In The Room with Sridhar Ramaswamy
Claudia and Madison welcome Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO and Co-Founder of Neeva, into The Room this week. Sridhar immigrated from India for his PhD in Data Science at Brown, back in 1989. Today, Sridhar is a Silicon Valley legend, first growing Google’s search ad program to a $115 billion business as the Senior Vice President of Ads and Commerce. After 15 years with Google, he joined Greylock as a Partner, a position he still holds today. Now, he’s also onto his newest venture called Neeva, an ad-free private search engine that just announced its Series B funding of $40 million led by Sequoia Capital and Greylock. Through Neeva, Sridhar is rebuilding trust within the Internet, reimagining the ways we can use data for value.
We discuss information and privacy in serving your customer, rethinking pre-existing mental models, and leadership principles. Let’s open the door.
Key Theme 1: Information, privacy, and what it means to serve your customer
Sridhar’s motivation to start Neeva, and in turn, fundamentally rethinking what search looks like, rested in the belief that search is an important function of humanity. He calls it “human’s curiosity.” His core aha moment? Ad-supported search inherently creates a conflict of interest between user and advertiser. Neeva offers a solution to this paradox. Rather than Neeva capitalizing on revenue brought in by use and mis-use of consumer data, they are empowering better search through customer sanctioned data collection. Their revenue model? Subscription.
Key Theme 2: Rethinking pre-existing mental models
While Google search is free and funded by ads, Neeva instead charges a subscription and is ad-free. With a pay-to-use product, Srdihar had to work out the issue of creating a non-elitist perception. The core mission, however, was returning agency to users. Neeva’s customer and user first approach is inherently different from the existing models of big tech. Sridhar created a product with different baseline principles, prompting users to think how they themselves can be the ones in control. By founding a product with these different principles, Sridhar describes the process of creating Neeva as liberating due to his ability to define the rules.
Key Theme 3: Leadership principles from an expert
“I decided to start a company because in my core, I believe in great products, I believe in being able to build these, and having these foundational principles makes a difference.”
These strong foundation principles have driven Sridhar’s leadership principles from SVP at Google, to Greylock venture partner, to now CEO and Founder. He saw during his time at Google that there was a mismatch between users and publishers and that the product for search did not have users as a top priority. Instead of just complaining about big tech, Sridhar led product driven innovation to create a unique counter point in the ad-supported ecosystem.
Thank you for joining us in The Room this week and congratulations again to Sridhar and the Neeva team on their second fundraise!
