Has AI Killed Pitch Decks? Yes, says Perplexity’s CEO

Pitch decks: time consuming to draft, iterate and design, a distraction from product and customers (albeit necessary), and often missing the mark in terms of what investors actually want. 

In many cases, the work can be for nothing, too. According to data from DocSend and Dropbox, average investor attention on decks is around two minutes. 

Perhaps, then, CEO of AI startup Perplexity Aravind Srinivas is on to something. 

Speaking in an interview with Berkely Haas, where he talked about his personal journey from researcher to CEO and the company’s incredible growth, Aravind said he uses AI instead of pitch decks for investor presentations.

He told host Alex Mas that he largely skips decks in favour of memos, live demos and Q&As, arguing they are obsolete for him because of AI’s capabilities. 

Ask Perplexity

Aravind said AI enables greater efficiency and an ability to connect the dots “between things that don’t exist.”

“Famously, the Series A was the only time I made a pitch deck,” he said. “I’ve never done a pitch deck for any of the other Perplexity funding rounds. I just write a memo and I tell them you can do a Q&A and ask whatever you want. 

“I’ll spend two hours with you, ask me all the questions you have, and we’re just going to pull the metrics for whatever you have and show you right there,” Aravind added. “Anything else that is internal, you can ask Perplexity.”

The reason, he says, he points people in the direction of his own product is “it already knows everything, I’m not even exaggerating.”

Building on the theme, the co-founder recalled a recent investor call. After answering an initial round of questions, a flurry of follow-ups headed his way. 

“I copied the entire email, put it into Perplexity and said ‘answer it like Aravind’,” he explained. 

“It has all the context of everything I’ve said in YouTube interviews and different blog posts. I took it out, saw it and was like ‘damn, I don’t think I could have done as good a job as this'.”

AI, leadership and Perplexity

Aravind co-founded Perplexity in mid-2022, together with Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski based on a simple premise: replace lists of links with concise, sourced answers that users can verify – an ambition that manifested in its first ‘answer engine’ in December 2022. 

Prior to Perplexity, he worked as a researcher at OpenAI, DeepMind and Google Brain. 

Touching on the transition from these roles to CEO during the interview, he said “I’ve always looked up to entrepreneurs. I think the spirit of driving change can only be truly done as an entrepreneur.

“One of my entrepreneurial inspirations has been Google founder Larry Page,” he added. “There is a particular thing he said – if you want to do something very impactful in the world there are two career paths you can go down. One is an academic [...] or you can start a company.”

Under Aravind, Perplexity has grown quickly into what it describes as “an AI-powered search engine” with a focus on synthesis and traceability. 

A focus on adding enterprise features while scaling usage has served the business well.

At last count, the platform has between 22 and 30 million active users with a reported 20% growth month-over-month. Speaking at Bloomberg’s Tech Summit in June, Aravind said: “Give it a year, we’ll be doing, like, a billion queries a week if we can sustain this growth rate. 

“And that’s pretty impressive because the first day in 2022, we did 3,000 queries, just one single day. So from there to doing 30 million queries a day now, it’s been phenomenal growth.”