Saurabh Sharma, You.com CPO on AI Search, Agents and Enterprise

Grace Gong (0:01)

We're live. Hi, Saurabh. Welcome to Venture with Grace.

Saurabh Sharma (0:04)

Hey, Grace. Thanks for having me.

Grace Gong (0:06)

I'm so excited about our conversation because I feel like the AI search industry has been going very strong. And I want to start with, you have worked on some amazing companies. Honestly, my favorite would be OpenSea, maybe online, obviously Google and stuff. So have you worked with like Shiv?

Yeah, so Shiv and another person who joined from Coinbase, Sen Chen. I don't know. I think it's Shiv. Shiv used to do product opening as well.

Saurabh Sharma (0:42)

Yeah.

Grace Gong (0:43)

I mean, OpenSea as well. So obviously the OpenSea squad has been killing it. That's like the open-air welfare was coming out of OpenSea squad.

I want to start with what were some core lessons that you have heard early on in your career, whether it's Google or CMU or at OpenSea that shape you to who you are today?

Saurabh Sharma (1:02)

Yeah, great questions. I think a couple of things come to mind. Number one is when you're given a problem, think about it, think about the system around the problem. So I remember at OpenSea, we were often talking about how do we make sure that customers at OpenSea have a great experience, that we can reduce the incidents of fraud that were a problem at that time.

As an example, there are all sorts of things that we could do to reduce our customers running into fraudulent situations at OpenSea. We were very successful at that. There was a great team around that worked really hard to make sure that fraud was going down. But if you only think about OpenSea, you're not solving the bigger problem for your customers as well. Back then, we needed to think about what's the experience like on the wallets themselves. We spent a lot of time working with wallets, crypto wallets to make sure that not only was the experience at OpenSea really great and reducing trust and safety issues, but also that when customers were using other adjacent products, that we were thinking about this together with the wallets and not just as an OpenSea specific problem.

I've often found that thinking about it at a systems level, as opposed to just that particular issue will ultimately lead to better solutions overall and can make it so that people are thinking about the solutions in a fundamentally different way. That's one thing I've always tried to approach problems with, whether it's at u.com, whether it's at OpenSea or Google before. Another thing that comes to mind is, ship fast. Every time I had a choice to ship something right away or wait for it to get a little bit better, I have always come back and looked at it. If I decided to ship fast, that was the right decision because we learned something, customers gave us feedback, customers are forgiving, and they know that there's a subset of customers that want to try things to give you feedback, that type of thing. Every time I made the decision to not ship fast and wait for it to get better, it ended up being the wrong decision because I missed out on feedback. I tried to build in a vacuum, and by the time that vacuum reached the real world, the market had changed and perhaps I could have adjusted faster had I pushed something out earlier. Sometimes people will say, well, at Big Tech, you have to take things a little bit slower, you have to get it right.

That's right. But at the same time, having a bias towards shipping and getting feedback from the real world in some way, which can be tricky sometimes, especially at bigger companies, is the right way to go. Thinking about how do I get into the real world faster? How do I get real signal, not just from 100 user studies, that type of thing, has always been something that I found to be valuable.

Grace Gong (4:04)

I wonder, so when you're thinking about, I really like what you said about ship fast, because you have to build in the real world, instead of building in an isolated, feedback-less world. So I want to start with, I feel like u.com did a really successful pivot, because you guys started with similar to a consumer search engine, similar to like for Plexi and stuff, but now you guys are focusing on the enterprise search. I wonder, maybe we'll go start from, what will be one piece of insight that you feel like you guys have gained from the journey of pivoting the product?

Saurabh Sharma (4:44)

It's been, in a way, there's been a through line throughout U.com's entire existence. It started off as human web search. As you described, we were focusing on AI web search for consumers.