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The a16z Show
Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI
01:39:18
Jack Neel speaks with Amjad Masad, CEO at Replit, about how AI is making it easier than ever to build and ship software without a technical background. They discuss Replit's rise from a browser-based coding tool to a platform generating $250 million in annual revenue, why Masad turned down a $1 billion acquisition offer, and his case for why AI represents empowerment rather than existential risk. This episode originally aired on The Jack Neel Podcast.
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- [00:00]
Amjad Massad
The world was built by people that are not much smarter than you. Your job is to find the way of doing things that's most aligned where the world is headed. I think it's the easiest time to get rich in the history of capitalism, but certainly in the history of Internet.
- [00:15]
Jack Neal
Growing up in Jordan, today's guest was fascinated by programming but couldn't afford a computer, which inspired him to make coding accessible for everyone.
- [00:23]
Amjad Massad
You can cast almost any problem in life as a coding problem, and I thought, okay, I'm gonna hack into school and change my grades.
- [00:30]
Jack Neal
But when his company hit a billion doll valuation, he refused every offer to sell, doubling down on his mission to turn the tech industry from a monopoly into a democracy. How much were you offered to sell your company for?
- [00:42]
Amjad Massad
When we're very small, not a lot of people. I think six people were offered a billion dollars.
- [00:47]
Jack Neal
And why'd you say no?
- [00:48]
Amjad Massad
Because I think I can build a trillion dollar company.
- [00:50]
Jack Neal
In this episode, we'll give his exact blueprint to build a million dollar app in minutes. Explore why the most powerful tech companies tried to kill his vision, and question whether AI will enslave us or empower everyone to escape the rat race. Why do you think AI isn't going to kill us all?
- [01:08]
A16Z Podcast Narrator
For most of the Internet era, building software required learning to code. That bottleneck shaped who got funded, who got hired, and who got rich. Replit was built to break it. In 2011, Amjad Massad posted a simple idea to Hacker News. Run any programming language in your browser, no installation required. That became REPL DOT. Today, REPLIT's AI agent produces a working app in under an hour, and the company's revenue went from $2.5 million to $250 million in just over a year. When a competitor offered to buy the company for $1 billion at six employees, Massad said no because he thinks he can build a trillion dollar one. His argument? Not having a coding background is becoming an advantage. The people who win now are the ones closest to the problem, not the ones who know the syntax. In this conversation previously aired on the Jack Neal podcast, Jack Neal speaks with Amjad Massad, CEO@repl.
- [02:15]
Jack Neal
Amjad Massahad, welcome to the Jackknow Podcast. Thank you, Amjad. You built a billion dollar company that makes apps just by talking to AI. If you wanted to build a million dollar app in five minutes, how would you do?
- [02:32]
Amjad Massad
Depends on my context. I would look around for problems to solve. So no matter where you are in life, you're in college, you're at work, There are people dealing with problems all around you. One of my favorite recent startups that came out of Replit is a finance guy. And he was on a plane and next to him was sitting at an investment banker, just spending a lot of time building spreadsheets and building decks for clients. And he had an idea to automate a big part of that. And he told him, I have an app for you. And he didn't have an app. Can I come pitch it to you tomorrow? He said, yeah, I mean, if you can solve this problem, if you can make it faster for us to get to our clients. He went home and he's been using Replit just personally, just for fun websites, things like that. He spent the night working on the app, next day, went and pitch it, left there with half a million dollars of letter of intent and did this a few more times with other bankers. And he's just raising at a $35 million valuation right now. So it's more than 1 million. It's 35. That because he already has a lot of contracts right out the door. So it's very contextual. We have a educator that's like a more of a story from two years ago because the company's pretty big right now, half a billion dollars worth. But he's a teacher. During COVID I think he just left his school and started playing around with AI, playing around with replit, going in and trying his hand at coding with AI. And because he knows the problem space deeply, he was able to build a lot of tools for teachers, for grading students, for creating assignments with AI. And education is one of the hardest markets. But AI has this amazing ability to sell itself and it quickly grew the company to 10 million annual revenue, 20 million annual revenue, and now it's like half a billion dollars worth company. But there are a lot of smaller ones too. The other day I was on, on Twitter, saw this guy who created an app quickly with with replit to generate brands, kits and brand design material, logos, all of that. You enter your product name, you go through a simple flow. It's called Anymark Co. And you pay, I think 40 bucks or something like that, and you get an entire brand kit generated with AI. And so I see these stories every day and it's typically someone who has some domain knowledge in a certain thing. You know, they realize there's a problem around them maybe. You know, I see all my friends trying to start companies, but brands are really hard to build. So let me automate that. So just like, look around you in the world and just see what, what are the problems that people are dealing with that they're willing to pay for it. And it's so easy to try things. And because it's so easy and cheap to try things, you can iterate really quickly and arrive at an idea. I think it's the easiest time to get rich online. I think it's the easiest time to get rich in the history of capitalism, but certainly in the history of Internet.
- [06:00]
Jack Neal
So if I'm someone with zero dev coding experience, what problem did you guys solve here? And like what are people missing about where AI's at? Like you can kind of just speak apps into existence at this point. Like how much editing of it do you have to do? Like how much of this really is
- [06:18]
Amjad Massad
just, it's done month over month, it's improving. I will say at this point we have an automated software engineer that is as good as a mid level software engineer. It would get a job at Facebook or Google. Like it is really good. Like you don't have to look at the code at all. Actually, you know, initially replr started as like, let's make coding easier. So there was still coding in the interface. Increasingly we're just removing the coding features because you don't need to code anymore. Actually, even professional software engineers are not coding anymore. So code is almost fully automated. I mean it depends on the specialty and the language and there's some nuance to it. But for the most part people are not coding anymore. It's become a more higher level thing. So engineers still do some kind of engineering, systems engineering, whatever. But if you're a product builder, all you have to care about is who the customer is, what the problem you're solving is, what's your core differentiator, what do you understand about the world that other people don't? And can you put that into an app? So if you go to our applet right now there's a prompt box like ChatGPT. You type in your idea like, I want to create, you know, brand kit generator. It'll go through a planning process. It'll tell you, here's what I understand you want to build. You can go back and forth on the plan and then you tell it to go. It'll work for 10 minutes, it'll get you a minimum viable product. Obviously that's probably not ready to ship yet. So you're going to iterate on it, you're going to ask it for adjustments and there's a preview there and there's the chat box there and you're Going back and forth. So you're telling it something, it's going, writing the code, fixing the bugs, testing it even. We gave it, we gave it a browser. So it can start a browser, it can look at the app itself, it can test, can go to the Internet, fetch information, it can integrate other AI models like image generation and things like that. And you go through this process and I think within an hour or two, most people have an app that they're ready to put in front of a user. It depends on the idea, obviously, but for a lot of ideas, you can get something done that you can share with a friend or a target user and get feedback from them. You don't need any development experience, you need grit and you need to be like a fast learner. You need to be like, I would say if you're a good gamer, if you can jump in a game and figure it out really quickly, you're really good at this. But even if you're not a good gamer, you'll figure it out eventually. But people who grew up with technology who are like fast learners are now like the best at this. I will venture to say that not having a coding experience is becoming an advantage because coders get lost in the details. Product people, people who are focused on solving a problem, on making money, they're going to be focused on marketing, they're going to be focused on user interface, they're going to be focused on all the right things. So at some point I think this year it's going to flip. And I think not having a coding background is going to be more advantageous for the entrepreneur. Now when the company grows and you're getting a lot of revenue coming in, at some point you'll hire engineers just to make sure the security and the infrastructure is scaling and replica continues to help with that as well. But getting to market and generating a revenue, you should be able to do it in a matter of days.
- [09:57]
Jack Neal
So I guess just to zoom in a little bit and give people practical steps. As someone with multibillion dollar company, if you wanted to build an app that could get a million downloads in six months, like what are the five major steps you need?
- [10:18]
Amjad Massad
If you could distill it a unique idea, an idea that is not like exact copy of something out there, because that thing exists, you need a spin on that idea that's interesting.
- [10:35]
Jack Neal
How do you find ideas?
