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- [00:00]
A
This is the first AI agent thing that has like, been a mind blowing moment for me where I am not a programmer, I am not a coder, but I can now create software.
- [00:10]
B
Well, that's insane.
- [00:11]
C
There are apps built on replit Agent that otherwise would take probably $100,000 of developer time. And you can build it like in, you know, $25 paid to replit. It's pretty wild how fast these companies are scaling. I don't think in the history of Silicon Valley we've seen anything like that, even in the, like, Web 2.0 era.
- [00:31]
A
So what is like a fast ramp for an AI company? What's impressive? That kind of broke the frame of how long things would take.
- [00:37]
C
So I would say reaching 10 million in three or four months. ARR.
- [00:42]
A
Oh my God. That's wild.
- [00:46]
B
Can I ask a blunt, crude question? How can I use your software to become a billionaire?
- [00:51]
C
I would say building. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.
- [00:58]
B
I put my all in it.
- [00:59]
C
Like no days off on a road, less travel, never looking.
- [01:03]
A
Okay, so how do we want to start this? So Amjad, you, you're awesome. So you have, you're today in a position that I think a lot of people want to be in. You have, you're doing the Silicon Valley dream. You had this idea. You go through yc, you've now raised hundreds of millions of dollars. You're valued at a, you know, billion dollar valuation. So that's today. But then the cool thing about your story is that didn't seem likely. You know, 10 years ago is a very unlikely success story. And yeah, you went through yc, but you were rejected a bunch of times. Like, yeah, you're in Silicon Valley now, but you started off coding in an Internet cafe in Jordan. That's what's interesting to me. And we asked you beforehand, we're like, hey, what killer stories could you come on the podcast and tell? And you go, you wrote this, so I'm going to read it word for word and then I want you to tell us the story.
- [01:49]
B
You go.
- [01:49]
A
Rejected four times and rickrolling into yc, raising tons of money and meeting amazing billionaires. Let's do the first part. Rejected four times and rickrolling into yc. Can you tell the story?
- [01:59]
C
Yeah. So I left my job at, at Facebook in 202016 and you know, Replit has been a side project for a while and it's been, it's been growing. I've been working on it like nights and weekends. It grew To. To a point where the, like, server cost was meaningful. And I was like, okay, you know, I have to. I guess I have to start a company around it. And so I went to my manager at Facebook and I was like, look, I have this side project. Can we make it, like, somehow a project at Facebook? And we looked into that. I sent Zuck an email at the time, and he ignored me, like, okay, I guess I have to start. I guess I have to start a company. And so, yeah, I quit my job, applied to YC the first time. We did the whole thing. We did the form and the video and all of that, and we didn't even get a. Get a call or anything like that. It was just like, we got the rejection letter. And so I was like, okay, I have this Facebook stock, some savings. I sold the Facebook stock. I put, like, half of it in bitcoin and then half of it into the company or just for us to kind of live.
- [03:12]
B
And how much money was that?
- [03:14]
C
It was like 70k or something like that.
- [03:17]
B
What was the original product of Replit?
- [03:21]
C
So it was basically an editor and a console. You could type code there, and you can run it. You can switch a language, and that's it.
- [03:33]
B
All right. So when I ran my company, the Hustle, I think we had something like 2 million subscribers. And we made money through advertising. We didn't actually make that much money per person reading the newsletter, because advertising in general is kind of a crappy business model. And so I remember sitting down, and I'm like, what are all the different ways that I can make money off the Hustle that aren't advertising? And so to make sure that you don't make this mistake, Sean, me and the husband team, we went and looked at a bunch of different ways to monetize your business. And we put it all together in a really cool document where we lay it all out along with our research. And we call it, very appropriately, we call it the Business Monetization Playbook. Go to the description of this episode, and you're going to see a link to that Business Monetization Playbook. It's completely free. You just click the link and you can see it back to the episode.
- [04:25]
A
By the way, Sam, have you ever used Replit?
- [04:27]
B
I was using it today before this. It's magical. And also your tweets describing what it is. Like, for example, your doctor saying, you know, he wants me to track my sleep. So I just uploaded the PDF that he wanted me to fill up, fill out into repl it, and it made an application so I can upload it much easier. Yeah, it's like, pretty magical. Sean, are you able to use it? It's definitely out of my league still.
- [04:46]
A
Both me and Sam have joked around because we both have maybe five or six times false started of like, I'm going to learn to code this summer. It's like a New Year's resolution thing where you just keep saying you're going to do it. You. You do 20% of it, 30% of it, and you give up. You know, we buy the Udemy course, learn Python the hard way, then you start doing it, and nothing really ever stuck. And one of the biggest problems was that nobody really talks about this. Do you think learning to code is like learning Spanish? It's like learning a language. You're like, okay, so how do I need to say the thing? But before you can even do that, it's like, oh, I'm supposed to download this program. So I need to download an editor, and then I need to download all these packages to be able.
- [05:23]
B
That's where I stop.
- [05:24]
A
And then you need to. And it's like just setting up the environment is so goddamn confusing to a beginner that you don't even get to do the part where you actually write the code and be able to run. Then it's like, oh, how do I run the code? I got to host it somewhere. Now I got to learn how to do hosting and cert. What is that? And so there's all these things around it that were confusing. Replit solved all of that, which was amazing. And I actually did Your, like, hundred days of learning to code. Like, it's actually made it really easy. You know, if I didn't have kids, I would just be doing a lot more because it's you. You solved that problem for me. And I know I'm asking you about the YC rejection. I want to come back to that. But to give Sam maybe a little more of the context, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, maybe I'm making this up. I think the reason you wanted to have this kind of like, online editor, online environment where it's all hosted there was because when you were younger, you were living in Jordan, and I guess you used to go try to learn to code out of an Internet or go try to code out of an Internet cafe. But that means every time you go, you have to set everything up for the first time, because not your. It's not your home base, not your home computer where you set it up once. And it's There. Is that true? Is that why you have you felt the problem like 10x what a normal person would feel?
- [06:28]
C
Yeah, basically like every time I wanted to do a little homework, I have to like spend an hour setting up the environment. At the time, the web was moving so fast until we had Google Docs and we had Gmail, we had this client side JavaScript application sort of revolution. And I'm like, okay, why can't I type code into the browser and run it? And I started looking around and turns out nobody solved this problem. There were some experiments and it was kind of crazy to me because it was almost like finding a hundred dollar bill in New York, Grand Central Station, right? Like, it's like, oh, I found an idea that nobody's paying attention to. And is that true because. Because it's kind of crazy. You know, the world's big a lot, there's a lot of programmer.
- [07:16]
B
That seems like an obvious thing. I mean, I'm a total outsider. So my question is like, was there some technical challenge to that? Because that seems like, I guess it's easy to say things that are successful are obvious ideas looking back. But like.
- [07:28]
A
Yeah, well, yeah, that seems like two things, right? There's the technical challenge of being able to make this all work in a browser. Right. That was not obvious. But then it seems like the second thing was I keep going back to the Internet Cafe thing because it's sort of like the hardship made the problem unavoidable to you. Whereas anybody else who learns to code, if you're just doing it at home in America you might do that setting up once, maybe you have a little bit of the problem, but you're not running into it face first every day as if you were, if you were working out of Internet Cafe.
