This transcript is generated with the help of AI and is lightly edited for clarity.
///
AMJAD
We have CEOs that finally feel unleashed, like they have Replit and they have an idea, and they don’t have to go beg someone to do it—they can, like, just vibe code it and bring into a meeting and “look what I built.” We want to get to a point where you don’t have to code at all, you should be in a creative space. A lot of coding is minutia. A lot of coding is accidental complexity. And turns out there’s actually research: doctors who play video games have much better reaction times. So if you want to do a surgery, always ask them if they’re a gamer. (laughs)
REID
Oh, not a gamer? Sorry. Where’s the gamer here? (laughs)
AMJAD
(laughs) Get the gamer.
///
REID
AI is reshaping how we work, learn and create. And nowhere is that change more tangible than in coding. That’s where today’s guest comes in. If you’ve heard of Vibe coding, you’ve heard of Amjad Masad, founder and CEO of Replit, the platform that lets anyone build software right from their browser.
ARIA
Amjad grew up in Jordan, where he taught himself to code before studying computer science and moving to the United States. He became a founding engineer at Codecademy and later led JavaScript infrastructure at Facebook. What you might not know is that he’s also an empathetic, people-focused voice in the AI space, talking about issues and philosophy that others won’t.
REID
I’ve used Replit myself and it’s clear to me this isn’t what’s next, it’s what’s happening right now. Replit makes building software as natural as writing an email, shifting the power of creation to anyone with an idea. So, yes, this is an interview about coding and the fastest-growing programming language in the world, English. But even more broadly, it’s about how AI is already forcing us to rethink how work and society function, told through the lens of one field that’s transforming before our eyes.
ARIA
And we’re thrilled to welcome to the show Amjad Masad.
REID
Amjad, I’m so glad this worked out. We’ve known each other for a number of years and part of the thing I love about doing podcasts is people that I learn from. And there’s been a whole stack of things out of our conversations. You know, mostly at the Grove, but other places as well. So welcome to Possible and so glad to have you here.
AMJAD
Thank you for having me. I’m really excited. I’ve been listening to the show recently. So happy to be here.
REID
I’d like to start with a question about, kind of, you. Right, like, Replit’s about making things. And so you might even phrase this question of how are you made? You know, tell me about your early experience playing video games and how video games kind of did your trajectory into where and then we’ll get into more depth in Replit.
AMJAD
Yeah, so, video games have been a huge part of my life. I started playing video games, I think under like Atari, maybe even before getting my first PC.
REID
I wonder how many people still know what Atari is.
AMJAD
(laughs) Yeah, maybe we have to actually describe what Atari is. But he used to admit from history, Steve Jobs worked at Atari. It was like the Silicon Valley premier company for computers. And so I was, I just like was captivated by video games. And when I first got a computer, my first idea was like, can you actually make a video game on this thing? Well, turned out it was initially very, very hard. But I remember going to every year back in Amman, Jordan, where I grew up, there’s a computer show that my father would take us to. And it’s like really big place where they have all sorts of new computers, new devices, CD-ROMs, whatever. And I bought a—I bought a CD-ROM and a collection of CDs and I went home and I didn’t know what’s in them.
AMJAD
One of them was like a fax program, whatever. I just bought a CDs. I just wanted to try one. One of them was like a visual programming experience that allowed you to build kind of game-like experiences. So one of the early games that I built was for my younger brother, five years younger than me, to teach him math. I think I was maybe 8 and he was 3 or something like that. And there’d be two boxes, it would be an equation. He’d have to like enter the right number. Like, you know, five plus blank equals six. And it’s like one. If he gets it right, he gets applause. He gets it wrong, he gets a boo. And it worked out so well. He now works at Replit (laughs), so I taught him math early on.
REID
It’s very early recruiting. (laughs)
AMJAD
Early recruiting, yes. Early recruiting worked out. The moment you give a user a program you made, it’s like horrific because they’ll put in things that you don’t expect. Like instead of one, it put an E. And it was like, “error.”
ARIA
“No edge cases, little bro.” (laughs)
AMJAD
Exactly. But then just the high of not only making something, but seeing other people getting value out of it just hooked me. And then video games’s just been through my journey since then. I got really into Counter-Strike and I used to go to these LAN gaming cafes and we would play Counter-Strike against each other. But all these cafes were kind of run by, you know, pen and paper. So you would go there, you’d pay for an hour or two, they’ll write your name and what time you came in, and they’ll watch you, which computer you’re on, and like they’ll tap you on the shoulder when there’s like, when your time’s up. And I was like, that’s so silly. Like, there’s computers all over the place. I’m gonna go write a program for it. And I was maybe 13 at the time.
AMJAD
It took me two years, but I built this like client server application to manage the entire thing with security and everything. And you could like have user accounts and have gift cards. And I started selling it and I got really, for the time, I felt like I got really rich. I got all my classmates, I took them to McDonald’s when it first opened in Jordan. And so, yeah, gaming has been like a recurring theme to kind of pull me more. And now Replit has a really fun gaming experience that you can build games with it.
REID
So, you know, starting with your younger brother. How much is like a gaming background part of kind of the recruiting target, the cultural organization target, the, the “how do you talk to people in Replit?” In addition, of course, the dynamic of how the product operates itself. But how much does the gaming background inform that whole stack of the company?
AMJAD
Yeah, it was never explicit, but I think for whatever reason, like the way we design the product, the kind of people we attract, the kind of art we put together around the product, even the product itself kind of attracts those gamer mindsets. And actually I’ve always intuited that people who played games early on had a, you know, their clock speed was higher. They could think faster, they could react faster. And turns out there’s actually research around it. Doctors who play video games have much better reaction times. So if you want to go to a surgeon, you want to do a surgery, I always ask them if they’re a gamer. (laughs)
REID
(laughs) Oh, not a gamer, sorry, where’s the gamer?
AMJAD
(laughs) Get the gamer. And then when we were designing Replit Agent, which was— is our like vibe-coding tool, codes on your behalf. I was playing this video game called Hades, and a lot of my colleagues were. I got them into it as well. And so in Hades, it is like a roguelike game where every game you start starts with a different run. And it’s actually a randomly generated game essentially. And so it was a very important mindset when designing AI experiences because AI is stochastic. And so even the language that we use inside the company, like an agent run, it’s sort of like a game run, and so on and so forth. So it’s a big part of the culture.
REID
So you’ve already described kind of your very first intensity code experiences. It’s the younger brother, it’s the manage the whole gaming land. How would you take the current kind of coding enablement? Like if your younger self had that coding enablement, how would your younger self have done this differently?
AMJAD
Yeah, you know, the interesting thing about programming—and you know this very well. Actually, I think my generation is the last generation where the tools were really a joy to use, and then it become— it became very industrialized. So when were programming, like, I started on like my real programming experience when I built that business was Visual Basic, and Visual Basic was a very creative interface. At some point, I think in the mid 2000s, like everything became this Linux terminal, even building a JavaScript app. You have to download all sorts of software and hook them together. And so at least I kind of grew up in a generation where coding was a little more creative. And then because it became such a high paying job, it kind of, I think, changed because of that.
AMJAD
And so as we’re building the product, we got a lot of criticism early on, even before AI, that Replit abstracts too much away from the environment. And we’re like, we abstract it, but it is there. Like, you can peer under the hood, and I think that’s what’s important. But if you make programming so complex at the top, people lose interest. And that’s why, you know, in CS classes in universities, but in schools as well, you can turn off a lot of people because they think it’s a— it’s this laborious IT task of like, you know, pip install and all of that stuff. Instead, what you want to do is make things. So for kids nowadays growing up, for parents encouraging their kids to code, just go on Replit and like make things. And I promise your kids will learn programming by osmosis.
AMJAD
Like, they can just like see, they’re going to get curious at some point, they run into a bug, they’re going to go Google around and ask ChatGPT, and that’s how I think the organic learning process happens.
