He Sold A Company To Salesforce And Now Raised $99 Million To Build An AI Assistant Helping Knowledge Workers Be More Productive

Richard Socher, an AI pioneer and accomplished entrepreneur, has a story that exemplifies innovation, resilience, and the ability to transform cutting-edge technology into impactful businesses.

From his upbringing in Germany and Ethiopia to founding and scaling AI-driven companies like MetaMind and You.com, Richard’s journey offers profound insights into building and scaling ventures in the dynamic world of artificial intelligence.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

Early Beginnings: The Intersection of Language and Technology

Richard’s passion for understanding and replicating human intelligence through technology began early. Growing up between Germany and Ethiopia, his fascination with math and languages naturally evolved into a career in AI.

In the early 2000s, before AI and neural networks started making waves, Richard studied computer science and linguistics in Leipzig and Montpellier in Southern France as an Erasmus exchange student.

Linguistics is essentially a different word for natural language processing, one of the most exciting areas of AI. Richard saw it as the most fascinating manifestation of human intelligence. Next, he pursued his master’s degree at the Max Planck Institute.

Inspired by pioneers like Andrew Ng and Chris Manning, Richard moved to Stanford to delve into AI research. Here, he did his Ph.D. and brought deep learning into the field of natural language processing.

Richard considers himself fortunate to be there at the right time to see and hear people talk about neural networks and learning computer vision and speech recognition. He could foresee a time when we could give AI raw data and have it learn features and use ideas.

AI could be taught to adjust ideas, modify them, and make them work for natural language processing. Richard was fascinated by recreating a capability and understanding it better.

Richard focused on developing neural networks capable of learning directly from raw data—a revolutionary approach when handcrafted features dominated natural language processing (NLP). He also witnessed the initial pushback from the community.

MetaMind: Democratizing AI

When Richard graduated from Stanford in 2014, he watched his peers and friends go on to join companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

Richard noticed a trend: advanced AI technology was confined mainly to tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Determined to democratize AI, he founded MetaMind, a platform designed to make neural networks accessible to businesses of all sizes.

MetaMind enabled users to create AI models with minimal effort, providing drag-and-drop tools for image classification and NLP tasks. Richard quickly realized that this technology could make a greater impact in the hands of a company with amazing distribution and an incredible “sales force.”

MetaMind’s innovative approach attracted attention, and within two years, Salesforce acquired the company. At Salesforce, Richard became Chief Scientist, spearheading efforts to integrate AI and machine learning across the organization.

Richard’s team achieved breakthroughs in prompt engineering, enabling a single neural network to handle diverse NLP tasks. They also explored AI-generated proteins, paving the way for startups in computational biology.

By the time Richard exited the company, he had gained valuable experience in the full cycle of a company, starting from creating and building it, scaling it, and reaching the finish line to sell it to a company like Salesforce, which was incredible.

Back in 2016, Salesforce stock was valued at $75, but it has now gone up to $300. Richard reveals that he is still a holder.

Lessons from Big Tech

Richard’s time at Salesforce taught him valuable lessons about scaling innovation within large organizations. He admired the company’s values-driven culture, particularly Marc Benioff’s emphasis on stakeholder capitalism and aligning social good with shareholder value.

Salesforce’s robust sales infrastructure and operational expertise left a lasting impression. “As an academic, sales didn’t come naturally to me,” Richard admits. However, the mentorship and training he received helped him grow as a leader and manager.

Richard also learned to balance listening and compiling data with making informed decisions. Marc was very forthcoming about the path he wanted to take to move forward. Richard picked up a valuable lesson on hiring to round off your weaknesses and become a better manager.

In retrospect, Richard recalls how the Salesforce culture was all about building amazing products for customers. Disagreements about the right methodology were commonplace, but they would spur tossing around ideas and coming to fruitful and innovative solutions.

Richard spent time understanding the organization and how to make things happen. He considers it an interesting and meaningful challenge that consistently pushed the research world forward.

At Salesforce, they invented prompt engineering, built the first large language model, and synthesized proteins from AI-generated biological proteins. They shipped real products and watched their impact on thousands of different companies.

Richard worked with Salesforce for about four and a half years before moving on.

Stagnating Traditional Search Engines

Talking about the genesis of You.com, Richard reveals how they had invented prompt engineering in 2018. This technology could train a single neural network for all the different and most complex natural language processing tasks.

Users could trigger that one neural network in natural language to solve any task and ask different questions like:

• What’s the sentiment?
• What’s the translation?
• What is the summary of this paragraph?
• Who is the president?

In Richard’s opinion, the availability of one powerful neural net for searching for answers online should certainly change search engines. In 2020, frustrated by the stagnation of traditional search engines, he launched You.com to revolutionize how people find and use information online.

Unlike Google’s ad-heavy approach that displayed fewer and fewer relevant organic links, You.com provides accurate, citation-based answers tailored to productivity-focused users. Google had become a monopoly, needing to increase its shares and revenues every quarter.

Users would continue with Google since they didn’t know there were alternatives. But now the technology was available. Neural networks could be used to significantly improve how people find information online.

However, the problem wasn’t how to make information accessible. It was how to deal with the massive influx of information. The solution was to summarize search results instead of giving users a list of the links. That’s what You.com does.

Founding You.com: Reinventing Search

You.com isn’t just a search engine—it’s a productivity engine. From summarizing search results to automating workflows, You.com empowers knowledge workers with tools that streamline tasks and improve accuracy.

Its emphasis on verifiable citations sets it apart in a landscape where hallucinated results from AI systems are all too typical. Richard explains that they have actually transitioned from a search engine via an answer engine to an app-based productivity engine.

You.com has evolved to a higher level and gives users the most accurate answers with references to make AI agents more productive. The accuracy of You.com citations has earned it customers like one of the largest hedge funds in the United States.

Richard is excited about other You.com customers, such as one of the largest European insurance companies, Germany’s largest press agency with thousands of TV and newspaper stations, and the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. They highlight the platform’s growing traction.

A Business Model Rooted in Accuracy

You.com’s business model revolves around two revenue streams:

APIs: Companies integrate You.com’s AI into their products to provide accurate answers.
Enterprise Licenses: Organizations use You.com to combine internal and external data, enabling precise information retrieval with actionable insights.

With accurate citation, users can click on it and then scroll directly down to where it found its facts, a feature unique to You.com. Users can also build agents and automate an entire workflow, which helps them unlock their productivity with AI.

The Fundraising Journey

To date, You.com has raised $99 million across three funding rounds, with Marc Benioff as a lead investor in the seed round. Richard credits their fundraising success to a combination of technical excellence and learning to embrace the nuances of marketing.

“I’ve learned that the best technology alone isn’t enough,” Richard explains. “You also need strong distribution and marketing to make an impact.” This realization led You.com to shift its focus from showcasing advanced technology to demonstrating how it enhances productivity for real users.

Richard has an interesting story about purchasing the You.com domain, which Marc Benioff had acquired 20 years ago. He approached Marc and explained his idea and what he wanted to do with his new company.

Marc not only gave Richard the domain but also came aboard as its largest and lead investor and board member for Series Seed funding.

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Looking Ahead: AI as a Catalyst for Productivity

Richard’s vision for You.com extends beyond search. He envisions a future where people have access to unbiased information that they can verify quickly, making them much more productive. He also views a world where organizations can excel significantly.

Richard would also want AI to transform productivity across industries fundamentally. By enabling organizations to automate workflows, You.com empowers teams to achieve more with less effort.

For example, marketing teams can use You.com to automate tasks like analyzing competitor data, drafting campaigns, and scheduling social media posts—all from a single interface—this ability to handle end-to-end workflows positions You.com as a critical tool for the knowledge economy.

Richard relates an interesting anecdote where a customer company, Mimecast, had purchased around 200 seed licenses. You.com organized a workshop inviting not just the engineering team and the initial teams but also sales, service, HR, recruiting, analysts, engineers, and service folks.

At the end of the workshop, the company purchased many more licenses since they were impressed by the foundational technology, similar to moving from paper to a computer. Other companies have expressed how they have saved more than 20 man-hours weekly.

As Richard says, “The more you care about complex knowledge work, the more you get that 10X experience from switching from Google to You.com.” You.com has the potential to become a multi-trillion dollar company thanks to the productivity and information it has available.

Investing in Other Companies Through AIX Ventures

Richard co-founded AIX Ventures with Shaun Johnson in 2021. The AIX Ventures Fund I was a $50M vehicle to participate in early-stage AI companies.

The AIX Ventures Fund II, again focused on leading preseed and seed rounds and co-leading series A, is a $202M vehicle with its initial close in 2023.

Richard has successfully navigated both projects simultaneously, with a keen eye for knowing what AI founders need from an AI native venture firm.

Richard’s investing roots began with an angel portfolio, which has grown 17 times since 2016. A core business insight was knowing that AI founders needed more than just a partner at a traditional VC claiming to be an AI expert.

He created and built AIX Ventures with the AI founder in mind, where the AI founder has an AI luminary such as Richard, Pieter Abbeel, Chris Manning, or Anthony Goldbloom, termed Investing Partners (“IPs”).

Paired with these IPs is Headquarter Partner with deep venture roots, providing founders the best early-stage platform to win. AIX Ventures Fund I boosts six unicorns, and its Fund II is off to a strong start.

One of the most exciting projects he has invested in recently involves using tiny little lymph nodes in a petri dish to test drugs more quickly.

Richard is also excited about supporting founders with visions that make people productive, often referred to as the future of work, learn things, help improve health care, referred to as the future of the human condition, and improve biotechnology. He considers himself a “constructive optimist.”

Conclusion

Richard Socher’s journey from academia to entrepreneurship illustrates the power of combining deep technical expertise with a commitment to solving real-world problems.

With You.com, he’s redefining how businesses and individuals harness AI to boost productivity and access accurate information.

As AI continues to shape the future, Richard’s story serves as a reminder that innovation thrives at the intersection of technology, vision, and a relentless drive to make a difference.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Richard Richard emphasized the power of first principles thinking in developing neural networks that learn directly from raw data, revolutionizing natural language processing.
• With MetaMind, Richard sought to democratize AI by making neural networks easily accessible to businesses of all sizes, eventually leading to a successful acquisition by Salesforce.
• At Salesforce, Richard’s team pioneered advancements like prompt engineering and AI-generated proteins, proving that big companies can drive groundbreaking research and innovation.
• Richard founded You.com to challenge the ad-heavy search model, aiming to create a productivity engine that combines accurate AI answers with verifiable citations.
• Richard learned that great technology alone isn’t enough—effective marketing and distribution are crucial for driving adoption and revenue growth.
• Guided by mentors like Marc Benioff, Richard cultivated skills in sales, stakeholder alignment, and organizational management to scale his ventures effectively.
• You.com envisions AI as a tool to empower knowledge workers, boost productivity, and enable organizations to unlock their full potential across industries.

 

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