Inside Perplexity's Growth Machine: What Worked, What Did Not Work

I have no clue. I have no clue. I had a great family that really pushed all of us to get out of Alabama to go do cool stuff, and, you know, here I am in San Francisco working at a really, really fun company.

Yeah. MBAs have such an interesting reputation in tech. Most people just absolutely hate them. I personally even though I left a year early in the MBA, I had a great experience. I got there. I came to tinker with ideas. I never took an interview. Started playing around with all my different ideas. You can get funding from the school. So it’s essentially like a pre pre seed, and you’re just tinkering full time. And investors start conversations start flowing, and it became very clear. Like, I’m gonna learn a lot more.

I’m gonna have such a better experience if I just go full steam ahead on this idea. And and that was it. I mean, it was amazing. Would you recommend MBAs to others? I think MBAs make a lot of sense for people who are trying to break into a specific industry. If you are trying to break into private equity or you wanna be a PM at Amazon or go into McKinsey, then MBAs have, like, your preset path and you just follow your guidelines. You have a community to work with and prep for, and you’ll hopefully get in.

So it’s a very, like, expensive bridge to breaking into one of those fields. But for many people, that’s an incredibly valuable, valuable journey.

Yeah. I mean, you know, I go to business school. I go take a swing for three years and just grinding up against startup life, and there’s nothing easy about it. Right? Like, when you’re when you’re a founder that, you know, month after month, pivot after pivot, nothing is moving, there is nothing more demoralizing than those moments. And, you know, when we when it came down to the final straw, we end up shutting down. I’m chatting with different companies. I’m chatting with Aravind, Denis, Johnny, Dmitry, everyone.

It became very clear, like, this is a company that is moving crazy fast, is having so much fun. I’m gonna go do that. But it’s different going from the founder seat. Right? You know, you one, you are now well aware of how freaking hard startups are. Your ego is bruised. Right? You just got your ass kicked. So it’s a total adjustment in terms of framing. And then you’re basically descoping yourself. I’m brought on to just drive growth. So founders enjoy the variety of I gotta go work on a 100 things and I gotta steer the ship, but now you’re hyper focused on, okay.

I’m here to drive growth. I am descoping myself just to go do an excellent job at this, and that’s an adjustment as well.

I see growth as an independent function that bridges product and marketing. K. So there’s growth product, and there’s growth marketing. Growth product, let’s start there, is a product team, engineering, design, data science all working together. But your core product, the product you’re obsessing over, is the user funnel. So acquisition, activation, retention, monetization. So growth is not just about let me fill the top of the funnel with new users. It’s about getting those users to become retained, to develop into power users so that you can eventually monetize them.

So you just obsess over that journey that facilitates that user life cycle. That’s growth funnel. Okay.

then we’ve got

Growth marketing, your goal is the exact same as the growth product team. Right? Drive that user funnel from acquisition down to monetization, but your tools are just different. You’re not approaching it from a engineering design or data science angle. Your tools are marketing channels. They’re life cycle communications. It’s community. It’s marketing campaigns. All these things need to live closely together. Right? Like, I can’t work on an onboarding experience without a product team iterating on every flow and without the marketing team thinking about copy, thinking about email drip campaigns.

Everything comes in as one cohesive unit to bring this funnel to life.

The easy the easy thing to say is post product market fit, but, like, what does that even mean?

Yeah. But, I mean, I think as soon as you see that you have early signs in retention, like, we’re seeing, like, you know, if you see 30% retention in month three or four, you have the kindling in your fire where it is now worth it to go put gasoline on it. Go make that investment. And it doesn’t have to be we’re gonna go turn on marketing channels and spend a bunch of money. It could just be, okay, can we get that 30% retention to go to 40%?

Can we make it really easy for to convert all these users through the funnel?

It’s a very flat organization. So there was nothing built out, but there were resources to pull from. Right? You you know, there there are engineers that are ready to jump in on, okay, let’s go hack onboarding, or let’s go really iterate on deeper retention, or or anything like that. And it it depends on when you are starting, but a lot of times it’s, well, what even exists today? And your first few weeks stepping into growth is you’re just turning over stones. You’re trying to build the map of the world.

