Amjad Masad (1:34)

Yep.

Emmett Shear (1:35)

You guys are close to 500 million in annual revenue now. Is that. I mean, blink twice if I'm. If I'm in the right ballpark, we're

Amjad Masad (1:42)

on our way to a billion this year.

Emmett Shear (1:43)

I'll just say, oh, on your way to a billion. How could I have missed it off by 500 million? So I. I'm unprofessional. I didn't. I don't know the exact number. Say the exact jump of, like, I remember when. When I invested, it was something like 2 or 3 million bucks.

Shaun (1:56)

Yeah.

Amjad Masad (1:56)

And it stayed 2 or 3 million bucks for a few years as we were like, navigating what to actually do. We went from 2.5 to $250 million in one year. That was between 24 and 25, 2.5

Emmett Shear (2:11)

million to 250 million in one year.

Shaun (2:15)

Did you get audited?

Amjad Masad (2:17)

We did. We actually passed a PwC audit a couple months ago. Oh, so that's crazy. By the way. You know, we're gross margin positive, which is, you know, something that is rare in the AI industry, but by a good amount as well. And we're very, we're very precise in how we calculate run rate when you

Shaun (2:40)

grow from almost nothing to a billion dollars in revenue in 24 months. What type of like legit. There's like all these logistical questions I have. Like, what type of relationship do you have to have with your bank? Like, did you prepare your bank where you're like, bro, that's your question.

Emmett Shear (2:58)

How's your banking relationship, dude?

Shaun (3:00)

There's so many like logistical questions. Like for example, are you like, what are you doing with that cash? And how are you managing spending it and investing it as fast as you're making it? Things like that. Like, there's so many logistical questions around. Literally, it's sort of like when Pablo Escobar was a drug dealer, he was saying, like, we can't get enough rubber bands for the money. Like, we don't know where to like store the money. Like there's these like logistical questions that I'm curious about.

Amjad Masad (3:23)

You know, the theory for, for one of the potential creators of Bitcoin is that he invented bitcoin because he was making so much money, he didn't know where to keep it. There's this story called the Mastermind about this guy who I think grew up in Rhodesia and now Zimbabwe. And he was a hacker, he was a computer hacker and he invented a lot of encrypted technology. Very well known guy. He ended up getting into criminal online activities, selling drugs online. One of the first to do that. And he generated so much cash, he actually had ships with billions of gold just in the international waters, just doing circles. Oh, wow. And so there's a lot like Paul, right?

Shaun (4:15)

Polar.

Amjad Masad (4:15)

Yeah, polar. And there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that he was potentially writing bitcoin because it was like, I don't know what to do with this money. So we're not there yet. But how did Paul Larue make the money? He was, he created the first like delivery online drug store.

Shaun (4:36)

Like do you remember, Sean, like in theearly.com, where like you would get spammy emails where it's like buy Viagra online

Emmett Shear (4:42)

the early days, as in yesterday yesterday,

Shaun (4:45)

early in your morning.

Emmett Shear (4:47)

Yeah, I remember that.

Shaun (4:49)

He like kind of pioneered that. Is that right? I mean he was one of the, the biggest guys. Like he had like, yeah, like thousands of domain names. He was sending millions of emails a day. He was basically one of the first spammers, like Internet marketers.

Amjad Masad (5:01)

Yeah.

Shaun (5:01)

And the monetization engine was selling drugs.

Amjad Masad (5:04)

And now there are a lot of startups that are doing it, you know, quasi, illegally, where they have a lot of doc doctors that are sort of approving those prescriptions and things like that. But yeah, he did it fully illegally and was wanted by, by the FBI and drug control and da and all of that for, for many, many years. And they caught him around the same year that Satoshi disappeared. Around the same time actually that Satoshi disappeared.

Emmett Shear (5:35)

Going from 2 million to now close to a billion in run rate. It's got to be a bit of an out of body experience for a founder. Walk us through like the interesting parts that are not like the game that's happening on the field, but maybe just of the founder experience. Like, yeah, dude, we had to figure this out. Dude, we didn't know this. I remember waking up and realizing the chart had jumped 10x whatever. You know, give us some of that.

Amjad Masad (5:57)

Well, first of all, I, I have such high expectations of myself and my team that at any given point, whatever progress we made, the question is why haven't we made more if we're growing,

Emmett Shear (6:11)

you're like the Asian pet mom of.

Amjad Masad (6:13)

I am the Asian of, of myself more than anyone else, which is, I don't really recommend it. So kind of a miserable way to live. But you know, it's, it's sort of like I was like, of course we're going to make this much money. Of course the company is going to grow this much. As it was always the plan, I was always on the cars. That was always the vision. I'm also naturally paranoid. And so I was fully expecting it to reverse at any given point. And so it was like, how can we make sure this revenue is sticky? How can we go up market, go to the enterprise, make sure our customers are getting a great experience, make sure that things that they create is not slop. It is secure. It is, we're, we're creating trust not just in us, but like in the whole space. And that's this vibe. Coding things, it's is possible, including doing podcasts. Like this is not only possible, it's viable to build businesses. And so the first reaction is, is adrenaline. And like, let's get to work. Like, this is an opportunity. Like, if we had sold or failed before we, you know, before the breakout point, I would have been, you know, probably depressed about it, but not as bad as you now have the wind in your back, and if you fail, it is fully on you. You. You kind of. You've. You've lost. Like, it's almost like someone passing you the ball and there's no one else in front of the. The basketball ring, and you could dunk, you could do whatever you want, and then. And then you somehow do a two shot and fail, right? So that's the feeling. It's incredible. Pressure from everyone from the market, from. Even investors went from, hey, you got to do a layoff. You got to cut, burn to go invest, put money, do it. You know, it's like. It's like a thrill of success. Only lasted like, you know, a week or two and then became sort of the reality of, like, how do you keep this motion going and how do you. How do you scale it? And the first thing that starts to break is people. When you have a supply and demand imbalance, companies start knocking on our door. It's like, hey, we want to buy this product. Like, our. Our employees are using it. Like, how do we get an enterprise deal? And we're like, yeah, we have one person who does three other things, but also. Also doing. They're, like, trying to close deals as fast as they can. I was like, okay, I've never done sales. Like, how do you actually do sales? But there's something about the universe where these people land in your life at crucial points. Not always, but sometimes. And we had a VP of sales that came to us at a moment when the company was. Was really at its darkest moment. We were about to do a layoff, and I'm sitting in this meeting room, and I'm asking him, like, why do you want to join us? His name is Patrick Purvis. He had previously was a VP of sales at Zoom Info, exited, took a couple years sabbatical, independently. Wealthy guy. And I was like, look, the company kind of sucks. Why do you want to come here?

Shaun (9:27)

You're like, for my last interview question, why?

Amjad Masad (9:33)

And he's like, look, I spent the past few years reflecting. I want to do something meaningful. And your mission of empowering people and democratizing software just seems one of the most important things to do. I was like, okay, welcome to the team. But it's not. It's not. We don't want anyone for you to sell.

Shaun (9:49)

All right, guys, here's the thing about side Hustles. Everyone wants one, but most people overthink about it and they never actually launch anything. But because of AI, you can go from my idea to your first sale in only seven days. My old company, the Hustle, they just dropped an AI side Hustle crash course. So basically what the Hustle did was they looked at things that me and SEAN and HubSpot, CMO, Kipbander, they look at stuff that we said and they broke it all down into simple bite sized steps. Which means you're going to get a guide that gives you everything you need to launch a side Hustle without any, any of the guesswork. So you can get it right now. You can scan the QR code or click the link in the description. Now back to the show. How grim did things get? How low was the bank balance or how many months did you have left?

Emmett Shear (10:39)

What was the darkest hour?

Amjad Masad (10:40)

Yeah, as you call being the, the agent parent. I was also kind of financially responsible. And so we never had like, we never was like, oh, we're weeks away from not making payroll. So when we did a layoff, it was more like about extending the Runway.

Emmett Shear (10:54)

But maybe, maybe not Runway, but like, you know, founder delusion.

Amjad Masad (10:58)

Yes.

Emmett Shear (10:58)

Takes people far. And I think you have it more than anyone. Right. Because you were like 10 years you've been working on this thing.

Amjad Masad (11:05)

Right.

