Mana Aynechi

ex Meta product. Investor and advisor supporting entrepreneurs. Formerly @square and @visa

[Gokul Rajaram @gokulr]

THE MODEL IS NOT THE PRODUCT

@AravSrinivas, Founder & CEO of @perplexity_ai , interviewed by @HarryStebbings (@20vcFund)

Summary: Aravind Srinivas argues the money in AI sits in orchestration, the system that turns every layer's progress into the most valuable output tokens per watt, while the binding constraint on the whole industry stays physical: power. He runs Perplexity on offense (400 people, a $20B valuation, revenue tripled past $500M this year) and bets that whoever conducts models, tools, chips, and devices wins more than any single model builder. If he is right, the winners pay for the frontier, fewer people build bigger companies, and Micron matters more than Meta.

1. Attack, Attack, Attack. Srinivas plays offense because he has nothing to lose. He grew up lower-middle-class in India, where his family counted a job at Google as the win, so everything past that already feels like a bonus. Whenever he catches himself playing defense to avoid failure, he treats that as the dumbest move available and goes all in. The line he repeats: be on offense all the time.

2. The Model Is Not the Product. Srinivas builds on Greg Brockman's line that the model is no longer the product. A pure reseller of model tokens has no business, because the model itself gets commoditized within months. The value sits in the orchestration around it: the agent harness, the connectors, the tools, the grounding in real context that turns raw intelligence into output people pay for. Even a frontier lab has to own an interface, or its application-layer business disappears.

3. Token Value Per Watt. Srinivas names one metric above all others: token value per watt per user. Dollars trace back to power, and power is the one input no company can subsidize except a government. Whoever produces the most valuable output tokens for the least power has the most pricing power. Everything else in the business is downstream of that ratio.

4. Orchestrating Across Models. Perplexity routes across competing models, something OpenAI and Anthropic structurally cannot copy. You will not find GPT-5 inside Claude Code or Opus inside Codex, but you will find both inside Perplexity. Because of that, every improvement anywhere helps the product: a better chip from Jensen Huang, a better model from Dario Amodei, cheaper open-source inference, a faster device from Apple. Perplexity tripled revenue this year partly on progress its competitors paid to make.

5. The Frontier Premium. Given a fixed budget, Srinivas would hire one Jeff Dean over five average engineers, and he applies the same logic to tokens. People pay up for frontier capability. The catch is that what counts as frontier keeps moving, and last year's frontier gets roughly 10 times cheaper once open-source models and a good harness catch up. So spend on today's tasks falls while new frontier work appears: autonomous software engineers, AI designing chips, AI designing drugs.

6. Bottleneck Economics. Srinivas states it as a pricing law: the bottleneck commands the price. Memory is the bottleneck right now, which is why he thinks Micron could be worth more than Meta in 6 to 12 months. CPUs became a constraint again because agent loops run on them, lifting AMD and Intel. His takeaway for investors: price follows the bottleneck, so track the constraint.

7. The Power Bottleneck. A data center is land, permits, turbines, grid deals, and cooling, not a rack of chips bought from Dell. Srinivas estimates 40 of every 100 planned data centers are stalled by public resistance, much of it driven by false claims about water and power use. This physical buildout time caps how fast frontier capability can grow, and he does not see it easing in 3 years. The buildout may simply move to countries with friendlier permits and spare energy.

8. The Local Compute Bet. The real risk of always-on AI is cost, not a rogue model doing something crazy. Nobody can afford continuous frontier inference running on a server at the fidelity of a few seconds. Srinivas wants a continuously learning local model, paired with its own chip and harness, that handles most work and calls the server only when it has to. The data center moves onto your device, and your most sensitive tokens stay with you.

9. The Export-Control Backfire. Short term, Srinivas credits export controls with the roughly 12-month gap between open-source and the frontier. Long term, forcing China onto the Huawei stack pushes a vertically integrated, memory-efficient architecture, the kind of KV-cache and SSD-inference work DeepSeek already shipped. He puts maybe a 20 to 30% chance on another DeepSeek moment that leaves overbuilt American capacity stranded. China can also build the physical layer, power and fabs and robots, faster than the US.

10. Fewer People, Bigger Companies. 400 people built Perplexity's $20B valuation, and Srinivas wants 1,000 startups of about 40 people each worth billions. The number he watches: token spend as a share of developer payroll. Salesforce reportedly spends about 3.8% today, which keeps the labs at $5T, and near 100% would make them $10T. Perplexity aims at the non-developer work, finance, corp dev, sales, research analysts, which he calls Claude Code times 10.

11. The Cost Of The Doom Narrative. Srinivas thinks Dario Amodei's "all the jobs are going" message is wrong and self-defeating, especially while the same labs ask the public to let them build data centers. He offers a counter-example: a San Francisco Uber driver watched one of his interviews, built a web app with AI, added billing, and now earns more in passive income than from driving. You cannot win by telling people they are about to be screwed and then complaining that you cannot build fast enough. Honest optimism about agency does more for the buildout than fear.

12. Velocity As Humility. In the first year or two of a company, Srinivas calls hunting for a moat a trap, since the only real edge is velocity. His line: moving fast is a way of expressing humility, because you keep making contact with the world and questioning your own assumptions. He sets the bar with Jensen Huang, who runs a $5T company and still wakes up telling himself he is 30 days from going out of business. For the one buy-and-hold pick among the coming IPOs, Srinivas takes SpaceX, the only one of the three he calls an n-of-1.

[Darya Safai MP @SafaiDarya]

On International Women’s Day, members of Iran’s women’s national football team used the internationally recognized “Signal for Help” gesture. Reports say their families in Iran are under severe pressure and have been threatened with death to stop the players from seeking asylum in Australia. After refusing to sing the Islamic Republic’s anthem, their lives are now at risk. The Australian government must act immediately to protect them.

[Mana Aynechi @Manak1901]

@SafaiDarya @BBC Disgusting indeed

[Sana Ebrahimi Ledene @SanaELedene]

Some people may think how what happened in Iran could ever happen in America. This is how it starts:

First, they grow their numbers inside your society. Slowly, steadily, without resistance.

Then they rebrand extremism as “inclusivity” and “respect for all views.” The moment you object, you’re labeled hateful, ignorant, or dangerous. Debate becomes taboo. Silence becomes survival.

Next, they move into institutions, media, education, politics, culture. Power doesn’t arrive with tanks; it arrives with titles, committees, and policy language.

Then they convince you to disarm and give up your second amendment. They tell you it’s for your safety. For peace. For your own good. They promise protection in exchange for obedience.

After that, everything accelerates. Very fast. Very dark.

You are made to feel like a stranger in your own country. Your values are ridiculed. Your culture is erased piece by piece. Compliance is rewarded. Resistance is punished.

What comes next is not coexistence.
It’s control.
It’s submission.
It’s quiet enslavement disguised as progress.

We have seen this movie before.
It does NOT end well.

[Mana Aynechi @Manak1901]

@BillCassidy You are an embarrassment to our country

[A. Ari Aramesh @AriAramesh]

We THE DEMOCRATS used to be the party of “separation of church and state.”

Now radical progressives celebrate ideology that looks a lot like theology.

That’s not progress. It’s dangerous.

[Mana Aynechi @Manak1901]

“But perhaps most stomach-turning of all are women like Karoline Leavitt, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Megyn Kelly, Tulsi Gabbard, Maria Bartiromo, and Laura Ingraham; women with the power and platform that few are given, and are using them to perpetuate the pain of other women.”

[John Pavlovitz @johnpavlovitz]

But perhaps most stomach-turning of all are women like Karoline Leavitt, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Megyn Kelly, Tulsi Gabbard, Maria Bartiromo, Laura Loomer, and Laura Ingraham; women with the power and platform that few are given, and are using them to perpetuate the pain of other women.

Their willingness to serve as a mouthpiece, a cheerleader, a proxy, and an instrument of injury for him boggles the mind of anyone still capable of compassion and critical thinking.

These women surely know damn well that Donald Trump is a rapist and a pedophile.
They’re fully aware of the absolute horrors he and his Epstein collaborators have put hundreds, perhaps thousands of girls and young women through.
They have both the knowledge of the prolific evil this man is responsible for and the ability to make him accountable.

https://t.co/hfQAvPaIeb

[Omid Memarian @Omid_M]

It is astonishing that a @CNN correspondent in Tehran seems mesmerized by the regime’s photoshopped billboards and shallow rhetoric — yet says nothing about the thousands reportedly killed in just a few days. Highly irresponsible! #IranMassacre

[Nazanin Boniadi @NazaninBoniadi]

I am sickened by the world’s inaction.

AT LEAST 16,500 Iranians killed and 330,000 injured in 48 hours means nothing to you?

[Nicole Lampert @nicolelampert]

Did anyone mention Iran at the Golden Globes?

[Don Winslow @donwinslow]

For the millions of women who voted for Donald Trump...

How could you ever vote for this???

[Ray Dalio @RayDalio]

History shows us that having too much debt during an economic downturn leads to a classic, self-reinforcing cycle where:

1) The empire can no longer borrow the money to repay its debts
2) It prints a lot of new money, which devalues the currency and raises inflation
3) Living standards decline, leading to the rise of political extremism
4) Turbulent economic conditions undermine productivity and there is conflict about how to divide the shrinking resources
5) Populist leaders emerge pledging to take control and bring about order

[Mana Aynechi @Manak1901]

@HeathrowAirport what is happening with the terminal 2/3 fire? There is no good communication or guidance to everyone stuck at the train platforms. This is unacceptable!

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Actor Jeff Daniels on Donald Trump’s 2nd term: “We’ve lost decency. We’ve lost civility. We’ve lost respect for the rule of law. We’ve normalized verbal abuse. We’ve normalized bullying. Out the window goes character, integrity. We’re supposed to elect the best of us, not the worst of us. He’s everything that’s wrong with not just America but being a human being.”

[Mana Aynechi @Manak1901]

@jack @Square Congrats @jack and @Square team! Exciting updates.

[Jon Favreau @jonfavs]

I think today was an inflection point - maybe small, but real.

The President, having launched a global trade war, feted in the Oval Office a Central American dictator who runs a mega-prison known for starvation and torture - a prison to which our government has, by its own admission, sent at least one person "in error."

They disappeared a man without a single criminal charge who's lived and worked here for 15 years - who was alleged to be a member of a gang based in a state he never lived by one anonymous informant. No other evidence. No trial. No conviction. Nothing but a legal order that he not be deported to El Salvador, where he's now serving a life sentence.

The Supreme Court just ruled, without any noted dissent, that the government must facilitate the man's release.

But Trump and his dictator friend said no. They laughed. They mocked the journalist who asked whether they'd abide by the Court's order. The Attorney General, the Secretary of State, and the White House Deputy Chief all lied about the facts of the case. Then the President repeated his proposal to send American citizens to the dictator's prison, and asked him to build five more.

The same day we found out that the government knowingly disappeared a PhD student for nothing but an op-ed, a man's 19-year old son who agents admitted was the wrong kid, and a visa-holding Russian scientist at Harvard who forgot to declare frog embryos at the border.

But: it's all breaking through. It's getting more coverage. More people are paying attention. More elected Democrats are speaking up. More conservative pundits and legal scholars are speaking up. Even Joe Rogan thinks it's bullshit.

Now we have to keep pushing. This is much bigger than immigration or deportation policy - this is about whether we live in a free country or a police state. It's the whole ballgame.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

“You escape competition through authenticity.”
- @naval

[Mana Aynechi @Manak1901]

@Acyn @JDVance you sound like a bully. This is not how a world leader should speak.

[Mana Aynechi @Manak1901]

@JackPosobiec Pretty lame comment.