Okay. What’s happening in acquisition? What’s happening in engagement? What’s happening in monetization? And usually when you ask those questions, you don’t get any answers, and you just get a 100 more questions that you’ve now go figure out. So then your job becomes, let me build the right infrastructure so we can actually measure and understand the world. And that’s where you start getting into engineering logging, attribution, do we have first party cookies, all of that.

Yep. I think micro optimizations are seriously underrated. I think anyone that has, like, built a growth model for their company imagine you you open up an Excel sheet, you have new users, you’ve retained users, you have resurrections, and you’ve churned users. Right? New users plus retained users plus resurrections minus churn users, that’s your weekly actives or monthly actives. Right? And then if you assume like a new user growth rate or a retention curve, you can now play around with, well, if I increase retention by 10%, what happens to my weekly actives?

What happens to my monthly actives? That 10% small change in retention or in new user activation, you see the entire water level of your active user base just increase. That small micro optimization just raised the entire water level of the company. And so that’s huge. Like, I’m gonna go after that if the opportunity is there. To hedge that though, micro optimizations have diminishing returns. At some point, I’m not gonna get be able to squeeze out an incremental 15% without a lot of wasted experimentation time. And that’s why, like, my rule of thumb is once a quarter, we have to be taking at least a couple massive swings.

Right? A big new feature, a big marketing campaign, it has to be high risk. It has to be high reward. I have to be able to stand in front of the company and say, I’m gonna do something and be willing to fail.

rate be on those big swings? I’d say 25% would be pretty great on these big swings. Maybe, like, one once a year, we have just a banger campaign or banger new feature that is now really driving growth or really opened up a new audience for us. That is huge.

There’s a good, a bad, and an ugly. The good is we we are using AB test to understand impact, to understand how every metric changes. Are we accidentally bringing down certain metrics? Do we really understand what is incremental and what is not incremental? That is like a well scoped a b test teaches you what you should work on next. It adjusts your direction. It adjusts your cadence. A bad a b test is poorly scoped. You’re not gonna get any information out of it. It’s a messy thing with a low minimum detectable effect, and you’re gonna run it and you’re not gonna get anything out of You just wasted a week of your time.

And then the ugly. The ugly is I’m running an AB test so that I can put something in my performance review about a number I moved, or I can, like, say something to my manager. And and you see that as companies get bigger. Right? We’re running AB tests just to, like, be able to say, oh, I increased activations by 12%.

Yeah. I I think your goal as a PM is to optimize direction. Are we working on the right thing? Are we poking at the right part of this product that can drive impact? And AB tests give you a quick response to it. And I think that is, like, core to understanding, are we working on the right thing? Are we moving fast enough? Are we really moving the needle on this? That being said, you should go into an AB test with a pretty strong confidence of what’s gonna happen.

And this is where, like, intuition comes in of, like, we’re running this, and here’s what I think is gonna happen. I think we’re really gonna move this metric, but we might see that other metric go down a bit, and that’s what we need to watch out for. If you don’t have that intuition, then you’re just flying blind.

A lot of times you see AB tests with mixed results, and that those are the trickiest ones to navigate. So let’s say we’re working on, okay, I wanna get a user to hit their, you know, fifth query in the session, then I’m gonna show them a sign in opportunity. Well, I’m showing them a sign in opportunity. I’m now juicing activations. Great. But a lot of people saw that sign in gate, and they hated it. They’re like, screw this. I’m out of here. And now I’m hurting query volume.

I’m hurting searches happening in Perplexity. So now I have two different metrics to to hold on to. How do I value those two things down the road? That is where it gets really, really fun for some of us where it’s like, okay. Well, how how do we value this? Will that activated user retain? And over time, those retained metrics, if I think about this on a thirty day time frame or a sixty day time frame, will make up for that initial loss in query volume. I’m not gonna go run that AB test for sixty days and then come back and tell the team, okay, we finally made a decision.

You kinda have to make a decision right there or figure out how to optimize and, like, protect that downside.

Yeah. I call these milestone metrics. So can we go take anyone who’s retaining at thirty, sixty days and then look back into their first couple sessions and say, okay, what did they do differently? What is unique about their experience? From that, can we establish a working metric? It’s not perfect. Right? Because it’s not deep retention. If I can get a user from Perplexity specifically to three queries in that first session, now I know I’m really onto something because that is what a lot of great people do.

It’s enough time and product where that user now understands the value of Perplexity, and they’re gonna more like, there’s a high likelihood that they’re gonna come back and retain.