- [08:00]
C
Yeah, absolutely right. I mean, you know, Paul Graham talks about it all the time. It's like, you know, the best startups are, you know, solving your own problem. And I felt that problem really deeply and I started working on it. I discovered why it's hard. Well, it's, it's hard to run different languages in the browser. You can run JavaScript, but you can run Python, for example. So we started writing interpreters, writing compilers to run on JavaScript. And then it took us a couple years, had like few languages running. It was like pretty rough prototype. But people started using it. My friends and people at school, and I'm like, okay, this idea has lags and so let me work on it more. And then 2011 had a breakthrough. And the breakthrough was we were the first to compile Python, Ruby, a bunch of languages to JavaScript and run them straight into the browser. And that went super viral. Like, so we open sourced it, we put it up and like on Hacker News. And that was my first experience of like going viral on the Internet, which is I, I was like, oh my God, this is, this is like an amazing rush. And I still feel that rush.
- [09:10]
A
Can you put that in context for a non, non engineer? Is the thing you guys did, Is it on a scale of like one to Satoshi Nakamoto solving the like double spend problem? Like, how hard of an invention was that?
- [09:23]
B
That was like the nerdiest analogy you ever could have with, that's what I'm here for.
- [09:27]
A
So, like, was it, was it genius or was it just that nobody had taken as much time as it would take to do that? Like, where was that breakthrough? How do, how would you describe that breakthrough?
- [09:37]
C
It's definitely not on the order of like the double, double spend problem, where it's like a fundamental invention. It was like, you know, pushing like a huge rock bolt like up a mountain. It took so much grit and, and just obsession to be able to hack the browser in order to run things that the browser wasn't supposed to run, wasn't designed to run. And so I would say it is solving hundreds of problems as opposed to solving like, you know, one. One invention. Perfect. Perfect. Yeah.
- [10:20]
A
So you, you're working on it as a side project for a number of years.
- [10:23]
B
That's a long time, by the way. Sean, can you imagine, like having a side project that's a hobby that takes three hours a night with little. I mean, to do that for two years is kind of a long time. No, dude.
- [10:33]
A
The only two things I've ever done that with is this podcast and my kids. And there's really no way out of the kids thing. So, you know, in the podcast was.
- [10:40]
B
A hit right away, I guess. Yeah.
- [10:41]
A
Gave me results right away. So it actually doesn't count. You were doing this without the kind of like financial rewards or fame rewards or any other major rewards during that time. How many years did you do this side project thing? And what kept it going?
- [10:53]
C
You know, 2009 was the original idea. 2011 was the breakthrough and, you know, went viral on Hacker News. And then I think that was the first time I felt like a little bit of fame, a little bit of return on investment. Like, I remember Brendan Ike, the inventor of JavaScript and was the CTO at Mozilla, like tweeting about it. I was like, wow, this is amazing. Like, you know, Kid and Jordan like made this like, fundamental breakthrough in like, you know, browser tech. And like, I'm getting this recognition. That's pretty cool. And also some articles wrote about it. It was, people talked about it in conferences. And so all that was evidence for my O1 visa to come to the States. Basically my entire adult life I'm working on this, which is crazy, right?
- [11:45]
B
Like, how old are you?
- [11:47]
C
I am 36. Wow. I think. And you know, well, you've been working.
- [11:54]
B
On this since you're 20. 21, I think. Yeah.
- [11:58]
C
21, yeah.
- [12:00]
B
That's, that's a while. That's your whole life, your whole adult life.
- [12:03]
C
And you know, it continued to like, you know, incrementally improve my life. So it wasn't, it wasn't this, you know, working in a room for 11 years and nothing happened. So I get this visa to the United States and they go work at Codecademy and they use the open source work that we did, right. And a bunch of companies in the U.S. there was like this boom in like MOOCs, if you remember that, Udacity, Coursera, whatever. And a lot of them used the open source version of replit to create interactive courses. And suddenly like the world opened up to me. I'm getting job offers all over the place and I and have choices where to go. And. And so we decided to go to New York.
- [12:47]
A
Naval has this great quote where he says people always ask him about like, you know, how to build a great network or networking, what are your tips for networking? And it's like, my only tip for networking is do something great and watch your network will appear overnight. People will immediately come to you because you've done something great, right? You didn't go try to get a coffee with Brendan Ike, you built something really cool that the creator of JavaScript and Mozilla browser was like, hey, that's awesome. I want to reach out and get to know you. And I think that's actually how you back to the YC thing. I think that's how you ended up getting into YC later was Paul Graham actually just thought what you were doing was cool, but like, let's go to the YC part. So you, you quit that Facebook job. Half the money in Bitcoin, half the money in your startup applied to yc. Rejected. That was the first rejection. What were the other rejections?
- [13:32]
C
VC is kind of wouldn't, wouldn't talk to us or you know, we'd get meetings with VCs. Some of them Are like yawning. And I think one of them slept. Um, and it, it was just like not interesting to them.
- [13:45]
B
Dude, I had that happen one time as well. Like a guy, A guy literally felt. It was like he, he. He was literally 80 and it was Friday at 4 and it was warm in the office and he like fell asleep mid, mid pitch. Like it was warm. Yeah, it was like a cold day. It was warm inside. So I was like, yeah, I mean like you, I was like, you deserve this. But dude, what, what, what did they not see in you? Because like it's so easy to look back in the past, but you seem like you got the it factor. This seems like such an obvious idea. You worked on it for two years. Smart people are talking about it.
- [14:19]
A
What were you missing? What was the case against it?
- [14:21]
C
Well, I think Silicon Valley is probably the most meritocratic place in the world. But it is also status driven. At least then it was very status driven. If you look at people who got into YC like with Stanford dropouts and things like that. And I think since then YC has, has, has improved and you know gets international people and all of that. But, but you know my background wasn't. Wasn't really interesting to, to them. You know I didn't have any fancy colleges or any of that. Also being married couple was, was somehow like something that, that they thought it was a disadvantage.
- [14:57]
A
You, you didn't match the patterns. You didn't match the Stanford pattern. You didn't match the co founder relationship pattern. You didn't match the, the trend of, of what categories have big exits you at that time.
- [15:11]
C
Right? Yeah. And so continue to apply to yc. Every season of YC will we'll send in the application and you know our thesis developed more and we felt like we had started making some money. Some people started paying for our service. We had an API at the time that people paid for. A lot of educators and people learning code started to pay for replit.
- [15:34]
B
What was the revenue when you got.
- [15:36]
C
In like maybe ten grand a month. It was enough to sustain us at that point. It was like the ramen profitability. But before yc the person who actually the first one to bet on us was Roy Bahat from Bloomberg Beta. So I knew him from my code academy days and it was such a. The meeting with him was so refreshing. Like he was like just a straight shooter. He would tell me like here's where I think you know the idea or the category is hard. You know, here is where I think the valuation should be and it was like the first meeting, he just gave me everything he was thinking about. He didn't obscure anything. And I was, I was feeling really good about it. And so, yeah, he gave us $500,000 on a 6 million valuation. So that was the first check we got.
- [16:29]
A
Nice.
- [16:30]
C
Good for him.
- [16:31]
A
And then how did the, how did you eventually get into yc?
