Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has advice for young entrepreneurs. Expect your ideas to be copied.
Srinivas said while speaking at Y Combinator's AI Startup School, large companies “copy good things.” At the time of release, Prplexity allowed chatbots to craze the web. Currently, Openai, Anthropic, and Google's competitive products have similar web browsing capabilities.
Talking an audience of bachelor's, graduates and doctoral students, the bewildered CEO began his advice by telling him to “work incredibly hard.”
Don't be surprised, if a large player would later make a copycat, he added.
“If your company is something that can make revenue on the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars or potentially billions of dollars, you should always assume that a model company will copy it,” Srinivas said.
Srinivas has listed the reasons why large companies copy fast-growing founders. “They're raising like tens or nearly 50 billion, and they need to justify everything they spend on Capex and continue to look for new ways to make money,” he said.
“They'll copy good things. I think you had to live with that fear,” Srinivas said.
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Perplexity was founded as a “response engine” that appears to provide accurate and integrated answers based on web search. At the time of Perplexity's debut, many other chatbots were usually restricted to responding based solely on training data with knowledge cutoffs for the past few months.
Perplexity released Answer Engine in December 2022. Google's Bard launched its internet crawling capabilities at launch three months later, after being rebranded as Gemini. In May 2023, ChatGpt followed suit. Anthropic's Claude allows you to search the web in real time as of March 2025.
In a follow-up statement to Business Insider, Jesse Dwyer, director of communications at Perplexity, wrote that not only large companies would copy, but would “do everything they can and speak up.”
Perplexity launched the Comet browser on July 9th, but Openai has not yet officially announced its browser. Later that day, Reuters reported that Openai was working on a web browser that challenges Google Chrome.
“Browser Wars must be won by the user. If the user loses the browser War III, it comes from the familiar playbook. It is an exclusive action by “all companies” that forces “all companies” in the market,” writes Dwyer. “In this sense, what Openai builds as a browser is no different from Google's.”
Openai did not respond to requests for comment on Srinivas and Perplexity's remarks.
