No Priors Ep. 8 | With Neeva’s Sridhar Ramaswamy

(instrumental music) . Sridhar, I've learned so much from you as an investing partner, founder, and friend. Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Very excited to be here saying I've (laughs) learned so much about companies and investing in tech from you.

Let's start with the background. Tell us about the motivation to start Neeva when you were already part of creating the dominant search product.

Yeah. So Neeva was a little bit of back to basics thinking. Uh, when I left Google, I knew I wanted to start a company. Um, I spent a lot of time with Vivek about what we wanted to work on, and we ultimately came to the conclusion that, like, we are (laughs) actually really excited about search. Uh, there's the geek in us that like to help people, uh, find information that they needed. Um, and we were also ambitious enough to think that, you know, 20 years in, uh, we could rethink the search product and create a better one. Our aha moment, uh, 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, like, monetizing, we truly could start from back to basics." As, uh, 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, uh, you know, whether they were ready for change, um, or not. Um, 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, 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."

So, I think many people, um, who use Google every day would say, like, "It's actually pretty good." And as somebody who was working on this, um, you could see, I think sometimes users are blind when they have a, you know, a default that's this strong. What were the things you thought could be better? And if I could add to that, like, how does that factor into the Neeva mission?

Yeah. So, I mean, an important part, at least early on, was the private and the ads-free. And, you know, we have to say that we underestimated how much people, especially in the US, would care about it. Um, as you know, figuring out consumers is a very tricky thing. People will often not do what they say they, uh, will do or will not even admit to things that... like, they will or will not do. That's just the nature of the game. For us, for example, we were surprised that, um, we did so much better in Europe compared to the United States. And 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 do we use the power of being, um, privacy-focused and ads-free to create truly a better experience. Um, so we've tried a number of things. Um, they have achieved varying degrees of success. For example, the integration of, uh, things like personal data, personal preferences. Um, but I would say the, 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? Um, 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, you know, 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, you know, one has to learn.