Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,
Today’s guest is Max Buckley, Senior ML Engineer at Exa and former Google engineer, who spent 12.5 years at Google working across 10 teams including Search, AI, and Trust & Safety. He transitioned from a business background into software engineering and now helps build agent-first search infrastructure at Exa.
🎧 Tune in now on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and share your thoughts! In the meantime: Follow the Gradient and stay tuned!
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Why you should listen
You should listen to this if you want to understand why search is shifting from human-first interfaces to agent-driven infrastructure and what that means for building products today.
As the conversation unfolded, it became clear that the real tension is not Google vs. startups, but bundled ecosystems vs. modular AI stacks.
What we talk about
00:00 - Introduction
01:26 - From business intern to senior ML engineer at Google
08:36 - What Exa actually builds and how it differs from Google
23:40 - Can a 70-person company take on Google?
25:09 - The Zurich AI talent cluster: 300 applications and counting
30:52 - How Exa runs operations through a central AI brain
43:53 - Making a startup in Europe: the exception vs the rule
48:14 - Burnout, boundaries, and non-negotiable gym sessions
Our main take away’s
Search is not broken but economically constrained. Google’s product works well, but its $400B search business prevents it from offering cheap, unbundled APIs, which creates an opening for smaller players despite inferior scale. This is true because offering flexible search access would cannibalize its core revenue.
Agent-driven search changes the product requirements entirely. Humans want fast, simple results, while agents generate complex queries with filters and tolerate latency for higher-quality outputs. This leads to fundamentally different architectures where latency, ranking, and verification trade-offs shift.