- [16:34]
C
So basically, you know, we're grinding and the product was getting better every week. And I started writing articles about what we're solving. So we're solving pretty hard problems. And so this article kept going in Hacker News and Hacker News was really excited about what we're doing. And program reads Hacker News a lot probably still to this day. And one day, like December 2017, I wake up, there's a DM on my phone and it is Sam Altman. And he's like, hey, I run yc and we're interested in what you're doing. I'm like, dude, I know who you are. You have to tell me you run yc. And he's like, okay, let's, let's meet, you know, come to this address. And it wasn't the YC address. I was like a little confused. And so I go there and it was the OpenAI office in the Mission. And so I meet him there and we talk a little bit. And then he turns his computer around. He's like, this is Paul's email. He emailed Sam and told him, this company is very important, you should reach out to them. And he's like, okay, talk to pg. I'm going to give you his email. Talk to him, and then maybe we can work on something to get you into yc. So I started this email relationship with Paul, which was really fascinating. I mean, he's a great writer, right? And so we talked about replit. We talked about the problems of setting up an environment, the problems of hosting an application. It turns out after he sold Viya Web, he started working on something like replit. He started working on like an editor. You write some lisp, of course, because he likes this, this very obscure programming languages and. But by the way, Paul Graham is the founder of yc. At the time, he was starting to retire and Sam was running yc. And so, you know, we had this email relationship where he wrote me essays essentially on the problem we're solving.
- [18:35]
A
By the way, were you, were you intimidated, you know, Paul Graham writing essays to you privately? Are you like, is that high stakes replies there for you?
- [18:43]
C
Yes. Like, I would spend hours kind of crafting the emails and and trying to, like, be as good of a writer as I can. But, you know, one thing about me is, like, I was never, like, nervous about meeting, like, famous and established people. And I think that helped me over time because, like, you know, I can be myself and I can talk to them at the same level, as opposed to, like, being a fanboy or.
- [19:12]
A
Why was that? Were you just oblivious to it, or you just had a different mindset about it? What was the reason?
- [19:18]
C
Yeah, I felt like my life was taking on this trajectory that was not to be too superstitious, but it was this force. And I felt like everything's going to be great and it's going to be hard, but I'm meeting all these people, Things are opening up to us. And so when I go and meet people, my mindset is I want to impress them, and I want to be able to, you know, get money from them or, like, I have a goal. And I think having a goal when you're. When you're meeting someone actually puts you in a very different mindset than, again, like, fanboying and just being very excited about the meeting.
- [20:02]
B
Dude, have you guys seen that? Do you guys know the director, Guy Ritchie? He's that, like, British director. He's got this great story. He was on some podcast, maybe Joe Rogan, and he was like, you know, I just want to be the director of my own life, and I want to live my life like a movie. And what you're describing is sort of like that, where you're like, I just. I am destined for greatness. And, like, we are taking on this amazing problem, and, like, we are going to do wonderful things, and it will be hard, but we will triumph. And I think that's actually great. That's a great story to tell yourself, and I think it's very motivating, and it makes life more exciting. I think that's really cool.
- [20:40]
C
Yeah. So I actually wrote a blog post. The title is do what Makes the Best Story. And the idea is, like, when you're faced with decisions where there's no obvious answer, like a fork in the road where the pros and cons are sort of the same, the heuristic I use in my life is, like, what is a more interesting story? And obviously, like, Elon talks about this, like, the most. The most entertaining outcome is most likely. Yeah, I wasn't thinking about it in terms of entertaining, but in terms of, like, what makes the story interesting. If my life was a movie, what would. What would be exciting about. About that story?
- [21:26]
B
All right, my Friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit and it's hosted by Luis and Fonzie Cameo, and it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and orangetheory Fitness, Louise and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're going to hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're going to hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. You can check out a recent episode called the Secret to Content that Converts and they break down. Our buddy Alex Heroes blueprint for Effective Video Production. So you can check out Content is Profit wherever you get your podcasts.
- [22:15]
C
For example, when, when I was in college, I was like coding all the time and I wasn't really going to class. And so. So I was failing a lot. Not because I was failing the exam, because, you know, they would bar me from the exam because I wasn't showing up. And I decided to hack the university to change my grades.
- [22:37]
A
And we're not talking like metaphorically, like a life.
- [22:39]
C
No, no.
- [22:40]
A
You actually hacked into the servers and changed your grade. Is that what happened?
- [22:44]
C
Yeah, I went into the basement, I spent like two weeks. I did the, what's his name, the famous inventor, Michelangelo or something like that. I did his sleep, polyphasic sleep, where you work for hours and then you sleep 15 minutes. And it was, it was sort of like I was writing on the wall. I was like. It was like a full on insanity.
- [23:05]
A
Were you angry? Why did you decide to?
- [23:08]
B
I know so many smart people who work so much harder to cheat or get around the thing than just doing the thing. And there's like a.50% of the time they end up being like losers. And then 50% of the time they are in fact, like the greatest.
- [23:22]
A
They're on this podcast.
- [23:23]
C
Yeah, well, I think it is like some adhd, right? Like you can't sit. You can't sit in class, but if you're interested in something, you're going to like, hack and like work on it a ton, right? And I almost got away with it, but the servers at the, at the university crashed and it crashed on my record. So the one of the administrators there gave me a call and he said, look, there's like this. There's some anomaly in the record of your exam in school and it's crashing our databases. Do you know anything about it? And I was like, what's the anomaly. And he's like, there's a field in the database that says you're barred from the exam and your grade should be 35. That's the default grade of failing the exam. And instead my grades were like 75, 90, whatever. That's what I entered into there. And I didn't understand that there was another field, by the way, that's not good design for a database. And since then, there was a fork in the road. I could lie and I think I could get away with it and just say, that's a bug on your side. And. But I was like, what's the most interesting story is they catch me and it becomes a story that people talk about. And I was like, okay, I'm just going to come clean and just tell them what I did.
- [25:03]
A
So you're like, better than getting the grade would be getting the reputation.
- [25:07]
C
Yes, exactly.
- [25:10]
A
So you tell them and then what happened? They kick you out?
- [25:13]
C
No. So I'm kind of a convincing person. So I, I go the next day and it's like all the deans there and they're discussing my case and they're like trying to find out what, what I did. And, and they're all computer science deans. So I went in there and I changed the subject to technical aspects of the hack and I drew on the whiteboard and show them what I did and, and all of that, and they were very impressed.
- [25:42]
B
Like a Good Will Hunting moment.
- [25:44]
C
Yeah. And like my reputation back then is like, I'm a loser. I'm failing everything. Right. I don't show up to class and it is kind of like Good Will Hunting. And then, you know, they say, okay, you have to go talk to the president, because I think he's going to make the final call. So I go to the president and he's a very intellectual person and we talk and I, you know, I tell him like, look, you know, I, I have this talent and I feel like it was undiscovered and I feel like I was treated unfairly. And, and I, I used the, the, you know, I used the university as my sandbox. Like, I didn't, like, you know, I came clean. I didn't, you know, mean to, to do anything, anything bad. And, and, and, and he gave me the Spider man line. He's like, with great power comes great responsibility. And it actually affected me. And I was like, okay, you know, you know, I think, you know, I, you know, I need to do something in order to kind of pay back. And I told them I'm Going to work this summer for free to make sure I secure your databases. And so they let me off the hook. And they're like, awesome. Yeah.
- [26:54]
A
What a great story.
- [26:55]
C
Dude.
- [26:55]
A
That is an amazing story. Sam, by the way, would you ever want to compete with Amjad at anything?
