Hey there! Welcome to the Marketer Of The Month blog!

We recently interviewed Bryan McCann for our monthly podcast – ‘Marketer of the Month’! We had some amazing insightful conversations with Bryan and here’s what we discussed about-

1. Founding Moments of the Search Engine.

2. AI’s Historical Conception and emphasis on current advancements.

3. Top three leadership insights from Salesforce.

4. Foresees evolving search expectations, emphasizing a shift from ad-centric models to aiding users.

5. Envisions You.com as a hub for personalized information.

6. Role of Algorithms in Search Engines.

About our host:

Dr. Saksham Sharda is the Chief Information Officer at Outgrow.co. He specializes in data collection, analysis, filtering, and transfer by means of widgets and applets. Interactive, cultural, and trending widgets designed by him have been featured on TrendHunter, Alibaba, ProductHunt, New York Marketing Association, FactoryBerlin, Digimarcon Silicon Valley, and at The European Affiliate Summit.

About our guest:

Bryan McCann, serving as the Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at You.com, commenced his professional journey at Salesforce, where he held the position of Lead Research Scientist, delving deep into the realm of NLP. He was instrumental in advancing NLP, notably shaping breakthroughs in contextualized word vectors like ELMo and BERT.

EPISODE 147: You-niverse Unlocked: You.com’s Bryan McCann Envisions a Personalized Information Hub

The Intro!

Saksham Sharda: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. I’m your host, Dr. Saksham Sharda, and I’m the creative director at Outgrow. co. And for this month we are going to interview Bryan McCann who is the Co-founder and CTO of You.com.

Bryan McCann: Great to be here. Thank you.

Don’t have time to read? No problem, just watch the Podcast!

Or you can just listen to it on Spotify!

The Rapid Fire Round!

Saksham Sharda: Describe what your organization does in one sentence.

Bryan McCann: Great. You.com is revolutionizing search by reorganizing the world’s data around who you are, and building applications that allow you to search less and do more.

Saksham Sharda: How long does it take you to get ready in the mornings?

Bryan McCann: Depends on the morning. Depends on how early the meeting is, sometimes five minutes when I run out of bed. Sometimes I’ll take some time to get my hair done.

Saksham Sharda: A most valuable skill you’ve learned in life.

Bryan McCann: Learn quickly by listening carefully.

Saksham Sharda: In one sentence, describe one problem that your organization is facing.

Bryan McCann: Search is really broad, and people search for a lot of different things, which makes traditional startup advice around focusing and finding niches particularly challenging.

Saksham Sharda: How do you relax?

Bryan McCann: Exercise, walks, talks, painting, a lot of reading,

Saksham Sharda: Work from home from the office?

Bryan McCann: Well, at You.com we’re all remote. So we all work from home. But we do rent out some offices every once in a while and I enjoy seeing people.

Saksham Sharda: How many hours of sleep can you survive on?

Bryan McCann: Nine.

Saksham Sharda: Biggest mistake of your career?

Bryan McCann: Not taking bigger risks when the opportunities presented themselves.

Saksham Sharda: How many cups of coffee do you drink in a day?

Bryan McCann: None.

Saksham Sharda: What would you be doing in life? If not this?

Bryan McCann: Finding some other way to have a company that helps people live happier and more fulfilling lives.

The Big Questions!

Saksham Sharda: When was the exact moment when you thought about launching your search engine?

Bryan McCann: OK good question. There are two moments, one when I met my co-founder back in 2013. And he had been hacking on a couple of different demos around search. But we didn’t know how the technology could work to make it possible. And then again, back in 2019 and 2020. When we revisited that question after AI and especially natural language processing had made some pretty market advancements, do we understand maybe we could take a crack at this and use AI that understands better? Just to some extent where people are trying to type into a search box. We could start to make progress on that, on that vision from way back in the day when we first met.

Saksham Sharda: So do you think a lot of other ideas around what could have been done with AI well conceived many votes?

Bryan McCann: Absolutely. A lot of what has been the driving force behind a lot of AI research and technology development has been, I think, conceived of and imagined, many, many decades ago. But the computer hardware, the layers of abstraction, we have now to make iteration quick and easy, is allowing us to execute on some of those things and make them possible, not all of them. Still, some of them are starting to feel a little different and more accessible to us now.

Saksham Sharda: So going back to your past, again, what were the top three lessons you learned, working as a lead research scientist at Salesforce?

Bryan McCann: take bigger risks, especially with your research. Find something that you think will force you to think on very long time horizons. And learn as quickly as possible from other people from as much experimentation as you can direct all that towards long-term visions and commitments to things that are ideally simple in concept, but sometimes hard to execute and make work.

Saksham Sharda: So taking all three of these into account what comes to mind when you hear the phrase search engine of tomorrow, what do you think the future holds for you.com?

Bryan McCann: The first thing that comes to mind is you.com. I think in the future, we’re going to see people’s expectations around search change a little bit. I think for you.com Especially we want to focus on helping will search less and do more. And get away from some of the kind of ad-addicted kind of attention economy that’s developed around search and many other things as a consequence of how searches are framed, and how we interact with the rest of the web. So we’re gonna keep working on, like I said, reorganizing the world’s information, not around what kind of information it is, or, or around advertisements and your attention, but more around what you’re trying to do at the moment. And building things into a search that might surprise people that they don’t think of as normally being part of the search, things like AI that helps you write essays and marketing copy AI that helps you write code, generate images, from text, things like this, that has AI and every industry accelerates, and the search becomes fragmented you.com can become a place where we reimagine search, and what it can be doing for us.

Saksham Sharda: So what would you have to say for people who are afraid that this is going to lead to job losses in the market or something?          

Bryan McCann: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think a lot of AI could force us to transition. And you know, the skill, we educate and shift towards a different kind of labor, different kinds of jobs. And it’s not necessarily going to be an easy thing to do. Ultimately, I hope that we’re creating AI, including search, that allows people to spend less time and energy on the things that they don’t want to be doing anyway. And they can spend more time on things that allow them to have more fulfilling lives, whether that’s generating images late at night, instead of you know, like working night shifts or something like that. If we can move more towards that, I think overall hope as a society and a community, we can navigate those tough transition points.

Saksham Sharda: And what role do you think algorithms or artificial intelligence bots play when it comes to search engines?

Bryan McCann: Well, they’re essential at this point. AI is pretty much the only way we know of different forms of AI, maybe other large language models, inverted index indices, and things like that. All these really powerful statistical methods and all the different kinds of machine learning and algorithms we’re developing are crucial for finding what we’re looking for when sometimes we don’t quite know exactly what we’re looking for. In a world that’s increasingly complicated, complicated, and has a lot more information every day that we have to sift through, it’s just not something that we’ll be able to do ourselves and AI will have to be there to help us do it.

Saksham Sharda: So I’m gonna repeat the question, the previous one, what would you be doing in your life if not this?

Bryan McCann: I would be finding some other way to help people live happier and more fulfilling lives.

Let’s Conclude!

Saksham Sharda: Thanks, everyone for joining us for this month’s episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. That was Bryan McCann who is the Co-founder and CTO of You.com.

Bryan McCann: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Saksham Sharda: Check out the website for more details and we’ll see you once again next month with another marketer of the month.