Will Bryk

And then in high school, I wanted to start a new type of news organization because I thought we're a civilization that got to the moon, we split the atom, and yet we can't understand what's going on at the border or in science news.

Like, why can't we fully understand any topic?

And then in college, I was roommates with Jeff, and we were like, we could just build a better search using crowdsourcing the highest quality links.

And we did build a pretty solid search.

But then five years ago, so in 2021, that's when Transformers started to get really good.

And it suddenly became possible to build a better search engine than Google.

And that was a really important opportunity because search is the gateway to the world's information.

If you could improve search, if you can make it perfect,

then that has so many downstream positive implications for the world across every industry, across every part of human life.

And so it just felt like this huge opportunity that no one was pursuing.

And I was like, I'm going to devote my life to this because it's everything I care about is about information.

And so, yeah, started EXA and now it's gone.

We actually made a lot of progress and we're a lot closer to that mission.

There's still a huge amount of things, a huge amount to go.

But yeah, it's been crazy to see how far we've come to achieving that mission that I've been thinking about for years.

Yeah, I mean, Google was amazing and is amazing for what it's meant to do, which is like get quick answers to consumers.

And now it's like increasingly longer answers.

But really, it's focusing on like, what do most of the billions of people in the world search for care about, and like making sure they're really happy.

And they do a great job of that.

That's what they're optimized for.