In this interview, Saurabh, Chief Product Officer of You.com, shares insights from his 11‑year tenure at Google and a stint at OpenSea, focusing on product leadership in the fast‑moving AI landscape. He explains that the half‑life of product advantage in AI is measured in months, making iteration speed and brand trust the primary sustainable moats for a startup competing with giants like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. You.com differentiates by refusing ecosystem lock‑in, offering transparent, trustworthy solutions, and integrating open‑source models when they best serve customers. Saurabh predicts a fundamental shift in search: instead of delivering blue‑link results to humans, search will primarily serve AI agents that act on behalf of users, turning search into a personal agent‑powering layer for knowledge, shopping, and health decisions. He also foresees browsers merging with AI assistants (e.g., Gemini, Chrome, ChatGPT) to deliver content directly to users. For product prioritization, You.com uses a three‑filter framework—accelerating agent adoption, creating differentiation, and delivering enterprise impact—to decide what not to build. Advising founders, he warns against chasing low‑hanging, already‑solved problems and instead encourages tackling hard, horizon‑looking challenges that will become feasible as models improve. Finally, he notes You.com’s strategic shift from consumer‑focused AI products to APIs and developer tools, driven by the need to empower enterprises and agents at scale.
Chapters
So Saurabh, you've had an incredible career. You spent 11 years at Google working in AI and product, you were at OpenSea working in search and now you're leading one of the fastest growing AI companies you.com as the chief product Officer. Many aspiring product leaders look to hyper growth AI companies and leaders for inspiration. What's one lesson about being a Chief Product Officer in AI that you wish you knew earlier?
Great question and thank you for inviting me. I'm excited to talk here today. I think that the one thing that always sticks out is that what I've come to learn over the last two or three years is that the half life of product advantage in AI is months, not years. When, when I was at Google during the last decade you could expect to utilize Google's ecosystem to create an advantage that would last for, for years or longer. But today that that advantage is months, even weeks. And what we found is that really the only sustainable moat, so to speak that we have, one is velocity of iteration. So as the market moves, moving along with it. As an example, we're often the first to market a new model. So if GPT5 comes out or Cloudsonnet 4.5, you can expect to see that on U.com within a few hours. And then people know that and so they come to us saying great, I want to try this out along with the other models that are out there. That's just a simple example in the enterprise space, that velocity of iteration and being able to create high quality, highly trustful solutions that enterprises are going to as they try to make AI work in their enterprise environment more seamlessly. They love the speed that we're moving at. And then the second is brand trust, right in a sea of new AI startups, folks that have referenceable solutions, folks that have brands that people can call up a prospective customer can call up another customer. And they're speaking volumes about us. We're proud and humbled when that happens and we recognize that it is a moat that is actually developing around brand trust for us. Those are the two things that I wish I knew going into this whole crazy couple of years. But we're thankful to understand those lessons and act on those now.
You.com is one of the fastest growing startups in AI. You're at the helm as the Chief Product Officer. You're competing with trillion dollar companies like Google and Microsoft and OpenAI. Where does you.com carve out an edge that those giants.
Yeah, it's a great question and something that we thought about a lot. One of the most important things that we found is that the giants are making ecosystems by default. Right? That is their goal, to build their ecosystem out and to drive lock in in that ecosystem. But when we talk to customers, every customer that we see says, I don't want to be locked into that ecosystem. I don't know who's going to turn out ahead. Is it going to be OpenAI's models, is it going to be anthropic models, is it going to be Google's models? Right. And they don't want lock in at this, you know, kind of the early innings of the AI game. And so we're optimizing for developers, we're optimizing for CIOs who need a transparent, trustworthy, you know, partner to build their solutions. On top of, if you're a developer that's looking for building block APIs to build your agents or you're a CIO is looking for a trusted partner to navigate and execute on your business transformation goals, they come to us because if they go to some of the big tech folks, big tech is going to steer them towards whatever it is that they're selling. Those things are good, don't get me wrong. Right. We build on top of those many times, but we act more as a trusted partner. That's going to help you navigate that. Right. And we can offer things for, for example, if the best thing for you is to use an, an open source LLM with a off the shelf rag system that, that Amazon has, great, we're going to put that together. But a lot of the big tech folks will not do that because it's not in their own interest of building that ecosystem. That ecosystem lock in. That is the fundamental basis of their business.
