Dmitry Shevelenko
Chief Business Officer, Perplexity. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executivefounderoperator
Dmitry Shevelenko is the Chief Business Officer at Perplexity, where he oversees global business operations, enterprise partnerships, and commercialization initiatives. Previously, he co-founded the robotics startup Tortoise and held senior business development roles at Uber, LinkedIn, and Meta.
2shows
2appearances
36statements
2resolved
2supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Dmitry Shevelenko said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Shevelenko: Computer-using AI agents were impossible before late 2025
“You couldn't have built something like computer before November, December of last year, because model capabilities advance where you can have longer time horizons for running tasks, right? Where you're not just answering a question, but you're actually doing W…”
Perplexity content team ships production code without engineers via Perplexity Computer
“We have people on our content team that submit pull requests, basically ship You know, code that goes live into production without engineers being in the loop. And that's all being run through Perplexity Computer.”
Shevelenko: Codex and proprietary AI assistants will never run rival models
“So the one thing that Codex is never going to be able to support is running Gemini models. You know, they will always be in the GPT family. Same thing for, you know, Claude, like they're not gonna, you know, have GPT models. Gemini is not gonna have Grok model…”
Shevelenko: AI labs aggressively petition Perplexity to use their models
“They aggressively petition us to use their models. They want, they give us early access. They want us to run evals. And so we have, you know, the exact opposite dynamic right now where they're, you know, more than happy to take revenue from us.”
Shevelenko: Perplexity hosts and post-trains Chinese open-source models in US data centers
“We never Integrate into perplexity any product that, or API that is hosted in China. We have ourselves post-trained. We have post-trained open source models. That, that come that are developed by Chinese labs. We run those in US data centers. We post-train the…”
Shevelenko: AI pricing will resemble Costco with memberships and compute credits
“AI is going to become a lot like Costco where you pay for the membership, right? And that gets you in the store. And that's actually the part of Costco's business that is, you know, the highest margin. And then you have, you know, everything you're buying in t…”
Perplexity Would Have Failed If Founded Six Months Earlier or Later
“If we had, you know, we got lucky with timing. If we had founded the company six months before we did, GPT-III would not have been good enough, the equivalent of it, at that point in time, and we wouldn't have been able to create that initial magical experienc…”
Shevelenko: Perplexity has a blossoming partnership with Apple using Mac minis
“We have a great blossoming partnership with Apple. They actually are really excited about what we're doing with personal computer and how it uses Mac minis.”
Shevelenko: Hardware will matter more as software faces commoditization pressure
“Apple's always been an incredible hardware company, and I think, ah, this is, you know, an era where hardware will matter even more because software is gonna face waves of commoditization pressure.”
Shevelenko: Ads alongside AI search answers undermine perceived accuracy
“When a core value prop of perplexity is accuracy it's really hard to reinforce that to users when you also have ads running alongside the answer.”
Shevelenko sees no indication the AI data center buildout is a bubble
“From the perplexity point of view, like we don't have strong opinions on the data center build out, but there's nothing I see that indicates that that is, you know, a bubble or anything like that.”
Shevelenko: Non-AI companies gain alpha from adoption depth, not custom tools
“The alpha for a company that is not an AI company is, is not in them building their own internal tools with AI necessarily. It is in the depth of their adoption.”
Shevelenko: The gap between the top two AI models has never exceeded 15%
“Since this industry has kicked off, there's never been a moment where the delta between the, you know, the best model and the second best model was, like, more than maybe, like, a 10, 15% gap.”
Shevelenko: Models may be better at exploiting cyber vulnerabilities than fixing them
“I think what is a real concern is that models will be better at exploiting cyber vulnerabilities than they are at fixing them, right?”
Shevelenko: Chinese AI models are pushing the frontier but not at it
“They are, you know, they're pushing the frontier. They're not at the frontier, but they're pushing it.”
Shevelenko: Perplexity has never subsidized paying Pro or Max users
“So we at Perplexity, we've never subsidized paying users. So if you're on a, you know, pro or max plan you know, we're, thank you, you're contributing to our success.”
Shevelenko: Perplexity 5x'd ARR to $500M With Only 34% Headcount Growth
“As we've increased our ARR by five X, you know, from a hundred million to five hundred million, we only grew a head count 34%.”
AI Brings Non-Specialists to 80% Expert Level in Unfamiliar Fields
“I think one mental model is to assume that using a tool like perplexity and other AIs, you can get to 80% of an expert level in a lot of fields that, you know, are not your profession, right?”
Shevelenko: Trust Will Be the Scarce Asset of the Agentic Internet
“And trust will be the scarce asset of the agentic internet.”
LLM Output Quality Deteriorates at Million-Token Context Sizes
“They claim million tokens, ten million tokens. When you start going up to that size of input. The quality deteriorates on the output”
Shevelenko: Perplexity Computer users consume more credits each week, driving revenue
“The longer people have had access to computer. I mean, this stuff is still brand new, but they're using it consuming more computer credits every week. Than the previous week, right? So we're actually just in, in the extreme upward part of the ramp. That's a bi…”
Shevelenko: Perplexity launching 36 workflows on top of Perplexity Computer
“So we actually are launching this week, 36 different workflows that go on top of computer.”
Shevelenko predicts powerful reasoning models will run locally on Mac Minis
“Well, I certainly think that as models get more powerful, you will certainly be, and as, you know, local CPUs get more powerful as well, you're going to be able to distill powerful reasoning models to a size where they can run on a Mac mini.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Dmitry's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 BIG TECHNOLOGYLEDGER | Chief Business Officer, Perplexity | 1 | 19 | — | full record on Big Technology → |
 SAASTRLEDGER | Chief Business Officer, Perplexity | 1 | 17 | 100% 2/2 | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |