I got rejected from YC (4x)…. now my side hustle is worth $1.16B

Shaan Puri

"This is the first **AI agent** thing that has been a *mind-blowing* moment for me. I am not a programmer; I am not a coder, but I can now create software."

Sam Parr

well that's insane

Amjad Masad

There are apps built on **Replit Agent** that otherwise would take probably $100,000 of developer time, and you can build them for, you know, **$25 paid to Replit**. It's *pretty wild* how fast these companies are scaling. I don't think, in the history of **Silicon Valley**, we've seen anything like that — even in the Web 2.0 era.

Shaan Puri

So, what is a *fast ramp* for an **AI** company? What's impressive—that kind of broke the frame of how long things would take?

Amjad Masad

so I I would say reaching 10,000,000 in 3 to 4 months

Shaan Puri

arr oh my god that's wild

Sam Parr

can I ask a blunt crude question how can I use your software to become a billionaire

Amjad Masad

I would say building

Shaan Puri

Okay, so how do we want to start this? **Amjad**, you're awesome. Today you're in a position that I think a lot of people want to be in: you're doing the Silicon Valley dream. You had this idea, you went through YC, you've now raised $100,000,000, and you're valued at, you know, a $1,000,000,000 valuation. But the cool thing about your story is that that didn't seem likely 10 years ago. It's a very unlikely success story. And yeah, you went through YC, but you were rejected a bunch of times.

Sam Parr

like yeah

Shaan Puri

You're in **Silicon Valley** now, but you started off coding in an internet café in Jordan. That's what's interesting to me. We asked you beforehand, "Hey, what killer stories could you come on the podcast and tell?" And you said, "You wrote this? I'm gonna read it word for word." Then I want you to tell us the story. You said: "Rejected four times and rickrolling into YC, raising tons of money, and meeting amazing billionaires." Let's do the first part — "rejected four times and rickrolling into YC" [Y Combinator]. Can you tell the story?

Amjad Masad

Yeah, so I left my job at **Facebook** in 2016. **Replit** had been a side project for a while, and it had been growing. I’d been working on it nights and weekends. It grew to a point where the server cost was meaningful, and I was like, “Okay, I guess I have to start a company around it.” I went to my manager at **Facebook** and said, “Look, I have this side project — can we somehow make it a project at Facebook?” We looked into that. I sent **Zuck** an email all the time and he ignored me, so I was like, “Okay, I guess I have to start a company.” So yeah, I quit my job and applied to **YC** the first time. We did the whole thing — the form and the video and all of that — and we didn’t even get a call. We just got the rejection letter. I had some **Facebook** stock and some savings. I sold the **Facebook** stock. I put half of it in **Bitcoin** and half into the company, or just for us to kind of live and...

Sam Parr

how much money was that

Amjad Masad

it was like 70 ks or something like that

Sam Parr

what was the original product of replit

Amjad Masad

So, it was basically an **editor** and a **console**. You could type code there and run it. You could switch the language, and that's it.

Shaan Puri

by the way sam have you ever used replit

Sam Parr

I was using it today before this. It's *magical*. I also liked your tweets describing what it is like. For example, your doctor saying, "He wants me to track my sleep." So I just uploaded the PDF that he wanted me to fill out into **Replit**, and it made an application so I can upload it much more easily. Yeah — it's pretty magical. Sean, are you able to use it? It's definitely out of my league still.

Shaan Puri

Both me and Sam have joked around because we both have, maybe, five or six false starts of, like, "I'm gonna learn to code this summer." It's a **New Year's resolution** thing where you just keep saying you're gonna do it. You do 20% of it, 30% of it, and then you give up. We buy the Udemy course *Learn Python the Hard Way*, then you start doing it and nothing really ever sticks. One of the biggest problems—nobody really talks about this—is: do you think learning to code is like learning Spanish? It's like learning a language. You're like, "Okay, so how do I need to say the thing?" But before you can even do that it's like, "Oh, I'm supposed to download this program, so I need to download an editor and then I need to download all these packages to be able to..."

Sam Parr

right stop

Shaan Puri

And then you need to — it's like, just setting up the environment is so goddamn confusing to a beginner that you don't even get to do the part where you actually write the code and be able to run it. Then it's like, "How do I run the code? I have to host it somewhere now. I have to learn how to do hosting and certs — what is that?" There are all these surrounding things that are confusing. Replit solved all of that, which was amazing. I actually did your "100 Days of Learning to Code" — it made it really easy. If I didn't have kids, I would just be doing a lot more because you solved that problem for me. I know I'm asking you about the YC rejection — I want to come back to that — but to give Sam a little more context: correct me if I'm wrong, or tell me if I'm making this up, but I think the reason you wanted to have this kind of online editor/online environment where it's all hosted was because when you were younger you were living in Jordan and you used to try to learn to code out of an internet cafe. That meant every time you went you had to set everything up from scratch because it wasn't your home computer — not your home base where you set it up once and it's there. Is that true? Is that why you felt the problem about ten times more intensely than a typical person would?

Amjad Masad

Yeah, basically—every time I wanted to do a little homework, I had to spend an hour setting up the environment. At the time, the web was moving so fast. Then we had Google Docs and Gmail; we had this client-side **JavaScript** application sort of revolution. I was like, *okay—why can't I type code into the browser and run it?* I started looking around, and it turned out like **nobody had solved this problem**. There were some experiments, and it was kind of crazy to me because it was almost like finding a $100 bill in New York's Grand Central Station—like, "Oh, I found an idea that nobody's paying attention to." *Is that true?* Because it's kind of crazy, you know... the world is big; a lot—there's a lot of programmers...

Sam Parr

That seems like an *obvious* thing. I mean, I'm a total outsider, so my question is: were there some technical challenges to that? Because that seems like... I guess it's easy to say things that are successful are obvious ideas looking back, but... well, it seems like there are.

Shaan Puri

Two things, right. First, there's the technical challenge of being able to make this all work in a browser. That was not obvious. Second, I keep going back to the *internet cafe* thing, because the hardship made the problems unavoidable to you. If you're learning to code at home in America, you might set things up once and only have a little bit of the problem. You're not running into it face-first every day the way you would if you were working out of an internet cafe.

Amjad Masad

Yeah, absolutely. Right — Paul Graham talks about it all the time: the best startups are solving your own problem. I felt that problem really deeply, so I started working on it. I discovered why it's hard. Well, it's hard to run different languages in the browser. You can run JavaScript, but you can't run Python, for example. So we started writing interpreters and compilers to run on JavaScript. It took us a couple of years. We had a few languages running; it was a pretty rough prototype, but people started using it — my friends and people at school — and I was like, okay, this idea has legs. Let me work on it more. In 2011 we had a breakthrough. We were the first to compile Python, Ruby, and most of our languages to JavaScript and run them straight in the browser. That went super viral. We open-sourced it and put it up on Hacker News, and that was my first experience of going viral on [unclear: "venonaut"]. I was like, "Oh my God — this is an amazing rush."

Sam Parr

and I

Amjad Masad

still feel that rush

Sam Parr

yeah can you

Shaan Puri

Put that in context for a non-engineer. Is the thing you guys did—on a scale of 1 to *Satoshi Nakamoto* solving the "double-spend problem"—how hard of an invention was that?

Sam Parr

that was like the nerdiest analogy you ever could have came up with

Shaan Puri

"That's what I'm here for. So—was it *genius*? Or was it just that nobody had taken as much time as it would take to do that? Where was that *breakthrough*? How would you describe that breakthrough?"

Amjad Masad

It's definitely not on the order of the *double-spend problem*, where it's a fundamental invention. It was like pushing a huge boulder up a mountain. It took so much grit and obsession to hack the browser to run things the browser wasn't supposed to—wasn't designed to run. So I would say it's solving hundreds of problems, as opposed to solving one single invention. That was fun, yeah.

Shaan Puri

so you you're working on it as a side project for a number of years

Sam Parr

"That's a long time, by the way. Sean, can you imagine having a side project—a hobby—that takes *three hours a night*? I mean, doing that for *two years* is kind of a long time, no?"

Shaan Puri

Dude, the only two things I've ever done that with are *this podcast* and *my kids*, and there's really no way out of the kids' thing, so, you know.

Sam Parr

and the podcast was a hit right away

Shaan Puri

"The podcast, yeah, gave you results right away, so it actually **doesn't count**. You were doing this *without the kind of financial rewards, fame, or any other major rewards* during that time. How many years did you do the side-project thing, and what kept it going?"

Amjad Masad

2009 was the original idea; 2011 was the breakthrough. Then it went viral on **Hacker News**. I think that was the first time I felt a little bit of fame—a little bit of return on investment. I remember **Brendan Eich**, the inventor of *JavaScript* and the CTO at *Mozilla*, tweeting about it. I was like, "Wow—this is amazing." It felt like a kid in **Jordan** had made a fundamental breakthrough in browser tech, and I was getting recognition. That was pretty cool. Some articles wrote about it, people talked about it at conferences, and all of that was evidence for my **O‑1 visa** to come to the States. Basically, my entire adult life I was working on this, which is crazy.

Sam Parr

old are you now

Amjad Masad

I am 36. *Wow*, I think. And, you know... well.

Sam Parr

it's just I mean you've been working on this since you're 2021 I think yeah

Amjad Masad

21

Sam Parr

yeah I mean that's a that's a wow that's your whole life your whole adult life

Amjad Masad

And, you know, it continued to incrementally improve my life. It wasn't this—working in a room for 11 years and nothing happened. I got a visa to the United States and went to work at Codecademy. They used the *open-source* work that we did, and a bunch of companies in the U.S. did the same. There was a boom in MOOCs—if you remember that: "Udacity," "Coursera," whatever—and a lot of them used the open-source version of Replit to create interactive courses. Suddenly the world opened up to me. I was getting job offers all over the place and had choices about where to go, so we decided to go to New York.

Sam Parr

Alright, so a lot of people watch and listen to the show because they want to hear us tell them exactly what to do when it comes to starting or growing a business. Really, many listeners have a full-time job and want to start something on the side — a side hustle. A lot of people message Sean and me and say, "Alright, I want to start something on the side — is this a good idea?" What they're really saying is, "Just give me the ideas." Well, my friends, you're in luck. My old company, **The Hustle**, put together one hundred different side-hustle ideas and appropriately called it the **Side Hustle Idea Database**. It's a list of one hundred pretty good ideas, frankly. I went through them — they're awesome. It gives you how to start them, how to grow them, things like that. It provides a little bit of inspiration. So check it out. It's called the **Side Hustle Idea Database**. It's in the description below — you'll see the link. Click it, check it out, and let me know in the comments what you think.

Shaan Puri

Naval has this great quote where he says people always ask him about how to build a great network or *tips for networking*. He's like: > "My only tip for networking is do something great and watch — your network will appear overnight." People will immediately come to you because you've done something great. You didn't go try to get a coffee with Brendan Eich [creator of JavaScript and co‑founder of the Mozilla project]; you built something really cool and he was like, "Hey, that's awesome — I want to reach out and get to know you." I think that's actually how — back to the YC thing — you ended up getting into YC later: Paul Graham actually just thought what you were doing was cool. But let's go to the YC part. So you quit that Facebook job, put half the money in Bitcoin and half the money in your startup, applied to YC, and were rejected. That was the first rejection. What were the other rejections?

Amjad Masad

**VCs** kind of wouldn't talk to us. We'd get meetings with VCs; some of them were yawning, and I think one of them even slept. It was just not interesting to them. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

Dude, I had that happen one time as well. A guy literally fell — he was *eighty years old*. It was Friday at 4 PM, it was warm in the office, and he fell asleep mid-pitch.

Amjad Masad

like it

Sam Parr

Was it—was it warm? *Yeah.* It was like a cold bay; it was warm inside, so I was like, "Yeah... I mean, put..."

Shaan Puri

it in put it in put it

Sam Parr

"I was in the room and I was like, 'You — I was like, you deserve this.' But dude... what, what, what did they not see in you? Because it's so easy to look back at the past, but you seem like you got the *it factor*. That seems like such an obvious idea. You worked on it for two years. Smart people are talking about it. Like, what were—"

Shaan Puri

you what were you missing what was the case against it

Amjad Masad

Well, I think *Silicon Valley* is probably the most meritocratic place in the world, but it is also status-driven. At least then, it was very status-driven. If you look at the way people who got into **YC** were, they were often Stanford dropouts and things like that. I think since then **YC** has improved and now accepts international people and all of that. But my background wasn't really interesting to them. I didn't have any fancy colleges or any of that. Also, being a married couple was somehow something that they thought...

Shaan Puri

**It was a disadvantage.** You didn't match the patterns. You didn't match the *Stanford* pattern. You didn't match the co‑founder relationship pattern. You didn't match the trend of what categories have big exits. You weren't *on trend* at that time.

Sam Parr

right

Amjad Masad

Yeah, and so we continued to apply to **YC** every season. We'd send in the application, and our thesis developed more. We felt like we'd started making some money—some people started paying for our service. We had an **API** at the time that people paid for. A lot of educators and people learning to code started to pay for **Replit**. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

what was the revenue when you got in

Amjad Masad

It was maybe $10 a month; that was enough to sustain us. It was ramen profitability. But before *YC*, the first person to actually bet on us was Roy Bahat from Bloomberg Beta. I knew him from my Codecademy days. The meeting with him was so refreshing — he was a straight shooter. He told me where he thought the idea or the category was hard and where he thought the valuation should be. In that first meeting he gave me everything he was thinking about; he didn't obscure anything. I was feeling really good about it. So, yeah — he gave us about $500–$1,000 on a $6,000,000 valuation. That was the first check we got.

Shaan Puri

nice good for him and then how did the how did you eventually get into yc

Amjad Masad

so basically you know we're grinding and the product was getting better every week and I started writing articles about what we're solving so we're solving pretty hard problems and so this article kept going in hacker news and hacker news was really excited about what we're doing and paul graham reads hacker news a lot probably still to this day and one day like december 2017 I wake up there's a dm on on my phone and it is sam altman and he's like hey I run yc and we're interested in what you're doing I'm like dude I know who you are you have to tell me you run yc and he's like okay let's meet you know come to this address and it wasn't the yc address I was like a little confused and so I go there and it was the openai office in the mission and so I meet him there and you know we talk a little bit and then he's like he turns his computer around he's like this is this is paul's email he emailed sam and told him this company is very important you should reach out to them and he's like okay talk to pg I'm gonna give you his email talk to him and then maybe you can maybe we can work on something to get you into yc so I started this email relationship with paul which was really fascinating I mean he's a great writer right and so we talked about we talked about replit we talked about the problems of setting up an environment the problems of hosting an application it turns out after he sold via web he started working on something like replit he started working on like an editor you write some lisp of course because he likes these very obscure programming languages and but by the way paul graham is the founder of yc at the time he was starting to retire and sam was running yc and and so you know we had this email relationship where he wrote me essays essentially on the problem we're solving

Shaan Puri

By the way, were you intimidated? You know, **Paul Graham** writing essays to you privately—are you, like, are those high-stakes replies for you? </FormattedResponse>

Amjad Masad

Yes. I would spend hours proofreading the emails and trying to be as good a writer as I could. One thing about me is I was never nervous about meeting famous, established people. I think that helped me over time, because I could *be myself* and talk to them on the same level, as opposed to being a fanboy or... you know.

Shaan Puri

Why was that? What—were you just *oblivious* to it, or did you have a *different mindset* about it? What was the reason?</FormattedResponse>

Amjad Masad

Yeah, I felt like my life was taking on this **trajectory**. Not to be too superstitious, but it felt like a force. I felt like everything's going to be great. It's going to be hard, but I'm meeting all these people and things are opening up to us. So when I go meet people, my mindset is: I want to impress them and I want to be able to get money from them. I have a **goal**. I think having a goal when you're meeting someone actually puts you in a very different mindset than—again—just fanboying and being very excited about the meeting.

Sam Parr

Dude, have you guys seen that? Do you know the director Guy Ritchie? He's that British director. He's got this great story—he was on a podcast with Joe Rogan and he said, "I just wanna be the director of my own life, and I wanna live my life like a movie." What you're describing is sort of like that. You're saying, "I am destined for greatness. We are taking on this amazing problem, and we are going to do wonderful things. It will be hard, but we will triumph." I think that's actually great. It's a great story to tell yourself. I think it's very motivating, and it makes life more exciting.

Amjad Masad

Cool. Yeah, so I actually wrote a blog post. The title is **"Do What Makes the Best Story."** The idea is: when you're faced with decisions where there's no obvious answer — like a fork in the road where the pros and cons are about the same — the heuristic I use in my life is: *what is a more interesting story?* Obviously Elon Musk talks about this — that the most entertaining outcome is most likely. I wasn't thinking about it in terms of entertaining, but in terms of what makes the story interesting. If my life was a movie, what would be exciting about that story? For example, when I was in college I was coding all the time and I wasn't really going to class. I was failing a lot — not because I failed the exams, but because they would bar me from the exam for not showing up. I decided to hack the university to change my grades.

Shaan Puri

And we're not talking metaphorically—like "a lifetime." You actually *hacked into the servers* and changed your grade. Is that what happened?

Amjad Masad

Yeah, I went into the basement. I spent about two weeks. I did the—what's his name—the famous inventor *Michelangelo* or something like that. I tried his *polyphasic sleep* method, where you work for hours and then sleep for 15 minutes. It was sort of like I was writing on the wall; it felt like full-on insanity.

Shaan Puri

were you angry why did you decide to have them

Sam Parr

I know so many smart people who work so much harder to *cheat* or get around the thing than just doing the thing. About 50% of the time they end up being, like, losers; the other 50% of the time they are, in fact, the greatest.

Shaan Puri

they're on this podcast

Amjad Masad

Yeah, well, I think it is, like, some *ADHD*, right? You can sit in class, but if you're interested in something, you're going to hack on it and work on it a ton. I almost got away with it, but the servers at the university crashed and it crashed on my record. One of the administrators gave me a call and he said, "Look, there's some anomaly in the record of your exam — it's crashing our databases. Do you know anything about it?" I asked, "What's the anomaly?" He said, "There's a field in the database that says you're barred from the exam and your grade should be 35." That's the default failing grade for the exam. Instead, my grades were like 75, 90, whatever — that's what I entered into the system. I didn't understand there was another field. By the way, that's not good design for a database. Since then, there was a fork in the road. I could lie — I think I could have gotten away with it and just said it was a bug on their side. But I thought, "What's the most interesting story? If they catch me, it becomes a story that people talk about." So I decided, "Okay, I'm just going to come clean and tell them what I did."

Shaan Puri

oh so you're like better better than getting the grade would be getting the reputation

Sam Parr

yes exactly

Shaan Puri

so you tell them and then what happened they kick you out

Amjad Masad

No. So, you know, I'm kind of a convincing person. I went the next day — all the deans were there, discussing my case and trying to find out what I did. They were all *computer science deans*. I went in, changed the subject to the *technical aspects of the hack*, drew on the whiteboard, and showed them what I did. They were very impressed.

Sam Parr

it's like a goodwill hunting moment

Amjad Masad

Yeah. My reputation back then was like, **"I'm a loser — I'm failing everything."** I didn't show up to class. It was kind of like Good Will Hunting. They told me I had to go talk to the president because he was going to make the final call. So I went to the president. He's a very intellectual person, and we talked. I told him, "Look, I have this talent and I feel like it was undiscovered. I feel like I was treated unfairly. I used the university as my sandbox. I didn't mean to do anything bad — I came clean." He gave me the Spider-Man line: **"With great power comes great responsibility."** It actually affected me. I thought I needed to do something to pay back, so I told them I'd work that summer for free to make sure I secured their databases. They let me off the hook and were like, "Oh, awesome."

Shaan Puri

"Wow — what a great story, dude. That is an amazing story, **Sam**. By the way, would you ever want to compete with **Amjad** at anything?"

Sam Parr

No — this is, like, this mentality. This is... it's *scary*. Yeah, I would not want to. You're like, "Excuse me, Dean, have you heard of the word *prodigy*?" You're like... trying.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, you're like, "I—my talents haven't been used well at this university." I accept your apology, dude.

Sam Parr

I like your fault, dude. It's like, "Why are you failing me?" Yes, yes. </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

That's so good. Okay, so I love the principle: "*do what makes the best story.*" I love the "hack story" — that's amazing. Where... how did we get here? We were talking about...

Amjad Masad

YC [Y Combinator] — okay, sorry. Let's get to the story of YC, because that's where we started. So **Sam** is like, "Yeah, you should do YC. Actually, the batch starts tomorrow — why don't you fill an application? It's just a process you have to do, and we can do a later interview tomorrow." And I'm like, "Fuck, I want to fill the application again? You made me do it four times. I don't want to do it again." So, you know, I kind of did a bare-bones application about **Raflat**. Then there's the video. I'm like, "Yeah, man, I don't want to do the video." So I pasted a YouTube link. And then we go the next day — Haya and I — by the...

Shaan Puri

For people who don't know, **YC (Y Combinator)**'s application is a one-page form. It's six or seven questions. Then they ask you to upload a two- or three-minute video where you talk about your startup — that's the video part. The interview is ten minutes of rapid-fire questions. You have about ten minutes and it's a **"make-or-break"** thing. It's less than a lunch; it's shorter than a job interview but more intense. So you're waiting around for that.

Amjad Masad

I mean, my view was they recruited us to **YC**. Like—why are you making us do... do... do this stuff, right? And so...

Sam Parr

Yeah, I was gonna ask that. They're acting like, you know, Paul Graham's like, "Maybe I could pull some strings." It's like...

Shaan Puri

I know a guy

Sam Parr

Yeah. Like, "you're the guy." So I—well, I don't understand what they're... what they're bullshitting. Well, I don't get it.

Amjad Masad

Well, I think they wanted to just go through the process. It's like the process applies to everyone, and I respect that. They called us to the interview. I walked in and there was Jared and Adora and all these amazing oic partners. Michael — he was the CEO at the time — was there too. I shook their hands, and when I shook Michael's hand his grip felt a little too hard. I thought, okay, that's fine. I sat down, and the moment I sat down Michael looked at me and said, "Why did you recall us? Oh my God." I said, "You know, we applied several times and I thought it'd be fun to do it. I thought this interview was just a formality." He replied, "That's not how you get into **YC**," and he was very, very angry. It turns out that while we were sitting outside, they were getting *rickrolled* inside. Imagine their mindset — looking at the application, hearing the recall song — and then they gave us a very tough interview.

Shaan Puri

"In that moment, did you... It's like, 'and that's when I realized I *fucked up.*' Did you realize?"

Amjad Masad

yes

Shaan Puri

how I'm coming across like what was your mindset there like they must be thinking

Amjad Masad

I was nervous. I was *very* nervous, and I was regretful immediately. Yeah.

Shaan Puri

Because people probably think, "Oh—here's just another *entitled* tech guy." They don't know you're an immigrant from Jordan who's scraped his way here. Right? The reality and how you were coming across weren't connected in that moment.

Amjad Masad

No, they weren't at all. So we go outside and I tell Haya, "Okay, this is done. Let's call an Uber and get back to work — we don't need to get into **YC** [Y Combinator]." I call an Uber, and just before I arrive I receive a call. I take the call and it's like, "Hey, it's Adora. You got in. Come back — the kickoff is about to start." I was like, "What? Are you sure?" She's like, "Yeah, come back, sign the paperwork, and get started." I was stunned the whole day. We start, we go to the dinner, and I'm kind of phased out, but it was really exciting. People who've never been to the YC office in Mountain View — it's all orange: bright orange, the lights, everything. It feels like a cult-like environment, doesn't it?

Sam Parr

I think I've seen the inside. Doesn't it—don't they have a *steeple*? Isn't one of the rooms triangular, like a church almost?

Amjad Masad

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And Sound gets up and tells us what the experience is going to be. It's like, "This is the hardest time you're going to work. You better tell your friends and family that you're going away for three months. You can't help them move or all of that. You just have to be focused on work." Haiyan and I took it very seriously. I was like, okay—these **three months** are very important for the success of the company, and we transformed the product in those three months. It went from a simple sort of editor/output to a place where you can host applications and build real things—all in three months. We were working **12–13 hour days**, and it was only **three of us** at the time. Our first employee actually was sort of a runaway kid. He grew up in California, a little down south, and he didn't want to go to school. So he left home, went to Hack Reactor, and became a programmer. He was 18 and looking for a job. I knew the guys at Hack Reactor—they used Replit—and I said, "Send me your best programmer." They said, "Look, this kid is a little awkward, but he's the best." So he comes in and he yells on our interview.

Shaan Puri

music to my ears

Amjad Masad

Yeah, basically, I like him because, you know, it *mirrors* kind of my life story a little bit.

Sam Parr

where is this guy now but we got

Amjad Masad

We got him some **liquidity** after six years of working. I felt that's the right thing to do, and because he was kind of burnt out and didn't want to continue, I called my brother in Jordan. I'm like, "Look — you gotta come out here to NYC; you need to." He's a programmer; I taught him programming when he was a kid, and I was like, "You gotta come help us." He's still with us today. I called my friend from Codecademy, Moody; he's still with us today as well. I said, "You gotta help us — you could do it remotely." So we assembled a team of essentially five people. We went really hard, and we were one of the hottest companies in **YC** [Y Combinator] at the time.

Shaan Puri

And can you give some sense of the scale of it now? Like, you know, I invested in it a year ago or so... two years ago, something like that. I don't know when, but the numbers were off. You had user growth. First, your graph looked like a *hockey stick* because when you zoom out, it ignores all of the little years where nothing was really going on, and you have this crazy growth. But the crazy thing about it is that your growth was **developers**. It's like—one developer user is worth, I don't know, *10–20 times* just a normal internet user.

Amjad Masad

mhmm

Shaan Puri

But you had this crazy *hockey-stick* growth of developers. Can you talk about it? Can you just say a couple of — *permission to brag* — can you say a couple of **brag-worthy stats** that would impress?

Amjad Masad

**Us.** Yeah — so, **Replo** was very easy to get started with. People would begin using it in college or high school and continue using it for many years, so it was *sticky*, especially for junior developers when they’re starting out. It spread on its own via word-of-mouth. There was a viral component: people could share a URL and suddenly you’re in the same environment as them. That created a multiplier coding experience where people were collaborating. COVID was really great for us because we were, I think, the only collaborative editor experience on the web at the time. A lot of people were remote and needed something to work with each other, so Replo was adopted widely. Growth was off the charts and the servers were going down. The marginal user of any web app is sort of like zero cost, but for us we tried to optimize a lot and it was still on the order of $1 to $5 a month per user. Growth was massive, but I have to admit it was hard to monetize at the time because developers were not used to paying for things. Now they kind of are — because of **AI** — but back then they weren’t paying. As we added limits and things like that, people thought they could move on and set up their own developer environment. It took a lot of creative thinking to figure out how to charge people. Ultimately, AI was the thing that people were willing to pay for. The productivity benefit of AI is obvious: it saves time and makes you a better developer, so people are paying for it right now.

Sam Parr

"Well, can you give any indication of how many *users*, or how much *revenue* the business has?"

Amjad Masad

Sign-ups: we have more than **30 million**—I think **35 million** users right now. In terms of active users, it kind of fluctuates, but it's probably **2–3 million** a month. There are about **100,000** apps hosted on **Replit**, because you can build an app and deploy it all in one environment. In terms of revenue, I can't share figures right now, but especially this year it's been *exponential growth*.

Shaan Puri

sam check this out this agent thing I gotta show you this so you you haven't used this right sam no alright so so watch this so yesterday I was like I'm I'm gonna mess around I was doing research for this but I was like I just got like sucked into replit and I started doing that stopped doing research so I go and I I go to replit and it's changed because now when you before when you would go it would be like here's a coding screen with a blinking cursor and it's like write some code and I'd be like oh cool I don't really write code so I don't know how to use this product exactly maybe I could learn to code maybe I could you know pay somebody to to build something on here but whatever I was stuck so now you open up replit and it just it's like chat gpt it just goes so what would you like me to create and so I go on there watch this so I go I'll give you the exact prompt I said build me an app that will text me every morning asking how I ate yesterday let me answer via text message and then track the results on a monthly calendar grid if textings doesn't work you could also use whatsapp or something else okay so basically like on the right here is just like the chat and it just goes absolutely let me propose what we'll build and then it just kinda like explains to me like a project manager it goes I'm gonna help you create a food tracking app through sms messaging with a calendar visualizations we'll start with the sms later we can add whatsapp as an alternative it's like okay okay prioritizing things that's interesting and then it goes the app will send daily message blah blah blah and then it goes how would you like me to proceed and it's like there was like you know add more features change the instructions or like go ahead and build the prototype so I clicked build the initial prototype and then literally I don't know if you can see this but like it starts like autoscrolling as it's writing code like this is all just a code it's generating so like you know like I'm not doing anything I'm literally sitting back with popcorn while this is happening so it's like here's your calendar grid and it's like hey I need I'm gonna use twilio for the sms it decides I'll use twilio for the sms can you go to twilio and give me your account and your phone number so that it'll we like we use twilio for sending sms so I go to twilio I give it my sms and then it's like it's made it literally made the thing exactly how I want everything works now yeah I actually got stuck on the twilio step because twilio has to verify my phone number so it like it hasn't verified it yet but I can go into I in twilio I see it tries to send me the message and it just says awaiting twilio verification to like be able to use this so I'm like a little bit stuck there which is like a common thing with agents I feel it's like almost absolutely incredible and then kind of frustrating at some.

Shaan Puri

Where you have to like you know fight through some walls

Sam Parr

Well, I think I'm just... I think he said, "I want people to be able to build an app faster than they could just Google the answer to a question."

Shaan Puri

and that's exactly what happened here

Sam Parr

well that's insane

Amjad Masad

So, this screenshot is the agent looking at the result. It's trying to verify. This is not the running app. If you click **"Run,"** you can...

Shaan Puri

I got the running app at the top, took a screenshot, and then it shows it to me. It's like, "Hey, is this how you want it?" and I was like, "Oh." Before, it had the wrong month on top. I said, "Put the month on top—don't say 'monthly food tracker' right, December." It also said, "Hey, would you like any other style improvements? I can make it broader. I can change the color scheme." I was like, "Dude, this is literally better than an employee." First, it's instantaneous. Second, I don't have to pay somebody to sit at a desk waiting for me. I had an idea on a whim, went to Repa, and did the thing with the agent. There have been a few **mind-blowing** moments for me in my tech career. I graduated in 2010, so I'll start there. The first time I took an Uber was one of them—I was like, "Holy shit, that was amazing." I pushed a button, a car showed up, the guy got in, and I didn't even have to pay in person; it just paid through my phone. That was magic. I could see him on an app getting closer and closer to the restaurant. That was one. ChatGPT was another, where I could tell it to make something and it'll write it for me. This is another one of those moments. This is the first AI agent thing that has been a **mind-blowing** moment for me: I am *not* a programmer, I am *not* a coder, but I can now create software.

Sam Parr

"This is, like, amazing. Can I ask a blunt, crude question? How can I use your software to become a **billionaire**? Because I see this and I'm like... you know, the ridiculous analogy I use is: I feel like an artist sometimes. I feel like I have the ability to conceptualize certain things, but I can't paint. I can't *fucking* paint what I want to paint that's in my head, because I literally don't have that skill set sometimes. So I'll be working on stuff and I'm like, 'Dude, I want this to do this,' but I have to go talk to a developer and I don't want to have that conversation. It's a pain in the ass. So, you basically are making it so I can finally express myself easily."

Shaan Puri

I like how, on the first date, you're like, "How can I get you to take your clothes off?" Then you're like, "How do I use your thing to get really rich?" </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

Yeah, I mean, that's basically it. Like Ed—on the document you had, you wrote, "Here are the opportunities: just use **Replit** to do X, Y, and Z." I want to go through that because this is amazing. There's a viral clip on YouTube and Twitter and a whole bunch of places with a headline we've probably used: "**$1 billion one-person companies**" or something like that. You're probably the person best positioned to answer that question.

Amjad Masad

yeah so there are apps built on replit agent that otherwise would take probably $100,000 of developer time and you can build it like in you know $25 paid to replit I will say that there are limitations right it is not perfect this is like the worst it's going to be it sometimes gets stuck with problems you need to have some skill in prompting to coax it to like figure it out and it sort of like teaches you over time because it tells you what it's doing as it's editing the code and so over time you're learning how to use it you're actually learning how code works you're learning how maybe you're not learning how to exactly type code but you're learning the different components in where things could go wrong you're learning about database we have like database you can go in and look at the tables and look what's happening and so you know the division for this is that that's all you need that's all you need to build an entire startup and you know every day we're inching towards that you know and I talked about like pushing the boulder up the hill and I think that's one of my one of my talents is like okay what are the problems that you can make progress on every day and every week such that you know in a year time you have this exponential progress and the product is so much better the other thing is we're riding this wave of the foundation models getting better so every time they get better we plug in a new foundation model and the product is suddenly better so you're riding this you know 2 exponential curves which is like the engineering we're doing but also the underlying models and infrastructure is getting better so I think in a year's time it's gonna be really mind blowing in a couple years time I think we're gonna see stories like someone getting super rich making an app in replit that sort of goes viral and so we're adding stripe integration right now you can you can already use kind of stripe on on replit but we're adding integration that makes it super easy to start monetizing your app

Shaan Puri

So, Sam said, "How do I get rich?" and you're like, "**Disclaimer:** it's not fully there yet," but now you still have to answer the question. </FormattedResponse>

Amjad Masad

I mean, the question is: what kind of applications—what are the ideas, what kind of applications can you build? I would say **AI applications** are growing really fast. The revenue ramp in some of those AI applications is kinda crazy.

Shaan Puri

can you can you tell the story of magic school I thought this was really interesting

Amjad Masad

**Yeah, so Magic School is an AI application for educators.** It's basically helping them use foundation models and LLMs to do their work, create assignments for kids, and provide an interactive AI experience. So it's a full suite of AI tools for educators.

Shaan Puri

the guy who created it is a was a teacher right

Amjad Masad

The guy who created it was a teacher. He took some time during COVID-19 to learn how to code, and he started using **Replit**. He and another person built the initial thing totally on **Replit**. Because you can go "from an idea all the way to deployment," it immediately started growing. These **AI** apps—when adoption starts happening—go super viral; you don't need a ton of marketing. The revenue ramp was one of the craziest ones I've seen, especially for education.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it was like a known thing — it was one of the hardest markets to sell into: schools, into teachers. **They're overworked, they're underpaid**, and they don't have the time to figure out your new tool. But this thing is great. If you go to it, it's basically because teachers spend a lot of their time *not* in the classroom. After the school day is done, they have to grade papers, create the lesson plan for the next day, and prepare quizzes or multiple-choice tests. They constantly have to do these things. There were platforms like *Teacher Pay Teachers* where, if I didn't want to make something myself because I'm tired after the school day, I might be able to go buy one for $9 from another teacher who teaches 5th grade science in another state. I would take that and buy it that way. What **Magic School** did was cool: you just say, for example, "I teach 5th grade biology; I want to do a pop quiz about how mitosis works," and it'll basically create either a lesson plan, a quiz, or a student-interactive workbook that they need to teach. So it lets a teacher not have to spend four hours a night creating the materials they need — because **AI** can do it for them. This thing looks... I don't know these guys. I don't know anything about them, but it says over 4,000,000 educators and their students are using it. I don't know if they're counting...

Amjad Masad

well if

Sam Parr

you go on similarweb they have millions of monthly uniques so that's like a really

Shaan Puri

I think they raised like $20,000,000 too obviously

Sam Parr

yeah I mean that's like a pretty huge signal

Amjad Masad

So they launched in, I want to say, **July 2023** — so a little over a year ago. You know how these **SaaS** metrics track how long it takes to get to, like, **$100,000,000**? With the AI apps, I would say **Magic School** is on that trajectory. The curve is just straight up.

Sam Parr

This is kind of weird, but maybe this is *a feature* of yours: you helped this company become potentially one of the fastest-growing companies of all time, and you only earned **$20 a month** from that.

Amjad Masad

Yeah. So, Replit has always had a problem of value capture. Partly that's why VCs struggled with it for a long time. There's some logic for why it is hard to monetize these things and capture some of the value. I will say I invested in Magic School, so there's some of that. With AI, I think we're going to be able to capture at least a little bit more of that value. If people are monetizing these apps on Replit via the agent, there's a way I think we can potentially take a cut of that—especially if we make it super simple to start monetizing an app. Also, once we reach scale, it is like [unclear: "chajibouti"]—you don't need a lot of skill to do that, and it's going to get easier and easier. Once we reach scale and you have millions of people paying for this, and it's not just $20, you'll pay incrementally after you finish your credits. We give you monthly credits, and afterwards, if you want to continue, you can buy more credits.

Shaan Puri

Are there other companies like *Magic School*—cool companies like that—you've seen that maybe we haven't heard of that are using *AI*?

Amjad Masad

Yes. I'm very excited about *agents* right now. I predicted earlier this year on a podcast that this is going to be the year when agents are born, and next year is when agents are going to scale. There's a company called **11x**, and 11x creates **AI SDRs** [sales development representatives]. Basically, you don't need to hire SDRs. Some companies feel like they can bootstrap their sales without SDRs: you can have one **AE** [account executive], and that AE is running tens of AI SDRs. The revenue ramp on 11x was also crazy. It's pretty wild how fast these companies are scaling. I don't think in the history of Silicon Valley we've seen anything like that even in the...

Shaan Puri

Like the Web 2.0 era: so, what is a **fast ramp** for **AI**? Maybe not 11x specifically, but for an AI company, what's impressive — what broke the frame of how long things would take that you've seen now?

Amjad Masad

"Yeah, so I would say reaching **10 million** in **three to four months**."

Shaan Puri

Ah — oh my God, that's wild. Yeah... I invested in *Jasper*, which was one of the early ones.

Sam Parr

kind

Shaan Puri

It was one of those *ChatGPT*-wrapper type companies, where there was, like, marketing—“you need to write a blog post, you need to write a description for a product,” or whatever. So you could use it for writing any kind of marketing copy. Their graph—I’d never seen it. In 10 or 11 months they scaled to **$50,000,000** in annual recurring revenue. It was... I’d never seen anything even remotely close to that. It raised the question: is this sustainable? What is happening here? This... it doesn't compute. But it definitely broke my frame of what’s possible, because I’ve been working in Silicon Valley since 2011/2012, and that just wasn’t a thing. You would never see a graph like that.

Sam Parr

What are some other companies that have reached around **$10 million**, or followed a similar trajectory, within **three months**? </FormattedResponse>

Amjad Masad

Yeah, so I wanted to give a sort of disclaimer about this. The big question in the investor community right now is the *moats* question. That started around the time that **ChatGPT** kind of came out and there were these *GPT wrappers* — a somewhat condescending way of looking at many of these companies. The argument is: if you can create a GPT wrapper in a month, a lot of other people will too. You end up competing on price, margins go down, and even if the ARR [annual recurring revenue] is great, **OpenAI** or **Anthropic** may capture most of the ARR, not you. You become a middleman and will have a hard time maintaining margins. I think that's a totally valid question. That said, moats develop over time through strategy and technical excellence. Some companies can fall quickly — there are examples of that right now — but you can also start building real technical advantages. With **Replit**, for example, it's like pushing a bullet off a hill: we have the runtime environment, the infrastructure, deployment, databases, and lots of integrations. It's the only end-to-end environment to make software, and catching up with that will take years. Still, technical advantage is not necessarily a long-term moat. The question isn't fully answered. There are strategic things you can do if you reach scale — if switching costs are high, that may be a way to create sustainable moats — but it is definitely a big question.

Sam Parr

You know what's crazy, Sean? For a long time I hated using the **"D-word"** — *democratize*. I think that's such an overused Silicon Valley phrase.

Shaan Puri

do it don't do it

Sam Parr

But this is actually one of those few examples where, for the longest time, building a website or a web app you just literally couldn't. Now you are making the technology that everyone can use. So what I think is: guys like **Sean and me**—or people like us who have an audience—why aren't we constantly launching companies using this technology? Our ability to get users (because we can just get on the microphone and talk about it) is actually a **competitive advantage**. Being technical is no longer—it's still an advantage, but it's not as much as before. **Getting customers now is actually the only hard part**, which is still hard, but it's way easier if you're popular.

Amjad Masad

**Yeah, so the playbook** I would use is: I would go into some inefficient market or industry. A deal from **Magic School** went into this hugely inefficient industry — schools and education. By the way, another product, *Synthesis Tutor*, is also going viral right now, and they have this revenue ramp that's kind of crazy.

Sam Parr

both sean and I invested in that company

Shaan Puri

I think all 3 of us did

Amjad Masad

Yeah. For a while they had this program where they actually had educators on the payroll. They replaced all of that with **AI**. Now the kids sit in front of the iPad, talk to the AI, and learn really fast. It's much better than the previous product.

Shaan Puri

right

Amjad Masad

So basically, find an industry you're familiar with and build a **DPG wrapper** to automate some of the work there. You could do it 100 times, and one of them will take off.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it's the era of the **"idea guy"** now. It's our turn — our turn to shine, right? Because now the limits on value creation are: do you understand a problem well enough to know how to take this really powerful **magic wand** and apply it to that problem and be able to make that more efficient? And then, of course, do all of the other hard things: go get customers, make it sustainable, build a good team — do all the normal entrepreneurship stuff. But it seems like, more than ever, having a great idea is a kind of key unlock to doing these things, because building has become easier. I'll give you my personal epiphany that I had while I was doing this.

Sam Parr

so I invested in

Shaan Puri

Replit, mostly. When I saw you, I thought you seemed really smart, and I saw a growth curve of developers using it. I thought, "Oh, cool." I've experienced this problem before: a one-stop place where I can come in, write the code, host it — all the stuff you talked about. Don't have to download Java, don't have to do any of that shit. That appealed to me at the time. I think, actually, in the same way that Synthesis took AI and almost 10x'd the value prop of the business, I think you guys are doing the same. So here's my quick pitch: now that I think of Replit as basically what Shopify was for creating online stores, I think Replit is that for creating software. So, to me, you guys </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

are dude his eyes

Shaan Puri

just brightened when you you're shopify for software so like I'll give you my example I recently celebrated a milestone that was both I was proud of it and really embarrassed also so a few years ago I started a ecommerce brand and we just crossed 50,000,000 in revenue like kinda like cumulative lifetime revenue half of it was like you know this year but but 50,000,000 total and I was like wow like 50,000,000 that's great like that's I had never created a business that had done 50,000,000 in revenue so that was like a personal pride. At the same time I was telling it to to to a friend of mine who's not an entrepreneur he's like yeah man I would love to learn how to you know like make websites and like make products with manufacturing and I was like oh I don't know how to do any of that like I was I was like this this brand that is on 50,000,000 in revenue for me I don't I just stacked alibaba times shopify I've never manufactured a product in my life still don't know how to and I've never made a website that's like you know actually used by customers still don't know how to but I was able to I was able to skip all the work and get to the brand part like do the thing where we created a product that people liked and you know it's a successful company now and I thought wow replit's gonna do that for the software space and I was like it used to be that the job was software engineer and now it's gonna be software creator it's like I can be a creator of software without being a programmer myself that little shift is a big shift because the way I think about it I don't know how many developers there are I think github has like a 100,000,000 or 200,000,000 accounts so I'll just use that like there's 200,000,000 let's say developer you know software engineers in the world well now there's gonna be 200 2,000,000,000 people that can create software because if you got the internet you got your phone you can create software now you just tell the agent make me an app that does this make a tool that does this and so you 10 x the number of people that can create software in the same way that shopify and alibaba 10 x or more the number of people who could create products and go sell them like hard goods that's how I see what you're doing

Amjad Masad

Yeah, so—even at the start of Repled, there's our initial seed deck. The deck kind of has this Elon Musk–style *"Master Plan."*

Shaan Puri

master plan

Amjad Masad

And it was like: we build a platform, we grow it, and then **AI** is going to make the thing a lot more accessible, because our mission was to *make programming accessible*. Then we updated our mission — it was to create **1 billion programmers**. So the moment that GPT-3 came out, I was like, "this is a thing," and I wrote this thread on **Twitter** about how AI agents will just change how programmers work. </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

This is the deck — 2015. I don't even know if **OpenAI** was a research lab at that time. Maybe... definitely, you know, there was no **ChatGPT**. But this was your master-planned deck. > "So we're gonna grow by building tools for teachers and students. > We're gonna build a simple network and an AI-assisted interface that blurs the distinction between learning and building, evolve into a platform where people can learn, build, explore, and host applications." Like talking about AI back in 2015, in your actual pitch deck.

Sam Parr

Dude, it's also clear how *Codecademy* was highly influential to you. I remember years ago Sean said, "Everyone tries to learn how to code. I used Codecademy and it was a pretty cool interface," and it's very similar to what you're describing.

Amjad Masad

You know, at some point I kind of lost hope in courses because we have a *100 Days of Code* mentality. We're telling users that to use our application you need to invest 100 days, and that's kind of crazy. There isn't any successful company in the world where you need 100 days to learn it. That's when I changed my mindset and said, "Okay, it needs to be *chatty-bitty*; it needs to be just a prompt." We started building that earlier this year, and now that's all we're focused on. We want to create new programmers. Existing developers are great — they have a lot of tools — but we want to go after the *citizen developer*. Everyone is a developer. I think that's what you're talking about, Sean. You go from something like 100,000,000 developers in the world — well, I think that overstates the numbers; it's probably more like 30,000,000 — and then you 10x that. So what does the world look like when anyone with an idea could make something? One of my favorite books is *The Sovereign Individual*. The thing I was really excited about is the idea that "ideas become wealth" — you no longer have the bottleneck of making something. That's where we're headed. This is what you're talking about, Sean: it's the time for the idea person. Maybe that's tongue-in-cheek, and a more precise way to put it is people who can find gaps in markets — people who have expertise in certain areas, who can see inefficiencies and create an AI application that can immediately pluck that.

Sam Parr

I saw this video on *Twitter* the other day. It was of a snake that got its head chopped off, and it floated around and bit the tail of its own body. Then the body reacted. Are your employees thinking this? They're sort of doing that to themselves — where, when you make jokes...

Shaan Puri

dark

Sam Parr

Or, when you talk about *"you don't need to hire all these programmers to do all this stuff,"* are they sitting there with their hands in their pockets? Does that mean us?

Amjad Masad

You know, I always wanted the company to be **super lean**. For a long time, we were about 10 people, but now we're about 70 people.

Sam Parr

that's still nothing

Amjad Masad

Yeah. I'd rather not hire a lot more people because I think, again, of the efficiency gains for programmers. Look: citizen developers are going to go from about **0 to 10x**, but existing software engineers are going to go from **10x to 100x**. They're going to become more and more productive. The moment we automate all of software engineering—I think that's sort of the moment of **AGI**—everything changes. I think it's a little far away. The reason I say that is: once you automate software, then agents can rebuild themselves. You go into a loop of increased intelligence, where every version builds the next version, and that next version builds the one after. This is what they call the **"intelligence explosion"**, which could lead to the **singularity**. So it's a pretty crazy time when we automate all of software engineering. I think it's coming; I don't know if it's 10 years or 15 years, but I think that's when the world really radically changes.

Shaan Puri

Have you met anybody in the tech industry that blew you away, either personally or maybe you read about them or a friend-of-a-friend told you a story? I saw a picture of you with **Jensen** — you know you've met **Paul Graham**; I know that you're connected in the AI circles. You met **Sam Altman**. In addition to building the tech, I love the characters and the stories. It's why every snippet of how **Elon** runs his companies goes viral and shit like that. What are your favorite inspiring or crazy stories that you've either experienced directly or read?

Amjad Masad

Yeah, one of the craziest stories: when we were raising from **a16z**, Marc invited me to breakfast at about 10 a.m. at his house. I went there expecting to talk about the business, but we spent two or three hours talking about politics, the world, and all sorts of things that are interesting to him. I thought, this guy is more than just a technologist — he's a philosopher. Right now he's going out and talking about this stuff. His Joe Rogan interview went super viral, and he's always had these interesting ideas about the world. The interesting thing about **a16z** is his partner, Ben, is sort of the executor — the executive. He wrote "The Hard Thing About Hard Things," where he teaches you what it means to run a company: it's painful, it's hard, and what it means to hire executives or to scale a company. So you have this duo of the doer and the philosopher, and I think that's really amazing. I think they have really big plans, and they're just getting started.

Shaan Puri

I would just hate the *philosopher*. I'd be like, "Are you gonna do anything? What are you—what are you talking about politics for right now? It's gotta be the worst to be..."

Sam Parr

the doer and the doer philosopher relationship

Amjad Masad

Right. I think **Sam** is—well, it was interesting to meet him and talk to him because he's very effective. The first time I met him—or maybe not the first time—he was on his computer while I was talking. I said, "Yeah, we're fundraising; I went to talk to **a16z**. I'm a really big fan of **Marc**," and he was typing on his computer. Then he said, "Okay, I introduced you to Marc." When you send Sam emails, he replies pretty quickly, often with a couple of words or a few sentences. I saw how effective and fast you can be, and I'm not like that. I'm trying to be more like that, but I'm someone who really values the *quietness*—to think about ideas and strategy. I'm not always on top of communication; it actually makes me a little overwhelmed. But I think seeing these people inspired me to be a little more like that.

Shaan Puri

You tweeted out the story that I loved. You said: > "The most gangster story in Silicon Valley is Steve Jobs buying Pixar for $5,000,000, investing $50,000,000, and operating at a loss for a decade—so much so that he had to cut personal checks to make payroll—and somehow turning it around to a $7,000,000,000 exit." Why did you like that story?

Amjad Masad

You know, there are people who are overrated in Silicon Valley and people who are underrated. I think people think about Steve Jobs in terms of the flashy things — the iPhone, the iPad, coming on stage and doing that. The thing I like about the Steve Jobs story is when he was "lost in the desert for 10 years." He left — he was fired from Apple — and then he created two companies that were failing the whole time. Next Computers and Pixar were literally failing. They weren't selling. He kept investing more and more of his money. I think he was going to go broke, but he kept going for 10 years. How do you do that? I'm a person who — as we talked about in my story — wants to be able to *go the distance*. I think going the distance is an advantage for entrepreneurs. Pixar became this hugely valuable company. It went from making no revenue to making $1,000,000,000 and going public over a couple of years. Next Computers saved Apple. Apple was having a problem with their operating system — [I think this involved chips and Intel; I'm not sure of the exact details] — and everyone was moving to Intel. They wanted their computers to be fast, so they needed a new operating system. They tried to buy and acquire companies on the market, but they couldn't find a great operating system. Next Computers had a great operating system, and that became macOS, so Apple bought them. </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

oh wow

Shaan Puri

I didn't know that. I thought *Next* was just a failure. I didn't even realize it, actually. I thought they just bought Steve back—*acquihire*—but it wasn't just an acquihire.

Amjad Masad

No. I mean **Objective‑C**, for example. **NeXT** was really obsessed with this idea of object‑oriented programming, and they innovated a lot on what that means. It is based on **Unix**, but it has a lot of interesting features on top of that. So, in a way, it saved **Apple**—because Apple otherwise wasn't going to be competitive without these new chips. </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

Right. Well, dude—I know we kept you half an hour over; I apologize for that. But this was amazing. This was one of my favorite episodes in a long time, and *I'm not just saying that.* You can go check all the other episodes—I don't say that at the end. So, this was awesome. Thanks so much for coming on. Where should people—**Twitter** is the best place to follow you.

Amjad Masad

Yeah — Twitter: "aim assad" on Twitter, and the Replit handle on Twitter as well — just "repl".

Sam Parr

dude thank you very much you're the best

Amjad Masad

of course of course my my pleasure