Why Perplexity’s CEO Replaces Pitch Decks with AI Talks

Pitch decks have been a fixture of venture capital fundraising since the earliest days of Silicon Valley, with founders spending weeks crafting presentations to secure funding. 

Aravind Srinivas, Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, has decided they are not worth the effort.

Speaking in an interview with Berkeley Haas, Aravind says he has ditched the traditional format in favour of something more direct: written memos, live product demonstrations and extended question-and-answer sessions with potential investors.

It is an unconventional approach in an industry that still treats the pitch deck as gospel.

“Famously, the Series A was the only time I made a pitch deck,” Srinivas says.

Ask Perplexity

Aravind says AI enables greater efficiency and an ability to connect the dots “between things that don’t exist.”

“Famously, the Series A was the only time I made a pitch deck,” he says. “I’ve never done a pitch deck for any of the other Perplexity funding rounds. I just write a memo and I tell them you can do a Q&A and ask whatever you want. 

“I’ll spend two hours with you, ask me all the questions you have, and we’re just going to pull the metrics for whatever you have and show you right there,” Aravind adds. “Anything else that is internal, you can ask Perplexity.”

The reason, he says, he points people in the direction of his own product is “it already knows everything, I’m not even exaggerating.”

Building on the theme, the co-founder recalled a recent investor call. After answering an initial round of questions, a flurry of follow-ups headed his way. 

“I copied the entire email, put it into Perplexity and said ‘answer it like Aravind’,” he explains. 

“It has all the context of everything I’ve said in YouTube interviews and different blog posts. I took it out, saw it and was like ‘damn, I don’t think I could have done as good a job as this'.”

The platform has absorbed years of Srinivas’s public statements, from interviews to blog posts. 

He recounts an exchange where an investor sent a barrage of follow-up questions by email. 

Rather than craft responses from scratch, Aravind fed the questions into Perplexity and asked it to answer as he would. 

The result surprised him. “I took it out, saw it and was like ‘damn, I don’t think I could have done as good a job as this’,” he says.

Aravind founded Perplexity in mid-2022 alongside Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski. 

The first answer engine went live that December. Before launching the company, Srinivas spent years in research roles at OpenAI, the organisation behind ChatGPT – and at DeepMind and Google Brain, both AI research operations within Google.

How Perplexity’s monthly growth hit 20%

The numbers suggest the approach is working. 

Perplexity now claims between 22 million and 30 million active users, with growth running at 20% each month. 

Speaking at Bloomberg’s Tech Summit in June, Aravind sketched out where that trajectory leads.

“Give it a year, we’ll be doing, like, a billion queries a week if we can sustain this growth rate,” he says. 

“And that’s pretty impressive because the first day in 2022, we did 3,000 queries, just one single day.”

The company has concentrated on adding features for business customers while scaling up usage. 

Perplexity markets its technology as a response to the limitations of traditional search engines, which dump users into a maze of links and expect them to find their own way out.

Reflecting on the shift from researcher to CEO, Aravind points to Larry Page, who co-founded Google, as someone who shaped his thinking: “I’ve always looked up to entrepreneurs,” he says. 

“I think the spirit of driving change can only be truly done as an entrepreneur.”

He recalls Latty’s framework for making an impact: “There is a particular thing he said – if you want to do something very impactful in the world there are two career paths you can go down. One is an academic [...] or you can start a company,” he says.