Yep. One is monitoring. Does this still correlate down the road once we’re done with gaining it, once we’re done with tinkering with it? And if if we’re seeing it, that correlation start to break, well, okay, I’m not being honest with myself around if we’re actually helping retention here. The other thing is to to take a rounded approach. You can’t just stare down one metric. I need to stare down number of queries, but also time in for a session. Did that first session timing hit that ten minute period and not just

Or you had so much great value early on that you’re not rabbit holing into Perplexity. Harry, you mentioned a query you and your family were putting in last night.

What if, like, if that can lead to a bunch of follow-up questions, that’s awesome. You’re now deep in the Perplexity experience learning and exploring, and it’s great for us.

Yeah. AI companies have a ton of curiosity traffic, which is awesome. Anyone who launches something that shows a little bit of magic or has a magical demo, they are going to get traffic. They’re going to get quick usage. All of our growth, most of our growth has been organic word-of-mouth. Two years in, and we’re still riding this incredible wave of organic traffic. That’s the best channel you can ever have. So the question for us is how do we keep nurturing that? How do we keep this organic magic still happening?

Word-of-mouth. Yeah. About 80%. It’s gonna depend on priority countries or international. We do a lot of big partnerships to drive distribution.

They are incredibly effective at driving distribution. You we can go out and scream from the mountaintops about Perplexity, but it is a lot better when someone else is telling you to use it or it is being bundled into an existing product of yours. That’s gonna drive a lot more trial. We have a phenomenal partnerships team. They are absolute sharks.

To a certain extent, but that’s acquisition cost. We’re willing to trade off a month of Pro. Because if you don’t use Pro, it’s pretty variable. Right? If you’re not using Pro, we’re not losing money. But if you are using it, well, now we’re capturing you as a user. You’re really starting to understand why Perplexity is magical. And then the game becomes, can we convert you to that paying user after? What partnership do you not have that you’d most like to have? I’d think about more audiences.

So what audiences do I wanna reach and what partnerships can we get to there? So I think a lot about the student audience. And so there’s some partnerships in that student world that I really wanna break into to help drive distribution within students at scale.

There’s so many. If we’re not making mistakes, we’re not learning fast enough. I think I came in really interested in influencer marketing and then really wanting to test this channel, creators, how do we work with creators to share Perplexity? And I totally underestimated the amount of effort it is to work individually with creators on specific content and making sure they get the right messaging. And Perplexity is not a simple concept to explain. Like me saying AI search engine means nothing. And so to manage a bunch of these creators creating content, long tail creators, it ended up a, falling flat and b, taking up a ton of time, ton of time.

And so I think we’re we’re moving very quickly as we’d rather work with fewer creators and just develop a really good relationship with them.

So if you come in, you turn over all the stones, you’re trying to get a sense of through this end to end funnel from acquisition down to monetization, like, where should I spend my time? Where is there the biggest opportunity to drive growth? And, you know, we had Dimitri and the business team running these big partnerships. We had tons of traffic coming in from the top of the funnel. My eyes went straight to that early activation rate, week one, week two retention. None of it was bad.

It was actually, like, pretty healthy consumer retention, but that was where if we can move that number early on at the top of the funnel, we’re increasing the water level of all activated users and weekly actives. That’s where I need to hang out. That’s where I need to set up. What’s a good activation rate? Very, very dependent on the company. So keep in mind, Perplexity, you don’t have to sign up to start using it. That’s amazing. Right? It’s it gives us the opportunity to have quick trials.

People can just put in there a question and immediately see the value of it. But that logged out visitor to logged in activation rate is tricky to navigate. And so, like, from that logged out experience, I’d love to push that into, like, the 30% of users are hitting my milestone metrics, and we’re converting them to to signed in users.

Consumer’s hard, man. Consumer’s really hard. And so what you wanna see is that that retention curve stabilize. I think it was, like, by month six, you want 45% is really, really, really good. That’s the target. Right? That’s where we wanna push to, especially when you’re not a social product that has more of, that smile retention curve. You really need to figure out how can we drive retained value and increase frequency to get to that 45 plus percent.

month six.

Yeah. Are you blown away by the drop off amount?

Oh, yeah. But that I mean, that’s how you know you’re providing value.

