Season 2 Episode 5: Sridhar Ramaswamy of Neeva

Come on into The Room. The Room is a series that lets you get a view into the room where it happened. If you're a founder facing questions about your first customer, first fundraise, or first hire, this is the show for you. I'm Claudia Laurie.

And I'm Madison McIlwain, your co-hosts.

This week, we are incredibly excited to talk to a true Silicon Valley legend and visionary. From leading Google's advertising business to investing at Greylock to now pioneering a deeply relevant and new way of thinking about search, we are honored to have sat down with today's guest, Sridhar Ramaswamy. Sridhar, having started his career in engineering, spent 15 years at Google growing the business to hundreds of billions of dollars. As the senior vice president of Google Ads and Commerce. About 2.5 years ago, Sridhar left Google, became a venture partner at Greylock, and founded Neeva. Sridhar isn't afraid to make bold bets and push preexisting mental models. Sridhar notes that we are now at a time when for many people, trust in the internet has been broken. His new venture Neeva's mission is to rebuild that and rethink the ways in which we use data to create value. Neeva is an ad-free private search engine. And just yesterday on Monday, we are so excited to announce that Neeva just announced their $40 million Series B co-led by Sequoia and Greylock. In today's episode, we will get an inside scoop into the early days of growth of Google Ads and explore themes and insights such as information, privacy, and what it means to serve your customer, rethinking preexisting mental models, and leadership principles from an expert. Let's open the door.

Sridhar, thank you so much for joining us today on The Room.

Hey, it's a real pleasure to be here.

So we like to really start our podcast off at the very beginning, giving our listeners a little bit of context on your start. And so if I have this right, you grew up in India and went to IIT in Madras before coming to the US to study computer science to get your PhD from Brown. Do I have that correct?

That's right. And my kids are at Brown now.

So what brought you to study computer science at Brown? What, what kind of research were you doing that really started kickstarting your career?

That's right. Brown was quite an unknown for my batch at IIT Madras. And in fact, my friend Ravi and I were the first people from my school that got into Brown ever. And yeah, we were thrilled because not only did we get admitted to this amazing school, but both of us scholarships, which was incredibly cool. I Did a PhD starting in database theory and then decided like 3, 4 years in that I liked writing software a lot more. And that's a theme that has happened many times in my life. I sort of start in a different direction, think, hey, it's great to be like a theory researcher or a manager. I always keep coming back to wanting to build. But I did my research in database theory and then in systems and then went on to work at Bellcore and Bell Labs after that.

And what year was this?

Oh gosh, now I'm going to date myself. I was there from '89 to '94.

What did database theory look like in '89?

Back in the time, Oracle was just beginning to get going. It was one of the mega successes of the Valley, and relational database systems, stuff that we now take for granted, was taking the world by storm. And so the kind of problems that I looked at were things like if you wanted to do spatial data processing, you know, say you wanted to overlay two maps on one another, how do you do that efficiently in a database? So a lot of the algorithms that are, that are there today in what are called like GISs today, geographic information systems, has its precursors in a bunch of work that was done during that time.

So much has changed since then. It's incredible to think back. When you were doing this work in, you know, the early '90s, kind of entrepreneurship was just becoming in vogue. It was something that people were thinking about. Obviously, you mentioned Oracle, that it was becoming part of the American dream to be an entrepreneur. Did you think you were going to become a founder, or were you really content in building other people's products at the time?

Yeah, I compared to say my kids who are in school and busy hatching plans to start their own company before they leave school, I was none of that. I just simply didn't really imagine being an entrepreneur. In fact, my, my first business idea was kind of like a total failure. I bought a bunch of leather jackets in India thinking that I could sell them for a nice profit after I got to the US. No one wanted to buy them. I've always had a lot more success, you know, renting out my skills, so to say, both, both in India and, uh, and in the US. I used to be the system administrator for the economics department. Having techie skills were useful, but I— it took many years before I was like, oh, I should do my own startup.