Emmett Shear (11:05)

It wasn't like 10 months. You just kept going, soldiering forward. On our last podcast, I remember you said, like, I think if there's one thing I might be good at, like, you were just pretty humble about it. Be like, I think, I guess reflecting, like, I can keep pushing the boulder up the hill.

Amjad Masad (11:19)

Yes.

Emmett Shear (11:19)

For a long time. Like I just have high pain tolerance. I think that seems like it's been helpful. So maybe it's not the bank balance, but like did the, did the doubts or the delusion or the. Is this ever going to happen?

Amjad Masad (11:31)

Yeah. I think the worst part about it is the, the belief that your team having you, your vision, your leadership, and when that goes away, you can see it in their eyes. And that is the most hurtful and depressing, depressing feeling. And so after we did the layoff, the layoff is a bubble bursting event.

Shaun (11:53)

What did you scale down to from where to where?

Amjad Masad (11:55)

So we actually wasn't that big. It was like a third. So we were like 120. Went to now to 90 or something like that. But by the end we were 60. By the end, in like three months, we were 60. And so we, we lost 50% of our team, but most of it was voluntarily. And the reason is because suddenly, you know, I've been for years getting in front of everyone and talking about this vision and mission and suddenly it just sounded like lies and sounded like, I don't know what I'm doing. And we had also at the same time moved our office from San Francisco to Foster City. We got a huge office. I like really knew that we were going to, we were going to hand it off and scale, but I was off, off by a few months. So we had already gone. This office, the office was empty and cold and kind of dark. And so every day I go to work and just like the mood is super dark. And I know that at the moment I'm going to get to my desk, someone's going to walk over again, they're going to tell me they're quitting. And so every night I've. Whatever sleep I got was like, okay, who's gonna quit the next day? And it just kept happening. And that was, that was really draining. And for me to put on a face and tell everyone that things are gonna be okay was incredibly hard. However, there were a group of people that were working on Replit Agent. Replit Agent is, is the breakthrough product that we created. It actually created a breakthrough in the entire industry because this was, remember, this was before cloud code or anything came out. We showed the world that it was possible to build end to end coding agents. And the people inside that team had almost a secret. We're on the precipice of a breakthrough. We were all kind of dogfooding it and playing with it and having a lot of fun with it. So whenever I go to the office, everything is depressing except this one room we call the war room. And I walk into the war room and the mood is intensely different. Everyone is super pumped. They know we have created something that's going to be super valuable. So I had this night and day, almost schizophrenic feeling of large parts of the company and the business totally lost faith in me and the company. And then a small part that were totally engrossed in the possibilities of AI and what we were inventing.

Emmett Shear (14:28)

Sam, can I just say, forget the numbers, man. What he just said was like the realest shit someone said on this podcast in a long time. The way you describe that feeling as the founder when you walk into the, to the office and your shit's like, you don't have the hot thing right now, right? And you've been telling everybody, and you could see when they start to lose faith. I've experienced what you just said. You just, like, described my childhood trauma as a founder. I didn't even realize it. I didn't even know until you said those words. I was like, I have felt that it's depressing. Then somebody emails you for like, hey, can we meet tomorrow? You know. You know they're about to quit, and you're like, it just got harder.

Amjad Masad (15:05)

And I don't have in me to convince them to stay. Like, why?

Emmett Shear (15:09)

Why would they say, yeah, exactly, exactly. That thing you just described is so real.

Amjad Masad (15:17)

Yeah.

Emmett Shear (15:17)

And I just want to give you props because I don't think most people ever really talk about what that feels like. And now it's. Obviously, it's great to talk about it now because, like, you know, it didn't just end.

Amjad Masad (15:25)

Sadly, you know, success is. Is reminiscing in a more positive way about the failures and the. Everything that. That goes wrong. But the other one is, you mentioned investors is just a broader industry. And, you know, I remember my calendar, you know, emptying, and I'm no longer invited to the hot parties. In many ways, when I go to one, it's like, oh, yeah, Replit. Oh, I remember that thing, you know,

Emmett Shear (15:55)

and what are you up to now?

Amjad Masad (15:57)

You're like, yeah, yeah, you're still at it. And our partners will. We're not including our logo anymore. And our vendors removed our logo from there.

Emmett Shear (16:06)

That's dirty. Because it's like, you didn't even have to. You proactively changed your website. Why'd you do that? Why'd you scrub us?

Amjad Masad (16:15)

And it felt like, you know, a big. A big part of my identity has been about Silicon Valley, and it's about. I've read everything. I could get my hands on every biography and read about all the different figures, from the biggest to the most obscure. And I. I just felt like the. The weight of Silicon Valley on my shoulders because I was backed by the best as well, like Marc Andreessen, Paul Graham, you know, David Sachs. You know, all these people are on our cap table, and I was, like, letting all of them down.

Emmett Shear (16:54)

So, so. So if this was a movie, there's a turning point, right? The montage begins. At some point, you wake up and you look at the dashboard. Something starts to change. You start getting emails, the music picks up, and suddenly things start to move. What was the first move of that? Like, of that. That second act? Before we hit the training montage, we

Amjad Masad (17:14)

launched Replit internally at Replit for employees outside of the core engineering group working on it. And the first time everyone tried it, I was especially paying attention to non engineers. Are they going to be able. Because that was the mission. Are we going to enable them to be actually successful using this? And you know Jeff, Jeff is our head of partnerships. Jeff Burke. Hay and I always take Jeff as like the prototypical potential customer because like he's a consulting background, he's super sharp, but he can't configure Python to save his life, right? So he tried it and I remember him posting the feedback is like, oh, this is miserable. I failed. They couldn't like make the simple app the first day, the next day, third day. I think one day when he posted it was like, oh, I was able to make this thing. We're like, okay, we got it. I think, I think that the product is ready right now. And it was around August in 2024 and the team felt they weren't ready. I was like, we gotta launch this. I don't care if it is semi broken, if you get 50% of the time, get amazing results, it's gonna wow the world because for the first time an agent can write the code, debug it, create a database for you and deploy to the cloud. It's never been done, even if it is in just like demo shape. And I was, one of the habits that I picked up during this darkest hour is playing video games. I hadn't played when I came to the U.S. i was like a pro gamer back in Jordan. When I came to the U.S. i was like, okay, I'm gonna focus, I'm gonna be the Silicon Valley entrepreneur, I'm gonna work really hard, I'm gonna, you know, I want to be, I wanna make a lot of money and I wanna be successful. So I just dropped all the hobbies that I had, but I bought a Steam deck because I just wanted something to take my mind off all the depressing stuff. They do this thing in games, it was called early preview, sort of like a beta. But the intention is that you're getting a semi broken thing, but you're expected to kind of give us feedback. I was like, okay, we're just going to release an early preview of the product and we're just going to call it that. We're going to say, hey, don't subscribe to this thing because it might be a buggy about it. If you're already subscribed or you have, you're okay with getting buggy software, join in. So we in September 2024, I posted a video of me in the office shot on an iPhone, saying, hey, like, AI coding is amazing. Generates a lot of code. But so far, you had to do all this other stuff. Today, for the first time, we're showing you that an AI agent can do the end to end thing. And there were a few moments when this tweet started going viral. One of them was Andrej Karpathy, who is head of AI at Tesla. Early OpenAI AI researcher Co tweeted it and said, this is a field, the AGI moment. And so that demo showed the industry luminaries what AI could do. People inside research firms like OpenAI Anthropic reached out to us and told us we did not know our models are capable of doing that. And so that moment was like, okay, we. We have something here. And then the revenue. First day, made like a million dollars of ARR. Second day, $2 million.

Shaun (20:34)

Were you just, like, hitting. Hitting refresh constantly?

Emmett Shear (20:37)

Amjad must be on a call. He's been in his office all day. What's he doing?

Amjad Masad (20:42)

Refresh? Yeah, the whole time. But at the same time, we were just hustling to make the product better.

Shaun (20:47)

So basically, in, like, two days, you made more revenue.

Amjad Masad (20:50)

Yes.

Shaun (20:50)

You, like, beat. You beat your. Your. Your. Yeah.

Amjad Masad (20:55)

Growth in two days.

Shaun (20:57)

That's got to be a crazy feeling.

Amjad Masad (20:59)

You know, I've always heard from other entrepreneurs is that the feeling of product market fit is like stepping on a. I don't know who said this. It's like stepping on a landmine. And I knew that we didn't have it for a long time. That's why. Pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot. And then that felt like stepping on a. On a lineman. I was like, okay, we got it now. We go from there.

