When Giants Fight, Underdogs Get Noticed

Why do you always have to mention LinkedIn in every podcast?

LinkedIn's great, because you're underestimating the power of LinkedIn. Okay, Cloudflare fired the first shot, or at least the first public shot. Perplexity is firing back, Browserbase is getting in the mix. This is an interesting development. We're kicking off with follow-up from our topic from our last episode on how Cloudflare called out Perplexity for stealth scraping. They called it, they put Perplexity in a really bad light in order to put themselves in a good light as defenders of their customers' websites, making sure that bots weren't scraping, you know, immorally. Perplexity fired back and said, hey, these aren't bots, these are agents. It's a new, different thing. We have to think about them differently. And then Browserbase kind of put themselves in the middle. What do you think of all this? What are your takes? What are the points I'm missing?

The first thing I'm proud of is that we found this fight before it started. Like it was appealing to us last week before it actually exploded. So I'm proud of us actually finding an interesting topic on Twitter. After the humblebrag, a couple of things on it. I think Perplexity did a really good job on replying on this idea of agents are based on a user command. A bot that is scrapping the web is not based on a user command. So anything that's based on a user command, you should allow us to do. The others, you shouldn't. And what they were saying is that they were doing those fake things because otherwise they would get locked. I'm pretty sure that Perplexity also uses the tactic for the bots as well. So what I'm saying is I think the reply is really good. I probably don't think it's entirely true. And I think most people will see through it as well. So if I would have been Perplexity, I would actually take a bit of mea culpa because just on how it looks like, it's obvious that they're not being honest. Like I would do something like, hey, it's true. We've used it for bots and that will stop. But we also used it for agents, which are based on user commands, for comment and stuff like that. And for those, we think we need to keep on doing it. But they actually fucked it up. I think on that and I think most people I talked to about it didn't believe them. So sometimes taking a bit of mea culpa, but then fighting back, I think is a better answer. What's your take on the Perplexity reply?

I think you're right on that, especially because some of the replies we're seeing, like there was the reply about Gary Tan and Y Combinator traffic being blocked because Cloudflare wants to monetize the traffic. And people don't trust Cloudflare. Cloudflare has this reputation of being very obstinate, very self-righteous, and their CEO never apologizes. So Perplexity had an opportunity to counter position and be like, hey, here's the nuanced take. They tried to have the nuanced take, but they didn't have the nuanced like morality take as well, which would have given them some interesting high ground and won them some favors. And by the way, people are already suspicious of them because their CEO has been very transparent about like, we're going to have ads and all sorts, like we're going to monetize the crap out of Perplexity. And like, people are like, whoa, you know, that's, you know, old news now. But I agree with you, they missed that opportunity for counter positioning in a really good way here.

And I think what's interesting is that, as you said, there was a lot of pushback towards Cloudflare. Like I saw the tweet from Sukay saying like he never says, sorry, as you said, the Gary Tan. And I saw others as well saying like Cloudflare by default now is stopping to show our content. So it's interesting that it's so clear for most people in tech how Cloudflare is doing it, not in the benefit of their customers as the article first teams, but rather for their own benefit. And they fucked it up because it could have been a great marketing, but by disallowing AI bots to crawl by default on websites, I think they fucked it up. They went to extreme instead of giving people a way to opt in. So it's interesting because like two monsters that are fighting and you mentioned browser based. I think browser based did a fantastic thing where they injected themselves into a fight that they got nothing to do with. But because they're proud of it and they are big, like they look bigger than before because they are fighting with giants.

Well, you might've missed it, but in the Twitter article that Perplexity posted, they did mention Browserbase and they said, oh, we think Cloudflare is confusing some of our stuff for Browserbase, you know, like, which has some bot-like behavior and some agentic-like behavior. And by the way, quick aside, I thought it was clever of, because this fight is taking place on Twitter, Perplexity did a Twitter article, which is really good. Like you're meeting the user, so it's more likely that people will read deeper into Perplexity's side because they're using the channel where the fight is happening.

And it's more than that because links in Twitter gets deprioritized, but if you have an internal article, it doesn't get deprioritized. So they chose really well, not just in the same platform, but also on a way so that they could get more vitality than Cloudflare.

Yeah, exactly. And they need that because Cloudflare has the history and the clout, like they're very well established. I just checked, Cloudflare's reach is definitely bigger and more significant, and they got, you know, more likes and all that stuff. But so Perplexity is kind of the underdog.

But still more giants compared to Browserbase and by them, I didn't know they were in the article, but even if they were, like they injected themselves on the fight and they used it also to announce that they are getting into a new specs. Like they hired somebody to own identity for agents and they mentioned how they hired that person and the launch for that person was actually writing this blog post together with Paul. So I think they did a fantastic, like really, really good job on injecting it. They had a good argument. They had good thoughts and they weren't as spicy as Cloudflare or Perplexity. So they tried to have a more neutral way so they don't get that many haters or lovers. I don't like neutrality as much, but I think they did on purpose.

And I think it's authentic. I mean, I know Paul of Browserbase. Oh, you do too. We've got a special episode with him coming up. But I remember I once like pinged Paul. I was like, hey, could Browserbase do this? And I sent him some idea. He's like, we try to prevent it being used that way because that is immoral by our standards. And so I think his nuanced take here is very authentic. And I think he has, you know, some compass here that's ruling him, which maybe to your point is holding back him being more inflammatory or getting more. But he's also the underdog here. So just getting the mention and the word out is plenty. Of course, his reach on this was far, far less than the others. But I'm sure there was, you know, some spike of interest in Browserbase just based on the Perplexity mention.

Exactly. At least it was mentioned it was showing on the Twitter timeline. I'll switch topics a bit. I read a tweet last week that actually blew my mind. I'm a millennial, so I still use Instagram, but I only used Instagram to see what my friends are doing. I basically used stories. And what I realized after reading this tweet is that I'm one of the few that actually do that. Like most people use TikTok and they don't see as much their friends. They see more influencers. And in Instagram, the stat is that 7% of the people see something related to their friends. The other 93% sees nothing. That means about 7% sees friends and potentially also other things. But that means that people now don't care as much anymore on what their friends are doing and why, which was true before on Instagram, TikTok and others. Now it's all about what are influencers saying. So I think the game of influencers is the number one thing that matters now for any B2B SaaS. And we're talking about what OpenAI did there. But what's your take on the influencers game?

Yeah, I mean, I don't have a stat handy or anything, but I do know that LinkedIn's focus is similarly more and more on content and the algorithms that control that, as opposed to like the recruiter and sales experience. They're trying to...

Why do you always have to mention LinkedIn in every podcast?

LinkedIn's great because you're underestimating the power of LinkedIn. I'm going to start bringing LinkedIn links instead of tweets. No. You're going to have to do your research.

One month after they come in.

Fair. This whole thing with influencers, it's something we've talked about at the start of the year. Cause you know, one of our goals, at least one of my goals was to figure out and start doing more influencer marketing in the B2B space. And it's clear that we're primed for this. We've got to like figure this out. I think we'll do a follow up on how we're doing on our goals in another week or two. But I wrote down kind of a counterpoint here. Cause you wrote that nobody cares about their friends anymore, which I think is true, but there is a craving for this. So I know that also Gen Z is leaning far into in-person, both working in person and in-person events. I just did a huge in-person event and it's very clear that when people are together, like they can actually focus and they're talking and they're not on social media as much. So there's kind of an interesting thing here of people crave it. It's not how they behave when they're on the social media. They don't seek out their friends, but they still have this craving and this desire for it. And I wonder if there are ways to tap into it. And I think it's in-person events and dinners and conferences.

Yeah. And I do see also private chats. So maybe it's more about private chats online and then offline, it's more conference and stuff like that. That is friends, but all of the rest of social media is not friends at all, which is very interesting. That's true.

