S11E1: Empowering The Future of Generative AI Search with Johnny Ho, Co-Founder of Perplexity

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This podcast is brought to you by Mercury. The banking platform businesses like The Room Podcast use to simplify their finances. It's time banking did more than hold your money. Now it can. With Mercury, you can pay bills in seconds, close the books faster, and even send invoices. Not only does Mercury do away with a patchwork of tools, it eliminates guesswork, giving you complete and accurate visibility into your business's finances, all from one account. Apply in minutes at mercury.com. Welcome back to The Room Podcast for our 11th season premiere. We're excited to continue our journey with a rare conversation featuring Jonny Ho, founder and chief strategy officer of Perplexity. There's not much online about Perplexity's founding story, so we are thrilled to take you inside the room where it happened. Perplexity burst onto the scene in 2022 when Jonny and his team set out to reimagine how we interact with information online. Frustrated by the limitations of traditional search engines, the Perplexity founding team envisioned a more intuitive, conversational approach to finding answers and exploring knowledge. In just 2 years, Perplexity has become a rising star in the AI-powered search space, challenging industry giants with its innovative blend of natural language processing and real-time information retrieval. The startup's potential has not gone unnoticed by investors. To date, Perplexity has raised an impressive $165 million with backing from notable funds, including IVP, NEA, Databricks, as well as tech luminaries like Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. In today's episode, we dive into Jonny's journey and how Perplexity is reshaping our relationship with information in the digital age. Key topics in this episode include disrupting the search engine status quo, the role of AI in enhancing human knowledge, and a behind-the-scenes look at building a tech startup that prioritizes user experience and information accuracy. We're thrilled to bring you this conversation as we kick off Season 11. Let's open the door. Johnny, thank you so much for being on The Room Podcast today.

Yeah, of course.

We're excited to dive into your founding journey of Perplexity, but before we do that, we really love to start at the beginning with our guests and get that full backstory. Tell us, where did you grow up and how did that shape your view of the world?

I grew up in San Jose near Cupertino. A lot of pressure to get into STEM, starting with math fundamentals, but then also branching out into like computer science, physics, all sorts of things. And really that just shaped my view in terms of making everything very discrete and data-driven. Unless you can show evidence of something existing or not existing, it's very hard to work with it.

I'd imagine growing up in San Jose, you're at the epicenter of Silicon Valley and some incredible entrepreneurs that have come before us. I'm curious, did you ever think you were going to become a founder when you were younger?

The founder journey is something I, I more stumbled into, honestly.

I always knew I wanted to lead a small team and like work on very small, high-impact projects, but never really anticipated Well, I'm excited for us to dig into exactly how that came to be, but in the sort of vein of early identity, you were also at a young age, a competitive programmer. You're a 3-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics, the IOI, and I think rumor has it that in 2012, you ranked first in the world at IOI, earning a perfect score. Pretty impressive. Tell us, how did you even hear about this competition?

Very much at a young age, there were all sorts of competitions, you know, starting with the math competitions. But eventually I decided to specialize into what I was more excited about, which was the programming competitions. So the programming competitions are pretty unique in that you get to actually work on projects that could develop into something real and high impact. That's where I developed and noticed I was like pretty good at this. I just decided to spend more and more time on it.

It's actually a fun Madison fact that I don't often share. I was actually a mathlete myself and was a part of the math club in my middle school. We competed technically internationally because we took a competition in Vancouver, Canada. Maybe I saw you at one of these West Coast math competitions.

It's a tight-knit group. There's still a bunch of other founders at other companies. They always stay in touch.

That's incredible. Before we fast forward into your experience at Harvard— go Crimson, 3 alumni on the call here— you really pursued that passion and made an untraditional decision to go to Quora as a full-time engineer prior to college. Tell us a little bit more about how you even came across Quora, met the team there, and decided to start programming full-time before school.