You.com it's one of the fastest growing AI search startups in the world right now. Search isn't just about retrieving blue links anymore. It's about answers, personalization, context. Where do you see the biggest opportunity for AI search to transform how people learn, shop and make decisions?
Yeah, great, great question. I think it's undeniable that search is going through its biggest transformation in a quarter century, right? Since the rise of Google. And to me, the biggest fundamental change is that search, the next generation of search, isn't going to be built for you and me, right? It's no longer going to be 10 blue links. It's not about AI overviews or anything like that. The next version of search is being built for AI agents. And that is a fundamentally massive shift in what's going on we're starting, just starting to see this, right? Today, consumers see AI overviews, they see what ChatGPT is doing and they're wowed by it, as they should be, right? They're helping you get to those answers, get to those shopping decisions faster. But I think that there's an actually bigger wave of change coming, which is that humans will start to use agents to do more and more of their tasks and those agents will be the actual consumers of search as we know it today. And so let me give you an example, right? If I'm, let's say that I, I want to buy flip flops, I want to buy black leather flip flops, size 12. And look, it's fall. So I don't really need those right away. I'm saying buy it for $50 or less or buy May 1, whatever comes first today. How do I do that? I have a bunch of triggers and a bunch of websites and I'll look at a couple things here and there. But what we're starting to see is an emerging class of agents, consumer agents, that says I'm just going to do that for you, and that those agents will consume search two to three orders of magnitude more than any human does today in order to accomplish your task for you. I'll give you another example. One thing that I manage is my blood sugar, but it is impossible to figure out is it rice or whole wheat or white wheat or a mango or an avocado, what's good? I don't know, right? If I had an always on agent, which is the world that we're heading to. You see these glasses, right? Those agents are doing search for me constantly to help me with whatever I need. And so often I think about what we're, you know, Uber had this famous tagline, your personal show for transportation. And I think what search is really heading into is your personal agent for whatever you need, right? For knowledge retrieval, for shopping, for learning. And so I think that's the fundamental change that we're going to see is we're not going to be searching as we have come to know it. We're going to be deploying agents to get work done for us and that those agents are the ones using search. And search will be now driven to power those agents better. And I think it's going to be an amazing future that we're already starting to see the green shoots of.
I love it. I love it. I've been reading about the browser and why the browser is such a big deal now.
So, and I think the Browser is going to, I think you're going to see a. What's the browser? A browser is a means to surf the web. Nobody wants to surf the web anymore. Right. They want that content coming to them. And so I think you're going to see this merge of these, you know, Gemini and Chrome and ChatGPT. What's the difference? Right? I think that you're going to see these things actually merge over the next year or two.
Amazing. Thank you. All right, I think we got a couple more. Let's keep an eye on the clock. You've had an incredible career. You spent 11 years at Google working in product management and AI. Very large, large, fast growing hyperscaler. Now you are the chief product officer at you.com, which is one of the fastest growing AI companies in the world, but definitely not the size of Google. Startups always have more ideas than resources and prioritization becomes the hardest skill. What's your framework for deciding what not to build?
Yeah, great question. Let's start with what we aim for. Our vision is to help the world create agents. So simply put, a simple heuristic is if it doesn't accelerate agent adoption, we're not going to do it. Now, underlying that premise is I tend to use three filters. One is, is a particular feature or customer request going to create an accruing advantage? Does it make it easier for me to create a compelling solution that actually becomes greater than the sum of its parts? And that's one test that I always look for. The next is, does that create a differentiation for me in market? Is it something that only we can credibly deliver, like our trusted web search APIs, transparent source controls? If not, we need to think twice about that. And then third, we look at enterprise impact. That's very important for us. Whether it's enterprise impact for a developer or enterprise impact for cio, is that going to help move that needle? And if a feature doesn't pass at least two of those three tests, it's going to get dropped on the floor. And so those are really what we look at in our general heuristics about when do we invest, when do we not invest? And that clarity of filters is something that the whole team understands. So they know that when they're coming to a product review internally, they need to think through these three questions and have an understanding of where their particular future might lie and understand why the business might invest there. And I think having that clarity throughout the organization helps us become a more efficient and more value oriented organization.
