This guy is trying to beat Claude Code (and winning?)

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We went from $2.5 to $250 million in one year. Did you say $2.5 to what?

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To $250. In one year. Did you get audited?

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The first time you came on this podcast, Replit's revenue was $3 million. I feel like I've heard that you guys are close to $500 million in annual revenue now. [SPEAKER_01] We're on our way to a billion this year, I'll just say that.

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[SPEAKER_00] He was deadlifting before it's cool.

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He likes sales before it's cool. He's got range. My guy's got range. [SPEAKER_01] The idea of losing some kind of a competitor is the worst billing in the world.

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[SPEAKER_02] I'll call, I'll show up to their office, we'll do whatever we need, and we rarely lose deals.

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Are there any interesting trends that you're seeing in AI and on the Replit platform? [SPEAKER_01] I think for the first time, because making software is cheaper, you can actually create a multimillion dollar business, not have to raise venture, not have to grow the team a whole lot.

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[SPEAKER_02] Do you think that we are 12 months or something like that away from the world changing dramatically? I think we are in the singularity. I just Googled it, how many billionaires are under the age of 40?

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There's only 71. Really?

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[SPEAKER_02] Of all the people under 40, you are probably in the top 1,000 richest ever. [SPEAKER_00] He just made his day.

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[SPEAKER_00] Look at that smile. [SPEAKER_01] I'm having mixed feelings, Sean. [SPEAKER_00] Dude, so the first time you came on this podcast, I'm pretty sure Replit's revenue was $3 million, $5 million. It was something like that. Because by the way, this was not 10 years ago. This was two years ago.

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[SPEAKER_01] Yep. You guys are close to $500 million in annual revenue now. Is that, I mean, blink twice if I'm in the right ballpark.

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We're on our way to a billion this year, I'll just say that.

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On your way to a billion. How could I have missed it? Off by $500 million. So, I'm unprofessional. I don't know the exact numbers. Say the exact jump of like, I remember when I invested, it was something like $2 or $3 million. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, and it stayed $2 or $3 million for a few years. As we were navigating what to actually do, we went from $2.5 to $250 million in one year. That was between $24 and $25. $2.5 million to $250 million in one year. [SPEAKER_01] Did you get audited? [SPEAKER_01] We did.

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We actually passed a PwC audit a couple months ago.

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[SPEAKER_01] That's crazy. [SPEAKER_01] By the way, you know, we're gross margin positive, which is something that is rare in the industry, but by a good amount as well. And we're very precise in how we calculate on rate.

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[SPEAKER_02] When you grow from almost nothing to a billion dollars in revenue in 24 months, what type of logistical questions I have. What type of relationship do you have to have with your bank? Did you prepare your bank where you're going to experience this?

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That's your question? How's your banking relationship? [SPEAKER_02] Dude, there's so many logistical questions. For example, are you doing what are you doing with that cash? And how are you managing spending it and investing it as fast as you're making it? Things like that. There are so many logistical questions around literally. It's like when Pablo Escobar was a drug dealer, he was saying we can't get enough rubber bands for the money. We don't know where to store the money. There are these logistical questions that I'm curious about.

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[SPEAKER_01] You know, the theory for one of the potential creators of Bitcoin is that he invented Bitcoin because he was making so much money. He didn't know where to keep it. There's this story called the Mastermind about this guy who I think grew up in Rhodesia and that was Zimbabwe. And he was a hacker. He was a computer hacker. And he invented a lot of encrypted technology. Very well-known guy. He ended up getting into criminal online activities, selling drugs online. One of the first to do that. And he generated so much cash, he actually had ships with bullions of gold just in international waters, just doing circles. [SPEAKER_01] Oh, wow.

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[SPEAKER_01] And so there's a lot of— This is Paul LaRue, right? Paul LaRue.

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Paul LaRue, yeah. Paul LaRue. And there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that he was potentially writing Bitcoin because it was, oh, I don't know what to do with this money. So we're not there yet. But— How did Paul LaRue make the money?

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[SPEAKER_01] He created the first delivery online drug store.

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[SPEAKER_02] Do you remember, Sean, in the early .com where you would get spammy emails where it's, buy Viagra online? Early days? [SPEAKER_00] As in yesterday? [SPEAKER_02] I mean, he still had. [SPEAKER_00] Yesterday, early in your morning yesterday. Earlier today, yeah. [SPEAKER_02] I remember that. He pioneered that. Is that right? I mean, he was one of the biggest guys. He was the first. He had thousands of domain names. He was sending millions of emails a day. He was basically one of the first spammers, internet marketers. [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. [SPEAKER_02] And the monetization engine was selling drugs.

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[SPEAKER_01] And now there are a lot of startups that are doing it, quasi illegally, where they have a lot of doctors that are approving those prescriptions and things like that. But yeah, he did it fully illegally and was wanted by the FBI and drug control and DA and all of that for many years. And they caught him around the same year that Satoshi disappeared around the same time, actually, that Satoshi disappeared.

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[SPEAKER_00] Going from 2 million to now close to a billion and running, right? It's got to be a bit of an out of body experience for a founder. Walk us through the interesting parts that are not the game that's happening on the field, but maybe the founder experience. [SPEAKER_01] And now there are a lot of startups that are doing it quasi illegally, where they have a lot of doctors that are approving those prescriptions and things like that. [SPEAKER_01] But he did it fully illegally and was wanted by the FBI and drug control and DA and all of that for many, many years.

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[SPEAKER_01] And they caught him around the same year that Satoshi disappeared, around the same time, actually, that Satoshi disappeared.

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[SPEAKER_00] Going from 2 million to now close to a billion and running, right? [SPEAKER_00] It's got to be a bit of an out of body experience for a founder. [SPEAKER_00] Walk us through the interesting parts that are not the game that's happening on the field, but maybe just of the founder experience. [SPEAKER_00] Dude, we had to figure this out. [SPEAKER_00] Dude, we didn't know this. [SPEAKER_00] I remember waking up and realizing the chart had jumped 10x, whatever, give us some of that. [SPEAKER_01] Well, first of all, I have such high expectations of myself and my team that at any given point, whatever progress we made, the question is, why haven't we made more?

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[SPEAKER_01] Yeah.

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If we're growing faster. [SPEAKER_00] You're like the Asian tiger mom of the startup world. I am the Asian mom of myself more than anyone else, which is, I don't really recommend. It's a miserable way to live. But, I was like, of course, we're going to make this much money. Of course, the company is going to grow this much. As it was always the plan. It was always in the course. That was always the vision. I'm also naturally paranoid. And so I was fully expecting it to reverse at any given point. And so it was like, how can we make sure this revenue is sticky?

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[SPEAKER_01] How can we go up market, go to the enterprise, make sure our customers are getting a great experience, make sure that things they're creating is not slop. [SPEAKER_01] It is secure.

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We're creating trust, not just in us, but in the whole space. And that's this vibe: coding things is possible, including doing podcasts like this. It's not only possible, it's viable to build businesses. And so the first reaction is adrenaline and let's get to work. This is an opportunity. If we had sold or failed before the breakout point, I would have been probably depressed about it, but not as bad as you now have the wind in your back. And if you fail, it is fully on you.

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[SPEAKER_01] It's like someone passing you the ball and there's no one else in front of the basketball ring. [SPEAKER_01] And you could dunk, you could do whatever you want.

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[SPEAKER_01] And then you somehow do a two shot and fail.

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[SPEAKER_01] So that's the feeling: incredible pressure from everyone, from the market, from even investors, from "Hey, you got to do a little layoff. You got to cut burn" to "Go invest, put money, do it."

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[SPEAKER_01] It's like a thrill of success only lasted a week or two. [SPEAKER_01] And then became the reality of how do you keep this motion going?

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[SPEAKER_01] And how do you scale it? [SPEAKER_01] And the first thing that starts to break is people. [SPEAKER_01] When you have a supply and demand imbalance, companies started knocking on our door. [SPEAKER_01] They're like, "Hey, we want to buy this product. Our employees are using it. How do we get an enterprise deal?" [SPEAKER_01] And we're like, "Yeah, we have one person who does three other things, but also doing sales." [SPEAKER_01] And they're trying to close deals as fast as they can. [SPEAKER_01] It was like, "Okay, I've never done sales. How do you actually do sales?"

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[SPEAKER_01] But there's something about the universe where these people land in your life at crucial points. [SPEAKER_01] Not always, but sometimes. [SPEAKER_01] And we had a VP of sales that came to us at the moment when the company was really in its darkest moment.

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We were about to do a layoff and I'm sitting in this meeting room asking him like, "Why do you want to join us?" His name is Patrick Purvis. He had previously been a VP of sales at ZoomInfo, exited, took a couple of years sabbatical, independently wealthy guy.

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[SPEAKER_01] And I was like, "Look, the company kind of sucks. Why do you want to come here?" [SPEAKER_01] And for my last interview question, I asked, "Why?" [SPEAKER_01] And he's like, "Look, I spent the past few years reflecting. I want to do something meaningful. And your mission of empowering people and democratizing software just seems one of the most important things to do." [SPEAKER_01] I was like, "Okay, welcome to the team, but it's not. We don't want you to sell anyone." [SPEAKER_02] All right, guys, here's the thing about side hustles. [SPEAKER_02] Everyone wants one, but most people overthink it and they never actually launch anything.

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[SPEAKER_02] But because of AI, you can go from idea to your first sale in only seven days. [SPEAKER_02] My old company, the Hustle, just dropped an AI side hustle crash course. [SPEAKER_02] The Hustle looked at things that me and Sean and HubSpot CMO Kit Bonder said, and they broke it all down into simple bite-sized steps, which means you're going to get a guide that gives you everything you need to launch a side hustle without any of the guesswork.

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[SPEAKER_02] So you can get it right now.

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[SPEAKER_02] You can scan the QR code or click the link in the description. [SPEAKER_02] Now back to the show. [SPEAKER_02] How grim did things get? [SPEAKER_02] How low was the bank balance or how many months did you have left? Yeah. What was the darkest hour? Yeah. Well, as you call it, being the Asian parent, I was also financially responsible. And so we never was like, "Oh, we're weeks away from not making payroll." So when we did a layoff, it was more like about extending the runway. [SPEAKER_00] But maybe not runway, but founder delusion takes people far. [SPEAKER_00] And I think you have it more than anyone, right?

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[SPEAKER_00] Because you were like, 10 years you've been working on this thing, right? [SPEAKER_00] It wasn't 10 months. [SPEAKER_00] Yes. [SPEAKER_00] You just kept going, soldiering forward. [SPEAKER_00] On our last podcast, I remember you said, "I think if there's one thing I might be good at," And so we never had like, we never was like, oh, we're weeks away from not making payroll. So when we did a layoff, it was more like about extending the runway.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] But maybe not runway, but founder delusion takes people far. And I think you have it more than anyone, right? Because you were like 10 years you've been working on this thing, right? It wasn't like 10 months. [SPEAKER_00] Yes. You just kept going, soldiering forward. On our last podcast, I remember you said like, I think if there's one thing I might be good at, you were just pretty humble about it, be like, I think, reflecting, I can keep pushing the boulder up the hill for a long time. I just have high pain tolerance, I think.

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[SPEAKER_00] Right. That seems like it's been helpful. So maybe it's not the bank balance, but did the doubts or the delusion or the, is this ever going to happen? Yeah. I think the worst part about it is the belief that your team have in you, your vision, your leadership. And when that goes away, you can see it in their eyes. And that is the most hurtful and depressing feeling. And so after we did the layoff, the layoff is a bubble bursting event. [SPEAKER_00] What did you scale down to from where to where?

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So we actually wasn't that big. It was like a third. So we were like 120, went to now to 90 or something like that. And, but by the end, we were 60. By the end, in like three months, we were 60. And so we lost 50% of our team, but most of it was voluntarily. And the reason is because suddenly, I've been for years getting in front of everyone and talking about this vision and mission. And suddenly it just sounded like lies and sounded like I don't know what I'm doing. And we had also at the same time moved our office from San Francisco to Foster City. We got a huge office. I really knew that we're gonna hand it off in scale, but I was off, off by a few months. So we had already gotten this office. And so the office was empty and cold and kind of dark. And so every day I go to work and just the mood is super dark. And I know that at the moment I'm gonna get to my desk, someone's gonna walk over again. They're gonna tell me they're quitting. And so every night whatever sleep I got was like, okay, who's gonna quit the next day? And it just kept happening. And that was really draining. And for me to put on a face and tell everyone that things are gonna be okay, was incredibly hard. However, there were a group of people that were working on Replit Agent. Replit Agent is the breakthrough product that we created. It actually created a breakthrough in the entire industry because this was, remember this was before ClotCode or anything came out. We showed the world that it was possible to build end-to-end coding agents. And the people inside that team had almost a secret. We're on the precipice of a breakthrough. We were all kind of dogfooding it and playing with it and having a lot of fun with it. So whenever I go to the office, everything is depressing except this one room, we call it the war room. And I walk into the war room and the mood is intensely different. Everyone is super pumped. They know we have created something that's gonna be super valuable. So I had this night and day, almost schizophrenic feeling of, large parts of the company and the business totally lost faith in me and the company. And then a small part that we're totally engrossed on, in the possibilities of AI and what we were inventing.

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[SPEAKER_00] Sam, can I just say, forget the numbers, man. What he just said was the realest shit someone said on this podcast in a long time. The way you describe that feeling as the founder, when you walk into the office and your shit's like, you don't have the hot thing right now. Right. And you've been telling everybody and you could see when they start to lose faith. I've experienced what you just said. You just described my childhood trauma as a founder. I didn't even realize it. I didn't even know until you said those words. I was like, I have felt that. It's depressing. Then somebody emails you like, Hey, can we meet tomorrow? You know, they're about to quit and you're like, it just got harder.

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And I don't have it in me to convince them to stay. Like why would they stay? [SPEAKER_00] Why would they stay? Yeah, exactly. That thing you just described is so real. Yeah. And I just want to give you props. Cause I don't think most people ever really talk about what that feels like. And now it's obviously great to talk about it now. Cause you know, it didn't just end sadly.

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That's the best thing about success is reminiscing in a more positive way about the failure. And everything that goes wrong. But the other one is you mentioned investors is just a broader industry. And you know, I remember my calendar, you know, emptying and I'm no longer invited to the hot parties, in many ways when I go to one, it's like, Oh yeah, Replit. Oh, I remember that thing, you know? [SPEAKER_00] And what are you up to now? Yeah. Yeah. You're like, yeah, you're still at it. And our partners will, we're not including our logo anymore. And our vendors removed our logo from there.

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[SPEAKER_00] That's dirty. Cause it's like, you didn't even have to, you proactively changed your website. Why'd you do that? Why'd you scrub us? And it felt like, a big part of my identity has been about Silicon Valley and it's about, I've read everything I could get my hands on every biography and read Yeah. Yeah. You're still at it. And our partners will, we're not including our logo anymore. And our vendors removed our logo from there. [SPEAKER_00] That's dirty. [SPEAKER_00] Because it's like, you didn't even have to, you proactively changed your website. [SPEAKER_00] Why'd you do that? Why'd you scrub us?

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And if it felt like a big part of my identity has been about Silicon Valley and it's about, I've read everything I could get my hands on, every biography and read about all the different figures from the biggest to the most obscure. And I just felt like the way to Silicon Valley on my shoulders, because I was backed by the best as well. Like Mark Andreessen, Paul Graham, David Sacks, all these people are on our cap table. And I was letting all of them down. [SPEAKER_00] So if this was a movie, there's a turning point, right? [SPEAKER_00] The montage begins at some point you wake up and you look at the dashboard, something starts to change.

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[SPEAKER_00] You start getting emails, the music picks up and suddenly things start to move. [SPEAKER_00] What was the first move of that second act before we hit the training montage? We launched Replit internally at Replit for employees outside of the core engineering group working on it. And the first time everyone tried it, I was especially paying attention to non-engineers. Are they going to be able to be actually successful using this?

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[SPEAKER_01] And Jeff, Jeff is our head of partnerships, Jeff Burke. [SPEAKER_01] Haya and I always think of Jeff as the prototypical potential customer. [SPEAKER_01] He's a consulting background. [SPEAKER_01] He's super sharp, but he can't configure Python to save his life. [SPEAKER_01] Right. [SPEAKER_01] And so he tried it and I remember him posting the feedback. [SPEAKER_01] It's like, oh, this is miserable. [SPEAKER_01] I failed. [SPEAKER_01] They couldn't make the simple app the first day, the next day, third day. [SPEAKER_01] One day when he posted, it was like, oh, I was able to make this thing. [SPEAKER_01] We're like, okay, we got it.

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[SPEAKER_01] The product is ready right now. [SPEAKER_01] And it was around August 2024.

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And the team felt they weren't ready. I was like, we got to launch this. I don't care if it is semi-broken. If 50% of the time you get amazing results, it's going to wow the world. Because for the first time an agent can write the code, debug it, create a database for you and deploy to the cloud. It's never been done.

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[SPEAKER_01] Even if it is just in demo shape. [SPEAKER_02] And I was, one of the habits that I picked up during this darkest hour is playing video games. [SPEAKER_01] I hadn't played. When I came to the US, I was a pro gamer back in Jordan. [SPEAKER_01] When I came to the US, I was like, okay, I'm going to focus. [SPEAKER_01] I'm going to be the Silicon Valley entrepreneur. [SPEAKER_01] I'm going to work really hard. [SPEAKER_01] I want to make a lot of money and I want to be successful. [SPEAKER_01] So I just dropped all the hobbies that I had, but I bought a Steam Deck because I just wanted something to take my mind off all the depressing stuff.

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[SPEAKER_01] They do this thing in games called early preview, a beta. [SPEAKER_01] But the intention is that you're getting a broken thing, but you're expected to give feedback. [SPEAKER_01] I was like, okay, we're just going to release an early preview of the product. [SPEAKER_01] And we're just going to call it that where I say, hey, don't subscribe to this thing. [SPEAKER_01] It might be buggy, but if you're already subscribed or you're okay with getting buggy software, join in. [SPEAKER_01] So in September 2024, I posted a video of me in the office shot on an iPhone saying, hey, AI coding is amazing.

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It generates a lot of code, but so far you had to do all this other stuff. For the first time we're showing you that an AI agent can do the end to end thing. And there were a few moments when this tweet started going viral. One of them was Andrej Karpathy, who is head of AI at Tesla, early OpenAI, AI researcher, co-tweeted it and said, this is the AGI moment. And so that demo showed the industry luminaries what AI could do. People inside research firms like OpenAI, Anthropic reached out to us and told us, we did not know our models are capable of doing that. And so that moment was like, okay, we have something here.

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And then the revenue first day made a million dollars of ARR. Second day, $2 million. [SPEAKER_00] Were you just hitting refresh constantly? [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] I'm trying to be on a call. [SPEAKER_00] He's been in his office all day. [SPEAKER_00] What's he doing? [SPEAKER_00] Just hitting refresh. Yeah. The whole time. But at the same time, we're just hustling to make the product better. [SPEAKER_02] So in two days, you made more revenue. [SPEAKER_02] Yes. [SPEAKER_02] You beat your annual eight years of growth. [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. [SPEAKER_02] In two days. [SPEAKER_02] That's gotta be a crazy feeling.

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You know, I've always heard from other entrepreneurs that the feeling of product market fit is stepping on a land mine. And I knew that we didn't have it for a long time. That's what pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot. And then that felt like stepping on a land mine. I was like, okay, we got it. Now we go from there. [SPEAKER_00] That same phrase, Sam, I don't know if you ever met him when you came to my office, there was this young guy who used to work out of our office. [SPEAKER_00] Furkan had basically adopted these kids. [SPEAKER_00] They were on the East coast. [SPEAKER_00] They wanted to come to Silicon Valley. It's stepping on a land mine.

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And I knew that we didn't have it for a long time. That's what pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot. And then that felt like stepping on a line. And I was like, okay, we got it. Now we go from there. [SPEAKER_00] That same phrase, Sam, I don't know if you ever met him when you came to my office, there was this young guy who used to work out of our office. [SPEAKER_00] Furkan had adopted these kids. [SPEAKER_00] They were on the East coast. [SPEAKER_00] They wanted to come to Silicon Valley. [SPEAKER_00] They didn't have money. [SPEAKER_00] He's like, here's some money. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] They're like, is this an investment?

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He's like, no, this is money. You just have this in your account and you come sleep on my couch and you work out of my office and get going. And so these two young guys, they were probably 20 years old, 21 years old. They were working out of our office and they were trying to do an early version of renting GPUs in the cloud. So they realized this was before the AI boom though. So it was for machine learning or research, but this was before everything kicked off. But they had seen that all the crypto miners had all these GPUs that were unused. And so they had posted on a crypto mining subreddit and thousands of people showed up right away, were ready.

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There were calls, all this stuff. And then they were trying to get the demand side, but the demand wasn't there. And I was like, Hey, this is a great idea. In theory, it's a great idea.

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[SPEAKER_00] Why are you guys pivoting? [SPEAKER_00] Why are you guys worried about these other ideas? And he goes, when we did that first thing, it was stepping on a landmine.

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And so now I kind of know that's what's possible. So all these little signals, I know they're not real signals. And this is 20, 21 years old. And I'm supposed to be mentoring him. And I walked back to my desk being like, I've never felt that. And I realized I'd been doing startups for six, seven years. I had never felt what they were lucky enough to stumble into on the first day. And you don't even know what you're looking for.

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[SPEAKER_00] Had you never felt it, it's love. [SPEAKER_00] It's like, am I in love? [SPEAKER_00] Maybe I'm in love. [SPEAKER_00] Maybe this is it. [SPEAKER_00] And then you feel it and you're like, oh, all that other stuff wasn't that. [SPEAKER_00] This is the thing.

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And I feel like for entrepreneurs, it's one of the hardest things.

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[SPEAKER_02] But I don't think you should expect that because I think that most great companies have never had that. [SPEAKER_02] If you look at the subset of companies, most don't work, some work. [SPEAKER_02] Okay. [SPEAKER_02] A handful work a little bit better. [SPEAKER_02] And then a very small percentage are amazing.

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[SPEAKER_02] And even amongst the amazing ones, what they're describing, what you guys are describing, they don't feel that. [SPEAKER_02] Like, for example, we were talking about Mars candy the other day, that's been around for 150 years. [SPEAKER_02] And more likely than not, it was a grind, a grind this year was not a grind.

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[SPEAKER_02] It did pretty good, but this year it was a grind. [SPEAKER_02] You know what I mean? [SPEAKER_02] Like there was never this moment where it's like, we just grew to a billion in revenue from 2 million in 24 months. [SPEAKER_02] I think you're right. [SPEAKER_00] A, it doesn't happen right away, even for you, even though it happened super fast. [SPEAKER_00] It's 10 years in, but there is a difference between push and pull. [SPEAKER_00] And I think the companies I've seen, which is a very small handful that actually have product market fit, it starts to feel like pull.

SPEAKER_00

In fact, Emmett, the CEO of Twitch, I remember asking him, you did Justin.tv, then you guys pivoted to Twitch. Was it obvious right away? And he basically said, product market fit is the main thing that matters. And he goes, you feel like you're pushing a boulder up a hill every day.

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[SPEAKER_00] And then at some point you kind of wake up and you realize it's like you didn't reach your hands out, but the boulder had already moved. [SPEAKER_00] And now you have to start running to catch up to it. [SPEAKER_00] And suddenly the whole game feels like a sprint catching up to the boulder going down the hill. [SPEAKER_00] It takes time, but there is a difference between manually pushing the crank versus it starts to get pulled by the market. Let's just offer a distinction between the different types of businesses. There are Clay Christensen, RIP, passed away recently, Harvard Business School professor, came up with this concept of disruption, right?

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

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So they're trying to capture a market from existing demand on existing competitors, right? Now there are market creation moments. And I think for Replit, this was a market creation moment. And most internet companies, right? Whether it's PayPal, Facebook, Google, the reason you have this explosive growth is you just invented something new and everyone's rushing because this capability didn't exist before. And there's no other alternative. [SPEAKER_02] That's a really good point. [SPEAKER_02] Then do you think that the right move for someone building a company is good? [SPEAKER_02] Okay. So on one hand, you could say, well, just have patience and keep going.

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Now there are market creation moments.

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[SPEAKER_01] And I think for Replit, this was a market creation moment.

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And most internet companies, right? Whether it's PayPal, Facebook, Google, the reason you have this explosive growth is you just invented something new and then everyone's rushing because this capability didn't exist before. And there's no other alternative, by the way. That's a really good point. [SPEAKER_02] Then do you think that the right move for someone building a company is good? [SPEAKER_02] Okay. So on one hand, you could say, well, just have patience and just keep going, keep going, keep going. [SPEAKER_02] And with this, maybe the same thing.

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[SPEAKER_02] Whereas on the other hand, would it be to pivot, just keep going until you find that rock rolling down the mountain? [SPEAKER_02] I mean, it depends what you're trying to build. Are you innovating something new? Are you creating something that wasn't really possible? Or are you entering a business where you have your business plan, right? Here's what the market size is. Here's how much we're going to capture from it. Here's how we're going to be better than competition. If that's the case, you're going to slog.

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And maybe every now and then you have some kind of innovation or some kind of breakthrough that gets you a bit of a jump over competitors, but prepare yourself to be very good at execution, build an amazing team, build amazing processes. Just be very good at the day-to-day execution to outcompete your competitors. If you're a young person trying to make something that didn't exist before, or you know, like Sean and some of the guys in social media, they're trying to create something new, Clubhouse or some kind of thing that I didn't know I would enjoy talking to people, taking a walk on my earbuds. This just didn't occur to me.

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So if you're inventing something like that, the point is pivot, pivot, pivot, until it hits, because if it's not hitting, you're not hitting on some human nature or element that you're finding, or you're finding a secret in the universe. Almost. You're a fun case study. Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] One of the reasons it's fun to talk to you is not only your business is interesting and you're interesting as a founder, but you're also a bit of a polymath. [SPEAKER_00] Like we were talking at the beginning of this about Paul LaRue, Bitcoin, and I feel like you have a bunch of these little rabbit holes that you've gone down. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00] I'm curious, what are those rabbit holes today? [SPEAKER_00] Because I've seen the original Replit deck and this was what, 2014, 2015, something like that? 2015, yeah. It's like, bro, you called your shot Babe Ruth style. So read this thing out. [SPEAKER_01] What was the master plan?

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[SPEAKER_00] So growth by building tools. [SPEAKER_00] How about the fact that in your deck, you have a slide called master plan? [SPEAKER_00] So growing the product by building tools for education, essentially people learning how to code.

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And then build a simple network and AI assisted interface that blurs the distinction between learning and building. [SPEAKER_01] That's essentially what Replit is today. [SPEAKER_01] Like you're learning how to make software, but you don't need to sit down and learn how to code. [SPEAKER_01] You're just coding and it's just happening as you go and you're picking up these skills. [SPEAKER_01] And then evolve the platform into a place where people come to learn, build, explore and host applications. [SPEAKER_01] So not only is it the development environment, but the hosting of the applications.

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[SPEAKER_01] And the hosting of the applications, I think I should have had another point because that unlocks the next step, which we're getting into now, which is monetization of those applications, scaling of those applications. [SPEAKER_01] Right now, if you go to Replit, you build something, you can just say monetize it.

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And it will integrate Stripe for you and all of that. And pretty soon you should be able to say market it. And I'll do that. How big are the biggest apps that are built on Replit? Like, are we talking guys are making hundreds of thousands of dollars, low seven figures? Like, has anybody really broken out that were made on Replit and they still run on Replit? This one is a little controversial, but Medvi, the billion dollar one person business covered by the New York Times. [SPEAKER_00] Basically, they were a company that sold what?

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GLP-1. [SPEAKER_01] And the reason it's controversial is because people don't like their marketing practices. [SPEAKER_01] The entrepreneur, I think, already fixed a lot of these issues that people are reacting to. [SPEAKER_01] But he runs a big part of the Replit, a big part of his stack on Replit. [SPEAKER_01] And it's been a crucial part of their growth because it's not only just the core application, but the automations he uses day to day. [SPEAKER_01] So for example, he's working with a vendor and every day he does something manual, like a marketing vendor. [SPEAKER_01] It's like, okay, I'm going to build this website for you.

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[SPEAKER_01] You go and you speak to an agent, the agent will give you all the information you need. [SPEAKER_01] Or the agent will give you the assets. [SPEAKER_01] So he'll build interfaces for all the different parts of the business, all the back office stuff of the business. [SPEAKER_01] And he's the fastest person to go from idea to prompt. [SPEAKER_01] Even when he was on Twitter going viral, he was building a game at Replit. [SPEAKER_01] And he built an experiment where you can scroll a site with your head. [SPEAKER_01] So you can read something without looking at your screen.

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[SPEAKER_01] I've never seen someone, after spending some time chatting with him, be so quick to create things. [SPEAKER_01] So boom, create that, create that, automate this, automate that. [SPEAKER_01] That's one example. [SPEAKER_01] There's been a lot that, over the years in the past, used to have to migrate off of Replit because the platform was not complete. [SPEAKER_01] But now the platform is actually complete and you can run a full business on it. [SPEAKER_01] We have a lot of venture backed companies, such as Spell Book. [SPEAKER_01] I think it's a multi hundred million dollar company started on Replit. [SPEAKER_01] Magic School.

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[SPEAKER_01] So I've never seen someone after spending some time chatting with him, be so quick to create things. [SPEAKER_01] So boom, create that, create that, automate this, automate that. [SPEAKER_01] That's one example. [SPEAKER_01] There's been a lot that I've spoken about over the years in the past that used to have to migrate off of Replit because the platform was not complete. [SPEAKER_01] But now the platform app is actually complete and you can run a full business on it. [SPEAKER_01] We have a lot of venture backed companies, such as Spell Book. [SPEAKER_01] I think it's a multi hundred million dollar company started on Replit. [SPEAKER_01] Magic School.

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[SPEAKER_01] I think a $500 million business started Replit and many others. [SPEAKER_01] More recently, since Replit Asian, there hasn't been enough time for them to really hit massive scale, but there's a lot of multimillion dollar businesses. [SPEAKER_01] For example, recently I think they just did a round, but there's a company that's building influencer marketing for local restaurants and local shops. [SPEAKER_01] So they'll, you know, you're a local restaurant. [SPEAKER_01] You want someone to cover your restaurant. [SPEAKER_01] You go to the platform, you hire an influencer.

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[SPEAKER_01] They actually physically walk to your restaurant, eat there, take a TikTok, whatever. [SPEAKER_01] Because now most people, especially Gen Z, they actually don't go to Google Maps anymore. [SPEAKER_01] If you ask Gen Z, let's find a restaurant. [SPEAKER_01] They're like, go to TikTok. [SPEAKER_01] And so that's already over a hundred thousand ARR in a few weeks. [SPEAKER_01] What's that one called? [SPEAKER_01] Do you know the name? [SPEAKER_01] Try Nearby.

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Dude, I still go to Yelp and my young employees were like, call me Greybush. They're like, you're so old, man. What are you doing? You look, you open the yellow pages and call them when you want to order food. I was like, why not Yelp? Can someone move the sundial for me? [SPEAKER_00] It's surprising to me that Google search queries keep going up. [SPEAKER_00] They just broke records. [SPEAKER_00] The revenue and search keeps going up. [SPEAKER_01] But yes, when people around me, they're not using Google as much. [SPEAKER_01] Are there any cool trends that you're seeing?

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[SPEAKER_01] We have a subset of young, like 18, 19 year old kids who listen to MFM and they want to hear business ideas. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Are there any interesting trends that you're seeing? Yeah. In AI and on the Replit platform where you're like, man, there's all these cool one or five or $10 million businesses that could be created.

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[SPEAKER_02] Yes. [SPEAKER_02] Silicon Valley has always approached problems with hyperscale in mind. [SPEAKER_02] And I think for the first time, because making software is cheaper, you can actually create a multimillion dollar business and not have to raise venture, not have to grow the team a whole lot. [SPEAKER_02] So local style businesses is very interesting. [SPEAKER_01] There is a guy in England that I think he's well on his way. [SPEAKER_01] He's a hundred thousand already in run rate. [SPEAKER_01] He's well on his way to a million. [SPEAKER_01] And he is building software for ice rink management. [SPEAKER_01] So skating, and all of that.

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[SPEAKER_01] I think that you go around your life and there's a lot of things that are just not computerized, there's no software running it. [SPEAKER_01] So that would be my first approach. [SPEAKER_01] Actually, that's what I did when I built my first business, building software for internet cafes and land gaming. [SPEAKER_01] And so that's always been a great place to start. [SPEAKER_01] You remind me of in Paul Graham's one of his essays about how to get startup ideas. [SPEAKER_01] He says the easiest way to get startup ideas is to sit like, if you want to find the startup idea of the future, simply live in the future and then build what doesn't exist.

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[SPEAKER_01] Yes.

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[SPEAKER_00] It's like, okay, what the hell does that mean? [SPEAKER_00] He describes when Zuckerberg built Facebook, it's not because he was a normal guy thinking, hmm, what would the next, what would the future look like? [SPEAKER_00] It's like, no, he was on computers all day. His social life was online. [SPEAKER_00] Right. [SPEAKER_00] The problem was he only had certain tools available. So for him, the idea of social networking online was not just possible. [SPEAKER_00] It was completely normal. It was his preferred medium to actually exist in. [SPEAKER_00] And you could just lean into that rather than thinking you're the oddball.

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[SPEAKER_00] And I think that's interesting because you built Replit partly because you grew up going to these internet cafes in Jordan. [SPEAKER_00] And every time you'd come, you'd be on a different computer. So you kind of needed something that lived in the cloud. [SPEAKER_00] And so for you, what was completely normal was odd to other people. [SPEAKER_00] So I think that's the trick with startup ideas, right, is to lean into maybe the things you do that are a little bit more than normal or a little bit odd. [SPEAKER_00] And then just say, what would make my experience doing this odd thing a little bit better?

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[SPEAKER_00] Another one I would say is being lazy. In programming, there's this old saying that laziness is a virtue. [SPEAKER_00] And the idea is to automate a lot of things, but now everyone is a programmer, essentially. [SPEAKER_00] So part of the reason why I made Replit is because I don't want to keep setting up the freaking IDE every time. [SPEAKER_00] And so go about your life with this laziness attitude. What are the kinds of things that are so annoying that you have to keep doing over and over again? [SPEAKER_00] There's probably a million, maybe a billion people that feel the same way. And perhaps you can make a piece of software to automate that.

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[SPEAKER_00] And more important than ever, this lazy mindset of viewing things through the lens of automation is very important with AI, because AI is truly a magic automation machine. [SPEAKER_00] So not only will you optimize your life, you'll become a lot more productive, but you might stumble on something that a lot of other people would want.

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[SPEAKER_01] Hey, can you give me your opinion on this? We were joking, not joking, a while back with the guests. [SPEAKER_01] And we were like, is are we like December of 2019, where we're just three months away from COVID happening and America shutting down. [SPEAKER_01] And we're just like, yeah, I heard there's this virus in China, but whatever, no big deal. Are we sort of like that with AI where it's like, well, Square maybe laid off a lot of people.

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[SPEAKER_01] Hey, can you give me your opinion on this? We were joking, not entirely joking, a while back with the guests. And we were asking ourselves, is this like December of 2019, where we're just three months away from COVID happening and America shutting down? And we're like, yeah, I heard there's this virus in China, but whatever, no big deal. Are we in that position with AI where Square maybe laid off a lot of people, but yeah, it's probably not going to happen anymore? Do you think we are months or 12 months or something like that away from the world changing dramatically?

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[SPEAKER_01] I think we are in the singularity. The original idea of a singularity, Werner Vinge, one of the early computer pioneers and sci-fi authors, talked about the singularity. He borrowed this concept from physics. In physics, it's the black hole. And you're right, anything that happens after the black hole is undefined. So we actually don't know what it is like. It's not knowable. Anything beyond that point, you can't even have formulas for because it's literally undefined. A lot of the early AI thinkers talked about this moment of singularity, whereas it is incredibly hard to predict what happens after because the pace of innovation is not only fast, it is accelerating as fast as it already is, meaning the second derivative is exponential.

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[SPEAKER_01] So I think this is the moment we're in where in 2022 we got GPT-4. GPT-2 came out in 2019, GPT-3 in 2020. So every two years we were getting a model. And now it feels every few weeks we're getting a model, sometimes every day. And there are these fundamental capability shifts that happen either in autonomy, cybersecurity, computer use, or what have you. And every one of those capability shifts has a lot of downstream applications that yet need to be discovered. We haven't actually productized it yet. So it's almost like you get a bundle of energy. That's how I think of models. They're potential energy that entrepreneurs need to figure out how to turn into products. And this is why it's an explosive time for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship because we have this potential energy that needs to be harnessed. Now, the reason there's a delay is because we have this capability overhang. The world will change. But it's really hard to know whether I can tell you in 12 months all entry level jobs will be gone.

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Well, what if you had to make a bet? My bet would be that I don't think unemployment numbers will move a whole lot, perhaps still marginally increase. I think Dario, the CEO of Anthropic, said we're going to get to 20% unemployment or something like that. I don't know if I'm misquoting him, but he said—

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[SPEAKER_02] He's a doomer basically. He's on the far end. [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, I don't think so. What I'm seeing from our customers is some customers that automate a lot of things end up laying off some people. We have other customers that automate a lot of things, make more revenue, and want to hire more people to automate more things and create more products. Net net, I think there's going to be a lot of new AI companies, a lot of companies that make use of AI, want to hire more people. So net net, I think the unemployment question will probably be neutral.

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[SPEAKER_02] How do you think this Game of Thrones AI war plays out? You've got the King of the North, Elon up there trying to come down. You've got the OpenAI kingdom over here, Google. They were in denial, but now they're here making it happen. What do you think? How does this play out?

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[SPEAKER_02] I like business theory. It's not always useful, but often it is. Hamilton Helmer wrote this book called The Seven Powers. Everyone talks about modes. Seven Powers is the theory of modes. The mode of these LLMs—is the technology fundamentally commoditizable? It seems very easy to replace these models. A lot of developers every day, professional developers, are switching between these models. In some cases, if you're in Cursor, it's literally one click away to switch to the next model.

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And I think a lot of the fighting has to do with this fact that it is hard to find a way to zoom too far ahead of the competition. You're always neck and neck competing with others. So you might want to try to block them in different ways, whether it's in court, with the government, or regulations. Whereas in the past, if you're Microsoft and you achieve dominance on the PC, it's really hard to unseat you. And so there are natural monopolies that used to emerge. They're protected by certain modes such as network effects and economies of scale. We haven't seen any of those modes emerge from these foundation model companies.

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And so my hypothesis is that maybe the one natural mode is capital. You need not just one-time capital to enter the market. You need continuous capital to train the current model, the next generation model, and the next generation model after that. And then you need enough install base revenue to cover your costs. But that is not enough of a mode to keep the other big players away. So you can imagine all the big companies will have a fighting chance and all the big governments can also participate.

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And maybe China as a place where you can't really distinguish between country and company. Maybe the country is going to do to the foundation model market what they did to the EV market. They'll subsidize the hell out of it in order to have a competing chance and maybe even destroy the market globally by subsidizing it. All of this to say, I think it is good for entrepreneurs because if we ended up with a monopoly or just an oligopoly and you're building on top of it, it is actually very hard to build a successful business. But if it ends up being a technology that's easy to replace, there is a place for a lot of entrepreneurs to participate.

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Sean, remember you were telling that story about the Anthropic CEO and he was like, yeah, things are booming, but in a weird way I'm always a few months or a few quarters away from running out of money because we're growing so fast. We have to buy inventory, GPUs. Are you in a similar position where even though you're making all this money, you're having to spend more and more, and is profitability in sight? No, to the first question, we're not burning nearly as much cash as foundation model companies.

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And sometime last year profitability was in sight. We had something like 30 years of runway or something like that. Since then we decided to spend a lot more on specialty sales and marketing. My thesis is that there are a lot of businesses that will need help adopting this technology and adopting Gramplet broadly. And there's this imbalance between supply and demand that I talked about. [SPEAKER_02] So I thought, okay, we just need to scale the sales team.

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And so the sales team was four reps or something like that by the end of last year. I think it's going to be more than half the company by the end of this year, which is very surprising for me to say because I was always a tech person. Yeah. How's that feel to be around a bunch of regional sales managers? Since then, we decided to spend a lot more on specialty sales and marketing. And my theory on this is that there are a lot of businesses that will need help adopting this technology and adopting Gramplet broadly. And so we, and also there's this imbalance between supply and demand that I talked about. [SPEAKER_02] So I thought, okay, we just need to scale the sales team.

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And so the sales team was like four reps or something like that by the end of last year. I think it's going to be more than half the company by the end of this year, which is very surprising for me to say because I was always a tech person. Yeah. How's that feel to be around a bunch of regional sales managers? [SPEAKER_02] I love it.

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[SPEAKER_02] I didn't know. [SPEAKER_01] Because I think I'm a sales bro. [SPEAKER_01] I am a sales bro. [SPEAKER_01] I am a sales bro. I think I'm weird as far as tech nerds. Well, why do you love it? This is actually really interesting, we laugh because it's funny, but this is actually quite interesting. He was deadlifting before it was cool. He likes sales before it was cool.

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[SPEAKER_00] He's got range.

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[SPEAKER_01] My guy's got range. [SPEAKER_01] Well, why do you like it? [SPEAKER_01] Because I used to hate salespeople.

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Then I realized that salespeople, all this wining and dining, it actually works and they do create demand.

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[SPEAKER_01] Yeah.

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And I'm like, okay. You serve a purpose. It's more of a direct support than consumer. Like consumer, you do something and then you do an A-B test and maybe two weeks later you'll find out whether it worked or not. And there's this huge delay. And there's so many things outside of your control. There's hype in the market that affects you. Someone writes about you, you go viral and then you die down. Or it's almost like the weather. You can't really control a lot of it. Sales is much more direct support. I can apply effort and whether we get the win or not is somewhat much more within our control.

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And so if I hear that some kind of deal is at risk, it activates me so much because the idea of losing some kind of comeback competitor is the worst feeling in the world. And I'll call whoever I need to call. I'll show up to their office. We'll do whatever we need.

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[SPEAKER_01] And we rarely lose deals. [SPEAKER_01] In the few times there was potential of losing a deal, we just pulled out all the stops.

