How a first-time CEO is taking on Google: No process, no NPC hires, and extreme shipping velocity
Will Bryk · Co-founder & CEO, Exa
Will Bryk was working as one of the first engineers at Cresta, writing a book about the history of civilization on the side, when the research started to feel absurd. “Google is great for surface-level investigations,” he says. “But it is not built to find every article on what people ate in medieval times across different regions of the world.” The frustration with accessibility of information went back to high school. He recalls thinking how ridiculous it is that we can split the atom and get to the moon, but still find it hard to understand what is happening at the border. To him, that’s an error in humanity.
Then GPT-3 arrived, and with it, the possibility of a different kind of search engine. Will and his college roommate Jeff Wang started Exa in 2021 with the lofty goal of building one better than Google. Five years on, Exa has raised $250 million at a $2.2 billion valuation led by a16z, its crawlers track over 500 billion URLs, and it powers search for Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot and more than 5,000 companies.
In this conversation, Will walks through how he runs the company making that bet. Why he gets genuinely upset when someone tries to introduce a process. What a non-playable character is and why Exa screens them out. Why the “bitter lesson” works on compute but not on people. And why a founder whose role models are Spider-Man and Ethan Hunt from Mission Impossible says he has not had a single thought about burnout in the past couple of years.
Will Bryk is the co-founder and CEO of Exa, which builds web search infrastructure for AI agents. Exa’s search API powers Cursor, Cognition, HubSpot, OpenRouter and Monday.com, and the company today serves more than 400,000 developers. Bryk co-founded Exa with Jeff Wang out of Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 batch, and the company raised its $250 million round from Andreessen Horowitz in May 2026. Before Exa, Will was one of the first engineers at Cresta, where he built real-time AI products. He studied computer science and physics at Harvard University, where he researched human-AI interaction and led the robotics club.
The most quotable moments from Will Bryk
“That to me is just an error in humanity. Why can’t they figure out how to share information in a normal way? Why is everything politicized? I always thought this was ridiculous, and I don’t accept it.”
“I think you could solve a lot of problems with culture, not process.”
“A month is an insane amount of time. Nothing should ever take a month to ship at Exa.”
“We really try to avoid non-playable characters. People who just go through life as if they’re on a stream and they have no agency over themselves.”
“If you actually think about what burnout is, it’s wheels turning but not moving.”
“Perfect alignment within the company, on what is most important and why this matters. This is my mission, if I choose to accept it.”