Aravind Srinivas’ failed startup before Perplexity

Aravind Srinivas and his co-founders initially developed a tool that allowed users to ask natural language questions about Twitter data. They aimed to make information buried in the platform's data easier to find without requiring users to write complex database queries. However, collecting enough Twitter data proved difficult and the approach was not scalable.

The team's initial idea was to turn questions into SQL queries and run them against a database to retrieve relevant records. They applied this method to Twitter, enabling users to ask questions like who Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos liked on Twitter and which accounts Dennis Fridman and Elon Musk shared. However, they soon realized that generating SQL queries with language models was not as easy as they had initially thought.

In 2022, Perplexity released a feature that allowed users to fall back on regular web search when a Twitter handle was missing from their index. This feature helped generate screenshots of the AI's responses, which circulated on Discord forums and other online platforms. These screenshots provided early exposure for Perplexity to users who were not aware of the startup.

Recognizing that the Twitter search project was difficult to scale and that API access was expected to become more restricted under Elon Musk's ownership, the founders decided to pivot to regular web search. The Twitter search tool had shown that AI could make complex information easier to explore, but they needed a more practical direction for their company's future. This pivot ultimately helped shape Perplexity's mission to help users discover new knowledge and guide them towards it.