Emmett Shear (21:21)

All right, let's take a quick break, and I got a question for you. When a buyer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up? Most companies have no idea. And by the time they found out, they've already lost the deal to another company that did. HubSpot has AEO, which helps you show up in the moments when the right buyers are looking for a company like yours before the first click before they fill in the form. That is the moment HubSpot AEO is built for. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Sam, I don't know if you ever met him. When you came to my office, there was this young guy who used to work out of our office furcon. Had basically, like, adopted these kids. They were. They were on the East Coast. They wanted to come to Silicon Valley. They didn't have money. He's like, here's some money.

Shaun (22:00)

Yeah.

Emmett Shear (22:00)

They're like, is this an investment? He's like, no, this is money. You just have this in your account and you come sleep on my couch and you work out of my office and, like, get going. And so these two young guys, they were probably 20 years old, 21 years old, they were working out of our office and. And they had, like, they were trying to do an early version of, like, rent GPUs in the Cloud. So they realized these. This was before the AI boom, though. So, like, it was for machine learning or like, you want to do like a. Just like some research maybe. But this is before everything kicked off. But they had seen that, like, all the crypto miners had all these GPUs that were unused. And so they had posted on a crypto mining subreddit. And like, thousands of people showed up right away and were ready. There were calls, all, all the stuff. And then they were trying to get the demand side, but the demand wasn't there. And I was like, hey, this is a great idea. Like, in theory, it's a great idea. Like, why are you guys, like, pivoting? Like, why are you guys worried about these other ideas? And he goes, when we did that first thing, it was like we stepped on a landmine. And so now I kind of know that's what's possible. So, like, yeah, all these little signals, I know they're not real signals. And this guy's 20, 21 years old, and I'm supposed to, like, be mentoring him. And I walk back to my desk being like, I've never felt that. And I realized, like, I'd been doing startups for six, seven years, I had never felt what they were lucky enough to stumble into on the first day. And. And, you know, you don't even know what you're looking for. Had you never felt. It's like, love. It's like, am I in love? Maybe I'm in love. Maybe this is it. And then you feel it and you're like, oh, all that. That other stuff wasn't that this is the thing. And I feel like for entrepreneurs, it's one of the hardest things, but I

Shaun (23:30)

thought it's almost bad to talk about that, not talk about it. But I don't think you should expect that because I think that most great companies have never had that. If you look at the subset of companies most don't work. Some work. Okay. A handful work a little bit better. And then a very small percentage are amazing. And even amongst the amazing ones, what they're describing, what you guys are describing, they don't feel that like, for example, we were talking about like Mars Candy the other day. Like that's been around for 150 years. And more likely than not, it was like a grind. A grind. This year was not a grind. It kind of did pretty good. But this year it was kind of grind. You know what I mean? Like there was never like this moment where it's like we just grew to a billion in revenue from 2 million in, you know, in 24 months.

Emmett Shear (24:09)

I think you're right. It doesn't happen right away, even for you, even though it happened super fast. It's like 10 years in. But there is a difference between push and pull. And I think the companies I've seen, which is a very small handful that actually have product market fit, it starts to feel like pull. In fact, Emmett, the CEO of Twitch, I remember asking him, you did Justin tv. Then you guys pivoted to Twitch. Was it obvious right away? And he basically said, product market fits the main thing that matters. He goes, basically you feel like you're pushing a boulder up a hill every day. And then at some point you kind of wake up and you realize it's like you didn't. You reached your hands out but the boulder had already moved. And now you have to start running to catch up to it. And suddenly the whole game feels like a sprint catching up to the boulder going down the hill. It takes time, but there is a difference between like you are manually pushing the crank versus it starts to get pulled by the market.

Amjad Masad (24:56)

Just to offer like a distinction between the different types of businesses, there are, you know, Clay Christensen's RIP passed away recently. Harvard Business School professor came up with this concept of disruption, right? Disruption became sort of a meme, but it's actually an economics theory almost about technology. And he talks about sustaining technology versus disruptive technology. You can be innovative on a sustained curve. You can make things incrementally better. But there are things that are disruptive and those are like moment of time businesses or technologies that create this explosion of demand because for the first time it became possible, right? So if you're Mars Candy, there was a lot of other candy. Maybe you're really good in your recipe, you're really good in your execution. Most businesses are trying to compete in a more or less zero sum market, so they trying to capture market from Existing demand on existing competitors. Right now there are market creation moments and I think for replit, this was a market creation moment. And most Internet.

Shaun (26:07)

That's a great point, right?

Amjad Masad (26:08)

Whether it's PayPal, Facebook, you know, Google. The reason you have this explosive growth is like you just invented something new and then everyone's rushing because this capability didn't exist before and there's no other alternative. By the way, that's a really good point.

Shaun (26:26)

Do then, do you think that the right move for someone building a company is okay? So on one hand you could say, well just have patience and like just keep going, keep going, keep going and with, you know, maybe the same thing. Whereas the other hand, would it be like pivot, just like the 20 year old kids until you find that, that, that rock rolling down the mountain?

Amjad Masad (26:47)

I mean it depends what you're trying to build. Are you innovating something new? Are you creating something that wasn't really possible? Or are you entering a business where you're like, okay, I know you've done the business plan right? Here's what the market size is, here's how much we're going to capture from it, here's how we're going to be better than competition. If that's the case, you're going to slog and maybe every now and then you have some kind of innovation or some kind of breakthrough that gets you a bit of a jump over competitors. But prepare yourself to be very good at execution, build an amazing team, build amazing processes. Just be very good at the day to day execution to outcompete your competitors. If you're a young guy trying to make something that didn't exist before, or like Sean and some of the guys in social media, they're trying to create a new clubhouse or some kind of thing that I didn't know I would enjoy talking to people taking a walk on my earbuds. This is just like, didn't occur to me. So if you're inventing something like that, the point is pivot, pivot, pivot until it hits. Because if it's not hitting, you're not hitting on some human nature or element that you're finding or you're finding a secret in the universe almost.

Shaun (28:11)

You're a fun case study.

Emmett Shear (28:12)

Yeah. One of the reasons it's fun to talk to you is not only your business is interesting and you're interesting as a founder, but you're also a bit of a polymath. Like we were talking at the beginning of this about like the Polaroo, like Bitcoin I feel like, you know, you have like a bunch of these like little rabbit holes that you've gone down. I'm curious like what are those rabbit holes today? Because I've seen the original Replit deck and this was what 2014, 2015, something like that? Yeah, like bro, you called your shot Babe Ruth style. So read this thing out. What was the master plan?

Amjad Masad (28:44)

So growth by building tools.

Shaun (28:47)

How about the fact that in your deck you have a slide called master plan.

Amjad Masad (28:52)

So growing the product by building tools for education, essentially people learning how to code then build a simple network and AI assisted interface that blurs the distinction between learning and building. That's essentially what Replit is today. Like you're learning how to make software but you don't need to sit down and learn how to code. You're just like vibe coding and it's just happening as you go and you're kind of picking up these skills and then evolve the platform into a place where people come to learn, build, explore and host applications. So not only is it the development environment but the hosting of the applications and the hosting of the application. I think I should have had another point because that unlocks the next step which we're getting into now which is monetization of those applications, scaling of those applications. Right now if you go to Replit, you build something, you can just say monetize it and it will like integrate stripe for you and all of that and pretty soon you should be able to say market it and I'll like

Emmett Shear (29:49)

how big are the biggest apps that are built on Replit? Like are we talking guys are making hundreds of thousand dollars set low 7 figures? Like has anybody really broken out that are just they were made on replit and they still run on replit?

