Building Moats in the Data Industry

Auren Hoffman (00:02.146)

Hello, fellow data nerds. guest today is Orel Lenzner. Orel is the CEO of Brightdata, a leading web data collection company. Orel, welcome to World of Deaths.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (00:12.451)

Thank you very much for inviting me. Super happy to be here.

Auren Hoffman (00:16.524)

I'm super excited as well. This is a topic I know both of us are very, very passionate about. And we're kind of at a point right now where there are a lot of companies and websites trying various tactics to make their content less accessible for data collection, crawling, scraping, kind of, et cetera. Can you give us an overview of the state of web data freedom right now?

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (00:41.325)

Yeah, it's becoming more challenging than ever. And I'll explain what that means, but I just want to start by saying that that was kind of always the case. So trying to get access to information that is in the public domain was always a challenge because someone always tried to prevent others to get to that data because as the cliche says, data is power.

And that's true. So what we're seeing today is that it's becoming an increasing challenge to gain access to public data. First, we need to define what public data means, think. It means, at least by our definition, that it's kind of getting to be the standard. Is any information you can find on a public web page, which means you don't need to do any sign up, log in.

by best of paywall or something like that. Any information that you can see is public.

Auren Hoffman (01:42.296)

which is like traditionally what search engines have been able to crawl or something like that. So that's kind of the similar data.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (01:48.599)

Sometimes, actually, yeah, sometimes search engines actually goes even deeper. But it's still public data. mean, there are some edge cases, I don't know, some open endpoints for APIs that you won't really find public data there, but it's not behind the login. So you can argue about that. We don't go to these places because we are all about collecting data and nothing else. But generally speaking, just think about yourself opening an incognito browser.

and searching the web, you can see the, whatever your eyes can see on incognito mode, which means without being logged in, that's pretty much public information. Now, the attempts to block access to this public asset that belongs to all of us, at least in my view.

is becoming an increasing challenge from the technical point of view. And in many cases, those websites are trying to just keep the data, the public data for themselves. Part of what we're doing pretty well is to help our customers with Shara.

pretty much every company you can think of to gain access to these public assets and to take that data and use it for the benefit of their business and eventually to the benefit of consumers, which are all of us. It's very interesting.

Auren Hoffman (03:18.38)

And is the, what's, is the analogy like, okay, I'm walking down a public street and I see the, a store, a Starbucks, a McDonald's, and I could note that the Starbucks or McDonald's is there, but like, I can't like go into the McDonald's and like jump behind the counter and start like opening up the, the, the internal refrigerator and stuff. Like that would be wrong, but I could just like, I could see what's going, is that the right analogy

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (03:48.131)

I'll simplify that. You're walking down the same street, and you're seeing like a window with clothes you want to buy, some products you want to buy, and there are prices, and you want to know what the price is, and it's there presented to you, potential consumer walking down the street, but then you're trying to look it up and someone identify you as a competitor.

and they are rushing out of the store to the street and blindfolding your eyes with something, you know? That's a better analogy, I think. That's literally what's going on in the internet. You want to pay the website money to buy a product, that's fine. You will see the price if you're just trying to see the price in order, for example, to compete and to make sure you can present a better offer.

Auren Hoffman (04:21.39)

Yeah,

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (04:45.389)

to the same consumer on your competing website, then someone is trying to block that from you. In what world this is a positive thing? mean, competition is great and you can't have competition without transparency. So I think that's a better analogy. You can think about also like two competing supermarkets at the same street.

Now, why an employee from one supermarket is walking into another supermarket to check the prices of the tomatoes because they want to win the consumer attention with discounts on tomatoes. But immediately when he's trying to enter the competing supermarket, someone is blocking him from access. That's actually even more closer to discrimination, I would say.

Auren Hoffman (05:30.668)

Yep. Yeah. Okay. Interesting.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (05:33.229)

So we see a lot of it and it's growing. And sometimes, you know, we see the same CTO of a company that is using Bright Data heavily to collect data from the web, also trying to implement sophisticated technology on his site, on his own website to block Bright Data from collecting data from their site.

Auren Hoffman (05:54.946)

Yeah, it seems like some of the biggest crawlers, the ones who most crawl the internet are also the companies who are most trying to stop people from crawling their site. Is that right? Okay. Yeah. Which I think is very funny and I don't know, maybe, maybe just it's very humorous. Maybe just part of human nature that that would happen. I don't know.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (06:08.652)

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (06:20.283)

I think that's an amazing, accurate representation of economics.

Auren Hoffman (06:26.274)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they want to get everything, all the benefits without giving any of their competition the benefits.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (06:33.849)

Exactly. actually that's like okay, I assume. It's an interesting cat and mouse game to play. I personally enjoy it a lot. And as long as we keep winning, that's even better.

Auren Hoffman (06:49.516)

Got it. So in the case, in your case, it's like, instead of sending the most recognizable, you know, instead of sending like Harold, Harold Schultz, the CEO or founder of Starbucks to Pete's Coffee, who he would be immediately recognized and shut out. You send a regular employee of Starbucks that they would never know to Pete's Coffee to check it out, to see how the service is and see how the products are, cetera.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (07:19.855)

Yeah, that's one thing that the more interesting part I think is doing that at scale. So it's sending Howard Schultz people to all of the branches of Pits Coffee across the US 10 times an hour.

Auren Hoffman (07:38.51)

every day.

Yeah, yep, yep.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (07:42.465)

Assuming the prices will change or and it's not just prices obviously just that's just an easy example or easy use case to understand but using exactly the same analogy you know physical coffee shops it can also be counting the customers.

understanding the sentiment inside the restaurant or the coffee shop. So it's much more than just the prices of the coffee and online obviously and we're talking about web pages and not actual coffee shops. Every web page holds infinite amount of data that represent an infinite amount of insights. So it's a lot more than just prices.

Auren Hoffman (08:24.13)

And I part of being a good citizen when you're crawling the internet is also not overly taxing servers. So crawling it in a way where you're a very tiny, insignificant percentage of the traffic and where you're kind of like being a good citizen in general, not overly crawling it. I assume that's kind of also

Like one has to figure those things out too, right?

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (08:55.231)

It has to go together. Okay, if you look for shortcuts to earn a quick buck You will fail You will you might succeed for a while, but you can't win in the long term if you're not

crawling the web in a polite, fair way, which means that you need to respect the website that holds the data. You need to educate your customers to understand that and to support that. And probably the most important thing because you can't control everything is that you need to develop.

proprietary technology, would say, because you have to do that because there isn't something available just out there. So you have to build your own in -house technology to make sure that you can enforce your own standards, policies, and rules. I'm very proud to say that we are doing that from the first day of the company. A lot of our technology, a lot of our R &D, a lot of our inventions

patents are not just about actual technology of web scraping but also about how to do it in the proper way. And it's not an easy task when you're talking about massive scale, a lot of traffic going to many websites from

thousands and tens of thousands of customers at the same time. But it's probably the should be and for us at least it's the number one priority above anything else. Otherwise, you know, if it won't be a win -win situation and if one side will lose then we wouldn't be here for a decade already.

Auren Hoffman (10:43.97)

Now, Meta recently dropped a lawsuit against Umbra Data for web scraping, web crawling, and that was a long kind of litigation cycle. Before we kind of get into, like, what did you learn from that experience?

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (11:05.081)

First of all, it was shorter than I expected because we, I think we were right and the courts, yeah, the courts saw that and realized that and it took less than a year and a half to win. That's actually pretty fast.

Auren Hoffman (11:12.236)

Yeah, you were doing all the right things following the guidance.

Auren Hoffman (11:20.568)

Which is extremely rare. Yeah, I've never heard of a lawsuit that can get adjudicated that fast between, especially between such a large company.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (11:30.285)

Yeah, mentally and resource wise, I was prepared for a very long and exhausting process. And that was a very good surprise to finish that quickly. yeah, just maybe how we started and what we're talking about. And obviously, I can only share what's public, but quite a lot of it has became public

Auren Hoffman (11:50.307)

Yep.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (11:53.963)

it was already, that's already behind us. So the experience to answer your question was, I think as any litigation, and it's not the first one, a roller coaster. You know you're right, you know that you're doing all the right things. And if you don't, don't go into litigation. But I knew, I knew that we're doing all the right things. So we decided to, you know, to fight for it.

But still it's a roller coaster, know, litigating with...

Auren Hoffman (12:27.17)

Yeah, you're going after you're going up against one of the biggest companies in the world with endless amounts of legal budget. And, you know, Bright Data is a cool company, but you don't have endless amounts of legal budget to fight.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (12:43.092)

Right, right. So, but I'll tell you that the decision to not to cave and to say we're not gonna stop because we're doing the right thing and we can back that up in court wasn't a hard decision. It wasn't a hard decision because we knew what we doing.

I can understand others that might cave. It's also a matter of resources, even if you're doing the right thing, sometimes you just can't sponsor it. Fortunately enough, Bright Data is a fast growing, very profitable company, so we could quite easily sponsor that. And that was, I think, one of the best decisions I ever.

had in my career to stand with my principles, my men and the company management principles and obviously the board back and support to say, okay, if that's the case, let's meet in court.

Auren Hoffman (13:43.864)

What was their, if you stand with me their argument, what was their contention? Why were they suing

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (13:51.823)

Great question for them. I can answer from what I've learned and saw from their filings. But basically how it unfolded was that they were a customer that was revealed in the court for probably six and a half years. I hope that happy customers because if you're using a vendor for such a long time, I assume that it's working well.

Auren Hoffman (14:16.173)

Yeah.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (14:20.591)

We're only doing one thing as a company, allowing our customers to collect public data from the web. So this is what they were doing with us. And one bright day, we just got a cease and desist letter from them, giving us a very short period of time to just stop collecting data from their assets, Facebook and Instagram, and also not allowing any of our customers to do that as well.

that was something that I kind of expected to happen one day from someone. I didn't know who exactly, but as time goes by, the value of data is just getting so big that it's still unregulated enough.

without any major court precedents listed in this case. So I knew that it's going to happen one day, especially because we are the leaders of this industry. Then we realized, we tried to understand what their claims are all about, because obviously, scraping is legal. They're doing that with us. So what's going on? And the major claims.

Auren Hoffman (15:34.412)

And at this time, they're still a customer or they've stopped being customer for you at this

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (15:41.135)

I'm not sure I can like reveal the exact dates, but when I got the season disease letter, they were a paying customer.

Auren Hoffman (15:44.064)

Okay, that's fair. Yeah, okay.

Auren Hoffman (15:50.326)

Okay. Got it. Okay. Yeah. And did the legal team know that or did they like, sometimes like one side doesn't know it's a, it's a huge company and stuff. Like, I assume they must've done like a vendor check internally. Like, are we like, that would be the first

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (16:01.13)

I

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (16:08.604)

I never asked that question. I regret not asking that at the same point of time. My personal opinion is that no, I actually didn't realize that. So anyway, we decided that almost immediately, but obviously I need to get the support of the management and the board.

Auren Hoffman (16:10.423)

Auren Hoffman (16:19.822)

They didn't realize that. Okay, got it, okay.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (16:33.113)

but it was unanimous that we're not gonna cave. You realize that we're doing the right thing and their claims were all surrounding contract claims. basically the claims were around, Bright Data, once many years ago, you opened a Facebook and Instagram pages for the company, when you're showing your happy hour on the first day night or whatever.

And by doing that, you accepted the terms of service or license agreement of the website. And one of those terms says no scraping is allowed. And we said.

Auren Hoffman (17:08.814)

Which is buried under like 500 pages that nobody would ever know anyway when they were on it or

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (17:15.989)

You know what, even if it was like the first paragraph in bold font, still, I mean, and our position was fine, but we didn't sign up to Facebook and Instagram as a company to scrape your websites. We're not collecting data behind the login ever in our history, never in the future, because it's our standards. We don't believe that this is right.

So that was around the contract claim and eventually it was two claims all around that. Fast forward probably a year and a half we got a summary judgment ruling that completely dismissed their first claim and a few weeks afterwards they just dismissed from their side. The second claim we haven't changed anything on our side.

if you need public information from any website, even if it's those websites, you will still get it from Bright Data because this is the right thing to do and the wrong thing to do is to try and block access to public information. It's public.

Auren Hoffman (18:20.526)

And I assume the one way they can block access is just putting it all behind a log in. Like today, my guess is 90 % of the data already is behind the log in. You're just being able to crawl 10 % of the data that's not behind a log in or some sort of proportion. So they could have made 100 % of it behind a log in if they choose to, right? At any point in

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (18:43.029)

Absolutely, and then we can't crawl it and that's completely fine. But you can't eat the cake and just leave it whole. You can't block all the access to your website and assume that Google, for example, will be able to index your website. And what you're going to do with

Auren Hoffman (18:46.87)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (19:06.414)

That's right.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (19:10.071)

Now other websites that embed your snippets on their website, which actually gives you traffic. you can't enjoy only being on one side and enjoy not being, you're allowing or at least not being able to block rollers to crawl the data.

and still be the successful company you are. Let's get back to that analogy. You can't put the prices on the cloth in the window of the store in the street to attract customers.

and assume that customers will see it and that's fine. But then you can't turn away or delete the prices and complain about the fact that no one is buying your clothes because you're hiding the prices. You need to get a decision. And what we're seeing is that even large websites that everyone are using that are testing a lot with moving data behind the login,

fast enough, you know, a matter of days, they just put it all in the public domain because it hurts their monetization, it's hurt the visitors, it's hurts their traffic, it hurts the experience. Just think about you looking for content online, usually on a specific website. Sometimes you will do it through Google. You'll Google whatever and the website name just to get into the direct link.

Auren Hoffman (20:36.376)

Yep. Of course. Yeah. In fact, if I'm searching LinkedIn and LinkedIn is their search is so slow and so, it's like almost unusable. So the way I search LinkedIn is I just go to Google and I say like LinkedIn and then, then, know, someone's name or some company or something like that. I get it much faster. So for me, it's a huge benefit that Google can crawl. like

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (21:01.227)

Exactly, and now it's completely fine if LinkedIn or anyone else will move out all of their traffic, all of their, sorry, information behind the login, but there will be a downside for that and this is why you don't really see it happening.

Auren Hoffman (21:06.691)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (21:14.56)

One of the things, you're in Facebook or WhatsApp or something like that, if you put a URL to a news site, let's say to New York Times or something like that, and it will then show you the content in a beautiful way. Basically, was essentially crawling, right? Yeah, so goes, it gets like the nice preview image.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (21:37.027)

preview.

Auren Hoffman (21:41.152)

It usually gets maybe the first sentence, gets the headline, and it makes the visual experience on a site like Facebook much more appealing to the user. And that is essentially, assume, just crawling. They're going out and they're getting it. At least the key things are public and they put it back. So just to make the internet work well and on just a regular basis, everybody has to kind crawl each

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (22:05.655)

Yeah, I don't think that people actually understand how their lives, regular ongoing daily lives would look like if data won't be accessible. You just gave one very simple example that everyone will notice and everyone will get really mad if this will disappear, this preview on social media networks. Just think about what will happen. We're being used by

the largest security companies in the world. They are using us in large scale to collect public data from the web to find malware, phishing attempts, scams. You can only do that if you collect massive amounts of data and then analyze it. And the analysis is being done on the company side and also with us.

just think what will happen if they don't have any more access to this information. I mean it's easier to think about immediate stuff that you'll feel like you know prices will go up because there's no competition, you won't see the nice previews on social media platforms. The implications are much much deeper than that.

Auren Hoffman (23:16.322)

Yeah. Now the, you know, there was a kind of also a famous case, and called high Q versus LinkedIn, which also had a very similar kind of case around crawling and scraping. and, now we've got your case and we've got other cases that are part of this kind of body of a law that seems to be at least favoring web crawling, these judges ruling

How do you see the totality of the legal landscape in the US?

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (23:48.279)

Yeah, it's becoming much clearer what's right and what's wrong and it's very, very happy. I wouldn't say surprised, but I wasn't sure how it's gonna unfold, but for sure very happy that it seems that the court system, and that's all happening in California, which has an even bigger implication.

