# $20B AI CEO: The ONLY trait for success in the AI era | Aravind Srinivas, Co-founder of Perplexity

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

Aravind Srinivas argues that success in the AI era comes from betting on what you are obsessed with and building it relentlessly.

- Show: Silicon Valley Girl
- Hosts: [Marina Mogilko](https://realalpha.app/people/marina-mogilko/)
- Guest: [Aravind Srinivas](https://realalpha.app/builders/aravind-srinivas/) is cofounder and CEO of Perplexity AI.
- Published: Sep 26, 2025
- Length: 41 min

## The best minutes

- [33:06](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=1986) [In AI, build what you are obsessed with](https://realalpha.app/s/in-ai-build-what-you-are-obsessed-with/) (4 min)

## Also worth watching

- [10:29](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=629) [Product quality and real reviews can guide AI recommendations](https://realalpha.app/s/product-quality-and-real-reviews-can-guide-ai/) (4 min)

Skip the opening and mid-episode sponsor reads, the Formula One brand discussion, the Comet demo, and the closing app list.

## Summary

Aravind Srinivas co-founded Perplexity AI in 2022 and is its CEO, according to the episode description. He discusses the company’s growth and its Comet browser, which he describes as an agentic browser that can reason across tasks and take actions.

Srinivas credits Perplexity’s growth to shipping quickly, improving the product in response to users, and compounding small gains. He says Comet can take on multi-step research and shopping tasks, shifting decision-making power toward users and potentially changing how businesses reach customers. He argues that workers and service providers will need to offer more than routine analysis as AI takes on basic tasks. For founders and young people, he recommends developing the ability to learn and betting on work they care about deeply.

### Minute by minute

- [3:20](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=200) **Brand partnerships build awareness.** Srinivas says it is difficult to link Perplexity’s Formula One partnership directly to installs. He sees the partnership, including Lewis Hamilton wearing the brand, as a way to build awareness and associate Perplexity with admired figures.
- [5:48](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=348) **Comet handles multi-step tasks.** Srinivas credits Comet’s release with contributing to recent growth. He demonstrates how it can find a video from a natural-language description, locate a moment in its transcript and play it; he also shows it summarizing an interview and drafting an email without requiring him to switch tabs.
- [10:29](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=629) **Products need genuine reviews.** Srinivas says businesses should focus on building good products and earning real reviews and discussion, since Comet can compare information across sources. He says users can ask the browser to skip ads, assess products based on reviews and recommendations, and make a choice using their preferences and budget.
- [14:44](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=884) **Agents could reshape advertising.** Srinivas says AI agents could make shopping apps less central, though companies’ stores, warehouses and supply chains would still matter. He suggests advertisers may make offers to agents, with the agent protecting users from manipulation and potentially sharing some advertising revenue with them.
- [33:06](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=1986) **Founders should follow obsession.** Srinivas says building foundation models requires ongoing talent, infrastructure and iteration, while product startups also face competition from labs and big tech companies. He advises founders not to rely on predictions about what competitors will avoid, but to build around a problem they care about deeply.
- [36:47](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=2207) **He tests competing AI apps.** Srinivas says he tests other AI apps as part of his job and uses ChatGPT most among them. He names Perplexity, Google and ChatGPT as his main apps, and says he sometimes uses Midjourney or Google features when Perplexity does not yet handle a task well.
- [40:01](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=2401) **Comet is coming to mobile.** Srinivas says Comet will not make every feature free, but expects almost all features to be available to everyone. He says Play Store preregistration has opened, App Store preregistration will follow, and he expects Comet to be available on iOS, Android, Windows and Mac by the end of the year.

## Transcript

Silicon Valley Girl, hosted by Marina Mogilko, with Aravind Srinivas.

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there. Where the podcast’s audio and the video part ways, some times are a minute or so off.

[0:03](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=3) Realistically, it's gotten ****. This is Erevin, CEO and founder of Perplexity, a $20 billion company challenging giants like OpenAI, Google and Meta. They just released Comet, the first AI browser that thinks and acts for you. It also understands you, your needs, your budget, everything. It has memory. I tried it myself and wow. It can book meetings, reply to emails, research products, even shop online. All without me. Amazon has AI to do the recommendation ranking. Google has AI to do the search ranking. So they can influence things and manipulate you to buying stuff. But for the first time, you have an AI in your hands.

