How Replit Agent made $1M on day one (then $250M in a year)

Key Takeaway

When building a company, distinguish between execution businesses (competing in existing markets through superior processes) and market-creation businesses (inventing something entirely new). If you're creating something novel, pivot rapidly until you find product-market fit—it should feel like a landmine going off. If you're in an execution business, prepare for a long grind and focus relentlessly on building an exceptional team and processes to outcompete rivals. Know which game you're playing, then optimize accordingly.

Episode Overview

Amjad Masad, founder of Replit, shares the company's remarkable journey from $2.5 million to $250 million in annual revenue in just one year, and now approaching $1 billion. He candidly discusses the darkest moments—layoffs, team departures, and losing faith from investors—before Replit Agent's breakthrough launch created explosive product-market fit. The conversation explores the difference between push and pull in startups, market-creation versus execution businesses, and how AI is enabling solo entrepreneurs to build multi-million dollar companies.

Full Transcript

Transcript of How Replit Agent made $1M on day one (then $250M in a year) from My First Million. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

We went from 2.5 to $250 million in 1 year. Did you say 2.5 to what? To 250 in 1 year. Did you get audited? The first time you came on this podcast, Replit's revenue was like $3 million. I feel like I've heard that you guys are close to $500 million in annual revenue now. We're on our way to a billion this year. I'll just say that. He was deadlifting before it's cool. He likes sales before it's cool. You're you He's got range. My guy's got range.

The idea of like losing to some kind of a competitor This is like the worst feeling in the world. I'll call. I'll show up to their office. We'll do whatever we need, and we rarely lose deals. deals. deals. Are there any interesting trends that you're seeing in AI and on the Replit platform? platform? platform? for the first time because the making software is cheaper, you can actually create a multi-million dollar business, not have to raise venture, not have to grow the team a whole lot. Do you think that we are like 12 months or something like that away from like the world changing dramatically?

I just googled it. How many billionaires are under the age of 40? There's only 71. Really? Of all the people under 40, you are probably in the top 1,000 richest ever. You just made his day. Look at that smile. I'm having mixed feelings, Sean. Dude, so the first time you came on this podcast, I'm pretty sure Replit's revenue was like $3 million. $5 million. It was like something like that. Cuz by the way, this was not 10 years ago. This was like 2 years ago. Yep.

You guys are close to $500 million in annual revenue now. Is that I mean, blink twice if I'm if I'm in the right ballpark. We're on our way to a billion this year. I'll just say that. that. that. Oh, on their way to a billion. How could I have missed it? Off by $500 million. So, I do I'm unprofessional. I didn't I don't know the exact number. Say the exact jump of like I remember when when I invested it was something like two or three million bucks.

Yeah, and it stayed two or three million bucks for many for a few years. [clears throat] [clears throat] [clears throat] Uh as we were like navigating what to actually do, we went from 2.5 to 250 million dollars in 1 year. Uh, that was between 24 and 25. 2.5 million to 250 million million million in 1 year? Did you get audited? Uh, we did. We actually passed a PWC audit a couple months ago. months ago. months ago. Uh, so Uh, so Uh, so That's crazy. That's crazy.

That's crazy. And and by by the way, you know, we're gross margin positive, which is, you know, something that is rare in the industry but by a good amount uh as well. And we're very we're very precise in how we calculate uh run rate. When you grow from almost nothing to a billion dollars in revenue in 24 months, what type of like logis- There's like all these logistical questions I have. Um, like what type of relationship do you have to have with your bank? Like did you prepare your bank?

Were you like Bro, that's your question? How's your banking relationship? Dude, there's so many like logistical questions. Like for example, uh are you like what are you doing with that cash? And how are you managing spending it and investing it as fast as you're making it? Things like that. Like there's so many logistical questions around literally It's sort of like when uh Pablo Escobar was a drug dealer, he was saying like we can't get enough rubber bands for the money. Like we don't know where to like store the money.

Like there's these like logistical questions that I'm curious about. about. about. You know the theory for for one of the potential creators of Bitcoin is that he invented Bitcoin because he was making so much money he didn't know where to keep it. There's this uh story uh called the Mastermind about uh the this guy who I think grew up in uh Rhodesia and now it's in Zimbabwe and he was a hacker. He was a computer hacker and he invented a lot of encrypt- encrypted technology. Very well-known guy.

He up getting into criminal online activities, selling drugs online, one of the first to do that. And he generated so much cash, he actually had ships with billions of gold just in the international waters, just doing circles. Oh, wow. And so there's a lot Paul Le Roux, right? Paul Le Roux, Paul Le Roux, yeah. Paul Le Roux, and there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that he was potentially writing Bitcoin because it was like, "I don't know what what to do with this money." Um so we're not there yet, but uh How did Paul Le Roux make the money?

He was he created the first like delivery online drug store. Like do you remember Sean, like in the early dot com where like you would get spammy emails where it's like buy Viagra online? The early days as in yesterday? It still happens. Yesterday, early in the morning yesterday or today, yeah. I remember that. He like kind of pioneered that, is that right? I mean he was one of the the biggest guys. Like he had like like thousands of domain names. He was sending millions of emails a day.

He was basically one of the first spammers, like internet marketers, and the monetization engine was selling drugs. And now there are a lot of startups that are doing it, you know, quasi legally, where they have a lot of doc doctors that are sort of approving those prescriptions and things like that. But yeah, he did it fully illegally and was wanted by by the FBI and drug control and and DEA and all of that for for many, many years, and they caught him around the same year that Satoshi disappeared, around the same time actually that Satoshi disappeared.

Going from 2 million to now close to a billion in revenue, in revenue, in revenue, it's got to be a bit of an out-of-body experience for a founder. Walk us through like the interesting parts that are not like the game that's happening on the field, but maybe just of the founder experience. Like, "Dude, we had to figure this out. Dude, we didn't know this. I remember waking up and realizing the chart had jumped 10x whatever, you know. Give us some of that. We'll First of all, I I have such high expectations of myself and my team that at any given point whatever progress we made, the question is why haven't we made more?

If we're going You're like the Asian pet mom of the world. world. world. of of myself more than anyone else, which is I don't really recommend. It's a kind of a miserable way to live, but you know, it's it's sort of like I was like, of course we're going to make this much money. Of course the company's going to grow this much as it was always the plan. It was always in the cards. It was always the vision. I'm also naturally paranoid. And so I was fully expecting it to reverse at any given point.

And so it was like, how can we make sure this revenue is sticky? How can we go up market, go to the enterprise, make sure our customers are getting a great experience, make sure that things that they create is not slop, it is secure, it is we're we're creating trust not just in us, but like in in the whole space and that's this vibe coding things that's it's possible including doing podcast like this. It's not only possible, it's viable to build businesses. Uh and so the first reaction is is adrenaline and like let's get to work.

Like this is an opportunity. Like if we had sold or failed before we uh you before the breakout point, I would have been you know, probably depressed about it. But not as bad as you now have the wind in your back and if you fail, it is fully on you. You you kind of you've you've lost. Like it's almost like someone passing you the ball and there's no one else in front of the the basketball ring and you could dunk, you could do whatever you want and then and then you somehow do a two shot and fail.

Right. So, that's the feeling. It's incredible pressure pressure pressure from everyone, from the market, from even investors went from hey, you got to do a the layoff, you got to cut burn to go invest, put money to you know, it's like it's like if that if thrill of of of success only lasted like, you know, a week or two and then became sort of the reality of like how do you keep this motion going and how do you scale it? And and how do you scale it?

And the first thing that starts to break is people. When you have a supply and demand imbalance, companies start knocking on our door is like hey, we want to buy this product. Like our our employees are using it. Like how do we get an enterprise deal? And we're like yeah, we have one person who does three other things but also also doing sales they they're like trying to close deals as fast as they can. I was like okay, I've never done sales. Like how do you actually do sales?

But but there's something about the universe where these people land in your in your life at crucial points. Not always but but sometimes and we had we had a VP of sales that came to us at the at the moment when the company was was really at its darkest moment. We were about to do a layoff and and I'm sitting in this meeting room and I'm asking him like why do you want to join us? His name is Patrick Purvis. He he had previously was a VP of sales at ZoomInfo, exited, took took a couple years sabbatical, independently wealthy guy and I was like look, the company kind of sucks.

Like why do you want to come here? come here? come here? And And And You're like for my last interview question. question. question. Why? Why? Why? Um Um Um And he's like look, I spent the past few years reflecting. I want to do something meaningful and your mission of empowering people and democratizing software which seems one of the most important things to do. Uh it's like, "Okay, welcome to the team, but it's not it's not we don't have one of anyone for you to sell." All right, guys.

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So, you can get it right now. You can scan the QR code or click the link in the description. Now, back to the show. the show. the show. How grim did things get? How low was the bank balance or how many months did you have left? What was the darkest hour? You know, what as you call being that the Asian parent, I was also kind of financially responsible. And so, we never had like we never was like, "Oh, we're weeks away from not making payroll." So, when we did a layoff, it was more like about extending the runway.

Well, maybe maybe not runway, but like, you know, founder delusion Yes. Yes. Yes. takes people far and I think you have it more than anyone, right? Cuz you were like, like, like, 10 years you've been working on this thing, right? It wasn't like 10 months. You just kept going, soldiering forward. On our last podcast, I remember you said like, "I think if there's one thing I might be good at." Like you were just pretty humble about it, be like, "I think I guess reflecting like I can keep pushing the boulder up the hill." Yes.

for a long time. Like I just have high pain tolerance, I think. That seems like it's been helpful. So, maybe it's not the bank balance, but like did the did the doubts or the delusion or the is this ever going to happen? Yeah, I think the worst part about it is the the belief that your team have in you, your vision, your leadership. And when that goes away, you can see it in their eyes. And that is the most hurtful and depressing depressing feeling. And so, after we did the layoff, the layoff is a bubble-bursting event.

What did you scale down to? From where to where? So, we actually wasn't that big. It was like a third. So, we were like 120 went to now to 90 or something like that. And but, by the end, we were 60. By the end in like 3 months, we were 60. And so, we we lost 50% of our team, but most of it was voluntarily. And And the reason is because suddenly, you know, I've been for years getting in front of everyone and talking about this vision uh and and mission, and suddenly just sounded like lies and sounded like I'm I don't know what I'm doing.

And we had also at the same time moved our office from San Francisco to Foster City. We got a huge office. I like really knew that we were going to head our going to we were going to head our office and scale, but I was off off by a few months. So, we had already gotten this office. And so, the office was empty and cold and kind of dark. And so, every day I go to work and just like the mood is super dark. And I I know that at the moment I'm going to get to to my my desk, someone's going to walk over and go they're going to tell me they're quitting.

quitting. quitting. And so, every night I've like the whatever sleep I got was like, "Okay, who's going to quit the next day?" And it it just kept happening. And that was that was really draining. And for me to put on a face and tell everyone that things are going to be okay was incredibly hard. However, there were groups of people that were working on Replit Agent. Replit Agent is is a breakthrough product that we created. It actually created a breakthrough in the entire industry because this was Remember, this was before Claude code or anything came out.

We showed the world that it was possible to build end-to-end coding agents. And people inside that team had almost a secret. We're on the precipice of a of a breakthrough. We were all kind of dogfooding it and playing with it and having a lot of fun with it. So, whenever I go to the office, everything's depressing except this one room. We call it the war room. And I walk into the war room and the mood is intensely different. Everyone is yeah, super pumped. They know we have created something that's going to be super valuable.

So, I had this this night and day almost schizophrenic feeling of you know, large parts of the company of the business had totally lost faith in me and the company and then a small part that were totally engrossed on in the possibilities of of AI and what we were inventing. Sam, can I just say forget the numbers, man. What he just said was like the realest [ __ ] someone said on this podcast in a long time. The way you described that feeling as the founder when you walk into the to the office and your shit's like you don't have the hot thing right now.

And you've been telling everybody and you can see when they start to lose faith. I I've experienced what you just said. You just like described my childhood trauma as a founder. I didn't even realize I didn't even know till you said those words. I was like, I I have felt that. It's depressing when somebody emails you for like, "Hey, can we meet tomorrow?" You know you you know they're about to quit and you're like, "It just got harder." And I don't have it in me to convince them to stay.

Like, why would they stay? Why would they stay? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That thing you just described is so real. Yeah. And I just want to give you props cuz I don't think most people ever really talk about what that feels like. And now it's obviously it's great to talk about it now cuz like, you know, it didn't just end sadly. That's just sad. just sad. just sad. is is reminiscing in a more positive way about the failures and the everything that that goes wrong. But, the other one is you mentioned investors is just a broader industry broader industry broader industry um and uh you know, I remember my calendar, you know, emptying and I'm no longer invited to the hot parties.

Uh in in many ways when I go to one, it's like, "Oh, yeah, Repl.it. Oh, remember that thing, you know?" And you up to now? You're like, "Yeah, you're still at it." And our partners will were not including our logo anymore and uh our vendors removed our logo on But, that's dirty cuz it's like, you don't even have to You proactively changed your website. Why'd you do that? Why'd you scrub us? Uh and and it if it felt like, you know, a big a big part of my identity has been about Silicon Valley and it's about I've read everything I could get my hands on, every biography, and read about all the different figures from the biggest to the most obscure.

And I I just felt like the the weight of Silicon Valley on my shoulders because I was backed by the best as well. Like, Marc Andreessen, Paul Graham, uh you know, David Sacks, you know, all these people are on our cap table and I was like letting all of them down. So, So, so if this was a movie, there's a turning point, right? The montage begins. At some point, you wake up and you look at the dashboard, something starts to change. You start getting emails. You hear the the the the music picks up and suddenly things start to move.

What was the first move of that like of that that second act before we hit the the training montage? We still We launched uh Repl.it internally at Repl.it for employees outside of the core engineering group working on it. And the first time everyone tried it, I I was specially paying attention to non-engineers. Are they going to be able to because that was the mission. Are we going to enable them to to be actually successful using this? using this? using this? And you know Jeff, Jeff is our head of partner partnerships, Jeff Burke.

Uh he and I always think Jeff as like the prototypical potential customer. Cuz like he's a consulting background, he's super sharp. But he can't configure Python to save him his life, right? So he tried it and I remember put him pushing the feedback is like, "Oh, this is miserable. I failed. I couldn't like make the simple app." The first day, the next day, third day, then one day when he posted it was like, "Oh, I was able to make this thing." We're like, "Okay, we got it.

I think I think that the product is is ready right now." now." now." And it was around August in 2024 and the team felt they weren't ready. I was like, "We got to launch this. I don't care if it is semi-broken, if you get 50% of the time get amazing results, it's going to wow the world because it's a for the first time an agent can not fully can write the code, debug it, create a database for you and deploy to the cloud. It's never been done, even if it is in just like demo shape.

And I I was was was one of the habits that I picked up during this darkest hour is playing video games. I hadn't played When I came to the US, I was like a pro gamer back in Jordan. When I came to the US, I was like, "Okay, I'm going to focus. I'm going to be the Silicon Valley entrepreneur. I'm going to work really hard. I'm going to you know, I want to be be be uh I want to make a lot of money and I want to be successful." So I'm I just dropped all the hobbies that I had.

But I bought a Steam Deck because I just wanted something to take my mind off all the depressing stuff. They do this thing uh with uh with uh with in games it was called early preview, sort of like a beta, but but the intention is that you're getting a semi-broken thing, but you're expected to kind of give us feedback. I was like, okay, we're just going to release uh an early preview of the product and we're just going to call it that. We're going to say, "Hey, don't don't subscribe to this thing cuz it might be a buggy product.

If you already subscribed or you have you have you have you're you're okay with getting buggy software, join it." So, we in September 2024, I posted a video of me in the office shot on iPhone saying, "Hey, like AI coding is is amazing, generates a lot of code. But so far, you had to do all this other stuff. Today, for the first time, we're showing you that an AI agent can do the end-to-end thing." end-to-end thing." end-to-end thing." And there were few moments when this tweet started going viral.

One of them was Andre Karpathy, who is you know, head of AI at Tesla, early OpenAI, OpenAI, OpenAI, AI researcher, co-tweeted it and said, "This is the I feel the AGI moment." And so, that demo showed the industry luminaries what AI could do. Peop- People inside research firms like OpenAI and Anthropic reached out to us and told us, "We did not know our models are capable of doing that." And so, that moment was like, okay, we we have something here. And then, the revenue first day made like a million dollars of ARR.

Second day, 2 million dollars. Were you just like hitting hitting refresh constantly? constantly? constantly? Yeah, I'm I'm Tom must be on a call. He's been in his office all day. What's he doing here? Just Just Just but at the same time, we're just hustling to make the product better. So, basically in like 2 days, you made more revenue. Yes. You like beat you beat your your your uh your annual Yeah. growth. growth. growth. In 2 days. That's going to be a crazy feeling. feeling. feeling. You you know, I I've always heard from other entrepreneurs is that the feeling of product market fit is like stepping on a I don't know who said this.

It's like stepping on a land mine. And I I knew that we didn't have it for a long time. That's why we pivot pivot pivot pivot. And then that felt like stepping on a on a landmine. I was like, "Okay, we got it. Now we go from there." That same phrase Same, I don't know if you ever met him when you came to my office. There was this young guy who used to work out of our office. Furqan had basically like adopted these kids. They were They were on the East Coast.

They wanted to come to Silicon Valley. They didn't have money. He's like, "Here's some money." Yeah. They're like, "Is this an investment?" He's like, "No, this is money. You just have this in your account and you can sleep on my couch and you work out of my office and like get get going." And so these two young guys, they were probably 20 years old, 21 years old, they were working out of our office. And they had like they were trying to do an early version of like rent GPUs in the cloud.

So they realized these This was before the AI boom though. So like it was for machine learning or like you want to do like a just like some research maybe, but this was before everything kicked off. But they had seen that like all the crypto miners had all these GPUs that were unused. And so they had posted on a crypto mining subreddit and thousands of people showed up right away and were ready. There were calls all all the stuff. And then they were trying to get the demand side, but the demand wasn't there.

And I was like, "Hey, this is a great idea. Like in theory it's a great idea. Like why are you guys like pivoting? Like why are you guys worried about these other ideas?" And he goes, "When we did that first thing, it was like we stepped on a landmine. And so now I kind of know that's what's possible. So like yeah, all these little signals, I know they're not real signals." And I This kid's 20 21 years old and I'm supposed to like be mentoring him and I walked back to my desk being like, "I've never felt that." And I realized like I'd been doing startups for six seven years.

I had never felt what they were lucky enough to stumble into on the first day. And and you know, you don't even know what you're looking for. Had you never felt It's like love. It's like, "Am I in love? Maybe I'm in love. Maybe this is it." And then you feel it and you're like, "Oh, all that That other stuff wasn't that. This is the thing." And I feel like for entrepreneurs it's one of the hardest things. But I sort of feel almost bad to talk about that.

Not talk about it, but I don't think you should expect that because I think that most great companies have never had that. If you look at the subset of companies, most don't work, some work okay, a handful work a little bit better, and then a very small percentage are amazing. And even amongst the amazing ones, what they're describing, what you guys are describing, they don't feel that. Like, for example, we were talking about like Mars candy the other day. Like, that's been around for 150 years, and more likely than not, it was like, a grind, a grind.

This year was not a grind, it kind of did pretty good, but this year it was kind of a grind. You know what I mean? Like, there was never like this moment where it's like, we just grew to a billion in revenue from 2 million in 3, you know, in 24 months. you're right. That A, it doesn't happen right away, even for you, even though it happened super fast. It's like 10 years in. But there is a difference between push and pull. And I think the the the companies I've seen, which is a very small handful that actually have product market fit, it starts to feel like pull.

In fact, Emmett, the CEO of Twitch, I remember asking him, "You did Justin.tv, then you guys pivoted to Twitch. Was it obvious right away?" And he basically said, "Product market fit's the main thing that matters." He goes, "Basically, you feel like you're pushing a boulder up a hill every day. And then at some point, you kind of wake up and you realize it's like you didn't you reached your hands out, but the boulder had already moved, and now you have to start running to catch up to it.

And then suddenly, the whole game feels like a sprint catching up to the boulder going down the hill. It takes time, but there is a difference between like, you are manually pushing the crank versus it starts to get pulled by the market." Just to offer like a distinction between the different types of businesses. There are, you know, Clay Christensen's, RIP, passed away recently, Harvard Business School professor, uh, came up with this concept of disruption, right? Disruption became sort of a meme, but it's actually an economics theory almost, about technology.

And he talks about sustaining technology versus disruptive technology. You can be innovative on a sustained sustained curve. You can make things incrementally better. But there are things that are disruptive, and those are like moments of time businesses or technologies that create this explosion of demand because for the first time it became possible, right? So if you if you're Mars candy, there was a lot of other candy. Maybe you were you're really good in your recipe, you're really good in your execution. Most businesses are trying to compete in a more or less zero-sum market.

So they trying to capture capture capture uh market from existing demands on existing competitors, right? Now there are uh are uh are uh uh market creation moments and I think for Rapha, this was a market creation moment. And most internet companies That's a great point. right? Well, whether it's PayPal, Facebook, you know, uh Google. The the reason you have this explosive growth is like you just invented something new and and then everyone's rushing cuz this capability didn't exist before. And there's no other uh alternative, by the way.

way. way. That's a really good point. Do then do you think that the right move for someone building a company is good Okay, so on one hand you could say, "Well, just have patience and like just keep going, keep going, keep going." And with this you know, maybe the same thing. Um whereas the other hand, would it be like pivot just like the 20-year-old kids until you find that that that rock rolling down the mountain? I mean it depends what you're trying to build. Are you innovating something new?

Are you creating something that wasn't really possible? Are you are you entering a business where you're like, "Okay, I know the you've done you the business plan, right? You Here's here's what the market size is. Here's how how much we're going to capture from it. Here's how we're going to be better than competition." competition." competition." If that's the case, you're going to slog and maybe every now and then you have some kind of innovation or some kind of breakthrough that that gets you a bit of a jump over competitors.

But prepare yourself to be to be very good at execution. Build an amazing team, build amazing processes, just be very good at the day-to-day execution to outcompete your competitors. If you're a young guy trying to make something that didn't exist before or you know, like like Shawn and and some of the guys in social media, they're trying to create a new, you know, Clubhouse or uh you know, some kind of thing that I I didn't know I would enjoy talking to people, you know, taking a walk with my earbuds.

This is just like did it didn't occur to me. But so if you're inventing something like that, you will, you know, the point is pivot pivot pivot until it hits. Because if it's not hitting, you're not hitting on some human nature or element that you're finding or you're like finding a secret in the universe almost. You're a fun case study. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the reasons it's fun to talk to you is not only your business is interesting and you're interesting as a founder, but you're also a bit of a polymath.

Like we were talking at the beginning of this about like the Paul Le Roux, like Bitcoin, you know, I feel like you know you have like a bunch of these like little rabbit holes that you've gone down. I'm curious like what are those rabbit holes today cuz I've seen the original Replit deck and this was what? 2014? 2015? Something like that? like that? like that? Like bro, you called your shot Babe Ruth style. So so read read this thing out. What was the master plan? So, growth by building tools I love the fact that in your deck you have a slide called master plan.

So growing the product by building tools for education essentially, people learning how to code. And then build a simple network and AI assisted interface that blurs the distinction between learning and building. That that's essentially what Replit is today. Like you're learning how to make software and but you need to you don't need to sit down and learn how to code. You're just like vibe coding and it's just happening as you go and you're kind of picking up these skills. And then evolve the platform into a place where people come to learn, build, explore, and host applications.

So, not only is it the development environment, but the hosting of the applications. And the hosting of the application, I think I should have have another point because that unlocks the next step, which we're getting into now, which is monetization of those applications, uh scaling of those applications. Right now, if you go to Replit and you build something, you can just say, "Monetize it." And it'll like integrate Stripe for you and all of that. And pretty soon, you should be able to say, "Market it." And it'll like How big are the biggest apps that are built on Replit?

Like, are we talking guys are making a hundreds of thousands of dollars, set low seven figures? Like, has anybody really broken out that are just they were made on Replit and they still run on Replit? This this this one is a little uh controversial, but Medvie, the billion-dollar billion-dollar billion-dollar uh one-person business covered by the New York Times. Basically, uh they were a company that sold what? GLP-1. And the reason it's controversial is because people don't like their marketing practices. The entrepreneur, I think, already fixed a lot of these issues that people are reacting to.

But, um he runs a big part of the Replit a big part of his stack on on Replit. And it it's been uh he says it's been a crucial part of their growth because it's not only just the core application, but the automations he's been up day to day. So, for example, he's working with a vendor and every day he does something manual, like a marketing vendor. He's like, "Okay, I'm going to build this website to you. You go and you speak to an agent." And the agent will give you all the information you need.

Or the agent will give you the assets. So, he'll he'll build interfaces for all the different parts of the business, all the back office stuff of the business. And he's the fastest person to go from idea to prompt. Even when he was on Twitter going viral, he was like building a game on Replit. And he built an experiment where he he sent he sent me that experiment where you can scroll a site with your with your with your head. So, you can read something without looking at your screen.

So, I've never seen someone after like spending some time chatting with him be so quick to create things. Boom, to create that, create that. Like, automate this, automate that. That's one example. There's been There's been a lot that, you know, I've spoken about over the years. In the past, they used to have to migrate off of Replit because the platform was not complete. But now, the the platform app is actually complete and you can run a full business on it. We have a lot of venture-backed companies venture-backed companies venture-backed companies uh such as uh Spellbook.

I think it's a multi-hundred-million-dollar company multi-hundred-million-dollar company multi-hundred-million-dollar company started on on Replit. Magic School, I think a 500-million-dollar business started on Replit. And many others. More recently, the since Replit Nation, there hasn't been enough time for them to really hit massive scale, but there's a lot of multi-million-dollar businesses. For example, For example, For example, uh recently, I think they just did a did a round, but there's a company that's building influencer marketing for local restaurants and local shops. So, they'll you know, your local restaurant, you want someone to cover your restaurant, you go to the platform, you hire an influencer.

They actually physically walk to your restaurant, eat there, take a TikTok, whatever. Because now, most people, especially Gen Z, they actually don't go to Google Maps anymore. If you ask a Gen Z, "Oh, let's let's find a restaurant." They're like, "Go to TikTok and search." and search." and search." And so, that that's already over 100 uh thousand AR like few few weeks. What's that one called? Do you know the name? Uh Try Nearby. Dude, I I still go to Yelp and my young employees were like call me gray bush.

They're like, "You're so old, man. Like, what are you doing?" look through the yellow pages and call them when you want to order food? I was like, "Why not Yelp?" Can someone move the sundial for me? It's It's surprising to me that the Google search uh queries keep going up. They just broke records. The revenue in search keeps going up, but but but yes, when people in my, you know, people around me, they're not using Google as much. Are there um like any cool trends that you're seeing?

Like, you know, we have um our we have like a subset of like young young like 18 19-year-old kids who listen to MFM and they like want to hear business ideas. Yeah. Are there in any interesting trends that you're seeing Yeah. in AI and on the Rebel platform where you're like, man, there's all these like cool like one or five or 10 million dollar businesses that could be created. created. created. Yes. Silicon Valley have always approached problems with like hyper scale in mind. And I think for the first time because the making software is cheaper, you can actually create a multi-million dollar business and not have to raise venture, not have to grow the team a whole lot.

It so uh local style businesses is is is very interesting. very interesting. very interesting. Um there is a guy in England that I think he's well on his way. He's 100,000 already in run rate. He's well on his way to a million. He uh is building software for ice rink management. So skating rinks and and all that. I think that you go around your in your life and there's a lot of things that are just not computerized yet. Not There's no software running it. So that that would be my first approach.

Actually, that's what I did when I I my first business was building software for internet cafes and and LAN gaming. And so that's always been a great place to start. You remind me of in Paul Graham's one of his essays about how to get startup ideas, he says uh the easiest way to get startup ideas is to sit like to if you want to find the startup idea of the future, simply live in the future and then build what doesn't exist. Yes. Like, okay, what the hell does that mean?

He he describes when Zuckerberg built Facebook, it's not cuz he was a normal guy thinking, hmm, what what would the next what would the future look like? It's like, no, he was on computers all day. His social life was online. Right. online. Right. online. Right. The problem was he only had certain tools available. So to for him, the idea of social like social networking online was not just like possible, it was completely normal. It was his preferred medium to actually exist in. And you could just like lean into that rather than thinking you're the oddball.

And I think, you know, that that's sort of interesting cuz, you know, you built Replit Replit Replit partly because you grew up going to these internet cafes in Jordan. And every time you'd come, you'd be on a different computer. So, you kind of needed something that lived in the cloud. And so, you know, for you what was completely normal was odd to other people. So, I think that's the a trick with startup ideas, right? It's to sort of lean into maybe the things you do that are a little bit more than normal or a little bit odd.

And then just say like, "What would make my experience doing this odd thing a little bit better?" You know, another another one I would say is being lazy. In programming, there's this old saying that laziness is a is a is a virtue. And the idea is to to automate a lot of things. But now everyone is a programmer essentially. So, you know, part of the reason why I made Replit is because I don't want to keep setting up the freaking IDE every time. And so, you know, go by your life with this laziness attitude.

What are the kind of things that are so annoying that you have to keep doing over and over again? There's probably a million, maybe a billion people that feel the same way. And perhaps you can make a piece of software to automate that. And more important than ever, this like lazy mindset of viewing things through the lens of automation is very important during with AI because AI is truly like you know, we have a magic automation machine. So, not only you'll optimize your life, you'll become uh you know, you know, you know, uh you'll become a lot more productive.

But you might stumble on something that a lot of other people would want. Hey, can you give me give me your opinion on this? We were kind of joking, kind of not joking uh a while back with the guests. And we were like, it's sort of like we were asking ourselves, we're like, is are we like in December of 2019 where we're just like 3 months away from like COVID happening and like the and like America shutting down? And we're just like Oh yeah, I heard there's this virus in China, but whatever, no big deal.

You know, are we sort of like that with AI where it's like, well, you know, like like like Square maybe laid off a lot of people, but like that's probably not going to happen anymore. happen anymore. happen anymore. Like do you think that we are like months or 12 months or something like that away from like the world changing dramatically? I I think we are in the singularity. Like the you know, the original idea of a singularity, I think Werner Vinge, one of the early computer pioneers and and and sci-fi authors talked about the singularity, borrowed this concept from physics.

In physics, it's like the is the is the is the black hole and you know, anything that happens after the black hole black hole is undefined. So we actually don't know what has is like not knowable. So anything that is beyond that point, you can't even have formulas for because it's literally undefined. You know, a lot of the early AI thinkers talked about this moment of singularity where is it is incredibly hard to predict what happens after because the pace of even innovation innovation innovation is not only fast, it is accelerating as fast as it is it already is meaning it is the second derivative is exponential.

