Interview with Scott Milener, CEO of Browster

Sure, thanks Nathan. Browster is the fastest way to browse. Browster is a free plugin for Internet Explorer and Firefox which consumers can install into the browser from www.browster.com. That makes it much faster and easier to browse through and get search results and your shopping sites, and your news like Yahoo and eBay or Yahoo News or CNN. It makes your whole browsing experience faster and easier.

My cofounder Wendell Brown and I were looking through the Internet and kind of be spending a lot of time searching, and this was actually 2004, and we realized that the way we put it the browsing is broken and that we do too much clicking too much use the back button, too much time waiting for pages to load and what this causes is illustration searches actually in precision access to data. If you think about what you are doing online you are always looking for some information, thats really the only reason you browse or search. The information might be entertainment or it might be news or it might be data or shopping but really thats all you’re trying to do. And with the clicking and loading of pages and the back button and all of the, if you map that process its very tedious. All the tiding around that we realized there must be a better way and that the browser has had a sort of Legacy designed on hyperlinks that no longer work at current level of searching and shopping that we do. We invented Browster as a way of looking at links instantly, just by mousing over the link and we bring the page to you in the Browster window and if you don’t want to be there, instead of using the back button you just mouse out and the page is gone and you’re back to Google or you’re back at Yahoo! So to change the way we access pages that makes it sort of more fluid and hence faster.

Correct. Browster is a free plugin or add-on for IE and its an extension for Firefox which anyone can get. Its also on our website www.browster.com. We also have lot of bloggers that have links to it, thank you to the bloggers, and of course site like tumble.com are probably the smallest partners. What we decided to do was make an enhancer to browser like Internet Explorer Firefox, instead of making yet another browser. We realized that those people who don’t use Firefox wants to enhance that enhance that experience with the Browster plugin so that we don’t have to switch to another application for browsing.

We launched the Beta in March of ’05 actually and we announced the company at the DEMO conference, which I am sure you’re familiar with in February of ’05. And the BETA came out and we jumped ahead of ourselves because it was so popular we realized we were getting tens thousands of people on our BETA when we really just wanted a few you know to try it out and work on it and then we realized with the one we did in July of ’05 and then we are now about to launch our 2.0 coming up soon it will be press announced before that. So we have come a long way in the last year.

We are approaching half a million installs and adding a good number of users everyday. So in the 1.X as we call it, we spent the last sort of 6 months tuning and tweaking and learning from users and getting ready for the 2.0 launch much as you do with an early version and we’ve got more users than expected on this version and then behind the 2.0 we are going to see quite a bit more marketing and more consumer versions now that we’ve sort of figured out exactly what customers want and we’re achieving new things, just a big push as we expect to get faster ranges sometime in the next five months or something.

Browster really is a sort of next generation web navigation. We believe that browsing can be greatly improved and so you will see in the next version additional features and designs that take us even beyond the previewing kind of mouse-out functionality that we have now into what we’re calling personalized viewing. Thats a big area we believe the web is going to be moving into. As you know personalization has become really the sort of web’s biggest driver now with software networking and blogging. And it turns out that the web is actually not created by publishers, its created by its users, and its distributed by publishers, but the cloud in the middle is actually being treated by the perimeter of all users on the outside. And that personalization is sort of powered to people and so Browster as a client side tool you will see us do more around personalization of your viewing. Imagine that I am on MySpace or on CNN News or I am on eBay and you know the page is complex and I don’t look at most of the content and it’s slow to load and I don’t want to look at all the content ever time I come. Why can’t I just look at these parts of that page as a simpler in Browster say, and then maybe do more if I want to actually spend more time on that page. So further in helping navigation and speeding up the experience you will see us personalize the viewing and give users control to do it themselves.

Two key things are you can view more pages but also in less time. And so you can view more pages in the same amount of time, more pages in even less time or just save time on what you already would have looked. So there is sort of metrics that we measure. On a given search, say on Google, Browster users, and this is directly out of our metrics, Browster users will look at 2 to 3 times as many pages as they do in our browser, which is a huge number. So did you know typically on a Google search the users look at 5 or less results, I think the average is 3. And a very few users actually get down to page 10, and then only a small percent of users click the page 2 and keep searching. In Browster we are seeing users look at an average of about 16 pages and twice as many users go to page 2, and that’s directly associated with the ease and speeds of site. Moving through them more quickly I can look at more. They also tend to look at more ads as you can Browster over sponsored links and look at ads. And so users just start finding its just an increased search in the meantime and the speed enhancement so if I only want to look at a few pages I can zip through them in Browster and per page you can look at page in about half the time. So typically the page load is just about a few seconds you know on broadband, but Browster because the pre-fetching and the rendering that we do A page comes up in one-sixteenth of a second on average. And if the page already preloaded, about half the time total so about half to one second. So you are cutting the time in half to look at the same amount of pages.

Good question. That information is harder to get but we do have some from our own studies and its about the same amount of time. So people who aren’t content just want to get to it faster. So what we find if you click through a page loaded and decide you are not going to be there and that you don’t want to be there because it’s not useful, hit the back button, that decision time or viewing time is about the same as if you were to bring that page up at Browster. But people do spend a fair amount of time and more and more we find, one thing about Browster is that its a full peek view when mouse over a link you can click in and move around as you normally do, but then mouse out and get back to where you were as opposed to hitting the back button. So that whole search process of viewing and then deciding to be there and they are clicking down is about the same, thats where the user is doing their normal thinking process. Well we have some interesting stats around it. For most of the users they at 10% to 20% of the pages in Browster as opposed to the browser, which is significant. So between 1 out of 10 and 2 out of 10 but almost one fifth of the pages are viewed in our world so to speak or then even in the Browster window. And that’s where people are spending more time in the Browster window. And then in the meantime we have this set of users who looks up more pages in Browster than in the browser. So it isn’t all just aggregate anonymous information we don’t have any personalized information. But in the aggregate we see specific user that we see sort of there is a long tail on a chart of an anonymous user but we can see that in a given session there is a certain number of users that had 10 pages viewed in their browser and more than you know say 40 pages viewed in Browster. So they’ll start a session through a search and spend the rest of the time in Browster. Its a pretty significant change, and we’re going to see more and more of that happen.

Browster makes money on Pay-for-Performance marketing. Today in the current versions you won’t see it. The 2.0 versions, it will be there so Pay-for-Performance marketing includes search referrals where we will drive traffic to Yahoo! or Google and get paid for that traffic. There is shopping where we help users find better deals. If you choose to view an offer in Browster we can rate their sure on top of our window. And we can also show Pay-per-Click ads either in the top of our window or you can mouse over one of our icons and view a Browster offer for a matching item, all of we get paid by the ad works, similar to, the same way Google makes money actually.

We would only show advertisements in the Browster window. If you choose to bring a Browster to view a page and then we would show them what we call non-invasively. So we will have a texture space that opens up above the Browster Window thats got sort of, its called a slider or if we showed and if we gave you an icon that said it was a way of money you can mouse over that icon and choose to bring up Browster to see if there is a better offer. So its sort of a real-time tool to view the ad in Browster or above Browster, we would never, you know, sort of put ads right on top of the page.

Browster is an extension to search and thats one of the biggest values that we bring to both the user and to the search engine, thats what interesting, we are good for both. So, its good for the user because you can view pages without having commit to go there. Its good for Google because they can view pages without really needing Google or Yahoo! or eBay, because the thing with, see, Google when you click on a link you leave Goggle which is actually bad for them, its also bad for the user because they have a navigation issue. So the advertisers are also happier because the user pre-qualifies, thats exactly how you put it, and imagine how you decide to be there or if not, you know, back to the search engine and back onto another page. More time spent on the search engine and less time spent on pages I don’t want to be at. But if I do move through an advertiser arguably that is worth something to the advertiser because the user is self selected so to speak.

Well you know what we are doing first is building a business and building a user base and a great technology. And then you know however we act a CEO and our job is to return to our shareholders but you know first and foremost is to provide technology and great services to users. Certainly we are in talks with the major players, I mean these things are moving quickly and you know generally we are getting very good response to what we are doing amongst the top search sites and the top portals, and so you know I could imagine an acquisition on the horizon but its not really the focus. We focus on the core things and if an acquisition happens because its a good business decision then thats great. But you know I think you will see us hopefully smash in with more and more major players here over the next few quarters as they are looking pretty seriously at trying to work with us.

I’ve been in consumer software or internet software now for a constant 10 years, its hard to believe, since ’75, but thats helped a lot to understand you know how to build a company, you know a couple of startups that have gone belly-up and a couple that have gone pretty big like eVoice which we sold to AOL. And I’ve learned a lot about how the team is critical and how to provide something that the users really want and focus on the user. How to differentiate is a key thing and also having learned from the boom and the bust how to be careful with your capital and to grow at a pace thats healthy but not where you are growing faster that your means, that has been a key thing. And interestingly I think it went too well, we are starting to see companies do that again where they’re getting capital and they’re growing beyond their means because they are feeling the heat in the race again and I think thats a mistake. Some things work at their own pace, I think that is the key thing that I’ve learned at Browster.

The blogging people who are rock stars in their industry that has integrity and experience and have their solid ideas about what works and what doesn’t, so they don’t have to relearn. You want to get great leaders, people who can make decisions and be pragmatic. And also people who leave their ego at the door. So for me I like to see ideas based on logic and fact as much as we can get it and pragmatism, not about politics or ego or people worrying about looking bad. And the best team members tend to combine those things, and thats that I look for.

I think it takes the same thing that it always has. You’ve got to have a differentiated product addresses a big enough market need where you can critical mass of users. And then whether the users are paying or sort of a business model decision. But primarily you’ve got to address a new niche thats also bog enough and had its time, like you know the is Browster is hot now because it turns out the browser matters and that people are evaluating their time online and spending so much of it online now, and the interfaces to the web have changed that they need a better way to browse, they need people to respond to speed and convenience. Whereas you know eight years ago the web was too new, I mean in the beginning it wasn’t there yet. You’ve got to have timing, and that’s the main point thats palpable to people to a degree on that that you are solving. And you can do those things, you can build a stable on your own and I thing your business doesn’t have to be or have to be a half a billion dollar to be successful. In the Silicon Valley we have this idea that if it doesn’t, you know, if the word billion start floating around it must not be successful. But you know I think some businesses are quite happy being a 20 or 30 million dollar business, and its good. Now what happens though is if you do something that it fast growing, differentiated and a good business, again the big players do, so they tend to be sp fulfilling that you end up with a big player, but I don’t think its required. I think the same reason that you know there were 12 search engines on the market when Google started, and now Google is number one. I mean you can certainly still come in with something and you won’t hit a mousetrap and become a big player if you stick with it.

Well its not just the numbers, so you know we expect to cross the 2 million user mark within the next year and this depends on how rollout with partners. Some of the major engines we are talking to now where there is interest to distribute, I mean you know we will hit that number in half a year or less. So at that point, once we get into the millions users we will be doing as fine from a financial standpoint and manage to grow from there.

A lot of this has been organic. Browster has a lot of followers who use the product, and two, of course you need the kind of folks that like internet technology and they also are bloggers. And so there tends to be a really good overlap with people who use Browster and who are web users and bloggers, and they like to write about the things that they like. You’re aware that you have some corporate enterprise server application and you are probably not going to get purely as much written about it as people are going to be using. So that has been one good thing is synergy. Secondarily we, I have a blog, its available through Browster.com if you want to look at it and has gotten fairly good. The leadership in the industry going to my blog have been influenced by whatever they have read there which in terms has caused them to either write about it or just reach out to others and start to spread the word. And we look for what bloggers post about Browster and then we will make sure that we respond and become part of their community and part of that conversation.

I think the experience has to change and will change a lot. So this idea that when you do a search you get back a page full of link which you manually go through is ridiculous and this idea that the number one leader in the search and run a billion dollar business is based on that exact interface and this is the testament that there were very early days. Search has become more interactive, faster, easier to move through the results and a lot of it is about the interface and how the data is delivered to the user, which is exactly of course what Browster is stressing is that better navigation and easier bridging to your data and helping you on search for search sites like Google. And also I think it has become more targeted and narrowed in the results, so if you do a search at Yahoo! or Google they show you that you know three and half million results came back. You know I look forward to the day when they are not bragging about how many results they brought back but how few, right. So I do a search and its it has to be relevant to me, its been socially vetted and they bring back eight results because there is no need of looking anymore, and better tools and better at doing it and thats what happens, and its got fewer results. I am not sure about vertical search because since you type a search self filter so I think it will be big a search aggregate and when you do a search term or search on something they’re delivering you all of the web and usually all the data from the whole web but in your category as opposed to going through the vertical search engine per se because there is still the need for that because your – already tells the search engine exactly what to look for. So I think a lot of it is about experience and speed and thats of course what Browster is looking for.