Why You Have to Make Peace With Some Problems
Perplexity’s Aravind Srinivas shares that he learned the virtue of accepting imperfections while building Perplexity.
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[Image creative: Chetan Jha/MITSMR India]
“I used to think every problem just needed to be fixed instantly. As the company has scaled, I have learned to make peace with some problems just existing. That is the number one skill you need as a CEO or a founder”
That’s how Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, summed up his hardest-earned lesson in leadership at a recent Dean’s Speaker Series talk at UC Berkeley Haas.
A former researcher at OpenAI, DeepMind and Google, Srinivas linked the idea to Perplexity’s product development: “You have to build products that are 80% ready… Six months later it’s 90/10, and in 12 months it’s 95/5.”
He added: “There’s really nothing to lose from taking risks.”
Srinivas joked that he started Perplexity because he’s “unemployable.”
“Some people are unemployable. They don’t listen to what the boss tells them. I’m one of them,” he said. “Now, Perplexity’s customers are the boss. Every day I wake up, my phone has hundreds of these (messages)… that’s how I know there’s always work to do.”
Srinivas is also an active angel investor, with publicly listed stakes including Cognition Labs, Pika and Suno, among others.
In August, Perplexity made headlines with an unsolicited $34.5 billion cash offer to buy Google Chrome, after the US Justice Department floated the idea of breaking up the tech giant’s search and browser businesses.
Eventually, on 2 September, a federal judge declined to order a Chrome divestiture in the Google search remedies ruling.
Later that month, Perplexity secured $200 million at a $20 billion valuation.
TechCrunch, citing PitchBook, puts Perplexity’s total funding at about $1.5 billion to date.
