# How a first-time CEO is taking on Google: No process, no NPC hires, and extreme shipping velocity Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy. Will Bryk argues that AI search needs a purpose-built information layer, and that Exa can win through focused execution and fast shipping. - Show: Knuckle Up with Nakul - Hosts: [Nakul Mandan](https://realalpha.app/people/nakul-mandan/) - Guest: [Will Bryk](https://realalpha.app/builders/will-bryk/) is cofounder and CEO of Exa. - Published: Aug 4, 2026 - Length: 59 min ## The best minutes - [10:20](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=620) [A history book exposed what Google search could not do](https://realalpha.app/s/a-history-book-exposed-what-google-search-could-not-do/) (4 min) - [21:19](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1279) [Bryk relies on culture to coordinate instead of adding process](https://realalpha.app/s/bryk-relies-on-culture-to-coordinate-instead-of-adding/) (4 min) - [29:47](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1787) [Scaling a company is a problem of information flow](https://realalpha.app/s/scaling-a-company-is-a-problem-of-information-flow/) (3 min) ## Also worth watching - [2:50](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=170) [Exa can compete by powering products instead of owning users](https://realalpha.app/s/exa-can-compete-by-powering-products-instead-of-owning-users/) (5 min) - [16:26](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=986) [Exa uses work trials to test first-principles thinking](https://realalpha.app/s/exa-uses-work-trials-to-test-first-principles-thinking/) (3 min) - [34:01](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2041) [AI rewards engineers who focus on outcomes, not tools](https://realalpha.app/s/ai-rewards-engineers-who-focus-on-outcomes-not-tools/) (3 min) - [38:49](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2329) [Bryk learned to communicate clearly as Exa scaled](https://realalpha.app/s/bryk-learned-to-communicate-clearly-as-exa-scaled/) (2 min) Skip the four-minute stretch on CEO loneliness and late-night work, plus sections on superhero role models and the future internet. ## Full analysis: Will Bryk says Exa serves 5,000 companies - Exa serves 5,000 companies, Bryk said, with search infrastructure built for agent queries. - That neutral position is plausible, but the episode offers no comparative retrieval results. - Buyers should test source coverage and quality before budgeting around speed. Its 6 sections, what it means for you and what to watch are on [the page](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/#analysis), free with an account: - [3:31](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=211) Exa sells reach into products, not a consumer destination - [2:25](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=145) Agents need retrieval built for longer, richer queries - [4:53](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=293) Exa wants to build more than search - [35:01](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2101) AI expands engineering ambition, but tests must guard releases - [30:43](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1843) Growth turns coordination into an information problem - [16:48](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1008) Work trials expose how candidates think ## Summary Will Bryk cofounded Exa with his college roommate Jeff Wang in 2021, after working as one of Cresta’s first engineers. While researching a book on the history of civilization, he found Google poorly suited to deep, cross-source research; Exa now builds search infrastructure for AI agents. Bryk argues that AI agents need search designed for complex prompts, diverse information and usable data, and that Exa can serve as neutral infrastructure rather than compete for end users. He sees Exa’s larger goal as a high-quality information layer, driven by his long-running frustration with hard-to-find and politicized information. As CEO, he favors first-principles thinkers, high-agency people and minimal process, while acknowledging that coordination gets harder as Exa grows. He says AI can boost output but does not make people interchangeable; his management work now includes communication, recruiting and improving information flow. He says mission, responsibility to employees and solving hard problems sustain his drive. ### Minute by minute - [1:43](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=103) **Agents need a different search.** Bryk says agents make complex queries and need useful data rather than ranked link lists, so their search needs differ from Google’s. He says Exa can serve as neutral infrastructure for other companies instead of drawing users to its own platform. He sees Exa’s goal as an information layer and says execution, customer feedback, data and physical resources can contribute to its defensibility. - [7:26](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=446) **AI will accelerate information exchange.** Bryk expects AI to speed up the internet’s existing role as an information-exchange network, not replace it. He thinks people will increasingly use LLMs to access information and agents will exchange it faster, while people continue creating and consuming human-made content. - [10:13](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=613) **Exa began with a research problem.** Bryk traces Exa to a long-standing frustration that important information, including current events, is hard to find and often politicized. While writing a book on civilization, he found Google suited to surface questions but not deep research across regions and sources. GPT-3’s ability to interpret paragraphs made him see a path to a new search engine. - [15:35](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=935) **Exa hires for first-principles thinking.** Bryk says Exa hires for first-principles thinking, not rebelliousness for its own sake. Candidates do one- to two-day work trials on real problems; founders also use walks and informal interactions to assess judgment, initiative and fit. He looks for agency rather than passive conformity, and says he now values useful ideas over fast speech. - [19:45](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1185) **Exa favors culture over process.