The Man Behind Perplexity "Aravind Srinivas" (jargoniseasy.com)

Aravind Srinivas, co‑founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, has built the startup into a leading “answer engine” that uses large language models plus real‑time web retrieval to read sources, synthesize direct answers and surface verifiable citations—an approach designed to reduce hallucinations and accelerate trust. Srinivas (IIT Madras, Ph.D. Berkeley) assembled a complementary founding team—Denis Yarats (LLM research), Andy Konwinski (scaling/systems) and Johnny Ho (search/product)—and focused Perplexity on product engineering (in‑house models, retrieval/citation pipelines and heavy scaling) rather than chasing network effects. The company has rapidly scaled user trust and investor interest (valuation reported >$18B) by emphasizing transparency and practical grounding over speculative demos. Perplexity’s roadmap is driven by Srinivas’s pragmatic playbook: the “80% perfect” rule (ship the core reliably and iterate), “pick the #1 thing” (focus on one user problem at a time), a product‑first funding style (no pitch decks, live Q&A with investors), and “attack the product, not the network” (compete on search quality, not entrenched social or mapping networks). For the AI/ML community this matters because it validates retrieval‑grounded generation as a productizable, trustable approach, stresses product‑led engineering at scale, and signals renewed competition with Google that will push advances in grounding, evaluation, and infrastructure for production LLMs.