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

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. I'm so glad to have you. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited. I've been listening to the show recently, so happy to be here. I'd like to start with a question about kind of you, right? Like, in a reference 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 than Repli.

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. I wonder how many people still know what Atari is. Yeah, maybe we have to actually describe what an Atari is. But here's a bit from history. Steve Jobs worked at Atari. I was like the Silicon Valley premier company for computers. And so I just was captivated 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 take us to. And it's like a really big place where they have all sorts of new computers, new devices, CD-ROMs, whatever. And I bought a CD-ROM and a collection of CDs and I went home and I didn't know what's in them. One of them was like a fax program, whatever. I just bought a CD's. 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 number, like five plus blank equals six. And it's like one. If he gets it right, he gets the flaws. he gets the wrong he gets a boo and it worked out so well he now works at replit so so i taught him math early on that's very early recruiting 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 uh i got really into counter-strike and i used to go to these land 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 you would 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 which computer you're in 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

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 build the games with it.

where you've been most surprised by what this unleash of early creativity has enabled some of the medical things were really interesting i 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 um rare eye disease and required her 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 very 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 sales people you know there's a role in these organizations that I recently learned about is RevOps, is those people 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 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 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 to hate us a little bit but ceos that feel disempowered because they've delegated a lot of things they don't have as much input on the on the process So, you know, we have CEOs that finally feel unleashed, like they have Replit and 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 why can't you do that in two weeks if I can do it in two days? So that's another interesting one. 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 Reed knows, I hadn't programmed since freshman year CS, so a long time ago. My coworker Parth sent me a Replit login a few months ago, and he's like, just play around. And literally within 20 minutes, I had built an app. And because I was so excited and because I could do it right away, it's just so easy to get onboarded.

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 Replit 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 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? Yeah. Well, I've learned through my times in the Valley is not to fight the hype wars. Sure. Sure. Like I remember when cloud was controversial, a lot of people hated cloud, but 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 like it was coined by andrew karpathy 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 gets 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. 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 be in a creative space, right? A lot of coding is minutiae. 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. 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 that's the history of programming. Like when Grace Hopper, the inventor of the compiler in the 1950s invented the compiler 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 karpathy 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 and focus on the more creative things. Now, there's 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

when they think of AI, they think of ChatGPT. And so when I'm talking about my friends who are not technical or not in Silicon Valley, 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? 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 a founding engineer at Code Academy. We taught millions of people how to code. And I'd like to help governments now. We did a deal with the governments out of 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 rep experience was we produced LinkedIn. Yes, I saw that. 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 both the ai revolution does and also what replit does is expand the zone of your imagination yes about what's doable walk us through kind of like like what's it 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 manual right but like what kind of imagination should people bring with them to start learning Replit and bringing an idea to reality?

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 it. We talk to a lot of users that sign up to Replit and then sit there for a little bit and then leave. And we're like, what happened? And it's like, I just didn't know what to type in there. And of course, in retrospect, us living in tech, 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. And once, once that clicks, it's pretty amazing. 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 do we tell them about it? But 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. 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- I was just thinking that. There's so many things. You're like, ah, just organize my camp schedule. 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 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. Do you know sort of who is the typical Replit user and what kinds of things are they building already?

Okay, great. What if you turned 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'm at my favorite cafe. I added more colors, different fonts, and harder levels. That's the best thing. People can code on their phones right now, which is amazing. Exactly. What other features should I add?

That's fantastic. And we didn't just select it because she added it to her bio. We first started working on the phone, people said we're just like crazy. Because back then, there was no AI. and we had to build a lot of things to make coding on the phone a little bit easier. 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. So one of the things that as you dig into AI, it becomes, 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 right you know etc it might be fun as a one-off thing but that kind of thing what is as we're in the game dynamics the next level of compute thinking right because it's like okay how does this work within the operational envelope of like ai enabling it being able to figure out what kind interface elements right 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 right you know helping people that kind

of compute thinking yeah i mean there are two aspects of this one is a strategy you want to be

Once you reach scale, you actually have negotiation advantages. 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 allows you to get to scale quickly,

So 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 you need a combination of that individual creativity, imagination, broadened imagination drive, but also standardization for work processes.

It's one of the reasons why the classic industrialization, I felt this form and then I hand it for you, and da-da-da-da as we were 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?

so it's like it's 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 um 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

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 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. Look, similar to what Grace Hopper said, you know, 75 years ago, she said, specialists will exist, but we want this technology to be... 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 and computers don't need to learn how to code. It's going to be a huge cost on them. It's going to 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 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 exists. We need them. If we're sending people to the moon, I don't want them to be on a vibe coded computer, but for the vast majority of applications, I think vibe coders will be able to make them. Now, do 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. What do you think is the temperament that a coder needs? Basic thing, like the ability to sit in front of the computer for 12 hours sure 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 the computer with diet coach 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 visual things. Some people want to work with other people all the time. But if you're someone who's comfortable, like I was, and I am, I am like totally, like my wife's not the same. Like I have an insane ability to be alone. Like I can be alone for a year, but other people can.

And you know, that's fine. We should be okay with people of different temperaments. 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. They'll find other jobs. Soft skills are important. Exactly, soft skills are important. Well, so I feel like we're in this time where some of us see Replit 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, what do you say to them? 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. 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 Rychkowski wrote, for example, Eliezer Rychkowski, 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 our bottlenecks that are not just intelligence and the regulatory bottlenecks that are all sorts of things. So without getting too deep into that, I think some of it, we just have to counter intellectually.

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 D.C. 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 us that doesn't allow the U.S. to be competitive. And so there's an aspect of it that I think we really need to to to to battle. uh there are aspects of it that i think is on the creative art film front sure 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 love reading mid-century sci-fi because it's a lot more optimistic something 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 kids. These are just everyday concerns that people have that aren't sort of fantastical that maybe are sort of based in reality. 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 humans tend to take the 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 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. I came to the U.S. none of my friends smoked and I just felt like an outcast and I stopped smoking. I see society is like, you know- It's 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. Yes, culture. Culture. I think religion used to play a role as well. And I don't know whether it will in the future or not, but like government is such a blunt instrument. You can't do everything. So I think it's leadership. It is 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 those are fraud as well. But like, if someone is saying to you, it's like, I'm spending all my time talking to sheep sheep, hey man, that's not really healthy, you know? So I think a lot of it is about culture and society. Well, I do think that like, there's like two points that I think are very important. One is in the friends point, completely agree. Part of the reason why like with, you know, inflections pie, you know, you kind of engage, you're my best friend. It's like, no, no, no, no, I'm your companion. I'm here to help you. Have you talked to your friend, Amjad, recently? What's the light with him?

Or you catch up. And I think that helping, especially for young people, where they might be encountering difficulty. 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 was waiting for all year to talk to you, et cetera. It's like, no, it's that thing of 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.

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 anything that is illusory that way is actually, in fact, destructive. that's why it's causing psychosis and things like that like uh you know there's uh high profile cases uh where uh uh people have psychotic breaks because they have like delusions of grandeur and things like that and chat gpt is like reinforcing that and that's like really bad and i think it's incumbent on the uh labs as well to like start a program pushback into these machines as well right 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

yeah 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 right help 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 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 they're be painful for me but i'm going to 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 time. 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. As you know, you live in AI nativity. On the previous point briefly, like I say version that you said very articulately as advice to people on the YouTube comments that I unfortunately sometimes read.

Hey, be nice. People are, it's easy for you to say you're rich, right? And 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, or maybe it's a government thing. I'm not entirely sure, but I think there's a responsibility to do that because 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, 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, 100 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're a programmer have technical ability go really deep go read the papers go build a fundamental understanding of how LLMs work maybe even build an LLM yourself like Karpathy 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 if you don't um i would say

using tools like replet to build lm experiences so kind of think about ideas for how lms could like improve your job and go try your hand uh 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 did when I just committed our company to AI is I went and followed all these 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 by the way, TikTok can be certainly destructive. 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'll 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. And so this next question, Reid, I do want you to weigh in on it.

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 and 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 kind of 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, et cetera. 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, et cetera.

