Aravind Srinivas
Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, the AI answer engine company that has expanded into autonomous agents, research and knowledge-work tools.
“We completely replaced our usage of AWS DynamoDB, which is where we hosted our entire trillion web page index. We built a new database from scratch using our own coding agents, and that's saving us several tens of millions of dollars a year now.”
Newcomer Pod · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Context
Srinivas argues the value in AI now goes to whoever knows how to get a return from agents. He gives Perplexity's own database rebuild as the example, in a week when AWS said agents wrote its new emulator.
Transcript
…to build infrastructure, what to not build as models get better, and own all the primitives outside of the model, like search, browsing, sandboxing. And that's basically what we did. Well, people were having fun chatting here. Right. We were building, and that paid off, and we're doing pretty well.
…is really where everything is at right now. I mean, can you give me a bit of the landscape right now of the frontier model companies? And OpenAI seems like they're desperately but quickly catching up. Anthropic seems to be in the lead. Just on a step-back sense, where are you seeing that world?
I think people are increasingly realizing that AI is a deeply recursive product more than a network effect product. There are a few people who use it a lot. 80% of the revenue is probably coming from 20% of the users. There's a deep parallel there. It might even be 90-10. And the reason for that is agency and curiosity are not widespread. There are only a few people who really know how to take the most out of these things and automate a lot of these things without being wasteful. It's not the same as token maxing. Everybody can just set up hundreds of loops and consume a lot of tokens here today, but there are very few people who actually know how to get the right ROI out of it. That saves you a lot of costs on so many other things. Applying agents to optimize your infrastructure, lowering your costs, building an entire new database. We did that. We completely replaced our usage of AWS DynamoDB, which is where we hosted our entire trillion web page index. We built a new database from scratch using our own coding agents. And…
Yeah. Well, what do you think about consumer though? Like where does that world go these days? I mean, if you have the biggest labs realizing that 90% of their revenue is going to come from or whatever your split was, what's the future of consumer look like? Is it even relevant, or does Google just…
Well, I feel like consumers is like kind of building the yellow pages equivalent in AI. Like Google AI overview or AI mode is that. And obviously some people are joking, okay, you put it's like the Google shipping perplexity on the Google search bar. Yes, but it may not help you make money. In…
SIGNGING. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He actually wrote a very good
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