AI startups are booming, but many are going to fail. Guidance from leaders who built at scale like you, that's invaluable guidance. If you are mentoring a founder who is building an AI today, what's the biggest mistake you would warn them against?
Yeah, great question. I see a lot of startups and the ones that are most compelling to me is the ones that are looking a bit over the horizon, if you can. It's something that is right in front of you, it's likely that somebody is already doing it. There's probably five or 10 other companies already doing it and they're going to be a bit ahead of you. And so the startups that I tend to see as being the most likely to succeed are the ones that are thinking a little bit over the horizon. And then the question becomes, well, how do you think over the horizon? And what I end up seeing is that startups that are focusing now in the. If you're a verticalized startup focusing on a workflow that is difficult and hard and nobody seems to kind of have a great idea on how to do it, start working on that because what's likely going to happen is that the models are going to get better and better and they're going to enable your use case in a short amount of time. But being there, going deep with those customers now, understanding what can be built now is going to give you a leg up so that when the models catch up, you're there. You've got to look over the horizon. That's my number one feedback and that's the number one thing I talk to founders about, is if you know how to build it today, somebody's probably already doing it. So you might as well pick a problem that looks really hard, it looks untractable, start to break it apart and expect the models to catch up to what you need. And I think that's going to be the root of a lot of successful.
Businesses here on out you.com has been around for a while and it had a lot of success early on in the consumer AI space, but recently it's shifted more to focusing on APIs and developers. Where did that progression come from?
Yeah, it's a great question and I think it goes back to the half life of innovation is shorter in the AI space than in any other space that I've ever been in. What we found was we were good at consumer AI search, we had a lot of good momentum there. And what we started seeing was two trends come alive. Number one is that developers would come to us and say, hey, I would love to use your web search API or I would love to use parts of your AI stack to power my application. And so we actually started a team that said, okay, let's go off and actually make our internals visible. External, right. Let's see if there's something there. And what started off as a bit of a side project for some engineers that were really interested has now grown into the fastest part of our business, the fastest growing part of our business. And what we're starting to see is we still have a very healthy AI consumer search based business. But our API building blocks business. What we call our API building blocks web search, other web APIs, data APIs, AI APIs is actually growing faster and it made sense to start to double down on that. On the same time that that was happening, we were also starting to talk to businesses that were saying, look, I don't have the teams in house to be able to execute on my transformation. We're going to use you.com in the enterprise setting, but we'd also like you to do this very bespoke thing, right? For example, I've got 10 terabytes of articles sitting in my Amazon S3 bucket and we'd love to run AI over that. Nobody's going to do that for us. Would you do that? And initially we were thoughtful about it and we said let's run a couple pilots and, and that has also become a very successful business for us because there's an accruing advantage. What we're doing is that we are taking our APIs and that we are stitching together custom solutions for the CIOs of the world. And what we're ending up seeing is that there's a flywheel there where when we build those solutions it's also giving us signal about what our API should be doing to make developers lives easier. And that's this great accruing advantage where you do one thing in one area, you it is causing us to speed up in another area which then is delivering feedback to that initial area as well. And so today that's where we see us. We help the world build agents. Whether you're a developer that is looking for building blocks to drive your agents and go to market faster, or whether you're a CIO looking for a trusted partner and thought leader to help you execute on your AI transformation mandate. And that's really, that's a story of really evolving as AI evolves over the last few years. And I think U.com is right in the center of that evolution. As well.
