Engineering Momentum: high-performance innovation techniques

0:00Perplexity AI, which is essentially a company trying to compete with Google for search. They've just released their own AI browser. This is a very interesting company in the AI space has just reached an$18 billion valuation. This is just months after the last funding round. I want to break down how they're able to do that, what they're able to do with the$18 billion. And at the same time, Perplexia right now is trying to unlock a completely different growth strategy than OpenAI has used. They've struck up an absolutely massive partnership that is going to unlock a ton of new users for them. So I want to cover all of that.

0:35I think this is how it kind of plays into them being able to raise at an$18 billion valuation. But anyways, overall, this is a fascinating company doing some very interesting things that you were not seeing with a lot of the other AI companies. They're really focusing on growth and they're doing it in some unique ways. So we're going to dive into all of that. Before we do, if you want to try any of the latest AI models from the top AI companies, I would love for you to try out my startup AI box dot AI. We just released a playground. playground. It's in beta right now. And it essentially allows you to use the top 40 AI models.

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1:36So it's a really cool tool. It stores all of your media files in one place, which makes it easy to find and also easy to find what prompts and what conversations you're using to generate those files. So there's a cool whole bunch of cool tools. But anyways, you can check it out. There's a link in the description. Make sure you go try it out. It's $19 a month saves you subscriptions to all of these different platforms. So hope that is a money saver and really useful for trying out all of the latest AI models. All right, let's get into what perplexity is doing. So essentially, they just raised at a$14 billion valuation two months ago, they're now at an$18 billion valuation, a$4 billion bump.

2:13This is this is pretty interesting, because in the in the past 18 months, they've went from about$500 million, the beginning of 2024, to now 14 billion in May. This is a company that is growing insanely fast. They did, I think, get a bit of resistance from investors in this latest May funding round, but the round closed and a bunch of new investors afterwards came to the company. They told them they could purchase equity in$18 billion valuation. So that's essentially how that happened. So this is only a three-year-old company. It's trying to take on Google right now, which is pretty impressive.

2:51and the latest growth vector that they're trying to unlock right now is actually India. So they're taking a completely different approach with this. Yes, you know, people here in America use it. But India is a big area that they're focused on. And they've actually just pulled a brand new, it's actually so technically at like growth rate wise, I think last quarter, it grew faster than OpenAI in India. But like, we're talking about, you know, they're like 8 million users versus like 46 million users or something crazy like that. So OpenAI is like still way bigger and also has way more paid revenue but they are doing some interesting things to grow which obviously is helping fuel their valuation and kind of market saturation so the big thing that they recently did they just partnered this week with um variety intel which air air tell which is uh baharti air tell which is india's second biggest telecom operator there's reliant geo which is the number one so this is the second biggest and they are offering 12 month perplexity pro subscriptions to anyone on Bahardi Airtel.

3:55So this is normally worth about$200. And if you want to know how many people are using this company, it's 360 million subscribers right now. So 360 million people are going to get access to Perplexity Pro for free if they would like to take them up on it. This is an exclusive deal, which means that no other telco in India can actually offer Perplexity services. Now, what blew me away is that's including free access. So if you would like to use perplexity in India, you have to go through them, period. And this is, I guess, kind of the way the deal works. They probably are paying some sort of discounted rate for the premium, you know, premium seats or whatever they can give away to people.

4:36But perplexity is not able, you know, not able to access it basically through anyone else other than them. So to me, that was very interesting. I think obviously perplexity is willing to do that because, you know, this is the opportunity to potentially have, you know, an extra 360 million users, which would make their valuation, you know, their usage go up a ton and make their valuation go up a ton. They'd be able to raise a ton of money from investors. So to them, I think they're just looking at this growth metric. I don't know how long, like the terms of this deal, how long this lasts. It's a 12-month engagement.

5:05This is a multi-year thing. Overall, you know, like I think perplexity doesn't want to get themselves stuck where there's only one way you can ever access or use perplexity. But at the end of the day, it's a, you know, I think this is a pretty good deal for them to, to actually grow. So Airtel's partnership is one of perplexity's biggest moves, I think yet in what they've basically been doing. They have the partnerships with more than 25 telcos globally. They made a bunch of deals with SoftBank in Japan and SK Telecom in South Korea. So I think at the end of the day, they're trying a bit of a different like approach where they're reaching out directly to telecommunication companies who are helping push them forward, get them users, and, you know, offer this free service to their customers to help.

5:51And Perplexity is happy because it's helping to grow what they have going on, you know, their total usage. So Perplexity is already getting a ton of traction in India. Like I mentioned, so it was actually the Q2 of this year. Downloads in India went up 600 % year over year, but that's about 2.8 million. This is according to Sensor tower which kind of shares some of this type of data so if we're comparing this though it's not i feel like it's not really a fair comparison like 600 sounds crazy but chad gpt and chad gpt had about a 587 percent increase so like a lot but less but chad gpt is at 46.7 million downloads so they're at 2.8 million it's just it's like you know it's a lot and it's growing a lot but it's not it's not 46 million yet so obviously open ai is you know definitely winning in this i would say though the growth trend um is extended to active users as well perplexity is monthly active users in india is up 640 year over year and a lot in q2 um chat gpt's grew by 350 so when you're talking about active users, it's really, really good numbers for perplexity.

7:05I would say ChatGPT has a huge lead in absolute numbers. They have 19.8 million monthly active users versus perplexity, which has 3.7 million monthly active users in India. So, you know, great. I think there's a lot of potential here, but you could see why they would make this kind of deal with a telecommunication company in India if they have, you know, let's say 3.7 million monthly active users in India, and there's a potential to reach 300 million, I think they're going to try to take that leap and essentially get extra users from something like this. So their CEO of Perplexity has made a whole bunch of commitments to India to try to work with them, to try to develop things there.

7:46I think he's really trying to build a lot of strong partnerships there. I think we see India as a really important market. Even Google has launched updates to Google Gemini in India before they release it to a lot of other countries. So I think this is, you know, one of the big markets to keep an eye on as we look at countries or as we look at companies trying to expand their growth rate. And the number one thing to know, though, is India versus United States. Obviously, India is much more price sensitive. So when, you know, ChatGPT is thriving in United States, they're making like orders of magnitude more money from that than their India users over in India.

8:25So definitely something to keep an eye on. But usage is usage. And I think this is all things that will help to raise more money, talk to investors and grow the company overall. So very exciting times over at perplexity. Hey, if you enjoyed the episode today, the number one way you could say thank you is by leaving a rating or review wherever you get your podcast. I know sometimes it's kind of annoying, but it helps to show it a ton helps you find more amazing guests. And if you've ever wanted to grow and scale your business using AI tools, I have an exclusive school community that I post a video every single week.

8:59I don't post it anywhere else. And I'm essentially breaking down the AI tools I use to grow and scale my businesses. So I'd love for you to be a member of the AI Hustle school community. There's a link in the description to that. We have over 300 members and we share. I've been doing this for over a year. So there's over 50 videos breaking down all my top AI tools, how I'm using them, how I'm growing my business with them, all of my different hacks and strategies. It's a great place. So you go check it out. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. And I will catch you in the next episode.