Amjad Masad (30:02)

This one is a little controversial but medv, the billion dollar one person business covered by the New York Times, basically

Shaun (30:13)

they were a company that sold what

Amjad Masad (30:14)

GLP1 and the reason it's controversial is because people don't like their marketing practices. The entrepreneur I think already fixed a lot of these issues that people are reacting to. But he runs a big part of a big part of his stack on replit and it's been, he says it's been a crucial part of their growth because it's not only just the core application but the automations. He's been up day to day. So for example he's working with a vendor and every day he does something manual like a marketing vendor. It's like okay, I'm going to build this website to you you go and you speak to an agent. The agent will give you all the information you need or the agent will give you the assets. So he'll build interfaces for all the different parts of the business, all the back office stuff of the business. And he's the fastest person that go from idea to prompt. Even when he was on Twitter going viral, he was like building a game in Droplet and he built an experiment where he sent me that experiment where you can scroll aside with your head so you can read something without looking at your screen. So I've never seen someone after spending some time chatting with him be so quick to create things. Boom. Create that, create that, automate this, automate that. That's one example. There's been a lot that I've spoken about over the years. In the past they used to have to migrate off of Replit because the platform was not complete. But now the platform app is actually complete and you can run full business on it. We have a lot of venture backed companies such as Spellbook. I think it's a multi hundred million dollar company started on Replit, Magic school, I think $500 million business started on Replit and many others. More recently since Replitation there hasn't been enough time for them to really hit massive scale. But there's a lot of multimillion dollar businesses. For example recently I think they just did a round. But there's a company that's building influencer marketing for local restaurants, local shops. So they'll, you know, you're a local restaurant, you want someone to cover your restaurant, you go to the platform, you hire an influencer, they actually physically walk to your restaurant, eat there, take a TikTok, whatever. Because now most people, especially Gen Z, they actually don't go to Google Maps anymore. If you ask the Gen Z, oh, let's, let's find a restaurant, they're like go to TikTok and search. And so that, that's already over 100,000, like few, few weeks.

Emmett Shear (32:31)

What's that one called? Do you know the name?

Amjad Masad (32:32)

Try nearby.

Shaun (32:34)

Dude, I still go to Yelp and my young employees were like, call me Gray Bush. They're like, you're so old man. Like what are you doing?

Emmett Shear (32:40)

You open the yellow pages and call them when you want to order food.

Shaun (32:44)

I was like, why not Yelp?

Emmett Shear (32:48)

Could someone move the sundial?

Amjad Masad (32:51)

It's surprising to me that the Google search queries keep going up. They just broke records, the revenue and search keeps going up. But yes, people in my, you know, people around me, they're not using Google as much.

Shaun (33:05)

Are there like any cool trends that you're seeing? Like, you know we have our, we have like a subset of like young, young, like 18, 19 year old kids who listen to MFM and they like want to hear business ideas. Yeah. Are there any interesting trends that you're seeing?

Amjad Masad (33:20)

Yeah.

Shaun (33:21)

In AI and on the rep platform where you're like, man, there's all these like cool like one or five or $10 million businesses that could be created.

Amjad Masad (33:28)

Yes. Silicon Valley have always approached problems with like hyperscale in mind. And I think for the first time, because the making software is cheaper, you can actually create a multimillion dollar business and not have to raise venture, not have to grow the team a whole lot. So local style businesses is very interesting. There is a guy in England that I think he's well on his way, he's 100,000 already in run rate. He's well on his way to a million. He is building software for ice rink management, so skating rings and all that. I think you go around in your life and there's a lot of things that are just not computerized, that there's no software running it. So that would be my first approach actually. That's what I did when I my first business was building software for Internet cafes and land gaming. And so that's always been a great place to start.

Emmett Shear (34:25)

You remind me of in Paul Graham's one of his essays about how to get startup ideas. He says the easiest way to get startup ideas is to like, if you want to find the startup idea of the future, simply live in the future and then build what doesn't exist.

Shaun (34:39)

Yes.

Emmett Shear (34:39)

Like, okay, what the hell does that mean? He describes when Zuckerberg built Facebook. It's not because he was a normal guy thinking what, what would the next, what would the future look like? It's like, no, he was on computers all day, his social life was online.

Amjad Masad (34:52)

Right.

Emmett Shear (34:52)

The problem was he only had certain tools available. So for him the idea of social, like social networking online was not just like possible, it was completely normal. It was his preferred medium to actually exist in. And you could just like lean into that rather than thinking you're the oddball. And I think you know that that's sort of interesting cause you know, you built Repl Dot partly because you grew up going to these Internet cafes in Jordan and every time you'd come you'd be on a different computer. So you kind of needed something that lived in the cloud. And so you, you know, for you what was completely normal was Odd to other people. So I think that's the, the trick with startup ideas, right, is to sort of lean into maybe the things you do that are a little bit more than normal or a little bit odd, and then just say, like, what would make my experience doing this odd thing a little bit better?

Amjad Masad (35:39)

You know, another, another one I would say is being lazy. In programming. There's this old saying that laziness is a, is a virtue and the idea is to automate a lot of things. But now everyone is a programmer essentially. So, you know, part of the reason why I made replit is because I don't want to keep setting up the freaking ide every time. And so, you know, go about your life with this laziness attitude. What are the kind of things that are so annoying that you have to keep doing over and over again? There's probably a million, maybe a billion people that feel the same way. And perhaps you can make a piece of software to automate that. And more important than ever, this like, lazy mindset of viewing things through the lens of automation. It's very important with AI, because AI is truly like, you know, we have a magic automation machine. So not only you'll optimize your life, you'll become, you know, you'll become a lot more productive, but you might stumble on something that a lot of other people would want.

Shaun (36:40)

This is for the folks out there who have a business that does at least $3 million a year in revenue. Because around this point, that's when you're able to look up after being heads down for years building your company, and you realize two things. One, you've done something great, but you're still a long way from your final destination. And two, you look around and you realize, I am all alone. I've outrun my peers. Which means you're now making $10 million decisions alone, by yourself. And that is when mediocrity can creep in. My company, Hampton, we solve this problem by giving you a room of vetted peers of other entrepreneurs who are going to hold you accountable, call you out on your nonsense, and help show you the way. Because the fact is, is that there's only a tiny number of people in your town who know what you're going through and who have been there. And they're hard to find. And if you can find them, it's hard to have this explicit time, this explicit place where you sit down, where the rules are clear that we are here to help each other and to be one another's board of directors. The biggest Risk is not failing. You have a company and it's working. You're going to be fine. But the biggest risk is waking up 10 years from now and saying, shit, I barely grew in business and in life. And for people like you who are ambitious, wasted potential and regret is what we want to help you to avoid. We have made so many of these groups and we have a thousand plus members. And I know this stuff actually works, whether you work with Hampton or you get your own group on your own, but having a group like this, a group of people who you meet with in real life once a month, it can change your life. It changed mine. And I know it will change yours. So check it out. Joinhampton.com hey, can you give me, give me your opinion on this. We were kind of joking, kind of not joking a while back with the guests. And we were like, it's sort of like we were asking ourselves, we're like, is, are we like in December of 2019 where we're just like three months away from like Covid happening and like the, in like America shutting down? And we're just like, oh yeah, I heard there's this virus in China, but whatever, no big deal. You know, are we sort of like that with AI, where it's like, well, you know, like square maybe laid off a lot of people, but like, yes, probably not going to happen anymore. Like, do you think that we are like months or 12 months or something like that away from like the world changing dramatically?

Amjad Masad (38:51)

I think we are in the singularity, like the, you know, the original idea of a singularity. I think Werner Finch, one of the early computer pioneers and, and, and sci fi authors talked about the singularity, borrowed this concept from physics. In physics, it's like the black hole. And anything that happens after the black hole is undefined. So we actually don't know what is not knowable. So anything that is beyond that point you can't even have formulas for because it's literally undefined. You know, a lot of the early AI thinkers talked about this moment of singularity, whereas it is incredibly hard to, to predict what happens after. Because the pace of innovation is not only fast, it is accelerating as fast as it already is, meaning it is the second derivative is exponential. And so I think this is the moment we're in where in 22 we got GPT4 at the time and GPT2 had come out in 2019, GPT3 in 2020. So every two years we were getting a model and now it feels like every few weeks we're Getting a model sometimes every day. And there are these fundamental capability shifts that happen either in autonomy or cybersecurity or computer use or what have you. And every one of those capability shifts have a lot of downstream applications that yet need to be discovered. We haven't actually productized it yet. So it's almost like you get a bundle of energy. That's how I think of models. They're potential energy that entrepreneurs need to go figure out how to make them into products. And this is why it's an explosive time for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship is because we have this potential energy that needs to be harnessed. Now the reason why there's a delay is because we have this capability overhang. The world will change, but it's really hard to know whether. I can't tell you in 12 months like all entry level jobs will be gone.

Shaun (41:04)

Well, what if you had to make a bet?

Amjad Masad (41:06)

My bet would be that I don't think unemployment numbers will move a whole lot, perhaps still marginally increase. I think Dario, the CEO of Anthropic said we're going to get to 20 unemployment or something like that. I don't know if I'm misquoting him, but he said all.

Shaun (41:21)

He's a doomer. Basically though, he's on the far end.

Amjad Masad (41:24)

Yeah, like I don't think we're. Because like what I'm seeing from our customers, we have some customers that automate a lot of things, end up laying off some people. We have other customers that automate a lot of things, make more revenue and want to hire more people to automate more things and create more products. And so net net, I think there's going to be a lot of new AI companies, a lot of companies that make use of AI and want to hire more people. So net net, I think the unemployment question I think will probably be be neutral.

Emmett Shear (41:55)

How do you think this sort of Game of Thrones AI war plays out? Right, you've got, you know, the King of the north, you got Elon up there, he's, he's the, he's trying to come down. You got the OpenAI kingdom over here. Google, you know, they were in denial but now they're here, you know, they're, they're making it happen. What, what do you think? How do you think this plays out?

Amjad Masad (42:17)

I, I like, I like business theory. It's not always useful, but it often is is useful. Hamilton Hamler wrote this book called Seven Powers and everyone Silk and Valley talks about moats. Seven powers is the theory of moats, the moat of these LLMs, is the technology fundamentally commoditizable? Right. Like it seems to be very easy to replace these models. Like, you know, a lot of developers, every day, professional developers are switching between these models. In some cases if you're in cursor, it's like literally one click away to switch to the next model. And I think a lot of the fighting has to do with this fact that it is hard to find a way to zoom heads too far ahead of the competition. You're always sort of neck and neck competing with others, so you might want to try to block them in different ways, whether it's in the court or with the government or regulations or things like that. Whereas I think in the past if you're Microsoft and you achieve this dominance on the PC, it's really hard to unseat you. Right. And so there's this natural monopolies that used to emerge and they're protected by certain modes such as network facts, economies of scale. We haven't seen any of those moats sort of emerge from these foundation model companies. And so my hypothesis is that maybe the one natural moat is capital. You need not just one time capital to enter the market. You need continuous capital to train the current model, the next generation model and the next generation model. And then you need enough installed base and revenue to cover your cost. But that is not enough moat to keep the other big players away. So you can imagine all the big companies have a fighting chance and all the big governments can also participate in this. And maybe China as a place where you can't really distinguish between country and company, and maybe the country is going to be doing to the foundation model market what they did to the EV market. Well, they'll subsidize the hell out of it in order to have competing chance and maybe even destroy the market globally by subsidizing it. All of this to say, I think it is good for entrepreneurs because if we ended up with a monopoly or just oligopoly and you're building on top of it, it is actually very hard to build a successful business because like you said, they'll come for you. But if it ends up being a technology that's kind of easy to replace, I mean there is a place for a lot of entrepreneurs to participate.

Shaun (45:11)

Sean, remember you were telling that story about the anthropic CEO and he was like, yeah, things are booming. But like in a weird way I feel like I'm always like a few months or a few quarters away from running out of money because we're growing so fast we have to buy inventory GPUs. Are you in a similar position where even though you're making all this money, you're having to spend more and more and more? And is profitability in sight?

Amjad Masad (45:33)

No to the first question. We're not burning nearly as much cash as foundation company model companies. And sometime last year, profitability was in sight. We had something like 30 years of Runway or something like that. Since then, we decided to spend a lot more on specialty sales and marketing. And my theory on this is. Or my thesis is that there are a lot of businesses that will need help adopting this technology and adopting ramps broadly. And so we. And also there's this imbalance between supply and demand that I talked about. So I thought, okay, we just need to scale the sales team. And so the sales team was like four reps or something like that by the end of last year. I think it's going to be more than half the company by the end of this year, which is very surprising for me to say because I was always like a sort of a tech. Yeah.

Shaun (46:31)

How's that feel to be around a bunch of regional sales managers?

Amjad Masad (46:34)

I love it. I didn't know because I think I'm a sales bro.

Emmett Shear (46:40)

I am a sales bro.

Amjad Masad (46:41)

I am a sales bro. I think I'm weird. As far as tech nerds.

Shaun (46:45)

Well, why do you love it? This is actually really. We laugh because it's funny, but this is actually quite interesting.

Emmett Shear (46:50)

He was deadlifting before it's cool. He likes sales before it's cool. He's got range. My guy's got range.

Shaun (46:57)

Well, why do you like it? Because I used to hate salespeople. Then I realized that salespeople like all these whining and dining. It actually works. And they do create demand.

Amjad Masad (47:04)

Yeah, yeah.

Shaun (47:05)

And they. And I'm like, oh, okay. You serve a purpose.

Amjad Masad (47:08)

It's more of a contact support than consumer. Like consumer. You do something and then you do an A B test and maybe two weeks later you find out whether it worked or not. And there's this huge delay and there's so many things outside of your control. There's like hype in the market that affects you. Someone writes about you, you go viral, and then you die down. Or it's like there's almost like the weather. You can't really control a lot of it. Sales is much more, like I said, contact sport. I can apply effort. And whether we get the win or not is somewhat much more within our control. And so if I hear some kind of deal is at risk. It activates me so much because the idea of losing some kind of comeback competitor, this is like the worst feeling in the world. And like I'll call whoever I need to call, I'll show up to their office, we'll do whatever we need. And we rarely lose deals. In the few times there was like a potential of losing a deal, we just pulled out all the punches and the company just because Haiya and I, you know, Haya, my co founder and my wife is also hybrid competitor, she also lifts and does boxing and all of that. I like built a culture that's incredibly competitive and so we get activated by this and then when we win, it just feels good. It's very real. It's like very different than seeing a number go up.

Shaun (48:33)

Like, you know, wait, so yeah, I had heard about this. Your wife is your partner or business partner. That's pretty, that's pretty cool, I think, I mean it's cool when it's cool. What do you get?

Amjad Masad (48:44)

Yeah, what is tragic is disastrous.

Shaun (48:50)

Yeah, how, how's that?

Amjad Masad (48:52)

I think that having replit being so hard, as hard as it is and it was, if we weren't in it together, I think it would have definitely driven a wedge. A wedge between us. Because you're both entrepreneurs, you know how much of your life energy startups take. Like they literally take your vitality. You age, you know, I had hair when we started the company. And so in life you have limited amount of energy and you direct it towards your spouse, your kids, your work, you know, things like that. But then if something is like this sucking energy, the sucking everything, time and energy, eventually it'll just strain your relationships. And I, I, I, you know, I, for a long time, like a lot of my friends just didn't hear from me. Like I kind of disappeared in many ways and still in many ways, you know, I would love to spend more time kind of checking in with friends and keeping connections alive. But the fact that we're in it together I think made our relationship stronger because those dark times and having all

Shaun (50:02)

the shares in the family, I mean that is pretty cool.

Amjad Masad (50:05)

That's cool too.

Shaun (50:06)

No, I mean, I'm not being funny, that's cool. I think Sean used to work with this guy, Michael Birch and him and his wife started a company and they sold it for like, I don't know, 6 or $800 million. And it was so, it was like their family, like, you know, got two times rewarded.

Amjad Masad (50:18)

But you have to be careful a few things, you have to be careful not to like make these mission decisions on the weekend and show up. I was like, hey, decision done. Have to be careful not to bring the tone. You bring it home to the office. Don't make it awkward around other people. It's very easy to make it awkward around other people. You have to work harder to ensure that this is meritocracy. Because I come from a world that is less meritocratic, that is more based on who you know, what you know. And family business are very common in that world. The problem with them is that people join the business and they expect if they're not part of the family, they're not really going to. Their work is not going to matter as much. Right. And so you have to be very clear about performance and set high expectations for yourselves and be communicative about it. And also always open to the potential that, you know, there are other people that are better at running the company than you are.

Emmett Shear (51:24)

You said you read a ton of biographies and especially with this kind of shift into sales mode and being like, oh, I get to play full contact startup. This is amazing. Who are the founders that either most resonate with you in their style or you respect something about them or a story that you find yourself retelling a bunch or telling yourself, telling your team? That's been kind of inspirational for you?