** Bryk says Exa appeals to engineers who want more agency and impact than larger labs offer, as well as people drawn to its technical challenges and potential upside. As the company grows, he is hiring experienced executives but resists codifying work into processes, preferring culture and rapid reviews. He acknowledges that coordination gets harder and that Exa may need more process as it grows. - [25:11](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1511) **People are not interchangeable compute.** Bryk says his work has shifted from engineering and research toward company operations, go-to-market and higher-level technical direction. He argues that the bitter lesson—more data and compute can improve software systems—doesn’t transfer cleanly to people, who are not interchangeable and do not coordinate automatically. As CEO, he is learning to inspire larger teams, adapt his time as headcount grows and seek candid feedback. - [29:47](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1787) **Growth strains information flow.** Bryk says scaling changes how people share information: once employees can’t see one another in one room, leaders must route useful updates without overwhelming everyone. He sees AI as a potential organizational assistant, but says current summaries miss context from face-to-face interactions and emotion, so he still walks the office and observes the team. Exa’s internal assistant lets employees query company systems, including customer usage. - [34:44](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2084) **AI rewards outcome-focused engineers.** Bryk says AI-era engineers need to work in parallel, focus on outcomes and use judgment rather than obsess over code syntax. He believes some engineers can implement ideas that 100 or 1,000 average engineers might never conceive. He sees engineering leaders more as coordinators and unblockers, and says versatile people can now work across design, front-end engineering and deployment. - [38:49](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2329) **CEO work shifts toward communication.** Bryk says company growth has made him learn public speaking, faster decisions and precise communication. He edits company-wide messages carefully because employees can mistake brainstorming for direction. He is also learning to step back from details and trust managers to handle them. - [42:29](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2549) **Bryk learns from close advisers.** Bryk says his cofounder Jeff Wang and the board are important sounding boards. He also uses fictional heroes as moral guides. In executive hiring, he learned to meet candidates in person and make clear that he wants them, because strong candidates have many options. - [45:25](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2725) **Bryk says mission and people sustain his drive.** Bryk says he has wanted to build something significant since childhood and has rarely prioritized personal leisure. Exa’s mission initially sustained him through uncertainty; now he is also motivated by responsibility to employees and his belief that the company can build an information layer for the world. He says he has not thought about burnout in the past couple of years as the company keeps progressing. - [48:24](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2904) **Bryk uses fictional heroes as guides.** Bryk says fictional characters offer models of sacrifice and service that he finds harder to see in public figures. Spider-Man, Batman and Ethan Hunt shape how he thinks about acting, and he uses Mission: Impossible as a startup analogy: repeated solutions to apparently impossible problems build confidence. Exa’s “we’ll figure it out” mantra helps new hires see how far the team has come. - [53:28](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=3208) **Bryk processes company problems at night.** Bryk says leadership can feel more distant as employees become more conscious around him, though he tries to stay approachable. Late at night, he synthesizes the day’s activity and reprioritizes; he describes his pattern as self-criticism rather than self-doubt. He identifies sleep as his biggest personal challenge and links his lack of burnout to the company’s continued progress. - [57:43](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=3463) **Bryk prioritizes alignment on the mission.** Bryk names confident wrongness as a candidate red flag. He says young founders get little credit for their age but may have fewer obligations, and says Exa performs well on list searches for people and companies. He identifies company-wide agreement on priorities and why the mission matters as a central challenge. ## Transcript Knuckle Up with Nakul, hosted by Nakul Mandan, with Will Bryk. Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there. [0:00](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=0) The first advice I got when I told everyone that we're building a search engine building Google in 2021 was like, what are you, nuts? Yeah. I kind of laughed, but also was like, maybe I am nuts. Really try to avoid non-playable characters is like the way of saying it. Like people who just go through life like as if they're on a stream and they have no like agency over themselves. A month is an insane amount of time. Nothing should ever take a month to ship. It feels like ridiculous that we can get to the moon and we split the atom. And yet if I want to understand what's going on at the border right now, it's really hard to. [0:24](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=24) Like that to me is just an error in humanity. When I was a kid, I thought, we have a bunch of adults. Why can't they figure out how to share information in a normal way? Why is everything politicized? I always thought this was ridiculous, and I don't accept it. This is my mission, if I choose to accept it. If you've used an AI product that searches the web, there's a good chance Wilbrick's company was underneath it. Exapower's search for OpenAI, Cursor, Cognition, and a growing list of the best tech companies in the world. It's valued at $2.2 billion, and it's quietly become one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in AI. [0:57](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=57) And it's all happening fast. XR went from about 10 people to 125 and tripled its valuation in under a year. The hard part of a company growing that fast is the person running it has to grow just as fast. Will is a first-time CEO doing exactly that in real time. What I find most interesting about our conversation today is Will's inner game. Will says instead of real-life role models, he's inspired by fictional superheroes. People who decide who they are going to become and then do the work. We'll figure it out from Mission Impossible has apparently become a mantra at XA. Today's conversation is a glimpse into Will's journey. [1:38](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=98) 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. [2:13](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=133) 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 even if ai agents are searching differently isn't this like such an important piece of infrastructure for ai agents that open ai google anthropic would want to own it in-house like how can an independent company even exist against the onslaught of uh the big labs yeah yeah so first of all like it's very very hard to build a search engine very few organizations on the planet have [3:15](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=195) ever done it you have to crawl a massive amount of data exabytes of data and then you have to you know do a lot of research over years to you know given a query how do you filter down a trillion documents right so it's very hard so only like the very big companies and company startups crazy enough to work on it for years can do this kind of thing and then i think x is in a unique position where we are happy to be neutral and search infrastructure that powers any company we serve 5 000 companies now we don't need to be a platform people come to so i think the biggest reason why a company like Excel could exist is that these other big companies like Google, they're not trying to enable Google's inside every product. They want you to go to Google and use it, right? [3:51](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=231) **Will Bryk:** There's an advantage for Excel that we don't need people to come to Excel. We want to enable every company, which is like fundamentally different strategy from these companies. Are there product [3:58](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=238) decisions that you are making? That's fundamentally a Google or an OpenAI will not be able to make for this? Yeah, for example, we expose the data of our index to all these companies so they could do downstream tests with it. Whereas Google or OpenAI, they'll more just do some sort of LLM summary of any data that they analyze. Are there areas where those guys are still ahead of you, which you're working on? Yeah, I mean, for example, Google has probably on the order of a trillion documents in their index. We're not there yet. It's very expensive. However, you don't actually need a trillion documents to be useful. [4:30](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=270) In fact, a lot of customers don't want all the data on the web because a lot of it is pretty crappy. So you want just like the highest quality information. But index scale is one thing that we are currently scaling up like crazy to get to hundreds of billions, yeah. Is the goal of medium to long term to remain a search API? Or you think beyond that, like you'll become part of the infrastructure for AI agents? Like what's the long vision here? Yeah, it's less about search. Search is almost an implementation detail towards the information layer. Like we just want to give people high quality information. [5:01](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=301) So for example, like you could have perfect search, but if you're searching over information that's incorrect, you're a great search engine, but you're not a great information engine, right? So like ultimately Excel will just be the information layer for any company that needs information, data. Is a key part of it that you're crawling real-time search? Because like any lab has already indexed the world's information to feed it for training, right? So if I say X is good or Y is good, they've trained the model for a certain amount, like till a certain date. And so does XR come in where it's real-time information or where does XR come in where Anthropic or OpenAI might fail? [5:39](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=339) Yeah. So, okay. So even if like a lab downloads the whole internet and does a pre-trains a model on it and then post-trains on that data. Okay. So now you have a very compressed version of the internet. And so one problem, like you said, is like it doesn't have real-time information. So it needs to use retrieval because the world's information is constantly changing but also even things that are old like it can't memorize it so it doesn't remember my birthday even though that doesn't change like yes these llms they're not going to remember will's birthday let's say it was on in some blog post somewhere right because it has to compress the whole so they have to rely on retrieval for like long tail information that you know it's going to know albert einstein's birthday but it's not going to will brick's birthday and then and in real time information these are kind of like two categories as you kind of build this uh use this competition but there's also the big labs and again they'll always want to own some of it how do you think about defensibility and moat over time for XR? Yeah, moat's an interesting question because the honest answer is that execution speed is the most important thing and