Perplexity CEO: AI Is About to Change the Internet Forever | Aravind Srinivas

In this episode of Silicon Valley Girl with Marina Mogilko features an interview with Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, exploring how artificial intelligence is transforming careers, education, and decision-making, while shifting power from corporations to individuals. Founded in 2022, Perplexity has grown at remarkable speed - by 2025, the company reached a valuation of $20 billion, underscoring its role as one of the most influential players in the AI landscape. Links: Follow my Newsletter:⁠⁠ https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/⁠⁠ https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/ Companies & Products: ⁠⁠https://Marinamogilko.co⁠⁠ https://Marinamogilko.co Instagram: ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ YouTube: ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl LinkedIn: ⁠⁠linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko/ X: ⁠⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠⁠ https://x.com/siliconvalleymm

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot, designed to keep you connected, powered by Verizon's 5G network. And no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month. Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code HACK. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.

• 0:56Marina Mogilko?

  So if you were 18 today in the US and had to start all over again, would you still do a Bachelor's BSc?

• 1:02Speaker 03

  Realistically, it's gotten [BLEEP].

• 1:04Marina Mogilko?

  This is Aravind, 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.

• 1:17Speaker 03

  It also understands you, your needs, your budget, everything. It has memory.

• 1:21Marina Mogilko?

  I tried it myself and wow. It can book meetings, reply to emails, research products, even shop online, all without me.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  Amazon has AI 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. It actually protects you. It actually gives you power against the big tech.

• 1:43Marina Mogilko?

  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?

• 1:53Speaker 03

  I certainly think so. Like, people need to push further.

• 1:57Marina Mogilko?

  So is there still opportunity? Or is it time to rethink everything?

• 2:03Marina Mogilko?

  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 2023. The company's valuation back then was 500 million, now it's around.

• 2:21Speaker 03

  Actually, we were just closing our CSG around then. So it was more like 150 and we were just about to close around at 520.

• 2:29Marina Mogilko?

  Okay, and now it's 20 billion?

• 2:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, roughly.

• 2:33Marina Mogilko?

  Okay, can you describe this period of time in one word?

• 2:36Speaker 03

  Exponential.

• 2:37Marina Mogilko?

  Exponential?

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:39Marina Mogilko?

  What do you think has played a tremendous role in this exponential growth?

• 2:43Speaker 03

  I think our constant urge for like shipping fast, yet maintaining the quality are relentlessness. Like I love the word relentless. In fact, I wanted to buy the domain relentless.com, except I figured it was owned by Jeff Bezos.

• 3:01Marina Mogilko?

  Really?

• 3:02Speaker 03

  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 don't ever give up. We are very curious. We constantly keep asking questions on how to improve the product. The first thing I do when I wake up is read everything people, all the users saying on different social platforms. 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 365 is 37.78.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  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%.

• 3:57Speaker 03

  You don't improve like one percent multiplied by three sixty five. That's the concept of the exponential.

• 4:03Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 4:03Speaker 03

  Um, it compounds. Uh, and uh, so it it may look like small steps every day. But as the changes propagate to a larger scale of users, they bring in more users. Uh, through word of mouth. Uh, and then those users like experiencing all the improvements you're making. Uh, people feel great using a product that, you know, you use last week and then uh, use it like a two, couple of weeks later and it feels much more different, much faster, much cleaner, much more accurate. So then people start trusting, we we earn the users' trust through our accuracy, our speed of improvement.

• 4:39Marina Mogilko?

  And your marketing, Formula One, Taobang, have you seen the spikes after like Formula One and when the episode went live?

• 4:46Speaker 03

  It's hard to attribute to these kind of brand partnerships. See, it's very easy to attribute, you you run some ads on Instagram or YouTube. Uh, and like there's a clear call to action button in terms of, you know, going to the app store place or and getting an install and then uh, looking at like how many queries that translated to or whether that user ended up subscribing to the app. It's very easy to practice and optimize the funnels. It's much harder to optimize, okay, like if Lewis Hamilton has perplexity on his helmet, how many people are actually going and installing the app after a Formula One race?

