Free Search is a Trap | Kagi's CEO Vlad on Building a New Internet

Hello everyone.

I'm Vishnu.

I'm the founder and CEO of Ente Today I have the pleasure of talking to a founder that I look up to, Vladimir Prelovoc or Vlad for short.

Vlad is a founder and CEO of Kagi.

For those unaware, Kagi is a search engine just like Google, but unlike Google, you have to pay to use Kagi.

It might sound unusual to pay for a search engine, but Kagi charges you for using their product instead of treating you like their product.

And Kagi does not show ads.

does not try to manipulate you and does not try to sell you stuff.

Hello Vlad Thank you for joining us.

I would like to start at the beginning.

When did you realize that the best use of what time would be to build Kagi and what led you to that point?

led you to that point?

First of all, thank you Vishnu for the invitation.

I'm looking forward to our conversation.

uh Kagi started as an idea in 2018.

um It was driven basically by two separate incidents I had with Google, let's say.

One is when I was searching something and there was the sponsor, the result followed by the exact same uh organic result, I guess.

And just seeing those two results, one next to each other, realize made me realize that I'm that my intelligence is being insulted as a user of the product, which I thought was pretty unusual given the company employ some of the smartest engineers on the planet.

And I was thinking, why would somebody in their same mind serve me to exactly same results and that obviously that then led to thinking deeply about Google's incentives business model and why they do choose to do that.

The second incident was that my daughter started elementary school here in Bay Area and in US and they got Chromebooks and all of the Chromebooks have obviously Google suite of products.

And I was terrified of the idea that my kid will be tracked and profiled, you know, for the next 12 years or so until she's an adult.

And those two together led to, well, let's see if we can change that.

Let's see if there can be a better search engine built on a premise that puts users first.

And what kind of business model would work for that?

And that led to the chain of thought ultimately leading up to Kagi creating a subscription-based search engine where the incentives are aligned between the users and uh the search engine.

uh And users pay a small monthly fee to access the product like you do for almost any other product in your life.

uh Like you don't walk into a coffee shop and expect to get free coffee.

Why would you do that for something as important as information consumption?

So that's how Kagi was born.

And I'm sure we have opportunity to talk more in depth.

What it looks like today.

Right, so what were the early days of Kagi like?

you alone in this or did you have some friends with you?

Yeah, the early days I bootstrapped the business, ah finding people around the world that were crazy enough to join me on this journey.

um It's pretty unusual how daring I guess it was from this perspective.

Basically the original team of about seven people had one guy, I told him, You're going to build a browser.

Then there was another guy, I told him, you're going to build the maps.

I was another guy.

uh You're going to figure out this AI thing.

And then to be fair to search, I appointed two guys to that.

So you guys are going to create a search engine.

And then we had another one do all the front end work, the website and all the interfaces.

So we started as a half a dozen people working on some of the most ambitious and challenging software projects imaginable.

Search browser, maps implementing AI and all that.

And so it was pretty scary, I guess, but also exciting because we saw so much opportunity and all these other products that were driven by misaligned incentives.

really provided bad ah user experience.

So we did see a lot of opportunity to improve that in the browser, in search engine, and more recently as Kagi ecosystem evolves and matures, we launched Kagi Translate, Kagi News working on Kagi email.

So uh the ambition is not lacking.

I would say even seven years after.

Still ambitious, obviously the team is much bigger now, almost 50 people.

Wow, 50 folks, that's You mentioned the word incentives in there, right?

And I've noted that KAGI is registered as a public benefit corporation.

And for those listening, uh PBC, public benefit corporation, a structure that allows a company to pursue a specific benefit alongside its for-profit goals.

And uh so reading out from your charter, it says that KAGI is committed to creating a more human-centric and sustainable web.

that benefits individuals, and society as a whole with a transparent business model that aligns the incentives of everyone involved.

So my question is, why did you decide to structure Kage this way?

And why did you choose this particular structure over a non-profit or like a for-profit or non-profit with a for-profit subsidiary, which is perhaps more common if you look at other companies in the space like Ozilla or Proton and so on.

Yeah that's a great question.

So PBC is a relatively new concept in the US.

Any C corporation can elect to become a PBC, which makes that process pretty easy.

You basically just check a checkbox.

And what PBC allows you basically is to pursue a public benefit uh in addition to obviously shareholder interest at every every corporation is obliged to and it's sort of best of both worlds because it does give

you the freedom of being a corporation and the simplicity of it but also you have additional protection shall we say in terms of how you as a founder and CEO run the company because uh the mission statement of the company now also plays a role.

And this is great, I would say great solution for mission driven companies like Kagi and yours, I guess.

And it really very flexible, super easy to set up.

And what it does basically in terms of, you know, practical gains is, uh for example, Kagi uh Kagi accepted about 90 investors from our user base.

uh any single one of them could basically in US force Kagi to make a decision to sell, for example, if you get a good offer.

And I don't like the offer.

But one of those investors likes the offer and says this is reasonable.

If you're just a C corporation, they could take you to court, for example, and force you to sell.

The PBC allows you to have that breathing room as a founder and CEO and say, because of our mission, I don't believe the sale would be beneficial to Kagi, our user base and what we are trying to achieve for society.

And therefore I can for example resist the acquisition.

I'm just giving one very plastic example that sort of illustrates the power that PBC gives you.

and this is, I think a wonderful blend between a pure corporation and a non-profit.

So once we found a bar that we embraced that and as I say, the process was simple.

You just make an election in your C-Corp charter and that's it.

So do you have any thoughts on why other companies like Mozilla or Signal, maybe not Signal, I Signal is a bad example, but let's say Mozilla, example, because they're headquartered at the same place.

Like, do know, or do you have any thoughts on why they might not have adopted this model and why they're sticking to the model they have right now?

I don't.

Every company is driven by their own goals.

eh Perhaps even they don't know.

It's a fairly new thing and I only learned about it last year.

um But ah yeah, I'm not sure you would have to ask them.

Cool.

See again I'll continue on the line on incentives.

There are a couple of things that Kagia has done differently from other companies in this space.

Firstly being that it's a paid product, it's not subsidized by ads.

And this morning I was talking to my wife about it while I was on my way to work and she was thoroughly confused because paying to use a search engine is unheard of.

And in hindsight at this point, maybe this seems rational, but I'm sure you've had to face your fair share of skeptics along the way.

Curious you know what gave you the conviction to play this game the way that you're playing it.

Well, it is the conviction that is the right thing to do.

Again I gave the example of coffee.

If you walked in into coffee shop and you got your coffee for free every morning and there is a stranger in the corner of the room paying for it and you don't know them, I bet you would you would think that's unusual at the very least.

And you probably would not accept that coffee because you would be asking yourself why somebody paying for my coffee every day.

It can't be right.

So I'd argue that information consumption in getting search results in this case is even more important than coffee because information shapes are thoughts beliefs who we are.

This is where we get information about education, medicine, uh science, politics.

And to have an intermediary paying for your searches also you see not what is in your best interest, but what is in their best interest is at the very least terrifying at worst leads to dystopia.

So it is pretty clear to me that for information consumption, important information consumption, you want the incentives of the information provider to be aligned with yours.

Now not all information consumption is as important.

Sometimes you read the news, which is mostly entertainment these days.

And I would argue that Google today is also its values for entertainment purposes at most.

because of the business model.

the information you consume on Google should be understood for entertainment purposes at best.

You still need to do a lot of your own research because you never know if the information served was indeed the best information possible.

And when you compare your card results to Google results, and as so many people do, you immediately start noticing the differences.

ah It's not just the lack of ads because an ad blocker can.

can deal with that.

It's the algorithms we do to, em for example, we downrank websites that have a lots of ads themselves because the quality of information with such websites is pretty low.

And many, many other things to really try and surface the most relevant results for the user.

um And we have every incentive to do that because if we don't show to our customers that we are many, many times better than any search engine out there.

They would never pay because as your wife says, why would you?

When there's so many other free alternatives.

So we are that one paid coffee shop in your town where every other coffee shop is free.

And there's a stranger in the room paying for your coffee every day and you're fine with that.

We are the new one that open and say Hey You pay $2, you get coffee, and we're going to make the best coffee in the world.

How about that?

So that's what coffee is.

Right.

Again, I think in hindsight, a lot of this seems very clear, but it's great that again, if you think about it from first principles, right, all of this makes sense.

And this is similar to, we have a different analogy for instead of coffee shops.

I tell folks, don't like if you're photographer who was printing out your photos, so then they would keep a copy of your family's photos and then they would use it for whatever, would you be okay with it?

