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Lightcone · 2 min · Jul 11, 2025

700,000 New Year's Eve queries convinced Srinivas Perplexity was real

Repeated use of Perplexity's Discord search bot helped persuade the team to launch. Nearly 700,000 New Year's Eve queries mattered despite slow answers, a weak name and hallucinations.

Aravind Srinivas

Aravind Srinivas is cofounder and CEO of Perplexity.

Held research roles at OpenAI and Google DeepMind before co-founding the AI search engine Perplexity in 2022.

  • Garry Tan, Host · President & CEO, Y Combinator

    Co-founded Posterous and Initialized Capital, an early Coinbase backer.

  • Harj Taggar, Host · Managing partner, Y Combinator

    Co-founded Auctomatic with the Collison brothers and later Triplebyte.

  • Diana Hu, Host · Managing partner, Y Combinator

    CTO of Escher Reality; after Niantic bought it, ran AR for Pokémon GO.

  • Jared Friedman, Host · Managing partner, Y Combinator

    Co-founded Scribd, which YC funded in 2006; has advised 20+ YC unicorns.

About this segment

Repeated use of Perplexity's Discord search bot helped persuade the team to launch. Nearly 700,000 New Year's Eve queries mattered despite slow answers, a weak name and hallucinations.

From “Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity's Race to Build Agentic Search”, Jul 11, 2025. Watch the full episode

“there was like close to 700 000 queries and i was like okay”
Aravind Srinivasat 10:43 · Lightcone10:43

Takeaways

  1. Repeat use showed more than an initial wow factor.
  2. The team launched seven days after ChatGPT debuted.
  3. Heavy usage outweighed a slow product with mistakes.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 11:27Google’s incentives leave room for search startups2:48
  2. 17:01A browser can turn an assistant into an agent2:47
  3. 27:33Perplexity sees subscriptions and task fees as revenue streams2:23
  4. 19:48AI coding tools cut some experiments from days to an hour2:33
  5. 23:53Browser agents can work even when sites lack MCP servers3:49

  6. 9:08700,000 New Year's Eve queries convinced Srinivas Perplexity was real2:23

Up next · LightconeFirst-principles reasoning can expose hidden cost reductions6:20

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 9:14

    So that's essentially what grad school was for me. Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, so you launched this first version of perplexity, which is largely to do Twitter search, effectively. At what point did it start to work, and you maybe internally felt like, oh, we should keep working on this. This is going to be something to explore. Yeah, so whoever we gave early access to, they were all very excited about it.

  2. 9:39

    They kept using it repeatedly. I think there is a phenomenon in products where there's an initial wow factor. And then mostly either drops completely, that means you never had real retention, or it definitely drops with their sustained usage. So when we saw that for the relational database searches like Twitter, LinkedIn, GitHub, we knew that there was something magical about combining large language models in search.

  3. 10:05

    But then what we did is we dreamt bigger and said, what if we just give answers and cite the relevant sources? We launched that as a Discord bot and that was also continually being used. It was not like a one-day usage and people started ignoring it. So that's when we decided we had the courage to launch it. We launched it seven days after the ChatGPT launch, especially at a time when ChatGPT did not have web search.

  4. 10:29

    That was a good moment. And I think like many of the successful AI products that people speak about today, Cursor included, all were like 2022 launches or like early 2023 or late 2022 launches. so they're all like old people you know in the in the in the in this ai timescale yes for me the aha moment was like the new year eve there was like close to 700 000 queries and i was like okay this has the crappiest name for a consumer product it's called perplexity very hard nobody even knows how to share it and then it was so slow took seven seconds to answer for a query at the time and it was making a lot of mistakes, hallucinations and like a no-name company, no-name founder one or two million dollars in seed funding despite that people were caring enough to sharing screenshots and like and then a new year eve

  5. 11:22

    and you could be you know watching Netflix right so that's when I knew there was something real here