That’s twelve month retention at fifty percent’s world class. And then they the engine they have built is incredible. It’s it’s a world class way of retaining users.

So there are finite ways to move retention. One, you are setting up your milestone metrics. What correlates with deeper retention earlier in the funnel? Right? So that three queries in your first session. And now how am I really trying to move that? But at a higher level, you’re you’re constantly playing with mix shift. Right? So one, you can optimize channel distribution. So organic and referrals is always gonna have higher retention than paid acquisition and partnerships. That’s, you know, because so much of our growth is word-of-mouth and partnerships led.

Like, we don’t have much channel distribution optimization to make. Two is you can target different audiences. Perplexity is incredibly horizontal. My grandmother uses it. My doctor uses it. Everyone uses it. So can I find different segments, different audience segments that have really high retention? And then can I specifically go after them? So I’m changing the mix shift of new cohorts to that new audience, which increases that retention for those cohorts. Which

Well, you see a lot of trial users that, like, are coming in from, like, curiosity traffic, like the weekenders that are putting in, you know, how many times does someone fart in a day, that’s little bit lower retention. If I’m here to solve a knowledge gap, like I’m using Perplexity for work specifically, or I’m a student using Perplexity to find sources for a paper, that is really, really sticky retention because we are solving knowledge gaps for you. It’s not just curiosity that we’re bringing you.

Yeah. Because you’re you’re getting more information from the user around what they’re looking for, which means we can provide better responses. We can reformulate that query to give you broader search results and then use that to to drive our answer. The more information we have in that query, the better of a result we can provide.

have been a couple. We’ve worked on a lot of different things. One is can you mix shift audience? So we’ve done a lot of audience targeting around specific high quality cohorts. Two is can you mix shift platform? I don’t want you just on the web app, or I don’t want you just on the mobile app. Can I get you across multiple devices? And that cross device conversion is really, really strong for retention. Because now you’re using it on weekends. You’re using it during the day, we’re everywhere, we’re integrating into your life.

Those are the two really big ones. And then you never can just underestimate driving product improvements is always going to drive retention.

think would have a big difference and didn’t? And this is something we’re gonna never stop banging our head against, but how we tinker with the messaging as soon as you land on Perplexity, it’s critical for us that people understand that Perplexity has up to date data that we show sources, and that is the inherent value. And so you’re gonna see a lot of experimentation on how can we drive the messaging so people understand what they landed on and can figure out how it can drive value for them.

because It’s a bit wordy, isn’t it? It’s a bit wordy. Is that our Google description, though?

I mean, there’s some SEO optimization happening there as well.

Where knowledge begins. Yeah. That’s the fine balance. How much information do we need to slap in your face? How functional should it be? How brand oriented should it be? This is where we spend all of our time tinkering in terms of what does someone need to hear to understand how Perplexity can help them, and what are the key differentiation points for us that we need to highlight.

What would you have? I I mean, I think where we’re moving to is really simple language around ask anything or what do you wanna know and search like never before. I I think it’s really important to get across that Perplexity has live search. We are searching the Internet in real time. We’re giving you up to date answers, and that is really critical to make sure everyone understands.

A couple pieces here. One is, like, should we even be focusing on monetization? Do we want to think about paid acquisition as a lever that that needs to bring in users and then we see that payback happen immediately? And my answer early on was no. I I think we just need to go focus on top of funnel, new user growth, and getting incredible sticky retention. And if we do that, guess what? We’re gonna be able to figure out how to monetize these users, whether it’s through a consumer subscription, whether it’s through ads, whatever it is, we’re going to be able to figure out that monetization.

So let’s put down CAC to LTV for now, and let’s the only metric I’m gonna just yell about all day is our activation rate and our retention rate, and hold me to moving that. When did

I I think that’s happening a little bit now. Like, you look at Perplexity, it is completely unoptimized for driving subscriptions. How could it be more optimized? Well, we we could add more gates. We could add more usage gates where you run into, okay, I really wanna use Pro Search or file upload more often. And, well, you know, you as a free user, you only have three per day, but we know you love this. So why don’t you consider upgrading to our Pro plan where you get basically unlimited of both?

That those are the optimizations where we can tinker with the limits. We can tinker with how we are showing you upsells in that moment.

