How a first-time CEO is taking on Google: No process, no NPC hires, and extreme shipping velocity

**Will Bryk** (0:00)
The first advice I got when I told everyone we're building a search engine behind Google in 2021 was like, what are you, nuts?

**Nakul Mandan** (0:04)
Yeah.

**Will Bryk** (0:04)
I kind of laughed, but also was like, maybe I am nuts. Really try to avoid non-playable characters is like the way of saying it. Like people who just go through life, like as if they're on a stream and they have no agency over themselves. A month is an insane amount of time. Nothing should ever take a month to ship. It feels like ridiculous that we can get to the moon and we split the atom. And yet, if I want to understand what's going on at the border right now, it's really hard to. Like that to me is just an error in humanity. When I was a kid, I thought we have a bunch of adults, why can't they figure out how to share information in a normal way? Like why is everything politicized? I always thought this was ridiculous and I don't accept it. This is my mission if I choose to accept it.

**Nakul Mandan** (0:37)
If you've used an AI product that searches the web, there's a good chance Will Bryk's company was underneath it. Exa Power's search for OpenAI, Cursor, Cognition and a growing list of the best tech companies in the world. It's valued at $2.2 billion and it's quietly become one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in AI.
And it's all happening fast. Exa went from about 10 people to 125 and tripled its valuation in under a year. The hard part of a company growing that fast is the person running it has to grow just as fast. Will is a first-time CEO doing exactly that in real time. What I find most interesting about our conversation today is Will's inner game. Will says instead of real life role models, he's inspired by fictional superheroes. People who decide who they are going to become and then do the work. We'll figure it out from Mission Impossible has apparently become a mantra at Exa.
Today's conversation is a glimpse into Will's journey. How he's scaling himself, how he runs an AI native team, and what actually drives him. Nakul up.
Will, welcome to the show.

**Will Bryk** (1:48)
Thanks for having me.

**Nakul Mandan** (1:49)
Exa is building web search for AI agents, but Google already has a 25-year head start on indexing the web. It is the best search engine by a long distance. Why do we need a new web search tool for AI?

**Will Bryk** (2:01)
Yeah. The short of it is that Google was built for humans, and now there's this new kid on the block called agents, and they search in very different ways. So Google was not optimized for this new world of agents searching the web, and Exa is built for this world. I have a list of 20 differences between humans and AI searching. One example is humans are lazy, they type in a few keywords, then they get some links, they click on those links. This is how humans used to search. But agents, they're not lazy at all, they make very complex queries, they can instantly output a paragraph explaining exactly what information they want, and they don't really want a list of links, they want a blob of data that exactly captures what they want. So another interesting thing is Google was optimized so that every link correctly is relevant to the query, because you might click on the third one, you might click on the second one, but to an agent, it actually wants a very diverse amount of information because it's just gobbling it up all at once. So these are just a few of the examples in there, you know, dozens.

**Nakul Mandan** (2:53)
But even so, even if AI agents are searching differently, isn't this like such an important piece of infrastructure for AI agents that OpenAI, Google, Anthropic would want to own it in-house? Like how can an independent company even exist against the onslaught of the big labs?

**Will Bryk** (3:11)
Yeah, so first of all, like it's very, very hard to build a search engine. Very few organizations on the planet have ever done it. You have to crawl a massive amount of data, exabytes of data, and then you have to do a lot of research over years to, given a query, how do you filter down a trillion documents, right? So it's very hard. So only like the very big companies and company startups crazy enough to work on it for years can do this kind of thing. And then I think Exa's in a unique position where we are happy to be neutral in search infrastructure that powers any company.