The core system understand the importance of data. They understand that this is an asset that is equivalent to money and even maybe with higher value than money. Again, a cliche, but a true one. That's like the shovels for the gold rush or it's the gold itself, depends who you're asking.

They get that and they also see who are those large corporates that are filing the lawsuits.

No, it's those large corporates that are trying to keep these assets to themselves, even though it's not theirs. And I believe that that also tells an important story that these judges, I assume, understand just by looking at our cases and they mentioned that I give versus LinkedIn, even though that ended up a bit differently. What's becoming very, very clear is that you need definitions. They need to be clear. They need to be

Auren Hoffman (25:13.773)

Yeah.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (25:21.481)

So the definition that

We keep talking about, and in both of our cases, the meta versus bright data and also the X versus bright data, which we want both. The definition of public data is what we define, what I told you about. That's anything that is not behind the login or sign up. And it seems that the courts are accepting that. And this is important because it's a fast growing, fast moving industry. It will always move faster than the regulator.

But usually what you see is that the precedent starts in major court cases, like the ones we're talking about, and then it moving up the chain to the regulators and legislators. And that's a positive thing. It's a very positive thing. And we're seeing it happening. mean, our case was already, I think, twice cited in the Congress. That's a positive thing.

Auren Hoffman (26:25.71)

In some ways, it's not a surprise to me that being able to crawl responsibly is protected by the courts in the US, because it does kind of like fit the zeitgeist of the US. But I can imagine that other countries and other jurisdictions may have very different ways of thinking about this.

and it's not, they maybe don't have the same types of freedoms built in as US. what, and you crawl all over the world. So how does, how do those, how do you, how do you navigate all those different jurisdictional issues?

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (27:06.233)

First of all, you said something interesting that I wanna react on, that they understand or think that they understand the concept of fair crawling. I absolutely agree. I would even say that there is unfair crawling. And these cases, the crawling companies should lose in court. That's even more important than the good guys winning in court.

And we are also seeing that happen. And it's super important because it's not just tells you, no, this is the right way to do it. It also tells you and that's the wrong way. And it kind of sets the borders. And that's a good conduit to your question about the global presence of what we're doing and what others are doing.

Auren Hoffman (27:42.435)

Yep.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (27:52.085)

It's all about logic. I'm not sure that the reasons that we're winning in the US courts is freedom of speech. It might be part of it. It's more about logic, I think. I mean, it's there. It's public. It's just like, yeah, it's like someone will sue a company that walked down the street and saw a billboard that anyone can see.

Auren Hoffman (28:09.378)

Yeah, anyone could see it.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (28:20.167)

But that company is competing with the person that published the billboard. It's just logic. So I hope, I assume, and I kind of know because we're really engaged and we're actually trying to contribute a lot to the regulators in different countries, also in Europe, for example. I kind of know that they have the same thinking. It's logical. It creates good competition.

It takes some of the power from the large organizations that are trying to get as much power and knowledge and advantage on anyone else. So that's a good thing. And I think they understand the risk in allowing someone to block access to public information. Think about an amazing library that only allows certain type of people to walk in, read books, gain knowledge.

and progress the world. No one will argue that this is a positive thing. So it kind of feels the same. And again, mean, two cases already, major cases that we want. it's like, to me, it's like a fact that they all get that.

Auren Hoffman (29:37.268)

And when you think of AI, LLMs, transformers, on the one hand, it seems like it would make it a lot easier for you to crawl sites and process the data and make sense of the data. On the other hand, it seems like it would also make it a lot easier for competitors, other crawlers to crawl. So when you think of AI, do you think of it more as an enabler or more as a

to the or get a

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (30:09.007)

100 % enablers and we're like a year and a half into that revolution. So that's like not a theory where we're using AI to serve AI and LLMs. So LLM or data for AI has become our largest growth driver in the company and the largest vertical.

Auren Hoffman (30:20.291)

Yep.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (30:35.667)

and it surpassed everything in the last year because they need as much data as they can get and we'll probably also talk about that but to your question we are able to deliver better, faster, bigger because we are implementing a lot of AI in Bright Data. Now the fact that you are a large language foundation model

doesn't mean that you have any ability whatsoever to get to a website in massive scale. like millions of websites at the same moment and crawl it deep, wide up, down, multiple times. It just has nothing to do with your algorithms.

That's a completely different challenge to overcome those blocking mechanisms, to do it in a proper, fair way, to understand the structure, to parse it from an HTML to a table that the machine can actually read. That's actually not really their business. And we can't really do what these guys are doing. I'm not an AI person. I know a lot about AI and I'm good friends with all of them, but...

we're getting the data, it's their job to write the sophisticated algorithms that I can't and that's not my focus.

Auren Hoffman (31:58.338)

Now much of the AI revolution was initially built on the, common crawl, data set. and, maybe a few other kind of like more open. Crawlers now, a lot of these, a lot of them, while they're still using a lot of open data that, maybe they get from bright data, et cetera, they're also trying to lock in proprietary data. They're making deals to get data data. Maybe the data that's behind a log in

How do you think some of this is going to shake out over

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (32:30.285)

Yeah. So what we're seeing is very, very interesting again, because we're serving most of these household names in the AI industry. So everyone, no matter if they're been around for a few years or just two people start up the raised money, everyone will go to the common cross of the world. Amazing, amazing platforms that are doing such an amazing and important work to the work to

get a lot, they're getting a lot of value from that. They're taking the corpus of data for training.

their models, it allows them to start running really, really fast. But then they're all at the same level. All of their models were trained on the same data. Everyone will tell a slightly different story because they're doing things a bit different with their experience. Fine, true, maybe, but it's all coming back to the data. You need three things. You need the best talent, you need compute, you need tokens. That's data.

So you can argue if the talent is different between one company to another. Usually it's exactly the same people moving from one to another. The second thing is compute everyone are, you know, it depends on how much money you raise, but eventually you buy a GPU from video. And the third thing is the token. And that's the major challenge and the huge opportunity. So what we're seeing now and like literally now, these are like.

the everyday calls that I'm having with the CEOs of the large AI companies is, okay, we have all the internet, what's now? And my reaction is you have no idea what the internet is and you don't know what you don't know. Let me show you what you don't know. And thanks to our scale and actually what we've built in the last decade and kind of landed on us in the last year,

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (34:34.017)

allows us to map the internet, talking about hundreds of millions of new websites every week that we are able to map and we can show them, this is the content that you're not seeing on a daily basis. It's more content and data than anything that you've collected so far. Fine, you can play around with synthetic data, that's fine, but you're not anywhere close

eating the internet as everyone likes to say these days. You just don't know what you don't know. And this is what I'm seeing now. So now they're all trying to get an advantage against their competition by adding more layers into their NLMs that are more specific and more sophisticated towards a specific use case.

And for that, you need to find the right data. It's very, very hard. There's a limit to how much relevant data you can find by Googling stuff manually, right? Especially when you need a lot of data. So the token part is very, very interesting. And this is what we're seeing now.

It's becoming more niche, more specific, and the challenge is to find it. And then also collect it, but that's kind of solved.

Auren Hoffman (36:00.94)

No, can we double click on this, this idea of a login as kind of the main gate? So one thing that is starting to happen is these agents that can work on an individual's behalf to go do things. So, you know, maybe right now for me to go, check, my, mileage status on Southwest airlines or something like that. I have to go to the Southwest side. have to log

I have to go see it, but maybe I will have an agent that can go do that for me and let me know, hey, you need to fly Southwest one more time this year before you get the new upgrade and status or something. Or I could even have an agent go book my flight or an agent to go do some of these other things. We're moving more and more to these agent worlds that are going to act on my behalf. In some ways, what it does is it goes logs in, it crawls, it does things, it does some actions.

comes back, it's taking data, it's bringing it somewhere else. Why is the login the mechanism that we've all decided it has to stop with the

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (37:12.291)

That's a very, very good point and we're seeing a lot of that. We're seeing a lot of demand coming from what, so okay, so crawling the web, that's pretty much a GET request, right? It's a read -only thing. And what you're describing is like a POST request that you're actually, yeah, exactly, exactly. We're seeing,

Auren Hoffman (37:27.981)

Yep.

Auren Hoffman (37:35.884)

Yeah, a post and a get at the same time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (37:43.087)

some interest from that. It's not exploding right now, but there's a difference, I think, that there's a difference between doing the logging to collect the data in large scale or doing the logging on your behalf with your real user, your real credentials. By your request with the contract with you, Aaron,

Auren Hoffman (38:05.207)

Yeah.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (38:10.603)

and just optimizing and automating your life. I think that these are completely two different things. I absolutely agree with the point. And I also believe that in the near future we'll see, I'm not sure, court cases, but I do think some regulation around that because that's the logical thing to do. I'm not even sure that websites would care.

that it's a bot working for you. I mean, it's still doing what they want the bot to do, what they want you to do, right?

Auren Hoffman (38:45.196)

Yeah, some, some might not care in Southwest Airlines case. They might not care at all. unless I'm using it to get the best offer or something like that somehow. and then, you know, maybe they'll care, but I can see like right now I might go to LinkedIn and I might go search, for, you know, all

engineers in the Atlanta area that work for these types of companies and get back. So I'll go personally, I'll go do it and then I'll kind of poke around a bit. And I'm like, that's, are maybe these are the four engineers I'm going to go approach for my company or something. I could have an agent do that for me in the future. it seems logical, to do it. would save me some

to go do that. could also call, could also have someone else in my company do that, who I pay less, which is usually what happens today. Usually you, you, you get a, you get a person who you pay less money to, to go do that for you and they go do the research and they come back and say, here's, here's four candidates that we think are good for your, your role. But why can't instead of outsourcing that to, you know, some fabulous people in the Philippines, why can't I outsource that to, an agent again, not to.

crawl every single person in LinkedIn, but just to do like whatever would take me an hour to do to do the same type of thing and get that maybe still take a whole hour, the agent to get it. So why this difference?

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (40:16.193)

I absolutely agree. I just think that currently it's a stepping stone to get to what you're describing. And this is how in previous days that no one really understood, I mean, not everyone understood what web data collection, web data crawling, web scraping, whatever you call it means. Now everyone knows because everyone are doing that. In many, you know.

cases that I try to explain, I use exactly the same explanation. So yeah, you can or I can take like, pay a thousand people in, you know.

in places that I can afford doing that. Buying all of them a thousand computers and ask them to go to a website to manually fetch the data. No one will argue that's not okay. I'm just doing that more efficiently. I took the thousand people, thousand computer and merged them into a single computer that does it for me. I absolutely agree that this is the next step of the evolution.

of the industry but it's more related I think to the AI industry and less to the data industry in a way.

