Transcription
So if you were 18 today in the US and had to start all over again, would you still do bachelor's PhD? Realistically, it's gone.
This is Aravven, 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 do the recommendation ranking. Google has AI to do the search ranking. So they can influence things for 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.
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 so like 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 Aravant, the founder of Perplexity in November 2023. The company's valuation back then was 500 million and now it's around actually we we we were just closing our series around then so it was more like 150 and we're just about to close around at 520. Okay. And now it's 20 billion. Yeah roughly. Okay.
Can you describe this period of time in one word? Exponential. Exponential. Yeah. Uh what do you think has played a tremendous role in this exponential growth? I think uh our constant urge for like like shipping fast yet maintaining the quality, our uh relentlessness, like I I love the word relentless. In fact, I wanted to buy the domain relentless.com except I figured it was owned by uh Jeff Bezos. Really? So, uh if you actually type relentless.com on your browser, it will redirect to Amazon.com. He's an investor in our company. That that that's like the spirit of the company. We we don't ever give up. We are very curious. Uh 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 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^ 365 is 37.78. Explain. Okay. So if you do a 1% improvement every day, how much do you improve at the end of the year? You improve uh 3,700%. You don't improve like 1% multiplied by 365. That's the concept of the exponential. Yeah. 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 u and then those users are 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 and your marketing formula one have you seen the spikes after like formula 1 and when the episode went live it's hard to attribute to these kind of brand partnerships 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 play store 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 track this 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 1 race. Yeah. Uh 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 1 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 the 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, you see all the people who really inspired Steve. 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. It's considered the greatest of all time in Formula 1. And so that's why we we did that brand partnership. And we're also going to be doing more uh uh like like particularly you know in 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 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 skill still matters conditions matters tires matters like like everything matters so uh we we do see like a lot of people asking these kind of questions on on the app.
2 years ago when I first interviewed Aravvent, Perplexity was valued at around $150 million. Today, it's a $20 billion company that competes with Google for our search queries. So, how do you scale like Aravan? You start by making sure that every customer touch point work as hard as you do. And that starts with email. Because when you're building from the ground up, you're not just the founder, you're also the marketer, support team, and ops lead all in one. In our company, 21% of sales come directly from email marketing. So, keeping that channel strong is non-negotiable. That's why I can recommend a platform called Omnisend. It's an all-in-one platform for email, SMS, pop-ups, push notifications, and segmentation. With 150,000 businesses using it, Omnisend isn't just a tool. It's how we build real relationships and drive revenue. Here's what I love most. Pricing. You can start for free and only scale up when your business does. You're never paying for features you don't need yet, which is huge for small teams. I love their support. Even on the free plan, you get 24/7 customer service with real humans. I've used it myself. Average response time is under 3 minutes. And third, the platform is clean and intuitive, something that we need as, you know, people who are doing it all. If you're sending a launch email, just choose your campaign type. Write a short punchy subject like my worst business mistake that cost me millions. Fill in your info, pick a template, customize, hit send, and you're done. So whether you're launching AI tools like Aravent or doing something completely different, email is still the engine of growth and Omniscent makes it effortless. Check out the link in the description and use code SVGirl30 to get 30% off your first 3 months. All right, back to the interview.
There was this huge spike in queries in June compared to May. Mhm. Can you attribute that to something? What happened? 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 take actions on your behalf and like actually go and do stuff.
I have Comet right here. Can you show one killer feature that you think everyone should start using on Comet? I love this thing because it's a it's a very simple thing where it kind of always works. Um, 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 uh Jensen Hong says, uh, I would rather uh torture people to greatness than fire them. 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. Wow. That that was the phrase I was I was hoping. And then you can chat with this video. Something that I did yesterday when I was watching, for example, there's 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. 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 talking about um the you know GPU uses time machines like I've never heard him say that GP uses time machines um and of course like scale and flexibility um science to application omniverse was cost. So that I can actually say can you can you just share this as an email? I don't know if you're connected to your Yeah. Yeah. Uh can you send this as an email to um Arvin Trinas uh the the founder and CEO of you can actually even edit it. You you can add say uh send from comment or something like that and uh you can even refine the email if you want and you can just send it 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 don't have to like compose email all the This is just one example. You could also schedule meetings from here. You could say, "Order the leather jacket Jensen's wearing for me from your 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 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 uh instruct your comet assistant to say like I want you to just skip all the ads. When you're tasking comet to go watch YouTube for you, uh you can ask comet to say ignore all the ads. Just get me the core sense of what the the content is about. You could ask Comed 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. So, how can businesses optimize for that experience? 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 read reviews, right? Because perplexity reads reviews, watches videos. 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 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 comment reads all that and uh is able to like suggest that to you. That that that would be the way to go maybe.