And so I think this is the moment we're in where, you know, in 22 you know, we got GPT got GPT got GPT 4 at the time and you know, GPT 2 had come out in 2019, GPT 3 in 2020. So every 2 years we were getting a model and now feels like every few weeks we're getting a model, sometimes every day. And and there are these fundamental capability capability capability shifts that happen either in autonomy or cybersecurity or computer use or what have you. And every one of those capability shifts capability shifts capability shifts have a lot of downstream applications that yet to need to be discovered.

We haven't actually productized it yet. So, it's almost like you get a bundle of energy. That's how I think of models. They're they're they're potential energy that entrepreneurs need to go figure out how to how to how to create make them into products, right? And this is why it's an explosive time for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship is because we have this potential energy that needs to be harnessed. Now, the reason why there's like a delay is because we have this capability overhang. The world will change, but it's really hard to know whether I I can't tell you in 12 months like all entry-level jobs will be gone.

Well, what if you had to make a bet? My bet would be that I don't think unemployment numbers will move a whole lot. Perhaps they'll marginally increase. I think Dario, the CEO of Anthropic, said we're going to get to 20% unemployment or something like that. I don't know if I'm I'm misquoting him, but he said all on Well, he's a doomer basically, though. He's on the far end. Yeah, and like I don't think we're because I get what I'm seeing from our customers, there we have some customers that automate a lot of things and up laying off some people.

We have other customers that automate a lot of things, make more revenue, and want to hire more people to automate more things, and create more products. And so, net net, I think there's going to be a lot of new AI companies, a lot of companies that make use of AI, and want to hire more people. So, net net, I think the unemployment question I think will probably be be neutral. How do you think this sort of Game of Thrones Thrones Thrones uh AI war plays out, right?

You've got you know, the king of the north, you got Elon up there. He's he's the he's trying to come down. You got the OpenAI kingdom over here. Google, you know, they were in denial, but now they're here, you know, they're they're they're making it happen. happen. happen. What What do you think How do you think this plays out? I I like I like business theory. Uh it's not always useful, but it often is is useful. Hamilton Helmer wrote this book called the seven powers. And everyone Silicon Valley talks about moats.

Seven powers is the theory of moats. The moat of these LLMs is the technology fundamentally fundamentally fundamentally commoditizable, right? Like it seems to be very easy to replace these models. Like you know, a lot of developers every day professional developers are switching between these models. In some cases in if you're in cursor it's like one literally one click away to switch to the to the next model. And I think a lot of the fighting has to do with this fact that it is hard to find a way to zoom heads too far ahead of the competition.

You're always sort of neck and neck and neck and neck competing with with others. So you might want to try to block them in in different ways with us in the in the court or with the government or regulations or or things like that. Whereas I think in the past you could if if if you're Microsoft and you achieve this dominance in the PC, it's really hard to unseat you. Right? And and so there's there's this natural monopolies that used to emerge and they're protected by by certain moats such as network effects, economies of scale.

We haven't seen any of those moats sort of emerge from these foundation model companies. It's a my hypothesis is that maybe the one natural moat is capital. You need not just one time capital to enter the market, you need continuous capital to train the current model, the next generation model, the next generation model. And then you need enough enough enough installed base and revenue to cover your costs. But that is not enough moat to keep the big other big players away. So, you can imagine all the big companies have a fighting chance and all the big governments can also participate in this.

And maybe China as a as a place where you can't really distinguish between country and company and maybe the country's going to be doing to to the um foundation model market what they did to the EV market. Well, they'll subsidize the hell out of it in order to have a competing chance and maybe even destroy the market globally by subsidizing it. All of this to say that I think it is good for entrepreneurs because if we end up with a monopoly or just oligopoly and you're building on top of it, it is actually very hard to build a successful business uh because like you said, they'll they'll come for you.

But, if it ends up being being being a a technology that's kind of easier to replace, I mean, there there is a place for a lot of entrepreneurs to participate. Sean, you remember you're you were telling that story about um the uh Anthropic CEO and he was like, "Yeah, things are booming, but like in a weird way, I feel like I'm always like a few months or a few quarters away from running out of money because we're growing so fast, we have to buy uh inventory uh GPUs." Are you in a similar position where even though you're making all of this money, you're having to spend more and more and more and is profitability in sight?

No to the first question. We're not burning uh nearly as much cash as as as foundation company model companies. And like you know, sometime last year profitability was in sight. We had something like something like something like you know, you know, you know, 30 years of runway or something like that. Um since then we decided to spend a lot more on um especially sales and marketing. marketing. marketing. And my theory on this is or like my thesis is that there there are a lot of businesses that will need help adopting this technology and adopting ground up broadly.

And so, we we And also, there's this imbalance between supply and demand that I talked about. So, I thought, "Okay, we just need to scale the sales team." And so, the sales team was like four reps or something like that, but at the last year, I think it's going to be more than half the company by the end of this year. this year. this year. Uh which is very surprising for me to say cuz I was always like a sort of a tech tech tech Yeah, how's that feel to be around a bunch of uh regional sales managers?

I I [ __ ] love it. I I I I didn't know cuz I think I'm I'm one of those sales bros. I am a sales bro. sales bro. sales bro. I am a sales bro. I think I'm weird as far as tech nerds. Well, why do you love it? This is actually really we are we laugh cuz it's funny, but this is actually quite interesting. He was deadlifting before it's cool. He likes sales before it's cool. You're You He's got range. My guy's got range. Well, why do you like it?

Because I used to hate sales people, then I realized that sales people like all these wining and dining, it actually works, and they do create demand. Yeah. Yeah, and they And I'm like, "Oh, okay. You serve a purpose." purpose." purpose." It's more of a contact sport contact sport contact sport uh than consumer. Like, a consumer, you do something, and then you do an AB test, and maybe 2 weeks later you find out whether it worked or not, and there's this huge delay, and there's so many things outside of your control.

There's like hype in the market that affects you. Someone writes about you, you go viral, and then you die down, or it's it's like there's a There's almost like a the weather. You can't really control a lot of it. Sales is is much more, like I said, contact sport. Like, I can apply effort, and and and whether we get the win or not is somewhat much more within our control. And so, if I hear like some kind of deal is at risk, risk, risk, it activates me so much cuz the idea of like losing to some kind of comeback competitor competitor competitor is is like the worst feeling in the world.

And like, I'll call whoever I need to call. I'll show up to their office, we'll do whatever we need, uh and we rarely lose deals. In the few times there was like a potential of losing a deal, we just pulled out all the punches. And the company is just cuz Hya and I, you know, Hya, my co-founder and my wife, is also hyper-competitive. She also lifts and does boxing and all of that. of that. of that. Uh Hya and I like built a culture that's incredibly competitive.

And so we we get activated by this. And then when we win, it just feels good. It's very real. It's like very different than seeing a number go up like that. You know? Wait, so you I I had heard about this. Your wife is your partner or business partner. That's pretty That's pretty cool, I think. I mean, it's cool when it's cool. When you guys do cool things. things. things. Yeah, when you guys do When it's strategic it's disastrous. Yeah. How How's that? I think that having Replit being so hard as hard as it is and it was, if we weren't in it together, I think it would have definitely driven a wedge a wedge between us because you both entrepreneurs, you know how much of your life energy startups take.

Like, they literally take your vitality. You You age. You know? I had hair when we started the company. company. company. And so And so And so in life, you have limited amount of energy and you direct it towards uh your spouse, your kids, your work, you know, things like that. But then if something is like this sucking energy this sucking everything, time and energy, eventually it'll just strain your relationships. And I I I You know, I for a long time, like a lot of my friends just didn't hear from me.

Like, I kind of disappeared in many ways and still in many ways, you know, I I would love to spend more time kind of checking in with friends and keeping uh connections alive. connections alive. connections alive. But the fact that we're in it together, I think made our relationship stronger because those dark And having all the the the shares in the family, I mean, that is pretty cool. That's cool, too. No, I mean, I'm not being funny. That's cool. I think Sean used to work with this guy Michael Birch, and him and his wife started a company, and they sold it for like, I don't six or eight hundred million dollars, and it was So, it was like their family, like, you know, got two times times times rewarded.

It's pretty cool. a few things. You have to be careful not to like make these mission decisions on the weekend and show up and was like, "Hey, decision done." Uh Uh Uh have to be careful not to bring, you know, the tone you bring at home to to to the office. Don't make it awkward around other people. It's very easy to make it awkward around other people. people. people. You have to work harder to ensure that this is meritocracy because because because you know, I come from a world that is less meritocratic, that is more based on who you know and what you know, and and family business are very common in that world.

The problem with them is that people join the business, and they expect if they're not part of the family, they're not really going to their work is not going to matter as much, right? And so, you have to be very clear about performance, and set high expectations for yourselves, and be communicative about communicative about communicative about and and and also always open to the potential that, you know, there are other people that are better at at at running the company than you are. You said you read a ton of biographies, and uh especially with this kind of shift into sales mode and being like, "Oh, I get to play full contact startup.

This is amazing." Who are the founders that either either either most resonate with you in their style, or you you you respect something about them, or a story that you find yourself retelling a bunch, or telling yourself, telling your team, that's been kind of inspirational for you? I think Ben Horowitz and like The Hard Things About Hard Things is it is it very good book and inspiration for especially like a more sales-driven business. business. business. That's a good one. I I read it a while back and it has a lot of really interesting stories about doing deals and losing deals and hiring sales people.

And then, you know, after I watched Pirates of Silicon Valley, started learning about Bill Gates. This is another really good old-school, very unknown uh biography, Hard Drive. It's like a '90s about Bill Gates. After reading about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and these guys, I just knew that I wanted to be part of that, part of Silicon Valley. It just seems the most exciting thing possible and you can have the most uh impact. And that is a blessing because I look at a lot of my friends and friends and friends and they're now almost 40 and they really haven't found the thing that they want to get after.

And I think that it creates this crisis of meaning in in a lot of people. I'm also a big fan of um visualization. There was a period of time where there was a lot of like pseudo-scientific stuff of documentaries coming out. There was one called What the Bleep Do We Know? It's like about quantum physics and visualizations. Like if you put the vibration out, the the universe will reward you. reward you. reward you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I kind of believe that. Uh in in in in a weird way and I I can't really disprove it, but I tell you a few stories.

Um you know, I I wanted to be on Rogan's show. I was like, you know, I've I've done done done I've done all these shows. Uh I've done Talker's Show, My First Million, all these shows. I was like, I want to be on Rogan. And I was The big dog. The big guy. I'm sick of the JVs. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you guys are amazing, but how do you How do you even get on Rogan? I started like sort of visualizing it. I was like, what would I talk about?

What would I tell him? How would the interaction be and things like that. A few weeks later, uh I get a message from two people. Mark Andreessen and and Lex Fridman and they both asked me the same question. Hey, I have a friend whose daughter is entering a entrepreneurship competition and wants her app her app her app wants to make an app and do do you know anyone who can help her? Like can you help her? help her? help her? It's like that's odd and I remember replying to Lex Fridman and he he goes to me and then I replied to Mark.

And it's really odd. I said I got the same message from Lex. Who's this person? He's like, yeah, you know, it's it's Joe Rogan. It's his daughter. daughter. daughter. And I said, you know, I'd like to help her. Like I'll freaking build the app for her. Like he introduced me. So he introduced me to Rogan. Rogan introduced me to his daughter. And I I say, let's let's get on a Zoom. I get on a Zoom call and it's like four high school girls and they're like they're very bright.

They have a business idea to connect Gen Z local Gen Z to local businesses for jobs. And they're like, you know, I'm going to teach you how to make applications and you're going to make it. And so I open a Replet. I'm like, here's your Replet. Here's what you do. You just, you know, type in your prompt and let's check in next week. Next week we we check in and they already made like half the app. And by the way, Replet agent was early on. It was still running into some problems.

So every now and then I'll jump in and like help them with with one thing. But for the like 95% of it, they built it themselves. And I'm always of the belief of like just provide value and like just don't ask for anything in return. It wasn't like, okay, I'm I'm doing this to get on the show. I think that would be the bad mindset to mindset to mindset to to to have. I kept mentoring her and I I give her advice on how to win the competition.

It's like, look, no one none of your peers will have an app. You're the only one that's going to have an app. Everyone will have slide shows. Before you do the pitch, go send the app to all the judges. And that way they'll know you're the only one that that that actually went above and beyond. And they actually they presented and they won the competition. And by the way, Joe I think might have thought I am some kind of contractor. Like he didn't know I didn't introduce myself and So I sent Joe a nice letter and I told him a nice message and told him like I'm you know, very very bright daughter.

So glad I I could be part of this. I I would love to just five minutes of your time to kind of introduce myself and my story. And so And so And so he's like, okay. I'll uh I'll uh I'll uh uh you know, I'll call you tomorrow whatever. Tomorrow comes, he didn't call me. And then text him, I didn't get a hear back. hear back. hear back. So I I gently told his daughter, I was like, I would just like a phone call with your dad.

And so she's like, okay. And then phone rings and it's Joe again. And I's like, about 90 seconds in, we're talking about MMA. MMA. MMA. I'm like, you're kind of a You're you're you're you. You're not It's like the same guy. And I'm not a big MMA guy. But on the on the call, I I just I was like like like I just told him about myself. It's a lot of pressure to do that quick, right? Yes. Yes. Yes. You have to be calm. I I'm actually the calmest the calmest the calmest moment.

And I I think I could learn this from gaming. from gaming. from gaming. I slow I slow down a lot under pressure. Like when pressure comes, you have to gaming, racing, anytime there's like incredible pressure and any mistake might kill you. In this case, not literally kill you, but like kill your chances. Actually, I experience time slow down. And I think you can train this in yourself and I think a lot of race drivers talk about this as well. way, weightlifting is a great place to practice this because it's low stakes, but like at the end of a the set is when you're shaking you you it's you're you're at the most fatigue.

Maybe you're shaking, maybe you don't know if you could do it. What most people do is they rush to finish and they sacrifice form. And basically, if you could practice poise poise poise in the last few reps, you're doing that now every day in the gym. It's like you you can get a lot of reps and practice in the gym as a metaphor for life. But you can't get that you can't simulate that pressure in other ways. But you know, your body kind of thinks you're dying dying dying Yes.

when you're when you're under the under the weights and it's you're shaking and you don't know what to do. So your body can simulate pressure that way. There's so many lessons from from powerlifting uh you can apply. Actually, one day I was at at the gym in San Francisco and I saw Brian Chesky lifting weights. He's hugely jacked. And I remember stri He's a former bodybuilder. Yeah, I I struck up a conversation with him about powerlifting and and startups. Uh Uh Uh and that was that was a lot of fun.

Actually, I've had visualization and that feeling of oh, I want this thing to happen and then that happened like way too many times. times. times. And And And it doesn't always happen in podcasts, but I think this is what's on my mind right now. Even even the interview I did with Tucker with Tucker with Tucker like I you know, I remember being a big fan of Tucker during the lockdowns when like nothing made sense in the world and like I had this anger in me cuz like you know, I came to the United States for freedom.

And like I feel like I can't say on what's on my mind. I can't leave my house. I have to like put a muzzle on my mouth and I have to take a shot. I like this is a scam. And I remember him like him like him like the I started watching Fox News and this guy guy guy You got radicalized. But but but one day I see Martin Shkreli on his podcast podcast podcast and and and I had helped Martin raise a round. I I learned finance from Martin.

Dude, he used to stream on Sean's platform. Yeah. I used to watch him on Sean's thing all the time. He was He's like one of the best teachers and he's super entertaining entertaining entertaining for finance stuff, right? Like he just says like He still does it on YouTube and they're real They're really good. out to the Shkreli pill channel. It's on YouTube. It's It takes his long live streams and just cuts it the the most interesting kind of 20 30 minutes. Shkreli pill is just doing God's work out there.

out there. out there. Yeah, and I knew nothing about personal finance. I knew nothing about the financial markets. I didn't know how money worked even. And so I remember just watching his channel and just getting educated. And when he got out of jail, I was like, "Oh, that's cool. Oh, look, Shkreli's out of jail." And I went and watched his stream and I I see him coding and I see him opening Runlet. And I sent him a tweet and I'm like, "Hey, I see you I saw you open a Runlet and I'm like a big fan.

Be great to connect." So I connected with him. He tells me he's starting a startup. The doctor one? So he started a company as like a holding company and he started the doctor one at the same time he started the Bloomberg terminal one. He started three other things. Yeah. He started audio AI one, but the one that took off is the Bloomberg terminal, I think. And they're now like multi-million dollar revenue. like this, I'm always curious, right? Cuz when somebody literally comes out of jail and then you're like, you could I like the streams, too, but then in terms of like investing, there's obviously a big you know, you kind of got to do your diligence of like this guy went to jail for some sort of wire fraud type of deal.

Am I going to be a part of that like I guess I'm just curious how you mentally think about it. Are you basically like it's [ __ ] banking. You You don't overthink it or do you go and you you kind of go get first first principles answers for yourself? Like what do you do? First of all, I'm I'm personally like very principled and very careful. The only The only The only problems with the law I had was was racing cars. I'm like a big fan of second chances and the thing I love about America is there's some forgiveness here.

You can have a second and a third act. And like I I saw his side of the story and it just seemed like he did his time and this is this is the system we live in is that you do something you get punished, you do your time and then you you leave and I think society should treat you treat you treat you with a with a blank slate. Early on at Repl it, um we our first investor Roy Bahat from Bloomberg Beta Bloomberg Beta Bloomberg Beta Roy is another very interesting character.

He's like Bloomberg Beta is an amazing investment firm. They have great returns. great returns. great returns. those guys years ago. I They said no, but I pitched them. They were all through my [ __ ] Yeah. Roy doesn't know. He will just tell you exactly He He might even tell you this idea sucks and like he's the He's the straightest shooter in Silicon Valley, I think. He'll tell it like it is. What's this thing about Roy is Bloomberg Beta Bloomberg Beta Bloomberg Beta is both the investment vehicle, but also just things he's fascinated in he'll he'll just go do.

He starts He has a this conference about the future of work, but one thing they did at the time is they did a trip to prison facility and we we went there and it was um um um it was us mentoring inmates about inmates about inmates about entrepreneurship and they wanted to start businesses internally. Some people were starting businesses inside and we were were were supposed to mentor them. That experience was very touching. Yeah, one exercise and maybe you could say it's a BS woke exercise, but like they lined up everyone on a line and then the inmates on another line and someone was saying, "If you grew up in a household where there's where there's where there's like crime and drugs stay forward.

If you did not, step back." And then like, you know, 95% of the non-inmates uh stay uh, step back and then uh, then maybe 5% step back. So, like they just like inversion and then and the exercise was to show you how much much much of the life of crime is sort of like somehow predetermined by by by I don't fully believe that. I believe in personal responsibility a lot, but maybe they were like people are born in just maybe harder situation. believe in agency and personal responsibility as well as probability.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Right? And influence. Yes. Yes. And so, you know, for for for all these reasons I've I've I've you know, I'm I'm I'm open to to talking and and potentially working with uh, people who have done things in the past, but then they paid their dues and and moved on. And so, it just felt like this is someone who helped me indirectly learn valuable skills and I want to help them. them. them. One of my favorite I love uh, I married into an immigrant family.

Shawn um, comes from a family of immigrants. What's it feel like um, from you know, you're an immigrant to like be living the American dream? Do you think that there's something about the Americans What What about the American experience do you think is different from other countries? I think America's vision of itself, at least the kind of liberal America's vision of itself was like about tolerance and inclusivity and there's there's a lot of truth to that. Like Like Like uh, you know, I think it is very easy to be to be to be anywhere else maybe in Europe perhaps with the UK is a uh, uh, uh, is an exception and and feel like an outsider.

But in the US uh, especially in like uh, you know, New York, San Francisco, these places, you just feel like anyone else. You just feel like you're you're accepted and you have as much of a chance chance chance to make it as as as someone uh, as someone who is who was born here and that's incredible and I don't think that's fully appreciated especially because America's so self-critical when it comes to these things. but but there is a lot of tolerance for for difference in this in this country.

And then there's just this period of innovation and and and openness to ideas. Like ask anyone who grew up anywhere else, literally quite literally anyone else. And the experience of entrepreneurs there is to have an idea and the likelihood of your friend telling you you're [ __ ] after you told them that idea is like 90% plus. And uh that was always my experience. I always safeguarded ideas, not because I didn't want other people to to copy them, but more like to protect those ideas cuz like they're fragile beings.

America and San Francisco Silicon Valley especially a place where you talk about these ideas and they grow. And they The problem is like they grow too much and they become radical. Let's start a ship island country. island country. island country. They become always like weird things. So there's like an opposite problem of this snowball and make it become that's a better problem that's a better problem than you know, I've got a a lot of my immigrant buddies they say back back home I tell people about my ideas and they're like, "Shut up, dude.

Let's just be plumbers. Like don't stand out." out." out." Don't stand out. Exactly. That's that's the usual thing. When I moved to San Francisco, cuz it's not even just America as a whole like San Francisco specifically is on the extreme edge. I remember I just moved there, so I didn't have a place to work. So I just sat in a coffee shop. And in San Francisco, the coffee shop is like, you know, dating is pre-dating for investments, right? So the table next to me just kept turning over every 30 minutes with another founder pitching another stupid ass idea to another investor who was hearing them out.

And I just remember by the eighth hour of her, you know, 15 of these pitches and I just remember thinking wow, every one of those ideas sounded terrible. And yet it was totally normal and common and accepted to be a little bit crazy like all those people were just now. just now. just now. Yeah. What's normal here is crazy elsewhere and vice versa. So I went to a meet up that night to go meet some people and there was a guy there who was working at JP Morgan.

And he he introduced himself in shame. He was like, "I work at JP Morgan but but but but but you know, but I'm I'm I'm leaving soon. I just need to you know, that's that's a small the normal in in other cities you have to apologize you have to be uh you have to add all this context if you're choosing the unconventional path of doing a startup. And in San Francisco you had to add all this this this disclaimer legalese Yeah. you had a normal job cuz it's like what the hell are you doing, man?

Why are you doing that stupid thing? Why are you why aren't you living for real like the rest of us? of us? of us? Yeah, and it's easy to get cynical about it and it's like oh man, this place sucks and then make fun of it and all of that but there's something truly unique about it. The other part is like rubbing shoulder with with billionaires like when you're literally worth nothing. Um you know, Mark Andreessen is one who's like makes friends on on Twitter and he goes on podcasts where like there's two listeners and he like he'll he'll become friends with with people that he find intellectually interesting and and stimulating.

Paul Graham is the same like like like wherever he go he's on vacation in Stockholm and he did like a YC meet up there like there like there like uh and he's just meeting all these kids that want to start start companies and so people get energy here from less from you know, showing off their wealth and more from more from more from uh being intellectually stimulated. You know who's like the unsung hero of San Francisco? meetup.com Francisco? meetup.com Francisco? meetup.com Yes. Oh my god. That's they're like the they're the tugboats of the of the Silicon Valley scene.

Like they they don't get enough credit. They uh they're the best. You know, I met a lot of amazing people who just going to meetups when I first came to Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley. Is it still going? Well, I'm like too old to use it so I don't use it. Uh but it is still going. It was sold. Um I think uh Kevin Ryan who started uh Business Insider and Gil Group and MongoDB. I think he bought it but the the founder of meetup.com has this like crazy story.

He like worked at McDonald's and now he's working at Amazon but as like a driver. activist like Amazon. [clears throat] Yeah, I talked to him. He he is worker rights union guy. And the reason he started Meetup was not to like get rich San Francisco kids to meet up but it like to actually organize. organize. organize. And so I he's back to his his passion now. So he goes and he takes a job at Amazon and he likes to give people tools to unionize. And the most frustrating Why would they hire him?

Dude, he'd be like a casino card counter. How does he have that job? Get this guy out of here. Does he still have all of his fingers? [clears throat] What are they doing? They should be like, "Dude, you are way too rich to work here." Dude, isn't it crazy that there is like this corporate espionage [ __ ] going on? Like it sounds like conspiracy but it's you also have to logically think it can't be zero. Does that happen to you, I'm Chad? Does like is there espionage?

He He wouldn't know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is it here in the room with you right now? now? now? I think you have to be careful about it. I think you have to build the right systems and processes and and all of that. And even if it is not an adversarial company, it could be adversarial state especially if you have model weights or something that they can they can steal and spend a couple stories where they they kind of uh uh uh you know, caught foreign agents trying to steal LM models.

But why foreign agent? Like Like I guess if you have a company that grew from, you know, two to one billion in that fast, I would think that there'd be someone to be like, "Hey, can you go get a job there? Hey, you work there. Like I'll bribe you to tell me X Y and Z." you know, we're a target probably but we we were not an easy target. We we had someone from the FBI come give it give us a talk about uh these things, some of these stories, how to protect ourselves.

And the broader point is is is more interesting now with AI. Both social engineering and cybersecurity risk has has gone up tremendously. Like you can have bots that are very good at convincing you of certain things. So phishing has gotten a lot scarier. And also you can do uh hacking and privilege escalation. Like the Vercel hack is kind of crazy. Do you guys know the entire chain of events? events? events? I I didn't understand what happened. I saw a couple of tweets where they were like kind of doing the thing where you you say, "Hey, this happened.

Just be aware." You know, you have to come out and say it at some point. But what was it what happened? There there there's an employee at this company called Context.AI. And it's one of those provide context to your AI companies that downloaded a Roblox cheat software. And that Roblox cheat software was infected with some kind of backdoor. And um And um And um then that company became fully compromised. And someone at Vercel installed Context.AI through Google OAuth on their workspace. And then they had an entry through Context into Vercel.

And then inside Vercel they've done a bunch of hacks to escalate privileges and get access to their to their databases. And this was all planned by Yeah. I mean I don't know if it's planned end-to-end. I I assume they infected Context.AI and they knew it was an attack vector for a lot of other other other other companies. other companies. other companies. And what did the the the creator what did they get? Uh they get data. They they're trying to sell on like the the internet internet internet of of companies.

would you get from Vercel? Like database data? data? data? Database Database Database database passwords database passwords database passwords and the code. And then you go to that person and you ransom it or think they did ransom. They just posted it and said, "Hey, I'm selling it for like a million dollars." for Vercel cuz you know, what did they do in this situation, right? I think the thing about Vercel, there are few things I mean I mean I mean look, every company has has issues and um this is not a knock on them, but there's one thing that was odd that they were storing the database secrets in clear text.

clear text. clear text. They had a way [clears throat] recently to make them sensitive and encrypt them, but uh they weren't encrypted at rest. So, once you get access to the database, you got access to every other customer database. I see. Has your life changed now that you're uh now that you're a billionaire? Like are you afraid of your security? security? security? Yes, unfortunately. Uh and I uh I am I have protection. have protection. have protection. Um I don't know, man. I just I don't feel like a billionaire.

Um like maybe What do you feel like? I just feel like a guy. I don't wake up in the morning millionaire. Yeah, what do you I definitely feel like a millionaire for sure. Okay, all right. I It took me a while to feel that, but like you know, after like the lifestyle upgraded all. I I guess because I didn't have the lifestyle upgrade of a billionaire. Like I don't have a house of a billionaire. Not a realized billionaire and um I don't like to upgrade my lifestyle too quickly.

Was was there any upgrade that you did do that was pretty cool where you're like, "Oh, money does have some utility. This actually brought me joy, freedom, and something some way up." I think most people should talk a little bit more about what spending actually moves the needle for you because most people have a very low imagination with their own money. Yeah, that that's that that's you know, when I when I start when I sold some second that we did some second secondary sale like a couple years ago.

I think most of it comes down to honestly living a a healthier lifestyle and saving time. So, uh a chef is pretty is pretty awesome. Being able to eat exactly what you want and and and eat healthy. Like you even when you go to DoorDash and you try to search for the healthiest food, it's still [ __ ] It's a pain, yes, yeah. And so it it just makes you feel better. It just becomes effortless to maintain your weight and maintain your discipline. Getting getting a coach, you'll have to cycle through a few to find someone that you like.

Getting someone who shows up at your door. And so you know, creating that lifestyle, a lot of it is about hiring other people. But you can overdo it. And I at some point I think we overdid it a little bit. And you want to be also careful with you you mentioned security, but there's a lot of people who want to leech in different ways and scam you and and do all sorts of nasty things. So I think you can expose yourself to like too many too many people.

Your house also starts feeling like like the office. A hotel. Hotel, the office, people working out of there. I'm like, man, like I I want my kids to have like a normal life like we grew up. Did you You know what's crazy? I just Googled it. How many billionaires are under the age of 40? There's only 71. Really? So yeah. So of the I don't know how many people 7 billion you know, people like Did you just made his name look at that smile? smile? smile?

You are in the probably the top like I'm having mixed feelings, Sean. I I He's uh It is very interesting. Well, you are in the 1,000 probably the of all the people under 40, you are probably in the top 1,000 richest ever. Well, that shows you I haven't really reflected on this all that much. I'm just like keep going. Yeah, build more. Yeah, you're like I know how much I want and the answer is more. That is the perfect answer. the perfect That is the perfect answer.

wealth and money more. It's in terms of success, impact, and enough reserve to actually have an impact on the world and do do the things that I want to do that I think are are are positive. By the way, getting a really kick-ass car the moment you get any kind of money is the most important thing you could do. What did you get? an AMG GT Black Series. Nice. I got an AMG E63 wagon when I got mine. mine. mine. it. My AMG is is is I think underrated because it has the luxury but also the class.

class. class. I bought an e-bike with a Burley wagon behind it and my kids sit in that. And that's what I ride around everywhere. Amazing. everywhere. Amazing. everywhere. Amazing. I think there is you know, now there's like a lot of um hate uh some of it is deserved for Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley. But part of it is because like they think you think think people like potentially hate us because because of our wealth. our wealth. our wealth. But and like we should like dress down and not show our wealth as as much.

But I think it just becomes more inauthentic. Like when you when you look at the ballers on TikTok or Instagram and you look at the comments people love them. They're like Laura Ballerini. But you look at the comments when like some tech CEOs saying some some dumb [ __ ] like everyone's going to lose their job. Everyone's like hating them. Um yeah and I think just like being a little more normal and the normal thing to do is when you come about some money you just like buy some cool [ __ ] We love having you on, man.

You you you you have this perfect um balance of like being wise being wise being wise but also being audacious and fun to hang out with and yet you got the CEO sensibility. sensibility. sensibility. also. He's a formidable guy. No, you're you're you're a you're a you're a blessing and we're so happy. You know, we sort of got to see you a little bit in the in the before phase and that's really exciting for us. I love I love that there I'm I'm coming here at different stages of my life and I get to look back on that and and reflect and you guys are doing amazing things.

I think we share the same mission of empowering people. I think that just it's incredibly exciting time that wealth is accessible to more people. We're just trying to get rich. Yeah, I hope I hope a lot more people get rich. I hope a lot more people get their first million and come on here and talk about it. And they use I we hope they use Replit along the way, dude. Thank you guys. You're a blessing. We appreciate you. That's it. That's the pod.