Welcome to the third issue of Worth Noting, a newsletter from Notable Capital where we share the ideas, conversations, and frameworks that founders and operators are actually paying attention to.

In 2024, you could find Paul Klein at virtually every AI meetup in San Francisco. "My wife never saw me," he said. "I was always out showing off Browserbase and getting live product feedback."

At the time, Browserbase was less than a year old and Paul was operating as a solo founder. But he committed that time on the happy hour circuit, ruthlessly showing up, demoing, listening, iterating, because he understood something specific about how developers decide to reach for a tool.

"Buying dev tools is like buying a jacket," he told us. "You don't often buy a jacket just by looking at it in the window. You want to try it on. You want to feel like you're cool when you’re standing in the store."

That vibe — the sense that this particular tool puts you in a certain crowd, marks you as someone who's paying attention — is the real product in the early days of a dev tools company. The docs matter. The self-serve matters. But underneath it all is a question every developer is implicitly asking: Is this where the smart people are? Paul's answer was to be present everywhere that question gets asked.

Fast forward two years, Browserbase has about 70 people (a far cry from Paul’s singular grind), and customers that include Clay, Ramp, and Vercel. The choices he made as a solo founder, particularly how he marketed, how he thought about the business, and how he hired, shaped the company in profound ways. Here's what he figured out. 

A calendar bursting at the seams with meetups wasn't exactly part of some well-thought-through brand strategy. It was Paul simply doing the only thing available to a solo founder who needed to build brand awareness and had no one to delegate it to.

"People follow people, not brands," he said. The goal was always to make the brand bigger than any one person. But that required one person to go first and showcase his (and, by extension, Browserbase’s) point of view.

But there’s a part that often gets missed about founder-led marketing: it has a second act. Paul has since worked to distribute that brand equity across the team, building up several people at Browserbase as individual voices with their own audiences and their own slices of the company's identity. The founder goes first to prove it's possible and to give others something to attach to, then the founder gets out of the way.

Paul built Browserbase around one core insight he borrows from the Waymos proliferating the streets of SF: We didn't rebuild the roads for autonomous vehicles; we taught the cars to navigate the roads we already had. 

The web is the same problem. There are billions of pages, forms, buttons, and workflows that aren't going anywhere anytime soon. So rather than waiting for the internet to be rebuilt for AI agents, Paul's bet is that agents will learn to navigate it as-is.

That makes Browserbase unusually dependent on something outside Paul's control: how good the models get, and how fast. Most founders treat that kind of external dependency as a risk to manage. Paul treats it as the whole thesis. Every time a lab ships a better computer-use model, Browserbase's customers can do more with the infrastructure they've already built.

Tracking that progress is where it gets interesting. "The best metrics are often the qualitative ones," Paul said. "We're lucky to have a solid cohort of bleeding-edge customers, and I learn so much from them because they're often pushing our infrastructure to a boundary we haven't expected." Before computer-use models existed, several of those customers were already attempting similar things on Browserbase without them. His most advanced customers are consistently ahead of what the labs have publicly shipped. If two or three of them start attempting the same strange new thing, that's his signal for what’s coming (and what to build) next.

In assembling his early team, Paul intentionally sought out proven builders, and estimates that at least a quarter of Browserbase's team are former founders.

"A rocket ship is really fun to look at," Paul said, "but it's also on fire all the time."

Former founders have learned that lesson the hard way. They've already been the person who had to figure out marketing, or recruiting, or pricing, with no one to hand it to. You either develop the instinct to move without certainty, or you stall. 

That muscle memory is exactly what Paul is looking for. Because at Browserbase, the target never stops moving — every model release reshapes what's possible, which reshapes what needs to be built. The jacket looks different every six months. Paul needs people who are excited to try on a new one.

The category Paul is building in barely existed two years ago. It looks different every quarter. And by his own read, the most interesting applications of browser agents haven't been built yet, as his bleeding-edge customers are only just starting to show him what's possible.

Something shifted in cybersecurity this past year, and it happened faster than most security teams anticipated. In our 2026 Rising in Cyber report, produced in collaboration with Morgan Stanley and based on a survey of 150 CISOs, we found that over 70% of organizations already have AI agents running in production. Yet only 11% of those same security leaders believe their controls are mature enough to manage them. Non-human identities now outnumber human users 82 to 1. Most organizations can't inventory what's running inside their own systems, let alone govern it.

The market is responding. Cybersecurity M&A hit roughly $87 billion in 2025 — a fourfold increase from the year prior. Series A and B funding climbed from $3.6B to $5.6B, with capital concentrating in AI-native startups building for visibility, identity management, and runtime protection. The full 2026 Rising in Cyber report maps where this investment is going, what CISOs are prioritizing, and how the threat landscape has evolved over the past 12 months. It's out now at risingincyber.com.