Auren Hoffman (41:27.15)

What is the difference between a company that publishes this data that's true, like a Bright Data or I work SafeGraph or something like that. We publish data that's true and a news organization like the New York Times or the Associated Press or Reuters or Bloomberg that is also trying to publish data that's true. Why is there a distinction between

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (41:55.16)

I'm not sure I'm following the differential.

Auren Hoffman (41:59.852)

Well, I mean, if you're if you're a news organization, you're saying, OK, this is what happened in the football game. This is, you know, so and so scored. This is what happened. Here's what you know. This is what happened in the stock market. This particular stock went up two percent last month. This other thing went down, et cetera. It's just it's just facts that they publish. Obviously, there's an opinion.

side of some of these things, but a lot of it is really just news. It's facts. It's here's what's going on. And then really that's, really that's what data is. I assume with your business, you're publishing facts about what's happening, maybe about a price. Here's the fact or about some other type of thing. And in some ways to me, it seems you're just a news organization, just like they are. And in some ways should be afforded the

type of rights that they are as well, but, or is that too crazy?

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (43:01.217)

No, no, that's exactly the same thing. I think that maybe the one single difference is that when you're reading the New York Times, you're a human. And when you're reading the Bright Data Dataset Marketplace or the Safe Graph Location Dataset,

you're usually a machine that needs to consume it large in large scale to process it and to get usually automated decisions by that. Other than that, exactly the same thing. I absolutely agree. Actually, the New York Times worked with Bright Data. It was already published because it's like a very good merge of what you just said. They wanted to publish a story. It was like probably two years ago or a year and half ago about what happened to

Auren Hoffman (43:19.778)

That's right.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (43:48.441)

to the Twitter feed after Twitter was acquired by Elon Musk. And so that's a news story. They tried to, I assume, reflect the facts, but they needed a lot of information.

and data to analyze the data to get to the facts. they parted up with bright data to collect public information from what was like that Twitter. And then you had a story in the New York Times. So it's exactly the same thing, but the data that they collected through us was given to an analyst team, which is the equivalent to a computer that reads them.

Auren Hoffman (44:31.01)

Yeah, it's interesting. It's like, if you have a whole bunch of data, it's data and it's treated one way. But if you turn it into a big pie chart for everyone to see it's news. right. And it's like, it's very funny. It's like, if we summarize the data, it's news, but the data itself is data. And it's like, let's, have to treat it in a different way or

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (44:42.513)

Yeah.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (44:50.065)

And by the way, the same data, don't give it to the New York Times, give it to a large hedge fund. It becomes alternative data that helps them to get investment decisions, exactly the same information. So that's even more, I mean, it's the same facts, but the insights varies depending who's reading them.

Auren Hoffman (45:00.44)

Correct. Yep.

Auren Hoffman (45:09.802)

The, there, there, there are so many things that are happening in the data business. one thing I'd love to get your opinion about is pricing. how does one think about how they should price for their data? it's competitive. We live in a competitive world. You have competitors, we have competitors. so how should one think about pricing the data, giving good value for the data?

you do what you could do a yearly price, you could price per data element. Like, how do you think about

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (45:44.079)

Yeah, so I'll give you my philosophy and it seems to be working for Bright Data for a while. It's all about value, but it's very hard to understand what is the value to the customer. So first of all, just start with a price. will, in 100 % of the cases, you'll get it wrong. Either too pricey, too high, too low.

That's fine, move fast and for the next customer you can adjust to the next customer you'll even adjust more. And then what will happen is that competition will arise and you need to adjust pricing usually down. That's what happens. What we're doing and what's working great for us is to make sure that every day I would say.

We're working on the next two to three years product line. And we're doing that for a decade. So every, I would say six months, we introduce a completely new product with the same single goal, get you the data you need. But it's always more advanced.

and that's a premium product. It's a premium product not because I decided one day and just because it's new. It's a premium product because it's easier for you, the customer, to get the data faster in a higher quality with less resources from your side. And then the price is slightly higher. So it's always the more mature products with higher competition

that are being priced along the years. And as long as you can keep innovating and increasing the value to the customer, you will always have higher yielding products. Now, specifically for data, it really depends how the customer is going to use the data. As I kind of started talking about it earlier, the same information from the same website.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (47:52.395)

even parsed in exactly the same way can be worth a lot of money to, again, let's say for an investment company that wants to get a very, very, very important decision if to invest billions of dollars in something or not, it's worth a lot of money, this information to them. And to another company, it can be a marginal value and maybe they can even skip it.

Auren Hoffman (48:17.826)

But then how do you discriminate then on prices? Okay, well you get it with a one second delay and you get it with a one week delay or something? Or how does one think about doing different types of pricing?

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (48:32.117)

So it's actually, in most cases, you don't. you, at least if you're trying to be the pure product company like we are, then you don't. You have that on the marketplace. It's visible to everyone. Transparency is important. So it's there. And you just understand after. Can you hear me? Seems like my connection dropped.

Auren Hoffman (00:00.142)

Well, we were, we were talking about pricing. and you know, partially it's, partially the goal is, you know, trying to keep doing things, cheek moving, keep trying to get things better. How does one like think of building a moat is the only way to build a moat, just like continual running and improvement every single day. Like you can never let up and you just have to keep improving, improving, improving.