focus, right? Like, [6:31](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=391) at least in the early days. Then when you start making billions, tens of billions of dollars a year, okay, now you have a lot of, you know, people who want in on that. And then you do need some answers to moats. Maybe one abstract way of thinking about it is like a company is kind of like a mix of intelligence or intelligences, physical resources, and maybe, you know, data, at least a software company. And if intelligence gets commoditized, everyone now can like have access to Fable times a thousand. And so like all the intellectual capital you've accumulated is not as much of a differentiator. Then a lot becomes like the physical resources and the information you have access to. So you can kind of think of different types of moats. [7:09](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=429) There's all sorts of different physical resources, like even feedback from customers is kind of like something in the physical world that you might have a lot of. So there's a very abstract way of thinking about like moats. I still think like having really smart people at the company is going of matter for years maybe forever it's hard to see how it plays out but but these are kind of like you could have moats in like in being just really smart people which we have right now in 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? [8:28](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=508) 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. [8:53](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=533) 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? [9:25](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=565) 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 last job you were literally writing a book on the history of civilization and as part of it you came [10:30](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=630) to the conclusion that the quality of information in the world is the most important thing for civilization and that kind of sparked or that was the genesis of XA right? That was definitely one of the big motivators. I think I've been thinking about ideas surrounding XA since like even high school. I remember in high school I was like I'm going to start a new type of news organization because like I have had this frustration and it continues to today where it feels like ridiculous that we, you know, can get to the moon and we split the atom. And yet if I want to understand what's going on at the border right now, it's really hard to. [11:01](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=661) Like that to me is just an error in humanity. Like when I was a kid, I thought this was like, we have a bunch of adults. Like why can't they like figure out how to like share information in a normal way? Like why is everything politicized? Like I always thought this was ridiculous and I don't accept it. Like I think that's just an error in our coordination structure. Something's wrong here, right? And I think a lot comes back to our information tools. So if, for example, let's say there was some really well-funded news organization that didn't have bad incentives and just was fully devoted to the truth, and they were super well-funded, I think that would have a huge impact on the world. [11:32](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=692) So that was kind of like the thing I was imagining back then. And then over the years, I've thought of different ideas. Like me and my co-founder actually built a search engine in college together, like way before Exa, because we were just like frustrated that it's so hard to find high quality information. Again, that was like, we were upset at the state of our information tools. What kind of searching was that? That one, so AI wasn't that good yet. So it was more like crowdsourcing the best URLs, kind of like Reddit, but for everything. And like really focused on like high quality URLs. I still think that'd be really cool. [11:59](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=719) And it's like, basically. Using like the intelligence of humans to, with the right incentives, like just organize, here are the best URLs on this topic if I'm trying to start a company or learn about like physics or something. But then in 2021, when we started Exa, yeah, I was writing this book on the side and just like really just became obsessed with history and just like, I always thought you don't need to read fiction books because if you just read history books, it's like insane what is happening. Like the deeper you go into any part of history, the crazier it is. It's just a fascinating story of humanity. [12:25](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=745) I was writing this book because I felt like no book captured the excitement I had. And I thought maybe as a new, I was not an expert by any means, but I was just so excited. I was like, maybe I could capture this in a 300-page book. It had a really interesting structure. I was really excited about it. But as I was writing the book, I was doing a lot of research because I had a cover of, you know, 5,000 years really fast because I didn't want to write this book for my whole life. So I was doing research really, really fast. [12:45](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=765) **Will Bryk:** And it's just really hard to get deep into a topic using Google. So Google is great for, you know, Google is great for surface level investigations. [12:53](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=773) Okay, like, where is this Costco? You know, what's the address? Stuff like that. But if you want to find like, you know, give me every article on medieval, what they ate in medieval times, like across different regions of the world, like you can't expect Google to do that, right? It's not meant for this like deep research. And so, yeah, just these were the ideas in the time. And then the critical reason we started, so it was like the technology became possible to build a new type of search engine. This is like, this is a time