Rajiv was my mentor and advisor from the very start of my first-time founder journey as the CTO of you.com . He provided invaluable perspectives as my role as CTO changed as quickly as the company grew.
In the first weeks and months, he advised me on how to structure the initial team and build a product from scratch with a small number of highly effective engineers. Many of his initial technical recommendations that I adopted remain part of our architecture, and his leadership experience gave me starting points from which to adapt 1:1s, team meetings, and product development as a whole. Especially when the team was small, Rajiv’s intuition on people and organizational dynamics shaped both how we operated day-to-day as well as how I prepared myself for future stages of the company. While I could easily have spent every waking moment on the short-term needs of the company, Rajiv pushed me to structure time and my team in a way that we could maintain course towards a long-term strategic vision.
As the team grew and our products became more developed, Rajiv continually proved adept in assessing our unique strengths as a team operating within an increasingly competitive landscape. His input guided us in small product decisions and large strategic ones. In particular, Rajiv helped me build conviction in exploring B2B API offerings, which a year later became the cornerstone upon which the company raised capital, doubled the size of the team, and began to accelerate revenue growth at a blistering pace.
Rajiv has a remarkable talent for fostering high-trust relationships, which stems from the core of generosity and empathy that is instantly apparent in talking with him. From the day we incorporated you.com to this day, I have trusted him with everything big and small in work and in life, and he has always exceeded my expectations. He is a joy to work with, always leaving me motivated and excited about the future no matter how difficult the challenges immediately before me. He understands that people are more than any particular role, that roles themselves change over time, and this allowed him to support me holistically as you.com and I made our way through an often unpredictable landscape.
It has been my joy to also see him venture out into new endeavors during the same time period. He has followed his passions, made big bets, and consistently pursued his vision for himself and those he works with in a way that truly befits a leader. I am eager to follow his journey and continue to learn from him.
Bryan McCann ( LinkedIn ) is co-founder and CTO of You.com , the first AI chat powered search assistant company founded in 2020 by Richard Socher ( LinkedIn ) and Bryan. Bryan previously led Artificial Intelligence research in Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing (NLP) at Salesforce . Bryan’s AI research work has been cited thousands of times , and he has spoken about the cutting edge of AI and NLP around the world.