Radical Trust Building
Not radical transparency — let people know you as humans, so the permission dialog gets the benefit of the doubt.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
The Browser Company films its board meetings and internal project post-mortems and publishes them. Miller is careful to say this is not radical transparency (they cannot share everything) but radical trust building. The bet: a browser holds your most sensitive personal and professional data, tech has lost the public's trust, and no privacy policy fixes that — so the only remaining move is to let people know the humans behind the software well enough that ambiguous actions get read charitably.
Origin
Josh Miller's own hypothesis, framed by his sociology background and by watching the industry lose cultural trust over a decade. He explicitly labels it a prototype and says he worries they will regret it. He also names Lenny's podcast as an example of the mechanism working on him — a year of hearing someone in your ear produces trust before you have ever met.
Core principles
- 01The category earns the practice: the more sensitive the data you hold, the higher the trust bar and the weaker a policy document is as an answer.
- 02Distinguish radical transparency (share everything — impossible) from radical trust building (share enough of the humans that people can decide about you).
- 03Show the uncomfortable material — a behind-schedule project meeting, a board meeting — because polished material builds no trust.
- 04The test of the bet: when you ask for a sensitive permission, does the user assume good intent?
- 05When a stranger reads you in the worst possible light, that is data about the trust deficit, not about their character. Miller's first reaction was anger; his second was that he'd have felt the same way.
- 06Guard against the gravitational pull toward the CEO. Storytelling naturally centres founders, and that is the failure mode Miller says would ruin it.
How to run it
- 1
Ask whether trust is a real constraint for you
Name what you are asking users to hand over. For a browser it is the most sensitive personal and professional data a person has. If your product does not carry that weight, the effort may not be worth its cost.
- 2
Publish process, not polish
Bring cameras into the rooms where the work actually happens — board meetings, a half-hour session with the head of design about a project that is behind schedule and how to get it out the door.
Pro tip Uncomfortable footage is the asset. Anything that could have been a press release does not move trust.
- 3
Feature the team, not the founder
Make the cast plural — Miller names Nash, Dina, Hursh — and route credit for the work to the individuals who did it. The goal is for people to know a group of humans, not a personality.
Pro tip Ask the audience to police it. Miller openly invites listeners to tell him if they see the company taking the CEO-centric version too far.
Watch out Miller flags the live risk of it curdling into 'they're trying to be internet celebrities'. Watch for the moment your best-performing content is a founder reaction video rather than the work.
- 4
Read hostile interpretations as feedback
When someone publicly assumes the worst about a decision, treat it as a measurement of trust not yet earned rather than as an attack, and ask whether you would have read it the same way given the last decade of tech.
In the wild
The Browser Company published a half-hour internal meeting between Miller and his head of design working through a project that had slipped and how to ship it — the sort of footage most companies would consider a liability.
→ Lenny cites it unprompted as the reason the company reads as unusually trustworthy and unusually attractive to work for.
A stranger publicly put the worst possible interpretation on something the company did. Miller's initial reaction was anger, then he recognized that given his own experiences with technology over the previous five to ten years he would have reacted identically — the person simply had not been given the chance to know them.
→ He reframed the incident as evidence for the trust-building thesis rather than against it: they had not yet earned that person's trust.
Common mistakes
Confusing it with radical transparency
No company can share everything, and promising to sets up an inevitable betrayal. The commitment is to let people know who you are, not to publish every fact.
Letting the founder become the story
The gravitational pull of public storytelling is toward the CEO. Miller's own best-performing YouTube video was one of him reacting to MKBHD, and he explicitly says he watched it and worried 'why am I trying to become a YouTuber'.
Only publishing wins
Trust is built by the uncomfortable footage. A stream of triumphant launch videos is marketing, and audiences discount it exactly as they discount corporate blog posts.
Is it for you?
Best for
Consumer software teams handling sensitive data who need users to extend good faith on permissions and privacy that no policy document can buy.
Not ideal for
Companies with genuine confidentiality constraints (regulated, enterprise-sensitive, pre-announcement), or founders who would use the camera to build a personal brand rather than a team's credibility.
From the transcript
“building in public showing you our meetings uncomfortably so is an act in if we were them why should they trust us”
“the intention with these built the building and public experiments are radical trust building now radical transparency we can't share everything but radical trust building…”
“so our bet is that if you get to know us Nash Dina me Hersh and you really feel like you get to know as…”
From the episode
Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product
Josh Miller (CEO)