Well, we'll be excited to touch on what finally was the idea that caught your attention and spirit there. But before we talk about Neeva, which is what you're building today, talk us through the decision to join Google in 2003 after what sounds like a failed e-commerce startup.

'99 reminds me kind of a lot of, you know, how SPACs are taking over the world today. You could do no wrong. And so my company Epiphany renamed itself e.epiphany because they wanted the dot in the dot-com. I was like this classic story of like, oh, they go public, stock shoots through the roof, and then, you know, there comes the crash. It was actually a customer relationship management software company. It was like a precursor to what we now think of as Salesforce and, you know, and Siebel and companies like that. And I was a director of a team there. And honestly, like, I didn't really want to be managing teams or managing product delivery and stuff like that. So I went to Google because I was able to get a job as a software engineer and sit in one room and write code. I used to tell my friends at the time that my goal in going to Google was to drink coffee and write code, and I got to do that for like over a year and play Ultimate Frisbee. So I did a lot of all of those for the first year or two.

That's incredible. I think that would probably not be why people join Google today, although perhaps it, perhaps it is for some. In 2003, you spent 15 years at Google. And when you started, did you start in Google Ads? Was that your first team at Google?

That's right. My first boss at Google, this person named Mike Frumpkin, he found the word database in my resume and said, "Aha, Sridhar should go work in Ads because Ads had databases." So that was the AI that decided 15 years of my life. So I joined the Search Ads team as an engineer and I stayed with them for the entire 15 years. I managed that team and many, many more teams after that, but I never left my association with the Search Ads team. And in many ways, it was also the ultimate crucible at Google because every line of code that you wrote for that team was an opportunity to make an incredible amount of money or to look like a complete fool because you brought the entire system down. And so just, you know, getting started in that team was a pretty amazing experience. And it turns out after a year, I also like tore up my knee pretty, pretty well playing Ultimate Frisbee. So I was just writing more code and then beginning to manage teams and stuff like that. So that's sort of what got me going at Google. So I managed the search ads, the backend team, and then more and more of the team. I was running most of the search ads team by like 2007, 2008. And none of us at the time predicted that was going to be like, now it's a $120 billion business, just like one team. And easily the highest margin business ever. One can argue that even today, if Google did nothing but search and search ads, it would have most of the market cap that it has today, even though it does so many things. That's because it was this incredible area, an incredible product, and I was super lucky to be a part of this amazing team.

You stole my fun fact. I was gonna share that, yeah, Google Ads is actually really in its own right $1 billion market cap company. And, and when you joined, it already was at a billion at one point, uh, revenue. So that kind of multiple growth is something we don't see in most startups. And to see inside a company that is its own independently traded is, is really quite fascinating. And at the time that you joined, it wasn't clear that Google was gonna be the winner. It was Google, Yahoo, search. What is this? Maybe just talk us through some of those early challenges that you faced as you built Google into what it is today.

