Pod Insights The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway Future of Search — with Sridhar Ramaswamy About this episode Sridhar Ramaswamy, the CEO and cofounder of Neeva, tells us how the company — an ad-free, private search engine — is differentiating itself in the search market. Sridhar also shares the leadership lessons he’s learned from running a team of 10,000 people during his fifteen and a half years at Google. Follow on Sridhar Twitter, @RamaswmySridhar.
Scott opens with how a lack of corporate governance could lead us to a market crash.
Related Reading: Coinbase Independent Directors Have Close Company Ties
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:32 Scott Galloway? Episode 74, The Atomic Number of tungsten. In 1974, my father left us for a flight attendant at Continental Airlines. That was okay, though, because every photo was a selfie.
1:42 Speaker 02 Let me take a selfie.
1:45 Scott Galloway? Hold me. Go, go, go!
1:57 Scott Galloway? Welcome to the 74th episode of the Prob G Show. In today's episode, we speak with Stridhar Ramaswamy, the CEO and co-founder of Niva. Niva is an ad-free, private search engine. So I'm excited. Sridhar was on Pivot, and I love the idea of a ad-free search engine. I think that Google is one unsustainable. No company has controlled over 90% share of $150 billion sector in the history of business. And I think that over time, the ad model is tobacco. What do I mean by that? Social media and search are the nicotine. They're addictive, but not necessarily bad for you. It's the tobacco or the ad model that gives you cancer. Now, why is that?
2:39 Scott Galloway? Slowly but surely, Google is no longer taking you to the best place based on your query. It's taking you to another place you can monetize. It has incentives in trying to figure out where you are anywhere on the web, not necessarily so it can give you better information, but that it can serve you a Nissan ad when it finds out you were at the Infinity website. I think Google has become a menace. I think Google is bad for our society. I don't think they're bad people, but I think that when a company has that kind of market share, it leads to an organization where there are three times as many people working in the advertising sector of the business or section of the business as opposed to actually on search. Anyways, I like the idea of funding. I have sort of an immunity investment strategy. What does that mean?
3:23 Scott Galloway? I've invested in Public, which I believe is an immunity to Robinhood that sells order flow and tries to get young men addicted to trading and ends up in a situation with the top 10 most traded stocks on Robinhood are actually vastly underperforming the market. And you just want to spin people and get them addicted with casino-like functionality, whether it's random rewards or visual stimulation. And I think Public is the antidote there. I like Better.com, which I invested in, which I think is an immunity to a lot of what's going on in financial services that can be have gender bias, systemic racism around proving people for mortgages. And you should just have technology that figures out way to pull out all the middlemen, all the different costs. I've been investing in Gannett.
4:07 Scott Galloway? That's right, the newspaper company. I would like to see more local journalism. I think a lot of these social media platforms have decided they're never going to invest in people that actually do the reporting. And so I'm investing in Gannett, I'm investing in an old fashioned newspaper company. Anyways, I like this citizen strategy and it's not just because I think of myself as a good citizen. The number one reason I'm pursuing this investment strategy is I think the immunities are kicking in and a lot of funds are going towards ESG based investing or people, capital is flowing towards what I'll call the immunity strategy. And that is people recognize the externalities and supposedly of the $50 trillion raised for alternative investments or of the $50 trillion in alternative investments, a third of it has some sort of ESG component.
4:49 Scott Galloway? So look at Pinterest and Snap, they're just not nearly as toxic as Twitter or Facebook or Google and those stocks have outperformed. So anyways, Niva is the immunity, the vaccine, I think, to a search, an unhealthy search sector. So I'm excited about this investment and I think you'll understand why when you hear from Sridhar. Okay, okay, what's happening? Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Square and Twitter, said during the Bitcoin 2021 conference that happened down here in Miami, well, aren't we having our moment, that he doesn't believe there's anything more important in his lifetime to work on other than Bitcoin. Well, good for you, Jack. Good for you. Isn't it great to be a Twitter shareholder?
5:33 Scott Galloway? I mean, it's, it's as if this guy's literally said, you know, Twitter, Twitter shareholders, I just don't give a shit. I just don't give a shit. His big thing, his big thing is Bitcoin and they have announced a cold storage hardware wallet will be a new product of Square. What a shocker. What if he'd said, I don't know, I'm devoted to spending the rest of my life developing media that unites us but doesn't divide us. Or I would like to figure out a way to develop a healthy dialogue online that doesn't render the firm I'm in charge of a handmade to sedition or a handmade into sedition. I mean, this is just, I think this is an authentic tweet and absolutely is continued confirmation of how ridiculous it is that the board of Twitter continues to allow this
6:18 Scott Galloway? bullshit. And let's just compare and contrast the innovation coming out of Square and Twitter. For one, Square stock is up about 16 fold since its IPO while Twitter I think it's about flat or maybe even down. Square has come out with a string of product developments since launching its signature white card reader for smartphones and now offers an iPad point of sale system, advanced terminals for chip cards, Apple Pay, a business debit card, accounting software, payroll software, and loans through Square Capital. I am going on strike. I'm going on strike. I've had it. Oh, and it has Cash App, which now counts more than 30 million monthly active users and brought in around $6 billion of revenue last year, a 440% increase year over year.
7:00 Scott Galloway? Meanwhile, meanwhile, in your second family, I'm the double-wide trailer park dad that you left us at while the other kids are getting to go see cats and going to Disneyland. Don't know why I brought up cats. Twitter recently unleashed Twitter Blue, a week subscription product that offers users the ability to undo tweets. I thought there was a delete tweet button. Anyways, change the color of the Twitter icon. Okay, they get hardware, they get to buy crypto, they get the most innovative payments methods in the world, and I can change the color of the app on my screen. Oh my God, I'm blown away with that innovation. And create bookmarks and folders. Bookmarks and folders? That's what we get? That's what we get?
7:44 Scott Galloway? Why on earth is Jack Dorsey the CEO of Twitter? There is no reason a board should allow an individual with the CEO of two companies. And all of this proves is a lack of corporate governance. Let's talk about corporate governance. Governance is both an internal and external function. Inside is how corporations govern themselves and hold management accountable to shareholders. Outside is how government oversees corporations. Both are important and both are breaking down. Corporate governance is supposed to mimic our governance, where the people in Washington are supposed to be fiduciaries for their representatives or the people they represent, whether it's 580,000 people in their congressional district or the people in their state if they're the senators. A lack of corporate governance.
8:28 Scott Galloway? Reflects something very frightening, and that is that it's usually a canary in the coal mine for what isn't going to be a correction, but a crash. Some canaries that are literally dropping dead. Elon Musk going on SNL where he manipulates the crypto market and then uses profits from that asset class he is manipulating to wallpaper over a missed earnings at Tesla. I think Michael Milken went to jail for less than that shit. An audit committee on coin, the audit committee of Coinbase's board of directors, right? Where two of the three supposedly independent directors are the company's co-founder and its lead venture capital investor. The audit committee, so this is what happens, an audit committee, someone who leads the audit committee is usually this six-year-old guy or gal from an accounting firm, and their
9:13 Scott Galloway? job is just literally to be the hall monitor, to be the total dork. They think they know something about business, they think they're on the board because of their wisdom, they're not. They're there to be an honest broker and to say, sorry, GAAP rules, this is how we report revenue. Because the CEO will find reasons to rationalize pulling revenues forward or pushing off expenses to juice short-term earnings because his or her compensation or hers or her neck, really, is so short-term focused in the capital markets that are the US equity exchanges. So what do we do? We put people on the audit committee who just tell it like it is, they're the source of truth. And when you put your largest VC and a co-founder on the audit committee, what are they going to do when they can't sell any stock to the lockup stock?
9:58 Scott Galloway? They're going to choose accounting methods, nomenclature, spin, that quite frankly, has a much greater likelihood of wallpapering over what is actually going on at this firm. Why is that bad? Why is that bad? Because cash flow crises are typically when a stock drops 20, 40, 80% in a single trading week. And cash flow crises never happen suddenly. They're disclosed suddenly. They're disclosed suddenly. Why? Because the board has talked themselves into a bunch of bullshit nomenclature, or lack of disclosure, or lack of transparency that creates really unwelcome surprises. And one of the board's key jobs- Is to create a lack of asymmetric information. What do we mean by that?
10:42 Scott Galloway? There are periods, there are periods where we know what is going on in a company, but every 90 days maximum, we are supposed to expunge ourselves of that asymmetry of information. In other words, the public markets are supposed to know as much as we do about the business. And when you have conflicted people on the audit committee, their temptation to create a constant asymmetry of information until it's too late and they have to disclose really ugly shit like, yeah, we were, we need to reclassify revenues. And they never reclassify revenues to take revenues and profits up. The reclassification is always to say, well, we've decided that in fact, we weren't accounting for this revenue correctly. And they come out with an ugly surprise and retail investors are sitting there oftentimes holding a much, much less valuable stock.
11:27 Scott Galloway? Another example of terrible corporate governance, terrible corporate governance, Palantir, the tech firm, the software AI firm, I'm not entirely sure what they do. They are investing in SPACs. They're taking shareholder money, they're taking corporate treasury and they're investing in SPACs. Why would they do this? What they do is they invest in a SPAC and say, okay, a company that may or may not survive, we'll invest $20 million in your pipe financing. Great. And then you have to spend $20 million plus on, wait for it, Palantir products. We think, well, there's nothing wrong with that. That's an innovative way of financing their customers' purchase of their products. Win-win. No, it's not. It's not a win-win. It's not a win-win.
