Two investors discuss whether Perplexity can become a trillion-dollar company by combining web search with AI. One frames it as a 1-in-3 shot against Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, pointing to early product-market fit and comparing it to the 1996 search-engine IPO wave. Both note the rarity of a small company having a credible path to that valuation.
Chapters
In a world where we have a rational M&A strategy, and it's TBD, if we will, under this administration, the big picture here is this is an at-bat, a 1-in-3 at-bat at a trillion-dollar company. 'Cause Google's a trillion-dollar company and this is a 1-in-3. You know, there's only 3 people that are gonna be relevant here. It's OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, right? The mere fact that you're in the arena, to use a phrase, and you know, you've got users, you've got revenue growth, you were first with the idea of web search plus LLM combined. You got that done, you got that out the door. That gives you the right to play the game, right? And maybe you can build a standalone thing and get public. In a world where, frankly, in a world where IPOs happened like they happened in '96, 4 search engines went public in '96. You don't remember any of them except Yahoo, but it was Lycos, Excite, it wasn't AltaVista, I can't even remember the 4th, proof, right? But, you know, because it was a big obvious market, it was happening fast, and all of them had a chance to be big. So going back to that upside junkie comment I made last week, What Perplexity is selling from an investor perspective is an at-bat, a credible 1 in 3, not equally weighted to be clear. OpenAI's clearly gonna win, but maybe you can be third and that's worth the downside if the prize is a trillion bucks. That's what they're selling.
So I am actually an investor in Perplexity. I think I have to announce that otherwise my CFO will fucking kill me. But that was exactly my thinking. Which is like how many companies have a credible chance of being a trillion-dollar company, where it is still very small, very, very, very small, very small, but still a credible chance.
And just to put out, that's why I mentioned you exactly right. And then, but to put the other side here, the credible M&A policy in a world where there can do, you can do M&A, which may not be today. There's also a whole bunch of big companies who need to be credible in this space too. So plan B shouldn't be awful. Now, as I said, the weirdness of M&A in tech for the last 5 years is headbangingly depressing. Right? But there's no doubt in my mind, you know, there's a couple of trillion-dollar companies who are like, shit, maybe I'd like to mess with Google's head. I need to have this.
