# Bryk relies on culture to coordinate instead of adding process

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/bryk-relies-on-culture-to-coordinate-instead-of-adding/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Will Bryk](https://realalpha.app/builders/will-bryk/) · Will Bryk is cofounder and CEO of Exa. · Co-founded Exa, a search engine built for AI agents with its own index and ranking algorithms.
- Host: [Nakul Mandan](https://realalpha.app/people/nakul-mandan/) · Host, Knuckle Up with Nakul · General partner at Audacious Ventures; his show goes deep with founder CEOs on how they build.
- Show: Knuckle Up with Nakul
- Episode: [How a first-time CEO is taking on Google: No process, no NPC hires, and extreme shipping velocity](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/), Aug 4, 2026
- Moment: 21:19 to 25:16 of the episode (4 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/bryk-relies-on-culture-to-coordinate-instead-of-adding/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1279

## Quote

> “I try to avoid process, kill it before it lays out because like **I'm very against process**.”
> — [Will Bryk](https://realalpha.app/builders/will-bryk/) at [21:29](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1289) · Knuckle Up with Nakul

## Takeaways

1. Rules can accumulate until people feel unable to move.
2. Retrospectives turn mistakes into shared learning.
3. He expects Exa may eventually need more formal processes.

## About this segment

Will Bryk resists codified rules, arguing they can constrain a fast-moving team. As Exa grows, he acknowledges coordination problems and uses retrospectives and shared cultural learning to address them.

From “How a first-time CEO is taking on Google: No process, no NPC hires, and extreme shipping velocity”, Aug 4, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[21:22](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1282) How are you ensuring that the culture and the early culture retains itself with more scale? Yeah, yeah. For definitely having hiring execs now, which is a whole different. It's interesting to do that. And I've had to learn. I try to avoid process, kill it before it lays out because like I'm very against process. Like someone recently tried to introduce a process and I got really upset. Like no process.

[21:39](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1299) I think you could solve a lot of problems with culture, not process. Because process is kind of like a rule. So you add a rule here and then you add another rule here and you add another rule here. And eventually you're like, you feel all corpo because you can't move and no one can do anything because they're constrained by all these rules. So I would much rather get rid of all the rules and everything's fluid and just like, oh, we have this cultural thing where we do this, we do this.

[21:56](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1316) And I just don't like codifying things into processes. But yeah, I mean, we are hiring people who have experience coordinating large groups of people, which is definitely a skill, obviously, that you could learn over time from other companies. And we try to hire from the best companies so that they've seen what great is and then they bring that into the company. Definitely a different type of skill than a new grad who's just like, you know, works crazy, like fast and just has no priors on what companies are like.

[22:21](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1341) Like they have amazing ability to think differently, but they don't know what great is necessarily. And so like having this mix of people is very valuable at a company in our stage. Maybe double click on culture. You touched on that culture versus process. How would you describe excess culture? So culture, I could say it in words, but the best way to feel someone's culture is to go into their office and just experience it.

[22:41](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1361) And so it is pretty shocking. You come in and just like you hear like laughter. Well, first of all, it's very bright in the office, which is beautiful. Like the sun comes in, which we deliberately chose the office. It would feel like an amazing experience. That's like this double-decker. Like everyone, it's like, kind of like it looks like one room, like a coliseum. You come in and there's just like so much activity.

[22:56](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1376) It's just the energy is like super crazy. So it's like high intensity, People are having a lot of fun. They're laughing. Every company probably has kind people, but I think they're like passionate kind. I don't know. I don't know if there's like a new type of word for that where it's like they want everyone else to succeed. Everyone's helping each other. These are kind of like common things in other cultures, but like it's really dialed up.

[23:13](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1393) Is it intense? Is it 996? How would you, you know, characterize in today's AI Silicon Valley times? I don't require people to like work like a certain times, but like people do work extremely hard because they are excited by it. So like one thing that's really important to me is I make sure everyone works on whatever they're most excited by. And luckily, like we're in a business where in any dimension of improvement, we make more revenue because like information is so essential.

[23:40](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1420) Everyone needs it. And so it happens to be the case that people are just working on the things that are most excited to them. And when you do that, it doesn't even feel like work. So people work really hard. I'm not telling them what to do. Having to enforce a rule like 996 is a symptom of a problem that you are not matching the things you need at the company to the right people. Could you double play?

[24:00](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1440) The process part of it, though, you specifically said you're anti-process, right? How does that scale over time? I guess I'm learning that. And I would say some of the places we can improve at the company are probably due to this, like, we don't want to have, like, not having process sounds great and it has benefits, but there are also negatives where, like, there are coordination problems. And so we're figuring that out as we scale very rapidly, like, all these systems, right?

[24:23](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1463) But yeah, I mean, I'm anti-process, but, like, we, you know, we basically make mistakes and then we quickly like have reviews on what happened and then try to, you know, now we have this cultural learning. It's kind of like a tribe, right? That could be a process in some ways, reviewing. Yeah, we do retros on any problem. We constantly talk to each other, right? People are talking a lot at XO. They're exchanging information.

[24:43](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1483) So we're in the, you know, around 100 people. When we're 300 people, then this might not work anymore. I would, as much as possible, try to have as minimal process as possible. Probably at some point we'll need real processes. And of course, we do have some processes, you know, like the founder mode type thing. Like, you know, if you don't, if you don't just like constantly think about the culture, like it could become siloed and rules everywhere.

[25:02](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1502) And you leave for a week, you come back and it just looks like a different company. So I'm constantly like observing like what's going wrong and like trying to remove bottlenecks. And processes are an example of a bottleneck. You know, we talked about the team and the recruiting