Transcript
Introduction
Patrick
My guest today is Sridhar Ramaswamy. Co-founder and CEO of Neeva and venture partner at Greylock. After a 15 year career building Google's ad business, Sridhar launched Neeva as an ad free search engine with a focus on personalization and privacy. During our conversation, we dive into the early days of search and what led to Google's dominance. Sridhar shares his view on the potential end state for ad based search engines and how all of his experiences led him to found Neeva. Beyond a great deep dive into the origins of search, this discussion is filled with great lessons about data-driven decisions, the value of partnerships, and balancing revenue opportunities against user experience. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Sridhar Ramaswamy.
The History of Search
Patrick
So I toyed with a number of ways to start our conversation. I think what we'll do is start with the top of the funnel, if you will, of the ideas behind Neeva and then narrow our way down. Search is such an interesting topic. It's one that everyone uses every day and probably doesn't think too much about anymore. But you've been a part of this job to be done if you will, since the earliest days. And so I think a neat place to begin would be with almost a history lesson. Could you give us what you think are the major chapters of search the technology itself? And then we'll slowly work our way towards the interesting thing you're building at Neeva.