Perplexity Stock Pitch Finals
If this is the future of publics talent we are so fucked
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I have never in my life ever seen such a poor showing. Shame on perplexity for wasting the judges time on kids who cant answer what the PE of their "researched" company trades at, or basic financials. Also these kids are horribly arrogant, the way they talk to these judges is frankly embarrassing for everyone in our generation.
I almost cried laughing when the broadcast switched to this
Watching that was painful. The discomfort from the judges was palpable.
I keep telling one of my friends he's being pessimistic trying to write off the current crop of college kids, but this shook my resolve a little... can't help but think these kids having access to AI as a shortcut before learning how to do real analysis/thinking themselves is going to be a recurrent problem. Have to hope it gets better.
Is there a recording somewhere?
I really hope not for the sake of the finalists
In college. The distribution of talent used to be normal, and in my experience it’s becoming barbell shaped. There are kids who learn the content and leverage AI to become much stronger, but also many more who use it as a replacement to their own thinking. Very little to nobody sits in between
Couldn't agree more. AI tools have proven to not be an equalizer, but an accelerant. In that regard I feel for the kids in school now going through the shift in real-time. Must feel hopeless for the ones that fall behind.
I graduated when AI was becoming a thing, and still very bad. The lack of critical thinking is a major issue, but I think AI + grade inflation also is a major issue.
We use to have the students who were smart, wouldn’t show up to class much, cram on quizlet and get a C. They would be forced to learn the material though.
Now they have way better tools and can copy and paste their ways to B’s.
To illustrate this, choose a random country and start prompting AI to explain their history or relevance to major events. You can have a decent 10+ page research paper in an hour that would previously take a college freshman 10+ hours.
Man. That was incredibly shite.
https://x.com/perplexity_ai/status/2043003902849626416?s=20
bruh
This is why publics out of college is a bad idea
I knew already that the average college student stock pitch was meaningfully worse than the average public investor pitch, but wow this is not what I was expecting. And I used to argue there were things other than banking to start out with, but no this is insane
I was genuinely shocked to see the finalists and their pitches, I feel bad that the perplexity judges put them through this humiliation ritual when they were clearly unprepared. Waste of time for the judges lol
David really stole the show haha
complete and utter joke… perplexity obviously just picked whatever submissions “looked cool”. these kids barely knew the company and it was so clear AI did everything. one person didn’t even know about a CEO change at their company within the last year.
These are the kids that get to talk to managing partners at major HFs, holy fuck
Will let you guys know how this goes
Shorted RKLB after that pitch...
The kids were retarded (no offense to them, great practice to put yourselves out there and take the rep) but I feel like most the blame has to go to perplexity here? I get inbounds from college kids way better spoken that at least have an actual idea beyond multiple expansion regularly so the selection is just bad
Surprised some of them have completed or recruited for top internships. I feel bad for RKLB presenter since her pitch wasn't great but she's just a freshman and its not easy to put yourself out there.
is it just me that thinks Perplexity set these kids up to fail?
I agree that they were unprepared and they should have done better but Perplexity should have done better promotion of this event. This is obviously a rushed ad campaign of Perplexity Computer.
1. I don't think students were given enough time
Perplexity announced this competition will happen on 24th March. Students had until 29th to register. Then they had 1 week to do the work - 30th March to 8th April. That's quite tight. It's entirely possible that many capable students with existing work on interesting names didn't hear about this and didn't enter. Students also have commitments and interviews - not everyone can shift priorities around to fit 80 hrs to do good work and form a varient view on an entirely new name.
Link 1Link 2
1.1 Competition says that that on "Pitch prompt [will be] released" on 30th March
We don't know what the prompt said but they might have been forced into using something sub-optimal...
1.2 Ramping up resources
Do their schools have ER access? How quickly could they have ramped up on a new name? How can you form a varient view if you don't know that consensus really is?
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Other random thoughts:
I've done stock pitch competitions before - out of 3 entries, I won twice and was runner-up in another. I did well because I was lucky to have names that got better the more you dug into them. That's not the case for nearly all businesses.
The reality is that students likely chose a name on day 1, spent 5 days searching with prompts (not real work) and submitted even though they realised some of these things don't make sense. Also, they probably spent 1 day configuring this Perplexity output and making it pretty...
Pitch was “pitch a long or short investment thesis on an NYSE or NASDAQ
listed stock with a market capitalization greater than $1B.”
Which was utter stupidity bc it had students like me waiting around to be given actual guidance when in reality the pitch couldn’t have been more vague if they tried. Agree w above that it was a rushed ad for perplexity computer and I have no idea how they forced real judges to waste their Saturday morning
I think the 1-2 week comp style can be done well. P72 runs their annual case comp which has pretty good pitches. I (tried to) compete in the perplexity comp and it was just run terrible. The prompt came out over 6 hours late, it was super vague, they emphasized using only computer for research (absolutely dumb). In the competitor slack channel somebody asked if competitors could be penalized for perplexity hallucinations and one of the admins said no which is just insane.
The biggest issue was: the comp was originally supposed to last 5 days, but perplexity decided to extend it by another 5. They received over 1400 submissions by Wednesday night, and somehow selected the best 5 submissions out of 1400 within 36 hours. So I am sure there were some quality pitches out of the 1400, even just somebody that refreshed a pitch they knew well. Perplexity just probably ran the pitches through an AI screener and grabbed 5, which obviously won’t actually select for quality. They didn’t know how to run a stock comp and it shows. Many other comps (Baly, p72, UT, UGA, UMich, Valiant, Harvard x citadel) get very quality pitches. Baly citadel and p72 likely wouldn’t be running stock comps and giving top performers interviews for years if it didn’t produce or at least surface talent, the perplexity comp just absolutely sucked.
you just gave us the answer and much needed insight… that’s why these stock pitches are terrible - particularly the part of “you can only use Perplexity…”
I honestly think it's more on Perplexity than the students. There was a misalignment with what Perplexity and therefore the students expected and what the judges were actually expecting. Perplexity wanted the students to showcase and market their AI, but the judges treated it like a legit stock pitch comp, and why wouldn't they. Their time is too precious for this shit.
And you cannot expect a serious stock pitch using only AI prompts that's just retarded. Honestly, I think the students did okay (except for the second girl, absolutely brutal btw), given the constraints. The last girl was also a freshman so fair that it was pretty shit as well.
This was on perplexity. What was on the kids however was the way they treated the judges, plain rude and disrespectful of their time, clearly all of them were unprepared but also they spoke to judges as if they were the nobodies with opinions. I mean seriously where do you get the audacity to completely dodge a straightforward question or disagree? even worse is doubling down on your view when its factually wrong then speaking over the judge.
I mean this is appalling, to get a shot like this and the chance to speak much less present your work with feedback from arguably a panel of some of the greatest investors ever is a once in a lifetime opportunity to change the trajectory of your life.
No doubt perplexity missed the mark here, some kids sent their work to me and posted their work in the slack channel and it's really quite good in comparison to what we saw here, shame we couldn't see some experienced kids with real reps at funds or competition wins compete, would be nice to see what AI in the right junior hands is able to create.
Overall this was a shitshow.
This is awesome - it’s like the perfect distilled example of AI struggles with analysis that requires context (so far i guess, who knows what’ll happen).
As an aside, I think they are batting like .250 when it comes to answering the questions asked, with 50% of the time they didnt address the question, just repeated the rehearsed speech and 25% of the time didn’t know the answer
Interesting that these are the people rejecting / gatekeeping others in their university finance clubs and access to interviews
I think the real college publics talent is completely different and didn’t compete in this pitch comp for some reason. If you watch any other college pitch comp you’ll see that this is not representative at all. Feel bad for the judges as they just got fucked by Perplexity’s shitty organizing and were forced to listen to this BS.
No, the real kids competed they just weren’t selected as finalists bc perplexity judged based on the ai output vs the actual pitch quality itself
I think the biggest problem is kids (i am a fellow one at 23) looking into companies that are hard to understand and thinking too much about themselves in the analysis. The kid who pitched the SIRI short said so many times that his generation doesn't listen to Sirius XM, so it's a bad business, but didn't actually point to the valuation. It is also laughable that he tried speaking about the debt and didn't look at the Moody's/S&P writeups--they are literally free online (the 1-2 pagers, obviously not the full writeup with their projections). I feel like Perplexity filtered for tickers that were different because I'm sure they got at least 20 mag 7 pitches.
there's no way they actually got mag7 pitches, the applicants knew they were getting filtered by perplexity product managers and there's no way they would allow their name to get attached to a dumb pitch where more ink has been spilled than on anything else
Like who the hell would put in 5 hours of effort on a NVDA pitch when the judges have jensen on speed dial
Funny one piece of feedback was "you should have asked perplexity what questions we would ask you".
Technical ability and lack of preparation aside, from what I saw, only one (maybe two) students had the EQ / self awareness to take feedback well - hopefully that's not representative.
finalists were screened by perplexity product managers with no publics experience, but surely when you know nothing about the product you at least check the candidates background to confirm they’ve done some sort of pitch work
That's the thing though - most of these finalists have definitely done pitch work before. They're all from at least semi-target schools, in the top finance clubs, have jobs lined up at reputable firms (2/5 interning at Moelis, Berkeley kid is the president of BIG and interned at ISI, allegedly going to P72 FT). Yet their pitches were god-awful, they couldn't answer basic questions about their companies and they were fairly disrespectful to literally some of the best investors in our generation.
I get that there's smart undergrad publics talent out there and that having to use shitty Perplexity AI slop was a hindrance but these kids are definitely not anomalous. Terrible look on this generation but as a result there's going to be insane opportunities for young people in investing who are halfway intelligent, can work hard and can act normally.
interning at moelis is not a good litmus test for your ability to pitch - far from it
Berkeley publics talent is horrendous. They haven't been placing well or getting returns
Will post a thread here posted in the Slack. Forensically proving this was set up by perplexity. These kids are nepos.
del
Nuked by Mods immediately - what was it?
The fact these are the kids that made it to the finals proves exactly why tech bros should stay out of finance’s business…nobody on Perplexity could see through this garbage? As long as they use their little product lmao
First dude couldnt even remember growth rate for the segment he was pitching
First guy was just terrible. Embarrassing to Michigan, but tbh a very below average school if interested in publics.
"And also what does the rest of the company grow?"
"Yeah, their biggest business is this pumps business which they sell couplers for immersion um immersion coolant for data centers. So instead of all the data centers that are transferring away from the HFC production and the air coolant, you know, with the crack and crawl systems, they're now going to those immersion systems. And this company benefits from that as well."
"So what is the growth? What has the growth been of that business? And you're you kind of think it's going to pick up now."
"Oh yeah. Um I don't want to give you a false false number, but I think it's ballpark 10 to 15%. I could just look it up, too. Um, but I I'll do that after send you an email."
Found it extremely funny how:
1. There were "extra credit" portions if you literally posted about Perplexity Computer on LinkedIn and X. The whole competition is just a way for them to promote the product, they spent 0 effort trying to make it a fairly judged/real competition where knowledgeable kids with good pitches would move on
2. For the initial video submissions they had to judge, the MAX time for your pitch was 2 minutes.... That's way too little time for anyone to properly go over a deck and a well thought-out thesis. Turns out the host of the event later said in the Slack that they were looking for people in their LITERAL PITCH to just talk about how they used Perplexity Computer and how it was able to help them throughout the competition. Not even about the thesis or the pitch itself... I guess that's how finalists moved on
Honestly funny how they got some of the greatest investors of our time to hop on this blatant advertisement
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