, speed. Um, and the richness of the applications are still, like, there's a lot of progress to be made. And so a lot of our development in the engine is just like, how do you just make that better? Then we get into kind of new, interesting stuff that's coming up as well, which the shift to AI is now emerging that people want to interact with, uh, the Internet in different ways. And so you get, um, new protocols. Like one is called mcp, which is basically, are people going to build websites that are not just for humans, but also for agents as well? And these are all new standards that are coming up. And a big thing that we are really pushing is to ensure that all these new things are open standards versus consolidating on any particular, uh, preferences that any of the big oss, uh, have. And you can see a lot of them pushing kind of their own AI standards, whereas we are, uh, very much pushing open standards and that you can switch any AI that you want.

Speaker D: I'm curious about that. From what I understand, when someone comes into Mozilla, they come into Firefox and they use it. You have the choice to use whatever kind of like AI model that you want when you're searching, like explain a little bit more about that from the user experience perspective.

Speaker C: Yeah, so, uh, we're very early in understanding how people want to use AI within a browser and there's been a lot of attempts, I could talk a little bit more about that, but there has been anything that's really stuck, uh, with users yet. It's, it says a lot of like, experiments. And so within Firefox, um, we understand that there are a lot of people who want AI, but then there are a lot of people who don't want AI at all for, and that could be for a variety of reasons. It could be that they don't like the functionality or it could be that they're worried about societal concerns, environmental concerns about AI. And ultimately like that's one of the benefits that we have at Firefox is that we are not an AI company, we are a browser company. And unlike a lot of the other browser companies, when you look at what I call as like their hierarchy of needs, it's browsers here, their AI adoption and success is probably their higher need than their browser success. And so you see a lot of the uh, forced integration of AI and it's tied to their own individual AI. So when OpenAI launched a browser, well, guess what, it was all built on ChatGPT and it was very integrated and you couldn't really do anything else. Um, and you see this with Gemini in Chrome, you see this with Copilot in Edge. Um, and the point that we're taking is that we don't have anything forced on users at all. And so any of the AI features that are coming up like it is an opt in experience, you have to take an affirmative action in order to enable it. We're also been starting small with things like on mobile we have something called Shake to summarize, which allows you to summarize a page. We have things like link previews, the ability to improve productivity by looking at your tab groups and suggesting names. But then also features that people really, uh, maybe not even think of as AI, like translations. And so this is one of the things that a lot of people are like, well, I love translations, but I hate AI. Most translations are AI driven now. And so our approach is like we want to make it so that people can pick and choose whatever features they're particularly interested in. Um, and so the longer term thing that we have is something called Smart Windows and I'll talk a little bit about that. But the sequencing that we did was first, before we were launching Smart Windows we built something called AI controls. And so this is almost like what we call a kill switch. If somebody doesn't want to be upsold, doesn't want to be seen AI at all, they can turn on the kill switch and then they can add anything like translations back and then we won't show anything at all. But the future um, is very likely that AI will have just such a big positive impact and transformative impact that we recognize that many, many people are going to want these powerful features. Um, but it's really important to understand what the trade off is. And oftentimes the trade off is you're giving data to a model in order to um, sort of get this context and then this. And so when we have this Smart Windows, it's basically an icon in the top upper right, you tap on comes up and then the screen will say um, first what model do you want to use? And so today we are giving three model choices and this goes from fast to more powerful to a balanced approach. Um, all these models have a different model powering them in the background and that could be open source models like Quinn, it could be Google models, It could be ChatGPT, uh, OpenAI models. Um, but we're trying to obfuscate it a little bit because a lot of people don't understand the difference between Gemini versus ChatGPT. But um, we are then making it for power users that someone can actually point to any model that they want as well. If they have a local model that they understand that this local model may be less powerful, less up to date, but it's much more private, you can point to a local model. Um, and so with this choice that is one of the big differentiators of when you are looking in Smart Windows and the models that power the new features that we're having, you can really bring any model uh, that you want with you or change it at any time, which is pretty different. I don't think any other browser offers uh, that kind of flexibility.

Speaker D: Uh yeah, and I think at a baseline level like being model agnostic as just smart, like it's pretty much a non negotiable. Like a lot of our business, we're trading organizations and if you've used Claude recently, you've seen all of the outages and hallucinations, it's like okay, I've built my entire workflow and my entire business on this model and now I can't use it. Right. So I'm using a browser that is only using one model. And then one day they experience an outage or something like that, my entire business falls apart. Like, yeah, what am I supposed to do?