Yeah, what really differentiated Quora at the time was how strong the team was. A lot of early employees from Facebook and various other companies who were on the forefront of like building just like very core web infrastructure. At the time, there's a lot to learn there, right? So there's how to be data-driven, how to make product decisions. How to do what at the time was very advanced machine learning in terms of ranking and, and distributing content on the web. Nowadays, some of these things are taken for granted, but at the time they were pretty revolutionary. And into high-frequency trading, I took a lot of those lessons.

Tell us a little bit more about how that early experience in fact informed going to Tower to do high-frequency trading, and what were some of those lessons that you took with you?

But Tower is also fairly similar in many respects. There's many small startups and they all have fairly advanced technology considering the size of the team. So really just continuing to work quickly, iterate quickly, and keep up with the, the latest and greatest in research, things like that, were all transferable. Even though you'd think they're completely different fields, a lot of the attitude and culture and mindset still transfer.

Your path up until this point has not exactly been a straight line drawn through, but that oftentimes leads to really unique opportunities. And we're curious about how this zigzag experience ultimately led you to meeting your current co-founders at Perplexity.

It is pretty unconventional. I think I, I actually didn't know Arvin going into it, but I knew Dennis from Quora. We all knew that the other was very like determined to like build a great product. Even at the beginning of Perplexity, we still didn't 100% know where all of our strengths and weaknesses were, and we developed and specialized more over time.

And how was that process of meeting someone who you did meet early, basically at the inception of your career, Dennis, with Arvin down the line later, and deciding to go in feet first to building Perplexity together?

When I do something, I don't hedge, I just go all in. If I was working in HFT, I would really just try my hardest and apply almost all of my free time towards it. and I did the same at Perplexity. It was a new field for me, large language models and natural language processing, but the differences were pretty minor, honestly. A lot of the mindset and, and like work initiatives were still transferable.

And when we are talking with other founders and our friends who are thinking about taking that leap to starting a company, was there something that gave you conviction about these individuals to go on the journey with?

Having that all-in mindset, not being distracted, making sure that at the end the company takes priority over any individual kind of priority with Drit, just having that aligned mindset just from the get-go has made a lot of sense for us. I think clearly all of us were from very technical backgrounds, so we had that alignment, but we also had various other diverse experiences, right? Me being in New York brought some different perspectives to the company. And allowed us to actually work in an async way where all of us have our own ideas and pitch them together and find something that will align, hopefully not only with a bubble, but like the entire world.

Well, it sounds like you guys built that conviction in each other and, and had a shared view of where the world was going. And for those who don't know, Perplexity allows users to query search results in a generative-first way. Tell us a bit about that aha moment. When first launching the product?

Really, the aha moment was just when we found that out of all the different demos and products that we had built internally, the only one that we continued to use on a daily basis was the Perplexity demo. Just being able to discover facts that we couldn't otherwise discover. Simple things like how should I launch a product? How do I do basic HR? Things like that that we had no experience with, but we're able to ramp up on quickly. With Perplexity's help, of course, just those kinds of queries gave us the conviction that not only would this be useful for us, but just the entire world.

I'm not going to lie, I'm a bit of a Perplexity fangirl. The user experience is so slick, and I love how clickable the reference images and links are when you do a search. And it's actually really significantly changed my daily workflow. Even tactically, when we were doing our Inside Summit just a few weeks ago, I ran my opening remarks through Perplexity. You guys were able to in real time pull up our Inside Summit website, which honestly had been a low-indexed website up until that point. It was really impressive. How have you and the team thought about building this intuitive user-first interface on top of a serious powerhouse of technology?

Generally, what we try to do is work from the user forwards. There's certain things that you have to take into account, like the limits of the large language model and what AI can actually provide to the user. But generally, if you think from the user perspective first, what, what does the user want? Generally, it's just want a straightforward answer. That's like the first step. But then the second thing you think of is they actually want to be able to verify the answers as well. So we have the sources available as well. Going from there, I think it becomes a little bit harder, like what else can you include? But sticking to those two first principles of answer first. And then trust but verify with sources has taken us a long way and we'll, we'll continue to work that way.

Was design something that you had implicit in your guys' skillset as founders, or was that something that you hired into as well?

It was definitely not inherent. I think honestly, a lot of the credit just goes to the, the strong design team at Perplexity, which is run by Henry, our head of design. Just having that pressure from the design team of, it actually doesn't really matter how the AI is used, but it, it just more matters what the user experience is. And just having them constantly remind us of that principle has taken us a long way.

There's, of course, the consumer-facing application experience of Perplexity, and a unique feature that is different than compared to most other generative search experiences today is that you as the user get to have your choice of LLM that you want to use for search. Curious, how complex was this to implement technically?

Honestly speaking, it's not too complex to implement technically. It's actually more of the decision-making problem for what use case do you want to pick which LLM for? Some might be faster, some might be more easily steerable, some might be more advanced and capable of reasoning. So having that experience just using each LLM. And, you know, choosing the right tool for the job is still a constant struggle. The space is changing so quickly. So it's actually more of a product decision rather than a technical decision in the end.

And are you always dynamically picking which model to use as the search comes through?

Yeah, so that's actually something that's very important. So it's not only important to give accurate answers, but it's important for them to be fast. So there's some amount of complexity there.

And this conversation of having name brand LLMs has really emerged in the last year or two. Was the idea of having this switchable feature for the models a part of the original vision for the product?

Honestly, not exactly, right? So at the time when we first founded, there was only a few usable LLMs, but over time The users have really been the driving factor here. People have just been asking for various LLMs for different purposes. So it actually comes down to the product decision, like, you know, would you want to offer multiple LLMs to users or just one? And it's a pretty easy decision from our end.

Is there any other features that have surprised you and the team that the users have been asking for?

Yeah, there's a lot of deep workflows that actually have been surprising. People are actually taking a lot of steps. In order to somewhat automate their day-to-day work. So people are using, uh, collections to store their threads and they're using collections to prompt their threads in a consistent way. So there's actually a lot of power users and we can plan to continue investing in those power user features to help differentiate us. Okay.

I guess I'm not a big enough power user. I haven't been asked for comment yet.

We constantly monitor the user feedback and requests and try to make some features that work for a large majority of the power users.

Absolutely. You've had an incredible few years since founding. Today you've raised over $165 million in funding from incredible venture firms such as NEA, Bessemer, IVP, and notable angels from Jeff Bezos and Susan Wojcicki, some names we definitely know. We're curious, who was the first person to say yes to investing in Perplexity?

I think it's hard to say exactly who was very first, but the ones that really stand out were the ones that took the time to actually talk to us and the entire team. Investors like Elad Gil and Nash Friedman, even though it's been like 2 years or so, the very first words and grains of truth in their advice still hold, even though we're at a, a very different stage.

I'm curious, as a founder, I've Spoke to a lot of investors and have a few different types of investors on my cap table. And for someone who's taken on a lot more funding and has gone through the funding process a few more times, I'm curious, what qualities do you look for in investors? And what advice would you give to our audience who are potentially fundraising around selecting the right investor?

The ones that stand out spend some time understanding your current problem set. Instead of giving very generic advice. Another common pattern I see is the investors that spend time trying to get away from the bubbles and instead of chasing hype and dive into what are your current fires and what are your 3 to 6 month problems that can be addressed with the investor's help. Just really looking at how much the investor cares and how much time they can spend on your particular problems.

Yeah, like a deep thoughtfulness. I'm sure with just the broader context in the industry around how much hype there's been with AI, I'm sure it's hard to differentiate sometimes who are just jumping on the train and who are deeply passionate about the space. Before we spend a little bit more time on the future for Perplexity and how you guys have been scaling so quickly, is there any fun story or an anecdote around the founding story of Perplexity that the internet might not be aware of?

