An investor argues Perplexity has a real shot at trillion-dollar status by combining web search with LLMs, putting it in a three-way race with OpenAI and Anthropic. The upside is small but genuine, and acquisition remains a plausible exit.
In a world where we have a rational M and a strategy and it's tbd, if we will under this administration. The big picture here is this is an at bat, a one in three at bat at a trillion dollar company because Google's a trillion dollar company and this is a one in three. There's only three people that are gonna be relevant here. It's OpenAI anthropic perplexity, right? The mere fact that you're in the arena, use a phrase, and 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, four search engines went public in 96. You don't remember any of them except Yahoo, but it was Lycos Excite. It wasn't Ultra. I can't even remember the Ford 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 is clearly going to win, but maybe you can be third and that's worth a damn side 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're exactly right. And then but to put the other side here, the credible M and A policy in a world where there couldn't do, you can do M and 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 and A in tech for the last five years is headbangingly. But there's no doubt in my mind there's a couple of trillion dollar companies who like shit. Maybe I'd like to mess with Google's head.
I need to have this 100% agree.
