> What's Kagi doing differently to be able to succeed?
Define success? It outperforms every other search engine in terms of quality of results and at least from what I understand, they're not too far off from breaking even on their salaries.
Neeva was a VC funded abomination and it showed, they even had deals with "big brand" companies like LastPass to offer bundles, but their core product sucked. Neeva search results were often worse than Google. That's not the case with Kagi.
Its not hard to define success. It means having more revenue than their cost, and paying all employees market rate salary(including the founder himself).
Everyone has their own definition of success. For many, a "successful" tech startup is one that eventually lands a $100M+ buyout, or gets millions of paying customers, or some other metric that's far beyond "simply" arriving at a sustainable business that you (and I) mentioned.
Unfortunately, it's a common bar for the continued existence of companies. I'd say successes if the company still offers a service in 5 or 10 years. Unless the operators an employees are all independently wealthy, you need to break even
Define success? It outperforms every other search engine in terms of quality of results and at least from what I understand, they're not too far off from breaking even on their salaries.
Neeva was a VC funded abomination and it showed, they even had deals with "big brand" companies like LastPass to offer bundles, but their core product sucked. Neeva search results were often worse than Google. That's not the case with Kagi.