We met Richard Socher, the founder of You.com.

Richard spent 17 years proving that AI could understand human language back when the world dismissed it as a "crazy idea." After serving as the Chief Scientist at Salesforce, he walked away from the top to reinvent the search engine.

From inventing Prompt Engineering to building a $1.5B unicorn in just 3 years, Richard reveals why he bet everything on Deep Learning, why AI giants like OpenAI now pay for his tech, and how to stay "stubborn" enough to win in the agentic era.

00:00 Intro
01:39 How the Inventor of Prompt Engineering Built a $1.5B Unicorn
02:39 Why Linguistics is the Operating System of Intelligence
04:15 The Moment We Had to Scale Up
05:27 Solving for Impact When Everyone Said No
06:50 The Beginning of You.com: Challenging Google
08:04 Build What People Will Actually Pay For
09:27 Are You Moving Fast Enough to Lead the AI Era?


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Richard Socher pioneered neural networks for NLP in 2010 when the approach was widely rejected, invented prompt engineering, and founded you.com to provide AI search infrastructure that prevents LLM hallucinations. After selling MetaMind to Salesforce, he built you.com into a $1.5B unicorn in 3 years by pivoting from consumer search to enterprise API infrastructure used by OpenAI, Amazon, and others. The company enables accurate, citation-backed AI responses by combining search with LLMs, serving over 100,000 automated agents.

How Prompt Engineering Inventor Built $1.5B in 3 Years | you.com, Richard Socher