Bryan McCann on Open Source CEO: Data Is King and AI Is Queen

Summary

You.com co-founder and CTO Bryan McCann sits down with Bill Kerr's Open Source CEO newsletter for a written interview about the problem You.com is solving, how the company works with AI agents, and the ideas that shape his thinking. McCann explains why agents that do higher-stakes work need fresh, reliable information from the web, and why that makes search more important in the age of AI, not less.

He also describes You.com's builder-minded culture, how his team uses AI coding and productivity tools day to day, and a framework for the future of knowledge work built around the idea that data is king. The conversation closes with how philosophy, mathematics, and Latin influence his work and how he keeps his energy up as a founder.

Key highlights

Why agents need search. McCann says language models are out of date as soon as training stops, so agents need to call out to search and data APIs, and You.com crawls and indexes the public web and exposes it through an API.
Search that is open to builders. He notes that the largest search providers mostly keep their indexes for their own ecosystems, and that routing queries through a third-party scraper of Google raises reliability and data-sharing concerns for enterprises and AI labs.
Search matters more with agents. If agents do more work than humans ever did, he argues, they will search more than ever, which makes search and data tools more important.
Customer examples. You.com serves US news traffic for DuckDuckGo, with a global expansion underway, and customers also use its APIs for product and competitive research, media background research, and hospitality.
Culture and org design. McCann describes a builder's mindset, a fairly flat organization, and an org designed like a neural network, with clear objectives, good information flow, and stable foundations.
Working with agents. He says many engineers now spend their time deciding what to build rather than writing code, wants sales and marketing to use the same tools for more personalized customer work, and encourages teams to always have something running in the background.
Data is king, AI is the queen. In his words, "Data is king, and AI is the queen on the board now." He expects most knowledge workers to either create data that trains AI or evaluate and direct it.
Philosophy, math, and Latin. He says mathematics shapes how he thinks about people and change, and that learning Latin deepened his understanding of language models and of low-resource languages.
Staying sustainable. He emphasizes basics like sleep, health, and staying connected to people and activities outside work.