Neeva Continues Growth, Welcomes Steven Shure as Chief Business Officer

Sridhar Ramaswamy and Vivek Raghunathan on 10/14/21

A longtime Amazon VP, Steven played a pivotal role in building and running Amazon Prime and oversaw Amazon’s Worldwide Consumer Marketing organization for over a decade.

We are delighted to welcome Steven Shure to the Neeva team. Steven played a pivotal role in building and running Amazon Prime and oversaw Amazon’s Worldwide Consumer Marketing organization for over a decade. At Neeva, Steven will serve as Chief Business Officer, overseeing all business operations.

We are delighted to welcome Steven Shure to the Neeva team. Since Neeva became publicly available in June 2021, over half a million people have visited the site. We’ve been thrilled at the response and the number of people who have signed up for Neeva. Steven’s arrival marks a critical step in the Neeva journey, and a commitment to building the business of Neeva at the same standard at which we’ve been building Neeva search itself since day one.  As the architect of Amazon Prime’s early and extraordinary growth and product evolution, and with three decades of experience overseeing widely-loved, consumer-paid subscription businesses, Steven is uniquely qualified to help the business of Neeva realize its full potential.

In the past months, we have made material investment in building out Neeva’s own web search stack to provide users the best possible search experience, private, and free of ads. Our stack is built on top of tens of billions of web pages we have selected from the hundreds of billions of URLs that our crawlers have discovered. With Steven’s arrival, the coming months will see similar investment and progress in how we take Neeva to market as well.

From the start, at Neeva we have believed in excellence. From the Neeva board to brilliant and broadly respected technologists, like Udi Manber and Darin Fisher, we have entrusted Neeva to a set of leaders who both share a deep passion for Neeva’s mission and themselves have a history of building extraordinary products and businesses. We are thrilled to add Steven, a leader with a similar track record in subscription-based products and businesses to the team. At Neeva, Steven will serve as Chief Business Officer, overseeing all business operations.

Steven joined Amazon in 2006 as the first Vice President of the just-launched Amazon Prime, overseeing all aspects of that business including product, engineering, and marketing. He helped build the service from the ground up, including its launch across Europe and in Japan and the incorporation of key benefits like streaming video. In Steven’s seven years overseeing Prime, its membership grew from fewer than 100,000 to more than 10 million. Steven added Amazon’s Worldwide Consumer Marketing organization to his responsibilities in 2008, overseeing all performance marketing for the company for 11 years, and administering a budget of over $2B annually. In addition to Prime and Marketing, Steven held senior leadership positions in Supply Chain Technology and Amazon Web Services, managing teams from as small as ten to greater than ten thousand. Prior to Amazon, he spent two decades at Time Inc. overseeing direct-to-consumer marketing and subscription services for magazine brands such as People, Sports Illustrated and Entertainment Weekly.

Steven’s ex-colleague, Christopher North, Managing Partner, L Catterton, and former Managing Director, Amazon UK says “During the decade we worked closely together at Amazon, Steve built an outstanding team, collectively driving large-scale innovation across global marketing and Amazon Prime that helped power growth from $11B to $136B in 2006-2016 alone. His thought leadership, domain expertise, and humble style made him one of the great all-time Amazonians.”

Says Steven, “I am beyond excited to join the Neeva team. Since my start in the magazine industry, I’ve always had a deep belief in the power of customer-supported, subscription-based products, and have seen firsthand how those products (and customers) are inevitably compromised when they become dependent on advertising revenue. Above all, it is my belief in Neeva’s mission, and the extraordinary team already in place, that led me to want to join. I remember people asking me years ago why I thought anyone would ever want to subscribe to a shipping service. I hope and expect that in the not too distant future, the question ‘why would anyone want to pay for a search engine?’ will, in hindsight, sound just as ridiculous.”

We’re continuing on our journey of building the world’s first ad-free, private subscription search engine that puts the customer first, and we’re thrilled to have Steven help make that a reality. We’re excited about what’s ahead and if you share a similar passion come join us!