The Information: Search Has Its Goliath. Could Richard Socher Be Its David?
Socher started working on You.com in 2020, convinced that he could build a better search engine with AI. Still, the idea of out-Googling Google seemed like a long shot. “I’ve had very smart people and investors say, ‘Richard, why would you build a search company? The space is dead. It’s never going to work. It’s a monopoly. It’s a fool’s errand,’” he told me recently.
But three years later, the future that Socher had imagined, anticipated and prototyped has suddenly and dramatically arrived. What once seemed like a quixotic obsession is now the hottest space in tech, and the real fools are those who didn’t see the promise of AI search coming.