Speaker C: Exactly. And there's also um, a big question on what is the, the I'd say personality, what is the tone? What is the biases that you expect from an AI model as well? And the reality is that it is going to probably change. Um, and I think it is. If everyone looked at the same AI model and asked it the same question and it gave back the same answer, well then it's going to be like very boring world because everyone's going to see the same thing. And so having this choice in user agency and where you can say, I want the temperature to be really creative, I want this model to be really creative. And we have been experimenting. Do we even let people toggle our open source models to go? The temperature setting could be like, yeah, let me make this super creative or super conservative. Um, we haven't got there yet because I don't think that a lot of people like understand that level. But I think in the future you could uh, you could imagine a world where people just are very familiar and they can fine tune AI themselves.

Speaker D: Yeah. I think something that comes into my mind with, with this right now is my general thesis is that the majority of people are lazy. Right. Majority of people just want one browser, they want an iPhone with icloud keychain. I can't be bothered even filling in my password anymore. Uh, I guess my question for you is like, how do you make this selection, this choice, this customization so good from a product standpoint that people want to do it right and they aren't going to be lazy.

Speaker C: Yeah. And the reality is we are very familiar with the power of defaults. And I think that the uh, reason that Firefox is most challenged is because of the patterns and the fact that people don't really ask themselves like what browser should I use? Um, it's just they'll use what they have and it's very rare for products. Like even if you look at other commoditized products like what soda do you want to drink? There's this like moment where you're like, okay, do you want Coke or Pepsi? Because you're in the grocery store, you have to make a choice. Um, and so a lot of the thing that we are thinking about within um, Firefox is not just do you have to build the best browser, but how do you actually let people understand, um, uh, like what these trade offs are? And so one of the Projects that I'm excited about that we're going to look at later this year is can you make it super easy to share your flavor of Firefox and the way that you've set it up? And so by this it's like, say, if I'm someone who's really passionate about privacy, like, I can go and toggle all the settings to say, let me maximize all the privacy settings. If I'm someone that's like, passionate about gaming, can I, like, you know, change the memory usage, change like the dynamic, change the new tab page to be like more gaming focused? And in the same way, I think of that as like in AI. And so if I'm like, you know, even if I say, like, if I was a company, like say in Anthropic, it's like, I don't need to build a separate browser. I can just make the anthropic flavor of the Firefox browser, create a link and then share it with other people. Um, and so I think this like, idea of like, maybe you have, um, like an individual who doesn't want to look through like hundreds of settings, but if we can make it easy for like an influencer or someone who does care, and you do have a lot of these passionate people and make it easy for them to share, um, to their kind of like followers of their audience, I, um, think that that could like, help this like, balance of making sure that there's thousands of flavors of browser, but not everyone has to think about the settings. They can easily, um, uh, look to someone to understand the best flavor of Firefox for them.

Speaker D: How do you feel about making that experience conversational? One of my favorite things to come out of my most recent months of AI usage is whisper flowing to Claude Perplexity and whoever. Right. And just being able to speak to my computer. That's my ideal version of work. Where does that fit into this conversation?

Speaker C: Yeah, um, so we are looking at this, um, we are actively working on it. Uh, primarily we're looking at mobile to start. Um, and so there's a lot of like voice APIs that we're looking at. Like, it just feels like a more natural kind of experience. And, and everyone brings up like the Star Trek Recorder. You can just talk to your recorder device and it does things. Um, the desktop experience, um, I think that we're definitely very open to it. One thing that we've seen is that there's so much muscle memory that people have into how they use it. And we've launched smart Windows and we Were like, okay, let's be more aggressive. And we removed the address bar and we put a single entry bar. And a lot of people that crossing the chasm becomes real around. Okay, well this is too much of a change. So now we're like looking at back, like what do we bring back? And so I think that um, if we add stuff it'll definitely be like additive versus replacing, kind of like the interface. But then uh, I think it's great for a lot of things like accessibility. It just feels more natural for a lot of people. Uh, so definitely we are looking at it for mobile and then we'll look at desktop depending upon how engaging it is.

Speaker D: Mhm. I'm very curious from your perspective what it's like to work inside Mozilla. From what I understand you've got a background in product at Meta, Google, Uber, a bunch more. You started at Deloitte I think as well.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker D: So all these experiences, kind of big companies, private organizations, and then you come into the Mozilla foundation, the corporation, like what sparked that change?

Speaker C: Yeah, so for me, um, you know I've kind of in my career alternated between a lot of like companies that, whether it's like big tech or founding my own company or working in startups. And the thing that has always motivated me is I want to um, have the biggest individual impact that I can have. And I kind of like look at what is individual impact and it's one is what is like the scale of the problem you're trying to solve and then what, what is your own individual impact on that? And so it's hard, it's hard to find that. So a lot of times like if you work at a big organization like Google, um, your absolute impact is mixed because the scale is huge. But if you weren't there, there's going to be someone else there and it's like a big company with lots of checks and balances. And it's kind of hard to say like any individual matters that much. Um, startup is kind of the flip side of uh, you have a lot of individual impact as a startup, but you don't have like the scale most of the time because it's not that many products that are, that are touching millions or hundreds of millions or billions of people. And so with Firefox, um, I think it is like great opportunity for me personally because it is uh, both the scale of the browser market is I think 3 billion people use a browser every day. Um, and then the individual impact is also what can I do to make the Internet better and have a positive impact on people's lives. And then looking at Firefox specifically around why I think it matters so much as the. I think that people assume that the way the world is today is the way the world will look in the future. And some of these things that we take for granted, um, they don't stay that way unless we work really hard to preserve it. And the thing that for me I look at is like the, the ability for a very meritocracy, like meritocratic society, a, um, very democratized society where everyone has access to information. Everyone who like, can hard can be successful means, um, that you really have to in my view, like have a very distributed system without gatekeepers and without controllers. Um, if you look at many of the successful companies today, whether it's Facebook, whether it's OpenAI, ChatGPT, whether it's Google, they all started off as a website. And the reason that they were able to be successful is because there wasn't a gatekeeper in front of them. They could create a great product and anyone in the world could discover that great product and start to use it. Um, if you look at uh, many even ideas like say, take crypto as an example. Crypto was not allowed on app stores. It was actually like, not like you couldn't have any crypto apps. So if you're like, well, what if there was only apps in the future? Well then you're not going to have a lot of the, Anything innovative, anything new, you're not going to have. I don't think that you would have had things like ChatGPT. You wouldn't have had things because they would have been controlled by the operating system. And so that's like the, the thing that I think is, is if I just like, look long term is the Internet has to be free, it has to be open, it can't be controlled by anyone. And that's really what motivates me and why I really like think that it's important for Firefox to be successful and make sure that there is competition so that even if the market share isn't there, it really is like a check and a balance, uh, against any one company from controlling the Internet. Um, and duopolies I think are the worst, to be honest with you, because I think duopolis make it seem like there's competition, but there's really not because you can see convergence of all the policies. If you look at like a MasterCard, Visa or Apple, Google, um, and so that's really like why I'm here, um, and why I hope uh, that over time like the best browser wins. And I think over time like the foundation and the structure of Firefox makes it so that we're not motivated by shareholders or not motivated by maximizing profits. We are motivated in more of a uh, in a mission driven way.

Speaker D: What did you think about the current ecosystem? Um, I love this idea of like having an independent ecosystem, having checks and balances. But I mean I follow the news, right? And it's Amazon's investing in Anthropic and Meadow with Google and so on. And it's like there's 30m 30 billion going here to Oracle, which is going back to this way, which is going into the Pentagon. Everyone's investing in each other and I guess a fight with us web of interconnections is so vast and complex that I've just went, I give up. You talked about like this idea that things that can change. I've been so confused by the I've. When I give up. What do you think about where we are right now?

Speaker C: Um, so unfortunately like I do think we are at this point in time where things are consolidated more and more. Um, and the past has shown examples of this as well. Like if you look at um, like you know, more familiar with like uh, America, but 120, 130 years ago you actually saw consolidation, whether it was steel making or the oil industry or railroads, um, and all the most valuable companies were actually those in those areas. And so then if you imagine, well today railroads are commoditized, like uh, power is commoditized. But you could imagine a world where all the value is extracted by the power company. All the value is extracted by the telco. The reason it doesn't is because actually government regulations came in and forced standards and forced openness. And so today where we actually see a lot of the competition in tech and where Firefox is actually doing well is actually in Europe. And it's because Europe wants to make sure that there isn't um, this consolidation. And to be honest, when you look at it from a global perspective, a lot of people are talking about like digital sovereignty and how do you make sure that companies aren't relying or countries aren't relying on companies that are perhaps controlled or influenced strongly by governments and maybe um, um, antagonistic in a way they weren't in the past. So this is like for me, um, this challenging. It is a challenging hard thing. But that's what's exciting about it. But I have to assume that if you gave something unlimited amount of time and unlimited amount of space I cannot imagine why it wouldn't be an open source product and a platform that won because the incremental cost to produce another browser or installation is just so low. So definitely uh, like at least I'm in the Pro. Open source will win over time, open systems will win over time because that's what users ultimately want.

