Ep. 1 Sridhar Ramaswamy Co-founder at Neeva.com

Show Notes

Neeva was created to give you a choice in how you search and experience the internet. We built Neeva to feel like your personal corner of the web, designed specifically for you – always ad-free and private. Our mission is to serve our users, and only our users.

https://neeva.com/

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Listen in as groundbreaking leaders discuss what they have learned. Discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research, articles and lessons that shaped their journey. Hosted by: Kevin Horek, Gregg Oldring, & Jon Larson.

Intro/Outro: Welcome to the learner.co show hosted by Kevin horic and his fellow learner co-founders listen in is groundbreaking leaders discuss what they've learned, discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research articles, and lessons that shaped their journey to listen to past episodes and find links to all sources of learning mentioned. Visit learner.co that's learner with two L's dot co.

Kevin Horek: Welcome to the first episode of the learner.co show. I am one of your co-hosts Kevin horic and I am joined by Greg and John Greg. Maybe, do you want to give a quick intro on yourself?

Gregg Oldring: Sure. I'm Greg . I've been doing startups for my whole career going back to 1995 and CEO of learner.

Jon Larson: And I'm Jon Larson. I've also been doing startups for over 15 years and I'm really interested in people's learning journey.

Kevin Horek: Very cool. I'm Kevin Horek, I'm also one of the co-founders of a learner. We're excited to have Sridhar Ramaswamy, the co-founder of Neeva on the show today had the pleasure of actually using Neeva for a number of months. For those of you that haven't heard of Neeva, it's basically a privacy first search engine. It actually works really well. I was a little skeptical and I went to try it out for the first time, because I think anything like Google, such a behemoth in the space, but Sridhar actually used to work at Google really helped them along the way in their ad Google ad space. Very much understands the space and privacy and everything about that. I'm excited to learn more about what he's kind of learned along the way, why privacy matters and I'm excited to have him on the show. Like what do you guys think?

Jon Larson: Oh, I'm really excited about this interview. I've I've heard him interviewed a number of times, including on your show, Kevin, and I'm just really interested in delving into what he's learned along the way what's inspired him, what he was surprised by both that Google gray lock and now it Neeva. I think it's going to be a fascinating interview.

Gregg Oldring: Yeah, I'm also really excited because I think his background is so interesting. He's lived in more than one place. He studied in more than one place. He's got a career in tech that now maybe is kind of defined a bit more though in things outside of tech, because privacy, isn't really a technological problem. It's kind of more of a philosophical one. And so that's really fascinating. I'm excited to see what corners and things that are outside of his lane, where he's learned from. So see where this goes.

Kevin Horek: Yeah. I think the other thing too, and we've talked, the three of us have talked about this before is just the three of us have different perspectives on how much of our own personal privacy we're willing to give up. I'm the one that is fine giving away probably the most out of the three of us, because I think there's some convenience attached to it. I also feel like I don't really have that much stuff that I guess I don't really care. I, that being said though, there are certain companies that I will not put their app on my phone because I don't want to give them any more details than they already have about me. I guess I'm willing to give it to some companies, but not every company, John or Greg thoughts on that.

Gregg Oldring: Well, I'm the middle, so I'm somewhere in between the two of you. Right? So yeah, that spectrum is really interesting. I think it's true for a lot of people and I think it will be interesting to see, w and of course of Neeva and what your daughter has to say, where maybe we fit for ourselves using me though, going forward too. It's going to be cool, John.

Jon Larson: Yes. Well, you're both under the impression that I have the strongest views on privacy, but I was just thinking that I, I, I use some of the Facebook products and so that you're obviously trading, you're making a trade there. You're for their tools. You're, you're giving they're, you're letting them broker your information. I do think that I think a lot of people are looking for a new model that is different than what Google and a number of the social media companies are going with these days. I think that's, what's really fascinating as well as how they're looking at kind of approaching Neeva as a business model and just what they see as the future of search and other online tools as well.

Gregg Oldring: They need to see what actually happens with this show now, too. This is the first episode, so let's make it a winner.

Kevin Horek: All right. Well with that, let's get to the interview. If you stay on after, we'll do a quick little wrap up between the three of us on with the show. Welcome to the learner.co show. Today we have Sridhar Ramaswamy. He's the co-founder at neeva.com Sridhar. Welcome to the show,

Jon Larson: Kevin. So pretty excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Kevin Horek: Yeah. I'm excited to, well, have you on the show again, you were on my other show a bunch of months ago, and I thought you would be the perfect first guest for this new show that we're building around an app called learner.co. I think what you're going to share today is going to be super valuable and educational for pretty much all the listeners. Before we get into all that stuff, maybe let's start off with your background and where you grew up.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Totally. I grew up mostly in south India to a middle-class family. Neither of my parents went to college, but education was always a thing. My parents saw that as a a way into middle class to buying a home to prosperity. So they always trust that a lot. That's all, Asian family is always a lot of pressure on stuff like that. I was lucky I got into, one of the best schools that there is, was india, 80 metros Garda gate. Got a great education there, then got a PhD from brown on the east coast. This was nearly 30 years ago. Yeah, that brought me to this country. I've been here ever since proud citizen of the U S both my kids were born here. So I'm your classic immigrant story?

