is interesting because I do think I've mentioned this on a previous pod you go elsewhere in the world England is way ahead in terms of schools and teachers knowing about retrieval practices in England compared

to elsewhere.

And so I think it's really good that then in 2025, Sultana and colleagues did a study and sort of asked the same kinds of questions with a couple of key differences.

They were looking, and it was in the UK, it was a school in Wales, and it was secondary school age, which Carpenter's study wasn't.

So I think, again, in terms of teachers in the UK going, you know, Apply this to where I work, it feels more directly comparable.

But their methodology was essentially the same kind of thing.

They asked students to explain what they did when they did their own studying.

So what's your take on this autonomy and how it can help intrinsic motivation, be it sometimes people make just really bad choices? Yeah.

What's going on there?

there?Our whole thing is that, you know, when we think about how people automate the web, and BrowserBase, for those who aren't familiar, we're basically a web browser that can be controlled by your AI.

We're really an infrastructure company, so we sell to developers who are building features that wanna go automate the web.

And we realized that one of the places that people are starting when they're building their applications is often in these kinda lovable, v0 or bolt experiences.

They're vibe coding.

And we kinda looked at the way vibe coding applications were set up to help developers who build like, you know, automation scripts, like submitting your Delaware franchise tax or grabbing a quote from a website of a supplier you wanna work with.

And for us, we wanted to build something built for the vibe coders who actually wanna build software that will do work on their behalf, and that's what Director is.

Yeah.

Okay.

... something you kinda need to do. For, at Stream Club, we used it because we were doing some really interesting, um, basically modifying video display or video overlays with HTML and CSS. The browser is incredible at reading and writing and handling HTML and CSS and JavaScript. Um, and it's always been used for things like testing of software. So if you're building, you know, software, you wanna test that your login button works, you're running that in your cloud, saying, "Go to the login page, click the button. Does it work?" That headless browser is what's used there. People have been using it for things like RPA for a long time. "Hey, we have to integrate with some vendor. Here's this hard-coded script that's gonna go to this page, find this button," using a kind of thing I call a selector. It's a very brittle way of, like, saying, "It's the fifth dom, it's the fifth div on the page. It's the 10th button down, click that button." So this headless browser has always been a way to control a web browser programmatically. And developers have used that for a bunch of different use cases and people have been using it for a long time. But it's always kind of been a hacky thing. So at Stream Club, I'd been spending so much time on this, like, hacky thing, this headless browser, and it was so painful. It sucked building on top of this type of an, uh, infrastructure. And what I realized was like, "Man, this thing sucks to work with." We ended up selling Stream Club to Mux, a video API company, i- in part because of a lot of the headless browser stuff that we'd built. We really pushed that space forward.

Do... Isn't there, isn't there an extent to which you hinge on, like, how smart AI gets and how capable these models are? Or how much do you think if we just sort of sat where we are, there'd be plenty for BrowserBase to do versus you're still counting on these models continuing to improve?

That's what's pre- pretty exciting about the business is that, like, there's actually a very huge non-AI market. Like, every Fortune 500 company uses headless browsers probably for testing or some sort of, like, lightweight automation already. So even if you, if AI disappears tomorrow, if Trump bans AI, there's still a great market here that we're excited about. Of course, though, the big, big vision opportunity is this idea of services as software, where there's going to be many new vertical AI companies that are automating certain, you know, professions or, or augmenting certain professions. And the ability to kind of work where people do, which is often in a web browser, that is really core to that vertical AI software category. And we think we're building the picks and shovels for vertical AI software. And we see that in our customer base. We see that in, like, the interesting categories that pop up. If, if you're building a procurement AI tool, you probably need to go to a bunch of websites and figure out, hey, what inventory is available? What are the quotes? Can I submit a quote? Can I submit a bid? Can I aggregate information about the inventory and then put that back into my model and, like, do some interesting reasoning on top of that? So for us, we think that AI is gonna get better. I'm an AI maximalist. I have to be. That's my, that's my space, right? It's gonna get better, faster, cheaper, and that just really creates a lot more demand for the infrastructure, like BrowserBase, that gives AI better capabilities.