[0:29](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=29) It actually protects you. It actually gives you power against the big tech. But while AI gives you unprecedented power, it's also reshaping the world of work faster than anyone expected. And it looks like those entry-level jobs are disappearing, right? What do you think is going to happen? I certainly think people need to push further. So is there still opportunity or is it time to rethink everything? Hello, everyone. Welcome to Silicon Valley, girl. It is the first time that I have a repeated guest on my podcast and your progress has been tremendous. We did a podcast with Aravind, the founder of Perplexity, in November of 2023.

[0:56](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=56) The company's valuation back then was $500 million, and now it's around... Actually, we were just closing our C++ around then, so it was more like $150 million, and we were just about to close around at $520 million. Okay, and now it's $20 billion? Yeah, roughly. Okay, can you describe this period of time in one word? Exponential. Exponential? Yeah. What do you think has played a tremendous role in this exponential growth? I think our constant urge for shipping fast, yet maintaining the quality, our relentlessness. I love the word relentless. In fact, I wanted to buy the domain relentless.com, except I figured it was owned by Jeff Bezos.

[1:36](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=96) Really? So if you actually type relentless.com on your browser, it will redirect to amazon.com. he's an investor in our company that's like the spirit of the company we we don't ever give up we are very curious um we constantly keep asking questions on how to improve the product the first thing i do when i wake up is uh read everything people all the users saying on different I make sure most of the bugs are immediately attended to. And you may think like, oh, what really comes out of this process of waking up every day and just bug fixing and triaging and like trying to like, you know, identify places for improvement. But we really believe in the mantra of like 1.01 to the power of 365 is 37.78.

[2:40](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=160) Can you explain? Okay, so if you do a 1% improvement every day, how much do you improve at the end of the year? You improve 3,700%. You don't improve like 1% multiplied by 365. That's the concept of the exponential. Yeah. It compounds. And so it may look like small steps every day, but as the changes propagate to a larger scale of users, they bring in more users through word of mouth. And then those users are experiencing all the improvements you're making. People feel great using a product that you used last week and then use it a couple of weeks later, and it feels much more different, much faster, much cleaner, much more accurate.

[3:25](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=205) So then people start trusting. We earn the user's trust through our accuracy, our speed of improvement. And your marketing, Formula One, Teobong, have you seen the spikes after Formula One and when the episode went live? It's hard to attribute to these kind of brand partnerships. It's very easy to attribute. You run some ads on Instagram or YouTube, and there's a clear call-to-action button in terms of going to the App Store or Play Store and getting an install, and then looking at how many queries that translated to or whether that user ended up subscribing to the app. It's very easy to track this and optimize the funnels.

[4:13](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=253) It's much harder to optimize, okay, if Lewis Hamilton has perplexity on his helmet, how many people are actually going and installing the app after a formula one race yeah it's pretty difficult to track that it is best way to track that is like brand awareness like oh like are people in the uk or people who typically are in the formula one crowd are they more aware of complexity now uh and i think that should be the case uh we have run some basic studies uh but the the core idea there is honestly to um associate our our brand with some of the greatest people of all time you know like steve jobs ran this famous uh think different campaign right he got inspiration from uh nike because nike celebrated great athletes so that's why in the ad you see einstein you see gandhi you see all these like like you know uh the beatles but you see all the people who really inspired steve um and so that's one thing we've been pretty intentional about like who we want to associate with in terms of the brand uh like at least in sports uh lewis hamilton is one of the greatest of all time it's considered the greatest of all time uh in formula one and so that's why we we did that brand partnership and we're also going to be doing more uh uh like

[5:22](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=322) like particularly you know an f1 um it's a pretty cerebral sport like everyone's attracted by all the hospitality and like the race cars and like you know it's very high high adrenaline thing but but but fundamentally the sport is largely engineering oriented like who has the best engine who has who's licensing uh whose engines like i think it's all about constructors like competing for like who has the best cars and and and skills still matters conditions matters tires matters like everything matters so uh we we do see like a lot of people asking these kind of questions there was this huge spike in queries in june compared to may can you attribute that to something what happened i don't know if it happened in june or july but definitely we grew a lot in the last couple of months actually the the main event that happened in july that i would say is fundamentally led to growth is like our release of our agentic browser comment for the first time you could have a browser that can actually think with you and and take actions on your behalf and like actually go and do stuff i have comment right here yeah can you show one killer feature that you think everyone should start using on comment i love

