Our CEO Ryan Paterson appeared on The Brave Technologist podcast last week. Brave’s podcast is hosted by Luke Mulks, the VP of Business Operations at Brave.
As an aside, if you enjoy emerging technology, but you want to maintain as much privacy, control, simplicity and understanding as possible, we recommend you make the Brave Technologist a regular listen. There are many fascinating guests and in-depth topics for the curious-minded.
It was a wide-ranging and lively conversation covers Ryan’s background in the Marine Corp and his two tours with DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and his appreciation for the DARPA research development and business model. They talk about Unplugged’s history as a startup, the challenges of building hardware as a small player, and why Ryan's friends told him he is crazy. The episode also highlights the value and kindness of early adopters, who are true believers, and the need for awareness around data and privacy for parents and families.
You’ll get the scoop and details about our first 10,000 phones and the next 10,000, what’s coming in 2025 and pending news about Unplugged’s open source announcements.
Luke and Ryan go into the philosophical alignment between Brave and Unplugged and the nature of our cooperative efforts, and how we plan to continue to work together.
Here are some highlights from the conversation (edited for brevity and clarity):
On the transformation from the digital advertising to surveillance capitalism and government overreach
Ryan: “It was very clear that it was data and precision that the intelligence community would have and did pay billions of dollars for. And now it’s in everybody’s pocket . . . We started to see overstep where government entities were buying commercially available data that was being used to get a probable cause affidavit. Then that was initiating warrants and subpoenas and all of those things. That’s not ever what the technology was initially designed for.”
On the importance of early adopters
Luke: “Early adopters, right? Like it’s such a key thing. I know with Brave, we dealt with this a lot, especially in early days when stuff was a lot rougher and we broke a lot of things, a lot of things. So, you know, those early adopters were like key.”
And later in the conversation
Ryan: “The reviews we’re getting seem to be great. I think, you know, this entire Early Adopters' group, you know, they were really sort of bought in on the mission of what we were trying to do. And, you know, when you’ve got a good group of early adopters like that, there’s a lot of grace that’s extended to you. I don’t know. You guys remember from your early days too, right? So when you’ve got people that are excited for something that’s different, they will deal with some of the things and realize you’re small, realize you’re trying to do this. We are not backed by big money.”
On Brave’s culture of Research & Development
Luke: “And one of the things we’ve been talking to you guys [Unplugged team] about and this is just a need for us because our research team spent a ton like years, right? Like developing Privacy preserving methodologies for everything from accounting and a bunch of other things and reporting and targeting all these things. And we haven’t really run into a ton of cases where folks are coming to us and saying, look, you guys did something with Brave. How can we do that with what we’re doing?
“And that was one of the really cool things about working with you guys is that. You guys are one of those first folks that came to us and said, look, like we have privacy needs, you guys have been doing R and D. And so I’m excited to kind of get our teams together . . .”
On continuous improvement
Ryan: "It's getting better and better every month... Being able to synchronize everything from your previous devices on to ours is, I think, one of the things that's causing the most frustration, and I think it's going to be right after the New Year that's going to be launched, so that ,from an iPhone or an existing Android, the ability to pull everything over to this phone will be there and automated and available."
On personal responsibility
Ryan: There’s no one piece of technology, the Brave browser, the Unplugged phone Graphene, you know, whatever the privacy tools are, there’s not one thing that’s going to solve this problem. A lot of it falls on us as users to have some understanding of and limit what we decide to share . . ."
We really appreciated the opportunity to have Ryan on the Brave Technologist podcast. Enjoy the show.
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