There are quite a few distinct phases to sort of how both Google— I mean, Google Search, Search Ads, and the whole business grew. Early on, as you point out, it was not clear that Google was going to be a winner. And most people also don't realize that Google went through two pivots before they got to what is called AdWords today. So they used to have essentially the equivalent of a display ads system. Where you could pre-buy all ads for a specific query. If you wanted rides for hire or headphones, you could like literally have a conversation with somebody at Google or use an interface and say, I'm going to buy all of those ads. And so there was like, like the scheme for pricing them and things like that. It's only towards as I joined the team, that they were switching over to this new system called AdWords, which was the pay-per-click model. And the amazing innovation, which Google honestly copied from Overture, was this idea of taking both the prediction for click-through as well as how much somebody is bidding to come up with what's called an eCPM auction. Essentially, if you multiply the two together, what you can— what you end up with is roughly like a prediction for how much money you're going to make if you show a particular ad. And it tends to optimize both quality and how much money Google makes. And it's really this combination of being super relevant, but also giving it to the highest bidder that created the magic of that ecosystem. Along with it, there was this technology called conversion tracking that let Google figure out on— and advertisers figure out on a per-ad basis whether something was working or not. It's really the combination of all of these that led to it becoming one of the most amazing businesses ever. Having said that, nobody thought that Google would keep growing, certainly not the people inside Google, especially as desktop sales were beginning to flatten out. Everybody inside Google said, ah, this happens to every business. Don't, like, what are you concerned about? This is what happens. And in fact, um, I met, uh, Bruce Falk, who runs revenue at Twitter, and, uh, I met his team last week and he and I had been part of a small group that Eric Schmidt, our CEO then, had commissioned to come up with a $100 billion plan for Google. And the amazing thing about the $100 billion plan was— this is circa 2007-8— everybody that even heard about the project was completely convinced that we were a bunch of lunatics for even thinking about making $100 billion. It was like a joke. But one of the conclusions of the $100 billion plan was If we were to hit $100 billion, most of the revenue would come from search ads. So sort of a disappointing outcome for a number of other teams at, at Google. But that certainly came to be true. By the time Google hit $100 billion, most of the revenue actually did come from search.

Well, after 15 sort of iconic years at Google and $100 billion businesses after Google, you became a venture partner at Greylock, also exploring some ideas that hopefully will become billion-dollar-plus ideas. Could you share a little bit more about that experience and really what prompted you to get back to building with Neeva?

Yeah, you know, there are a number of reasons why I left Google, but one of them was just that I had been there for a very long time. And I had specific worries about where things like the ad-supported ecosystem was going and how Search, the product, which I really admired a lot, but that also felt the pressure of a company needing to make more and more money. So there are a bunch of reasons that contributed to my saying, hey, I really need to take a step back and figure out what I want to do with my life. And Greylock, where I continue to be a venture partner, was a great transition. I got the freedom to talk to a ton of startups, learn honestly after many years of being in a startup what it is like to create one, what areas of excitement, you know, there were in terms of opportunities. So I continued to track things like enterprise companies, which is, which is the area where I invest in. I invest in companies that are in like the data, the privacy kind of space. It was fun, but I was also having a lot of conversations with Vivek, my co-founder, and we were trying to figure out what area we wanted to focus on. And we kind of came to the conclusion that in a strange way, even though we had worked on search for such a long time, we wanted to rethink, reimagine search for a few reasons. One, we said this is a really, really important function for humanity. I think of search as humanity's curiosity. People literally, like, whatever is in their heads, they'll go type into a browser to see. And I was talking to this friend the other day about why search was private, and she laughed and said, "Sridhar, like, I'm the mom of a 3-year-old, and sometimes I type 'how to be a good mom' to a 3-year-old." and sure as heck, I don't really want anyone else to know about that. And so it's a very personal product, and we felt strongly that being ad-supported made the product worse. We also felt equally strongly that having an alternate voice for that important function was going to be really important for us and for the world in general. And that's sort of what led us to actually start the company and get going in earnest, like early 2019.

That's incredible. And so for our listeners, kind of in one sentence, What would you say Neeva is and what Neeva's mission is?

Yeah, Neeva is search reimagined. We are an ads-free private search engine that has only one aim: create a great product for you as a customer. So we are an ads-free private search engine.

It seems like based on sort of all of your experience at Google and deep expertise in not only ads but also search, was there a particular aha moment when you decided that the future of search was ads-free?

