Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI

Jack Neel speaks with Amjad Masad, CEO at Replit, about how AI is making it easier than ever to build and ship software without a technical background. They discuss Replit's rise from a browser-based coding tool to a platform generating $250 million in annual revenue, why Masad turned down a $1 billion acquisition offer, and his case for why AI represents empowerment rather than existential risk. This episode originally aired on The Jack Neel Podcast.

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

• 0:00Amjad Masad?

  The world was built by people that are not much smarter than you. Your job is to find the way of doing things that's most aligned where the world is headed. I think it's the easiest time to get rich in the history of capitalism, especially in the history of internet.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Growing up in Jordan, today's guest was fascinated by programming, but couldn't afford a computer, which inspired him to make coding accessible for everyone.

• 0:23Amjad Masad?

  You can cast almost any problem in life as a coding problem. And I thought, okay, I'm gonna hack into a school and change my grades.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  But when his company hit a billion-dollar valuation, he refused every offer to sell, doubling down on his mission to turn the tech industry from a monopoly into a democracy. How much were you offered to sell your company for?

• 0:41Amjad Masad?

  When we were very small, not a lot of people, I think six people, we were offered a billion dollars.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  And why'd you say no?

• 0:47Amjad Masad?

  Because I think I can build a trillion-dollar company.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  In this episode, we'll give his exact blueprint to build a million-dollar app in minutes. Explore why the most powerful tech companies tried to kill his vision, and question whether AI will enslave us or empower everyone to escape the rat race. Why do you think AI isn't going to kill us all?

• 1:07Erik Torenberg?

  For most of the internet era, building software required learning to code. That bottleneck shaped who got funded, who got hired, and who got rich. Replit was built to break it. In 2011, Amjad Masad posted a simple idea to Hacker News. Run any programming language in your browser, no installation required. That became Replit. Today, Replit's AI agent produces a working app in under an hour, and the company's revenue went from $2.5 million to $250 million in just over a year. When a competitor offered to buy the company for $1 billion at six employees, Masad said no, because he thinks he can build a trillion-dollar one.

• 1:52Erik Torenberg?

  His argument: not having a coding background is becoming an advantage. The people who win now are the ones closest to the problem, not the ones who know the syntax. In this conversation, previously aired on the Jack Neal podcast, Jack Neal speaks with Amjad Masad, CEO at Replit.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  I'm Job Masad. Welcome to the Jack Know Podcast.

• 2:18Amjad Masad?

  Thank you.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  I'm Job.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  You built a billion dollar company that makes apps just by talking to AI. If you wanted to build a million dollar app in five minutes, how would you do it?

• 2:31Amjad Masad?

  It depends on my context. I would look around for problems to solve. So no matter where you are in life, you're in college, you're at work, there are people dealing with problems all around you. One of my very recent startups that came out of Replit is a finance guy. And he was on a plane and next to him was sitting an investment banker, just spending a lot of time building spreadsheets and building decks for clients. And he had an idea to automate a big part of that.

• 3:09Amjad Masad?

  And he told him, you know, I have an app for you. And he didn't have an app. Can I come pitch it to you tomorrow? He said, yeah, I mean, if you can solve this problem, if you can make it faster for us to get to our clients. He went home and he's been using Replit just personally, just for fun, websites, things like that. He spent the night working on the app, next day went and pitched it, left there with half a million dollars of blood of intent.

• 3:40Amjad Masad?

  And did this a few more times with other bankers. And he's just raising at a $35 million valuation right now. So it's more than $35 that because he already has a lot of contracts right out of the door.

• 3:55Amjad Masad?

  So it's very contextual. We have a educator that's like a more of a story from two years ago because the company is pretty big right now, half a billion dollars worth. But he's a teacher during COVID. I think he just left his school and started playing around with AI, playing around with Replit, going in and trying his hand at coding with AI.

• 4:21Amjad Masad?

  And because he knows the problem space deeply, he was able to build a lot of tools for teachers, for grading students, for creating assignments. With AI and education is one of like the hardest markets, but AI has this amazing ability to sell itself. And quickly grew the company to 10 million annual revenue, 20 million annual revenue. And now it's like half a billion dollars worth company. But there are a lot of smaller ones, too. The other day I was on Twitter, saw this guy who created an app quickly with Replit to generate brand kits and brand design material, logos, all of that. You enter your product name, you go through a simple flow. It's called anymark.co.

• 5:05Amjad Masad?

  And you pay, I think 40 bucks or something like that, and you get an entire brand kit generated with AI. And so I see these stories every day, and it's typically someone who has some domain knowledge in a certain thing, you know, they're, they realize there's a problem around them. Maybe, you know, I see all my friends trying to start companies, but brands are really hard to build, so I'm gonna automate that. So just like look around you in the world and just see what, what are the problems that people are dealing with, that they're willing to pay for it. And it's so easy to try things. Because it's so easy and cheap to try things, you can iterate really quickly and arrive at an idea. I think it's the easiest time to get rich online.

• 5:50Amjad Masad?

  And, and, and I think it's the easiest time to get rich in the history of capitalism, but certainly in the history of internet.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  So if I'm someone with zero dev coding experience, what problem did you guys solve here? And like, what are people missing about where AI is at? You can kind of just speak absent to existence at this point, like how much editing of it do you have to do? Like, how much of this really is just, it's done?

• 6:20Amjad Masad?

  Month over month is improving. I will say at this point, we have an automated software engineer that is as good as a mid-level software engineer. It would get a job at Facebook or Google. Like, it is really good. Like, you don't have to look at the code at all. Actually, you know, initially Replit started as like, let's make coding easier. So there was still coding in the interface. Increasingly, it was just removing the coding features, because you don't need to code anymore. Actually, even professional software engineers are not coding anymore. So code is almost fully automated.

• 6:55Amjad Masad?

  I mean, it depends on the specialty and the language and there's some nuance to it. But for the most part, people are not coding anymore. It's it's become a more a higher level thing. So engineers still do some kind of engineering, systems engineering, whatever. But if you're a product builder, all you have to care about is who the customer is, what the problem you're solving is, what's your core differentiator? What do you understand about the world that other people don't? And can you put that into into an app?

• 7:24Amjad Masad?

  So if you go to an app right now, there's a prompt box like chat GPT. You type in your idea, like I want to create, you know, brand kit generator. It'll go through a planning process. I'll tell you, here's what I understand you want to build. You can go back and forth on a plan. And then you you tell it to go, it'll work for for 10 minutes. It'll get you a minimum viable product. Obviously, that's probably not ready to ship yet. So you're you're going to iterate on it. You're going to ask it for adjustments. And there's a preview there and there's the chat box there. And you're going back and forth. So you're telling it something, it's going, writing the code, fixing the bugs, testing it even. We give it we give it a browser.

• 8:08Amjad Masad?

  So it can start a browser, it can look at the app itself, it can test it. It can go to the internet, fetch information. It can integrate other AI models like image generation and things like that.

• 8:20Amjad Masad?

  And you go through this process. And I think within an hour or two, most people have an app that they're ready to put in front of a user. It depends on the idea, obviously. But for a lot of ideas, you can get something done that you can share with a friend or a target user and get feedback from them.

• 8:40Amjad Masad?

  You don't need any development experience. You need grits and you need to be like a fast learner. You need to be like, I will say, if you're like a good gamer, if you can like jump in a game and figure it out really quickly, you're you're really good at this. But even if you're not a good gamer, you'll figure it out eventually. But people who are who grew up with technology or like fast learners are are now like the best at this. I I will venture to say that. Not having a coding experience is becoming an advantage because coders get lost in the details, product people, people who are focused on solving a problem, on making money, they're going to be focused on marketing, they're going to be focused on user interface,

• 9:22Amjad Masad?

  they're going to be focused on all the right things. So at some point, I think this year it's going to flip and I think not having a coding background is going to be more advantageous for the entrepreneur. Now, when the company grows and you're getting a lot of revenue coming in, at some point you'll hire engineers just to make sure the security and the infrastructure is scaling and rapidly continues to help with that as well. But getting to market and generating a revenue, you should be able to do it in a matter of days.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  So I guess just to zoom in a little bit and give people practical steps.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  As someone with multi-billion dollar company, if you wanted to build an app that could get a million downloads in six months, like what are the five major steps you need if you could distill it?

• 10:21Amjad Masad?

  A unique idea, an idea that is not like an exact copy of something out there because that thing exists. You need a spin on that idea that's interesting.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  How do you find ideas?

• 10:36Amjad Masad?

  I think that's actually the core skill in AI. I think if you want to work on a skill, it's going to be about idea generation because the costs of implementation of those ideas is going down rapidly. It's going to go to zero at some point. So the bottleneck becomes this, like, how fast can you generate ideas? And that skill is about one perception, like just looking around you in the world and seeing what's happening, what are the trends? Are you plugged in on social media? What are people talking about? What is like the most interesting thing that's happening? And is there a market for that? Maybe we'll get to that later on, but we were discussing this idea of

• 11:20Amjad Masad?

  a looks maxing app, right? I mean, it's your idea and I think it's a great idea because it's something in the ether right now. People are discussing, people are interested in it. Can you build an app that gives you feedback on your looks maxing progress? That's really great. I saw an app the other day that judges like gives you, allows you to track your hairline progress, allows you to like, you know, gives you interventions to make in terms of like what medications to take and things like that. And unless you take like a scan of your head and like, obviously it's past time for me, but if you're dealing with that early on,

• 12:05Amjad Masad?

  it can help you track your progress. So that's very important. Like I think a lot of young people now, your generation younger, care a lot more about this than say my generation. Right, I'd say that's the big trend of the past few months. So being plugged in is super important. And so, you know, a lot of the vices that my, like older generations think are vices might actually become advantages. So if you're brain rotted, you know, terminally aligned person, that might be advantage because you know what's happening in the world. If you're someone who's also just like

• 12:48Amjad Masad?

  ADHD, really interested in novelty, want to try a lot of different things. That's actually an advantage because AI really benefits people who can try a lot of things really quickly. Obviously you can, you need to get things to completion. You need to have some grid at some point, once you've got some validation. But trying a lot of ideas is important. So back to your question, I don't feel like I answered. How do you generate ideas?

• 13:14Amjad Masad?

  It's it's it's practice. It's a skill like generate ideas, put them out there. I really like to use Twitter. I I used to do that a lot where I talk about ideas. I kind of share them and see what the feedback early on. But now like just make the app and see what the feedback is and learn from that and and go from there. And and think about ideas all the time. I think it's a muscle. Like just continuously thinking about, okay, what if I built this? What would happen? And so there's all these different ways to be a better idea generator.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  I do wanna ask you some ideas you have specifically, but maybe we'll get on that later in the interview. So step by step process. First one, get a good idea.

• 14:01Amjad Masad?

  Get a good idea, typically tied to a trend. Second, get break that break that idea down as much as you can into like, say, a paragraph with a bunch of bullets. Like the app, the looks maxing app should, you know, have a camera with an AI integrated. And it should be able to take a photo of my face on my phone or my laptop. And it should kind of draw, I'm just making this up, should draw lines. Like get specific, like imagine the user interface and get specific about that. You don't have to write more than a paragraph because what's gonna happen then?

• 14:44Amjad Masad?

  It'll give you the initial implementation and you'll react to that and see if it got it right or wrong. And then you can like sort of nudge it in in different directions.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  You're looking for your key use case.

• 14:55Amjad Masad?

  Yes, yes, you're looking for the main use case. Don't overcomplicate it. Don't like add a bunch of features. You're just like, what is the core experience? And how can you get really quickly to value? Users, consumers these days just don't have a lot of attention span. So they're gonna give your app like five minutes. And so figure out what's the user journey to get to like a five minute value, a moment.

• 15:24Amjad Masad?

  And then, once you, once you do that. You got your MVP, go try it on someone. Go try it on a classmate, on a friend.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Before that though, so let's just assume for the sake of your company is Replit. Use Replit or tool like Replit. And then how do you build it? Like, how simple is it?

• 15:45Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, you just put in the prompt, you hit start building. It'll start the working environment. It'll work for 10 minutes. It'll show you a preview. You can, if you want to use it on your phone, you can open that preview on the phone, it'll give you a QR code.

• 16:02Amjad Masad?

  And then test the app. If the app is not exactly what you wanted, most likely it's not. The first iteration is not. Go type today, I tell it exactly what it got wrong. It's like, you misunderstood this. And don't try to overcome it, just talk to it. Talk to it like you would talk to a person. Just be as specific as you can. So you misunderstood this, I meant the AI should work in this or this other way.

• 16:30Amjad Masad?

  And, and give it feedback, go through that iteration cycle a few times. And, and then go test the app. It's really that simple, like, you know, you just need to be able to explain ideas well.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  I think that's super helpful. I don't think the marketing aspect is as important in this particular discussion, but because good products market themselves.

• 16:57Amjad Masad?

  Well, I would say, I would say it is, it is important. Like, yeah, good products are very important, especially if you're creating something totally novel. But figuring out how to promote this is, is going to be important. The easiest places to, to do it is find communities like on Reddit and other communities. Like if you have a looks maxing app, there's probably a looks maxing Reddit, just like post it there. Try to get some early users through there. Go to the various discords. At some, so that's like the early users, that's how to get like 100 users. At some point, you need to scale that. And that's where Instagram and TikTok comes into play.

• 17:42Amjad Masad?

  If you're someone who's good at that, you have a superpower. If you're someone who's able to like create these short clips and talk about products, you have a superpower. But if you're not, you can still go reach out to influencers and you can cut a deal with them. You can get them, um, you know, part of the subscription, part of the revenue. You can, you can just pay them.

• 18:06Amjad Masad?

  And, um, and then, and then you go from there. But I would say that's like the first few weeks.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  That's really interesting about the communities. That's also a way to find ideas in general is just scour Reddit, scour TikTok hashtags and see like, what's a community of people? Let's say example, looks maxing, or let's say example, uh, like a specific sports team or like sports gambling, something like that, not promoting gambling, but uh, you would look at the community, look at the problems they have, and then kind of get ideas for what you could build. It's really fascinating.

• 18:39Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, the original, when I posted Replit on Hacker News, that's how I got my first users. Hacker News was still kind of is a very popular place for, for programmers, technical people in general. Before Replit became more possible for non-technical people to use, it was more of a technical product.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Do you remember your headline?

• 19:02Amjad Masad?

  Yeah. Uh, I said, um, try Python, JavaScript, all these different programming languages in your browser without installing anything, right? And so it's like, gets to the core value proposition. At the time, to write any piece of code, you had to download insane amount of software. Uh, maybe you try to take a coding class in college. It's really ridiculous how much, uh, you have to deal with, uh, in terms of just like writing any kind of code.

• 19:34Amjad Masad?

  And so I was like, why shouldn't I be able to code in my browser? Like my browser, you know, I can do my email, I can write my docs there, should we be able to code there? And I also like scouring these forums. I'd already seen interest in that and there was like small examples that weren't really working of people trying to build that. So it was like, if I got it working. I can really wow these people. And just like there's a demo effect, right? Like if you're building something novel,

• 20:04Amjad Masad?

  like if you can make your looks maxing app like a truly cool experience, then people would just be attracted to that as well. And they're going to promote it and tell their friends about it. So in terms of the headline, yeah, just like, what is the core value proposition?

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:20Amjad Masad?

  And for me at the time was it's about quitting in the browser.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  It's so fascinating about what you've built because something I discussed with a lot of young entrepreneurs that built these multimillion dollar AI apps or startups was like this concept of making short form content before you even build out your MVP or like your minimum viable product. And then just seeing if there's interest in it. But with your company and where AI is at, just build it instantly. And you don't really have to worry about the moat of, oh, this thing does work. Let's build it really fast before someone steals it.

• 20:59Amjad Masad?

  It really changed. It really changed like even the past few months. That advice of it's like called the lean startup advice. I think started in like mid 2000s. There's a book called Lean Startups. And the idea is that it was following from this Toyota way of building cars where they would, you know, cars used to be manufactured in like a, you know, heavy industrial way where they kind of know exactly what they're going to build and like they'll, you know, they have all the schematics and they'll like create the factory pipelines and it's very inflexible. They can't react to demand. They can't react to changes.

• 21:44Amjad Masad?

  They can't react to like recalls or customer feedback. And so Toyota kind of developed a way of like called lean manufacturing. And so it was like borrowed from that. It's like, how can you do risk startups and like make it more iterative?

• 21:58Amjad Masad?

  But we're at such a different place, like execution is no longer bottleneck. If you have an idea, just like make the app and then go, go, go figure out the demand. Because it's a lot easier than just like talking about it.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  I do want to ask.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  As far as your mission goes and what you've built today, what's the most important part or moment of your childhood to help us understand who you are and what you're working on?

• 22:32Amjad Masad?

  I grew up in Jordan, kind of lower middle-class family. We didn't have a lot of money.

• 22:43Amjad Masad?

  I was lucky enough to get good education. But also, the hard thing about it is because I was in a class with kids that had a lot more money than us. And so I saw their PlayStations, their Air Jordans, their, like, all the cool stuff they had that I didn't have. And that really fucking sucked. And I was always motivated to make money. A lot of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs be like, oh, it's all about connecting the world or whatever. Yes, I care about all of that stuff. But my journey starts with, I love programming. I've always loved programming and understand like how computers work.

• 23:20Amjad Masad?

  But at the same time, I was also always motivated to make money with computers. And I felt like we're at a moment in time where you can build,

• 23:31Amjad Masad?

  you can build businesses really quickly. Ever since I found the internet and in the 90s, I wanted to build websites to make money. And there was a bunch of ideas. There's a bunch of examples of people making money really quickly. There was this idea of like a million-dollar homepage, where someone was selling pixels and you can be Microsoft. You can buy like 10 pixels and write Microsoft's logo, whatever, 100 pixels. And so there was this mania, even at the time, it's like, okay, you can make money online.

• 24:03Amjad Masad?

  And I was going to the internet cafe because we didn't have internet at home. So I would scrap whatever money we had, find in couches or whatever, to go pay for like an hour of internet. And I would sit there and like, look at different websites, look at what people are doing, different games, different ways. I could like build something that could like make money.

• 24:24Amjad Masad?