12:11 Scott Galloway? It turns a correction into a crash. Why? First off, first off, Palantir shareholders don't need Palantir management to buy SPACs for them. You can go buy your own SPACs. You don't need Palantir to buy a SPAC for you. That's not why they have cash. That's not why you bought their stock. And, and what happens is it creates the illusion of prosperity. Related party transactions. And that is, would this little shitty or semi shitty software firm that's about to SPAC or AI firm or whatever it is, spend $20 million on a contract with Palantir? If Palantir had invested $20 million in them, probably not. Which- Which misleads investors and the market about how healthy the organic business growth is of Palantir.
12:54 Scott Galloway? In other words, Palantir, which has been around the better part of two decades and has never been profitable, can't figure out a way to actually sell their product based on its own merits. They have to provide their customers with shareholder money to then spend it again back or to flow it back into Palantir. This means, this means when we hit a correction, and inevitably we always do, the terrible thing about recessions is they always happen, the wonderful thing about them is they always end, but we are due for the kind of the first part, they're gonna happen, what's gonna happen, is then when these SPACs hit a wall, and a lot of them will, a lot of these things, let's be honest, are pretty suspect, right? We're selling hope and a dream and an operating committee here. They will then stop paying their Palantir contractor, they will go out of business,
13:38 Scott Galloway? and we'll find out that a lot of these related party deals were supported by duct tape and chicken wire. This is, both of these things, both of these things conflicted directors on the audit committee, investing in a company with shareholder money such that they will buy your product. And how are the two linked? Why do we have poor corporate governance? Because there's no enforcement, there's no governance. What happens when the FTC, the DOJ, and the SEC are underfunded and constantly disparaged? Firms grow unchecked, or firms go unchecked. Deceptive business practices unfold, and we end up with a class of business leaders who think they can ignore laws and regulation. And it's all fine when the economy's booming and business is booming, right?
14:20 Scott Galloway? In 2019, the FTC had only around 1,100 full-time employees, down 37% compared to 1979. Think about that. Think about how much more complex the markets have become and companies have become, and we've decided, we've decided to cut the FTC by 37%. The DOJ's funding has only risen 14% since 2018 and is still less than $200 million a year. Think about the Department of Justice. Who metes out justice? Oh, the Department of Justice, and their total funding is $200 million this year. Meanwhile, Big Tech spent more than $65 million on lobbying, just lobbying last year. And have reached a market capitalization greater than the GDP of Japan. And think about
15:01 Scott Galloway? the amount of money they spend on legal. This is, corporate governance is important. Guardrails are important, not only in our society, but in our companies. This is absolutely where smoke is and where there's going to be a much bigger fire than we need to be if we just had better disclosure and if VCs and management took corporate governance more seriously.
15:24 Scott Galloway? Stay with us. We'll be right back for our conversation with Shadar Ramaswamy.
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17:51 Scott Galloway? Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Stridhar Ramaswamy, the CEO and co-founder of Niva.
17:58 Scott Galloway? Stridhar, where does this podcast find you?
18:01 Speaker 03 Well, I'm in Cupertino, 30 miles south of San Francisco, and it's a very warm day, just like in New York.
18:09 Scott Galloway? Nice. So let's bust right into it. For people who aren't familiar with Niva, give us the voiceover. What is Niva?
18:17 Speaker 03 Niva is the world's first ads-free private subscription search engine.
18:24 Speaker 03 Let me back that up a little bit. All of us use search day in and day out. It is a commonly used function, whether it's a headache you have or a product that you want to buy or an air conditioner that you want to research, you're going to go search for it. It is also one of the largest businesses ever built. You know, the major players in search are going to make close to $150 billion of revenue this year on search, and it is still growing. Which is pretty remarkable. What is also remarkable is that one player, Google, has more than 90% market share in search. The problem, however, is that Google Search, which started off as a great product for people
19:08 Speaker 03 like you and me, users, is mostly about the advertisers. The ad load goes up and more and more of your searches, you know, return a ton of ads. We at Niva think that there is a great opportunity to create a customer-first search product. And so in one sense, we are subscription search and being paid by the customer just gives us so much power to reimagine what a search engine should be and then makes things like being completely ad-free, being private, being militantly for you, a core part of the product. That's the market that we want to go after and that's what Niva is.
