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Will Bryk

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2026-06-06

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2026-06-06

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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

1. “That's why people are constantly switching tools, like trying out new tools is because we just don't have comprehensive information over all the people or companies we want. So that's a really good example. That's something Exo's leaning very deeply into. Like go to market intelligence because we care a lot about it. It's very exciting. It's also very useful to use internally. We have companies to sell to and we have people to hire. It's been great to dog twitter on things.”

   2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “And so, yeah, I mean, what are some examples where searches not good? I do think company and people search is the most easy to see. And just most value to people. Every company in the world has to search over companies to sell to, or almost every company in the world has to search for companies to sell to and people to hire You could ask yourself if finding companies to sell to or finding people to hire is a solved problem. I think every company would say, no, it's not.”

   2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Yeah, right. So, but on the other hand, like search, when you are trying to enrich every cell in your Excel sheet with competitors or people you're trying to recruit, then every extra nine of quality in search really matters. Basically, I would argue that a lot of knowledge work is actually a search problem, not only intelligence problem.”

   2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “You're trying to find competitors or something. Most of knowledge work does not require the smartest model. Just an open source model that's big enough. And now the infrastructure for running them is very good. It's pretty cheap. You can just reuse open source models for most of knowledge work. Not that the crazy smart LMs don't, they do have a super amount of value in terms of inventing new science and math and in certain cases you want the find any bugs in your code or something like that. But increasingly, I would say if you think of knowledge work, like all the different tasks you might do as like concentric circles of difficulty. A huge amount of that service area is covered by like off-the-shelf models you get right now.”

   2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Yeah, I guess what does commoditize mean? It means over time will the thing will it just not matter which tool you use? They're all kind of the same. I would argue that the LLMs are going to get commoditized or are getting commoditized faster than searches.”

   2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Like LLMs, like, you know, Opus 4.6 comes out. Everyone's really happy. This is working on 99.9% of use cases. And then when the next one version comes out, everyone wants that thing, right? Because the extra nines of quality are so important in this new Ageentic economy. And so you have a similar thing for search. So it's both easier to build a search engine fast but really hard to build a perfect search engine.”

   2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Basically, like if traditional surgeons had like 99.9% quality or reliability, these new surgeons for agents need 99.99, 99.999. And this is a great thing because it's just pushing us towards that dream of perfect search I've always been dreaming about. It's very similar to.”

   2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “I wake up in the morning and we have customers love us, but we still have customers being like, wait, why can't you be perfect at this search? Or what about this search? And they're constantly pushing us towards the edge because we're serving business use cases that have deeper and deeper needs, like billion dollar investments around the line. This has to be perfect. And that's great.”

   2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Yeah, like Google probably had hundreds of people working on re-ranking. Whereas, you know, because I was a complex thing before LLMs, but now with LLMs, you could have a re-ranker that you just call an LLM and one engineer work on it. Now, obviously, we have more than one engineer working on re-rankers at this point because you don't want to just call an LM. You want to train your own models and make them faster, higher quality. But you don't need a team of hundreds. You could do it with a couple people. So how have we a team that has always been below 100 people been able to build a search engine that's better than Google in all sorts of ways? Well, it's because LLMs unlock, the technology unlocks new types of techniques. And then also because serving agents, like you don't need all the click data and data that Google has been collecting. So those are some ways why it's easier to build a search and why we've been able to build a fantastic search engine with a small team, I think a small crack team. But it's also harder. Why is it harder? Well, it's because the requirements for a search engine now.”