Speaker D: Where else is open source winning would you say outside of browsers?

Speaker C: Um so I think that there are um still like open source systems that are powerful whether it's like a Linux, um, you know, but it is like a long ways to go. But there are a lot of things that I think people, people maybe um, take for granted. So things uh, like um, a lot of the web standards are open but there's also things like SQL. There's a lot of standards that were built by IBM many years ago that they just contributed back because I think it was a different era where companies were contributing a lot of things back. Um but open source is still um. I don't think most people think about open Source um and so definitely I would say it's hard to think of a lot of examples but uh, um, a lot of coding tools, a lot of development tools, a lot of engineering centric uh things. But on the consumer side it is more uh, a fewer handful of examples on the consumer side.

Speaker D: You're a big product guy. Does open source suffer from a branding problem?

Speaker C: Um I think that the kind of one of the points that you made earlier is that people want convenience and it's what, what is easier and oftentimes like because the profit margins may not be there for open source, it may not be like the most convenient and that's where people oftentimes like will pay for you know uh, I just don't want, I like it's, it's easy and I think everyone, it's very reasonable um to take like the easy solution. But that's where like at Firefox like we're trying to make it so that there's not a trade off. And so as much as like we're like well this browser is as good as any other browser, it's as fast as any other browser. There's no like trade offs that you have to make in order to support something that adheres to your values. And I think that this is like where it's key is like I think it's, it's beneficial, it's good to have the inspectability, it's good to have like the ability to verify anything, uh, by being open source. But ultimately you don't need to compromise on quality, uh, in order to do that.

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Speaker D: There's a, there's a difference in your user base compared to Safari or Chrome, right? It's people that care more about security, they care more about customization. Um, and I'm wondering if you've seen any shift and the users that actually have came onto your platform. On Firefox recently you mentioned the idea of like, like, um, influencers, right? Translating the value of using that. And I'm wondering if you've seen any kind of demographic or psychographic shift in the people that you see on your platform.

Speaker C: Um, I think that you definitely called out the strengths of Firefox. So privacy customization are definitely like the things that, that I think um, really drives people to, to Firefox Um, those are often more power user kind of features. A lot of people who care about privacy, like, it's hard to understand, like, what does that, that even mean? Um, and so a lot of our focus is actually, uh, how do we make privacy more felt? How do you make privacy more understandable? Um, and so features that we've launched are things like vpn, uh, things like email, uh, masking, uh, things like, um, we'll have a lot of stuff coming up over the next few months that say, okay, well, Firefox cannot see your browser history at all. That's not true of Chrome, that's not true of Safari. Uh, but it's like talking about it from an encryption perspective is hard for people to understand. And so how do we change that messaging to like nobody can see your browser history, not even Firefox? Um, and trying to make that simple. And this is actually where I look at a lot of the cues from my own background is before this I spent a lot of time in WhatsApp. And WhatsApp privacy was really important. But an interesting thing that I saw was that most, um, people will actually think that Telegram is the most private and will not even understand Signal privacy, where Signal is definitely the most private unless you're techie. And it's. Well, why is that? Well, Telegram has things like ephemeral messaging. It has things like secret chats. By default, none of these things are really there, but it's like people are like, ah, secret chats. That feels really private. Um, and so I say we are the most private browser, but we don't do a good job. So that's why I compare us to like Signal. We don't do a good job like explaining it. And so like, how do we get better at saying that? These are all these things that we're doing to really, um, increase privacy. And how do we help, uh, users see that on the customization side, again, like, the reason that I'm excited about this thing that we'll have later in the year around sharing is because customization takes effort. And so how do we make it so that you can actually make it that it's like, here's a one link, I take it I download it that I can have the flavor of the browser that I want. Uh, and so these are all things that we're hoping will help, uh, spread the word about Firefox. Um, but definitely, I'd say you see this convergence, um, on like very techy, very powerful power users who care a lot are kind of the users that are um, um, on Firefox. And then a lot of the more casual Internet users are kind of the demographics that stick with the operating system browser, uh, of choice, whatever that may be.

Speaker D: Something, a word you've used a lot throughout this conversation is the word feel. All right? And for example, you gave the, you gave the example of copy of secret chats. But beyond just copying words, how does someone feel privacy?

Speaker C: Um, so the thing is like, I think that there's like a lot of cues that um, that happen as you naturally use the product. And so one example is like private browsing mode. So in private browsing mode, I think a lot of people are like, hey, this is session, I want it to be more private. Like let me go into this, the private mode. Um, there are a lot of like caveats to anything in private browsing mode. Like your ISP can still see what you're doing. Um, um, if you log into a site like Yahoo, like, well, you've logged in and so can tire sessions. Um, and then there's all these things that you could do on top of it, depending upon what you want, like do you add a vpn? And so for us, like the way that it historically was, you load it up and then you'll put in all the caveats around this is what's happening because we're like, let's make sure your user really understands what's going on. And so our private browsing mode is much more private than say Chrome because Chromium incognito, like we disable third party trackers. We have uh, like very enhanced tracking protection mode. We do all these things. And if you show someone side by side, Chrome won't put any of the caveats. It'll just say it's really private. And people will say, well that's way more private because it's telling you it's more private. So I'm like, well, you know, we don't want to throw up a modal that's like these are all these things because in a weird way it like scares people. And so to me it's like this felt privacy. Like, well, you know, do you have like this like super dark screen? Do you have things like when you close the window, like it burns? Like that's what, you know, brave does it like, you know, reduct go like burns the screen. Um, and so these are like all these things that I'd say it doesn't change anything. Like the privacy could be less. But when someone sees like, okay, I close the window and the screen burned up like it feels more private. And so um, the felt privacy is this idea of like now because we are the most private and we're doing all these things. What are these cues in the product that makes it more accessible for people to understand that? And then for people who care a lot about it, then they can go into all the details and compare the difference of the private modes. Um, and what does login, what does sync mean? What does encrypted like end to end encryption mean? Um, but the average person I don't think should need to know all these terminology and technical concepts. They should just be able to say okay, this is a commitment that this browser makes. I trust this company, I can verify it, it's open source, I know exactly what's happening. Whereas that's like not true for any other browser. Like you don't know what's going on. And so these are all these things that um, I think um, technical people understand and how do we make that possible for everyone to understand?

Speaker D: Where does sound fit into this?

Speaker C: What do you by sound?

Speaker D: Okay, I come onto a browser, maybe there's the I enter that incognito window or the most private version of it and there's like a little thing where it's like a keypad unlocking or something. Is that uh, something you played with?

Speaker C: Um, we have not thought about that. But it's a good idea to uh, see if there's like something. I've not actually thought of that before but uh, can definitely uh, look into. That's a good idea.

Speaker D: Hey, if you need a part time product marketing brain to put a project, let me know. Yeah, I think what I'm curious about, like you've got this ability to experiment. You've spent so much time and product. I'm curious where consumers are smart and where we're dumb.

Speaker C: Um, so I think that uh, I would say like everyone is just different in terms of what they're optimizing for. And the thing is people want convenience. At the end of the day I think they want the technology to go into the background. And so I don't think most people think of this is a technology because I need to use this technology, is I have some job I need to complete, I need something I need to do whether it's like productivity, task or entertainment. And then they're looking like technology is like a way to make it easier, um, for them uh, to do it. Um, and so I think um, with products it's like well how do you actually make it easy? And I think One fallacy with a lot of products is you assume that more features actually make it easier for people to do things. And a lot of times, like, simplicity is actually what's important. And so a lot of the stuff that we focus on, like at WhatsApp and we focus on at Firefox is simple, is actually like a pretty powerful value proposition. And so it's like not getting in the way of people trying to complete tasks. Because I have some KPI or metric that I'm like, I need to get more adoption for like, account creation. So let me put all these account signups. Well, the user doesn't care about accounts. Like, what is an account? Help them. Um, and so the thing that I think that users are also interesting is that on the flip side is I see a lot of use cases where people spend so much work in order to prevent work from happening. And so, um, it's like finding examples. But you'll see people do spend so much effort in order to be lazy. And so I think a lot of this is like, well, how does technology then? You know how. But when you see things like agentic behavior, and I see a lot of, like, the cases, I'm like, it's so simple to just do the task instead of you're spending so much work to get, like, an agent to do a task for you. And I know people that are like, running like 10 agents at once and they're doing all these sorts of things that I'm like, do we, we have any benefit from that or not? I don't know. Um, so that's kind of like one thing that's interesting. But it's good to, like, see like, people trying new things and then, you know, we'll see, like, what works or doesn't work. Um, but, um, but I think a lot of this comes down to just, like, people. People want to do the things that they enjoy in life. And, uh, I don't think that people want to spend all their time, like, learning new things and, and doing complex things in order to, to do work. Um, and so it's like, I think the goal of product people and people building things is made things simple and

Speaker D: accessible as really, really good agents. Not the best example of simplicity. If I can just tell an agent to be like, go and book me a doctor's appointment, a dentist appointment, sort my mail and it goes, yeah, that would make my life ideal.

Speaker C: Yeah. And I think that that's definitely the hope in AI is you get to this, like, point where the agents are, are good enough and the rate of improvement is just, is just like incredible where it is. Um, it is like you, you see all these like great improvements that are happening, but the flip side of it is, um, all the AI slop that is being, uh, created. And um, I won't call anyone out, but I will say like, I, I read many documents that are so long and I read them and I have to read them again and I read them again and I'm like, I don't quite understand what is going on. And then after I read it three or four times, I'm like, like, I think this was 90% generated by AI because I'm like, these things like don't connect. And I'm like, I just wasted all my time because I'm like, it sounds good. And I'm like, what am I missing? And then I'm like, it just like doesn't quite make sense. And so I'm like, well, does that actually productive to create now hundreds of things? And so it's like, well in a weird way it's like if I have an AI agent and it's much better at sending emails. Well, someone has to read all those emails. And so then it's like, did you actually like make the world more productive or efficient if you're just producing so much like low quality content that then someone else then has to go like sort through. And you see this with like coding with, you know, we see the bottleneck isn't from code creation, now it's code reviewing. And so someone has to like review the code to make sure it's there. But I think ultimately the hope is that AI gets to a point where, you know, it is not needing to review by human. Is this like one bot talking to another bot and making people's lives better? And you know, you don't have to have a human review the document, it's just that, you know, everyone's reviewing it. I have an agent, someone sends me an email. Ah, my agent reviews the email and says, agents talking to each other.

Speaker D: Where does your AI use personally? Start and finish.

Speaker C: Um, so I use a lot of like the um, AI for like, let's say like inception and idea creation. So in general, like, well, you know, if, if I look at say from a work concept, I'm like, okay, I have this idea, let me start to come up with like even more ideas. You know, I want to experiment with creating a piece of code. Like, let me have AI like start. And I think that AI is, is definitely, maybe it's, you call it like the writer's block problem or like where to start. Um, but I think it's like been really uh, effective at that. Like uh, like, like origination and then I will like thing is, okay, these are great ideas, like let me edit it. Um, and so I think in a lot of ways like people become more like editors and more like what are this uh, intuition based of? Like, okay, there's all these things. Uh, but what is like my intuition, tell me, is like the best thing to prioritize case, right? Yeah.

Speaker D: Becoming the valuable commodity here.

Speaker C: Exactly. Um, but then a lot of experimentation. Um, for instance, like my wife like uh, has a small business and so I just been doing like the typical like vibe coding of like let me create a site and it is like the, the classic story of like you're like wow, like this would have, you know, five years ago taken me so much effort and now takes me like 20 minutes before. Like in my role, like it's just really hard to do coding because there's so much context switching. And so you need this like four or five hour block in order to like really do coding. Um, and so kind of like as you, you uh, as you do more management, like it's just hard to find that. But with AI tools you can really like remove some of the context switching of. Let me have an idea and let me go, Let like AI start running and then I come back and then I go ask it to summarize or tell me what's going on. And so you can do like multitasking a lot better. And it gets like back to like the craft, um, a lot more. Which, which, which I love. Like I, I, I love everyone to be builders. Like, I want people to be closer to like the metal and stuff like that. Um, and so like being in a world where there's less managers and more builders and creators, I think AI enables that which is great.

Speaker D: What are you most excited about for the future? When we take AI as like a lens that we're looking through personally.

Speaker C: Um, so for me the key is that AI has to be built for humanity. And so it's not built for maximizing corporate profits, but it's really built for making humanity better. Um, and one thing that um, that I've like spent a lot of time in my career is how can we make it so humans can do the stuff that they love to do and the stuff that they don't like to do gets put into the background. So as an example, like say if you love to cook and you are a Chef and then you open up a restaurant. The reality is like that person probably has to spend a lot of their time on stuff that's not related to cooking. It's let me go hire people, let me do bookkeeping, let me go do marketing, let me go do branding. And that's just like, well, this is all the stuff I need to do in order to spend some amount of time doing what I love to do. But for me, if AI does a job well, it's, well, humans shouldn't need to do that if they don't want to do that. If I'm a restaurant, I can focus on doing the stuff that I love, which is cooking the food. And then I go have an AI agent, figure out my brand strategy, my marketing strategy, do my taxes for me, and then I can do what I, what I love. And that's just like true for, for every industry. And so in a way it's like, how do you democratize, uh, um, uh, uh, things? And um, I'll, I'll also like give my own like personal antidote. So I started a company and when I started a company I was like, this is going to be great. I'm going to be an engineer and I can just program all day and it's going to just uh, you know, uh, like I can be my own boss. The reality was I spent all my time on everything else. Like I did the, you know, negotiating at least for our space to rent, um, going in fundraising, going in hiring, going and doing all these things. And so I was like, okay, I'm successful as a startup founder when I can go hire someone to do all these tasks that I don't want to do and I can just do what I want to do. I never got to that point. But with AI, I'm like, well, could you actually create this world where an individual can actually create their own company? And then you have hundreds and thousands of people that become entrepreneurs and run their own companies because just all this other stuff is just easy and very cheap to do. Um, and so that, that hopefully, hopefully will be, will be a uh, future where people can just do the stuff that they love, love to do.

Speaker A: You.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker D: I love the idea of AI being this great equalizer and um, providing a level of democracy. But I find it like hard to come to terms with or see considering where we're at and considering how motivated major governments and companies are through money, obviously primarily in the U.S. yeah. And I guess just how do you see that? Do you see there being any potential solution? Because I think most of these arguments come down to like, what can we do at an individual level to make sure that we do live in a fair society in the future?

Speaker C: Yeah, so this is where you have a lot of discussion on there's hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars. Like I think the estimated estimation is the hyperscalers are going to put $750 billion just in this year into building uh, out like the infrast structure. So then the question is like, well at some point that has to be paid for. And so you know, like if you look at a lot of other industries in the past, like things were, things were great. Like ride hailing was great at one point because there's so much competition. And I remember everyone's like this is great, like I can get a ride. It's so cheap, it's so easy. And then over time it's like well this is just as expensive as a cab. And you look at like unbundling of streaming. It was great. And now you're like, well now all the streamers have ads in it because they're just maximizing revenue. So you're like one thing, once something owns a market, does it just revert back to how it was maybe at a previous time? Um, and so I think there's a real risk uh, of that. And the way I think that that doesn't happen is that there's just such intense competition between all the companies. And that's to me why it's great to have an anthropic, it's great to have OpenAI, it's great to have Google, Microsoft, Meta, ah, all these competitors and even more getting funded. Um, because it leads to hopefully a world where all this is commoditized. And I think a commodity product is what ultimately means that there's all these sort of like low margin products that ultimately that the cost is not much more than the, than the value and as the value increases the cost has to decrease because users can easily switch to something else. Um, but if it consolidates, I think that that is the big challenge up then if know instead of hiring a human, do you then spend tens of thousands of dollars on hiring an AI? Then you're like well we didn't actually create a better world. It's just that the, the value is just accruing to, instead of human labor, it's accruing to a company that then creates a handful of trillionaires in the world. Um, and that's, that's a big risk. And so that's where competition matters. And you know, going back to like why I'm at Firefox is like I think that the open Internet is important to create like accessibilities and prevent g. But I would say um, people should experiment and make sure they're using all the AIs rather than going all in on an individual AI because I think that's the biggest risk.

Speaker D: Yeah, it's funny because the people that um, are the same people that advocate for anti capitalistic values and burn down the billionaires. The same people that cannot be bothered switching from Safari in their Eiffel. So I think you gotta, you got a big task on your hand with um, translating the value of product here. It's, it's a huge task and I hope, I hope that you accomplish it. And I'm, I'm curious, I'm really curious. You mentioned the idea of like influencers, right? And how can we get influencers to like actually talk about this? I'm curious how that plays out and if you guys have looked into like user generated, generated content. Um, I wonder if I'll be scrolling. I don't have tech talk or YouTube, but I, I have someone next to me and they're scrolling TikTok and they see a, a Firefox influencer one day.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean that, that would be amazing. Um, I think that it is something that um, we are now looking at more like we have a great cmo, uh, who's like joined, who has a lot of new ideas. And I think that we're definitely going to be trying a lot of things, things that we haven't tried in the past. I don't know which ones will work but ultimately it's like this learning mindset of let's go try new things, let's see what resonates, what works. How can we encourage people um, to care about the values that we care about? Um, and I do think that at some point competitors will make a mistake to show what they really care about. Not to make a mistake, but it's like they're going to show what they optimize for, which is shareholder profits and maximizing the share price. Um, and so you can kind of see this where people are like, why does uh, you know, Edge look like a copilot app? Well, because it's going to be a copilot app. Like it's not, it's not accidental. Like you know, these companies are very smart. Like they're not accidentally rolling something out, but it's like that's their, their hierarchy needs and their Value. And so by us, just like maintaining this, we are going to be the best browser. We are going to focus on choice. We're not going to like, you know, uh, prefer our own LLM. I think over time like we will start to work with other um, and you know, we have a lot of partnerships that we have with other um, uh, companies. But the um, increasingly like, I think that it will be just important for users to advocate, uh, to fight for what they believe in, to fight for an open Internet. And um. And I really hope you, we don't have to like go to a bad world and people see the negatives before they want to fight for. Hopefully we'll always maintain the positives. Um, but unfortunately I think that that is a very plausible scenario where it gets worse before it gets better. But I do think over time um, it will get to a better spot.

Speaker D: Just something that stands out from this conversation, I hope it stands out from the audience as well, is like I do a lot of podcasts with execs at big multi billion dollar corporations and there's a real demarcated difference and with the candor that you can speak to with um, in comparison to other people. Um, like you've admitted like faults or like we're not quite there yet with product or like we're trying to do better in this area. We want to translate the value. We're not, not done the best job of that yet. And you don't hear that. You hear more of like the corporate lines that have been fed by PR folks from other companies. Um, and I'm kind of curious from like a personal perspective, how does that feel? You spent so long being product of these huge corporations and now get this peace of mind or what does that feel like?

Speaker C: Um, I mean I'd say that um, it is amazing to be able to fight for building the best product. And the decision is you build the best product. And in a lot of ways I don't even think that Firefox controls Firefox the browser, Mozilla corporate. It's like a community product. Like we are built by a community. We're doing this all together. It's not just the people in the company. Is everyone like outside, uh, the organization as well, building it together. But I think a lot of times like at big companies it's, it's not that people aren't fighting for one thing or the other. It's that, it's that you have to reconcile a lot of different goals. And so it's like, well, you have to make More profits, and you have to, you know, push another product. And that is totally, like, reasonable. It's why the company's existence. I definitely, like, don't, you know, speak negatively like that. That's the reason the organization exists and they're doing the right thing, um, for the reason they exist. And so for me, it's like, it's nice to be able to just focus on building the best product. And I think as a product person, as an engineer, that's great, like to say, like, you are focused on building the best product. And I don't think a lot of organizations, um, I think a lot of organizations start that way, but then they evolve to, um, maximizing for another North Star. Um, and so it's great to be in an organization that is the ultimate goal and that will always be the goal in the future is just build the best product and the best browser.

Speaker D: I ask every single one of my guests the same question to finish with off. Um, I feel as if we've kind of touched on what your answer might be, but maybe it's something entirely different. Um, the only context I'll give you is that everyone kind of answers differently in regards to this question. Some people talk about family, some people talk about purpose, some people talk about their job, their work, whatever. My question for you, why do you do what you do?

Speaker C: So the reason I even got into technology was because I look at as like, how do you make the lives of humans better? And that is like, across the board is, you know, there's a lot of things, like, as a parent, you know, like, I spend a lot of time, like, making sure my kids are like, you know, good for the world. You know, that's like an important, uh, aspect of my life. Um, but it's like in the worst. And everything is just really like, how do you make, uh, things better? And the thing is, it's very subjective thing around, like, how do you make things better? And so for me, um, like, freedom, I think is like, very important. Uh, people being able to say that if I work hard, I can accomplish whatever I want in life. Like, for me, things like, uh, um, not being able to control your destiny, Whether it's a power of governments or power of companies or nepotism or inheritance. Like, these are all things that I think are, like, very negative for the world. And so for me, like, um, I want to make sure that there is competition, that there is like, capitalism. And these are all, like, really important because I think ultimately it gets this value of. Anyone can, like, create the life that they want and be happy in the way that they want without these, like, things like bad luck or, um, you know, societal like rigidness or it's set destination or fatalism happening. But people can ultimately create their own destiny. And so for me, like, Firefox is a big part of that. But all the jobs that I've, like, had I think are really like part of advancing that mission of how do you democratize the world? How do you create a level playing field?

Speaker D: Awesome. Well, Ajit, thank you so much for coming on. If people want to learn more about you, who you are, what you do, how do they go about getting in touch?

Speaker C: Yeah. Um, so I am, I am on everything like LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, X. Uh, so if you Google, Google my name, you can get, uh, a hold of me in many ways. But definitely love feedback. Uh, and if anyone has any feedback on how we can make the Firefox the best browser for them, would, um, always love to hear it and really want to emphasize the community aspect of what we're doing. And so we're going to do this together. It's not owned by anyone. It's owned by everyone. And, um, love to always hear feedback.

Speaker A: Awesome.

Speaker D: Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.

Speaker C: Thank you. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. Uh, so there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment

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