Yeah. It depends on stage. Right? Do they have are they at the scaling period where it is now turn on these channels and drive growth? Because we feel really good about where we are in terms of retention or any incremental work we’re gonna do on trying to move activation or move early retention is hitting diminishing returns. Then it’s okay. Let’s now go move our focus to attacking these channels and maximizing efficiency of them, maximizing these CAC to LTV ratios. That’s when I think, okay. We’re we’re seeing diminishing returns on retention.

Now it’s time to move to CAC to LTV optimization.

We barely touch pay paid acquisition is a total drug. It makes everyone feel good because top of funnel numbers move up. And once you see those, you know, weekly activation rates, well, no one wants to see that go down, but it’s going to underperform on retention. And maybe most importantly, it’s most likely not gonna be incremental. I basically started my career on the paid acquisition team at Lyft, Right? Spending millions and millions of dollars on these channels. And I’ll never forget this. Our head of growth at the time was basically just like, go turn off every single paid channel for new passengers.

And, like, we’re spending like, paid acquisition was driving a good amount of passenger acquisition. And so the growth marketing team turns off every single paid channel, and installs and sign ups barely move. They go down by, like, maybe 10%. I don’t remember what it was. What did go down, it was all low quality. Every marketing dollar that was being spent to acquire these new passengers was just cannibalizing organic traffic. None of it was incremental. So maybe it pulled those users forward by a few weeks. But overall, it was just Lyft had enough organic word-of-mouth traction where once you factored in the incrementality of the channel, it was wasn’t efficient.

It made no sense.

Let’s flip that Lyft scenario. So then you have the passenger side, not incremental at all. The supply side, it’s really hard to get drivers in a ride sharing network. And guess what? You’re a marketplace, you need to balance supply and demand. You need to acquire the drivers. And so I think this is where we did run a lot of paid at Lyft to acquire the supply side. And part of that is, well, if we acquire the supply side, we can balance the marketplace. Balance marketplace is gonna be much more efficient.

Lyft will grow because of it, and that spend will pay back much faster. So I think it makes sense as, like, a very intense balancing lever for marketplaces. And then if your unit economics support it, I I do think there are advantages to using paid acquisition to go after audiences that you’re under indexed in. So right now, like, the only paid acquisition we’ve ever touched and it’s so lightweight are some just like simple TikTok ads, testing different value propositions with 18 to 24 year olds. Very specific marketing.

It’s hard, and TikTok’s a crazy beast of a place. My god.

You know, the the algorithm is so different than how we think about traditional algorithms where it’s built for virality. So if you’re trying to do organic TikToks, you’re comfortable with, you know, 10 failing, but one hitting 7,000,000 views. And, like, that’s almost like it’s it’s such a crazy power law. On the on the TikTok ad side, like, I think we are learning a lot around how AI companies need to be positioning themselves with new audiences that don’t care about AI. Like, can’t walk up and be like, well, we’re an AI search engine.

And people people are gonna be like, oh my god. That’s what I’ve been waiting for my entire life. You need to abstract away this whole AI piece and just go straight to the value prop of get answers immediately backed by sources.

Yeah. And and it worked really well early on. Right? It was kind of like a magician pulling a rabbit out of the hat of, like, look at this magic. But now it’s find conversion shit on TikTok? Conversion is pretty good. We’re still very early in testing this. Conversion is solid, like, top of funnel campaigns do well. I’m still waiting for some of this retention to bake. How much are you willing to spend on tests today? Not much at all. You don’t need to spend much to really understand what that retention is gonna look like.

10 k a week. And the amount we can learn is pretty great in terms of what messaging is working, what messaging is not working, or what use cases really, really resonate with people, whether it’s travel planning, studying, solving something at work. There are lot of different things we can test because we’re so horizontal.

You need someone to hear about your product three to seven times before they’re gonna give it an honest trial. I I really do believe in that, and I think it’s incredibly hard to measure the value of And just because we can’t measure it does not mean that it’s useless.

I get a lot of these emails. You know, I mean, we’re we’re doing a lot. What’s cool about Perplexity is we don’t have a marketing department. So we’re doing so many cool things, and all of these are just someone on the team had a passionate was really passionate about an idea that we believe has viral potential. If so, like, go execute and make it happen. And and the metric that matters in brand marketing for me is there’s an expected number of impressions that anyone will tell you you’re gonna see if you go run a TV campaign or sponsor a jersey.

And what really matters is what is the incremental impressions you’re getting from that? Can that moment go viral where, okay, we may be paid for x amount of impressions, but we’re getting a lot more on top of it because people are reposting about it, because it has gone viral across social. That is where brand marketing can be really interesting.

especially when you’re hitting net new audiences. So we ran a a TV ad with Jim Harbaugh, great football coach, American football in The US. And the commercial goes live, and we have tons of influencers, reporters in sports retweeting it, commenting on it. And this is a new audience. Right? For all the sports fans sitting at a bar watching the game who have all their niche questions about what’s happening in the game, like who won this game twelve years ago, Perplexity is perfect for that, and we are now introducing them to this net new audience that we’re not really reaching right now.

It’s very effective.

channels to test. I don’t wanna lose my focus spending on channels where I’m not gonna learn much. And I think I got burned. Like, a good example of another area I got burned was newsletter sponsorships. It’s like, okay. Like, there there’s some interesting audiences here. I wanna try this out. But it’s really hard unless you have a really crisp product that you can put into a really simple ad placement that is, like, two sentences of text, and that’s it. Right? Newsletter placements are really hard. And so, like, again, that’s another one where we came up flat, and I don’t know how many learnings I walked away with there.

So I kinda just spun my wheels for no reason.

Growth growth is a game of intuition. All we have to do is just keep learning to figure out the right direction and then just work on cadence to just keep driving in that specific direction as we learn.

Yeah. I mean, there’s no middle ground. So every everyone in growth is looking for alpha. Right? Find the untapped channel, beat everyone to it. Right? Dropbox, like, with the referral program, Groupon and email, Pinterest and SEO, Duolingo, and just like a totally unhinged social media. Right? All of them were kind of first to this concept, and it really, really worked. And so as a growth person, you’re constantly looking for like, where is this opportunity? What are the channels right now that are kind of greenfield? Now the problem right now is like, channels are a little bit quiet right now.

Facebook and Instagram are really expensive. Apple updates have made paid hard. Organic social is really, really hard. Notifications are so crowded. Everything feels really crowded right now. There’s no middle ground if you’re not first. It literally just means your only other option is to just be a lot better than everyone else. And that’s, like, where we need to hold ourselves to.

This is a controversial one. I think community and how you can unlock your power users to share the value of your product to their own miniature communities is incredibly powerful. How do you do that? Let’s take students. There there are students using Perplexity and getting tons and tons of value, but we under index in awareness with students relative to ChatGPT. So then the question is, well, how do we take our best students and give them everything they need, marketing budget, swag, whatever they want, so that they can go be on the ground on these campuses and drive growth for Perplexity and build density on that campus.

Let’s arm our troops, our power users with everything they need to grow for us. It’s an incredible strategy because they’re on the campus, these are not big campuses. You can build density very, very quickly. And as soon as you have that initial density, then you see word-of-mouth start to come alive. Who do you consider your biggest competitor? The the obvious ones, Google and ChatGPT. Which one? Both. I mean, I think I think search is a massive market. And so if there’s somewhere we wanna live, it’s it’s going up against the big guy.

I mean, luckily for us, we aren’t on many channels. We we are still so organic growth driven, partnerships driven. I do want to really, really try and figure out how we can unlock creators and taste makers in a more efficient way. And that, again, is building relationships with fewer of them and working with them, not where we’re just, you know, throwing a sponsorship placement on their newsletter or in their podcast, but, like, finding really creative ways to bring it to life.

And you don’t learn anything from that. Like, I would rather try and entertain and come up short because, okay, like, that one didn’t work. But if we’re just trying to, like, go in the middle and say, here’s Perplexity, like, that’s not never gonna work.

I mean, I think I’m still kicking myself for those newsletter sponsorships.

This is an in product one. I don’t think sharing is inherent to the Perplexity user journey or user flow. Like, I don’t think that we have an inherent viral loop where someone does some research and then shares a thread or screenshot to another person. But there’s a lot of sharing happening on Perplexity right now. Take an answer and put it on Twitter or send it to Harry. Whatever it is, we see a lot of traffic come in through sharing. The more I really, really wanna get my hands on that experience and just drive sharing and find creative ways to promote sharing of this knowledge that you are curating as a user.

in a growth team? It depends what you need. Do you want a marketer that can juice the top of the funnel but can still get in the weeds, run experiments, think about onboarding flows, or do you want a product person that can run marketing campaigns? I I obviously fall into more of the latter. Right? I want to, like, spend time in the data. I wanna be turning over stones. I wanna be holding on to that data. It depends on the makeup of the current team and the founders.

If you’re feeling good from a top of funnel perspective and you have a complex funnel that is cross device, go for the product person that has built these funnels before.

We have a lot of founders here. And I think the best part about hiring founders is that they are much more comfortable at taking very big swings and being willing to fail. Like, it is by nature, if you’re going down the founder path, you have to be a little bit more comfortable in that world than the average. And the average person is not willing to fail. They’re not willing to go stand up in front of the company and be like, we’re gonna try this out, and it might not work.

And so the more people you can get like that you know, Mike Maples at Flaggett has this incredible analogy that early startup teams need to be like a jazz band. Right? Like, throw out the sheet music. This is not what it’s about. It’s like, no. You are here to just riff off of each other and make it work. And that’s where founders, I think, are great. It can go sour, I guess, as things scale, and you start to need that sheet music. You start to need a lot more coordination as the company grows, and some founders just don’t wanna they they miss the jazz band, and they’re gonna jump quick to the next jazz band.

Yeah. I mean, I think you have to let them cook. I mean, you wanna give them enough ban if you if you hired them and you trust them and they can execute, get out of their way. Let them go experiment. Right? I mean, you don’t wanna put guardrails over their ability to experiment and try different things. Guardrails is gonna hurt everyone. It’s gonna make everyone think a little bit smaller. You remove those guardrails, everyone’s thinking big. One person at the company goes, takes a big swings, runs a TV ad with Jim Harbaugh.

Everyone’s now thinking at that level of, okay. How do I how do we go bigger? And that’s the kind of culture you wanna create.

Yeah. Taste is the ability to understand what good looks like. I’m convinced that I don’t I’m not actually that good at anything, but what I can do is go look at what’s happening in the world, understand what good looks like, and then try and reverse engineer it. So that’s all that’s that’s the game.

I I mean, I think it comes down to, like, what are the questions they are asking that shows the depth at which they are thinking? Right? I mean, I’m a pretty open book when I’m interviewing about what our challenges are, and we kinda just jam on them. And you can tell very quickly how deep someone is thinking about your challenges and their experience with it that, okay, they they’re asking the right questions. They’re trying to reverse engineer how to make this good very, very efficiently.

Yeah. I I mean, I love trade war stories, especially people with a little bit more experience of, okay, you were at Lyft. Tell me, like, tell me about the war stories around when times are really hard, what didn’t work. Tell me about your biggest, you know, just total flop, and let’s go laugh about this flop together.

Yeah. Because it’s almost a personality trait, and you’re trying to evaluate that personality trait because that’s something you probably had early on.

I do for every every role. It’s a big ask, so I am cognizant of trying to keep it well scoped.

We we give we give different scenarios, usually two or three different scenarios. They’re all fairly open ended, you so can go into as much depth or but the goal is to walk us through your thinking of how you would approach it and all the different areas that you need to consider along the way. It is really hard.

think that’s fine. Like, that’s a that’s a fair argument. In the end, like, we give them a hypothetical about Perplexity. Like, we’re considering launching x. Now walk us through your thinking of how you would approach this launch or something like that. So it’s not, you know, something that we have done. We’re all in the room brainstorming together. And you can kinda get a sense and feel of, like, what is it like to jam with this person and brainstorm with them when it’s that hypothetical but still related to Perplexity.

How quickly are they gonna ramp up and fit in?

think fairly quickly. My rule of thumb is if they truly need an onboarding doc, we’re in trouble. If because if they need me to say, here are the 20 things that you’re gonna do over the next thirty days and, like, this is your checklist. I want someone who can come in, turn over stones, and build their own onboarding doc very quickly. Like, I am very high trust in the in the amount of rope I wanna give someone to go in here and and start working on the area of ownership that you have and go make it really, really great.

I I’m gonna have perspectives on how we should be implementing it or what we should be working on, but I wanna see them come in and very quickly be able to figure out and have the motivation or the drive to say, this is what we need to work on and here’s why.