Kevin Horek: No, I think that's great. So walk us through your career. Maybe some highlights and some learnings, and maybe some, hopefully some failures along the way. Cause I think somebody like yourself, that's had tremendous success talking about still going through failures and dealing with failures makes people that are just starting out, been doing it for a long time. I think it just gives them some perspective and sometimes it picks them up when they're down. So, so can you maybe give us a bit of some career highlights and walk us through your journey?

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Yeah, totally. I think dealing with failures, being resilient to them, believing in yourself is one of the most important things that we all need to learn. I'll start with an early one. I told you, I went to it matters the way it works is it's basically like a college entrance examination. You can think of it like an sat, but think sat is like, literally the only thing that'll be used to give you a rank and the, to decide which college you get into. You take this, straight out of high school and I did, and it's comes in, it's four parts, physics, chemistry, math, and an optional part in language. And I did terribly. After the first day, these are for, four exams over two days after the first day, I was like, I am so bad. I don't even want to go for the second day, gave up, went home.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: I said, I'm going to really try hard, edit, took a year off pretty much, sat in one room and studied for an entire year and took the exam again. It's crazy looking back at it, but I had the belief in myself to want to do that. I, I made it in that was like a big deal for me. And, and similarly I did research for close to 10 years. I got a PhD, at brown in computer science, to be honest, I was not a great researcher, but I, I tried, I got it.

Kevin Horek: Sorry to cut you off. Yeah.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: P it's one of those things where you can see it, how productive you are, how like really enthusiastic about the work that you are, how much your heart is into it, with the wisdom of age, I'll say like, you should pick professions that like enthrall you where work does not feel like work, looking back research didn't feel like that was always hard. I got some papers because I'm also stubborn, but I was not a great researcher. So, I worked at places like Belcore Intel labs, but then said, I just want to go write software work for a company, create products. It went so much better. For example, the career shift is an example of a kind of failure is my saying like, yeah, she thought I was a researcher, not so hot. Try my hand at being a software engineer. That's also, when I, got my first taste at managing teams being a leader and that worked out much better.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: I joined as an IC at Google, individual contributor, writing code for a living to running a team of 10,000 people. I just like it's inconceivable, even to me that one can do stuff like that. I think this, yes, there is this evolution. You want that success, but occasionally you have to reset and say, you're going to try something again or switch directions. Completely. Neva is a similar story. I went from being an exec in a big company to like team of three, my two co-founders. Now we are about 60 people, clearly running a team of 60 or a company of 60 has nothing to do with like running a team inside a giant company like Google. I think all of these experiences are great, but it falls into this overall theme. You got to reinvent yourself, you got to try new stuff. You're going to fail along the way, but hopefully the successes more than make up for it.

Kevin Horek: No, I think that's actually really great advice, but how did you kind of pick yourself up after these failures and just decide to not give up and pivot basically, because that can be very scary in itself. It sounds like you've done that a few times, right? Sometimes you chose to do that and other times you were kind of forced to do that.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Yeah. It's hard. I'm, I'm not sure that there are simple answers. As I said, looking for resonances, looking for things where work doesn't feel like work where you're like, I like doing this that really helps a lot. There is also this, the simple thing of believing in yourself, if there is one piece of advice that I would give to a younger me, it would be life's really long and there's a lot of time to do all kinds of stuff and it's okay to be patient it's okay to like, not burden yourself with so much expectation because I, I would put, I still do put a lot of pressure on myself to get things done. I think having that core belief and also believing that there's plenty of time to get great things done. Those are the best things that I can recommend everybody, people have to kind of find their own formula, but I'll stress again, being kind to yourself, realizing that there is a lot of chance to have a big impact regardless of what stage of life you are in, that can propel you forward.

Kevin Horek: Sure. How did you, because you made it very high up in Google and I'll let you talk about that in a second. You're also, you still work, you're still doing some investment with Greylock and now you're doing your own startup. How have you managed to basically, have you had kids in America, you mentioned, how have you kind of managed being like a very busy executive at one of the biggest companies on the planet to know, doing investments again, with one of the biggest investment firms on the globe and now doing your own startup, like obviously you're a busy guy.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Yeah. I think it's important to have priorities. I've done relatively few things at any given point in time. And I don't do many things. I'd Google, for example, I basically did two things. I worked at Google and I wanted to be a good parent to my two sons and a good husband to my wife. I was always there, for example, in the evenings to help my kids with homework. I remember like, working on problems from like on a plane trip with like bad Wi-Fi and I would send solutions to my kids, our ideas about our problems that they were solving. When, my 15 years at Google, I either I just worked or I was home with my kids. I gave up on a bunch of like social activities. Didn't make it to a ski trip. The fame, Google skate trips until I had spent about 10 years at Google because, evenings and weekends were for spending time with the kids, not for being on a ski trip.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Again, you have to find out what are the most important priorities. If, you were to ask me, even if I look back on the 15 years, yeah. I'm proud of like becoming an executive Google and having an impact on the company. I'm even proud about the fact that I was actually there for my kids as they were going through school. Now they're in college and beyond. Having these kinds of priorities about your most important relationships is important currently, pretty much all of my time is spent focused on nivo. I have an association with Greylock partners. I'm a venture partner. There it's a part-time job. I help them out because I know a bunch of people in a bunch of areas in terms of just technical expertise and connections. Clearly my focus is on making Neeva, the company succeed. That's what I ended up spending a lot of time on.

Kevin Horek: Sure. No, that makes a lot of sense. Your education is very like computer science focused. What have you learned outside of computer science? That's really helped you at Google and at Neeva and throughout the rest of your career?

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Yeah. This is a really great question. I think the early education that I got at it metros and before that india was very stem focused. It was all about science and math and technology. It's good to have a firm basis, but I think it is also important to understand the broader world that we all live in the context off. Brown actually did a fabulous job there because there's so much choice brown, as has an open curriculum. We can go audit any course, sit on any course. I learned a lot of literature, a lot of music. And so it was really very expansive. I'm a curious person. I read a lot, some of my highlights during the last 18 months of the pandemic was reading the biographies of people like Mandela or Martin Luther king, our Gundy. Being informed of what is the broader world off things like politics, which obviously affect all of our lives a lot.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: To understand the context in which progress is being made on is really important for all of us. I'll give you a simple example. As Asians are basically forbidden from immigrating into the U S up until 1965. The immigration reform act was passed primarily as a result of all the civil rights work that went on during the sixties. People like me, people like my uncle who came in 1971 and got a PhD in chemistry would not have made it out to the U S if not for the civil rights struggle. It's important for immigrants to realize things like this. Yes, I got lucky that I came in, got a full scholarship to do a PhD, but what, there was blood, sweat and tears that went into providing these kinds of opportunities for us to me as I grew up just relating what we got, what was possible, for immigrants like me, with the broader context of how the society make progress reminds you of how lucky you are, but it also tells you of your obligations to give back to the larger society that you are a part of.

Kevin Horek: No, I, I had no idea. That's, that's amazing. I'm curious, you mentioned a few other things there, music and a couple other things that have inspired you. Can you give us some other examples of why music and a couple other things have inspired you and have they inspired you when you decided to do Neeva and then I want to get into NEBA?

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Yeah, I think as I said, being informed of the larger world in which technology plays a role, lets you then examine technology's roles in the good and the bad that has resulted in the last two years. I would say, like broadening your horizon essentially gives you that kind off scope to give you a concrete example. All of us take it for granted that we should be as successful as we can be. It's kind of a dumb thing to say, but that's, it's true, right? It's just like, yeah. It's like all of us, like we are supposed to aspire to be billionaires. We just take it for granted like that. Hey, that's what you're supposed to do. Similarly, every company thinks that it is supposed to expand and get to be really big and be a trillion dollar company. That's what companies are supposed to do.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: At some point you also realize, wait, I'm being a complete monopoly in an area, might not be good for the larger society towards the end of my stay at Google. I also realized, yes, Google is incredibly successful, but a world in which Google is literally the only search engine that there ever is going to be is not only bad economically. It's kind of scary. It's like one being the arbiter of truth. Similarly, a situation in which anyone that wants to connect with a new customer on the internet has to pay toll to a Facebook or a Google or an Amazon, which by the way, is the current state of the world for all intents and purposes is not one that's good for all of us. I think that broad context that recognition that monopolies, in the extreme are bad and that competition is important. You need the broader perspective to realize otherwise you simply take it for granted that the only way is like, up into the right.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: To say at some point, as I was saying, I was like, wait, we are going to end up in a situation where Google is going to be the only search engine. If you put in a commercial query, Google is only going to show you ads. If you put in a non-commercial query looking for information Google by itself, without any other website was going to tell you what the answer to your question was going to be. I said, that's a terrible world that we are living in and all things unchanged. That is the outcome that we can all confidently predict in a large way. NEBA came as like answer to it is possible to solve a problem like this very differently. It is possible to rethink business models, to rethink what a great product should be to innovate on the core idea of something. As basic as search, we all take for granted how search is supposed to work, but nivo was born.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Both of the realization that monopolies are bad, that toll takers are bad and the different models actually make us a better people. I would look at Neeva as a way in which like all of my learnings starting from technology, but then about people, politics, economics, behavioral economics come full circle into creating a product where we want to say, Hey, we want to create technology that serves humanity. That doesn't exploited. Yes, it's a small thing for a product, but I think, that's the base of NEMA. That's how we, at least I think about innovation now.

Kevin Horek: That's very cool. You came to this conclusion, but what made you decide to be the one to actually execute and build Neeva?

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Good question. I, I have a tactical answer to this one, which is, I knew that if I did not start a company, I never would. I have, like every other kid that there is, or every other grownup that there is, I had dreamed about starting my own company, to create a startup, like sure. Trying to beat it is the dream of every person in Silicon valley. And, and part of the reason why I left Google was like, I wanted to leave while I was still motivated to create a startup. We worked my co-founder and I spent a bunch of time talking about what it is that we would be excited to do. He's worked in search ads like me. He's also worked on the Google assistant and so has a lot of expertise in the area. We both realized that the only real way in which to innovate in search was to be diametrically different and opposite to how Google operated and, while we Florida did a bunch of ideas, this is how we came to the conclusion that this was where we wanted to start.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: We both love search because we think of it as the ultimate expression of just human curiosity, literally anything that comes to people's heads, they're going to put into a search engine. It's also a very personal product. If you have a headache, you're going to look for it. If you have a scratch on your hand, you're going to look for what that means. We wanted to create a product with a very different set of principles focused on you as the consumer and the customer. And that's how nivo was born.

Kevin Horek: Very cool. You guys let me in to play with Neeva months ago and it was still, I think, in beta or closed beta and it's com well, not that it was not a long way to begin with, but you've added a ton of really useful features. You maybe want to talk about the features that Neeva has and kind of how it's evolved over the last few months. I would like to give you my perspective on how I use the product and see if that's how I should use it, or if there's things around it or if, kind of what feedback you've gotten around my thoughts, if that's okay.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Absolutely. I'd love that. Of we think about product development along two axes. One is how do we satisfy those things that people just take for granted a search engine should do. That's not easy because Google has been at it for 20 years. Clearly they have had some of the best people on the planet, literally working on that product. We've done a lot of work on maps. We've added other things like currency conversion that people really care about. Our, better answers to two questions. We call this the table stakes keeping up bucket, and we still have work to do, especially in areas like local search is very difficult, especially in very dense areas like New York city or Toronto and getting that right. We have more work to do. People ask us for things like lyrics. If you search for the name of a song, people want to see the lyrics for it.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: And things like that. We will continue to add. That's one part of the team. An equally important part is we have gotten from feedback that search quality needs to get better, especially when things get more obscure. There are long queries, for example, in technology, in programming that we need to go do better at. We have a good sized portion of the team that is focused on building search infrastructure. This is a little scary because these are literally petabyte scale systems. That's a lot of zeros that, we have to, that we have to be building. We have an amazing team. That's busy at work on it. The third part, and this is a part that people get really excited about. We get excited about are the places where we can innovate. One of the core things that you get from being a customer paid a subscription search engine is you do what's right for the customer.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Giving people more agency over their search is a fun thing. We love doing it, but it also makes a big difference for our users. So we've launched something called preferred providers. You basically get to decide what kind of providers of news that you want to see when you search for news, all other things being equal. We've also launched a set of what we call facets. If you look for a medical concept, for example, we want to tell you very clearly how you can look just at government websites versus ad supported websites. Supporting this kind of personalization is important to us. We've also added a number of what we call connections. You can now bring in data from Figma, from box, from other applications that you use so that he can search for it all within the same search box. That's roughly the three axes by which we've been, that we've been innovating.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Plus we do a lot of just like growth experimentation with different copy, different sites and so on. We want on to use the power of being able to build this tech stack ourselves, to create more and more useful things. People have asked us for things like, Hey, then I look for clothing. Let's say, I want you to only show me retailers that ethically sourced their materials are. I only want to see small retailers. I don't want to see the big box retailers being able to support features like that. Very visual experiences for travel. People love looking at pictures when they're thinking of where they want to go for their next vacation. These are some of the things that are on our roadmap, but of course, I want to hear what, how you've seen the last three, four months and what you think we can do better.

Kevin Horek: Sure. Well, you touched one of the things that I think is my favorite feature is, and it's hard to explain, but I'm going to try my best and maybe you can correct things or add some stuff to it, but I find Neeva more like a dashboard that does search then almost like a, a competitor to Google. I'll explain what I mean by that is because one of my favorite features that you guys added a well you've added more recently is the ability to add integrations with slack and Google drive. Why feel like it's more of a dashboard to me, is it finds stuff obviously online when I want it to find stuff online, but it also finds stuff that's relevant in my own personal, like drives or apps. Right. I find that so useful as somebody has multiple drive accounts and multiple slack accounts and multiple emails, and the list goes on and on the fact that you guys put it all into one interface has saved me so time that I, it was a problem that like I knew I had, but I didn't know how to solve that.

Kevin Horek: That's one of my favorite things about Neeva. The other thing I would say when I first started it, obviously I would do a search in Neeva and then try and Google to see if I'd get the quality of the results. Right. I think the nice thing about using Neeva is like, if you want to google, you can go to Google. For me, it's like, I've been using it more as like a dashboard landing page. When I'm searching, like I find what I'm searching for, but I also find, past slack conversations or Dropbox files or Google drive, like stuff like that, I didn't realize how innovative and important that stuff is to me. I know when I go to a Google and start, I start looking for that stuff and then I'm like, oh yeah, they don't do that. I think the fact that you guys have kind of aggregated my life into an interface that I call a dashboard for lack of a better term for, it has really been one of my favorite uses of Neeva.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Lot of busy people like you love that, I, my life runs ironically on Google drive, all my personal stuff, investments or passport, all the documents in my life. They're all basically in drive. Being able to search for that easily is super important. There's a lot more fun stuff coming in terms of how we can better organize things. I don't know if you've used a feature that we have called spaces, but you can make, yeah, you can make a space off like, webpages or other documents that you care about. You can shirt with a friend, a spouse, a colleague, and the two of you can collaborate on, it's like a folder of bookmarks, but it is so much more because you are actively collaborating on it. We want you to be able to put like news alerts into these spaces. There is a lot that we can do.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: We also have a great iOS app in between. We hired that in Fisher, literally the guy that was the head of the Google Chrome team. They have been busy at work, creating an amazing app first for iOS. And soon there'll be android app coming. There's so much more that we can do in that we are excited about because that is a complete browser plus search experience packed into one. There's a lot more school for innovation. We had like kids in a candy store. We sorta have to watch ourselves and say, Hey, let's really like the most important things, but yeah, being able to connect your different accounts in which you have information and being able to search through it all from one search box is something that people love. I tweeted about this recently from the Chrome bar. I know from the browser bar, if you type in, Kevin at files are a 3d Ramaswamy at my it'll take you directly into the personal tab and it'll bring up the conversations like that.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: You and I have had you go straight into the personal tab. Like these little sharp cuts that just help you get at what you want quickly, that's, it's just super fun. And a lot of users love it.

Kevin Horek: Sure. Even just simple stuff, like you pull in the stocks that I've invested in the weather, my calendar, like simple things like that it's like a full-on kind of dashboard that goes kind of wherever or shows me kind of whatever's coming up or what I'm trying to look for. That's relevant to what I'm searching or not searching, which I find really useful. One question and you kind of touched on it, but I want to dive deeper into is how do you handle some of the controversial stuff that, we keep reading about that's showing up in, a lot of the other platforms are dealing with stuff that's like true or not true. Like how do you decide which search results actually show up in Neva? How do you validate that they're actually good search results.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Yeah. Figuring out which domains are trustworthy is one of the most important things that a domain can do. The big difference between social media and search in general, this is not specific to Neeva is that it is hard to build up trust for our website quickly because the way you build up trust for a website is to get reputable websites, to point to you. Reputable websites will not point to disreputable content in general. And, and so trust is a core element of how a search engine operates. That's part one. The other thing that we do is we think of it as our responsibility, our job, to give you additional context around the results are on the sites that you are going to visit. For example, I talked about medical queries. There is a similar effort for programming queries, and then we have a feature that we are about to launch for legal queries, where we basically make it super easy for you to tell, is this from a reputable government website?

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Is this from a nonprofit? Or is it from, a lifestyle magazine? There are all kinds of people that will tell you, Hey, having like Bazell with Rosemary will make you lose weight. I don't know if that's true or not, but sure people will go make claims like that. We want to be, we want to be clear and say, yes, it's fine for you to read that, but understand this is a lifestyle magazine. It is not a medical journal. So providing that kind of context. We are also talking to a few other companies about for new sites, how do we provide additional information? For example, things like there's a new site, have an editorial policy, do they actually publish corrections? Where do they get funding from? Things of this kind of nature. That's what we try to do, which is first, we make sure that trust is established slowly and it works fine on the web because trust is established kind of slowly.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: We also want to provide that additional context around the site and the results. You can decide for yourself is this trustworthy. If a, if a page is not supported, we want you to know that. In the future, we will also tell you things like, Hey, this page has 10 ads compared to this other page that has three ads. It's up to you. Like you should be in charge of where you want to go. We want to give you agency, but we want to give you the additional context. You get to decide, how you want to deal with search.

Kevin Horek: Sure. No, I think that's great. Well then you guys also have like an ad blocker. Do you want to talk about that quick?

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Oh, 100%. So we don't block ads. We have, we call it tracking prevention. Basically what that does is it stops third-party sites that have nothing to do with the site that you are on from keeping track of what you're doing. Let's say you go to a site like cnn.com, all of us, CNN, it's kind of reputable. The fact of the matter is the people that run the cnn.com site also run code from a hundred other companies on their site. They all keep track of what you're doing. What we do is our philosophy is that, Hey, if a company wants to be ad supported, that's their thing. We don't want to prevent them from doing their work, but we do want to stop third parties that have nothing to do with our company, from keeping track of what you're doing. We do ship an extension that blocks trackers.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Our iOS app also does the same thing. This is very similar to what safari has done, what apple has done. The basic principles very much is that what you do online should between you and the provider that you are dealing with and wherever possible, we block off other people from observing the conversation. By the way, this has had a nice side effect, which is a lot of nivo users say that they feel a lot calmer and safer searching on the web and consuming information. Cause all those crazy remarketing ads that used to follow people, you looked at a shoe, you kept seeing ads of shoes that gets prevented because we blocked tracking. A lot of people say that like feeling calm is one of the benefits of using NEBA because they're not being chased all over.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. There anything else that maybe surprised you that you've learned along the way, whether building Neeva or in your past lives at Greylock doing some stuff for Greylock or Google? Because I think that calm is probably surprising to you that you probably never thought of that, is that fair to say.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: 100% never. I would not have, especially put that as like a top to benefit. The top benefit that users told our users tell us now is that they think he was better for the world than ad supported business model. Again, I would have thought like people would kind of be jaded about this kind of stuff, but no, the early nivo users pick these two as like the two top benefits of using NEBA. I guess my bigger lesson here is follow the user, listen to the user. We do a lot of user research, but it ebbs and flows. Sometimes we are busy with other stuff. We start doing less. They are actually going through a phase in which we are doing a lot of user research right now last week, this week, and the findings surprise us. They're like, wow, we really should do more of this because understanding users, having the conversation on an ongoing basis is really important.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: All of us like to think that we can be that average users, but what, nothing beats actually talking to them and getting that feedback, especially as your product is changing, you might create a great app, but after a while, you're used to how the app looks and feels and behaves. You're going to be totally shocked by how a brand new person that knows nothing about learner, what their reaction is to what you have built.

Kevin Horek: No, a hundred percent. Do you have any general findings from some of this research that either may be applied to nivo or just kind of building a startup in general?

Sridhar Ramaswamy: I would say doing user research, having people in your team are learning good principles around how you conduct this research. Things like don't lead people along ask open-ended questions, be patient listen. And, and don't like immediately take user research as gospel use inform hypothesis that perhaps you're on surveys, you're on larger quantitative tests on there's like a methodology to learning from users that can lead to really insightful and often surprising conclusions. It's important to have that discipline both about how you talk to potential users and customers and how you then figure out what to take away as learnings from that. It's of a, it's of an art, but I would say it is important for all founders startups to invest in that and keep investing in it because you want that voice of the customer to be rather in your head all the time.

Kevin Horek: No, that makes a lot of sense. I want to dive into privacy . I mentioned earlier about connecting apps and stuff. You do not collect any of that data on your servers. Correct. Do you want to maybe explain that?

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Yeah. So, this is an ongoing topic that we are trying to figure out how we can get better. You connect your private, your personal accounts, that data is indexed by an automated system. When you construct an index, a lot of that information in that system, the titles, things like that are present indices first, we make sure that absolutely nobody, other than you gets to look at your private information, we designed systems, we like are continuously running tests to make sure that, nothing can go wrong with respect to access. And then, or that information is stored. Whether it's on say S3 on disk or in transit, we make sure that it is encrypted. The flaw still is that the few people that have like route access to all of the production systems, they technically have the capability to look at this data. Of course, everything is logged.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: We have strict policies within the company that say like, Hey, there is zero reason to ever look at anyone's personal data. It is forbidden. Anyone including the founder of that is, found to do this will be immediately fired from the company. We want to create systems that are end user key encrypted. What we mean by that is only you should be able to decrypt and search over your data as you're doing the searching. This is the, this is the holy grail is of a research topic, how to do it's called like homomorphic search, where you can actually search over encrypted data. That's the thing that we are driving towards, but your data is used to serve your results. It is obviously like never used to show ads are ever sold to anyone, but we want to get to that final stage of everything is completely encrypted with your keys in a way that no one can decrypt.

Kevin Horek: No, that makes a lot of sense. Have you found corporations, governments, or people in the education space have adopted this because they don't want some of their data in the big companies or they don't want the big companies knowing what they're searching for.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: So that is definitely angle. It's one of the main reasons why users end up trying an Eva trying a duck all we're. We don't yet sell to companies per se. It is something that they are actively looking into, especially with the connected apps that you're talking about. As you can imagine in the context of, work and like a company in which data split everywhere, those like being able to search over all the data is super useful for now. We are focused on selling to consumers and prosumers. There is an enterprise business to be created here, but we're just beginning to think about.

Kevin Horek: No, that makes a lot of sense. You had a, you talked about some failures throughout your career, but you had one recently related to switching your keyboard style. Do you maybe want to elaborate that? Cause I find that an interesting story.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Yeah. I said, I've, I I've done things. I've learned a lot of stuff been successful at places like Google, but it's important to keep trying, keep challenging yourself. Some of them will come out fine. Others, you know, maybe not so much. And that's fine. About a year and a half ago, actually March last year, I decided to change my keyboard style to, from the traditional QWERTY keyboard. I thought like this would make me faster. I tried for months and it was very painful. I went from being like someone that typed at a a hundred words a minute to like 20 words a minute, because then you switch a keyboard. It just slows you down. Even after a year, I had not gotten past 80. About six weeks ago, I switched back to Kurdi and I am back now, at like a hundred words a minute.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: I'm not sure that is a big learning here. Other than that, trying is really good. I think this is just part of an ongoing journey. I we've had a great intern this summer and she's been teaching me how to make Tik TOK videos and mostly worry that I'm making a fool of myself, but I'm like, wait, there's like a lot of detail. This stuff is hard. Making good talk videos. Yeah. You can like edit it and put like little captions and splice and multiple videos. I was like, that's a lot of work to do inside a little app. Huh. But it's been fun. I think that kind of learning is super cool. Early last year. My big challenge and fun item. I, I learned swimming. I had a coach last year before the pandemic and she was teaching me flip turns and that was like the hardest thing to do to come into yourself, like to go straight the water and flip over and come back.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: You know, these things keep young. These things remind you that there is a fun stuff to learn, fun stuff to get done, and you're not going to be great at everything. And that's okay.

Kevin Horek: No, I think that's really good advice, but we're kind of coming to the end, but I'm curious to know, is there any books or podcasts or any other resources that you would recommend that you felt were really useful throughout your journey, whether it's past present or maybe for the future?

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Oh gosh, there is a lot. I, I read a lot. I read a lot of business books. I listened to a lot of podcasts. I will mention a few of them. I am, I'm happy to share like a nivo space of books that I've read in the last 15 days. Yeah, it's also linked off of neba.com/community, but I'll share the space, with you. I listened to, I listened to a ton of podcasts, people from Kara Swisher. I like the Israel Klein show. I think he is amazing, not all about tech, but he's just so thoughtful. People like Alex Kantrowitz and Scott Galloway. In terms of business books, Tim who is a special advisor to the Biden government on antitrust hazard and some pretty celebrated books. If you want to learn about the history of tech and communications, I highly recommend the master switch. It's a great, it's a pretty short and great book.

Sridhar Ramaswamy: There are a ton of biographies that have made my life so much richer. You hear of the struggles that people like Nelson Mandela, Gandhi or Martin Luther king went through, sometimes your troubles don't feel as big. You realize what sacrifice and striving are. Yeah, it's a rich world, lots to sample from and lots to be inspired by.

Kevin Horek: Very cool. But sadly we're out of time. How about we close the show with mentioning where people can get more information about yourself Neeva and any other links you wanna make?

Sridhar Ramaswamy: Absolutely. Yes. Neveah is the world's first ads free private subscription search engine. We are in a free trial period. You can try us for three months with no obligations. You can set up an [e-mail], N E V a M dot.com. Yeah, we would love your feedback on the product. If you want to drop me a line, it's my first name or my last name.

Kevin Horek: Perfect Sridhar. I really appreciate you again, taking out time out of your busy day to be the show. I look forward to keeping in touch with you and have a good rest of your day.

Jon Larson: Thank you, Kevin. It's always a pleasure to chat.

Kevin Horek: Yep. Thanks very much really enjoyed it. Talk soon. Okay. Bye. Bye. I dunno. I thought that was a pretty good first interview. It was.

Jon Larson: Great. That was amazing.

Gregg Oldring: Guy. First of all,

Kevin Horek: Like the nicest dude. Hey.

Gregg Oldring: Yeah. I mean, it's one thing it's exciting to have somebody that is as bright as he is on his humility and his just genuine nature really comes through. That was just wonderful to listen to I'm that's that was great. I'm really excited about, I want to do more of this. How do we get more people extra dark?

Kevin Horek: The sad reality is there. It's not going to be all downhill from here, but there will be some peaks and valleys of the people that we have going forward. Th the nice thing about him is he's kinda like brutally honest about even what they struggle with as a product, right. Somebody that's raised 70 million plus dollars and he worked at Google and he still has these fears and he still talks about the struggles and he still talks about how UX and design and developers still get it wrong. They're doing research and they have the money to do. It's just, it's inspiring to people. I think if they actually pay attention to some of that stuff that look, they're not going to get it right. I don't have a hope in hell of getting it right either. Right. And that's okay. Coming out of the gate,

Gregg Oldring: There were points where I wanted to just hijack the whole conversation and just nerd out with them about some of the things she was talking about. I wanted to jump on a call.

Jon Larson: What I think is really interesting is that they're doing something that really could change the way tech is going. I think that's what's and how passionate he is about that. I think that's what made, I was like a great interview when he talked about how it's bad, that Google has a monopoly on search and how search is so important. Incorta people as individuals and that they're both a monopoly and these big companies take a toll and that's not good for anyone. I thought that was really good.

Gregg Oldring: I agree. That is so interesting. It's such a bold thing for him to actually voice publicly. He worked at Google, but also he's doing a startup that I think a lot of people would say the playbook for it is to become an monopoly. That's a really fascinating thing to hear from him. Obviously it has been able to raise money quite a bit of it with that message still. And, and that's actually really encouraging because that so much of the narrative that we hear I think, or for startups is to become a monopoly essentially. And that's the power that you get. I mean, there's a lot to be said, but in terms of making money and it being an investment. To be able to raise money saying, that isn't necessarily what we're after is being a man, the monopoly, we just, we want to be this great search tool that doesn't do this and people can pay for, and we can create a huge, sustainable business around that.

Gregg Oldring: That's really interesting.

Jon Larson: I wonder if you think back on the early days of the PC war, if there, more of an apple going for the, it really with a really opinionated going at search in a really opinionated way and saying that we're doing it completely different than everybody else and being really bold about it. When you think back to like the early apple Microsoft, that was, or an IBM, that was the way apple was.

Gregg Oldring: Yeah. Actually that's a funny point because you could say, I mean, Apple's opinionated approach has meant that they have a really small market share in terms of number of users. Like they are, they're the number two in a lot of things in a lot of weird ways, they're just really nailed. It's a, so maybe it's not such a bad strategy to be the number two for certain things. It's just, you can still make a, you can make an awful lot of money can be one of the one over if not the biggest company in the world.

Kevin Horek: Well, the other thing that I think was interesting too, is how I think there's going to be a shift and you could kind of see it coming for the last few years is where people are willing to pay basically the price of coffee, or maybe more, depending on what the services for something that's specialized or that they're not tracked, or their privacy actually matters. You could start to see that, or it gives them extra features or something like that. I think, I wouldn't say freemium is dead, but I think a lot of people are starting to realize like, what, for five bucks, this is actually worth it to me to pay for something this, and I think even just some of the apple stuff that they've been doing with some of their services and some of the stuff that obviously like Neeva and other people are doing, it's worth it.

Kevin Horek: Right. You end up maybe spending 30 or 40 or 50 bucks a month, just on little services that are giving you extra or not sending other people, your stuff is actually really relevant.

Gregg Oldring: Yeah. It, w we've gotten used to things being free for, to the consumer, like not paying money anyways for things, but maybe paying in a different way. And, and it's actually not, it doesn't have to be that way. Like I I've I know my brother had a really funny conversation with his son years ago about paying for apps, basically when the app stores first came out and he was complaining to his son about spending money on the app store and his son's responses. Dad used to pay 25 cents just to play a video game. Yeah, come on, I'm paying $4 and it's, I've got this thing for whatever. And, and it's a really valid point. I mean, we've made this progression, we've created this expectation that things would be free, but sometimes really cheap is actually fantastic. When you can get the service without some of those other, without giving up on other things, or we're handing over control, it's great.

Gregg Oldring: Now, I don't know. I agree. I think it's interesting.

Intro/Outro: Thank you for tuning in to the learner.co show. If you're looking to be a guest, try out our app, or want to get in touch, please visit learner with two L's at www.llearner.co. The music for the show is by electric mantra. Thanks for listening and keep on learning.