- [10:36]
Amjad Massad
I think that's actually the core skill in the AI age. I think if you want to work on a skill, it's going to be about idea generation because the cost of implementation of those ideas is going down rapidly. It's going to go to zero at some point. So the bottleneck becomes this like, how fast can you generate ideas? And that skill is about one perception. Like just looking around you in the world and seeing what's happening. What are the trends? Are you plugged in on social media? What are people talking about? What is like the most interesting thing that's happening and is there a market for that? Maybe we'll get to that later on. But we were discussing this idea of looks maxing app, right? I mean it's your idea and I think it's a great idea because it's something in the ether right now. People are discussing, people are interested in it. Can you build an app that gives you feedback on, on, on your looks maxing progress? That's, that's really great. I saw an app the other day that judges like, gives you, allows you to track your, your hairline, allows you to like, you know, gives you interventions to make in terms of like what medications to take and things like that. And, and unless you take like a scan of your head and like, obviously it's past time for me, but if you're dealing with that early on, it can help you track your progress. So that's very important. Like, I think a lot of young people now, your, your generation younger care a lot more about this than say my generation.
- [12:16]
Jack Neal
Right. I'd say that's the biggest, the big trend of the past few months.
- [12:20]
Amjad Massad
So being plugged in is super important. And so, you know, a lot of the vices that my, like older generations think are vices might actually become advantages. So if you're brain rotted, you know, terminally online person, that might be advantage because you know what's happening in the world. If you're someone who's also just like adhd, really interested in novelty, want to try a lot of different things. That's actually an advantage because AI
- [12:58]
Jack Neal
really
- [12:59]
Amjad Massad
benefits people who can try a lot of things really quickly. Obviously you need to get things to completion. You need to have some grit at some point once you got some validation. But trying a lot of ideas is important. So back to your question. I don't feel like I answered. How do you generate ideas? It's practice, it's a skill, like generate ideas, put them out there. I really like to use Twitter. I used to do that a lot where I talk about ideas. I kind of share them and see what the feedback early on, but now just make the app and see what the feedback is and Learn from that and go from there and think about ideas all the time. I think it's a muscle, like just continuously thinking about, okay, what if I built this, what would happen? And so there's all these different ways to be a better idea generator.
- [13:52]
Jack Neal
I do want to ask you some ideas you have specifically, but maybe we'll get on that later in the interview. So step by step process. First, one, get a good idea.
- [14:01]
Amjad Massad
Get a good idea typically tied to a trend. Second, get. Break that, break that idea down as much as you can into like say a paragraph with a bunch of bullets. Like the app, the looks maxing app should, you know, have a camera with an AI integrated and it should be able to take a photo of my face on my phone or my laptop. And it should kind of draw, I'm just making this up. It should draw lines like, get specific. Like imagine the user interface and get specific about that. You don't have to write more than a paragraph because what's going to happen? Then it'll give you the initial implementation and you'll react to that and see if it got it right or wrong. And then you can like sort of nudge it in different directions.
- [14:54]
Jack Neal
You're looking for your key use case.
- [14:56]
Amjad Massad
Yes, yes. You're looking for the main use case. Don't overcomplicate it. Don't like, add a bunch of features. You're just like, what is the core experience and how can you get really quickly to value users? Consumers these days just don't have a lot of attention span. So they're going to give your app like five minutes and so figure out what's the user journey to get to like a five minute value. Aha moment. And then once you, once you do that, you got your mvp. Go try it on someone. Go try it on a, a classmate, on a friend.
- [15:35]
Jack Neal
Before that though. So let's just assume for the sake of your company is replit use replit or tool like replit. And then how do you build it? Like, how simple is it?
- [15:45]
Amjad Massad
Yeah, yeah, you just put in the prompt. You hit start building. It'll start the working environment. It'll work for 10 minutes. It'll show you a preview. You can, if you want to use it on your phone, you can open that preview and the phone will give you a QR code and then test the app. If the app is not exactly what you wanted, most likely it's not. The first iteration is not, go type to the AI, tell it exactly what it got wrong. It's like you misunderstood this and don't try to overcomplicate, just talk to it. Talk to it like you would talk to a person. Just be as specific as you can. So you misunderstood this. I meant the AI should work in this or this other way and give it feedback, go through that iteration cycle a few times and then go test the app. It's really that simple. Like you know, you just need to be able to explain ideas.
- [16:46]
Jack Neal
Well, I think that's super helpful. I don't think the marketing aspect is as important in this particular discussion, but because good products market themselves well, I
- [16:58]
Amjad Massad
would say, I would say it is important. Like yeah, good products are very important, especially if you're creating something totally novel. But figuring out how to promote this is going to be important. The easiest places to do it is find communities like on Reddit and other communities. Like if you have looks maxing app, there's probably a looksmaxing Reddit just like posted, there's try to get some early users through there, go to the various discords at some point. So that's like the early users, that's how to get like a hundred users at some point. You need to scale that. And that's where Instagram and TikTok comes into play. If you're someone who's good at that, you have a superpower. If you're someone who's able to like create these short clips and talk about products, you have a superpower. But if you're not, you can still go reach out to influencers and you can cut a deal with them. You can get them, you know, part of the subscription, part of the revenue. You can, you can just pay them and, and, and then, and then you go from there. But I would say that's like the
- [18:11]
Jack Neal
first few weeks that's really interesting about the communities. That's also a way to find ideas in general is just scour Reddit, scour TikTok hashtags and see like what's a community of people. Let's say example looks maxing or let's say example like a specific sports team or like sports gambling, something like that. Not promoting gambling but you would look at the community, look at the problems they have and then kind of get ideas for what you could build. It's really fascinating.
- [18:39]
Amjad Massad
That's exactly right. I mean the original, when I posted replit on Hacker News that's how I got my first users. Hacker News was still kind of is a very popular place for programmers, technical people in general. Before replit became more possible for non technical people to use it was More of a technical product.
- [19:00]
Jack Neal
Do you remember your headline that you used?
- [19:03]
Amjad Massad
Yeah, I said try Python, JavaScript, all these different programming language in your browser without installing anything, right. And so it's like gets to the core value proposition at the time to write any piece of code. You had to download insane amount of software. Maybe you try to take a coding class in college. It's really ridiculous how much you have to deal with in terms of just like writing any kind of code. And so I was like, why shouldn't I be able to code in my browser? Like my browser, you know, I could do my email, I can write my docs there, I should be able to code there. And I also like scouring these forums. I'd already seen interest in that and those like small examples that weren't really working of people trying to build that. So it was like if I got it working, I can really wow these people and just like there's a demo effect, right? Like if you're building something novel, like if you can make your looks maxing app like a truly cool experience, then people would just be attracted to that as well and they're going to promote it and tell their friends about it. So in terms of the headline, yeah, just like what is the core value proposition?
- [20:20]
Jack Neal
Right.
- [20:21]
Amjad Massad
And for me at the time was it's about quitting in the browser.
- [20:25]
Jack Neal
That's so fascinating about what you've built because something I discussed with a lot of young entrepreneurs that built these multimillion dollar AI apps or startups was like this concept of making short form content before you even build out your MVP or like your minimum viable product and then just seeing if there's interest in it. But with your company and where AI is at, just build it instantly and you don't really have to worry about the moat of oh, this thing does work, let's build it really fast before someone steals it.
- [20:59]
Amjad Massad
It really changed. It really changed. Like even the past few months that advice of it's like called the Lean Startup advice. I think started in mid 2000s. There's a book called Lean Startups and the idea is that it was following from this Toyota way of building cars
- [21:23]
Jack Neal
where
- [21:25]
Amjad Massad
they would cars used to be manufactured in a heavy industrial way where they kind of know exactly what they're going to build and like they'll, you know, they have all the schematics and they'll like create the factory pipelines and it's very inflexible. They can't react to demand, they can't react to changes, they can't react to like recalls or customer feedback. And so Toyota kind of developed a way of like, called lean manufacturing. And so it was like borrowed from that as like how can you de risk startups and like make it more iterative? But we're at such a different place, like execution is no longer bottleneck. If you have an idea, just like make the app and then go, go, go figure out the demand because it's a lot easier than just like talking about it.
- [22:13]
Jack Neal
I do want to ask, as far as your mission goes and what you've built today, what's the most important part or moment of your childhood to help us understand who you are and what you're working on?
- [22:32]
Amjad Massad
I grew up in Jordan, kind of lower middle class family. We didn't have a lot of money. I was lucky enough to get good education. But also the hard thing about it is because I was in a class with kids that had a lot more money than us. And so I saw their PlayStations, their Air Jordans, their like all the cool stuff they had that it didn't have and that really fucking sucked. And I, I was always motivated to like make money. A lot of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs be like, oh, it's all about connecting the world or whatever. Yes, I, I care about all of that stuff. But my journey starts with I love programming, I've always loved programming and understand like how computers work. But at the same time I was also always motivated to make money with computers. And I felt like we're at a moment in time where you can build businesses really quickly. Ever since I found the Internet in the 90s, I wanted to build websites to make money. And there was a bunch of ideas, there's a bunch of examples of people making money really quickly. There was this idea of a million dollar homepage where someone was like selling pixels and you can like be Microsoft, you can buy like 10 pixels and write Microsoft's logo, whatever, a hundred pixels. And so there was this media even at the time it was like, okay, you can make money online. And I was going to the Internet cafe because we don't have Internet at home. So I would like, you know, scrap whatever money we had, find in couches or whatever to, to go pay for like an hour of Internet. And I would sit there and like look at different websites, look at what people are doing games, different ways I could like build something that could like make money. And then the main idea was sitting right under my nose, which is the Internet cafe itself. I was like, well, Internet cafes make a lot of money, but they don't use software to manage their business like their business is. You go in there, you pay, you know, a buck or two. You get an hour on the computer. And when you're sitting on the computer, they have to keep track of you. They're like, every hour, they look at the clock and they're like, okay, your time is up. They tap you on the shoulder. Also, when you're on the computer, you can, like, install a virus. You can, like, delete files. It could do whatever. So it was like, okay, what if I build something that secures the system, makes it so that there's, like, usernames and passwords, makes it that so that Internet cafes need less employees, because once you run out of time, it'll just, like, boot you out. So I built this Internet cafe management system and. Cause I knew it. And this is the. I keep coming back to this idea of the way to build businesses, to build things, you know, about either trends you're plugged in or problems around you in the world. So I was 12 or 13, and I spent, like, you know, a year or two trying to build this software for Internet cafes and then went out and sold it and made quite a bit of money from it. At the time, McDonald's was just opening in. In Jordan, and I took my entire class to McDonald's, and no one had McDonald's at the time.
- [25:53]
Jack Neal
So how much money did you make from.
- [25:55]
Amjad Massad
I made, like, like 500 bucks.
- [25:58]
Jack Neal
Okay.
- [25:59]
Amjad Massad
Which was amazing for me. You know, salaries in Jordan are. Are not nowhere near the US and so it's like, you know, so, yeah, I felt rich and it felt good to make money, and it felt even better to make money from something that I love doing. And later on, as I found more ways to make money with computers and programming, I bought an xbox. I was so happy because I'm able to buy things that my friend's parents buy for them, but I'm able to buy it myself even as a teenager. So it felt empowering to make your own money. But as part of that, like, a lot of the painful part was, like, the tools. I was talented programmer, and I was fighting with the tools all the time. And you have an idea, you have the right market, you have the right product idea and skills to build that, but you're still dealing with a lot of the problems with the tools. So I was always motivated to make better programming and coding tools in order for me to build easier, more startups, more companies, more products, and for other people as well. And I thought that the Internet could be this great wealth equalizer and generator. There's no reason that Silicon Valley captured most of the wealth on the Internet because it is the most distributed, decentralized, accessible technology in the world. I think part of the reason is because the tools are hard. And maybe there's like a intentional part that the tools are harder than they should be. And so like the guiding mission for replit became how do you make coding tools so easy that you don't even need to be a coder to use them? And what kind of world does that create in terms of accessibility to wealth generation, wealth creation?
- [28:08]
Jack Neal
I want to hone in on that point. How much were you offered to sell your company for
- [28:14]
Amjad Massad
at some point? I was offered when we're very small, not a lot of people. I think six people were offered a billion dollars.
- [28:22]
Jack Neal
And why'd you say no?
- [28:25]
Amjad Massad
Because I think I can build a trillion dollar company.
- [28:31]
Jack Neal
Do you think Silicon Valley or whoever was offering, do you think the people offering to pay a billion dollars for your company were just going to kill it?
- [28:42]
Amjad Massad
Yeah, it was a competitor. And implicit in any acquisition offer is a threat. If you don't sell, we're going to build something to compete with you because they're interested in the product, they're interested in the market. You have to make a bet on yourself that if I'm not going to sell, they're going to go buy some other company or they're going to go build it themselves and they're going to compete with me. And do I first have the self belief that I can go against the juggernauts, go against the big incumbents and win? Ultimately for me, it came down to what I would regret more. Would I regret not selling? Or would I regret more not achieving my and the company's potential? And I thought that would have been a bigger regret. Yes, I would be rich, but I would be yet another rich asshole. There's a lot of them. But building something meaningful that creates meaning not just in your life, but in other people's lives. Whether it's like the team we built, the customers we serve, the entrepreneurs that we're creating, the worldview, we're putting out the mission, we're putting out the influence that comes from that. I thought it would be a loss not to try.
- [30:12]
Jack Neal
Do you think big tech in general is threatened by your mission?
- [30:17]
Amjad Massad
Yes. You know, what's the saying first like they, you know, they laugh at you, then they try to fight you, then they join you or something like that. They're saying it like that. Where at the, like they're joining us right now. Like they initially it was like, oh, replet us this toy. You know, kids use it. Yeah, we have a lot of kids using it. We're proud of it. It's so easy that kids use it. Yeah. And it's like, why is that a negative thing?
- [30:43]
Jack Neal
It's probably a good sign.
- [30:44]
Amjad Massad
It's a good sign. Yeah. And, and then, and then, and then when they felt threatened by it, they would like try to buy it or, or like try to compete on the margins or try to like you know, compete in the press or pr, but not really on the, on the product because they still don't believe in it, but they want to counter the narrative that actually programming can be coding or making software can be something anyone could do. And finally when we've, we've, we've grown so much like our revenue like a hundred X, then they paid attention and they're like, okay, this is a real thing and people want it and now they're building actual competing products.
- [31:29]
Jack Neal
Do you see what you're doing as, I mean essentially you see it as the democratization of building software. Do you think we'll see something similar with tech that we saw with social media where, or with media in general where the barrier to entry was so low that instead of, I mean there's two versions of this. There's the big media like cnn, Fox, ABC to influencers and then there's influencers to micro influencers and there's tons of people making 10k a month with social media. Do you think that's where we're moving in tech where? I don't know, someone like my parents in Kentucky can build an app, make a nice couple thousand dollars a month and then that's just their job.
- [32:18]
Amjad Massad
Yeah, I think that's an age old thing that's been happening with technology since the dawn of time. So think about literacy during medieval Europe like reading and writing was, was regulated was only like priests were able to do it and priests were like controlling the population right before the, you know, Protestant Reformation. And so there's like the priesthood control over the ability to read and write. And then we had the Gutenberg printing press and that was decentralized. The ability to print books and have books available to the population. People started learning how to read and then learning how to wr. And that caused massive changes in the world and like leading up to revolutions and different religions and democracies and all of that happening because of reading like none of the world. That, that, that's, that we have today would not have happened without mass literacy. Right. We have the big media companies, but you can have a substack and there are people making millions of dollars on substack, there are people making 10k on substack, there are people making 2k on substack. And so you know, Instagram is the same thing. You had to be a professional photographer at some point and only the professional photographers could make some money. And then later on anyone could like take photos and make money. Influencers is the same thing really. Like every skill and every profession goes through this where it's usually an elite minority and they're gatekeeping, they don't want other people to do it. And certainly programmers in big tech felt threatened by replace is because they, they make a lot of money. Like we were in this like really strange world over the past, you know, 15, 20 years where if you go to computer science school for four years you're guaranteed like the best life and the best and you know, the upper echelon of income and, and if you get a job at Google, you're set for life and you know, in four or five years you're pulling a couple million dollars. And it's certainly threatening when that skill can be democratized and anyone can do it, anyone can build it. It's also threatening to VCs and the way Silicon Valley works because Silicon Valley needed to build all this infrastructure in order to and raise all this capital in order to fund companies, needed a lot of capital to build the software and market it and all of that. But with social media, with tools like Replit, you don't need as much capital. And so I think every piece of technology in history has had this decentralizing and democratizing effect. And every time there's like a pushback from some group of people that are benefiting from the gatekeeping. But then the dam breaks and we live in a fundamentally new world, typically a much better world. And I think it's true of media. Like the democratization of media has been really good. I think that I, you know, I get my news more from social media than I do and it has its challenges obviously, but it's much better than getting propaganda.
- [35:41]
Jack Neal
That's very true. That's super interesting comparison about the Gutenberg Press with how religions evolved over time because I mean it really was, I mean it would be ignorant of me to say it was the big three, but I would say they were much more dominant and there wasn't so many branches of, I'm trying to think of the Dating, but it's a very apt comparison. Andrea, what do you think everyone is getting wrong about AI and jobs?
