Perplexity reviews query growth weekly and routes bugs directly

Transcript

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

1. 22:16

   So I presume your team has grown a bunch of money. How do you manage the team? How do you operate your team on a week to week or cycle to cycle basis with that, you know, number of queries per day is our primary metric. So every all hands, we start with that number. Okay. I don't believe in this, um, putting a TV and having a metric, you know, being seen every day, because I think that's also distracting, but I do think like it makes sense to take a look every week, see the weekly growth rates, um, see the monthly growth rates and like if something declined and discuss about it figure out ways to actually freak out if something declines like we do and something grows like look into why where so we are very data driven and we share it across the company actually i've been trying to share to the users too so that they feel like uh you know it's an

2. 23:11

   something that's actually happening right in front of their eyes and they want to be part of it there's a hierarchy like if if there's some bug to be fixed if i know some particular person's working on it i can go and talk to the person directly nobody else feels threatened because i'm going and talking to that person there is no feeling that because i'm raising a bug uh uh it's like oh they're going to be fired or something uh because i raised like 50 bugs a day so if you know like it's more like they understand okay this it's important for the product to feel uh great and if it doesn't feel good for ourselves then the user is also not going to feel that in fact we have way more incentive to go use our own product, but the user doesn't.

3. 23:52

   So the standards for the user should be even higher. So always feel like a user. I think that culture is there in the company. I love that. And did you intentionally select for that when you were hiring? Like people who are very product centric and in the details? I wouldn't say I explicitly have that as a criterion, but I look for people who cared about doing good work. If you don't care and you're just treating it as a job, then it's very hard for you to get excited about things.

4. 24:18

   And I think so much of it feeds off of the founders and like your culture, your DNA. And it sounds like you're that type of person that obsesses over the details. And you're just going to naturally want to hire people who share that trait. Yeah, I do get pissed off if answers are wrong, and I do get pissed off if people on Twitter are saying, like, perplexity is degrading or, like, you know, but a lot of the things, some things are actually not true.

5. 24:41

   But I do try to see, you know, leave aside the cynicism, even if it was someone who's, like, a hater. But if there was something true there, and I want to still know.