- CEO of AI startup Perplexity, Aravind Srinivas, admits he used the early days of Elon Musk and SpaceX—when the billionaire refused to give up even after rockets would blow up—as a source of inspiration for his career. “It’s only over when you think it’s over,” Srinivas tells Harvard students.
Starting a new tech company is no walk in the park. For Aravind Srinivas, cofounder and CEO of Perplexity, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
The AI search engine startup company is now valued at over $9 billion and is fighting daily headwinds in a field dominated by Google and OpenAI. However, Srinivas recently revealed that his secret for staying motivated is simply believing in yourself—even when others don’t.
“It’s only over when you think it’s over,” Srinivas told students at Harvard Business School’s Entrepreneurship Summit. “Until then, you can always find a way. No matter how hard it feels in that moment, it’s only really over when you give up.”
He admitted that part of this inspiration came from Elon Musk, before he was in the political landscape.
“I don’t ever give up,” the world’s richest person told 60 Minutes in 2012. “I’d have to be dead or completely incapacitated.”
While Srinivas taking Musk’s words to heart may sound cliché, it’s working. Perplexity is one of the fastest-growing startups in the world. It was valued at close to $1 billion in March of last year, and by December, it had grown ninefold. According to CNBC, the company is even in talks to raise money at a $18 billion valuation.
Fortune reached out to Srinivas for comment.
Advice for catching investors’ attention: Forget the pitch deck and do this
On his journey as a millennial entrepreneur building Perplexity—or, as he calls it, the “fastest way to get answers to any question”—Srinivas says that watching others struggle early on has been a huge help.
“In a startup, when you have an initial group of people, the number one thing to do is just iterate and do something,” he said. “I’ve seen many founders spend at least six months to a year in the idea maze going around and around and not getting anywhere.”
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In the world of software, developing a product as soon as possible should be the top goal of entrepreneurs, he added.
Once you have a demo to show investors, a pitch deck becomes next to obsolete, admitting he wouldn’t even know how to create one himself, despite his company being less than three years old.
From coworkers to competitors
OpenAI may be one of Perplexity’s biggest competitors, but the two growing AI powerhouses are on nothing but good terms—in part thanks to Srinivas and Sam Altman once calling themselves coworkers.
Srinivas began his career as an OpenAI research intern and has largely kept a friendly relationship with his former boss. In February, Altman posted on X to Srinivas: “Keep cooking out there! Proud of you.”
The two are far from the only tech leaders to get their start at the company behind ChatGPT—with some now alluding to OpenAI as the modern-day version of the PayPal mafia. Ilya Sutskever, the former chief scientist at OpenAI, now runs the $30 billion Safe Superintelligence. Dario and Daniela Amodei, the sibling cofounders of Anthropic—the $61 billion company behind Claude—also call themselves OpenAI alumni.