Yeah. You know, I got my laptop on Friday and was gonna start on Monday. Like, I was in every single dashboard we have, and part of it was just pure excitement. You wanted someone that is just, like, obsessing about the problem at day one.

and I’m trying to get faster at it. Why are you slow to hire? I care a lot about team. People say that, you know, they quit the manager, not the company. Like, I think people quit the team. And if you have an incredible team that is just like well old machine, mutual respect, and everyone loves working with each other, it’s really hard to quit that. You’re just having too much fun. And that’s what I want to try and create. I want everyone at the company to be like, man, I wish I could like work on the growth team for a couple months.

Like, that’s the thing to like, that’s the goal to have. And to find someone that can fit into that, that I believe is gonna jump right into this and play an amazing part and have the mutual respect of everyone and be a great teammate, it’s hard to find, and you can overthink it sometimes. So I’m trying to be a little bit quicker to the punch on evaluating and taking risks with hires.

Oh, assuming the user’s pain points when they’re just straight up false. Really, really not understanding what does someone actually need to learn in that first session. It it it’s the most common that you end up running up the wrong wall. What’s the most polluted growth channel today? I mean, I think especially with all the latest Apple changes, I don’t know how anyone is going to make Instagram or Facebook ads efficiently work at scale as, like, a core growth channel. It’s a very classic answer.

Obsess about every single number in the dashboard. Get your hands in on as much data as possible. You know, when I started at Lyft, was literally, like, entry level, nobody role. But, like, my one thing is, like, I’m just gonna know the numbers better than everyone else. And, like, you start to learn how the machine works when you see how all these numbers start to correlate with each other. And then when you start knowing the numbers better than everyone else, you get pulled into all these incredible meetings because you’re just the numbers guy.

Like, we have to have him in the meeting because he knows these numbers better than anyone. And I think that is the ultimate way to just build intuition of how your growth machine works, where the friction points in it, and that is what’s gonna help you make the better decisions in terms of what you should be working on.

Donate around paid ads, focus on retention, focus on iterating on product.

We overestimated how much better we could make the ride sharing product. Like when you look at ride sharing four or five years ago versus today, how much has the product changed? Not that much. So if you believe that you can keep making the product better and better and better and that’s gonna unlock new markets, well, that’s one thing. But if you’re wrong about that, well, then you should be pivoting to meal delivery and stuff like that because you’ve hit your diminishing returns. And I think we underestimated how quickly we hit the ride sharing diminishing returns on the product side.

Exactly. Yeah. And it’s tough in AI right now because the world is changing every second. But it’s critical just to be honest to yourself of what is the true TAM of this. Are we still seeing unbelievable growth in product iteration?

about the world of growth today? Just clarity of what the hell it is. You put 10 growth people in a room and everyone has a slightly different answer of what we’re working on. But it’s growth product and growth marketing, and I think the more people that understand that, the better. What have you changed your mind on in the last twelve months? When I joined Perplexity and was writing out my pro con list, I think the one that was, like, up there was, like, can the application layer capture and monetize value?

Or is it all just, know, one big pass through cost? And now, you know, fast forward not that long, I love being at the application layer. Like, this is awesome. I think that’s really changed, Ryan, where I think the application layer’s an amazing place to be. I think that’s where so much of the value is gonna emerge.

And, I mean, it’s crazy that eight, nine months ago, that was a big question. It wasn’t clear where there would be value, and today, we’re getting a little more insight into people who crush at the application layer, who go really, really specific on high TAM areas can make a lot of money. What’s Aravind’s biggest

He can go from a very high level company strategy of what direction do we need to go very quickly two seconds later down into incredibly specific weeds of, like, what a user funnel should be. He can jump at these layers like no one I’ve ever seen, and this is all in one meeting.

Perplexity is his first big swing at a company. And so there’s a lot of intuition that he’s picking up on the fly. And it’s it’s awesome to see how quickly he is to pick up on whether it’s growth intuition, whether it’s partnerships, whatever it is, but he’s learning on the fly because he is a first time founder.

I’m a huge fan of products or features that are built that can drive viral sharing with users. I think like Spotify wrapped, right, was like the first one to just like, oh my god. This is going everyone’s sharing this. And I think that strategy is now adopted by so many AI startups, whether it’s image generation, whatever it is, but create something that is very, very shareable or very unique and people wanna put out into the world, and now everyone knows who you are. It is the fastest way to growth by letting your users do it for you.

This is great.