How a first-time CEO is taking on Google: No process, no NPC hires, and extreme shipping velocity

How he's scaling himself, how he runs an AI native team, and what actually drives him. Knuckle up. Will, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. XA is building web search for AI agents, but Google already has a 25-year head start on indexing the web. It is the best search engine by a long distance. Why do we need a new web search tool for AI? Yeah, I mean, the short of it is that Google was built for humans and now there's this new kid on the block called Agents and they search in very different ways. And so Google is not optimized for this new world of agents searching the web and Exa is built for this world.

I have like a list of 20 differences in humans and AI searching. One example is, you know, humans are lazy. They type in a few keywords. then they get you know some links they click on those links this is how humans used to search but agents they're not lazy at all they make very complex queries they could instantly output a paragraph explaining exactly what the information they want and they don't really want a list of links they want like a blob of data that exactly captures what they want so another interesting thing is you know google was optimized so that every link correctly is relevant to the query because you might click on the third one you might click on the second one but to an agent it actually wants a very diverse amount of information because it's just gobbling it up all at once so these are just a few of the examples in there you know dozens but even so

physical resources which we are getting closer to and then uh with information which we also have a lot of so taking a giant step back i mean it is a fascinating world we are entering in in terms of like we are going to go towards an internet where ai agents are doing the searching and i'm just talking to agents you're at the forefront of it like walk me through what is your vision of how the internet will look like in the future because the last 20 years of the internet has been built around google and maybe some social networks like facebook and twitter but we are entering a new age and you're at the Yeah, I think the internet is going to change a lot. At the same time, I think a lot will be the same. So if you think about what the internet is on like the most fundamental level, it's an information exchange network between people. You know, so I find information from a blog post or from a YouTube video, someone created information, and then I'm consuming that information. And even if you're buying plane tickets, it's like, it's kind of like an information exchange where an airline has availability for planes, and then I want a plane ticket. And now we do this exchange over the internet. And now I have a ticket, right?

So it's kind of like information exchange. And I don't think AI changes that. I think it accelerates it like crazy. Where now, you know, everyone has their AI assistant. And so you imagine every human has AI assistants and they're exchanging information at like a thousand X the rate. So they're doing the same thing, but more of it. Maybe the analogy is like, you know, if you take like a bazaar, like where people are exchanging goods, like humans are exchanging goods, it's like, it's kind of crazy and raucous. But then you imagine like New York Stock Exchange, it's like an automated version of that.

And exchanges are happening way faster. They're doing the same thing. It's at a larger scale. That's kind of how I see the internet. Will it look different? I think a lot more of people's interactions with this information exchange network will be through their LLM. But I still think their internet is a place for creative expressions. People will still want to see all sorts of YouTube videos and types of content that people have created. So in a lot of ways, it'll be similar, just at a crazy rate. In your view, will it be that we engage only with other humans and all informational access will be through agents?

Meaning human to human on the internet, that it's like when we go on the internet it'll only be for human interaction. Maybe the social networks or watching a video, entertainment maybe. But every time I need information, whether it's a booking available at a restaurant or some news, I'll only talk to LLMs. Yes, I think often you'll be talking to an LLM for sure or your LLM will be talking to an LLM. Like human bandwidth to the internet is too slow for the speed at which the internet is going to be moving. I do think though that like, you know, a lot of people talk as if like we're having like trillions of new laborers or trillions of things on the internet really is like it's still billions of humans interacting agents are kind of like this we think of them as like real beings but really they're just kind of like they spawn and they spawn down it's still software in the other day it's not like uh they don't they don't really exist the physical i don't know they're it's still gonna be humans interacting with humans but like you might be interacting with a software that the human created in the form of an agent your uh origin story with x is pretty fascinating given in your

Like, is this a recruiting filter almost for you?

So I've been doing this for five years, right? So no matter what happened at the company over the course of five years, I always thought this was a very noble mission. And that drives me at the foundational layer. But definitely increasingly, there's this feeling of just like, it's almost like a video game. It's so fun to reach the next level. With every 10% increase in people, there's new problems, new emergent problems we have to solve. Now we're starting to have interactions with not hundreds of companies, but thousands of companies, right? It's just fascinating problems all over the place. Soon we'll have to talk to governments.

I'm very excited for every next stage. And so that is an increasing percentage of my excitement. But as a recruiting filter, is that a critical filter for you? Like if somebody is not bought into the mission and is joining XR because it's a rocket ship, is that kind of a negative for you? Okay, yes. So people's motivation for joining a company is very important to me and like building the right culture is very important. Someone who wants to join just because it's a rocket ship, that's bad. But they don't necessarily have to believe in like improving the information ecosystem. Like that doesn't have to be their primary driver to be like, that's like not like something I look for necessarily.

I think if they do believe that, it's awesome and I get all excited. But some people are really excited about EXA in various dimensions. So one is just like, a lot of the engineers join EXA because they're super excited about exabyte scale systems. That's really cool. Or training models for retrieval, it's just like a fascinating problem. That's okay too. I think definitely I look for passion and quirkiness and like thinking differently. They don't necessarily have to believe in that mission. I think it's actually my job to convince them that this is the most important thing in the world. I have not done the best job I think I think like it's something I think about a lot is like I am so so excited about this and I don't I don't think I've done a great job of explaining it because it's actually it's kind of hard it's like perfect search what does that really mean like you know for example if I had enough time I would make a video explaining what is the day in the life of someone with perfect search what does the world look like so there's more work to be done for me there what I understood from preparing for this uh discussion was that you did hire for rebelliousness in the early days and first principles thinking how much of that is then scalable right like

the first hundred maybe they were all rebels of some form but has it stopped scaling as you've gone from 10 people to 125 people in the head I wouldn't say it's rebels. I think there was some article that wrote that. It's not quite rebels, because you can have a rebel without a cause, someone who just wants to be different. That's not good. You want his first principles thinkers, meaning people who just will really think about the problem and not care how it's been done before. We've always hired for that at Exxon. We've always attracted people like that. Because from the beginning, it was like, we're going to build a better searcher than Google. Only someone who could think from first principles could imagine that that's possible. And so we continue to really try to hire only people like that. Problem is, you might run out of people like that. There's not infinite supply of people who are like that.

the war for talent is insane right now and you know every company we've invested in feels it i mean every founder that i've ever talked to in the last few years it's always been intense but it feels crazier now. And you're fighting against these labs who are growing super fast, have big missions. It's not that you're the only company with a big mission today. They're literally going for AGI and they haven't seen packages. How are you fighting for the top talent today? I mean, the types of people that joined us in the early days were people who just don't want to join bigger companies. And I think that's still true today.

Like, look, I mean, these companies, they're building really cool stuff. No one could deny that, but they're really large now. And not everyone wants to join a 5,000 or 10,000 person company. It's like very different. You don't feel like you have agency over the output. Like X is still at a size where you could have a massive impact on the company. You could know everyone's name. And like, that's just a, it's just a really different experience. So the experience is very different. I think also just like the upside could be insane at X. If you believe in the mission, whatever we're worth now, we could be worth, you know, 100,000 X that.

And so like, that's, you know, a big deal. I don't want to, we shouldn't just have people who are interested in that, but it is true that like, you're not going to get a 100 X return from, from one of these big companies anymore. So I think over time, as X has become clearer that we could actually like do this and these other companies have like kind of like become really big, it's been easier to recruit. As you've scaled, you know, there's an early team, which is first principles and the rebel is not the perfectly right word, but directionally that as you've scaled to 125 people, have you gone towards a point where you now need some people who are execs and more process oriented as you're kind of finding that balance?

and the culture a little bit. Let's shift gears to how you actually run the company. Starting with you maybe, how do you spend your week these days? How much is spent on product, vision, engineering, sales? communication with the team recruiting obviously changed over the years five years right it's like the first couple years i was just doing engineering and research um which is very fun uh then there's a spectrum from that to like you know all people stuff and there's a spectrum and like it's increasing i mean now i mean i don't do any i don't do any engineering research anymore i do i do still like uh at a high level it's basically become more and more abstract like i stopped coding but i still did like architectural decisions and now it's more like high level architectural decisions i'm still involved in those yeah like engineering and research direction you know sales like talking a lot of customers uh marketing i think a lot about that and then just like high level like

what's happening at the company if you had to break it up into percentages do you have a sense today like the x of today how does it get well 30 just the operation of the company uh 30 go to market marketing 30 like engineering research vision reviewing of work 10 just i was very curious that you talked about like how you believe bitter lesson is how you approach like search right uh and just maybe just give color to our audience on what the bitter lesson refers to but i was curious if you've extended that to how you run your company i think okay bitter lessons like the idea that like you know you could try all sorts of heuristics to solve some problem in software but like if you just dump data and compute onto something it'll get better Those systems always went out.

I feel like the bitter lesson, it doesn't really apply to humans as much. You can't just dump humans onto a problem and it just works better. Like, for example, you do not want to overhire. We could hire, you know, hundreds of people right now. That would be the wrong, that would not be good because humans are not like GPUs. They're not all the same. And they don't perfectly work. They don't perfectly coordinate. So I would say a bitter lesson does not apply to humans. Maybe that's why humans will not win out in the end because we're not like an ant colony that perfectly works with each other.

Is part of the bitter lesson not applying is that there are more talented people and less talented people. Not every human is fungible, but every unit of compute is fungible and is an additional equal force. Let's say imagine a world where a bitter lesson worked for humans, meaning like you just dump more humans onto the problem. Like, but you could try, you know, this organizational structure, that one, but really it's all about just dumping humans on the problem. You would need like automaton humans who like just work perfectly in coordination. Like sometimes when I imagine like humanoid robots in the future in a factory, they're like tossing a tool and they perfectly, like, that's just not how humans work.

Like, humans are way more inefficient. It doesn't quite apply. Partly I'm trying to understand this too, you know, the fascinating thing about X. As it's growing super fast, it's become an important part of the infrastructure and is continuing to be. And you're a first-time CEO who's learning as you scale, right? And you've obviously done a great job. That's why you are here in terms of the number of customers and the explosion and usage that XI is seeing. But I'm also curious as to how you are evolving yourself as a leader and a manager. Like, have there been managerial philosophies or thoughts that you've evolved over the last few years where you used to think this way and now you've completely flipped in how you run the company?

Well, definitely how I run the company has changed a lot. Like, again, like I'm doing a lot more like people management, people coordination issues, less just like, you know, obviously engineering. I've definitely had to adapt, right? Like I have to, you know, being a leader for five people is very different being a leader for 100 people. A lot more of my job is aspiring. So I've had to learn how to inspire, how to talk in front of a crowd. like i don't know about his philosophies it's more just like i'm picking up skills as i go and i realize okay wait the way i used to operate the way i used to spend my time it worked when it was 30 people but now it's 60 people and it doesn't work anymore so i'm kind of like yeah like learning as you go as fast as i can definitely not having like meeting amazing people uh whether it's like our investor who's just like ridiculously good at sales let's say or you know a new engineer who's ridiculously good at architecting things and i just like take that i'm trying to like be the best possible leader but I think I have no ego basically I just like take things and then just like I will form I'm trying to form the best possible leader so I'm constantly ask people

for feedback like one thing I do is like I constantly be like hey just give me critical feedback and one thing I've learned is people never give you critical feedback like they're just they're kind of like worried or something and I try to like force it out of people and so one thing I've tried is you know like you have to like I will not stop often I go on walks or we're a walking culture like I say like you have to give me critical feedback or else we won't stop walking and then they'll say something but like I said I'm trying to constantly learn yeah

i but everybody kind of knows how engineering has been the i-fied but let's talk about some of the other departments like how how do your sales and marketing departments use ai today so okay so talk about like exes being very ai native yes we have exit.ai we also want to make like AI XO, which is kind of like an initiative to make like XO super AI build.

And one thing we do is we have, you know, anyone at the company can get access to like, it can run evals, for example, whether you're an engineer or going to market person, ops person, you just like, you talk to our, the assistant that we've created and it just like can, has access to a bunch of our systems or, hey, I want to know, like, has this customer's usage gone up? Like we could just do that. It's like very, everything's just like very easy to interact with. So that's been a huge boon, yeah. But are salespeople like fully using all kinds of AI tools? Are they building their own AI tools?

Are your salespeople on cloud code and just building their own automations for outreach or, you know, faster responses to customers or prospects? Or ultimately, sales are sales and they use some AI tools, but it's not as much as if you were a salesperson. No, I mean, people are definitely building their own tools and like everyone can help. There's like, everyone is a builder. Like sales is a lot of, you know, human to human interactions and relationships. and that is, you know, a majority of the job. Of course, we have like go-to-market engineers now. They're trying to help as much as possible.

But ultimately, it's a lot of like relationships.

I was talking to Arvind at Glean recently and many of the AI native orgs where they're saying even within the organizations, there's the top 5% of fully AI native people who are just supercharging themselves with all kinds of automation. These are like you, pretty AI native orgs, but they're still laggards. Yeah, no, I would say everyone is using AI tools. There's no one who's not. There are people who use it better or more, and then there are people who use it less, but everyone understands that it's just way better to use it.

What's the hardest mental ship that people have to make if they're coming up in traditional orgs? They've been working for 15 years. At Exa, the hardest thing people need to transition to is the speed of shipping. And so in traditional orgs or bigger orgs, you might take a long time to ship something, maybe a month. A month is an insane amount of time. Nothing should ever take a month to ship at Exa. And so we try to teach this culture really fast. like the first week you got to ship something important and then post about it and that's really critical because it like you know teaches people okay like this is this is the the standard and just you see people shipping things like non-stop like multiple times a day and that's expectation i think people will rapidly adjust that i mean we only hire people who can do that kind of thing but yeah some people have to adjust how do you even manage today's space of shipping like you're talking about like people shipping multiple times a day how is the organization coming together on the engineering side as a cohesive unit attacking the goals if everybody shipping almost yeah so one thing we put a lot of effort into is like automations with our search

engines we have constantly doing automated evals right and like i've heard like you know bigger search engines like google they have to go through like a human has to look through like the final thing and like we try as much as possible just have ai automation so like you feel very comfortable shipping something and as long as it passes automations you're good and so we have like really smart intelligences testing all parts of the product before a new thing ships so that really helps maybe let's shift gears towards how you are scaling as a ceo um the company has chenexed in

I like to think that they're not that different. Like, what is an engineer? They're trying to solve problems. Like, I'm not a software engineer anymore, but I am an engineer. I'm engineering the company.

I'm trying to solve problems constantly. Like, every day is just solving problems. Even like sales, you know, trying to have a customer, you know, like you and solve a problem for them. I mean, the way I said it is clear. It's like, it's engineering. So if you abstract engineering, I'm still an engineer. But yeah, it is a lot of people, like engineering, like people and the culture and processes and stuff like that. Are there decisions or situations where your engineering instinct kicks in naturally and you've had to correct yourself and say, hey, that because of the human aspect of leadership, I need to think differently?

Like, are there instincts you've curbed? It can sometimes be like overly logical, saying exactly what is true. And sometimes you have to like, it's more of an emotional argument. Like when you're inspiring, like for example, if I'm inspiring someone or the team, I don't know exactly how big we'll be or how many people will be using XO. But I might choose a number. Hey, a billion people will be using us two years. I don't actually know that, right? So my logical brain is like, well, it could depend on this. When you're giving a speech, you just say a billion people because it's roughly right. And does the details matter?

So that's the kind of thing I've had to learn, like a little bit less logical and more emotional. That's an example. You're learning fast and the company is growing super fast. Who are your advisors or even CEO friends who are your sounding boards on decisions or even just personal growth as a leader? I mean, my co-founder is super critical. We were like, we've known each other for 10 years now. We were roommates at college. Like we can like read each other's thoughts. I could look at him and know what he's thinking. So that's been critical. I have no idea how we'd get here. I mean, we would not have got here without having each other.

So that's like, yeah, we're like one organism, which I love. And then we have advisors, right? And I learned from like, we have an amazing board who like, I don't know what other boards are like because it's my first company, but this board is amazing. And we have advisors who are amazing. I don't have some crazy network where I go to like, you know, like retreats or something. Like I don't really do that. One interesting thing is like a lot of my role models, they're not like real, they're fictional. I have been obsessed with superheroes since I was a kid and I continue to be obsessed with them.

And I think they're actually like, it sounds ridiculous, but like they're critical to like how I make moral decisions. For example, I look up to them like I do like to my older brother. I also have an older brother who's been a role model. Is there advice that you've gotten along the journey? Now you look back and you feel like, man, that was completely wrong advice as I scaled. Oh, I mean, definitely the first advice I got when I told everyone that we're building a search engine but then Google in 2021 was like, what are you, nuts? Yeah. I kind of laughed but also was like, maybe I am nuts. There was definitely, I wasn't sure this made sense for a couple of years.

I had like, it's like drive, okay, maybe it's possible. I think like, maybe like a year and a half in we made a retrieval breakthrough that really was like, oh my God, you can be way better than Google. It is possible to do all these crazy stuff. And then there have been other like, I don't know, yeah. I mean, there's been so much advice that I've gotten that's been wrong. No one. knows the company remotely close to to you and if someone knows it better than you that's a problem like like something's wrong you're obsessed with it you're living it every day like there's certain types of advice if it's been done before like building a go-to-market org is not like we don't have to reinvent the wheel so of course for that kind of thing i could totally take advice from like our cro or something but for like the future of ai search like no one's gonna really know that except for us you talked about how you had to learn about hiring execs and now that you look back, you have a ton of advice even for the young CEOs who come to you sometimes.

Could you talk about like what were you bad at when hiring execs that you've completely like grown out of? Yeah, yeah. It took like only like a month or two to like get good or get better. I'm sure there's like people who are way better and I'm still learning. There were a few things that were just very obvious like for example, I would do Zoom calls instead of meeting in person. We were looking for you know, various execs like in person just way better. And these are important hires it's worth it for you to spend a lot of time going to wherever they are even if they're in australia you got to go there you know like so you got to go meet them one other interesting thing is like uh it's really important to show that you care about them and like really want them maybe at first i was like you know more about like having them sell me on themselves but really you have to sell yourself you have to sell them you have to tell them that you want them because if you have good execs you're trying to hire they have infinite optionality right uh and so they have to really trust that they're going to be you know have huge impact at the organization that you're going to care about them and so like

I think the right way, the right balance is like, you know, we're awesome. And you're awesome. We really want you to join us. It's like it's like it's like you're leaning in really heavily. You're not like acting too cool. What actually drives you is a question that I would love to understand. Like you're clearly an intense person who's, you know, working insanely hard. Could you take a step back for us? And like, where does the drive actually come from? I don't think I've really taken a break ever. I worked extremely hard in elementary school and middle school, high school. Like I would, I, my friends would come over to our house and I would like, I would, I would like not meet them because I feel like just wanted to work and stuff.

I mean, I grew up in a hardworking family. My parents were really hardworking. I just wanted to do something big always. So I've been journaling for a long time. Looking back at my journals, I'll always see like, okay, like what if I was like this crazy thing? Like I'd be like Iron Man or like it's changed over the years. Albert Einstein was inspiring. Like I wanted to be like those types of people. I never really cared so much about my personal life. I think it may be one interesting thing. Like I just don't care. Like, I don't care about having, like, you know, going to the park and enjoying myself.

I just never, I just never cared. I really just want to build something amazing. So that's always been the drive. And so obviously to build something amazing, you have to work really hard. I also just, you know, I get excited by things. EXO is like the perfect storm of exciting thing that really matters for the world. And that wasn't always the case, right? When we started, it wasn't clear we were going to, like, build something awesome. It was a bet. And again, a lot of the inspiration was, like, mission-oriented. It was like, okay, this is important for the world. So it's a noble mission. Even if it fails, it'll be valuable.

And there were a lot of hard things, especially in the beginning days, where it was like, okay, does this even make sense? Like rolling in my bed at night, like, you know, there's so many other things to do. Like, does this make sense? But like the mission really motivated me. I think once it started going, my motivation, like once it started like working, my motivation started to change. So certainly when we started hiring people, okay, now lives are on the line. Like, you know, people who are really smart, who could have done anything are now like relying on this company. So when it was like five people, 10 people, you kind of feel that, but the bigger it gets, the more that, like now we have, you know, over a hundred people who could have done lots of other things and they're doing this, they have families. Like I feel that pressure and I want to make them like, you know, I want, I want this to be the best time of their lives. That's a pressure. And it's like, it's motivating just to know that the tribe is relying on me and the company. So like mission, like it's just a noble cause, the people. And now the third thing is like, I actually think we could do it. I fully believe that we could be the information layer for the world in a way that

no one's ever done before. Like perfect search infrastructure that never existed before will exist because of exa one thing i have never had even a thought about burnout in the past couple years like zero uh it's just not a thought in my head i could do this for like decades like until it's solved i don't think it'll take decades luckily i think it won't take that long i just feel this incredible responsibility so i think competition is very exciting so like that also adds like a little bit of a gain I love sports when I was a kid, and still love sports. I don't play that often, but it's just more fun when you're competing. For example, if you're running in a track, you could run fast, but when someone starts coming back behind you, you run faster. It does sound like the desire to go big seems like you were saying earlier that it was innate pretty early, and then you found your mission, and then it has compounded to a competitive thing that you're having fun building, and now it does seem like it's compounded to a different level.

You also said, like, superheroes are a huge part of your mental models and psyche. Like, where did that come from? The first superhero movie I remember watching is Spider-Man 2002 with my dad. I was six. And that was, like, life-changing. I mean, I was like, holy cow. Like, he was a nerdy kid. I was a nerdy kid. And he just, like, became the superhero who changed the world. And I love that he was so humble about it. Like, he just, like, helped the world. And he had to give up the thing he loved the most, Mary Jane. You know, the last line was, like, this is my gift, my curse. i'm getting shivers when i say like that's like such a beautiful message and so a lot of superheroes have that exact same ethos where it's they have something they need to do for the world and they don't take recognition for it they often have to hide their identity to save their loved ones but like that's pretty cool that they're they're very self-sacrificing so i've always looked up to those types of people so like spider-man was the first one and then the second the next spider-man came out like 2004 that was pretty good too and then what was an iron man i think when 2008 that was a big one because i was okay like this is a super superhero like self-made through technology that

was very inspiring the dark knight series was like the next big one became obsessed i know like every line i love that one because i mean i think you said you like batman right it's like yeah i don't tell you and then i would say the next era of superheroes for me was like the mission impossible series now it's like i live and breathe that i watch that like all the time every weekend i'm like watching clips from it i listen to the music i listen to this song called firefight every day uh in the morning to wake up and then also will figure it out is another uh song from final reckoning the last movie and like this is very real for me it's like very it's like I don't know what I don't meditate but I imagine this is like as the same you know the same types of things people do like their rituals their religion like this is kind of like it has that similar vibe for me why have real life superheroes like let's say Elon Musk or I don't know political figures or Albert Einstein not have the same impact because you did mention Albert Einstein is it the hero's journey is it no I think it's actually because like real life people are a lot messier and I mean I have immense respect for all the people you mentioned but like Spider-Man like

toby mcguire is so pure in his desires for the world and like at least like a lot of the famous people in the world are just not like that you know because to get famous often you have to you know be a maniac in some dimension and that's awesome and like they help the world but like i'm sure they exist these people but it's very rare to be like a true batman you know by the way why you don't know about them because they're self-sacrific they don't like they don't claim the light you don't even know who batman is so it's like it's almost like an oxymoron for there to be a famous real superhero because if you're a real superhero you're not you're anonymous so i think that's maybe part of it obviously like it's cinema right so cinema is going to be like epic the soundtrack is perfectly timed if i watched the batman movies without hans zimmer's soundtrack i wouldn't be as inspired right so it's a bit like it's fictional it's it's uh it's fantasy you mentioned you listen to the mission impossible soundtrack literally every morning yeah and what's that ritual about like you walk towards office with that or like no i do it in the home i guess sometimes i do it in the uber yeah the idea is like well what i like about the mission of possible movies is that they have this like

really high stakes mission um and they're constantly encountering problems that seem insurmountable and yet they surmount them and i think i think that's a great analogy for startup right like we have this crazy high stakes mission and literally every day there are it used to be five problems a day now they're like 20 problems a day and you just have to solve them like there's no option especially like for me like i just okay there's a problem gotta solve it uh you can't just like let it fester you have to solve it immediately you do that like over and over again for years and then you just get this confidence like oh we'll solve it so i do say like there's this meme at exit now like we'll figure it out it's like completely taken from the mission impossible movies they say that a lot like we'll figure it out and it's like it's a beautiful phrase i don't know why it's not used more it's like It's very optimistic. People see we have these problems, and then we solve them, and then you forget about them. And I often like to remind people where we came from at the company because they're like, oh, wait, we did that. And of course, if the search got so much better in three months, and of course, in three months, it can be so much better. So like for new hires, we do like an onboarding. I do a mission onboarding with them. I show them. Actually, I made a video of like the past of X, like the past five years, because I always start, I say like, you know, I'm going to say a lot of crazy things about where we're going. For you to believe me, you have to see where we come from. So here's a video where we came from. And then they see it like, wow, this company went from like nothing to this.

we're still nothing but look how far we're gonna go and then because they saw how far we came they believe me last superhero question otherwise we can spend the rest of the evening here favorite superhero he's not a superhero technically but ethan hunt ethan used to be bruce flame but not anymore really ethan hunt yeah i mean you know ethan hunt i know it's not but i would not have said my answer is the opposite so uh we can debate that later over drink segue this back into you as a ceo and then again that you've gone through where does the superhero thing show up for you on a day-to-day or a weekly basis as you run the company?

Is it more in the back of your mind, the motivation? Where does it show up? I think it's like a guidance. It's like, what would this person do? How would they act? If I'm facing a hard decision, okay, like whether it's like a people problem, like I always try to like, you know, what would Ethan Hunt do? He would never get emotional. He really cares about people. He deeply cares about people. He deeply cares about the mission. He'll make hard decisions sometimes. Like they're actually like perfect role models. Just simulating them in my head can tell me often what the right thing to do is. They would be great CEOs.

What's the part of being a leader or a CEO that's been lonelier than expected? You know, weirdly people are, as we get bigger, people are a little more, like when I sit down at the lunch table, people are a little more like, I don't know, like cognizant of what they're saying or something like that, which is sad because I'm just a guy, you know? I'm not like, I'm not, and it's just like, you become a little more distant from the people of the company. Although I'm extremely friendly. Like I walk around, like I've inside jokes with literally everyone. So I try to counter that, but I think as the company gets bigger, that is just necessary or is or happens so it does get a little lonelier yeah is there ever doubt uh in the journey is there a nagging thought that keeps coming back every every other night at 2 a.m as you kind of keep growing yourself also so 2 a.m is like i think where my best thoughts happen okay great mostly because i know like you know still people are up at the company but i know most of the company is sleeping you have to imagine i come into the office around like 9 30 um and the second i come in it's just like chaos like there's so many things going on there's so

many problems there's so many amazing things it's just like slack is like going crazy it's just this like monstrosity of like energy and so like so many things are going on so many threads we have so many priorities at the same time which i know is also an oxymoron you can't have so many problems we do and then like it's just a jumble and then it goes till like literally then i'll go home at like maybe like midnight or something and then i'll you know you know shower or whatever and then i get to like process okay now it's like and then my brain starts to like uh synthesize everything that happened and then it's like oh wait like this is the most important it's like kind of like seeing i think the most important patterns and then i'll send a bunch of messages at like 2 a.m to like people okay like we gotta do this we gotta do that like we gotta change that and then i'll fall asleep and i usually like collapse like i'll just like throw my computer aside and just and then do it over over again and then weekends are slower so i get to like think a lot more there and a lot a lot of like important like strategic decisions happen over the weekend but that's kind of like the day which i i just love my question partly was about

more like does self-doubt ever creep in or you don't know self-doubt i have pretty clear problems that i need to fix for example i'm like i i over promise like it's like something i have to learn right like i over promise oh yeah i'll get back to you i'll do that and like i just i've had to learn like i can't do that but i still do it there's like example wrong so like i don't know about self-doubt but i like self-criticism oh i'm constantly like oh god damn it and like uh you know like i have like strong emotional responses for things that are pretty trivial like like how did i miss that and i'll like think about it really hard but because it's so emotional for me i think i i often like don't do it again or don't do in the same way and so i am in a constant state of like yeah self-critique is it managerial feedback that you've gotten about yourself through advisors, CEO coaches, or board members that has been hard to digest?

I don't think it's hard to digest. Again, I welcome feedback. But I mean, yes, they've definitely, board members are like, we've seen this a thousand times, you're doing this wrong. And I'm like, oh, got it. It's usually not hard to digest. I know they're right. It's just like, oh, I don't want to do that. Like, I really liked the way I was doing my job. I have to change. But that's just necessary. Like, for example, I really didn't like recruiting at first. I just wanted to code. And then I was like, you, Jeff, you do the recruiting. but then I started to do it because I had to and then I started to get some wins like hire people and you get a lot of dopamine and now I love recruiting, I can do it all day but now I can't just do recruiting all day, I have to do other things and so I've had to force myself to change but then I end up liking it if I get good at it You mentioned that burnout is not a thing for you and I understand it but at the same time there's a speed and intensity at which you're running How are you managing your own psyche and health or you're young you're running on adrenaline I really don't think much about this like i'm trying to optimize my sleep like i'm very sensitive to sound light and temperature

and it's actually impossible in san francisco to find a place that both has ac and is not loud because all the ac is in like the modern building this is the most annoying thing about san francisco and i just can't solve the problem so i just deal with it and i think i'm sensitive to all these things probably because i'm i am like very you know i'm stressed like there's a lot of things going on and i'm constantly thinking so if some sound happens if some uh fire truck goes off like i'll wake up i was really annoying so i think sleep is probably my biggest problem but everything else is fine and i would just say one thing about burnout like i like the if you actually think about what burnout is it's like it's wheels turning but not moving because we're progressing you know we're progressing fast and and the company keeps changing i don't feel burnout like i think if for example we were working so hard and we weren't progressing then maybe burnout would start but because we've just been like smoothly uh progressing over the course of a couple years like i don't feel it okay next up is our quick fire round you ready yeah red flag you never ignore in the candidate when recruiting? When someone is confidently wrong. Most overrated

thing about being a young founder. You don't get much credit for it. People just want like, does the product work? Most underrated thing. You have no real obligations, so I could just work nonstop. A search query that XR does better than Google. Really any list of entities, so like lists of companies or people. A search query that Google still does better than XR that irritates the fuck out of you. I was going to say like flight tickets, but it doesn't really irritate me. Okay. The book on civilization, finished or abandoned? Delayed. The bit of listen applied to something people should take more seriously. We could have all sorts of heuristics of solving problems in the world, but I think a lot of it just comes down to like more and more knowledge.

So you throw more and more knowledge at the world, I think a lot of problems get solved. So Ethan Hunt always figures out how to get to Mission Impossible. What are you, Wilbrick, trying to figure out as a leader for XR's Mission Impossible to come true? I guess perfect alignment within the company on what is most important and why this matters. This is my mission, if I choose to accept it. All right, Will, this was great. Thank you for having me. Thank you.