Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas's Big Advice To Entrepreneurs: "Sleep With Fear That..."

If you are a young entrepreneur with a big idea, expect that billion-dollar companies would try to steal it, said Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. But what can be done to prevent it? According to Srinivas, one should prepare for the inevitable and keep building anyway.

Speaking at Y Combinator's AI Startup School, the Indian computer scientist and entrepreneur noted that bigger companies will "copy anything that's good". But rather than letting that pressure of plagiarism paralyse the growth, Srinivas asked the undergraduate, graduate, and PhD students in the audience to "use it as fuel" and "work incredibly hard."

"You should assume that if you have a big hit, if your company is something that can make revenue on the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars or potentially billions of dollars, you should always assume that a model company will copy it," he said.

Sharing his own experience of building Perplexity, Srinivas said in December 2022, his company released its answer engine with the functionality of real-time web crawling. The same feature was soon adopted by rivals like Google's Gemini, ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude.

The 31-year-old listed the reasons why bigger companies play copycats. "They raise like tens of billions or close to 50 billion, and they need to justify all that CapEx spend, and they need to keep searching for new ways to make money," he said.

"They will copy anything that's good. I think you've got to live with that fear, and you have to embrace it. Realise that your mode comes from moving fast and building your own identity around what you're doing because users at the end care," he added.

Perplexity launched its Comet browser on July 9. Later that day, Reuters reported that OpenAI was working on a similar web browser that would challenge Google Chrome. However, Sam Altman's company has yet to formally announce the release. 

Later, in a statement to Business Insider, Perplexity's head of communications, Jesse Dwyer, said that bigger companies will not only copy but also "do everything they can to drown your voice."

"Browser wars should be won by users, and if users lose Browser War III, it will be from a familiar playbook: monopolistic behaviour by an 'everything company' forcing its product on the market. In this sense, whatever OpenAI builds as a browser will be no different than Google's," Dwyer wrote.