• 5:18Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  Uh, it's pretty difficult to track that.

• 5:20Marina Mogilko?

  It is.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  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 perplexity 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.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  Um, and so that's one thing we 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, is 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 gonna be doing more uh, uh, like, like particularly, you know, in F1.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  It's a pretty cerebral sport, like e- 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, 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, and skills still matters, conditions matters, tires matters, like, like, everything matters, so, uh, we, we do see, like, a lot of people ask me these kind of questions.

• 6:51Marina Mogilko?

  There was this huge spike in queries in June compared to May.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:56Marina Mogilko?

  Can you attribute that to something? What happened?

• 6:58Speaker 03

  I don't know if it happened in June or July, but definitely, we, 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, you know, led to growth is like, our, our release of our agentic browser, Comet. For the first time, you could have a browser that can actually, think with you and, and, and, and take actions on your behalf and like actually go and do stuff.

• 7:19Marina Mogilko?

  I have Comet right here.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:20Marina Mogilko?

  Can you show one killer feature that you think everyone should start using on Comet?

• 7:25Speaker 03

  I love this thing because it's a, it's a very simple thing, but it kind of always works. Um, you know, if you wanna go to, there's some video, I remember I watched before, but I'm, 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 is a video where, uh, Jensen Huang says, uh, I would rather, uh, torture people to greatness than fire them.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  Um, can you find it and? Play it for, play from, play for me, uh, from that exact moment. So, the point here is not that it 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.

• 8:16Marina Mogilko?

  Wow.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  That, that was the phrase I was, I was hoping to.

• 8:20Marina Mogilko?

  And then you can chat with this video, something that I did yesterday when I was watching one of your interviews.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  For example, that's, I, 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 I don't wanna watch everything. Maybe he's saying a lot of things that he's repetitively saying. The AI is gonna explode, blah, blah, blah, but I only wanna know new things.

• 8:48Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  And so it's reading all the transcripts. It's particularly talking about um. The the, you know, GPUs as time machines. Like I've never heard him say that. GPUs as time machines. Um, and of course, like scale and flexibility, um, science application, omniverse costs. So that I can actually say, can you can you just share this as an email? I don't know if you've connected it to your.

• 9:11Marina Mogilko?

  I have, yeah, yeah.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  Uh, can you send this as an email to um. Aravind Srinivas, uh, the the founder and CEO of Flexity. You can actually even edit it. You can you can you can add, say, uh, send from comment or something like that. And uh, you can even refine the email if you want. You can just send it.

• 9:32Marina Mogilko?

  Right from there.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  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. All this. This is just one example. You could also schedule meetings from here. You could say order the leather jacket Jensen's wearing for me uh for from Amazon. It's gonna find it. Of course, it's gonna be pretty expensive, so it's not gonna place the order directly. So it it it's gonna do a lot of these like multi-step things.

• 9:55Marina Mogilko?

  What's gonna happen to businesses who survive on paid ads? Is it gonna skip paid ads or how is it gonna research information about what product to buy?

• 10:04Speaker 03

  So you can uh instruct your comment assistant to say, like, I want you to just skip all the ads. When you're tasking comment to go watch YouTube for you, uh, you can task comment to say, ignore all the ads. Just get me the core sense of what. The the content is about. You could ask comment to say, like, uh, go look at, like, favorite uh Instagram influencers of airing. 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 and go buy it for me.

• 10:35Marina Mogilko?

  So how can businesses optimize for that experience?

• 10:37Speaker 03

  I would say that what businesses should really do is like like really focus on just building a great product and get a lot of people.

• 10:44Marina Mogilko?

  Like reviews, right? Because perplexity reads reviews, watches videos. So get as much content of your product as possible, right?

• 10:51Speaker 03

  The solution shouldn't be to like paying people to like write great things about you, but but honestly. Uh like building a great product and getting the word out and then people uh talk about it, rave about it. And then Comet reads all that and is able to like suggest that to you. That that that would be the way to go maybe.

• 11:11Marina Mogilko?

  How fast do you think we're gonna switch to asking our A I assistants to buy things for us?

• 11:17Speaker 03

  I think we can do that already.

• 11:18Marina Mogilko?

  But I mean, like, there there is a friction in society. And I remember you were talking about like how we're overpaying, I don't know, real estate people, financial advisors. But still, when I think about a person who's in their sixties, who's done it for a while, they're not gonna just switch to A I to do things for them.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  I'll 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 gonna like.

• 12:00Marina Mogilko?

  You're gonna do your research.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  Spend a lot of time deciding what to buy. And you've wasted your entire day just reading views and watching videos and like scrolling through reviews. And and you end up getting even more confused than you were at the beginning. Right? And and this is the kind of thing we want Comet to help you like, like make really good decisions really quickly. Uh and delegate all the mundane uh cognitive labor to something like Comet. Like, why do you wanna go read all the reviews like? It's boring. Like, anyway, like, pe- people are paid to write good things. So how do you, like, get the signal from the noises? 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.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  So definitely, if your product is pretty bad uh overhyped, then someone's gonna say something negative on on YouTube or Reddit.

• 12:53Marina Mogilko?

  Flex is gonna see.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then reflexively give you a pretty balanced perspective. Okay, here are the five different things. Like, imagine reading, like, thirty, forty tabs in like the matter of few seconds or minutes, then telling you what to do. And it also understands you, your needs, your budget, everything, like, it has memory. The comet can answer questions about yourself, um like, you know, it can give you tips on how to do better. So uh 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 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.

• 13:31Speaker 03

  But I'll give you another example. I wa- 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 Jins and Steve Jobs and everything, and also read the current draft, which was written by my comms person. And then I want you to edit it a little bit to feel a little more brandy-ous. But I still wanna preserve how I speak.

• 13:58Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  So you watch my interviews too, and you watch these guys' interviews, and you try to blend a little where, you know, I I wanna say some things that slightly feel more inspiring, but I don't wanna uh appear inauthentic. And so um uh I did a great job, actually. You did such a good job that I was like, damn, I would have paid someone like a thousand dollars for that.

• 14:19Marina Mogilko?

  Let's transition to twenty thirty. What is shopping like? Everybody has an AI agent.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:24Marina Mogilko?

  They talk to.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:25Marina Mogilko?

  So Amazon app is dead, Walmart app is dead.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  I wouldn't say it's dead. Uh fu- fundamentally, the the moats for companies like Amazon and Walmart is is physical real estate.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  The warehouses, the stores, like for Walmart, the stores. Uh, and like the packaging and and the supply chain like like.

• 14:44Marina Mogilko?

  But the app itself, the shopping experience is gonna be.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  The core shopping experience might 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 or Walmart. Uh, 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.

• 15:13Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  You want, you want, you want what is good for you. So just show me that and I'll pay you more money. Uh, and and that's that's the kind of relationship you're gonna have with your comment assistant. Maybe the advertisers are still gonna 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 would.

• 15:33Marina Mogilko?

  But then I can go to to ignore the ads.

• 15:34Speaker 03

  Exactly, they and and and that's a handshake. Uh, 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 your team. Right, you you're running a podcast company and and so maybe there is a a new microphone that's really good, but not many people know about it. They go and tells the person working on in your team, hey, like, can you please tell Silicon Valley girl to go use that 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 and you trust that person on your team, so you know that that person's not gonna unnecessarily.

• 16:17Marina Mogilko?

  Evaluate, not just take it as.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 16:19Marina Mogilko?

  Is that how you're gonna monetize this experience?

• 16:21Speaker 03

  Uh, we haven't thought deeply about it. Uh, I'm just imagining a future where uh ads redundant level of agents. Uh, and also between between apps. So for example, um, you might be tasking Comet to do something, uh, like book me a ride. Uh, and then the three different apps like Uber, Lyft and something else might be like, hey, I, I think I can deliver the best ride for uh her. Uh, 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 wanna win her business. So I'm actually gonna offer this ride for free. Uh, just tell her that the experience will be better than Uber. The competitor could say that.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  The agent could charge some uh revenue for, you know, the apps trying to get your attention and share it back with you.

