YouSaid · the spoken record

Dmitry Shevelenko

lines on the record: 38
first: 2025-11-06
most recent: 2025-11-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'm tempted to do a live check of whether perplexity will give you a good answer on that. But this goes back to what I was saying about emergent capabilities. The fail case, and this comes up actually in many enterprise conversations, is just because you tried something two months ago. It doesn't mean, and it didn't work, it doesn't mean it's not working today. And so we all need to keep this open mind that these technologies are getting smarter and better at a rapid clip. And those are solvable problems.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think of all of the time and leverage that professionals and knowledge workers are getting. And to me, the ROI on that, like I can see the trillions of dollars in economic productivity happening from it. But are there certain companies that have just raised too much capital and is going to create imbalances in the ecosystem? Yes.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so kind of having core foundational principles while at the same time preserving agility and adaptability and being the best at applying the new gifts we get for the service of users, that's going to be a key operating skill.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is a funny time to drop his name, but this is where we love the Jeff Bezos line of, you know, It's the hard thing to predict what's going to change, but what's going to remain the same. I think from our vantage point, the bedrock is accuracy and trust, right? And that's actually as intelligence gets much more powerful at manipulating us. And so that's why kind of that trust bedrock is paramount. That said, One of my management mantras is that I have absolute conviction that six months from now, I'm going to have a top three priority, that today I don't know what it is. And that embedded in that is an understanding that even the model makers themselves, when they release a new model, Until it's out, they don't know what emergent capabilities and what the useful applications of that will be.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So memory will be an important feature of products like perplexity. And the way we avoid that trap is transparency, just like we do with sources, where we actually show you all of the things that we've added to your memory. And if you don't want to be pigeonholed as a romantic comedy lover, you just delete that memory. And I mean, I'm kind of, I recently got into health supplements, and now every time I ask about health supplements. My decision to begin pomegranate supplements is getting mentioned the answer. Yeah, and I deleted that because I'm like, you know what? I don't want it coming back to the pomegranates as great as they are. And that was, I just went and deleted that memory. I saw where it was. And I'm pomegranate free in my answers.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to call it a fraud. I have not uncovered those companies provide analytics, but they are not actionable. And so I have not found an actionable output there. And in some ways, our purpose is to prevent those insights from being actionable because if you can game a perplexity answer, it means it's not accurate and trustworthy. And so, you know. If they do find a hack, like we have better engineers that will fill that hack.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very powerful distribution leverage point, but their greatest strength is also a weakness in that they built it around an AdWord system where they're reliant on people clicking on links. And the behavior of clicking on promoted links will just matter less in the future of the internet than it has in the past.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think to me, asking a good question, it's like a level deeper than the prompt engineering is kind of that in some ways will get abstracted very soon. When I say asking good question, it means a question that embodies and embeds all the known knowledge on a given topic. And the question you're asking is then where do you push the frontier? Like what is the thing that is not yet knowable that in your question you're pushing your organization on?”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think my answer to this is the answer I think is a key skill set for any professional in the age of AI is you have to get really good at asking the right questions. And so that means asking your teams why are they working on what they're working on? What's the leverage? What's the unique differentiation? And so it is approaching their business with a profound curiosity and an understanding that there are new disruption and leverage opportunities and to kind of lead with that curiosity.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think for us, the bigger opportunity. The bigger opportunity is not to go after Bloomberg terminal. It's giving everyone who can't afford Bloomberg Terminal a version of it that is useful for them. And when they're making retail stock investment decisions, when they're understanding the interplay of the markets and the news cycle, that they have access to powerful technology, right? It's not like Bloomberg Terminal, like people are there for the chatting. Like there's all kinds of features there that we're not trying to replace. Thank you. And it's an amazing product and amazing brand. I think it's for us, this is about democratizing, expanding the scope of who has access to premium financial intelligence.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For us, the success of Perplexity Finance is similar to what I was saying about with Amazon and people that have personal shoppers. Bloomberg Terminal is that this is like the highest.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, how many people have access to Bloomberg Terminal? It's like, I mean, you guys, it's not millions, right? Yeah, it's not millions.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're introducing something called Comet, which we already have the Washington Post and Cond ⁇ Nast, LA Times, many great publishers signed on for. And it was really inspired by Apple News Plus, where if you are a Comet Plus subscriber, which is $5 a month and we bundle it into Perplexity Pro. So even people that didn't necessarily want to pay for it, we're taking money out of our cut and feeding it into this program to seed it. As you consume premium content in the Comet browser, we're then sharing that revenue back proportionally with publishers. And it's actually accounting for not just page views of premium content, but agent actions on that content and citations in the comment browser. And so ultimately, I think subscriptions are a very powerful business model for media. I think there's a lot more to do.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, this is very analogous to when the internet was first introduced, you had traditional brick and mortar retailers. And the best brick and mortar retailers adapted to the digital environment. And the best publishers are adapting and gaining leverage with AI. I mean, last night we had the CEO of Axel Springer talk about how he's leaning into AI. And it's actually an incredible opportunity for productivity. And so I don't think this is zero sum. I do think there's going to be some publishers that thrive and others. And the media business was already facing challenges, certain segments of it well before AI. So I don't see this as being kind of the fundamental tension.