YouSaid · the spoken record

Sridhar Ramaswamy

lines on the record: 80
first: 2020-06-29
most recent: 2020-06-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We are in a closed beta. As I said, we are at hundreds of users adding a few hundred per month. You can go to Neiva.co, n-e-v-a.co to sign up for our waitlist. You can also follow us on Twitter at Nivako. And we hope to rapidly expand the number of folks that are testing the product. And yes, it's free through the end of the year. And beyond that, we'll obviously make sure that we have a long trial period and so on so folks can try the product and feel like they're getting value from it. And we'd love to have you try the product at some point. I will.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Slowly I'm not sure there are like immediate answers within the context of my startup, for example, you know, eight out of our 28 folks are women. And that's still not a good enough number. I have an all-male board. And so I think there needs to be female representation in my board. Yeah, we are a startup, but as we grow, these are things that we all need to make personal commitments to. I was the sort of the product head of diversity when I was at Google and it was a very hard problem to increase the amount of women, to increase the number of minorities that we had in our teams. And immigration is one part of it, but I don't think we do a great job in tech. to create opportunities for blacks or Hispanics. I think that is very much something that takes reflection and commitment. And I think we need to”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And last question, you yourself are an immigrant and there's been a lot of from India and so many people in Silicon Valley are. Do you feel like we're at the right place in bringing in more voices, not just this country, but throughout the world? What do you think has to happen in that area? Because one of the great parts of tech is that diversity of thought. And I didn't even get into women and people of color in this discussion. But how do you preserve that going forward? Because tech has been a largely white male point of view. How do you change that?”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think that kind of religion goes hand in hand with new technologies. It gives purpose. But it's up to the rest of us to say, you know, we'll take what's good and we'll stay away from what's not so great for us. And again, what the government can do is create an environment in which there is competition, in which there are choices. I think at that point, you can trust people to take good decisions.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“not just with my personality and background, I tend to question a lot of stuff. So I was not one of those people that said that everything tech related was automatically the right thing to do. I'm not super active on social media. I was militantly against my children being active on social media when they were young. And so I do think that we all need to take a rational and hard look at what are the benefits that tech is providing us and take what's the best. It turns out that, you know, people in any particular industry always like to proclaim themselves as the next Messiah. Again, as a fan of history, people that invented newspapers, people that invented the radio, people that invented TV all thought they were going to revolutionize the world, even movies.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when you look back at your career, when you look at the impact of tech, do you think, you know, in general, you could say it's a net plus. You could say electricity is a net plus. You know, there's all kinds of, but the damage, how do people feel, you know, you are the top echelons of this. Is there a shift in people's thinking about what have we wrought? Do you feel like there's a movement? I do feel at the lower levels that people are saying, I don't know. One of the things my goals is people who work at Facebook is, do you really want to do this? Is this what you were meant to put on the planet to do kind of thing? I think that's pretty much my entire goal is to make people think about that. Do you think there is a shift in mentality in Silicon Valley, or does it just have to go somewhere else? Should there be another Silicon Valley or another place of innovation? Do you imagine there's a change in the attitude?”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd say it's a lot of things. Certainly I set store by innovation. That's the reason why I started Neva. I set store in principles. And I actually have a lot of belief in the inherent smartness of people. can easily dismiss things and say like, oh, people will never get off a free product or do what's right for them. But in my mind, if you create options, you are going to be surprised by outcomes. And, you know, that in combination with the government playing its role of thinking again about what's right for society, thinking about, hey, what do we do in kind of this post-industrial environment about just Employment, things like that. I think that will hopefully create the next wave of innovation for us.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The bar for the government is not consumer harm. The bar for the government is what's right for society. Laws need to reflect that.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to me, like they kind of need to wake up and say, technology is innovated, companies have innovated, we are where we are today. And how should we think about this very important element of antitrust that we know is important for the long-term health of the country? Yeah, so I just think there needs to be just a lot more innovative thinking in this space.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not An expert on things like antitrust. But I do obviously read about it. I'm a keen fan of history, about how AT&T got to be where it was and how it was subsequently broken down, the innovations that that came out from that and so on. But I do strongly think, and your other guests have said this as well, that the current dogma behind antitrust, that it somehow has to be tied to consumer price harm is completely out of date with the reality that we live in today because you essentially get a free check if you are a free service. The law apparently is not applicable. If you go back and look at the original intent, it was consumer harm. But there was also this element of what's right for society.