- [36:15]
Amjad Massad
AI is seen as a replacement as opposed to a tool that can be wielded by the most creative, by the most ambitious people who want to make a fundamental change in their lives, in their communities and their companies. Obviously, AI can automate a lot of work, but to automate that work, someone needs to build that system. Someone needs to be observant enough to look around their company or look around their school, whatever community they exist in. Say we're doing a lot of BS things. There's a lot of, yeah, bullshit work. There's actually a book called Bullshit Work and it's like by David Graeber and it talks about how like most of the economy is kind of bullshit work. I mean, if you think about it, you know, post industrial revolution we, we created a world where machines were doing a lot but not enough and humans had to step in and act like machines. And so if you look at any office job, most of the time they're doing things that are easily automatable. They're putting data entry in Excel sheets, they're repeating the same process time and time again and they know it's automatable or they're sending the same sort of email, or they're doing the same kind of marketing. And you could say, okay, you know, we can get an AI system to like replace that person, but there's going to be more work to be done, not less because you know, you get more revenue, get more users, you're going to have different challenges, different operational thing you should do. So it's a hamster wheel. But we can go much faster now. And the way to look at AI is and jobs is how can I upgrade my workforce for them to become generalist business people that can wield AI for the benefit of our customers and our on our bottom line. And we see it in a lot of our enterprise customers where the most ambitious people are creating billions of dollars of value of their company. So there's every, every company out there, every tech company for sure. There are people that are closest to the customer that feel that they have ideas that could make more revenue for the business. But they're often blocked by engineering. Engineering don't think the idea is worth it or they have their own roadmap, they don't care about it. And now a lot of them are bringing in replit to work. They're building that idea and they're making the money for their company. And then they're getting promoted and then they're giving more power and a lot of them go out and hire more people like them. I'm going to build a team of vibe quarters that are going to go around the company and find all the inefficiencies and go solve them. So we have a new role of this like generalist automator. And they're less parochial than the engineer. The engineer is like really focused on systems and engineering. They're not as focused on one particular domain like sales and marketing. They can hold the context of the entire business in their head and they can find ways to increase efficiency or add revenue to the business.
- [39:45]
Jack Neal
What's the most obvious AI automation that people should be doing today?
- [39:52]
Amjad Massad
In the context of companies, we see a lot of just like copy pasting of data. Like you have data in Salesforce and you want to get it into an Excel sheet somewhere or you want to get it into some data lake or something like that. And we see a lot of data entry work that is like just copy pasting because they don't know how to write code. Engineers are busy, it is busy. So just like anytime you find yourself copy pasting things from one place to another and you do it regularly like it's an obvious automation. Go to Repl and just say go pull the data from, from Salesforce and put it in Snowflake, right? So that's in the context of companies, I think there's a lot of data movement that happens manually and that really blows my mind. And even if there's like some process in, in between that you're doing some transformation in the data that you're doing, you can also have the AI do that. So for example, like every company has this person that's called like the deal desk person. Every, you know, B2B company especially, and the deal desk person is responsible for generating quotes to give like order forms to give salespeople. So the salespeople put in the deal content in Salesforce, the deal desk person pulls it from Salesforce, puts it in a PDF and then like post it to like Slack or some other chat group. They talk about it, they send it to the client, the client gives them feedback, they go, they regenerate that in a lot of companies end up hiring a lot of people doing just that. Like, you know, there's also entire complicated software systems that people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for called quote configurators, right? So we hired this deal desk person and she automated all of that. Every time we get a new deal In a CRM, there's an AI that generates the order form directly, posts it. In Slack, the salespeople take it like, you know, they send it to the client, they get feedback in Slack, they give the bot feedback on the thing, it kind of updates it and they send it back. So a lot of that used to be manual copy pasting things and putting that from Excel to Word to CRM. So anyone working, listening to this, working at a company, if you want to get a promotion, just look around you and see what people are copy pasting data around. And you could build a bot, or you could build an AI or can build a piece of software that can automate that. In personal lives, there's a lot of things that, like if you're someone who's interested in health and do a lot of tracking of health, like I like to track my sleep and at some point it has some sleep issues and my doctor gave me like a sheet to, to track like, you know, what I ate, what medications I took, if any, if I exercised and then what time I slept, what time I woke up, any sleep interruptions. And like I would wake up in the morning and like feel the sheet. And most of the time lazy. I'm like, I don't want to do it. I forget whatever. I'm like, you know, I can automate this. I took a photo of that sheet, put in a replit, you can just give repl a screenshot and just say like, make it into an app, made it on an app. And now we've gotten a little easier to like put in the, you know, all this information. But then I was like, I still forget what I ate or what medications I've took or, you know, whatever I've done that day. So I was like, why don't, why can't I like take photos of these things as I'm doing them instead of like forgetting and like doing it later. So throughout the day I can like take photos of, of whatever I ate or, or have done and then, and then that, that AI will like generate the content for, for the next morning. And then I'm like, okay, but like I'm putting my time to go to sleep and what time I woke up and then interruptions manually. But like my mattress, I use eight sleep for example, or you can have a wearable, have all that information. So I just told the replica, just pull that information from there, ask me for some login information. I did that. So now the entire process is seamless and automated and finally I can commit to it. So I think in people's lives, there's so many things that are manual and they get lazy and they don't want to do. And one thing I would say about the age of AI, and this is back to this idea of how do you generate ideas if you're lazy? That's gonna be a virtue. And I, I don't mean it in a, in a way that you don't wanna complete your work or, but like, if you're naturally just like, don't wanna do manual work, you're gonna go about your life and you're gonna see all these places that are just like, boring and you should be doing manually and just like, go build an app for that and maybe that becomes a consumer app that I, I, you could like the app that I'm building for myself. I could potentially put it on the app Store at some point because it is probably useful for other people who wanna track their sleep.
- [44:56]
Jack Neal
You've heard of Kalii, right?
- [44:58]
Amjad Massad
No. What is that really?
- [45:00]
Jack Neal
Oh, that's. We had the founder on. I mean, they do like, I think he made like 25 million from it in high school. Or maybe that was the valuation. It was just take a photo of food and tracks calories automatically. It just sounds like you built that for yourself. As a personal.
- [45:14]
Amjad Massad
These things are easy. And it's not just that. It is, you know, it does sleep and does some, some of the other stuff.
- [45:22]
Jack Neal
Yeah, I was like, that sounds more integrated. That's really interesting, huh? That's a cool space to think about, like, all the wearable tech and like, all the things that are tracking data and building apps that combine all these things in general. But what do you think separates someone who's bad at prompting AI from someone who's really good at it?
- [45:44]
Amjad Massad
You know, I kind of hate the word prompting AI because AI researchers spend a lot of time figuring out how to make AI respond to human queries. I would say what separates those people are the people who are good communicators. You need to be good communicator in general. Like prompting humans versus prompting AI. Are you someone who can manage an intern well? If you're someone who can manage an intern well, you can manage an AI well. Think about an AI as an employee or an internal instead of thinking about, oh, how do I talk its language? No, just communicate. Well, just take an idea, break it down to its parts. If its parts are still complicated, break them down further. It's all about breaking down things into individual components and then giving precise feedback and giving as much Context and feedback as possible. Taking screenshots, taking images. If you want to get really good at just communication in general, I would suggest, like, doing public speaking.
- [46:49]
Jack Neal
Right.
- [46:50]
Amjad Massad
I had a actually stage fright growing up and I would still do it because I just don't like to be held back by my fears. But when I first came to the US and I felt like I want to be able to start startups and be on podcasts, be a leader, thought that I need to get past that. And so I thought, like, what is the hardest place I could put myself in? Like, throw myself in the fire to get past that fear? So, so deprogram the fear by desensitization. Right. It's a popular, like, psychology method, I think, you know, we're in such a soft world right now that, like, psychiatrists, psychologists don't treat things like that. But it's always been the case, like, if you're afraid of water, if your kid is afraid of water, throw them in the fucking water. Let him swim. That's how my dad did it. So I took up improv classes in New York. And improv is if. If you're bad at public speaking or thinking on your feet, you're going to do really bad at it. And then I took up storytelling classes and I did a storytelling show where I told a story about how I hacked into my school to change my grades. And so I'll have to hear that
- [48:18]
Jack Neal
story, but continue your thought.
- [48:21]
Amjad Massad
So over time, I just got better at talking to people and trying to communicate complex ideas, simply because I think that's what really good communication is about. And if you're good at that, then you're good at talking to AI and prompting it.