- [27:00]
B
No. This is like this mentality. This is. It's scary. Like, yeah, I would not want to. You're like, excuse me, Dean, have you heard of the word prodigy?
- [27:13]
A
You're like, my talents haven't been used well at this university. I accept your apology, Dean.
- [27:21]
B
It's like, why are you failing me?
- [27:23]
C
Yes. Yes.
- [27:25]
A
That's so good. Okay, so I love the principle. Do what makes the best story. I love the hack story. That's amazing. Where we. How did we get here? We were talking about yc. Yc. Okay, sorry.
- [27:36]
C
Let's get to the story. Yc because that's where we started. Okay, so Sam's like, yeah, you should do. I see. Actually, the batch starts tomorrow. Why don't you fill an application? It's just. Just a, you know, process you have to do. And we can do a late interview tomorrow. And I'm like, fuck, I want to fill the application again. Like, you made me do it like four times. Like, I don't want to do it again. And so, you know, I. I kind of do a bare bones application about. About replied. And then there's the video. I'm like, oh, man, I don't wanna. I don't wanna do the video. So I pasted a YouTube link and we go the next day. Hi. And I, by the way, for people.
- [28:15]
A
Who don't know, the YC application is like one page. It's like six or seven questions. But then they say, upload a video two or three minutes. You talking about your startup? So that's the video part. And then the interview is 10 minutes where there's rapid fire. So you have like 10 minutes and it's like this make or break thing. It's less than a lunch, you know, like it's less than a job interview. It's more intense. So you're waiting around for that?
- [28:36]
C
Yeah. I mean, my view was they recruited us to yc. Like, why are you making us do. Do do this stuff? Right? And.
- [28:42]
B
And so, yeah, I was going to ask that. Like they're asking, they're acting like, you know, Paul Graham's like, you know, maybe I could pull some strings.
- [28:49]
A
It's like, I know a guy.
- [28:51]
B
Yeah. Like you're the guy. So I don't understand what they're. What they're bullshitting. I don't get it.
- [28:59]
C
Well, I think they wanted to, to just like go through the process. It's like the process applies to everyone and I respect that. So, you know, the, they call us to the interview and I walk in and there was Jared and Dora and all these amazing YC partners. And there's Michael. He was the CEO at the time. And I shake their hands, and I shake Michael's hand and I felt like his grip was a little too hard. I was like, okay, that's fine. And then I go sit down on the chair and the moment I sit down, Michael looks at me. Why did you recall us?
- [29:38]
B
Oh my God.
- [29:41]
C
And I'm like, we applied several times and I thought it'd be fun to do and you know, I thought this interview was just, you know, formality. And he's like, that's not how you get into yc. And he was very, very angry. Well, it turns out when we're sitting outside, they were getting Rick rolled inside. Right? So imagine their mindset, looking at the application and getting the recroll sign and, and then they give us a very.
- [30:12]
A
Tough interview in that moment. Did you. It's like. And that's when I realized I fucked up. Like, did you realize like, yes, how I'm coming across? Like, what was your mindset there?
- [30:22]
C
Like, they must be thinking X. I was nervous. I was very nervous and I was regretful immediately.
- [30:29]
A
Yeah, because you probably. It's like, oh, here's this entitled, just another, just another tech entitled guy when they don't know you're like immigrant from Jordan who's like scraped his way here. Right? They don't. Reality and how you were coming across weren't connected in that moment.
- [30:44]
C
No, they, they weren't at all. And, and so, and so I, you know, we go outside and, and I tell Haya, okay, this is done. Let's. Let's call an Uber and get back to work. Like, we don't have, we don't need to get into yc. So I call an Uber and just before I arrive, I receive a call and, and I take the call and it's like, hey, it's Adora. You got in, come back, the kickoff is about to start. And I was like, what? Are you sure? She's like, yeah, come back, sign the paperwork and get started. So I was stunned the whole day. Like it was, you know, we start, we go to the dinner and I'm like, you know, phased out and all, but like, it was really exciting. And you know, people who's never been to the YC office in Mountain View. It's all orange, like bright orange and the lights and everything. It feels like a cult like environment. And like, isn't it like.
- [31:38]
B
I think I've seen the inside. Doesn't it like a, like a, they have like a steeple or isn't like one of the rooms. It like is a triangle, like a church almost.
- [31:45]
C
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And Sam gets up and tells us what, what the experience is going to be. It's like this is the hardest time you're going to work. You know, you better tell your friends and family that you're going to go away for three months. You can't help them move or all of that. You just gotta be focused on work. So Haya and I like took it very seriously. Okay. I was like, okay, these three months are very important for the success of the company. And we transformed the product in these three months. It went from a simple sort of editor output to a place where you can host applications and build real things. And all in three months that we were working, you know, 12 hour, 13 hour days and, and, and it was, it was only three of us at the time. Our first employee actually was, was sort of a runaway kid. He grew up in California, little down, down south and, and he didn't want to go to school and so he leaves his home, he goes to hack reactor and, and he becomes, he becomes a programmer. And he was 18, he was looking for a job. I knew the guys at Hacker Actor, they use replit and I'm like, send me your best programmer. And he's like, look, this kid is a little awkward, but he's the best. And so he comes in, he nails our interview music to my ears. Yeah. And basically I like him because, you know, it mirrors kind of my life story a little bit.
- [33:07]
B
Where's this guy now?
- [33:09]
C
But we got him, we got him some liquidity. After six years of working, I felt that's the right thing to do. And because he was kind of burnt out and didn't want to continue. So I called my brother in Jordan. I'm like, look, you gotta come out here when YC you need to. And he's a programmer. I taught him programming when he was a kid. And I was like, you gotta come help us. And he's still with us today. And I called my friend from Code Academy, Moody. He's still with us today as well. I'm like, you gotta help us. You could do it remotely. And so we assembled a team of five people essentially and so we go really hard and we were like one of the hottest companies in YC at the time.
- [33:50]
A
And can you give some sense of the scale of it now? Like you know, I invested in it a year ago or two years ago or something like that. I don't know when, but the numbers were off. You had user growth first your graph looked like a hockey stick because you zoom out and you ignores all of the little like years where nothing was really going on. But you have this crazy growth. But the crazy thing about it is that your growth was developers. So it's like, you know, one developer user is worth, I don't know, 10, 20 times just like a normal Internet user. But you had this crazy hockey stick growth of developers. Can you talk about, can you just say a couple of like permission to brag? Can you say a couple of brag worthy stats that would impress us.
- [34:33]
C
Yeah, so, so replit was very easy to get started with and so people would start starting using it in college or high school and continue using it for many years. And so it was sticky for especially junior developers when they're starting out and it was spreading on its own like word of mouth. There was a viral component to it. People can share URL and then suddenly you're in the same environment as them, right. And then we have this multiplier coding experience. And so people were collaborating and, and also Covid was really great for us because we were I think the only collaborative editor experience on the web at the time. And so a lot of people were remote and needed something to work with each other. And so repload was adopted at the time. And so the growth was off the chart and the servers were going down and the marginal user. Any web app is sort of like zero, zero cost. But for us it was, you know, we try to optimize it a lot but it was still on the order of like one to five dollars, like a month. And you know, the growth was off the charts. But I, you know, I have to admit it was hard to monetize at the time because developers are actually not used to pay for things. Now they kind of are paying for things because of AI, but at the time they, they weren't, they weren't paying. And then, you know, as we added limits and things like that, they felt like they can like move on and set up their own developer environment. And so it took a lot of, you know, creative thinking to figure out how to charge for people. And ultimately AI was the thing that people are paying for. And the reason is like the Productivity benefit of AI is like, it's like obvious. And people are like, okay, this saves me time and makes me a better developer. And so people are paying for it right now.