when GB3 had recently come out. So GB3 was like this magical technology where you could type in a whole paragraph and it would fully understand all the words in your paragraph. [13:25](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=805) And then Google at the time was like, you can't type in a paragraph to Google. You still can't. It just wouldn't understand anything more than a few keywords. And so like, what if you could take the technology of GB3 and put it into a search engine? You could have perfect search. That would have a huge impact on our information ecosystem and hopefully solve some of these political problems that I noticed since high school. So it's a pretty mission-driven start of the company. How much of that now is your private fuel or you're looking for that in every person who joins? Like, is this a recruiting filter almost for you? [13:54](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=834) 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. [14:21](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=861) 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. [14:51](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=891) 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 [15:51](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=951) 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. [16:29](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=989) but we try as best as we can. How do you test for that first principle thinking? Because a lot of people look smart on paper. What is the recruiting process to assess this? Yeah. I mean, so for example, on the engineering side, we have a couple of technical interviews. Those are reasonably standard. You know, we've chosen for like interesting, not just like leak code type stuff. But then I think the big thing that helps us test for this is we do a work trial, meaning people like come to the office and work with us. For how long? For one to two days. And that's critical because then you really get to see what someone's like. [16:59](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1019) So you get to see first principle of thinking because you give them a real problem. So you can't really see someone's first principle of thinking if you give them some lead code style problem. [17:06](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1026) **Will Bryk:** You have to give them a real creative problem and see how they think through all the trade-offs and stuff like that. [17:09](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1029) You could tell just from just like seeing the way they think through the problem. Awesome thing about a work trial is you also get to see all these intangibles. Like, you know, how do they interact with people at lunch? Are they like optimistic? Are they, you know, can you imagine working with them every day? Are they locked in during the day? Like all these kinds of things you could test during a work trial. I read somewhere, correct me if I'm wrong, that you try to, for people who are coming for the work trials, you try to have a meal with them. Is that kind of the intangibles? It's starting to not scale because we have multiple at the same time. [17:37](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1057) I definitely walk with everyone, or I try to, or me and my co-founder. That's very critical. We should continue doing that for literally as physically long as we can because we've gotten good enough for a 15-minute walk. We could see a lot in someone. We have all sorts of methods that we do and places we take them and just see how they react. double click on that like how have you gotten better what are traits that you are now double like looking more for and what are traits that you've stopped caring about that you may have over cared two years ago we really try to avoid non-playable characters is like the way of saying it like people who just go through life like as if they're on a stream and they have no like agency over themselves someone should be like they think about their life and think about the world and like adjust accordingly and don't just follow like non-followers and how do you test for that well you just literally just ask them about their life and like their decisions and stuff like that And you can kind of see. [18:25](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1105) Also, I just tell people about where EPS is going and just see how they react to it. Like, do they get excited? Do I see a sparkle in their eye? Reasonably easy to see a sparkle in their eye. Sometimes people are jet lagged because we have to fly them. So you have to adjust for that. And so all these subtleties that you learn over many trials. Are there traits you used to care a lot more about two, three, four years ago when you started the company that has just like you've gotten better at looking for something that now you think I was over-indexing it doesn't matter? I'm sure there are a lot. [18:51](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1131) One thing that just comes to mind, right, when you're asking that is like uh speed of talking like i happen to really like uh fast talkers just because like i talk really yeah and that is a surprise and i don't have time like you know my time i just want to move fast and make decisions fast and i get really bored but i think one thing i've changed there is like there are some people who speak slower but every token that they say is really high value so it's not actually the speed of words it's like valuable tokens per second it's kind of like the right metric so i've adjusted there is there a type of person who's clearly talented but you have realized it's not a good cultural fit for EXA? Yeah I mean there are a lot of really experienced it depends what you mean by talented but like definitely there's a lot of experienced people and that could often be a negative thing. There are a lot of people who are like you know incredible pedigree even have done amazing work in the past but can they like adjust to this new agentic world whether it's like the tools they use every day to build or just like the way they think about retrieval. Sometimes people are you know locked in the past. I mean [19:49](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1189) 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. [20:22](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1222) 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. [20:47](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1247) 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? [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. [21:32](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1292) **Will Bryk:** I try to avoid process, kill it before it lays out because like I'm very against process. [21:36](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1296) Like someone recently tried to introduce a process and I got really upset. Like no process. 