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I haven't had a lot of conversations with senior folks about this. My personal take is that alternative viewpoints are important. And I made a lot of decisions even for Google that I've gotten to the heart of matter. I was the person that led the decision to make shopping an all-paid property. I'm fascinated by business models and alternative vices. So I would say this is actually a good thing for Google that someone is thinking about a different way of approaching this problem. And we have a long road ahead. But I think ideas are important. Ideas are important for our society, for the industry. And so I'm excited to be trying it. And I obviously have a lot of friends who call me and say, wow, that's bold, but I'm glad you're doing it. And I hope that's the reaction that folks have.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, when you're a startup, you have to focus on the now. You can have all the grand concepts that you want for the distant future, but you have to create value user by user. We are at hundreds of users. Our sort of aspiration is to get to thousands of users loving our product. So these steps come very small. To a certain extent, if you talk about massive market share on day one, you basically set yourself up for failure. I listened to the conversation that you had with JSON and the benefits of smallness. To me, big things come from having the right principles, like really crafting your solution and then trusting that it will scale. I don't think there is a way to hurry this through.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's interesting is there's been a lot of products like this that I just recently read about hey.com, which you've heard about with their fight with Apple. When you think about this, there's attempts to do this. And this is an email fighting the Gmail or even the App Store. They were in a fight with the App Store. There are big players here. That have really sort of sucked up, as you said, all the oxygen in the room. How difficult it is to up on that? You can create a nice little business, but how do you actually shift the entire business away from, which has become an exploitative situation for large companies?”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All core principles continue to be like a search product that works for you, the ability to bring in your personal data so you don't have to go to many different places to be searching FUDIT. And in the areas that I talked about, like commercial queries, we want you to feel like a truly better product experience that is partly facilitated by the model and the lack of pressure with respect to showing ads. We have to create a product that is truly better. If we are merely search as it exists today without ads, I think we are in trouble in the long term. But our bet is that this actually opens the door to a lot more innovation in the product, some of which we have already done.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so when you're thinking about the idea of advertising less world, can it get big? I mean, you look at others who have tried different things, and there's been competitor social networks that have tried different things, some of them very early on. Path was one of them. How difficult will it be to get people in this state of mind? I mean, you're using the idea of no ads is pretty much your marketing tactic here. There's not complete lack of privacy because you need people's information in order to give them a product, essentially. How do you, what is, do you think the best, I don't want to see, marketing for this thing, what is the reason I pay you $10 a month or whoever much it's going to be initially? What is the argument from your perspective to the average consumer to get them to move off of things that are bad for them, essentially?”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me, it all comes down to how compelling the product is. And Dr. Go, this you said this, in fact, does show ads. And the privacy is a good add-on to that. But what we are promising is that for this very important function of search, a product that's focused on you, a product that can innovate in areas that benefit you, for example, in shopping, in a way that there is not quite that incentive for the other folks. Is that sufficient value? To me, that's like the big open challenge of Neva for me and the rest of the team.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Should there be a business where there's no search history at all? I mean, look, Duck DuckGo has that. They have an ad business, but it's contextual ads. You see someone like that who's been trying really hard to compete with Google. People don't, there's no pickup on it. Why is that? Why do you imagine there's not? And it's a good service, but nobody goes there. I mean, a lot of, I mean, it's... Essentially”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“because we don't want to create artificial distinctions about user data. We don't want you to say, well, this level of granularity is going to be used, but that level is not going to be for us, your comfort comes from the fact that literally it's only subscriptions that we make money off of. There are no other products.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would never do, for example, in this kind of a formula, even doing a product like trends is not something that we would do. Can you explain that?”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's what Facebook and Google claim. We don't sell the data, but really they sell insights into the data is what they're doing. I mean, they make this really weird little distinction. It's kind of laughable. We would never do”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just in the context of making your product better, the data goes nowhere else. And yeah, and there's obviously with a model like ours, there's no question of selling any data whatsoever.