CEO of $20 billion AI firm Perplexity says the secret to success is ‘sleeping with that fear’ that your competitor will steal your idea

Building a billion-dollar company is hard enough—but keeping others from stealing your big idea and doing it better might be even harder, says Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. As Sam Altman and Mark Cuban predict AI will create a wave of new billionaire (and even trillionaire) founders, Srinivas says that looming threat should serve as motivation, not fear.

Being a startup founder today means operating with a constant sense of urgency. The clock is always ticking—investors want returns, rivals are circling, and someone else could be racing to market with your idea.

But rather than letting that pressure paralyze him, Aravind Srinivas, the cofounder and CEO of AI search startup Perplexity—which was reportedly last valued at $20 billion—uses it as fuel.

“You should assume that if you have a big hit, if your company is something that can make revenue on the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars or potentially billions of dollars, you should always assume that a model company will copy it,” Srinivas said last year at Y Combinator’s AI Startup School.

“You’ve got to live with that fear and you have to embrace it. Realize that your mode comes from moving fast and building your own identity around what you’re doing because users at the end care.”

For the 32-year-old, embracing that pressure has helped him build out a multi-billion-dollar AI-powered search engine that rivals the innovation of tech giants Google and Microsoft, as well as fellow newcomers OpenAI and Anthropic. Perplexity’s success has even caught the eye of Apple, last year reportedly had talks about purchasing Perplexity.

‘I don’t do anything other than work’

For Srinivas, staying ahead of the competition admittedly means frequently sacrificing work–life balance.

“I don’t do anything other than working, sadly. I listen to podcasts and audiobooks whenever I can. I spend a lot of time on X (which is both good and bad),” Srinivas said in a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) in 2025.

While he still makes time to spend time with family on the weekends—and even hit the gym three times a week—he emphasized that persistence matters: “Work incredibly hard. There is no substitute for it,” he said to the Y Combinator crowd.

“There’s real benefit from embracing that fear and sleeping with that fear and waking up every day and feeling excited about what you’re doing to build because that’s the only thing that’ll keep you going.”

AI will make it easier than ever to become a billionaire, predicts tech leaders

Luckily (or not) for Srinivas, he’s about to get more motivation as the competition gets thicker: AI has ushered in an era where building out a business is easier than ever. After all, generative technology can help create business plans in just a matter of seconds.

OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman believes this will lead to entrepreneurship growing exponentially.

“In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there’s this betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion-dollar company,” Altman told Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian in a 2024 interview. “Which would have been unimaginable without AI, and now will happen.”

And while that dream of a one-person, billion-dollar company has yet to come to fruition, other tech leaders have conceded it’s bound to happen eventually—and have even raised the ceiling. Billionaire Mark Cuban predicted last AI will eventually help crown the world’s first trillionaire (although Elon Musk claimed that title on Friday following SpaceX’s record IPO).

“We haven’t seen the best or the craziest of what [AI is] going to be able to do,” Cuban told the High Performance podcast in an episode published last year. “And not only do I think it’ll create a trillionaire, but it could be just one dude in the basement. That’s how crazy it could be.”

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on July 16, 2025.