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And the company, because Haya and I, you know, Haya, my co-founder and my wife is also a competitor. She also lifts and does boxing and all of that. Haya and I built a culture that's incredibly competitive. [SPEAKER_02] And so we get activated by this. [SPEAKER_02] And then when we win, it just feels good. [SPEAKER_02] It's very real. [SPEAKER_02] It's very different than seeing a number go up later. Wait, so I had heard about this. Your wife is your partner or business partner. That's pretty cool, I think. I mean, it's cool when it's cool. Cool, it's cool, yes. Yeah, yeah. What is tragic is disaster. Yeah. How is that?

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I think that having Replit being so hard, as hard as it is, and it was, if we weren't in it together, [SPEAKER_02] I think it would have definitely driven a wedge between us because you're both entrepreneurs. [SPEAKER_02] You know how much of your life energy startups take. They literally take your vitality. You age. [SPEAKER_00] You know, I had hair when we started the company. Yeah. And so in life, you have a limited amount of energy and you direct it towards your spouse, your kids, your work, things like that. [SPEAKER_02] But then if something is sucking energy, sucking everything, time and energy, eventually it'll just strain your relationships. [SPEAKER_02]

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[SPEAKER_00] I had to work with this guy, Michael Birch, and him and his wife started a company and they sold it for like, I don't know, six or $800 million. [SPEAKER_00] And so their family got two times rewarded. [SPEAKER_00] But you have to be careful. [SPEAKER_00] A few things. [SPEAKER_02] You have to be careful not to make these mission decisions on the weekend and show up saying, hey, decision done. [SPEAKER_02] I have to be careful not to bring the tone you bring at home to the office. [SPEAKER_02] Don't make it awkward around other people. [SPEAKER_02] It's very easy to make it awkward around other people.

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[SPEAKER_02] You have to work harder to ensure that this is a meritocracy because I come from a world that is less meritocratic, that is more based on who you know, what you know. [SPEAKER_02] And family businesses are very common in that world.

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[SPEAKER_01] The problem with them is that people join the business and they expect if they're not part of the family, they're not really going to, their work is not going to matter as much. [SPEAKER_01] Right. And so you have to be very clear about performance and set high expectations for yourselves and be communicative about it. [SPEAKER_01] And also always open to the potential that there are other people that are better at running the company than you are. [SPEAKER_01] You said you read a ton of biographies and especially with this kind of shift into sales mode and being, oh, I get to play full contact startup.

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[SPEAKER_01] This is amazing. Who are the founders that either most resonate with you in their style or you respect something about them or a story that you find yourself retelling a bunch or telling yourself, telling your team that's been inspirational for you.

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[SPEAKER_01] [SPEAKER_01] Really good old school, very unknown biography, Hard Drive. [SPEAKER_01] It's a nineties book about Bill Gates.

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After reading about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and these guys, I just knew that I wanted to be part of that part of Silicon Valley. It just seems the most exciting thing possible. You can have the most impact. And that is a blessing because I look at a lot of my friends and they're now almost 40 and they really haven't found the thing that they want to go after.

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[SPEAKER_01] And I think it creates this crisis of meaning in a lot of people. [SPEAKER_01] I'm also a big fan of visualization. [SPEAKER_01] There was a period of time where there was a lot of pseudoscientific documentaries coming out. [SPEAKER_01] There was one called "What the Bleep Do We Know?" [SPEAKER_01] It's about quantum physics and visualizations. [SPEAKER_01] If you put the vibration out, the universe will reward you. [SPEAKER_01] I kind of believe that in a weird way.

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You can have the most impact. And that is a blessing because I look at a lot of my friends and they're now almost 40 and they really haven't found the thing that they want to get after. And I think it creates this crisis of meaning in a lot of people. I'm also a big fan of visualization. There was a period of time where there was a lot of pseudoscientific stuff in documentaries coming out. There was one called "What the Bleep Do We Know?" It's about quantum physics and visualizations. If you put the vibration out, the universe will reward you. I believe that in a weird way. And I can't really disprove it, but let me tell you a few stories. I wanted to be on Rogan's show.

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I was like, I've done all these shows.

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[SPEAKER_01] I've done Tucker's show, My First Million, all these shows. [SPEAKER_02] I was like, I want to be on Rogan. [SPEAKER_02] The big guy. [SPEAKER_02] I'm sick of the JVs. [SPEAKER_02] You guys are amazing, but how do you even get on Rogan? [SPEAKER_02] I started visualizing it. [SPEAKER_01] I was like, what would I talk about? [SPEAKER_01] What would I tell him? [SPEAKER_01] How would the interaction be? [SPEAKER_01] And a few weeks later, I get a message from two people. [SPEAKER_01] Mark Andreessen and Lex Friedman. [SPEAKER_01] And they both asked me the same question.

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[SPEAKER_01] Hey, I have a friend whose daughter is entering an entrepreneurship competition. [SPEAKER_01] She wants to make an app. [SPEAKER_01] Do you know anyone who can help her? [SPEAKER_01] Can you help her? [SPEAKER_01] That's odd. [SPEAKER_01] And I remember replying to Lex Friedman. [SPEAKER_02] And then he goes to me and then I replied to Mark. [SPEAKER_02] It's really odd.

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[SPEAKER_02] I got the same message from Lex. Who's this person? It's Joe Rogan. It's his daughter. And I said, I'd help her.

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I'll build the app for her. He introduced me to Rogan. Rogan introduced me to his daughter.

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And I said, let's get on Zoom. I get on a Zoom call and it's four high school girls.

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[SPEAKER_01] And they're very bright. [SPEAKER_00] They have a business idea to connect Gen Z locally to local businesses for jobs. [SPEAKER_00] And I said, I'm going to teach you how to make applications and you're going to make it. [SPEAKER_00] And so I opened Replit and here's Replit. [SPEAKER_01] Here's what you do.

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[SPEAKER_01] You just type in your prompt and let's check in next week. [SPEAKER_01] Next week we check in and they already made half the app.

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By the way, Replit AI was early on. It was still running into some problems. So every now and then I'll jump in and help them with one thing. But for about 95% of it, they built it themselves.

SPEAKER_01

And I'm always of the belief of just provide value and don't ask for anything in return. It wasn't like I'm doing this to get on the show. I think that would be the wrong mindset to have. I kept mentoring her and I gave her advice on how to win the competition. Look, none of your peers will have an app. You're the only one that's going to have an app. [SPEAKER_02] Everyone will have slideshows.

SPEAKER_01

Before you do the pitch, go send the app to all the judges. That way they'll know you're the only one that actually went above and beyond. And they presented and they won the competition. By the way, Joe might have thought I'm some kind of contractor. He didn't know. I didn't introduce myself. So I sent Joe a nice letter and a nice message. I told him, you have a very bright daughter.

SPEAKER_02

[SPEAKER_01] I'm so glad I could be part of this.

SPEAKER_01

I would love just five minutes every time to introduce myself and my story. And he's like, okay, I'll call you tomorrow or whatever. Tomorrow comes.

SPEAKER_02

[SPEAKER_01] He didn't call me and then I texted him. [SPEAKER_01] I didn't hear back.

SPEAKER_01

So I gently told his daughter, I would just like a phone call with your dad. And she's like, okay. And then the phone rings and it's Joe again.

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] And about 90 seconds in, we're talking about MMA. [SPEAKER_01] I like MMA. [SPEAKER_01] You're kind of a guy. [SPEAKER_01] You're the same guy. [SPEAKER_01] And I'm not a big MMA guy. [SPEAKER_01] But on the call, I just told him about myself.

SPEAKER_01

It's a lot of pressure to do that quick. Yes. Yes. You have to be calm. I'm actually calmest in those moments. And I think I could learn this from gaming. I slow down a lot under pressure. When pressure comes, in gaming, racing, anytime there's incredible pressure and any mistake might kill you—in this case, not literally kill you, but kill your chances—I experience time slow down. And I think you can train this in yourself. And I think a lot of race drivers talk about this as well. By the way, weightlifting is a great place to practice this. Yeah. Because it's low stakes, but at the end of the set is when you're shaking, you're at the most fatigue. Maybe you're shaking.

SPEAKER_01

Maybe you don't know if you could do it. What most people do is they rush to finish and they've sacrificed form. If you can practice poise in the last few reps, you're doing that now every day in the gym. You can get a lot of reps and practice in the gym as a metaphor for life that you can't get elsewhere. You can't simulate that pressure in other ways. But your body thinks you're dying. Yes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Because it's low stakes, but at the end of the set is when you're shaking, you're at the most fatigue. Maybe you're shaking. Maybe you don't know if you could do it. What most people do is they rush to finish and they've sacrificed form. And if you can practice poise in the last few reps, you're doing that now every day in the gym. It's like you can get a lot of reps and practice in the gym as a metaphor for life that you can't get that. You can't simulate that pressure in other ways. But your body thinks you're dying. Yes. When you're under the weights and you're shaking and you don't know what to do. So your body can simulate pressure that way. There's so many lessons from powerlifting. Actually, one day I was at the gym in San Francisco and I saw Brian Chesky lifting weights. He's hugely jacked. And I remember he's a former bodybuilder. I struck up a conversation with him about powerlifting and startups. That was a lot of fun. Actually, I've had visualization and that feeling of, oh, I want this thing to happen. And then that happened way too many times. And it doesn't always happen in podcasts, but I think this is what's on my mind right now. Even the interview I did with Tucker. I remember being a big fan of Tucker during the lockdowns when nothing made sense in the world. And I had this anger in me because I came to the United States for freedom. And I feel like I can't say what's on my mind. I can't leave my house. I have to put a muzzle in my mouth and I have to take a shot. Like, this is this camp. And I remember him, I started watching Fox News. He got radicalized. But one day I see Martin Shkreli on his podcast. And I had helped Martin raise around. I learned finance from Martin. Dude, he used to stream on Sean's platform.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. I used to watch him on Sean's thing all the time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

[SPEAKER_01] He was like one of the best teachers and he's super entertaining for finance stuff. Right? Like he just was. [SPEAKER_01] He still does it on YouTube. [SPEAKER_01] And they're really good. [SPEAKER_01] Shout out to the Shkreli Pill channel. It's on YouTube. It takes his long live streams and cuts the most interesting 20, 30 minutes. Shkreli Pill is just doing God's work out there.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And I knew nothing about personal finance. I knew nothing about the financial markets. I didn't know how money worked even. [SPEAKER_00] And so I remember just watching his channel and getting educated. And when he got out of jail, I was like, oh, that's cool. Shkreli is out of jail. And I went and watched his stream and I see him coding and I see him opening Reflit. And I sent him a tweet and I'm like, hey, I see you. I saw you opening Reflit. I'm a big fan. It'd be great to connect. So I connected with him. He tells me he's starting a startup. The doctor one. So he started a company as a holding company. And he started the doctor one.

SPEAKER_01

At the same time, he started the Bloomberg terminal one. He started three other things. He started audio AI one. But the one that took off is the Bloomberg terminal. [SPEAKER_02] And they're now multimillion dollar revenue.

SPEAKER_01

With stuff like this, I'm always curious. Because when somebody literally comes out of jail and then you're like, you could. I like the streams too. But then in terms of investing, there's obviously a big question, right? You kind of got to do your diligence of like, this guy went to jail for some sort of wire fraud type of deal. Am I going to be a part of that? I'm just curious how you mentally think about it. Are you basically like, it's retard maxing? You don't overthink it? Or do you go and you kind of get first principles answers for yourself? What do you do?

SPEAKER_01

First of all, I'm personally very principled and very careful. The only problems with the law I had was racing cars. I'm a big fan of second chances. And the thing I love about America is there's some forgiveness here. You can have a second and a third act. And I saw his side of the story and it just seemed like he did his time. [SPEAKER_02] And this is the system we live in. You do something, you get punished, you do your time and then you believe. [SPEAKER_00] And I think society should treat you with a blank slate.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] Early on at Replit, our first investor, Roy Bahat from Bloomberg Beta. Roy is another very interesting character. Bloomberg Beta is an amazing investment firm. They have great returns.

SPEAKER_02

I pitched those guys years ago. I thought they said no. [SPEAKER_00] Great investors.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] And Roy. [SPEAKER_00] So through my bullshit.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] When Roy says no, he will just tell you exactly. He might even tell you this idea sucks. He's the straightest shooter in Silicon Valley. I think he'll tell it like it is.

SPEAKER_02

[SPEAKER_01] What's interesting about Roy is Bloomberg Beta is both the investment vehicle, but also just things he's fascinated in. He'll just go do. He starts. He has this conference about the future of work. But one thing they did at the time is they did a trip to a prison facility and we went there and it was us mentoring inmates about entrepreneurship and they wanted to start businesses internally. Some people were starting businesses inside and we were supposed to mentor them. That experience was very touching. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] What's interesting about Roy is Bloomberg Beta is both the investment vehicle, but also just things he's fascinated in. He'll just go do. He starts, he has this conference about the future of work. But one thing they did at the time is they did a trip to a prison facility and we went there and it was us mentoring inmates about entrepreneurship and they wanted to start businesses internally. Some people were starting businesses inside and we were supposed to mentor them. That experience was very touching.

SPEAKER_00

One exercise and maybe you could say it's a woke exercise, but they lined up everyone on a line and then the inmates on another line. And someone was saying, if you grew up in a household where there's crime and drugs stay forward. If you did not step back and then 95% of the non-inmates stay, step back and then of the inmates, maybe 5% step back. So this inversion and then the exercise was to show you how much of the life of crime is somehow predetermined by, I don't fully believe that I believe in personal responsibility a lot.

SPEAKER_00

But maybe they were like, people were born in just harder situations. You can believe in agency and personal responsibility as well as probability. Yes.

SPEAKER_02

[SPEAKER_00] Right. And influence. [SPEAKER_00] Yes. Yes. And so for all these reasons I've, I'm open to talking and potentially working with people who have done things in the past, but then they paid their dues and moved on. And so it just felt like this is someone who helped me indirectly learn valuable skills and I want to help them.

SPEAKER_02

[SPEAKER_01] One of my favorite, I love, I married into an immigrant family. Sean comes from a family of immigrants. What's it feel like from, you know, you're an immigrant to be living the American dream. Do you think that there's something about the Americans? What about the American experience do you think is different from other countries? I think America's vision of itself, at least the liberal America vision of itself was about tolerance and inclusivity. And there's a lot of truth to that. I think it is very easy to be anywhere else, maybe in Europe, perhaps the UK is an exception and feel like an outsider. But in the US especially in New York, San Francisco, these places, you just feel like anyone else.

SPEAKER_02

You just feel like you're accepted and you have as much of a chance to make it as someone who was born here. And that's incredible.

SPEAKER_02

[SPEAKER_01] And I don't think that's fully appreciated, especially because America is so self-critical when it comes to these things, but there is a lot of tolerance for difference in this country. And then there's just this spirit of innovation and openness to ideas. Ask anyone who grew up anywhere else, literally quite literally anyone else. And the experience of entrepreneurs there is to have an idea and the likelihood of your friend telling you you're retarded after you told them that idea is 90% plus. And that was always my experience. I always safeguarded ideas, not because I don't want other people to copy them, but more to protect them because they're fragile beings. America and San Francisco, Silicon Valley, especially a place where you talk about these ideas and they grow and they, the problem is they grow too much and they become radical. Let's start a ship island country. And they've got always weird things. So there's an opposite problem of they snowball and they become.

SPEAKER_02

[SPEAKER_01] Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

But that's a better problem than, I've got a lot of my buddies, they say back home, I tell people about my ideas and they're like, shut up, dude, let's just be plumbers. Don't stand out. Don't stand out. Exactly. That's the usual thing. When I moved to San Francisco, because it's not even just America as a whole, San Francisco specifically is on the extreme edge. I remember I had just moved there, so I didn't have a place to work. So I just sat in a coffee shop and in San Francisco, the coffee shop is a speed dating for investments. [SPEAKER_00] Right?

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] So the table next to me just kept turning over every 30 minutes with another founder pitching another stupid idea to another investor who was hearing him out. And I just remember by the eighth hour, 15 of these pitches. And I just remember thinking, wow, every one of those ideas sounded terrible. And yet it was totally normal and common and accepted to be a little bit crazy. All those people were just now. Yeah. What's normal here is crazy elsewhere and vice versa. So I went to a meetup that night to go meet some people.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_02] And there was a guy working at JP Morgan and he introduced himself in shame. He was like, I work at JP Morgan, but I'm leaving soon. I just need to. That's a small thing. The normal in other cities, you have to apologize. You have to add all this context. If you're choosing the unconventional path of doing a startup and in San Francisco, you had to add all this disclaimer legalese. If you had a normal job, because it's like, what the hell are you doing, man? Why are you doing that stupid thing? Why aren't you living for real? Like the rest of us.

SPEAKER_01

And it's easy to get cynical about it. And it's like, oh man, this place sucks. And then make fun of it and all of that. But there's something truly unique about it. The other part is rubbing shoulders with billionaires. When you're literally worth nothing. [SPEAKER_02] You had to add all this disclaimer legalese. If you had a normal job, what the hell are you doing, man? Why are you doing that stupid thing? Why, why aren't you living for real? Like the rest of us.

SPEAKER_01

And it's easy to get cynical about it. And it's, oh man, this place sucks. And then make fun of it and all of that. But there's something truly unique about it. The other part is rubbing shoulders with billionaires. Like when you're literally worth nothing. You know, Lark and Dresen is one who makes friends on Twitter.

SPEAKER_02

[SPEAKER_01] And he goes on podcasts where there's two listeners and he'll become friends with people that he finds intellectually interesting and stimulating. [SPEAKER_01] Paul Graham's the same. [SPEAKER_01] Like wherever he goes, he's on vacation to Stockholm and he did a YC meet up there. [SPEAKER_01] And he's just meeting all these kids that want to start companies. [SPEAKER_01] And so people get energy here from less from showing off their wealth and more from being intellectually stimulated. [SPEAKER_01] You know who's the unsung hero of San Francisco? Meetup.com.

SPEAKER_01

Yes. Oh my God. They're the tugboats of the Silicon Valley scene. [SPEAKER_02] Like they don't get enough credit. [SPEAKER_02] They're the best. [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. [SPEAKER_02] We met a lot of amazing people who just go into meetups when I first came to Silicon Valley. [SPEAKER_02] Is it still going? [SPEAKER_02] Well, I'm too old to use it, so I don't use it. But it is still going. It was sold. I think Kevin Ryan, who started Business Insider and Gilt Group at MongoDB, I think he bought it, but the founder of meetup.com has this crazy story. [SPEAKER_00] He worked at McDonald's and now he's working at Amazon as a driver.

SPEAKER_02

[SPEAKER_00] He's an activist. [SPEAKER_00] He's an Amazon worker rights union guy. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] I talked to him. [SPEAKER_00] He is a worker rights union guy. [SPEAKER_00] And the reason he started meetup was not to get rich San Francisco kids to meet up, but to actually organize. [SPEAKER_00] And so he's back to his passion now. [SPEAKER_00] So he goes and takes a job at Amazon and he likes to give people tools to unionize. [SPEAKER_00] And the most frustrating thing is they hired him. What was that? [SPEAKER_00] Why would they hire him? [SPEAKER_00] He'd be like a casino card counter if it was up to me. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] They should be like, dude, get this guy out of here.

SPEAKER_00

Does he still have all of his fingers? What are they doing? They should be like, dude, you are way too rich to work here.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] Isn't it crazy that there is corporate espionage going on? [SPEAKER_00] It sounds like a conspiracy, but you also have to logically think it can't be zero. [SPEAKER_00] Does that happen to you? Amjad, is there espionage? He wouldn't know. Yeah. Is it here in the room with you right now? I think you have to be careful about it. I think you have to build the right systems and processes and all of that. And even if it is not an adversarial company, it could be an adversarial state, especially if you have model weights or something that they can steal. And there's been a couple of stories where they caught foreign agents trying to steal LM models.

SPEAKER_01

But why foreign agent?

SPEAKER_02

[SPEAKER_01] If you have a company that grew from two to one billion that fast, I would think that there'd be someone who'd be like, hey, can you go get a job there? Hey, you work there.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_02] And I'll bribe you to tell me X, Y, and Z. [SPEAKER_02] Probably we're a target, but we're not an easy target. [SPEAKER_02] We had someone from the FBI come give us a talk about these things. [SPEAKER_02] Some of these stories help us protect ourselves. [SPEAKER_02] And the broader point is more interesting now with AI. Both social engineering and cybersecurity risk has gone up tremendously. You can have bots that are very good at convincing you of certain things. So phishing has gotten a lot scarier. And also you can do hacking and privilege escalation. The Vercel hack is kind of crazy. [SPEAKER_02] Do you guys know the entire chain of events?

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_02] I didn't understand what happened. [SPEAKER_02] I saw a couple of tweets where they were saying, hey, this happened, just be aware. You have to come out and say it at some point, but what was it? What happened? [SPEAKER_02] There's an employee at this company called Contacts at AI. And it's one of those "provide contacts to your AI" companies that downloaded a Roblox cheat software and that Roblox cheat software was infected with a backdoor. [SPEAKER_02] And then that company became fully compromised and someone at Vercel installed Contacts at AI through Google OAuth on their workspace.

SPEAKER_01

And then they had an entry through Contacts into Vercel and then inside Vercel, they did a bunch of hacks to escalate privileges and get access to their databases. And this was all planned by someone? Yeah. I mean, I don't know if it's planned end to end. I assumed they infected Contacts AI and they knew it was an attack vector for a lot of other companies. Got it. And what did the creator get? They get data. They're trying to sell it on the internet from companies. Like what would you get from Vercel? Database data? [SPEAKER_00] Database passwords, source code. [SPEAKER_00] And then you go to that person and ransom it?

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] I don't think they did ransom. They just posted it. It's like, hey, I'm selling this for like a million dollars. [SPEAKER_02] It's for Vercel. You know, what did they do in this situation? Right? Got it. And what did the creator get? They get data. They're trying to sell on the internet of companies. Like what would you get from Vercel? Database data? [SPEAKER_00] Database passwords, source code. [SPEAKER_00] And then you go to that person and you ransom it? [SPEAKER_00] I don't think they did ransom. They just posted it. It's like, "Hey, I'm selling it for like a million dollars." [SPEAKER_02] It's for Vercel. What did they do in this situation?

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] I think about Vercel. Every company has issues, and it's not a knock on them, but there's one thing that was odd. They were storing the database secrets in clear text. [SPEAKER_02] They had a way recently to make them sensitive and encrypt them, but they weren't encrypted at rest. [SPEAKER_02] So once you get access to the database, you got access to every other customer database. [SPEAKER_02] I see. [SPEAKER_00] Has your life changed now that you're a billionaire? Are you afraid of your security? [SPEAKER_00] Yes, unfortunately. I have protection. [SPEAKER_00] I don't know. I just don't feel like a billionaire. [SPEAKER_00] What do you feel like?

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_02] I don't know. I just feel like a guy. I wake up in the morning. A millionaire? Yeah. I definitely feel like a millionaire for sure. It took me a while to feel that, but after the lifestyle changes. [SPEAKER_02] I don't have a lifestyle upgrade at all. I guess because I didn't have the lifestyle upgrade of a billionaire. I don't have a house of a billionaire, not a realized billionaire. I don't like to upgrade my lifestyle too quickly. [SPEAKER_02] Was there any upgrade that you did do that was pretty cool where money does have some utility and brought you joy or freedom in some way?

SPEAKER_01

I think most people should talk more about what spending actually moves the needle for you because most people have very low imagination with their own money. When I did a secondary sale a couple of years ago, I think most of it comes down to honestly living a healthier lifestyle and saving time. A chef is pretty awesome. Being able to eat exactly what you want and eat healthy. [SPEAKER_00] Even when you go to DoorDash and you try to search for the healthiest food, it's still shit. It's a pain. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] It just makes you feel better.

SPEAKER_01

It just becomes effortless to maintain your weight and maintain your discipline. Getting a coach—you'll have to cycle through a few to find someone you like—getting someone who shows up at your door. Creating that lifestyle, a lot of it is about hiring other people, but you can't overdo it. [SPEAKER_02] At some point, I think we overdid it a little bit. You want to be careful with security, but there's a lot of people who want to leech in different ways and scam you and do all sorts of nasty things. You can expose yourself to too many people. Your house also starts feeling like the office. [SPEAKER_02] A hotel.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_02] A hotel, the office, people working out of there. I want my kids to have a normal life like we grew up. I just Googled it. How many billionaires are under the age of 40? There's only 71. Really? Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] So of 7 billion people, you are probably in the top 1,000. [SPEAKER_00] I'm having mixed feelings. It is very interesting. You are probably in the top 1,000 richest people under 40 ever. I haven't really reflected on this all that much. I'm just going to keep going. Yeah. Build more. You're like, I know how much I want. And the answer is more.

SPEAKER_01

Not in terms of wealth and money more. It's in terms of success, impact, and enough reserve to actually have an impact on the world and do the things that I want to do that I think are positive. Getting a really kick-ass car the moment you get any kind of money is the most important thing you could do. I got an AMG GT Black Series. Nice. I got an AMG E63 wagon when I got mine. Love it. AMG is underrated because it has the luxury but also the class. I bought an e-bike with a burly wagon behind it and my kids fit in that. That's what I ride around everywhere. Amazing.

SPEAKER_01

There's a lot of hate now, some of it deserved, for Silicon Valley, but part of it is because people think they should potentially target us because of our wealth, and we should dress down and not show our wealth as much. But I think it just becomes more inauthentic. When you look at the ballers on TikTok or Instagram and you look at the comments, people love them. They're balling. But when you look at the comments of some tech CEOs saying some dumb shit, like everyone's going to lose their job, everyone's hating them.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_00] Some of it is deserved for Silicon Valley, but part of it is because they think people potentially hit us because of our wealth, and we should dress down and not show our wealth as much. But I think it just becomes more inauthentic. When you look at the ballers on TikTok or Instagram and you look at the comments, people love them. They're balling. But you look at the comments when some tech CEOs say some dumb shit, everyone's going to lose their job. It's just hating them. And I think just being a little more normal and the normal thing to do is when you come about some money, it's buy some cool shit. [SPEAKER_02] We love having you on, man.

SPEAKER_01

You have this perfect balance of being wise but also being audacious and fun to hang out with. And yet you got the sensibility. Intimidating also. He's a formidable guy. He's got it all, man. No, you're a blessing. And we're so happy. We got to see you a little bit in the before phase. And that's really exciting for us. Well, I love that I'm coming here at different stages of my life and I get to look back on that and reflect and you guys are doing amazing things. I think we share the same mission of empowering people. I think that it's incredibly exciting time that wealth is accessible to more people. We're just trying to get rich.

SPEAKER_01

[SPEAKER_02] I hope a lot more people get rich. I hope a lot more people get their first million and come on here and talk about it. And they use—we hope they use Replit along the way, dude. [SPEAKER_02] Thank you guys. You're a blessing. [SPEAKER_02] We appreciate you. That's it. That's the part.

SPEAKER_00

[SPEAKER_01] Thank you. Thank you. And when he got out of jail, I was like, oh, that's cool. Oh, Shkreli is out of jail. And I went and watched his stream and I, I see him coding and I see him opening Reflit. And I sent him a tweet and I'm like, hey, I see you. I saw you opening Reflit. I'm like a big fan. It'd be great to connect. So I connected with him. He tells me he's starting a startup. The doctor one. So he started a company as like a holding company. And he started the doctor one.

SPEAKER_01

At the same time, he started the Bloomberg terminal one. He started three other things. He started audio AI one. But the one that took off is the Bloomberg terminal, I think.

SPEAKER_02

And they're now like multimillion dollar revenue.

SPEAKER_01

With stuff like this, I'm always curious, right? Because when somebody literally comes out of jail and then you're like, you could, I like the streams too. But then in terms of like investing, there's obviously a big, you know, you kind of got to do your diligence of like, this guy went to jail for some sort of wire fraud type of deal. Am I going to be a part of that? Like, I guess, I'm just curious how you mentally think about it. Are you basically like, it's retard maxing. You don't overthink it. Or do you go and you kind of go get first principles answers for yourself? Like, what do you do? First of all, I'm personally like very principled and very careful.

SPEAKER_00

The only problems with the law I had was racing cars.

SPEAKER_01

I'm like a big fan of second chances. And the thing I love about America is there's some forgiveness here. You can have a second and a third act. And like, I saw his side of the story and it just seemed like he did his time.

SPEAKER_02

And this is, this is the system we live in is that you do something, you get punished,

SPEAKER_00

you do your time and then you believe. And I think society should treat you with a, with a blank slate. Early on at Replit, we, our first investor, Roy Bahat from Bloomberg Beta. Roy is another very interesting character. He's like, Bloomberg Beta is an amazing investment firm. They have great returns.

SPEAKER_02

I pitched those guys years ago.

SPEAKER_00

I thought they said no. Great investors. And Roy. So through my bullshit. Yeah. When Roy says no, he will just tell you exactly.

SPEAKER_01

He, he might even tell you this idea sucks and like, he's the, he's the straightest shooter in Silicon Valley. I think he'll tell it like it is. What's interesting about Roy is, uh, Bloomberg Beta, uh, is both the investment vehicle, but also just things he's fascinated in. He'll, he'll just go do. He starts, he has this conference about the future of work. But, uh, one thing they did at the time is they did a trip to a prison facility and we, we went there and, uh, it was, um, it was us mentoring, uh, inmates about, um, entrepreneurship and they wanted to start businesses internally. Some people were starting businesses inside and we were, uh, supposed to mentor them.

SPEAKER_01

That experience was very touching. Yeah. One exercise and maybe you could say it's a BS woke exercise, but like they lined up everyone, um, on a line and then the inmates on another line. And someone was saying, if you grew up in a household where there's, uh, where's, uh, where there's like crime and drugs stay forward. If you did not step back and then like, you know, 95% of the non inmates, uh, stay, uh, step back and then of the inmates, maybe 5% step back. So like this like inversion and then, and the exercise was to show you how much of the life of crime is sort of like somehow predetermined by, by, by, I don't fully believe that I

SPEAKER_01

believe in personal responsibility a lot.

SPEAKER_00

But maybe they were like, people were born in just maybe harder situations. You can believe in agency and personal responsibility as well as probability. Yes. Right. And influence. Yes. Yes. And so, you know, for, for, for all these reasons I've, you know, I'm, I'm open to, to talking and potentially working with, uh, people who have done things in the past, but then they paid their dues and moved on. And so it just felt like this is someone who helped me indirectly learn valuable skills and I want to help them.

SPEAKER_01

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

SPEAKER_01

the UK is a, is an exception and, and feel like an outsider. But in the U S especially in like, uh, you know, New York, San Francisco, these places, you just feel like anyone else.

SPEAKER_02

You just feel like you're, you're accepted and you have as much of a chance to make it as, as, as someone, uh, someone who is, who was born here. And that's incredible.

SPEAKER_01

And I don't think that's fully appreciated, especially because America is so self critical

SPEAKER_00

when it comes to these things, but there is a lot of tolerance for, for difference in

SPEAKER_01

this, uh, in this, uh, country. And then, uh, there's just this spirit of innovation and, um, openness to ideas. Like ask anyone who grew up anywhere else, literally quite literally anyone else. And the experience of entrepreneurs there is to have an idea and the likelihood of your friend telling you you're retarded after you told them that idea is like 90% plus. And, uh, you know, that was always my experience. I always safeguarded ideas, not because I don't want other people to, to copy them, but more like to protect those because like they're fragile beings. America and San Francisco, Silicon Valley, especially a place where you talk about these ideas

SPEAKER_01

and they grow and they, the problem is like they grow too much and they become radical. Let's start a ship island country. And they've got always like weird things. So there's like an opposite problem of they snowball and they become. Yeah. But that's a better, that's a better problem than, uh, you know, I've got a, a, a lot of my buddies, they say back, back home, I tell people about my ideas and they're like, shut up, dude, let's just be plumbers. Like don't stand out. Don't stand out. Exactly. That's, that's the usual thing. When I moved to San Francisco, cause it's not even just America as a whole, like San Francisco specifically is on the extreme edge.

SPEAKER_01

I remember I had just moved there, so I didn't have a place to work. So I just sat in a coffee shop and in San Francisco, the coffee shop is like, you know,

SPEAKER_00

a dating, a speed dating for investments. Right? So the table next to me just kept turning over every 30 minutes with another founder pitching another stupid ass idea to another investor who was hearing him out. And I just remember by the eighth hour of her, you know, 15 of these pitches.

SPEAKER_01

And I just remember thinking, wow, every one of those ideas sounded terrible. And yet it was totally normal and common and accepted to be a little bit crazy. Like all those people were just now. Yeah. What's normal here is crazy elsewhere and vice versa. So I went to a meetup that night to go meet some people.

SPEAKER_02

And there was a guy there was working at JP Morgan and he introduced himself in shame. He was like, I work at JP Morgan, but, but, but, but, you know, but I'm, I'm, I'm leaving soon. I just need to, you know, that's, that's a small, the normal in, in other cities, you have to apologize. You have to be, you have to add all this context. If you're choosing the unconventional path of doing a startup and in San Francisco, you had to add all this disclaimer legalese.

SPEAKER_01

If you had a normal job, cause it's like, what the hell are you doing, man? Why are you doing that stupid thing? Why, why aren't you living for real? Like the rest of us. And it's easy to get cynical about it. And it's like, oh man, this place sucks. And then make fun of it and all of that. But there's something truly unique about it. The other part is like rubbing shoulder with, with billionaires. Like when you're literally worth nothing. Um, you know, Lark and Dresen is one who's like makes friends on, on Twitter. And he goes on podcasts where like there's two listeners and he'd like be, he'll, he'll become

SPEAKER_01

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

SPEAKER_02

Like they, they don't get enough credit. They, uh, they're the best. Yeah. We, I met a lot of amazing people who just go into meetups when I first came to Silicon Valley. Is it still going? Well, I'm like too old to use it, so I don't use it.

SPEAKER_01

Uh, but it is still going. It was sold. Um, I think, uh, Kevin Ryan, who started a business insider and guilt group at MongoDB.

SPEAKER_00

I think he bought it, but the, the founder of meetup.com has this like crazy story. He like worked at McDonald's and now he's working at Amazon, but as like a driver. He's an activist. He's like an Amazon. Yeah. I talked to him. He, he is a worker rights, uh, union guy. Uh, and the reason he started meetup was not to like get rich San Francisco kids to meet up, but it like to actually organize. And so he's back to his, his passion now. So he goes and he takes a job at Amazon and he likes to give people tools to unionize. And the most frustrating.

SPEAKER_01

What was that?

SPEAKER_00

Why would they hire him? Was, was, dude, he'd be like a casino card counter if I, if it was up to me. Yeah. Yeah. Like, oh, things here. How does he have a, get this guy out of here. Does he still have all of his fingers? What are they doing? They should be like, dude, you are way too rich to work here.

Dude. Isn't it crazy that there is like this corporate espionage shit going on? Like it sounds like conspiracy, but it's, you also have to logically think it can't be zero. Does that happen to you? Amjad does like, is there espionage? He wouldn't know. Yeah. Is it here in the room with you right now? I think you have to be careful about it. I think you have to build the right systems and processes and, and all of that. And even if it is not an adversarial company, it could be an adversarial state, especially if you have model weights or something that they can, they can steal. And there's been a couple of stories where they, they kind of, you know, caught foreign agents

SPEAKER_01

trying to steal LM models. But why foreign agent? Like, like, I guess if you have a company that grew from, you know, two to one billion in that fast, I would think that there'd be someone who'd be like, Hey, can you go get a job there? Hey, you work there.

SPEAKER_02

Like I'll bribe you to tell me X, Y, and Z. Probably, you know, we're a target probably, but we, we, we're not an easy target. We, we had someone from the FBI come give it, give us a talk about these things. Some of these stories had to protect ourselves. And the broader point is, is, is more interesting now with AI, both social engineering and cybersecurity risk has, has gone up tremendously.

SPEAKER_01

Like you can have bots that are very good at convincing you of certain things. So phishing has gotten a lot scarier. And also you can do, uh, hacking and provision escalation. Like the Vercel hack is kind of crazy.

SPEAKER_02

Do you guys know the entire chain of events? I didn't understand what happened. I saw a couple of tweets where they were like, kind of doing the thing where you, you say, Hey, this happened, just be aware, you know, you have to come out and say it at some point, but what was it, what happened? The, there, there's an employee at this company called contacts at AI.

SPEAKER_01

And it's one of those provide contacts to your AI companies that downloaded a Roblox cheat

SPEAKER_02

software and that Roblox cheat software was infected with some kind of backdoor.

SPEAKER_01

And, um, then that company became fully compromised and someone at Vercel installed contacts at AI through Google OAuth on their workspace. And then they had an entry through contacts into Vercel and then inside Vercel, they've done a bunch of hacks to escalate privileges and get access to their, to their databases. And this was all planned by someone? Yeah. I mean, I don't know if it's planned end to end. I, I assumed they infected contacts AI and they knew it was an attack factor for a lot of other, other companies. Got it. And what did the, the, the creator, what did they get?

SPEAKER_01

Uh, they get data. They, they're trying to sell on like the, uh, the internet, um, of, of companies. Like what, what would you get from Vercel? Like, uh, database data?

SPEAKER_00

Database, uh, database passwords, um, source code. And then you go to that person and you ransom it? I don't think they did ransom. They just posted it. It's like, Hey, I'm selling it for like a million dollars.

SPEAKER_02

It's like for Vercel. Cause you know, what did they do in this situation? Right?

SPEAKER_00

I think just think about Vercel, there are a few things, I mean, look, every company has, has issues and, uh, it does not a knock on them, but there's one thing that was odd that they were storing the database secrets in clear text.

SPEAKER_02

They had a way recently to make them sensitive and encrypt them, but, uh, they weren't encrypted at rest. So once you get access to the database, you got access to every other customer database. I see.

SPEAKER_00

Has your life changed now that you're, uh, now that you're a billionaire, like, are you afraid of your security? Yes, unfortunately. Uh, I, uh, I am, I have protection. Um, I don't know, man.

SPEAKER_02

I just, I don't feel like a billionaire.

SPEAKER_00

Um, like maybe, what do you feel like?

SPEAKER_02

I don't know. I just feel like a guy. I wake up in the morning.

SPEAKER_01

A millionaire? Yeah. What do you, I definitely feel like a millionaire for sure. Okay. All right. I, it took me a while to feel that, but like, you know, after like the lifestyle,

SPEAKER_02

I don't have a lifestyle upgrade at all. I guess because I didn't have the lifestyle upgrade of a billionaire. Like I don't have a house of a billionaire, not a realized billionaire. And, um, I don't like to upgrade my lifestyle too quickly. Was, was there any upgrade that you did do that was pretty cool where you're like, oh,

SPEAKER_01

money does have some utility. This actually brought me joy, freedom, and some, some way. I think most people should talk a little bit more about what spending actually moves the needle for you because most people have very low imagination with their own money. Yeah. That, that's, that, that's, you know, when I, when I start, when I sold some second, we did some second, secondary sale, like a couple of years ago. I think most of it comes down to honestly living a healthier lifestyle and saving time. So, uh, a chef is pretty, it's pretty awesome. Being able to eat exactly what you want and, uh, eat healthy.

SPEAKER_00

Like even when you go to DoorDash and you try to search for the healthiest food is still shit. It's a pain in the ass. Yeah. And so, uh, it just makes you feel better.

SPEAKER_01

It just becomes effortless to maintain your weight and maintain your discipline. And getting, getting a coach, you'll have to cycle through a few to find someone that you like, getting someone who shows up at your door. Right. And so, you know, creating that lifestyle, a lot of it is about hiring other people, but you can't overdo it.

SPEAKER_02

And I, at some point, I think we overdid it a little bit and you want to be also careful

SPEAKER_01

with, you mentioned security, but there's a lot of people who want to leech in different ways and scam you and, and do all sorts of nasty things. So I think you can expose yourself to like too many, too many people. Your house also starts feeling like, like the office.

SPEAKER_02

A hotel. A hotel, the office, people working out of there.

SPEAKER_01

I'm like, oh man, like I, I want my kids to have like a normal life.

SPEAKER_00

Like we grew up.

SPEAKER_01

Did you, uh, you know, it's crazy. I just Googled it. How many billionaires are under the age of 40? There's only 71. Really? So yeah.

SPEAKER_00

So of the, I don't know how many people, 7 billion, you know, people like you are in probably like, you are in the, probably the top, like, you know, 1,000. I'm having mixed feelings, Sean.

SPEAKER_01

I, I, he's, uh, it is very interesting. Well, you are in the 1,000, probably the, of all the people under 40, you are probably in the top 1,000 richest ever. Well, that shows you, I haven't really reflected on this all that much.

SPEAKER_02

And I'm just like, keep going.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Build more. Yeah. You're like, I, you're like, I know how much I want. And the answer is more. That is the, that is the perfect. Not in terms of wealth and money more. It's in terms of success, impact, and enough reserve to actually have an impact on the world

SPEAKER_00

and do, do the things that I want to do that I think are, are, are positive.

SPEAKER_01

By the way, getting a really kick-ass car, the moment you get any kind of money is the most important thing you could do, I got an AMG GT Black Series. Nice. I got an AMG E63 wagon when I got mine. Love it. AMG is, is, is, I think underrated because it has the luxury, but also the class. I bought an e-bike with a burly wagon behind it and my kids fit in that. That's what I ride around everywhere. Amazing. I think there is, you know, now there's like a lot of, um, hate.

SPEAKER_00

Uh, some of it is deserved for Silicon Valley, but part of it is because like, they think, you think people like potentially hit us because, because of our wealth, but, and like, we should like dress down and not show our wealth as, as much. But I think it just becomes more inauthentic.

SPEAKER_01

Like, like when you, when you look at the ballers on Tik Tok or Instagram and you look at the comments, people love them. They're like balling. But you look at the comments when like some tech CEOs saying some, some dumb shit, like everyone's going to lose their job. It was like hating them. Um, and I think just like being a little more normal and the normal thing to do is when you come about some money, it's like buy some cool shit.

SPEAKER_02

We love having you on, man.

SPEAKER_01

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

SPEAKER_01

I think that just, it's incredibly exciting time that wealth is accessible to more people. We're just trying to get rich. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

I hope a lot more people get rich. I hope a lot more people get their first million and come on here and talk about it. And they use, we hope they use Replit along the way, dude. Thank you guys.

SPEAKER_01

You're a blessing.

SPEAKER_02

We appreciate you. That's it. That's the part.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you. Thank you.