I’ve been using Arc a long time. I’ve used it on and off for almost exactly 3 years at this point and have been using it primarily for about half of that. Now we’ve all heard the news that The Browser Company, the makers of Arc and Dia, have sold to Atlassian, the company (in)famous for Jira, Confluence, and the like, and people are not happy with it.

When a Startup Goes Enterprise

BCNY Isn’t the Only One

This has been happening quite a bit in recent years: Humane was acquired by HP, Superhuman was acquired by Grammarly, and now The Browser Company has been acquired by Atlassian. This usually is because these enterprise companies have something these startups don’t: cash flow and scale. I’m not going to go a ton into the finances of a startup and investment rounds and all that fun stuff, you can check out Theo’s video for a look into how startups raise money, why going to an enterprise like this is beneficial, and how these calculations are made from a business standpoint. He’s had much more experience in the startup world than I have.

Enterprise is Boring

The downside of all of this is that typically enterprise companies are—well—boring. They don’t do the flashy bleeding edge stuff that startups are known for. They don’t move fast, they don’t typically disrupt the consumer market, and that’s why these companies effectively die for people who aren’t in the enterprise space.

If you are someone who works at a large enterprise, you know all about companies like Atlassian, SalesForce, SAP, IBM, and other large names. They don’t really make consumer products, so the general tech news world that we live in doesn’t talk much about this.

What BCNY Actually Did Wrong

I’ve been rather up front about my thoughts on The Browser Company the whole time I’ve been using Arc and Dia across the internet through one medium or another.

I wrote a eulogy to Arc, I covered when BCNY said they were no longer going to be working on Arc in order to build Dia, I’ve included it in round-ups of some of my favorite apps (here's another one), and I talk about why I still prefer it over Dia.

Safe to say, I’ve been candid about my opinions on The Browser Company. Their problem was ambition—specifically ambition without foundation. It’s perfectly normal to have the dream of building something big, startups can’t exist without it. The issue was that Josh and The Browser Company were so focused on being big, they no longer cared about anything else. They started catering to what they thought the market would want and they kept trying to build themselves into that established company despite never having made a single cent off any of their products.

They couldn’t sustain what was really a façade of a corporation anymore. They hired too many people, they grew their valuation too quickly, and they killed all their growth by abandoning Arc. It’s a sad death, but it’s not surprising.

A Ray of Hope

Atlassian does seem interested in the product. Right now Jira is, like, unusably bad. A large number of the users of the software are true browser power users. They’re not people who have all kinds of customizations and all that, but they are the people with hundreds of tabs open all the time. At my own job, I have 5 different spaces with some 65 tabs open at all times. A focus on this kind of user wouldn’t be particularly flashy in the consumer tech world in which we live, but it could be genuinely interesting for an enterprise knowledge worker (which is where I spend a decent amount of time at my day job).

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