One of the benefits of, you know, doing a doctorate, doing a PhD, is a relentless focus on ideas. It's all in the abstract, and I've slaved away like weeks, sometimes more, at just writing like an 8-sentence abstract. So it's, you know, I place a lot of emphasis on getting to the core of a problem. To me, the aha moment for search was the realization that an ad-supported search was inherently a conflict of interest that could be papered over for some time, but one that could never be solved in a foundational way unless you are completely aligned with the user of the product. And once you decide that you are customer first, a lot of other conundrums you have around, gosh, what does this lack of privacy mean? What does like all of this tracking that goes on for serving ads mean? It sort of clicks in your head and you go, I can create a much simpler, much better product. In a weird way, I talk to people about why Niva is important by saying, by focusing on concepts like product loyalty, by having this customer-first model, we can ensure that every result is focused on delivering a great answer for you. It provides that product clarity. And the flip side of this is like, Hey, if people don't pay for it, you have no business. There's also that real visceral fear of needing to create a product that really delivers value to customers. And so the aha moment was this realization that the only way to avoid kind of like this conflict of interest between the user and the advertiser— do you do things that are good for the advertiser and therefore your business, or do you do things that are good for the person that's typing in the query? Is really putting those two together and saying the only way to resolve this is to have the person that pays you also be the person that uses the product.

And it seems almost an obvious insight, but so different from how users, you know, think about search to date. And I think with many incredible companies, they start with ideas in which sort of consumers maybe have not yet conceptualized or caught up with. So you have this incredible product insight, Could you tell us a little bit more about, you know, after so many years in-house at Google, what it was actually like going out on your own and starting a business from scratch?

One thing that is clearly liberating, especially if you're taking on an old problem— and let's face it, search is an old problem— is being able to define sort of what you think of as the foundational principles for your product. People ask me, friends, close friends, why I could not have started Neeva at Google. It's such a disconnect from how the company thinks about search that trying to get something like this going essentially sets off like this harnessness of people that are very upset that you're even considering something like this because that's sort of the initial reaction. In fact, a friend of mine who's no longer at Google in her own sort of blunt way asked, so Sridhar, I hear like you want to put the sales team out of business. No, it's more that you want to start a product with a very different set of principles. Having said that, you know, that's the liberating part. You get to define the rules. I talk about, for example, with my team all the time about how I don't want to be, I don't want us to become an engineer-first company or a product-first company. So too many people have these labels. Google is very proud of being like an engineer-led company. So we've set the tone very clearly as we want to be an excellent company. We want to expect a lot from all of our people. We want to expect excellence from all of our people. The flip side of that is we want to be respectful. There are lots of people in lots of companies that felt like they were second-class citizens. And so you get to sort of set the tone of the company. Those are all the nice parts. And obviously we have amazing backers in Greylock and Sequoia. And so to a certain extent, at least for the first few years, it's not like you're going to run out of money. Those are the good parts. The hard part is if you take a problem that is as well solved as search, how do you create a competitive product? And there's no easy answer to that one. And so we think in terms of what does it take to get to parity, and we think in terms of what does it take to differentiate. So you have to evolve that point of view about how you create a product where the familiar Turns out, for example, people really like doing currency conversion right within the search result page. I worked on search for 15 years. I would not have guessed this. I'd have said like, okay, so click on the top side, go enter the same number there. Why is it so hard? Like, turns out like, nope, they want it right in the search engine. Or how attached they are to Maps. And so we spend a lot of time on those, and then on how do we truly differentiate? How do we create this personalized experience? And this challenge of taking a very large, very well-worked-on problem and still creating something compelling, honestly, it's not hard. And it's hard on some days, terrifying on other days. And, you know, as I said, the nice thing about not making any money is you get to make up the rules. But the other side of not making any money is like, you're not making any money. And so how you figure that part out can be fun, and, uh, it It is challenging.

Well, luckily, as you mentioned, you have some incredible venture backers who are supporting you along this journey, both your firm Greylock, who you're still close with as a venture partner, as well as Sequoia, having raised your Series A this past June at $37 million. Not every day I see Greylock and Sequoia co-leading around. That's an incredibly impressive feat on your end. Uh, tell us a little bit more about your first check and your fundraising journey.