• 17:11Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  Which Google never does. So Google takes your queries, does a bidding process among different companies trying to like, uh, 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 agency sees the ad, uh, the company that runs the agent gets some of it, but the user also gets some of it.

• 17:43Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  And only uh 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.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a fifty-page restoration blog or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies eighteen plus.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited five G wireless data and hotspot designed to keep you connected. Powered by Verizon's five G network. And no contract holding you back. Plans start at twenty-five dollars a month. Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save ten dollars on your first month when you use promo code HACK. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.

• 18:56Marina Mogilko?

  I love that model.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  Uh, that way our margins are lower, but our trust is higher. So 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 gonna 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.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  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, the comet assistant.

• 19:48Marina Mogilko?

  That works for me.

• 19:48Speaker 03

  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 that you need and that's giving you power against the big tech. Uh, and, and therefore, uh, some of that money can flow back to you for the first time. So that, that.

• 20:10Marina Mogilko?

  I love that. I love the way you think about that. I hope everybody who's creating AI agents thinks the way you do.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:17Marina Mogilko?

  What about other jobs? So I asked perplexity, I asked it to analyze my portfolio.

• 20:21Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 20:22Marina Mogilko?

  And I asked it whether I should find my financial advisor and it was like, yes, you should do this immediately. Like that, that's the first time I saw something that definitive from AI, because it said, you know, this is strategy. He's utilizing, he's buying very expensive mutual funds. Like, what's gonna happen to these professions, financial advisors, real estate brokers?

• 20:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:40Marina Mogilko?

  Because perplexity does it now and it created the whole strategy for me to rebalance and everything.

• 20:44Speaker 03

  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, it's not yet there, so people who watches them go and try it, doesn't work yet, but it's gonna work pretty soon, which is, you could just have a task that says, you know, every day morning, just. Look at all the news since Redfin. Uh, you know, these are the preferences I have. I know Redfin kind of already has some of these features, but it's not. It's very hardcoded 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. Uh, and, and that's within this neighborhood. Make sure to like, send me a push notification.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  Uh, and, and submit an application on my behalf and schedule a meeting for a visit. You have access to my calendar, everything you can, you can. So.

• 21:34Marina Mogilko?

  Just take.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  So if your agent only shows you listings on Redfin and Zillow, I, I think they're useful. But if your agent is doing off-market deals for you, they're still pretty useful because tho- those things do not exist on the web.

• 21:47Marina Mogilko?

  Okay.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  I feel like having the power of like intelligence and computer at your hands, it, 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, if the Java, 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, 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 the impact on your portfolio. Uh, what would Warren Buffett do if, if he had you exactly, exactly your portfolio? Like, like it can answer questions like that, that no financial advisor can.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  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, or access to like funds of 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 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.

• 23:00Marina Mogilko?

  And it looks like those entry level jobs are disappearing, right? Because they are an entry level financial advisor, you're going to lead to like managing stocks. What do you think is going to happen?

• 23:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I, I certainly think so, like people need to push further. Like if you're just literally managing, but 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. Cause I I don't have time to manage all this myself. There they helped me through uh their time and and they also give me some uh advice on and like. You know, what to do stuff, how to save taxes a little bit.

• 23:35Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  Uh those kind of things. So your value add should expand further than just managing a portfolio.

• 23:42Marina 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?

• 23:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:50Marina Mogilko?

  That era is over.

• 23:52Speaker 03

  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's 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 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.

• 24:26Marina Mogilko?

  Is it worth four years?

• 24:27Speaker 03

  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 Indians come here for masters. Uh but you got to realize that in in order to come here for masters, you need to be able to fund your own tuition fee. Uh 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 uh one 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. Uh so I had a deep passion for the topic. I love AI, I love the ability, I I I like digging deep into things.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  I'm I'm fundamentally like curious about, you know, learning deep 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 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.

