There are two major Steve Jobs movies.
I learned this talking to Perplexity AI cofounder and CEO Aravind Srinivas, who wanted to be clear with me—he was talking about the Steve Jobs movie featuring Michael Fassbender, not Ashton Kutcher.
I’d only seen Fassbender’s 2015 take on Jobs, and I should keep it that way, Srinivas told me.
“That’s the good one,” he said. “There’s this scene where Wozniak comes in and says to Jobs: ‘You don’t write any code. You don’t do design.’ Then Jobs says, ‘I play the orchestra.’ And that’s what Perplexity’s like. We don’t train the foundation models. We don’t build the core GPU infrastructure. But we take all that, and play the orchestra.”
And Srinivas’ Perplexity AI orchestra has played a promising first movement. The AI search startup last week announced that it had raised $73.6 million in a funding round led by IVP and including Jeff Bezos, NEA, NVIDIA, Databricks, and Bessemer Venture Partners at a $520 million valuation. Like a number of AI startups, Perplexity has managed to raise money in a tough environment. In 2023, $170.6 billion was invested across venture—that marks a decline of $71.6 billion from 2022 totals, and a whopping $177.4 billion drop from 2021, according to PitchBook and NVCA data released Wednesday. Much of 2023’s deal value was bolstered significantly by the $17 billion raised by Open AI and Anthropic combined, a testament to the AI boom’s power.
But there’s an extra wrinkle to Perplexity’s story. The company is looking to make its mark on the search market, famous for the spectacular dominance of one player: Google. Srinivas says Perplexity will find its place because the company is operating with a fundamentally different business model.
"Google has no incentive to actually move fast and nail this product experience because their core money is coming from making people click on links and view links,” he told me. “Right now, our core money is coming from being the best."
Benchmarking in AI is difficult, but I will say this: I have found Perplexity to be pretty compelling. I’ve asked specific questions, from “What are some famous IPOs in which the company was not profitable?” to “How many Steve Jobs movies are there?” And I’ve found the answers to be accurate and concise on an interface that’s easy to use. I’m the target customer for Perplexity right now, as the company is currently operating on a subscription business model selling Perplexity Pro for $20 per month or $200 per year to knowledge workers. The free version doesn’t have the image upload or assistant called Copilot, but it is able to take on the same sorts of queries.
"Our value proposition is that the free product is already so good that you can still use it without having to pay for it, but the paid product is going to be insane,” he said.
So it’s a business predicated on being the best, which is tough to objectively ascertain and, well, stressful. That got me thinking about another on-screen drama: I recently (finally) watched FX’s The Bear, a TV show that's ostensibly about a fine dining chef, but is really so much more—it’s about the crippling anxiety and inevitable pitfalls that come with wanting to be the absolute best at something. I asked Srinivas if he’d seen The Bear, and he hadn’t. But I told him about something one character says to another, as they talk about her ambition to win a Michelin star: “You’re going to have to care about everything, more than anything.”
I ask him if he agrees. Srinivas sat back, and paused. There was a long beat.
“You have to care about the things that matter.”
I pressed, asking how you can know what matters.
“Part of being a leader is looking at 100 different things, and telling people that these are the three that matter,” Srinivas said. “That’s my job, and if I’m not doing it, I shouldn’t be the CEO anymore,” adding that he thinks often of leaders he admires like Elon Musk—“I know he’s controversial”—and Bezos.
It’s the sort of reference that speaks to what a big swing Perplexity AI is. It’s hard to believe Google will hold its place at the top of the search heap forever (nothing lasts that long), but it’s also hard to see how they won’t. And Perplexity is also competing with chatbots fielded by heavyweight tech companies like Meta, Amazon, and AI startups like Anthropic and Open AI. I say that this all strikes me as pretty bold.
"Startups are all about being bold,” Srinivas told me. “Are you building a company that has unbounded potential? That’s risky, but there's an infinite reward if it works.”
I tell him that I’m just not sure how on earth Perplexity finds scale in search. Srinivas takes it in stride.
“You can ask all these questions and I think they’re all fair, pretty rational ways of thinking about it. But startups are for irrational people, right?”
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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