What is the future of search? With Neeva’s Sridhar Ramaswamy

**Sridhar Ramaswamy** (0:07)
Even in terms of what can search engines do, we are very much at the beginning. I think we're going to expect a lot more from these kinds of interfaces.
And the difference between a chatbot and a search engine that combines a chatbot and retrieval is going to just look more and more bloody going forward.

**Sarah Guo** (0:29)
This is the No Priors podcast. I'm Sarah Guo.

**Elad Gil** (0:32)
I'm Elad Gil.

**Sarah Guo** (0:33)
We invest in, advise and help start technology companies.

**Elad Gil** (0:36)
In this podcast, we're talking with the leading founders and researchers in AI about the biggest questions.

**Sarah Guo** (0:49)
For the first time in decades, one of the Internet's most important products, Web Search, feels like it might be at risk for disruption.
Bing has allied with OpenAI to integrate LLMs. Google is committed to launching new products, and new startups are emerging.
A former 16-year Google veteran, who most recently led the Internet's most profitable business as SVP in charge of Google Ads, Commerce and Privacy, Sridhar Ramaswamy co-founded the challenger, AI-powered search platform, Neva, in 2019 Sridhar, I've learned so much from you as an investing partner, founder and friend. Welcome to the podcast.

**Sridhar Ramaswamy** (1:20)
Thank you. Very excited to be here. Same, I've learned so much about companies and investing in tech from you.

**Sarah Guo** (1:26)
Let's start with the background. Tell us about the motivation to start Neva when you were already part of creating the dominant search product.

**Sridhar Ramaswamy** (1:32)
Yeah, so Neva was a little bit of back to basics thinking. When I left Google, I knew I wanted to start a company. I spent a lot of time with Vivek about what we wanted to work on.
And we ultimately came to the conclusion that we're actually really excited about search. There's the geek in us that helped people find information that they needed.
And we were also ambitious enough to think that 20 years in, we could rethink the search product and create a better one. Our aha moment is a little bit of an abstract aha moment, which is we said, if we didn't have to deal with ads, if we didn't have to worry about monetizing, we truly could start from back to basics. As both of you know, in startups, it's as much about taking advantage of opportunity as it is the original direction that you set. So the first three years of Neeva were really about building a better private search engine. And honestly, it also taught us a lot of pretty harsh lessons about consumers and whether they were ready for change or not.
And really what we saw happen with AI and large language models last year was that aha moment when we realized, wait, we can have the great principles that we started Neeva with and create a much, much better experience. And so that's a little bit of the journey to where we were. But at our core, Neeva was like, there must be a better search product. It cannot be that there's one company, one religion, one product for the whole world.

**Sarah Guo** (3:03)
So I think many people who use Google every day would say like, it's actually pretty good. And as somebody who was working on this, you could see, I think sometimes users are blind when they have a default that's this strong.
What were the things you thought could be better? If I could add to that, how does that factor into the Neeva mission?

**Sridhar Ramaswamy** (3:24)
Yeah, so I mean, an important part, at least early on, was the private and the ads-free.
And we have to say that we underestimated how much people, especially in the US, would care about it. As you know, figuring out consumers is a very tricky thing.
People will often not do what they say they will do or will not even admit to things that they will or will not do. That's just the nature of the game.
For us, for example, we were surprised that we did so much better in Europe compared to the United States. You don't really think of them as being that different. But in practice, in terms of how many people care, it is actually very different. So a lot of the early Neeva was really about how to use the power of being privacy-focused and ads-free to create truly a better experience. So we have tried a number of things. They have achieved varying degrees of success. For example, the integration of things like personal data, personal preferences. But I would say the fundamental challenge of Neeva, especially in the United States, has been how do you get people to take that initial step of caring enough to want to change their search engine? Once you actually get people to do that, the job gets considerably easier and they begin to see all of the things that were not really that great about that experience. Again, as a startup founder, as a consumer startup founder, I think these are pretty harsh lessons in consumer psychology, but one that one has to learn.