Or is there some sort of way in some of these data businesses to build a moat? Not, I guess, of course you never can coast, but building a little bit more of a moat that can make your business a little bit more defensible.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (00:39.66)

So I think it's actually about keep moving fast and it's all about product, even when it doesn't look this way, I'll give you an example. So eventually 99 % of our customers, the only thing they wanna get is the data. It's just doing the crawling and scraping, that's the mean to get to the end goal, which is the data, right? And even more than that,

Auren Hoffman (00:59.052)

Yep.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (01:03.872)

They don't need the data, most of them. So AI companies do want just the raw data, but most of the other companies or customers, they want the insights from the data if they can just get it.

Auren Hoffman (01:14.427)

They care about a specific type of thing like the different price or something and they want to get that data from

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (01:22.728)

Exactly. So one new product that we launched probably a year and half ago is Bright Insights. For now only for the e -commerce industry that gives you the bottom line insight. Your market share on this website is X and these are your competitors. This is their market share. This is how much units they sold yesterday in that average price. Really an amazing product.

So that's like, okay, so that's, you can call it the strategic mode to give more value to the customers.

Auren Hoffman (01:57.602)

Guys, in some ways you could just be giving them a dashboard in a way. know, like they just need a way of like being able to review the

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (02:06.292)

Yeah, but my point is that this is still product. It's just about, it's always about that. You can have a very sophisticated pricing model with subscription that will lock the customer for a long time and the value is there, that's all fine. But eventually, at least in my view, it's all about the product. It's all about the technology. Otherwise,

Auren Hoffman (02:10.488)

course.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (02:32.556)

you know, something will happen one day and you'll start losing business. It's all about that.

Auren Hoffman (02:36.654)

There are some data companies that have either tried to get like more proprietary data or have some sort of give to get model where they have some sort of proprietary data where they can lock in a little bit more of advantage. Like how do you think most, how do you think other, what would be your advice to some of these other data companies out

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (02:57.056)

So I'm not against, but it can work for a specific niche. That's fine. So think about those large LLMs that are, as you said before, are contracting directly with big publishers.

Auren Hoffman (03:13.248)

Reddit or something.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (03:16.912)

I'm not sure it's great example because a lot of the content is still public and not behind the log in. So it's still collectible. I'm talking about more of like big publishers, the big newspapers of the world that are contracting with the open AIs of the world. That's fine. That's actually, it can be a mode. But if you're using Chetch GPT for coding as a copilot,

Auren Hoffman (03:32.845)

Yep.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (03:45.536)

Who cares, right? So if the coding copilot won't be in par with the cloud copilot for coding, you'll just move to the better product. So it can work really, really well as a load for specific use cases. But if you want to conquer the world, then that's just not good enough. It's all about product.

Auren Hoffman (04:08.93)

What do think about these data marketplaces where a buyer can see many, different data sources, maybe a data source could, a data seller could access many buyers. I haven't yet seen them take off. There's a lot of data marketplace, but I don't yet see a lot of dollars going through them, but I'd be interested in your thoughts about

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (04:31.392)

Well, if we weren't a private company, you would have seen. So the bright data marketplace, which you can sign up and you can see it, is that's a product. It's a marketplace, but it's being built from a product. We have third party data sellers that are selling on that. But I think that that's

Auren Hoffman (04:47.2)

So you have other data sellers that sell on

Auren Hoffman (04:53.172)

I didn't realize that. that's interesting.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (04:58.218)

Not the most interesting part. I think that the interesting part of it is the way that we're building it from a product point of view, not from a business point of view. So we see what our customers and the prospects and previous customers and everyone who needs data are looking for. And this is how we get the decisions, how to build it and what to build, what data sets to add, how to consume it, how to filter it.

So I'll give you an example. In the early days of the marketplace, we believe that that's a marketplace that you can literally get a CSV or even an Excel. So that can serve not just the data science team in a company, it can serve the marketing team because anyone knows how to read in Excel.

So this is how we started building that from a product point of view. It has the GUI, it still has a GUI that you can go in and filter stuff and see with your own eyes without writing a single line of code. What we realized from product perspective is that even if it's serving the marketing team eventually,

The person that is responsible to get the data wants to consume it through an API. That's a product understanding. So we've built an API for that. And this is why it's taking off. And yes, you can also sell the third party, I mean, your own datasets there if you're not a part of Bright Data. And it's, I assume like an economy scale game. We're sending it out to around

20 ,000 data buyers. They need the data. They don't really care if Bright Data produced a data set or if that's SafeGraph that produced the data set. And they are coming back to get the data because they know that they will find it with us. Also because we won't cave if a large company, if a huge company will sue us.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (07:08.708)

And that we also have a very good technology to overcome the blockings to get the data. And because we have strong partnerships with other sellers that are sitting on our marketplace and so on. So once we reach that tipping point at past dates that we have many data buyers that just keeps coming in, then it's again, all about the product. You need to deliver the right product to give them the data they needed fast, high quality.

and that will always be the mode.

Auren Hoffman (07:40.878)

And joining data across, you know, all these different data sources in your case, you're crawling many, many different sites is really hard. If you think of this shirt that I'm wearing, it's a green shirt and it might be sold on 10 different places at 10 different prices. And of course it may come in different sizes and of course comes in different colors and it's probably very related to, you know, the women's version of the shirt and this other shirt.

you know, and there are these other brands and they're all kind of connected to one another. How do you think about like joining the data and these different join keys, especially for products for different like, I imagine that's just a huge challenge.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (08:23.53)

That's a huge challenge, not a new challenge. Product matching, that's the definition. And that was a very interesting thing for Bright Data to solve. That was a classic build versus by the lemma that we had. And in this case, we actually chose by. So to launch Bright Insights and the product matching part.

and Bright Data is under the Bright Insights product suite. We actually acquired one of our customers. That was a great due diligence because they used us for like six years. We realized what they're doing. We saw, this is the next piece in the value chain for us. Giving the insight what the customer actually wants to get.

and that's a very very hard thing to solve. These guys are doing that a company called the Market Beyond. It was an easy decision for us.