- [48:36]
Jack Neal
My last girlfriend, she was like, jack, I'm such a bad computer kid. Like, how do I, like, work on this? I was, like, just going to improv class. She didn't really love it, but like I said, I think it helped her a bit understand, like, the basic techniques. Yeah, I think it's super helpful, but it is. So you hacked into your school to change your grades as a kid?
- [48:54]
Amjad Massad
Yeah, so I was going to university in Jordan, Princess of my university for technology. Good, good computer science school. But, you know, I. I don't know how to pay attention to things that I don't like. Like if I'm taking like a history class or econ class and I feel like whatever they're teaching me is not going to be useful for me in life, or it's just not interesting the way they teach it, I just can't it's like incredibly painful for me to just sit there and just listen. So I would skip class and I would like go work on my programming, go, you know, take a job. I always had jobs during school. And then I would study enough to, to just pass. And I almost always pass in some cases in like math and computer science. I would like, get good grades. The problem in my school is in a lot of schools around the world is that if you, they count your attendance. So if you missed class too many times in a row, you get, you get disqualified. And so I, I, I felt like it was kind of deep injustice, especially for, for people like me who are like, creative, want to be doing things, they want to be sitting in class, which I think is like a very outdated way of, of learning in general. I think we're going to move past it, especially with AI. So all my friends were graduating. I'm like five years in, almost six years in school. School should have been three, four years. And I feel like life is passing me by. I had all these big dreams and ambitions. I want to build companies, make a lot of money, all of that. But I was like, stuck. And so I thought I'd use my skills to get over this problem. You can cast almost any problem, life as a coding problem. And I thought, okay, I'm gonna hack into school and, and change my grades from, from when they fail me for attendance to like a passing grade. So I spent two, three weeks in, in my parents home in, in the basement trying to like break into the systems there. I would like, work on like scripts and do network scans and all that. And I implemented polyphasic sleeping. Do you know that?
- [51:30]
Jack Neal
That sounds familiar. What is that?
- [51:32]
Amjad Massad
Michelangelo. You know, the inventor artists. It's like one of the most highest output human beings in history probably ever to come, would sleep 15 minutes every four hours because he was working nonstop.
- [51:47]
Jack Neal
Tesla did a similar thing.
- [51:49]
Amjad Massad
I remember Tesla's probably, yeah, did that as well. And so I was like, yeah, I want to be able to like, you know, work a lot and really hard and be really efficient. So I, I did that as well. So for two weeks, just madness, just going and like trying to, you know, map out of the system and figure all that out. So I finally found a vulnerability, a way to, to get into, to, to the system. But I was worried about maybe I didn't have the right systems. And so I had a neighbor who was going to the same school as me. I was like, hey, can, you know, I have this, this, this thing that I can Change grades. Can I test it on you? And so we, I, I, we, we tested, we changed the grades, but actually, turns out that I, I was doing that on a replica database, not on the master database. So when he went to kind of pull his grades, this is transcripts. It wasn't, it wasn't reflected there. So I spent another two weeks and then found a way out of the actual system. And then, and then I was confident that I could, like, change my grades and actually get to graduate. And I still felt like it was the, the just thing to do. It was a fair thing to do, right. So I changed my grades. I. Calculus and other things that I didn't want to go to school, but I passed. I know. I, you know, but they failed me anyways for attendance. So I changed my grades and I bought my gown, went to the graduation parties, took photos. I was just graduating. One day I'm at home and the telephone rings, and I pick it up, and it's like the person responsible for the college network and registration system, and he's like, look, the entire network and the university is down. And whenever we look at the code, we see the. There's a bug in your record. There's a problem where it says you're disqualified from the final exam, but you're also passing. Turns out they had another field that I didn't know about that was true or false, whether you're disqualified for attendance. And they had all these bad names for the field, so I think they're bad programming on their part. But it's still. I, I kind of missed something. So I, I had a choice. You lie and you kind of live with the lie, or you can't you come clean. And, and I just didn't want to lie. And I told him, look, I, you know, I have something to tell you. I'm gonna come tomorrow's school, kind of share it with you. So I went the next day, and it was a much bigger deal than I expected. All the different deans were sitting there. The computer science dean, the engineering dean. They've been racking their brain who, like, trying to figure out what's the problem. And so I'm like, this is my opportunity to make it a tech talk as opposed to, to an interrogation and pull out the whiteboard and explain all the different problems and all the systems they had and how, how I hacked into it and really, like, pulled out all the, all the stops and all the charisma to kind of try to impress them. And they were really impressed. So impressed and so Kind of in the element of the technical discussion that I'm like, all right, now that I've seen it, I'm headed home. I'll see you guys later. And I opened the door, I was like, wait, where are you going? Like, we got to deal with you. You just did this, this thing to our school. You just hacked into the school. We can't let you go. Luckily, the president of the university was someone who's like, really enlightened and saw the talent that I had and they could have easily derailed my life, you know. But I explained my reasoning for why I did this, and he was understanding and he gave me at the time, the Spiderman line is like, you have a great talents, great power, but with power comes responsibility. I was very sincere about it. And he said, we're gonna let you go, but you're gonna have to spend the summer working for the university, trying to fix the vulnerabilities and the security issues. And so I was like, that's no problem. I would love to do that. So I show up in the summer and the programmers there hate my guts because I hacked into their system and they wouldn't let me in. Like, I would go knock at the door where they work and I can see them and they wouldn't let me in. So they didn't give me a chance to contribute and fix the system. And by the way, everyone was cutting me slack. I think all the professors just was worried, I'm gonna hack into their emails. So I had this, like, implicit power
- [56:25]
Jack Neal
A.
- [56:25]
Amjad Massad
It was like notor. It was really cool as well. I was getting recognition everywhere. And this computer science dean comes and tells me like, hey, you know, I helped you a lot to get past this problem. So for your graduation project, you need to work with me. And what we're going to do is we're going to hack into the school again. I'm like, bro, I'm not, I'm past that. I'm not even working on security and hacking. I'm just like, you know, I'm going to build companies and things like that. It's like, no, you have to do it or, you know, I won't graduate you. So I was like, okay, I'll do it. And so I, I, I'm like, okay, but this time I'm gonna build a system. I'm not gonna go hack directly into it. So I built a piece of software that scans any system for vulnerabilities, and sure enough, I found some vulnerabilities in the system. So my graduation defense so you're sitting in front of the different deans and you're kind of giving a presentation. And I told them how I built the security scanner. And by the way, I'm going to run it on the university system. And yeah, we have a bunch of vulnerabilities here. And then different dean of engineering was like, you're lying. I was surprised that he said that. I'm like, why? Why do you think I'm lying? And he's like, because we fixed the system. I was responsible for fixing the system and we fixed the system. I was like, clearly it didn't. It's like, prove it. I'm like, okay. I also built, like, something in my system where you can automatically execute the vulnerabilities. So I get a shell access to the database. I'm like, okay, what do you want us to find? Your password or your. Or your salary or how do you want us to prove. I was like, okay, get my password. So with a query, I get his password. And it was some embarrassing password. I forgot what it was right now, but people have all sorts of embarrassing passwords. And his face turned red and he got really angry and he got up, shook my hand, and left. Well, turns out I was like a pawn. And this rivalry between the two different deans. So he, the other dean, like one dean was given the responsibility to secure the system. The other one wanted to kind of make sure I rehacked the system to prove it. But anyways, at the end, I graduate and I now have, like, really great relationship with the university.
- [58:51]
Jack Neal
That's a great story. Genuinely, it seems like some type of commonality with really successful founders. In your space is like this kind of hacker, black hat, white hat background, just on this concept of learning in general, cheating, hacking the system. How do you think we should be using AI to become smarter and how do you do it?
- [59:18]
Amjad Massad
Personally, I think that there's a mindset here. There's a mindset of. First of all, the world was built by people that are not much smarter than you. And there are a lot of rules that are accidental, that are there for historical reasons. And your job is to find the path to the future, find the way of doing things that's most aligned where the world is headed. Because the advice your teachers, your parents are going to give you are just not valid anymore. My generation, like millennials, the advice that the boomers would give us is that you work hard, you get into good university, you check this box, this other box, you get a job, you buy a house and a car. Get a family. That's it. You know, few years in like you'll, you know, 20 years later you're a millionaire because your house, property went up value and you retire, live happily ever after. That's, that doesn't exist. That does like, existed for like 20, 30 years post World War II, and then it's gone.