• 25:50Marina Mogilko?

  Um hum.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  Uh and and and I feel like these three qualities are like a reflective of this proverbial phrase, 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.

• 26:05Marina Mogilko?

  Um hum.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  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 what you think. Like, maybe I I can stop doing this thing and I can still find a new field or a new topic to go and I I I can still bet on myself to like learn that and be successful at it.

• 26:24Marina Mogilko?

  So if you were eighteen today?

• 26:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:26Marina Mogilko?

  In the US and had to start all over?

• 26:29Speaker 03

  Um hum.

• 26:29Marina Mogilko?

  Again, would you still do?

• 26:30Speaker 03

  I actually came here when I was twenty-two. I finished my undergrad and came here.

• 26:34Marina Mogilko?

  But if you were in the US and you had to start your career from scratch?

• 26:37Speaker 03

  Um hum.

• 26:37Marina Mogilko?

  What would you do?

• 26:38Speaker 03

  Look, I would definitely pursue my interests, but eighteen 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 my personal opinion is that eighteen is still pretty early, so I would just pick something and try to do it well. I think people underestimate the importance of like having that inner confidence in you to uh 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 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.

• 27:18Marina Mogilko?

  Um hum.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  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 a software job at one of the existing companies. You could start out 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 I know you're a YouTuber. So it's kind of weird. People are saying, and then we're we're doing a whole YouTube thing. So yeah, you should watch YouTube and and and get knowledge out of it.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  But I remember telling Sundar when I talked to him that, hey, 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? So I I regret how the amount of time I wasted on YouTube just watching useless stuff. When you are 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.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  Or like like like work really, really hard. And and then you 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 and things are not going your way. And like you 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 to bet on yourself for the next next set of.

• 28:55Marina Mogilko?

  Is that where your confidence come comes from?

• 28:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've done like.

• 28:57Marina Mogilko?

  So you're like, we're gonna take over Google. We're gonna take over this.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  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 competitor like Google, it's very hard. Like, that's what. Turns most people off. Like, like, sorry, when turns turns most people away is like. Uh, how do you uh compete in a space? Where, okay, let's say in 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 sort of competitors keep, you know, going away too. And and you're like surviving, surviving, surviving. It's like squid games.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  And then um finally, you're ending up with in a in a scenario or the arena where it's this Google OpenAI and yourself. And uh funding wise, you know, like we raised a billion dollars. OpenAI raised close to uh eighty billion or seventy billion. Google has like hundred billion in just the cash and and they make two hundred, three hundred 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 to you that you have to sell to Apple, you have to sell to Meta, the game is over, like it's gonna die in a couple of years. I bet, I can bet my entire savings that this company is gonna go to nothing. And you have to be able to read all that and like still motivate yourself and also motivate the people

• 30:25Speaker 03

  who have 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.

• 30:36Marina Mogilko?

  What do you tell yourself when you read those comments?

• 30:38Speaker 03

  I tell myself that I'll prove you wrong.

• 30:40Marina Mogilko?

  And it keeps you going?

• 30:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:42Marina Mogilko?

  That's amazing. Do you think that's your main trait that made you who you are? Your confidence?

• 30:46Speaker 03

  One of, one of my important traits. I wouldn't say that's the singular. I would say the single main trait at the end is uh, it's not primal or anything. I, I, I generally just like to learn a lot about any topic. I, 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 like something that's, you know, served me very well.

• 31:12Marina Mogilko?

  I love that.

• 31:13Speaker 03

  I mean, immigrants are all survival survivors.

• 31:16Marina Mogilko?

  We are.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:17Marina Mogilko?

  Do you still work twenty-four seven?

• 31:19Speaker 03

  No one can work twenty-four seven.

• 31:20Marina Mogilko?

  Well, almost at the time you're, you're awake.

• 31:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I technically, no, I, I spend, I, I do spend like time working out. I do spend time with my family. Uh, so I do work or think about work almost every waking hour. So it's very hard for me to like not look at my phone or like not check notifications, uh, not be thinking about some problem in my head, uh, zoning out sometimes when someone's talking to me, trying to stay present in the moment. These are all like hard things. And so these are the things I would sacrifice in order to like do whatever I'm doing really well. People like to think like, oh, work is work. After you go back home, you just. Shut down Slack and like uh your laptop, you never open it and you're just like

• 32:07Speaker 03

  staying present in the moment at home. I I I cannot do that. And even on a walk, like I 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 is 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 you and Elon says he works so hard, I'm sure he counts all that. But uh, it's truly like, like uh, the time I spend where I'm just looking at the product and thinking how to improve it.

• 32:51Speaker 03

  Or uh, I'm like, like talking to some of our people internally on like what we can do to like grow the app more or like what what are all the new ideas we can put in the app to make it even better? How can we put the uh 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? Like those are the times when I think I'm uninterrupted state. And I that that's where I feel like I can do my best work and that usually happens during the day. Um, other than that, I'm I'm mostly just multitasking.

• 33:20Marina Mogilko?

  Couple of last questions for all, everyone who's trying to build something in AI. Do you think opportunity still exists? Uh, aside from like, everyone's building a G P T wrapper, right? Uh, do you say there is still opportunity for that or people should switch and what are the areas that they should be looking at?

• 33:36Speaker 03

  Realistically, it's gotten much harder. Yes, like you, you would wanna build a G P T wrapper. Because building your own models like basically way harder.

• 33:46Marina Mogilko?

  It's almost impossible for

• 33:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, almost impossible. And and I I don't even think people should be looking at it as like building a model once. That that 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 uh who now went to Meta and it's like, oh, it's gonna cost two hundred thousand dollars to train a G P three model. So why can't you do it? I'll I'll give you like a million and you you spend two hundred K on the model. Like it it's it's not about like that one model. It's about that relentless exercise of iterating the models, building the next cluster, hiring the talent to go figure out like what the next model should be, and continually iterating, bringing down the cost, improving the capabilities, improving the reasoning, all that stuff.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  That requires a lab and a cluster and the people and the uh milestones. And like some way to like uh actually turn all those models into like a product and and a business and revenue. And then you end up basically like saying, oh, you have to build another open AI or another enterprise. And what what are you like, why do you need to exist? Like, okay, where's the talent arbitrage? So uh that's why I think product is actually at least, you know, a little more statistically probable. Uh 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.

• 35:12Speaker 03

  And and no one's gonna be like, oh, perplex is just gonna do uh research. I can go do the commerce stuff. No, like.

• 35:19Marina Mogilko?

  Perplex is in commerce.

• 35:21Speaker 03

  Exactly, right? Like, everyone's building horizontal products.

• 35:23Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  And and and that applies to us to, oh, ChatGPT will never do shopping, ChatGPT will never do travel, uh won't do finance. All that is like not true, like everyone's gonna do anything that works. So I I would just say the bet you can make is do what you truly are obsessed about. Because uh fundamentally, it's a bet on yourself.

• 35:44Marina Mogilko?

  Hmm.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  It's not a bet on the market, it's not a bet on um ecosystem, like what competitors will do, will not do. Like, don't try to be this uh whiteboard uh strategy master, like it it's completely pointless. Like, when your idea works and and gets like hundred 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.

• 36:17Marina Mogilko?

  Hmm.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  And then so they'll go after you. So the only thing you can bet on is whether you are 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 and no one cared about the problem more than you did. And for us, like for me, like I started the whole, you know, you asked me what my most important trait is, like I love learning and and um. 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 loves, everybody in the world loves having an AI that they can summon to do do stuff for them. Everybody wants more time in their lives. So I think uh build for yourself. Hopefully uh that's a thing that a lot of people in the world want.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  And therefore you can turn it into a scalable product and and and a scalable company.

• 37:06Marina Mogilko?

  And get acquired, so stage I guess. Uh thank you. That's 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?

