0:00:05 This is the first AI agent thing that has been a mind-blowing moment for me,
0:00:10 where I am not a programmer, I am not a coder, but I can now create software.
0:00:11 Well, that’s insane.
0:00:18 There are apps built on Replit agents that otherwise would take probably $100,000 of developer time.
0:00:23 And you can build it like in, you know, $25 paid to Replit.
0:00:25 It’s pretty wild how fast these companies are scaling.
0:00:28 I don’t think in the history of Silicon Valley we’ve seen anything like that,
0:00:30 even in the like web 2.0 era.
0:00:32 So what is like a fast ramp for an AI company?
0:00:36 What’s impressive that kind of broke the frame of what how long things would take?
0:00:42 So I would say reaching 10 million in three or four months era.
0:00:42 Oh my god.
0:00:47 Can I ask a blunt crude question?
0:00:50 How can I use your software to become a billionaire?
0:00:52 I would say building.
0:00:54 I feel like I can rule the world.
0:01:00 I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like the days off on the road.
0:01:02 Let’s travel never looking back.
0:01:04 Okay, so how do we want to start this?
0:01:07 So Amjad, you, you’re awesome.
0:01:11 So you have, you’re today in a position that I think a lot of people want to be in.
0:01:13 You have, you’re doing the Silicon Valley dream.
0:01:16 You had this idea, you go through YC.
0:01:18 You’ve now raised hundreds of millions of dollars.
0:01:21 You’re valued at a, you know, billion dollar valuation.
0:01:22 So that’s today.
0:01:28 But then the cool thing about your story is that didn’t seem likely, you know,
0:01:29 10 years ago.
0:01:31 It is a very unlikely success story.
0:01:35 And yeah, you went through YC, but you rejected a bunch of times.
0:01:40 Like, yeah, you’re in Silicon Valley now, but you started off coding in an internet cafe in Jordan.
0:01:41 That’s what’s interesting to me.
0:01:45 And we asked you beforehand, we’re like, Hey, what killer stories could you come on the podcast and tell?
0:01:47 And you go, you wrote this, I’m going to read a word for word.
0:01:48 And then I want you to tell us the story.
0:01:54 You go rejected four times and Rick rolling into YC, raising tons of money and meeting a basic billionaires.
0:01:55 Let’s do the first part.
0:01:57 Rejected four times and Rick rolling into YC.
0:01:58 Can you tell the story?
0:01:59 Yeah.
0:02:07 So I left my job at Facebook in 2016.
0:02:13 And, you know, Replet has been a side project for a while and it’s been, it’s been growing.
0:02:15 I’ve been working on it like nights and weekends.
0:02:19 It grew to a point where the server cost was meaningful.
0:02:24 And I was like, okay, you know, I have to, I guess I have to start a company around it.
0:02:27 And so I went to my manager at Facebook and I was like, look, I have the side project.
0:02:30 Can we make it like somehow a project at Facebook?
0:02:32 And we looked into that.
0:02:35 I send duck an email at the time and he ignored me.
0:02:39 Like, okay, I guess I have to start, I guess I have to start a company.
0:02:44 And so yeah, I quit my job, apply to YC the first time.
0:02:45 We did the whole thing.
0:02:50 We did the form and the video and all of that.
0:02:53 And we didn’t even get a call or anything like that.
0:02:57 It was just like we got the rejection letter.
0:03:03 And so I was like, okay, you know, I have this Facebook stock, some savings.
0:03:04 I sold the Facebook stock.
0:03:09 I put like half of it in Bitcoin and then half of it into the company.
0:03:11 Or like just for us to kind of live.
0:03:13 And how much money was that?
0:03:17 It was like 70 K or something like that.
0:03:20 What was the original product of Replet?
0:03:24 So it was basically an editor and a console.
0:03:26 You could type code there and you can run it.
0:03:28 You can switch a language and that’s it.
0:03:35 All right, so when I ran my company, the hustle,
0:03:37 I think we had something like 2 million subscribers.
0:03:38 And we made money through advertising.
0:03:42 We didn’t actually make that much money per person reading the newsletter
0:03:45 because advertising in general is kind of a crappy business model.
0:03:47 And so I remember sitting down and I’m like,
0:03:50 what are all the different ways that I can make money off the hustle
0:03:52 that aren’t advertising?
0:03:54 And so to make sure that you don’t make this mistake,
0:03:56 Sean, me and the Husbot team,
0:04:00 we went and looked at a bunch of different ways to monetize your business.
0:04:04 And we put it all together in a really cool document
0:04:06 where we laid it all out along with our research.
0:04:08 And we call it very appropriately.
0:04:11 We call it the business monetization playbook.
0:04:13 Go to the description of this episode
0:04:16 and you’re going to see a link to that business monetization playbook.
0:04:16 It’s completely free.
0:04:19 You just click the link and you can see it back to the episode.
0:04:26 By the way, Sam, have you ever used Replet?
0:04:28 I was using it today before this.
0:04:28 It’s magical.
0:04:31 And also your tweets describing what it is.
0:04:32 Like, for example, your doctor saying,
0:04:35 you know, he wants me to track my sleep.
0:04:38 So I just uploaded the PDF that he wanted me to fill out into Replet
0:04:42 and it made an application so I can upload it much easier.
0:04:43 Yeah, it’s like pretty magical.
0:04:44 Sean, are you able to use it?
0:04:46 It’s definitely out of my league still.
0:04:47 Both me and Sam have joked around
0:04:51 because we both have maybe five or six times
0:04:54 false started of like, I’m going to learn to code this summer.
0:04:55 It’s like a New Year’s resolution thing
0:04:57 where you just keep saying you’re going to do it
0:04:59 and you do 20% of it, 30% of it and you give up.
0:05:03 You know, we buy the Udemy course, learn Python the hard way.
0:05:06 You start doing it and nothing really ever stuck.
0:05:07 And one of the biggest problems was that
0:05:09 nobody really talks about this.
0:05:11 Do you think learning to code is like learning Spanish?
0:05:12 It’s like learning a language.
0:05:14 You’re like, okay, so how do I need to say the thing?
0:05:16 But before you can even do that, it’s like,
0:05:18 oh, I’m supposed to download this program.
0:05:20 So I need to download an editor.
0:05:22 And then I need to download all these packages
0:05:22 to be able to use this thing.
0:05:23 That’s where I stop.
0:05:24 And then you need it.
0:05:26 And it’s like just setting up the environment
0:05:28 is so goddamn confusing to a beginner
0:05:31 that you don’t even get to do the part
0:05:33 where you actually write the code and be able to run.
0:05:34 And then it’s like, oh, how do I run the code?
0:05:35 I got to host it somewhere.
0:05:36 Now I got to learn how to do hosting.
0:05:38 And what is that?
0:05:40 And so there’s all these things around it
0:05:42 that were confusing, Replet solved all of that,
0:05:42 which was amazing.
0:05:45 And I actually did your like 100 days of learning to code.
0:05:47 Like it’s actually made it really easy.
0:05:47 You know, if I didn’t have kids,
0:05:48 I would just be doing a lot more
0:05:51 because you solved that problem for me.
0:05:54 And I know I’m asking you about the YC rejection.
0:05:55 I want to come back to that.
0:05:58 But to give Sam maybe a little more of the context,
0:05:59 I think, correct me if I’m wrong.
0:06:00 Maybe I’m making this up.
0:06:03 I think the reason you wanted to have this kind of like
0:06:05 online editor, online environment,
0:06:08 where it’s all hosted there was because when you were younger,
0:06:09 you were living in Jordan.
0:06:12 And I guess you used to go try to learn to code out of an internet,
0:06:14 or go try to code out of an internet cafe.
0:06:15 But that means every time you go,
0:06:17 you have to set everything up for the first time
0:06:20 because it’s not your home base,
0:06:22 not your home computer where you set it up once and it’s there.
0:06:23 Is that true?
0:06:25 Is that why you felt the problem?
0:06:27 Like 10X, what a normal person would feel?
0:06:29 Yeah, but basically like every time
0:06:31 I wanted to do a little homework,
0:06:34 I have to like spend an hour setting up the environment.
0:06:37 At the time, the web was moving so fast
0:06:39 until we had Google Docs and we had Gmail,
0:06:41 we had this client slide,
0:06:43 JavaScript application sort of a revolution.
0:06:49 And I’m like, okay, why can’t I type code into the browser and run it?
0:06:55 And I started looking around and turns out like nobody solved this problem.
0:07:00 There were some experiments and it was kind of crazy to me
0:07:06 because it was almost like finding a $100 bill in New York Grand Central Station.
0:07:10 Like it’s like, oh, I found an idea that nobody’s paying attention to.
0:07:12 And is that true?
0:07:14 Because it’s kind of crazy.
0:07:16 The world is big, there’s a lot of programmer.
0:07:17 That seems like an obvious thing.
0:07:18 I mean, I’m a total outsider.
0:07:20 So my question is like,
0:07:21 was there some technical challenge to that?
0:07:24 Because that seems like, I guess it’s easy to say
0:07:27 things that are successful are obvious ideas looking back.
0:07:28 But like, yeah.
0:07:29 Well, it seems like there’s other two things, right?
0:07:31 There’s the technical challenge
0:07:33 of being able to make this all work in a browser, right?
0:07:34 That was not obvious.
0:07:36 But then there seems like the second thing was,
0:07:38 I keep going back to the internet cafe thing,
0:07:45 because it’s sort of like the hardship made the problems unavoidable to you.
0:07:46 Whereas anybody else who learns to code,
0:07:48 if you’re just doing it at home in America,
0:07:51 you might do that setting up once,
0:07:53 maybe you have a little bit of the problem,
0:07:56 but you’re not running into it face first every day,
0:07:59 as if you were if you were working out of internet cafe.
0:08:00 Yeah, absolutely right.
0:08:03 I mean, Paul Graham talks about it all the time.
0:08:07 It’s like, the best startups are solving your own problem.
0:08:10 And I felt that problem really deeply.
0:08:12 And I started working on it.
0:08:14 I discovered why it’s hard.
0:08:17 Well, it’s hard to run different languages in the browser.
0:08:18 You can run JavaScript,
0:08:20 but you can’t run Python, for example.
0:08:22 So we started writing interpreters,
0:08:26 writing compilers to run on JavaScript.
0:08:28 And then, you know, it took us a couple of years,
0:08:30 had like few languages running.
0:08:32 It was like pretty rough prototype,
0:08:33 but people started using it.
0:08:36 My friends and people at school,
0:08:37 and I’m like, okay, this idea has lags,
0:08:40 and so let me work on it more.
0:08:43 And then 2011 had a breakthrough.
0:08:45 And the breakthrough was,
0:08:49 we were the first to compile Python, Ruby,
0:08:51 and most of the languages to JavaScript,
0:08:53 and run them straight into the browser.
0:08:55 And that went super viral.
0:08:57 Like, so we open sourced it,
0:08:59 we put it up on Hacker News.
0:09:02 And that was my first experience
0:09:03 of like going viral and then or not,
0:09:05 which is, I was like, oh my God,
0:09:08 this is like an amazing rush.
0:09:09 And I still feel that rush.
0:09:12 Can you put that in context for a non-engineer?
0:09:14 Is the thing you guys did,
0:09:18 is it on a scale of like one to Satoshi Nakamoto
0:09:20 solving the like double spend problem,
0:09:22 like how hard of an invention was that?
0:09:24 That was like the nerdiest analogy
0:09:26 you ever could have came up with.
0:09:27 That’s what I’m here for.
0:09:29 So like, was it genius,
0:09:30 or was it just that nobody had taken
0:09:32 as much time as it would take to do that?
0:09:34 Where was that breakthrough?
0:09:36 How would you describe that breakthrough?
0:09:38 It’s definitely not on the order
0:09:41 of like the double spend problem
0:09:44 where it’s like a fundamental invention.
0:09:51 It was like pushing like a huge rock bolt,
0:09:53 like up a mountain.
0:09:57 It took so much grit and just obsession
0:10:03 to be able to hack the browser in order to run
0:10:08 things that the browser wasn’t supposed to run,
0:10:09 wasn’t designed to run.
0:10:14 And so I would say it is solving hundreds of problems
0:10:17 as opposed to solving like one invention,
0:10:19 which is double spend.
0:10:19 Yeah.
0:10:21 So you’re working on it as a side project
0:10:22 for a number of years.
0:10:24 That’s a long time, by the way, Sean.
0:10:26 Can you imagine like having a side project
0:10:29 that’s a hobby that takes three hours a night with little,
0:10:33 do you have for two years is kind of a long time, no?
0:10:34 Dude, the only two things I’ve ever done that with
0:10:36 is this podcast and my kids.
0:10:38 And there’s really no way out of the kids thing.
0:10:40 And the podcast was a hit right away.
0:10:42 The podcast gave me results right away,
0:10:42 so it actually doesn’t count.
0:10:44 You were doing this without the kind of like
0:10:47 financial rewards or fame rewards
0:10:49 or any other major rewards during that time.
0:10:51 How many years did you do this side project thing
0:10:52 and what kept it going?
0:10:55 2009 was the original idea.
0:10:59 2011 was the breakthrough.
0:11:03 And then went viral on Hacker News and then on that.
0:11:06 And I think that was the first time
0:11:08 I felt like a little bit of fame,
0:11:11 a little bit of return on investment.
0:11:16 Like I remember Brent Denike, the inventor of JavaScript
0:11:19 and was the CTO at Mozilla, tweeting about it.
0:11:21 I was like, wow, this is amazing.
0:11:25 Kid and Jordan made this fundamental breakthrough
0:11:27 and like, you know, browser attack
0:11:29 and like I’m getting this recognition.
0:11:30 That’s pretty cool.
0:11:33 And also some articles wrote about it.
0:11:36 It was people talked about it in conferences.
0:11:39 And so all of that was evidence for my O1 visa
0:11:40 to come to the States.
0:11:43 Basically my entire adult’s life I’m working on this,
0:11:45 which is crazy, right?
0:11:46 How old are you now?
0:11:50 I am 36, I think.
0:11:57 Well, you’ve been working on this since you’re 21, I think.
0:11:58 Yeah, 21.
0:12:00 Yeah, that’s a wow.
0:12:02 That’s your whole life, your whole adult life.
0:12:07 And it continued to like incrementally improve my life.
0:12:11 So it wasn’t just working in a room for 11 years
0:12:12 and nothing happened.
0:12:15 So I get this visa to the United States
0:12:18 and they go work at Code Academy
0:12:22 and they use the open source work that we did, right?
0:12:23 And a bunch of companies in the US
0:12:25 there was like this boom and like MOOCs,
0:12:29 if you remember that, Udacity, Coursera, whatever.
0:12:32 And a lot of them used the open source version of Replet
0:12:34 to create interactive courses.
0:12:39 And suddenly like the world opened up to me.
0:12:42 I’m getting job offers all over the place
0:12:44 and I have choices where to go.
0:12:46 And so we decided to go to New York.
0:12:48 Naval has this great quote where he says,
0:12:50 people always ask him about like,
0:12:52 you know, how to build a great network or networking.
0:12:53 What are your tips for networking?
0:12:57 And he’s like, my only tip for networking is do something great
0:12:59 and watch your network will appear overnight.
0:13:01 People will immediately come to you
0:13:02 because you’ve done something great, right?
0:13:05 You didn’t go try to get a coffee with Brendan Eich.
0:13:06 You build something really cool
0:13:09 that the creator of JavaScript and Mozilla’s browser was like,
0:13:10 hey, that’s awesome.
0:13:11 I want to reach out and get to know you.
0:13:14 And I think that’s actually how you, back to the YC thing.
0:13:16 I think that’s how you ended up getting into YC later was
0:13:18 Paul Graham actually just thought what you were doing was cool.
0:13:20 But like, let’s go to the YC part.
0:13:23 So you quit the Facebook job, half the money in Bitcoin,
0:13:27 half the money in your startup, apply to YC, rejected.
0:13:28 That was the first rejection.
0:13:29 What were the other rejections?
0:13:35 VCs kind of wouldn’t talk to us.
0:13:37 Or, you know, we’d get meetings with VCs.
0:13:40 Some of them are like yawning and I think one of them slept.
0:13:45 And it was just like not interesting to them.
0:13:46 Dude, I had that happen one time as well.
0:13:51 Like a guy literally felt, it was like, he was literally 80.
0:13:53 And it was Friday at four and it was warm in the office.
0:13:55 And he like fell asleep mid pitch.
0:13:56 Like it was warm.
0:13:59 Yeah, it was like a cold day.
0:14:00 It was warm inside.
0:14:06 So I was like, yeah, I mean, I was like, you deserve this.
0:14:08 But dude, what, what did they not see in you?
0:14:11 Because like it’s so easy to be, to look back in the past,
0:14:13 but like you seem like you got the it factor.
0:14:15 This seems like such an obvious idea.
0:14:16 You worked on it for two years.
0:14:18 Smart people are talking about it.
0:14:19 Like, what were you, what were you missing?
0:14:20 What was the case against it?
0:14:23 Well, I think, you know, Silicon Valley is like probably
0:14:26 the most meritocratic place in the world.
0:14:29 But it is also status driven.
0:14:31 At least then it was very status driven.
0:14:33 Like if you look at the white, you know, people who got into YC,
0:14:36 like with Stanford dropouts and things like that.
0:14:39 And I think since then YC has, has, has improved and,
0:14:41 you know, gets international people and all of that.
0:14:44 But, but, you know, my background wasn’t,
0:14:46 wasn’t really interesting to, to them.
0:14:50 You know, I didn’t have any fancy colleges or any of that.
0:14:54 Also being married couple was, was somehow like something
0:14:56 that, that they thought it was a disadvantage.
0:14:59 You didn’t match the patterns.
0:15:00 You didn’t match the Stanford pattern.
0:15:04 You didn’t match the co-founder relationship pattern.
0:15:09 You didn’t match the trend of what categories have big exits.
0:15:10 You weren’t on trend at that time.
0:15:12 Right. Yeah.
0:15:15 And so continue to apply to YC every season of YC.
0:15:17 We’ll, we’ll send in the application.
0:15:20 And, you know, our thesis developed more and we felt like
0:15:23 we had started making some money.
0:15:25 Some people started paying for our service.
0:15:28 We had an API at the time that people paid for.
0:15:31 A lot of educators and, and people learning to code
0:15:34 started to pay, pay for replete.
0:15:35 What was the revenue when you got in?
0:15:38 Like maybe 10 grad a month.
0:15:41 It was enough to sustain us at that, at that point.
0:15:43 It was like the ramen profitability.
0:15:48 But before YC, the person who, who actually the first one to,
0:15:51 to bat on us was Roy Bahat from Bloomberg Beta.
0:15:54 So I knew him from my code academy days.
0:15:59 And, and it was such a, the meeting with him was so refreshing.
0:16:02 Like he was like just a straight shooter.
0:16:06 He, he would tell me like, here’s where I think, you know,
0:16:10 the idea or the category is, is hard.
0:16:13 You know, here, here is where I think the valuation should be.
0:16:14 And it was like the first meeting.
0:16:17 He just gave me everything he was thinking about.
0:16:18 He didn’t obscure anything.
0:16:20 And I was, I was feeling really good about it.
0:16:26 And so yeah, he gave us $500,000 on a, on a six million valuation.
0:16:28 So that was the first check we got.
0:16:28 Nice.
0:16:33 And then how did the, how did you eventually get into YC?
0:16:38 So basically, you know, we’re grinding and, and, and,
0:16:42 and the product was getting better every, every week.
0:16:44 And I started writing articles about what we’re solving.
0:16:47 So we’re solving pretty hard problems.
0:16:49 And so this article’s kept going in hacker news.
0:16:53 And hacker news was really excited about what we’re doing.
0:16:56 And Pulgrim reads hacker news a lot, probably still to this day.
0:17:05 And one day, like December, 2017, I wake up, there’s a DM on, on my phone.
0:17:06 And it is Sam Altman.
0:17:11 And he’s like, Hey, I run YC and we’re interested in what you’re doing.
0:17:13 I’m like, dude, I know who you are.
0:17:15 You’d have to tell me you run YC.
0:17:19 And he’s like, okay, let’s, let’s meet, you know, come to this address.
0:17:20 And it wasn’t the YC address.
0:17:21 I was like a little confused.
0:17:26 And so I, I go there and it was the open AI office in the, in the mission.
0:17:31 And so I meet him there and, and, you know, we’re talking a little bit.
0:17:34 And then he’s like, he turns this computer around.
0:17:37 He’s like, this is, this is Paul’s email.
0:17:41 He emailed Sam and told him this, this company is very important.
0:17:43 You should reach out to them.
0:17:45 And he’s like, okay, talk to, to PG.
0:17:47 I’m going to give you his email, talk to him.
0:17:51 And then maybe you can, maybe we can work on something to get you into YC.
0:17:54 So I started this email relationship with, with Paul,
0:17:56 which was really fascinating.
0:17:58 I mean, he’s a great writer, right?
0:18:01 And so we talked about, we talked about Replit.
0:18:04 We talked about the problems of setting up an environment,
0:18:06 the problems of hosting an application.
0:18:10 And it turns out after he sold via web,
0:18:13 he started working on, on something like Replit.
0:18:15 He started working on like an editor.
0:18:18 You write some lists, of course, because he likes this,
0:18:20 this very obscure program languages.
0:18:23 And, but by the way, Paul Graham is the founder of YC at the time.
0:18:26 He was starting to retire and Sam was, was running YC.
0:18:31 And, and so, you know, we had this email relationship where he,
0:18:34 he wrote me essays essentially on, on the problem we’re solving.
0:18:36 By the way, were you, were you intimidated?
0:18:38 You know, Paul Graham writing essays to you privately.
0:18:42 Are you like, is that high stakes replies there for you?
0:18:47 Yes, like I would spend hours kind of crafting the emails and
0:18:51 trying to like be as good of a writer as, as I can.
0:18:58 But you know, one thing about me is like, I was never like nervous
0:19:00 about meeting like famous and established people.
0:19:04 And I think that helped me over time because like,
0:19:08 you know, I can be myself and I can talk to them at the same level
0:19:11 as supposed to like being a fanboy or, or yeah.
0:19:12 Why, why was that?
0:19:14 What, were you just oblivious to it?
0:19:16 Or you just had a different mindset about it?
0:19:17 What was the reason?
0:19:25 Yeah, I felt like my life was, was taking on this trajectory
0:19:29 that was not to be too superstitious, but like it was this force.
0:19:33 And I felt like everything’s going to be great.
0:19:36 And you know, we’re, it’s going to be hard, but you know,
0:19:39 meeting all these people, things are opening up to us.
0:19:44 And, and so when, when I go and meet people, my mindset is like,
0:19:48 I want to impress them and I want to be able to, you know,
0:19:49 get money from them.
0:19:51 Or like, I have a goal.
0:19:54 And I think having a goal when you’re, when you’re meeting someone
0:19:56 actually puts you in a very different mindset than,
0:20:01 than again, like fanboying and, and run just being very excited about the meeting.
0:20:03 Dude, have you guys seen that?
0:20:05 Do you guys know the director, Guy Ritchie?
0:20:07 He’s that like British director.
0:20:08 He’s got this great story.
0:20:12 He was on some podcast and Joe Rogan and he was like, you know,
0:20:15 I just want to be the director of, of my own life.
0:20:18 And I want to live my life like a movie.
0:20:20 And what you’re describing is sort of like that where you’re like,
0:20:23 I just, I am destined for greatness.
0:20:27 And like, we are taking on this amazing problem and like,
0:20:29 we are going to do wonderful things and it will be hard,
0:20:31 but we will triumph.
0:20:32 And I think that’s, that’s actually great.
0:20:34 That’s a great story to tell yourself.
0:20:38 And I think it’s very motivating and it makes life more exciting.
0:20:39 I think that’s really cool.
0:20:43 Yeah. So I actually wrote a blog post.
0:20:45 The title is do what makes the best story.
0:20:48 And the idea is like,
0:20:53 when you’re faced with decisions where there’s no obvious answer,
0:20:57 like a fork in the road where the pros and cons are sort of the same,
0:21:02 the heuristic I use in my life is like, what is a more interesting story?
0:21:05 And obviously like Elon talks about this, like the most,
0:21:09 the most entertaining outcome is most likely.
0:21:12 Yeah. It wasn’t thinking about it in terms of entertaining,
0:21:15 but in terms of like, what makes the story interesting?
0:21:19 If, if my life was a movie, what would, what would be exciting about,
0:21:20 about that story?
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0:22:19 You know, for example, when, when I was in college, I was like coding all the time,
0:22:21 and I wasn’t really going to class.
0:22:26 And so, uh, so I was failing a lot, not because I was failing the exam,
0:22:29 because, you know, they would bar me from the exam because I wasn’t showing up.
0:22:36 And, and I decided to, to hack the university to change my grades.
0:22:39 And we’re not talking like metaphorically, like a life.
0:22:42 No, no, you actually hacked into the servers and changed your grade.
0:22:43 Is that what happened?
0:22:46 Yeah, I went into, into the basement.
0:22:47 I spent like two weeks.
0:22:51 I did the, what’s his name, the famous inventor Michelangelo or something like that.
0:22:57 I did his sleep, polyphasic sleep where you work for hours and then you sleep 15 minutes.
0:23:01 And it was, it was sort of like, I was writing on the wall.
0:23:04 I was like, it was like a full on insanity.
0:23:05 Were you angry?
0:23:08 Well, why did you decide to hack them?
0:23:13 I know so many smart people who work so much harder to cheat or get around the thing
0:23:14 than just doing the thing.
0:23:18 And, and there’s like a 50% of the time they end up being like losers.
0:23:21 And then 50% of the time they are in fact like the greatest.
0:23:22 They’re on this podcast.
0:23:23 Yeah.
0:23:26 Well, I think it is like some ADHD, right?
0:23:30 Like you can sit, you can sit in class, but if you’re interested in something,
0:23:33 you’re going to like hack and like work on it a ton, right?
0:23:36 And I almost got away with it.
0:23:44 But the servers at the, at the university crashed and it crashed on my record.
0:23:53 So the, one of the administrators there gave me a call and he, he said, look, there’s like this,
0:24:00 there’s some anomaly in your, in the, in the record of your exam and school and it’s
0:24:02 crashing our databases.
0:24:03 Do you know anything about it?
0:24:05 And I was like, what’s the anomaly?
0:24:11 And he’s like, you know, there’s a field in the database that says you’re barred from the exam
0:24:16 and your grade should be, should be 35.
0:24:19 That’s, that’s the default grade of failing the exam.
0:24:23 And instead my grades were like, you know, 75, 90, whatever.
0:24:27 That’s the, that’s what I entered into there.
0:24:30 And I didn’t understand that there was another field.
0:24:35 By the way, you know, that’s not good, good design for a database.
0:24:41 And so since then I, you know, I had, there was a fork in the road.
0:24:45 I could, I could lie and I think I could get, get away with it and, you know, and, and just
0:24:47 say that that’s a bug on your side.
0:24:55 And, but I was like, what’s the most interesting story is they, they catch me and it becomes
0:24:57 a story that people talk about.
0:25:02 And I was like, okay, I’m just gonna, I’m just gonna like come clean and just tell them what I did.
0:25:07 So you’re like better, better than getting the grade would be getting the reputation.
0:25:09 Yes, exactly.
0:25:12 So you tell them and then what happened, they kick you out?
0:25:17 No, so, you know, I’m kind of a convincing person.
0:25:24 So I, I go the next day and it’s like all the deans there and they’re discussing my case
0:25:29 and they’re like trying to find out what, what I did and, and they’re all computer science deans.
0:25:34 So I went in there and I changed the subject to technical aspects of the hack
0:25:40 and I drew on the white board and show them what I did and, and all of that.
0:25:41 And they were very impressed.
0:25:43 It’s like a good will hunting moment.
0:25:44 Yeah.
0:25:47 And, and like my reputation back then is like, I’m a loser.
0:25:48 I’m failing everything, right?
0:25:53 I don’t show up to class and, and it is, it is kind of like good will hunting.
0:25:58 And then, you know, they say, okay, you have to go talk to the president
0:26:00 because I think he’s going to make the final call.
0:26:07 So I go to the president and, and he’s a very intellectual person and we talk and I,
0:26:12 you know, I tell him like, look, you know, I have this talent and I feel like it was undiscovered
0:26:18 and I feel like I was treated unfairly and, and I, I use the, the, you know, I use the
0:26:22 university as my sandbox. Like I didn’t like, you know, I came clean, right?
0:26:26 I didn’t, you know, mean to, to do anything, anything bad.
0:26:29 And, and, and he gave me the Spider-Man line.
0:26:32 He’s like, with great power comes great responsibility.
0:26:34 And it actually affected me.
0:26:38 And I was like, okay, you know, you know, I think, you know, I, you know,
0:26:43 I need to do something in order to, to, to, to kind of pay back.
0:26:50 And I told him, I’m going to work this summer for free to, to make sure I secure your databases.
0:26:53 And so they, they let me off the hook and they’re like, okay, yeah.
0:26:55 What a great story, dude.
0:26:56 That is an amazing story.
0:27:00 Sam, by the way, would you ever want to compete with Amjad at anything?
0:27:02 No, this is like this mentality.
0:27:05 This is a, it’s scary.
0:27:06 Like, yeah, I would not want to.
0:27:09 You’re like, excuse me, Dean, have you heard of the word prodigy?
0:27:17 Yeah, you’re like, you’re like, I, my talents haven’t been used well at this university.
0:27:18 I accept your apology, Dean.
0:27:19 Yeah, I think you’re at fault, dude.
0:27:22 He’s like, why are you failing me?
0:27:23 Yes.
0:27:25 Yes.
0:27:25 That’s so good.
0:27:25 Okay.
0:27:28 So I love the principle, do what makes the best story.
0:27:29 I love the hack story.
0:27:30 That’s, that’s amazing.
0:27:32 Where we, how did we get here?
0:27:33 We were talking about, um, YC.
0:27:34 YC.
0:27:35 Okay.
0:27:35 Sorry.
0:27:36 Let’s get to the story of YC.
0:27:37 Yeah.
0:27:38 Cause that’s where we started.
0:27:39 Okay.
0:27:41 So Sam’s like, yeah, you should do YC.
0:27:43 Actually the batch starts tomorrow.
0:27:45 Why don’t you fill in an application?
0:27:48 It’s just a, just a, you know, process you have to do.
0:27:50 And we can do a later interview tomorrow.
0:27:53 And I’m like, fuck, I want to fill the application again.
0:27:55 Like you made me do it like four times.
0:27:56 Like I don’t want to do it again.
0:28:02 And so, you know, I, I kind of do a bare bones application about, about a replica.
0:28:03 And then there’s the video.
0:28:07 I’m like, yeah, man, I don’t want to, I don’t want to do the video.
0:28:10 So, so I pasted a YouTube link.
0:28:13 And we go the next day, uh, hi.
0:28:16 By the way, for people who don’t know, the YC application is like one page.
0:28:18 It’s like six or seven questions.
0:28:20 But then they say, upload a video two or three minutes.
0:28:22 You’re talking about your startup.
0:28:23 So that’s the video part.
0:28:27 And then the interview is 10 minutes where there’s rapid fire.
0:28:30 So you have like 10 minutes and it’s like this make or break thing.
0:28:33 It’s less than a lunch, you know, like there’s less than a job interview.
0:28:34 It’s more intense.
0:28:35 So you’re waiting around for that.
0:28:36 Yeah.
0:28:39 I mean, my view was they recruited us to do YC.
0:28:41 Like, why are you making us do the stuff?
0:28:42 Right.
0:28:42 And, and so.
0:28:43 Yeah.
0:28:44 I was going to ask that.
0:28:47 Like they’re asking, they’re acting like, you know, Paul Graham’s like, you know,
0:28:48 maybe I could pull some strings.
0:28:50 It’s like, I know a guy.
0:28:50 Yeah.
0:28:52 Like you’re the guy.
0:28:57 So I don’t understand what they’re, uh, what they’re bullshitting.
0:28:57 Well, I don’t get it.
0:29:03 Well, I think they, they wanted to, to just like go through the process.
0:29:05 It’s like the process applies to everyone.
0:29:06 And I respect that.
0:29:11 So, uh, you know, they, uh, they, they call us to, to the interview.
0:29:18 Um, and, and I walk in and, and there was, uh, Jared and Adora and, and, and, you know,
0:29:20 all these amazing YC partners.
0:29:21 And there was Michael.
0:29:22 He was the CEO at the time.
0:29:28 And I shake their hands and I shake Michael’s hand and, and I felt like his grip was,
0:29:29 was a little too hard.
0:29:30 I was like, okay, that’s fine.
0:29:36 And then I, I go sit down on the chair and, and the moment I sit down, Michael looks at me.
0:29:37 Why did you recall us?
0:29:39 Oh my God.
0:29:46 And, and I’m like, you know, we, we applied several times and, and I thought it’d be fun to do.
0:29:51 And, and, you know, I thought this, this interview was just, uh, we’re just, you know,
0:29:55 formality and, and, and he’s like, that’s not how you get into YC.
0:29:58 And he was, he was very, very angry.
0:30:02 Well, it turns out when we’re sitting outside, though we’re getting recalled inside, right?
0:30:08 So you say, imagine their mindset, looking at the application and, and, and getting the, the,
0:30:10 the, the recall song.
0:30:13 And, uh, and then they give us a very tough interview.
0:30:17 In that moment, did you, it’s like, and that’s when I realized I fucked up.
0:30:20 Like, did you realize like, how I’m coming across?
0:30:22 Like, what was your mindset there?
0:30:24 Like, they must be thinking I was nervous.
0:30:29 I was very nervous and I was regretful immediately.
0:30:33 Cause you probably, it’s like, oh, here’s this entitled, uh, just another,
0:30:35 just another tech entitled guy.
0:30:39 When they don’t know you’re like immigrant from Jordan, who’s like scraped his way here.
0:30:39 Right.
0:30:44 They don’t, the reality and how you were coming across weren’t connected in that moment.
0:30:45 No, they weren’t at all.
0:30:52 And, uh, and so, uh, and so I, you know, we go outside and, and I tell hi, okay, this is done.
0:30:54 Let’s, let’s call an Uber and get back to work.
0:30:56 Like we don’t have, we don’t need to get into YC.
0:31:03 So I call an Uber and, uh, just before I arrive, I receive a call and, and I, I take the call
0:31:09 and it’s like, Hey, it’s a Dora, uh, you got in, come back, uh, the, the kickoff is about to start.
0:31:13 And I was like, what are you sure?
0:31:15 She’s like, yeah, come back, sign, sign the paperwork and get started.
0:31:17 So I was stunned the whole day.
0:31:21 Like it was, you know, we start, we go to the dinner and I’m like, you know, you know,
0:31:25 phased out and, and, and all, but, but like, it was really exciting.
0:31:29 And, you know, people who, who, who’s never been to the YC office and, and mountain view,
0:31:33 it’s all orange, like bright orange and, and the lights and everything.
0:31:36 It feels like a cult-like environment.
0:31:38 And like, I think I’ve seen the inside.
0:31:42 Doesn’t it like a, like a, they have like a steeple or isn’t like one of the rooms
0:31:45 that like is a, a triangle, like a church almost.
0:31:47 Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
0:31:51 And sound gets up and tells us what, what the experience is going to be.
0:31:53 It’s like, this is the hardest time you’re going to work.
0:31:57 You know, you better tell your friends and family that you’re going to go away for three
0:31:58 months.
0:32:00 You can’t help them move or all of that.
0:32:02 You just got to be focused on, on work.
0:32:04 So Haya and I like took it very seriously.
0:32:08 Okay, I was like, okay, this, these three months are, are, are very important for,
0:32:10 for the success of the company.
0:32:13 And we transformed the product in these three months.
0:32:17 It went from a simple sort of editor output to a place where you can host
0:32:21 applications and build real things and all in three months.
0:32:24 And we were working, you know, 12 hour, 13 hour days.
0:32:29 And, and, and it was, it was only three of us at the time.
0:32:33 Our first employee actually was, was sort of a runaway kid.
0:32:38 He grew up in California, a little down, down south.
0:32:41 And, and he didn’t want to go to school.
0:32:43 And so he leaves his home.
0:32:45 He goes to Hack Reactor.
0:32:49 And, and he becomes, he becomes a programmer and he was 18.
0:32:50 He was looking for a job.
0:32:53 I knew the guys at Hack Reactor, they use Replet.
0:32:55 And I’m like, send me your best programmer.
0:32:58 And he’s like, look, this kid is a little awkward, but he’s the best.
0:33:00 And so he comes in and yells on our interview.
0:33:01 Music to my ears.
0:33:02 Yeah.
0:33:07 And basically I like him because, you know, it mirrors kind of my life story a little bit.
0:33:08 Where’s this guy now?
0:33:12 But we got him, we got him some liquidity after six years of working.
0:33:14 I felt that’s the right thing to do.
0:33:17 And because he was kind of burnt out and didn’t want to continue.
0:33:21 So I called my, I called my brother in Jordan.
0:33:25 I’m like, look, you got to, you got to come out here when YC you need to.
0:33:26 And he’s a programmer.
0:33:27 I taught him programming when he was a kid.
0:33:30 And I was like, you got to come, come help us.
0:33:32 And he’s still with us today.
0:33:34 And I called my friend from Code Academy, Moody.
0:33:36 He’s still with us today as well.
0:33:37 I’m like, you got, you got to help us.
0:33:40 Like, like, you know, you could do it remotely.
0:33:43 And so we assembled like a team of five people essentially.
0:33:49 And so we, we go really hard and we were like one of the hottest companies in YC at the time.
0:33:53 And can you give some sense of the scale of it now?
0:33:59 Like, you know, I invested in it a year ago or so, two years ago, something like that.
0:34:02 I don’t know when, but the numbers were off.
0:34:03 You had user growth.
0:34:07 First year graph looked like a hockey stick because you zoom out and you,
0:34:12 you, you, it ignores all of the little like years where nothing was really going on.
0:34:13 But you have this crazy growth.
0:34:16 But the crazy thing about it is that your growth was developers.
0:34:21 So it’s like, you know, one developer user is worth, I don’t know, 10, 20 times,
0:34:23 just like a normal internet user.
0:34:26 But you had this crazy hockey stick growth of developers.
0:34:29 Can you talk about, can you just say a couple of like permission to brag?
0:34:32 Can you say a couple of brag worthy stats that would impress us?
0:34:35 Yeah. So, so replete was very easy to start with.
0:34:41 And so people would start, start using it in college or high school and continue using it for many years.
0:34:46 And so it was sticky for especially junior developers when they’re starting out.
0:34:51 And, and it was, it was spreading on its own like word of mouth.
0:34:54 You know, there was a viral component to it.
0:34:59 People can share URL and then suddenly you’re in the same environment as them, right?
0:35:03 Like, and then we have this like multiplier coding experience.
0:35:09 And so people were collaborating and, and also COVID was really great for us because we were,
0:35:13 I think the only collaborative editor experience on the web at the time.
0:35:18 And so a lot of people were remote and, and needed something to work with, with each other.
0:35:21 And so replete was adopted at the time.
0:35:26 And so the growth was, was off the chart and the servers were going down.
0:35:30 And the marginal user or any web app is sort of like zero, zero cost.
0:35:34 But for us, it was, you know, we try to optimize it a lot,
0:35:38 but it was still on the order of like one to five dollars, like a month.
0:35:41 And you know, the growth was off the charts.
0:35:44 But I, you know, have to admit it was hard to monetize at the time.
0:35:49 Because developers are actually not used to pay for things.
0:35:51 Now they kind of are paying for things because of AI.
0:35:56 But at the time they, they weren’t, they weren’t paying.
0:36:01 And then, you know, as, as we added limits and things like that,
0:36:06 they felt like they, they can like move on and set up their own developer environment.
0:36:12 And so it took a lot of, you know, creative thinking to figure out how to charge for people.
0:36:17 And ultimately AI was the thing that, that people are paying for.
0:36:22 And the reason is like the productivity benefit of AI is like, is like obvious.
0:36:27 And people is like, okay, this saves me time and makes me a better developer.
0:36:28 And so people are paying for it right now.
0:36:32 Well, can you give any indication on how many users or how many,
0:36:34 how much revenue the business has?
0:36:37 You know, signups, we, we have like more than 30 million,
0:36:42 I think 35 million users right now in terms of active users that kind of fluctuates.
0:36:47 But, you know, three, you know, two to three million a month,
0:36:51 probably a hundred thousand apps hosted, hosted on replete.
0:36:57 Because you can build an app and, and deploy it all in one environment.
0:37:03 In terms of revenue, I can’t share it right now, but like, especially this year,
0:37:05 it’s been like exponential growth.
0:37:06 Sam, check this out.
0:37:09 This agent thing, I gotta show you this.
0:37:11 So you, you haven’t used this, right, Sam?
0:37:12 No, all right.
0:37:13 So let’s watch this.
0:37:16 So yesterday, I was like, I’m going to mess around.
0:37:18 I was doing research for this, but I was like,
0:37:21 I just got like sucked into replete and I started doing that and stopped doing research.
0:37:25 So I go and I, I go to replete and it’s changed.
0:37:28 Cause now when you, before when you would go, it would be like,
0:37:33 here’s a coding screen with a blinking cursor and it’s like write some code.
0:37:34 And I’d be like, oh, cool.
0:37:35 I don’t really write code.
0:37:38 So I don’t know how to use this project exactly.
0:37:39 Maybe I could learn to code.
0:37:42 Maybe I could, uh, you know, pay somebody to build something on here.
0:37:44 But whatever, I was stuck.
0:37:48 So now you open up replete and it just, it’s like chat GPT.
0:37:51 It just goes, so what would you like me to create?
0:37:53 And so I go on there, watch this.
0:37:55 So I go, I’ll give you the exact prompt.
0:37:59 I said, build me an app that will text me every morning asking how I ate yesterday.
0:38:02 Let me answer via text message and then track the results on a monthly calendar grid.
0:38:06 If texting doesn’t work, you could also use WhatsApp or something else.
0:38:06 Okay.
0:38:09 So basically like on the right here is just like the chat.
0:38:11 And it just goes, absolutely.
0:38:12 Let me propose what we’ll build.
0:38:14 And then it just kind of like explains to me like a project manager.
0:38:18 It goes, I’m going to help you create a food tracking app through SMS messaging
0:38:19 with a counter visualizations.
0:38:20 We’ll start with the SMS.
0:38:22 Later we can add WhatsApp as an alternative.
0:38:24 It’s like, okay, okay.
0:38:24 Prioritizing things.
0:38:25 That’s interesting.
0:38:28 And then it goes, the Apple send daily messages, blah, blah, blah.
0:38:30 And then it goes, how would you like me to proceed?
0:38:34 And it’s like, there was like, you know, add more features, change the instructions,
0:38:35 or like go ahead and build the prototype.
0:38:37 So I clicked build the initial prototype.
0:38:39 And then literally, I don’t know if you can see this, but like,
0:38:44 it starts like auto scrolling as it’s writing code.
0:38:45 Like this is all just a code it’s generating.
0:38:48 So like, you know, like, I’m not doing anything.
0:38:50 I’m literally sitting back with popcorn while this is happening.
0:38:53 So it’s like, here’s your calendar grid.
0:38:57 And it’s like, hey, I need, I’m going to use Twilio for the SMS.
0:38:58 It decides, I’ll use Twilio for the SMS.
0:39:01 Can you go to Twilio and give me your account and your phone numbers
0:39:05 so that it’ll be like, we use Twilio for sending SMS.
0:39:07 So I go to Twilio, I give it my SMS.
0:39:09 And then it’s like, it’s made.
0:39:12 It literally made the thing exactly how I want to say.
0:39:13 So this works now?
0:39:16 Yeah, I actually got stuck on the Twilio step
0:39:18 because Twilio has to verify my phone number.
0:39:19 So it like, it hasn’t verified it yet.
0:39:23 But I can go into, in Twilio, I see it tries to send me the message.
0:39:25 And it’s just as awaiting Twilio verification
0:39:26 to like be able to use this.
0:39:28 So I’m like a little bit stuck there,
0:39:30 which is like a common thing with agents, I feel.
0:39:33 It’s like, almost absolutely incredible.
0:39:36 And then kind of frustrating at some point
0:39:38 where you have to like, you know, find through some walls.
0:39:39 Well, I think I’m just treated.
0:39:42 I think he said, I want people to be able to build an app faster
0:39:44 that they can just Google the answer to a question.
0:39:46 And that’s exactly what happened here.
0:39:47 Well, that’s insane.
0:39:51 So this screenshot is the agent looking at the result.
0:39:53 It’s trying to verify.
0:39:54 So this is not the running app.
0:39:55 If you click run, you can hit the running app.
0:39:57 It says the top took a screenshot.
0:39:58 And then it shows it to me.
0:40:00 It’s like, hey, is this how you want it?
0:40:02 And I was like, oh, because before it had it
0:40:03 where it was like not the right month.
0:40:05 I go, oh, put the month on top.
0:40:06 Like don’t say monthly food tracking, right?
0:40:07 December.
0:40:08 And then it also said, like, hey,
0:40:10 would you like any other style improvements?
0:40:11 I can make it broader.
0:40:13 I can change the color scheme.
0:40:16 And I’m like, dude, this is literally better than an employee, right?
0:40:17 Like, first, it’s instantaneous.
0:40:23 Second, I could, you know, I don’t have to pay somebody
0:40:25 to sit in the desk to sit around waiting for me to do something.
0:40:28 I had an idea on a whim, go to Repa,
0:40:30 and did the thing with the agent.
0:40:32 This was a, like, there’s been a few, like,
0:40:35 mind-blowing moments for me in my, like, tech career.
0:40:37 You know, like, I graduated 2010.
0:40:39 So I’ll start at that point where it’s like,
0:40:42 the first time I took an Uber, I was like, holy shit,
0:40:43 that was amazing.
0:40:46 I pushed a button, a car showed up, the guy got in.
0:40:47 I didn’t even have to pay for, like,
0:40:48 it just paid through my phone.
0:40:49 That was magic.
0:40:51 And I could see, you know, I could see him on an app
0:40:53 getting closer and closer to the restaurant.
0:40:54 That was like one of them.
0:40:56 You know, chat GPT for sure was another
0:40:58 where I could just, you know, tell it to make something
0:41:00 and write something and write it for me.
0:41:01 This is another one of them.
0:41:04 This is the first AI agent thing
0:41:07 that has, like, been a mind-blowing moment for me,
0:41:11 where I am not a programmer, I am not a coder,
0:41:13 but I can now create software.
0:41:14 – This is, like, amazing.
0:41:16 Can I ask a blunt, crude question?
0:41:18 How can I use your software to become a billionaire?
0:41:21 Because, like, I see this and I’m like,
0:41:27 you know, like, the ridiculous analogy that I use
0:41:30 is I’m like, I feel like an artist sometimes,
0:41:32 where, like, I feel like I have the ability
0:41:34 to conceptualize certain things, but I can’t paint.
0:41:36 It’s like, I can’t fucking paint what I want to paint
0:41:37 that’s in my head, like,
0:41:39 because I literally don’t have that skill set sometimes.
0:41:40 And so, like, I’ll be working on stuff,
0:41:43 and I’m like, dude, I want this to do this,
0:41:44 but I gotta go talk to this developer,
0:41:46 and I don’t want to have this conversation,
0:41:47 and that’s just, like, a pain in the ass.
0:41:49 And so, like, you basically are making it
0:41:52 so I can finally express myself easily.
0:41:54 I like how you’re on the first date.
0:41:57 You’re like, how can I get you to take the clothes off?
0:42:00 You’re like, how do I use your thing to get really rich?
0:42:03 I mean, that’s basically like, like,
0:42:05 and you had on the document, you’re like,
0:42:06 here’s just, here’s the opportunities.
0:42:08 Just use Replet to do X, Y, and Z.
0:42:12 And I want to go through that, because this is, like, amazing.
0:42:13 This is actually, you know, there’s, like,
0:42:16 there’s, like, the viral clip on YouTube or Twitter,
0:42:17 like, in all bunch of places where it’s, like,
0:42:19 the headline, which we probably have used,
0:42:22 which is, like, billion-dollar one-person companies,
0:42:23 or something like this.
0:42:25 You’re the closest person to this, probably,
0:42:28 to that question, to answer that question.
0:42:33 Yeah, so there are apps built on Replet agent
0:42:39 that otherwise would take probably $100,000 of developer time.
0:42:44 And you can build it, like, in, you know, $25 paid to Replet.
0:42:47 I will say that there’s limitations, right?
0:42:48 It is not, it is not perfect.
0:42:51 This is, like, the worst it’s going to be.
0:42:53 It sometimes gets stuck with problems.
0:42:57 You can, you need to have some skill in prompting
0:43:00 to coax it to, like, figure it out.
0:43:02 And it sort of, like, teaches you over time,
0:43:05 because it tells you what it’s doing as it’s editing the code.
0:43:07 And so over time, you’re learning how to use it.
0:43:09 You’re actually learning how code works.
0:43:11 You’re learning how, maybe you’re not learning
0:43:13 how to exactly type code,
0:43:15 but you’re learning the different components
0:43:16 in where things could go wrong.
0:43:17 You’re learning about database.
0:43:19 We have, like, database.
0:43:21 You can go in and look at the tables and look,
0:43:22 oh, what’s happening.
0:43:24 And so, you know, the vision for this
0:43:26 is that that’s all you need.
0:43:29 That’s all you need to build an entire startup.
0:43:33 And, you know, every day we’re inching towards that.
0:43:37 You know, and I talked about, like, pushing the boulder up the hill.
0:43:41 And I think that’s one of my, one of my talents is, like,
0:43:44 okay, what are the problems that you can make progress on
0:43:47 every day and every week, such that, you know,
0:43:50 in a year time, you have this exponential progress
0:43:52 and the product is so much better.
0:43:55 The other thing is we’re riding this wave
0:43:57 of the foundation models getting better.
0:43:58 So every time they get better,
0:44:00 we plug in a new foundation model
0:44:02 and the product is suddenly better.
0:44:05 So you’re riding this, you know, two exponential curves,
0:44:06 which is, like, the engineering we’re doing,
0:44:09 but also the underlying models and infrastructure
0:44:11 is getting better.
0:44:14 So I think in a year’s time, it’s going to be really mind-blowing,
0:44:17 in a couple years’ time, I think we’re going to see stories,
0:44:22 like someone getting super rich making an app in Replit
0:44:23 that sort of goes viral.
0:44:26 And so we’re adding Stripe integration right now.
0:44:30 You can already use kind of Stripe on Replit,
0:44:32 but we’re adding integration that makes it super easy
0:44:34 to start monetizing your app.
0:44:41 So I’m obsessed with being transparent about money,
0:44:44 particularly with ultra-high net worth people.
0:44:47 The reason being is that there’s not a lot of information
0:44:48 on this demographic.
0:44:50 And so because I own Hampton,
0:44:51 which is a community for founders,
0:44:53 I have access to thousands of young
0:44:55 and incredibly high net worth people.
0:44:56 We have people worth hundreds of millions
0:44:59 and sometimes billions of dollars inside of Hampton.
0:45:00 And so every year, we do this thing
0:45:02 called the Hampton Wealth Report,
0:45:04 where we survey over a thousand entrepreneurs
0:45:06 and we ask them all types of information
0:45:08 about their personal finances.
0:45:10 We ask them about how they’re investing their money,
0:45:12 what their portfolio looks like.
0:45:13 We ask them about their monthly spend habits.
0:45:15 We ask them how they’ve set up their estate,
0:45:17 how much money they’re going to lead to charity,
0:45:18 how much money they keep in cash,
0:45:20 how much money they’re paying themselves
0:45:21 from their businesses.
0:45:25 Basically every question that you want to ask a rich person,
0:45:27 we went and we do it for you
0:45:29 and we do it with hundreds and hundreds of people.
0:45:30 So if you want to check out the report,
0:45:32 it’s called the Hampton Wealth Report.
0:45:34 Just go to joinhampton.com, click our menu,
0:45:36 and you’re going to see a section called Reports
0:45:37 and you’re going to see it all right there.
0:45:38 It’s very easy.
0:45:40 So again, it’s called the Hampton Wealth Report.
0:45:42 Go to joinhampton.com, click the menu,
0:45:44 and then click the Report button.
0:45:45 And let me know what you think.
0:45:50 So Sam said, how do I get rich?
0:45:52 And you were like, disclaimer, it’s not fully there yet.
0:45:56 But now you still have to answer the question.
0:45:59 I mean, the question is what kind of applications?
0:46:00 It’s like, what are the ideas?
0:46:02 What kind of applications you can build?
0:46:06 I would say AI applications are growing really fast.
0:46:09 Like the revenue ramp in some of those AI applications,
0:46:10 it’s kind of crazy.
0:46:12 Can you tell the story of magic school?
0:46:14 I thought this was really interesting.
0:46:14 Yeah.
0:46:19 So magic school is like an AI application for educators.
0:46:24 It’s basically helping them use foundation models and LLMs
0:46:28 to do their work, to do assignments for kids
0:46:32 to have an interactive AI experience.
0:46:35 And so it’s like a full suite of AI for educators.
0:46:37 The guy who created it was a teacher, right?
0:46:39 The guy who created it was a teacher.
0:46:42 He took some time during COVID to learn how to code
0:46:43 and he started using Replet.
0:46:50 And him and I think another person built the initial thing,
0:46:52 totally on Replet.
0:46:54 And because you can go from the idea all the way to deployment,
0:46:57 and it immediately started growing.
0:47:04 Like these AI apps, when the adoption starts happening,
0:47:05 it goes super viral.
0:47:07 You don’t need a ton of marketing.
0:47:09 And the revenue ramp was one of the craziest ones
0:47:11 I’ve seen, especially for education.
0:47:13 Yeah, it was a known thing.
0:47:14 It was the hardest thing you could do,
0:47:16 selling it into schools, into teachers.
0:47:17 They’re overworked, they’re underpaid.
0:47:20 They don’t have the time to figure out your new tool.
0:47:21 But this thing is great.
0:47:23 So if you go to it, it’s basically like…
0:47:26 Because teachers spend a lot of their time
0:47:27 not in the classroom.
0:47:29 It’s after school is done.
0:47:30 They have to grade papers.
0:47:33 They have to create the lesson plan for the next day.
0:47:35 They have to create the quizzes or the multiple choice tests.
0:47:37 And they have to constantly do these.
0:47:40 And there was these platforms like teacher paid teachers
0:47:41 where I could just…
0:47:42 If I don’t want to make it myself
0:47:44 because I’m tired after the school day,
0:47:47 I might be able to go buy one for nine bucks
0:47:49 from another teacher who teaches fifth grade science
0:47:50 in some other state.
0:47:52 And I would take that and I would buy it that way.
0:47:54 What Magic School did was it was like, cool.
0:47:56 Generate…
0:47:59 You just say like, I teach fifth grade biology.
0:48:04 I want to do a pop quiz about how mitosis works.
0:48:06 And then it’ll basically create either a lesson plan
0:48:12 or a quiz or a student like interactive workbook
0:48:14 that they need to create or whatever.
0:48:18 And so it lets a teacher not have to spend four hours a night
0:48:20 creating the materials that they need just to teach class
0:48:22 because AI can do it for them.
0:48:23 And this thing looks…
0:48:24 I don’t know these guys.
0:48:25 I don’t know anything about them,
0:48:28 but it says over 4 million educators are using this,
0:48:31 which are 4 million educators and their students,
0:48:32 which I don’t know if they’re counting…
0:48:33 Well, if you go on similar web,
0:48:34 they have millions of monthly unique.
0:48:36 So that’s like…
0:48:38 Really, I think they raised like 20 million bucks too.
0:48:39 Yeah, I mean, that’s like a pretty huge signal.
0:48:46 So they launched in like, I want to say July 2023.
0:48:48 So they’re like a little over a year.
0:48:51 And do you know that these like SAS metrics are like,
0:48:56 how long to get to whatever, like a hundred million or whatever.
0:49:01 The AI apps, and I would say Magic School is on that trajectory
0:49:02 is like just like that.
0:49:06 You know, the curve is like, all the way straight up.
0:49:07 This is kind of weird,
0:49:10 but maybe this is like a feature of yours
0:49:13 that you helped this company become potentially
0:49:15 one of the faster growing companies of all time.
0:49:18 And you only earned $20 a month from that.
0:49:23 Yeah, so Replet had always a problem of value capture.
0:49:28 Honestly, that’s why like VC struggles with it for a long time.
0:49:32 So that there’s some logic for why it is hard to monetize
0:49:34 these things and like capture some of the value.
0:49:37 I will say, you know, I invested in Magic School.
0:49:38 So there’s some of that.
0:49:44 And with AI, I think we’re going to be able to,
0:49:48 you know, capture at least a little bit more of that value.
0:49:52 If people are monetizing these apps on Replet via the agent,
0:49:56 there’s a way I think where we can potentially take a cut out of that,
0:50:00 especially if we make it like super simple to start monetizing an app.
0:50:03 And also, like if once we reach scale, you know,
0:50:06 it is like chagopity, like you don’t need a lot of skill to do that.
0:50:09 And it’s going to get easier and easier once we reach scale.
0:50:12 And you have, you know, millions of people paying for this.
0:50:13 And it’s not just like 20 bucks.
0:50:17 You’re going to pay incremental after you finish your credits.
0:50:19 So we give you monthly credits.
0:50:20 And then afterwards, if you want to continue,
0:50:22 you can like buy more credits.
0:50:24 Are there other companies like Magic School,
0:50:27 like cool companies like that you’ve seen that maybe we haven’t heard of
0:50:29 that are using AI?
0:50:35 Yes. So, you know, I’m very excited about agents right now.
0:50:41 And, you know, I think I predicted earlier this year on a podcast
0:50:44 that, you know, this is going to be the year where like agents are born.
0:50:46 And next year is like where agents are going to scale.
0:50:50 So there’s this company called 11x.
0:50:53 And 11x creates AI, SDRs.
0:50:58 And so basically, you don’t need to hire SDRs.
0:51:01 Like there are some companies that feel like, you know,
0:51:04 they can, they can bootstrap their sales without SDR.
0:51:13 You can have like 1A and that account executive is like running these like 10s of AI, SDRs.
0:51:18 And the revenue ramp on 11x was also crazy.
0:51:21 It’s pretty wild how fast these companies are scaling.
0:51:23 I don’t think in the history of Silicon Valley,
0:51:26 we’ve seen anything like that, even in the like web 2.0 era.
0:51:30 So what is like a fast ramp for AI, for maybe not 11x specifically,
0:51:34 but just for an AI company, what’s like, what’s impressive,
0:51:37 that kind of broke the frame of what, how long things would take?
0:51:38 But you’ve seen it now.
0:51:43 Yeah. So I would say reaching 10 million in three or four months.
0:51:45 Yeah. Oh my God.
0:51:53 Yeah, we, I invested in Jasper, which was like one of the early
0:51:55 kind of chat GPT rapper type of companies where they was like,
0:51:58 hey, like marketing, you know, you need to write a blog post.
0:52:02 You need to write a description for a product or whatever.
0:52:05 And so you could use it for writing any kind of marketing copy.
0:52:08 And their graph was, I’d never seen it.
0:52:10 It was like in 10 months or 11 months,
0:52:13 they scaled like 50 million in annual recurring revenues.
0:52:16 It was like, I’ve never seen anything even remotely close to that.
0:52:20 It was, it brought up a question, like, is this sustainable?
0:52:22 Is this like, what is happening here?
0:52:24 Like this is, I’ve just, it doesn’t compute,
0:52:27 but it definitely broke my frame of what is possible because I’d been working,
0:52:31 you know, in Silicon Valley since, you know, 2011, 1112.
0:52:34 And that just, that wasn’t a thing.
0:52:36 You would never see a graph like that.
0:52:37 What are some other companies that have gotten to that,
0:52:43 like 10-ish or 10-ish million or similar trajectory in three-month type of businesses?
0:52:47 Yeah. So this is, I wanted to kind of give a, you know,
0:52:48 sort of a disclaimer about this,
0:52:52 which is the big question in the investor community right now
0:52:54 is like the mode’s question.
0:52:59 And that started around the time that Chatchapiti kind of came out
0:53:03 and there was these GPT wrappers, sort of this condescending way
0:53:05 of looking at a lot of these companies.
0:53:09 It’s like, ah, if you can create GPT wrapper, you know, in a month,
0:53:12 then, you know, a lot of other people will create GPT wrappers in a month.
0:53:16 And you’re going to be competing on price and the margins go down.
0:53:20 And yes, the ARR is great, but you’re, but Anthropic is capturing
0:53:23 or OpenAI is capturing most of the ARR, not you.
0:53:26 You’re kind of a, you’re kind of like a middleman
0:53:29 and you’re going to have like a hard time having margins.
0:53:33 And I think it’s totally a valid question.
0:53:37 Now, I think, you know, modes develop over time
0:53:41 through strategy and technical excellence.
0:53:44 So, I mean, some of these companies can go down pretty fast
0:53:46 and there are examples of that right now.
0:53:50 But, but I think if you, you know, you can have,
0:53:53 you can start building technical, like with the replete,
0:53:56 again, this like idea of like pushing it both up a hill.
0:54:00 You know, we have this runtime environment.
0:54:01 We have like this infrastructure.
0:54:02 We have the deployment.
0:54:03 We have databases.
0:54:05 We have all these integrations.
0:54:10 I mean, it’s the only one in the world that is like an end-to-end environment
0:54:11 to make software.
0:54:14 And like to catch up with that, it’s going to take years, right?
0:54:18 But technical advantage is also not a long-term moat.
0:54:21 And so, again, it’s a big question.
0:54:22 I don’t think it’s answered yet.
0:54:24 You know, there’s strategic things you could do
0:54:27 if you reach scale, if the switching costs are high,
0:54:31 you know, that may be like a way to have sustainable moats.
0:54:32 But it is definitely a big question.
0:54:34 You know, it’s crazy, Sean.
0:54:38 Like for the long, I hate using the D word democratize.
0:54:40 I think that’s like such an overused like sonic invalid.
0:54:42 Don’t do it. Don’t do it.
0:54:43 Don’t do it.
0:54:46 But this is actually one of those few examples
0:54:50 where like for the longest time building a website or a web app,
0:54:52 like you just literally couldn’t.
0:54:56 And so now you are making the technology that everyone can do it.
0:54:59 And so what I think is like guys like Sean and me
0:55:01 are people like us who have an audience.
0:55:03 It’s like, why don’t we just,
0:55:06 why aren’t we like constantly launching like companies
0:55:09 using this technology because like our ability to get users
0:55:11 because we just get on the microphone and talk about it.
0:55:14 That’s like actually a competitive advantage.
0:55:19 Whereas being technical is no longer, it’s still an advantage,
0:55:21 but it’s not as much as before.
0:55:24 It’s like getting customers now is actually the only hard part,
0:55:27 which is still hard, but it’s way easier if you’re popular.
0:55:31 Yeah. So, you know, the playbook I would use is like,
0:55:37 I would go into some inefficient market or industry.
0:55:41 So a deal from Magic School went into this hugely inefficient
0:55:47 you know, industry, which is schools and education.
0:55:51 And by the way, another product is Synthesis Tutor,
0:55:54 which is also going viral right now.
0:55:59 And they have also this revenue ramp that’s kind of crazy.
0:56:01 Both Sean and I invested in that company.
0:56:03 Yeah, they all invested.
0:56:08 Yeah. Yeah. And for a while they had like this thing where like,
0:56:11 you know, they had educators on the payroll and whatever.
0:56:13 They replaced all of that with AI.
0:56:17 Now like, you know, the kids sit in front of the iPad
0:56:19 and they’re talking to the AI and like learning really fast.
0:56:21 And it’s much better than the previous product.
0:56:23 Right.
0:56:27 So basically like find an industry where you’re familiar with
0:56:30 and just like build a deep-sea wrapper
0:56:31 to like automate some of the work there.
0:56:34 And like you could do it like a hundred times
0:56:35 and one of them will take off.
0:56:38 Yeah, it’s the era of the idea guy now.
0:56:39 It’s our turn.
0:56:40 It’s our turn to shine, right?
0:56:44 Because now the limits and the kind of the value creation is,
0:56:46 do you understand a problem well enough
0:56:49 to know how to take this really powerful magic wand
0:56:50 and point it at that problem
0:56:52 and be able to make that more efficient?
0:56:54 And then of course, do all of the other hard things.
0:56:57 Go get customers, make it sustainable, build a good team,
0:56:59 you know, like do all the normal entrepreneurship stuff.
0:57:03 But it seems like more than ever, having a great idea
0:57:07 is the kind of like key unlock to doing these things
0:57:08 because building has become easier.
0:57:11 And I’ll give you kind of my personal epiphany
0:57:12 that I had while I was doing this.
0:57:16 So I invested in Replet mostly when I just thought,
0:57:16 you seemed really smart.
0:57:19 And I saw a growth curve of developers using it.
0:57:22 And I thought, oh, cool, like I’ve experienced this problem before.
0:57:26 Like a one-stop place where I can come in,
0:57:29 write the code, host it, all the stuff
0:57:30 you talked about, like don’t have to download Java,
0:57:31 don’t have to do any of that shit.
0:57:34 That appealed to me in this time.
0:57:37 I think actually in the same way that Synthesis like took AI
0:57:41 and actually almost like really like 10xed the value prop
0:57:44 of the business, I think you guys are doing the same.
0:57:47 So here’s my quick pitch, which is now that I think of Replet
0:57:54 as basically what Shopify was for creating, you know,
0:57:55 like online stores.
0:57:57 I think Replet is that for creating software.
0:57:59 So to me, you guys are–
0:58:01 Dude, his eyes just brightened when you–
0:58:02 You’re Shopify for software.
0:58:04 So like I’ll give you my example.
0:58:06 I recently celebrated a milestone that was both–
0:58:09 I was proud of it and really embarrassed also.
0:58:13 So a few years ago, I started an e-commerce brand
0:58:15 and we just crossed 50 million in revenue,
0:58:17 like kind of like cumulative lifetime revenue.
0:58:19 Half of it was like, you know, this year, but 50 million total.
0:58:21 And I was like, wow, like 50 million, that’s great.
0:58:23 Like that’s, I had never created a business
0:58:25 that had done 50 million in revenue.
0:58:26 So that was like a personal pride point.
0:58:30 And at the same time, I was telling it to a friend of mine
0:58:31 who’s not an entrepreneur.
0:58:34 He’s like, yeah, man, I would love to learn how to, you know,
0:58:36 like make websites and like make products and manufacturing.
0:58:39 And I was like, oh, I don’t know how to do any of that.
0:58:45 Like I was like, this brand that is on 50 million in revenue,
0:58:46 for me, I don’t–
0:58:49 I just stacked Alibaba times Shopify.
0:58:51 I’ve never manufactured a product in my life,
0:58:52 still don’t know how to.
0:58:55 And I’ve never made a website that’s like, you know,
0:58:58 actually used by customers, still don’t know how to.
0:59:02 But I was able to skip all the work and get to the brand part,
0:59:03 like do the thing where we created a product
0:59:06 that people liked and, you know, it’s a successful company now.
0:59:10 And I thought, wow, Replet’s going to do that for the software space.
0:59:14 And I was like, it used to be that the job was software engineer.
0:59:17 And now it’s going to be software creator.
0:59:19 And so I can be a creator of software
0:59:20 without being a programmer myself.
0:59:23 That little shift is a big shift
0:59:24 because of the way I think about it.
0:59:26 I don’t know how many developers there are.
0:59:29 I think GitHub has like 100 million or 200 million accounts.
0:59:30 So I’ll just use that.
0:59:33 Like there’s 200 million, let’s say,
0:59:35 developers, you know, software engineers in the world.
0:59:39 Well, now there’s going to be two billion people
0:59:40 that can create software.
0:59:41 Because if you got the internet, you got your phone,
0:59:42 you can create software now.
0:59:45 You can just tell the agent, make me an app that does this,
0:59:47 make a tool that does this.
0:59:51 And so you 10x the number of people that can create software
0:59:53 in the same way that Shopify and Alibaba
0:59:57 10x or more, the number of people who could create products
0:59:58 and go sell them like hard goods.
1:00:00 That’s how I see what you’re doing.
1:00:04 Yeah. So, you know, even at the start of Repled,
1:00:09 you know, there’s our initial seed deck.
1:00:12 And the deck kind of has this Elon Musk style,
1:00:13 like, you know, master plan.
1:00:14 Master plan.
1:00:17 And it was like, we build a, you know,
1:00:18 we build a platform, we grow it,
1:00:22 and then AI is going to make the thing a lot more accessible.
1:00:25 Because our mission was make programming accessible.
1:00:29 Then we updated our mission, it was create a billion programmers.
1:00:32 And then so the moment that, you know,
1:00:35 even GPT-3 came out, I was like, this is the thing.
1:00:39 And I wrote this thread on Twitter about how AI agents
1:00:41 will just change how programmers work.
1:00:42 This is the decks.
1:00:46 2015, I don’t even know if OpenAI was a research lab
1:00:47 at that time, maybe.
1:00:50 Definitely, you know, there was no chat GPT,
1:00:51 but this was your master plan deck.
1:00:55 So we’re going to grow by building tools for teachers and students.
1:00:57 We’re going to build a simple network and AI-assisted interface
1:00:59 that blurs the distinction between learning and building,
1:01:01 evolve into a platform where people can learn,
1:01:03 build, explore, and host applications.
1:01:07 Like talking about AI back in 2015 in your actual pitch deck.
1:01:12 Dude, it’s also clear how Code Academy was highly influential to you.
1:01:14 Because I remember years ago, Sean said,
1:01:15 everyone tries to learn how to code.
1:01:18 I used Code Academy, and it was a pretty cool interface.
1:01:20 And it’s very similar to what you’re describing.
1:01:26 You know, at some point, I kind of lost hope in courses.
1:01:30 Because like, you know, we have 100 days of code.
1:01:33 We’re telling users that to use our application,
1:01:35 you need to invest 100 days.
1:01:37 That’s kind of crazy.
1:01:40 Like, there isn’t any successful company in the world
1:01:42 where you need 100 days to learn it.
1:01:47 And so that’s when I kind of changed my mindset.
1:01:50 And I said, okay, it needs to be ChatGPT-like.
1:01:52 It needs to be just a prompt.
1:01:56 And we started building that earlier this year.
1:01:58 And now that’s all we’re focused on.
1:02:00 We want to create new programmers.
1:02:04 You know, existing developers, great, they have a lot of tools.
1:02:07 But we want to go after the citizen developer, right?
1:02:09 Everyone is a developer.
1:02:12 And I think that’s, you know, that’s what you’re talking about.
1:02:15 You go from like 100 million developers in the world.
1:02:16 Well, I think it overstates the numbers.
1:02:18 Probably a more 30 million.
1:02:19 And then you 10x that.
1:02:22 And so what does the world look like
1:02:25 when anyone with an idea could make something?
1:02:30 And one of my favorite books is The Sovereign Individual.
1:02:32 The thing I really was excited about
1:02:34 is this idea of ideas become wealth.
1:02:38 And so you no longer have the bottleneck of making something.
1:02:39 That’s where we’re headed.
1:02:41 And this is what you’re talking about, Sean.
1:02:46 It’s like the time for an idea guy.
1:02:48 And like maybe that’s, you know, tongue in cheek.
1:02:53 And like maybe the way to talk about it in more precise terms
1:03:00 is that people who kind of find these gaps in markets,
1:03:03 people who have expertise in certain areas
1:03:06 that they can tell there’s inefficiency
1:03:09 and they can like create an AI application
1:03:11 that can immediately plug that.
1:03:13 Like I saw this video on Twitter the other day.
1:03:16 It was of a snake that got its head chopped off
1:03:21 and it like floated around and bit like the tail of its own body.
1:03:23 And then like the body like reacted.
1:03:27 Your employees, are they thinking that they’re sort of doing that to themselves?
1:03:30 Where they’re like, like when you make jokes.
1:03:31 Dark.
1:03:33 Or like when you’re, when you’re like talking like,
1:03:36 you don’t like, you don’t need to hire all these programmers to do all this stuff.
1:03:38 Are they like sitting there with their hands in the pocket?
1:03:41 Like, like, does that mean us?
1:03:45 You know, I always wanted the company to be super lean.
1:03:49 And so for a long time, we’re like 10 people.
1:03:51 But like now we’re like 70 people.
1:03:52 That’s still nothing.
1:03:53 Yeah.
1:03:56 So I’d rather not hire a lot more people
1:04:00 because I think that again, the efficiency for programmers.
1:04:04 So look, as citizen developers are going to go from zero to like say 10x.
1:04:08 But also existing software engineers are going to go from 10x to 100x.
1:04:10 Right.
1:04:12 And so, and so they’re going to become more and more productive.
1:04:18 The moment we, we automate all of software engineering.
1:04:21 I think that’s sort of like the moment of AGI.
1:04:23 So I think it’s like a little far away.
1:04:27 And the reason I say this is because once you automate software,
1:04:31 then the agents can rebuild themselves.
1:04:36 And you go into this, into this loop of, you know, increased intelligence.
1:04:40 Every version builds its next version, builds its next version.
1:04:43 And so this is what they call intelligence explosion
1:04:44 that would lead to the singularity.
1:04:45 Right.
1:04:48 So it’s like a pretty crazy time when we automate all of software engineering.
1:04:53 And so I think, I think it’s coming, I don’t know if it’s 10 years or 15 years.
1:04:57 But I think that’s the time where the world really radically changes.
1:05:05 Have you met anybody in kind of the tech industry that blew you away,
1:05:08 either personally or maybe you read about them, maybe a friend of a friend told you a story?
1:05:10 Because I saw a picture of you with Jensen.
1:05:12 You know, you’ve met Paul Graham.
1:05:14 I know that you’re like connected in the AI circles.
1:05:15 You met Sam Altman.
1:05:20 In addition to building the tech, I love the characters and I love the stories.
1:05:24 Is why every, you know, Elon snippet of how he runs his companies goes viral and shit like that.
1:05:28 What are your favorite kind of inspiring stories or crazy stories that you’ve either
1:05:30 experienced directly or read?
1:05:32 Yeah, you know, one of the crazy stories when we’re
1:05:39 raising from A16Z, Mark invites me to breakfast at like 10 a.m. at his house.
1:05:43 And so I go there and I expect like I’m going to talk about the business.
1:05:47 And so we spend like two or three hours talking about politics
1:05:52 and the world and like all sorts of things that are interesting to him.
1:05:56 And I thought like this guy is like more than just a technologist.
1:05:57 He’s like a philosopher.
1:06:01 And so right now he’s going out and he’s talking about this stuff.
1:06:04 Like his Joe Rogan interview went super viral.
1:06:08 And he’s been always have like these interesting ideas about the world.
1:06:13 And the interesting thing about A16Z is his partner Ben is sort of like the executor,
1:06:14 sort of the executive, right?
1:06:16 He wrote the hard thing about hard things
1:06:20 where like he teaches you like about what it means to run a company.
1:06:21 It’s painful.
1:06:23 It’s hard and what it means to hire executives.
1:06:25 What it means to scale a company.
1:06:30 And so you have this duo of like the duo and like the philosopher.
1:06:34 And I think that’s really amazing.
1:06:38 And I think they have really big plans and almost just get excited.
1:06:40 If I was the doer, I would just hate the philosopher.
1:06:42 I’d be like, are you going to do anything?
1:06:44 What are you talking about politics for right now?
1:06:47 It’s got to be the worst to be the doer and the doer philosopher relationship.
1:06:56 You know, I think Sam was interesting to kind of meet him, talk to him.
1:06:57 Because he’s very effective.
1:07:04 Like he, like the first time I met him, or like maybe not the first time,
1:07:08 but like he was on his computer as I’m talking.
1:07:10 And so I’m talking, I was like, yeah, we’re fundraising.
1:07:13 I went to talk to, you know, A16Z.
1:07:17 I’m like really big fan of Mark and he was typing on his computer.
1:07:18 Okay, I introduce you to Mark.
1:07:27 And then, you know, when you send Sam emails, it’s like pretty quickly replies with like a,
1:07:29 you know, a couple of words or like a couple sentences.
1:07:33 So I saw how effective and fast you can be.
1:07:38 And that I’m not like that, you know, I’m trying to be more like that.
1:07:45 But I’m someone who really values the quietness, like to think about ideas
1:07:48 and to think about strategy and things like that.
1:07:50 So I’m not always on top of communication.
1:07:53 It actually makes me like a little, you know, it’s overwhelming.
1:07:58 But I think seeing these people, at least, you know,
1:08:00 inspired me to be a little more like that.
1:08:03 You tweeted out the story that I loved about.
1:08:09 You said the most gangster story in Silicon Valley is Steve Jobs buying Pixar for $5 million,
1:08:13 investing $50 million and operating at a loss for a decade.
1:08:16 So much so that he had to cut personal checks to make payroll
1:08:19 and somehow turning it around to a $7 billion exit.
1:08:22 Why did you like that story?
1:08:26 You know, there are people who are overrated in Silicon Valley
1:08:29 and I think there are people who are underrated.
1:08:31 Like I think people think about Steve Jobs in terms of like, yeah,
1:08:35 the flashy things, the iPhone, the iPod, you know, coming in stage and doing that.
1:08:41 The thing I like about the Steve Jobs story is when he was lost in the desert for 10 years.
1:08:45 So he left, he was fired from Apple.
1:08:50 And then he created two companies that were failing the whole time.
1:08:56 Like Next Computing, Next Computers and Pixar were literally failing.
1:08:58 Like they didn’t do anything, they weren’t selling.
1:09:01 He was just like investing more and more of his money.
1:09:04 I think he was going to go broke.
1:09:06 But he kept going for 10 years.
1:09:07 Like how do you do that?
1:09:11 And you know, I’m a person who, like we talked about in my story,
1:09:14 where I want to be able to go the distance.
1:09:18 I think going the distance is an advantage for entrepreneurs.
1:09:22 And Pixar became this hugely valuable company.
1:09:26 And it goes from making no revenue to making billions of dollars
1:09:29 and going public over a couple of years.
1:09:34 And Next Computers saved Apple.
1:09:37 Apple was having a problem with the OS.
1:09:41 Like Intel, you know, they had the chip before, I don’t know,
1:09:43 they made it internally or something like that.
1:09:45 And then everyone was moving to Intel.
1:09:50 Intel was the best computing chip and they wanted their computers to be fast.
1:09:53 And so they needed a new operating system.
1:09:56 And they tried to buy, they went to the market,
1:09:57 they tried to acquire companies.
1:09:59 They kind of find a great operating system.
1:10:03 And Next Computing had a great operating system.
1:10:05 And that became Mac OS.
1:10:06 So they bought–
1:10:07 I didn’t know that.
1:10:08 I thought Next was just a failure.
1:10:10 I didn’t even realize it actually–
1:10:12 I thought they just bought Steve back Aquahire,
1:10:14 but it wasn’t just Aquahire.
1:10:16 No, I mean, Objective-C, for example,
1:10:22 Next Computing was really obsessed with this idea of object-oriented programming.
1:10:24 And they innovated a lot on what that means.
1:10:27 And it is based on Unix,
1:10:30 but it has a lot of interesting features on top of that.
1:10:34 So it saved Apple because Apple was otherwise not going to be competitive
1:10:36 without these new chips.
1:10:37 Right.
1:10:39 Well, dude, I know we kept you half an hour over.
1:10:40 I apologize for that.
1:10:42 But this was amazing.
1:10:45 This was one of my favorite episodes in a long time.
1:10:46 And I’m not just saying that.
1:10:48 You can go check out all the other offices.
1:10:48 I don’t say that at the end.
1:10:50 So this was awesome.
1:10:51 Thanks so much for coming on.
1:10:55 Where should people– Twitter is the best place to follow you?
1:10:59 Yeah, Twitter, Amosod on Twitter.
1:11:04 And the replete handle on Twitter as well, just our EPL.
1:11:06 Dude, thank you very much.
1:11:06 You’re the best.
1:11:07 Of course.
1:11:09 Of course, my pleasure.
1:11:11 I feel like I can rule the world.
1:11:13 I know I could be what I want to.
1:11:17 I put my all in it like no days off on a road.
1:11:18 Let’s travel never looking back.
1:11:27 Hey, everyone, a quick break.
1:11:30 My favorite podcast guest on My First Million is Darmesh.
1:11:32 Darmesh founded HubSpot.
1:11:33 He’s a billionaire.
1:11:35 He’s one of my favorite entrepreneurs on earth.
1:11:37 And on one of our podcasts recently,
1:11:40 he said the most valuable skill that anyone could have
1:11:43 when it comes to making money in business is copywriting.
1:11:45 And when I say copywriting, what I mean
1:11:48 is writing words that get people to take action.
1:11:49 And I agree, by the way.
1:11:51 I learned how to be a copywriter in my 20s.
1:11:52 It completely changed my life.
1:11:54 I ended up starting and selling a company
1:11:55 for tens of millions of dollars.
1:11:59 And copywriting was the skill that made all of that happen.
1:12:00 And the way that I learned how to copywrite
1:12:03 is by using a technique called copywork,
1:12:06 which is basically taking the best sales letters,
1:12:07 and I would write it word for word.
1:12:09 And I would make notes as to why each phrase
1:12:11 was impactful and effective.
1:12:13 And a lot of people have been asking me about copywork.
1:12:15 So I decided to make a whole program for it.
1:12:16 It’s called Copy That.
1:12:17 CopyThat.com.
1:12:19 It’s only like 120 bucks.
1:12:21 And it’s a simple, fast, easy way
1:12:23 to improve your copywriting.
1:12:25 And so if you’re interested, you need to check it out.
1:12:26 It’s called Copy That.
1:12:28 You can check it out at CopyThat.com.
1:12:31 (upbeat music)