- [60:39]
Jack Neal
So
- [60:42]
Amjad Massad
it's not about cheating, it's about figuring out how the system is rigged against you and how do you actually hack it, how do you get past it, how do you, how do you do things in a way that is more native and true to the, where the, where the world is headed today? AI is a great tool for that. Just the fact if you're someone who just understands how these tools work and understand how you have an amazing time advantage, you can do things a lot faster again. There are a lot of programmers that are still doing programming the old way and they're going very, very slow and they're going to continue to go very slow until they get obsoleted. But there are a lot of new builders coming up today and they're like, I'm going to just like make things with, with replit or tools like that and I'm going to go just a lot faster. I'm going to iterate faster, make, make better ideas, build better companies and systems. So. I would re. Emphasize this, this virtue of laziness. Like I think a lot of what we're taught in school is, it's not worth it, it's not worth our time. And my approach to school was like, how do you get around it? Like I, I needed a college education to get to the United States, otherwise I would have dropped out. If I was in the US I would have dropped out. And it's, it's probably a good idea for a lot of people to drop out and not, not go to college. And so, but, but I needed to do that in order to, to get a visa, to get, to get here. Right? And so think about your circumstances and think about ways around them. And there's probably ways in which AI could, could help you get there faster and do things better and realize that if you truly understand how this technology work, if you're up to speed on it, if you can do things better and faster than other people, you have an advantage and just look, lean into that.
- [63:01]
Jack Neal
I think that's super helpful. What is it? Hormozi says it's volume times feedback loops and AI helps you build things faster, iterate faster. On the concept of jobs, what do you think will be the highest paying jobs in the age of AI Entrepreneur.
- [63:19]
Amjad Massad
Entrepreneur. My mindset has always been about building wealth as opposed to getting salary. There are a lot of different ways to build wealth, but all of them revolve around ownership as opposed to getting salaries. When I got my first job in the US working for a code academy, a company that sold for half a billion dollars, I told them, you can just like pay me enough to eat. Just give me as much equity as I as it can give me. I was paid $70,000 in New York City. You know how painful that was? I was living in a studio with other people, right? But who cares? Like, you know, if you're young and scrappy, like, you know, you just, you can eat anything, you can sleep, you know, few hours, you can sleep on the, on the ground, who cares? You know, you're very resilient when you're in your 20s and you know, early 30s and things get a little worse after that, but you're very resilient and your job is to build equity. And the best way to build equity is to start a business. The second best way to build equity is to join a business that someone else are and get equity in it. And then third is if you already have capitals to invest and build equity that way. And I've done all these different things. I started by joining a startup that was growing fast, got as much equity in it as possible, worked as if I was a founder. Then I started a business, got some liquidity from that, started investing in other businesses. By the way, a lot of early replit employees are already rich. A lot of early replit employees already got some liquidity out. We let them sell some shares. Some early replit investors sold some shares as well. If you invested in Replit when you were at like 6 million valuation and we were like many order magnitudes more than that right now, you made a lot of money, right? So if you're surrounded by really smart people, you don't have to have the best ideas. You can join their ideas. You could also like figure out a way to invest in your friends and join in their venture. Or if you have a certain skill, let's say you're an influencer and you want to partner with an entrepreneur. Try to get equity. You can get a lot of cash for sure, but what are you going to do? You're going to get taxed 50% on that cash. You're gonna spend it on nonsense. Instead, try to get equity and build that equity up.
- [66:00]
Jack Neal
It seems like the only two ways to get Rich are build a cash flow business and move to Puerto Rico or Dubai and revoke your citizenship. Hate your life for a few years and sell a company.
- [66:14]
Amjad Massad
Well, you don't have to hate your life. You can, you can have fun building a business.
- [66:19]
Jack Neal
Right? That's fair I guess. Hate your life in terms of not have excess cash to spend on stuff, just kind of like living below your means to an extent. But if you build the business properly, I guess you would have excess cash.
- [66:32]
Amjad Massad
Yeah, we'd have excess cash at some point. Like it's a lot more fun later in life to like pulling a six figure salary. Like you're not gonna, it's not an exciting life. I think having wealth is a lot more like just the, the, the calmness on your nervous system that you've escaped the rat brace. That itself is worth it. And so I, I don't know, I've never like, yeah, I've went out and partied and experienced all that. And you could do that with not a lot of money. We're in back in Jordan, we used to like drive to Beirut and like go clubbing for like you know, 20 bucks. You know, it's like you can, you can have fun with not, not that much money. But then there's like a huge dead zone in terms of like how much quality of life and how much hedonism or fun if that's what you're interested in. Up until you get to operation of wealth. Like there isn't that much difference between like a student going out. Like some of the best fun you could do just like going out to, to, to clubs or traveling or whatever, going to like low income places and like having fun there and then, and then it's not that much better when you're pulling you know, few hundred grand a year. It's like you're kind of stuck at that at that point. But so what you want to focus on is building enough equity and up until to the point where you're just like starting to build a family because that's when you're going to have to like settle down a little bit. You're not going to have as much time and so on and so on for. So I would just like focus on building equity.
- [68:14]
Jack Neal
That's super helpful. Yeah, I, the first startup I was at, I had equity. I did the same thing as you. I like took a lower salary to try to get as much equity as possible. But I think I fell victim to the sentiment like oh, bet on yourself. I didn't even like pay the Strike price to vest my shares. And I looked at it the other day and the company had sold and I was like, I didn't know how much for. But yeah, if someone gives you the opportunity for equity, it's usually worth it if you think they have a good chance of selling. Especially if people are building to sell. It feels like some people are building to sell quickly versus some people are building to sell on a longer time horizon. I do want to ask you, what do billionaires know about money that people just starting out in entrepreneurship don't realize? Like, what's something you wish you knew about the way money works itself or things you can do with your money? Like two years ago, four years ago.
- [69:15]
Amjad Massad
Money is money. Like cash. Like dollars are worthless. They are depreciate fast depreciating assets. Like they depreciate faster than your 1976 Honda Civic, right? Like it's like don't hold cash. Like again, that's why I emphasize equity. It's like assets, like buying assets, like all the assets go up. Like gold right now is just ripping like a shitcoin. So assets go up, cash doesn't.
- [69:51]
Jack Neal
And do stocks really go up though? Like if you're just doing S and P or is it just kind of like a wealth maintenance thing from your perspective?
- [70:00]
Amjad Massad
Okay. I mean, over the past couple years the S and P has been dominated by a few companies. Then they've gone up a lot. Like if you invest in S and P, what is it like 20, 30% in 2025? That's huge. Is it 20, 30%? I'm not entirely sure.
- [70:16]
Jack Neal
I think the average is 10% with accounts for inflation and be like 5% returns. Oh, really?
- [70:21]
Amjad Massad
That's it? Okay. I don't know. I do have some money with like a money manager that is like just like trying to main wealth. But I also do buy stock. I buy, I invest in startups, I buy stock in the companies that I really like. I bought Tesla like a long time ago because I really like the product. It's like the grug brain approach to investing is like buy stocks you like. I don't know, I don't want to give like too much of financial advice because like a lot of this is like very, very selective. But like the, the main idea here is assets, like understanding inflation, how inflation works, and how the dollar is continuously being printed. Really every currency out there is continuously being printed. And if you're optimizing for cash, you're really losing wealth and you're not really building wealth. Wealth is through accumulation of assets. And those assets tend to. There's certain assets that tend to compound. I bought Bitcoin when I left Facebook to start replacement that I sold my Facebook shares, which I could have held onto them and though they've done really well, but I bought Bitcoin and put the rest in my company. And so understanding inflation is core and like, go research that and really understand how the system is working on debt and quantitative easing and all that stuff. You don't have to understand it that much in depth. But the main lesson is the economy's run on inflation and the rich don't hold cash, they hold assets. I don't know, I mean, I. I don't really think about money all that much. Like, I don't say it in a way to like, you know, to. To brag or anything. It's just like for me, like, build cool shit and, and money will come, right? Like, build poor things, hold ownership in those things that you build or invest in. Like important things and products and services that you think are just the future. Try to predict where the future is headed, be plugged in enough to figure out where the future is headed. Like, follow the tech news, follow the trends and form a prediction about the future and then bet on that, and then evaluate that over time and continue to figure out. When you hear about a new thing, don't be cynical about it. Like you hear about. A lot of my generation heard about Bitcoin. A lot of them was like, what is this? But if you pay a little bit attention, you're like, okay, and you understand the system, you understand that this is an alternative asset to cash. And a lot of people are looking for alternative assets. And so you have some hypothesis about the future. So have some predictions and some beliefs about the future and try to bet behind them. And again, most importantly, build things. I think that's the best way to gain wealth, is to build useful things.
