Currently: Co-founder @ Browser Use (YC W25)
Studies: MSc CS @ ETH Zürich ‘23 - ‘25 (paused), Exchange @ NUS ‘22, BSc Cognitive Science @ Osnabrück ‘20-’22
Experiences: Co-founder GreenWAI, AI Research @ Aucos AG, Research @ Cambridge CARES, Intern @ ŠKODA
Origin: Germany
Links: LinkedIn, Twitter
Browser-Use just raised $17M and are hiring cracked engineers to work on the tools for AGI! 👇
Supported by Founderful Campus! They run the VC Academy program, selecting top students from Swiss universities that invest in the hottest university startups.
They’re organizing a Fireside chat with Julian the co-founder and CEO of EthonAI. March 26, 17:30 at ETH SPH - sign up now!".
Growing up in Germany & early startup experiences
Where did you grow up and what were you doing?
I grew up in a very small town in Germany with 500 people, 5000 cows, a cheese factory and a bakery. I played a lot of football and loved exploring places. From age 16, I worked in the cheese factory making 80kg blocks of cheese and got my forklift license.
I helped a friend upload 5000 T-shirt designs online to sell, but I hated doing the repetitive clicking tasks. So I started creating Python and Selenium scripts to automate it. It became really addictive seeing the mouse click automatically on my computer.
Over time, I moved more into ML research and studied cognitive science. When Covid hit, I left Germany to hitchhike around the world as a digital nomad. I went to Singapore to do research for Cambridge, where I got to know many researchers from ETH. I thought they were amazing people and wanted to go there, so I applied for a master's in data science and got in.
What made you decide to continue studying instead of finding a job after Singapore?
It was quite obvious because during my bachelor's I didn't study that much due to Covid. From the first semester though, I got really addicted to coding and ML research. I wanted to learn more about the mathematical foundations of ML, and I heard how much ETH pushes people to learn that, so I thought it was perfect.
You had a startup called Greenway while at ETH. What was that about?
We won a hackathon with a traffic light optimization idea. An accelerator asked if we wanted to continue it, so 4 people from the team did. We had really sick reinforcement learning algorithms that could reduce traffic light waiting times by 25% and CO2 emissions by 50%. It worked awesome in simulation.
But we had many internal fights in the team because we didn't choose each other specifically in the beginning. We also didn't have much traction. I was responsible for fundraising but in Germany I couldn't raise a single euro for half a year, even though we had awesome tech and I created great pitch decks.
How were you able to manage building a startup, doing research, studying and traveling all at the same time?
I really like to go fully into things. For example, one day I asked a friend "let's hitchhike from Germany to Iran." We just met up in Munich and hit the road, got hammocks to sleep in the forest, and hitchhiked for six weeks across the Middle East. If you think about how much time you have in a year, it's crazy - you can do so many things.
At the same time, I have to say, at ETH I really wasn't the best student. Some courses I failed, some I barely passed. There were for sure many others who were much better than me in math and other subjects.
Meeting co-founder & starting Browseruse at ETH
How did you meet your co-founder Gregor and what led to starting Browseruse?
SPH is paradise. It's a student project house next to the main building of ETH where it's forbidden to study and you have to work on your side projects. When Gregor left his previous startup, he made a LinkedIn post saying he wanted to build something more ambitious. So I reached out to him.
Last summer I was feeling really low. My previous startup had lawyers involved and wasn't going anywhere. I was thinking "should I just push through or pivot and quit this team?" I decided to quit after a long time. Then I started building small side projects week by week.
I was always annoyed that in software like Photoshop, you have a million buttons. You know exactly what you want to do but have no clue which buttons to click to reach your goal. I thought "why can't I just tell my computer what to do and it figures out itself how to do the tasks?"
GPT-3.5 was now good enough at reasoning, we just needed to give it access to the web. So with Gregor, we just built a prototype in 5 days combining web scraping with LLMs to enable taking action. We pushed it to Hacker News thinking it was really shitty, but people were fascinated by AI clicking the browser. Early adopters came in and since then, over the last three months, we've become the biggest open source repository for browser agents.
Going through Y Combinator
How did you get into YC and decide to do it?
We pushed to Hacker News and I think one week later was already the YC deadline. We applied to YC and got an interview with Jared but he didn't respond for three weeks. Every week we pushed him new updates. After three weeks, while I was taking a week off with my girlfriend in the Oman desert, he wanted a second interview. I needed to get out of the desert to find WiFi somewhere. Then he said we're in.
What are the main differences you noticed between US and Europe?
Actually, in terms of people it's quite similar. Especially around ETH, there are super many ambitious people in SPH. They're not smarter here. Maybe compared to Europe, to my hometown, you get more pushed to build awesome stuff. If I tell someone here "I want to build my startup tonight", they say "awesome, let's do coworking." In my hometown they would say "hey, what are you doing?"