• 37:16Speaker 03

  Well, uh as part of my job, I I am required to use other apps uh to see like what they are doing better than us. Uh because no one's gonna be best at everything. So I I I have all the AI apps on my phone. But you know, like like ChatGPT, uh Grok, Gemini, Claude, almost all of them I have it. Uh I don't have Copilot and Claude, but maybe mainly because they're not. That that mainstream in terms of consumer distribution. But in terms of organic usage, like I I do go pretty often and and try. Uh I would say I've I've tested ChatGPT the most, but again, it it mostly comes down to testing.

• 37:56Marina Mogilko?

  So you don't use any like wrapper apps that are specific for, I don't know, nutrition or.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  No.

• 38:02Marina Mogilko?

  Image editing. So if you need something, you would just ask perplexity and.

• 38:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, if if it doesn't work, I would ask it in ChatGPT.

• 38:08Marina Mogilko?

  Um.

• 38:09Speaker 03

  And if it doesn't work there also, um for example, if I need to edit and I I'll just do my usage, right? If I need to do image editing, I've done that. Uh and if it doesn't work on both ChatGPT and uh perplexity, then I would. I would just write code myself and do it.

• 38:24Marina Mogilko?

  I love that.

• 38:25Speaker 03

  But that's that's just me. Yeah. Same thing with like uh search, like if it does, like for example, we have an integrated tennis course and I love tennis. I I like following live scores, so I go to Google and and you know, get the score. We haven't all done currency conversions all the time, like 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, we're not like best product on that yet.

• 38:52Marina Mogilko?

  What do you mean by by links?

• 38:53Speaker 03

  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 we grew up like that, right? Like, uh, back then, like Googling was actually a skill. So if you knew how to like search for links with those specific phrases.

• 39:23Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 39:24Speaker 03

  And and and or contains and like those dates suffixes, you can get whatever you want. And that also gives me ideas on how to improve the flexibility product 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, that's my life. Like, I I think I mostly say perplexity, um, Google, ChatGPT. I think these are the three main apps I use. Uh, Midjourney sometimes, uh, because it has a pretty good aesthetic quality in it. And then, um, yeah, I feel like that's it.

• 40:03Marina Mogilko?

  Got it.

• 40:04Speaker 03

  I mean, it's a kind of a boring answer, I guess.

• 40:06Marina Mogilko?

  But yeah, well, that's but that's you, right?

• 40:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's me.

• 40:08Marina Mogilko?

  That's you.

• 40:09Speaker 03

  The the the thing was like Comet uh lets me do anything right now.

• 40:13Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 40:13Speaker 03

  Like, I don't even have to go to these separate apps. Comet as a browser, um, you can, it it actually does better search than even perplexity.

• 40:23Marina Mogilko?

  Will you make it free for everyone with all the features?

• 40:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:25Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 40:26Speaker 03

  Not every feature.

• 40:27Marina Mogilko?

  Mm hmm.

• 40:27Speaker 03

  And we have to make some money here.

• 40:28Marina Mogilko?

  Mm hmm.

• 40:29Speaker 03

  Uh, but, yeah, but almost all the features we think will be available to everybody.

• 40:33Marina Mogilko?

  And it's gonna be on mobile too, right? Or is it, because I'm only using it on desktop?

• 40:37Speaker 03

  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 generally available on desktop for both Windows and Mac.

• 40:58Marina Mogilko?

  I love it. It's it generally, it is.

• 41:00Speaker 03

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

• 41:12Marina Mogilko?

  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. Thank you. Thanks a lot.

• 41:22Speaker 04

  When you shop Kroger delivery, you can expect the savings you love and fresh groceries delivered right to your door. From delicious produce to everyday essentials, enjoy the convenience of delivery and the trusted selection you've come to know from Kroger. Because bringing you fresh, quality groceries is what we do best. Right now, enjoy free delivery on orders of fifty dollars or more with your digital coupon. Restrictions apply. See site for details. Kroger. Fresh for everyone.

• 41:53Speaker 05

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones. Like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states.