We are lucky to have a strong association with both Greylock and Sequoia. Our board member from Sequoia is Bill Koren. I know many of the other folks at Sequoia as well. I have many friends there as well. And Bill worked on search for many years. In many ways, he's been both a support and an inspiration in this journey to reimagine search. And then on the Greylock side, we have Reid. Reid needs no introduction, and Ashish. On our boards, and again, a number of colleagues and friends who work with us on the product and making it better. And in some ways, they did it together because the three groups, so to say, Vivek and I on one side, Greylock and Sequoia, really wanted to work together. And they're equal down to the cent in the investments and down to board seats and stuff like that. And it's a wonderful relationship with both the firms. We are very fortunate.

I think it's helpful for our listeners because for you to share about this co-leading, because I think a lot of first-time founders wonder, why would I need one lead or why would I need two leads? And what does this co-leading relationship look like between venture firms? So, it's helpful to hear you say these investors were friends first and people who knew and believed in your vision for the future of ads.

I take our role as the stewards of the company seriously. and we have a close working relationship with both the firms, and they've been very good. They've been very, very good partners for us.

You mentioned not only incredible investors, but incredible members of your team, and a startup is sort of a, definitely a team effort. Would love to learn a little bit more about who was kind of with you in the proverbial room as you were building your business.

We had a small team. You know, we are about 45 people. We have an amazing set of fresh grads that are going to be joining this summer, about 10 of them. But Vivek Raghunathan, who I worked with for over 10 years at Google, among other things, he worked in search ads straight out of his PhD from Urbana-Champaign. And then he was also the lead for YouTube ads at Google within the ads team. So he and I are the You know, he and I are the co-founders. It's a very good team. We get a lot of work done quickly, and it's also a really fun team to work with.

And that's probably one of the incredibly exciting things with starting something that's young and new and small, just sort of the iteration cycles and the pace in which you're able to reimagine this function of searching, which has been available for so long, but in a way that is completely new. You need those sort of lean teams I would love to actually, like, dig into some of the new mental models with search, and one of which is Google was free because it was sort of funded by ads. But unlike Google, Neeva is charging a subscription, if I have that correctly. Could you tell us a little bit more about your decision to pursue a subscription-based model and what the implications of that are?

As I said, being customer paid is the most important part. Subscription then becomes kind of, it becomes a device for how you manage that relationship. And being customer paid, as I said, lets us be ads-free. We also don't even show, we don't show affiliate links, and you'll be surprised by the number of folks that show affiliate links without it really being clear. And so this purity of business model is really, really important. To us. We're very careful about sort of not collecting data without you knowing. And in that sense, we want Neeva to be a simple, worry-free service. And the subscription model then was sort of the mechanism for ensuring the alignment. Now obviously one of the things that we have to worry about is with a paid product, we'll be seen as an elitist product. And one of the things that we want to make sure that we do is keep the cost of the subscription for a full-fledged product low enough that lots of people can afford it. One of the surprising things about search is, you know, our users, our early users, for example, who are passionate, will often search like a dozen times a day. There are not many things that you consistently do a dozen times a day that has such an impact on sort of the information you consume about how you inform yourself about the world, how you learn about new or what products you buy, or what services you go get, or what places you go visit. So, we feel like having that alignment becomes very important. And one of the ways in which we approach Search very differently, in addition to being ads-free and private, is we think of— we think of Neeva as giving you a lot more agency into what it is that you want to see. If you want to see certain kinds of news outlets more, say because you have subscriptions for them, we want to enable that. One feature that we have not yet launched, but we would love to be able to launch in the next few months, is being able to do things like customize your retailers. One of the complaints that we get about shopping queries is people tell us that they only see big retailers, not just in the ads, but also on the organic page. And so we get requests for things like, "I only want to see small boutique retailers," or, "I only want to see retailers who, you tell me, ethically source the material that they use, say, for clothing. So I think once you are— once you have the freedom of the business model that's focused on what the customer wants, then there's a lot of follow-up that you can do to create that compelling product. And so, you know, we think a lot in terms of how the subscription model then facilitates how we can create a great product for you.

Wow, my mind's kind of blown because as a willing participant in the data economy and, you know, on the younger side of the dot-com boom, I'm just used to having my data sold and then getting recommendations as a result that work 50% of the time. And when they do work, it's great. And so I'm okay with it. But the idea that there could be a better model and a better way for my data to be used with my permission is really powerful.

100%. And the kind of things that we are very excited to do are things like show you review sites when you're looking for a product. Remember, when you type a product into a search engine, whether you like it or not and whether the people that are creating the search engine like it or not, if you have the ads model, it's only the top retailers that can pay the most money and optimize their campaigns that are going to be on top. You really have no choice in the matter. We are perfectly happy for you to browse through reviews. We are perfectly happy if you set a price alert on a product instead of actually buying the product, because our goal is to serve you, not make the transaction happen today. And so it just lets us think very differently in terms of what can we help you get done. It's early, but it can be a refreshingly new approach to how you think about how you interact with the world, you know, around you. Where you are much more firmly in, in control, and you have a company, Neva, and you have a product that is militantly about doing right by you and guarding your privacy.

I'm excited about what's to come for Neva. And as you think about how you've really dived deep into the assumptions we have about our data today and how it's being used, you really are this expert on data. I'm going to call you that. You have so much literature written really both technical and high level. And it's an active conversation, especially all of us living here in California, but across the country and the world around how our data is being used and when and why. I'm curious on your take around how critics of big tech, do you think they're too alarmist of where the view of our data and privacy is? And if not, why are consumers still so slow to delete apps that allegedly or likely are using our data like Facebook and Instagram?

That's a complicated question to unpack. I think I'll make a few observations. One is that it is really important for all of us to understand that all companies, including Big Tech, their kind of natural mode of operation, so to say, is to create things that benefit the company, that benefits the shareholders. We should sort of not be under this illusion that in some sense they're like benefiting broader society. In my mind, the ad-supported product experiment, I'll call it that, it's now 20+ years old, is an interesting one. It's brought a lot of goodness. The fact of the matter is an amazing product like Google Search is available to every person on the planet. That's positive. But the other side of that is like high-quality information is harder than ever to find. And one of the consequences of the ad-supported economy is that, you know, two companies sort of rule the roost in terms of the majority of profits. And the fact of the matter is, if a Google or a Facebook make more money with advertising, there's not necessarily— first of all, they can't lower the cost of the product that they give you. It's free to start with. And so one of the things to remember with big tech foundationally is that all the benefits of scale, they go to big tech. They don't come to you and me. And so having a customer-first product that protects your data, that focuses on sort of what is right for you, that doesn't try to steer you towards an ad because that company is going to make more money by showing you these ads, we think will create more value in the long term. The way I think about big tech is they are companies. They are going to push for outcomes that benefit the companies and benefit their shareholders. And we need to be thinking in terms of what are options that we should have. In terms of why haven't people walked away from some of these things, at least for a product like search, I would say it's for lack of real options. I mean, what option do you have? But they have the same model. but it's the same model as Google. And so it becomes harder to, to switch to that product. And certainly the social media space, you are seeing more people trying other things for things like personal communications. My main point about big tech would be companies favor themselves. And I think the more options we have, the more competition there will be. And the more we can create value to actual customers of the product.

I love what you're really calling to the attention is being customer first in user-first of how you build your product, which in many ways is not how big tech has grown, although maybe they say they have, or they are solving for some parts of the consumer experience, but not for all. And as you think about building Neeva, which hopefully we can talk to you in 15 years at how you've grown from your current revenue to the multiple that Google has, I'd love to double-click into your leadership style. You've been a leader in many ways, um, for, for years in this industry and talking about how data is being used while you were at Google and then as a venture partner. So how has that changed and how does that manifest today as a CEO and founder?

