Rand Fishkin is the co-founder and CEO of SparkToro, an audience research platform that helps marketers understand where their audiences spend time online. Previously, he built Moz into the world's leading SEO software company before stepping down as CEO in 2014 after a public battle with depression. Author of 'Lost and Founder' (Penguin/Random House, 2018), he is known for radical transparency about the messy reality of startup life, pioneering the Whiteboard Friday video series, and championing a 'chill work' philosophy that rejects hustle culture in favor of sustainable, sub-30-hour work weeks.
Perplexity AI is a San Francisco-based AI company that built the world's leading 'answer engine' ? replacing traditional link-based search with real-time, AI-generated responses that cite their sources. Founded in August 2022 by four AI researchers from OpenAI, Meta, Databricks, and Quora, Perplexity has grown from a scrappy post-ChatGPT prototype to a $20B+ company with 45 million monthly active users, over $1.7B in total funding, and a product suite spanning a conversational search engine, a developer API platform, and the Comet AI browser.