I think not many people still remember our very first couple products. Like, we also had a product that was more of like a text-to-SQL product that was used to search what was then Twitter. A lot of people don't remember how many branches we took and how difficult it was actually to get off the ground at the very beginning. But this is not a discouraging story. If you try and you have a lot of different experiments at the beginning, it's actually not a bad thing. If you just take time to try each product, put it in front of a user, get their feedback, I think you can quickly differentiate what actually has staying power or not.

We hear often about the sort of idea maze that founders often go down before they land on something that truly is product-market fit. It sounds like experimentation and looking at the data was core to how you made decisions around where to pivot or spend more time. What frameworks or advice would you have for founders who are not sure if they should continue a path for an idea or if it's time to maybe try something new?

The key point is always to have several ideas, but not to overinvest in any individual one. So making sure that whatever you're building has some generality to it where you can quickly pivot between similar ideas. I think having a user base that can leverage multiple products is also important. So Perplexity even today skews more towards like the AI and tech scene, which helps us inform our strategy, right? So we can develop a lot of experiments that help power users, that help researchers, that help knowledge workers. And there's a billion ideas that we could try. Yeah, so regardless of how poorly one experiment is going, just keep pushing forward and keep having, you those learnings that carry over between experiments.

Your learnings from early experiments have certainly carried over to what Perplexity is today. Let's chat a little bit more about these users you've mentioned. It's clear that you guys are on a rocket ship. Not only does Perplexity now have close to 100 employees, in all of 2023, Perplexity also processed 500 million queries. Today, Perplexity processes more than 250 million queries a month. So that's the kind of a big shift from last year. How do you think more about your go-to-market strategy and monetization plans now that you've hit a scale inflection point?

Yeah, I think the go-to-market strategy still remains about the same. Honestly, it's just continuing to appeal to more of a, a research and knowledge worker demographic. What is changing slightly is how much staying power we want to have in someone's daily workflows. So not only are we good at research, but we're good at more shallow research as well as deeper research. And not only are we working on a very obvious answer engine, but we're also working on more of a discovery platform where you can learn more about subjects that you couldn't have otherwise discovered on your own. And just gradually expanding that feature set so that there's more ways than just one of using Perplexity.

Staying power, I think, is an important word that has come up in a lot of our podcast recordings and conversations with founders that are building foundational models, such as the team at Runway, to founders that are leveraging existing models to really revolutionize a workflow or vertical. Tell me a little bit more about how you guys think about being differentiated and building a moat, especially on kind of the consumer application of AI.

Yeah, I think the staying power really comes around developing that user trust that whatever we build is going to continue to be relevant to the user. It's making sure that all the, features that revolve around the research and knowledge use cases is very important. We don't want to deviate from that and hedge too much and expand too far all at once. I think naturally, if you just have more of an opinion there instead of trying to do everything, you'll come out to be more differentiated. Just also having that conviction that if you keep persisting on one demographic rather than every single one, you can eventually expand and grow and formal sustainable consumer business.

How did you guys come up with the focus area for what that initial demographic was supposed to be? I feel like Perplexity very much comes across as a consumer product where it's really easy to ask questions, get answers, but maybe tell us a little bit more about how you positioned Perplexity at the beginning.

Yeah, I think it was something that organically fell out, out of the founding team's preferences really. And what we were passionate about working on. A lot of us had experience from Quora about how to gather knowledge into one place and have it be searchable and have it connect all within each other. Took a lot of those same lessons into Perplexity. It's just about having a strong team that's aligned at the very beginning.

As Perplexity has scaled beyond the initial user segment of folks that might have been your friends or peers. How are you thinking about Perplexity's long-term user base? Is B2B on the roadmap?

Yeah, I think again, B2B is part of a, a larger strategy. Initially, the only reason we had a pro product is just again, because the users were asking for it because they wanted a tool that they could use with practically unlimited use cases. So instead of having subscriptions to 3 other products, they could just come to one platform. Monetization is falling out of the user perspective. And the same applies for the B2B strategy. Actually, a lot of companies are coming to us and asking, we actually don't want our users to subscribe one at a time to your pro products, and they want better security and privacy guarantees. So actually, it again comes from the, the consumer perspective. And just overall, as we scale, I think the B2B route is pretty scalable. If we sell to one enterprise, it actually increases the user base by potentially thousands. And it becomes a very long-term play where now we're building not only for consumer researchers, but also enterprise researchers as well.

It's incredibly cool to see how much user feedback has been really at the forefront of not only where you guys have taken the product, but also go-to-market strategy, where to focus on there. I think getting feedback from customers and users is often something a lot of first-time founders or just founders in general struggle with. Users typically want to be really nice and they'll just say that something's great and that might not actually back up the data that you're seeing. What advice do you have in terms of getting authentic, true, measurable feedback from customers? What does that look like?

As a founder yourself, you can use your own product and just see how often you're coming back every day as a data point. That's like retention. But on the qualitative side, it's, it's very important to take what they're literally saying and distill it into how much impact is it making on their daily life. So this goes for both overly positive feedback and overly negative feedback. If someone is struggling to log in and is very passionate about that issue, that actually might be a good thing, right? Because they're actually struggling to access your product, and that means that there's something in the product that they're looking for. And then it takes another follow-up question to really get at what are they trying to log in for? Like, what value is login bringing to their daily lives?

I think sometimes the negative feedback is often hard to hear as a founder, but in many ways you're exactly right. It means that people care. If people didn't care, they just wouldn't even give feedback. So I think that's a wise thing to remind everyone about. We know that a founder's journey is really full of high highs and low lows. Could you share a little bit about a moment in Perplexity's life cycle where things just didn't go as planned?

At the beginning, there were a lot of these moments of uncertainty, right? Where it was unclear whether it was enough marketing to just try to launch everything on social media. So you always wonder, could you be doing more? Is the outcome as good as could have been? So there's a lot of like moments of doubt at the beginning, even today, but I think the important thing is to not take it personally, to just keep working through, keep having a plan and working through all the incremental improvements backed by data, of course, but keep working through it and like really only take it personally if you actually have evidence that you didn't follow your plan or if you didn't deliver as much as you could have.

So you haven't had a CrowdStrike moment yet, I'm guessing.

We, we hope not, but I think there's always been new announcements of competitors, things like that, that really can impact morale a lot. But again, it's important just to not take personally, to understand that the game is just beginning and it's definitely not zero-sum. So there's a lot of potential for everyone.

A lot of your partners in the ecosystem are somewhat competitors at times as you think about this future of generative search. And I'm curious how you guys have thought about navigating those relationships and those dynamics from a business development perspective too.

Following that same advice of not taking things personally, of understanding that of the number of people that have traditional use cases of search and like traditional research workflows, there's a lot of people out there that have very antiquated workflows, right? Like using extremely legacy tools, opening extremely legacy file formats, things like that. That are just so far behind where you can bring a lot of value just by delivering very simple tools and understanding that AI is, is just a moment in time, one blip in the long life of a successful business.

There's the buzziness of today, but there's the tactical reality of pushing our workforce and consumer experiences forward. And I think as we look at the history of venture specifically in how VCs have invested in startups, there's been this debate of B2B versus B2C, and many times B2C gets a bad rap in terms of being a zero-to-IPO startup. As you look at the ecosystem, even outside of Perplexity, which of course has flavors of both, are you long consumer as an investment area?

Yeah, personally, I, I wouldn't consider investing in broad areas like that. So I wouldn't categorize companies just purely enterprise or purely consumer. And then like invest in only one half or the other, right? I would invest more based on the founding team, the domain, and like how much disruption potential there is there. So I think a lot of consumer platforms are saturated, right? A lot of advertising platforms are saturated. So obviously there's less potential there, but I think there's still a lot of potential in terms of disrupting day-to-day workflows, right? How many of your day-to-day things are just extremely repetitive, extremely ripe for disruption. Things as basic as email still are not really perfected. I have like infinite spam in my inbox, things like that. Yeah.

Yeah. Until we have no headaches on the internet, there is still problems to be solved and we have plenty of headaches. So that makes a ton of sense. And I like disaggregating it from this framework of categorization of consumer versus enterprise. People love to put people in boxes, but that's harder to do than you might think. As you guys have thought about finding those partners from the zero to IPO journey. And you mentioned some of the early believers. Have you created a board for Perplexity?

I think the best part of our investors is they don't try to govern too strictly, right? They kind of understand that it's a new space and it's going to take a lot of experimentation, a lot of failures before we, we get anything completed.

Well, taking a step back then, as we look towards the future for Perplexity, What is next on the roadmap?

Continuing to differentiate us from other products, making sure that not only is Perplexity a good answer engine, but a good discovery platform, a good day-to-day helper. Things like that are very exciting to us and really try to increase that staying power, right? Continuing to scale the team, just really understanding each person's strength and weaknesses and You know, making sure that each person's learning as much as they can and owning as much as they can is the most important thing to me. Early on, you can try to do everything yourself, but I think at this point it's extremely unscalable and it's really going to take an army to accomplish what we want to do.

So are you guys hiring?

Yeah, we actually have a bunch of open roles. So anyone who's listening, please apply.

We'll link that below.

You have so much going on and never a dull moment, I'd imagine. But we're curious too, Johnny, what's next for you personally?

Personally, I think continuing to try to meet the team as much as I can, just trying to fly between our various offices more often and understand how to work productively with a larger team. I think that's going to be the biggest challenge for me personally. I think as our skill sets develop, it's inevitable that I'm going to have to specialize more. So probably just focusing more on the product strategy and really understanding the user base and how it's going to evolve over time.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for spending the time with us today to talk through your founding journey of Perplexity and all the future that is search and how you guys are bringing it to the forefront. We have one more question, which is our hero question we ask everyone on the podcast. Who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you and your career?

There's a very, like, almost infamous math teacher early on at our high school, and she had very high standards, so she would give you a look if you didn't do well on a test and things like that. One time I mentioned I was going to go to Cornell, and I think she gave me this look and she pulled up like an old profile of the CTO of DoorDash, went to our high school, and she like, she asked me like why I couldn't be more like him. So I think, yeah, I think really learning from that, there's a, no matter how well you think you're doing, there's always higher you can aspire for. That would like a high school math teacher to tell you. I think she had taught him at some point because she had been there forever and really, she really understood that it's important not to let anything get to your head. There's always something better that you could be trying to do.

Absolutely. I love that future-forward mindset even at a young age, which is clearly already taking you far, Johnny. And thank you so much for taking the time to share your story here with us today on The Room.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, it's been a pleasure being here. Yeah, looking forward to getting more job applications.

Thank you so much for joining us at The Room Podcast. If you want more from The Room every week, subscribe to our newsletter at theroompodcast.com/newsletter. We'll be back next week with a new episode and inspirational guest Tuesday. See you in the room. Perkins Coie supports the most innovative entrepreneurs and investors in fast-moving and high-growth sectors, addressing their myriad of legal needs. But the firm doesn't just provide end-to-end legal and business counseling to its startup clients. It also facilitates introductions to key advisors and sources of capital. Perkins Coie's interactive website Startup Percolator offers access to programs, resources, and rich dynamic content designed to assist entrepreneurs on their startup journey. To learn more, go to startuppercolator.com and perkinscoie.com.

This podcast is brought to you by Mercury, the banking platform businesses like The Room Podcast use to simplify their finances. It's time banking did more than hold your money. Now it can. With Mercury, you can pay bills in seconds, close the books faster, and even send invoices. Not only does Mercury do away with a patchwork of tools, it eliminates guesswork, giving you complete and accurate visibility into your business's finances, all from one account. Apply in minutes at mercury.com.