I was very much a part of the Google Ads team and the Search Ads team, and we really did see our role as supporting users, for sure, supporting advertisers, many of whom were small businesses, and also supporting publishers on the web. And to a large extent, my decision to sort of start over with a different set of principles came from my own conclusion that this was a mismatched deal for both users and publishers. I don't think great content is thriving on the web, and I don't think users are getting the best search product ever. And so it is a change of heart in terms of, uh, how I think about products and how I think we can create different and better products. So, and 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 make a difference. I could be one of those folks that complain about big tech, but not really like do anything about it. But I thought product-driven innovation and creating a great product would serve as a better basis thought, rethinking how things should be. And obviously there are other folks in the government, in other places, thinking about where should privacy go and stuff like that. So in many ways, I think of Neeva as an interesting and different counterpoint to how the ad-supported ecosystems have worked.

So more broadly, from your perspective as both an investor and a founder coming into this year, would love to get a sense of what you think the growing spaces and the spaces you're excited to see develop this year are?

[Speaker:VISHNU] So at least as an investor, I spend most of my time in the enterprise space. There's just an amount of innovation here that's pretty stunning. I think the transition to cloud and the fact that everybody got used to working from their homes has really spurred an enormous amount of investment There's also a ton of investment in applications of AI and ML, whether it is to privacy. I have an investment in a company called Gretel, but just more generally across in different kinds of applications. I think that part is incredibly exciting right now. I would say from like an investing perspective, enterprise fintech, just incredible opportunities to create great companies. And of course, there are also consumer hits. Like Clubhouse, which are, which are fabulous to see.

We'd love to ask you our hero question for our podcast. We ask this to all of our guests. Who is a woman that has had a profound impact on your career?

I'd probably point to my friend and colleague Diane Tang. I worked with her pretty much for the entirety of my 15 years at Google. You know, she was part of my team for 10 of those. 15 years. She's Google's first female engineering fellow, and it's an accomplishment that I'm likely as proud of as she is, if not more. Amazing engineer, amazing thinker, amazing communicator. Many of kind of the brilliant innovations in ads quality having to do with things like how do you really figure out the long-term value of showing an ad which answered many questions around things like what is the optimal revenue for Google Search to be making. She also pioneered, along with other folks, an entire area of analysis called UI analysis, which is around— which is the science of how you measure the impact of changes in Google Search's UI. She's had a huge impact on how I think about problems and how the entirety of Google and Google Ads thinks about these problems. And in many ways, our careers also, like, they've progressed in parallel, but she's probably the one that's kind of had the most impact on my thinking, on my teams, and honestly on Google as a whole.

Thank you so much for sharing that. And on a more personal note, would love to get a sense of what's next for you.

I guess at least for the next few years, the, the biggest goal is going to be to get Niva to what I think of as a sustainable point, which is where, let's say, like, we're making more money than we spend and we're able to actually create this great search product that I've been dreaming of. That is an important professional goal, and there's time to be spent with family. My younger son is going to be graduating from college this year. Unfortunately, he's finishing up in pandemic year, but he's going to start a new job in June. The younger one's a sophomore. So hopefully some semblance back to normalcy, like being able to actually go on a vacation with my wife and children. Small things, but you realize more than ever that you can't really take these for granted.

Thank you so much, Sridhar, for sharing your multifaceted journey of being at Google and a venture partner and now a founder and a dad all at the same time. It's just been such a treat to chat with you. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Thank you, Madison. Thank you, Claudia. I really appreciate the time and the questions.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Room. If you enjoyed our conversation, please like, follow, subscribe, talk to us in Clubhouse, and share with friends. We'll be back next week with Allison Barr-Allen, co-founder and COO of Fast, the one-click checkout and login platform for online shopping, airing Tuesday, March 16th at 10 AM Eastern, 7 AM Pacific. See you in the room.

All opinions expressed by Claudia Madison and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of The Five EC. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.