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. But I mean like there's still 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 60s who's done it for a while, they're not going to just switch to AI to do things for them. 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 Noi Valley when I used to live there and uh another person was also having a haircut in the same place and uh he was somewhat older and he was ranting about how he spent his entire day until that haircut probably 3 4 hours just looking for a new washing machine because it's a pretty expensive purchase. So, you're going to like spend a lot of time deciding what to buy and you've wasted your entire day just reading reviews 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 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, overhyped, then someone's going to say something negative on on YouTube or Reddit is going to see. Yeah. And it reflexes give you a pretty balanced perspective. Okay, here are the five different things. Like imagine reading like 30 40 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, right? It has memory. The comet can answer questions about yourself um and 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 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 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 Jens and Steve Jobs and everything and also read the current draft that was written by my coms 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 some things that slightly feel more inspiring but I don't want to uh appear inauthentic and so um uh and you did a great job actually. You did such a good job that I was like damn I would have paid someone like $1,000 for that.
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 I wouldn't say it's dead. Uh fundamentally the the modes for companies like Amazon and Walmart is is physical real estate the warehouses the stores like for Walmart is the stores u and like the packaging and and the supply chain like 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 or or Walmart. I think it's fundamentally like what's good for the user, right? Like actually the founder of Amazon says like 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, right? Like you actually don't want ads. 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 going to have with your comment 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 would But then I can code it to ignore the ads. Exactly. And and that's a handshake agreement you have with your agent that the advertiser cannot influence or cannot like manipulate and uh 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're running a podcast like 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 you trust that person on your team so you know that that person's aren't going to unnecessary evaluate not just take it as exactly is that how you're going to monetize this experience uh we haven't thought deeply about it uh I'm just imagining a future where uh ads were done at the level of agents uh and also between between apps so for example um you might be tasking comment to do something uh like book me a ride um and then the three different apps like Uber lift 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 want to win her business, so I'm actually going to offer this ride for free. Just tell her that the experience will be better than Uber. The competitor could say that the agent could charge some u 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 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 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 uh the company that runs the agent gets some of it But the user also gets a little bit 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 I love that model uh that way our margins are lower but our trust is higher so the lifetime value the LTV is higher because you're 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. The comment system 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 NATO and that's giving you power against the big tech. Uh and and therefore uh some of that money can flow back to you. So that that I love that. I love the way you think about that. I hope everybody who's creating AI agents thinks the way you do. Yeah.
What about other jobs? So I asked Perplexity I asked it to analyze my portfolio. Okay. M and I asked it whether I should fire 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 a strategy he's utilizing he's buying very expensive mutual funds like 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 Redin 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 watch this and go and try 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, everyday morning just look at all the new listens on Redfin. Uh, you know, these are the preferences I have. I know reference 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 in within this neighborhood, make sure to like send me a push notification uh and and submit an application on my behalf and schedule a meeting or a visit. You have access to my calendar, everything you can you can. So, just stick So, if your agent only shows you listings on Redin and Zillow, I I think they're useless. But if your agent is doing offmarket deals for you, they're still pretty useful because th 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 if the job of the financial advisor to tell you like what stocks to buy then I don't think it's 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 on 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 he had exact 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 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 the MS. And it looks like those entry-level jobs are disappearing, right? Because they are an entry-level financial adviser. You can only do like managing stocks. What do you think is going to happen? Yeah, I I I certainly think so like people need to push further. Like if you're just literally managing for who you're not doing much like I I have some private wealth managers too and uh I think the way I use them is like like helping me move money around those kind of things cuz I I don't have time to manage all this myself there. They help me through uh their time and and they also give me some um advice on and like you know what to do stuff how to save taxes a little bit those kind of things. So your value ad should expand further than just managing a portfolio.
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? The fundamental thing you learn in 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've acquired 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 uh a lot of Indians come here for masters um But you got to realize that 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 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 love the ability I I I like digging deep into things. I'm I'm fundamentally like curious about you know learning deep deeply about any topic. So if 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. Uh and and I feel like these three qualities are like like reflective of this proverb or 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. 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 new things. 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 can still bet on myself to like learn that and be successful at it.
So if you were 18 today, yeah, in the US and had to start all over again, would you still do when I was 22, I finished my undergrad and came here? But if you were in the US 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 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 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. you need a year or two to actually get really good like topnotch at something. 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 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 pour in the hours like I I regret like watching YouTube videos and I know you're a YouTuber so it's kind of weird people are saying and we we're doing a whole YouTube thing so yeah you should watch YouTube and and get knowledge out of it. But I remember telling uh Sundar when I talked to him that hey like YouTube is a great app but I wish you focus more on knowledge and learning and he agreed with me because it's not just that right. Um, so I I regret how 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 u 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 do it at least once in your life to to bet on yourself for the next next set of is that where your confidence come comes from? Yeah. I've done you're like we're going to take over Google. We're going to take over this. Where does it come from? I then you never 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 like sorry what turns turns most people away is 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 pivot seed round to like where we are today. Your set of competitors keep you know going away too and and you're like surviving surviving surviving. It's like Squid Games and then um finally you're ending up with in a in a scenario or the arena where it's just Google, OpenAI and yourself and uh funding wise you know like we raised a billion dollars. Open has raised close to u 80 billion or 70 billion. Google has like 100 billion in just the cash and they make 200 300 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 you have 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 trusted you to like u be the investors or the employees 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? Tell myself that I'll prove you wrong and it keeps you going. That's that's amazing. Do you think that's your main trait that made you who you are? Your confidence. 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 is not primal or anything. I I I generally just like to learn a lot about any topic and 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 uh the survival instinct is definitely like something that's you know served me very well. I love it. I mean immigrants are all survival survivors. We are. Yeah.
Do you still work 24/7? No one can work 24/7. Well all the time you're you're awake. Yeah. I technically no. I I spend 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 checking 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 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 staying present in the moment at home. I I cannot do that. And uh even on a walk like I'm thinking about something there, 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 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. That doesn't mean I'm really working. Some people like to count that as hours. And I know I know and Elon says he works 12 hours a day. I'm sure he counts all that. But it's truly like like uh the time I spend where I'm just looking at the product and thinking how to improve it 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 into the app to make it even better? How can we improve 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 could be doing? Those are the times when I think I'm uninterrupted state and I 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.
Couple last questions for everyone who's trying to build something in AI. Do you think opportunity still exists? Uh aside from like everyone's building a JPT wrapper, right? Uh do you still there's 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 you would want to build a GPD wrapper because building your own model is like basically way harder. It's almost impossible for almost impossible and and I don't even think people should be looking at it as like building a model once. That 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 he's like, "Oh, it's going to cost $200,000 to train a GP3 model, so why can't you do it? I'll I'll give you like uh a million and you spend 200k 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. 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 or another then what what are you like why do you need to exist like okay where's a 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 and and no one's going to be like oh Perplexi is just going to do uh research. I can go do the commerce stuff. No likeies in commerce. Exactly right. Like everyone's building horizontal products and and and that applies to us too. Oh chat PT will never do shopping. CHP will never do travel. It won't do finance. All that is like not true. like everyone's going to do anything that works. So I 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 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. when your idea works and 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 are so obsessed about a topic that you will do it anyway regardless 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 that's why 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 go do stuff for them. Everybody wants more time in their lives. So I think uh 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 and and a scalable company and get acquired at some stage I guess. 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? Well uh as part of my job I am required to use other apps uh to see like what they are doing better than us uh because no one's going to be best at everything. So I I I have all the AI apps on my phone but you know like like chat GPT Grock Gemini Claude almost all of them I have it. uh I don't have co-pilot and plot but maybe mainly because they're not that that mainstream in terms of consumer distribution but in terms of organic usage like I do go pretty often and try uh I would say I've tested chat to be the most but again it mostly comes down to testing so you don't use any like rapper apps that are specific for I don't know nutrition or no image editing so if you need something you will just ask for perlexity and yeah if it doesn't work I would ask it in chat GPT and if it doesn't work there also um 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 chat GPT and perplexity then I would I would just write code myself and do it I love that but that's that's just me that's you 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 like following life 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 haststack like links maybe not like best product on that yet. What do you mean by by links? Like there are some really old links on the like some blog post 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 trained 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 back then like googling was actually a skill. So if you knew how to like search for links with those specific phrases Yeah. Yeah. And and or contains and like those dates, you can get whatever you want. And that also gives me ideas on how to improve the product too. Like maybe you 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, Google, Chat, GPT. 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. Got it. Thank you. I mean, it's a kind of a boring answer, I guess. But but yeah, well that's but that's you, right? Yeah, that's you. The thing is like comet lets me do anything right now. Yeah. like I don't even have to go to these separate apps. Comet as a browser. Um you can it actually does better search than even perplexity because 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. App store pre-registering will be announced shortly. 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 this stuff for both Windows and Mac. I love it. It's it generally it is. So that's the thing with comet by the way. You can summon it to go use mourney, go use Photoshop and it 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. 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.