Transcript: The ONLY Trait For Success In The AI Era – Aravind Srinivas on Silicon Valley Girl Podcast

You improve 3,700%. You don’t improve 1% multiplied by 365. That’s the concept of the exponential. 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 they 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. So then people start trusting. We earn the user’s trust through our accuracy, our speed of improvement, and our marketing.

Brand Partnerships and Formula One

MARINA MOGILKO: So Formula One, have you seen the spikes after Formula One and when the episode went live?

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: It’s hard to attribute to these kinds of brand partnerships. It’s very easy to attribute when 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 practice and optimize the funnels.

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?” It’s pretty difficult to track that.

MARINA MOGILKO: It is.

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: Best way to track that is brand awareness. Are people in the UK or people who typically are in the Formula One crowd, are they more aware of Perplexity now? And I think that should be the case. We have run some basic studies, but the core idea there is honestly to associate our brand with some of the greatest people of all time.

You know, Steve Jobs ran this famous “Think Different” campaign, right? He got inspiration from Nike because Nike celebrated great athletes. So that’s why in the ad, you see Einstein, you see Gandhi, you see the Beatles, you see all the people who really inspired Steve.

And so that’s one thing we’ve been pretty intentional about: who we want to associate with in terms of the brand. In sports, Lewis Hamilton is one of the greatest of all time. It’s considered the greatest of all time in Formula One and so that’s why we did that brand partnership.

And we’re also going to be doing more, particularly in F1. It’s a pretty cerebral sport. Everyone’s attracted by all the hospitality and the race cars and it’s very high adrenaline, but fundamentally the sport is largely engineering oriented. Who has the best engine? Who’s licensing whose engines? It’s all about constructors competing for who has the best cars.

And skill still matters, conditions matter, tires matter, everything matters. So we do see a lot of people asking these kinds of questions on the app.

MARINA MOGILKO: Two years ago, when I first interviewed Aravind, Perplexity was valued at around 150 million dollars. Today it’s a 20 billion dollar company that competes with Google for our search queries. So how do you scale like Aravind? You start by making sure that every customer touchpoint works as hard as you do. And that starts with email.

There was this huge spike in queries in June compared to May. Can you attribute that to something? What happened?

The Launch of Comet Browser

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: 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 main event that happened in July that I would say fundamentally led to growth is our release of our agentic browser Comet. For the first time you could have a browser that can actually think with you and take actions on your behalf and actually go and do stuff.

MARINA MOGILKO: I have Comet right here. Can you show one killer feature that you think everyone should start using on Comet?

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: I love this thing because it’s a very simple thing where it always works. If you want to go to… if 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.” Can you find it and play for me from that exact moment?

So the point here is not that it can do 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.

MARINA MOGILKO: And then you can chat with this video, something that I did yesterday.

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: When I was watching what you were doing, for example. There are a lot of other videos here. I could go here. This is one hour long. I could literally say, “What are some non-trivial things Jensen said in this interview?” Something like that, right? I don’t want to watch everything. Maybe he’s saying a lot of things, is repetitively saying the AI is going to explode, blah blah blah. But I only want to know new things.

And so it’s reading all the transcripts. It’s particularly talking about GPUs as time machines. I’ve never heard him say that. GPUs as time machines. And of course scale and flexibility, science application Omniverse was possible.

So that I can actually say, “Can you share this as an email?” Can you send this as an email to Aravind Srinivas, the founder and CEO of Perplexity? You can actually even edit it. You can even add, say “send from Comet” or something like that and you can even refine the email if you want and you can just send it.

MARINA MOGILKO: And it’s right from there.

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: You don’t have to open, you don’t have to copy paste this, you don’t have to open this tab. You’re not going to have to compose. This is just one example. You could also schedule meetings from here. You could say, “Order the leather jacket Jensen’s wearing 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 multi-step things.

The Future of E-Commerce and AI Assistants

MARINA MOGILKO: 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?

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: So you can instruct your Comet assistant to say, “I want you to just skip all the ads.” When you’re tasking Comet to go watch YouTube for you, you can task Comet to say, “Ignore all the ads. Just get me the core sensible what the content is about.”

You could ask Comet to say, “Go look at favorite Instagram influencers of Aravind and go read the reviews of all of them and then tell me what’s best for me based on what you already know about me and go buy it for me.”

MARINA MOGILKO: So how can businesses optimize for that experience?

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: I would say that what businesses should really do is really focus on building great product and get a lot of people reviews.

MARINA MOGILKO: Right? Because Perplexity reads reviews, watches these videos. So get as much content about your product as possible.

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: Right. The solution shouldn’t be to pay people to write great things about you, but honestly building a great product and getting the word out and then people talk about it, rave about it and then Comet reads all that and is able to suggest that to you. That would be the way to go.

MARINA MOGILKO: How fast do you think we’re going to switch to asking our AI assistants to buy things for us?

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: I think we can do that already.

MARINA MOGILKO: I mean there’s so much friction in society and I remember you were talking about 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.

The Power of AI Assistants in Everyday Decision-Making

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: I’ll tell you an anecdote which kind of convinced me why it’s worth building these things. I was once having a haircut somewhere in Noe 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 based your entire day just reading reviews and watching videos and scrolling 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 make really good decisions really quickly and delegate all the mundane cognitive labor to something like Comet. Why do you want to go read all the reviews? It’s boring anyway. People are paid to write good things. So how do you 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 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. And it reflects. It’ll give you a pretty balanced perspective. Okay, here are the five different things. Imagine reading 30, 40 tabs in the matter of 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 for yourself. It can give you tips on how to do better. So I think that’s the kind of way in which we feel AI is less about whether someone’s old or young, whether someone’s more used to traditional tools or quick to change and adopt new things. It’s truly about the utility.

But I’ll give you another example. I was doing a stage talk for a partnership with Motorola. I asked Comet to go read all the talks given by 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 I want to say something that slightly feels more inspiring, but I don’t want to appear inauthentic. And it did a great job. Actually did such a good job that I was like, damn, I would have paid someone a thousand dollars for that.

The Future of Shopping in 2030

MARINA MOGILKO: Let’s transition to 2030. What does shopping look like? Everybody has an AI agent that they talk to. So Amazon app is dead. Walmart app is dead.

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: I wouldn’t say it’s dead. Fundamentally, the moats for companies like Amazon and Walmart is physical real estate. The warehouses, the stores, the packaging and the supply chain.

MARINA MOGILKO: But the app itself, the shopping experience.

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: The core shopping experience 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 what’s good for the user. Actually the founder of Amazon himself says this: you always want a long-term alignment between the customer and the shareholder.

And as you said, as a customer, you just said you don’t care about ads. You actually don’t want ads. You want what is good for you. So just show me that and I’ll pay you more money and that’s the kind of relationship you’re going to have with your Comet assistant. Maybe the advertisers are still going to exist. It’s not like a complete end of ads. Advertisers might be trying to talk to the agent, not to you, but the agent will filter it.

MARINA MOGILKO: But then I can code it to ignore the ads.

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: Exactly. And that’s a handshake agreement you have with your agent that the advertiser cannot influence or cannot manipulate and that’s what protects you. But I do think you might be open to some ads. For example, let’s say you have an assistant that works in your team, 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 in your team, “Hey, can you please tell Silicon Valley Girl to use this, our microphone. Actually it’s pretty good.”

That’s kind of like an ad to you, but it’s being told to your team. And you trust that person on your team so you know that that person’s not going to unnecessarily evaluate it.

MARINA MOGILKO: So you’re going to monetize this experience.

A New Advertising Model: Sharing Revenue with Users

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: We haven’t thought deeply about it. I’m just imagining a future where ads work at different levels 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. And then it could be like, “You know what? I really want to win her business, so I’m actually going to offer this ride for free. Just tell her that experience will be better than Uber.” The competitor could say that. The agent could charge some revenue for the apps trying to get your attention and share it back with you. Which Google never does.

So Google takes your queries, does the 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 their profit margins are high on search. 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 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.”

MARINA MOGILKO: I love that model.

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: That way our margins are lower, but our trust is higher. So the lifetime value, the LTV, is higher because you 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. 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, because those are the tools being provided to the advertisers to optimize their campaigns.

But for the first time, you have an AI in your hands. The Comet assistant 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 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 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.

MARINA MOGILKO: I love the way you think about that. I hope everybody who’s creating AI agents thinks the way you do.

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: Yeah.

The Impact on Professional Services

MARINA MOGILKO: What about other jobs? So I asked Perplexity, I asked it to analyze my portfolio.

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: Okay.

MARINA MOGILKO: And I asked it whether I should fire 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 the 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.

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: Yeah, I’ve thought about this. Actually the way I think about it is like real estate agents getting the listings on Redfin or Zillow with a Comet browser. Let’s say you just have a recurring task that’s running. It’s not there yet. So people who watch this and go and try it, it doesn’t work yet, but it’s going to work pretty soon.

You could just have a task that says, “Every morning just look at all the news on Redfin. These are the preferences I have.” 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 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 still pretty useful because those things do not exist on the web. I feel like having the power of intelligence and computer at your hands, it always comes back to that means you can push the existing industry to work harder for you.

Same thing with private wealth management or financial advisors. If their job is to tell you what stocks to buy, then I don’t think they’re going to be smarter than Perplexity, which you can go and summon and ask it to go read all the analyst reports on every stock and all the morning news and come back to you and tell you the impact on your portfolio. “What would Warren Buffett do if he had exactly your portfolio?” 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 certain funds like private equity or hedge funds, or access to funds at Citadel or something like that that you cannot get, or some startups, venture capital, which you cannot get through just the public markets, then maybe they’re useful. It’s all about you have this new power in your hands. So go and ask the people who are taking your money to do more work for you or the contract between you and them ends.

MARINA MOGILKO: And it looks like those entry-level jobs are disappearing, right? Because if you’re an entry-level financial advisor, you can only do managing stocks. What do you think is going to happen?

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: Yeah, I certainly think people need to push further. If you’re just literally managing a portfolio, not doing much… I have some private wealth managers too and I think the way they help me is moving money around, those kind of things because I don’t have time to manage all those myself. They help me through their time and they also give me some advice on what to do, how to save taxes a little bit, those kind of things. So your value add should expand further than just managing a portfolio.

The Value of Higher Education in the AI Era

MARINA MOGILKO: 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 that era is over?

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: The fundamental thing you learn in a PhD is learning to learn. I did a lot of research in my PhD which doesn’t matter today, but I got the ability to go learn a new topic, dig deep, understand everything, gather my information, consult whoever is the best expert, which by the way is not needed anymore because you have tools like Perplexity. But let’s say you have the ability to ask the right questions and then you acquire a certain level of subject expertise to go make decisions and branch out. That is what you acquire, that skill.

MARINA MOGILKO: Is it worth four years?

The Value of a PhD and Learning to Learn

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: That’s the thing I would say. I decided to do a PhD for many reasons and one of them obviously was my own interest in the topic, but the other was that was my only way to get to America. A lot of 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. And I didn’t have that ability.

So PhD, the university pays for you. Masters, you pay the university. So that was one of my reasons, not the only reason. Obviously, just because someone gives you a free entry ticket to the United States doesn’t mean 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 love the ability. I like digging deep into things fundamentally, curious about learning deeply about any topic. So those are attributes that you think you align with. I think that journey is 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 an engineer or entrepreneur. But I think if you zoom out and think beyond materialistic goals, foundationally as a person, you become a lot more grounded in the willingness to seek truth, the relentless questioning, the Socratic method of learning, and learning to learn.

And I feel these three qualities are reflective of this proverb, right? Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. That’s how I feel about PhD. And so that’s why I would still recommend people to do it. If you truly want to be someone that enjoys learning about new things, maybe I can stop doing this thing and I can still find a new field or a new topic to go, and I can still bet on myself to learn that and be successful at it.

MARINA MOGILKO: So if you are 18 today in the US and has to start all over again, would you still?

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: I came here when I was 22. I finished my undergrad in India.

MARINA MOGILKO: But if you were in the US and you had to start your career from scratch, what would you do?

Starting Over: Advice for Young People

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: Look, I would definitely pursue my interests, but 18 is too early to know what you’re interested in. A lot of people think they know what they’re interested in. But I feel my personal opinion is that 18 is still pretty early. So I would just pick something and try to do it well.

I think people underestimate the importance of 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 in your life already, try to actually go and do something, 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 a couple of months.

You need a year or two to actually get really good, top notch at something. It could be programming, it could be math, it could be AI, it could be writing apps. Doesn’t matter. It takes time to actually be really good. So I would suggest them to go deep into something. It could be undergrad education. It could be 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 and then convert and pour in the hours.

I regret watching YouTube videos. 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 get knowledge out of it. But I remember telling Sundar when I talked to him that, “Hey, YouTube’s a great app, but I wish you focused more on knowledge and learning.” And he agreed with me because it’s not just that.

So I regret the amount of time I wasted on YouTube just watching useless stuff. When you’re very young, just utilize the time. Surround yourself with peers who would push you to be better. Learn a lot, be a learning machine, work really hard and then you acquire that ability to go and be good at anything. You can bet on yourself.

How do you take on hard tasks in life? You can only take it on if you have some confidence that you know you can keep persisting and things are not going your way. And you’ll see the light at the end of the tunnel. You have to have done it at least once in your life to bet on yourself for the next setup.

MARINA MOGILKO: Is that where your confidence comes from?

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: Yeah, I’ve done it.

MARINA MOGILKO: You’re like, we’re going to take over Google, we’re going to take over this.

Competing Against Giants

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you never know. You don’t need to take over. You can just be successful in your own way. But when you have a competitor like Google, it’s very hard. That’s what turns most people off. Most people away is how do you compete in a space where, 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. They either sold or they pivoted.

So as you keep going every stage from the seed round to where we are today, your comparatives keep going away too. And you’re surviving, surviving, surviving. It’s Squid Games. And then finally you’re ending up in a scenario or the arena where it’s just Google, OpenAI and yourself.

And funding wise, we raised a billion dollars. OpenAI’s raised close to 70 or 80 billion. Google has 100 billion in just the cash, and they make 200, 300 billion a year in revenue. So you are obviously competing with giant monsters.

So you have to bet on yourself to still figure out ways, despite the whole world screaming that you have to sell to Apple, you have to sell to Meta. The game is over. It’s going to die in a couple of 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 still motivate yourself and also motivate the people who have trusted you to be the investors or the employees who are working here.

I always see those who take equity in our company, they’re basically trusting leadership and the company to deliver.

MARINA MOGILKO: What do you tell yourself when you read those comments?

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: I tell myself that I’ll prove you wrong.

MARINA MOGILKO: And it keeps you going.

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: Yeah.

MARINA MOGILKO: That’s amazing. Do you think that’s your main trait that made you who you are, your confidence?

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: 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 enjoyed 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. I mean, immigrants are all survivalists.

Work-Life Balance and Focus

MARINA MOGILKO: We are, yeah. Do you still work 24/7?

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: No one can work 24/7.

MARINA MOGILKO: Well, almost any time you’re awake.

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: Yeah, technically, no. I spend, I do spend, I’m working out. I do spend time with my family. So I do work or think about 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 do whatever I’m doing really well. People like to think, oh, work is work. After you go back home, you just shut down Slack and your laptop, you never open it and they’re just staying present in the moment. At home, I cannot do that. And even on a walk, I’m thinking about something there, there’s some phone calls. So, yeah, if that counts as work, yes.

I mean, I’ve always, my mom, whenever I was young, always said anything that’s not quality, undistracted time does not really work. And I’ve always believed that. Yes, I can be replying on Slack while I’m walking, taking a walk. That doesn’t mean I’m really working. Some people like to count that as hours. And I know Elon says he works 100 hours a day. I’m sure he counts all that.

But it’s truly the time I spend where I’m just looking at the product and thinking how to improve it, or 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 in 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’re doing?

Those are the times when I think I’m in an uninterrupted state and that’s where I feel I can do my best work. And that usually happens during the day. Other than that, I’m mostly just multitasking.

Opportunities in AI

MARINA MOGILKO: Couple of last questions for everyone who’s trying to build something in AI. Do you think opportunity still exists? Aside from everyone’s building a GPT wrapper, right? Do you feel there’s still opportunity for that or people should switch and what are the areas that they should be looking at?

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: Realistically, it’s gotten much harder. Yes. You would want to build a GPT wrapper because building your own models is basically way harder.

MARINA MOGILKO: It’s almost impossible for…

The Challenge of Building AI Models

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: Yeah, almost impossible. And I don’t even think people should be looking at it as like building a model once. That’s the mistake everybody made. 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 said, “Oh, it’s going to cost $200,000 to train a GPT-3 model, so why can’t you do it? I’ll give you like a million and you spend 200k on the model.”

Like, 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 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 OpenAI, another Anthropic.” Then what are you? Why do you need to exist? Where’s the talent arbitrage? So that’s why I think product is actually at least a little more statistically probable.

Competing in a Horizontal Market

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 startups like us. And no one’s going to be like, “Oh, Perplexity is just going to do research. I can go do the commerce stuff.” No, Perplexity is in commerce. Exactly right. Everyone’s building horizontal products and that applies to us too.

“Oh, ChatGPT will never do shopping, ChatGPT travel, we won’t do finance.” All that is not true. Everyone’s going to do anything that works. So I would just say the bet you can make is do what you truly are obsessed about because fundamentally it’s a bet on yourself. It’s not a bet on the market, it’s not a bet on ecosystem. What competitors will do or will not do—don’t try to be this whiteboard strategy master. It’s completely pointless.

When your idea works and gets 100 million or a 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 business profits. And then they’ll go after you.

Building for Yourself and the World

So the only thing you can bet on is whether you’re so obsessed about a topic that you will do it anyway, 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, for me, that’s where the whole—you asked me what my most important trait is—I love learning. And this is one of the best apps for learning. It’s designed for us, it’s designed for our founders. We built it for ourselves. The key bet was everybody in the world loves learning. Everybody in the world loves having an AI that they can summon to go do stuff for them. Everybody wants more time in their lives.

So I 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.

MARINA MOGILKO: 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 top three favorite then?

Testing the Competition

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: 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—ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Claude, almost all of them. I have it. I don’t have Copilot and Claude, but maybe mainly because they’re not that mainstream in terms of consumer distribution. But in terms of organic usage, I do go pretty often and try. I would say I’ve tested ChatGPT the most, but again, it mostly comes down to testing.

MARINA MOGILKO: So you don’t use any wrapper apps that are specific for, I don’t know, nutrition or image editing. So if you need something, you would just ask Perplexity?

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: 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, I’ll just do my usage, right? If I need to do image editing, I’ve done that. And if it doesn’t work on both ChatGPT and Perplexity, then I would just write code myself and do it.

MARINA MOGILKO: I love that.

Daily AI Usage

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: But that’s just me. Yeah, same thing with search. For example, we have an integrated tennis score. And I love tennis. I like following live scores. So I go to Google and get the score. We haven’t done currency conversions all the time. We are still working on that. So I use Google for some of the widgets they have and then sometimes finding these needles in a haystack links. Maybe not the best product on that yet.

MARINA MOGILKO: What do you mean by links?

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: There are some really old links on the web, some blog posts that I definitely remember. I read it when I was a kid and Perplexity sometimes helps me find that, but it’s very old links. So I still try to use Google with all the macros. I know how to suffix the dates and all that stuff. So that’s because we grew up like that, right? Back then, Googling was actually a skill.

So if you knew how to search for links with those specific phrases and “or contains” and those date suffixes, you can get whatever you want. And that also gives me ideas on how to improve the Perplexity product too. Maybe teach the AI to use some of these macros yourself and then against your index you’re building and train that to retrieve these things with these keyword arguments.

So yeah, my life, I think I mostly use Perplexity, Google, ChatGPT. I think these are the three main apps I use. Midjourney sometimes because it has a pretty good aesthetic quality in it. And then, yeah, I feel like that’s it.

MARINA MOGILKO: Got it.

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: I mean, it’s kind of a boring answer, I guess, but—

MARINA MOGILKO: Yeah, well, that’s you, right?

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: Yeah, that’s me, that’s you. The thing is, Comet lets me do anything right now.

MARINA MOGILKO: Yeah.

The Power of Comet

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: I don’t even have to go to these separate apps. Comet as a browser—you can—it actually does better search than even Perplexity.

MARINA MOGILKO: Well, you make it free for everyone with all the features.

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: Yeah. Not every feature. We have to make some money here, but yeah. But almost all the features we think will be available for free.

MARINA MOGILKO: And it’s going to be on mobile too, right? Or is it? Because I’m only using it on desktop.

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: That’s right. So we just announced today that the Play Store—you can pre-register. App Store pre-registering will be announced shortly. By end of the year, I think we should have it available on iOS and Android and then also have it be generally available on desktop for both Windows and Mac.

MARINA MOGILKO: I love it.

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: So that’s the thing with Comet, by the way. You can summon it to go use Midjourney, go use Photoshop and it’ll just do it for you. You don’t even have to have these as apps you explicitly open. So it’s a super app. It’s an everything app.

MARINA MOGILKO: It is, it is, it is fascinating. Thank you so much. That is so inspiring. I feel like we’re tapping into the future, actually right now. Thank you.

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: Thanks a lot.

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