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Being a startup founder today means operating with a constant sense of urgency. The clock is always ticking\u2014investors want returns, rivals are circling, and someone else could be racing to market with your idea.<\/p>\n
But rather than letting that pressure paralyze him, Aravind Srinivas, the cofounder and CEO of AI search startup Perplexity\u2014which was reportedly last valued at $20 billion\u2014uses it as fuel.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou should assume that if you have a big hit, 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,\u201d Srinivas said last year at Y Combinator\u2019s AI Startup School.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve got to live with that fear and you have to embrace it. Realize that your mode comes from moving fast and building your own identity around what you\u2019re doing because users at the end care.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the 32-year-old, embracing that pressure has helped him build out a multi-billion-dollar AI-powered search engine that rivals the innovation of tech giants Google and Microsoft, as well as fellow newcomers OpenAI and Anthropic. Perplexity\u2019s success has even caught the eye of Apple, last year reportedly had talks about purchasing Perplexity.<\/p>\n
For Srinivas, staying ahead of the competition admittedly means frequently sacrificing work\u2013life balance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t do anything other than working, sadly. I listen to podcasts and audiobooks whenever I can. I spend a lot of time on X (which is both good and bad),\u201d Srinivas said in a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) in 2025.<\/p>\n
While he still makes time to spend time with family on the weekends\u2014and even hit the gym three times a week\u2014he emphasized that persistence matters: \u201cWork incredibly hard. There is no substitute for it,\u201d he said to the Y Combinator crowd.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s real benefit from embracing that fear and sleeping with that fear and waking up every day and feeling excited about what you\u2019re doing to build because that\u2019s the only thing that\u2019ll keep you going.\u201d<\/p>\n
Luckily (or not) for Srinivas, he\u2019s about to get more motivation as the competition gets thicker: AI has ushered in an era where building out a business is easier than ever. After all, generative technology can help create business plans in just a matter of seconds.<\/p>\n
OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman believes this will lead to entrepreneurship growing exponentially.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there\u2019s this betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion-dollar company,\u201d Altman told Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian in a 2024 interview<\/a>. \u201cWhich would have been unimaginable without AI, and now will happen.\u201d<\/p>\n And while that dream of a one-person, billion-dollar company has yet to come to fruition, other tech leaders have conceded it\u2019s bound to happen eventually\u2014and have even raised the ceiling. Billionaire Mark Cuban predicted last AI will eventually help crown the world\u2019s first trillionaire (although Elon Musk claimed that title on Friday following SpaceX\u2019s record IPO).<\/p>\n \u201cWe haven\u2019t seen the best or the craziest of what [AI is] going to be able to do,\u201d Cuban told the High Performance<\/em> podcast in an episode published last year. \u201cAnd not only do I think it\u2019ll create a trillionaire, but it could be just one dude in the basement. That\u2019s how crazy it could be.\u201d<\/p>\n A version of this story originally published on\u00a0<\/em>Fortune.com<\/em>\u00a0on July 16, 2025.<\/em><\/p>\nMore on careers:<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n