And if you're going up against blitzscalers, it's very hard to succeed without also blitzscaling because the blitzscaling will set the market. It may blow up, but we'll set the market and if it blows up, it'll probably blow you up with the market. like the scooter market yes exactly and it doesn't matter that you were kind of you know minding your operating margins and you know it just it just gets swamped and so so you have to look at what's happening in the market you have to look at what happened with competition there are definitely opportunities where you can build more like you know like one of the ones from the graylock portfolios roblox where like for many years it's kind of like yeah out in the wilderness and then boom all of a sudden it's the amazing new thing and you can build towards that then 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's recognizing it. And so that's a little bit of kind of the reason like with Monus AI, we can say, hey, we can actually take some time to think about exactly 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. 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 there's a number of markets where that speed and that speed to revenue scale. By the way, the speed to revenue scale is not just revenue feud, 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 you have to make a kind of strategic decision. by the way you may have to change your decision as you're going 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 so they see you being successful and all of a sudden that becomes the hot industry and so you have to change your stance yes and that's the other thing that's what happened with us right like you know it's like you know replet agent was kind of the first vibe coding thing that anyone could use and suddenly everyone poured into it.

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, maintain. I also think that the configurations of how business models come together will still actually get to different kinds of moats. Now we have speculation of what those moats are. are the moats only scale now are the moats brand are the moats network effects you know are the moats data now like in and it'll be in different combinations of different things in terms of you have to be okay with the uncertainty of yes and you're gonna and you're gonna be iterating through it and you should be thinking about what those moats 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 right as the moat and by the way network effects still very valuable right but they're changing and the shape and how they establish and what happens and so forth and that's that's that 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 right oh and by the way it's also reinvent your business model oh and by the way it's also reinvent what the moats are behind this and it's all of these kinds of different things. Like Google search doesn't have network effects from its search engine. It has scale effects that work, but it's AdWords is where the network of it. 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?

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 etc 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 i 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 i understand what people uh in in gaza are going through right now and i really care about that but i also think that um you know the the corporate world the market has has changed and that when you stand for something i think there's actually there's there's an effect where maybe you 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 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 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 going to come and try to burn us at the stake. And so it's important for us to kind of take the role that we're playing seriously. Yeah, I completely agree.

And I think actually part of how you think of it is think of humanity first. And that's part of the principles, you know, alleviate suffering, economic enablement. And 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 member of society. That's right. Absolutely.

On that basis of frame, what are some of the really important things we should do as leaders in Silicon Valley and the tech industry to make sure that technology is spreading compassion too? 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 society. So what do we do to grow empathy, to grow compassion? What are some of the ideas that you might have kicked around on this? 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 Replit benefits when people's lives improves through that software that they're building 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, you know, 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?

Right. 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 allow you to create that that joint winning? 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?

You know, a book that I think is, 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. and like the human aspect of human stories um i am a strange loop by douglas hofsetter is is an amazing book it's partly about his a book about his wife dying and their kids and and how 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 it goes through vignettes about like girdles and completeness theorem or what that says about um 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 what is a question that you wish people would ask you more often? 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. Yeah. One, 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 you know i this is very fresh on my mind but i i took a uh demo a tour of a of a plane and i was so surprised that they got to full automation this is a tbm 960 a turboprop plane um 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 don't just don't want to use neural networks there's like too probabilistic to 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 so always our final question uh 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 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 grit 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 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 the tools 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? The technology is there, but the tools are not there just yet. So rewarding work, work that is more human, allows us to relate with one another more creatively and less siloing and less politics at work, but also the ability for anyone to generate ideas and build businesses. That's something I'd be really excited for. Yeah, Amjad, it's a great pleasure. We could have gone on for hours. Thanks for being here. Thank you for having me. Possible is produced by Pallet Media. It's hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reid Hoffman.

Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Tanasi Delos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmoor, Imozu, Trent Barboza, and Tafadzwa Niemorundwe. Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Sayida Sapieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Rallis. And a big thanks to Ben Kaznoka and the Village Global team, Philip Smith at Action House, Lorenzo Davis and Will Whiteley at Static, and Kaitlin Norod and the team at Replit.