19:49 Scott Galloway? So when I think, if I think about the value chain, there's the person doing the query, let's call them the consumer. There's the customer, which is the advertiser trying to get in front, and then there's the creator, the person who's, you know, built the website, built the content. And it seems like, as you outline it, that you can't help but focus your attention, if you're the search company, on the customer, and that is the advertiser, as opposed to the consumer, the creator. How does it change your business, or as you launch a subscription-based search engine, how does it change the technology and the offering when you don't have the advertiser, you just have the content, the website or the media company, and you have the person doing the queries?
20:33 Scott Galloway? How does that make your business different?
20:37 Speaker 03 Well, it gives you focus. The entirety of my team is focused on how do you create a great product that the consumer is going to love. So in addition to not showing ads, it also means a focus on privacy. You don't have to track people. You don't have to keep track of what they're doing across the internet because that's an ingredient for advertising, which of course I said we don't do. But much more so than that, we can focus on putting you back in charge. So we can have features like have you tell us what your preferred providers are. You know, I read news on a certain set of newspapers that I have subscriptions to. And Niva can prioritize those.
21:21 Speaker 03 Similarly, when you look for a product on Niva, we focus on giving you helpful reviews. Not just where can you find this product right now to buy, sort of what a commercial search engine does. One of the most commonly asked feature for Niva, which we're in the process of building out, is people just want to see small retailers when they search. They don't want to see the big chains come up for each and every search that there is. So it lets us have this razor focus on what the consumer wants that is simply not possible in an advertiser-supported search engine. It shocks most people to hear that the size of the ads teams, the ads product teams and the ad sales team, something like four times the size of the search team.
22:06 Scott Galloway? So 93% share is what Google has of $150 billion market. And there's a lot of reasons why that happened. But I would argue first and foremost, Google is just great at what they do. And they have fantastic tech. I think arguably the greatest concentration of IQ ever assembled to mankind has happened at Google. How do you compete with that? How do you catch up and build? I mean, the business model is important, I can see that. And that stat, you said three or five times the number of people in sales as opposed to actual engineering on this, on search itself. But they still have this incredibly deep well or deep reservoir of tech talent and technology. How do you catch up and offer something similar or ideally better?
22:52 Speaker 03 Clearly, this is the big challenge for anyone that wants to play in search. And previous players that have tried it have essentially tried to out-Google Google, which of course, back to your point of the greatest concentration of tech talent, that's not exactly an easy thing to do. While we start with the business model, which gives us asymmetric advantage with what we can do, which is on all the queries that show ads, our product is better because we are focused on what you want. But when it comes to the core search, we have assembled what I think is a remarkable team. A little bit about myself, I ran search ads at Google for over 10 years,
23:33 Speaker 03 but I also ran teams like the travel team, the shopping team, the payments team. And my co-founder Vivek not only did a lot of impressive work in search ads, he also ran YouTube ads, but was also the first tech lead on what's now called the Google Assistant. In addition to that, much of the early talent that wrote, you know, both the quality portions, you know, ranking is the secret sauce, what are the results that should come up on top? You have engineers that worked on those, you have the people that built the infrastructure for Google, they work for Neva, that's because they believe in the mission of Neva and our vision of creating a product that is customer-first.
24:13 Speaker 03 In addition, folks like Udi Manber, again, used to head search at Google, works for Neva. Bill Koren, the first SVP at Google that was in charge of running the product area search, is on my board of advisors, as are people like Margot, who were a key part of the business side of Google. So we have assembled incredible talent that is focused on solving the problem, that's number one. The second part is that cloud computing is a game changer for us. If you wanted to have a petabyte of storage, that's a lot of storage. 10, 15 years ago, you'd pretty much have to rent yourself a town, take over all the buildings and put computers in them.
24:56 Speaker 03 You know, we use all the cloud providers and we just rent this stuff from them. It to be a massive CapEx investment turns into an OpEx investment that is super inexpensive for us to do. We also leverage the latest and greatest in machine learning and deep learning that is, you know, that is out there. We are one of the first people on G P T three, which was a revolutionary new machine learning model that came out last year. Plus, we focus a lot on features that a commercial search engine just cannot do. It is not an option when you search for, I don't know, headphones. For Google to say, ah, Scott, let me give you all the reviews first because it's against the business model. They make a lot of money on it.
25:40 Speaker 03 So it's really a combination of getting great talent, using the best technologies out there, which are game changers. But relentlessly focusing on what are things that he can use to drive differentiation that in some sense are uncopyable. But it is a big challenge and it's one of the biggest challenges that we face as a team.
26:00 Scott Galloway? What about what so you launch a subscription search engine, you figure out a way to use cloud computing to catch up. The business model creates a superior or better dynamic or a direct dynamic between the creator and the consumer. Or the searcher and then Google says, great, and they offer, they just say, we now have a premium product. It's, you know, four bucks a month instead of five bucks a month and it's called Google Plus, right? Or whatever. And what's to stop them from basically just coming in and going, okay, thanks. Thanks for doing the hard work. They steal your features. Could they do to you what Facebook does to Snap every three months?
26:40 Speaker 03 Well, I think it's important to remember the kind of ad supported business model. That Google has is deeply, deeply ingrained into the company.
26:53 Speaker 03 And for them to change massively overnight just creates all kinds of conflicts within. You've dealt with change, Scott. Whenever you try and remake a company on a new set of principles, you just run into this institutional resistance. And I think the fact of the matter is that especially in search, this also will greatly increase the amount of scrutiny that Google gets if they come out with basically a me-too product in this space. And finally, part of what is happening is that while in some sense, Niva starts out as search without the ads, the product is rapidly diverging because of this focus on the customer. So I would say already the product is very different
27:38 Speaker 03 from what you would get as a commercial search engine. This would almost have to be a parallel business where the strengths of Google don't necessarily help all that much. And our goal is to keep driving the differentiation. And also, as we go about creating Niva, we already see that people love the devotion that we bring to the product. People love how passionate we are about creating something that is useful for them, something that is worry-free, something that keeps them safe. We're building loyalty along the way. And for a big company to suddenly say, oh, you know, this thing about us being great for the world, forget about it here. We will offer the same product that someone is doing. I don't think we'll give them a lot of credibility.
28:23 Speaker 03 To be fair, I think of Niva as offering a useful counterpoint to how search should work. It has become accepted wisdom that large products need to be, large tech products need to be supported by advertising to truly scale, but they need to preserve all options. They need to collect every piece of data because that piece of data might be useful in the future. To me, an important element in the construction of Niva is also letting go of options. A lot of people early on told me, hey, why don't you create a great search engine and put some ads on it anyway? Just tell people you will like limit the number of ads that you show. I've like sort of watched that movie before. Starts like that and then the pressure sort of kicks in.
29:05 Speaker 03 So we've like, you know, issued a lot of choices because we want to create that cleaner, better product. I think it's really hard for a company to change overnight and say, oh, forget about everything that we have told you so far. We are really this new person. You need to start out that way. And it's something that permeates the company. I think it's hard to copy. But you know, my team runs scared that it doesn't every feature that we do, Google is absolutely capable of copying. And so we feel a lot of pressure about acting quickly on that opportunity. I use what you said as motivation, both for me and for my team.
29:42 Scott Galloway? And from a consumer standpoint, is the primary value proposition? All right, the the business model is different. So I know when I put something into the search query box, they're going to take me to the best place, not a place that can be further monetized. Or is it that I don't have this mothership tracking everything I do? And then as a function of their business model, getting different data points from all over the web and maybe exploiting or tracking my data to an extent that I'm not comfortable. Is it utility or is it privacy that is the foot you lead with in terms of trying to get consumers to sign up?
30:20 Speaker 03 So it is the privacy and the ads-free nature of Neva that gets people's attention. We've done a lot of research on what is the fastest way to tell someone that knows nothing about Neva about Neva. And the shortest phrase that we have is ads-free private search engine. That gets them interested, that gets them to want to try the product. But once they are actually on the product and use it for a month, we go back and run surveys with them. You know, the kind of things that they say they like about Neva, they're like, yes, yes, yes, ads-free and private. We we took that for granted. You told us that when you came in. But what we really like is this feeling of safety, that people are not tracking us, that you're showing me the best results.
31:05 Speaker 03 I don't have to worry about what I click on. It'll shock you, but people are actually kind of afraid to click on randomly. Because pages do weird things on my phone, for example. I'm afraid to click on some sites because I know that if I go there, my screen will be filled up with something. There'll be some warning about something. And so people talk about that. People talk about how calm they feel when they're not being chased around by ads all the time. And much to my surprise, people also talk about how they like this model better because it's just better for the world. And so it is really the process of learning and personalization as they use the product that makes them fall in love with the product. And the more utility we can deliver, the more we can give you agency and make the search your own,
31:49 Speaker 03 the more likely it is that you're going to say, hey, this is worth paying for because it is worth it for me. There are a number of products that I pay for subscriptions because the lack of ads removes the hassle. I can just watch a few videos. Ironically, I subscribe to YouTube Premium for this very reason. I watch five little clips every day and it is worth it. So we want to get to a point where this sort of you first, of course, ads free and private, but delivering utility to you day after day is something that you just come to expect. And people want that choice.
32:28 Scott Galloway? What, so you were at, how long were you at Google?
32:31 Speaker 03 Fifteen and a half years.
32:33 Scott Galloway? Okay, so, I mean, kind of the seminal experience in your professional life. You had a, you're a senior executive there. Well, how do they feel about you? Like, what's your relationship with Google now? Are you part of the rebel force? And, you know, has your name been erased from the scrolls? Are they supportive? Do they want to see people go on and do things? I mean, you are, you have left and now you are firing at the, at the wall.
33:01 Scott Galloway? I'm just curious, what is, do you still stay in touch with people? Or are they like, are they scared to speak to you? What's the vibe like between you and the firm that, that, you know, did so much for you and you did so much for them?
33:14 Speaker 03 Yeah, you know, those were fifteen and a half amazing years. I'll just mention a few things. I started as an individual engineer, writing code for a living, sitting in one cotner. And when I left, my team had more than 10,000 people.
33:29 Scott Galloway? 10,000 people.
33:31 Speaker 03 10,000 people reporting to me in my team when I left.
33:36 Scott Galloway? That is frightening. 10,000 people. I'm sorry, we'll come back to that, go ahead.
33:41 Speaker 03 Yeah, you learn a lot of leadership lessons. Leading a team that large is an object lesson in humility and leadership. The business was 1.6 billion dollars when I joined. We made over 100 billion dollars just in ads the year that I left Google. And truly, it was a greatly beneficial relationship. To this day, I have fond memories of my time at the company, how we all worked together, the ethos of the company, and obviously, many, many, many friends here. But I think it is also okay for people to realize
34:22 Speaker 03 that there are larger constructs than a single company. Part of my tough learning over the last 10 years is really that companies are not a substitute for democracy and government. The company is fundamentally about maximizing value for itself. And I could see how Google's very attitude, it's sort of self-centered. It is what is in something for Google. From that perspective, they're going to look at something like Neva as anti-Google. But I stress very much that Neva as a counterpoint to a basic function that all of us use is actually a good thing for Google. I have a ton of friends that are both at Google and have left Google.
35:07 Speaker 03 And I have great relationships with them, we talk about it, and they have differing opinions. And I also tell people, it's just like, hey, it is okay to change your mind about important topics in your life. And my overall take is that, you know, companies exist to perpetuate themselves. Billionaires want to get richer. Companies want to get bigger. There comes a size when they're not that great for the country. So I think the more options there are, the better that we all will be. I for one. I'm loving the man in streaming video. I'm like, bring it on. These are great options.
35:43 Scott Galloway? Yeah, it's great as a consumer. The 10,000 people. Give us a sort of advice to managers. Two or three sort of, you know, general principles that you brought to trying to manage, arguably, one of the most productive teams in the world. And what are some misconceptions that you initially went in with that you would say are landmines or things to be mindful of when you're a manager that don't necessarily fit the common sense that you've learned?
36:15 Speaker 03 Obviously, it's a long and tough journey. But I would say one of the most profound things that I learned as a leader, especially of large teams, was that my job was to recruit amazing people, set clear expectations for them, motivate and support them, and be very demanding of them. I decided relatively early on that I wanted to be a just leader rather than a liked leader. And I was very clear with that about people. And so having clear expectations and demanding a lot from your team, but being exceptionally fair
36:59 Speaker 03 about how you evaluated people. And understanding that as a leader, your voice of approval, your show of approval matters a lot to people that are working within your teams. They look to you for support in difficult situations. The final point that I'll make on this one is I think the most important thing that one should do as a leader is recognize talent in people, is take bets on people. I'm very open about it. People gave me opportunities at Google that I did not deserve. Based on what I had done. This was because they saw something about what I could do in the future.
37:42 Speaker 03 To me, bringing that vision of what can this person be in the future? And giving them those opportunities is one of the most profound things that you can do as a leader. And I'm happy to tell you that, you know, one of the folks that worked in my team is an honest to goodness billionaire somewhere else now. I could not be happier.
37:59 Scott Galloway? I bet there's a few of them. So when you, when you work with, a lot of young people listen to this podcast. When you have an opportunity, I mean, you have interaction with people in a meeting or you're working on a project with them. What were the signals of someone on your team and you thought this person is going to be successful? And is the kind of person I want to, I want to provide cloud cover for in terms of their progress?
38:25 Speaker 03 I look for people that are motivated by what they do. I've had a lot of conversations with people about promotions and getting bigger roles. And generally, my first piece of advice to them is, trust me, no one is giving you a promotion to a bigger role. If you're not happy with the current role that you have. And so just bringing that passion day in and day out. Obviously, you have to make big choices and people get stuck in awkward places and so on. But in general, steering your way into a place that resonates with you. And then being driven about what you get done is, is really a very important quality that I look for.
39:07 Speaker 03 You know, I've learned over time that even motivation can be taught. But to me, that drive to get stuff done is something that I very much look for. I also place a lot of emphasis on virtuosity. Having a clear distinction between what is knowable and what is not knowable. A lot of people, smartphones especially, get into like analysis paralysis. I make like clean distinctions in my life about here are the things that I know I can quantitatively figure out. And there are things that, you know, there are things that you do not know. And in these situations, I emphasize speed within my team, for example. But honestly, even running Google, be, you know, Google. With the behemoth that it was, we placed a lot of emphasis on virtuosity.
39:51 Speaker 03 We just kept trying lots of things with safeguards. But to me, those two, being driven and motivated about what you do and being quick and nimble about getting stuff done with good taste. Those are the two primary things that I look out for when I talk about, hey, then I think in my head, is this person going to have an amazing future?
40:13 Scott Galloway? Coming up after the break.
40:14 Speaker 03 I think we are all so facing a reckoning of what technology means to all of us. And I think this reevaluation is going to have a profound impact on the kinds of technologies and the kinds of businesses that get developed. It is going in my mind to sort of lead to a lot of disruption in how tech works.
40:38 Scott Galloway? Stay with us.
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42:20 Scott Galloway? So returning back to Neva, I always ask when I'm involved in a small company, where's the friction here? Is it capital? Is it more consumers? Is it we need to find people? My startup, Section 4, we're having a really difficult time finding people. There's a war for talent right now, especially in ed tech. There's just, if you have any background or any pulse in online learning, you have just a ton of opportunities. What is the most difficult problem you're trying to solve against right now?
42:50 Speaker 03 I would say the most difficult problem right now is actually getting in front of people, getting them to use Neva as their search provider. So for example, on some browsers, we cannot be set as a default option. So it's like just getting that visibility. We feel very confident that a ton of people are going to stay on Neva. So I would say that's the first one. And the second step is going to be, how do you scale the user base to millions, to tens of millions? Because getting that usage data is very important for making the quality of a search engine better. There are technical challenges to how do you make the product better?
43:33 Speaker 03 But if we have users who I'm confident will stay once they get to try the product, my team feels very confident that the quality of the product can get a whole lot better. And at that kind of scale, supporting like tens of millions of users, the amount of capital that we invest into it becomes an issue. But so far, we have done quite okay with capitalization. We have deep-pocketed investors. So we've done well so far. But I would say the primary challenge really is, how do you get a million users to try Neva and see what this amazing experience is like?
44:08 Scott Galloway? When you see all these different technologies out there, AI, autonomous driving, space has taken on new relevance, mostly funded by, as far as I can tell, it's like the mother of all midlife crises. But what technologies do you think are overhyped? You've led big technology teams. You have a pretty interesting, you're sort of the helm of the bobsled looking at tech. Which technologies do you think, if you were going to go long technologies or short technologies, any stand out?
44:35 Speaker 03 I would say machine learning and cloud computing are going to have a massive impact. I think we are at a stage where more and more of our physical lives are being re-implemented in technology. So we can look forward to a time where all the devices in our house, the things, the lights, the fixtures, they are all going to be interconnected. The rollout of 5G and massively more bandwidth, but also more connectivity is, I think, going to be a big influence. But much more than that, I think we are also facing a reckoning
45:17 Speaker 03 of what technology means to all of us. And I think this reevaluation is going to have a profound impact on the kinds of technologies and the kinds of businesses that get developed. It is going, in my mind, to sort of lead to a lot of disruption in how tech works. But I think the very core of cloud computing, machine learning and AI, and massively more interconnectivity with 5G is a secular trend that is just going to permeate more and more of our lives. And how people create products that put us in charge as opposed to technology driving everything we do is a really important question, but one, I think, has a lot of
46:02 Speaker 03 business opportunities as well. My long-term criticism of technology over the last 20 years is that we've somehow managed to create models in which the creators of technology are the ones that primarily benefit from the technology. I talk to people, "Google Search was free for you in 2003. It's free for you now." In fact, in some sense, it's worse because the ads load is a lot higher and all of the benefit of the scale went to one company and its investors. So to me, there is a great opportunity here for, you know, companies, very different kinds of thinking like Niva that says, "No, we want to put the consumer and customer first, and we want to share in the wealth that this technology is going to create."
46:45 Speaker 03 So I think of this decade as also one in which technology needs to mature and grow up.
46:52 Scott Galloway? And final question, advice for your 25-year-old self?
46:57 Speaker 03 I would say just paying more attention to the people relationships in your life, taking the time to breathe and understanding that life is really very long and not being quite so impatient about it. Honestly, I tell that to myself to this day. But I would say investing in the people, stopping and caring even more and, you know, cherishing that time and saying, "Work is there. It will be a marathon. Probably be the most important thing that I would tell myself."
47:30 Scott Galloway? Sridhar Ramaswamy is the CEO and co-founder of Niva, an ad-free and private search engine. He's been a venture capital partner at Greylock since October 2018. Prior to founding Niva, Sridhar oversaw all of Google's advertising products, which included search, display, and video advertising analytics, shopping, payments, and travel. He joined Google as an engineer in 2003 and was an integral part of the growth of AdWords and Google's advertising business and oversaw 10,000 people. Sridhar, thanks for your time and stay safe.
47:59 Speaker 03 Thank you, Scott. Take care.
48:09 Scott Galloway? Altar of Happiness, last week was the 7th versus 8th grade basketball team with dads. So it was the father-son basketball tournament at my kid's school. And I was really excited about it. I was an athlete growing up and played basketball or a little bit of basketball and was really excited to play with my son. And it was, the way they did the game was two dads and three 7th graders against two dads and three 8th graders. And when your kid's 13, my son is 13, turning 14. You know, when they're, I always say from like zero to five, they want too much of you. They just want to hang out and play and it's like, it's a little bit maddening. And I know you should appreciate those years. From five to 10 is just magic. They kind of play just, I would call it the right amount.
48:53 Scott Galloway? They have their own interests, but they also just love hanging out with dad. And then from 10 on, it becomes a challenge. They don't really want to hang out as much with you. And this was just, I was excited to do this with him. And the game, we did this game. And when I noticed, I was probably a little bit too into it. It was when an eighth grader went up for a shot. And I not only blocked his shot, but I hit the ball so hard into his face and he went rolling. And rather than thinking, okay, that's inappropriate. I dove for the ball and rolled over him. And about two revolutions into my roll, the thought did, did actually enter my brain of too much? Too much? Anyways, it's, we're playing to, we're playing to 15, three pointers and two pointers.
49:36 Scott Galloway? Of course, no one has three pointers, seventh, eighth graders. And it's 14 each, next bucket wins. I steal the ball. I dribble down the court, bust up the middle, post up to take a shot and then dish it to my son, who's coming in on the right flank and he hits a layup. Crowd goes crazy and you know, my son high fives me and it's something out of the Hallmark channel. And I'm so excited. This is just one of those moments that maybe happens once a year where everything kind of falls into place with you and your son. And I'm just feeling, I'm just feeling wonderful. And the thing I was really excited about was that my son and I have been watching the Game of Thrones. Where I'm re-watching it with him and we're down to the last, I think, two or three episodes.
50:21 Scott Galloway? By the way, I could so be Bran, just acting really stoned and hanging out by a tree. I could do that job. I could do that. Anyways, we're watching Game of Thrones. I'm like, we're going to do the father, son basketball game. And then we're going to go back and get pizza. It was just him and me. And then we're going to watch the last two episodes of the Game of Thrones. And he comes up and he high fives me. And I say, okay, let's go home and watch Game of Thrones. And he looks at me and he goes, can I go to Finley's house? And Finley is a friend, another. Another seventh grader. And of course, what are you gonna say as a dad? Say, sure, you know, I'm not gonna say, well, I thought this was our night. I don't want to be that dad. I don't want ever, I want my son to be excited to spend time with me, not to think of it as a tax. But it was really upsetting for me.
51:05 Scott Galloway? And that is, I thought, finally, we have a night. It started off great with the father-son basketball game, and my son would much rather spend time with his friends. And you realize, well, that's natural. That's good. That's what, you know, that's what 13-year-olds are supposed to be doing. So where am I going with this? Time goes really fast as a father. I mean, it goes just ridiculously fucking fast. And you are gonna look back on those moments when your son or your daughter wanted to spend more time with you than you wanted to spend with them. And a lot of dads will virtue signal and say, I can't get enough. Yeah, I don't buy it. And it's just like, when they want to play board games, Jesus Christ, Sushi Go Fish and Clue, I hate Clue. God, I hate that game.
51:48 Scott Galloway? I'd like to go back in time and find the person that invented Clue and hit them over the head with a candlestick. Anyways, you do want to look forward into the future and realize, really soon, really soon, they're gonna want to go hang out with their friend Finley. And you're gonna, you're gonna look back and you're gonna be glad you over-indexed on time with your kids. Because regardless of how cool you are, regardless of your ability to dish winning shots to your son, he's gonna want to go hang out with Finley. Spend more time with your kids than you want.
52:26 Scott Galloway? Our producers are Caroline Chagrin and Drew Burrows. Claire Miller is our assistant producer. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. Thank you for listening to The Prop G Show from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll catch you next week on Monday and Thursday.
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Previous Office Hours: Robo-advisors, Team Design, and the Consequences of Innovation Next Office Hours: Tesla’s Competition, Identity Verification, the Scam of Tenure, and Public vs. Private Companies Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
