Related:

I Lost Faith in Kagi

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40011314

Note: This was the original post that the CEO of Kagi was replying to in the currently posted email exchange.

I think it's great that the CEO wants to respond to criticism. It's certainly not scalable, but I don't see anything wrong with this response.

If someone stood in a public square shouting falsehoods about you and people gathered around to listen, you'd want to defend yourself too. The CEO could have written a public post about this blogger's personal attacks, but instead he tried to address them privately; the blogger pulled a 5th grader move and basically put his fingers in his ears and started singing "lalalalaala I can't hear you lalalalalaa".

Except I don't see many falsehoods there, and CEO's "defense" actually confirms things that blogger said.

For example, the blogger was complaining that Kagi uses too much of AI tools. CEO responded with blog post which announced one AI tool being deployed, confirmed that they are going to keep working on AI, and announced upcoming features.

When blogger complained "Kagi stretches itself way too thin", CEO said "we have to do it"

Re taxes, CEO confirmed that they were not paying taxes, etc..

The best part was how blogger said: "LOL CEO does not understand PII, andd says emails are not PII because one can enter throwaway email" and CEO replied by restating the same thing.

This would have been not at all noteworthy had the Kagi CEO simply resisted the urge to reply and walked away. The blogger's first reply could be interpreted as antagonistic and he should have recognized that and chosen not to engage.

My advice for anyone who runs a company (or may): make an active effort to learn about (healthy) human interactions, as well as how to figuratively take one on the chin. Like much of life, you can't choose how you'll feel about circumstances you find yourself in, but you absolutely can consciously decide how you'll respond.

Didn't know about starting a T-shirt company using a 3rd of the money they raised. It's kinda bizarre.

But I'm still hoping they become sustainable and make it. I like using it and really do get great value from it.

It sounds like they consider it advertising.

Sounds pretty reasonable if you ask me. Especially considering that they are profitable.

It is reasonable to purchase advertising, it is not reasonable to spend 1/3 of your funding on a t-shirt factory for the sake of advertising.

I’m no marketing expert.

Doesn’t sound all that wrong to me.

Are they profitable though? From the contents of these posts and emails mentioned in the article, it looks like they aren't yet.

One of the emails explicitly mentions them being profitable since recently.

Frankly, other than continuing to email him despite the explicit wish not to, the emails look totally reasonable.

Btw. the AI built-in to Kagi is imo excellent. I frequently suffix my query with a question mark to trigger their AI responder (it responds based on the content of a few top results, with citations), and the results are almost always great, and spare me the need to open each of the sites individually and look through them.

> no other search CEO has shown up in my email inbox to mansplain their company to me.

Using your opponent’s gender as an argument shows that you truly don’t have any actual arguments.

Shame this was flagged. A discussion of a spicy argument over search (one level away from the argument) should be allowed.

This is not an argument... the blogger said he didn't want to engage and the CEO continued to try and engage anyway.

Thanks for this, very interesting.

PS I wonder why the original blog post was flagged here on HN. It was also very enlightening.

Didn't this person's blog post make the front page of HN the other day? Why do they think it got "so little attention"? Said blog post and the resulting discussion is quite literally the only reason I know of Kagi's existence.

and shares the email exchange on mastodon.