Fireside Chat with Aravind Srinivas, Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI
The Entrepreneurship Club at Harvard Business School (HBS) organized this event.
Earlier today, Patrick Chung (bio here) hosted a fireside chat with Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, at Harvard Business School.
Background
Aravind Srinivas was born in Chennai and studied electrical engineering at IIT Madras before shifting to AI and earning a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. He worked at OpenAI (contributing to DALL-E 2), Google, and DeepMind. In 2022, he co-founded Perplexity AI with Denis Yarats and Andy Konwinski, attracting early backing from Jeff Bezos and Nat Friedman.
Perplexity is a conversational answer engine that delivers accurate, trustworthy responses using models like GPT-3. To stay competitive, it recently launched Comet, an AI-powered web browser for complex searches.
As of March 2025, the company is raising $500M–$1B at a valuation of $18B—double its $9B valuation from November 2024—with SoftBank among the key investors.
Main Points
Instead of repeating Patrick’s questions and Aravind’s responses verbatim, here’s a summary of their conversation:
Leadership & Culture: Aravind champions a truth-seeking company culture that values open debate over social affirmation. As Perplexity scales, he aims to preserve speed and quality by introducing structure without losing agility.
Vision for AI & Search: He sees AI transforming knowledge access, aspiring to build conversational AI that reasons like great thinkers. His goal is to democratize knowledge, helping users ask better questions.
Aravind on Building Perplexity: He built the first prototype over a weekend and emphasized that while competing with Google is tough, it's crucial for innovation. As AI models become commoditized, solving real problems through reasoning agents will be the key differentiator.
Perplexity vs. Google: He criticized Google for misaligned, cluttered results driven by ads, noting it struggles to answer user questions directly. Perplexity, by contrast, offers clear, accurate answers with sources and a UI built for evolving tech.
Advice to Founders: Aravind credits early top-tier investors with helping attract key talent and advises entrepreneurs to value intellectual honesty, curiosity, and passion over consensus or external validation.
Hot Takes
Here are three “Hot Takes” from their conversation:
Aravind dismissed rumors of an Apple acquisition, affirming Perplexity’s focus on independence.
On TikTok, he noted its search could benefit from more useful, truthful content, calling fact-checking a key social tool.
He also highlighted the value of open source in keeping LLMs accountable and accessible, citing DeepSeek as a strong example.
Conclusion
The Fireside Chat with Aravind Srinivas offered sharp insights into building and scaling Perplexity AI. From a weekend prototype to an $18B company, Aravind shared his vision for truthful, accessible AI and the future of search. He emphasized a culture of intellectual honesty, the value of open source, and staying independent amid acquisition rumors. This chat highlighted how bold ideas and mission-driven leadership can challenge tech giants and reshape how we access knowledge.