- [36:29]
B
Well, can you give any indication on how many users or how much revenue the business does?
- [36:35]
C
You know, signups, we have like more than 30 million, I think 35 million users right now. In terms of active users, this kind of fluctuates. But you know, three, you know, 2 to 3 million a month, probably 100,000 apps hosted on Replit because you can build an app and deploy it all in one environment. In terms of revenue, I can't share right now, but like, especially this year, it's been like exponential growth.
- [37:06]
A
Sam, check this out. This Asia thing, I gotta show you this. So you haven't used this, right, Sam?
- [37:12]
B
No.
- [37:13]
A
All right, so watch this. So yesterday I was like, I'm going to mess around. I was doing research for this, but I was like, I just got like sucked in Replit and I started doing that, stopped doing research. So I go and I, I go to replit and it's changed because now when you before, when you would go, it would be like, here's a coding screen with a blinking cursor and it's like, write some code. And I'd be like, oh, cool. I don't really write code. So I don't know how to use this product exactly. Maybe I could learn to code. Maybe I could, you know, pay somebody to build something on here. But whatever, I was stuck. So now you open up replit and it just, it's like chat GPT. It just goes, so what would you like me to create? And so I go on there, watch this. So I go, I'll give you the exact prompt. I said, build me an app that will text me every morning asking how I ate yesterday. Let me answer via text messages, and then track the results on a monthly calendar grid. If texting doesn't work, you could also use WhatsApp or something else. Okay, so basically on the right here is just like the chat. And it just goes, absolutely. Let me propose what we'll build. And then it just kind of like explains to me like a project manager. It goes, I'm going to help you create a food tracking app through SMS messaging with a calendar visualizations. We'll start with the SMS. Later we can add WhatsApp as an alternative. It's like, okay, okay, prioritizing things. That's interesting. And then it goes, the app will send daily message, blah, blah, blah. And then goes, how would you like me to proceed? And it's like there was like, you know, add more features, change the instructions or like go ahead and build the prototype. So I clicked build the initial prototype and then literally I don't know if you can see this, but like it starts like auto scrolling as it's writing code. Like this is all just a code it's generating. So like, you know, like I'm not doing anything. I'm literally sitting back with popcorn while this is happening. So it's like, here's your calendar grid. And it's like, hey, I need. I'm going to use Twilio for the sms. It decides, I'll use Twilio for the sms. Can you go to Twilio and give me your account and your phone number so that it'll we like, we use Twilio for sending sms. So I go to Twilio, I give it my SMS and then it's like it's made, it literally made the thing exactly how I want.
- [39:13]
B
So this works now?
- [39:14]
A
Yeah, I actually got stuck on the Twilio step because Twilio has to verify my phone number. So it like, it hasn't verified it yet, but I can go into, I into I see it tries to send me the message and it just says awaiting Twilio verification to like be able to use this. So I'm like a little bit stuck there, which is like a common thing with agents. I feel it's like almost absolutely incredible and then kind of frustrating at some point where you have to like, you know, fight through some walls.
- [39:39]
B
Well, I think I'm just tweeting. I think he said, I want people to be able to build an app faster than they can just Google the answer to a question.
- [39:45]
A
And that's exactly what happened here.
- [39:47]
B
Well, that's insane.
- [39:48]
C
So this screenshot is the agent looking at the result is trying to verify. They said this is not the running app. If you click run, you can took.
- [39:57]
A
A screenshot and then it shows it to me. It's like, hey, is this how you want it? And I was like, oh, because before it had it where it was like not the right month on top. I go, oh, put the month on top. Like don't say monthly food tracking. Right. December. And then it also said like, hey, would you like any other style improvements? I can make it broader, I can change the color scheme. And I'm like, dude, this is literally better than an employee. Right? Like first, it's instantaneous. Second, I could, you know, I don't have to pay to Pay somebody to sit in the desk to sit around waiting for me to do something. I had a idea on a whim, go to repla and did the thing with the agent. This was a, like, there's been a few, like, mind blowing moments for me in my, like, tech career. You know, like, I graduated 2010, so I'll start at that point where it's like the first time I took an Uber, I was like, holy shit, that was amazing. I pushed a button, a car showed up, the guy got in. I didn't even have to pay for. Like, it just paid through my phone. That was magic. And I could see it. I could see him on an app getting closer and closer to the restaurant. That was like one of them. You know, ChatGPT for sure was another where I could just, you know, tell it to make something and write something and write it. For me, this is another one of them. This is the first AI agent thing that has like been a mind blowing moment for me where I am not a programmer, I am not a coder, but I can now create software.
- [41:14]
B
This is like amazing. Can I ask a blunt, crude question? How can I use your software to become a billionaire? Because, like, I see this and I'm like, you know, like the ridiculous analogy that I use is I'm like, I feel like an artist sometimes where I feel like I have the ability to conceptualize certain things, but I can't paint. It's like I can't fucking paint what I want to paint that's in my head because I literally don't have that skill set sometimes. And so I'll be working on stuff and I'm like, dude, I want this to do this, but I got to go talk to this developer and I don't want to have this conversation. And that's just a pain in the ass. And so, like, you basically are making it so I can finally express myself easily.
- [41:53]
A
I like how you're on the first date, you're like, how can I get you to take the clothes off?
- [41:57]
C
What?
- [41:58]
A
You're like, how do I use your thing to get really rich?
- [42:01]
B
Yeah, I mean, that's basically like. Like you had on the document. You're like, here's just, here's the opportunities. Just use repl it to do X, Y and Z. And I want to go through that because this is like, amazing. This is actually, you know, there's a. There's like a viral clip on YouTube or Twitter, like a bunch of places where it's like the headline, which we probably have used, which Is like billion dollar one person companies or something like this. You're the closest person to this probably to that question. To answer that question.
- [42:30]
C
Yeah. So there are apps built on Replit Agent that otherwise would take probably a hundred thousand dollars of developer time and you can build it like in $25 paid to replit. I will say that there's limitations, right? It is not, it is not perfect. This is like the worst it's going to be. It sometimes gets stuck with problems. You can, you need to have some skill in prompting to coax it to like figure it out. And it sort of like teaches you over time because it tells you what it's doing as it's editing the code. And so over time you're learning how to use it. You're actually learning how code works. You're learning how maybe you're not learning how to exactly type code, but you're learning the different components in where things could go wrong. You're learning about database. We have like database, you can go in and look at the tables and look what's happening. And so, you know, the vision for this is that that's all you need. That's all you need to build an entire startup. And you know, every day we're inching towards that, you know, and I talked about like pushing the boulder up the hill and I think that's one of my talents is like, okay, what are the problems that you can make progress on every day and every week such that in a year time you have this exponential progress and the product is so much better. The other thing is we're riding this wave of the foundation models getting better. So every time they get better, we plug in a new foundation model and the product is suddenly better. So you're writing this, you know, two exponential curves, which is like the engineering we're doing, but also the underlying models and infrastructure is getting better. So I think in a, in a year's time it's going to be really mind blowing. In a couple of years time, I think we're going to see stories like someone getting super rich making an app and replit that sort of goes viral. And so we're adding stripe integration right now. You can, you can already use kind of stripe on replit, but we're adding integration that makes it super easy to start monetizing your app.
- [44:40]
A
Hey, can I tell you a Steve Jobs story real quick? So Jobs once said that design is not just how something looks, it's how it works. And a great example of that is my new partner, Mercury. Mercury has made a banking product that just works beautifully. I use it for not just one, but all six of my companies. Right now it is my default. If I start a company, it's a no brainer. I go and I open up a Mercury account. The design is great. It's got all the features that you need. And you could just tell it was made by a founder like me, not a, you know, banker somewhere who hired a consultant in an agency to try to make some tool. So if you want to be like me and 200,000 other ambitious founders, head over to mercury.com and open up an account in minutes. And here's the fine print. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve bank and trust members. Fdic. All right, back to the episode. So Sam said, how do I get rich? And you're like, disclaimer. It's not fully there yet, but now you still have to answer the question.
- [45:36]
C
I mean, the question is like, what kind of applications? It's like, what are the ideas? What kind of applications you can build? I would say AI applications are growing really fast. Like, the revenue ramp in some of those AI applications is kind of crazy.
- [45:50]
A
Can you, can you tell the story of Magic School? I thought this was really interesting.
- [45:53]
C
Yeah. So Magic School is like an AI application for educators. It's basically like helping them use foundation models and LLMs to do their work, to do assignments for kids, to have an interactive, like, AI experience. And so it's like a full suite of AI for educators.
- [46:15]
A
The guy who created it was a teacher, right?
- [46:17]
C
The guy who created was a teacher. He took some time during COVID to learn how to code and he started using replit. And him and I think another person built the initial thing totally on replit. And because you can go from an idea all the way to deployment, and it immediately started growing these AI apps. When the adoption starts happening, it goes super viral. You don't need a ton of marketing. And the revenue ramp was, was one of the craziest ones I've seen, especially for education.
- [46:51]
A
Yeah, it was like a known thing. It was like hardest thing you could do. Sell into schools, into teachers. They're overworked, they're underpaid, that they don't have the time to like figure out your new tool. But this thing is great. So if you, if you go to it, it's basically like, because teachers spend a lot of their time not in the classroom, it's after, after school is done, they have to grade papers, they have to create the lesson plan for the next day. They have to create the quizzes or the multiple choice tests and they have to like. So they have to constantly do this. And there was these platforms like teacher pay teachers where I could just. If I don't want to make it myself because I'm tired after the school day, I might be able to go buy one for nine bucks from another teacher who teaches fifth grade science in some other state. And I would take that and I would buy it that way. What Magic School did was it was like cool. Generate a. You just say like, I want to, I teach, you know, fifth grade biology. I want to do a pop quiz about, you know, how this, how mitosis works. And then it'll basically create either a lesson plan or a quiz or you know, a student like interactive, like you know, workbook that they need to create or whatever. And so it lets a teacher not have to spend, you know, four hours a night creating the materials that they need just to teach class. Because I can do it for them. And this thing looks, I don't know these guys, I don't know anything about them, but it says, you know, over 4 million educators are using this, which. Over 4 million educators and their students, which I don't, I don't know if they're counting.
- [48:12]
B
Well, if you go on similar web, they have millions of monthly unique. So that's like a really big, I.
- [48:16]
A
Think they raised like 20 million bucks too off.
- [48:18]
B
Yeah, I mean that's like a pretty huge signal.
- [48:20]
C
So they, they launched in like I want to say July 2023. So they're like a little over a year. And do you know that these like SaaS metrics are like how long to get to whatever, like 100 million or whatever the AI apps. And I would say Magic School is on that trajectory is like just like that. You know, the curve is like, you know, all the way straight up.
- [48:46]
B
This is kind of weird, but maybe this is like a feature of yours that you helped this company become potentially one of the faster growing companies of all time and you only earned $20 a month from that.
- [48:58]
C
Yeah. So Replit had always a problem of value capture. Partially. That's why VCs struggled with it for a long time. So there's some logic for why it is hard to monetize these things and capture some of the value. I will say I invested in Magic School, so there's some of that. And with AI, I think we're going to be able to, you know, you know, capture at least a little bit more of that value. If people are monetizing these apps on replit via the agent, there's a way, I think, where we can potentially take a cut out of that, especially if we make it, like, super simple to start monetizing an app. And also, like, if once we reach scale, you know, it is like ChatGPT. Like, you don't need a lot of skill to do that. And it's going to get easier and easier once we reach scale. And you have, you know, millions of people paying for this. And it's not just like 20 bucks. You're going to pay incremental after you finish your credits. So we give you credit, monthly credits. And then afterwards, if you want to continue, you can, like, buy more credits.
- [50:02]
A
Are there other companies like Magic School, like, cool companies like that you've seen that maybe we haven't heard of that, are using AI?
- [50:09]
C
Yes. So, you know, I'm very excited about agents right now. And, you know, I think I predicted earlier this year on a podcast that this is going to be the year where agents are born and next year is where agents are going to scale. So there's this company called 11x and 11x creates AI SDRs, and so basically you don't need to hire SDRs. There are some companies that feel like they can bootstrap their sales without SDR. You can have one. A1. And that a account executive is like, running these, like, tens of AI SDRs. And in the revenue ramp on 11x was also crazy. It's pretty wild how fast these companies are scaling. I don't think in the history of Silicon Valley we've seen anything like that, even in the, like, Web 2.0 era.
- [51:06]
A
So what is like a fast ramp for AI, for maybe not 11x specifically, but just for an AI company? What's like, what's impressive? That kind of broke the frame of how long things would take, but you've seen it now.
- [51:18]
C
Yeah. So I would say reaching 10 million in three to four months.
- [51:24]
A
Oh, my God, that's wild. Yeah. I invested in Jasper, which was like one of the early kind of ChatGPT wrapper type of companies, where there was like, hey, marketing, you need to write a blog post, you need to write a description for a product or whatever, and so you could use it for writing any kind of marketing copy. And their graph was. I'd never seen it. It was like in 10 months or 11 months, they scaled like 50 million in annual recurring revenue. It was like, I've never seen anything even remotely close to that. It was. It Brought up a question like is this sustainable? Is this like what is happening here? Like this I've just. Doesn't compute. But it definitely broke my frame of what is possible because I'd been working, you know, in Silicon Valley since, you know, 2011, 11, 12 and that just, that wasn't a thing. You would never see a graph like that.
- [52:15]
B
What are some other companies that have gotten to that like 10 ish or 10 ish million or similar trajectory in three month type of businesses?
- [52:23]
C
Yeah, so this is, I wanted to kind of give a, you know, sort of a disclaimer about this. Which is the big question in the investor community right now is like the Moats question. And that, that started around the time that ChatGPT kind of came out and there was these GPT wrappers sort of this condescending way of looking at a lot of these companies. It's like if you can create GPT wrapper, you know, in a month, then you know, a lot of other people will create GPT wrappers in a month. And you're going to be competing on price and the margins go down. And yes, the ARR is great, but you're, but anthropic is capturing or OpenAI is capturing most of the ARR, not you. You're kind of a, you're kind of like a middleman and you have like hard time having margins. And I think it's totally a valid question now. I think moats develop over time through strategy and technical excellence. So I mean some of these companies can go down pretty fast and there are examples of that right now. But I think if you can start building technical like with replit again, this idea of pushing a boat up a hill, we have this runtime environment, we have this infrastructure, we have the deployment, we have databases, we have all these integrations. It's the only one in the world that is an end to end environment to make software to catch up with that. It's going to take years. But technical advantage is also not a long term moat. And so again, it's a big question. I don't think it's answered yet. There's strategic things you could do if you reach scale, if the switching costs are high. That may be a way to have sustainable moats, but it is definitely a big question.
- [54:13]
B
You know what's crazy, Sean? I hate using the D word democratize. I think that's such an overused Silicon Valley.
- [54:21]
A
Don't do it, don't do it.
- [54:23]
B
But this is actually one of those few examples where like for the longest Time building a website or a web app, like, you just literally couldn't. And so now you are making the technology that everyone can do it. And so what I think is, like, guys like Sean and me are people like us who have an audience. It's like, why don't we just. Why aren't we, like, constantly launching, like, companies using this technology? Because, like, our ability to get users, because we just get on the microphone and talk about it, that's like, actually a competitive advantage, whereas being technical is no longer. It's still an advantage, but it's not as much as before. It's like getting customers now is actually the only hard part, which is still hard, but it's way easier if you're popular.
- [55:07]
C
Yeah. So, you know, the playbook I would use is, like, I would go into some inefficient market or industry. So a deal from Magic School went into this hugely inefficient industry, which is schools and education. And by the way, another product is Synthesis Tutor, which is also going viral right now. And they have also this revenue ramp. That's kind of crazy.
- [55:39]
B
Both Sean and I invested in that company.
- [55:41]
A
I think all three of us did.
- [55:42]
B
Yeah.
- [55:44]
C
And for a while they had this thing where they had educators on the payroll and whatever. They replace all of that with AI now, like, you know, the kids sit in front of the iPad and they're talking to the AI and like, learning really fast. And it's much better than the previous product.
- [56:02]
A
Right.
- [56:03]
C
So basically, like, find an industry where you're familiar with and just like, build the GPT wrapper to, like, automate some of the work there. And like, you could do it like 100 times and one of them will take off.
- [56:15]
A
Yeah. It's the era of the idea guy. Now it's our turn. It's our turn to shine. Right. Because now the limits and the kind of the value creation is do you understand a problem well enough to know how to take this really powerful magic wand and point it at that problem and be able to make that more efficient? And then, of course, do all of the other hard things. Go get customers, make it sustainable, build a good team, you know, like, do all the normal entrepreneurship stuff. But it seems like more than ever, having a great idea is the kind of, like, key unlock to doing these things, because building has become easier. And I'll give you kind of my. My personal epiphany that I had while I was doing this. So I invested in Replit mostly when I just thought you seemed really smart. And I saw a growth curve of developers using it. And I thought, oh cool. Like I've experienced this problem before, like a one stop place where I can come in, write the code, host it. All the, all the stuff you talked about, like don't have to download Java, don't have to do any of that shit. That appealed to me at the time. I think actually in the same way that synthesis like took AI and actually almost like really like 10x the value prop of the business, I think you guys are doing the same. So here's my quick pitch which is now that I think of Replit as like basically what Shopify was for creating, you know, like online stores. I think Replit is that for creating software. So to me you guys are, dude.
- [57:39]
B
His eyes just brightened when you're Shopify for software.
- [57:42]
A
So like I'll give you my example. I recently celebrated a milestone that was both. I was proud of it and really embarrassed also. So a few years ago I started a E Commerce brand and we just crossed 50 million in revenue. Like kind of like cumulative lifetime revenue. Half of it was like, you know, this year, but, but 50 million total. And I was like, wow, like 50 million, that's great. Like that's. I had never created a business that had done 50 million in revenue. So that was like a personal pride point. At the same time I was telling it to a friend of mine who's not an entrepreneur, he's like, yeah man, I would love to learn how to, you know, like make websites and like make products with manufacturing. And I was like, oh, I don't know how to do any of that. Like I was, I was like this, this brand that is on 50 million in revenue for me. I don't. I just stacked Alibaba times Shopify. I've never manufactured a product in my life, still don't know how to. And I've never made a website that's like, you know, actually used by customers. Still don't know how to. But I was able to skip all the work and get to the brand part, like do the thing where we created a product that people liked and you know, it's a successful company now. And I thought, wow, Replit's going to do that for the software space. And I was like, it used to be that the job was software engineer and now it's going to be software creator. It's like I can be a creator of software without being a programmer myself. That little shift is a big shift because of the way I think about it. I don't know how many developers There are, I think GitHub has like a hundred million or 200 million accounts. So I'll just use that. Like there's 200 million, let's say developers, you know, software engineers in the world. Well, now there's going to be 202 billion people that can create software. Because if you got the Internet, you got your phone, you can create software. Now you can just tell the agent, make me an app that does this, make a tool that does this. And so you 10x the number of people that can create software in the same way that Shopify and Alibaba. 10x or more the number of people who could create products and go sell them like hard goods. That's how I see what you're doing.
- [59:41]
C
Yeah. So, you know, even at the start of replit, you know, there's our initial seed deck, and the deck kind of has this Elon Musk style, like, you know, master plan, master plan. And it was like, we build a platform, we grow it, and then AI is going to make the thing a lot more accessible. Because our mission was make programming accessible. Then we updated. Our mission was create a billion programmers. And then so the moment that, you know, even GPT3 came out, I was like, this is the thing. And I wrote this thread on Twitter about how AI agents will just change how programmers work.
- [60:21]
A
This is the deck. So 2015, this is. I don't even know if OpenAI was a research lab at that time. Maybe. Definitely there was no chatgpt, but this was your master planned deck. So we're going to grow by building tools for teachers and students. We're going to build a simple network and AI assisted interface that blurs the distinction between learning and building. Evolve into a platform where people can learn, build, explore and host applications. Like talking about AI back in 2015 in your actual pitch deck, dude.
- [60:47]
B
It's also clear how Code Academy was highly influential to you, because I remember years ago, Sean said, everyone tries to learn how to code. I used Code Academy and it was a pretty cool interface. And it's very similar to what you're describing.
- [61:00]
C
You know, at some point I kind of lost hope in courses because, like, you know, we have 100 days of code. We're telling users that to use our application, you need to invest 100 days. And that's kind of crazy. Like there isn't any, like, successful company in the world where you need 100 days to learn it. And so that's when I kind of changed my mindset and I said, okay, it needs to be chatgpt like it needs to be just a prompt. And we started building that earlier this year and now that's all we're focused on. We want to create new programmers, existing developers. Great, they have a lot of tools. But we want to go after the citizen developer. Right. Everyone is a developer and I think that's what you're talking about. You go from like 100 million developers in the world. Well, I think it overstates the number. It's probably more 30 million and then you 10x that. And so what does the world look like when anyone with an idea could make something? And one of my favorite books is the Sovereign Individual. The thing I really was excited about is this idea of ideas become wealth and so you no longer have the bottleneck of making something. That's where we're headed. And this is what you're talking about, Sean, is like the, the, it's the time for idea guy. And like, maybe that's, you know, tongue in cheek. And like maybe the way to talk about it in more precise terms is that people who can find these gaps in markets, people who have expertise in certain areas, that they can tell there's inefficiency and they can create an AI application that can immediately plug that.
- [62:51]
B
Like, I saw this video on Twitter the other day. It was of a snake that got its head chopped off and it floated around and bit the tail of its own body. And then the body reacted. Your employees, are they thinking that they're sort of doing that to themselves where they're like, when you make jokes dark or like when you like talking like, you know, like, you don't need to hire all these programmers to do all this stuff. Are they like sitting there with their hands in their pocket like, does that mean us?
- [63:21]
C
You know, I always wanted the company to be super lean. And so for a long time we're like 10 people, but like now we're like 70 people.
- [63:31]
B
That's still nothing.
- [63:32]
C
Yeah, so I'd rather not hire a lot more people because I think that again, the efficiency for programmers. So look, citizen developers are going to go from 0 to like say 10x, but also existing software engineers are going to go from 10x to 100x. Right. And so they're going to become more and more productive. The moment we automate all of software engineering, I think that's sort of like the moment of AGI. I think it's a little far away. And the reason I say this is because once you automate software, then the agents can rebuild themselves and you go into this loop of increased intelligence. Every version builds its next version, builds its next version. And so this is what they call intelligence explosion that would lead to the singularity. Right. So it's like a pretty crazy time when we automate all of software engineering. And so I think, I think it's coming. I don't know if it's 10 years or 15 years, but I think that's the time where the world really radically changes.
- [64:38]
A
Have you met anybody in kind of the tech industry? That blew you away, either personally or maybe you've read about them. Maybe you met a friend of a friend, told you a story. Because I saw a picture of you with Jensen. You know, you've met Paul Graham. I know that you're like connected in the AI circles. You met Sam Altman in addition to building the tech. I love the characters and I love the stories. Is why every, you know, Elon snippet of how he runs his companies goes viral and shit like that. What are your favorite kind of inspiring stories or crazy stories that you've either experienced directly or read?
- [65:11]
C
You know, one of the craziest story, when we're raising from a 16Z, Mark invites me to breakfast at like 10am at his house. And so I go there and I expect like I'm going to talk about the business. And so we spend like two or three hours talking about politics and the world and like all sorts of things that are interesting to him. And I felt like this guy is like, is like more than just a technologist, he's like a philosopher. And so right now he's going out and he's talking about this stuff. Like his Joe Rogan interview went super viral and he's been always have like these interesting ideas about the world. And the interesting thing about a 16Z is his partner Ben is sort of like the executor, sort of the executive. Right. He wrote the Hard Thing about Hard Things where like he teaches you like about what it means to run a company. It's painful, it's hard. And what it means to hire executives or what it means to scale a company. And so you have this duo of like the doer and like the philosopher. And I think that's really amazing. And I think they're, they have really big plans and I was the doer.
- [66:19]
A
I would just hate the philosopher. I'd be like, are you going to do anything? But what are you talking about politics for right now? It's got to be the worst to be the doer in the doer philosopher relationship, right?
- [66:30]
C
You know, I think I think Sam is. It was interesting to kind of meet him, talk to him, because he's very effective. Like, he. Like, the first time I met. I met him. Or like, maybe not the first time, but like, he was on his computer as I am talking. And so I'm talking, I was like, yeah, we're fundraising. I went to talk to a 16Z. I'm like, really big fan of Mark. And he was typing on his computer, okay, I introduced you to Mark. And then when you send Sam emails, it's like pretty quickly replies with a couple of words or a couple sentences. So I saw how effective and fast you can be. And that. I'm not like that. I'm trying to be more like that. But I'm someone who really values the quietness, like, to think about ideas and to think about strategy and things like that. So I'm not always on top of communication. It actually makes me, like, a little. It's overwhelming. But. But I think. I think seeing these people at least, you know, inspired me to be a little more like that.
- [67:41]
A
You. You tweeted out the story that I loved about you said the most gangster story in Silicon Valley is Steve Jobs buying Pixar for 5 million, investing 50 million, and operating at a loss for a decade. So much so that he had to cut personal checks to make payroll, and somehow turning it around to a $7 billion exit. Why? Why did you like that story?
- [68:02]
C
You know, there are people who are overrated in Silicon Valley, and I think there are people who are underrated. Like, I think people think about Steve Jobs in terms of, like, yeah, the flashy things, the iPhone, the ipod, you know, coming in stage and doing that. The thing I like about the Steve Jobs story is when he was lost in the desert for 10 years. So he left, he was fired from Apple, and then he created two companies that were failing the whole time, like NEXT Computing, Next Computers and Pixar were literally failing. Like, they didn't do anything. They weren't selling. He was just, like, investing more and more of his money. Like, I think he was going to go broke, but he kept going for 10 years. Like, how do you do that? And, you know, I'm a person who, like we talked about in my story, where I want to be able to go the distance. I think going the distance is an advantage for entrepreneurs. And Pixar became this hugely valuable company, and it goes from making no revenue to making billions of dollars and going public over a couple of years. And Next Computers saved Apple. Apple was having a problem with os. Like intel, they had a chip before, I don't know, they made it internally or something like that. And then everyone was moving to Intel. Intel was the best computing chip and they wanted their computers to be fast and so they needed a new operating system and they tried to buy. They went to the market, they tried to acquire companies. They couldn't find a great operating system. And Next Computing had the. Had had a great operating system and that became macOS. So they bought.
- [69:46]
A
I didn't know that. I thought Next was just a failure. I didn't. I didn't even realize it actually contributed. I thought they just bought Steve back aqui hire. But it wasn't an acqua. It wasn't just acquire.
- [69:54]
C
No, I mean Objective C, for example. You know, Next Computing was really obsessed with this idea of object oriented programming and they innovated a lot on what that means. And you know, it is based on Unix, but it has a lot of interesting features on top of that. So Apple, it saved Apple because Apple was otherwise not going to be competitive without these new chips.
- [70:16]
A
Right. Well, dude, I know we kept you half an hour over. I apologize for that, but this was amazing. This was one of my favorite episodes in a long time. And I'm not just saying that. You can go check all the other episodes. I don't say that at the end. So this was awesome. Thanks so much for coming on. Where should people. Twitter is the best place to follow you.
- [70:35]
C
Yeah, Twitter. Amosad on Twitter and the replit handle on Twitter as well. Just R e PL dude, thank you very much.
- [70:45]
B
You're the best.
- [70:46]
C
Of course, of course. My pleasure. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.
- [70:53]
B
I put my all in it.
- [70:55]
C
Like no days off on the road, let's travel.
- [70:57]
B
Never looking back.
- [71:05]
A
Hey, Sean here. I want to take a minute to tell you a David Ogilvy story. One of the great admin, he said, remember, the consumer is not a moron. She's your wife. You wouldn't lie to your own wife, so don't lie to mine. And I love that you guys, you're my family. You're like my wife. And I won't lie to you either. So I'll tell you the truth. For every company I own right now, six companies, I use Mercury for all of them. So I'm proud to partner with Mercury because I use it for all of my banking needs across my personal account, my business accounts, and anytime I start a new company, it's my first move. I go open up a Mercury account. I'm very confident in recommending it because I actually use it. I've used it for years. It is the best product on the market. So if you want to be like me and 200,000 other ambitious founders, go to mercury.com and apply in minutes. And remember, Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve bank and Trust Members fdic All right, back to the episode.