Amjad Masad (51:48)

I think Ben Horowitz and like the Hard Things About Hard Things is a very good book and inspiration for especially like a more sales driven business. That's a good one. I read it a while back and it has a lot of really interesting stories about doing deals and losing deals and hiring salespeople. And then, you know, after I watched Pirates of Silicon Valley, started learning about Bill Gates. This is another really good old school, very unknown biography, Hard Drive. It's like in the 90s about Bill Gates. After reading about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and these guys, I just knew that I wanted to be part of that. Part of Silicon Valley just seems the most exciting thing possible. You can have the most impact and that is a blessing because I look at a lot of my friends and they're now almost 40 and they really haven't found the thing that they want to get after. And I think that it creates this crisis of meaning and in a lot of people. I'm also a big fan of visualization. There was a period of time where there was a lot of like pseudoscientific documentaries coming out. There was one called what the Bleep Do We Know. It's like about quantum physics and visualizations

Shaun (53:08)

like if you put the vibration out, the universe will reward you.

Amjad Masad (53:12)

I kind of believe that in a weird way, and I can't really disprove it, but tell you a few stories. I wanted to be on Rogan's show. I was like, I've done all these shows. I've done Tucker's show, my first million, all these shows. I was like, I want to be a Rogan. And I was the big dog, the big guy.

Shaun (53:37)

I'm sick of the JVs.

Amjad Masad (53:38)

No, I mean, you guys are amazing. But how do you. How do you even get on Rogan? I started, like, sort of visualizing it. I was like, what would I talk about? What would I tell him? How would the interaction be? And things like that. A few weeks later, I get a message from two people, Mark Andreessen and Lex Friedman. And they both asked me the same question. Hey, I have a friend whose daughter is entering a entrepreneurship competition, and once her app wants to make an app, and do you know anyone who can help her? Like, can you help her? It's like, that's odd. And I remember replying to Live Stream and then he, he goes to me and then replied to Mark, and it's really honest. It got the same message from, like, who's this person? It's like, yeah, you know, it's. It's Joe Rogan. It's his daughter. And I said, you know, I'd like to help her. Like, I'll freaking build the app for her. Like, he introduced me so introduced me to Rogan. Rogan introduced me to his daughter. And I, I say, let's, let's get on a Zoom. I get on a Zoom call and it's like four high school girls, and they're like, they're very bright. They have a business idea to connect Gen Z, local. Gen Z to local businesses for jobs. And they're like, you know, I'm going to teach you how to make applications and you're going to make it. And so I open replit, and like, here's replit. Here's what you do. You just, you know, type in your prompt and let's check in next week. Next week we. We check in and they already made, like, half the app. And by the way, replit Agent was early on, it was still running into some problems. So every now and then I'll jump in and, like, help them with. With one thing, but for the, like, 95% of it, they built it themselves. And I'm always off the belief of, like, just proof you provide value and like, just don't ask for anything in return. It wasn't like, okay, I'm doing this to get on the show. I think that would be the bad mindset to, to, to have. I kept mentoring her and I, I gave her advice on how to win the competition. It's like, look, no one, none of your peers will have an app. You're the only one that's going to have an app. Everyone will have slideshows. Before you do the pitch, go send the app to all the judges and that way they'll know you're the only one that, that, that actually went above and beyond and they actually, they presented and they win the competition. By the way, Joe, I think, might have thought I am some kind of contractor. Like, he didn't know I didn't introduce myself. And so I sent Joe a nice letter and told him nice messages, told him, look, I'm, you know, very, very bright daughter, so glad I could be part of this. I, I would love just five minutes of your time to kind of introduce myself and my story. And so he's like, okay, um, I'll, you know, I'll call you tomorrow, whatever tomorrow comes. He didn't call me and then text him I didn't get here back. So I gently told his daughter. I was like, I would just like a phone call with you, dad. And so he's like, okay. And then phone rings and it's zero again. And it's like about 90 seconds in. We're talking about MMA. I, like, you're kind of a. You're, you're, you're, you, you're not. It's like the same guy and I'm big MMA guy. But on the, on the call, I, I just was like, I just told him about myself.

Emmett Shear (56:59)

It's a lot of pressure to do that quick, right?

Amjad Masad (57:01)

Yes, yes. You have to be calm. I, I'm actually the calmest moment and I, I think I could learn this from gaming. I slow, I slow down a lot under pressure. Like when pressure comes, you have to gaming, racing, anytime, there's like incredible pressure and any mistake might kill you. In this case, not literally kill you, but like kill your chances. Actually, I experienced time slow down and I think you can train this in yourself. And I think a lot of race drivers talk about this.

Emmett Shear (57:37)

By the way, weightlifting is a great place to practice this because it's low stakes. But like at the end of the set is when you're shaking, you're at the most fatigue. Maybe you're shaking, maybe you don't know if you could do it. What most people do is they rush to finish and they sacrifice form. And basically, if you could practice poise in the last few reps, you're doing that now every day in the gym. It's like you can get a lot of reps and practice in the gym as a metaphor for life, that you can't get, that you can't simulate that pressure in other ways. But, you know, your body kind of thinks you're dying.

Amjad Masad (58:11)

Yes.

Emmett Shear (58:11)

When you're.

Shaun (58:11)

When you're under the.

Emmett Shear (58:12)

Under the weights and you're shaking and you don't know what to do. So your body can simulate pressure that way.

Amjad Masad (58:17)

There's so many lessons from. From powerlifting you can apply. Actually, one day I was at the gym in San Francisco and I saw Brian Chesky lifting weights. It's hugely jacked.

Shaun (58:28)

And I remember he's a former bodybuilder.

Amjad Masad (58:30)

I struck up a conversation with him about powerlifting and startups.

Shaun (58:35)

That was.

Amjad Masad (58:35)

That was a lot of fun, actually. I've had visualization and that feeling of, oh, I want this thing to happen. And then that happened, like, way too many times. And it doesn't always happen in podcasts, but I think this is what's on my mind right now. Even. Even the interview I did with Tucker. Like, I, you know, I remember being a big fan of Tucker during the lockdowns when, like, nothing made sense in the world. And, like, I had this anger in me because, like, you know, I came to the United States for freedom. And, like, I feel like I can't see on what's on my mind. I can't leave my house. I have to, like, put a muzzle in my mouth. I have to take a shot.

Shaun (59:12)

Like.

Amjad Masad (59:14)

Like, this is a scam. And I remember him like, I started watching Fox News.

Emmett Shear (59:20)

He got radicalized.

Amjad Masad (59:21)

But, But. But one day I see Martin Shkreli on his podcast. And I had helped Martin raise around. I. I learned finance from Martin.

Shaun (59:35)

Dude, he used to stream on Sean's platform. Yeah, I used to watch him on Sean's thing all the time.

Emmett Shear (59:40)

He was. He's like, one of the best teachers. And he's super entertaining for finance stuff. Right?

Amjad Masad (59:45)

Like, he just, like, he still does it on YouTube.

Shaun (59:47)

And they're really. They're really good.

Emmett Shear (59:48)

Shout out to the Shkreli Pill channel. It's on YouTube. It's. It takes as long live streams, it cuts it. The most interesting kind of 20, 30 minutes. Shkreli pill is just doing God's work out there.

Amjad Masad (59:58)

Yeah. And I knew nothing about personal Finance, I knew nothing about the financial markets. I didn't know how money worked even. And so I remember just watching his channel and just getting educated. And when he got out of jail, I was like, oh, that's cool. Oh, Charlie's out of jail. And I went and watched his stream and I see him coding and I see him opening Rufflet and I sent him a tweet and I'm like, hey, I see you. I saw you opening Rufflet. I'm like a big fan. Be great to connect. So I connected with him. He tells me he's starting a startup, the Doctor One. So he started a company as like a holding company and he started the Doctor One at the same time he started the Bloomberg Terminal one. He started three other things. Yeah, he started Audio AI one, but the one that took off is the Bloomberg terminal, I think. And they are now like multimillion dollar stuff like this.

Emmett Shear (60:47)

I'm always curious, right, because when somebody literally comes out of jail and then you're like, you could. I like to streams too. But then in terms of like investing, there's obviously a big, you know, you kind of got to do your diligence of like this guy went to jail for some sort of wire fraud type of deal. Am I going to be a part of that? Like, I guess I'm just curious how you mentally think about it. Are you basically like, it's retard vaccine, you don't overthink it or do you go and you kind of go get first, first principles answers for yourself like, what do you do?

