Being a startup founder today means operating with a constant sense of emergency. The clock always turns – investors want returns, the rivals turn and someone else could run to market with your idea.
But rather than letting this pressure paralyze it, Aravind Srinivas, the co-founder and CEO of $ 14 billion Look for the perplexity of the start -up, uses it as fuel.
“You must assume that if you have a big blow, if your business is something that can generate income on a scale of hundreds of millions of dollars or potentially billions of dollars, you must always assume that a model company will copy”, Srinivas recently said at the YA start -up school in Y combinator.
“You have to live with this fear and you have to adopt it. Know that your fashion has just passed quickly and build your own identity around what you do because users at the end of care.”
For the 31 -year -old, kissing this pressure helped him build a search engine fed by AI of several billion dollars that competes with the innovation of giants of Google and Microsoft technology, as well as the new new arrivals Openai and Anthropic. The success of Perplexity even attracted the attention of Apple, who would have had talks about the purchase of perplexity.
Fortune contacted the perplexity for an additional comment.
‘I do nothing but work’
For Srinivas, staying ahead of the competition certainly means to frequently sacrifice the work-life balance.
“I do nothing but work, unfortunately. I listen to podcasts and audio books every time I can. I spend a lot of time on X (which is both good and bad) ”, Srinivas said in a reddit, ask me anything (Ama) earlier this year.
Although he still takes time to spend time with his family on weekends – and even hitting the gymnasium three times a week – he stressed that the persistence is important: “Work incredibly hard. There is no substitute for this, “he told the crowd of the combiner Y.
“There is a real advantage of kissing this fear and sleeping with this fear and waking up every day and feeling enthusiastic about what you do to build because it is the only thing that will make you continue.”
AI will facilitate the billionaire more than ever, predicts technological leaders
Fortunately (or not) for Srinivas, he is about to motivate himself as the competition becomes thicker: AI inaugurated an era when the construction of a business is easier than ever. After all, generative technology can help create business plans in a few seconds.
The founder and CEO of Openai, Sam Altman, believes that this will lead to an exponential growth in entrepreneurship.
“In my small group, discuss with my CEO friends, there is this Paris Basin for the first year that there is a billion dollars,” Altman told Reddit Alexis Ohanian co -founder in a 2024 Maintenance. “What would have been unimaginable without AI, and now will happen.”
And although this dream of a person and a billion dollars does not materialize, other technological leaders conceded that this was going to happen – and even increased the ceiling. The billionaire Mark Cuban predicts that AI will eventually help top the first trillionaire in the world.
“We have not seen the best or the craziest what [AI is] will be able to do, ”Cuban told the High performance podcast In an episode published at the end of last month. “And not only will I think it will create a trillionaire, but it could be just a guy in the basement. That’s how it could be crazy.”
