But at the end, products need to be having some magic to them and the magic comes from letting you be more lazy.
Words found on the source page on Nov 6, 2026.
More from Aravind Srinivas
PodcastLex Fridman Podcast #434: Aravind SrinivasJun 19, 2024
Every person in the world is curious, but not all of them are blessed to translate that curiosity into a well-articulated question.PodcastLex Fridman Podcast #434: Aravind SrinivasJun 19, 2024
I think of Perplexity as a knowledge discovery engine, neither a search engine. Of course, we call it an answer engine, but everything matters here.PodcastLex Fridman Podcast #434: Aravind SrinivasJun 19, 2024
In fact, I feel the primary difference of Perplexity from other startups that have explicitly laid out that they’re taking on Google is that we never even tried to play Google at their own game.PodcastLex Fridman Podcast #434: Aravind SrinivasJun 19, 2024
We would rather take a more dramatic position, that the best way to actually make a dent in the search space is to not try to do what Google does, but try to do something they don’t want to do.PodcastLex Fridman Podcast #434: Aravind SrinivasJun 19, 2024
What is the weakness of Google is that any ad unit that’s less profitable than a link, or any ad unit that kind of disincentivizes the link click is not in their interest to go aggressive on, because it takes money away from something that’s higher margins.
On the same topics
BlogNew founder archetypes in the AI eraOct 27, 2026
The solo founder is part of a list of maybe new archetypes that I think we’ll soon see a lot more of - and I’ll make both the pro and con case for each here: Solo founders Why: Solo founders can do 100x with AI, so they can ship a v1 when previously they couldn’t have before Why not: Maybe a team of cofounders still makes more progress.UnverifiedBlogCan solo founders win in the AI era?Oct 27, 2026
These days at a16z I’m mostly working on Speedrun , where we write the first check into brand new startups (up to $1M), and a lot of what we focus on is founder backgrounds/profiles. What are the right ones? How will the profiles change as we enter the age of AI?UnverifiedBlogThe coming product retention crisisSep 8, 2026
That’s a fair question at the dawn of the AI age when an app might take about as much time to build as editing a Youtube video. So this means average product retention will collapse, and the days of seeing >20% D30 will feel like a dream.BlogThe coming product retention crisisSep 8, 2026
The future of marketing (and by extension, a large swath of product) is zero-sum and PvP - the abundance of apps/videos/pods/creators/experiences will mean we have infinity times more supply than demand.EssayMaking Startups PowerfulSeptember 2026
The obvious AI variant is to let your users opt in to training your model on their interactions with it. Many will resist that, but if some don't, the model they get to use will outperform the vanilla one used by the others.EssayMaking Startups PowerfulSeptember 2026
You own the customer relationship, and the model companies are in effect component suppliers. The question is how easy it would be for them to engulf you, or even your customers.
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