There's the whole concept of dark social. That was kind of a term that was thrown around maybe a year or two. It hasn't really picked up, but dark social is the idea of like, okay, what are all the Slack workspaces and Discord channels and Telegram groups and WhatsApp groups that people are in, especially as professionals that you can tap into to do some sort of marketing, right? And an example is we have like a multi-hundred person unofficial Telegram group for Laracon that's been going for years. So it just kind of reactivates the week before Laracon every time and people get together and we have a huge Discord and all that. But there's something to that. It's not as visible in these types of stats, but maybe that's where people are going for this type of stuff.

Exactly. I have an example on this, like in Argentina, people were using Uber and recently there was a new write-up called DiDi. DiDi is the Chinese Uber. And what they did to get people was there's a lot of WhatsApp groups for Uber drivers where they help each other, they talk, etc. And DiDi, what they did was once they got one driver in that group, if they have other people, they will give extra referrals if they would inject DiDi into some of those dark groups. And that's how they grew in Argentina, for example. They leveraged these small groups, dark socials at scale to get people to change, which I think is fascinating as a way to inject yourself. And that's what you need to do, I think, when you're the underdog. This week, OpenAI also tweeted about a really good video professionally made with seven influencers. And that's the other thing that blew my mind on how good it was. Like they invited seven very well-known influencers like Theo, like Sean and a few others. They gave them access to GPT-5 and they asked them like, go try it out. And one of the folks actually tried things that they tried in the past, like Theo, for example, trying the ball game that he always tries every time. And he was like, oh, this is really good. And I personally hated the GPT-5 launch. I was complaining on Twitter about it, but I saw how these six, seven people that were invited, including Theo, were like GPT-5 is the best model. And I don't think they got paid to say that, but because they were included before the team helped them, et cetera, they unconsciously owed it to them to be nice and be good at GPT-5. So they're basically getting influencers a special access. It's good for them because now they can say, oh, OpenAI gave me special access. And they basically create this feeling on this Fosun. You cannot say bad things about GPT-5. So that to me was a masterful move. Of course, OpenAI can do it because it's OpenAI. I think that's hard for less known startups, for sure.

True. It's the law of reciprocation, right? It's the reason that salespeople, you know, give you swag. It's the reason you get early access to stuff and so on, because there is kind of a social implied rule that you're going to say the good things about it. And sometimes NDAs even specify that. That, you know, hey, you can't say anything negative about this. And also when you're OpenAI and you're cutting the video, you can cut it so only the good stuff is in there.

But it's not only a video. They were all of them. I follow them on Twitter to see what they said. They all said only good things on Twitter about GPT-5 when there were so many people complaining.

Yeah. Well, and it's interesting. Let's talk about that aspect of it. This is less about the influencer game and more about like the product launch game. GPT-5 has been hyped and people saw the difference between 3.5 and 4 and 4 and these other iterative models that really mostly just added breadth. It's really hard to have a big hype launch that's going to just be marginally better. And OpenAI has known that it's only going to be marginally better. There's nothing like new or revelatory about it. They kind of put themselves in a corner with this, I feel like. And I don't know if there's a way that they could have gotten out of it or maybe downplayed it or set expectations appropriately. But people who are saying it's bad, they didn't actually mean that it's bad. They just mean, oh, I was hoping for another big leap and there's not a big leap here.

Exactly. To me, the big leap was from GPT-4 to O3. O3 was to me a big leap and they didn't make as much noise on that. GPT-5 was very similar to my usage on O3 and I actually preferred O3 a bit more. But I agree that they hyped it too much knowing that it wasn't going to be there. Maybe they thought they were in the future. I know. But I think they fucked up. Like you don't create high expectations if you're not going to deliver.

And I'm kind of relating this to myself because at Laravel in several weeks from now, like a couple of months, we're going to release a huge update to our main product, Forge, which we announced at LaraCon. And so I've had these thoughts of like, OK, where are people going to be underwhelmed and where is the hype appropriate? Because I've got to do this in the lead up campaign. So it feels very relevant to me and to anyone launching a major update.

But that's worked. As you work inside the company, it's hard to know if it's going to be really good or not. And that's what I would actually include influencers not one week before, but months before. OK, try it out. Give me your honest thoughts. I'm going to try to improve it based on your thoughts, if you can. But I think getting people from the outside who are known influencers from before instead of one week before could even help even more. I don't know if they did. I think that Claire tweeted at me the other day saying they got access only five days before.

Oh, yeah, that's not that's not a lot. And really, was it clear to you if they got access, like it looked like they got access while they were sitting on that couch?

No, they got it.

I was like that would because when I saw that, I was like, if this is true, if they did just get access right then, that's a disaster. Like, how are they going to create the content? So that's good, because clearly some of them had put some thought into what they would run and and all that. It's also fun, just like there's kind of a hack here of when you have multiple influencers at once, they're almost competing to give you the good clips like they all want to be in the video. So they're all trying to think of what's the cleverest thing I can do? What's the cleverest test I can run? What's the best thing I can say so that my face is shown the most in the video? Because they all want the spotlight. It's part of their job.

I agree. Let's switch to our latest small topic. Do you want to talk about it?

Yeah, small topic. I saw this tweet. David Kramer is always throwing out spicy tweets. He's a fun follow. He tweeted out just an email he got. He's like, this is like the easiest way to get me to unsubscribe. It was about the Gartner Magic Quadrant. You know, Vercel got in it and they sent out an email announcing this. This is standard, you know, AR analyst relations. It's kind of a part of PR. It's a standard practice in AR. And I hate it. I always tell my teams like, we got to be very careful on self congratulatory tweets, emails, anything. Blog posts are always OK because those are very like opt in. People have to see it. But for something like this, I would have tucked this at the bottom of a newsletter. This would have been an item number three at the highest. I also always tell my team there are two laws of email. It has to be valuable and it has to be interesting. This to me, I was just like, oh, that misses the mark on both. Most people are not interested in this and it's also not providing any value. What you want is you want people who follow Gartner to see that you're on a magic quadrant and then come to you. And what you want is for this to be mid funnel content, where if you're talking to some enterprise that has a little like, hey, can you guys actually handle our volume or whatever? You can say, hey, look, Gartner's evaluated us, Forrester, whatever, blah, blah, blah. Like, where do you agree, disagree with this? How's my take?

I agree. My note, actually, I literally wrote, it's OK if it's hidden. Like it can be part of the newsletter, but just hidden with other stuff. Like I like the idea of like, I will mention it, but it's not the main thing that we mentioned. It's just part of a newsletter, part of something that we send. And in that case, I think it's OK. The other way that I would do it is actually being funny on how we're bragging about it. Like I would tweet like, oh, we're now visionary, something like that. And then like hashtag couple brag and potentially like connecting with business or something like that. I think if you congratulate yourself, but you're actually funny about how that's a fucked up thing to do, then I think it can work.

Yeah, that's a careful line to walk. I would not recommend that to most people. I would just just tuck it in the footer of a newsletter, put it in your blog and you're good. But you do these things so that traffic flows to you. People used to do it because it was something to talk about and brag about. And it was appreciated more. But since every company like can effectively pay to play with Gartner and Forrester and the other analysts.

It's not that easy, I'll say. Of course you need to pay, but it takes years to become a visionary by working with them, showing them and stuff like that. So I don't think it's that easy. I would still not show it because the only people that will care are the enterprise folks. And for them, you either have a special page for that or you send it to them directly or something like that.

But the only people who know the distinctions between being on the quadrant and being a visionary on the quadrant and that stuff, it's people like you and me who have had to pay at previous companies so much money to get on those quadrants and done the years of work. We're talking dev tool marketing. Zero developers understand the distinctions on these different squares and charts.

The only people that do know besides us are... I always think about Gartner. Gartner is the way of you converting into IBM. This idea of like nobody got fired for bringing or buying IBM. Being a Gartner visionary leader basically puts you in that category. If Gartner stays here a visionary, that means they are stable enough that you're not going to get fired if you hire them. So it gives more pro enterprises to use it. But as you said, developers or startups, they don't give a shit about it.

Yeah. And Gartner and Forrester and the like, they have services where they will generate leads for you because companies like IBM actually pay them and ask them like, hey, what tech should we be looking at? What should we be investigating? I agree. I think that's it for today.

That's it.

Good stuff. Thanks everybody.

Thank you all.