- [73:23]
Jack Neal
You're one of the few AI billionaires that has a. It's funny that it's even a contrarian perspective on the future of AI, but why do you think AI isn't going to kill us all?
- [73:41]
Amjad Massad
A lot of my peers in Silicon Valley have this very mechanistic view of life. They think of humans as, you know, meat robots. And I think fundamentally, I think there's something more than that. There's something. There's some spark about consciousness about humanity that's different and that's special and that life is important. Maybe it's a religious view, but even without, like a very Concrete religious view. You can arrive at the same answer by just being perceptive, like just looking at the world around you. Like, how can, how can this all be an accident? Like, just like, even through science, like when you look at, you know, I see these videos of like how DNAs work and just like this sane engineer micro, like nanoengineering, just like it doesn't feel like an accident. So there's something about the mystery of life, the mystery of creation, the mystery of why we're here that I try to struggle with. And I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley, a lot of people in tech, have this very dry physicalist view, like we're automaton, it's input, output. And therefore the natural conclusion is that humans are not very special. We're going to build a more intelligent being. That intelligent being, it's got to be so, so much more intelligent that again, treat us like ants in the same way we treat ants. But no, I think there's something special about humans. And I, I, I believe in like, I, I'm like, I, I'll tell you something about my personal life that I think is, is very interesting. I think a lot of success comes, comes down to, to like mindset and visualization. Why does that work? Why does visualization work? It does work. A lot of people swear by it. Like, if you visualize yourself as successful. I used to like visualize the cars that I want to drive. And invariably I would get those cars some way or another, I would like, if I want to meet someone, I would have this intent about meeting this person and eventually I will meet them somehow. And it's like random circumstance. Like whether it was like people in tech that are respected, whether it's Paul Graham, Mark Andreessen. I always wanted to, to meet Paul Graham. I always had this intent of like, I would like, imagine the conversation we would have. Paul Graham's the founder of Y Combinator and like he also founded the site Hacker News. And I was reading that a lot and he wrote a lot about programming and things like that. Really respected how he thought. And you know, one, one morning, obviously, like I, I do things in the world. I don't sit there, just visualize. Like you act. One morning in 2017, I get a message from Sam Altman on, on, on Twitter and he's like, hey, I'm, I'm Sam. I run, I say, dude, I know who you are. So Sam, before opening, I was running Y Combinator, the, the premier startup accelerator. And he's like, I'd like you to come meet me. And so I went and met him and he gave me this address. I'm like, where is this? This is not Y combinator. I know. Y combinator is Mountain View. And I walked in this place and it was called OpenAI. And next to it was Neuralink. It was like a small Elon fiefdom in the Mission in San Francisco when Elon was still involved in OpenAI. So I met Sam there and when we sat down, he said he had his laptop in front of him and turning around he's like, like read this email. It was an email from program and he says like there's the site replit. It's like really cool. It's something I've thought about for a long time where we can like make it really easy to code and host applications and we should, we should like reach out to them, get them into the YC batch. And we had like tried to apply to YC many, many times before. But it like had this intention that like I'm going to meet Paul Graham and he's going to like know about irpla, we're going to discuss it and he's going to get really excited about it. And that happened. And like two years ago I was like totally different person, totally different industry. It's like it'd be really cool to meet Tucker Carlson. I respect him a lot. I respect how brave and courageous he is and how he can speak his mind and how inspiring his view of America is and what it could be. And through a series of accident I ended up meeting him. Gina Martin Shkreli, pharma bro.
- [78:26]
Jack Neal
That sounds a little familiar, but no,
- [78:28]
Amjad Massad
you should definitely look up Martin Shkreli. Martin Shkreli is a farm entrepreneur that went to prison for some like financial reasons. But he became very notorious for a few things. One is like he bought a Wu Tang album that was like one in production and like he become it because like he, he hoarded that. But like also he just like was like the initial like social media troll and like got into under everyone's nerves and all of that. But anyways, I used to watch his stream because he would like put out a lot of really cool financial material. We talked about financial literacy and I learned a lot from him. And when he got out of prison one day he was like quoting a line. It was quoting a repl. And so like I sent him a message. I'm like, hey, like I saw you're quitting a replit. It would be called like I sent him a tweet so he responded, we got on the ph, whatever. I ended up investing in his new startup and you know, introduced him to a few other people in Silicon Valley. And then one day he's like, you know, I owe you man. You know, it's really cool. How have you been able to help me get back into, into the startup game? What can I do for you? I'm like, you know, you were on Tucker the other day, invited you on the show. I would love to meet him. And then, and then he made that connection. We got on a call kind of. I have very similar story with Joe Rogan as well. I got on Joe Rogan's show. So I mean I'm kind of digressing a lot but all I'm saying is that there's like more mystery to life and I've experienced a fair amount of affecting the world in an, in a very indirect sort of mental way. And there's something, something to that. And like a lot of people just don't, don't struggle with the fact that there's more to life than just mechanistic physics of it all. So when you start from this premise and I can talk about all the different, I can have a technical debate about AI as well, but just at rock bottom I feel like there's something special about humans. There's something about the mystery of the world that we haven't really figured out
- [80:40]
Jack Neal
by that same token, just to clarify, because I think this is fairly high level thinking but I, I understand what you're saying about it is basically you feel as though you're the type of individual that thinks there's magic to life and you will things into existence. And this is something that, it is your logical view as well as it is the view that you want to have for humanity. But do you think that these other individuals that have this AI doom thesis are trying to will that reality into existence?
- [81:11]
Amjad Massad
I think there is a sense in which intentions matter and you can get into a self fulfilling theories of the world. Right. And we've seen that throughout history. Predicting doom and bringing about crisis, you know, happens a lot. And so I think it is important to be optimistic and I think if you have like a doomer mindset and it is, it is dangerous for that, for that reason for sure. And so I do think like people who are naturally depressed and like not very optimistic do kind of gravitate towards like a more doomer mindset.
- [81:59]
Jack Neal
It's so fascinating because with you in particular, I spoke with another AI founder about this. I was like, it's so interesting that Amjad's thesis is like, AI won't kill us all. And you would assume that would be the thesis of all the billionaire AI founders. Like oh, it's not gonna kill us all. And it's like, oh shit, it might actually, but it's really like they're all saying it is, but it's actually not. And I think the only other person that's really in the space with these individuals that has a similar thesis to you is Naval Ravi Kant. There's probably a few others that I just haven't consumed their content. But what's the main logical reason for it? Just to give people some hope. Because I've had a lot of doomers on my show and I haven't had anyone in your position.
- [82:55]
Amjad Massad
So. So think about how machine learning models are trained right now. Machine learning models are trained by consuming super large corpus of content, essentially all of content on the Internet and then simulating creating algorithms. So they would learn by creating internal algorithms essentially. That's a good way to understand machine learning to simulate how a human might respond to a query. You can go really far with that. It's like it's, it's amazing that it works. But if you give a query to an AI for something it doesn't have an algorithm for, it will fail at. And there's a bunch of research showing that it's called like out of distribution queries or contexts. So you know, if a machine learning model is not trained on a certain like language or flavor of math or something like that, it will struggle to give you like a reasonable output and you end up in hallucination, you end up with all sorts of problems. The reason AI is really good at coding because coding has a binary outcome outcome. It's either true or false. Anything that is soft more requires
- [84:31]
Jack Neal
like
- [84:31]
Amjad Massad
reasoning through, through the problems not based on prior material. AI right now is not doing very well at and AI companies are having to buy more and more perpetual data to get better at these things. So the way they're training models is they'll buy, you know, they'll go into an industry, oh, let's target accounting. We're going to go buy all the data that exists out there. We're going to scrape all the data that exists out there, we're going to buy all the data. We're also going to get accountants in Africa that are going to sit down all day and they're going to do spreadsheets and they're going to like talk over how they're doing Spreadsheets and they did that in coding as well. And they're targeting biotech, accounting, science, everything in order to do that. And that that's a very repeatable process. And you can create AIs that are very good at doing jobs that people are currently doing. But that is not like a general intelligence that you can drop it like you would drop a human into any sort of environment and they can like learn efficiently.
- [85:33]
Jack Neal
So self recursive improvement is kind of a fallacy to you, like when it comes to things that aren't binary.