REID
And say a little bit about how the gaming dynamic enhances that. What’s the way that the things you’ve learned from being a gamer to make that creative experience, you know, kind of come alive.
AMJAD
So there’s no game in the world that starts with a manual.
REID
Yeah.
AMJAD
Right, so if your program is starting with a manual, you’ve already sort of lost. So the first thing you want to get to—dopamine—really quickly. So with Replit, getting you the first preview, getting you the first thing that you can see that immediately, just like, hooks you, like, “oh, I immediately made something. I put in a prompt. I made something.” And then you want to create a safe environment where it is easy to go back. Right. In video games, if you think about save and load, it’s a very important part of exploring a game. You don’t want to be in a position where you just die and that’s it and you have to restart all over. So Replit, we spent a lot of time working on checkpoint and restore.
AMJAD
So every action you make in the IDE—and if I can get a little more technical—every action in the IDE is actually stored in a sort of ledger. So you make an action to the file system, to the database, to the runtime, all of that is stored in a ledger. And then anytime you feel like you got into a weird spot, you can always go back, or the agent did something you don’t like, you can always go back to the previous one. So that’s another principle. And then there’s the aspect of like sharing and having other people use your thing. So publishing should be really easy, inviting other people. So we designed the multiplayer experience to be sort of like gaming as well. And really I think the mindset goes a long way.
AMJAD
Instead of thinking of the onboarding mindset, it’s just thinking about it, of how it’s an unfolding experience of more complexity. The first experience is like sort of fractal.
REID
Yeah, Level 1, Level 2, Level 3. Gaming dynamics.
AMJAD
That’s right.
REID
What’s some of the places where you’ve been most surprised by what this unleash of early creativity has enabled?
AMJAD
Some of the medical things were really interesting. I, I—because it’s so outside of the purview—I wouldn’t have imagined it even. But, you know, there’s a woman that had like a very rare eye disease and required it to do certain exercises, and she built an app that helps her do these exercises with her eyes every day. There’s a woman in Korea, and her kid has also like a very rare disease, and she built an app to, like, manage that disease on a day-to-day basis. So medical is one that’s really fascinating. I think there’s more to do there. And then something also—so outside of my purview—is, like, go to market and, like, salespeople.
AMJAD
You know, there’s a role in these organizations that I recently learned about is RevOps. It’s those people that are managing a lot of the data flow within that go-to-market teams and building the tools and helping salespeople do their jobs. And those people tend to use a lot of SaaS software, a lot of other data sources, but they don’t have anything to connect all these things together to create applications and make their salespeople more successful. So that’s go to market. And then finally, I think one thing that’s been really, really surprising is CEOs—and maybe I get some engineers to hate us a little bit, but—CEOs that feel disempowered because they’ve delegated a lot of things. They don’t have as much input on the process.
AMJAD
So, you know, we have CEOs that finally feel unleashed, like they have Replit and they have an idea. They don’t have to go beg someone to do it. They can, like, just vibe code and bring into a meeting and “look what I built,” and “why can’t you do that in two weeks if I can do it in two days?” So that’s another interesting one.
ARIA
I mean, you’re talking so much about building, and you’re also talking about sort of, for kids, bringing them the whimsy and the creativity and the fun. And as Reid knows, I hadn’t programmed since freshman year CS. So a long time ago. My coworker Parth sent me a Replit login a few months ago, and he’s like, just play around. And literally within 20 minutes, I had built an app. And, like, because I was so excited and because I could do it right away, like, it’s just so easy to get onboarded. There’s no barriers. Whether you’re a CEO or a five-year-old or someone who’s a little rusty, you can get right in there. And I think Replit is sort of so closely associated with what might be the Silicon Valley word of the year, which is vibe coding.
ARIA
And so you’ve said that you don’t love that word. We all use that word. How would you define vibe coding? And is there—are there other words that you would prefer to use when talking about sort of the full suite of what Replit does?
AMJAD
Yeah, well, I, I’ve learned through my times in the valley is not to fight the hype boards.
ARIA
Sure, sure.
AMJAD
Like, I remember when Cloud was controversial. A lot of people hated Cloud, but it just stuck around. Right. So, so, although I have feelings about it, we kind of embrace it in many ways. So what Vibe coding is, like, it was coined by Andrej Karpathy, and he was the head of AI at Tesla at some point. And he talked about how when he’s programming—especially when he’s prototyping—he got to a point where he’s no longer looking at the code, where he’s typing in the prompts, a bunch of code comes out, and he hits tab or accept, and he just keeps going and trying to make as much progress as possible before it stalls out. He calls it “this is no longer coding” because I’m going by the vibe. Like, whether the vibes feel right, if the app is running, then it is working.
AMJAD
And so that, that’s how Vibe coding come around. Now, I think that the reason that, you know, for us might not be really fitting is because, you know, a lot—you can do coding, but a lot of times you’re not coding at all. And I think Vibe coding might scare some people away because the word coding is still in it. We want to get to a point where you don’t have to code at all. You should be in a creative space. Right? A lot of coding is minutiae. A lot of coding is accidental complexity. You know, the fact that I know that null is an object in JavaScript doesn’t add anything to my life. Right? But I had to learn all that stuff. I think there’s going to be a generation of programmers that don’t have to learn that stuff. I think that’s fine.
AMJAD
And that’s the history of programming. Like when Grace Hopper, the inventor of the compiler in the 1950s, invented the compiler, she was actually inventing a form of Vibe coding. She said, I want millions of people to experience programming because it’s such a wonderful thing and changes people’s lives, changes businesses. And I want them to program in English. And she said that way before Karpathy said that. And then the machine code people were like, pitchforks. “Program in English?! No! that’s— you know, you can’t do that! How can you understand, you know, how much data you’re putting into each register or whatever!” Right? But the history of humanity has been, “let’s abstract away the details so we can focus on the more creative things.” Now there’s always specialists.
AMJAD
There’s still people kind of looking at machine code, and there’s people doing C and there’s people doing JavaScript. And I think there are people that are going to be entirely programming in natural language.
REID
That’s a great segue to one of the questions I’ve been thinking about is like, “what is the new literacy” is the high line. Because obviously, you know, previously literacy was reading and writing and part of how we get to a massive elevation of humanity is through as broad based literacy amongst the billions of people as we possibly can. Because what enables everything enables learning, enables cultural evolution, enables patterns of thought. Now with the “no-code” code, you know, kind of like the vibing as opposed to vibe coding or the, you know, whichever, that’s a new form of literacy. So say a little bit about how you think about this new form of literacy and then also add in a little bit is like “one of the things I think is”, I think actually in fact everyone’s going to be having a coding copilot, whatever.
REID
Coding, I’m coding because just like that CEO and everyone else, it’s like that’s now part of just the way that you would also write, like write an email or anything else, as ways of doing it. So, so give a little bit of this kind of literacy and future of how everyone’s going to be navigating thinking and information spaces.
AMJAD
Well, the first thing I will say is that soft skills I think are more important than ever. So for a while in the US at least we’re always stem, stem and stem is still really important. But I think, you know, you have a lot of engineers going to work right now and they don’t really—are not very good at communication, at like talking about ideas. They’re good at writing the code, translating some of those ideas into code. But I think now the way we see our product being used by product managers, for example—product managers are some of the best vibe coders because they’re really good at taking problems and breaking them down into their constituent parts and communicating them very well to the machine—and then, like, the machine can build them.
AMJAD
So whatever we do, if it’s like a question about education in our education system, it needs to get better at—much better at, like, being able to take problems and breaking them down. There was a hype word, like, I think 10, 15 years ago called computational thinking. And, like, people were building startups around teaching people computational thinking. I think that’s still important because underlying all of this is still computational. So when you’re describing an idea to an LLM to build it, you need to be able to talk about databases, you need to be able to talk about persistence, you need to be able to talk about lists and things like that. So if I’m designing a computer course for young people, I would focus more on the abstract concept of computation as opposed to, again, null is not an object, type of thing.
REID
Part of that, to elaborate, is not only is the baseline computation about what the three of us learned—even if it goes all the way back to freshman year—which it tends to be a very deterministic, algorithmic, data structures, memory management, other kinds of things. But also, I think what’s going to happen is we’re going to bring in a set of other computational concepts. I think it’ll be probabilistic concepts.
AMJAD
Yes.
REID
Because actually most of, like, LLMs, everything else is very interesting. It’s probabilistic. I think it’ll be maybe even quantum. But a bunch of other things where compute is not just like one plus one equals two. There’s a richer sense of compute. Have you seen any of that yet with Replit, or is that still kind of in the glimmerings of what’s coming?
AMJAD
We see the problems of not understanding. We see the problems of user not understanding that it’s a probabilistic system, it’s a stochastic system. They expect results to be reproducible and all of that stuff. So 100%, like, I think the future is understanding these concepts really well. And by the way, once you understand them, you can predict how these tools might work, and you can go from one tool to another and still have the same mental model understanding of it, in the same way that, you know, when I was growing up, I really understood how computers work, and that allowed me to build, you know, all these businesses and programs and whatever. Understanding how LLMs work is going to be very important. Now, the problem is most people’s experiences with ChatGPT that is trained to sound like a friend.
AMJAD
You’re not getting raw access into the LLM in order to, like, figure out how to program it. And so we just introduced a set of AI integration. So now if you ask Replit, like, make me an app that takes a prompt, generates an image model, audio model, puts them together, or something like that, it’s so simple. You don’t have to do anything. Just putting that prompt. It will tell you, we’re going to use OpenAI for this. We’re going to use Gemini for this. We’ll take care of the billing, we’ll bill you on behalf of them. But I feel like there needs to also be a sort of UI. I don’t think we’ve invented the UI for how to mix and match these LLMs and how to program them.
AMJAD
So as much as I am a big believer in natural language based programming, I think at some point, as agents get better and they’re, like, working most of the time in the background, we need to invent the new interfaces for how to program these machines.
ARIA
Well, also, I mean, you said most people when they think of AI, they think of ChatGPT. And so when I’m talking about my friends who are not technical or not at, you know, not in Silicon Valley, like, that’s their only thought about what AI is. And so they can’t even open their minds to anything else because that’s the one experience they have. And I think one of the things we’re excited about is that with Replit and tools like it, we’re going to open up the possibility to build to so many people. And sort of a two part question. One is what is the ways that we can have more people experience AI in this positive agentic, like super agency way? And then, like, what happens when we open up these opportunities for more people to build?
AMJAD
Yeah. So Alan Kay has this essay. Alan Kay, one of the computer pioneers, has this essay called the Computer Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet. And in it he makes the case that literacy changed the world. We had democratic revolution, scientific revolution. You couldn’t imagine any of those without literacy. Now computational literacy, or people being able to use a computer to its best ability—which is being able to program a computer—will change the world in fundamental ways. I think you need an entire generation of people to grow up using these tools. Maybe I’m showing my bias because I have a history and kind of working in education. I was founding engineer at Codecademy. We taught millions of people how to code, and I’d like to help governments now.
AMJAD
We did a deal with the government, et cetera, where they want to put Vibe coding as part of their curriculum. Like, an entire generation of people actually experientially, you know, learning how you use these tools will change the world in ways we haven’t predicted just yet.
REID
One of my first public Replit experience was reproduce LinkedIn.
AMJAD
Yes, I saw that. Yeah.
REID
Yes. And it was partially because it was kind of, you know, it was a bit of a memetic hack and everything else. Part of what I think both the AI revolution does and also what Replit does is expand the zone of your imagination about what’s doable. Walk us through kind of like what’s a really—I mean, and obviously like it’s not a—I’m not looking for a manual. Because just like your gaming point, it’s like a manual. But, like, what kind of imagination should people bring with them to start learning Replit and bringing an idea to reality?
AMJAD
Such a good point. Because we still suffer. Although you don’t need an onboarding or manual, we still suffer from the blank page problem. So we see a lot of it. We talked to a lot of users that sign up to Replit and then sit there for a little bit and then leave. And I’m like, what happened? And it’s like, I just didn’t know what to type in there. Of course, in retrospect, you know, us living in tech, it’s like, you prompt? What do you mean? But of course, you know, it’s a skill. Now, before I go back to how we solve it, I think after people go through this hump, it’s an amazing experience because you become possessed. You walk around your day and you’re looking for software problems to solve. You’re like, wow, I have this new hammer.
AMJAD
And now everything kind of looks like a nail. And once that clicks, it’s pretty amazing. Now we’re doing a lot of work at the top of the funnel, figuring out what kind of educational experiences we give people. When do we tell them about it? But the first thing I would say is don’t complicate it. Like, you know, have a very simple idea, an app that you would have liked existed. Like, maybe every one of us has an idea for an app that you can’t find it in the app Store, right? Like, I want something to do this or that for my kids. Having kids is a great way because—
ARIA
Just thinking that. There’s so many things, you’re like, just organize my camp schedule.
AMJAD
Right, exactly. Or I want this, you know, educational thing. I want to be able to this fun thing with my kids and then talk to it. Like you would talk to a person. Just say, well, I have an idea. And, like, you know, just like, don’t worry about the grammars, all that. You’ll get better at prompting. But initially, just really get in. And with any kind of idea, if you want some sample ideas, I would just say, like, basic things. Like, just say, I want to build a collaborative whiteboard. And then just imagine—if you’ve done improv, improv is like a good way to do it. Just like word association. I want to collaborative whiteboard. And then, like, look around the room, and you’ll see a plant that allows me to, like, create a garden or something like that.
AMJAD
So really just be generative, and you’ll get an experience and you’ll get a feeling of it.
ARIA
Do you know, sort of who is the typical Replit user and, like, what kinds of things are they building already? Is it, oh, 80% of people are building whatever, SaaS software.
AMJAD
Yeah, yeah. I think most of it is AI software, which is why we built this recent thing. It used to be that you have to go figure out how to get an API key from OpenAI or others. But people have AI ideas. Like, they see AI and, like, a lot of people will be like, “oh, I wish ChatGPT did this one thing,” right? And then, and then they want to build AI experiences, like chatbots. Like Reid AI is a great example. Obviously, Reid AI is very advanced in that it has video and all of that. But you can build, like, you know, AMJAD AI. Like, go, like, tell Replit to, like, go look at your personal blog or paste in your notes and just say, “I want to create a chat experience that sounds like me based on these notes.”
AMJAD
And so AI is a really big one. Another one is, like, people want to build businesses. And this is, you know, as I started thinking about our business more, there’s two aspects of our business, I would say maybe three. There is the consumer aspect, which is, you know, building family stuff and building personal things. And then there’s the enterprise, which is like automating things at work, line of business applications, you know, rapid prototyping, product development inside businesses, larger businesses. And then entrepreneurs. And the way I started thinking about entrepreneurs is that everyone has domain knowledge in their head that is not monetized just yet. Similar to how, you know, Airbnb found that everyone has space in the room that’s not monetized. There are people all over the world that have niche specific problems that they’ve run into that no one else has solved.
AMJAD
I was talking to an entrepreneur on Replit the other day. His wife is a yoga teacher in rural England and she does these pop up yoga events, and most of the communication is happening over WhatsApp. Payment is really hard to do. They use PayPal, all these different things. And so he wanted to build a platform for her, but other people like her. So she doesn’t have a yoga studio that you can go to every day, but she does these events at backyards and things like that. So he’s built a platform and he has users and he has other instructors. And so every niche in our life there are people that are experts and that previously were not entrepreneurs. Because they didn’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to go pay developers to do, and now they can do it.
ARIA
I love that example because obviously there’s entrepreneurs that you’re serving that are building, you know, million dollar, billion dollar businesses that serve hundreds of thousands of customers, millions of customers. But I think that, like, solopreneur, the woman who has a yoga studio, like, I think of my mom who’s a piano teacher and she’s always trying to figure out how do I get my schedule straight, how do I get payment, how do I figure this out? And so there’s so many, like, she’s an entrepreneur, the person who runs a yoga studio, the person who has like a bakery outside their house. Like, those are the people who would never be able to afford fancy coders, a fancy website. But Replit can empower them to do so much more. So I love that.
AMJAD
And there’s something about it that makes me really excited about the world to come. As much as I love Silicon Valley, we tend to flatten the world. We just like build one size fit all. And that means, like, you know, SaaS software tends to have all these buttons and configuration just to fit every use case. But instead we’re going to explode that and decentralize it around the world. And every community might have a special business that does one specific niche thing. And that diversity, I think, is exciting.
REID
And as part of that diversity and being fun, we’d like to play for you a short clip of one of the ways people have used Replit to build something important to them.
CLIP
What if you turn Boba into a game? I prompted a basic app and sketched out some Boba. I made three different drinks. Taro, milk tea and Matcha. I added logic so the pearls fall from the sky. If you miss three bobas, you lose. But the game was way too easy. So let’s make it difficult and add some bombs and a scoreboard. I noticed the game was a bit glitchy and I wanted to try it on mobile. So I’m at my favorite cafe. I added more colors, different fonts, and harder levels.
AMJAD
This is the best thing. People can code on their phones right now, which is amazing.
REID
Exactly.
CLIP
What other features should I add?
AMJAD
That’s, that’s fantastic. I mean—
REID
And we didn’t just select it because she added it to her bio. (laughs)
AMJAD
When we first started working on the phone, people said we’re just, like, crazy because back then there was no AI and we had to build a lot of things to make coding on the phone, like, a little bit easier. But I always imagined, because back in school I remember that I had a Symbian phone. I was like, I wish I could program it under my desk. So it’s really cool to see people doing that now.
REID
So one of the things that as you dig into AI, it becomes, you know—one, the earlier question, which is how do you broaden your imagination? But also now, like, what’s, what’s a good way of optimizing? Like, for example, you know, obviously you can do things that have huge token counts and that’s kind of like… doesn’t build a good business, you know, et cetera. It might be fun as a one off thing, but that kind of thing. What is, as it were in the game dynamics, the next level of compute thinking? Because it’s like, okay, how does this work within the operational envelope of, like, AI enabling it? Being able to figure out what kind of interface elements.
AMJAD
Right.
REID
What’s some of the things you’ve seen there in terms of, you know, kind of context optimization, managing the AI token outputs, you know, helping people with that kind of compute thinking.
AMJAD
Yeah, I mean there are two aspects of this. One is strategy. You want to be able to do things that the big labs are not going to do or eat your lunch and, like, actually be able to build a good business. And then the other thing, what can LLMs do right now and what scaffolding do they need around them? Right?
AMJAD
The scaffolding part is really important because this is where you can build the value on top of the LLMs. So the way I think about our business right now, we were in the business of training models, now we use all the different commercial models, and I see our businesses to build the milieu, the environment around LLMs. If you think about LLMs as a person, you want to create the habitat for them. So we built the best habitat I think for programming, right? So when we first did this pivot from the human being of the programmer to the AI being the programmer, I took the same teams at the company and I told them now you’re no longer built for humans, you’re building for the AI. So the editor team built editing tools for the AI.
AMJAD
The cloud infrastructure teams that have built deployment tools for humans, they now build it for the AI. So I would look at any different vertical and I would think this way, you know, if you want to build, like, a financial agent, just think about what kind of environment you can build for that agent. Now I see a lot of people, for example, like, trying to put LLMs into, into Excel sheets, whatever, which I think works okay, but can you build an Excel interface for the AI, right? Like, in a way, it’s textual, it can use it in, you know, based on the “you want to hit the right distribution of the LLMs.” You can pick any vertical. And if you want to build, like, a really great business, just think about building your user—your first user is the LLM.
AMJAD
Think about building that habitat for LLM to live in, to create, like, amazing experiences.
REID
Amazing things with the product, the unlock of creativity, the unlocks of ‘What does that mean for more personalization, things that work for individuals, businesses. You know, creative thinking’ is great. So let’s talk a little bit about also kind of some of the business attributes. And, like, one of them is, you know, you just mentioned that the, that, you know, part of what you’ve done, as opposed to homegrowning your own models, you’re now using a fleet of models, but that obviously makes you somewhat dependent on them, makes you more copyable, et cetera, you know, business attributes. So one of the things that the people who listen to our podcast, a lot are entrepreneurs. You’re navigating a business challenge that they need to learn from. So how do you think about that? What are the things that you’re doing to build unique and enduring business? What are the kinds of considerations that go into that?
AMJAD
First thing I would say is user obsession. There’s a massive platform called LLMs, right? That platform is useful on its own. People can use it directly. But for you to build a very valuable business on top of what kind of value you’re creating, one is if you’re really obsessive over certain types of users. OpenAI can’t build for every type of user in the world. So pick a user that you know very well. Hopefully, it’s you. You’ve had that experience. You’re a salesperson. You were going to build the best LLM for salespeople, right? That goes into UI, UX, all of that. Now, second, and this might comment—I’ll go a little deeper on the comment about the environment around it. So, you know, I said that people using Replit should feel like they’re in a safe environment. It should feel like anything is reversible.
AMJAD
Now, that turns out to be a huge technical challenge. Now, you could easily kind of hack around it or say, we’ll just restart the app or do whatever. But what we did is we built a transactional file system that allows undo. Like we have proprietary file system that we spent two years building that every action is like an immutable part of a ledger that anything can be rolled back and rolled forward. That ends up being like a time travel system. And now we’re finding more use cases for it. For example, one way to make models better and more performant is by doing sampling. Because models are stochastic. Every time you run the model, you might get better results, you might get worse results. And if there’s a way to verify whether the result is good or bad, you can sample from the model.
AMJAD
So what we do is, because the system is immutable, has this characteristics of being very cheap to fork. So you can take a file system, you can fork it 100 times, run the same prompt with different parameters on these different forks, and then pick the best one, do it repeatedly. Obviously that costs quite a bit of money, but for the advanced users, they’re willing to pay it. They, they will get the extra money. So do hard technical things on top of the models in the environment where the models are sitting, right? You want to build technical advantage. It doesn’t have to be in the model itself because that costs billions of dollars. There are huge industries around it. You don’t want to be training models, at least not yet, when you’re building—initially building business.
AMJAD
But you can do a lot of other hard technical challenges on top of it to make the models work a lot better. That’s the second thing. Third is reaching scale. Once you reach scale, you actually have negotiation advantages. Like you can negotiate really large discounts with providers similar to cloud, and you can pit them against each other and so on and so forth. So, and venture capital is an amazing system to give you that initial money that allows you to get to scale quickly. And then the business, you know, and then you can enter more of an optimization phase of the business.
ARIA
So you have this great metaphor which is cathedrals built from bazaars. And so you wanted to describe the tension between open source and closed product design. And the bazaar is this messy, collaborative, maybe fun, bright. And that’s where open source lives. And then you have the cathedral and that is the top down. That’s, that’s sort of Apple, where they live. And you said that you want to build cathedrals from bazaars. Tell us more about what that means to you.
AMJAD
Yeah, so I think that comes from Eric Raymond or some of the original, like, Linux hackers—cathedrals versus bazaars. And there was a huge discussion early on in the world of software. And so I gave a twist on it, on cathedrals made of bazaar. Now in the early 2010s, when this idea of “no code” kind of emerged, there were a lot of different approaches. There are amazing businesses built there, obviously. You know, Zapier, Airtable, Notion. You can all think of them as no-code builders. Now our approach—which for a while didn’t work until AI kind of really made it work—the amazing hyper competitive, diverse landscape of open source, of people building all these open source packages and components, what’s happening there, it’s bizarre, it’s messy, but it’s very innovative
AMJAD
Can you build a facade on top of all of this that makes it feel as good as a user experience as, say, in Notion? It wasn’t obvious that you can do that, but the kind of abstractions you have to build on top of that and you can still hook into the latest and greatest. Like when a new package comes on open source, Replit has it on day one because we built all this abstraction to be able to go get the packages and install them and run them on the system. And so we’re riding a huge wave. We’re riding multiple waves. LLM’s getting better. We’re also riding open source; [it’s] getting better. New programming language comes out; we can run it on day one.
AMJAD
And that required a lot of investments upfront, and there are a lot of competitors that are not doing this, and it might be short term easier for them to do. But I know how the landscape programming works. Things will shift. Like the other day we saw a new JSON format called Tune that is more efficient. It’s, I think, token optimized format that is more efficient for LLMs. And so again, like, programming will continue to improve, and we want to be the platform where you can program anything with LLMs.
REID
Let’s think a little bit also about kind of how the future work is going to evolve. You know, most people’s experience right now is with chatbots. So they put in something, they get out something to put in something, get out something. So they’re kind of directing the work in some ways, but it’s kind of iteratively from what they’re doing. So how do you imagine this trend, Replit, others, in this kind of “everyone working” with, you know, kind of that power of code because it’s got—you need a combination of that individual creativity, imagination, you know, broaden imagination drive, but also standardization for work processes. It’s one of the reasons why the classic industrializations, “I filled this form and then I hand it from you” and you know, as he was doing it.
REID
So I’m certain that you’ve been thinking about what this means for the future of corporate work. What are some of the observations you might share?
AMJAD
Yeah, when I first came to the corporate world, one thing that I found extremely depressing is how atomized and siloed people are. So, you know, over time, you know, with capitalism sort of emerging, you have the original, I think Adam Smith, like, how do you make a pencil? Right? Like someone make an eraser. And so people become sort of cogs in a machine. And I don’t think that is conducive to the human spirit. Like, I think humans are fundamentally creative. I think anytime we assume the shape of a machine, I think people are actually not happy in their lives. I’m not a Marxist, but I’ve read some Marx, and Marx has the theory of alienation and the theory—I think Marx was right on a lot of the critique of capitalism. Maybe not the solutions. (laughs)
REID
(laughs) Definitely not the solutions.
AMJAD
One of his critiques is alienation, is that you don’t see the fruits of your work. You, you build one part of one part of one part of a larger supply chain of things, right? And that doesn’t make people proud of—like I said when I was a kid, when I built this entire thing and my brother used it, that’s amazing. That’s, I think, what a—what being human is about. And so I think now we’re at an—there’s an opportunity in the workplace to a lot of that standardization stuff to be taken care by agents, by work process automation and all that stuff. And what’s left for people… Yes, we’ll have broad swim lanes. Like I’m generally in design, but I can code. I can write a, you know, PRD using ChatGPT or whatever. I can even have a marketing idea.
AMJAD
And I can, like, use all the tools and, like, hey, I built, like, this marketing package. And that to me is a lot more exciting. So we have, for example, one of our customers, large enterprise. One person had an idea—it’s a real estate marketplace where they connect real estate buyers with real estate agents—had an idea on how to optimize that algorithm and couldn’t get engineering resources. Now previously it was just that. The idea is that, although he’s in the business, he understands that he talks to real estate agents all the time. Instead he went to Replit. He built a new routing algorithm that drove tens of millions of dollars, if not a hundred million dollars to the business. And that person got promoted again and again and again. And now he’s sitting with the board members guiding their AI strategy.
AMJAD
Entrepreneurship, I think, in my opinion, is not just about building businesses. You can be an activist entrepreneur, you can be humanitarian entrepreneur, you can be an entrepreneur inside a large business, and I promise you, your life will be a lot more interesting, exciting. You’ll meet a lot more exciting people. You’ll have a better reputation. You’ll have a halo around you. So my hope for the future of corporate work, but humanity in general, is that as the boring things, the automated things actually taking care of our machines, we’re left to be more entrepreneurial and more creative, obviously.
REID
Obviously, totally hope that’s the case. That goes back to my very first book, The Startup of You. So it’s like it’s a definite strong—because it’s like it’s not that we all have to start businesses, but that kind of creativity, entrepreneurship, the engagement with it, the exact passion that you had with your brother. One micro thing that I think is an important thing for people to focus on because it’s part of the general lack of context awareness that current agents have.
AMJAD
Yeah.
REID
What do you see as the kind of the longest unsupervised work that agents can currently do?
AMJAD
I think it’s more possible than our tools allow it to be. So I think state of the art LLMs—especially Gemini—has done a great job at a million contexts, million token context, but others have 200,000 or somewhere there. You know, the easy thing is, like, to fit all history inside the context, but that’s not feasible. There are few components. If you put them together, then you can run agents a lot longer. One component is verification. The work needs to be verified. It’s a form of supervision. If the AI agent is going on a path and doesn’t have feedback from the environment, from the work, from the human for someone, then we’ll very likely stray off the path and do something really—like if you make one mistake, it’ll just compound over time. So Replit Agent 3 came out in September.
AMJAD
We now boot up a browser for the agent, have the agent use it to test the application for you, and we have another agent that’s adversarial. That’s, like, reviewing the code and giving you feedback. And because of that, we went from—agent one ran for two minutes unsupervised. After that it didn’t work very well. Agent two is 20 minutes. Agent three, you know, 200 minutes. We’re seeing 200 minute runs that are actually really useful. There’s, there’s still mistakes and all of that. Now we’ve introduced an autonomy selector inside Replit. So depending on your risk appetite, you can go all the way high autonomy. And some people run it for 10 hours. Now I don’t recommend it to everyone. Now if you have a lot of disposable income, you should still do it. (laughs)
AMJAD
But, you know, we have medium autonomy and it can run for, you know, 100 minutes. High autonomy, it can run for 200, 300 minutes. So I, I think it’s possible. In terms of the context. So the verification is very important. So you pass from one agent to another. And so one agent does the unit of work, another agent gets a prompt and says test the app. You don’t have to give it the entire thing. So it’s a multi agent system. And then after the testing is done, pass back. But you don’t pass it back using all the existing context, you kind of summarize and give the next—It’s almost like passing the baton to the next one. Again, ideally we put everything in the agent, but I’m not sure we’re going to be there anytime soon.
ARIA
So I think this sort of relates back to what we were saying, how the difference between programmers and non programmers is collapsing because if everyone has a Replit Agent, you don’t need to be a programmer. And I think so many people are talking about—and you said yourself you worked at Codecademy—the last 15, 20 years we were telling everyone, like, parents, teach your kids to program. Learning to code is the future. You recently said you don’t think people should learn how to code. And so I’m all for the democratization of this for people who are not coders now to be able to use Replit to do amazing things. Yet at least right now I feel like the people who are most adept at using AI for anything are actually the people who have learned how to code.
AMJAD
Yeah.
ARIA
So I would say to you, do you think we’re at a moment in time or will that continue to be true? You’re a parent. Will you want your kid to learn how to code in the traditional sense or that’s going to be a skill that’s not important soon?
AMJAD
Look, similar to what Grace Hopper said, you know, 75 years ago. She said, “specialists will exist, but we want this technology to be democratized.” So my advice would apply to 99% of people. Like, you know, I don’t think you—most people who want to make things with software and computers don’t need to learn how to code. It’s going to be a huge cost on them. It’s going to take a lot of time. But instead just jump into making things. And if it’s your cup of tea, if you’re looking at the agent traces and you’re seeing the code and you’re like, okay, I’d like to learn what it’s doing, then go learn it. I think it’ll take you further, for sure, this time along.
AMJAD
But if you believe in AI, as I do, and we’re going to continue to make progress on AI agents and all the labs—billions of dollars, perhaps trillions of dollars—are going towards optimizing code specifically, then we’re going to get to a point where it’s, again, specialists exist. We need them. If we’re sending people to the moon, I don’t want them to be on a vibe coded computer. But for the vast majority of applications, I think vibe coders will be able to make them. Now to the question about my kids. I’ve struggled with this a little bit. I’ve never wanted to admit that there’s a temperament to coding, but there is. There is a certain temperament to coding. Do my kids have that temperament? I’m not entirely sure.
REID
What do you think is the temperament that a coder needs?
AMJAD
Basic things, like the ability to sit in front of the computer for 12 hours.
ARIA
Sure.
AMJAD
I think coding is actually bad on your health. (laughs) And if you’re okay with that, like, you really—I mean, I don’t know any programmer that didn’t go through periods of life where they’re like really spending a lot of time in that, in front of the computer with Diet coke or whatever and like, just like coding all the time and like learning every aspect of it. Do you enjoy that? A lot of people don’t. And that’s fine. Like, again, diversity. Like that people come with all sorts of temperaments. And some people want visual things, want to interact with visual things. Some people want to work with other people all the time. But if you’re someone who is comfortable, like I was and I am. Like, totally, like, my life is not the same. Like, I have an insane ability to be alone.
AMJAD
Like, I can be alone for a year, but, but other people can’t. And, you know, that’s fine. We should be okay with people of different temperaments.
ARIA
That is actually really illustrative to me because I love math, I love logic, I loved AP computer science in high school. But I’m an extrovert. I couldn’t, I can’t do that. I can’t sit with code for 12 hours. Okay, so people like me are okay in the future (laughs)
REID
Other soft skills are important. (laughs)
ARIA
(laughs) Exactly. Soft skills are important. Well, so I feel like we’re in this time where some of us see Replit and see AI and we’re like, oh my God, it is so empowering. We’re helping small business owners, we’re helping young people. But when you actually look at the numbers, it’s like more Americans are nervous about AI or scared about AI than are excited about it. And so if you’re talking to someone like that, like what do you say to them? Like what’s your sort of go to line to be like no, this is why we have excitement coming forward and in the future, even though we understand that there are risks.
AMJAD
I think there’s like a various distribution of intent. Some people just want to get famous by writing, like, sci fi sounding, like, you know—just to be concrete about it, like, I don’t think anything that Eliezer Yudkowsky, for example, Eliezer Yudkowsky, big AI, maybe he doesn’t describe himself as a doomer. I would say AI Doomer, (he) wrote a lot about how AI could end the world and kill literally everyone. Like, I can’t—like, you know, every time you try to read some of those, like there’s insane loops in logic and really it doesn’t compute for me like how that actually ends up happening. And I think it’s like a fundamental misunderstanding of the world. Anyone who’s tried to build a business understands there are bottlenecks that are not just intelligence, regulatory bottlenecks, there are all sorts of things.
AMJAD
So without getting too deep into that, I think some of it we just have to counter intellectually, and the AI optimists have to be out there arguing with these people. I don’t have time to do that. I did that for a little bit. But it’s important. I know they’re out there in D.C. kind of scaring politicians and all of that. And I think that’s really bad because, you know, we can get to a point where, you know, AI is regulated in a way that allow us—that doesn’t allow the US to be competitive. And so there’s aspect of it that I think we really need to battle. There are aspects of it that I think is on the creative art film front. Like, you know, everyone thinks about Skynet and Terminator and things like that.
AMJAD
But who’s producing, like, really optimistic visions about sci fi/human. I love reading mid century sci fi because it’s a lot more optimistic. Something happened in our culture and we don’t have really good sci fi anymore. So that’s another part. Now third part, now this is the more pragmatic. I’m worried about my job. I’m worried about my kids.
ARIA
These are just everyday concerns that people have that aren’t sort of fantastical, that maybe are sort of based in reality.
AMJAD
I worry about it for my kids a lot. Like, the idea of it’s really hard to go out in the world and make friends and have people like you. It’s really easy to have an AI like you. I mean, and humans tend to take the, you know, shortest, the easiest path. And, like, I worry about this AI friend thing becoming a real problem. My eternal optimist is always like, well, look, you know, we had a period of history where, you know, eating junk food was acceptable and, like—But I think there’s like societal antibodies. I think healthy societies have antibodies around. You know, smoking. You know, smoking is like, you know, when I grew up in Jordan, everyone smoked. I smoked. I came to the US, none of my friends smoked. And I just felt like an outcast and I stopped smoking.
AMJAD
I think society is like, you know—
ARIA
Truly one of the greatest public health battles of our time. And to your point, a lot of it was we solved it with culture.
AMJAD
Yes, culture. I think religion used to play a role as well. And I don’t know whether it will in the future or not, but, like, government is such a blunt instrument. You can’t, you can’t do everything. So I think it’s leadership. It is culture. It is incumbent on all of us to just say, like, no, ChatGPT is not your friend. Like, it’s friendly and you can use it for therapy. You can use it for all sorts of things, and those are fraud as well. But, like, if someone is saying to you, it’s like, “I’m spending all my time talking to ChatGPT,” it’s like, “Hey, man, that’s not really healthy,” you know? So I think a lot of it is about culture and society.
REID
Well, I do think that, like, there’s, like, two points that I think are very important. One is, in the friends point, completely agree. Part of the reason why, like, with, you know, Inflection’s Pi, you know, you kind of engage as you’re my best friend, it’s like, no, no. I’m your companion. I’m here to help you. Have you talked to your friend Namjad recently? You know, what’s life with him? Or you catch up. And I think that, that helping—especially for young people where they might be encountering difficulty—and so I think it’s like tying you back into community, tying you back into connecting with other human beings. Because, by the way, part of actual real friendship is not just saying, “oh, Amjad, you’re so great, Oh Amjad. I just, I was waiting, for all year to talk to you.”
REID
It’s like, no, it’s that thing of, like, where I might show up thinking, oh, I’ve had a bad day, I want to talk to Amjad about it. And then I hear about your day. I’m like, oh, we’re talking about Amjad’s day.
AMJAD
Right, right.
REID
That is actually part of how you evolve, part of how you elevate, part of how you learn compassion, wisdom, empathy. And it’s really important. And that’s part of the reason I also share with you. It’s not impossible to make AI friends, but it’s not what’s happening right now. And it’s not, you know, anything that is, that is, that is illusory that way is actually in fact destructive.
AMJAD
That’s why it’s causing psychosis and things like that. Like, you know, there’s high profile cases where people have psychotic breaks because they have, like, delusions of grandeur and things like that. And ChatGPT is, like, reinforcing that, and that’s, like, really bad. And I think it’s incumbent on the labs as well to, like, start a program pushback into these machines as well. Right?
REID
Yeah. There was this funny thing that a friend of mine showed me, which is by only listening to, you know, AI agents, you end up in a desert by yourself, drinking a glass of milk, thinking the whole world’s out to get you. So it’s like, that’s the wrong long path. Now back to the jobs thing. People ideally love to say, I’d like to have an elevation of my life, but I’d like to have no strain. And unfortunately, those aren’t the times we’re in. We’re in the similar times to the industrial revolution. Now there’s a cognitive industrial revolution and so many jobs will change. Right? Like if you said, my job is I’m a form filler for digital marketing, like, yeah, that’s not really gonna be—You better start thinking about other things. Now, AI can help you with that.
REID
Like, okay, well, what can I learn? What can AI help me do? Et cetera. What we have to embrace is that kind of that entrepreneurial mindset. People say, well, I don’t want to, I just want to keep doing what I’m doing. It’s like, well, so did the horse groomer back when there were lots of horses and that was all the transport. That’s not the way it works, right? And by the way, if you try to lock that in, you’re essentially going to be stealing your children’s future because the other society will move ahead and then yours will now have put them in a very disadvantaged position.
REID
So the important thing, almost like that Adam Smith specialization thing you were talking about, the important thing is say, look, I understand that it can be painful for me, but I’m going to own this change because I’m helping my children, my community’s children, the future generations, and by the way, own it as an adventure. Yes, sometimes you don’t choose to go on the adventure, but sometimes you just find yourself on it and own it as the adventure. And how do you shape it and make that happen? And so in this vein, one of the things that companies are starting to look for is what is AI native talent? What kind of pointers, heuristics, thoughts, lenses might you offer to people to say, here’s how you can think about becoming AI native talent. Here’s what companies should look for in hiring AI native talent. Because, you know, you live in AI nativity.
AMJAD
On the previous point, briefly—I say version that you said very articulately—advice to people on the YouTube comments that I unfortunately sometimes read—hey, be nice—(laughs) People say It’s easy for you to say, you’re rich, right? And I think that Silicon Valley has a responsibility to do something. I don’t know if it is some kind of, like, non profit where we have, like, you know, retraining and upskilling, or maybe it’s a government thing, I’m not entirely sure. But I think there’s a responsibility to do that because it is hard for people, like people who’ve done marketing form filing for 30 years. It is hard to break out of that. But I think there are potential to create AI education programs. Now on the question of how to become AI native, we were at a CEO event earlier and even the CEOs are struggling with themselves.
AMJAD
And really amazing CEOs built, you know, $100 billion plus companies and they’re like, I take a week every few months to kind of learn AI, but I’m constantly behind. And what I said, if you’re a programmer and have technical ability, go really deep. Go read the papers. Go build a fundamental understanding of how LLMs work. Maybe even build an LLM yourself. Like Karpathy has, like, this really nice GitHub repo that you can go explore and try to train your own LLM. Now this is conditional on the fact that you have some technical background. If you don’t, I would say using tools like Replit to build LLM experiences. So kind of think about ideas for how LLMs could improve your job and go try your hand at building them. That’s one. Two. Just train your algorithms and feeds to give you AI news.
AMJAD
One of the first things that I did when I just, like, committed our company to AI is, like, I went and followed all these, like, different AI people. My YouTube is all AI content. There’s a wealth of information out there and so many of us consume content passively. You can be consuming information and learning. And this is—And by the way, TikTok can be certainly destructive. I see it as a skill to actually, like, train my TikTok algorithm. So, like, they try to bait me with, like, you know, different content and just scroll really fast. And I pitched this to Elon and I think he responded to me once. So I said, like, you should be able to prompt your feed. I want only AI content today to be able to consume. But, like, this passive consumption that we all do, you can fill it with useful information.
ARIA
And so this next question, Reid, I do want you to weigh in on it, but you and Replit recently passed 100 million ARR. Congratulations. Huge milestone. And you guys have been building for a long time, but right now in the Valley, there’s so many companies that are getting to both enormous valuations but also enormous revenue very quickly. So my question for you is, what do you think about this time where it seems like everyone has to get to insane revenue numbers immediately. Is this good? Is that true? And, like, what. What is sort of the new kind of era we’re in sort of building in an AI era.
59:35
Speaker 1
So one of the reasons, there are a few reasons that happened that, that made it so that these revenue ramps are really high. One obvious one is the ROI is really clear. When we make an application for someone and then we put a paywall, like, they really like the application they wanted, they’re much more likely to pay. But also just like credit card penetration across the world has, like, reached certain heights, Internet stability and connectivity. There’s all these confluence of factors that got us to a point where you can grow revenue fast. That being said, like, AI revenue can go up as easy as it goes down. You know, we’ve seen businesses, I think Jasper is now, like, an enterprise business, but at some point they had, like, a really amazing consumer business that they lost all of it to ChatGPT, right?
AMJAD
Like, so if you’re not an AI business, if you’re a SaaS business and your investors like, oh, why don’t you have AI revenue? Well, I mean the other thing is, like, you know, easy come, easy go, you know? So, and we spent, like, eight, nine years building all this infrastructure to get to a point where the company took off. But we’re also still very paranoid. Like Google just released another Vibe coding thing today and they’re a close partner of ours and obviously they’re going to do it. But so many companies are interested in the Vibe coding space right now. And so it’s very competitive. And so if you can build a business that is lasting, that grows slower and compounds over time, I think there’s still a lot of value in it.
AMJAD
Now the question is, like, are there a lot of investors that want to put a lot of capital into that? Well, maybe you don’t need a lot of capital anymore. And so yes, a lot of the capital is going to AI, but, like, you can build SaaS businesses today that are cash flowing, that can grow over time.
ARIA
What do you think your moat is? Is it your brand, is it your existing consumers? Like, how do you make sure that you’re not, you know, subject to that?
AMJAD
I think there are less moats these days than before. I mean one of my favorite books is Seven Powers by Hamilton Helmer, and it just talks about there’s seven moats—network effects, economies of scale, so on. I think that we have a technology lead in that we built all this technology for so many years. We built it hyper competitive, amazing team that will continue to produce these technology advancements. We launch a new breakthrough version of agent every few months. Elon said this a long time ago. The only moat is continued innovation and rapid progress. And I think that’s true in AI today. I think at some point when you reach certain scales, there are certain decisions that you can make that really create structural moats. We’re not there yet, but I think, you know, I would say the big labs achieved economies of scale, obviously, right?
AMJAD
And that’s a moat for them now. It’s very competitive between, like, the five of them, but I think it is a game that will play over time. So, just a CEO just constantly thinking about what are the degrees of freedom that we have in order to position our business in a way to create lasting advantage.
REID
Your earlier question was, like, almost like the classic blitzscaling question.
REID
And part of the reason why, now, trying to remember how many years ago I wrote Blitzscaling, but it was kind of the lessons from Silicon Valley and China about how the technology companies of the future are built. If anything, it’s 5x, 10x true as when I did it. It’s like, it’s the trend of where it’s kind of going to. Now that doesn’t mean that everyone has to go to, you know, amazing revenue, 10x employee growth in, like, 6 months, 12 months, et cetera. The thing in Blitzscaling, which you know, Chris and I wrote about was, it depends a lot on what the nature of the market is, what the nature of competition is, etc. And if you’re going up against blitzscalers, it’s very hard to succeed without also blitzscaling, because the blitzscaling will set the market. It may blow up, but it will set the market. If it blows up, it’ll probably blow you up with the market.
AMJAD
Like the scooter market or—
REID
Yeah, exactly. And it doesn’t matter that you were kind of, you know, minding your operating margins and you know, it just gets swamped. And so you have to look at what’s happening in the market. You have to look at what happened with competition. There are definitely opportunities where you can build more like—you know, like one of the ones from the Greylock portfolios, Roblox, where, like, for many years kind of like, yeah, out in the wilderness and then boom, all of a sudden it’s the amazing new thing and you can build towards that and that kind of phase can come. So you have to kind of make an evaluation of where you’re at. Now, if you’re going kind of where the zeitgeist is, where everyone currently recognizes it, you’d better be moving pretty fast because everybody is recognizing it.
REID
And so that’s a little bit of kind of the, the reason, like with Manas AI, we could say, hey, we can actually take some time to think about it exactly and build iteratively to what the AI pieces are for doing for the drug discovery. Because most of the people don’t realize what are the things you need to do. And so you can take more time to build that. You don’t have to go, you know, like it’s basically do extreme uncertainty risks trying to capture a market. So there’s a nuanced answer there, but there’s a number of markets where that speed and that speed revenue scale—By the way, the speed of revenue scale is not just revenue for you, not just what comes in as capital. It also comes into what happens with hiring employees and a bunch of other things.
REID
And there’s a whole set of compounding things that get to that. So it’s—You have to make a kind of strategic decision. By the way, you may have to change your strategic decision as you’re going.
AMJAD
One thing on that is that what’s interesting is once you hit an inflection point, then other people pay attention and now it’s blitzscaling because they notice the revenue and they want to go after it.
ARIA
So they see you being successful and all of a sudden that becomes the hot industry. So you have to change your stance.
REID
And that’s the other thing—
AMJAD
And that’s what happened with us, right? Like, you know, so, like, you know, Replit Agent was kind of the first vibe coding thing that anyone could use, and suddenly everyone poured into it.
REID
And this is one of the things that people don’t understand about the blitzscaling side, which is it’s not that you start blitzscaling from day one and it’s not that you blitzscale forever. By the way, if you don’t end blitzscaling at some point, I think that the seven powers, because I, you know, great book, great call out, maintain. I also think the configurations of how business models come together, we’ll still actually get to different kinds of moats. Now we have speculation of what those moats are. Are the moats only scale now? Are the moats brand? Are the moats network effects, you know, are the moats data now? Like, it’ll be in different combinations of different things in terms—
AMJAD
But you have to be okay with the uncertainty of it in the moment.
REID
Yes, and you’re going to be iterating through it and you should be thinking about what those moats are. And you can’t go, well, we, you know, because Silicon Valley went for maybe even two decades and I was one of the architects of this, you know, gaga over network effects as the moat. And by the way, network effects still very valuable. But they’re changing and the shape and how they establish and what happens and so forth. And that’s that, that reinvention, like people tend to think, oh, the most central thing is you reinvent your product or service. And by the way, of course it’s really important, by the way, it’s also reinvent your go to market. Oh and by the way, it’s also reinvent your business model. Oh and by the way, it’s also reinvent what the moats are behind this.
REID
And it’s all of these kind of different things. Like Google search doesn’t have network effects from its search engine, it has scale effects. But its AdWords is where the network effects. And then what it does is it buys distribution from Apple and other people through that is the way that it—And so how do these things kind of come together.
ARIA
And actually sort of per our conversation in the car, Amjad, one of the things I’ve really appreciated is that your willingness to speak out about things that matter in our society, whether it’s Gaza, human rights, etc and it can be difficult for people to speak out, especially when they’re CEOs of companies. You’re fighting for talent. Why do you think it’s important for people in the space, specifically in technology to speak out about human rights and things like that?
AMJAD
I, I don’t do it because of this. I do it because of principles and because, you know, we also have a family history and I, I understand what people in Gaza are going through right now and I really care about that. But I also think that, you know, the corporate world, the market has changed in that when you stand for something, I think there is actually—there’s an effect where maybe you might be—certain people don’t want to work with you or don’t want to invest in you, but there are other people that might be attracted to that, right?
AMJAD
So I think the, you know, people are no longer sort of attracted to these, you know, bland corporate brands, and the faces behind these companies, I mean thanks to LinkedIn and things like that, are becoming more important than the brands themselves. And as humans we care about things, and if you’re, if you just have no opinions and you’re just—no one has no opinions, right? And so I think a lot of people come to work at Replit because they know I care about these things. And people want to invest in Replit because they know we stand for certain things. And I think Silicon Valley is no longer the underdog as well. Like Silicon Valley is now the mainstream. People look to us for leadership, but they also, when we do certain things that are not conducive to society, they’re gonna come and try to burn us at the stake. And so it’s important for us to kind of take that, the role that we’re playing seriously.
REID
Yeah, I completely agree. And I think actually part of how you think of it, think of humanity first. And that’s part of the principles. Alleviate suffering, economic enablement. Part of what I love about Replit is economic enablement across the entire world, then society, what’s the organization on which we live together, and then industry. By the way, industry is super important. It’s been my entire life. But thinking about those, even when you’re an industry leader, you should not abandon the fact that you’re also humanist and you’re also a nervous society.
AMJAD
That’s right, absolutely.
REID
On that basis of frame, what are some of the really important things we should do as leaders in Silicon Valley and the tech industry to make sure that technology is spreading compassion too? One of the problems with some of the social networks is it’s rage and engagement, click baiting and so on. But yet that is not who we aspire to become as individuals in society. So what do we do to grow empathy, to grow compassion? What, what are some of the ideas that you might have kicked around on this?
AMJAD
One thing I try to do on our business is align our business model with something that allows us to be good in the world. And so, you know, Replit benefits when people’s lives improves through, you know, the software that they’re building or they’re creating or the business they’re creating or how they’re improving their business. And so I’ve always been really inspired by businesses that create, like, a game theoretic win/win/win situation, right? Like when you think about platforms like, you know, Shopify is an amazing business where the company’s winning, the entrepreneurs are winning, and consumers are winning. Not every business is like that. There’s a lot of businesses where consumers are losing or someone’s getting exploited. But by the way, the best businesses are the win/win/win businesses, right?
AMJAD
So I think one of the, you know, speaking of moats and things like that, one of the early strategic decisions that you can make is what is the business model? And try to actually kind of write down, it’s usually, you know, different constituents, usually the company, the users, maybe the developers, whatever kind of business that you have, or what situations or what business models allow you to create that joint winning.
REID
So now we’re moving to our rapid fire. That doesn’t mean you have to answer rapid fire. These are just questions we ask all of our guests. Is there a movie, song or book that fills you with optimism for the future?
AMJAD
You know, a book that I think is, is amazing, that it pulls together everything that I love. I really love learning about theory of consciousness, theory of mind, the philosophy of that. I like computers and math and physics and all of that, and, like, the human aspect to human stories. I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter is an amazing book. It’s partly about his wife dying and their kids and how his personal story in that. It’s also a book about him struggling with the concept of soul and kind of trying to understand it in a more secular way and mathematical way. It goes through vignettes about Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, or what that says about how consciousness is potentially a loop.
AMJAD
And it’s an amazing book that tells you that really everything is interconnected, and we can’t be technical or innovators without actually caring about all the other things that happens in our world.
ARIA
What is the question that you wish people would ask you more often?
AMJAD
I mean, this question is really fascinating. I mean, I, I don’t get to talk a lot about, you know, literary or philosophical inspiration, so that’s a great one.
REID
Yeah, well, and The Strange Loop is awesome. So where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry, you know, tech, you know, kind of AI vibe coding applications, that inspires you.
AMJAD
You know, I—I, this is very fresh on my mind, but I took a demo, a tour of a plane, and I was so surprised that they got to full automation. This is a TBM960, a turboprop plane, and it—everything’s automated, including landing, and there’s not one neural network in it. And so it’s surprising because in Silicon Valley, we think that we sort of tapped out on classical deterministic systems in terms of what you can do in terms of automation. But actually there are industries that are just slogging along. They just don’t want to use neural networks. It’s too probabilistic. So that was really fascinating, and there’s a lot more to go, even in the classical systems and the traditional technology that we have.
ARIA
So always our final question. Can you leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible if everything goes humanity’s way in the next 15 years? And what’s the first step to get there?
AMJAD
The thing I think a lot about, and this is driven by my history, my family, is that anyone who has ideas should potentially be wealthy. Anyone who has ideas and can follow through and has the grit and has the moral upstanding and can do the right things, should be able. I think that’s the true promise of capitalism. And I think it’s very easy to imagine the world where it’s like certain corporates that are controlling everything and the business models are not aligned with humanity in such a way that it’s like it’s all based on spying on us and selling us the worst things that we desire. But instead in a world where the tools create the decentralized power ability to generate wealth for everyone in the world, the entire world is sort of interconnected.
AMJAD
I think people waking up in the morning and feeling like tap dancing to work, like Jeff Bezos. Like most 99 of people don’t tap dance to work, right?
AMJAD
Like so, including me. Like, I love my job a lot, but I hate email. Like, why hasn’t anyone solved that, right? Like the technology is there, but, like, we, you know, the tools have not—are not there just yet. So rewarding work, work that is more human, allows us to, to relate with one another more creatively and less siloing and less politics at work, but also the ability for anyone to generate ideas and build businesses. That’s something I’d be really excited about.
ARIA
Amen.
REID
Yeah, Amjad, it’s a great pleasure. We could have gone on for hours. Thanks for being here.
AMJAD
Thank you for having me.
REID
Possible is produced by Palette Media. It’s hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Thanasi Dilos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmore, Yimu Xiu, Trent Barboza, and Tafadzwa Nemarundwe.
ARIA
Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Parth Patil and Ben Relles. And a big thanks to Ben Casnocha and the Village Global team, Phillip Smith and Action House, Lorenzo Davis and Will Whitley at Statik, and Kaitlan Norrod and the team at Replit.