Perplexity AI CEO shares his advice to startup founders on building a team

• The CEO of Perplexity AI shared some principles that guided him as a startup founder.
• Aravind Srinivas talked about having “an extreme bias for action” in a recent talk at Stanford.
• He also said he believes in taking chances on hiring people who have “some chips on their shoulders.”

Where do you start when hiring for your startup? The CEO of Perplexity AI has some tips.

Aravind Srinivas, who cofounded the AI startup in 2022, discussed his approach to leading Perplexity in a recent interview at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

In the earliest days of the startup, Srinivas said he looked to bring on cofounders and “people with complementary skills.”

“You don’t want to be as good as them in what they excel at — I think they should be a lot better. Also, you don’t want to step on their toes when they do that.”

Over time, you build the team out further with a similar approach, targeting people who can “bring in new skills,” he added.

The AI CEO also talked about his approach to running a company as it grew.

“I would say there’s an extreme bias for action that I try to bring in and try to encourage everybody else in the company to adopt,” he said. “And I think that’s what’s helping us continue to be fast, even when you’ve gotten to about 100 people.”

Srinivas recalled advice he once received from a founder who said, “Once you get to 100 people, you’re guaranteed to move slow.”

While it’s “so far, so good” at Perplexity, Srinivas said that at some point “you’re going to hit the problems of scale and how to move fast, so I’m determined to solve that problem.”

Srinivas also spoke of the importance of taking chances on people who have “some chips on their shoulders.”

“Giving people who haven’t necessarily become experts at one thing the opportunity to go do something they’re not yet proven for is something I’ve done a lot,” he said. “That’s something that I wish more people did, the sort of experimentation, putting someone in the waters and letting them figure out how to swim. Rather than hiring the most well-known expert at that topic.”

Perplexity made headlines earlier this year when news publications including The New York Times, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired, alleged that the AI startup was improperly using their content without sufficient attribution.

Srinivas told The Associated Press in June that Perplexity “never ripped off content from anybody” and that its AI-powered search engine, which aggregates material generated by other companies’ AI models, “is not training on anyone else’s content.”

“We are actually more of an aggregator of information and providing it to the people with the right attribution,” Srinivas said at the time.

He reiterated the startup’s position in the interview at Stanford.

“What we are trying to say is we are trying our level best to summarize, synthesize from diverse sources, and make sure to give credit to all the original sources,” he said.

“We are doing our best to make sure the credit attribution part is clear,” Srinivas said.