Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk

Will Bryk, co-founder and CEO of Exa, speaks with a16z's Sarah Wang about the origins of Exa and his lifelong mission to build perfect search. Bryk describes how his interest in information quality began in childhood and evolved through writing a history book, where he realized Google's surface-level results were inadequate for deep research. He and co-founder Jeff built a crowdsourced search engine in college, then founded Exa in 2021 when Transformer models made it technically feasible to beat Google using neural retrieval systems.

Bryk distinguishes between human search and agentic search, arguing they require fundamentally different systems. While Google is optimized for billions of tired consumers typing imprecise keyword queries, AI agents need comprehensive results (thousands to tens of thousands, not just ten), complex semantic queries, fine-grained controllability, and lower latency. He uses the analogy of building a search engine for sloths versus humans — agents are so different from humans that a human-optimized system simply doesn't serve them well.

On competition with Google, Bryk acknowledges Google excels at consumer use cases but argues it fails at deep, complex queries like finding every competitor in a market, recruiting candidates, or understanding a historical period in depth. He notes that Google's massive click-data advantage is largely irrelevant for agent use cases, and that LLMs have democratized capabilities like re-ranking that previously required hundreds of engineers, enabling Exa's small team to build a superior product for specific use cases.

Bryk discusses the 'tokenpocalypse' — the problem of runaway AI inference costs — and argues that retrieval-augmented systems using smaller models are the solution. He claims Exa can save customers up to 20x on costs by extracting only the most relevant information and enabling smaller models to perform like larger ones. He predicts this shift toward smaller, tool-using models will be clearly visible by end of 2026.

Bryk frames many major societal problems as search problems in disguise: political polarization (people receiving inaccurate information), loneliness (inability to find people with shared interests), and knowledge gaps. He also discusses Exa's go-to-market intelligence product, its use by coding agents like Devin, and research directions including RL on search tools, where Exa outperformed Google-wrapped search in efficiency and quality.

On company culture, Bryk emphasizes passion ('fire in the eye') as the primary hiring criterion, citing the meritocratic opportunity enabled by agentic tools. He describes an environment where engineers work on whatever excites them most, laugh loudly at 8pm, and are unified by the mission of perfect search. He draws leadership inspiration from his SpaceX internship and Elon Musk's detail-orientation and memetic communication style.