Auren Hoffman (09:32.3)

No, why? You could have also, instead of buying the whole company, you could have, I'm sure, just been a customer of theirs or something. And they could have paid them to be a customer, which would have been a lot cheaper than buying the whole thing. Like, why do you choose to, you had to own the whole

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (09:49.342)

Yeah, in the last decade, and I'm the CEO of Bright Data for like, I think seven years almost, but been to the company almost from day one, I learned that what's working really, really well for us is two things. First one is focus only, or almost only on getting the data. It's hard enough, huge market.

and we're the best. The laser focused only on that. Now, the second thing is to keep going up the value chain. And that was just a decision to a decision that if we want to keep going up the value chain, we need to own this technology. And it's working well for us because we own the technology from the underlying infrastructure. For example, the proxy networks.

all up to the insights and I already know what's the next things in the value chain will look like and we're working on that and I have a few strong build versus buy dilemmas right now.

Auren Hoffman (11:01.1)

Now, a couple of personal questions before we go. Outside of Silicon Valley, Israel has been really the most prolific of all the high tech scenes. There's so much has been written about it, but what are some non -obvious reasons why Israel has been so successful in the tech

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (11:22.124)

I think, I'm not sure if that's obvious or not, I think that we have no other choice. That's just thinking and solving problems in large scale. That's something that we have to do as a nation. Even though we're not an island, an actual island, it's like living on an island. So just because...

who's surrounding us and physically if I want to visit Europe or come to you, I need to go on a plane. Even though that theoretically if I'll clear a couple of weeks, I can drive the at least part of the way, but technically it's impossible. So we're like an island. It means that we need to use the resources that we have as a nation. You won't find any oil in Israel.

and you won't find minerals that you can take from the and then sell to other countries, not a lot. You will find a lot of knowledge that was developed over the years from the, I want to say from the, you know going back to our history and

the Bible and reading books and writing books three to four thousand years ago. But that might be too much for me to testify on. even going to servicing in the army in a young age before going to college and just getting a lot of responsibility without the option to fail.

when you're 18, then there's no option to fail. when, and I see it with bright data, I see it with a lot of Israeli CEO friends and colleagues. Really no, no, that's not an option. And if we fail, it will be a big failure because we need to try really hard, but then getting up and then trying to get.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (13:41.448)

And I think that that compensates for a lot of things that might be missing in Israel. So keep trying with a lot of resilience. While understanding the power of knowledge, that's like a very good mixture. And this is why I think you're seeing a lot of the important technologies coming out from Israel. And we're seeing it now also in the AI.

just recently a few large new ventures started in Israel. Even going back a few years when Nvidia bought Mellanox for many billions of dollars, that's a good testimony for that.

Auren Hoffman (14:29.582)

Our last question we ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (14:36.512)

that solving something in a meeting or just doing meetings is a legitimate way. I am really, really against meetings. This is how the company operates. I'm not sure you even noticed, but when we try to schedule this one, I don't have anyone to schedule.

my calendar, I'm doing that because I don't have any meetings. I just told, yeah, whatever works, I'm free. And that's usually the case. And I like to be challenged by people that are asking me, yeah, I get that, sounds cool, but you can't do this and that without an actual meeting. And the answer is no, you can actually do it much better without doing a

Auren Hoffman (15:26.446)

So you you, you async it, you know, you've got a shared doc or you shared, you know, confluence or shared Slack or some other, so you're, you're asyncing the stuff or it's really just, do you do it live or you do it async? Is that the diff or, cause you're collaborating with other people in your company, assume.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (15:45.674)

That's actually, yeah, but let's not confuse a meeting with collaboration. What you talked about, that's methods to collaborate. When you're doing a meeting, usually it means that there's no clear ownership. And if there is a clear owner, then they don't have the authority to be a real owner. What I'm trying to do, and it's hard.

is to make sure that there's clear owners with the right authority. It's not always working, but we have to keep trying. And then you don't really need the meeting. You need someone that knows how to get the right decisions and execute.

And to collaborate, yeah, you can absolutely do it async. It doesn't mean that they can't, you know, give you a short phone call there and I'm going to do this and that. What you think about it. I need your help with this and that. That's absolutely fine.

Auren Hoffman (16:44.238)

Guys, so you don't need to have a meeting. You just call someone just quick and just a quick sync on it or something like

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (16:49.644)

Yeah, you're taking the 45 to an hour meeting, which usually is not very useful, and summarizing into the actual five minutes that are useful, that are about the action items, the decisions, the things to be taking, and all of that.

Auren Hoffman (17:07.02)

Yeah, that sounds amazing. well, thank you or lunch or, for joining us on world of DAS. You're at or lunch on X. So I think you mostly post in Hebrew. So some of our audience could benefit from that, but you're also active on LinkedIn. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. This has been a ton of fun. I really appreciate you coming on world of DAS.

Or Lenchner (Bright Data - CEO) (17:29.078)

Thanks for having me and unfortunately my Instagram and Facebook accounts were shut down by Meta when they sued us. So find me on LinkedIn and feel free to reach out and really I appreciate the invitation. was a great time.

Auren Hoffman (17:43.148)

Awesome. Great.