Inside How Perplexity is Disrupting Google Search | Aravind Srinivas
The secrets behind Perplexity's incredible shipping velocity and focus. Plus how it plans to deliver better ads than Google's 10 blue links.
Dear subscribers,
Today, I want to share a new episode with Aravind Srinivas.
Aravind is the CEO of Perplexity, the AI answer engine disrupting online search. He gave me an inside look at how Perplexity builds products, how it scaled to 100M queries a week, and how it’ll deliver better ads than Google’s ten blue links.
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Aravind and I talked about:
(00:00) Perplexity doesn’t do product reviews
(01:22) The secret to Perplexity's incredible shipping velocity
(05:16) Giving feedback as a user, not the CEO
(07:01) How Perplexity picks what to build next
(10:56) Perplexity's "7 friends in 10 days" metric
(14:02) How Perplexity uses AI to build Perplexity
(17:30) How to get a great job without traditional credentials
(21:50) Drivers behind Perplexity's growth to 100M queries
(27:50) The future of search ads and why 10 blue links are dead
(35:56) Closing advice to get what you want out of life
Read on for the takeaways.
Inside Perplexity’s incredible shipping velocity
Welcome Aravind! So you’re a 100-person startup challenging Google Search. In the last 10 days alone, you shipped half a dozen new features. What’s the secret to shipping so fast while maintaining quality?
Our speed comes from our culture. Since the beginning, we've operated with a high sense of urgency. This flows from the top down to every person in the company.
Every week is 2% of the year. If you don't ship this week, you've lost 2% of the year. Four weeks means losing 10%.
We motivate employees to get features running for internal testing first. We tell teams: ”Get your first users from within Perplexity. If employees are excited about your feature and there's some virality, it'll likely be an external success too.”
How do you get product teams to move fast?
Big companies struggle because more people create overhead, bureaucracy, and communication gaps.
At Perplexity, we try to make our teams independent. Each team has a PM, designer, and engineers (frontend, backend, AI, search) that can operate separately from other teams.
Of course, we still share learnings between teams but we try to reduce the dependencies as much as possible.
Honestly, it feels like you’re shipping products faster than it takes for Google to push a document from one executive to another. Do you have a product review process?
We don't do product review meetings. My mentality is:
Why wait for a review meeting? Just give me the link to try the product now so I can give feedback.
Then, I'll check again in a few days and give you new feedback. This is much faster than spending half a week preparing for a meeting with me.
Also, I'm not giving feedback as an executive but as a user.
That feedback is more genuine. The products we build at Perplexity are meant for all users, including me. I do several dozen queries daily, so I can easily give feedback on almost anything we build. But I see people on X who use it even more than me, which motivates me to use it more.
How Perplexity decides what to build next
Focus is so important for startups. How do you and the team decide what to build next?
We prioritize based on our most important metric: