Henry Modisett
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First of Kind · The Curious Case of Henry Modisett
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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. The information stays robust because the original innovation was using sources. Getting robust information on demand to more people is the biggest contribution he can imagine. An LLM can build a personal bridge between someone and the information available to them.
He was bad at math until a tutor let him ask questions and hear the idea another way. Then he did well. Object-oriented programming did not click the way it was taught to kids who were also good at math. It clicked when he wrote ActionScript in Flash, put a circle on the screen, and saw tha
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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. A thousand of those reps in a year, instead of a hundred, produces a better designer and a smarter person, because there is more information to learn from.
Most companies do not let you practice that. You are part of a machine, you do one piece, and you contribute in a small way only infrequently. Making something special means starting without knowing what you want to make, and without the burden of proving the work or getting people onto the right project. Most of a startup is jumping in and trying to swim. You own every decision because explaining each one and gettin
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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. It is not worth the design team's time when the company does not mean to ship it.
A mock is cheaper in hours than a built product, so an anxious organization asks for three directions and turns design into a service that draws possible outcomes. Blue-sky prompts get out of hand because they are fun for the person asking, and they kill the team's energy. The best designers want to make things people use, not visualize options for leadership.
He compares that trap to a concept car. People who love automobiles can spend a career on cars nobody drives, while anoth
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What Is Perplexity's Brand Strategy?
Henry Modisett's brand strategy for Perplexity starts from the product being about knowledge, and knowledge is everything. A constrained, stoic, black-and-white look would turn everything into nothing. He takes the other path: the brand is everything and can show up in every possible way, with no fixed palette and no fixed style. The only through line is how it feels to use the product, and how Perplexity wants you to feel.
Perplexity helps people learn, and habitual use will make a person more curious. He believes that, and he believes it is a good thing. The brand is built around curiosity, discovery, and empowerment. That matches how he sees AI: not a fake human you order around, but a f
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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. Ask why a great designer left the last job, or what makes the current one worth staying for, and the answer does not look like management at most companies. People left because they were asked to become a manager when they were individual contributors, or because they landed on a team with five other designers stuck on the same problem. The best designers want hard problems, they want to own those problems, they want to be trusted to figure the work out, and they want to be held accountable for impact. They want that from each other, not onl
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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 people get information or take action.
Chrome is the most used browser in the world, and Google is baked into it. Open a browser on a phone, even Safari, and it just hits Google. The idea that a search engine and a browser are separate things only holds if you understand the tech. People might be on a phone, on a computer, or using voice. Perplexity should be available in every one of those places. Building one is a design problem he likes: distill the product, then adapt it to the context.
Everybody with a computer or a phone uses a bro
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What Happened to View Source?
Henry Modisett says the great poverty of the web today is that the view source impulse is being lost. Hitting view source once opened the underbelly of the medium: an inherent logic that was still malleable, so a person could read someone's code, move a piece, and see what would happen.
He hopes a new browser can act as a bridge and make the web malleable again, something a curious person can understand rather than only change and edit. People in school still have the energy for rapid artifact generation, even when nobody knows how anything works, and making stuff that way is better than nothing. He expects an explosion of that type of designer if the idea spreads, because putting something
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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. What stayed with him was figuring out how the material actually worked and building something a person could use, rather than doing the hardest engineering problems just for their own sake.
Friends nearby were product designers working on physical products, or architects. The worldview expanded with a basic realization: every object and every piece of software was designed by a person, so all of it could be better, improved, and iterated on by someone with an idea. He finds that deeply empowering, and treats it as the optimism a designer should carry.
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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. The hardest things to find and suss out sit apart from work you can already see. A weirdly ugly resume signals something, because the designer had complete control, the page is just typography, and they phoned it in.
A designer looking for a job gets to flex and signal in the smallest ways, because the person hiring is very detail oriented, and all they have to do is show the detail. Hiring a product manager is sometimes the hardest search, because it takes a lot more talk to figure out a worldview and what the person really did. Reps, plus work the person actually did,
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How Did Perplexity Become an Answer Engine?
Henry Modisett says Perplexity became an answer engine through truly iterative experiments. A working setup already hit a database with SQL, and the team kept adding more text. More text meant people could ask questions beyond what anyone expected the tool to do.
They were not thinking about Google or about search. They were thinking about asking questions of a large data set. Someone changed the backend and plugged it into a Bing search API. Suddenly a person could ask anything and get an answer. After many years at Quora spent on how people obtain knowledge and how information is organized on the Internet, an on-demand question with an instant answer was what they had always wanted. It li
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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.