Sarah Wang speaks with Exa cofounder and CEO Will Bryk about building search infrastructure for the AI era.
The conversation covers Exa’s origins, why traditional search engines were not designed for AI agents, and how search changes when the user is no
longer a human but an autonomous system. They discuss retrieval, agent workflows, coding agents, data access, and why search may become a foundational
layer for the emerging agent economy.
Along the way, Bryk shares his views on AI-native products, the future of information discovery, and why some of the most important problems in technology can ultimately be framed as search problems.
Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 00:55 - Exa Origin Story 02:35 - Beating Google With LLMs 09:00 - Search Built For Agents 26:01 - Tokenpocalypse and
Retrieval 29:21 - RL for Better Search 32:23 - Benchmarks and Agentic TAM 44:20 - Culture Hiring and Wrap
Resources: Find Will on X: https://x.com/WilliamBryk Find Sarah on X: https://x.com/sarahdingwang
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