Inside How Perplexity is Disrupting Online Search | Aravind Srinivas

we don't really do like product review meetings or anything like that my mentality is that why even wait for review meetings just give me the link I want to try now and I'm going to give you instant feedback now that moves much faster than like you preparing for a week for just a meeting with uh me which shouldn't be the case I'm not uh like giving you feedback as like a executive in the company I'm giving you feedback like a user I think that is the more genuine feedback I think the feedback that you give just because you have more Authority is usually coming from some other motivations not necessarily a true user right so the nice thing is the products we build here perplexity it's meant for all perplexity users and I'm one of the main perplexity user all right welcome everyone my guest today is Aran is the CEO of perplexity the AI answer engine that's disrupting online search really excited to talk to him about how perplexity builds products how it's grown to I think 100 million queries a week and how they'll deliver ads that are a lot better than 10 blue lcks welcome our event thank you Peter yeah so let's talk about how perplexity is Building Products I'm like super impressed by your shipping velocity I think you launched like half a dozen features over the last 10 days including the Mac App internal knowledge search and so on you know what's the secret to

shipping so much so fast I mean first of all yeah internally I'm always thinking we could move even faster I'm externally very proud that people view us as like a very fast shipping machine but I I'm let me just be very honest with you and say we have like still a lot of inefficiency and we could be doing even better so what causes us to at least do at this level is first of all like we it's been part of our culture since the beginning we've always been operating with a very high sense of urgency and that comes down from the top to like pretty much every person in the company that like every day matters and every week is essentially 2% of the year so you know if you don't ship something a week like you lost 2% and for 4 weeks you lost like almost 10% so it's it matters and then we also motivate people to try to push get it up running for internal testing there are approximately 100 people in the company so the way we motivate them is like look you get your first users as those working here and if they're excited about your thing if there is some Vitality there there's some internal excitement it's quite likely that it'll be an external success too because like 50 people are most people you know a divers of 50 people so I think the mentality of like operating with urgency getting dopamine from you know getting some initial feedback is still ex exists in the company but in terms of how we organize we try to operate very independently like a bunch of independent teams are working on features in a parallel manner now that's difficult because in the beginning of startup you're just doing only like one project at a time because there are only like three or four people so you do that you ship that and then you move to the next thing and so then there's no need to think about parallel operations you're only thinking about like how to move in a sequence but as you get bigger let's say you have 100 people you obviously have to do more things otherwise like why you even have that many people right but it's not quite obvious though just because you have more people doesn't mean you do more things in fact that's why a big companies struggle because they have a lot of people but then there's a lot of overhead and bureaucracy and communication gaps so we felt like best to structure teams are completely independent like the product team that works on shopping or local or would not necessarily have to collaborate much with the finance vertical or like people are working on Spaces or internal search they're all like working independently now that doesn't mean they don't talk to each other there's some lessons to be learn from one another I think they all collaborate but the main perspective is that you should be able to have a repeatable set of a playbook for how to pair the right group of people for any new vertical or feature you target which could be like a right group of designer frontend engineer full stack engineer backend engineer AI engineer search engineer product manager engineering manager that sort of like group of people that you can replic replicate across different features if you've succeeded at it I think it works out pretty well and by bite dance I had the opportunity to talk to the bite dance CEO once and he told me this exactly how bite dance operates too which is they have a group of people who can just go and do any app in the bite dance family doesn't matter the same group of people work on the growth for any bite dance Family app not just so whatever lessons they learned it's just pull repeated across like many different functions got it and you know like I think your shipping features then it takes for Google to like push one document to another Executives do you have like a prod review process or is it just purely like people play with it internally and then decide it's ready to go yeah I mean we don't really do

like product review meetings or anything like that I mean like anyone would be very motivated by doing such things because that's kind of how Steve Jobs ran Apple like an editor almost like he all the teams would just go demo to him and they would prepare for that meeting because he they'll be worried what he's going to say and I know some CEOs who have tried to like sort of I want to be like Steve Jobs and we do the same thing in some sense Zuckerberg did it like this the whole thing Concept in Facebook called Zak reviews and so he did it but my mentality is that why even wait for review meeting just give me the link I want to try now and I'm going to give you instant feedback and then I will bring you again in a few days to ask if you fix those bugs and then once you fixed it I'm going to give you a new set of bugs now that moves much faster than like you preparing for a whole half an hour half a week for just a meeting with uh me which is which shouldn't be the case you prepare you only care about the user I I'm not like giving you feedback as like a executive in the company I'm giving you feedback like a user I think that is the more genuine feedback I think the feedback that you give just because you have more Authority is usually coming from some other motivations not necessarily a true user right yeah so the nice thing is the products we build here perplexity it's meant for all perplexity users um and I'm one of the main perplexity users like uh definitely not the top I see a lot of people on X who use even more than me which makes me feel like I should use even more but I definitely use like several tens of queries a day and so I can easily like give feedback on almost anything we build here and uh I think that matters though that's amazing so the other part of like moving

fast is like staying focused and I see you sometimes tweeting like hey should we build a browser or should do and that and how do you guys decide what feature to build next you know or yeah it all works backwards for us from what moves the needle on like the more most important metric we care about internally and externally which is how many queries per day are people doing you know Google also cared about only this one metric that's why you wouldn't necessarily have Google you see Google really talking much about like how many users they have for Google search they only talk about how many queries they have and like I think right now the count is around like 5 billion I think five to six billion a day could be even more and so for perplexity when we first started the first week we got like 3,000 queries a day or something very little nobody was using but again like from there we went to 3 million ques a day we were like very happy like oh my God that we literally grew over 1,000x and then from there like from 3 million to like I think now we are around like 16 million or something so another five to 6X so that's difficult to sustain the sort of growth rate is very difficult but if we do like for example if one day if we able to do 100 million queries not far away and from there if we get to a billion queries that's like true success it doesn't matter anything else doesn't matter you see my point like a lot of other metrics but there's no way to win on the queries per day metric without getting users and without getting retention you can have like billion installs and nobody uses the app then you won't get it similarly if you can have existing users use the app regularly but most people don't have more than six or seven questions a day right so you have to get new users so this is like essentially the one metric you can really core focus on and then whatever feature we can ship to increase this metric either like first order way or second order way we prioritize that I think like for you can sort of approximate the if cause and effect equation with like just first order and second order terms that should be enough let me give you an example if you ship Auto suggest or something like that automatically it's likely to increase the queries per day because people can like ask their first question much faster so similarly if you ship related questions at the bottom of an answer it might increase the likelihood of a user asking a follow-up question simply because they see a bunch of follow-up questions they don't even have to click on what you suggest they can just get mean hack to ask another person and then like there are some other things that you could do like making the search like f fter improve the latency so that means like people once they get the answer really fast they like using fast products they use it more so there are like a lot of ways in which you can increase this without it like particularly thinking about user growth alone right and so working on different verticals means people start using it for many different purposes not just like asking fact checks and research so it becomes part of their daily habits that's why I try to sometimes ground my thinking in what people are saying on x2 it's very important by the way like it's not just wasting time a lot of people on X are users so I'm literally talking to users it's very rare that like you get to do a job where being on X is also like part of work it's not exactly like wasting time so and then I think like more people should do it Elon must does it a lot right like he asks lot you people a lot on like what car should Tesla build what do you think about FSD you know like he's constantly like seeking feedback right I think that's very entral and Mark Zuckerberg also does this on his channels on what meta on Instagram yeah no I mean like I love cosos that like talk to users all time and that's kind of like part of my jobs what I mean like you know I was using Google and then I tried perplexity like long time ago and it didn't take me that long to realize how good this thing is like probably just a couple queries to realize how good it is for information and knowledge SE search but I think you had this long tweet a while ago there's like many different types of searches right so like so I guess couple questions like do you have like the

Facebook pure where like you know you get seven friends and 10 and you get hooked that or I yeah by the way that you know you should take that a little bit of grain salt because it might not be exact but it's a useful way to think about things yeah we in our case it's all about like how many of your first K questions that you ask that you got a pretty good answer if a user asks like maybe let's say 10 questions then it's unlikely that they drop off right so you can essentially see it like the percentage of people who ask like one question how many of them ask two questions percentage of people who how many of them who ask two questions ask five questions 5 to 10 or 10 to 20 to 50 to 100 I think once you like ask 100 questions on the product it's unlikely that you just completely drop it off and go to some other place so that's all stuff that we see and we try our best to improve these ratios each of these funnels and then it always comes on three things which is accuracy latency and how readable the answers are you don't want a like wall of text you don't want slow answers you don't want inaccurate answers that's the worst thing actually inaccurate answer makes user lose trust in the product and move away so that's that these are three main Dimensions to improve the product and it's like cool to break it down to these three things because even a year from now I'll give you the same three dimensions it's all about speed accuracy and that's a fourth dimension which is kind of more meta than this which is robustness or reliability of the product like it shouldn't go down it should infrastru shouldn't go down that shouldn't be like we we'll be back in half an hour all those sort of like infra issues I mean we had a lot of them in this quarter so we've actually worked hard on like trying to remove them but we've also seen some users drop off because the pr was down quite like consistently that like people would might be like oh like I don't want to go there so all these issues contribute and like we are we're still a startup right we're learning how to like scale our operations how can you tell like how accurate the answer is like it's just like do people search again or like how do you do people give you feedback or how can you tell it's difficult to know just from the logs if an answer is correct I think if anyone's crack that formula then it means many more things because you could literally just use AI to verify Ai and like make every answer accurate essentially if you can just parse the logs and say if and answer was correct I guess like one signal is like rather the follow-up question was to keep clarify Ing and asking for the same thing or ask another thing I think that's a good signal to say if like a particular question had a correct answer another way to verify this is to have even smarter model take the query the sources and the answer and check if something was correct or not obviously it's expensive so you can't do it for like million prompts okay a day like it's going to cost you money but essentially like just have Pro throw more context at these larger models and see if they can verify stuff got so how does your product team use AI or

perplexity internally to build perplexity really curious about that yeah I A lot of people are using these coding tools GitHub copilot or cursor because I think these coding tools are integrated right into the editor so you don't really have to think about which AI to use outside the editor so I think that's like one place we're seeing a lot of prod productivity improvements then I think they're all using perplexity or chat GPT whatever product they want to use it and I say chat GPT uses are more like grammar English those kind of cases they can use perplexity for that too but you can see why you know even if you work at a company doesn't me you have to use a product you have to earn the user and perplexity has the first way we got users is to First crack the use case of like searching asking questions and so CH the way they got there for a set of users is oh you can you don't have to worry if you had poor English didn't know how to write code or like like you know another language and you had to translate all these sort of like writing use cases yeah like a text generation use cases they just nailed it right so even if perplexity is able to do all that or even if Chang is able to do some search on the web it doesn't matter the initial mentality of the user has been cornered so you so I think that's how I think about how people use these different AI tools is like coding tools are used for coders writing people who need to write a lot like send a lot of emails searching is used for people who need to do a lot of analysis and research so depending on that function they just use whatever tools they want I actually find perplexity pretty decent at you know eding my blog post because you spent a lot of time like making sure the report is concise and like to the point and like actually it's not bad like I use it sometimes over a cloud or chat gbt yeah I interestingly I know a lot of people in the Bay Area who are big fans of Claud actually and I personally have used Claud multiple times in the context of like when I'm interviewing someone for a job like say like some kind of like recruiting role or corporate Council these kind of like roles obviously what do I know about these roles like I know okay I know to some extent what they do but I've never been in those roles before to ask very pointed questions that'll give me a lot of signal so I just go to like Claud or like and ask like what question should I ask and the answ it gives are very interesting because it gives an answer from the AI model not from the internet so there's like some decoupling of course I can also get the same thing to work on the writing mode of complexity but I I've noticed some differences at times when Claude gives you like a pretty interesting answer that I would never gotten otherwise and suggest sometimes I just use these search free AI tools to give me some perspec of that is very different it doesn't always happen the model sometimes just regurgitates the same thing on the web but the only model I've seen that has some sort of like I would say opinions of its own seems like seems to be like Claw at least in my usage so far yeah it's my main AI tool out perplexity cuz yeah I really enjoy you using it and you mentioned like hiring people I watched your interview with this person from India and he talked about your career a little bit like this is kind of like a side you mentioned how you got rejected by a

computer science department and then after that you went to Google and you went to you know open Ai and you know we went to brookley how do you like I really believe like this whole thing about chasing credentials and gatekeeping is like kind of a waste of time so how do you think about this having be on this journey and like how do you when trying to hire people how do you not get impressed by like the Google or like whatever the brand name is and try to figure out what they actually are see yeah I mean okay let me be very direct here once upon a time being ex Google M was an insanely useful potential to have like I would say probably even like eight years ago you know or yeah8 to 8 to 10 years ago being X Google was like a very interesting credential you could probably the most important credential you could show on your silicon valueing was that mainly because Google hire hiring process was very strict I think they had like three rounds of engineering and two or three more rounds of like software design MH um so just to get in there and like was very difficult and if you did well internally also I think it mattered because they were still shipping a lot back then so that's why Google was the thing you know now it is not because there's a lot more people they've hired so obviously the hiring quality and the interview process needs to get like a little more easy going um or else you just they're not if the world had like 500,000 extremely amazing engineers then like uh that would be amazing but that's not true right yeah uh so I think my the what we look for is like people who are having a lot of potential but haven't really made it yet and like we hope perplexity can be their big career step and we are happy if we can produce Engineers who go on to do amazing things in their career even outside perplexity is fine too right like I'm I know I don't want to like think oh this person is going to be here forever but I hope like they learn so much here and they you utilize those skills and like do amazing things and ideally I would hope they go and start new companies you assuming we continue to do well and they get somewhat well off that they don't have to work for anybody else and they can go do amazing things and what we look for outside of potential is like track record obviously is a good IND Ator and that's not really coming from where you work but like what you've done in each of those places and especially if you even if you were in a fail startup but you really did a lot of the work I think that matters a lot like because the startup did not fail because you didn't work I think the vision or the idea of the startup was wrong so that means you really need a victory of your own yeah for yourself but you gained the willpower and the determination to like succeed in a startup already seen that so you're like perfect to come to another and that's happened by the way a lot of the successful engineers in like most of the unicorns and eons have been people who previously worked at a company that didn't work out but they gained the skill of working at a smaller startup yeah probably have a chip on the shoulder as yeah a is a good thing one of my investors elot Gil told me this because I was very critical of like one candidate I was trying to hire I was like hey yeah but you know this candidate talks a lot and they talking like they achieved so much I'm like why would they come and like succeed here if uh if they feel like they've already done a lot and he told me in life most people have zero hits some people have like one amazing hit and extremely few people have like more than one hit in their life and that's why like people respect entrepreneurs who've done multiple successful companies because it's very hard even if you are very successful once there's no need that you can hire a lot of people you can raise a lot of funding for the second one but like it's not obvious to actually succeed again yeah because you know find that part of Market F hard correct yeah trip on the shoulder therefore yeah Tri on the shoulder is therefore like a useful Criterion because they that means they are still looking for their big headit makes sense let's talk a bit about how perplexity scaled to I think now you're

at 100 million queries a week is it just through Word of Mouth people tweeting like this is perplexity this is Google is is that the main driver well that was a very important source of growth in the beginning and I think I still I don't know why I'm still like on X like tweeting about all these like comparisons a lot of people give me a lot of comments there for doing it seeing like I need to mature and become more grownup like person but I would say Twitter definitely is one of the biggest reasons people know about us no questions about it and we've almost given a playbook for other startups of how to use Twitter to grow and uh Beyond Twitter I think LinkedIn is pretty good A lot more like professional posting there though and then um after that there's emails like we have a lot of users so we send periodic emails to them on like what we've shipped so those newsletters help a lot and then we've also like been successful at um I would say like this is not something you can track but lot a lot of people who allow using perplexity they just send text messages to others saying like sharing a Perma link the answer and then uh you go and check out the answer and then you know what product this is so I think WhatsApp like there's a lot of perplexity links being shared on WhatsApp or ey messages on a daily basis that has that inherent virality and like that is a feature we particularly built with that mindset hey maybe like the answer is so good that someone goes and shares it and then people get to know like let's say you're asking a question on a group chat and nobody knows the answer and then someone drops a link and then like you're like oh what is this product right so I think that also helped us a lot I think H and my wife to it because we're planning a vacation I was using spaces yeah so yeah it's great collaboration it's kind of has some prority big thing you know yeah and also like I find that the free like maybe you're too generous but like you're giving four free Pro searches every four hours I think which is like very generous like I guess that helps it's like new user retention but it might hurt the paid upgrades or yeah so I mean we could the way we thought about it is like if whatever plan we come up with someone will undercut us anyway Whoever has more resources than us yeah so we could optimize for revenue and then have a churn or later and it's happened to very successful companies I'm not going to name who but like they had like a lot of very fast Revenue growth but then once open AI came and gave it away for free their revenue eared and like their valuation got affected so from the beginning we were like let's go for users let's go for usage let's go for queries if people love using the product and their daily habits have changed already there's very little chance that because someone else ships the same thing they'll churn but when people are paying for a utility and that utility is now offered by someone else with a bigger Brand Power for free they will churn it's historically proven so we were like okay even if we are not getting certain users to pay when they really should be paying us because we're spending a lot on their queries it's okay we will figure out later how to monetize them more effectively but let's single-mindedly focus on user growth and query growth for now yeah but the subscription plan is doing pretty well right it's like millions of people paying for the yeah see that's another thing I would say a lot of people made fun of us when we launched the subscription plan saying like why would I pay for another AI I'm already paying for chat gbt look at this person trying to monetize search through a paid plan it's going to end up in a failure look the jury is still out I'm not saying we have succeeded but we made enough people to pay for search that Google considered trying to make us paid version of their search product like Financial Times supported that so there is something to be said there of like you know like a lot of your assumptions about the world may not even be correct that there are enough people who want to pay for accurate unbiased fast answers a neutral fast search product that that's just always works is pretty underrated like you can certainly get it to a point where millions of people are paying for it now you can argue hey like you get millions of people to pay $200 a year that's at best maybe like a two billion a year business it's like a drop in the ocean of Google's 200 billion 1% so who cares you could argue that but then you can also remember hey data breaks snowflake their revenue is 2 billion year or three billion year so you literally built a company that's as big as like 7,000 10,000 people with like one amazing daily utility product right so there are like multiple way when you're always thinking about things relative to Google Everything feels small and irrelevant but when you think about like companies that have ipoed airbnbs door Dash like snowflake or upcoming IPO data breaks 2 to 3 billion or 4 billion a year in Revenue with like significant chance for profit profitability and is pretty amazing outcome for any Venture back business so that that's why some investors got it and that's why they like being part of the perplexity cap table because they clearly know that like the even the downside is pretty high relative to most companies of IPO whereas the upside you know if you get somehow you figure out a way Beyond just paid subscribers The Upside is even more like amazing and I think the future is going to be a mix of paid subscriptions that have a lot of utility as part of the plan not just access to AI models and like some kind of advertising that doesn't corrupt the answer quality if you can figure a good healthy balance of the two and monetize free users even more efficiently then what we do today I think that would be uh pretty amazing yeah so let's our last

topic let's talk about advertising like just as a user you know like Google search has obviously devolved a lot there's like a lot of sponsor links like mobile websites is like just a terrible experience it's like so many ads all over Place yeah so how are you thinking about delivering these ads that are better than what exists right now yeah so we by the way just related to the mobile Point 60 to 65% of Google's ad Revenue comes from Mobile to the extent that theyve actually optimized their indexing more for mobile web than web which is why sometimes the experience on the web feels bad because you're like why am I like seeing all these other things so um so that point side how are we going to approach it now every all this confusion comes from making the ad unit being a link when the ad unit is a link and when the UI is ranked order of links then obviously there's no argument that helps you win here you have to corrupt the rank order at the end you have to show sponsored ads either at the top or in between or at the bottom right and then when you Show sponsored ads in between or at the bottom nobody's clicking on it which means the click through rate on ads is low if the click to then your ad Revenue at the end of the quarter is low and that will lower your stock price so you have to put it at the top so that's essentially why you're feeling frustrated and if the core user growth as user behavioral growth of typing in keywords into the Google search bar if that is not a growing Trend if that's a saturated Trend then like you just have to put more ads at the top to keep the clickthrough rate the constant and make sure the revenue doesn't go down now if we saying let's avoid all this trap let's make the ad Unit A question at the bottom of an answer which incentivizes the user to ask the next question so if there is a question about like best running shoes and different running shoe brands can advertise to be a sponsored question at the bottom of an answer now that's not really hurting your answer the first answer that we gave you of what are the best running shoes different tradeoffs that's still unbiased by any Advertiser but the after the answer after you finish reading it if a particular brand like an or Nike or Adidas can like have a question about them it's like what makes an rers like pretty comfortable to walk with something like that or which shoes of Nike are the most sought after in 2024 you might not have been interested in asking those questions in the beginning but because you saw them you might be interested in like clicking on them and if you clicked on them and learn more about a brand and you're able to transact directly if the answers come with the Brand's product catalog directly and you're able to click on them and buy directly essentially you generated a demand the brand has generated a demand for itself through a question and fulfill the demand through a answer and I think that's more efficient than like paying a certain ad budget for a tblo link to be at the top when somebody types in running shoes and generate a demand on your own site through referral traffic this is how we you can get even more hyper targeted at the right user the right intent without corrupting the user experience and also like making sure you still have a Roi and the budget you spend that's our view now I got to say all this is TB remains to be proven I'm not saying this is going to work but you asked me for my hypothesis and this is our hypothesis and there's a lot of people actually click on the followup questions right there's like I think half of the queries I don't have the exact count today but it's very significant enough that we feel confident betting on this being a an ad unit and there are other there's other surface area for ads if you see some on this essentially this the side space on perplexity is blank like that real estate is not being utilize so a sponsored image or sponsored video could be anywhere where we think a multimedia asset can enhance the answer a review video of different shoes could be a sponsor video and it's not just like um uh Brands being able to buy that at inventory I think influencers can too uh an influencer who reviews different Tech products could be uh advertising for being a sponsored video in a question about like comparing different gadgets or phones so there are like so many different ways to get eyeballs that will not just benefit The Advertiser but also the user just like taking your shoe example like I think if I use Google I have to click on the link and I have to probably sign up for account to buy the thing or like check out enter my information again like if everything I guess is just part of perplexity ux it's probably less friction for me too correct exactly yeah that's one place we want to like you know I think both us I think meta can also do this is like and they already begin to do this is when you discover a new brand you're still fulfilling the demand in Google like you're like scrolling through Instagram you discover like a cool shoe or like a cool watch but then you go to Google type in the name of the watch or the shoe and then buy go to the referral to the merchant and buy it there and so they never generate the demand for you but they get to claim the credit for fulfilling it and demand fulfillment is also the place where add budget and arwi highest so people spend more there yeah and that means like if you're able to transact natively on the place where you first originally discover the brand where the demand was even generated I think that could go a long way into like making the experience more efficient and streamlined for the user and also convincing The Advertiser to like stay more on the demand generation platform than like the Fulfillment platform and I think that's the long-term game to play for making a successful consumer product in AI where like you can be very good at answering questions in an unbiased way but very helpful for Brands to like get attention of users through questions and get the return on investment through a transaction that's our idea and you can ask me why would Google not do this I'm betting you that the margins on this might be like significantly lower than um the current advertising business they have because you know the extent to which they go to like actually clim credit is insane if people were to like get an award for like who gets to claim most credit for like doing something it's probably Google will be number one there because apparently what I heard is like if you use Google Maps to go to a particular local business they claim credit for generating the demand essentially like they claim that if you got a purchase in the physical store because someone came through Google Maps then uh Google is the reason for that and they can track that because if they use Android phones you can track the transaction and stuff like that so that's how they get all these like you know longtail businesses to like buy a lot of AD inventory on Google yeah and so when you're like seeing the Google stock go up it's because of a lot of work put in by the ads and sales teams not really by the product teams and and that's why like I'm saying there's a genuine shot at like changing all this and making a more consumer friendly experience yeah I think you have a really good shot man because you know there's like the bureaucracy is dma right like Google has 100,000 employees like they're not going to blow up their ad business model overnight yeah you could read it in the antitrust document the do anti document where it states $8 billion was spent on search infrastructure and payroll but like 12 billion 11 to 12 billion doar was spent on ads infrastructure pay so they're literally spending 40 to 50% more money yearly on ads rather than on improving the core product so whether you should always read like where the money is going is where like the real intent is if someone's like more F continually saying we're staying focused on the mission of improving like the answers or like search results yeah look at the money being spent on it versus elsewhere yeah that's very good point yeah same for the elections I guess but let's not talk about that yeah so I want to wrap up this question there's a

lot of people watching this who working Tech or maybe students trying to make something of their life like just want to wrap up do you have any like closing words of advice for people who want to kind of like really achieve something like you have like is there any yeah either people who are like students or people who like looking for something more in their career I would say you know like work hard is no substitute to hard work it feels like boring advice but it's really like the one thing that uh keeps coming back to me and the other thing I would say is when you do something you really like enjoy work doesn't feel like work so you can actually put in more hours so that's actually the real secret how to work hard is to pick something you really enjoy doing and I think you're automatically driven to put in more hours on it because you feel like it's your life's work and the last thing I'd say is like don't give up until you're forced to there's going to be plenty of moments where when you're doing something pretty hard people feel like this is not worth doing they'll come and tell you on your face but anything worth doing has always been difficult I remember this because Jensen Wang told me this directly it's like anything that was worth doing should have been difficult by Design if it was not difficult to do it probably was not worth doing and I don't know if it's like 100% accurate but it's pretty accurate that it feels if you're trying to get something new into the world or like something different that go goes against so many existing structures I think usually if you come through at the other end uh it probably was worth doing it probably changed the world in a meaningful way and you know just to close you had this tweet on Friday saying like you want your week to end but I don't so is that because just like you're motivated by just like the product to users no just like a random comment about like look weekends but way I'm not against week nobody works nobody's forced to work in the weekend here do it if they want to and I'm not like forcing any there no culture of like hey come on Saturdays let's work in fact if you're forcing people to work they probably like it's a wrong thing but what I meant to say was when you're like thinking about work all the time like it's not like on a Saturday I'm just completely zoned out and not thinking about the product of the company that's what I meant to say yeah cool all right thank thanks so much this is an awesome conversation yeah appreciate time