  And then the main idea was sitting right under my nose, which is the internet cafe itself. I was like, well, internet cafes make a lot of money, but they don't use software to manage their business. Like their business is you go in there, you pay, you know, a buck or two, you get an hour on the computer. And when you're sitting on the computer, they have to keep track of you. They're like every hour they're look at the clock and they're like, okay, your time is up. They tap you on the shoulder. Also, when you're on the computer, you can like install a virus, you can like delete files, they can do whatever. So it was like, okay, what if I built something that secures the system, makes it so that um there's like usernames and passwords.

• 25:06Amjad Masad?

  Makes it that so that internet cafes need less employees because once you run out of time, it'll just like boot you out. So I built this internet cafe management system. And because I knew it, and this is the I keep coming back to this idea of the way to build businesses to build things you know about. Either trends you're plucked in or problems around you in the world. So I was 12 or 13 and and I I spent like, you know, a year or two trying to build the software for internet cafes. Uh, and then went out and and sold it and made quite a bit of money from it. At the time, McDonald's was just

• 25:46Amjad Masad?

  opening in in Jordan and I took my entire class to McDonald's and no one had McDonald's at the time. So. How much money did you make from? I made like, like 500 bucks. Okay. Which was amazing for me, you know, uh, salaries in Jordan are not nowhere near the US. And so it's like, you know,

• 26:09Amjad Masad?

  so, uh, yeah, I I felt rich and it felt good to make money and it felt even better to make money from something that I love doing.

• 26:21Amjad Masad?

  And later on, you know, as I found more ways to make money with computers and programming, I bought an Xbox. I I I was so happy because I'm able to buy things that, you know, my friends' parents buy for them, but I'm able to buy it myself even as a teenager. So it felt empowering to make your own money. But as as part of that, like a lot of the painful part was just like the tools. Like I would like I was a talented programmer and I said the tool I was fighting with the tools all the time. And you just you have an idea, you have the right market, you have the right product idea and skills to build that. But you're still dealing with a lot of the problems with the tools.

• 27:04Amjad Masad?

  So I was always motivated to make better programming and coding tools in order to in order for me to build easier, more startups, more companies, more products and for other people as well. And I thought that the internet could be this great wealth equalizer and generator like, you know, there's no reason that Silicon Valley capture most of the wealth on the internet because it is the most distributed decentralized accessible technology in the world. I think part of the reason is because the tools are hard.

• 27:44Amjad Masad?

  And maybe there's like a intentional part that the tools are harder than they should be. And so like the guiding mission for Replit became, how do you make coding tools so easy that you don't even need to be a coder to use them? And what kind of world does that create in terms of accessibility to wealth generation, wealth creation?

• 28:07Speaker 01

  I want to hone in on that point. How much were you offered to sell your company for?

• 28:13Amjad Masad?

  At some point I was offered when we're very small, not a lot of people, I think six people were offered a billion dollars.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  And why'd you say no?

• 28:24Amjad Masad?

  Because I think I can build a trillion dollar company.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Do you think Silicon Valley or whoever was offering, do you think the people offering to pay a billion dollars for your company were just going to kill it?

• 28:41Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, it was a competitor. And implicit in any acquisition offer is a threat.

• 28:50Amjad Masad?

  If you don't sell, we're going to build something to compete with you.

• 28:54Amjad Masad?

  Because they're interested in the product, they're interested in the market. You have to make it better on yourself. That if I'm not going to sell, they're going to go buy some other company or they're going to go build it themselves and they're going to compete with me. And do I first have the self belief that I can?

• 29:13Amjad Masad?

  Go against the juggernauts, go against the big incumbents and win. Ultimately, for me, it came down to

• 29:24Amjad Masad?

  what I would regret more. Would I regret not selling? Or would I regret more not

• 29:34Amjad Masad?

  not achieving my and the company's potential? And I thought that would have been a bigger regret. Yes, I would be rich, but I would be yet another rich asshole. There's a lot of them.

• 29:49Amjad Masad?

  But building something meaningful that creates meaning, not just in your life, but in other people's lives. Whether it's like the team we built, the customers we serve, the entrepreneurs that we're creating, the worldview we're putting out, the mission we're putting out, the influence that comes from that.

• 30:09Amjad Masad?

  I thought it would be a loss not to try. Do you think big tech in general is threatened by your mission?

• 30:17Amjad Masad?

  Yes. You know, what's the saying? First, like they, you know, they laugh at you, then they try to fight you, then they join you or something like that. They're saying it like that. We're at the like, they're joining us right now. Like they initially, it was like, oh, Replit is this toy, you know, kids use it. Yeah, we have a lot of kids using it. We're proud of it. It's so easy that kids use it.

• 30:40Amjad Masad?

  Yeah. And it's like, why is that a negative thing? It's probably a good sign. It's a good sign. Yeah.

• 30:47Amjad Masad?

  And, and then, and then, and then when they felt threatened by it, they would like try to buy it. Or like try to compete on the margins or try to like, you know, compete in the press or PR, but not really on the, on the product because they still don't believe in it. But they want to counter the narrative that actually programming can be coding or making software can be something anyone can do. And finally, when we've, we've, we've grown so much, like our revenue, like a hundred X, then they paid attention and they're like, okay, this is a real thing and people want it. And now they're building actual competing products. Do you see?

• 31:31Speaker 01

  What you're doing as, I mean essentially you see is the democratization of building software. Do you think we'll see something similar with tech that we saw with social media where, or with media in general, where the barrier to entry was so low that instead of, I mean, there's two versions of this. There's the big media like CNN, Fox, ABC to influencers, and then there's influencers to micro influencers. And there's tons of people making 10K a month on social media. Do you think that's where we're moving in tech where, I don't know, someone like my parents in Kentucky can build an app, make

• 32:13Speaker 01

  a nice couple thousand dollars a month, and then that's just their job?

• 32:17Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, I think that's like an age-old thing that's been happening with technology since the dawn of time. So think about literacy, right? Like during medieval Europe, like reading and writing was regulated, was only like priests were able to do it. And priests were like controlling the population, right? Before the Protestant Reformation. And so there's like the priesthood control over the ability to read and write. And then we had the Gutenberg printing press. And that was decentralized, the ability to print books and have books available to the population. People started learning how to read and then

• 32:57Amjad Masad?

  learning how to write. And that caused massive changes in the world. And like leading up to revolutions and different religions and democracies and all of that happening because of reading. Like, none of the world that we have today would not have happened without mass literacy, right? We have the big media companies, but you can have a Substack, and there are people making millions of dollars on Substack. There are people making 10K on Substack. There are people making 2K on Substack. And so...

• 33:32Amjad Masad?

  You know, Instagram is the same thing. You had to be a professional photographer at some point. And only the professional photographers could make some money. And then later on, anyone could like take photos and make money. Influencers is the same thing. Really, like every skill and every profession goes through this. Whereas usually an elite minority and they're gatekeeping. They don't want other people to do it. And certainly programmers in big tech felt threatened by Replit is because they make a lot of money. Like, we were in this like really strange world over the past, you know, 15, 20 years, where if you go to computer science school for four years,

• 34:16Amjad Masad?

  you're guaranteed like the best life and the best, you know, the upper echelon of income. And if you get a job at Google, you're set for life. And, you know, in four or five years, you're pulling a couple million dollars. And it's certainly threatening when like that skill can can be democratized and anyone can do it, anyone can build it. It's also threatening to VCs and the way Silicon Valley works. Because Silicon Valley needed to build all this infrastructure in order to, and raise all this capital in order to like fund, you know, companies need a lot of capital to build the software and market it and all of that.

• 34:58Amjad Masad?

  But with social media, with tools like Replit, you don't need as much capital.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:03Amjad Masad?

  And so I think every piece of technology in history has had this decentralizing and democratizing effect. And every time there's like a pushback from some group of people that are benefiting from the gatekeeping. But then the dam breaks and we live in a fundamentally new world, typically a much better world. And I think it's true of media, like the democratization of media has been, has been really good. I think that I, you know, I get, I get my news more from social media than I do. And it has its challenges, obviously, but it's much better than getting propaganda.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  That's very true.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  That's a super interesting comparison about the Gutenberg press with how religions evolved over time, because, I mean, it really was. I mean, it would be ignorant of me to say it was the big three, but I would say they were much more dominant and there wasn't so many branches of. I'm trying to think of the dating, but uh. It's a very apt comparison.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  I'm trying, what do you think everyone is getting wrong about AI and jobs?

• 36:14Amjad Masad?

  AI is seen as a replacement as opposed to a tool that can be wielded by the most creative, by the most ambitious people who want to make a fundamental change in their lives and their communities and their companies. Obviously, AI can automate a lot of work, but to automate that work, someone needs to build that system, someone needs to be observant enough to look around their company

• 36:43Amjad Masad?

  or look around their school, whatever community they exist in. So we're doing a lot of BS things. There's a lot of bullshit work. There's actually a book called Bullshit Work and it's like by David Graeber. And it talks about how like most of the economy is kind of bullshit work. I mean, if you think about it.

• 37:06Amjad Masad?

  You know, post-industrial revolution, we created a world where machines were doing a lot, but not enough, and humans had to step in and act like machines. And so if you look at any office job, most of the time they're doing things that are easily automatable.

• 37:27Amjad Masad?

  They're putting data entry in Excel sheets, they're repeating the same process time and time again, and they know it's automatable. Or they're sending the same sort of email or they're doing the same kind of marketing.

• 37:39Amjad Masad?

  And you could say, okay, you know, we can get an AI system to like, replace that person. But there's going to be more work to be done, not less, because you know, you get more revenue, get more users, you're gonna have different challenges, different operationals thing you should do. So it's a hamster wheel. But we can go much faster now. And the way to look at AI is

• 38:08Amjad Masad?

  end jobs is how can I upgrade my workforce? For them to become generalist business people that can wield AI for the benefit of our customers and our, on our bottom line.

• 38:24Amjad Masad?

  And we see it in a lot of our enterprise customers. Where the most ambitious people

• 38:33Amjad Masad?

  are creating billions of dollars of value to their company.

• 38:37Amjad Masad?

  So there's every, every company out there, every tech company for sure. There are people that are closest to the customer. That feel that they have ideas that could make more revenue for the business. But they're often blocked by engineering. Engineering don't think the idea is worth it, or they have their own roadmap, they don't care about it. And now a lot of them are bringing in Rapid to work, they're building that idea. And they're making the money for their company. And then they're getting promoted and then they're giving more power. And a lot of them go out and hire more people like them. I'm going to build a team of vibe quarters. That are going to go around the company and find all the inefficiencies and go solve them.

• 39:20Amjad Masad?

  So we have a new role of this like generalist automator. And they're less parochial than the engineer, the engineers like really focused on systems and engineering.

• 39:32Amjad Masad?

  They're not as focused on one particular domain like sales and marketing. They can hold the context of the entire business in their head. And they can find ways to increase efficiency or add revenue to the business.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  What's the most obvious AI automation? That people should be doing today?

• 39:51Amjad Masad?

  In the context of companies, we see a lot of just like copy pasting of data. Like you have data in Salesforce and you want to get it into an Excel sheet somewhere, or you want to get it into

• 40:10Amjad Masad?

  some data lake or something like that. And we see a lot of data entry work that is like just copy pasting because they don't know how to write code, engineers are busy, IT is busy. So just like anytime you find yourself copy pasting things from one place to another and you do it regularly. Like it's an obvious automation, go to Repland, just say, go pull the data from Salesforce and put it in Snowflake, right? So that's in the context of companies, I think there's a lot of data movement that happens manually and that really blows my mind. And even if there's like some process in between that you're doing some transformation in the data that you're doing. You can also have AI do that. So for example, like

• 40:57Amjad Masad?

  every company has this person that's called the like the deal desk person, every B two B company especially. And the deal desk person is responsible for generating quotes to give like order forms to give salespeople. So the salespeople put in the deal content in Salesforce, the deal desk person pulls it from Salesforce, puts it in a PDF. And then like post it to like Slack or some other chat group. They talk about it, they send it to the client, the client gives them feedback. They go, they regenerate that. And a lot of companies end up hiring a lot of people doing just that. Like, you know, there's also entire complicated software systems that

• 41:41Amjad Masad?

  people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for called quote configurators, right? So we hired a steel dust person and she automated all of that. Every time we get a new deal in CRM, there's an AI that generates the order form directly. Post it in Slack, the salespeople take it like, you know, they send it to the client, they get feedback in Slack, they give the bot feedback on the, on the thing, it kind of updates it and, and they send it back. So a lot of that used to be manual copy pasting things and putting that from Excel to Word to CRM. So anyone listening to this, working at a company, if you want to get a promotion, just look around you and see what people are copy pasting data around.

• 42:25Amjad Masad?

  And you could build a bot, and you could build an AI, or you could build a piece of software that can automate that. In in personal lives, there's a lot of things that,

• 42:35Amjad Masad?

  like, i- if you're someone who's interested in in in health and do a lot of tracking of health, like, I like to track my sleep, and I at some point had some sleep issues. And my doctor gave me like a sheet to to track, like, you know, what I ate, what medications I took, if any, if I exercised, and then what time I slept, what time I woke up, any sleep interruptions. And like, I would wake up in the morning and like fill the sheet. And and most of the time lazy, I'm like, I don't want to do it, I forget, whatever. I'm like, you know, I can automate this. I took a photo of that sheet, put it in a rappler. You can just give Rappler a screenshot and just say, like, make it into an app. Made it on an app, and now it's gotten a little easier to like, put in

• 43:19Amjad Masad?

  the, you know, all this information. But then I was like, I still forget what I ate, or what medications I've took, or, you know, whatever I've done that day. So I was like, why don't, why can't I like, take photos of these things as I'm doing them, instead of like, forgetting and like, doing it later? So throughout the day, I can like, take photos of of whatever I ate or or have done. And then, and then that that AI will like, generate the content for for the next morning. And then I'm like, okay, but like, I'm putting my time to go to sleep, and what time I woke up, and interruptions manually, but like, my mattress, I use Eight Sleep, for example, or you can have a wearable, have all that information.

• 44:01Amjad Masad?

  So there's just like, total rappler, just like, pull that information from there, it asked me for some, you know, login information, I did that. So now the entire process is seamless and automated, and finally, I can like, commit to it. So I think in people's lives, there's so many things that are manual, and they like, get lazy, and they don't want to do. And one thing I would say about the age of AI, and this is back to this idea of like, how do you generate ideas? If you're lazy, that's gonna be a virtue.

• 44:30Amjad Masad?

  And I don't mean it in a way that you don't want to complete your work or but like if you're naturally just like don't want to do manual work, you're going to go about your life and you're going to see all these places that are just like boring and you shouldn't be doing manually and just like go build an app for that. And maybe that becomes a consumer app that I you could like the app that I'm building for myself, I could potentially put it on the App Store at some point because it is probably useful for other people who want to track their sleep.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  You've heard of Calliope, right?

• 44:57Amjad Masad?

  No. What is that?

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Really? Oh, that's, uh, we had the founder on. I mean, they do like, I think he made like 25 million from it in high school, or maybe that was the valuation. It was just take a photo of food and uh, tracks calories automatically. It just sounds like you built that for yourself as a personal.

• 45:13Amjad Masad?

  These things are easy.

• 45:16Amjad Masad?

  And it's not just that. It is, you know, it does sleep and does some of the other stuff.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was like, that sounds more integrated. That's really interesting.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  It's, that's a cool space to think about, like all the wearable tech and like all the things that are tracking data and building apps that combine all these things in general. But what do you think separates someone who's bad at prompting AI from someone who's really good at it?

• 45:44Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, I kind of hate the word prompting AI because AI researchers spend a lot of time figuring out how to make AI respond to human queries. Um, I would say what separates those people are the people who are good communicators. You need to just be good communicator in general, like prompting humans versus prompting AI. Are you someone who can manage an intern well? If you're someone who can manage an intern well, you can manage an AI well. Think about an AI as an employee or an intern. Instead of thinking about, oh, how do I talk its language? No, just communicate well. Just take an idea, break it down to

• 46:25Amjad Masad?

  its parts. If its parts are so complicated, break them down further. It's all about breaking down things into individual components.

• 46:33Amjad Masad?

  And then giving precise feedback and giving as much context and feedback as possible, taking screenshots, taking images. If you want to get really good at just communication, in general, I would suggest like doing public speaking.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:49Amjad Masad?

  I had a, actually, stage fright, uh, growing up and I would still do it because I just don't like to be held back by my fears. But when I first came to the US and I felt like I want to be able to start startups and be on podcasts, be a leader, I thought that I need to get past that. And so

• 47:16Amjad Masad?

  I thought, like, what is the hardest place I could put myself in? It's like throwing myself in the fire to get past that fear. So, so deprogram the fear by desensitization, right? It's a popular, like, psychology method. I think, you know, we're in such a soft world right now that, like, psychiatrists, psychologists don't treat things like that. But it's always been the case, like, if you're afraid of water, if your kid is afraid of water, throw him in the fucking water. That's why my dad did it. Um, so I took up improv classes in New York. Um, and improv is, if, if, if you're bad at public speaking or, or thinking on your feet,

• 48:00Amjad Masad?

  you're gonna do really bad at it. And then I took up storytelling classes and I, I did a storytelling show where I told a story about how I hacked into my school to, to change my grades. Um,

• 48:15Amjad Masad?

  and, and so.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  I'll have to hear that story, but can you continue your thought?

• 48:20Amjad Masad?

  So, um, over time, I just got better at talking to, to people and like trying to communicate complex ideas simply because I think that's what really good communication is about. And if you're good at that, then you're good at talking to AI and prompting it.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  My last girlfriend, she was like, Jack, I'm such a bad comedic kid. Like, how do I like work on this? I was like, just go to an improv class. She didn't really love it, but like I said, I think it helped her a bit, um, understand like the basic techniques.

• 48:47Amjad Masad?

  Yeah.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  I think it's super helpful.

• 48:48Amjad Masad?

  But it is.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  So you hacked into your school to change your grades as a kid?

• 48:53Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, so I was going to university in Jordan, Princess semi university for technology. Good, good computer science school, but you know, I, I don't know how to pay attention to things that I don't like. Like if I'm taking like a history class or econ class, and I feel like whatever they're teaching me is not going to be useful for me in life, or it's just not interesting the way they teach it. I just can't, it's like incredibly painful for me to just sit there and just listen.

• 49:23Amjad Masad?

  So I would skip class and I would like go work on my programming, go, you know, take a job. I always had jobs during school. And then I would study enough to just pass, and I almost always pass. And some cases in like math and computer science, I would like get good grades. The problem in my school is, and a lot of schools around the world, is that if you, they count your attendance. So if you missed class too many times in a row, you get, you get disqualified.

• 49:59Amjad Masad?

  And so I, I, I felt like it was kind of deep injustice. Especially for people like me who are like creative, want to be doing things, don't want to be sitting in class, which I think is like a very outdated way of learning in general. And I think we're going to move past, especially with AI. So all my friends were graduating. I'm like five years in, almost six years in school. School should have been three, four years. And I feel like, like life is passing me by. Like, you know, I had all these big dreams and ambitions.

• 50:37Amjad Masad?

  I want to build companies, make a lot of money, all of that, but I was like stuck. And so I thought, I'd use my, my skills to, to, to get over this problem. You can cast almost any problem in life as a coding problem. And I thought, okay, I'm gonna hack into a school and, and change my grades from, from when they fail me for attendance to like a passing grade.

• 51:06Amjad Masad?

  So I spent two, three weeks in, in my parents' home in the basement,

• 51:17Amjad Masad?

  trying to like break into, to the systems there. I would like work on like scripts and do network scans and all of that. And I implemented polyphasic sleeping. Do you know that? That sounds similar. What is that? Michelangelo, you know, the inventor, artists. One of the most highest output human beings in history probably ever to come. Would sleep 15 minutes every four hours because he was working nonstop. Tesla did a similar thing, I remember. Tesla's probably, yeah, did that as well.

• 51:53Amjad Masad?

  And so I was like, yeah, I want, I want to be able to like, you know, work a lot and really hard and be really efficient. So I, I did that as well. So for two weeks, just madness, just going and like trying to map out the system and figure all that out.

• 52:08Amjad Masad?

  So I finally found a vulnerability, a way to, to get into, to the system. But I was worried about maybe I didn't have the right systems. And so I had a neighbor who was going to the same school as me. I was like, hey, you know, I have this, this, this thing that I can change grades. Can I test it on you?

• 52:29Amjad Masad?

  And so we, we tested, we changed the grades, but actually turns out that I, I was doing that on a replica database, not on the master database. So when he went to kind of pull his grades, this is transcripts. It wasn't, it wasn't reflected there. So I spent another two weeks and then found a way to the actual system. And then, and then I was confident that I could like change my grades and actually get to graduate. And I still felt like it was the, the just thing to do. It was a fair thing to do, right?

• 53:02Amjad Masad?

  So I changed my grades. I calculus and other things that I didn't want to go to school, but I passed. I know I, you know, but they failed me anyways for attendance. So I changed my grades and I bought my gown, went to the graduation parties, took photos. I was just graduating. One day I'm at home and the telephone rings and I, I, I pick it up and it's like the person responsible for the college network and, and registration system. And he's like, look, the entire network in the universities down. And whenever we look at the code, we see the, there's a bug in your record.

• 53:42Amjad Masad?

  There's a problem where it says you're disqualified from the final exam, but you're also passing. It turns out they had another field that I didn't know about. That was, was like true or false, whether you're disqualified for, for attendance. And then they had all these bad names for the field. So I, I think they're bad programming on their part, but it's still, I, I kind of missed something. So I, um, I had a choice. You lie and you kind of live with the lie. Or you, you come clean and, and I just didn't want to lie. And I told them, look, I, you know, I have something to tell you. I'm going to come tomorrow's school, kind of share it with you.

• 54:25Amjad Masad?

  So I went the next day and it was a much bigger deal than I expected. All the different deans were sitting there, the computer science dean, the engineering dean. They've been racking their brain a whole night, stayed up all night, trying to figure out what's the problem. And so I'm like, this is my opportunity to make it a tech talk. I suppose to, uh, to an interrogation and pull out the whiteboard and explain all the different problems and all the systems they had and how, how I hacked into it. And really like pulled out all the, all the stops and all the charisma to kind of try to impress them. And they were really impressed. So impressed and so kind of in the element of the technical discussion that I'm like, "All right, now that I've explained it, I'm headed home. I'll see you guys later."

• 55:09Amjad Masad?

  And I opened the door and I was like, "Wait, where are you going? Like, we got to deal with you. You just did this, this thing to our school. You just hacked into the school. We can't let you go."

• 55:18Amjad Masad?

  Luckily, the president of the university was someone who was like really enlightened and saw the talent that I had and they could have easily derailed my life, you know, but I, you know, I explained like my reasoning for why I did this. And he was understanding and he gave me at the time the Spiderman line. It's like, "You have a great talents, great power, but with power comes responsibility." He was very sincere about it. He said, "We're gonna let you go, but you're gonna have to spend the summer working for the university, trying to fix the vulnerabilities and the security issues."

• 55:56Amjad Masad?

  And so I was like, "That's no problem. I would love to do that." So I show up in the summer and the programmers there hate my guts because I hacked into their system and they wouldn't let me in. Like, I would go knock at the door where they work and I can see them and they wouldn't let me in. So they didn't give me a chance to contribute and fix the system. And by the way, everyone was cutting me Slack. I think all the professors just was worried I'm gonna hack into their emails. And so I had this like implicit power.

• 56:25Amjad Masad?

  It was like notorious. It was really cool as well. I was getting recognition everywhere.

• 56:31Amjad Masad?

  And this computer science dean comes and tells me like, "Hey, you know, I helped you a lot to get past this problem. So for your graduation project, you need to work with me. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna hack into the school again." I'm like, "Bro, I'm not, I'm past that. I'm not even working on security and hacking. I'm just like, you know, I'm gonna build companies and things like that." It's like, "No, you have to do it or I won't graduate you." I was like, "Okay, I'll do it."

• 56:58Amjad Masad?

  And so I, I, I'm like, "Okay, but this time I'm gonna build a system. I'm not gonna go hack directly into it." So I built a piece of software that scans any system for vulnerabilities. And sure enough, I found some vulnerabilities in the system. So my graduation defense, so you're sitting in front of the different deans and you're kind of giving a presentation. And I told them how I built the security scanner.

• 57:22Amjad Masad?

  And by the way, I'm gonna run it in the university system. And yeah, we have a bunch of vulnerabilities here.

• 57:29Amjad Masad?

  And then different dean of engineering was like, you're lying.

• 57:35Amjad Masad?

  Uh, I was surprised that he said that. I'm like, why, why do you think I'm lying? And he's like, because we fixed the system. I was responsible for fixing the system and we fixed the system. I was like, clearly you didn't. It's like, prove it. I'm like, okay, I also built like something in my system where you can automatically execute the vulnerabilities. So I get a shell access to the database. I'm like, okay, what do you want us to find? Your password or your, uh, or your salary? Or how do you want us to prove it? I was like, okay, get my password. So with a query, I get his password. And it was some embarrassing password. I forgot what it was right now, but people have also some embarrassing passwords.

• 58:18Amjad Masad?

  And his, his face turned red and he got really angry and he got up, shook my hand and left. Well, it turns out I was like a pawn in this rivalry between the two different deans. So he, the other dean, like one dean was given the responsibility to secure the system. The other one wanted to kind of make sure I re-hacked the system to prove it. But anyways, I, at the end, I, I graduate.

• 58:45Amjad Masad?

  And, uh, and I now have like really great relationship with the university.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  That's a great story, genuinely. It seems like some type of commonality with really successful founders in your space is like this kind of hacker, black hat, white hat background. Just on this concept of learning in general, cheating, hacking the system.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  How do you think we should be using AI to become smarter? And how do you do it personally?

• 59:20Amjad Masad?

  I think that there's a mindset here. There's a mindset of, first of all, the world was built by people that are not much smarter than you. And there are a lot of rules

• 59:39Amjad Masad?

  that are accidental, that are there for historical reasons.

• 59:44Amjad Masad?

  And your job is to find the path to the future, find the way of doing things that's most aligned where the world is headed. Because the advice your teachers, your parents are going to give you are just not valid anymore. My generation, like millennials, the advice that the boomers would give us is that you work hard, you get into a good university, you check this box, this other box, you get a job, you buy a house and a car, get a family, that's it. You know, a few years in, like you'll, you know, 20 years later, you're a millionaire because your house property went up value

• 1:00:27Amjad Masad?

  and you retire and live happily ever after. That's, that doesn't exist, that does like existed for like 20, 30 years post-World War II, and then it's gone.

• 1:00:38Amjad Masad?

  So it's not about cheating, it's about figuring out how the system is rigged against you.

• 1:00:47Amjad Masad?

  And how do you actually hack it? How do you get past it? How do you, um, how do you do things in a way that is more native and true to where the world is headed today?

• 1:01:03Amjad Masad?

  AI is a great tool for that.

• 1:01:07Amjad Masad?

  Just the fact, if you're someone who just understands how these tools work and understand how you have an amazing time advantage, you can do things a lot faster.

• 1:01:18Amjad Masad?

  Again, there are a lot of programmers that are still doing programming the old way and they're going very, very slow and they're going to continue to go very slow until they get obsolete. But there are a lot of new builders coming up today and they're like, I'm going to just like make things with, with Rappler or tools like that. And I'm going to go just a lot faster, I'm going to iterate faster, make, make better ideas, build better companies and systems.