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, when I look at the earnings numbers for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times for Bloomberg, Media companies seem to be doing fine. New York Times is doing well in games.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It got a lot easier to begin a new initiative, to begin a new prospect, how many more new engagements are you going to be able to spin up, right? Because the biggest constraint on new business is an employee feeling they have the bandwidth to take it on. And experienced leaders now have much more leverage. And I think that's going to play a profound role at Lazard and part of why I'm excited to be part of the organization.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just think this is going to be a incredible flowering of creativity and productivity lift. I think of using a product like Perplexity and other AI tools in the day-to-day of somebody that works in an investment bank is really twofold. The first is saving you 80% of the time to get to the 80% first draft of a work product, right? In investment banks, that's kind of putting together pitch decks, doing modeling, just gaining tremendous efficiency. And it's not, it's important to distinguish. It's not about making that workflow autonomous. You still absolutely need human judgment on what the end output should be, how to approach it. This is not about replacing investment bankers. It's about”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So about 80% of the room raised their hands. And we see the early adopter behavior in audiences like this, folks that work in financial services, people that, again, for whom quickly getting high quality information matters. As this behavior becomes more mainstream, we obviously will need more compute for inference. The folks that are kind of talking about trillions of dollars in investment, it's really a different universe than ours. It's unclear to me why some of those investments are needed. Sometimes it feels like a strategy of what the U.S. was trying to do with the Soviet Union of just getting your competitors to go broke by being able to raise the most capital. And we'll see how that plays out.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And those are the ones that are really pushing for the massive infrastructure buildouts. We're not constrained on compute for inference. At the current usage levels. But as behavior shifts, I mean, by a show of hands in the room, how many people have stopped primarily using Google when they have an informational question?”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the biggest expense is inference, right? So it is the cost of compute when you're asking a question and running it through an LLM, that is a material expenditure. Perplexity doesn't do pre-training. So the sorts of AI PhDs that other companies are paying reported hundreds of millions of for. We're not in the market for that. We have incredible AI application engineers, and that's what we recruit for. Ultimately, engineers that are joining perplexity are joining because they believe we're just getting started, right? And they're coming for an equity appreciation story that's already bearing fruit, but we're just at the beginning of that journey.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's not a material amount. And we've also introduced a max tier. So we have a $20 a month pro subscription. And for the folks that want the most expensive reasoning models and higher limits on them, there's a $200 a month product called Max, and that also gets you access to our email assistant. And so I think you'll other companies have also introduced kind of higher tiers of subscription. So this is not a Problem that's unique necessary to AI, and you kind of introduce tiers of service to support it at scale.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the unit margins are strong. The free users right now, because we do not monetize them, we don't, we lose money on those. AI companies, I think something that is underappreciated, they generally actually, when they do the accounting. Of free users, they attribute that to research and development because you're still using those prompts to improve and train your system So, you know, it does allow for your unit economics to potentially appear more pristine than they are.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was when we made that bid, the GoJ had still not decided whether Chrome would be divested from Google. The web browser, as evidenced by Amazon's behavior, is clearly incredibly valuable surface area. And that, you know, $35 billion was a starting bid. At this point, I can safely say I think Chrome is worth more than that. What I can confidently say is we had more than $35 billion of investor interest in making that bid. So it was not a constraint on The funding side, obviously, Google does not want to sell Chrome unless they'll be forced to and it doesn't look like the government will be forcing them.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's important when you're a privately held company to control the sale of your equity. And I think the challenge, why we haven't, we've been approached by a lot of these tokenization schemes. Again, if you have folks on your cap table, May be looking for quick flips, and then that creates a weird signal in the market, and that may harm a primary raise, right? And so the noise that comes with that, it's not like we're short on other investment avenues. So it's just an unnecessary kind of noise risk.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there's this phenomenon that tends to happen in bubbly periods of multi-layered SPVs. So SPVs are special purpose vehicles. And so you basically have many layers of outsourced fundraising where you have principal agent misalignment, where the fundraiser is not making money off the investment. They're just making money off the management fee. And so we often get approach from players in that space and we, you know, whenever we can detect that's what it is, we avoid taking on funds like that because we want investors who are getting direct access to perplexity and who are in it for the long haul, who aren't just trying to make a quick buck on a management fee flip.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're kind of getting all the second order information with perplexity, use it yourself. You understand the value, the time that you just saved, the creative expansion you just had. And that gives investors conviction. And so that is fueling this environment. Is it at times too frothy? Sure. Are there going to be some investors that make the wrong bets? Absolutely. human need of getting good answers to good questions. We think that is boundless. And so we're confident in the path ahead.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By private investors in that. I think a second piece is that investors themselves are power users of products like Perplexity. They are people that have a lot of questions, do a lot of research. And so they have not just an abstract understanding of a balance sheet, they have their own intuition, which is very different than B2B SaaS, where it's like. You have to go do 30 customer interviews”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So before perplexity, I mean, I spent most of my career at consumer internet companies, but I stint as a founder of a robotics startup. And AI is definitely a different fundraising environment than that was, which was. Very challenging. I think at his core, a lot of investors believe, and we agree with this belief, that what's happening with AI now is as profound as the original introduction of the internet. And so they're Going to be a wave of new generational companies that are being built right now. And a lot of the value is actually compounding while these companies are privately held. And so that is, you know, there's a lot of conviction.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A potential commercial opportunity, something you might buy, imagine alongside the answer, you get an offer for an exclusive discount. That would be something that your agent would say, hey, this is, even though this someone's paying for this to show up here, this is actually a good deal. If it's just an ad that says click me, click me, click me, we don't think that's going to be sustainable. And that's not the type of marketing products we're looking to build.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we're seeing tremendous traction with both consumer subscriptions and then companies buying the enterprise version of Perplexity for their employees. Ultimately, it's in that enterprise context where having accurate, useful knowledge is incredibly valuable. And so we've had been fortunate with a enterprise go-to-market team of just five people, seeing that business more than 8x this year, seeing many multiples increase in our consumer subscriptions. And we're excited about building products that are user aligned that also create marketing value for brands and advertisers, but this isn't going to be rebuilding AdWords and Click-Based systems. We think it's important to create real value so that when your personal AI agent, powered by Perplexity, is evaluated.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That isn't the Bing search API, which is what ChatGPT uses. Those are all the building blocks of a more useful, accurate AI.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm fortunate to get to speak with a lot of curious people that have to answer a lot of hard questions every day. And they tell me they use perplexity. And it comes back to we're focused on accuracy above all else. ChatGPT is an amazing product, but they built a product that is optimized for engagement. It's trying to be your cheerleader, your coach. It's trying to get you to keep going. And they've also built a product that is designed not to use the best LLM in service of your question, but it's designed to use their LLMs. And so part of being neutral, part of being independent, trustworthy, accurate, is using the best possible technology to answer the question the best possible way. And so being an aggregator of all the best models, having our own independent search infrastructure.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I should have you join our next investor pitch. It's exactly that. Oh dear. There is a big opening for an independent, neutral AI player that is aligned with users. Google is still, you know, they're generating $100 billion in revenue per quarter, which is amazing. But a lot of that is coming from getting their customers advertisers. Amazon, they're trying to get you to buy as many things as possible. Our success metric is the users, are they willing to pay for a perplexity subscription? And so we're purely aligned with our users.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On Amazon, it's not Amazon's business whether you're using AI to help you evaluate. Is this the best thing to buy? Can I find it cheaper somewhere else? Do I actually need to buy the other thing they're telling me to buy with it? The world's wealthiest people, they have personal shoppers that help them do this. And we're democratizing that sort of intelligence, that sort of assistant access to everyone.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think, and I haven't read the article yet, but I'm going to read it out. I think I have an understanding of the issues. Ultimately, the issue with Amazon is tied to a perplexities web browser called Comet. And Comet is a web browser that has an AI assistant built into it. And what we think is important is that consumers and end users have access to powerful AI when they are accessing publications, accessing websites, accessing the internet. The first 30 years of the internet, we had lopsided AI where big tech, Google, Netflix, Facebook, they used AI to control what we see to get us to click on certain things and not click on other things. And what is changing now is perplexity is focusing on giving powerful AI to the end user. And we think this is the right thing to do. We think it's a principled viewpoint that when you're”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not me at the wheel. Ultimately, this is where we focus a big part of our technology. It's building accurate AI. The thing that we believe is that's going to be most scarce in the future is not intelligence, it's trust. I think the bedrock of trust is transparency. That's why perplexity pioneered showing you exactly which source the information is coming from and empowering users to apply their own judgment of whether that is a good source or not so good source. But we deploy many different algorithmic strategies. Oftentimes if many publications are saying the same thing, that's a strong signal that they're onto something and the outliers, you're kind of more sensitive to. But this isn't a simple problem. And this is why we raise. A lot of capital and hire the world's best technologists to build accurate AI.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, again, it goes back to, I think the reason we're drawn to media properties is because of the questions the journalists and editors are asking. It's not necessarily, it's the framing, it is what is actually worth asking about what's worth reading about. Perplexity doesn't have answers to that. You have to come to perplexity already armed with a question. And oftentimes people read news and there's something they didn't understand fully and they come to perplexity to get that deeper understanding. But the spark, that comes from editorial judgment, that comes from the intuition of a world-class reporter. And that's why we're excited through programs like Comet Plus to find new business models for that.”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, thank you for having me. It's great to be here. I love that tee up and you guys were scheming backstage of like what's going to be the hard opening question but I love it because the thing that humans will always be uniquely exceptional at is asking questions So perplexity may have the answer, but perplexity does not have an innate desire to be curious and that's what you guys have and that's why journalism is so important and that's why having these conversations important it's about the questions not necessarily the answers”
2025-11-06 · Odd Lots · Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source