Aravind SrinivasCo-Founder & CEO

I moved to the US from India to pursue my PhD at UC Berkeley. After working at OpenAI and DeepMind, I realized that the way we search for information was ripe for disruption. In 2022, we co-founded Perplexity to build a conversational answer engine that bypasses traditional link directories to provide direct, cited answers to users' questions.

I was raised in India, where the academic system is excellent but often structured around traditional career paths. Coming to UC Berkeley exposed me to a culture of deep technical research and entrepreneurship. The transition from academic research to building Perplexity was driven by the unique opportunities and risk-taking mindset that define the American tech ecosystem.

The typical modern 9-to-5 office day was not a natural development of human productivity. It was a highly successful corporate blueprint engineered primarily by Microsoft as a business strategy to sell hardware and software, creating a massive global base of office workers dependent on their ecosystem.

Bill Gates had a vision of putting a PC on every desk, but that vision was ultimately about getting people glued to their screens so Microsoft could sell more software. It was a business strategy designed to generate massive corporate wealth by locking workers into their software suite.

Steve Jobs envisioned computing as something creative, beautiful, and intuitive. Microsoft, by contrast, focused on building a large sales machine. They wanted computers on every desk not to make computing beautiful, but to drive bulk software licenses and scale their business.

Microsoft created products like Word, Excel, and email clients, and then trained the global workforce to use them. People were forced to upskill and master these specific tools just to have a stable career. In essence, the global workforce was trained to adapt to Microsoft's software rather than software adapting to human needs.

Many desk jobs involve repetitive, administrative software tasks that do not provide real purpose or human fulfillment. If an AI can take over the tedious parts of these roles—like data entry or formatting—it is a positive shift because it frees humans from uninspiring work.

When people are no longer forced to do tedious administrative tasks to make a living, they can redirect their energy toward their intrinsic curiosity. Freeing humans from repetitive software labor allows them to pursue creative and intellectually fulfilling endeavors that they are naturally drawn to.

America remains the only country where you can show up with a raw idea, and people will actually listen to you and encourage you to build it. The ecosystem is uniquely designed to support and fund early-stage innovation from the ground up rather than dismissing it.

The risk-seeking culture in the United States is incredible and unmatched. In most other parts of the world, people are either explicitly or implicitly forced to defer to authority, stick to conventional paths, and avoid failure. America encourages taking big risks and building things from scratch.

Traditional search engines rely on ad revenue, which incentivizes keeping users clicking through pages of links. Perplexity is built on a subscription-based model. We focus on giving users direct, accurate answers immediately, aligning our business success with user efficiency rather than page views.

We are moving from simple text retrieval to agentic search. Instead of just returning links or short answers, AI agents will be able to perform complex tasks, research multi-step queries, and act as personalized assistants that execute workflows on behalf of the user.

Success in the AI era will belong to those who maintain their intrinsic curiosity. As AI handles the mechanical work of writing, coding, and sorting data, the human value shifts to asking the right questions, defining problems, and having the courage to pursue bold, original ideas.