• 1:01:48Amjad Masad?

  I would reemphasize this virtue of laziness.

• 1:01:57Amjad Masad?

  Like, I think a lot of what we're taught in school is it's not worth it. It's not worth our time. And my approach to school was like, how do you get around it? Like, I needed a college education to get to the United States.

• 1:02:16Amjad Masad?

  Otherwise, I would have dropped out. If I was in the US, I would have dropped out. And it's probably a good idea for a lot of people to drop out and not go to college.

• 1:02:28Amjad Masad?

  And so, but I needed to do that in order to get a visa to get to get here, right? And so, think about your circumstances and think about ways around them. And there's probably ways in which AI could help you get there faster and do things better. And realize that if you truly understand how this technology work, if you're up to speed on it, if you can do things better and faster than other people, you have an advantage and just lean into that.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  I think that's super helpful. What is it Hormozzi says? It's volume times feedback loops and AI helps you build things faster, iterate faster. On the concept of jobs, what do you think will be the highest paying jobs in the age of AI?

• 1:03:16Amjad Masad?

  Entrepreneur.

• 1:03:19Amjad Masad?

  Entrepreneur, like.

• 1:03:23Amjad Masad?

  My mindset has always been about building wealth as opposed to getting salary.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:30Amjad Masad?

  There are a lot of different ways to build wealth, but all of them revolve around ownership as opposed to getting salaries. When I got my first job in the US, working for Code Academy, a company that sold for half a billion dollars, I told them, you can just like pay me enough to eat. Just give me as much equity as it can give me. I was paid $70,000 in New York City. You know how painful that was? I was living in a studio with other people.

• 1:04:01Amjad Masad?

  But who cares? Like, you know, if you're young and scrappy, like, you know, you just, you can eat anything, you can sleep a few hours, you can sleep on the, on the ground. Who cares? You know, you're very resilient when you're in your twenties and, you know, early thirties, things get a little worse after that, but you're very resilient. And your job is to build equity.

• 1:04:25Amjad Masad?

  And the best way to build equity is to start a business. The second best way to build equity is to join a business that someone else started and get equity in it. And a third is if you already have capitals to invest and build equity that way. And I've done all, all these different things. I started by joining a startup that was growing fast, got as much equity in it as possible, worked as if I was a founder.

• 1:04:51Amjad Masad?

  Then I started a business, got some liquidity from that, started investing in other businesses. By the way, a lot of early Replit employees are already rich. A lot of early Replit employees already got some liquidity out. We let them sell some shares. Some early Replit investors sold some shares as well. If you invested in Replit and when you were at like, you know, six million valuation, and we were like, mini order magnates, more than that right now, you made a lot of money, right? So if you're surrounded by really smart people, you don't have to have the best ideas. You can join their ideas.

• 1:05:33Amjad Masad?

  You can also like figure out a way to invest in your friends and join in their venture. Or if you have a certain skill, let's say you're an influencer and you want to partner with an entrepreneur, try to get equity. You can get a lot of cash for sure, but what are you gonna do? You're gonna get taxed 50% on that cash.

• 1:05:54Amjad Masad?

  You're gonna spend it on, on nonsense instead of try to get equity and build that equity up.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  It seems like the only two ways to get rich are.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  Build a cash flow business and move to Puerto Rico or Dubai and revoke your citizenship.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  Hate your life for a few years and sell a company.

• 1:06:14Amjad Masad?

  Well, you don't have to hate your life. Like you can, you can have fun building a business.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  Right. That's fair. I guess hate your life in terms of not have excess cash to spend on stuff. Just kind of like living below your means to an extent. But if you build the business properly, I guess you would have excess cash.

• 1:06:31Amjad Masad?

  It would have excess cash at some point, like.

• 1:06:35Amjad Masad?

  It's a lot more fun later in life to, to like, like pulling a six-figure salary. Like you're not gonna, it's not an exciting life.

• 1:06:47Amjad Masad?

  I think having wealth is a lot more like just the, the calmness on your nervous system that you've escaped the rat brace that itself is worth it.

• 1:07:01Amjad Masad?

  And so I, I don't know, I've never, like, yeah, I've, I've went out and partied and experienced all of that. And you can do that with not a lot of money. We're in, back in Jordan, we used to like drive to Beirut and like go clubbing for like, you know, 20 bucks, you know? It's like, you can, you can have fun with not, not that much money. But then there's like a huge dead zone in terms of like, how much quality of life and how much hedonism or fun, if that's why you're interested in up until you get to upper echelon of wealth. Like there isn't that much difference between like a student going out, like some of the best fun you could do, just like going out to, to, to, to clubs or traveling or whatever, going to like low income places and like having fun there.

• 1:07:45Amjad Masad?

  And then, and then it's not that much better when you're pulling, you know, a few hundred grand a year. It's like, you're kind of stuck at that, at that point. But what you want to focus on is building enough equity and up until to the point where you're just like starting to build a family. Cause that's when you're gonna have to like sell down a little bit. You're not gonna have as much time and so on and so forth. So I would just like focus on building equity.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  That's super helpful. Uh, yeah, I, the first startup I was at.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  Had equity. I did the same thing as you. I like took a lower salary to try to get as much equity as possible, but I think I felt victim to the sentiment like, oh, bet on yourself. I didn't even like pay the strike price to vest my shares. And I looked at it the other day and the company had sold and I was like, shit, I didn't know how much for, but uh, yeah, if someone gives you the opportunity for equity, uh, it's usually worth it. If you think they have a good chance of selling, especially if people are building to sell. Like it feels like some people are building to sell quickly versus some people are building to sell like on a longer time horizon. Uh, I do want to ask you, what do billionaires know about money that people just starting out in entrepreneurship

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  don't realize? Like what's something you wish you knew about the way money works itself or things you can do with your money? Uh, like two years ago, four years ago?

• 1:09:15Amjad Masad?

  Money is money like cash, like dollars are worthless. Uh, they are depreciate, fast depreciating assets. Like they depreciate faster than your 1976 Honda Civic, right? Like it's like, don't hold cash. Like, again, that's why I emphasize equity. Um, it's like assets, like buying assets, like all the assets go up, like gold right now is just ripping like a shit coin. So assets go up, um, cash doesn't and-

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  Do stocks really go up though? Like if you're just doing S and P or is it just kind of like a wealth maintenance thing from your perspective?

• 1:09:58Amjad Masad?

  Okay. I, I mean, over the past couple of years, the S and P has been dominated by a few companies. Then they've gone up a lot. Like if you invest in the S and P, what is it like 20, 30% in 2025? That's huge. Is it 20, 30%? I'm not entirely sure.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  I think the average is 10% with accounts for inflation and be like 5% returns.

• 1:10:20Amjad Masad?

  Oh, really? That's it? Okay.

• 1:10:24Amjad Masad?

  I don't know, I do have some money with like a money manager that is like just like trying to maintain wealth, but I also do buy stock. I buy, I invest in startups. I buy stock in the companies that I really like. I bought Tesla like a long time ago because I really like the product. It's like the grog brain approach to investing. It's like buy stocks you like.

• 1:10:52Amjad Masad?

  I don't know, I don't want to give like too much of financial advice because like a lot of this is like very, very selective, but like the, the, the main idea here is, is assets, like understanding inflation, how inflation works and how the dollar is like continuously being printed. Really every currency out there is like continuously being printed. And if you're, if you're optimizing for cash, you're really losing wealth and you're not really building, building wealth. Wealth is through accumulation of, of assets and those assets tend to, there's certain assets that tend to compound. I bought Bitcoin. When I left Facebook to start Replit, I sold my Facebook shares, which I could have held on to them and though they've done really

• 1:11:33Amjad Masad?

  well, but I bought Bitcoin and put the rest in my company. And so, understanding inflation is, is core and like go research that and really understand how the system is working on debt and quantitative easing and all that stuff. You don't have to understand it that much in depth, but the main lesson is the economy is run on inflation and the rich don't hold cash, they hold assets. I don't know. I mean, I don't really think about money all that much like, and I don't say it in a way to like, you know, to brag or anything. It's just like for me is like build cool shit and, and money will come. Right.

• 1:12:17Amjad Masad?

  Like build poor things, hold ownership in those things that you build or invest in like important things and products and services that you think are just the future. Try to predict where the future is headed. Be plugged enough to figure out where the future is headed. Like follow the tech news, follow the trends and form a

• 1:12:40Amjad Masad?

  Prediction about the future and then and they bet on that and then evaluate that over time and continue to like figure out like when you hear about a new thing, don't be cynical about it. Like you hear about like, you know, a lot of my generation like heard about Bitcoin, a lot of them was like, what is this? But if you pay a little bit of attention, you're like, okay, and you understand the system, you understand that this is an alternative asset to to to cash. And like, you know, a lot of people are looking for alternative assets. And so you have some hypothesis about the future. So have some predictions and some beliefs about the future and try to bet behind them. And again, most importantly, build things. I think that's, that's the best way to gain wealth is to build, build useful things.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  You're one of the few AI billionaires that has a, it's funny that it's even a contrarian perspective on the future of AI. But why do you think AI isn't going to kill us all?

• 1:13:39Amjad Masad?