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, when someone wrote me when I was talking to various people about doing this interview, someone wrote me making advertising the boogeyman is missing the point, data collection, targeting, and subsequent manipulation is is the problem. And Google and Facebook do say they don't sell user data. Now, you're not going to be selling this data. You're going to be using this data in order to give a better experience, which is, I think, different.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in that case, for example, the connection that you have with Neva is on HTTPS. It is secure, it's encrypted, so intermediaries cannot save it. And the final thing that I'll say is this is the beauty of a consumer first, customer first product. If there is a strong desire to have a product that also remembers no search history but has the other context, you would absolutely make this because the search history lets us do things like autocomplete off your queries when you're typing the same query. Again, easier and it's not particularly hard for us to create an option where it's like where we remember no search history. And by the way, we also decided early on that we would never keep any logs for more than 90 days. So everything that you do beyond 90 days is deleted. Again, if some users come to us and say, no, I want it to be 180, we'll add that option. But our default is you don't have to worry about this.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Knowing your watch history and just making better recommendations, but our belief is that the business model and the strong principles that come with how your data is going to be used is the guarantee that we are providing. Having said that, there are queries that are awkward and you don't really want associated even with your search history. We offer an incognito mode for that. Is it like, you know, you get a headache? You're like, ah, what does this headache mean? I don't really want that sitting sitting in my search history. You can open up NIVA in an incognito mode. Our engineers came up with a clever solution for how a signed in user can transition into having this incognito window that can talk to Neva without anything at all being recorded. And I'll say this including”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think there has been sort of this unfortunate mixing up of privacy with not collecting any data at all. You know, when we talk about you being able to connect your Gmail accounts to Neva, definitionally we know things about your personal life. But I think the privacy principle that we enshrine in NEVA and that we try to follow very religiously is your data is yours. And yes, we use search history as a convenience for you, this, in our opinion, is no different from, say, like a shopping app that you use that knows the previous products that you've bought or Netflix.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we are very careful in our relationship with all third party providers that they do not get personally identifiable data. As a matter of policy, like within Neiva itself, we don't lock the full IP. You almost certainly know that your IP address is pretty much a dead giveaway for your house because it doesn't change that often. So we dropped the last octet and we don't save it in any of our logs. Similarly, if we get location from our phone, we falsify it to a square kilometer radius so that individual people cannot be identified. And so we take care of that part of privacy. And the providers that we work with, yes, they provide services for us, but we make sure that they do not get your personal search history, audio personal maps history, and things like that.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I'm like, we can be better than this. So I would say we take full ownership and responsibility for quality. And we are product people. Will get better at this day in and day out”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we use a number of services, definitely use Bing, definitely use Apple Maps. We also use this company called Intrinio for stock information. We have another relationship for weather information. The first thing that I'll say here is that, first of all, I'm glad Bing exists. It's an alternative for all of us. It pushes Google to innovate. And they also have a pretty partner friendly API approach. which obviously benefits us. The first thing is when you're a startup of 25 people taking on a problem that is currently being solved by over 5,000 people and like a huge amount of money, you need to approach things with humility. There are only certain things that you can build. And, you know, certain things that you cannot. But the mentality...”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, not as good as Google's, but because it's not as big, but still not bad. So you have to have a search. You have to have a search element. So how does that come into it? Talk about how that is because we're going to get into privacy also, but you use Apple for Maps explain what you're using.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can also make choices because we'll talk about the next section about this sort of false discussion debate over First Amendment. You can also make choices. We want the New York Times here. We're not going to have this person. We're not going to have that person. If you look at the top 10 searches right now on Facebook, nine out of 10 are pretty right-wingy. You know what I mean? You don't actually get what is high quality or even diverse. You don't get diverse even, which is fascinating since the right wing always says they're not heard, but they are indeed. So right now, let's talk about NIV itself. So you're using Bing for search. You're using, let's go through this. You're using Bing is Microsoft's service that you competed against for years, which people's, it's interesting because people tend to sort of insult Microsoft for Boat Search and their phone, but I thought their phone was pretty good. And it just was late. And it was too late to compete. And their search is pretty good.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know you pay a certain monthly cable bill and you turn around and say who adds the most value and you distribute portions of your revenue. My point is that the subscription business model is a much more direct tie-in between the information that you consume in the search engine and the value that the publishers are creating. And that makes us approach it differently.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Us the power of a subscription model is that the value that we provide to users comes directly from publishers. There's a one-to-one content. Unlike in an advertising model where the incumbents can reasonably say, wait, we make money over here and you are news or you are reviews or you are this amazing blog over here, we show no ads when this blog is being shown. We can take a very different approach. Of course, when you're making zero dollars, there's not much to handout, which is currently our state. We are a startup. But as we gain scale, this is something that we very much want to do. And again, I'm not talking about rocket science. This is your cable model.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Explain that. I know, I know. Explain that. What it is is there's been a lot of news organizations that feel that Google and Facebook and others take their information sort of blackmail them into having to be on there because they have to get people to sites and then don't pay them. So they're essentially having everybody paint their fence for them. They're using their content. And I think it's a pretty good argument, but there's nothing they can do about it at the same time”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But what scale brought is a drop in prices so that more and more people can offer these things. The allure clearly with the advertising model is that the product is free. But the long-term consequence of that is that the few winners get all the spoils off scale. And you can kind of do rough math around things like this. Yes, we will start at a certain point, but as we gain scale, we expect our prices to drop. And the other key aspect of our model is this also provides for a much more direct publisher alignment, something that I haven't talked about that much so far. And that is that once we reach a certain revenue threshold, we very much intend to share part of our revenue with people that are creating great content. 100%.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the first thing that I'll say is innovation and business that has uplifted the lives of so many people in the world has operated on a paid model. Every single thing that's in front of you, the monitor, the phone, the microwave downstairs, a coffee mug, all started off as items that only the rich people could offer.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, give them a better service. I'm going to get into the pricing because poor people have to take the shitties, the ad service, right? So that one of the arguments that Google always makes and Facebook makes, and they all do. They all do. They go, oh, well, you know, you're talking about wealthy people who can afford to opt out of things. And I'm like, wealthy people do that all the time, obviously. But talk about that idea is that this creates a have and have-not search engine. People who are protected from being tracked and people who or being acted upon by advertisement and people who can't afford it and therefore. So if people do know they're being played by a Google or an Amazon or whoever or Facebook, how do you deal with that? Because that's an obvious situation. Most of the world can't pay for subscription service.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“we better be providing value for you month after month canceling us is just one click away it makes us hungry to want to do the right thing by you i would definitely give people a lot more credit yeah”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do a lot of user interviews, Kara, and I have to say I am blown away by the degree of awareness and the degree of sophistication that people have towards shopping. I spoke to this one ice hockey mom in North Dakota who's like, yep, I search on Google, I search on Yahoo, I search on Bing. I know exactly what's going on. Let me tell you what to buy on Amazon, what not to buy on Amazon. And people are very, very aware. We run a lot of surveys. People are very aware of how much ads are being targeted to them. I think the average person in our country deserves more credit than we give them. To me, part of the reason for creating NIVA is also creating that choice. Yes, here is another option that lets you look at this problem very differently. And it's strong motivation for us. If you are a subscription service,”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'm a more sophisticated user, but most people don't know that. Most people don't realize what they're getting. And click, I think how many pages do people go in? Not many, right? One, maybe two? Possibly never go into the second page, I'm guessing. I don't know.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is the simplicity of the product. It has one goal to show you the best results. If you need comparison sites, we would highlight the highest quality comparison sites. If you needed places where you can buy the product, we can show those to you. And you can have the confidence that there's no money exchanging hands in any of these pages that is Do you know with its merchants? Should the merchant offer you the best price or should they give $5 to Amazon so that they are right upon top? There's no easy answer to conflicts like this. To us, this is the reason why we think that this not only provides for FISUP mine, but it can actually be super valuable for you, just the freedom to focus on what are the great things that we should be showing Kara today.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was, yeah, and when I was watching it, the stuff I was getting on Google was not the best information. It took me several ways to get to Wirecutter. You know what I mean? It was really, which is where I wanted to get in the first place. And it was really interesting what was surfacing. I was fascinated by because I was just, it was a really interesting problem. And on Amazon, the same thing. It was there. It was the products they wanted me to surface. And I could feel like I was in a store and being shoved to end caps all at the same time.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're not going to muck it up with maybe ads they don't realize they don't want or or information. I mean, another example, let me just be clear, Google's not the only one in the search business these days. It's also Amazon, which is an increasing player, but Amazon tends to show their products the things that they're making because they've also, besides being in the marketplace business, they're in the selling stuff business. So you get suddenly you get, I was looking for something one of the oasuitcases, I guess. But of course, away won't be there because they don't want to be copied. Do you immediately get a version of it that Amazon is making and selling somewhere? Same thing with Facebook. They tend to orient you towards their things, which was, I think, the problem with Microsoft. That was the original problem with Microsoft is orienting you towards other things they're doing aside from the very problems with the business itself, with the privacy. So the idea is that you'll get, say, today I was looking for baby gates. I just had another baby.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We can just focus on creating the best experience for you. And so it's more than take an existing search engine and take out the ads. It's really the freedom to truly rethink what this product can be about. And that's kind of our bet for why we think people are going to pay for it.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we also wanted to make sure that we had a strong commitment to no tracking and privacy that went beyond the product. We created an extension that works to prevent as much tracking as possible. Of course, other companies like Apple are doing this, but those were kind of the key elements that we had. And the thing to remember is once you create a product like this, you have an enormous amount of intellectual freedom to think about what that product should be. A concrete example, if you're looking for a standing desk, I can make sure that I show you the best review sites for it. I'm not obligated to fill up the page with ads.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I But on the other hand, we were very firm that we would not show affiliate ads or we would not bundle up the data and sell it to some other people. We start with the simple premise this service serves you and we have a business model and a set of principles that are all designed to make sure that we get to only serve you. And the second part of it is bringing the context of your personal life into the product. You can attach your Gmail account. You can attach your Dropbox account. We make it easy for you, I don't know, to find the PDF of your passport or your tax returns or the phone number of a friend or that long-last conversation sitting in some mailbox. You're like, we want you to be able to bring that if you want and have it be searchable for you. To us, this is a very different kind of service.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we all talked about how search was a really important problem for all of us, something that we turned to multiple times today. It's our portal to information. It's our portal to other people. It's our portal to buying products. It's a lot of stuff. And it's deeply, deeply personal. And we've sort of come to accept the fact that search is what it is today, which is essentially public search. That's not personalized a whole lot, that doesn't know a lot of context about you. And one that doesn't really touch on the many personal services that we all use. You talked in one of your podcasts about how you have five email accounts. I have files in both Dropbox and G-Suite. Our world is complicated. And so we wanted to in some ways go back to a simpler Canvas for our product. We said we want a product. That serves our customers”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so explain what Nive is. You went to, I can talk about you going to Greylock, but you were there first. You parked yourself there and decided to do this. Talk about the thinking of explain what Neva is and why you went in this direction. Because there's been attempts at this before, but free search is something everyone's gotten used to. So explain what Neva is going to do.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of things. I would say the time enroll. You see a lot of friends leave. In some ways, I would feel like the old man left standing. And more and more, you know, my friends and people that I worked with for a decade left. And there were more and more difficult problems with not always easy solutions. And then there was also just this very simple thing of I like creating. I was running a large team, but my happy moments came at the points where projects were being created, where we would work together as small teams to actually imagine something new and make it happen. To me, this is like the ultimate reward of being a computer scientist and to be at a time where such a thing is possible. If I were to make a new car, you know, only Elon can make new cars. Like I can. But I can imagine a new company. And so that desire to just start over also came from this desire to just work with a small team, imagine a different world and create a product that”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“think I was ever in the running you are So when you were looking at this, is there one thing that was it child pornography? What was the thing that sort of is like this is not something I want to try something new? I want to make something fresh.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think I was ever in the running. So he became the head of Google in 2015 and he's done a fabulous job. It's a very difficult job. And he's done well.”
2020-06-29 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Sridhar Ramaswamy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT