Pod Insights The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch 20VC: Why AI Will Lead to Thousands of Billionaires and Elon Musk's, Will TikTok Be Banned and How Facebook Should Be Investing in AI & Why Startups Have Become Too Soft; We Need a Spiritual Reform with Amjad Masad, Founder & CEO @ Replit About this episode Amjad Masad is the Founder and CEO @ Replit, whose mission is to bring the next billion software creators online. With Replit, Amjad has raised over $100M from the likes of Peter Thiel, a16z, Coatue and Addition, to name a few. Before founding Replit, Amjad was a tech lead on the JavaScript infrastructure team at Facebook. Before Facebook, Amjad was #1 employee at Codecademy. In Today's Episode with Amjad Masad We Discuss: 1.) From Troublemaker Child in Iran to Silicon Valley Founder: How did Amjad make his way into the world of tech and Silicon Valley having grown up as a misbehaving child in Iran? In what ways did Amjad show early signs of exceptionalism? Why does he always look for this in people he is hiring for Replit? What does Amjad know now that he wishes he had known when he started Replit? 2.) The Future: A New World with AI at the Centre: Why does Amjad believe we will see thousands of billionaires created from the innovation in AI? Why does Amjad believe AI will lead to 100 more Elon Musks? If Amjad were CEO of Facebook, what would he do? Why and how do they have to invest in AI? Will TikTok be banned in the US? How will this be resolved? Why does Amjad believe that 300 people control the future of AI? Is that not concerning? 3.) The Future of Society, Employment and Wages: Why does Amjad believe in 10 years, 1 engineer will be able to do what 100 do today? What will happen to the real wages of engineers? How does Amjad see the inclusion of universal basic income in the future? Is Amjad concerned about societal and civil unrest with wealth disparity widening further? 4.) Building the Replit Army: Why does Amjad believe that so many in tech have gotten too soft in the last few years? Why does Amjad release a "Why You Should Not Join Replit" page and share it with all candidates? How can a founder know if they have good company values or not? Why does Amjad feel we need a spiritual reform in company building? Why are startups and religion the same?
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Wealth inequality will grow a lot. One good engineer in 10 years would be as productive as 100 engineers today. It's going to create a new crop of millionaires and billionaires in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. And these people are going to have more and more power in the world. And I think that will create more envy.
0:14 Harry Stebbings? Oh, this episode does not disappoint. We discuss the future of AI, the good, the bad, wealth inequality, the need for spiritual reform within startups. We go all over the place. And joining me is Amjad Massad, founder and CEO of Replit, whose mission is to bring the next billion software creators online. And with Replit, Amjad has raised over $100 million from some of the best, including Peter Thiel, Andreessen, Co2, Edition, Paul Graham, just to name a few. And before founding Replit, Amjad was a tech lead on the JavaScript infrastructure team at Facebook. And before Facebook, Amjad was number one employee at Code Academy. I want to say a huge thank you to Eric Torrembo for some fantastic question suggestions today. Eric, I so appreciated that. But before we dive into the show today, before every show we do,
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3:28 Speaker 02 You have now arrived at your destination.
3:31 Harry Stebbings? Amjad, I am so excited for this. As I said, I've heard so many good things from Mazzio for years. So thank you so much for joining me.
3:37 Speaker 00 Thank you. I'm a big fan of the show and excited to be here.
3:40 Harry Stebbings? That is very kind. Now, normally we start with, oh, the founding moment of the company, but you have a pretty awesome background. There's not, oh, I grew up in Silicon Valley and surprisingly, I founded a startup. You actually grew up in Jordan. And so I wanted to ask, what were you like growing up as a child in Jordan? And how were those early years?
3:57 Speaker 00 I was a big troublemaker. I looked very different. So I'm like a redhead. My family is actually split right in the middle, where some of my uncles are extremely dark complexions and a couple of parts of the family were extremely bright redhead. I'm actually like fairly on the not too intense redhead, but we have really intense tingers in the family. But I look fairly different There isn't a lot of gingers in Jordan. And at the same time, I had a bit of a temper. I had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder rebellious angle to me. My father, he worked in government. He didn't make a lot of money. He was an engineer, a very low level engineer in government. But he really put a lot of money behind our education. And so we went to school in a good part of town.
4:42 Speaker 00 And coming from a bit of a, let's say, a challenging part of town where you had to fight and you had to grind and hustle to just play and be just a kid. And then when we go to school, we're a little bit odd once out. And again, like I said, my appearance was a little different. And so I always got in trouble. Since I was six years old, I would get in trouble for running away from school or inciting my whole class to do something strange or weird. And so I was just seen as a sort of a troublemaker my entire childhood.
5:13 Harry Stebbings? Did you always know that you'd be successful? It's sometimes an innate feeling, sometimes it's not. Did you know that you'd be successful?
5:19 Speaker 00 Yeah, there was a lot of early successes. So my older brother and I, we found an arbitrage opportunity. The toys in the not so great part of town were actually much cheaper than the richer part of town where we went to school. And so we started selling toys at preteen, young age. My mother would come pick us up in this like this beat up old car. And we would stash the toys in the trunk. And so we would sell them. We would tell people what we have during school because we couldn't carry the toys. And then we'd tell them, meet us outside after school, then we'd go to the trunk. My mom didn't know what we were doing. So we would sell these toys. We also sold toys that weren't necessarily the most savory. So we sold guns and
6:02 Speaker 00 we did a lot of stuff like that early on to make money. And later on, when I was a teenager, I also started my first software business. It just felt like I sort of had it in me. I had the hunger. I also was attracted to greatness. Really loved watching movies and reading books about great entrepreneurs, great athletes, great history figures and leaders. And so I always wanted to do something great.
6:26 Harry Stebbings? It's funny, whenever I meet with founders, because obviously I invest for a living, I always Say, tell me one, how you first made money? And I think it's a really important question because he'd say, oh, I sold BB guns to kids at arbitrage prices. And it says a lot. Do you look for those early signs of exceptionalism when you hire people? And do you agree that when you see that, you're like, ah, this person's different?
6:45 Speaker 00 That's basically the biggest sign, the early sign of exceptionalism. I think it's fairly hard for people who has taken a normal, straight path to life to do something exceptional later in life. I think there's always signs of exceptional things. Sometimes you'd have to dig for it, but I think it's always there, whether it's hustling and selling and starting businesses. Incredible athletic ability and exceptional drive to achieve athletic things is also a sign. It can be very diverse, but it's always there, I think.
7:19 Harry Stebbings? Sadly, I wasn't the athlete. I have to be honest. I could have lied and played that one out, but I better to be honest early. I think my hundred meter record was about forty eight seconds, which meant they lacked me on a hundred meters. I believe strongly that we're all a function of our histories, which means we're all running from something. What do you think you're running from, Amjad?
7:36 Speaker 00 Mediocrity? The idea of being normal is just very scary to me. And undifferentiated is something that I really don't like to be.
7:45 Harry Stebbings? I'm just gonna let go straight into the advice section of this show. Fuck it, fuck the schedule. So I don't like dating today because it's like the time that you spend on a date, it could be used so much better elsewhere. And I don't want to be that mediocre person like going on a date when you could just be fucking crushing it. How did you get over that? Because you have kids and a wonderful wife.
8:02 Speaker 00 Yeah.
8:03 Harry Stebbings? How did you get over that fear?
8:05 Speaker 00 I think taking massive risk is the key. If you're really worried about mediocrity, the best way to sort of run as far as possible from it is to do something so weird and so different that is almost unthinkable. I guess in a dating scenario, maybe you would not attract a vast majority of people would be actually turned off by this. But I think the people who would actually like you and would want to be with you for a long time and would actually match your sort of personality, you would attract them. I'm a big fan of being authentic and attracting allies and potentially rebelling people you don't like anyway. Repelling them.
8:40 Harry Stebbings? But I think you managed to do that with your personal brand, don't worry, I am just. Imagine that kind of like the big risk taker. You said something before on Twitter that I thought was fascinating. You said, great startups are examples of conspiracies to change the world. And I thought, God, that sounds great. What does he mean by that?
8:57 Speaker 00 If you read a bit of history, you find that most of history is actually built and changed by a small number of people. We're actually living through a moment of history right now, especially given the AI revolution. You could argue that OpenAI is at the center of it. And it's really a small group of people. There are three hundred people now, and they were much smaller before. They had a conspiracy and their conspiracy was that if you get a lot of talented people together, that's what the original thing. And you work in really interesting AI research, you're going to find something. And then they found something and most of the world wasn't paying attention to it, which is if you scale language models and if you keep scaling them up and put more compute and data in them, you're going to find that it becomes more and more intelligent
9:39 Speaker 00 to the point that it's actually reaching some kind of general intelligence. There's some generality in GPT based models. So that was a conspiracy. There was a small group of people with a secret, planning for a long time. And so they were conspiring and now they're at a point where they're changing the world. They obviously started this new arms race between the two of the biggest companies of the world. They birth a new startup ecosystem. It's changing software as we speak. I'm sure we'll get into it later. It's a top of mind example, but you see it in history all the time. One person starts it. Obviously, religion is a big part of it. Jesus or Muhammad, you read their stories and they're typically small groups of people that fit in a room. They have some sort of secret or some sort of message. They work really hard over many years, perhaps decades.
10:23 Speaker 00 Then eventually they succeed and they change the world. So I think startups tend to follow the same logic as these examples.
10:30 Harry Stebbings? Do you think you're creating a religion with Rappler? And how do you self identify with those that want to create a religion versus those that just want to be in a hot company?
10:38 Speaker 00 I think it'd be super intentional about creating a religion. But I think the main tenets is have somewhat of a, Peter Thiel calls it a secret, but somewhat of an insight into how the world works or how the world should. Work or where the world is headed and so you work to advance that. One of our biggest insights at Replit is that software is a superpower. And this superpower is actually stuck in this ivory tower of Silicon Valley elite. And we're trying to free this superpower. It get more and more people to experience it and make use of it. It's almost at the time like the printing press. It was that people who could read and write were the priesthood. And then at some point, everyone in the world started doing it and that changed our world. Everything software kind of follows the same trajectory. So that's our main insight.
11:21 Harry Stebbings? I totally get you and your main insight allows everyone to do stuff with software. And you tweeted before, the best job description is doing stuff. I find that we live in this generation of planners. They love meetings, they love taking notes, they love planning, let's brainstorm. So you said the best job description is do stuff. How do you get these traditional lethargic teams to do shit? How do you create goals, structures, mechanisms to encourage productivity?
11:45 Speaker 00 Honestly, that's not the way to do it. The way to do it is more of a selection thing. You want to hire exceptionally entrepreneurial people. There's no amount of processes you can put in to make someone who doesn't want to work hard to work hard.
11:59 Harry Stebbings? Do you think we're in a generation of people that don't want to work hard? That want kombucha, that want the yoga retreats? And that actually the savage mentality that I think probably me and you both have, for better or worse, is relatively lost on the majority.
12:13 Speaker 00 Yes, and it is unfortunate. And I think it is the result of some decadence in the culture. There's a feeling that life is about pleasure and hedonistic pursuits. Whereas I think cultures have passed, even 20th century, America was very different. The values of hard work and exceptionalism were there. It is a problem and I think the way to find that problem, partly to inspire people, inspire younger generations that actually the value of making something is very important. And I think partly we need some kind of spiritual reform. Because people need to understand that pleasure is such a fleeting thing. And that that's not the thing that makes life meaningful.
12:57 Speaker 00 There's just so much of it, consumption and just being passive. A big part of diagnosing what's wrong with the world today is going to be about just a lot of people are like super passive, not interested in doing anything interesting.
13:08 Harry Stebbings? I totally agree with you. In terms of avoiding those that aren't, I heard you have a non-values page from one of your trusty investors. What is a non-values page, Amjad? And how does that guide your thinking on who you hire?
13:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's just one set of, one page among a set of things that we do to filter out people. Filtering out people is the hardest thing you could do in an interview process. I'm a big believer in free markets. There are companies out there for every type of person to work on. But the type of person that we want to work at is a very specific type of person. We do a lot of work to filter people who wouldn't be a fit out at the top of the process. We send people a lot of material, including why not to work at Replit. We have an entire blog post about that. Work here is hard. There's a lot of uncertainty. We haven't succeeded yet, all these things. We send them the non-values page. At the end of the process, we're typically selling people, but we're also anti-selling them at the same time and just saying, you shouldn't join if that's a problem or this other thing.
14:04 Speaker 00 Even our values page, we try to be somewhat provocative in the phrasing.
14:08 Harry Stebbings? How are you provocative in phrasing? Because I find everyone's like, we look for a team player who's good at communication and shared interests and alignment. And you're like.
14:16 Speaker 00 Yeah, Zuck said something very interesting about move fast and break things. I think a journalist was asking him about it. And he said, one heuristic to know whether you're saying something meaningful is that reasonable people can disagree with it. And the opposite of it is also reasonable. So move fast and break things could be like move slow and don't break anything. And that could be a value at IBM. If something were the opposite of it, doesn't make sense or it's not a value anyone would hold. They're actually not saying anything. It cancels each other out. To be provocative, you need to say something that people will disagree with, and the opposite of is also somewhat reasonable. One of our values, for example, is seek pain. The idea behind seek pain is that there's a lot of painful things in building a startup.
14:58 Speaker 00 Talking to customers is actually extremely painful. When your product is not working or there's some fundamental lack of product market fit or some issue you're dealing with, founders and entrepreneurs typically don't want to face that. And facing that is painful. At Replit, we've had some things in the past that weren't willing to face, for example, and that created a lot of problems down the line. Most problems at companies are just delusions from not wanting to face pain. So to create a company that is more in touch with the reality, you have to create a company.
15:28 Harry Stebbings? What do you, what do you tell yourself when you have a painful problem in front of that you don't wanna face? It's natural human intuition, pain, you pull away. What do you tell yourself now then to engage with that pain and to be proactive about it?
15:40 Speaker 00 It is a constant struggle. There's a personal answer, perhaps there's a team's answer, but like a personal answer is that I've tried to teach myself really deeply. The cliche, no pain, no gain is absolutely true. Every good thing in life comes from pain and you work out that's pain in order to live healthier and better and perhaps have a good body. Even things like the cold shower, they feel amazing afterwards, but you have to go through a bit of pain. A lot of the things that actually feel good in life in a really fundamental way have a period of pain that precedes them. There's a Pavlovian sort of aspect of this. So you wanna condition yourself to really understand that pain often precedes good things. That's one way to go about it.
16:23 Speaker 00 It's just tell my team that the longer you delay a painful sort of conclusion or decision, the more painful it becomes. You're just building a mountain of pain that you're gonna at some point have to subject yourself to.
16:35 Harry Stebbings? I find as a leader, most of the pain actually comes from teams, the people within your companies. When you think about the pain that teams drive, have there been any core elements that really drive home for you? I think one of the biggest for me would be people who do not scale with roles. And it comes very clear that they are not up to scratch for the new size of company or new role.
16:56 Speaker 00 That is extremely painful because especially people who's been with you since the start. You kinda wanna have some loyalty towards them and obviously they have a loyalty or two.
17:06 Harry Stebbings? But do you, I push on that one, they're not up to scratch.
17:10 Speaker 00 No, I'm saying that's the natural instinct. I think it comes from this tribal way of living that is in our DNA. But in a sort of free market enterprise, it becomes deleterious and really harms you. What you wanna do is you wanna maximize the likelihood of success, maximize shareholder value. And so you're having empathy for. For the individual, you're not having empathy for the collective, for the rest of the company, for the company itself, for the customers and for the investors. You would need to reframe that in your mind as that, yes, I'm making this bad decision in order to signal some loyalty to this individual who's not working out, but I'm actually harming a lot more people. From the utilitarian perspective, it's actually a bad trade off. You have to do the right thing by the company ultimately,
17:53 Speaker 00 which is either layer them, replace them, or do something else like that.
17:56 Harry Stebbings? You have, from one of your investors, you were very creative in the way that you dealt with an employee that didn't scale. How did you deal with them in this situation?
18:04 Speaker 00 I typically tried to find places for them in the company that would be still happy. You obviously also want to make sure that they save face and the change doesn't look like an obvious demotion. Sometimes there are ways to find the intersection of where they would be happy and productive and where the org really needs to be. I think you can also be too hasty instead of letting that person go or replacing them. And instead, there are some ways to find a place for them in the organization that would be happy for a longer period of time.
18:34 Harry Stebbings? Amjad, what are the biggest mistakes you've made in hiring? I think when you're young, it's easy to fall for logos. And you look at people's CVs and go, yes, they've worked at Salesforce, they've worked at X, TIC. When you think about your biggest hiring mistakes, what have they been?
18:47 Speaker 00 I give so much credence to the misfit. And we've had such a good luck with the misfit. The early days of Rappler, I was the only computer science grad up until 10, 12 people, maybe. All the hackers at the company were dropouts and English majors and poets and all sorts of misfits that got into programming semi randomly.
19:05 Harry Stebbings? Not a mistake?
19:06 Speaker 00 I'm not saying that's a mistake. I'm saying that my bias to the misfit sometimes becomes pathological. I find misfits that I know are creative and good, but they have some personality flaw. And I try to make it work at the expense of other people on the team. It ends up wreaking some havoc sometimes. Maybe I stick with misfits too long and really try to make them work. One of my, I would say, special abilities is to be able to manage misfits. But it's not an ability that everyone can do and they can have. A negative effect on the company, even if they're creative. The usual sort of engineering manager rather have a normal engineer who is a team player than a sort of hostile, toxic engineer that was like a 10x engineer.
19:51 Harry Stebbings? A misfit scale, it's a great culture to have early. There are 75 people now. When you're 400 people, 500 people, does the misfit culture actually scale with process, with HR, with compliance, with approvals, with company-wide culture? Can you scale and still have misfits?
20:06 Speaker 00 Guess I'm dealing with that right now, so I can get back to you. I would love to think you can. I think that there's a way of doing that, but the history of companies showed Wozniak was marginalized as Apple grew and he's like a total misfit, still is. But he stayed there for a long while. He was working on the Apple II even when the Mac was the thing and he continued to contribute and things like that. Probably some ways of making it work. However, I will submit that you can't build a company made entirely of misfits that scale.
20:37 Harry Stebbings? Yeah, it's been scaling. I wouldn't talk about scaling through time because the world seems to be accelerating a little bit faster than ever. Honestly, Amjad, and I'd like to just focus on a little bit of context first. Specifically related like software development. How did making software get progressively easier over the last century? And by how much? Just set the scene in terms of developments and by how much?
20:58 Speaker 00 So you go back to the early days of computing and the way to program a computer was to directly interact with machine code. So that's literally zeros and ones. And then we had some ways of programming computers that were a little easier, like punch cards. You're still typing in machine code was a little easier. The biggest jump we had at the time, which was like probably 10 to 100x improvement, which was assembly code. It just created the software industry as we know it, starting with the assembly and the assembler. And then you had the first innings of programming languages and C was the first time you had. And again, now we think of C as low level, but at the time it was the highest level thing. The sort of haughty assembly programmers would look down and C programmers, like people look down now on Python programmers,
21:43 Speaker 00 for example, but C was another 10x jump because C now you had the concept of. Subroutines and loops and code you can really reason about in the same way like a human kind of thinks, whereas the assembly is more related to the machine. You're increasingly going away from working on the machine, reasoning in the machine, towards something that more resembles a human narrative and the way humans think about abstract objects in the world. So C, I would say, were another 10x improvement in productivity. And then the next big improvement was the scripting languages. So C was, it was like a typed language. You had to think about the types of the values and the objects you have in the system.
22:24 Speaker 00 But then you go from C to something like Ruby, Python, JavaScript, that era that started in the late 90s was that actually we want languages that are very flexible. You don't have to think about types. You don't have to design the entire program from scratch. You can just start typing and it's almost like jazz or improv. You're thinking as you're typing and as you're coding. And arguably, that was another 10x improvement. But then we had a bit of a stagnant period for maybe 10, 15 years. The next 10x improvement wasn't a language. So up until now, we had all these 10x improvements that I think is multiple orders of magnitude. Let's say a thousand x improvement in productivity since then. The next one was not a language. I think it was tapped out on how much languages could actually make you more productive.
23:09 Speaker 00 I would say the next era was open source and open source packages and sharing of packages. In pre-GitHub era, pre-open source, every programmer in the world had to write the same functions all the time. Like, we're all writing the same sorting functions and the same sort of stuff. And now we had this way of sharing code, not just within companies, but just globally. And I would say that was another 10x, perhaps more, maybe 100x improvement in productivity. You had a college student like Zuck build a site that reached billions of people because he used PHP and MySQL and a bunch of libraries that were all written for him. He didn't have to write all that stuff. Actually, since then, we haven't had a big jump in productivity.
23:50 Speaker 00 My prediction is we are at the start of a new sort of S-curve in productivity growth.
23:56 Harry Stebbings? Why do you think we're at the new start now? I love Marc Andreessen. Statement that there's no such thing as a bad idea, only the bad time. And it's timing is everything I've learned in investing. Why is now the time? Because everyone always says now is the time. Why is now the time?
24:09 Speaker 00 We don't have to speculate. We actually can look at the results. Andrej Karpath was the head of AI Tesla, built the self-driving team there. He now, I think, back at OpenAI. A few months ago, he tweeted that AI is writing eighty percent of his code today. Eighty percent of his code is written by a machine. That is unprecedented. On Raplet, we see that thirty or fifty to fifty percent of code for Ghost Rider are AI. Ghost Rider users is written by the AI. Ghost Rider users report that tasks sometimes are cut in half in terms of how much time they needed. There was a study actually done on Copilot users, GitHub's Copilot, that showed that programmers are fifty-five percent more productive. Okay, this is not a ten X, but it is a start of something.
24:53 Harry Stebbings? Where do you think that is in ten years? I saw a similar statement, which was GitHub's CEO said that forty percent of their code today for the whole company was AI-generated. Where is that in ten years? Is there an increasing speed of development? Do you see what I mean? Is the cadence of development increasing with time?
25:08 Speaker 00 There are two ways in which large language models are going to change software. So one is the AI-assisted development. A Copilot is leading in the space. I think we're like a fast follower. Perhaps we're going to exceed them in the future. But we are, Rapid Ghost Rider is another sort of AI-assisted development. Actually, by the time the episode comes out, we would have come out with Ghost Rider Chat. Imagine ChatGPT embedded in your code, knows everything about your code, can answer questions about your code, really starts to feel like another pair programmer, human that's sitting there and helping you. That's one track of ways that it's going to help us become better software developers. But there's another way which large language models can help us make better software and make more software. They are in themselves, software.
25:52 Speaker 00 Every large language model is a function, essentially. You give it input, it takes output. And that function is programmable in English, what we call prompting. And you can make it do whatever you want it to do. Crawling a website, scraping a website and getting useful information out of that. We have a lot of libraries and ways of doing it, but it's still a difficult task. It's at least a many hours task, sometimes like many weeks. GPT three can extract any type of information, even in a structured fashion from any website. That's how Bing search is in, that's how Niva perplexity, all the new search startups are done. So instead of spending weeks writing a parser, you can just plug in a large language model that's trained to parse or that's prompted to parse, and you just saved hours of programming.
26:35 Speaker 00 So not only is it helping us program, it's actually replacing pieces of software. And it's going to become a core piece of software in the like function call graph of software.
26:46 Harry Stebbings? You said it will allow programmers to operate at a higher level than mere code. This is my question, when we reduce so much of the workload of programmers with the automation many respects. What do they do then? What does a higher level mean?
26:58 Speaker 00 So the higher level means that you focus on the customer. It's crazy to think, but most of programming today is really still trying to appease the machine. You're dealing with the issues with the libraries, you're writing library code, you're writing meta code in order to manage your workflow. But the actual time spent on business logic is probably like maybe fifteen, twenty percent of your day to day coding, which is absurd. So you take that fifteen, twenty percent and that becomes the hundred percent, maybe ninety five percent.
27:31 Harry Stebbings? Does it slim down your engineering team significantly?
27:33 Speaker 00 Yes, yes, but that doesn't mean software engineers go out of work. It just means that smaller software engineering companies will actually be able to have a lot more impact. But I think you would need way less engineers. You asked me about the ten year prediction. I think one person would be worth a hundred engineers. One good engineer in ten years would be as productive as a hundred engineers today.
27:52 Harry Stebbings? Why can the automation layer not solve business logic layer? If it solves, as you said, a lot of the traditional infrastructure layer work, why can it not abstract itself one higher and go business logic?
28:02 Speaker 00 I think that's an AGI complete problem. What AGI complete is basically you would need an AGI in order to do that. Your prediction might be that AGI will be here in ten years. Sam Altman in OpenAI thinks that. But then after that, the world changes in a fundamental way. So it's called the singularity point because. You can't really predict what happens after that. But ultimately, if there's no AGI, and I think it's still a low chance that we're going to get AGI in 10 years, then logic is fundamentally creative activity and fundamentally novel activity that it would be hard for them to entirely do that. Because it would go out and have to understand customer needs and perspectives and have to have some way of having good judgment about the world.
28:44 Speaker 00 It is like all these fuzzy things that we don't know how to program today.
28:48 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask, I'm an economist, which is always dangerous. Never trust a VC who's an arms share economist, terrible trade. But when you look at simple demand and supply theory, when you actually allow the world to create a code and when you create this excess within developer time, you have an excess of supply. Will we see the price and the real wages of developers go down as a result?
29:08 Speaker 00 Probably. I think there are developers today that are commanding insane amount of salaries while actually working very little. It goes to what we talked about, the value of hard work and all that. The idea that you can go coast at big tech and still be a millionaire, I think it's absurd and I think that will go away. I think that's just the effect of an inefficient market, right? And perhaps a zero interest rate market. But, but I think that was an unnatural thing that happened. In that regard, yes, maybe the average developer salary would go down. But I think the most creative, most hardworking developers will actually be able to earn a lot more.
29:46 Harry Stebbings? Because you value their creativity, but why is that? I'm not that logic for me.
29:49 Speaker 00 Because their leverage will be huge. John Carmack, one of the best software engineers in the world, he made Doom. He worked on VR and now he's working on AI. He's still limited by how fast he types, which is like a crazy thought, right? If he's not, because ultimately you have to type the code out, right? If the AI is actually better at typing the code out and he's actually manipulating things at a higher level abstraction and he's talking to not just one or two, maybe 10, 100 AIs doing work for him, he's going to have an insanely higher leverage on the world. And so I think the best, most creative people will have a lot of the Work automated for them. They wouldn't have to type a unit test anymore. The AI would do that, for example.
30:34 Speaker 00 And so a lot of their time is spent just doing more things. And think about Elon, right? Elon is starting companies left and right. That's probably not the end of it. He'll probably start more companies in the future. Part of the reason is because he's operating at a much higher level because he's built a set of very competent people around him. They follow him from one company to another, whether it's like on the finance and legal side, or it's on the sort of engineering side. A lot of that could be AI and could be automatable. So we can see more Elon Musk type people that are engineers. Because once you abstract the kind of low level work, you can do more and more things. You can start more things and do more things.
31:14 Harry Stebbings? Amjad, when you look ahead, I see the green shoots. I see the creativity. I see the enablement. What does concern you?
31:21 Speaker 00 Wealth inequality will grow a lot.
31:23 Harry Stebbings? How so?
31:24 Speaker 00 Because people look at Instagram or WhatsApp as these outlier companies that were able to achieve massive valuations with very little people. And I don't think it's going to be an outlier in the future. I think we're going to see a lot of companies, five, 10 people, that is going to have massive impact, probably be valued in the billions of dollars. It's going to create a new crop of millionaires and billionaires in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. And these people are going to have more and more power in the world. And I think that will create more envy. I think humans will just continue to get richer, but I think wealth inequality is concerning, not because it means that some people are getting the short end of it. Sometimes that happens, but I don't think it happens in technology. I think what happens just creates more envy because people think they look at rich people and they think, oh, you must have robbed someone to get there.
32:08 Speaker 00 That's how politicians are going to frame it as well. And when you hear Elizabeth Warren talk about rich people, they talk about it as if they're thieves.
32:16 Harry Stebbings? You can continue to see such wealth inequality. There is only so long before the mass populace will put up.
32:21 Speaker 00 Exactly.
32:22 Harry Stebbings? A one with 250 billion. I think there is a case for the kind of storming of the gates.
32:27 Speaker 00 I think rich people will get more and more hated, and I think it's going to create more division that way. I think politicians will jump on that and will try to gain from that. Maybe it will lead to violence. Obviously, I hope not, but maybe what you're. Saying Storm the Gate could actually literally quite happen, people on the streets and all of that. So I think wealth and quality is something to worry about, that's for sure.
32:46 Harry Stebbings? Do you not worry also about knowledge inequality? And what I mean by this is, we talk about all of this, we can talk about ChatGPT as an infrastructure layer and the applications you can build on top and all of this, which actually is very base level knowledge bluntly in this space, but it's ninety nine point nine percent higher than anyone else in society.
33:01 Speaker 00 I actually think that ChatGPT probably added multiple IQ points to a lot of people. So I actually think that AI is equalizer in terms of intelligence. You have people who don't have access to the same education and now you can have an AI tutor that is everywhere, that works the same for everyone. So I actually think that the knowledge gap will shrink and the education gap will shrink and even the intelligence gap will shrink. So all those are good things, but nonetheless, I think the outcomes will be radically different. That's just because it's a free system and free systems tend to follow power law. Like even in nature, anytime you see free unrestricted system, you basically have this problem where the winner takes all, right? As as a venture capitalist, like the power law is almost like a law of nature.
33:44 Harry Stebbings? You mentioned the demonization of these very powerful and successful figures. I'm intrigued, you tweeted the other day about Zuck and Zuck's priorities shifting from the metaverse to AI and the TikTok threat. What would you do if you were Zuck and how do you think about this reshifting of priorities?
33:59 Speaker 00 I think that's absolutely the right thing to do for Zuck. I think that metaverse bet is not fundamentally misguided. I think it's pretty clear to me that at some point we're gonna have photorealistic technology, whatever it is, whether it's AR, VR or what have you. It'd be great if you and I were actually sitting in the same room or seemingly sitting in the same room. That's obviously true. I think they underestimated maybe how much time it's gonna take and they probably overestimated how much free cash in the world is gonna be to continue to invest. On the other hand, AI absolutely clearly has traction and absolutely clearly has happened. It would make total rational sense to kind of shift some resources to invest more in AI.
34:39 Harry Stebbings? Speaking of kind of investing more in AI, I think one concern that the US has is China and China's ability. I thought it was actually quite hilarious bluntly when you saw the shooting down of the China. Balloon and now causing such controversy. And then you look at the app store and see their three top placed consumer apps. And I'm like, we're sucking data from three hundred and twenty million phones, but you're right, we should shoot down a balloon. And be worried about. My question to you is, how do you feel from a security standpoint about Chinese domination US consumer apps?
35:07 Speaker 00 Look, I moved to the US because I like sort of Western values of freedom and democracy and individuals. The Chinese Communist Party embodies none of that. It's pretty obvious, they say they don't like individualism. They're clearly at odds with our values. But part of our values is free market and free competition. And so shutting them down just because we don't agree with them is also bad. And corrosive to future investors and future sort of countries and other players all over the world that want to invest in the US. We need evidence that they're actually doing something bad. But if we don't have that evidence, I would think it's government overreach to go and try to ban them.
35:44 Harry Stebbings? The evidence that they're doing something bad is actually just roosting their company infrastructure. And which is all Chinese companies have the right and are required to share data with Chinese government upon request.
35:56 Speaker 00 Do we have actual evidence that data on US citizens is actually like making it some way to the CCP?
36:02 Harry Stebbings? That doesn't matter, they have the right to request it. If they have the right to request it, should we not have the right to ban it to prevent that? Because as I said, we are willed wherever they say, yes, I want it.
36:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, I'm a little conflicted on that because the Twitter files just showed that there's incredible US government collusion with US social media companies as well.
36:21 Harry Stebbings? But at least the value alignment is there, like you believe in individualism, you believe in meritocracy, hopefully. Do you see what I mean?
36:29 Speaker 00 I see what you mean, certainly. But don't you think that we need to at least give some weight to the idea that we want our markets open to foreigners to compete in?
36:39 Harry Stebbings? One hundred percent, but not if it goes back to a central governing body that fundamentally has disparate values to what makes us human.
36:47 Speaker 00 Yeah, I would agree with that, but there's a lot of room. If you were to make that law, how would you actually make it law? What kind of value?
36:54 Harry Stebbings? You would ban TikTok and you would ban Chinese apps.
36:56 Speaker 00 Right, you're basically, you just signal out China. What about Singapore? So Singapore is very much a top down and it's somewhat authoritarian, but actually they're a good ally of the US. People like to live there as well. Do you ban Singapore Singaporean apps? So it's defining those values clearly to make it into law, I think it's going to be tricky.
37:16 Harry Stebbings? I agree with you. There's a scale of how far is wrong, just a little bit wrong or very wrong. Well, I get you that, but do you think TikTok will be banned?
37:23 Speaker 00 I think there's going to be increasing pressure on them to move more of their operations to the US. Obviously, they use Oracle data centers now. Maybe there's going to be more pressure to spring up more firewalls there. I think maybe there's more pressure for more US-based companies, maybe investors in the US have to own more of the company than buy dance. I think things like that will happen just with the increased pressure. And I think TikTok will have to become more transparent because right now they're not very transparent. They use every growth hack. It's a very slimy app in that way. But I think they'll just have to react to the sort of public pressure on them. And I think they might be able to do a good job and save it off and give the US government, US people,
38:06 Speaker 00 some assurances that they're not collecting data and sharing with the CCP. Banning them outright, I don't see that happening unless there's a full Republican government and political will.
38:17 Harry Stebbings? Also, actually, to be fair, it powers a lot of people's primary earnings now. It is such a driver for both small business and individual creators than for the US economy. I think there'd be a massive outcry in that way. I want to move into my favorite, which is a quick fire round, my friend. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?
38:33 Speaker 00 Yeah, let's do it.
38:34 Harry Stebbings? What are you most optimistic for when you look forward? We've spoken about concerns. What are you most optimistic for?
38:39 Speaker 00 Equality of access, the ability for anyone in the world to participate in the software economy is just going to be huge.
38:45 Harry Stebbings? How did having children change how you think and operate?
38:49 Speaker 00 You become a lot more future oriented. You actually worry a lot more about the world.
38:53 Harry Stebbings? Do startups still do best when in SF?
38:56 Speaker 00 Yes.
38:56 Harry Stebbings? Why?
38:57 Speaker 00 There's something in the air. I don't know what it is, but there's this optimism, this feeling. I don't know what it is, but it is intangible. Some kind of community is important. I think New York has a lot more of it today. I think you can find it somewhere else, but community is important.
39:11 Harry Stebbings? What's the one word that will be on your tombstone? So mine is persistent.
39:15 Speaker 00 Win. And I don't mean that that I'm like consistently winning, but I consistently try to win. And I think it's a good value to have to try to win, to win as sort of a command.
39:24 Harry Stebbings? If you could be CEO of one other company. Company for a day, what would it be and why that company?
39:29 Speaker 00 I would want to say a company that's so different, just to experience something so radically different, like a frigging insurance company or something like that. Just to be able to know what happens in parts of industry that I know nothing about. Something super boring, like an insurance company.
39:44 Harry Stebbings? Amjad, CEO of Pest Control Limited.
39:49 Harry Stebbings? We can make it happen, my friend. What do you believe that many disagree with?
39:52 Speaker 00 I probably said a lot of things on this podcast that many will disagree with. Maybe the spiritual malaise, but that's more in the ether today. I think Bitcoin is the future reserve currency of the world.
40:03 Harry Stebbings? Okay, I'm back there.
40:04 Speaker 00 I think if you play out the game theory of how played out, reserve currencies have played out in the world. Now, a lot of people know that the problem with fiat currencies and just the problem with creating money out of thin air. There's going to be some kind of return to a commodity pegged money. You could return to gold, but gold has all these problems with it, like not being able to move it easily. I think that rational, long-term thing that will happen, and it might not happen in our lives, but ultimately humanity will discover that there's only one commodity with all the values we'd want for money to create on top of it, a lot of different national currencies, and that's going to be Bitcoin.
40:42 Harry Stebbings? Amjad, if you could tell your 24-year-old self one thing, coming to the US with nothing but credit card debt, didn't sell enough of those BB guns, my friend, what would it be that you would tell yourself?
40:53 Speaker 00 Not to sacrifice health and maybe friendship a lot. I think I was so driven that I'm paying down a lot of sort of health debt and maybe reconnecting with friends now and things like that. I'm not going to word totally healthy, but there's some, just getting fit and getting back into a good life habits and all of that has been a lot of work. And so I've also neglected some relationships and, I don't know, it's almost like, you know the tweet recently by Mr. Wonderful? What's his name?
41:20 Harry Stebbings? Yeah, no, I know exactly on short time, what he said about wife and dog.
41:24 Speaker 00 Yeah, so like work, be so dedicated to success that you could lose your wife and mother and dog in something like that. And then after you achieve freedom, you can do whatever you want. There's some way to steel man his tweet, people got really. Angry at it, even people in Silicon Valley and entrepreneurs. But there's a way to steel man that is that like you can actually take tremendous in the same way you can take debt, tech debt, you can take tremendous amount of life debt in order to be successful. And I've certainly took that. Now, the question is like, could I have not taken that? Obviously, nothing irreversible. I wish I'd spend a little more time with my mom before she passed away. Maybe I would tell myself to like, take life a little bit more seriously.
42:01 Harry Stebbings? I totally get you. The joys of hindsight. So the final one, my friend. 2028, so five years' time, say. Where's Replit then?
42:08 Speaker 00 There's all sorts of ways that you could answer that. Obviously, financial company, all of that. But I would focus on impact. Want like a kid in rural Jordan to be able to have started a startup or successful business on Replit. I want people anywhere in the world to be able to come to Replit, teach themselves how to code, go do a few bounties and generate some income, and then start a startup and put it up in our App Store community and start generating income from that. Maybe start growing it. And I really want that opportunity to be available for in the world. I want Replit to be a full stack service from your first line of code, to your first app, to your first company, to your first dollar.
42:47 Harry Stebbings? I'm done. I've loved this. I've pushed you to the edges. I've been harder than I normally am. Normally, I'm British and I'm like, ah, whatever, just let it go. I'm like, no, we're getting answers. Thank you so much for being so great, my friend, and I really enjoyed the chat.
42:59 Speaker 00 Thank you. I appreciate it.
43:02 Harry Stebbings? What a rock star, and I had so much fun with that one. If you want to see more from us, of course, you can by searching for 20VC on YouTube or going to 20vc.com. I always love to hear your thoughts on the show. Let me know on Twitter, at Harry Stebbings. But before we leave you today, before every show we do, we do 10 references with 10 friends or investors of the guest. That leads to a lot of data and information. All of that data and information needs to be stored in one single location that is shareable, searchable, and really great to work with. And that's why I love Coda. It's been a game changer for us, bringing all of our research and cool notes together in one single place, meaning instant collaboration among all of our team and no more blockages. If you're ready to join the efficiency revolution with Coda,
43:46 Harry Stebbings? Take advantage of this special limited time offer just for startups. Sign up today at coda.io/20vc and get a thousand dollar startup credit on your first statement. That's coda.io/20vc to sign up and get a startup credit of a thousand dollars. And speaking of tools we cannot live without, you probably know Brex. Brex was the first corporate card for startups, but Brex has grown a lot since then to scale up, right along with its customers. Now 90% of Y Combinator grads trust Brex as their all-in-one financial stack. I get to speak to founders all day and I know how important having the right financial stack is to their success. With Brex, you get fast access to high-yield business accounts, high-limit cards,
44:30 Harry Stebbings? and rewards like cash back and billboards to fuel your growth. Beyond that, Brex has the venture debt, financial modeling, and spend management solutions you need to run your startup globally and well. So are you ready to make your future CFO proud? Learn more at brex.com/20vc. That's brex.com/20vc. And finally, if Coder and Brex make your team work more efficiently, Intercom makes modern customer service software that really redefines how businesses support their customers. And their platform connects businesses directly to customers using powerful messaging and automation. Intercom enables teams to scale support without investing more resources, leading to happier customers and more efficient support teams.
45:15 Harry Stebbings? And Intercom is used to send over 500 million messages per month and enables interactions with over 600 million monthly active end users, trusted by customer service teams at more than 25,000 global organizations, including Atlassian, Amazon, and Lyft Business. Check out this amazing offer. Eligible startups get advanced Intercom features at a 95% discount. So do not miss out. Head over to intercom.com/20vc to find out more. As always, I so appreciate all your support and we have an incredible episode with founder and CEO of Shopify on the show on Monday, Toby Lutka.
Previous 20Product: Shopify's VP Product on Why the Founder is Always the Head of Product, What Makes Truly Special Product Managers, Why The Majority of Product Managers Need to Change, Why Top-Down Decision-Making in Product is Good & How Shopify Will Be Bigger Next 20VC: SVB: What Happened? What Happens Now? Will Depositors Have Deposits Guaranteed? How Long Will It Take? Will There Be a Buyer? Who is the Most Likely Buyer? What is the Best and Worst Outcome? Page updated September 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
