#753 Bringing Coding To The Masses w/ Amjad Masad

Amjad Masad is the Co-Founder & CEO of Replit, a website dedicated to writing code and building apps. In this conversation, we discuss software development, the importance of coding, how to educate more people on this technical endeavor, and why Replit is such an impressive business. ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments, commerce and financial applications worldwide. Circle is also a principal developer of USD Coin (USDC), the fastest growing, fully reserved and regulated dollar stablecoin in the world. The free Circle Account and suite of platform API services bridge the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading, DeFi, and NFT marketplaces. Create seamless, user-friendly, mainstream customer experiences with crypto-native infrastructure under the hood with Circle. Learn more at circle.com.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Amjad Massad is the co-founder and CEO of Replit. In this conversation, we discuss software development, the importance of coding, how to educate more people on this technical endeavor, and why Replit is such an impressive business. I really enjoyed this conversation with Amjad, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is BlockFi. BlockFi provides financial products for crypto investors. Those products include a high-yield

• 0:44Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:25Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:18Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:03Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:21Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:44Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so this next guest, Amjad, is going to come on here. And I'm an investor in the business, but this is one of those businesses that I don't really care if I get the money back. Like, I just fundamentally believe, John's looking at me like I'm crazy for saying it, but I fundamentally believe in what they're trying to accomplish here. And because I believe so much, I think that they're going to end up building a massive, massive, massive business. So it'll be a great investment as well. But I think understanding why this is so important is a key piece to this. So, Amjad, are you there?

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Yes, I'm here.

• 4:14Anthony Pompliano?

  How are you, my friend?

• 4:15Speaker 02

  I'm doing well. I'm excited to be on the best business show. I've been a viewer for a long time.

• 4:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, you know what they say, the best business show only has the best guests. So obviously you had to come on. Like, it's pretty simple.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  You're very kind.

• 4:28Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, let's start first with Replit, just in terms of like... What is the business and why are you building this? You could be building a lot of different things, but like, why is this so important for the world?

• 4:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, so fundamentally, we believe that we're in the middle of a great transition that was accelerated 2020 with the pandemic. And we're in the middle of this shift from a primarily industrial society to the information age. And people have been predicting that for a long time, but like, for the first time, you could actually feel it, that it's, it's happening, people are coming online, they want to make business, their businesses online. A lot of people are quitting their jobs and it's a very, very exciting time. But there's a fundamental problem in our opinion, which is most people are consumers of computers.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  We think computers are the most powerful medium, the most powerful technology in the history of humanity. It's on the order of what the printing press was. You know, before, the reading and writing is a superpower. It gives you the ability to extend your brain, your mind, to communicate with large amounts of people, to, to save things, to write things down for generations to come. And initially, reading and writing was only, you know, practiced by the priesthood. You know, the elite only had access to these, to this very powerful technology.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  And then the printing press really changed that. And now we have, you know, you go from less than 1% know how to read and write. And now we have essentially, you know, full literacy in the modern world. And, and that changed the world, like a lot of the democratic, scientific, industrial innovation would not be possible without reading or writing. And it would not be possible without a population that actually can read and write. And so we think we're in this middle of this transition. And less than 0.5% of the world can actually use computers to their fullest extents, meaning to compute, to be able to write software, to be able to manipulate data.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  And the rest of us are just like at the mercy of, you know, the creators of the software, which happens to be kind of concentrated mostly in North America, mostly in Silicon Valley. And so we think, um, uh, you know, what, what we're building at Replit is, is very important, which is really, uh, bringing the tools to everyone, uh, bringing the tools that are creating the modern world, namely software development and building software, um, to everyone in the world. And so we've been working, I've been working personally on it my entire career. You know, I started working on it in college. I had this realization back in college when I found it so hard to just to set up the development environment. Basically, when you're starting to code, you have to set up all the software, download

• 7:39Speaker 02

  gigabytes of software. And, uh, and I was like, you know, this is absurd. Like I have a computer in front of me. Why can't I just program it? Like, why can't I open a browser window and program it? So Replit was one of the first, uh, kind of online environment. Later on, we had a collaboration and we added a community and then we had a place for people to host their application. So it became this end-to-end platform where you come in, you write your first line of code and then, um, you build your first application, maybe even build your first business without, without leaving the platform.

• 8:11Anthony Pompliano?