  I, a lot of my peers in Silicon Valley have this like very mechanistic view of life. They think of humans as, you know, meat robots. And I think fundamentally, I think there's something more than that. There's something, there's some spark about consciousness, about humanity, that's different and that's special and that life is important. Maybe it's a religious view, but even without like a very concrete religious view, you can arrive at the same answer by just being perceptive, like just looking at the world around you, like, how can, how can this all be an accident? Like, just like, even through science, like,

• 1:14:24Amjad Masad?

  when you look at, you know, you see these videos of like how DNAs work and just like this sane engineer, micro, like nano engineering, just like, doesn't feel like an accident. So there's something about the mystery of life, the mystery of creation, the mystery of why we're here, that I try to struggle with. And I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley, a lot of people in tech have this very Dry physicalist view, like we're automaton, it's input, output. And therefore, the natural conclusion is that humans are not very special. We're going to build a more intelligent being.

• 1:15:05Amjad Masad?

  That intelligent being is going to be so fault, so much more intelligent that again, treat us like ants in the same way we treat ants. But no, I think there's something special about humans. And I, I, I believe in, like, I, I'm, like, I, I'll tell you something about my personal life that I think is, is very interesting. I think a lot of success comes, comes down to, to like mindset and visualization. Why does that work? Why does visualization work? It does work. A lot of people swear by it. Like if you like visualize yourself as successful, I should like visualize the cars that I want to drive.

• 1:15:47Amjad Masad?

  And invariably I would those, get those cars somewhere or another. I would like, if I want to meet someone, I would like have this intent about meeting this person. And eventually I will meet them somehow. And it's like random circumstance. Like, uh, whether it was like people in tech that I respected, whether it was Paul Graham, Mark and Jason. I always wanted to, to meet Paul Graham. Uh, I always had this intent of like, I would like imagine the conversation we would have. Paul Graham is the founder of Y Combinator. Um, and like, he also founded the site Hacker News and I was reading that a lot. He wrote a lot about programming and things like that. I respected how he thought.

• 1:16:30Amjad Masad?

  And, you know, one, one morning, obviously like I, I do things in the world. I don't sit there and just visualize, like you act. One morning in 2017, I get a message from Sam Altman. On Twitter, and he's like, hey, I'm Sam, I run, I say, dude, I know who you are. So Sam, before OpenAI, I was running Y Combinator, the premier startup accelerator. And it's like, I'd like you to come meet me. And so I went and met him, and he gave me this address. I'm like, where is this? This is not Y Combinator. I know my Y Combinator mind view. And I walked in this place, and it was called OpenAI. And next to it was Neuralink.

• 1:17:11Amjad Masad?

  It was like a small Elon fiefdom in the mission in San Francisco, when Elon was still involved in OpenAI. So I met Sam there, and when we sat down, he said, he had his laptop in front of him and turned it around. He's like, read this email. It's an email from Paul Graham, and he says, like, there's this site, Replit. It's like, really cool. It's something I've thought about for a long time, where it can like, make it really easy to code and host applications.

• 1:17:36Amjad Masad?

  And we should, we should like, reach out to them, get them into the YC batch. And we had like, tried to apply to YC many, many times before.

• 1:17:44Amjad Masad?

  But it like, had this intention that like, I'm gonna meet Paul Graham, and he's gonna like, know about Replit. We're gonna discuss it, and he's gonna get really excited about it.

• 1:17:52Amjad Masad?

  And that happened. And like, two years ago, I was like, totally different person, totally different industry. So it'd be really cool to meet Tarko Carlson. I respect him a lot. I respect how brave and courageous he is, and how he can speak his mind, and how inspiring his like, view of America is, and what it could be.

• 1:18:17Amjad Masad?

  And through a series of accident, I ended up meeting him.

• 1:18:22Amjad Masad?

  Do you know Martin Shkreli? Pharma bro? That sounds a little familiar, but no. You should definitely look up Martin Shkreli. Martin Shkreli is a pharma entrepreneur that went to prison for some like, financial reasons. But he became very notorious for a few things. One is like, he bought a Wu-Tang album that was like, one in production. And like, he'd become hated because like, he hoarded that. But like, also, he just like, Was like the initial like social media troll and like got into under everyone's nerves and all of that. But anyways, I used to watch his stream because he would like put out a lot of really cool financial material.

• 1:19:05Amjad Masad?

  We talked about financial literacy and I learned a lot from him. And when he got out of our prison, one day he was like coding online, he was coding a rappler. And so like I sent him a message. I'm like, hey, like I saw you were coding a rappler, be called like, I sent him a tweet. So he responded, we got on the phone, whatever. I ended up investing in his new startup.

• 1:19:25Amjad Masad?

  And, you know, she just seemed to a few other people in Silicon Valley. And then one day he's like, you know, I owe you, man, you know, it's really cool. How have you been able to help me get back into into the startup game? What can I do for you? I'm like, you know, you were on Tucker the other day, invited you on the show, I would love to meet him. And then, and then he made that connection and we got on a call. Kind of, I have a very similar story with Joe Rogan as well, I got on Joe Rogan's show. So, I mean, I'm kind of digressing a lot, but all I'm saying is that there's like more mystery to life. And I've experienced a fair amount of affecting the world in a very indirect sort of mental way.

• 1:20:11Amjad Masad?

  And there's something, something to that. And like, a lot of people just don't, don't struggle with the fact that there's more to life than this like mechanistic physics of it all. So when you start from this premise, and I can talk about all the different, I can like have a technical debate about AI as well. But just like at rock bottom, I feel like there's something special about humans. There's something about the mystery of the world that we haven't really figured out.

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  By that same token, just to clarify, because I think this is fairly high level thinking, but I understand what you're saying about it. Is basically you feel as though you're the type of individual that thinks there's magic to life and you will things into existence. And this is something that it is your logical view as well as it is the view that you want to have for humanity. But do you think that these other individuals that have this AI doom thesis are trying to will that reality into existence?

• 1:21:11Amjad Masad?

  I think there is a sense in which.

• 1:21:16Amjad Masad?

  Intentions matter and you can you can get into a self fulfilling theories of the world. Right? And we've seen that throughout throughout history predicting doom and bringing about crisis. You know, happens a lot. And so I think it is important to be optimistic. And I think if you have like a doomer mindset and

• 1:21:47Amjad Masad?

  it is it is dangerous for that for that reason, for sure. And so I do think like people who are naturally depressed and like not very optimistic do kind of gravitate towards like a more doomer mindset.

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  It's so fascinating because with you in particular, I spoke with another AI founder about this. I was like, it's so interesting that Amjad's thesis is

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  like AI won't kill us all. And

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  like you would assume that would be the thesis of all the billionaire AI founders like, oh, it's not gonna kill us all. I was like, oh, shit, it might actually, but it's really like they're all saying it is, but it's actually not. And I think the only other person that's really in the space with these individuals that has a similar thesis to you is Naval Ravi Kant. There's probably a few others that I just haven't consumed their content, but what's the main logical reason for it? Just to give people some hope? Because I've had a lot of doomers on my show and I haven't had anyone in your position.

• 1:22:54Amjad Masad?

  So think about how machine learning models are trained. Right now, machine learning models are trained by consuming super large corpus of content, essentially all of content on the internet.

• 1:23:12Amjad Masad?

  And then simulating, creating algorithms. So they would learn by creating internal algorithms. Essentially, that's a good way to unseam machine learning to simulate how a human might respond to a query. You can go really far with that. It's like, it's amazing that it works.

• 1:23:35Amjad Masad?

  But

• 1:23:37Amjad Masad?

  If you give a query to an AI for something it doesn't have an algorithm for, it will fail at. And there's a bunch of research showing that it's called like auto-distribution queries or context. So, you know, if a machine learning model is not trained on a certain like language or flavor of math or something like that, it will struggle to give you like a reasonable output and you end up in hallucination and end up with all sorts of problems. The reason AIs really got a coding because coding has a binary outcome. It's either true or false.

• 1:24:21Amjad Masad?

  Anything that is soft or requires like reasoning through the problems, not based on prior material, AI right now is not doing very well at. And AI companies are having to buy more and more proprietary data to get better at these things. So the way they're training models is they'll buy, you know, they'll go into an industry, oh, let's target accounting. We're going to go buy all the data that exists out there. We're going to scrape all the data that exists out there. We're going to buy all the data. We're also going to get accountants in Africa that are going to sit down all day and they're going to do spreadsheets and they're going to like talk over how they're doing spreadsheets.

• 1:25:06Amjad Masad?

  And they did that in coding as well. And they're targeting biotech, accounting, science, everything in order to do that. And that that's a very repeatable process. And you can create AIs that are very good at doing jobs that people are currently doing. But that is not like a general intelligence that you can drop it like you would drop a human into any sort of environment and they can like learn efficiently.

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  So self recursive improvement is kind of a fallacy to you like when it comes to things that aren't binary?

• 1:25:39Amjad Masad?

  I think we need to struggle with the question of consciousness because consciousness, I think, is an important ingredient of generality in how humans reflect on their decisions and their questions. And, you know, we come up with these ideas that seemingly come out of nowhere. We call them inspiration. Uses whatever people call them. It's like, oh, suddenly I'm struck by this idea like eureka, right? And we don't know how it works in order to build it into machines. All of like, science come, a lot of the scientific, big scientific discoveries come from these eureka moments. That is not based on prior, on strict prior training. That is a fundamental paradigm

• 1:26:23Amjad Masad?

  shift, a huge jump that comes from somewhere. We don't know where it is. And by the way,

• 1:26:29Amjad Masad?

  all the original scientists in antiquity and history talked about this in spiritual terms. You know, I remember reading Bertrand Russell's book about like the history of like Western philosophy and things like that. And he was talking about Pythagoras. Like, Pythagoras was running a religious cult. He was not running a mathematics club. And they, they came up with all these different, different theories. And if you look at the current state of humanity, we're actually not having that much scientific breakthroughs. And I think, counterintuitively, because we've become so mechanistic in our thinking,

• 1:27:07Amjad Masad?

  and less spiritual, less open to mystery and mysticism, that, that degraded the quality of science. Because science became an industrial process. It became a bureaucracy. It became government funded. It became all of these different things as opposed to, as opposed to people seeking true knowledge or original knowledge and trying to seek it in all of these different ways and arriving at it and all sorts of random and interesting and, you know, mystical ways.

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  Science used to be more spiritual, is what you're saying?

• 1:27:45Amjad Masad?

  Yes.

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  I mean, Pythagoras, correct me if I'm wrong, he basically invented like this whole religion of numerology, right?

• 1:27:53Amjad Masad?

  That's probably true. I think Newton spent most of his life, like, Newtonian physics was a side project. Most of his life was spent in studying a religious text and doing things like alchemy and random things like that.

• 1:28:08Speaker 01

  Tesla said that all of his ideas like came from dreams.

• 1:28:11Amjad Masad?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:11Speaker 01

  Like spirit world.

• 1:28:13Amjad Masad?

  Einstein too. Like Einstein was like, oh, sitting in his chair and like dreaming it all the time. And so we kind of lose something about what is Essential to us as humans and what is true discovery and inspiration. When you think about the world in purely mechanistic ways and I. I doubt that. Without struggling with these questions that we're going to be able to replicate. That into machines and have machines going to go discover new discoveries. They're going to do a lot of amazing things for science, like protein folding is an exact kind of problem. That you want to direct an AI on. It's a computationally intractable problem. It's really hard for us to solve in many different. Explicit ways. It is a large data problem, big data problem.

• 1:28:59Amjad Masad?

  And so we're going to use AI to advance science in all sorts of exciting ways. Those original paradigm shifting ideas. I think are human in a way that. That is hard to describe.

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  Is there any spiritual practice you do? To come up with ideas? Be more creative or? Just do better in business?

• 1:29:23Amjad Masad?

  I do cold plunges. And when I do a cold plunge. I. It shuts down this like. Constant thinking, talking mind that I have. And suddenly I become. More. Receptive to. Inspiration and ideas outside of me. I don't know. I think you can replicate some of that in meditation. Haven't done that very well, but like. I find like physical shock to my body tends to create stillness. And so cold plunge is one of the big ways you can get it with exercise as well.

• 1:30:06Amjad Masad?

  Like like exercise to exhaustion to where like you can't really think a lot and a lot of people find that. But I think you can replicate in different religious practices and things like that. But for me, like I found that. Cold plunges forces my mind in a in a certain way and I've.

• 1:30:23Amjad Masad?

  And it's just like the creates this clarity and sometimes there's like really exciting ideas that comes out of that.

• 1:30:28Speaker 01

  It's all about creating state changes.

• 1:30:33Amjad Masad?

  And kind of split testing like what ideas or I guess even personalities, communication styles like come out of those. But do you feel like I gave you a good answer for like the doomerism question?

• 1:30:48Speaker 01

  I really did want to touch on the cult, but I'll say this.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  The aspect of Omjet's thesis on AI doomerism

• 1:31:04Speaker 01

  that I found most fascinating was in his interview with Tucker Carlson, where he talked about

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  the cult, the Silicon Valley of these AI doomers. And when I realized that there's some propaganda involved, maybe some weird spiritual shit, I was like, yeah, I don't really entirely believe in this AI doom thesis. So I'd definitely recommend checking that out.

• 1:31:28Amjad Masad?

  But by the way, part of the reason why I didn't focus on that is because I think their influence is waning. When I, when I did that interview in 2024, it was at the height of the influence of the effective altruisms. And, and I think luckily through various things that happened, including like, you know, tech people responding to it, their influence is sort of waning. But, but certainly, I mean, in that interview, I talk at length about

• 1:31:59Amjad Masad?

  the self-serving nature of their thesis and how they use that to like manipulate people and to, to gain all sorts of like favors and weird things that happening there. So, but luckily they're not as important.

• 1:32:14Speaker 01

  Theoretically, do you suspect intelligence agencies or the military have some involvement with AI development?

• 1:32:24Amjad Masad?

  The cool thing about large language models is that it doesn't really matter because it is a very simple process. Being at the frontier is very hard, like creating GPT 5.3 or OPUS 4.5 or whatever. GPT 2 at some point was the frontier. Now you can train GPT 2 on your phone. So there isn't enough of a gap that they can create to have proprietary technology. This technology is decentralizing and becoming more accessible really, really quickly in order of months. Now we have open source models from China coming out and maybe there's involvement

• 1:33:09Amjad Masad?

  in the government there, but they're coming out that are as good as like the, you know, models that came out three months ago from Anthropic and OpenAI. So maybe, but it doesn't really matter because once we learn what they've done in the latest generation of things and as compute gets cheaper, anyone can replicate these things at home. And that's the cool thing about what's happening in the world today. These companies are trying to create enough of a mode around data and computer and things like that in order to block competitors and create more proprietary technology and create an oligopoly around it. But so far they have been successful, luckily.

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  So you would suspect that

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

  the top models are at most a few months ahead of what's publicly accessible.

• 1:33:59Amjad Masad?

  Okay.

• 1:34:01Speaker 01

  That's fair. I think a lot of people have suspicions that, oh, they're keeping this technology that's 10 years ahead.

• 1:34:06Amjad Masad?

  You can download Kimi 2.5 on your computer and run it and you would get a model that is as good as, you know, GPT 5 when it first came out.

• 1:34:17Speaker 01

  And John, you've built a billion dollar company by making tools more accessible to the everyday person. If you could distill everything you've learned,

• 1:34:28Speaker 01

  what's the one piece of advice you would give to make sure anyone listening could find success?

• 1:34:36Amjad Masad?

  I was sorry with intention, with intention and focus and perseverance. Like if you're really intent on finding success, you're gonna find success, no matter who you are. Like I think if you, if you put, if you just like visualize it, you put your mind into it, you have the right mindset, you don't have limiting beliefs, I can meet whoever. Like I can, there's no difference between me and some other billionaire. I can, I can learn all the skills needed. No one is like better than me.

• 1:35:18Amjad Masad?

  Start with these beliefs and you're gonna be unstoppable.

• 1:35:25Amjad Masad?

  I think at some point, the hard thing about scaling a company from like a billion dollars to a hundred billion dollars to a trillion dollars is the game changes fundamentally. And that's what I'm going through right now.

• 1:35:44Amjad Masad?

  You know, you become resource rich but time poor. That's like the worst feeling, like you don't have enough time to do things manually. And you have to like delegate a lot, you have to learn how to like build a team and hire and do all these different things. Those are all very important, but I think getting the initial set of success, it's all about being really good at believing yourself, not quitting, not taking no for an answer. Keep, keep going, keep going, never quit. I think those are really the only necessary ingredients in order to achieve enough success

• 1:36:29Amjad Masad?

  to potentially retire or like escape the rat race.

• 1:36:35Speaker 01

  I love that. I've been wanting someone to give that advice for a while. It's kind of like this idea that people say you get what you deserve, but it's really like you get what you want. And to find the success, you have to really genuinely want it. And if you don't have it, then you actually don't want it.

• 1:36:53Amjad Masad?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's right. You have to really, really want it. Here's the irony of life. At some point, you're going to get to a position where you're like, do I really want it? And that's when, you know, you have to grow and change your, your, your mind. And that's what I'm saying is scaling past that is a different thing. Like, there isn't any material thing that I, that I really want right now. I'm not that liquid of a rich person, right? Like on paper, I have a large wealth. Like, I can't buy everything that I want. But I also bought enough things to know that that's not what life is about. And I wish that for everyone. I wish for everyone to get to a point that they find that the material world is just like, not all that worth it.

• 1:37:38Amjad Masad?

  I think money is, is great in so many ways. But, you know, you buy a car and you're like, all right, that's cool. It's like, it's not gonna, really at some point, you're like, okay, what do I really want? And, and that question is actually a lot harder. But if you're starting from zero, you know, fix your mind on whatever it is, a car, success, status, whatever it is, and drive really hard at it and you're gonna get it.

• 1:38:03Speaker 01

  Beautiful. Hello, everyone. This has been your guest, I'm John Masood. This is the Jack Neil Podcast. I appreciate you coming on.

• 1:38:12Amjad Masad?

  Thank you.

• 1:38:16Erik Torenberg?

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.

• 1:38:42Erik Torenberg?

  This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and may include paid promotional advertisements, other company references, and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z. Such advertisements, companies, and individuals are not endorsed by AH Capital Management, LLC, A16Z, or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy.