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Back to The Curious Case of Henry Modisett, with Henry Modisett.

Why Did Henry Modisett Join Perplexity?

Henry Modisett joined Perplexity because he had worked with two of its co-founders at Quora and already knew them as some of the best engineers he had ever worked with. One co-founder joined Quora at 16 and was a world champion competitive programmer. When an engineer like that wants to work together, you take the call.

He was winding down his last project. At Quora the group had already played with early LLMs, including experiments that generated answers and generated questions. The output was bad. He remembers using an OpenAI Playground for the work, then falling back to writing silly poems. When ChatGPT came out, silly poems were the big novelty effect.

Grokipedia·Perplexity·Quora

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The Curious Case of Henry Modisett ·

First of Kind

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  1. Why Would Perplexity Build a Browser?Henry Modisett wants Perplexity to build a browser because most people cannot tell a search engine from a browser, and the product should show up wherever…
  2. What Do the Best Designers Want From a Job?Henry Modisett says the best designers want ownership, trust, and accountability from a job. He hires and keeps people by working backward from talent.
  3. What Is Perplexity's Brand Strategy?Henry Modisett's brand strategy for Perplexity starts from the product being about knowledge, and knowledge is everything.
  4. How Did Perplexity Become an Answer Engine?Henry Modisett says Perplexity became an answer engine through truly iterative experiments.
  5. Why Is Craft the Easy Part of Hiring a Designer?Henry Modisett treats craft as the easy part of hiring a designer because the work can be judged before any conversation.
  6. Why Does Perplexity Refuse Design Mocks?Henry Modisett refuses design mocks unless Perplexity really believes it will build and launch the work. A mock can open a project.
  7. How Did Henry Modisett Get Into Software Design?Henry Modisett studied computer science, loved the big concepts such as algorithms and graph theory, and basically failed most of his tests.
  8. What Happened to View Source?Henry Modisett says the great poverty of the web today is that the view source impulse is being lost.
  9. Why Does a Startup Make a Better Designer?Henry Modisett says a startup makes you a better designer because you make hard decisions, ship them, and see the results.
  10. How Can Someone Know a Fact Faster Than Ever Before?Henry Modisett says a person can know something confidently faster than ever before. He calls that property of Perplexity speed to knowledge.

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