Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, credits advice from Sam Altman for helping him identify his strengths: "Whatever comes easy to you...but seems hard to other people." This idea helped Srinivas focus on his strengths for real impact. At IIT Madras, he applied this mindset during a data science competition, despite lacking formal machine learning training. By experimenting with scikit-learn, he built a winning solution. That win boosted his confidence and opened doors at DeepMind and OpenAI before he launched Perplexity AI in 2022.