Prediction
Hit
Privacy products that looked like losers will quietly take over
Shaan argues DuckDuckGo, ProtonMail, Signal and Brave looked like non-winners for years because their core bet — that people would come to care about privacy and not being tracked — hadn't paid off yet, but it's now coming true.
“Their core insight, which is that people are going to care about privacy. People are going to care about not being tracked by big tech companies, not being advertised to. And they're going to care about not having all their messages stored forever in a way that could get leaked or hacked.”
Fact
Why privacy-search still makes money: high-intent ads don't need your identity
Shaan explains DuckDuckGo's model: it still runs search ads, but because search is high-intent, the ad can be relevant without knowing who you are. The slight drop-off from not personalizing becomes the brand's value proposition.
“They know what you're looking for so they can serve you a relevant ad. And their insight was the slight drop-off you get by not personalizing is not so bad if that can become your value proposition, that, hey, we're not using personal information to serve these ads.”
Steal thisSell privacy as the product: drop personalization on a high-intent surface and make that trade-off your differentiator.
Number
DuckDuckGo averages 62 million queries per day
Sam cites DuckDuckGo's traffic page: the privacy search engine averages around 62 million queries per day, versus an estimated billions for Google.
$62M
Search queries per day · queries/day
“they average 62 million queries per day”