You have to live with that fear: Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas' advice to students and young founders

India Today

4 days ago

What do you do when Big Tech copies your big idea? According to Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, you prepare for it and keep building anyway. Speaking at Y Combinator's AI Startup School, Srinivas offered candid advice to a room full of young students, entrepreneurs, and future founders. He told them that in today's fast-paced AI world, if your product is good, there's a high chance a major company will copy it. 'They will copy anything that's good,' he said, adding, 'You've got to live with that fear.'advertisementPerplexity, a startup known for building a real-time AI answer engine, is itself an example. When the company launched its web-crawling chatbot in late 2022, it stood out in a market where most tools relied solely on static, outdated training data. Months later, tech giants like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic launched similar features.Srinivas explained that large companies are under pressure to justify their massive investments and infrastructure costs. 'They raise tens of billions... and need to keep searching for new ways to make money,' he said. 'If your company can make hundreds of millions or even billions in revenue, expect a model company to copy it.'
Last week, Perplexity launched Comet, an AI browser that is designed to act like a digital assistant that understands context, answers questions across websites, and completes tasks on the go. However, Srinivas' ultimate advice to aspiring builders was simple but sharp: work incredibly hard, stay ahead with innovation, and accept that competition is part of the game. 'You have to live with that fear,' he repeated, reminding young founders that pressure from Big Tech is almost inevitable, but not unbeatable.In a separate interview earlier this year on Raj Shamani's podcast, Srinivas turned his attention to India, where Perplexity has a growing user base, and offered a candid call to action for developers, freelancers, and tech entrepreneurs in the country. He acknowledged that Indians are among the world's fastest adopters of AI tools but warned that usage alone won't make India a global leader in the field. 'I hope the usage goes beyond just identifying cheat codes to get work done faster,' he said. 'Figure out side gigs, earn more, raise throughput and if enough people start doing that, average income rises, and GDP goes up.'However, his deeper point was about ambition. Srinivas encouraged Indian developers to build AI-first products that don't yet exist, not just optimise workflows or build clones. 'Can you build something that doesn't exist yet and get it into the hands of 100 million people. here or globally? That's how we create a new market cap, employ people, and lift incomes from scratch.'advertisementHe pointed to three sectors where India has a real shot at making an impact: healthcare, software development, and financial consulting. In each of these, he believes AI tools can supercharge individuals to scale like never before , from helping doctors interpret diagnostics, to giving small software firms advanced code-completion tools, to offering financial insights once reserved for the elite.But he also offered a warning: industries built on repetition, like call centres and dev shops churning out template work, are on borrowed time. 'Voice agents are improving fast,' he said. 'Whoever's running those businesses should disrupt them first before someone else does.'- Ends