[8:06](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=486) This thing, because it's a very simple thing, but it kind of always works. You know, if you want to go to, there's some video I remember I watched before, but I don't know exactly what it is. And I can search for it with just simple natural language and ask it to just open and play from that exact moment. So for example, there's a video where Jensen Huang says, I would rather torture people to greatness than fire them. um can you find it and play it for play for me uh from that exact moment so the point here is not that you can do a video search or anything like that it's how it does multi-step reasoning finds the video pulls the transcript and actually opens tab and starts playing wow that was the phrase i was hoping and then you can chat with this video something that i did yesterday when i was watching for example that's there are a lot of other videos here i could go here this is like one hour long i could literally say like what are some uh um non-trivial things uh jensen said in this interview something like that right like i don't want to watch everything i mean maybe he's saying a lot of things he's repetitively saying that ai is going to explode blah blah blah but i only want to know new things yeah and so it's reading all the transcripts it's particularly

[9:32](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=572) talking about GPUs as time machines. I've never heard him say that. GPUs as time machines. And of course, scale and flexibility, science to application, omniverse, viscosity. I can actually say, can you just share this as an email? I don't know if you're connected to your team. Can you send this as an email to Erivan Sweeney Vaz, the founder and CEO of Flexity. You can actually even edit it you're going to add say uh sent from comment or something like that and uh you can even refine the email if you want and you can just send it and it's right from there you don't have to open you don't have to copy paste this you don't have to open this tab you're gonna have to like compose email this is just one example you could also schedule meetings from here you could say order the leather jacket jensen's wearing for me for me on amazon it's going to find it of course it's going to be pretty expensive so it's not going to place the order directly so it's going to do a lot of these like multi-step things what's going to happen to businesses who survive on paid ads is it going to skip paid ads or how is it going to research information about what product to buy so you can instruct your comment assistant to say like i want

[10:59](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=659) you to just skip all the ads when you're tasking comment to go watch youtube for you uh you can task comment say ignore all the ads just get me the core sense of what the content is about you could ask comet to say like uh go look at like favorite uh instagram influencers are wearing and go read the reviews of all of them and then um tell me what what's best for me based on what you already know about me and and go buy it for me so how can businesses optimize for that experience i would say that what businesses should really do is they like really focus on just building great product and get a lot of people like reviews right because perplexity reads reviews Just watch these videos.

[11:30](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=690) So get as much content about your product as possible, right? The solution shouldn't be to like paying people to like write great things about you. But honestly,

[11:39](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=699) **Aravind Srinivas:** like building a great product and getting the word out and then people talk about it, rave about it,

[11:46](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=706) and then comment reads all that and is able to like suggest that to you. That would be the way to go. How fast do you think we're going to switch to asking our AI assistants to buy things for us? I think you can do that already. I mean, like, there's still friction in society. And I remember you were talking about, like, how we were overpaying, I don't know, real estate people, financial advisors. But still, when I think about a person who's in their 60s, who's done it for a while, they're not going to just switch to AI to do things for them. I'll tell you an anecdote, which kind of convinced me why it's worth building these things.

[12:18](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=738) I was once having a haircut somewhere in Noye Valley when I used to live there. And another person was also having a haircut in the same place. And he was somewhat older. And he was ranting about how he spent his entire day until that haircut, probably three, four hours, just looking for a new washing machine because it's a pretty expensive purchase. So you're going to spend a lot of time deciding what to buy. And you've wasted your entire day just reading reviews and watching videos and exploring through reviews. And you end up getting even more confused than you were at the beginning. And this is the kind of thing we want Comet to help you like.

[12:58](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=778) Make really good decisions really quickly and delegate all the mundane cognitive labor to something like comment like why do you want to go read all the reviews like it's boring like anyway like people are paid to write good things so how do you like get the signal from the noise it's like you have to consume the reviews across different platforms not just one platform i could pay someone to write good reviews on google maps but um i couldn't necessarily pay someone to do it on every single platform i wouldn't be that thoughtful so definitely if your product is pretty bad or overhyped, then someone's going to say something negative on YouTube or Reddit.

[13:36](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=816) And then perplexing will give you a pretty balanced perspective. Okay, here are the five different things. Imagine reading 30-40 tabs in a matter of a few seconds or minutes and then telling you what to do. And it also understands you, your needs, your budget, everything. It has memory. The comet can answer questions about yourself. It can give you tips on how to do better. So I think that's the kind of way in which we feel um ai is less about like you know whether someone's old or young uh whether someone's like uh you know more used to traditional tools or like like easy like like quick to change and adopt new things it's truly about the utility but i'll give you another example i was doing like a stage for uh like talk for a partnership with motorola i asked comet like to go um read all the like like you know talks given by jensen steve jobs and everything and also read the current draft it was written by my comms person and then i want you to edit it a little bit to feel a little more grandiose but i still want to preserve how i speak so you watch my interviews too and you watch these guys interviews and you try to blend a little where you know i want to say something that slightly feel more inspiring but i don't want to appear inauthentic and so um and it did

[14:56](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=896) a great job actually it's such a good job that i was like damn i would have paid someone like thousand dollars for that let's transition to 2030 what does shopping look like everybody has an ai agent yeah they talk to yeah so amazon app is dead walmart i wouldn't say it's dead uh fundamentally the the modes for companies like amazon and walmart is physical real estate the warehouses the stores like walmart's stores um and like the packaging and the supply chain like but the app itself right the shopping experience is going to be the core shopping experience might might not matter this is essentially what we've been talking about ever since the beginning it doesn't matter if it's amazon or google or walmart i think it's fundamentally like what's good for the user right like actually uh the founder of amazon himself says this like you always want a long-term alignment between the customer and the shareholder and as you said as a customer you just said that you don't care about ads right like you actually don't want yeah you want you want what is good for you so just show me that and i'll pay you more money and that's that's the kind of relationship you're going to have with your comedy system. Maybe the advertisers are still going to exist.

[15:53](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=953) like a complete end of ads advertisers might be trying to talk to the agent not to you but the agent but then it can go to to ignore the ad exactly they and and that's a handshake agreement you have with your agent that the advertiser cannot influence or cannot like manipulate and that's what protects you uh but i do think like you might be open to some ads like for example um let's say you have an assistant that works in a team right you're running a podcast and so maybe there is a new microphone that's really good but not many people know about it they go and tell the person working on in your team hey like can you please tell silicon valley girl to go use this our microphone actually it's pretty good that's kind of like an ad to you but it's being uh told to you to your team uh and and you trust that person on your team so you know that that person's not gonna unnecessarily evaluate not just take it yeah exactly is that How are you going to monetize this experience?

[16:34](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=994) We haven't thought deeply about it. I'm just imagining a future where ads were done at the level of agents and also between apps. So, for example, you might be tasking Comet to do something, like book me a ride, and then the three different apps, like Uber, Lyft, and something else, might be like, hey, I think I can deliver the best ride for her. and then the agent knows your preference that you prefer uber let's say uh and then uh it could be like you know what like i really want to win her business so i'm actually going to offer this right for free uh just tell her that experience will be better than uber the competitor could say that the agent could charge some uh revenue for you know the apps trying to get your attention and share it back with you yeah which google never does so google takes your queries does a bidding process among different companies trying to bid for that query and takes all the money. Doesn't share it with anyone. That's why they have profit margins, a high answer.

[17:23](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=1043) But that's bad for the user because you at the end are getting influenced. On the other hand, I'm saying there are two levels of protection. One is I don't let you directly see any ad and even if your agent sees the ad, the company that runs the agent gets some of it but the user also gets some of it. And only that's the that's the best way to continue to win the user's trust by saying okay i'm actually open to being advertised to through my agent and in return for that i actually want some money back you don't get to take all of it real traders still hear the noise they just know when to stop listening to it Find and research opportunities to fit your strategy with thinkorswim trading platforms from Schwab.

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[18:50](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=1130) Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. I love that model. That way our margins are lower, but our trust is higher. So the lifetime value, the LTV, is higher because your trust more. And as long as the agent is not getting manipulated, and therefore you're not getting manipulated, this model could work. So all roads lead to a future where the ad margins are going to go lower. that's for sure because the user has an ai in their hands for the first time until now ai existed in the hands of the advertising companies like like amazon has ai do the recommendation ranking google has ai to do the search ranking so they can influence things for and manipulate you to buying stuff because that's what the advertisers are those are the tools being provided to the advertisers to like you know optimize their campaigns but for the first time you have an AI in your hands. Become a system.

[19:38](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=1178) That works for me. That works for you. It doesn't work for the advertiser. It actually protects you. It actually gives you power against them. You have intelligence on your demand to summon and do your bidding based on the prompt and your memory and your preferences. And so that's a contract between you and an agent and that's giving you power against the big tech. And therefore some of that money can flow back to you for the first time. I love that. I love the way you think about that. I hope everybody who's creating AI agents things. What about other jobs? So I asked Perplexity. I asked it to analyze my portfolio.

[20:13](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=1213) And I asked it whether I should find my financial advisor. And it was like, yes, you should do this immediately. That's the first time I saw something that definitive from AI, because it said, this is strategy he's utilizing, he's buying very expensive mutual funds. What's going to happen to these professions, financial advisors, real estate brokers? Because Perplexity does it now. And it created the whole strategy for me to rebalance and everything. Yeah, I've thought about this, actually. The way I think about it is like real estate agents getting the listings on like Redfin or Zillow with like a comment like browser or say you just have a recurring task that's running. It's not yet there. So people watch this and go and try it. It doesn't work yet, but it's going to work pretty soon, which is you could just have a task that says, you know, every day morning, just look at all the new listings on Redfin. You know, these are the preferences I have.

[21:04](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=1264) I know Redfin kind of already has some of these features, but it's very hard-coded and there's a lot of selector drops and filters that don't really work properly. But you could have something like every time there's a house below a certain budget and that's within this neighborhood, make sure to send me a push notification and submit an application on my behalf and schedule a meeting for a visit. You have access to my calendar, everything. So if your agent only shows you listings on Redfin and Zillow, I think they're useless. but if your agent is doing off-market deals for you they're so pretty useful because those things do not exist on the web okay i feel like having the power of like intelligence and computer at your hands it always comes back to that means you can push uh the existing industry to like like work harder for you uh same thing with private wealth management or financial advisors like what are the job of the financial advisor to tell you like what stocks to buy then i don't think they're not going to be smarter than perplexity which you can go and summon and ask it to go read all the uh analyst reports in every stock and like all the morning day news and they come back to you and tell you like impacting your portfolio uh what would warren buffett do if he

[22:18](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=1338) had exactly your portfolio like like it can answer questions like that that no financial advisor can but if your financial advisor does more stuff for you like getting you some access to uh certain funds like private equity or hedge funds or access to like funds or citadel or something like that that you cannot or like some startups venture capital which you cannot get through uh just the public markets then maybe they're useful right it's all about like you have this new power in your hand so go and ask the people who are taking your money to do more work for you or the contract between you and them and it looks like those entry-level jobs are disappearing right because they are an entry-level financial advisor you can only do like managing stocks what do you think is going to happen yeah i i certainly think so like people need to push further like if you're just literally managing before you're not doing much like i i have some private wealth managers too And I think the way I used to, like helping me move money around those kind of things, because I don't have time to manage all this myself.

[23:23](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=1403) There, they help me through their time and they also give me some advice on like, you know, what to do stuff, how to save taxes a little bit, those kind of things. So your value add should expand further than just managing a portfolio. you if we apply this to any market how can you do this as a recent graduate and do you believe people still need to do their phds like you did or yeah that era is over the fundamental thing you learn a phd is uh learning to learn like i i did a lot of research in my phd which doesn't matter today but i got the ability to like go learn a new topic dig deep understand everything gather my information consult like whoever is the best uh expert which by the way is not needed anymore because you have tools like perplexity but let's say you know you you have the ability to ask the right questions and then you acquire a certain level of subject expertise to go make decisions and like you know branch out that is what you acquire that skill is it worth four years that's the thing i would say like i decided to do a phd for many reasons um and one of them obviously was my own interest in the topic but the other was my that was my only way to get to america a lot of

[24:35](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=1475) indians come here for masters but you got to realize that in order to come here for masters you need to be able to fund your own tuition fee and i i didn't have that ability so phd the university pays for you masters you pay the university so uh that was one of my one of my reasons not the only reason so obviously just because someone gives you a free entry ticket to the united states doesn't mean you should you should do a phd because it's a pretty grueling journey. So I had a deep passion for the topic. I loved AI. I like digging deep into things. I'm fundamentally curious about learning deeply about any topic. So those are attributes that you think you align with. I think that journey is very, very, very useful in your life. I don't believe that you need a PhD to be contributing positively to AI as a topic, either as a researcher or engineer or entrepreneur but i think if you zoom out and think beyond materialistic goals like just foundationally as a person you become a lot more grounded in like the the willingness to seek truth the relentless questioning the socratic method of learning uh and uh learning to learn and and i feel like these three qualities are like like reflective of this proverb or phrase

[25:50](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=1550) right like give a man a fish you feed him for a day teach a man to fish you feed him for a lifetime like that's how i feel about phd uh and and uh so that's why i i would still recommend people to do it if you truly want to be someone uh that enjoys like learning about music like maybe i i can stop doing this thing and i can still find a new feel or a new topic to go and i i can still bet on myself to like learn that and be successful at it so if you are 18 today yeah in the u.s and has to start all over again would you still i actually came here when i was 22 i finished my undergrad came here but if you were in the u.s and you had to start your career from scratch what would you do look i would definitely pursue my interests but 18 is too early to know what you're interested in a lot of people like think they know what they're interested in but i feel My personal opinion is that 18 is still pretty early.

[26:44](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=1604) Just pick something and try to do it well. I think people underestimate the importance of like having that inner confidence in you to bet on yourself. That no matter what you do, you can do it well. So unless you've done some things like that in your life already, like try to actually go and do something. Like commit yourself to one thing and do it for a sustained period of time. Because it's very hard to be good at something if you just do it for like a couple of months. you need a year or two to actually get really good like top-notch at something uh it could be programming it could be math it could be ai it could be like writing apps doesn't matter it takes time to actually be really good so i would suggest them to like like go deep into something it could be undergrad education it could be like finding a software job at one of the existing companies you could start off as an intern if they don't hire you full-time uh and then convert and like four in the hours like i i regret like watching youtube video i know you're a youtuber so it's kind of weird people are saying and we're doing a whole youtube thing so yeah you should watch youtube and and get knowledge out of it uh but i remember telling

[27:51](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=1671) uh sundar when i talked to him that hey like youtube is a great app but i wish you focused more on knowledge and learning and he agreed with me because it's not just that right um so i i regret the amount of time i wasted on youtube just watching like useless stuff when you're very young just you utilize the time surround yourself with like like peers who would push you to be better learn a lot like be a learning machine um or like like like work really really hard uh and uh and then you acquire that ability to go and like be good at anything you can bet on yourself okay like how do you take on hard hard tasks in life you can only take it on if you have some confidence that you know you can keep persisting when things are not going your way and like you you'll see the light at the end of the tunnel you have to have had to do it at least once in your life to bet on yourself for the next next step is that where your confidence come comes yeah i've done like we're gonna take over google we're gonna take this yeah exactly i mean you never know you don't need to take over like you can just you know be successful in your own way but when you have a competitor like google it's very hard like that's what turns most people off like sorry

[29:02](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=1742) when turns most people away it's like uh how do you uh compete in a space where okay let's say when we started there were some other startups that were trying to do the same thing they're all not around anymore like they either sold or like they pivoted so as you keep going every stage from the seed round to like where we are today your serve competitors keep you know going away too and you're like surviving surviving surviving it's like squid games and then um finally you're ending up with in a scenario or the arena where it says google open ai and yourself and uh funding wise you know like we raised a billion dollars open ai is close to uh 80 billion or 70 billion google has like 100 billion in just the cash and they make 200 200 billion a year in revenue so you you are obviously competing with like giant monsters so you have to like bet on yourself to like still figure out ways despite the whole world screaming at you that you have to sell to apple to sell to metal the game is over like you're it's going to die in a couple years i bet i can bet my entire savings that this company is going to go to nothing and you have to be able to read all that and like still motivate yourself and also motivate the people who have

[30:13](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=1813) trusted you to like be the investors or the employees who are working here, I always see like those who take equity in our company, they're basically trusting the leadership and the company to like deliver. What do you tell yourself when you read those comments? I tell myself that I'll prove you wrong. And it keeps you going. Yeah. That's amazing. Do you think that's your main trait that made you who you are? One of my important traits. I wouldn't say that's the singular. I would say the single main trait at the end is. It's not primal or anything. I generally just like to learn a lot about any topic. I enjoy the intellectual aspects of it. That's my most important trait, I would say. People have multiple traits, and so do I. And the survival instinct is definitely something that's served me very well.

[31:07](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=1867) I mean, immigrants are all survivors. We are. Do you still work 24-7? No one can work 24-7. Well, almost the time you're awake. Yeah, technically, no, I do spend time working out. I do spend time with my family. So I do work or think of what work almost every waking hour. So it's very hard for me to not look at my phone or not check notifications, not be thinking about some problem in my head, zoning out sometimes when someone's talking to me, trying to stay present in the moment. These are all hard things. And so these are the things I would sacrifice in order to, like, do whatever I'm doing really well.

[31:51](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=1911) People like to think, like, oh, work is work. After you go back home, you just shut down Slack and, like, your laptop, you never open it. And you're just, like, staying present in the moment at home. I cannot do that. And even on a walk, like, I'm thinking about something, there's some phone calls. So, yeah, if that counts as work, yes. uh i mean i've always my mom like whenever i was young like always said like uh anything that's not quality like time undistracted time does not really work and i i've always believed that like yes i can be replying on slack while i'm walking taking a walk uh that doesn't mean i'm really working some people like to count that as hours and i know i know you even elon says he works I'm sure he counts all that, but it's truly like the time I spend where I'm just looking at the product and thinking how to improve it, or I'm talking to some of our people internally on what we can do to grow the app more, or what are all the new ideas we can put into the app to make it even better, how can we improve the orchestration of the models even better, how can we reduce the cost, how can we ship new features, what are all the new things we can be doing.

[33:01](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=1981) Those are the times when I think I'm uninterrupted state. And that's where I feel like I can do my best work. And that usually happens during the day. Other than that, I'm mostly just multitasking. A couple last questions for everyone who's trying to build something in AI. Do you think opportunity still exists aside from, like, everyone's building a JPT router, right? Do you think there is still opportunity for that or people should switch? And what are the areas that they should be looking at? Realistically, it's gotten much harder. Yes, like you would want to build a GPT wrapper because building your own models, like basically way harder.

[33:34](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=2014) It's almost impossible for a beginner. And I don't even think people should be looking at it as like building a model once. That's the mistake everybody made. It's whoever tried to build models around the time we started. I was like, yeah, how much does it cost to launch? I even had an investor who now went to Meta and it's like, oh, it's going to cost $200,000 to print a GP3 model, so why can't you do it? I'll give you like a million and you spend 200K on the model. It's not about that one model. It's about that relentless exercise of iterating the models, building the next cluster, hiring the talent to go figure out what the next model should be, and continually iterating, bringing down the cost, improving the capabilities, improving the reasoning, all that stuff.

[34:20](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=2060) That requires a lab and a cluster. and the people and the milestones and some way to actually turn all those models into a product and a business and revenue. And then you end up basically saying, oh, you have to build another open air, another end product. What are you like? Why do you need to exist? Like, okay, where's the talent arbitrage? So that's why I think product is actually at least, you know, a little more statistically probable. But even there, you have to compete with the likes of the labs themselves, which are building their own products, and the big tech companies, and like upstarts like us.

[35:00](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=2100) And no one's going to be like, oh, Perplexes is going to do research. I can go do the commerce stuff. Perplexes and commerce. Exactly, right? Everyone's building horizontal products. And that applies to us too. Oh, ChatGPT will never do shopping. ChatGPT will never do travel. We won't do finance. All that is like not true. Like everyone's going to do anything that works.

[35:23](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=2123) **Aravind Srinivas:** So I would just say the bet you can make is do what you truly are obsessed about.

[35:32](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=2132) Because fundamentally, it's a bet on yourself. It's not a bet on the market. It's not a bet on ecosystem, like what competitors will do, will not do. like don't try to be this uh whiteboard uh strategy master like it's completely pointless like when your idea works and gets like 100 million or like billion in revenue always expect existing people to go after it because everyone's looking for that incremental revenue in ai because the capex is so high so the only way to justify all this is to actually turn that into like business profits and then so they'll go after you so the only thing you can bet on is whether you're so obsessed about a topic that you will do it anywhere regardless of all the odds stacked against you and then you'll prove the world wrong because you go so far deep into that and no one cared about the problem more than you did and for us like for me like that's where the whole you know you asked me what my most important trade is like i love learning and and this is one of the best apps for learning it's designed for us it's designed for our founders like we built it for ourselves key bet was everybody in the world allows everybody in the world allows having an AI that they can summon to go do stuff for them. Everybody wants more time in their lives. So I

[36:45](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=2205) think build for yourself. Hopefully, that's a thing that a lot of people in the world want. And therefore, you can turn it into a scalable product and a scalable company. And get acquired at some stage, I guess. Thank you. That's a great answer. My last question, do you use anything aside from perplexity in terms of AI apps? And what are your tops are your favorite then? Well, as part of my job, I am required to use other apps to see what they're doing better than us because no one's going to be best at everything. So I have all the AI apps on my phone, like ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Cloud, almost all of them I have it.

[37:29](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=2249) I don't have Copilot and Cloud, but maybe mainly because they're not that mainstream in terms of consumer distribution. But in terms of Organic usage, like I do go pretty often and try. I would say I've tested ChatGPT the most. But again, it mostly comes down to testing. So you don't use any like wrapper apps that are specific for, I don't know, nutrition or image editing. So if you need something, you would just ask Perplexity. Yeah, if it doesn't work, I would ask it in ChatGPT. And if it doesn't work there also, for example, if I need to edit, and I'll just do my usage, right? If I need to do image editing, I've done that.

[38:11](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=2291) And if it doesn't work on both ChatGPT and Perplexity, then I would just write code myself and do it. I love that. But that's just me. But that's you. Same thing with like search. Like if it does, like for example, we have an integrated tennis course and I love tennis. I like following life scores. So I go to Google and, you know, get the score. We haven't all done currency conversions all the time. Like we are still working on that. So I use Google for like some of the widgets they have. And then sometimes finding these needles in a haystack like links may not like best product on that yet. what do you mean by links like there are some really old links on the like some blog posts that i'm i definitely remember i read it like when i was a kid and perplexity sometimes helps me find that but it's very old links so um i still train to use google with all the macros like i know how to like suffix the dates and like all that stuff so that's because we grew up like that right like back then like googling was actually a skill so if you knew how to like search for links with those specific phrases and and or contains and like those dates of fixes you can get whatever you want and that also gives me ideas on how to improve the perplexity product

[39:27](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=2367) too like maybe teach the ai to like use some of these macros yourself and then uh against your index you're building and like train that to like retrieve these things with these keyword arguments so yeah so my life like i think i mostly say perplexity um google chat gpt i think these are the three main apps i use uh mid-journey sometimes because it has a pretty good aesthetic quality in it and then um yeah i feel like that's it got it i mean it's a kind of a boring answer i guess but yeah well that's but that's you right yeah that's me that's you the thing was like comet lets me do anything right now.

[40:07](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=2407) Yeah. Like, I don't even have to go to these separate apps. Combat as a browser, it actually does better search than even perplexity. Will you make it free for everyone with all the features? Yeah. Not every feature. We have to make some money here. But, yeah, but almost all the features we think will be available to everybody. And it's going to be on mobile too, right? Or is it? Because I'm only using it on desktop. That's right. so we just announced today that the play store like like you can pre-register to get it uh app store pre-registering will be announced shortly uh by end of the year i think we should have it available on ios and android um and then also have it be uh generally available on desktop for both windows and mac i love it it's it generally it is so that's the thing with comment by the way you can summon it to go use my journey go use uh photoshop and just do it for you you don't even And how these apps you explicitly open.

[41:03](https://realalpha.app/v/U7PcyE0p54s/?t=2463) So it's a super app. It's an everything app. It is. It is. It is fascinating. Thank you so much. That is so inspiring. I feel like we're tapping into future like actually right now.