It wasn’t long ago that Sridhar Ramaswamy was the king of Google advertising.
“Sometimes I joke with people: Listen, all of us pay for the water that comes through our tap,” says Ramaswamy. “And they just don't care. Because you know what? It's a low-cost, high-quality product. Why don’t online services work the same way?” Reid Hoffman, the billionaire cofounder of LinkedIn who is now a partner at Greylock, says people forget how much room for innovation still exists outside of tech giants.
Even while Neeva plots out its rollout for 2021, Google is making moves of its own to change the way it tracks users and serves them ads across the web. Last week, Googleit would not develop tools for individual tracking when it phases out supporting third-party tracking cookies next year. That news sent several publicly traded ad-tech companies stock tumbling.