But for example, in my home village they're all farmers. They work harder than I do - they get up at 6am to milk the cows, take two days holiday per year because they need to feed the cows daily. They work 14 hours per day standard, no one talks about it.
How do you feel you changed going to SF?
For me, it's interesting - I feel I'm the same. All those things in my mind, all those ideas and stories, were always important to me. But maybe two years ago people didn't listen to me that much. Now if I'm the hot company in YC, people say "wow" and look up to me. But my ideas are still exactly the same as two years ago.
It's interesting how just because you created something awesome, people now look up to you. This is a little bit strange. I want to be on eye level with all people.
Raising $17 million and future vision
How were you able to raise $17 million and what do you foresee?
Around demo day we had like $4 million already on uncapped SAFEs before even taking investor meetings. I had 140 investor meetings scheduled. Investors who knew they were in the later part of the week emailed me saying "hey I want to be part of your round, just take my uncapped SAFE." So they didn't care about valuation at all. This went crazier and crazier and gave us a lot of leverage.
I did all the pitching and I think over the meetings my vision for the company got crazier and crazier. We want to build at least the tools for AGI so that AGI can take action on the web.
What does your work schedule look like now?
Last week I was waking up at 6:30am for interviews with people from Europe who I'm hiring. Normally lunch around 12 or 1, most often we order Uber Eats. In the afternoon I'm definitely less productive. Then dinner and most often in the evening there are some events or friends come over. Yesterday we did barbecue here.
How are your relationships and friends given the intense focus?
I definitely talk now and then with my family. Right now my best friend from bachelor's university is visiting me and sleeping on my couch. This definitely feels crazy because if they would have told me six months ago that I'd meet all these crazy people and suddenly get $17 million... For me day-to-day it feels normal - I still go out, go for walks, go to the gym. But for people outside like family, this is completely absurd.
Hiring & advice for students
What kind of people are you looking for while hiring?
We want to have an awesome community. We want to get a hacker house where people can hack together, have fun building together and just work really hard. If they have understanding of LLMs or browser side scraping, it's definitely useful. But they don't need to have a PhD in math or LLMs - I did traffic lights 5 months ago!
For founding engineer roles, it's mainly important that you can ship extremely fast. Ship so much, see if it works, otherwise build something else. Just ship all the time. That's the most important thing - don't overthink, just ship.
What tips do you have for someone without much experience who wants to follow in your footsteps?
I think for the startup route, the most useful thing is to build MVPs in 5 days. Build awesome things which you think "wow that's insane." Launch it somewhere, send it to your friends or upload it to Hacker News and see what people say.
For example, my last project was this goal setting app. I went to ETH in front of the main building and showed it to people. I asked them "tell me about the last time you had problems achieving your goals" and then "what do you think of this app?" Then they tell you if it's good or bad.
All those people from ETH and SPH, they are smarter than I am and many are more hardworking than I am. But it's just iterating, a little bit of luck, a little bit of craziness.
Do you plan to stay in SF and would you recommend others from SPH to move there?
Yes, we want to stay here. Every week we meet someone from LangChain, Anthropic, OpenAI who are just one or two steps ahead of us where we can learn a lot. I think it's just easier to build the company because you have this community of amazing people and it just feels normal to build that stuff. If I go back to my home village, it would be normal to get sheep or cows in my garden. Here it's normal to build AI agents.
I think what I see many people doing here is just coming for one month instead of doing an internship in summer. Fly here for six weeks, go to events, get to know people. Just message people on X "hey should we hang out?" Meet people to get a feeling how it feels here.
But SPH is amazing - you can build amazing things there. You have this small community. Fundraising and stuff is just easier here but you can do the same in SPH, just at lower valuations. It's just harder. If you have a shitty product, you don't come to SF and suddenly become amazing. You still need to build something amazing that people love.
Arnie here - hope you enjoyed this new episode! Been super busy as usual haha. Going forwards the blog will be more of a spontaneous rhythm where I interview amazing EPFL & ETHZ students/alumni and post directly (rather some fixed weekly/monthly schedule).
I’m also expanding the podcasts moving forwards, with ai-generated blogs from the interviews. This one was generated - if you didn’t notice then it means it’s working great!
(Don’t be worried though - I spent an absurd amount of time building an automated pipeline to convert podcasts into blogs. The quality is super high + I personally review/edit everything (& so do the guests)! Check it out here: https://github.com/AnirudhhRamesh/BlogEditor)
Anyhows - first podcast episode, please give me lots of feedback! Also any future guests you’d like me to feature or questions you might have :))
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