- [85:39]
Amjad Massad
I think we need to struggle with the question of consciousness. Because consciousness, I think is an important ingredient of generality in how humans reflect on their decisions and their questions. And you know, we come up with these ideas that seemingly come out of nowhere. We call them inspiration, uses whatever people call them. It's like, oh, suddenly I'm struck by this idea like Eureka, right? And we don't know how it works in order to build it into machines. All of like science come. A lot of the scientific, big scientific discoveries come from these eureka moments. That is not based on prior, on strict prior training. That is a fundamental paradigm shift, a huge jump that comes from somewhere. We don't know where it is. And by the way, all the original scientists in antiquity and history talked about this in spiritual terms. You know, I remember reading Bertrand Russell's book about like the history of like Western philosophy and things like that. And he was talking about Pythagoras. Like Pythagoras was running a religious cult, he was not running a mathematics club. And they, they came up with all these different, different theories. And if you look at the current state of humanity, we're actually not having that much scientific breakthroughs. And I think counterintuitively, because we've become so mechanistic in our thinking and less spiritual, less open to mystery and mysticism, that, that degraded the quality of science. And because science became an industrial process, it became a bureaucracy, it became government funded, it became all of these different things as opposed to, as opposed to people seeking true knowledge or original knowledge and trying to seek it in all these different ways and arriving at it in all sorts of random and interesting and you know, mystical ways.
- [87:43]
Jack Neal
Science used to be more spiritual is what you're saying.
- [87:46]
Amjad Massad
Yes.
- [87:47]
Jack Neal
I mean Pythagoras, correct me if I'm wrong, he basically invented like this whole religion of numerology, right?
- [87:54]
Amjad Massad
That's probably true. I think Newton spend most of his life like Newtonian physics was a side project. Most of his life was spent in studying religious text and doing things like alchemy and random things like that.
- [88:08]
Jack Neal
Tesla said that all of his ideas like came from dreams. Yeah, like spirit world.
- [88:13]
Amjad Massad
Einstein too, like Einstein was like, oh, sitting in his chair and like dreaming the whole time. And so we kind of lose something about what is essential to us as humans and what is true discovery and inspiration when you think about the world in purely mechanistic ways. And I, I, I doubt that without struggling with these questions, that we're going to be able to replicate that into machines and have machines kind of go discover new discoveries. They're going to do a lot of amazing things for science. Like protein folding is an exact kind of problem that you want to direct an AI on. It's a computational intractable problem. It's really hard for us to solve in explicit ways. It is a large data problem, big data problem. And so we're going to use AI to advance science in all sorts of exciting ways. Those original paradigm shifting ideas I think are human in a way that is hard to describe.
- [89:12]
Jack Neal
Is there any spiritual practice you do to come up with ideas, be more creative or just do better in business?
- [89:24]
Amjad Massad
I do cold plunges. And when I do a cold plunge, I, it shuts down this like constant thinking, talking mind that I have and suddenly I become more receptive to inspiration and ideas outside of me. I don't know. I think you can replicate some of that in meditation. Haven't done that very well. But like I find like physical shock to my body tends to create stillness. And so cold plunge is one of the big ways you can get it with exercise as well. Like, like exercise to exhaustion, to wait. Like you can't really think a lot and a lot of people find that. But I think you can replicate in different religious practices and things like that. But for me, like I found that cold plunge just forces my mind in a, in a certain way. And I've, and it just like declares this clarity and sometimes there's like really exciting ideas that comes out of that.
- [90:29]
Jack Neal
It's all about creating state changes and kind of split testing. Like what ideas or I guess even personalities, communication styles, like come out of those.
- [90:42]
Amjad Massad
But do you feel like I gave you a good answer for like the doomerism question?
- [90:48]
Jack Neal
I really did want to touch on the cult, but I'll say this. The aspect of Amjad's thesis on AI Doomerism that I found most fascinating was in his interview with Tucker Carlson where he talked about the cult, the Silicon Valley of these AI Doomers. And when I realized that there's some propaganda involved, maybe some weird spiritual shit. I was like, yeah, I don't really entirely believe in this AI doom thesis so I'd definitely recommend checking that out.
- [91:29]
Amjad Massad
By the way, part of the reason why I didn't focus on that is because I think their influence is waning. When I did that interview in 2024 it was at the height of the influence of the effective altruisms and, and I think luckily through various things that happened including like you know, tech people responding to it, their influences is sort of winning. But, but certainly, I mean in that interview I talk at length about the self serving nature of their thesis and how they use that to, to like manipulate people and to, to, to gain all sorts of like favors and weird things that happening there. So. But luckily they're not as important theoretically.
- [92:17]
Jack Neal
Do you suspect intelligence agencies or the military have some involvement with AI development?
- [92:25]
Amjad Massad
The cool thing about large language models is that it doesn't really matter because it is a very simple process. Being at the frontier is very hard like creating GPT 5.3 or Opus 4.5 or whatever. GPT 2 at some point was the frontier. Now you can train GPT2 on your phone. So there isn't enough of a gap that they can create to have proprietary technology. This technology, technology is decentralizing and becoming more accessible really really quickly in order months. Now we have open source models from China coming out and maybe there's involvement in the government there, but coming out that are as good as like the you know, models that came out three months ago from Anthropic and OpenAI. So maybe, but it doesn't really matter because once we learn what they've done in the latest generation of things and as compute gets cheaper, anyone can replicate these things at home. And that's the cool thing about what's happening in the world today. These companies are trying to create enough of a moat around data and compute and things like that in order to block out competitors and create more proprietary technology and create an oligopoly around it. But so far they have been successful luckily.
- [93:48]
Jack Neal
So you would suspect that the top models are at most a few months ahead of what's publicly accessible. Okay, that's fair. I think a lot of people have suspicions that oh they're gatekeeping this technology that's 10 years ahead.
- [94:07]
Amjad Massad
You can download Kimi 2.5 on your computer and run it and you would get a model that is as good as, you know, GPT5 when it first came out.
- [94:18]
Jack Neal
Andrade, you've built a Billion dollar company by making tools more accessible to the everyday person. If you could distill everything you've learned, what's the one piece of advice you would give to make sure anyone listening could find success?
- [94:36]
Amjad Massad
I would start with intention. With intention and focus and not. And perseverance. Like, if you're really intent on finding success, you're going to find success no matter who you are. Like, I think if you, if you put, if you just like visualize it, you put your mind into it, you have the right mindset. You don't have limiting beliefs. I can meet whoever. Like I can. There's no difference between me and some other, you know, billionaire. I can, I, I can learn all the skills needed. No one is like better than me. Start with these beliefs and you're going to be unstoppable. I think at some point the hard thing about scaling a company from like a billion dollars to a hundred billion dollars to a trillion dollars is the game changes fundamentally. And that's what I'm going through right now. You know, you become resource rich but time poor. That's like the worst feeling. Like you don't have enough time to do things manually and you have to like delegate a lot. You have to learn how to like build a team and hire and do all these different things. Those are all very important. But I think getting the initial set of success, it's all about being really good at believing yourself. Not quitting, not taking no for an answer. Keep, keep going, keep going, never quit. I think those are really the only necessary ingredients in order to achieve enough success to potentially retire or like escape the, the rat race.
- [96:36]
Jack Neal
I love that. I've been wanting someone to give that advice for a while. It's kind of like this idea that people say you get what you deserve, but it's really like you get what you want and to find the success, you have to really genuinely want it. And if you don't have it, then you actually don't want it.
- [96:54]
Amjad Massad
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's right. You have to really, really want it. Here's the irony of life. At some point you're gonna get to a position where you're like, do I really want it? And that's when you know you have to change your, your, your mind, your. But. And that's what I'm saying is scaling past that is a different thing. Like there isn't any material thing that I, that I really want right now. I'm not that liquid of, of a rich person. Right. Like on, on paper, I have large wealth. Like, I can't buy everything that I want, but I also bought enough things to know that that's not what life is about. And I wish that for everyone. I wish for everyone to get to a point that they find that the material world is just like, not, not all that worth it. I think money is great in so many ways, but you know, you buy a car and you're like, all right, that's cool. It's like, it's not gonna really. At some point, you're like, okay, what do I really want? And that question is actually a lot harder. But if you're starting from zero, you know, fix your mind on whatever it is, a car, success status, whatever it is, and drive really hard at it and you're gonna get it.
- [98:04]
Jack Neal
Beautiful. Well, everyone, this has been your guest. I'm John Massad. This is the Jack Neal Podcast. I appreciate you coming on.
- [98:13]
Amjad Massad
Thank you.
- [98:16]
A16Z Podcast Narrator
Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to, like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes go to YouTube, to Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Follow us on X16Z and subscribe to our substack@A16Z substack.com thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and may include paid promotional advertisements, other company references in individuals unaffiliated with A16Z. Such advertisements, companies and individuals are not endorsed by AH Capital Management, LLC, A16Z or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy.