Why Ex-Google Ads Boss Sridhar Ramaswamy is Building An Ads-Free Search Engine

Sridhar Ramaswamy is CEO of Neeva, an ads-free search engine he helped found after running Google's ads and commerce business. Ramaswamy spent seventeen years inside Google, and eventually grew disillusioned with its business. Now he's trying to create the solution with $77.5 million in funding. In this conversation, we discuss his evolving view on advertising, what decoupling search from ads allows from a product standpoint, and how the current anti-trust environment is opening Google up to the competition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put Agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay?

• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.

• 1:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Joining us today is Sridhar Ramaswamy, the former head of Ads and Commerce at Google, who is building a new ads-free search engine called Neva. Neva is one of the most interesting startups on the market today. It's raised $77.5 million and is going after a tech giant's bread and butter. That tech giant, of course, is Google, Sridhar's former employer. Sridhar is also someone I've wanted to speak with for quite some time, and I'm so glad he agreed to come on with us today. Sridhar, welcome to the show.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Alex, super excited to chat with you. Love your writing, love your podcast. Glad to be here.

• 1:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Really appreciate it. You are running one of the most fascinating companies in Silicon Valley today. And of course, your background makes it all the more interesting. So we'll just go through that. But before we get to Niva, I figure we start with the news. So this week, or over the past week or so, the tech giants have had, almost all of them have had blowout earnings. I think Microsoft beat projections, but not by enough. So the stock went down, which just goes to show you how much Wall Street is expecting from these companies. And Google, where you used to work, or I guess they call it Alphabet now. It had $31.9 billion in search ad sales last quarter alone.

• 2:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  And that's a jump up from $24.5 billion in Q1 2020. YouTube had ad sales that were up 49% to $6 billion in Q1. So my question for you is, how long can this keep up?

• 2:59Speaker 01

  So to me, that's one of the fascinating things today. At one level, the year-on-year comparisons are a bit wonky because last year clearly was a very tough year. And so, you know, the comparison is always easier now than what it was clearly last year.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  But I think they're also benefiting from the increased shift to everything being online that we are collectively going through. So I think the growth rate doesn't surprise me. But in some sense, I think it also sets up sort of the next steps.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  In these trends and we'll get into Niva, you know, a bit as we are talking about it. But to me, this kind of growth, this kind of impact, sets up some interesting dynamics, both in Washington and in beyond and in terms of opportunities. And that's really what we are hoping we'll be able to tap into.

• 4:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep, but, okay, so you were the Ads Chief at Google. And you must know that advertising is generally a certain fixed percentage. Total ad spend is a certain fixed percentage of GDP. And, you know, obviously, online advertising has been spiking recently because advertisers said, "Hey, maybe I should stop putting all this money in magazines and start moving it to a format where I can target better and track better."

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Or TV.

• 4:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  And that's what, or TV exactly, and that's why we've seen these jumps in digital. But eventually, that's going to hit a ceiling, one would imagine, where we can't see leaps from, you know, $24 billion to $31 in a year. And of course, we factor in COVID, but this party can't keep going on forever. So, or maybe it can.

• 5:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I guess like, yeah, the core question I want to get to you is, how long is this going to last? Do you see this eventually, you know, coming to a ceiling in digital advertising? And what are the implications of that?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  At one level, that's going to happen when digital advertising is a large, is like most of all of advertising. And I think from that perspective, we have not quite hit the ceiling yet. We have hit ceilings in a number of areas, other areas, like smartphone sales. You know that year on year, it's not really growing significantly. And so there are other changes. I think it's just that the move to online advertising is part of the way there. So I would say there is some, you know, some more space or there. But all of these converge to the level of GDP growth, which all of us know is nowhere close to that.

• 6:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, like eventually, Facebook and Google, those numbers are going to have to slow down. And then I wonder what they end up doing to try to keep finding growth? Or do they just tell Wall Street that, hey, look, we are what we are? And we've, we've gobbled up as much as we can get, enjoy the margins.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  There's definitely that and margin always gives you enormous amount of of power. Um, I think this is actually a nice point at which to talk about sort of Niva and why Niva.

• 6:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, you're going in the opposite direction.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Well, so it's the largest untapped sort of consumer market. It's already a hundred and fifty billion dollars and to your point, still growing. Um, you know, digital marketing still growing at twenty percent. That's driven by the fact that it has not caught up with like total ad spend. Um, to me, what is super interesting is that there has never been uh, in the history of business, a company that has commanded ninety plus market share in a market that's like a hundred plus billion dollars.

• 7:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  Which Google's doing now.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, these companies have always gotten into trouble. Abused power in some way or the clients want out or consumers want choice. There's never been a company in the history of the world like this. And um, and if you look at previous cases of what has disrupted them, it is typically a subscription play. If you look back, what did HBO do to a Time Warner? Or what did Netflix do to ad-supported television? Um, or honestly, in one of the very few cases that there ever have been, what Adobe did to itself in sort of moving to a SaaS model? Or what Amazon Prime did to what was like, you know, um, traditional e-commerce, which is one at a time kind of shopping?

• 7:53Speaker 01

  The common theme in all of this is the subscription model. And back to my earlier point about how smartphone sales um, have kind of tapered off. Apple has actually not grown revenues significantly, but its subscription business and stock have grown because they have invested more and more into services, more and more into into subscriptions.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  To me, at a business level, this is the big attraction of Neva. And I'll walk through a set of sort of why Neva and why now as we think about it. But part of what is exciting from a business perspective about about Neva is even if you were to get, call it 2% of market share, it is going to command like significantly more in terms of things like capitalization. If you are to look at comparable examples from, you know, the companies that I mentioned before, like a Netflix, like an Amazon, like HBO. So we think that, you know, this is a great point for Neva.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  And there are a set of reasons for why, you know, why us.

• 9:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and before we jump into that, let's just set the stage. So Neva is a subscription-based search engine?

• 9:13Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right.

• 9:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  No ads?

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, Neva is informed by both product principles and by business principles. And to a certain extent, in my mind, reflects a place in our cultural history. What I mean by that is the ads model has clearly worked for all of these companies. But the ads model has always gotten disrupted. And I know from both personal experience and the enormous amount of user studies and so on that we have done, that there is resentment about it. So we wanted to create Neva as a product that catered only to customers. That was actually very, very strict and open about things like not having ads in it.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  It's a consequence of the business model. But to us, subscription search was the way to create a superior product. And having really squeaky clean business principles, not just around no ads, but also around things like no affiliate links ever, no data getting packaged and sold ever, being privacy first, all of those are consequences of the model where we say we want to create the best product for you.

• 10:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  So the idea is people will pay you a monthly fee and be able to search on your search engine and they won't get served ads, they won't get their data collected, they won't end up, I guess, going to links that will end up getting the search engine more money when it ends up, you know, being packaged in the search results. And that's going to be worth something to consumers. How much? I have two questions for you about that before we go deeper into this. How much do you think you can charge? And also, do you think that this could be something that ends up going mass market?

• 11:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, for Netflix, like, I end up, you know, paying, what, $8 a month to get access to their content library. Google Search works pretty well and most people are cool with the ads. In fact, I think most people have a pretty favorable opinion of Google. So is this, is your product going to be sort of a niche luxury product, privacy for the rich? Or do you think that it can be something that will appeal to the masses? And what makes you, and if so, what makes you feel that?

• 11:38Speaker 01

  First, our aspiration is to be a product that everybody will want. And, you know, to us being able to create a product that delivers clear value was very, very important, which is why we set both the fundamental model as well as other product principles that came as a result of it. The counterpoint to your thoughts about ads on Google being okay is that, you know, our society, like on every other issue, is layered. There are some set of people that just say, I'll scroll by, it's not a big deal.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  There are others that ask themselves, wait, why do I need this? Why do I not get the best results right on top where I'm going to consume them? And for a lot of our users on our own data, for example, search is something that people do like a dozen times a day. There are not many things that people go back to time and time and time again. I picked search as the point at which to launch a new kind of service was, and that's because both Vivek, my co-founder, and I thought that it is the ultimate aggregator of intent. Whether it is you just looking for a weather or looking for the answer to a complicated financial problem in your life that you want to solve, or something, you know, something

• 13:02Speaker 01

  super personal and awkward, like, you know, a friend of mine told me, I search for how to be a good mom to a three-year-old because my three-year-old wouldn't stop crying. She is like, why would I ever want that to get packaged up and sold up for advertising? So we think of ourselves as creating a daily use product without any worries, without any gotchas. And we think it's, it is a daily use product and people use it often enough. So we think that we will be able to price this at a point where lots of people will get value from it, will get, you know, will pay for it. And much of the early reviews that we get on the product, by the way, somewhat to our

• 13:42Speaker 01

  surprise, are things like, wow, this is such a relaxing clutter-free experience. This, I actually feel good about the fact that ads are not chasing me around, that what I do is my business. So I think more people than we think are going to find the product desirable. Pretty much not a day goes by without someone telling me, you know, we are in the prepaid payment phase, you don't pay for Niva, you just get to, you just get to try it while we make the product better. But pretty much every day, someone either wants to invest in my company, like without my asking, they send me an email saying, I love your company, can I invest in it? Or they're like, hey, can I pay for the product? So we feel pretty good about where we are.

• 14:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I've tried it. I've enjoyed it. And it is interesting, I think, that I switched my default in Chrome to Niva. And we can talk about that in a bit, because that's sort of the source of antitrust, but let's put a pin in that for a moment. But yeah, it is interesting how, when you switch your search engines, you start to see how often you search. And it is a real stark contrast when you're searching on a search engine without ads. Scott Galloway, who wrote the fore and will be on the show in a couple of weeks. He compares Google to God, like it used to be. You would ask God, I don't know if you've heard this before, you'd ask God, when will my sick kid be healed? And now you type it into Google, you type in the symptoms and you look at the average recovery time. And it's like, wait a

• 15:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  second, why is an advertiser, why is this data going to an advertiser as well? I'm talking to God here, not to, I don't know, Kleenex.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Actually, you raise an important point. You know something? The ad-supported model, even for queries like that, tends to favor high engagement sites that have figured out how to get your attention and how to cram a lot of ads. You know, in fact, I joke to people that anytime I do a medical query and go to a medical health site, generally, my conclusion is like, I have a serious problem and I'm dying.

• 15:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, my God. I went to WebMD a little while ago, and I was for a scratchy throat. And WebMD is like, well, you may just have the common cold, or you might have Ebola. I'm like, wait a second, that's a heck of a range, guys.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Do you know why?

• 16:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Why?

• 16:04Speaker 01

  It gets you to click. It's the same as clickbait. You put a bunch of these, and by the way, all of this happens without anyone designing it to be so. You're like, okay, what is the highest likely click-through after the cold thing? There's an algorithm that sits there and says, if I put Ebola, if I put something else that is super serious, Alex is going to click on it and go. And there's another chance to show one more ad in front of Alex. It's the system that is working as it is designed. And even on those queries, the kind of features we think about are, hey, how do we surface government websites? How do we surface high authority websites and not the ones that are chasing after clicks?

• 16:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know this better than me. You're running as at Google. Isn't the purpose of Google to sort of, you know, get you useful results so you just keep coming back?

• 16:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Because if you do, or, you know, do they want you to end up being some sort of roundabout cycle? Because you'll search, and then you'll click, and then, you know, maybe you'll come back if you didn't get the quite perfect answer. And you'll click again, and then maybe one day you'll click an ad.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Well, so the answer depends on what kind of queries you're thinking about. When it comes to commercial queries, for example,

• 17:18Speaker 01

  so the algorithm is now optimized towards showing you results in which you click on ads.

• 17:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  And and those are the ones that are taking up more and more of the space. Again, that's the model. If you optimize for revenue, you talked about 20% growth. You know, one of the ways in which you get that growth is by taking that extra line. And, you know, search ads over the years have gone from taking 3% of the result on the page to 10%, 20%. I joke to people, if you search on a place like Yahoo.com, pretty much even on a large screen, you only you only see ads. And so there is now this very strong incentive to show you results that are that are ads. And ads in some sense, in a very strong sense,

• 18:08Speaker 01

  are a conflict of interest for the search engine. Should they show you an ad or should they show you the best result? And over time, you know, the answer is more and more ads.

• 18:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  It'll surprise you to know that one of the biggest feature asks that we have are things like, I want to control what retailers I see. I do not want to see big retailers when I search for stuff. I want smaller retailers. I if I'm looking for clothing, I only want to be shown stores that make a commitment to ethically sourcing their material. So those kinds of features, not showing the top retailer in the country is not an option for an ad-driven search engine. For us, it's a feature we must build because that's what keeps you as a customer.

• 18:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, because that top retailer is going to be a top advertiser for Google. So Google doesn't have the ability to tell somebody who's using Google, hey, maybe you don't want to show this retailer. But you do because you're not beholden to these companies.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  That's correct. That's right.

• 19:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  One of the interesting things I saw when I started using the product was that you allow people to also tailor the news results they want to see. So I was like, so it's draft weekend for the NFL and I'm searching, all right, who are the Jets picking and all that stuff? And I put it into Niva and now I'm getting to decide, well, do I want some of like the fan blogs to be the items that show up when I'm searching? Or do I want ESPN? And that immediately struck me as sort of a really cool feature is that I now have some more control in terms of what I'm, what I'm seeing when I search and who gets to be part of that. Is that intentional?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  That's 100% intentional. Giving you, giving you agency over the search results is one of the things that we focus on a lot. The other features we have built around personalization, being able to bring your personal data into a safe environment where you can search. Lots of us have multiple email accounts, multiple like drive-like accounts. I was talking to someone, I think, that had nine email accounts that they connected to their Niva account because they were like, yeah, how am I going to search through all of them? So things like personalization, giving you agency is very much a core part of the product. And in some ways, you know, we're impatient about the tech that we have to build because we want to be able to support

• 20:31Speaker 01

  things like this more and more and more. And especially with news, by the way, we also realize that this is,

• 20:41Speaker 01

  you know, we worry about things like filter bubbles. We have ideas for how we present different perspectives. So in this particular case, for example, in a, in a couple of months, I want to be able to come back to you and say, hey, Alex, would you actually, you know, you're a, you're a public personality. Would you be open to having your news preferences be available to any Niva user so they can see the world the way you see it?

• 21:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wow.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  You know, it's just a bunch of preferences.

• 21:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Um, and so we are like, I often have diametrically opposite viewpoints on my screen. I like looking at CNN on one side and Fox News on the other side and going, this is the same country. This is my country. Let's see what's here. Um, and to be able to do things like that, but it sort of goes back to this thing of you have choice and we should make it possible for you to exercise choice in different ways.

• 21:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I was gonna ask you the filter bubble question, but you sort of preempted me. But, um, yeah, if that that's so such an interesting point about being able to give people control over their search experience because you can, of course, you know, this, the most fundamental or basic layer of this is pick your, uh, pick your retailers you want to see or pick your, um, news or news sites, but then, yeah, one level deeper than that is starting to pick, you know, viewpoints or, you know, do you want the, you know, three sixty view or do you just want the left or the right view?

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Or do you want a particular person's view? We relate to people.

• 22:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  We don't relate to abstract concepts. So you want to see the world that Alex does or David Brooks? To me, that's like super cool.

• 22:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  And again, you know, we are a signed in product. Um, we are a subscription product. I know I'm not ashamed of either of these. I believe sort of capitalism should enable great products at scale. So I don't think of ourselves as creating somehow this elitist premium product. It's a great product. Of course you pay for it, um, but that makes the product better. That allows us to serve you better. Um, and, uh, along the way, we want to be able to build the features that make the product your own.

• 22:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Totally. And none of this stuff could happen, well, ostensibly, well, you were there, so I'll just ask you. Could any of this stuff happen at Google? Because, you know, I, I imagine Google like allowing people to customize their, the publishers that they get or, you know, making, uh, decisions about what type of publications to show. Obviously, we just went over which type of commerce vendors. That's a little bit more tricky than if you don't have advertisers.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  Google can do anything, you know, it's an enormously powerful, enormously successful company.

• 23:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  But when people ask me, why did you not want to do this within Google? The answer is that sometimes principles have to be thought over from the ground up. And a successful company is necessarily and correctly hesitant about what it sees as heretical ideas. And so this is the reason why I felt it was really important that I pressed the reset button in my life. And Vivek and I pressed the reset button when it came to how did we want to imagine search as being? As you point out, some things are easy, but will Google ever really want to create like, you know, a completely ads-free product in which you can customize everything?

• 24:05Speaker 01

  As I said, they can do everything, but at this point in their history with all the antitrust stuff, it is also going to look, you know, very odd if they were to do that right now. But I think this is one of those classic cases where success hinges on a set of parameters that are going to become hard to change, especially after you achieve, what, $120 billion of success? That's a lot of dollars speaking here.

• 24:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and when you talk about heretical ideas, that's what you're doing. It would be heretical to bring this up inside.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  It's just hard. It's hard. I've done many of these things before. Even the move that we made to have desktop and mobile advertising be a single concept. You know, we call this enhanced campaigns. This was like 2013, 2014.

• 24:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Inside Google, yeah.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Inside Google, and this is just so hard to pull off because you have people that are wedded to one way of doing things. I was also the exec that was in charge of making all of the shopping property into a paid property. So I've gone through these changes, but some changes are extra super hard.

• 25:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. Okay, I do want to hear a little bit more about your personal story. And I'm especially intrigued how the guy who runs ads and commerce at Google, all of a sudden decides that he, you know, after helping build this business, decides that he wants to build the exact opposite or something heretical. Let's do that after the break. I feel like that's a good cliffhanger for us. We'll hear from our sponsors and come back right after this. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data, and most teams have no single way to see it,

• 25:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what Avpoint does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate. Your data, your cloud, and the agents acting on your behalf. It's how more than 28,000 organizations deploy AI with confidence. So innovation scales without scaling risk. Avpoint, the unifying trust layer for AI. Head to avpoint.com to see how enterprises deploy AI with confidence. Learn more at avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast. That's avpt.co/bigtechnologypodcast.

• 26:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Violent threats against executives are growing at an alarming rate. When a company experiences backlash, executives are the first people blamed. When their address and other personal details are sitting online, this backlash can lead right to their front door. The team at Ironwell knows this better than anyone. They've protected some of the most targeted executives and individuals on the planet for almost two decades. As a white glove enterprise security service, they protect your people with continuous personal data removal, proactive prevention tools, and human-led emergency support. So when someone goes looking for your executives, Ironwell ensures they hit a dead end. So here's what to do. Go to ironwell.com/bigtechnology, fill in the quick form, and request your free risk assessment. Their team will show you just how exposed your executives are,

• 27:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  and how to lock it down before a threat reaches their front door. That's ironwell.com/bigtechnology. Learn how to stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. The link's in the show notes.

• 27:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here for the second half of the Big Technology Podcast. We have a great guest, Sridhar Ramaswamy, who is here. Ran the Google Ads business, Google Commerce business, and is now building an ads-free, privacy-focused, something-you-can-tailor search engine called Niva. So let's get to your personal story here because it is common, or increasingly common, to hear some people who disagree with the direction that their companies have taken to like write a book and go on some media tour and become like a dial-a-quote person in Silicon Valley. There are plenty of those people when it comes to Facebook, but that's

• 28:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  not you. You decided that, having seen the way that the ad business inside Google was functioning, you were going to actually go build the solution to some of the problems you were seeing. So how did that happen? Do you one day wake up and say, "Wait a second, all this ad stuff we've been building inside Google has all the wrong incentives. I gotta get out of here and find a way to solve this." Did you bring it up internally? What happened?

• 28:50Speaker 01

  So I'd been at Google for close to 15 years, and let's face it, achieved more success in my career than I ever thought possible. I'm very grateful to sort of an incredible number of people. I've talked about some of them, Jeff Huber, Eric Schmidt, even Bill Campbell, who all spent more time and gave me more opportunities than I certainly I thought I deserved at the time. And so it was a great career, but coming up on 15 years at Google, there was a part of me that just wanted out. I was just like, it's a very busy, very stressful job. I just wanted to start over. I like small teams. I like

• 29:32Speaker 01

  creating things. I'm an academic. I used to work at Bell Labs out on the East Coast. To me, principles are important. I did not like where the ads ecosystem had brought us. You know, big companies were tracking everything that we were doing, doing remarketing ads. There's like a relentlessness about how they work that I did not like. So I knew I didn't want to work on ads as I was getting to the end of my career. But Niva really came after I left and then lots of conversations with my co-founder Vivek about what it is that we wanted to do. And we came to the conclusion that we love the problem, but we wanted a very different

• 30:17Speaker 01

  way of thinking about it. So you know, Niva, the search engine, is a back-to-basics look in so many different levels at this problem of search. We are like, search is a very deeply personal utility. It's something that you and I do a dozen times a day without thinking about it. It drives everything from our need for information to stuff that we want to know that's going on outside in the world to sort of our deepest fears. And so we wanted to create truly a product that served you as a customer. That's when the subscription business model came about. And this allowing of ads is sort of more a reaction to what I saw as a lot of companies

• 31:01Speaker 01

  essentially saying they wanted no limits whatsoever to the number of products that they created or the ways in which they decided they needed to make money. So a lot of the, you're completely ads-free, we will not show affiliate links, we will never sell your data, are an exercise in self-frustration. You're like, we can create a great company that focuses on creating a single product that's going to work great for you. I'm not an anti-ad's person. I think ads as a supporter of monetization especially is a fine concept. But when you're talking about a search engine that literally puts ads before you can get to the results that you want, you just don't think that that's a model that works well in the long term. And that's sort of how Niva was informed.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  And again, I have nothing against the people that, you know, either the company or the people that I have worked with. But I do think when it comes to really important problems like search, it's fine for there to be alternate views and it's also fine for someone like me to change my mind about this kind of a model and say, you know, there is a better model, there is a better way to do innovation, there is a better way to create value for a lot of people.

• 32:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  No doubt, and no penalties here. Big technology podcast. We like to hear alternative views for sure. In terms of your personal journey, though, you know, we talked a little bit about how ads have started to fill up more and more of the Google page. This happened under, you know, the group

• 32:27Speaker 01

  My watch.

• 32:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  you were running. So what was the moment? Was there a moment? Did you? Was it? Did it happen slowly where you started to say, maybe this isn't the right way to do search? Or did it kind of happen all at once?

• 32:42Speaker 01

  You know, my own personal journey to Niva happened over several phases, as you correctly point out, and certainly I'm not disavowing that part.

• 32:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  I was the exec in charge of many of the increases in ad load. There was an expectation of a certain amount of growth. There were a set of techniques that were available for how you increased growth. You're always very thoughtful about the trade offs implied by growth. And and there came a certain point in time where when it came to the overall ad ecosystem, I said, I didn't want to be working on that anymore. I'm an accidental ads person. I had nothing to do with ads before I joined Google. I joke to people, my first boss found the word database in Medesuman and sent me to work on the ad system. That was like the reason why I worked on ads for 15 years. And so I'm like, hey, I'm a computer scientist. I'm a tinkerer. I just want out. I'm going to start over.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  But this idea of Niva sort of came later. You're like, we love the problem with the different model. It can be a powerful differentiator. And along the way, I actually learned more and more. What's the power of a subscription business? I started the subscription business initially as this is the best way to provide alignment between you, the customer, and us, the provider. But then you learn all of these other qualities that they bring. Everything from 100% of your team is focused on creating the product. If you look at the math of how Google works, a vanishing fraction of people work on Google search. And you would think like, how can that be? But that's the reality. The size of the Google Ads team and the Google Ads product team dwarfs that of the search team.

• 34:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  The ads team is bigger than the search team.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  One hundred percent.

• 34:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wild.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  And if you take the ads business team and the ads product and engineering teams, they're way larger than the search team. And so you have all of these like dynamics that play over the course of ten years. And this is part of the reason why I said, hey, a product in which one hundred percent of the people in your team can focus on the core value that you want to deliver. That's like, oh, that's a good deal. And we are lucky. You know, first of all, I'm lucky to have Vivek work with me. He's he ran YouTube ads, the one that you mentioned earlier, made over six billion dollars a quarter. He ran the team.

• 35:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  And his last name?

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Vivek Raghunathan. Yeah. And so he was the exact in charge of of of of that team. And we are also fortunate to have a number of other amazing computer scientists and thinkers that are part of our team, everybody from Woody Manber, who used to run search at Google, Bill Corin also ran search. He's he's on our board. And Darren Fisher, who was one of the early architects of Chrome. So we have an amazing team that are all driven by this passion to create a truly better search product.

• 35:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  What does it what does it say about Google that all these people sort of foundational to its business and its search algorithm are now have have now gone rogue and are trying to build the antidote to the problems?

• 35:50Speaker 01

  And so we think of us as a counterpoint to ad-driven search. It's not a sort of, you know, it's not any kind of duel, just like nobody talks.

• 36:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  But it is. It's a duel in some in some ways, for sure.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  We think there's plenty of space for both the companies to exist. Sorry?

• 36:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  The market is large. I mean, what what's your sense of the market? Well, you said it's one hundred fifty billion.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  A hundred and fifty billion dollars.

• 36:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  In ads alone. And then if you add a subscription, maybe you get a chunk of that, capture a chunk

• 36:21Speaker 01

  And it's driving trillions of dollars of commerce underneath overall.

• 36:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I know you say it's not a duel, but what goes through your head before you say, hey, OK, we're gonna we're gonna go do this. You know, obviously, people are going to look at it as competitive to your old employer. Did you worry about relationships there or, you know, how it might be received? And what has the feedback been from your former colleagues?

• 36:45Speaker 01

  You know, I obviously do worry about it. I have a lot of close relationships with a lot of people at Google. Um, and I would roughly say that feedback falls into two buckets. One set of people that go like, yeah, we understand why you're doing this and why you didn't think you could do this within Google. And a different set that kind of goes, um, you know, we wish you really you had done this within Google because if anyone could have changed what Google was, it should have been you. Yeah. You know, both are reasonable points of view and there are some people that, you know, kind of don't just don't want to deal with it. This is all too much um for them. Um, and I respect those points of view.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  But at some level, one has to be driven by what one sees is, uh, you know, is the right long-term outcome. I personally do not think of ad-supported free products as being good for consumers. Um, good for our country in the long term. Um, because it is very hard for them to stay true to what you and I want as users and as customers of these, um, you know, of of these products. That conflict of interest is just, is just really, really unavoidable. And the fact of the matter, uh, Alex, is that, um, while at one level the products are free,

• 38:08Speaker 01

  all the benefits of scale for products like this, they go to the creator of the product. They don't come to you and me. You know, when it comes to Neo, for example, I talk about charging a subscription of like five to $10 at most per month. Okay. And as we gain scale, I expect that product to actually get cheaper over time. You know what? When you start with a free product, the product is, does not get any freer for you. All the benefits of scale go to the creator of the product. So in many ways, I actually see these, um, as not even working with like the same principles of capitalism that's worked so well for us as a country and honestly as a globe for the last hundred, 200 years.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Um, and so we think back to basics of you're the customer, you pay for the product in the long term is going to give us better products than free products that, um, basically they all charge the advertiser.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  And you know, like, who then turns and gives you and me a higher price?

• 39:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  It's that. The advertiser.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  They're the retailer, they're the merchant. And in e-commerce, by the way, it's kind of well-known that a marketplace can squeeze out between fifteen to twenty percent of GMV.

• 39:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Which is.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  As the ad tax. It's an enormous amount of money.

• 39:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  GMV.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  You and I will pay it. The gross merchandise value.

• 39:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  If you run a marketplace.

• 39:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  And you're, you know, you have like a billion dollars of revenue of like, you're selling goods worth a billion dollars. You can extract between fifteen and twenty percent of that as an ads tax, just by showing ads on top of that marketplace. But it comes from the users, the customers of that marketplace, you and me. So this whole fallacy that ad-supported products are good for the world because they give everything else to, you know, to us for free. It's just what that is. It is a fallacy. You and I are paying just indirectly and not knowingly.

• 40:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Now, one of the things that's been left unsaid through this whole conversation is, I guess we talked a little bit about how subscription has replaced free or bitten into free's market, market power in the beginning. Talk about things like Netflix and Amazon Prime.

• 40:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  The, the interesting thing about search ads is they were designed to be these elegant, least invasive type of ads. And I know we talked a little bit about how like we're talking in our health problems, but generally, instead of having to follow you behaviorally through the internet and look at every search you, you'd, every, every website you visit and build a profile of you and say, this person is, you know, someone in the market for a car or diet pills or whatever. With search, you just type in your intent. You don't really need to be tracked. And the ads are something that the advertiser goes in and tries to match to your interest, the stuff you type in in the keyword, and then bam, there's a match. They don't really have to know who you are. In fact, a lot of people would say

• 41:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  that Google search ads are the least invasive and least tracking of all ads online. So yeah, why don't you seize seize on that a little bit and talk about

• 41:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  whether you think that that's off base, because out of all the online ads to solve, all the problems with online ads to solve, like the tracking and stuff like that, doesn't seem to be the first issue, although we have touched on the fact that it can bias search in some ways, or give you less control.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, first of all, there's no limit

• 41:38Speaker 01

  to how many ads can be shown to you. By the way, it is perfectly legal under current interpretations of antitrust for the entirety of a search result page to only have ads.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  It's it's it's perfectly legit. And what used to be 3% of a search result page being covered by ads 10 plus years ago, now gets closer to like 90 plus percent on some queries. And the fact that so much of your attention is taken by these ads and you have to make a conscious effort to get past them is a subtle and indirect tax. You've read about things like dark patterns. All of us are more susceptible to having our choices influenced than honestly, any of us wants to admit. And so how a choice is presented to you, how a choice is presented to you has a huge influence.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  And so the fact that you have to go through reams and reams of these affects you, even if you think it doesn't affect you. I tell people I am, I eat what I keep on the surface on my kitchen. I think I'm full of self-control, but honestly, I just eat what's out there, like over the long term. So I think there is that effect. And the other thing to keep in mind is that

• 42:55Speaker 01

  tracking, keeping track of conversions, wherever they happen on the internet, having all of the data come back to a Google, come back to a Facebook is the core part of ads technology. And it is then very difficult to then say that this information is not going to be used to serve ads in other places. So again, to give you a concrete example, your searches can be used to show you ads on YouTube. We can be used to show you ads on Gmail. And so there is really no limit to how information gets used. And this is part of the reason why we are so adamant about having these core principles for Niva. Your data is yours.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  We are not going to profit off of the data other than in creating the service that works for you. So these hardline principles really matter because over the long term, this need for constant expansion drives every system astray.

• 43:54Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, there was this move that Google made, right? There used to be a firewall between what you searched in the search engine and the search ads you were shown and then the rest of the business, Gmail and the display stuff and YouTube. And that eventually was broken down. How did that happen?

• 44:12Speaker 01

  It is a very long and very complicated topic, but...

• 44:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Give us the Cliff Notes.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  The Cliff Notes is roughly that whenever you were signed in across different Google properties, it was always the, it was always okay for that information to get moved around to show you ads. That was always part of the equation. There were boundaries that were kept between what happened outside Google and what happened inside Google. But information always flowed into Google via the various conversion tracking pixels that there were.

• 44:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, interesting. So that stuff was always connected. Last thing that I think we should talk about, given the current climate, is the fact that Google is under some antitrust scrutiny right now because of the way that it's iced out other businesses like yours. The number one thing that the Department of Justice is looking at Google right now is the way that it's... Found ways to be the default search engine, you know, across a number of properties. Of course, it's built its way into that with stuff like Chrome, but it's paying Apple billions of dollars a year to be the default in, and on the iPhone and iOS.

• 45:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  When you search, it's going to be Google search, and that's because Google's paying Apple to be in that position. So you were there, and now you're on the outside trying to compete for that space again. So I'm curious, is it something that's, you know, intimidating to you to try to go up against Google now knowing the tactics? And do you think the current antitrust moment is going to open a door for a company like Niva to actually occupy some of that space that's been traditionally held by, by Google, the default search engine on iOS, for instance?

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, we think choice is, choice is important. Search is the gateway to information for tons and tons of people. And to have single companies be in charge of this, well, you saw what happened in Australia. For a company to, to essentially threaten a sovereign nation to turn off its water, that's, that was kind of my, you know, my view of what was going on.

• 46:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  And that's when Facebook said, no more news. If you're gonna make us pay. But Google, Google paid.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  No, no, but before that, there was a period of time where they said, oh, we'll just like pull off.

• 46:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Shut it off. And Google has shut stuff off in countries before when they tried to regulate it.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And to me, I think that kind of concentration of essential functions is very problematic. And it's also very clear, the current interpretations of antitrust law, which have, you know, to me, I've been this, I've become a student of the topic. To me, antitrust has as much to do with politics as economics. And I think we have gone through a period of 30, 40, 50 years where we have applied very narrow economic principles to how to think about antitrust in ways that I don't think are great for the country. And the final point that I'll make just as background on this is that it is very hard,

• 47:26Speaker 01

  even for large companies, to understand that behavior that would be that would be condoned when they were a small player is in fact illegal once you become a monopoly.

• 47:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  Companies like, especially people that have been in the same company for 15 years, at some level are never going to get it. And so this is part of what surprises me about zero day, like always day zero. It's like, you know what? When you're a monopoly with a $2 trillion market cap, for you to pretend that it is day zero is A, not the truth, B, positively stupid.

• 47:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  And so when it comes to, you know, when it comes to Google and search, yes, I worry about just getting in front of users. You know, we understand that we have a lot more to build, whether it's in terms of personalization or the 1,000 features that people have. But I can tell you with a straight face that there is also an amount of joy that people get when they use Neva, that feeling of relaxation, oh, wow, I'm like not getting stressed out by lots of stuff is also very real. So I worry about having the chance to get in front of you, to get in front of 100 other people like you and say like, hey, give us a chance. If you think it's worthwhile, pay it. If not, that's also fine. To me, that is the important part.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  And the DOJ case at least gets to the heart of it, which is how does a monopoly not prevent others from even being able to compete? It is a fair chance that I want for new.

• 48:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, it is interesting. We talked about this a little bit on the land of the giants series that I was just on with Recode going into the Google history. But like, you know, we asked, is this company a survivalist or is it a monopolist? Because and oftentimes those two sides, plural, you talk about like these companies feeling like, you know, it's zero day or Amazon always day one, Facebook 1% done. Every tech giant has their version of this and they they have faced like Google has faced challenges when it came to like being default when they were a website or then a toolbar that relied entirely on Microsoft to get to people. But yeah, at a certain point.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  It's terrifying for us to do that today when Chrome keeps popping up warnings that says, "Hey, do you want to change your default back?"

• 49:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, is that what happens? Because you, okay, so, so for listeners, I set up Niva today. And, um, and the, very interestingly, part of the, the setup is make Niva your default search engine. So I did. And now I'm like typing into the address bar searches, uh, in, in Chrome, and they're going, they're popping up as Niva searches. So, but the thing is, Google owns Chrome. Very, very wisely, they built a, a browser because I think they had a feeling that this was going to become an important place directly in the Chrome, quote unquote, which is, you know, the stuff that's not the browsing window on your browser, which is why they named it Chrome. Uh, that's where the fun happens for search. Uh, so is that what happens now? If I search, uh, for a while, they're going to send me a pop-up

• 50:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  asking to make the default Google again?

• 50:26Speaker 01

  That pop-up shows up randomly.

• 50:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Dank. And you can't do anything about it. It's not your product.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  It's not under, it's not our, it's not under our control.

• 50:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  The fact of the, I mean, and you know, it's just like, then you have discussions. They say there are lots of people that are trying to take over search that are unscrupulous. And that's why we pop up the warning. But the, but the thing about this attitude is, gosh, are you also ensuring that there can in fact be no legitimate search providers anyway? Because they're all going to be driven out by the same pop-up? So it's a self-fulfilling kind of situation. So those are the things that I, um, I worry about of, uh, essentially getting our product in front of people that are, are quite willing to say, "I will try a different experience."

• 51:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. So the DOJ is, is, uh, taking on Google in terms of its search deals. I haven't heard much about Chrome and Android being, well, Android, I guess, a little bit, you being used to Iced Out, other search engines. Where do you think this all leads? Because eventually, you know, I guess these hearings could go on forever. Uh, the cases could go on forever. But do you, as a business owner that could really use a little bit of help in this area, uh, anticipate that it's ever going to show up?

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Just the scrutiny helps. I think it heightens awareness that these are real issues. As I said, I think it increases the likelihood that we will get a fair chance. And I, you know, will sort of repeat my basic viewpoint that alternates are important. Complementary products actually strengthen the overall ecosystem and create more trust. I think tech in general has a big problem in that we are sort of becoming like, take your pick, the oil barons, the banks of yesteryear. I think it's important to understand that this kind of a day one, compete at all costs mentality does not fly when companies are as dominant as they are.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  So I think all of this increased attention scrutiny, yes, gives us a better chance. Do I expect an actual outcome in these? No, not, not anytime soon. But the scrutiny helps. It gives us that little bit of a chance.

• 52:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I, I felt that as I, as I signed up for Neva, I was like, the fact that this scrutiny had been going on, of course, I watch it closely, given my job. But having read about all this stuff, it, it immediately hit me, okay, this is different. And there's a compelling reason to use it, or at least give it a shot.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I'm on it. Thanks for letting me in. You guys are on a close beta now? Is that what's going on or?

• 53:06Speaker 01

  We are on, we, we are closed, meaning you can't sign up for the product right away. But we are actually hoping to be in GA in a couple of months. In the meanwhile, you can go to neva.com and sign up for our waitlist. We are getting folks on boarded onto the product very quickly. And yeah, sometime in June, we hope to get to a point where anyone that wants the product can, can, can sign up for it. Check us out.

• 53:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, GA, general availability. So

• 53:35Speaker 01

  In the US, yeah, anyone that wants it. Absolutely.

• 53:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  So this stuff's coming. Well, I, I, I think that what you're doing is interesting. I agree with you. Good to have alternatives. And I'm really fascinated by especially what you've brought up in terms of being able to customize the retailers that you see in shopping results and then in particular, this idea that maybe you can start to see the news search with the filter that, you know, people that you follow have put on and see the news through their viewpoint. That's cool.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Are people that you don't agree with. To me, how to like, you know, actually have that viewpoint is, is a skill that we seem to have lost as a country. How to disagree without being disagreeable. So I think there's lots of choices.

• 54:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I like it. All right. So it's neva.com. If you go sign up, maybe you get in in a couple of months. Or maybe Sridhar will let you in early.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Sooner than that.

• 54:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Tell them you heard about it on Big Technology Podcast. All right. Well, thank you so much, Sridhar. It's great having you on. I was really looking forward to this conversation and it delivered. So I appreciate you joining.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Thank you, Alex. Great to chat. We'll be in touch.

• 54:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Awesome. And thank you, everybody, for listening. Thanks always to Nate Gawatney for editing the podcast. We'll give them a little bit of leeway on this one a couple of days early. So Nate, have at it. And then thank you to the folks at Red Circle for hosting the podcast and selling ads. If you want to advertise, there should be a way for you to get in touch with them. If not, just email me [email protected]. We'll get you the right place. If you like the show, you're here. We're almost an hour in. If you give us a rating, that would be awesome. If you're the first, you're for the first time and want to subscribe. We do this every Wednesday, a conversation with tech insiders or outside agitators. I think the second week in a row, we have someone who's kind of both a tech insider and an outside agitator at the same time.

• 55:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's kind of cool. Join us next week. We will have Brad Stone, the author of the new book, Amazon Unbound. I'm halfway through the book, quite enjoying it. And we'll have a conversation about what's going on with Amazon, the future of all that. All right, folks, that's going to do it for us this week. It's been a pleasure having you as always. And we look forward to seeing you next week. Take care. Have a nice next couple of days. Sorry, folks, I'm trying to still work through this sign off. Anyway, we'll see you next time. It's been a pleasure as always.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPact.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.