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. And I just don't like codifying things into processes. [21:59](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1319) 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. 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. [22:30](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1350) 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. 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. [22:55](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1375) You come in and there's just like so much activity. 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. 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. [23:29](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1409) 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. 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. [23:58](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1438) Could you double play? 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? 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. [24:33](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1473) 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. 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 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 [26:02](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1562) 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. [26:54](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1614) 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. [27:20](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1640) 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. [27:53](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1673) 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? [28:34](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1714) 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 [29:27](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1767) 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 so I've had to change a lot you also mentioned how like there are different stages of the company that you've already experienced the company was one way when you were 10 people then it changed and now you're 125 people or such yeah could you talk about the two or three different stages that have happened and what broke and what then changed in you a lot of it by the way has to do with physical office structure so like for example when you're four people you fit in a room and then a big stage that happens is when you can't fit in a room anymore like you just physically can't fit in one room well now there's an information because a company is like a bunch of people [30:23](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1823) sharing information and when you don't fit in a room now you have to like how do you make sure everyone knows what's going on the next physical infrastructure thing that changes is like you can't see each other like even if you can't fit you might have one office space it's like one giant thing so you can see each other but then at some point the office gets big enough where you can't all see everyone uh so now not only like you don't know what everyone's up to but also it's just harder to exchange information it's really about information exchange uh like information flow is probably like the biggest thing as a company scales there's also so much going on at the company now that like i don't want everyone to know everything that's going on so you like you physically can't fit into your context window or your memory right so and it's just not efficient so you need to like you have to make sure that only the information that someone needs goes to them and that's a really fascinating problem and i think ai can totally help with this you know like everyone uses ai to be way more efficient on an individual level i don't think we've seen AI like really accelerate productivity on like organizational level and that's like a [31:16](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1876) really interesting concept like how do you like for example like basically we would love to have a bot where I have an AI assistant and it tells me all the stuff I need to know so as CEO the stuff I need to know is a lot more like high level sometimes it should go low level for an engineer it might be like you know this thing for for a go-to-market person might be this thing but it's like some subset all the all the information of the company right now we use Slack and it's just like so many things going on so we're trying to figure out this. Excel is also probably one of the most AI native companies on the planet. How do you guys use AI operationally? So maybe starting like what you just hinted, sounds like you use an AI assistant and it gives you exactly like on a daily basis or an hourly basis, this is the information that Will needs to consume right now. [31:58](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1918) I do have this, but it just... doesn't it's not it doesn't work but why because it's missing context like and that's everyone's realizing the same problem that like there's so much context like if people are talking with each other in the physical world it's not being recorded like and if you miss that then like [32:11](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1931) **Will Bryk:** your summary is just gonna be off if it doesn't have eyes if your ai is only in the textual world then you're missing someone's emotion and maybe someone's not having a good day like all these things matter right so we're very ai native but like there are huge limitations and i can't we're [32:23](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1943) not yet in a world where i could just get a summary and that's all i need to know i still need to constantly walk around the office talk to people get a feel i actually will look at people's faces and be like just like see like is something wrong like i overhear conversations i'm like constantly like just walking around and and getting a feel for for the day it's probably slightly reassuring to hear that even an excel like company has not solved everything with the 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. [33:00](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=1980) 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? [33:28](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2008) 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. [34:02](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2042) But ultimately, it's a lot of like relationships. I'm assuming almost all of your code is AI written now. What is the skill that you're looking for in engineers now in this new world? The type of person who's very good in this AI world is just very different. And everyone can adapt, I think. But like, you know, someone who can think in very parallel ways. Like now people are doing like 20 things at the same time. Like the people who can do that, and function in that world are just like ridiculously productive so it's like it kind of rewards the add type engineer um i would also say it rewards people who are obsessed with the with the final outcome maybe you could divide engineers into those who like love the tools themselves and those who love the final outcome and like a very good judgment about what is good [34:40](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2080) **Will Bryk:** product like they'll just keep telling their agents until it works whereas people obsessed [34:44](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2084) with the tools and the code and like the syntax obviously doesn't matter as much anymore do you feel like there's always been this concept of the 10x engineer in the ai world what's the delta between the best engineer versus a solid AI enabled engineer? I would actually argue there are like 100x and 1000x engineers. And the reason I'm saying that is because they're like, there are some engineers who will do something that even if you had 100 or 1000, they would never go to do it, which is a little different from the AI tooling, right? But like those engineers who are able to think those thoughts can now just like implement, implement it, right? So like AI tools make people extremely productive at doing their thing. So you can imagine like someone, yes, you could have someone do what other people would do but 10x faster but i think the more interesting thing is like someone who do things that the other person would never go to do so i'm very excited about those people uh who can just like think thoughts that would never be thought of by 100 you know average engineers what about like the engineering leader how has the role of an engineering leader evolved in the ai world i think because everyone has so much agency an engineer leader is a little [35:44](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2144) bit more hands-off like at least at excel we have a very decentralized organizational structure where like the best ideas come from anywhere uh and so i think like engineering leader is very much like a coordinator and unblocker as opposed to like a top down like here's what you should do just because like the best ideas are coming from everywhere like everyone's talking to like AI's. Imagine if you had an army of interns and each intern had access to Terence Tows. Like, you don't want to tell those army of interns what to do. You want the interns to talk their Terence Tows and then come up with the ideas, right? So I do think an engineering leader is more about a coordinator now. Are there roles at XA today because of the pace at which this AI is moving and enabling individuals like that didn't exist? Like maybe one that you already hinted at is a GTM engineer. Like, are there roles in every department that are forming this role? Like, Do you have almost, like, every department has its own engineer? [36:32](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2192) I don't think every department needs an engineer. I think everyone can basically act like their own engineer. So increasingly, you might not need that. I would say there are interesting roles now that are happening at the intersection of roles that used to be separated. For example, like, design, front-end engineering, and then, like, I don't know, deployment can all be one person, right? Basically, people can do, like, a huge amount of things now across different departments. We don't have departments, but across different parts of the company that they couldn't do before. The generalist really wins in this world, basically. [36:58](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2218) Like you don't want specific people. When I talk to people, a lot of people, CEOs are telling me, even in the AI orgs, like 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. [37:32](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2252) 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 [38:28](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2308) 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 the last year or so what's the part that you've had to change in your leadership style just in the last year from 10 to 125 people I mean honestly I'm thinking the biggest thing is like I've had to learn how to speak in front of crowds I would say that's one of the biggest skills I've learned is every Monday I give a kind of like a speech in front of like the whole team and now it's getting like quite big and and like it would have made I was I was scared of that kind of thing when I was younger but now I love it and so I think there's an example of just like I was forced to do this every week and what used to be you know really scary is now something i really enjoy [39:25](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2365) i've had to learn how to make decisions really fast uh and so like and this is this is i think an awesome skill that has carried to the rest of my life like oh should i go to that restaurant boom i'm just done i just don't it's like really fast i've had to learn how to communicate extremely clearly um because one thing i i was i was surprised by when we got to like the 20 30 person size was you know like if you're at all unclear in like oh what exactly do we do here it'll just like trickle down to the company i'll have like serious problems so i try to be extremely [39:55](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2395) **Will Bryk:** clear in my messaging certainly when i send a message to the whole company i edit that for like an hour because CEO, like, every word matters. Like, everyone is hanging on. That's also, like, been a surprising thing. I've had to learn to watch a little bit, like, what I say. I might say something like, oh, like, lunch should be at this time. But, like, I'm, like, joking. And then suddenly, it'll be at that time. And so, like, I love brainstorming, right? But sometimes when I'm brainstorming, people interpret that as, like, commands. They're not. So, I have to be, like, extremely explicit. Like, FYI, this is just complete brainstorming. Feel free to just completely contradict me. And that's been helpful. [40:25](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2425) But you've also, maybe on the human side, have become a manager of managers, right? So one goes from an IC to a manager to a manager of managers. How has that evolution hit you or not really much different? It's been sad to be like out of the details of everything. So, you know, when we were five people, 10 people, I could be in the details of literally everything. I used to like pick out what chairs we would have in the office. And I loved that. I love being in the details. And so there's been this thing where I have to increasingly not be in the details of things and only be in details of things that are problematic or the biggest bottleneck for the company. [40:54](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2454) You know, as I manage people who manage, I have to trust that they're going to like get into the details. That's kind of been a thing to learn, like how do you manage people and make sure that they bring that intensity and detail-orientedness to what they're doing. And so I've been learning how to do that well. You came up as an engineer. Have you already made the mental shift from being an engineer to a CEO now? 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. [41:20](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2480) 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? [41:50](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2510) 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? [42:19](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2539) 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. [42:51](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2571) 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. [43:16](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2596) 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. [43:45](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2625) 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. [44:29](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2669) 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 [45:21](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2721) 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. [45:57](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2757) 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. [46:23](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2783) 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. [46:50](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2810) 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 [47:38](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2858) 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. [48:27](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2907) 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 [49:24](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=2964) 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 [50:21](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=3021) 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 [51:20](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=3080) 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. [52:29](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=3149) 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? [53:02](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=3182) 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. [53:31](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=3211) 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 [54:29](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=3269) 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 [55:19](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=3319) 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? [56:06](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=3366) 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 [57:03](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=3423) 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 [57:56](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=3476) 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. [58:32](https://realalpha.app/v/9S9UOjpGFUs/?t=3512) 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.