And then they're not, but suddenly when it's not in print and then it's in the cloud, you kind of just forget about it.

m Anyway, yeah, cool.

it's actually really nice to see how we're thinking about this because there is some level of parallel that I can personally draw.

anyway, okay, so moving on, right, you had mentioned a bunch of projects initially that that Kagi is up to since the beginning.

And first thing that you mentioned was actually a browser.

And I do think that's one of the more interesting things that Kagi has built because for variety of reasons, one is that it's a massive project in itself, right?

And It's also not uncommon for search engines to deploy their own browsers like that go as a browser, brave as a browser.

And Google of course came up with a browser, is perhaps the reason why they're still alive and kicking.

But I'm guessing on some level they kind of did this to reduce the dependency on browser defaults because having your own browser means that there's one layer of abstraction between your search engine and the customer.

But again, building and maintaining a browser is a massive exercise.

And the rest of the folks I mentioned, like even if you would ignore Google, they Doctor Goes, I think that raised like 100 million dollars and Bravest raised around 50 million dollars and Kagi on the other hand to me seems to be playing a far more sustainable game and Orion is somehow not fitting into that mentoring model that I have for Kagi.

So could you share the motivation behind building and maintaining Orion and like what your long-term plans for it are?

Sure.

from day one, the idea was that we will create an ecosystem of products and not be a single product company because you cannot compete in this space with a single product.

And many search engines and browsers that failed before Kagi, think, are evidence for that.

And the reason is simple.

If you're just a search engine and your customer is using your competitor's browser and competitor's email, ah then your competitor has a lot of friction points to win them back, especially if the cost of their product is zero, the monetary price.

So it was pretty clear to me that we will have to create the whole ecosystem to holistically replace the big tech ecosystems. So we started working on the browser and search engine from day one.

Actually we started working on the browser first.

We didn't raise $50 million, but I did raise a guy in India.

And his name is Dinesh.

And he was the only guy working on the browser for the first uh three or four years or something like that.

So this $50 million doesn't get you that level of uh commitment devotion ingenuity.

ah and all props to Dinesh for building what was the base of Orion.

Now the team is expanded, but I was using Orion back in those days as well as my main driver.

And really the idea behind Orion is not just to complement search.

Even today when you install Orion, Kaggy is not set as a default search engine.

And we ask you which one you want.

The idea was that browser is even more intimate tool than search.

You are in your browser eight, 10 hours a day.

It's the most intimate piece of software you have on your computer.

It's the most important piece of software you have on your computer.

And what did most people pay for it?

Zero.

And it's...

it's...

And building a browser is incredibly expensive.

So it's even worse than search.

People should be asking themselves, why is it there's somebody somewhere, complete stranger paying for my browser?

Because I'm not.

And so the idea is we will again create a browser that's very transparent, zero telemetry, privacy respecting in a true sense of the world, and the business model for the browser is that you pay for it.

So Orion is again a paid product.

There's a free version, but you can also pay $5 a month or we have a lifetime license of 150 and you basically own your browser.

um And it wasn't unusual to pay for the browser, unlike search, until 20 years ago, we used to pay for browsers.

Browsers came in these packages that you would pay, like you would buy a browser like any other software.

uh It's only when the browser's business model started being driving traffic to ads, then they became free.

but I thought that was rubbish and that we as users deserve a better option.

And really the purpose of Orion is to be a general purpose browser that has your best interest in mind at all times.

It comes with a built-in ad as content blocker, that state of the art.

It's zero telemetry by default and you can pay to own it.

And there are no back doors.

There's no...

no...

There's nothing shady going on.

It's not sending any data to us.

ah Really, it's the user's browser.

So it's extending the Kagis philosophy of creating a user-friendly, user-centric ecosystem that respects the users and does not have any intermediaries between the user and us.

Now that you said there is a monetization plan for it, all of this makes sense.

And thanks to the niche for like exciting this thing.

I yeah, thanks in a straight.

That's it.

ah So now I'll want to rewind things a bit.

It's been around a year, I think, since we last met back then.

You'd give me a very short story on how you ended up in San Francisco, which I thought was very interesting.

And for the benefit of those listening, could you please share your origin story like one got you into programming and What is the first thing you built and like how did you end up where you are right now?

Yeah, and just for listeners, we, and I met in Palo Alto.

I think you were on a business trip.

And we had a coffee at my favorite coffee place here.

ah So yeah, I started with computers in 83.

I was seven.

I got my first computer was Commodore 64.

um I got a manual in German, which I did not know, but still did not prevent me from teaching myself basic and started programming basically from the day one.

uh And then throughout the education, I eventually dropped out of college in 2000 and ah just started working as a freelancer um on one of those many freelancing websites.

um And eventually I got bored with that in 2010, just doing it all by myself.

And in 2010 decided I will create a company with a couple of friends.

so it happened.

And we created a company.

had some money through my freelancing and things like that.

I also published a book on WordPress development, which was pretty...

was pretty...

pretty popular those days.

So I had some money, I gathered a couple of people, rented a small office, and incorporated it.

That was 2010.

The problem is I had no plan.

my incentive was I was bored doing this alone in my home.

I wanted some guys to do something with.

So it's three or four of us in our office.

We show up day one for work and we look at each other like, what now?

So the company started working on just so crazy ideas, crazy projects.

And they were not just that crazy, but we had no chance and we had no experience building, shipping, distributing a product.

And we are doing all this from Serbia.

So there's not a developed scene for all of that and things like that.

So for the first year or two, we were just basically spending my savings.

We made zero revenue.

And then a friend of mine suggested that we should build a platform for managing WordPress sites, which was a great idea.

It turned out we built that, uh gathered some community.

I already had the influence in that community as someone who participated for years.

And when we launched that, we had hundreds of people pay on day one, which is the best thing you can imagine for a bootstrap startup, obviously.

And you know, long story short, a few years from there I got an acquisition offer from GoDaddy in 2016.

They wanted to acquire that company which we eventually arranged and this is how I ended up in Silicon Valley.

Cool story.

So were you in Serbia throughout your life or were you moving around?

So I was born in a country called Yugoslavia that doesn't exist anymore.

uh And then Yugoslavia fell apart in the 90s in a bloody war, unfortunately.

I was born in present day Croatia.

I grew up in Bosnia and then I moved to Serbia.

So I'm sort of all over the place, a classical Yugoslavian, if you would like.

And yeah, the Yugoslav identity is still sort of a pretty strong part of me.

And I'm very sorry that the country doesn't exist anymore.

It was a great country.

So what are your like some of your best memories from a childhood?

um It was just the country was great.

The people are great, very generous, very friendly.

The country had everything from mountains and skiing to phenomenal ah seaside.

uh It was just a very amazing country to grow up in.

The Yugoslav passport in the 1780s was one of the most sought out in the world because of Yugoslav's neutrality.

Both East and West respected Yugoslavia, so the passport was one that opened most borders.

um From my point as a kid, it was just a phenomenal country to grow up in.

and my childhood was as happy as it gets.

We were not richer or anything by any standard.

Everybody was, it was a socialist country.

So everybody was sort of the same, had the same amount of resources, but that was enough.

And I remember that I ate my first banana like in 87 or something.

I was like 12 or 13.

It was not easy to get bananas in.

in a socialist country back then.

um But I didn't mind like it was all part of growing up and you know, the childhood is as happy as it could get.

From my point of That is nice.

I did not know about the neutrality bit.

That's new information.

That's good to know.

uh uh and the independent movement.

So Tito created it with Nehru and Nasser of Egypt.

I forgot the other country, but they basically created sort of anti-East and West.

So there was the Soviet bloc, there was the, you know, the Western NATO bloc, and these three guys created it.

completely new block that had like 100 countries in it.

I was sort of independent and not belonging to either East or West.

um So it was interesting from a political standpoint how they managed all that and that doesn't exist, I guess, in that form anymore.

And the world is pretty polar I would assume.

uh Especially if you live in the I don't know what it looks like from your perspective there.

ah I think things are equally polar here for a very different set of reasons.

even for, I think for customers, think both Kagi and Ente are getting to a customer base, which is very aware of this issue center, is folks who are mostly hang out on the internet.

I guess a lot of internet is now very polarized.

And this is why we are on the topic of geopolitics, right?

Like there is this one thread that had seen earlier today where Kagi was getting some flack for your dependency on Yandex.

which is a Russian company that provides such indexes.

And I'm asking this because at ATA, we receive some amount of criticism for having based the company out of the US and some for where we are from and the latter is unfortunate.

uh But I'm someone who does not believe in borders.

And I'm guessing that as someone who's from a country that does not exist anymore, you would have even fewer reasons to believe in borders.

And so I'm curious to know how you handle criticism related to geopolitics.

Well, we have a pretty firm set of beliefs and really the politics is not influencing any decision that we are making.

We're trying to make all decisions to the best benefit of the customer because that's what they're paying us for.

So I'm pretty apolitical especially in my professional life.

I would never discuss politics uh in my professional capacity and I even rarely discuss it.

personally.

uh And one of the reasons is not a lot of people understand what I went through and my understanding of politics is very different to somebody who, for example, grew up here in US and everything is about left and right.

And in my view, I was a refugee of two world wars twice and was running away from being shot.

twice in my life as a kid basically.

And so my understanding of politics is very different than somebody else's and it's usually not worth while going deeper you don't have time.

So I appreciate and respect everybody's view of politics, but it's not something I would engage on because I just understand that for everybody it's a very deep and personal topic and you can never almost by definition reach understanding.

So it's not time well spent, if you ask me.

And I think politics is the only human activity where you can not ever win.

You can just delay losing.

Like even like in US, there's George Washington, you know, one of the founding fathers.

And today there are people who you know, we would be saying bad things about him and things like that.

Not to go very political, I'm just illustrating an example where you cannot win, you can just delay losing.

It's just a matter of fact when somebody will, you know, dig out something to have against you as a politician.

So I never aspire to be one.

It's interesting how think both of us have grown up with very different environmental variables, but I think I have a very similar thought process on this at this point.

And anyway, I like you said, the lesser we talk about politics, the better.

So moving on, we spend some time talking about the past and the present.

And now I'd like to talk about the future because on your website, you mentioned that this little bit wherein you're building aagiyas, a tribute to your children.

I found very touching because I have a daughter and she was not there when I started Entei and now since she has come in my reasons for building the company has at least the depth of the reason has actually increased quite a bit.

And I'm curious to know what is your long term vision for Kagi?

What do you hope to leave behind?

Well I'm not planning on leaving anytime soon.

ah But um yeah, it's really the idea of creating a user-friendly alternative to big tech.

That's what Kaggy is about.

ah And it's building a suite of products that will allow one to get on the web, consume information.

and know that their best interest is protected at every single point in time in return for a small monthly subscription.

So the transaction is very clear.

It's the one that makes sense and makes incentives aligned and allows you as a customer to walk away with your wallet if you're not satisfied with anything that CalGEE does.

If you are not listening to your feedback, fixing bugs or creating new features, you're going to walk away.

with your wallet, which is the most powerful kind of protest you have, which by the way, you don't have in most of the tech companies today.

You cannot walk away with your wallet from Google as you're not, you're not the one paying for the transaction.

So, so we're going to continue and expand the ecosystem.

I see four core products as a part of it, the search browser.

email and the AI assistant.

And then we are building a whole suite of companion products that integrate well into these core products and provide additional value.

Apps like Kagi News, Kagi Translate, and in the future Kagi Maps.

basically allowing you full independence of the big tech.

ah And again, for a small monthly fee, you get high quality products that are designed ah with really huge passion for product and in your best interest as a customer.

So that's the vision for Kagi.

uh And the best part of that vision is the company does not need to become a Google killer or have billions of users.

um you know, just uh half a million users or five million users, which I sort of set as our goal as a company right now is enough for this to be big enough of a company to make an impact.

So that's pretty cool.

And I would really like serving five million or so customers, um which would give us fantastic resources to serve them even better than we can today.

uh That's what like yeah let's hit 50 million.

Hope that makes sense.

All the cool things that you said, is one product in a particularly interesting which is Kagi Mail.

What can you tell us about it?

Um, so I had ideas of building email even before I started Kagi.

My most uh my oldest notes go back to like 20, or 2012.

So I was always fascinated by email.

and it is this sort of, uh, immutable nature of email.

It has survived decades without changing a lot.

that fascinated me and it's also something where you spend a lot of time.

So it was clear to me that we will be building mail at some point and now we are, it's actually in an alpha preview state and we have a few dozen people testing it already.

It is a full end-to-end email stack so it's not just an email client.

We are not building an email client actually.

So we are building a full end-to-end stack, and then we will have full control of.

And some of the design goals for that were that it has to be incredibly fast and has to be incredibly simple.

And with AI proliferating in the recent years, we saw a lot of opportunity to implement it in a useful way, not like Gmail is summarizing my emails and I cannot turn it off and it frustrates me a lot.