  So what's fascinating to me is you immediately go to this idea of learning to read and write and the impact that had on the world, right? And I, and I agree with you that that was, uh, uh, probably underestimated how important it was by people today. Cause we just know everyone reads and writes, you know, of course. Is your thought process that, um, 90 plus percent of people or like the majority of people 20, 40, 50 years from now will be technically savvy enough to write code and, uh, kind of use software that they've created to operate within the world, whether it's for commercial purposes, personal purposes, et cetera? Or is it something where you think it'll still be, you know, I don't know how many, uh, developers there are today from a global population standpoint, but you know, probably five.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  25 billion.

• 8:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, less than 5% uh, end up creating all of the software in the world. Like, how do you think about, uh, as we move forward, how that percentage changes?

• 8:59Speaker 02

  So there's going to be two trends, right? So one trend is, uh, you know, computer science education. And that's happening in school and we build a lot of tools for teachers to be able to deliver that, that education. Um, and then, you know, online learning is another, another trend, um, that will like spread, uh, uh, spread coding education. But then there's another trend and this other trend is Sort of just starting and this other trend is about, okay. You know, maybe coding is not, you know, just the only medium for computing and for creating software. So there's this no code movement.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  You know, one thing we're interested in, we're investing in is what does AI mean for for coding and code generation? You know, it's like one of the earliest. One of the earliest applications of AI was actually to be able to, for the AI to be able to program itself. So the programming language Lisp, which was invented in the 50s. At the MIT AI lab and the interesting thing about Lisp was this idea of like code as data. The the idea that the AI would be able to rewrite itself to create dynamic behavior. Now that didn't really materialize like they thought, you know, that the deep learning and neural net revolution kind of overtook that. But I think there's still a, there's still something fundamental there.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  And the question is like, you know, uh, can can the AI generate code better than humans? And can humans operate at a higher level than just code? Can we? You you need that structured thinking, you need to understand how computing works, you need to understand how computers work. And so you need to do all that work and maybe you need a little bit of coding as well. But maybe in the future, you'll be able, if you can think clear thoughts. In a structured way, you'll be able to translate into software. So we're excited about these two trends. Like I I don't think there's going to be like a, you know, a point where everyone is a software developer in the world. I think that percentage will go much higher than we think, maybe double digit percentage. But I think the rest of the people will not be mere consumers and I think that's the key point.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  I think they'll be able to manipulate data in an easy way, they'll be able to at least use. Some kind of computation for their work and and maybe that's done on a higher level.

• 11:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so when you think about that, let's say that we all agree, which I think you and I definitely agree on this. But how does that manifest itself into a product? Because there's basically three different kind of aspects to going from I don't understand how to code to now I'm an effective software developer. The first is you've got to learn, right? So there's an education component. The second is what I'll call the initial setup of the environment. And then the third is what I would consider the like sustainable or the like everyday environment that you end up using. And what I think is unique about the approach that you all are taking is you really are kind of end to end solving all three of those things in a single product that feels very seamless and doesn't feel like you're

• 12:03Anthony Pompliano?

  kind of moving from one to the next to the next. So talk through a little bit about how you think about the design of the product and then what that user, if somebody wanted to go learn from scratch how to code, like what does that look like for them as a journey?

• 12:15Speaker 02

  So when I, when I first started thinking about these problems and started designing applications, I actually joined Code Academy as the first engineer at the company. And what we built there was really, really cool and it helped and continues to help. And it's a really strong business. The founders just done amazing thing is just like make it really easy for people to learn how to code, have the environment right next to instructions and, and kind of like go step by step. Where, where I think, you know, our vision for Replit has been is that we don't want to, you know, we don't want to like create something where just like, you know, it's just for training and then,

