Amjad Masad on vibe coding, AI agents, and the end of boilerplate

On this episode of Possible, Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger sit down with Amjad Masad, founder and CEO of Replit, to explore how AI is fundamentally changing who gets to build software and what that means for work, creativity, and human agency. Masad traces his journey from growing up in Jordan teaching himself to code and connects it to his love of video games which helped inspire him to build a platform that turns natural language into working software. The conversation spans everything from why gaming mindsets make better builders, to how CEOs are rediscovering hands-on creation, to why “vibe coding” is the next form of literacy and why computational thinking is more important than syntax mastery. The conversation also digs into the future of AI agents, long-running autonomous workflows, and what it means to design environments for machines rather than humans. They also confront harder questions about jobs, fear, regulation, and society’s responsibility during a cognitive industrial revolution. The episode ultimately reframes AI not as a replacement for human creativity, but as a force that can return people to a more entrepreneurial, expressive, and meaningful way of life. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/ 01:45 – Introductions and Amjad’s background 02:07 – Growing up in Jordan, video games, and learning to build 06:19 – How gaming culture shaped Replit’s product philosophy 09:55 – Designing Replit around safety, reversibility, and exploration 13:24 – Defining vibe coding and where the term came from 15:55 – The new literacy: computational thinking and soft skills 22:09 – Getting past the blank page and learning by making 25:06 – Entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and who Replit empowers 30:48 – Designing environments for AI agents and durable businesses 35:55 – Open source, abstraction, and “cathedrals built from bazaars” 38:25 – The future of corporate work and creative ownership 48:29 – Fear, skepticism, and cultural responsibility around AI 54:13 – Jobs, disruption, and becoming AI-native in a changing economy 01:11:12 – Rapid Fire Questions

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We have CEOs that finally feel unleashed, like they have Repland, they have an idea, they don't have to go beg someone to do it. They can like just vibe code and bring into a meeting and look what I built. We want to get to a point where you don't have to code at all. You should be in a creative space. A lot of coding is minutia, a lot of coding is accidental complexity. It turns out there's actually research. Doctors who play video games have much better reaction times. So if you want to do a surgery, I always ask them if they're a gamer.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Oh, not a gamer, sorry. Where's the gamer?

• 0:30Speaker 00

  Get the gamer.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  AI is reshaping how we work, learn and create. And nowhere is that change more tangible than in coding. That's where today's guest comes in. If you've heard of vibe coding, you've heard of Amjad Masad, founder and CEO of Repland, the platform that lets anyone build software right from their browser.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  Amjad grew up in Jordan, where he taught himself to code before studying computer science and moving to the United States. He became a founding engineer at Code Academy and later led JavaScript infrastructure at Facebook. What you might not know is that he's also an empathetic, people-focused voice in the AI space, talking about issues and philosophy that others won't.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  I've used Repland myself and it's clear to me, this isn't what's next, it's what's happening right now. Repland makes building software as natural as writing an email, shifting the power of creation to anyone with an idea. So yes, this is an interview about coding and the fastest-growing programming language in the world, English. But even more broadly, it's about how AI is already forcing us to rethink how work and society function, told through the lens of one field that's transforming before our eyes.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  And we're thrilled to welcome to the show, Amjad Masad.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Amjad, I'm so glad this worked out. We've known each other for a number of years and part of the thing I love about doing podcasts is people that I learn from. And there's been a whole stack of things out of our conversations, you know, mostly at The Grove, but other places as well. So welcome to Possible, so glad to have you.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me, I'm really excited, I've been listening to the show recently, so happy to be here.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  I'd like to start with a question about kind of you, right? Like, and Repland's about making things and so you might even phrase this question of how are you made? You know, tell me about your early experience playing video games and how video games kind of did your trajectory into, and then we'll get into more depth in Repland.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah, so video games have been a huge part of my life. I started playing video games, I think, under like Atari, maybe even before getting my first PC.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  I wonder how many people still know what Atari is.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, maybe we have to actually describe what Atari is. But he used to bid from history, Steve Jobs worked at Atari. It was like the Silicon Valley premier company for computers. And so I was, I just like was captivated by, by video games. And when I first got a computer, my first idea was like, can you actually make a video game on this thing? Well, it turned out it was initially very, very hard. But I remember going to every year back in Amman, Jordan, where I grew up. There's a computer show that my father would, would take us to. And it's like really big place where they have all sorts of new computers, new devices, CD-ROMs, whatever. And I bought a, I bought a CD-ROM and a collection of CDs. And I went home and I didn't know what's in them.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  One of them was like a fax program, whatever. I just bought a CDs. I just wanted to try it. One of them was like a visual programming experience that allowed you to build kind of game-like experiences. So one of the early games that I built was for my younger brother, five years younger than me, to teach him math. I think I was maybe eight and he was three or something like that. And there'd be two boxes. It would be an equation. He'd have to like enter the right, the right number, like, you know, five plus blank equals six. And it's like, one, if he gets it right, he gets applause. He gets it wrong. He gets a boo. And it worked out so well. He now works at Replit. So it's like taught him math early on.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  That's very early recruiting.

• 4:02Speaker 00

  Yes, early recruiting worked out. The moment you give a user a program you made, it's like horrific because they'll put in things that you don't expect. Like instead of one, I put an E. And I was like, error. No edge cases, little bro. Exactly. But then just the high of not only making something, but seeing other people getting value out of it just hooked me. And then video games just been through my journey since then. I got really into Counter-Strike and I used to go to these LAN gaming cafes and we would play Counter-Strike against each other. But all these cafes were kind of run by, you know, pen and paper. So we'd go there, you'd pay for an hour or two. They'll write your name and what time you came in and they'll watch you with your

• 4:44Speaker 00

  computer and like they'll tap you on the shoulder when there's like when your time's up. And I was like, that's so silly. Like there's computers all over the place. I'm gonna go write a program for it. And I was maybe 13 at the time. It took me two years, but I built this like client server application to manage the entire thing with security and everything. And you could like have user accounts and have gift cards. And I started selling it. And I got really, for the time, I felt like I got really rich. I got all my classmates, I took them to McDonald's when it first opened in Jordan. And so yeah, gaming has been like a recurring theme to kind of pull me more. And now Replit has a really fun gaming experience that you can you can build the games with it.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  So, you know, starting with your younger brother, how much is like a gaming background part of kind of the recruiting target, the cultural organization target, the the how do you talk to people in Replit? In addition, of course, the dynamic of how the product operates itself. But how much does the gaming background inform that whole stack of the company?

• 5:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was it was never explicit. But I think for whatever reason, like the way we designed the product, the kind of people we attract, the kind of art we put together around the product, even the product itself, kind of attracts those gamer mindsets. And actually, you know, I've always intuited that people who played games early on had a, you know, their clock speed was higher. They could like think faster, they could react faster. And turns out, there's actually research around it, like doctors who play video games have much better reaction times. So if you want to go to a surgeon, you want to do a surgery, I always ask them if they're a gamer.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Oh, not a gamer? Sorry. Where's the gamer?

• 6:19Speaker 00

  Get the gamer. And then when we were designing Replit Agent, which was is a like five coding tool, codes on your behalf, I was playing this video game called Hades. And a lot of my colleagues were got them into it as well. And so in Hades, it is like a roguelike game where every game you start starts with a different run. And it's actually a randomly generated game, essentially. And so it was a very important mindset when designing AI experiences, because AI is stochastic. And so even the language that we use inside the company, like a like an agent run, it's sort of like a like a game run and so on and so forth. So it's a big part of the culture.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  So you've already described kind of your very first Intensity goat experiences. It's the your younger brother, it's the manage the whole gaming land. How would you take the current kind of Coding enablement, like if your younger self had that coding enablement, how would your younger self have done this differently?

• 7:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, the interesting thing about programming and you know those, you know this very well. Actually, I think my generation is the last generation where the tools were really a joy to use. And then it become, it became very industrialized. So when we were programming, like I started on like my real programming experience when I built that business was Infiduel Basic. Infiduel Basic was a very creative interface. At some point, I think in the mid 2000s, like everything became, you know, this like Linux terminal, even building a JavaScript app, you have to download all sorts of software and like hook them together. And so at least I kind of grew up in a generation where coding was like a little more creative. And then because it became such a high paying job, it kind of, I think,

• 8:00Speaker 00

  changed because of that. And so as we're building the product, we got a lot of criticism early on, even before AI, that Rappel abstracts too much away from the environment. And we're like, we abstract it, but it is there. Like you can peer under the hood. And I think that's what is important. But if you make programming so complex at the top, people lose interest. And that's why, you know, in CS classes in universities and in schools as well, you can turn off a lot of people because they think it's a, it's this laborious IT task of like, you know, pip install and all that stuff. Instead, what you want to do is make things. So for kids nowadays growing up, for parents encouraging their kids to code, just go on Rappel and like make things. And I promise you, your kids will learn programming by osmosis.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  Like they can just like see, they're going to get curious at some point, they run into a bug, they're going to go go around and ask JATGPT. And that's how I think the organic learning process happens.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  And say a little bit about how the gaming dynamic enhances that. What's the way that the things you've learned from being a gamer to make that creative experience? You know, kind of come alive?

• 9:08Speaker 00

  So there's no game in the world that starts with a manual, right? So if your program is starting with a manual, you've, you've already sort of lost. So the first thing you want to get to dopamine really quickly.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  So with Replit getting you the first preview, getting you the first thing that you can see, that immediately just like hooks you. It's like, oh, I immediately made something. I put in a prompt. I I I made something. And then you want to create a safe environment where it is easy to go back, right? In video games, if you think about save and load, it's a very important part of exploring a game. You don't want to be in a position where you're just like die and that's it. And you have to restart all over. So Replit, we spent a lot of time working on checkpoint and restore. So every action you make in the IDE, if I can get a little more technical, every action in the IDE is actually stored in a sort of ledger.

• 10:03Speaker 00

  So you make an action to the file system, to the database, to the runtime, all of that is stored in a ledger. And then anytime you feel like you got into a weird spot, you can always go back. Or the agent did something you don't like, you can always go back to the previous one. So that's another principle. And then there's the aspect of like sharing and having other people use your thing. So publishing should be really easy, inviting other people. So we designed the multiplier experience to be sort of like gaming as well. And really, I think the mindset goes a long way. Instead of thinking of the onboarding mindset, it's just thinking about how it's a unfolding experience of more complexity. The first experience is like sort of fractal.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, level, level one, level two, level three, gaming dynamics.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  What's some of the places where you've been most surprised by what this unleash of early creativity has enabled?

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Some of the medical things were really interesting. I because it's so outside of the purview. I wouldn't have imagined it even. But you know, there's a there's a woman that had like a very rare eye disease and required to do certain exercises. And she she built an app that helps her do these exercises with her eyes every day. There's a woman in Korea and her kid has also like a rare disease and she built an app to like manage that disease on a day to day basis. So medical is one that's really fascinating. I think there's more to do there. And then something also so outside of my purview is like go to market and like, uh, salespeople, you know, there's a role in these organizations that I I recently learned about is rev ops is uh, those people

• 11:45Speaker 00

  that are managing a lot of the data flow within go to market teams and building the tools and helping salespeople do their jobs. And those people uh, tend to use a lot of SaaS software, a lot of other data sources, but they don't have anything to connect all these things together to create applications and make their salespeople more more successful. So that's uh, go to market. Uh, and then um, finally, I think one thing that's been really, really surprising is CEOs, and maybe that gets some engineers say, hey, that's a little bit, but CEOs that feel disempowered because they've delegated a lot of things. They they don't have as much input on the on the process. So you know, uh, we have CEOs

• 12:29Speaker 00

  that finally feel unleashed, like they have Repland, they have an idea, they don't have to go beg someone to do it. They can like just vibe code and bring into a meeting and look what I built and uh, why can't you do that in two weeks if I can do it in in two days? So that's another interesting one.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  I mean, you're talking so much about building and you also talking about sort of for kids, bringing them the whimsy and the creativity and the fun. And as Reid knows, I hadn't programmed since uh, freshman year CS, uh, so a long time ago. My coworker Parth sent me a Repland login a few months ago and he's like, just play around. And literally within 20 minutes, I had built an app and like, because I was so excited and because I could do it right away, like, it's just so easy to get on board and there's no barriers, whether you're a CEO or a five-year-old or someone who's a little rusty, you can get right in there. And I think Repland is sort of so closely associated with what might be the Silicon Valley word of the year, which is vibe coding. And so you've said that you don't love that word. We all use that word. How would

• 13:29Speaker 02

  Do you define vibe coding? And is there, are there other words that you would prefer to use when talking about sort of a full suite of what Replit does?

• 13:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I've learned through my times in the valley is not to fight the hype wars.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Sure, sure.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  Like, I remember when cloud was controversial, a lot of people hated cloud, but it just stuck around, right? So, so although I have feelings about it, we kind of embrace it in many ways. So what vibe coding is, it was coined by Andrew Karpati and he was the head of AI at Tesla at some point. And he talked about how when he's programming, he, especially when he's prototyping, he got to a point where he's no longer looking at the code, where he's typing in the prompts, a bunch of code comes out and he hits tab or accept and he just keeps going and try to make as much progress as possible before it stalls out. He calls it, this is no longer coding because I'm going by the vibes, like whether the vibes feel right, if the app is running, then it is working. And so that, that's how vibe coding come around.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  Now, I think that the reason that, you know, for us might not be really fitting is because, you know, a lot, you can do coding, but a lot of times you're not coding at all. And I think vibe coding might scare some people away because the word coding is still in it. We want to get to a point where you don't have to code at all. You should be in a creative space, right? A lot of coding is minutia, a lot of coding is accidental complexity. You know, the fact that I know that null is an object in JavaScript doesn't add anything to my life, right? But I had to learn all that stuff. But I think there's going to be a generation of programmers that don't have to learn that stuff. I think that's fine. And, and that's the history of programming, like when Grace Hopper, the inventor of the compiler in the 1950s invented the compiler,

• 15:14Speaker 00

  she was actually inventing a form of vibe coding. She said, I want millions of people to experience programming because it's such a wonderful thing and changes people's lives, changes businesses. And I want them to program in English. And she said that way before Karpati said that. And then the machine code people were like pitchforks. Program in English? No, that's, you know, you can't do that. How can you understand, you know, how much data you're putting into each register, whatever, right? But the history of humanity has been, let's abstract away the details so we can focus on the more creative things. And there was always specialists, there's still people kind of looking at machine code. And there's people doing C and there's people doing JavaScript. And I think there are people that are going to be entirely programming in natural language.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  That's a great segue to one of the questions I've been thinking about is like, what is the new literacy is the highlight because obviously, you know, previously literacy was reading and writing and part of how we get to a massive elevation of humanity is through as broad based literacy amongst the billions of people as we possibly can because what enables everything else enables learning, enables cultural evolution, enables patterns of thought. Now with the no code code, you know, kind of like the vibing, as opposed to vibe coding or the, you know, whichever, that's a new form of literacy. So say a little bit about how you think about this new form of literacy and then also add in a little bit is like, one of the things I think is I think actually, in fact, everyone's

• 16:38Speaker 01

  going to be having a coding co-pilot, whatever coding, vibe coding, because just like that CO or anything else, it's like, that's now part of just the way that you would also write, like write an email or anything else as a way of doing it. So, so, so give a little bit of this kind of literacy and future of how everyone's going to be navigating thinking and information spaces.

• 16:57Speaker 00

  Well, the first thing I will say is that soft skills, I think, are more important than ever. So for a while in the, in the US, at least we're always STEM, STEM, STEM is still really important, but I think, you know, you have a lot of engineers going to work right now and they don't really, are not very good at communication, at like talking about ideas. They're good at writing the code, translating some of those ideas into code. But I think now the way we see our product being used by product managers, for example, product managers are some of the best vibe coders because they're really good at taking problems and breaking them down into their constituent parts and communicating them very well to the machine. And then like

• 17:39Speaker 00

  the machine can, can build them. So whatever we do, if it's like my question about education, in our education system, it needs to get better at much, much better at like being able to take problems and breaking them down. There was a hype word, like I think 10, 15 years ago called computational thinking. And like people were building startups around teaching people computational thinking. I think that's still important because underlying all of this is still computational. So when you're Describing an idea to an L M to build it, you need to be able to talk about databases. You need to be able to talk about persistence. You need to be able to talk about lists and things like that. So if I'm designing a computer course for young people, I would focus more on the abstract concept of computation.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  As opposed to, again, null is not an object type of thing.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Part of that, to elaborate, is not only is the baseline computation about what the three of us learned, even if it goes all the way back to freshman year C S, which it tends to be a very deterministic, algorithmic, data structures, memory management, other kinds of things. But also, I think what's going to happen is we're going to bring in a set of other computational concepts. I think it'll be probabilistic concepts.

• 18:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Because actually, most of like L L M's and everything else is very interesting. It's probabilistic.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  I think it'll be maybe even quantum, but a bunch of other things where compute is not just like one plus one equals two. There's a richer sense of compute. Have you seen any of that yet with Replit? Or is that still kind of in the glimmerings of what's coming?

• 19:06Speaker 00

  We see the problems of not understanding it.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  We see the problems of user not understanding that it's a probabilistic system. It's a stochastic system. They expect results to be reproducible and all of that stuff. So a hundred percent, like, I think the future is understanding these concepts really well. And by the way, once you understand them, you can predict how these tools might work. And you can go from one tool to another, still have the same mental model understanding of it. In the same way that, you know, when I was growing up, I really understood how computers work. And that allowed me to build, you know, all these businesses and programs, whatever. Understanding how L L M's work is going to be very, very important. Now, the problem is most people's experience is Chat G P T that is trained to sound like a friend. You're not getting raw access into the L M in order to like figure out how to program it. And so we just introduced a set of A I integration.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  So now if you ask for upload, like, make me an app that takes a prompt, generates an image model, audio model, puts them together or something like that. It's so simple. You don't have to do anything. Just put in that prompt. It will tell you, we're going to use OpenAI for this. We're going to use Gemini for this. We'll take care of the billing. It will bill you on behalf of them. But I feel like there needs to also be a sort of UI. I don't think we've invented the UI for how to mix and match these LLMs and how to program them. So as much as I am a big believer in natural language based programming, I think at some point, as agents get better and they're like working most of the time in the background, we need to invent the new interfaces for how to program these machines.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  Well, also, I mean, you said that most people, when they think of AI, they think of ChatGPT. And so when I'm talking about my friends who are not technical or not at, you know, not in Silicon Valley, like that's their only thought about what AI is. And so they can't even open their minds to anything else because that's the one experience they have. And I think one of the things we're excited about is that with Replit and tools like it, we're going to open up the possibility to build to so many people. And so sort of a two part question. One is, what is the ways that we can have more people experience AI in this positive, agentic, like super agency way? And then like, what happens when we open up these opportunities for more people to build?

• 21:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Alan Kay has this essay, that's Alan Kay, one of the computer pioneers, has this essay called The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet. And in it, he makes the case that literacy changed the world. We had democratic revolution, scientific revolution. You couldn't imagine any of those without literacy. Now computational literacy or people being able to use a computer to its best ability, which is being able to program a computer, will change the world in fundamental ways. I think you need an entire generation of people to grow up using these tools. Maybe I'm showing my bias because I have a history and kind of working in education. I was founding engineer at Code Academy. We taught millions of people how to code and I like to help governments now.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  We did a deal with the governments at Arabia where they want to put vibe coding as part of their curriculum. Like an entire generation of people actually experientially, you know, learning how you use these tools will change the world in ways we haven't predicted just yet. One of my first public Replit experience in English was reproduce LinkedIn.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Yes, I saw that, yeah.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  Yes, and it was partially because it was kind of, you know, it was a bit of a memetic hack and everything else. Part of what I think

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Both the AI revolution does and also what Replit does is expand the zone of your imagination about what's doable. Walk us through kind of like, like what's a really, I mean, and obviously like it's not a, I'm not looking for a manual because just like your gaming point, it's like a manual. But like, what kind of imagination should people bring with them to start learning Replit and bringing an idea to reality?

• 22:50Speaker 00

  Such a good point because we still suffer, although you don't need an onboarding or a manual, we still suffer from the blank page problem. So we see a lot of, we talked to a lot of users that sign up to Replit and then sit there for a little bit and then leave. And I was like, what happened? And it's like, I just didn't know what to type in there. Of course, in retrospect, you know, us living intact, it's like, are you prompt? What do you mean? But of course, you know, it's a, it's a skill. Now, before I go back to how we solve it, I think after people go through this hump, it's, it's an amazing experience because you become possessed. You walk around your day and you're looking for software problems to solve. You're like, wow, I have this new hammer and like, and now everything kind of looks like a nail.

• 23:36Speaker 00

  And once, once that clicks, it's pretty amazing. So now we're doing a lot of work at the top of the funnel, like figuring out what kind of educational experiences we give people, what, when do we tell them about it? But the, the first thing I would say is don't complicate it. Like, you know, have a very simple idea, an app that you would have liked existed. Like maybe every one of us has an idea for an app that you can't find it in the app store, right? Like I want something to do this or that for my kids. Having kids is a great way because

• 24:06Speaker 02

  I was just thinking, there's so many things, you're like, ah, just organize my camp schedule.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. Or I want this, you know, educational thing, I want to be able to do this fun thing with my kids. And then talk to it like you would talk to a person. Just say, well, I have an idea and like, you know, just like, don't worry about the grammars, all of that. You'll get better at prompting, but initially just really get in and with any kind of idea. If you want some sample ideas, I would just say like basic things like Just say, I want to build a collaborative whiteboard. And then just imagine if you've done improv, improv is like a good, good way to do it. Just like word association, I want a collaborative whiteboard. And then like, look around the room and you'll see a plant that allows me to like, create a garden or something like that. So really just be generative and you'll get an experience and you'll get a feeling of it.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Do you know sort of who is the typical Replit user? And like, what kinds of things are they building already? Is it, oh, eighty percent of people are building whatever SaaS software?

• 25:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think most of it is AI software, which is why we built this recent thing. It used to be that you have to go figure out how to get an API key from OpenAI or others. But people have AI ideas, like they see AI and like, a lot of people will be like, oh, I wish ChatGPT did this one thing, right? Uh, and then, and then they want to build AI experiences like chatbots, like ReadAI is a great example. Obviously, ReadAI is very advanced in that it has video and all of that. But you can build like, you know, Amjad AI, like go like, tell Replit to like, go look at your personal blog or paste in your notes and just say, I want to create a chat experience that sounds like me based on these notes. And so AI is a, is a really big one.

• 25:48Speaker 00

  Another one is like, people want to build businesses. And this is, you know, as I started thinking about our business more, there's two aspects of our business. I would say maybe three. There is the consumer aspect, which is, you know, building family stuff and building personal things. And then there's the enterprise, which is like automating things at work, line of business applications, you know, rapid prototyping, product development inside businesses, large share businesses, and then entrepreneurs. And the way I started thinking about entrepreneurs is that everyone has domain knowledge in their head that is not monetized just yet. Similar to how, you know, Airbnb found that everyone has space in their room that's not monetized.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  There are people all over the world that have niche specific problems that they've run into that no one else has solved. I was talking to an entrepreneur on Replit the other day. His wife is a yoga teacher in rural England. And she does these pop up yoga events. And most of the communications happening over WhatsApp. Payment is really hard to do. They use PayPal, all these different things. And so he wanted to build a platform for her, but other people like her. So she doesn't have a yoga studio that you can go to every day, but she does these events at backyards and things like that. So he's built a platform and he has users and he has other instructors. And so the, the, every niche in our life,

• 27:10Speaker 00

  there are people that are experts and that previously were not entrepreneurs because they didn't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to go pay developers to do it. Now they can do it.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  I love that example because obviously there's entrepreneurs that you're serving that are building, you know, million dollar, billion dollar businesses that serve hundreds of thousands of customers, millions of customers. But I think that like solopreneur, the woman who has a yoga studio, like I think of my mom who's a piano teacher and she's always trying to figure out, how do I get my schedule straight? How do I get payment? How do I figure this out? And so there's so many, like she's an entrepreneur. The person who runs a yoga studio, the person who has like a bakery outside their house, like those are the people who would never be able to afford fancy coders, a fancy website, but Replit can empower them to do so much more.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  I love that.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  And there's something about it that makes me really excited about the world to come. As much as I love Silicon Valley, we tend to flatten the world. We just like build one size fit all. And that, that means like, you know, your SaaS software tends to have all these buttons and configuration just to fit every use case. But instead of we're going to explode that and decentralize it around the world. And every community might have a special business that does one specific niche thing. That diversity, I think is exciting.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  And as part of that diversity and being fun, we'd like to play for you a short clip of one of the ways people have used Replit to build something important to them.

• 28:37Speaker 00

  Okay, great.

• 28:38Speaker 03

  What if you turn boba into a game? I prompted a basic app and sketched out some boba. I made three different drinks, taro, milk tea and matcha. I added logic so the pearls fall from the sky. If you miss three bobas, you lose. But the game was way too easy, so let's make it difficult and add some bombs and a scoreboard. I noticed the game was a bit glitchy and I wanted to try it on mobile. So I mapped my favorite cafe. I added more colors, different fonts and harder levels.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  The matcha level is amazing. People can code on their phones, which is amazing.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 29:06Speaker 03

  What other features should I add?

• 29:07Speaker 00

  That's, that's fantastic.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  I mean,

• 29:11Speaker 01

  and we didn't just select it because she added it to her bio.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  We first started working on the on the phone. People said were just like crazy like because back then there was no AI. And we had to build a lot of things to make coding on the phone like a little bit easier. But I but I always imagined because back in school, I remember that I had a Symbian phone. I was like, I wish I could program it under my desk. So it's really cool to see people doing that now.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  So one of the things that as you dig into AI, it becomes, you know, one, the earlier question, which is how do you broaden your imagination? But also now, like, what's what's what's a good way of optimizing? Like, for example, you know, obviously, you can do things that have huge token counts. And that's kind of like, doesn't build a good business.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  You know, etc. It might be fun as a one off thing, but that kind of thing. What is, as it were, in the game dynamics, the next level of compute thinking? Because it's like, OK, how does this work within the operational envelope of like AI, enabling it, being able to figure out what kind of interface elements?

• 30:15Speaker 00

  Right.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  What's some of the the things you've seen there in terms of, you know, kind of context optimization, managing the AI token outputs?

• 30:25Speaker 00

  Right.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  You know, helping people with that kind of compute thinking?

• 30:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there are two aspects of this. One is a strategy. You want to be able to do things that the big labs are not going to do or eat your eat your lunch. And like, I should be able to build a good business. And then the other thing, what can L L M's do right now? And what scaffolding do they need around them? Right, the scaffolding part is really important because this is where you can build a value on top of the L L M's. So the way I think about our business right now, we were in the business of training models. Now where we use all the different commercial models. And I see our businesses to build the the milieu, the environment around L L M's. If you think about L L M's as like a as a person, you want to live the you want to create the habitat for them.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  Right, so we built the best habitat, I think, for programming. Right, so when we first did this pivot from like the human being of the programmer to AI being the programmer, I took the same teams at the company and I told them now you're no longer built for humans, you're building for AI. So the editor team built editing tools for the AI. The cloud infrastructure teams that have built deployment tools for humans, they now build it for the AI. So I would look at any different vertical and I would think this way. You know, if you want to build like a financial agent, just think about what kind of environment you can build for that agent. Now I see a lot of people, for example, like trying to put LMS into into Excel sheets, whatever, which I think works okay. But can you build an Excel interface for the AI, right?

• 31:55Speaker 00

  Like in a way, it's sexual, it can use it in, you know, based on that you want to hit the right distribution of the of the LMS. You can pick any vertical and if you want to build like a really great business, just think about building your user, your first users, the LM. Think about building that habitat for LM to live in to create like amazing experiences.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Amazing things with the product, the unlock of creativity, the unlocks of what does that mean for more personalization? Things that work for individuals, businesses, you know, creative thinking is great. So let's talk a little bit about also kind of some of the business attributes. And like one of them is, you know, you just mentioned that the that, you know, part of what you've done as opposed to homegrowing your own models, you're now using a fleet of models. But that obviously makes you somewhat dependent on them, makes you more copyable, et cetera, you know, business attributes. So one of the things that the people who listen to our podcast a lot are entrepreneurs. You're navigating a business challenge that they need to learn from. So how do you think about that? What are the things that you're doing to build unique and enduring business? What are the kinds of considerations that go into that?

• 32:59Speaker 00

  First thing I would say is user obsession. There's a massive platform called LMS, right? That platform is useful on its own, people can use it directly. But for you to build a very valuable business on top of what kind of value you're creating. One is if you're really obsessive over certain types of users. OpenAI can't build for every type of user in the world. So pick a user that you know very well, hopefully it's you. You've had that experience, you're a salesperson, you were going to build the best LM for salespeople, right? That goes into UI, UX, all of that. Now, second, and this might comment, I'll go a little deeper on the comment about the environment around it. So, you know, I said that people in using Repli should feel

• 33:42Speaker 00

  like they're in a safe environment. It should feel like anything is reversible. Now, that turns out to be a huge technical challenge. Now, you could easily kind of hack around it or say, you know, we'll just restart the app, we'll do whatever. But what we did is we built a transactional file system that allows undo. Like, we have proprietary file system that we spent two years building, that every action is like an immutable part of a ledger, that anything can be rolled back and rolled forward, that ends up being like a time travel system. And now we're finding more use cases for it. For example, one way to make models better or more performant is by doing sampling, because models are

• 34:24Speaker 00

  stochastic. Every time you run the model, you might get better results, you might get worse results. And if there's a way to verify whether the result is good or bad, you can sample from the model. So what we do is, because the system is immutable, has this characteristics of being very cheap to fork. So you can take a file system, you can fork it 100 times, run the same prompt with different parameters on these different forks, and then pick the best one, do it repeatedly. Obviously, that costs quite a bit of money, but for the advanced users, they're willing to pay it, they will get the extra money. So do hard technical things on top of the models in the environment where the models

• 35:06Speaker 00

  are sitting, right? You want to build technical advantage, it doesn't have to be in the model itself, because that costs billions of dollars, there are, you know, huge industries around it. You don't want to be training models, at least not yet, when you're building, initially building a business. But you can do a lot of other hard technical challenges on top of it to make the models work a lot better. That's the second thing. Third is reaching scale. Once you reach scale, you actually have negotiating, negotiation advantages. Like you can negotiate really large discounts with providers, similar to cloud. And you can pit them against each other and so on and so forth. So, and venture capital is an amazing system to give you that initial money that, that allows you to get to scale quickly.

• 35:50Speaker 00

  And then the business, you know, and then you can enter more of an optimization phase of the business.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  So you have this great metaphor, uh, which is cathedrals built from bazaars. And so you want to describe the tension between open source and closed product design. And the bazaar is this messy collaborative, maybe fun, bright, and that's where open source lives. And then you have the cathedral and that is the top down, that's sort of Apple where they live. And you said that you want to build cathedrals from bazaars. Tell us more about what that means to you.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I think that comes from Eric Raymond or some of the original Linux hackers, cathedrals versus bazaars. And there was a huge discussion early on in the, in the world of software. And so I, I gave a twist on it as cathedrals made of bazaars. Now, in the early 2010s, when this idea of no code kind of emerged, there are a lot of different approaches. You know, there are amazing businesses built there, obviously, uh, you know, Zapier, Airtable, Notion. You can all think of them as no code builders. Now, our approach, which for a while didn't work until AI kind of really made it work. The amazing, uh, hyper competitive, diverse landscape of open source of people building all these open source packages and components.

• 37:08Speaker 00

  What's happening there is, is the bazaar, it's messy, but it's, it's very innovative, very. Can you build a facade on top of all of this? That makes it feel as good as a user experience as say a Notion. It wasn't obvious that you can do that, but the kind of abstractions you have to build on top of that. And you can still hook into the latest and greatest, like when a new package comes on open source, Replit has it on day one. Because, because we built all this abstraction, like to be able to go get the packages and install them and run, run them on the system. And so we're writing. Huge wave, we're writing multiple waves, LLMs getting better. We're also writing open source getting better. New programming language comes out, we can run it on day one. And that acquired a lot of investments upfront.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  And there are a lot of competitors that are not doing this. And it might be short term easier for them to do. But I know how the landscape programming works. Things will shift. Like the other day, we saw a new JSON format called Toon that is more efficient. It's, I think, token optimized format that is more efficient for LLMs. And so again, like, programming will continue to improve. And we want to be the platform where you can program anything with LLMs.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Let's think a little bit also about kind of how the future work is going to evolve. You know, most people's experience right now is with chatbots. So they they put in something, they get out something, they put in something, get out something. So they're kind of directing the work in some ways, but it's kind of iteratively from what they're doing. So how do you imagine this trend, Replit, others, in this kind of everyone working with, you know, kind of that power of code? Because it's got, you need a combination of that individual creativity, imagination, you know, broad imagination drive, but also standardization for work processes. It's one of the reasons why the classic industrial religions, I fill this form and then I hand it to you. And you know, da, da, da, as we're doing it. So I'm certain that you've been thinking about what this means for the future of corporate work. What are some of the observations you might share?

• 39:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, when I first came to the corporate world, one thing that I found extremely depressing is how atomized and siloed people are. So, you know, over time, you know, with capitalism sort of emerging, you have the original, I think, Adam Smith, like, how do you make a pencil, right? Like, someone make an eraser. And so people become sort of cogs in a machine. And I don't think that is conducive to the human spirit. Like, I think humans are fundamentally creative. I think anytime we assume the shape of a machine, I think people are actually not happy in their lives.

• 39:52Speaker 00

  I'm not a Marxist, but I've read some Marx and Marx has the theory of alienation and the theory of the, I think Marx was right on a lot of the critique of capitalism, maybe not the solutions. Definitely not the solution.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  The, one of his critiques is alienation is that you don't, you don't see the fruits of your work. You, you, you build one part of, one part of, one part of, part of a larger supply chain of, of things, right? And that doesn't make people proud of like, like I said, when I was a kid, when I built this entire thing and my, my brother used it. That's amazing. That's I think what, what being human is about. And so I think now we're at an op, there's an opportunity in the workplace to a lot of that standardization stuff, to be taken care by agents, by work process automation and all that stuff. And what's left for people, yes, will have broad swim lanes. Like I'm generally in design, but I can code.

• 40:50Speaker 00

  I can write a, you know, PRD using chat GPT or whatever. I can even have a marketing idea and I can like use all the tools and like, hey, I built like this, this marketing package. And that to me is a lot more exciting. So we, we have, for example, one of our customers, large enterprise, one, one person had an idea. It's a, it's a, you know, real estate marketplace where they connect, uh, real estate buyers with real estate agents, had an idea on how to optimize that algorithm and couldn't get engineering resources. Now previously it was just that, the idea is that although he's in the business, he understands it. He talks to real estate agents all the time. Instead he went to Replit, he built a new routing algorithm. That drove tens of millions of dollars, if not a hundred million dollars to the business.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  And that person got promoted again and again and again and again. And, and now he's sitting, he's sitting with the board members, guiding their AI strategy. Entrepreneurship, I think, in my opinion, is not just about building businesses. You can be an activist entrepreneur. You can be humanitarian entrepreneur. You can be an entrepreneur inside a large business. And I promise you, your life will be a lot more interesting, exciting. You'll meet a lot more exciting people. You'll have a better reputation. You'll have a halo around you. So my hope for the future of corporate work, but humanity in general, is that as the boring things, the automated things actually taken care by machines, were left to be more entrepreneurial, more creative.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Obviously, totally hope that's the case. It goes back to my very first book, The Startup of You. So it's like, it's a definite strong, because it's like, it's not that we all have to start businesses, but that kind of creativity, entrepreneurship, engagement with it, the exact passion that you had with your brother. One micro thing that I think is an important thing for people to focus on, because it's part of the general lack of context awareness that current agents have.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  What do you see as the kind of the longest unsupervised work that agents can currently do?

• 42:48Speaker 00

  I think it's more possible than our tools allow it to be.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:54Speaker 00

  So I think state of the art LM's, especially Gemini has done a great job at a million contacts, million token contacts, but others have 200,000 or somewhere there. You know, the easy thing is like to fit every, all history inside the context, but that's not, that's not feasible. There are few components. If you put them together, then you can run agents a lot longer. One component is verification. The work needs to be verified. It's a form of supervision. If the AI agent is going on a path and doesn't have feedback from the environment, from the work, from the human, from someone, then we're very likely stray off the path and do something really, like if you make one mistake, it'll just compound over time. So Replit Agent 3 came out in September.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  We now boot up a browser for the agent, have the agent use it to test the application for you. And we have another agent that's adversarial, that's like reviewing the code and giving you feedback. And because of that, we went from agent one ran for two minutes unsupervised. After that, it didn't work very well. Agent two is 20 minutes. Agent three, you know, 200 minutes, we're seeing 200 minute runs that are actually really, really useful. There's, there's still mistakes and all of that. Now we've introduced an autonomy selector inside Replit. So depending on your risk appetite, you can go all the way high autonomy and some people run it for 10 hours. Now, I don't recommend it to everyone. Now, if you have a lot of disposable income, you should definitely do it. But,

• 44:23Speaker 00

  you know, we have medium autonomy and it can run for, you know, 100 minutes, high autonomy, it can run for 200, 300 minutes. So I, I think it's possible. And in terms of the context, so the verification is very important. So you pass from one agent to another. And so, you know, one agent does it, it work, another agent gets a prompt and says, test the app. You don't have to give it the entire thing. So it's a multi-agent system. And then after the testing is done, pass back, but you don't pass it back using the, all the existing context, you kind of summarize and give the next, it's almost like passing the baton to the next one. Again, ideally, you put everything in the agent, but I'm not sure we're going to be there anytime soon.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  So I think this sort of relates back to what we were saying, how the difference between programmers and non-programmers is collapsing. Because if everyone has a Replit agent, you don't need to be a programmer. And I think so many people are talking about, and you said yourself, you worked at Code Academy, the last 15, 20 years, we were telling everyone, like, parents, teach your kids to program, learning to code is the future. You recently said, you don't think people should learn how to code. And so, I'm all for the democratization of this, for people who are not coders now, to be able to use Replit to do amazing things. Yet, at least right now, I feel like the people who are most adept at using AI for anything, are actually the people who have learned how

• 45:44Speaker 02

  to code. So I would say to you, do you think we're at a moment in time? Or will that continue to be true? You're a parent. Will you want your kid to learn how to code in the traditional sense? Or that's going to be a skill that's not important soon?

• 45:56Speaker 00

  Look, similar to what Grace Hopper said, you know, 75 years ago, she said, specialists will exist, but we want this technology to be just. So my advice would apply to 99% of people. Like, you know, I don't think you, most people who want to make things with software or computers don't need to learn how to code. It's gonna be a huge cost on them. It's gonna take a lot of time. But instead, just jump into making things. And if it's your cup of tea, if you're looking at the agent traces and you're seeing the code and you're like, okay, I'd like to learn what it's doing, then go learn it. I think it will take you further for sure this time along. But if you believe in AI, as I do, and we're going to continue to make progress on AI agents

• 46:40Speaker 00

  and all the labs, billions of dollars, perhaps trillions of dollars are going towards optimizing code specifically, then we're going to get to a point where it's, again, specialists exist. We need them. If we're sending people to the moon, I don't want them to be on a vibe coded, you know, a computer. But for the vast majority of applications, I think vibe coders will be able to make them. Now, the question about my kids, I've struggled with this a little bit. I've never wanted to admit that there's a temperament to coding, but there is. There is a certain temperament to coding. Do my kids have that temperament? I'm not entirely sure.

• 47:14Speaker 02

  What do you think is the temperament that a coder needs?

• 47:17Speaker 00

  Basic thing, like the ability to sit in front of the computer for 12 hours.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 47:21Speaker 00

  I think coding is actually bad on your health. And if you're okay with that, like you really, I mean, I don't know any programmer that didn't go through periods of life where they're like really spending a lot of time in that, in front of their computer with diet coke or whatever, and like, just like coding all the time and like learning every aspect of it. Do you enjoy that? A lot of people don't. And that's fine. Like, again, diversity. Like, did people come with all sorts of temperaments? And some people want visual things, want to interact with visuals things. Some people want to work with other people all the time. But if you're someone who is comfortable, like I was, and I am, I am like totally, like, my wife is not the same, like, I have an insane ability to be alone. Like, I can be alone for a year.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  But, but other people can. And you know, that's, that's fine. We should be okay with people of different temperaments.

• 48:12Speaker 02

  That is actually really illustrative to me because I love math, I love logic, I loved AP Computer Science in high school, but I'm an extrovert. I couldn't, I can't do that. I can't sit with code for 12 hours. Okay, so people like me are okay in the future.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  They'll find other jobs. Exactly. Soft skills are important. Well, so I feel like we're in this time where some of us see Repli and see AI and we're like, oh my God, it is so empowering. We're helping small business owners, we're helping young people. But when you actually look at the numbers, it's like more Americans are nervous about AI or scared about AI than are excited about it. And so if you're talking to someone like that, like, what do you say to them? Like, what's your sort of go to line to be like, no, this is why we have excitement coming forward and in the future, even though we understand that there are risks?

• 49:02Speaker 00

  I think there's like a various distribution of intent. Some people just want to get famous by writing like sci fi sounding, like, you know, just to be concrete about it. Like, I don't think anything that Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote, for example, Eliezer Yudkowsky, big AI, maybe he doesn't describe himself as a doomer, I would say AI doomer, wrote a lot about how AI could end the world and kill literally everyone. Like, I can't, like, you know, every, every time you try to read some of those, like, there's insane loops in logic and really it doesn't compute for me, like, how that actually ends up happening. And I think it's like a fundamental misunderstanding of the world. Anyone who's tried to build a business, understand that are bottlenecks that are not just intelligence in the bit,

• 49:44Speaker 00

  regulatory bottlenecks, there are so, all sorts of things. So without getting too deep into that, I think some of it, we just have to counter intellectually and, and like, we, you know, the AI optimists have to be out there, like, arguing with these people? I don't have time to do that. I did that for a little bit, but it's important. I know they're out there in DC kind of scaring politicians and all of that. And I think that's really bad because like, you know, we can get to a point where, you know, AI is regulated in a way that allows, that doesn't allow the US to be competitive. And so there's an aspect of it that I think we really need to, to, to, to battle. There are aspects of it that I think is on the creative art film front.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 50:27Speaker 00

  Like, you know, everyone thinks about Skynet and Terminator and things like that. But who's, who's producing like really optimistic visions about sci-fi? I, I love reading mid-century sci-fi because it's a lot more optimistic. Something haven't happened in our culture. We don't have really good sci-fi anymore. So that's another part. Now, third part, now this is the more pragmatic. I'm worried about my job. I'm worried about my, I'm worried about my kids.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  Everyday concerns that people have that aren't sort of fantastical, that maybe are sort of based in reality.

• 51:01Speaker 00

  I worry about it for my kids a lot, like the idea of, it's really hard to go out in the world and make friends and have people like you. It's really easy to have an AI like you. I mean, and, and humans tend to take the, you know, shortest, the easiest path. And like, I worry about this AI friend thing becoming a really problem. My eternal optimist is always like, well, look, you know, we had a period of history where, you know, eating junk food was, was acceptable and like, but I think there's like, uh, societal antibodies. I think healthy societies have antibodies around, you know, smoking. You know, smoking is like, you know, when I grew up in Jordan, everyone smoked, I smoked.

• 51:44Speaker 00

  I came to the US, none of my friends smoked and I just felt like an outcast and I stopped smoking. I see societies like, you know,

• 51:52Speaker 02

  Like truly one of the greatest public health battles of our time. And to your point, a lot of it was we solved it with culture.

• 51:58Speaker 00

  Yes, culture, culture. I, I think religion used to play a role as well. And, and I don't know whether it will in the future or not, but like government is such a blunt instrument. You can't, you can't do everything. So I think it's, it's leadership, it is, uh, culture. It is incumbent on all of us to just say like, no, chat GPT is not your friend. Like it's friendly and you can use it for therapy. You can use it for all sorts of things and that those are fraud as well. But like, if, if someone is saying to you, it's like, I'm spending all my time trying to achieve you. Hey, hey man, that's not really healthy, you know? So I think, I think a lot of it is about culture and society.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  Well, I do think that like, there's like two points that I think are very important. One is the friend's point, completely agree. Part of the reason why like we, you know, inflections pie. You know, you kind of engage, you're my best friend. It's like, no, no, no, I'm your companion. I'm here to help you. Have you talked to your friend Amjad recently? You know, what's life with him? Or you catch up. And I think that, that, that helping, especially for young people.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Where they might be encountering difficulties. And so I think it's like tying you back into the community, tying you back into connecting with other human beings. Because by the way, part of actual real friendship is not just saying, oh, Amjad, you're so great. Oh, Amjad, I just, I, I, I was waiting to, for the, for all year to talk to you. It's like, no, it's, it's that, that thing of like, where I might show up thinking, oh, I've had a bad day. I want to talk to Amjad about it. And then I hear about your day. I'm like, oh, we're talking about Amjad's day.

• 53:28Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  That is actually part of how you evolve, part of how you elevate, part of how you learn compassion, wisdom, empathy. And it's really important. And that's part of the reason I also share with you. It's not impossible to make AI friends, but it's not what's happening right now. And it's not, you know, anything that, that is, that is, that is illusory that way is actually in fact destructive.

• 53:49Speaker 00

  That's why it's causing psychosis and things like that. Like, you know, there's high profile cases where people have psychotic breaks because they have like delusions of grandeur and things like that. And ChatGPT is like reinforcing that. And that's like really bad. And I think it's incumbent on the labs as well to like, start a program, push back into these machines as well, right?

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. There was this funny thing that a friend of mine showed me, which is by only listening to, you know, AI agents, you end up in a desert by yourself, drinking a glass of milk, thinking the whole world's out to get you. You know, so it's like, that's, that's the wrong, long path. Now, back to the jobs thing. People ideally love to say, I'd like to have an elevation of my life, but I'd like to have no strain. And unfortunately, those aren't the times we're in.

• 54:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  We're in the similar times to the industrial revolution. Now there's a cognitive industrial revolution. And so many, many jobs will change, right? Like if you said, my, my job is I'm a form filler for digital marketing. Like, yeah, that's not really gonna be, you better start thinking about other things. Now, AI can help you with that. It's like, okay, well, what can I learn? What can AI help me do, etc. What we have to embrace is that kind of, that entrepreneurial mindset. People say, well, I don't want to, I just want to keep doing what I'm doing. It's like, well, so did the horse groomer back when there were lots of horses and that was all the transport. That's not the way it works, right? And by the way, if you try to lock that in, you're essentially going to be stealing your

• 55:18Speaker 01

  children's future because the other society will move ahead and then yours will now have put them in a very disadvantaged position. So, the important thing, like, almost like that Adam Smith specialization thing you were talking about, the important thing is say, look, I understand that it can be painful for me, but I'm gonna own this, this change because I'm helping my children, my community's children, the future generations. And by the way, like, own it as an adventure, right? Yes, like, sometimes you don't choose to go on the adventure, but sometimes you just find yourself on it and own it as the adventure and how do you shape it and make that happen? And so, in this vein, one of the things that, you know, companies are starting to look for is, what is AI native talent?

• 56:00Speaker 01

  What kind of pointers, heuristics, thoughts, lenses might you offer to people to say, here's how you can think about becoming AI native talent? Here's what companies should look for in hiring AI native talent, because, you know, you live in AI nativity.

• 56:15Speaker 00

  On the previous point, briefly, like, I, I say version that you said very articulately, advice to people on the YouTube comments that I unfortunately sometimes read. Hey, be nice.

• 56:30Speaker 00

  People, ah, it's easy for you to say you're rich, right? And I, I think that Silicon Valley has a responsibility to do something, I don't know if it is some kind of like nonprofit where we have like, you know, retraining and upscaling, maybe it's a government thing, I'm not entirely sure, but I think there's a responsibility to do that because it is, it is hard for people, like, people who've done like marketing form filling for like, you know, 30 years, it is hard to break out of that, but I think there are potential to create like AI education programs. Now, on the question of how to become AI native,

• 57:11Speaker 00

  you know, we were at a CEO event earlier and even the CEOs are struggling with it themselves. And really amazing CEOs built, you know, hundred billion dollar plus companies. And they're like, I take a week every few months to kind of learn AI, but I'm constantly behind. And what I said, if you, if your programmer have technical ability, go, go really deep. Go read the papers, go build a fundamental understanding of how LLMs work. Maybe even build an LLM yourself, like Karpati has like this really nice GitHub repo that you can go explore and try to train your own LLM. Now, this, this conditional on the fact that you have some technical background.

• 57:51Speaker 00

  If you don't, I would say using tools like Replit to build LLM experiences. So kind of think about ideas for how LLMs could like improve your job and go try your hand at building them. That's one. Two, just like train your algorithms and feeds to give you AI news. One of the first things that I've, I did when I just like committed our company to AI is like, I went and followed all these like different AI people. My YouTube is all AI content. There's a wealth of information out there and so many of us consume content passively. You can be consuming information and learning. And this is, and by the way, TikTok can be certainly destructive.

• 58:36Speaker 00

  I see it as a, as a skill to actually like train my TikTok algorithm. So like they try to bait me with like, you know, different content and I just scroll really fast. And I pitched this to Elon and I think he responded to me at one. So I said, like, you should, you should be able to prompt your feed. I want only AI content today to be able to consume. But like this passive consumption that we all do, you can fill it with useful information.

• 59:00Speaker 02

  And so this next question, Reid, I do want you to weigh in on it. But you and Replit recently passed a hundred million ARR. Congratulations, a huge milestone. And you guys have been building for a long time. But right now in the valley, there are so many companies that are getting to both enormous valuations, but also enormous revenue very quickly. So my question for you is, what do you think about this time where it seems like everyone has to get to insane revenue numbers immediately? Is this good? Is that true? And like, what is sort of the new kind of era we're in, sort of building in an AI era?

• 59:35Speaker 00

  So one of the reasons, there are a few reasons that happened that that made it so that these revenue ramps are really high. One obvious one is the ROI is really clear. When when we make an application for someone, then we put a paywall, like, they really like the application they wanted, they're much more likely to pay. But also, just like credit card penetration across the world has like reached certain heights, internet stability and connectivity, there's all these confluence of factors that got us to a point where you can grow revenue fast. That being said, like, AI revenue can go up as easy as it goes down. You know, we've seen businesses, I think Jasper is now like an enterprise business, but at some point, they had like a really amazing consumer business that they lost all of it

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  to ChatGPT, right? Like, so if you're not an AI business, if you're a SaaS business and your investors like, oh, why don't you have AI revenue? Well, I mean, the other thing is like, you know, easy come, easy go, you know? So and we spent like eight, nine years building all this infrastructure to get to a point where where the company took off. But we're also still very paranoid. Like, Google just released another vibe coding thing today, and they're a close partner of ours. And obviously, they're gonna do it. But so many companies are interested in in the vibe coding space right now. And so it's very, very competitive. And so if you can build a business that is lasting, that is grows slower and compounds over time, I think there's still a lot of value in it. Now, the question

• 1:01:03Speaker 00

  is like, are there a lot of investors that want to put a lot of capital into that? Well, maybe you don't need a lot of capital anymore. And so, yes, a lot of the capital is going to AI. But like, you can build SaaS businesses today that are cash flowing, that can grow over time.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  What do you think your mode is? Is it your brand? Is it your existing consumers? Like, how do you make sure that you're not, you know, subject to that?

• 1:01:25Speaker 00

  I think there are less moats these days than than than before. I mean, one of my favorite books is Seven Powers by Hamilton and Hamler. And it just talks about there's seven moats, really. You know, network facts, economies of scale, you know, so on. I think that we have a technology lead in that like we built all this technology for so many years. We built a hyper competitive, amazing team that will continue to produce these technology advancements. We launch a new breakthrough version of agent every few months. Elon said this a long time ago, the only mode is continued innovation, rapid

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  progress. And I think that's true in AI today. I think at some point, when you reach certain scales, there are certain decisions that you can make that really create structural modes. We're not there yet, but I think, you know, I would say the big labs achieved economies of scale, obviously, right? And that's, that's a mode for them. Now, it's very competitive between like the five of them. But I think it is a game that we'll play over time. So I was just, as CEO, just constantly thinking about what are the degrees of freedom that we have in order to position our business in a way to create lasting advantage.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Your earlier question was like almost like the classic blitzscaling question, right? And part of the reason why, now I'm trying to remember how many years ago I wrote blitzscaling, but it was kind of the lessons from Silicon Valley in China about how the technology companies of the future are built. If anything, it's 5x, 10x true as when I did it. It's like it's the trend of where it's going to. Now, that doesn't mean that everyone has to go to, you know, amazing revenue, 10x employee growth in like six months, 12 months, etc. The thing in blitzscaling, which, you know, Chris and I wrote about was it depends a lot on what the nature of the market is, what the nature of competition is, etc. And if you're going up against blitzscalers, it's very hard to succeed without also blitzscaling

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  because the blitzscaling will set the market. It may blow up, but will set the market. If it blows up, it'll probably blow you up with the market.

• 1:03:29Speaker 00

  Like the scooter market.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. And it doesn't matter that you were kind of, you know, minding your operating margins and, you know, it just gets swamped. And so, so you have to look at what's happening in the market. You have to look at what's happening with competition. There are definitely opportunities where you can build more.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  Like, you know, like one of the ones from the Greylock portfolio is Roblox, where like for many years, it's kind of like, yeah, yeah, out in the wilderness. And then boom, all of a sudden, it's the amazing new thing. And you can build towards that and that kind of phase can come. So you have to kind of make an evaluation of where you're at. Now, if you're going kind of where the zeitgeist is, where everyone currently recognizes it, you'd better be moving pretty fast because everybody is recognizing it. And so, so that's a little bit of kind of the, the, the reason like with, like with Monis AI, we could say, hey, we can actually take a look some time to think about exactly and, and build iteratively to what the AI pieces are for doing for the drug discovery. Because most of the people don't realize what are the things you need to do. And so you can take more time to build that.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  You don't have to go, you know, like it's basically do extreme uncertainty risks trying to capture a market. So there's a nuanced answer there. But, but there's a number of markets where that speed and that speed revenue scale. By the way, the speed revenue scale is not just revenue fee, not just what comes in as capital. It also comes into what happens with hiring employees and a bunch of other things. And there's a whole set of compounding things that get to that. So it's, you, you have to make a kind of strategic decision. By the way, you may have to change your strategic decision as you're going.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  One thing on that is that what's interesting is once you hit an infliction point, inflection point, then other people pay attention and now it's split scaling because they notice a revenue and they want to go after it.

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  Well, they see you being successful and all of a sudden that becomes the hot industry. And so you have to change your stance.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Yes. And that's the other thing.

• 1:05:18Speaker 00

  And that's what happened with us, right? Like, you know, it's like, you know, Replit agent was the kind of the first vibe coding thing that anyone could use. And suddenly everyone poured into it.

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  And this is one of the things that people don't understand about the blitzscaling side, which is it's not that you start blitzscaling from day one and it's not that you blitzscale forever. By the way, if you don't end blitzscaling at some point, I think that the seven powers, because I, you know, great book, great call out.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  Maintain. I also think the configurations of how business models come together will still actually get to different kinds of modes. Now, we have speculation of what those modes are. Are there modes only scale now? Are there modes brand? Are there modes network effects? You know, are the modes data now? Like, and it'll be in different combinations of different things in terms of-

• 1:06:06Speaker 00

  But you have to be okay with the uncertainty of it in the moment.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  And you're gonna be iterating through it, and you should be thinking about what those modes are. And you can't go, "Well, we..." You know, because Silicon Valley went for maybe even two decades, and I was one of the architects of this, you know, gaga over network effects-

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  As the mode. And by the way, network effects still very valuable.

• 1:06:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  But they're changing in the shape and how they establish and what happens and so forth. And that's, that's, that reinvention, like, people tend to think, "Oh, the most central thing is you reinvent your product or service." And by the way, of course, it's really important. By the way, it's also reinvent your go-to-market.

• 1:06:39Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  Oh, and by the way, it's also reinvent your business model. Oh, and by the way, it's also reinvent what the modes are behind this. And it's all of these kind of different things. Like, Google search doesn't have network effects from its search engine. It has scale effects, but it's AdWords is where the network effect. And then what it does is it buys distribution from Apple and other people through that is the way that it kind of... And so how do these things kind of come together?

• 1:07:06Speaker 02

  And actually, sort of per our conversation in the car, Amjad, one of the things I've really appreciated is that your willingness to speak out about things that matter in our society, whether it's Gaza, human rights, et cetera. And it can be difficult for people to speak out, especially when they're CEOs of companies, you're fighting for talent. Why do you think it's important for people in the space, specifically in technology, to speak out about human rights and things like that?

• 1:07:28Speaker 00

  I don't do it because of this. I do it because of principles and because, you know, we also have a family history, and I understand what people in Gaza are going through right now, and I really care about that. But I also think that-

• 1:07:44Speaker 00

  You know, the corporate world, the market has changed in that when you stand for something, I think there's actually, there's an effect where maybe you might be, certain people don't want to work with you or don't want to invest in you, but there are other people that might be attracted to that, right? So I think the, you know, people are no longer sort of attracted to these, you know, bland corporate brands and the faces behind these companies, I mean, thanks to LinkedIn and things like that, are becoming more important than the brands themselves. And as humans, we care about things and if you're, if you just have no opinions and you're just, no one has no opinions, right? And so I think a lot of people come to work at Replit because they know I care about

• 1:08:28Speaker 00

  these things and people want to invest in Replit because they know we stand for certain things. And I think Silicon Valley is no longer the underdog as well. Like Silicon Valley is now the mainstream. People look to us for leadership, but they also, when we do certain things that are not conducive to society, they're gonna, they're gonna come and try to burn us at the stake. And so it's important for, for us to kind of take that, the role that we're playing seriously.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I completely agree. And I think actually, part of how you think of this, think of humanity first, and that's part of the principles, you know, alleviate suffering, economic enablement. Part of what I love about Replit is economic enablement across the entire world, then society, what's the organization on which we live together, and then industry. By the way, industry is super important. I've, you know, it's been my entire life, but thinking about those, even when you're a industry leader, you should not abandon the fact that you're also a humanist and you're also a nervous society.

• 1:09:26Speaker 00

  That's right, absolutely.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  On that basis of frame, what are some of the really important things we should do? Leaders in Silicon Valley and the tech industry to make sure that technology is spreading compassion to. And one of the problems with some of the social networks is it's rage and engagement, clickbaiting and so on. But yet, that is not who we aspire to become as individuals in a society. So what do we do to grow empathy, grow compassion? What are some of the ideas that you might have kicked around on this?

• 1:10:00Speaker 00

  One thing I try to do on our business is align our business model with something that allows us to be good in the world. And so, you know, Rapid benefits when people's lives improves through, you know, that software that they're building or they're creating or the business they're creating or how they're improving their business. And so I've always been really inspired by businesses that create like a game theoretic win-win-win situation. Right? Like when you think about platforms, like Shopify is an amazing business where the company's winning, the entrepreneurs are winning and consumers are winning. Not every business is like that. There's a lot of businesses where consumers are losing or someone's getting exploited. But by the way, the best businesses are the win-win-win businesses, right?

• 1:10:46Speaker 00

  So I think one of the, you know, speaking of modes and things like that, one of the early strategic decisions that you can make is what is the business model? And try to, try to actually kind of write down, it's usually, you know, different constituents, usually the company, the users, maybe the developers, whatever kind of business that you have. What situations or what business models will allow you to create that, that joint winning?

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  So now we're moving to our rapid fire. That doesn't mean you have to answer rapid fire. There's this questions we, we ask all of our guests. Is there a movie, song or book that fills you with optimism for the future?

• 1:11:25Speaker 00

  You know, a book that I think is, is amazing that it pulls together everything that I love. I really love learning about theory of consciousness, theory of mind, the philosophy of that. I like computers and math and physics and all of that. I like the human aspect, human stories. I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter is is an amazing book. It's partly about his, a book about his wife dying and their kids and how his personal story in that. It's also a book about him struggling with the concept of soul and kind of trying to understand it in like a more secular way and like mathematical way.

• 1:12:05Speaker 00

  It goes through vignettes about like Gödel's incompleteness theorem or what that says about about how consciousness is potentially like a loop and it's it's it's an amazing book that tells you that like really everything is interconnected and we can't be technical or innovators without actually caring about all the other things that happens in our world.

• 1:12:28Speaker 02

  What is the question that you wish people would ask you more often?

• 1:12:32Speaker 00

  I mean, this question is really fascinating. I mean, I don't get to talk a lot about, you know, literary or philosophical inspiration. So that's a great one.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, The Strange Loop is awesome. So where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry, you know, tech, you know, kind of AI, vibe coding, applications that inspires you?

• 1:12:55Speaker 00

  You know, I, this is very fresh on my mind, but I took a demo, a tour of a plane. And I was so surprised that they got to full automation. This is a TBM 960, a turboprop plane. And it, everything's automated, including landing. And there's not one neural network in it. And so it's surprising because like, you know, in Silicon Valley, we think that we sort of tapped out on classical deterministic systems in terms of what you can do in terms of automation. But actually, there are industries that are just slogging along. They just don't want to use neural networks. It's like too probabilistic to.

• 1:13:36Speaker 00

  So that was really fascinating. And it's like, there's, there's a lot more to go, even in the classical systems and the traditional technology that we have.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  So always our final question. Can you leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible if everything goes humanity's way in the next 15 years? And what's the first step to get there?

• 1:13:55Speaker 00

  The thing I think a lot about, and this is driven by my, my history, my family, is that anyone who has ideas should potentially be wealthy. Anyone who has ideas and can follow through and has the grits and has the moral upstanding and can do the right things should be able. I think that's the true promise of capitalism. And I think, you know, it's very easy to imagine the world where it's like certain corporates that are controlling everything and the business models are not aligned with humanity in such a way that it's like it's all based on spying on us and selling us the worst things that we desire. But instead, in a world where where the tools

• 1:14:38Speaker 00

  create the decentralized power, ability to generate wealth for everyone in the world, the entire world is sort of interconnected. I think people waking up in the morning and feeling like tap dancing to work, like Jeff Bezos, like most, 99% of people don't tap dance to work, right? Like, so including me, like, I love my job a lot, but I hate email. Like, why hasn't anyone solved that? Right? Like, the technology is there, but like, you know, the tools have not are not there just yet. So rewarding work, work that is more human allows us to to relate with one another more creatively and less siloing and less

• 1:15:19Speaker 00

  politics at work. But also the ability for anyone to generate ideas and build businesses. That's something I'd be really excited.

• 1:15:25Speaker 01

  Amen. Yeah, I'm Jod. It's a great pleasure. We could have gone on for hours. Thanks for being here.

• 1:15:30Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  Possible is produced by Palette Media. It's hosted by Ari Fingier and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Tenasi Delos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmore, Imo Zoo, Trent Barboza, and Tafadzwa Nirmurundwe.

• 1:15:47Speaker 02

  Special thanks to Surya, Yala Manchili, Sayida Sapieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Relles. And a big thanks to Ben Casnoca and the Village Global team, Philip Smith and Action House, Lorenzo Davis and Will Whitley at Static, and Caitlin Norad and the team at Replit.