But in a way to let's say you can say like filter all messages from my mom and label them as mom is I think something that is useful in the context of email where AI can be ah implemented thoughtfully.

So I'm looking forward to releasing this.

Hopefully it happens in the next few months.

We can go to the open beta.

And one of the other things that it will do, it will leverage the Kagi ecosystem.

So the idea is you can send an email and request search results, for example, or you can search for stuff while you're writing email.

Or if you're searching in Kagi, you can elect to search through your emails as well and surface them.

So all these all sorts of integration that it's astonishing to me that nobody did and then Google could have, Microsoft could have, but none of this exists.

And it's just mind blowing to me that you would not integrate your product portfolio in that way.

But that is definitely the plan.

And then some other.

Products of ours will integrate into this as well.

For example, Translate is going to integrate natively into Mail and things like that.

So yeah, pretty excited about this.

Can't wait to move my 20 gig Gmail archive over to Kagi Mail and start using it as my primary source.

Yes I was very cool.

I mean, I'm also looking forward it personally for my personal use case.

And mail is one thing, right?

You did mention a bunch of other products as well, like there's Assistant, there's Translate, there's a browser, and there's my favorite that you launched recently, just Kagi News.

And there is a some amount of concern that I can see on Hacker News and like a forum where in customers, I think this is a very common that happens where in customers have this thing where in they see their favorite company doing more and they start burying that.

We're spreading ourselves too thin.

How do you reassure these folks that you know what you're doing?

Do you see the same problem ah with your user community?

It hasn't started yet, but I do foresee it happening because so far we've been focusing just on photos.

And at this point, for a variety of reasons, we are, we've started building more things, like at least one more product, the locker product we're building wherein we can just upload some files and I can assign those files to my wife so that she gets it when I'm not around.

A lot of things from a posterity perspective, not really a drive product, but at the same time, we're kind of prioritizing some of those products over features on photos and I know inevitably people will start asking that, dude, like why do you like fixing or like shipping those features while you started a new product?

And I see this in other ecosystems as well.

I see Proton running into this issue all the time.

And today I was checking out a Cardi thread when I saw a similar comment there, which is when I was wondering like, do you respond to these folks?

Well, there is a funny answer and a serious answer.

The funny answer is, you know, we built search with two guys and now we have 50 guys.

So other people need to do something.

um But ah when I say guys, I mean both boys and girls.

And.

This is the more serious answer is.

First, in what we are doing, you cannot be a single product company and hope to succeed, um which I already talked about.

So you have to create an ecosystem and you need to offer a holistic solution.

So when a family wants to move to Kaggy, they are able to move all their online services to it, so to speak.

um And this is what really creates, I think, uh the biggest alignment.

If you are a Kagi Search customer, but you have to use Chrome, then you're getting only half of the benefit of our vision.

So for that reason, we have to expand our product portfolio.

m about the choice of these, we call them companion apps like Translate and News.

We are usually opportunistic about these and wage if they are simple enough to build but provide long term benefit.

And when you ask that question, then the answer is at least for the apps that we publish is usually yes, like news is instrumental for information consumption.

ah It is what Kagi is in the business of.

So, and we had a pretty cool idea how to change news.

I don't know if you've tried Kagi News.

It brings a very fresh view on the news.

It updates only once a day.

It removes all the anxiety doom scrolling.

And it is news created with the purpose of informing and educating citizens.

It is not, you know, news created with the purpose of monetizing views with ads, which is what most of the news in the world are.

So when we have a fresh take on a subject there and it seems viable to build it, we kind of build it.

I was the guy who made Kagi News.

Like the first version it was me, the CEO coding.

And that was until six or so months ago, then there was another guy who basically took it over.

And then we had somebody build the app.

So the total, you know, human resource investment is like two people.

And the first concept was built like me.

It's not like it derailed us from building better search.

um So that's what most people do not understand how these projects come to life.

And we passed on many, other ideas because they did not fulfill one of those two conditions.

Either they will not fit into our long-term vision and product integration or they were too complicated to do.

So we passed on many, many ideas that people do not know about.

But yeah, so from my standpoint, when we build something like news or translate, not only did we not make search worse or something or fail to make it better, I would...

I would say that everybody can agree that Kagi Search is getting better each day.

And every time I ask these critics, ah they are sort of quiet because they can read the changelog and acknowledge that every week or every two weeks these days, we publish a bunch of new features and bug fixes and things like that.

um So not only did it not slow down development of the other products they like, I think uh this long-term benefit of product integration, how you can go into Orion browser and translate any page.

You can go into Kaggy search results and translate any page in your language.

That's a huge thing that would not have existed without Kaggy Translate.

And you'll soon be able to wake up and ask Kaggy, what are the news?

And eh you will personalize it.

will know what what topics you like and maybe it will read it to you.

And then you might as a user, you know, understand the benefits of having an ecosystem and the company that build products you can trust and rely on.

So yeah, it's complicated, but we do not take these decisions lightly.

It's always a serious discussion because we are also aware uh of our resources and things like that.

But as I say, we have 50 very talented people that can each build a product on their own.

And we are nowhere near 50 products.

Yes.

what you said about uh complementing, mean, see, in general, feel, cities that actually aligned at least the long term between customers and the company because uh they're like the more it's actually important for the companies to grow so that we can actually serve those folks better.

And to grow, it's actually important for us to play some bets.

You're right.

I missed to say that these products also play a strategic role as a distribution channel, which is super important because Kaggy does not invest in advertising.

the more products you have basically provides more ways for people to discover you.

And we have many people who discover Kaggy through the browser and more recently through news and translate.

especially in Asia.

We have fantastic reception both for the news product and the translate product in Asia.

many, think Japan is our now third uh source of traffic overall for the website.

And it's mainly because of translate.

So instead of investing in advertising, we're investing in product development and these products that serve as the distribution channel that bring people.

to your ecosystem and then if the rest of the ecosystem is good, eventually they would embrace the whole ecosystem.

So that's the strategic idea behind all of that.

Right.

And for those listening, you have already, please check out Kagi News.

It makes what is or what would otherwise be a very painful overload of information easy to consume.

And these are some of the projects that make me hopeful that the Internet is actually headed in a direction that I can keep consuming it.

So thank you for building it.

And on that note, talking of hope, there is this beautiful post that I had read on your website about your dinner with David Ribbon.

And I'm not sure if I got the last name right, but Basically the post talks about this game that you played when you were eight years old called the Light, wherein you could command spaceships and explore galaxies.

You said that the game actually had a huge influence on you and who you grew up to be and inducing a level of optimism about where we are headed as a species.

And now we are here, it's like 40 years later.

And I would like to wrap up this conversation by asking you what makes you hopeful for the future?

I think in the nearest sense, it's the companies like ours and yours that are built with true passion for those you're serving.

Because innately, I believe humans are good and want to do good things.

So if we can do that, not just in our personal lives, but also in our work.

think this is what leaves a big influence and big mark on the society.

And it just so happens that the last couple of decades, we have been obsessed as a society with free stuff without really thinking through the consequences of that.

um mainly talking about online, not just in the context of search and browsing, but also social media and things like that.

And I think we are starting to understand as a society that we have been paying the price all this time, whether in loss of productivity, change of behavior, mental health issues and all that, which are not small prices to pay.

So I am really encouraged by seeing companies like yours and others that are coming uh to life and founders really wanting to change the world for the better for their own kids, understanding that it doesn't matter how rich

you are, if your kid lives in a world where, you know, they will not have it as good as they Could.

uh So these kind of things make me hopeful.

uh I think we did lose like 40 years doing the wrong stuff.

And when I was seven and 80s, we were promised jetpacks we were promised jetpacks and flying cars.

I think back to the future, two goes back to like 2023 or something.

the cars are flying and everything and we are nowhere near.

And instead, we have some of the most talented engineers figuring out how to monetize clicks.

um But that cannot last for too long, I think, because there only two ways this plays out.

One is the dystopian version that we see in Terminator and Matrix.

And the other one is Star Trek.

and I'm sort of a Star Trek fan and I think that's where we'll end.

um So yeah, I'm doing my share contributing to the Star Trek version of the future and going boldly where no one gone before.

Yeah.

I think that's a beautiful note to end this conversation on.

Thank you so much for taking all the time.

Vlad, I am glad that there are founders like you were pushing the internet towards a nicer direction where like you said, our children can feel safe.

So thank you for doing what you're doing.

Those who are interested in Kagi, please check out kagi.com.

out kagi.com.

And if you have an entire account, please check out entire.io slash friends to get three months of Kagi for free.

And yeah, that's all folks.

Thank you for listening.

Have a good one.

Thank you very much for having me Vishnu.