Amjad Masad (61:16)

First of all, I'm personally like very principled and very careful. The only problems with the law I had was. Was racing cars. I'm like a big fan of second chances. And the thing I love about America is there's some forgiveness here. You can have a second and a third act. And I saw his side of the story and it just seemed like he did his time. And this is the system we live in is that you do something, you get punished, you do your time and then you leave. And I think society should treat you with a, with a blank slate. Early on in Replit we our first investor, Roy Behat from Bloomberg Beta. Roy is another very interesting character. He's like, Bloomberg Beta is an amazing investment firm. They have great returns.

Shaun (62:03)

I pitched those guys years ago. They said no.

Emmett Shear (62:06)

But great investors,

Amjad Masad (62:11)

no. He will just tell you exactly. He might even tell you this idea sucks. And he's the, he's the straightest shooter in Silicon Valley. I think he'll tell it like it is. What's interesting about Roy is blooming. Beta is both the investment vehicle, but also just things he's fascinated in. He'll just go do. He has this conference about the future of work. But one thing they did at the time is they did a trip to prison facility, and we went there and it was. It was us mentoring inmates about entrepreneurship, and they wanted to start businesses internally. Some people were starting businesses inside, and we were supposed to mentor them. That experience was very touching. And one exercise, and maybe you could say it's a BS Woke exercise, but, like, they lined up everyone on a line and then the inmates on another line. And someone was saying, if you grew up in a household where there's. Where there's like, crime on drugs, stay forward. If you did not step back. And then, like, you know, 95% of the non inmates step back, and then of the inmates, maybe 5% step back. So, like this, like, inversion. And the exercise was to show you how much of the life of crime is sort of like, somehow predetermined by. By, by. I don't fully believe that I believe in personal responsibility a lot, but maybe

Shaun (63:44)

they're like, people are born in just maybe harder situations.

Emmett Shear (63:46)

You can believe in agency and personal responsibility as well as probability. Yes, right. And influence.

Amjad Masad (63:51)

Yes, yes. And so, you know, for all these reasons, I've, you know, I'm. I'm open to. To talking and potentially working with people who have done things in the past, but then they paid their dues and moved on. And so it just felt like this is someone who helped me indirectly learn valuable skills, and I want to help them.

Shaun (64:13)

One of my favorite, I love. I married into an immigrant family. Sean comes from a family of immigrants. What's it feel like from, you know, you're an immigrant to, like, be living the American dream? Do you think that there's something about the Americans. What about the American experience do you think is different from other countries?

Amjad Masad (64:32)

I think America's vision of itself, at least the kind of liberal America's vision of itself was like, about tolerance and inclusivity. And there's a lot of truth to that. Like, you know, I think it is very easy to be anywhere else. Maybe in Europe, perhaps the UK is a. Is an exception and feel like an outsider. But in the U.S. especially in, like, you know, New York, San Francisco, these places, do you just feel like anyone else? You just feel like you're. You're accepted and you have as much of a chance to make it as someone. As someone who is who was born here. And that's incredible. And I don't think that's fully appreciated, especially because America is so self critical when it comes to these things. But there is a lot of tolerance for difference in this country. And then there's just the spirit of innovation and openness to ideas. Like ask anyone who grew up anywhere else, literally, quite literally anyone else. And the experience of entrepreneurs there is to have an idea and the likelihood of your friend telling you you're tarded after you told them that idea is like 90% plus. And that was always my experience. I always safeguarded ideas not because I didn't want other people to copy them, but more like to protect those ideas because they're fragile beings. America and San Francisco, Silicon Valley especially, a place where you talk about these ideas and they grow. And the problem is they grow too much and they become radical. Let's start a ship island country. They've got always weird things. So there's an opposite problem of they snowball and they become.

Shaun (66:20)

Yeah, but that's a better problem than I've got a lot of my buddies, they say back, back home I tell people about my ideas and they're like, shut up dude, let's just be plumbers. Like, don't stand out.

Amjad Masad (66:32)

Don't stand out. Exactly. That's, that's the usual thing when I

Emmett Shear (66:36)

moved to San Francisco, because it's not even just America as a whole. Like San Francisco specifically is on the extreme edge. I remember I had just moved there, so I didn't have a place to work, so I just sat in a coffee shop. And in San Francisco, the coffee shop is like, you know, dating, speed dating for investments. Right. So the table next to me just kept turning over every 30 minutes with another founder pitching another stupid ass idea to another investor who was hearing him out. And I just remember by the eighth hour of her, you know, 15 of these pitches and I just remember thinking, wow, every one of those ideas sounded terrible. And yet it was totally normal and common and accepted to be a little bit crazy. Like all those people were just now, yeah, what's normal here is crazy elsewhere and vice versa. So I went to a meetup that night to go meet some people and there was a guy there who was working at JP Morgan and he introduced himself in shame. He was like, I work at J.P. morgan, but, but, but, but, you know, but I'm, I'm, I'm leaving soon. I just need to, you know, that's, that's a small, the normal in, in other cities you have to apologize, you have to be. You have to add all this context if you're choosing the unconventional path of doing a startup. And in San Francisco, you had to add all this disclaimer legalese if you had a normal job, because it's like, what the hell are you doing, man? Why are you doing that stupid thing? Why. Why aren't you living for real like the rest of us?

Amjad Masad (67:55)

Yeah. And it's easy to get cynical about it, and it's like, oh, man, this place sucks. And then make fun of it and all of that. But there's something truly unique about it. The other part is like, rubbing shoulder with. With billionaires, like, when you're literally worth nothing. You know, Marc Andreessen is one who's, like, makes friends on. On Twitter and he goes on podcasts where, like, there's two listeners and he'd, like, he'll become friends with people that he find intellectually interesting and stimulating. Paul Graham's the same, like, wherever he goes. He's on vacation in Stockholm, and he did, like, a YC meet up there. And he's just meeting all these kids that want to start companies. And so people get energy here from less from showing off their wealth and more from being intellectually stimulated.

Shaun (68:44)

You know who's like, the unsung hero of San Francisco? Meetup.com.

Amjad Masad (68:48)

yes.

Shaun (68:48)

Oh, my God. That's. They're like, they're the tugboats of the. Of the Silicon Valley scene. Like, they. They don't get enough credit. They. They're the best.

Amjad Masad (68:55)

Yeah. I met a lot of amazing people just going to meetups when I first came to Silicon Valley. Is it still going?

Shaun (69:02)

Well, I'm, like, too old to use it, so I don't use it, but it is still going. It was sold, I think Kevin Ryan, who started Business Insider and gilt group at MongoDB, I think he bought it. But the founder of meetup.com has this, like, crazy story. He, like, worked at McDonald's, and now he's working at Amazon, but as, like, a driver. He's like, an Amazon.

Amjad Masad (69:24)

Yeah, I talked to him.

Emmett Shear (69:24)

He.

Amjad Masad (69:25)

He is worker rights union guy. And the reason he started meetup was not to, like, get rich San Francisco kids to meet up, but, like, to actually organize. And so he's back to his passion now. So he goes and he takes a job at Amazon, and he likes to give people tools to unionize. And the most frustrating.

Shaun (69:44)

Why would they hire him?

Emmett Shear (69:46)

Dude, he'd be like a casino card counter. If it was up to me, I'd be Like, oh, he's here. Get this guy out of.

Shaun (69:54)

Does he still have all of his fingers?

Amjad Masad (69:59)

What are they doing?

Shaun (70:02)

They should be like, dude, you are way too redstone here.

Emmett Shear (70:08)

Dude. Isn't it crazy that there is like this corporate espionage shit going on? Like, it sounds like conspiracy, but it's. You also have to logically think it can't be zero.

Shaun (70:16)

Does that happen to you? Amchad does. Like, is there espionage?

Emmett Shear (70:20)

He wouldn't know.

Shaun (70:22)

Yeah. Is it here in the room with you right now?

Amjad Masad (70:25)

I think you have to be careful about it. I think you have to build the right systems and processes and all of that. And even if it is not an adversarial company, it could be an adversarial state, especially if you have model weights or something that they can. They can steal. And there's been a couple stories where they. They kind of, you know, caught foreign agents trying to steal LLM models.

Shaun (70:50)

But why foreign agent? Like. Like, I guess if you have a company that grew from, you know, 2 to 1 billion in that fast, I would think that there'd be. Someone would be like, hey, can you go get a job there? Hey, you work there? Like, I'll bribe you to tell me x, Y.

Amjad Masad (71:02)

Probably, you know, we're a target. Probably. But we. We're not an easy target. We. We had someone from the FBI come give it. Give us a talk about these things, some of these stories, how to protect ourselves. And the broader point is, is. Is more interesting now with AI, both social engineering and cybersecurity risk has. Has gone up tremendously. Like, you can have bots that are very good at convincing you of certain things. So phishing has gotten a lot scarier. And also you can do hacking and privileged escalation. Like, the Vercel hack is kind of crazy. Do you guys know the entire chain of events?

Emmett Shear (71:44)

I didn't understand what happened. I saw a couple of tweets where they were like kind of doing the thing where you. You say, hey, this happened. Just be aware. You know, you have to come out and say it at some point. But what was it? What happened?

Amjad Masad (71:55)

There's an employee at this company called Contacts AI and it's one of those provide contacts to your AI companies that downloaded a Roblox cheat software. And that Roblox cheat software was infected with some kind of backdoor. And then that company became fully compromised. And someone at vercel installed Contacts AI through Google OAuth on their workspace. And then they had an entry through contacts into Vercell and then inside Vercel they've done a bunch of hacks to escalate privileges and get access to their, to their databases.

Shaun (72:34)

And this was all planned by someone.

Amjad Masad (72:35)

I mean, I don't know if it's planned end to end. I assume they infected Context AI and they knew it was an attack vector for a lot of other companies got it.

Shaun (72:43)

And what did the creator, what did they get?

Amjad Masad (72:47)

They get data they're trying to sell on the Internet of like, what would

Emmett Shear (72:53)

you get from Vercel? Like database data.

Amjad Masad (72:56)

Database database passwords, source code.

Shaun (73:01)

And then you go to that person and you ransom it.

Amjad Masad (73:03)

I don't think they did ransom. They just posted. It's like, hey, I'm selling it for like a million dollars.

Emmett Shear (73:07)

That sucks for Vercel because, you know, what did they do in this situation? Right?

Amjad Masad (73:11)

I think the thing about Vercel, there are a few things. I mean, look, every company has, has issues and this is not a knock on them. But there's one thing that was odd, that they were storing the database secrets in clear text. They had a way recently to make them sensitive and encrypt them, but they weren't encrypted at rest. So once you get access to the database, you got access to every other customer database.

Emmett Shear (73:33)

I see.

Shaun (73:35)

Has your life changed now that you're. Now that you're a billionaire? Like, are you afraid of your security?

Amjad Masad (73:41)

Yes, unfortunately, I have protection. I don't know, man. I. I don't feel like a billionaire. Like, maybe.

Shaun (73:51)

What do you feel like?

Amjad Masad (73:52)

I feel like a guy I don't wake up in the morning.

Shaun (73:56)

Yeah. What do you.

Amjad Masad (73:57)

I definitely feel like a millionaire. For sure. It took me a while to feel that. But like, you know, after like the lifestyle upgrade at all, I guess because I didn't have the lifestyle upgrade of a billionaire. Like, I don't have a house of a billionaire, not a realized billionaire. And I don't like to upgrade my lifestyle too quickly.

Emmett Shear (74:15)

Was, was there any upgrade that you did do that was pretty cool where you're like, oh, money does have some utility. This actually brought me joy, freedom in some, some way. I think most people should talk a little bit more about what spending actually moves the needle for you. Because most people have very low imagination with their own money.

Amjad Masad (74:32)

Yeah, that's, that's, you know, when I, when I start, when I sold some second. We did some second secondary sale like a couple years ago. I think most of it comes down to honestly living a healthier lifestyle and saving time. So a chef is pretty, it's pretty awesome. Being able to eat exactly what you want and eat healthy. Like even when you go to doordash and you try to search for the healthiest food, it's still shit.

Shaun (75:03)

It's a pain in the ass. Yeah.

Amjad Masad (75:04)

And so it just makes you feel better. It just becomes effortless to maintain your weight and maintain your discipline. Getting a coach, you'll have to cycle through a few to find someone that you like. Getting someone who shows up at your door. And so, you know, creating that lifestyle, a lot of it is about hiring other people, but you can overdo it. And I, at some point, I think we overdid it a little bit. And you want to be also careful with. You mentioned security, but there's a lot of people who want to leech in different ways and scam you and, and do all sorts of nasty things. So I think you can expose yourself to like too many, too many people. Your house also starts feeling like, like the office, A hotel.

Shaun (75:47)

Hotel.

Amjad Masad (75:48)

The office. People working out of there. I'm like, oh man. Like I, I want my kids to have like a normal life. Like we grew up.

Shaun (75:55)

Did you. You know, it's crazy. I just googled it. How many billionaires are under the age of 40? There's only 71.

Amjad Masad (76:00)

Really.

Shaun (76:01)

So. Yeah. So of the, I don't know how many. Seven billion. You know, people like you are smile. You are in the probably the top. Like you know, having 1,000.

Amjad Masad (76:14)

I. He's. It is very interesting.

Shaun (76:17)

Well, you are in the 1000. Probably the. Of all the people under 40, you are probably in the top 1000 richest.

Amjad Masad (76:23)

Well that shows you. I haven't really reflected on this all that much. I was just like, keep going. Yeah, build more. Yeah.

Shaun (76:30)

You're like, you're like, I know how much I want. And the answer is more. That is the, that is the perfect

Amjad Masad (76:37)

wealth and money more. It's in terms of success, impact and enough reserve to actually have an impact on the world and do do the things that I want to do that I think are positive. By the way, getting a really kick ass car the moment you get any kind of money is the most important thing you could do.

Shaun (76:58)

What did you got?

Amjad Masad (76:59)

An AMG GT black series.

Shaun (77:02)

Nice. I got an AMG E63.

Amjad Masad (77:04)

That's amazing.

Shaun (77:04)

I got mine.

Amjad Masad (77:05)

Love it. AMG is I think underrated because it has the luxury but also the class.

Emmett Shear (77:11)

I bought an E bike with a burly wagon behind it and my kids fit in that. And that's what I ride around everywhere.

Amjad Masad (77:17)

Amazing. I think there is you know now there's, like, a lot of hate. Some of it is dessert for Silicon Valley, but part of it is because, like, they think you think people, like, potentially hit us because of our wealth and we should dress down and not show our wealth as much. But I think it just becomes more inauthentic when you look at the ballers on TikTok or Instagram and you look at the comments, people love them or like. But you look at the comments when, like, some tech CEOs saying some. Some dumb shit, like, everyone's gonna lose their job. I was, like, hating them and I think just, like, being a little more normal. And the normal thing to do is when you come about some money, it's like, buy some cool.

Shaun (78:10)

We love having you on, man. You, you, you. You have this perfect balance of, like, being wise but also being audacious and fun to hang out with, and yet you got a little bit intimidating also.

Emmett Shear (78:23)

He's a formidable guy.

Shaun (78:26)

No, you're a blessing. And we're so happy. We sort of got to see you a little bit in the before phase, and that's really exciting for us.

Amjad Masad (78:37)

I love that I'm coming here at different stages of my life, and I get to look back on that and reflect, and you guys are doing amazing things. I think we share the same mission of empowering people. I think that just. It's incredibly exciting time that wealth is accessible to more people.

Emmett Shear (78:56)

We're just trying to get rich.

Amjad Masad (78:57)

Yeah. I hope a lot more people get rich. I hope a lot more people get their first million and come on here and talk about it.

Shaun (79:03)

And they use. We hope they use replit along the way. Dude, thank you, guys. You're a blessing. We appreciate you. That's it. That's a pod.

Amjad Masad (79:09)

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it. Like, no days off on a road. Let's travel. Never looking.

Emmett Shear (79:18)

Hey, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about a podcast that you could check out. It is called the Science of Scaling by Mark Roberge. He was the founding CEO of HubSpot, and he's a guest lecturer at Harvard Business School. The guy's smart, and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like Klaviyo and Vanta and OpenAI. And he's asking about their strategies, their tactics, and how they're growing their companies as, you know, head of sales or chief revenue officer. If you're looking to scale a company up, if you're a CRO or head of sales that's looking to level up in your career. I think a podcast like this could be great for you. Listen to the Science of Scaling wherever you get your podcast.