
Former Mozilla CEO raises $35M in under 30s for his browser startup Brave - andruby
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/brave-ico-35-million-30-seconds-brendan-eich/
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wmf
Yesterday's discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14453344](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14453344)

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keerthiko
This article has way more info than a tweet though, so I wish HN didn't tag
this as [dupe]. Although the link to the old discussion is useful.

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outsidetheparty
I'll say this much, Brave has done a marvelous job of branding this
advertising middleware platform as an ad blocker and privacy protector.

Look at question 15 in their FAQ.
[https://brave.com/FAQ.html](https://brave.com/FAQ.html) They're gathering
much more information than regular ads are able to, and they're using that
information to push more highly targeted ads at you. That's the business
model. All the handwaving about how that information never leaves the browser
is irrelevant; it's still being used to push ads at you.

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BrendanEich
Sorry, that FAQ's way out of date. We won't do anything other than what other
browsers do for history, anti-tracking (see Apple's announced on-device
machine learning for third-party cookie blocking exception management), etc.
in baseline Brave without users opting in. Any machine learning ad matching
code will be a separate open source codebase and downloaded component.

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outsidetheparty
That's good news, and represents a significant change for the better compared
to the last time I took a serious look at your company. I still find the whole
ad replacement concept problematic, and I wish your marketing materials were a
bit clearer about which ideas are current, which planned, and which abandoned
-- but making it opt-in does go a long way toward allaying those concerns.

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BrendanEich
Could you do me a favor and point out any more old junk on the site that you
see? We scrubbed but clearly missed FAQ items, too much eng work not enough
mktg, lol. Thanks!

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roryisok
I'm amazed there's been no mention of HNs favourite angry rant topic: Brave is
a browser built on electron. And no, I do not mean webkit.

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fooker
A browser built on a browser sandbox, what could go wrong! Can we go deeper?

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deburo
It has its appeal. An interface made in html/css/js is customizable and
programmable from a user's pov. Only the performance can be annoying, but
sometimes its not too much of an issue, as Visual Studio Code demonstrated.

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fooker
Firefox had XUL for a long time, which is imo a better solution for building
structured user interfaces compared to raw html.

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deburo
I tried modding Firefox once. Maybe its the tools required that are not really
well made, but XUL felt like a mess to deal with.

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cyrofox
I'm going to give Brave a try as my primary browser for a week and see how it
goes. So far so good.

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bitxbitxbitcoin
It wasn't that bad when I used it for a week.

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flashmob
There needs to be a fairer distribution of the tokens if they want this to
succeed. This is because token holders become the ambassadors / evangelists
for the project.

There's probably a lot of disappointed people who missed the crowdsale - this
means the project would have a lot of salty opponents now.

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Overtonwindow
Brave is wonderful. Whenever I encounter a site with bad advertising, or a
paywall, Brave skips right around it. I really like the idea the browser puts
forth that you can have some say over where advertising dollars go. It's a
little clunky but hopefully that will get better with time.

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ouid
yeah, I'm really looking forward the browser where I can pay to do the things
I do now for free.

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tahw
I'm certainly willing to pay if it means producers don't have to bug me with
patreon links and shitty ads at every opportunity!

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roryisok
But they still will. They'll still have to bug people who don't use brave. You
think they're going to recode their sites to recognise brave and hide
everything away? You'll get the same experience as you do right now with an ad
blocker, except you'll be paying for it while the majority of people don't.
And then in a few years brave will go belly up and you'll be out of pocket,
and the internet will still be full of intrusive ads

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rc_kas
> "in under 30s"

Sheez FFS, someone learn how to write headlines. I was trying to figure out
what that mean. 30 is not a dollar bill denomination? All the donations were
under $30? What?

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toomanybeersies
I agree. I was actually under the impression that he raised $35MM from people
under the age of 30.

