[thor-rodrigues]

I’m not sure whether I find it more worrisome or fascinating that we live in a world where a company that, as far as I know, has never generated a single dollar in revenue has managed to exist for over five years, employ more than 100 people, and still get acquired for this amount.

This isn’t criticism or sarcasm — I’m genuinely impressed, but also very curious about the rationale behind it.

[colelyman]

Agreed, to make it even more interesting Browser Company discontinued Arc earlier this year. So not only did they do all of the things OP listed, but also didn't have a current product when acquired.

[MarcelOlsz]

My experience with Arc was installing it, asking myself "I have to pay to change the app icon? wtf" and uninstalling it. Horrendous UI as well.

[ar_lan]

They have "Dia" - which is Chrome + AI chat?

https://www.diabrowser.com/

[mikodin]

My hunch is a loyal user base.

Anecdotally, everyone I put onto Arc and the person who put me on still uses it.

I’ve been using Arc for the last two years and was genuinely sad on its discontinuation. I now don’t really know what I’ll do when it goes away.

[emoII]

Where can I read about this? It still gets regular updates and is front and center on the browser company website

[darth_avocado]

There are some businesses that are simply not viable without losing money first. SpaceX cannot generate revenue until it first employs hundreds of people for a few years (maybe a decade) where they focus on building what will eventually bring revenue. Software has those problems too.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I'm told that it can take ten years for a vineyard to start generating profit.

[anon191928]

yeah and what makes them different compared to half baked fraud startups with no revenue ? most of the world would not believe that they will bring revenue in years?

[turnsout]

I mean this with no snark: I would love to see the investor deck that explains how an AI-powered browser is going to make any multiple of $610M.

[echelon]

I can't tell you how many designers I interviewed who told me they used the Arc browser. It was at least a dozen.

I'd never heard of the damned thing before.

I don't know why, but it appears to be popular with some creative demographics.

The browser is an essential pane of glass to platformization and taxing the web. Anyone who wins a browser with significant market share has a huge opportunity to capitalize on.

Not sure if Arc is that browser, but lots of teams are trying.

Chrome is shitty on purpose because it is designed to sell ads. Other browsers can sell AI or other things to fund their development.

It's a shame we don't have a good open source browser with decent leadership anymore. I'm sure they'd be killing it. I could swear Mozilla is led by a revolving door of paid off Google plants.

[pqtyw]

And there are business which will never be highly profitable unless the competition implodes for no particular reason (like making your own browser).

[specialist]

Atlassian has always baffled me. In that JBoss sort of way.

Explaining why they're successful and I'm not.

[ruszki]

Luck. It’s always just luck.

Of course, you need to have other ingredients too, but hundreds of millions, if not even billions of people have those skills too. Who win more among them is pure luck.

And in that, of course a ton of predetermined parameters, like where you born, who your parents are, what your skin color is, etc.

I have a friend who is worse in almost every skills which matter in our work. Not much worse, he is still awesome in his job. But I’m better. Every single person who saw us work in comparable environments would tell you the same thing. His career is still better than mine. And the single reason is that he born in wealth. He had the opportunity to live without income for years, and kick off a startup, and try to start some others, and simply try out, and risk things which I couldn’t do. Nothing else. Pure luck.

[porridgeraisin]

Atlassian essentially got a big fairly locked-in userbase that they will now squeeze using their existing proven mechanisms. Oh and they probably got a few free competent developers without needing to go through an expensive hiring process.

All told, probably worth 610M.

[gniting]

Browser users are not (by default) Atlassian ICPs so IMO there's zero lock-in. I am going to most likely change my browser very shortly because I don't see Atlassian building out Arc. TBC raised $50M, they and their investors got a good return in a short amount of time. This chapter is now closed.

[mritchie712]

are they locked-in tho? People loved Arc, but they killed it. Doesn't seem the reviews of Dia are all that great.

[dkyc]

I would think of it that way:

- no company generates revenue in its first second. Even if you start a lemonade stand tomorrow, you'll have to buy some lemons first. The time-to-revenue might be very short, but it's never zero. Therefore, making no revenue for 1 day or for 10 years is not a step change, but simply a point on a curve.

- Capitalism is basically a long history of creating vehicles with increasing sophistication to bridge that gap: provide funding for ventures that have returns in the future. This is intrinsically difficult, and it's easy to waste money, but it can work immensely. This started with the Dutch inventing limited liability corporations to fund ship expeditions, and today's VC is essentially an extension of that.

- It has worked well in the past to bet on companies that don't optimize for time-to-revenue, but something else – famous examples being e.g. Amazon, Google, Meta, who all lost lots of money initially.

Hence there can be companies that make no money for quite a while. And it can even turn out that the vast majority of the companies that make no money for a while never make any money. Accepting this risk is a feature, not a bug.

[mrkramer]

>- no company generates revenue in its first second. Even if you start a lemonade stand tomorrow, you'll have to buy some lemons first. The time-to-revenue might be very short, but it's never zero. Therefore, making no revenue for 1 day or for 10 years is not a step change, but simply a point on a curve.

Yea, it's called investment. If you want to get rich overnight play lottery or start gambling.

[blackqueeriroh]

This is nothing new.

[trhway]

less than a $6M/head - it is a steal. Not even counting whatever IP they have.

[rafram]

How much do you think it costs to hire people?

[rvz]

VCs are not allowed to lose.

[BoorishBears]

Atlassian invested in their series A. Atlassian decided Atlassian isn't allowed to lose