• 12:59Speaker 02

  and then you have to leave it and, and, and, you know, go do something else. So like the idea of like use a product to learn and then you go find the real thing. And by the way, like, you know, there's still this chasm in between. A lot of people drop off between kind of doing some tutorials and actually going and practicing the real thing. And, and just fundamentally doesn't make a lot of sense. Like imagine if to, to learn how to drive a car, Get like a special car, you drive it for a week and then like you you you drop it off and then you get the real car, you know. A better better analogy is like training wheels, how you know, you you get on a bike, you buy a bike, the first thing you do, you put uh.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Training wheels when you're a kid and then you learn how to do that and then your dad is like, all right, you're ready and then you. Yeah, they'll take the the training wheels off and off you go, right? But uh so so for us, we always think about this idea of like low barrier, high ceiling. And it's a really tough design problem, like so we want the environment to fundamentally make sense to you at the moment you see it. And we've done a lot of research and the idea of like, okay, there's input here, there's output here and there's a big run button. And that's like the replet sort of identity and like core design innovation from the start was like just. That part is really understandable for people.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  And then from there on, we uh try to make the environment more and more customizable. And we'll try to make the environment more intelligent. So one thing that happens is when the uh environment detects that you're trying to do something a little bit more complicated. It will actually reconfigure itself to support your use case. So for example, let's say you're writing a piece of code, you just started with hello world and. You're building up your application and then you're like, okay, I want to make this server. So you it, you know, you start an H T B server. And so the environment actually detects that and then opens a new window. And that window is the output from the web server you just built.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  And um another kind of piece of uh another thing we do to make that sort of transition. Like very um, you know, very stepwise transition between the, you know, between the initial experience and the. Complex day to day work. We designed this thing called the Universal Package Manager. And package management is one of the hardest things to wrap your head around. Package management is awesome because it gives you millions, if not billions, of human hour of code that had happened in the open source world. And so you'll be able to import that into your code and build a much more powerful application. The problem is package managers are very complex pieces of software.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  So with our package manager, we actually parse the code and detect that you're trying to import a package or bring in a package. And we'll do all the backend work for you. So we'll install the package and we'll show you that work. It's not like abstracted away or magic or anything like that. But we'll do the work for you and the environment just like is more intelligent to understand like you're trying to do this, you're trying to do that. So that's been our that's been our sort of approach to this. And so far it's worked, you know, we've had you know, we've had kids, actually yesterday, Samarth Jajju, shout out if you're listening to this, but he started, he's user number 500.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  He started coding Replit when he was 14 in India. And now he got into Berkeley. And yesterday he came and visited our office and he's still coding on Replit. And and you know, that that kind of retention over like, you know, four or five years is like pretty amazing. He is hitting some limitation, to be clear. And he's giving us feedback constantly. But I think there's like enough sort of convenience that we provide for more advanced programmers that they'll stick with the with the app as we make it powerful and we do make it more powerful year over year. And then, and then just because their friends are in there and just because it's like a fun community as well, like

• 17:13Speaker 02

  another thing we do is like, one of the things that bothered me, I love the programming and open source community. But there are some things to be desired. There's this like, you know, toxic behavior sometimes or, you know, gatekeeping and with the Replit community, we try to keep it fun and light and exciting. Kind of like how programming was in the early days, how the early days of the internet was and and that's how we're able to kind of build a place where learners can can learn valuable skills, meet friends and start coding with other people, but also can continue and do their job and build their projects.

• 17:50Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you think about this environment and this structure, I think what you just described is incredibly powerful. How many people are using it? Or how do you think about like success based on user metrics or retention or any of that type of stuff? Like, what are the metrics that you pay attention to? Like, this is a really important metric for us? And then how do you evaluate where you all are today in terms of progress or milestones?

• 18:15Speaker 02

  So that's a very important question. The... One of the hardest things about understanding Replit as a business is that it sits between consumer and enterprise, meaning like, you know, the level of engagement we're striving for is kind of a consumer business. And we do have like, the average session of Replit is one hour, which is like more than YouTube, which is 45 minutes. And then, and then there are some aspects of the business where, where, you know, it's like, right now, the population of developers is not that much, like, like we talked about, 25, 30 million people.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  So GitHub, for example, has like, I don't know, 100% penetration, like maybe 95% penetration in the developer world. And they have something like, you know, you know, 15, 20 million monthly active users. And then with, with Replit, it's, you know, over time, we've changed how we look at things. Initially, we're looked at monthly active users. More recently, we think it's more honest for us to, to look at weekly active users. And because we want people to build at least a weekly habit.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Again, like Replit is still mostly used by hobbyists, teenagers, students, early career engineers. And eventually, I think we'd want to look at daily active users. Because like, if you're coding every day for your job, like, that should be like a very, like, a very intense activity that you do on a daily basis. We haven't disclosed our like monthly active users figures yet, but you know, our, our like total signups is 10 million users today. By comparison, like I think GitHub's total signups is like 70 million users.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  In terms of like how we benchmark, like I, I think we should be growing really fast compared to any other developer network in history. And, and you know, as we compare our growth to like GitHub early days, we're like running at twice that kind of growth. And then, and then in terms of like milestones, there's like product milestones and there's like adoption milestones. In terms of adoption, the, the, you know, we've been growing at least a hundred percent year over year. You know, some years 150 to 100, depending on the year, COVID was a big year for us where we grew a lot faster.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  And, and that, that I think that exponential growth need to continue, you know, in perpetuity, because we want to reach, we want to reach a billion user mark at some point, there are a lot going to change between us and getting there. It might take a decade or so, but we think that, you know, we, you know, as we develop our product, we need to make sure that like everyone can get value out of it. Students can learn on it and then developers can, can build and create businesses on top of it.

• 21:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And then what are the things that people are building inside of this? Like when you think about what's possible or what's actually happened, are people building like hello world apps? Or are they building something that's much more complex or they're like one or two anecdotal examples that you're like, yeah, this is pretty cool?

• 21:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually, Samarth, I was, I was talking to him yesterday. He built this social network for gifting. So you create a profile and you put like, like your wishlist, like especially books. And then like people can buy you books and they can do it anonymously and they can send you a letter. I've received books when I created my profile for it. It went viral a little bit on Twitter. You can still see it in links in people's bios and he made some money out of it as well. And he built that and Replit.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  In terms of like, Other examples, like we, we do have a lot of games, like if you go to replit.com forward slash apps, there's a lot of games, there's a lot of like mad science experiments, like can I run like Mac OS from the eighties in Replit? And like you'll see a lot of that, can I like build a compiler, interpreter, and operating system, a database? There's a lot of things that like people who are, you know, learning or hacking a Replit, they just build like really cool infrastructure that other people end up using as well. There's a lot of things that people build for the ecosystem itself. So like, you know, embarrassingly, we don't have a user search yet, but you can actually, you can actually, like there's a user program

• 22:58Speaker 02

  where you can search for Replit users and they're augmenting the platform with their own tools. So there's a lot of extensibility happening, people extending Replit. You know, there's a theme app store where, or like a theme store where you can go and theme your IDE and that's someone who is also hacking and extending Replit. So there's a lot of like tools that are just like making the platform better. And then a lot of games, a lot of fun experiments and learning projects. And then, you know, every once in a while, we'll see entrepreneurs, especially in their like late teens, early twenties, where, you know, they build, they build a business and that's, that's one of the most inspired, inspiring things we've seen.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Soren, who's now actually a product manager at Replit, we discovered him because he, during the SPAC race last year, he built a bot that like scraped the like government websites to look for potential upcoming SPACs so that they can invest early in it. So they made that bot and then they started charging access for that bot. So they hosted a Replit and then you go to Discord. And you want to add that bot to your Discord so you can get updates on, on the SPACs. You have to pay, you have to pay a certain amount. And finally, like one of my favorite, favorite kind of projects or like community-based projects where they're like exploring what the network could do for them, like the Replit compute network. There was a project, I think last year was called Stonk Exchange and the idea behind Stonk

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Exchange is like, there's this like thirteen year old kid who built this like fully working market where you can like, you can, you can sort of buy and sell usernames on the platform or other users on the platform. And not only that, he built an API so you could actually build trading bots. And so for like weeks, our entire community was engaged in, in, in like imaginary meme and stocks and trading bots and like a lot of emergent behavior happened. These, these are some of the most fun projects that I see because this is like kind of fundamentally new. It's like the sort of Reddit behavior, but like, but they have quoting superpowers as well.

• 25:09Anthony Pompliano?

  I've got two of my brothers here with me, Joe and John. What questions do you guys have?

• 25:13Speaker 03

  Hey, so thanks for doing this. First off, my, my question would just be around the age that you guys are seeing people on Replit, right? So my understanding is that a large percentage of your user base is younger, call it eighteen or younger. And what impact do you think that has on your business now and then going forward into the future?

• 25:29Speaker 02

  It, it has a negative impact on our business now because they're not monetizable. It, it has a very positive impact on our community and our engagement.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  You know, I, I was talking to, to one of our users and I'm like asking him like, like how, how often do you use Replit? And he's like, really, the only thing distracting me from Replit is school. And so, and so like that kind of like level of engagement, like love for the brand and the community, we get a lot from our younger user base.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  But they're harder to monetize. I think, I think things like the creator economy are actually beginning to make this core audience, you know,

• 26:19Speaker 02

  a lot more valuable for the business as well. But the way we think about it, we have this like very long term view of things and the way we think about it, if we do a good job and this community grows with us and we continue to grow and acquire the next generation programmers, eventually they're going to be very, very valuable users and developers in the, in the ecosystem.

• 26:41Speaker 03

  Who's the youngest user? What age are we talking here?

• 26:44Speaker 02

  Um, so

• 26:46Speaker 03

  Like under ten?

• 26:47Speaker 02

  So there was, uh, there was, uh, there's one on Twitter about, his name is, uh, DJ Wang. Uh, he emailed us, I think when he was 13, he said, um, like, I, I've been using the site since, uh, since I was eight. I think he was asking for like swag or something, something like that. Uh, and he was like, you know, I, I was coding on Scratch when I was five or six. Scratch, by the way, is an awesome website from MIT where, uh, you can do like no code for, for kids. So it's like drag and drop. It was like, you know, I really wanted to get into real coding and then I found Replit. And, you know, here's my profile. I've been coding since I was eight. And then like you scroll through his profile and you can see the first thing he did was like,

• 27:29Speaker 02

  learn Python using Turtle, like Turtle logo is like a interesting way to kind of use Python to draw shapes and make games. And then you go down his profile and it's getting more and more complex. It's getting into computer science stuff, it's getting algorithms, it's getting into, um, uh, into applications. And I see that over and over again, under 10 kids coming to the platform and, and growing from, um, you know, writing, um, um, you know, writing the first line of code, uh, to, um, all the way to, to sort of making, um, making really cool apps.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  Gotcha. John, what questions you got? Yeah. First of all, congratulations on your new fundraising round.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  My question would be revolving around like, when you were fundraising, what were those conversations like? And is there any like story in particular that you're like, wow, like, that wasn't, they were trying to impress you because it seems like everyone was trying to get, uh, their hands on this round.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  I mean, really credit goes to Coach U. Um, they, they've been helping us. They did a survey around Replit, um, which, which was very exciting and they saw some interesting, uh, behavior around people having friends on the platform, how much time. So they had this conviction because they wrapped, they did their own due diligence. You know, since 2019, maybe, and you know, I liked uh uh Moz and the team there. Um, you know, Dan Rose uh was at Facebook and uh I worked at Facebook as well. Um, and um, and we we've had mutual connections. So um, we've been building this relationship and then when um, when they heard that we might be uh fundraising, they immediately sent in a term sheet.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  Just because they've done their homework, they have the conviction. And uh, and that started the round and then I was like, okay, I'm very flattered, but I wanna, you know, run a process and talk to other um, other investors. Um, Peter Thiel was a really interesting conversation as well. Um, I'm a big fan of Peter and his work. Um, his intellectual output around startups from zero to one. Also, just like his uh social commentary and things like that, really uh trying to understand the world uh from a, from a deep perspective. And um, a a lot of understanding startups is understanding the world uh in that way. And so uh, the meeting with Peter was fascinating because

• 29:55Speaker 02

  he sort of got the idea and got the plan and the mission and the vision uh in the first like, you know, five, 10 minutes and he he started pacing me. He started kind of like, you know, uh, jumping the next step and the next step. And here's what you could do, here's what we learned from PayPal. So that was a really fascinating conversation. Um, and then sort of the, the bidding sort of started and um, uh, you know, uh, I I told Paul Graham is um, you know, one, one of my mentors and early investors at Replit. And then I I told him like, this thing is happening, there's, there's a lot of excitement around the round. Like it's getting bid up and um, what what Paul told me is that

• 30:36Speaker 02

  There's some like, like don't optimize for, for, for price, you know,

• 30:43Speaker 02

  there's, you, you still have to be conservative about things. And so we actually ended up taking the,

• 30:52Speaker 02

  basically he said, Paul Graham said that like, there's, there's could be some negative aspects of like, you know, optimizing all the way, you know, or letting the market run with the price. And, and I agree with that. And we opted for less than, than a billion and we, we, we took the, the offer that was eight hundred million post-money valuation because we didn't feel like we figured everything out to be called a unicorn. We felt like people who are joining Rapid today needs to share in the glory because there's a lot of uncertainty, uncertainty, a lot of hard work in front of us to, to be able to figure out a scalable business model, to be able to invent the rest of the platform. So, and we're still a small team. We're still forty people.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  And so we're so thankful and happy that people really believe in our mission, especially because it's been, it's been really rough. You know, I started on this like, you know, twelve, thirteen years ago on some of the ideas here. We've only been able to make it a company in twenty sixteen. Between twenty sixteen, twenty eighteen was sort of a desert in terms of like financing, we couldn't raise a lot of money. We had some early believers. Uh, but now we've sort of reached this escape velocity with regards to financing and, and capital. And, um, and that's awesome, but it's, it's like not the success, right? It's like, we're just getting started and we want to signal that to people.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  You're very humble. I think most people go, go after that unicorn valuation pretty, uh, whenever they can.

• 32:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, I, I think the other piece of this too is, uh, I'm sorry, when you think out twenty, thirty, forty years, like, how big can this be? Are you talking about like the people who joined today, the business and enjoying in the upside? I'm guessing, based on my conversations with you, you don't think there's two or three X upside, but there's, you know, a lot of upside. Like, how do you think about any sort of rating, you know, limitation, right? Or like a governor on growth? Is this $100 billion, you know, business opportunity in terms of whoever wins here is that large? Or how do you think about it?

• 32:59Speaker 02

  As we project out forward and software continues to eating, eat the world and run, run our lives and run our businesses and as computers get more powerful, as Moore's Law continues to do its thing, as AI gets more powerful, like the, you know, the future's really unbounded. A lot of what you guys talk about in this show, like what's happening in the Bitcoin world and the decentralized world is, is really exciting. So we're at this like point of acceleration between all the different technologies and how they affect

• 33:37Speaker 02

  each other. And, you know, projecting forward, I think the platform that captures much of the developer mind share of the new generation of programmers, the upside seems like it would be really, really high. I'm confident that we're gonna continue to grow and we're gonna continue to achieve higher and higher valuations. I think there's a lot of uncertainty. We need to figure out more aspects of the business. But I can tell you for sure that like we are aiming for that really, for that North Star. And, and, and the reason I think the

• 34:19Speaker 02

  business is gonna be really huge is because our focus is on unlocking human capital. It's about unlocking the talent over all over the world. It's about making software and the internet truly the great equalizer. And so if we bring all that talent from all over the world, bring them online and have them create and share and collaborate with each other, it's really hard to imagine like a, like a, like a cap on that. And, and so

• 34:48Speaker 02

  And so I think, you know, I think like my ambition is that this is going to be a really, really big company. And we want people who to join us who are really committed to the vision and the mission. The ride is going to be amazing. And the journey is is is their reward and kind of inventing the future of software is I care a lot about the craft as well. And the the things we built for our users. And so that's going to be really fun. But I, you know, I think also the upside is going to be tremendous.

• 35:24Anthony Pompliano?

  I I couldn't agree more. I hope so. I I've said multiple times that I don't care if the money comes back, but you know, it'd be nice.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  You know, I, I, you know, that's my, that's my job, right? To make sure it comes back.

• 35:40Anthony Pompliano?

  I have no doubt, my friend. All right. Where can we send people to find you on the Internet? Or I'm dropping a replit.com into the chat right now for people to go check out there. Where should we send folks to to find you?

• 35:50Speaker 02

  Um, so my Twitter is amasad, A M A S A D. That's generally like my handle on on the web, on on replit, on GitHub, on Twitter, everywhere. And I have my email address open on Twitter. I always welcome like feedback and people who are interested in working with us, or or people who are in similar fields and missions. And I always welcome discussion.

• 36:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. Well, listen, I don't say it lightly when I say that you are building what I think is one of the more important companies in the world. So I am obviously cheering you on one, two, I just want more and more people to learn how to code. I think it's a skill set that can be incredibly impactful for their life on a personal level, but also the things that they build and create, obviously can change the world. So it's pretty cool.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Thank you. And, you know, part of the reason I was excited to take your money is like, we're incredibly aligned and like the kind of message you put out, the optimism, the the idea of like, anyone, anywhere with kind of little resources can now like build something amazing. And we're 100% aligned on that. And so glad to have you as part of our journey.

• 37:01Anthony Pompliano?

  I appreciate it. I think that's it, man. If you don't follow on Twitter, go follow him. If you haven't checked out replit.com, go there. Links are in the chat. And we'll definitely have to do this again in the future, but I appreciate you taking the time to do it. And we'll talk soon.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 37:17Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. See you later, buddy.

• 37:18Speaker 02

  Thank you.