   2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Humans, when you want to find results that humans click on, which is obvious, right? So if you get a huge amount of human click data, you could train on that. And now Google can understand what you mean even when you don't even know what you mean. However, agents just don't, they don't benefit that much from clicks. I mean, maybe a little bit in terms of the ranking signal. It's valuable for agents to know what humans think is valuable. That's a very minor thing. So it's interesting that all that click data that Google has accumulated just doesn't really matter for agents. And so it's a whole new ballgame. So there's not much of an advantage there. There are also other things like”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Okay, so why is it easier? Well, first of all, this whole click, you know, Google has an insane amount of human click data. Just doesn't matter that much for serving agents. I remember saying this years ago. People thought that was crazy. But it turns out to be right. Like human click data is great for”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “It's easier and harder to build a search engine for AI agents. And so I'll tell you. Oh, interesting. Yeah, please. Yes. I know that's for your interest.”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “So it's just a whole, it's like hard to express how different. I have like a list of like 20 different ways humans and agents are different. And when you just build it from scratch for agents, you just make fundamentally different architectural decisions.”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “You want complete information because you're making very important monetary decisions and you don't want to miss anything. You don't want to have any FOMO, any you're missing some critical startup that exists that actually reflects well or badly on the current one you're thinking about. And so you want your agent to have complete information about every topic. So with Exile, you could search something and then get not just like 10 results or 100 results, but 1,000 results or 10,000. And increasingly agents are wanting this. You also want like lower latency because agents search faster than humans. But at the same time, you want higher latency because certain applications don't care about latency at all. So I think another big thing with serving agents is like extreme customizability because we're serving businesses. We're serving agents that are very different, somewhat super lowly latency, somewhat super high latency or latency doesn't matter to them.”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “You're like, no, yeah, that's not what I want. And then you try to change some keywords. And it's like it's just missing it. It's not like it doesn't feel like very controllable toggle. You want the opposite for an agent because the agent's just going to keep searching until it gets to its outcome. You don't want it to have to make like a thousand, like 10,000 keyword queries and still never get to. It's comprehensive information. You wanted to like make a few queries and get comprehensive information. Anyway, so complex queries, toggleable, also like comprehensive results. So this is a thing where it's like, an agent doesn't just want 10 results or 10 pieces of information. It wants everything. Because imagine you're an investor. You don't have to imagine that. If you're an investor and you're looking at biotech companies,”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Simplify its complex need for its user into simple keyword phrases because you're just losing information. So you want something that could actually semantically handle complex, but also handle keywords because sometimes you just literally want, hey, like I have this complex chemical formula, like I want that to be part of the document, right? So you want a tool that can handle both semantic queries, keyword queries, really just like expose all the fundamental toggles to the agent. Because the agent, by the way, has the patience to make a domain filter here and a keyword filter there or like search in this way, searching that way. So you want to have a very controllable search engine. You know, like with Google, like you search something and then”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Yeah, yeah. It's like imagine we had a great surgeon for sloss and then humans came around. They're not going to wanna use that same surgeon. And so you should think of agents as these crazy creatures that have infinite time is meaningless for them. They just want to make complex queries very fast and like analyze it really fast. And they want perfect output for their human users, right? So you want to build a search engine for that. So what matters for that type of creature? Well, lots of different things. So first of all, you need a search engine like a handle complex queries, right? Like you do not want that feature to have to”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “I've been thinking about this for a long time since there were the first agents, right? Like we were the first search engine. Like we were an early search engine and the first AI products came to us because they were like, okay, they could be a search API. And so I've been thinking about this for a long time. And yeah, the world of agents. Searching is just completely different from human searching. I guess you can make the analogy of agents to humans to sloths. Imagine we had to start”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “This is a big paradigm shift, even as investors. We're thinking, hey, it's not humans who are deciding the dev tool that wins. It's actually agents. Personal anecdote. I think I told you this one, but we have a family open claw, Michael Claudberg, and we wanted to give it web access. And he was like, I recommend Exa before we invested. I was like, sure. I'll go with whatever you recommend, right? And so it sounds like there's this nice dovetailing of how you were intending to build Exa in the first place to what agents want, but how do you think about what agents want right? That's sort of the holy grail right now of, hey, I don't care about database I'm using. My agent's going to select Convex or SuperBase. These are entire tailwinds that are making some of these companies. How do you optimize for that? Think about that.”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “I'm not an oral consumer. I want to get really deep into any topic, and so do agents. And so it's cool that we were building a search engine for ourselves. It ended up being the exact same search engine for agents, or very similar.”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “But to the world, I think it was the first time they met this new creature, and it was just easy to use, which was a very big learning, which was like, okay, you make something easy to use, that's very important, obviously. Anyway, so then AI started really taking off. And then early 2023, people started asking us for API access to our search engine that they had used. Based on that Twitter announcement, Not quite ages because it wasn't a term at the time to see AI products, these AI workflows. And they're going to want comprehensiveness. They're going to want to search in these more complex ways. All the ways that we as nerds in 2021 wanted to search, agents were very similar. So that was another interesting realization was like.”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “By the way, two weeks later, ChatGPT came out. So then people realized okay, there's another new way of finding information outside Google with LLMs. And that was very critical to us. So we released our first search engine to the world in a year and a half after starting Exa November 2022. Two weeks later, Cheshi came out. Actually, to me, I was at nerves when I saw the announcement. I played with it. I was like, this feels like GB3, but a little bit like better UI.”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “And then it would filter it down to the top 10 documents. And that would be better than Google. The problem is that would cost like, you know, $10 billion per query. And so then it became an optimization problem. But at least there was like an existence proof that it's possible to build a better search on Google. And that was very inspiring for me. So then it was like, okay, like, how do we optimize the hell out of that? And Transformers had gone really good at the time. And Google wasn't really leaning into it. And we just had this deep belief in the bitter lesson, maybe more than Google, for search, which is that if we could develop systems, like neural systems where you pour more data into it, it just gets better and better for the thing we're optimizing for than you could actually just totally be better than Google. When we released this to the world in November 2022, like it was actually shocking. And Andre Carpathy retweeted it. It's pretty popular on Twitter. It was like this new way to find information. It was the first time people were like, holy cow, it's possible to find things beyond Google.”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “From the ground, basically, we were like in 2021, we could build a better search on Google. I don't care how long it takes. I guess we were young, high energy, just like ready to do anything, devote our lives to this. There was a thought experiment that really excited me, which is that, wait, I could totally build a better search than Google right now. And here's how I would do it. For every query, I would take all the trillion documents on the web, and I would run GB3 over it. I would say, does this document match the query? Is this document?”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Say, hey, Google, I'm looking for Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, to the extent you talked about starting to build Ecza five years ago, and then it feels like in the last five years, the world has completely changed, which is actually, in my opinion, a great thing to happen to you and to exile while you're building because you can bring in this new technology versus trying to either fight it or have some sort of innovator's dilemma. Maybe share a little bit more on why you decided to build exit from the ground up and what parts were the hardest or have been the hardest, and then how has it changed as the world of LLMs have changed?”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “And right now, Google is just not good at that. No matter how many changes they make, you don't trust Google to find you literally every competitor in your company, whether it's in Europe or Asia. You don't use Google for recruiting. And this announcement doesn't change that. Like you're not going to go, you say, hey, Google, I'm looking for machine learning engineers in San Francisco who have a background at startups because it's not built for that kind of thing. So there is an opportunity to build a new type of search engine that's meant for extremely deep, complex queries that businesses really care about and agents really care about.”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Like, what if you could have true, perfect understanding of any topic? And so, yeah, okay. So Google has been changing their search engine a little bit. I would say I've seen many Google IOs now at this point at Exa. Every Gulai on located, they say they're changing search. And they do, but they change it more to be valuable for the consumer type use cases, which for me, it's like there are so many different use cases that go beyond that. There's like really deeply understanding the Roman Empire, but there's also finding every competitor to your company.”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “It's probably on hold right now. I would have finished it around now, but at some point I was like, okay, let's, maybe I can build a search engine and then I could automate the building of writing up books. And I feel like that turned out to be true. But anyway, in writing that book, it became extremely obvious that if you want to go really deep into some topic, Google fails. Google's created service-level information, which is great for most of the billions of consumers. But if you want to really understand what it was like to live in the Roman Empire, you know, in like 100 AD, it's actually quite hard. And that information is scattered. It's everywhere, but it's like you need really, really good search, like really deep search to understand it. And so that was like the first realization that, or one of the first realizations that wait.”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “And making sure they're really happy. And they do a great job of that. That's what they're optimized for. That's why they're optimized for human clicks. It's like you're really tired, you type in a few keywords that make no sense. And Google just magically understands what you're saying. That's magical because it has billions of other people searching similar things. I'm excited by Google too, but there are certain times when you want something deeper. And I was actually before starting Exa writing a history book, I just got obsessed with history and I wanted to get to the bottom of what did it feel like to live in every period in history going back 5,000 years. I don't know if you ever talked about it.”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Yeah, I mean, Google was amazing and is amazing for what it's meant to do, which is like get quick answers to consumers. And now it's like increasingly longer answers. But really it's focusing on what do most of the billions of people in the world search for care about?”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “And we did build a pretty solid search. But then five years ago, so in 2021, that's when Transformers started to get really good. And it suddenly became possible to build a better search than Google. And that was a really important opportunity because search is the gateway to the world of information. If you could improve search, if you could make it perfect, then that has so many downstream positive implications for the world across every industry, across every part of human life. So it just felt like this huge opportunity that no one was pursuing. And I was like, I'm going to devote my life to this because it's everything I care about is about information. And so yeah, started exile and now it's gone. We actually made a lot of progress. And we're a lot closer to that mission. There's still a huge amount of things, a huge amount to go. But yeah, it's been crazy to see how far we've come to achieving that mission that I've been thinking about for years.”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Yeah, yeah, sure. So I would say it's a life mission. So since I was a kid, I've cared about finding the highest quality knowledge, right? I was obsessed. And then in high school, I wanted to start a new type of news organization because I thought we're a civilization that got to the moon. We split the atom and yet we can't understand what's going on at the border or some in science news. Like, why can't we fully understand any topic? And then in college, I was roommates with Jeff, and we were like, we could just build a better search using crowdsourcing the highest quality links.”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “World of Agents searching is just completely different from human searching. An agent doesn't just want 10 pieces of information, it wants everything. With exile, like you could search something and then get not just like 10 results or 100 results, but 1,000 results or 10,000. How have we a team that has always been below 100 people have been able to build a search engine that's better than Google in all sorts of ways? Well, it's because”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Want to go really deep into some topic, Google fails. Most people want to understand the world, but they're getting fed information that's just misleading in some way or straight up wrong. And if everyone had like information that was accurate, most reasonable people would be reasonable.”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Church is the gateway to the world's information. If you can make it perfect, then that has so many downstream positive implications for the world.”

    2026-06-06 · a16z Podcast · Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source