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

How Replit Agent made $1M on day one (then $250M in a year) Speaker 1: We went from $2.5 to $250 million in one year. Speaker 2: Did you say $2.5 to what? Speaker 1: To $250? In one year. Speaker 2: Did you get audited? Speaker 3: The first time you came on this podcast, Replit's revenue was like $3 million. I feel like I've heard that you guys are close to $500 million in annual revenue now. Speaker 1: We're on our way to a billion this year. Speaker 2: I'll just say that. Speaker 3: He was dead lifting before it's cool. He like sales before it's cool. He's got range. My guy's got range. Speaker 1: The idea of like losing some kind of This is like the worst feeling in the world. I'll call, I'll show up to their office, we'll do whatever we need and we rarely lose deals. Speaker 2: Are there any interesting trends that you're seeing in AI and on the Replit platform? Speaker 1: I think for the first time, because the making software is cheaper, you can actually create a multi-million dollar business and not have to raise venture, not have to grow the team a whole lot. Speaker 2: Do you think that we are, like, 12 months or something like that away from, like, the world changing dramatically? Speaker 1: I think we are in the singularity. Speaker 2: I just googled it. How many billionaires are under the age of 40? There's only 71. Really? Of all the people under 40, you are probably in the top 1,000 richest ever. Speaker 3: He just made his day. Look at that smile. Speaker 1: I'm having mixed feelings, Shaan. Unknown Speaker: I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to do. Speaker 3: So the first time you came on this podcast, I'm pretty sure Replit's revenue was like $3 million or $5 million. It was like something like that. Because by the way, this was not 10 years ago. This was like two years ago. You guys are close to 500 million in annual revenue now. Is that, I mean, blink twice if I'm in the right ballpark. Speaker 1: We're on our way to a billion this year, I'll just say that. Speaker 3: Oh, 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 bucks. Speaker 1: Yeah, and it stayed 2 or 3 million bucks for a few years. As we were like navigating what to actually do, we went from 2.5 to 250 million dollars in one year. Speaker 3: That was between 24 and 25. 2.5 million to 250 million in one year. Speaker 2: Did you get audited? Speaker 1: We did. We actually passed a PwC audit a couple of months ago. Speaker 2: That's crazy. Speaker 1: And by the way, you know, we're gross margin positive, which is, you know, something that is rare in the industry, but by a good amount as well. And we're very precise in how we calculate on rate. Speaker 2: When you grow from almost nothing to a billion dollars in revenue in 24 months, there's all these logistical questions I have. What type of relationship do you have to have with your bank? Did you prepare your bank where you're like, Bro, that's your question? Speaker 3: How's your banking relationship? Speaker 2: Dude, there's so many logistical questions. For example, 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's so many logistical questions around, literally. It's sort of 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's these logistical questions that I'm curious about. Speaker 1: 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 now 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 the international waters, just doing circles. Speaker 3: Oh, wow. Speaker 1: And so there's a lot of... Speaker 3: This is like a Paul LaRue, right? Speaker 2: Paul LaRue, yeah. Speaker 1: Paul LaRue. And there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that he was potentially writing Bitcoin because it was like, oh, I don't know what to do with this money. So we're not there yet. Speaker 3: But how did Paul Reutemann make the money? Speaker 1: He was he created the first like delivery online drug store. Speaker 2: Like, do you remember, Shaan, like in the early dotcom where like you would get spammy emails where it's like buy Viagra online? Speaker 3: The early days, as in like Yesterday. Speaker 2: Yesterday, early in the morning. Speaker 3: I remember that. Speaker 2: He like kind of pioneered that. Is that right? I mean, he was one of the biggest guys. He had like, yeah, like thousands of domain names. He was sending millions of emails a day. He was basically one of the first spammers, like Internet marketers. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: And the monetization engine was selling drugs. Speaker 1: And now there are a lot of startups that are doing it, you know, quasi illegally, where they have a lot of doc Doctors that are sort of approving those prescriptions and things like that. But yeah, he did it fully illegally and was wanted by the FBI and drug control and DEA and all of that for many, many years. And they caught him around the same year that Satoshi disappeared, around the same time, actually, that Satoshi disappeared. Speaker 3: Going from two million to now close to a billion and running it, it's got to be a bit of an out of body experience for a founder. Walk us through like the interesting parts that are not like the game that's happening on the field, but maybe just of the founder experience. Like, yeah, dude, we had to figure this out. Dude, we didn't know this. I remember waking up and realizing the chart had jumped 10x, whatever, you know, give us some of that. Speaker 1: 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? Speaker 3: You're like the Asian mom. Speaker 1: I am the Asian mom of myself more than anyone else, which is I don't really recommend. It's kind of a miserable way to live. But, you know, it's sort of like 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 cars. 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? How can we go upmarket, go to the enterprise, make sure our customers are getting a great experience, make sure that the things that they create is not slop, it is secure, we're creating trust, not just in us, but in the whole space. This vibe coding thing 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 like, 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. You kind of, you've lost, like it's almost like someone passing you the ball and there's no one else in front of the basketball ring. And you could dunk, you could do whatever you want. And then you somehow do a two shot and fail. Speaker 3: Right. Speaker 1: So that's the feeling. It's incredible pressure. From everyone, from the market, from even investors went from, hey, you got to do a little layoff, you got to cut burn to go invest, put money, do it. It's like a thrill of success only lasted like a week or two and then became sort of the reality of like, how do you keep this motion going and how do you scale it? And the first thing that starts to break is people. When you have a supply and demand imbalance, companies start knocking on our door. It's like, hey, we want to buy this product. Like our employees are using it. Like, how do we get an enterprise deal? And we're like, yeah, we have one person who does three other things, but also also doing sales. They're like trying to close deals as fast as they can. It's like, OK, I've never done sales. Like, how do you actually do sales? But there's something about the universe where these people land in your life at crucial points. Not always, but sometimes. And we had a VP of sales that came to us at a moment when the company was We're about to do a layoff and I'm sitting in this meeting room and I'm asking him, like, why do you want to join us? His name is Patrick Purvis. He had previously was a VP of sales at Zuma Info, exited, took a couple of years sabbatical, independently wealthy guy. And I was like, look, the company kind of sucks. Like, why do you want to come here? Speaker 2: And you're like, for my last interview question, why? Speaker 1: 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. I was like, OK, welcome to the team. But it's not we don't want anyone for you to sell. Speaker 4: All right, guys, here's the thing about side hustles. Everyone wants one, but most people overthink about it and they never actually launch anything. But because of AI, you can go from idea to your first sale in only seven days. My old company, The Hustle, they just dropped an AI side hustle crash course. So basically what The Hustle did was they looked at things that me and Shaan and Hubspot CMO Kit Founder, they look at stuff that we 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. So you can get it right now. You can scan the QR code or click the link in the description. Now back to the show. Speaker 2: How grim did things get? How low was the bank balance or how many months did you have left? Speaker 3: What was the darkest hour? Speaker 1: You know, as you call being the agent parent, I was also kind of financially responsible. And so we never had like we never was like, oh, we're weeks away from not making payroll. So when we did a layoff, it was more like about extending the runway. Speaker 3: But maybe not runway, but like, you know, founder delusion. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 3: 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. You just kept going, soldiering forward. On our last podcast, I remember you said like, I think if there's one thing I might be good at, like you were just pretty humble about it. I think, I guess reflecting, like I can keep pushing the boulder up the hill. Yes, for a long time like I just have high pain tolerance. I think that seems like it's been helpful So maybe it's not the bank balance, but like did the did the doubts or the delusion or the is this ever gonna happen? Speaker 1: 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 2: What did you scale down to from where to where? Speaker 1: 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. But by the end, we were 60. 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's 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 were going to hand it off in scale, but I was off by a few months. So we had already gotten this office. And so the office was empty and cold. And kind of dark. And so every day I go to work and just like the mood is super dark. And I know that at the moment I'm going to get to my desk, someone's going to walk over and they're going to tell me they're quitting. And so every night I've like whatever sleep I got was like, OK, who's going to quit the next day? And it just kept happening. And that was that was really draining. And for me to put on a face and tell everyone that things are going to be OK was incredibly hard, however. There were a group of people that were working on Replit Agent. Replit Agent is a breakthrough product that we created. It actually created a breakthrough in the entire industry because, remember, this was before Cloud Code 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 going to be super valuable. So I had this night and day, almost schizophrenic feeling of, You know, large parts of the company and the business have totally lost faith in me and the company, and then a small part that we're totally engrossed in the possibilities of AI and what we were inventing. Speaker 3: Sam, can I just say, Forget the numbers, man. What he just said was like 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. Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 3: 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 like described my childhood trauma as a founder. I didn't even realize. I didn't even know until you said those words. I was like, I have felt that. It's depressing when somebody emails you for like, hey, can we meet tomorrow? You know, you know, they're about to quit and you're like, it just got harder. Speaker 1: And I don't have it in me to convince them to stay. Like, why stay? Speaker 3: Why would they stay? Speaker 1: Exactly. Speaker 3: That thing you just described is so real. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: And I just want to give you props, because I don't think most people ever really talk about what that feels like. And now it's obviously it's great to talk about it now, because like, you know, it didn't just end sadly, you know, about success. Speaker 1: This is reminiscing in a more positive way about the failures 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 3: And what are you up to now? Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: You're still at it. Speaker 1: And our partners will. We're not including our logo anymore. And our vendors remove the logo. Speaker 3: That's dirty because it's like you didn't even have to. You proactively changed your website. Why'd you do that? Why'd you scrub us? Speaker 1: And it felt like, you know, 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 weight of Silicon Valley on my shoulders because I was backed by the best as well. Marc Andreessen, Paul Graham, David Sachs, all these people are on our cap table and I was like letting all of them down. Speaker 3: So if this was a movie, there's a turning point, right? The montage begins. At some point you wake up and you look at the dashboard. Something starts to change. You start getting emails. The music picks up and suddenly things start to move. What was the first move of that second act before we hit the training montage? Speaker 1: 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, because that was the mission, are we going to enable them to be actually successful using this? And you know Jeff. Jeff is our Head of Partnerships, Jeff Berg. Haiya and I always think of Jeff as the prototypical potential customer because he's a consulting background, he's super sharp, but he can't configure Python to save his life. So he tried it and I remember him posting the feedback. It's like, oh, this is miserable. I failed. I couldn't make the simple app. The first day, the next day, third day, I think one day when he posted, it was like, oh, I was able to make this thing. We're like, OK, we got it. I think I think that the product is ready right now. And it was around August in 2024, and the team felt they weren't ready. I was like, we got to launch this. I don't care if it is semi-broken. If you get 50 percent of the time, get amazing results, it's going to wow the world. This is 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, even if it is in just like demo shape. One of the habits that I picked up during this darkest hour is playing video games. When I came to the US, I was like a pro gamer back in Jordan. When I came to the US, I was like, okay, I'm going to focus. I'm going to be the Silicon Valley entrepreneur. I'm going to work really hard. I want to make a lot of money and I want to be successful. 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. They do this thing in games, it was called Early Preview, sort of like a beta. But the intention is that you're getting a semi-broken thing, but you're expected to kind of give us feedback. I was like, OK, we're just going to release an early preview of the product and we're just going to call it that. We're going to say, hey, don't subscribe to this thing because it might be buggy. But if you're already subscribed or you have You're okay with getting buggy software? Join in. So we, in September 2024, I posted a video of me in the office, shot on an iPhone, saying, hey, like AI coding is amazing, generates a lot of code. But so far, you had to do all this other stuff. Today, for the first time, we're showing you that an AI agent can do the end-to-end thing. And there were a few moments when this tweet started going viral. One of them was Andrej Karpathy, who is, you know, head of AI at Tesla, early open AI, AI researcher, co-tweeted and said, this is a feel 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. And then the revenue first day made like a million dollars of ARR. Second day, $2 million. Speaker 2: Were you just like hitting refresh constantly? Speaker 3: Amjad must be on a call. He's been in his office all day. What's he doing? Speaker 1: Just hitting refresh. Yeah, the whole time. But at the same time, we're just hustling to make the product better. Speaker 2: So basically, in like two days, you made more revenue. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: You like beat your... Speaker 1: Eight years of growth in two days. Speaker 2: That's got to be a crazy feeling. Speaker 1: I've always heard from other entrepreneurs is that the feeling of product market fit is like stepping on a, I don't know who said this, it's like stepping on a landmine. And I knew that we didn't have it for a long time. That's why we pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot. And then that felt like stepping on a landmine. I was like, okay, we got it. Now we go from there. Speaker 3: All right, let's take a quick break, and I got a question for you. When a buyer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up? Most companies have no idea, and by the time they found out, they've already lost the deal to another company that did. Hubspot has AEO, which helps you show up in the moments when the right buyers are looking for a company like yours, before the first click, before they fill in the form. That is the moment Hubspot AEO is built for. Check out Hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. 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. Furcon had basically like adopted these kids. They were on the East Coast. They wanted to come to Silicon Valley. They didn't have money. He's like, here's some money. They're like, is this an investment? 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 like get going. And so these two young guys, they were probably 20 years old, 21 years old, they were working out of our office. And they had like, they were trying to do an early version of like rent GPUs in the cloud. So they realized this was before the AI boom, though. So like, it was for machine learning, or like, you want to do like, just like some research, maybe, but this is 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 and were ready. 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. Why are you guys pivoting? Why are you guys worried about these other ideas? And he goes, When we did that first thing, it was like we stepped on a landmine. And so now I kind of know that's what's possible. So like, yeah, all these little signals, I know they're not real signals. And this guy's 20, 21 years old, and I'm supposed to like be mentoring him. And I walked back to my desk being like, I've never felt that. And I realized like I'd been doing startups for six, seven years, I had never felt what they were lucky enough to stumble into on the first day. And, you know, you don't even know what you're looking for had you never felt it. It's like love. It's like, am I in love? Maybe I'm in love. Maybe this is it. And then you feel it and you're like, oh, all that. That other stuff wasn't that. This is the thing. And I feel like for entrepreneurs, it's one of the hardest things. Speaker 2: But I thought it's almost bad to talk about that, not talk about it, but I don't think you should expect that because I think that most great companies have never had that. If you look at the subset of companies, most don't work. Some work. Okay, a handful work a little bit better and then a very small percentage are amazing. And even amongst the amazing ones, what they're describing, what you guys are describing, they don't feel that. Like, for example, we were talking about like Mars candy the other day. Like that's been around for 150 years. And more likely than not, it was like a grind, a grind. This year was not a grind. It kind of did pretty good. But this year it was kind of a grind. You know what I mean? Like there was never like this moment where it's like, we just grew I think you're right. Speaker 3: A, it doesn't happen right away, even for you, even though it happened super fast, it's like 10 years in. But there is a difference between push and pull. And I think the companies I've seen, which is a very small handful that actually have product market fit, it starts to feel like pull. In fact, Emmett, the CEO of Twitch, I remember asking him, You did just in TV, then you guys pivoted to Twitch. Was it obvious right away? And he basically said, product market fits. The main thing that matters. He goes, basically, you feel like you're pushing a boulder up a hill every day. And then at some point you kind of wake up and you realize it's like you didn't you reached your hands out, but the boulder had already moved. And now you have to start running to catch up to it. And suddenly the whole game feels like a sprint catching up to the boulder going down the hill. It takes time, but there is a difference between like you are manually pushing the crank versus it starts to get pulled by the market. Speaker 1: Let's just offer like a distinction between the different types of businesses. There are, you know, Clay Christensen's RIP passed away recently. Harvard Business School professor came up with this concept of disruption, right? Disruption became sort of a meme, but it's actually an economics theory almost. about technology and he talks about sustaining technology versus disruptive technology. You can be innovative on a sustained curve. You can make things incrementally better. But there are things that are disruptive and those are like moment of time businesses or technologies that create this explosion of demand Because for the first time it became possible, right? So if you're 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. So they're trying to capture 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. Speaker 2: And most are at a great point, right? Speaker 1: Whether it's PayPal, Facebook, you know, Google. The reason you have this explosive growth is like you just invented something new. And then everyone's rushing because this capability didn't exist before. And there's no other alternatives, by the way. Speaker 2: That's a really good point. Then do you think that the right move for someone building a company is, OK, so on one hand, you could say, well, just have patience and like, just keep going, keep going, keep going with, you know, maybe the same thing. Whereas the other hand, would it be like pivot just like the 20 year old kids until you find that that that rock rolling down the mountain? Speaker 1: 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're like, okay, I know that you've done the 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. 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 To be very good at execution, build an amazing team, build amazing processes, just be very good at the day-to-day execution to out-compete your competitors. If you're a young guy trying to make something that didn't exist before, or like Shaan and some of the guys in social media, they're trying to create a new clubhouse or some kind of thing that I didn't know I would enjoy talking to people You know, taking a walk on my earbuds. This just like didn't occur to me. So if you're inventing something like that, you will, you know, the point is pivot, pivot, pivot until it hits. Because if it's not hitting, you're not hitting on some human nature or element that you're finding or you're like finding a secret in the universe almost. Speaker 2: You're a fun case study. Speaker 3: Yeah. One of the reasons it's fun to talk to you is not only your business is interesting and you're interesting as a founder, but you're also a bit of a polymath. Like we were talking at the beginning of this about like The Paul LaRue, Bitcoin. I feel like you have a bunch of these little rabbit holes that you've gone down. I'm curious, what are those rabbit holes today? Because I've seen the original Replit deck and this was what, 2014, 2015, something like that? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 3: Bro, you called your shot Babe Ruth style. So read this thing out. What was the master plan? Speaker 1: Growth by building tools. Speaker 2: How about the fact that in your deck you have a slide called master plans? Speaker 1: So growing the product by building tools for education, essentially people learning how to code. I then build a simple network and AI-assisted interface that blurs the distinction between learning and building. That's essentially what Replit is today. Like you're learning how to make software, but you don't need to sit down and learn how to code. You're just like vibe coding and it's just happening as you go and you're kind of picking up these skills. And then evolve the platform into a place where people come to learn, build, explore and host applications. So not only is it the development environment, But the hosting of the applications, and the hosting of the 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. Right now, if you go to Replit, you build something, you can just say, monetize it. And it will like integrate Stripe for you and all of that. Then pretty soon, you should be able to say, market it. Speaker 3: 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 are just, they were made on Replit and they still run on Replit? Speaker 1: This one is a little controversial, but Medve, the billion dollar one person business covered by the New York Times. Speaker 2: Basically, they were a company that sold what? Speaker 1: GLP1. And the reason it's controversial is because people don't like their marketing practices. The entrepreneur, I think, already fixed a lot of these issues that people are reacting to. But he runs a big part of his stack on Replit. And he says it's been And today, we're going to talk about a crucial part of their growth because it's not only just the core application, but the automations he's been up day to day. So, for example, he's working with a vendor and every day he does something manual, like a marketing vendor. It's like, OK, I'm going to build this website to you. You go and you speak to an agent. The agent will give you all the information you need or the agent will give you the assets. For all the different parts of the business, all the back office stuff of the business. And he's the fastest person to go from idea to prompt. Even when he was on Twitter going viral, he was like building a game in Replit. And he built an experiment where he sent me that experiment where you can scroll a site with your head. So you can read something without looking at your screen. So I've never seen someone after like spending some time chatting with him. Be so quick to create things. Boom. Create that. Create that. Automate this. Automate that. That's one example. There's been a lot that I've spoken about over the years. In the past, they used to have to migrate off of Replit because the platform was not complete. But now the platform app is actually complete and you can run a full business on it. We have a lot of venture-backed companies. Such as Spellbook, I think it's a multi-hundred million dollar company, started on Replit. Magic School, I think a $500 million business started on Replit. And many others. More recently, since Replitation, there hasn't been enough time for them to really hit massive scale, but there's a lot of multi-million dollar businesses. For example, recently, I think they just did a round, but there's a company that's building Influencer marketing for local restaurants and local shops. So they'll, you know, you're a local restaurant, you want someone to cover your restaurant, you go to the platform, you hire an influencer, they actually physically walk to your restaurant, eat there, take a TikTok or whatever. Because now most people, especially Gen Z, they actually don't go to Google Maps anymore. If you ask the Gen Z, let's find a restaurant, they're like, go to TikTok and search. And so that's already over 100,000 ARR, like few weeks. Speaker 3: What's that one called? Do you know the name? Speaker 1: Try Nearby. Speaker 2: Dude, I still go to Yelp and my young employees were like, calling me Gray Bush. They're like, you're so old, man. Like, what are you doing? Speaker 3: Do you open the yellow pages and call them when you want to order food? Speaker 2: I was like, why not Yelp? Speaker 3: Could someone move the sundial for me? Speaker 1: It's surprising to me that the Google search queries keep going up. They just broke records. The revenue and search keeps going up. But but yes, when people in my, you know, people around me that they're not using Google as much. Speaker 2: Are there any cool trends that you're seeing? We have a subset of young 18, 19-year-old kids who listen to MFM and they want to hear business ideas. Are there any interesting trends that you're seeing 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? Speaker 1: Yes. Silicon Valley have always approached problems with hyperscale in mind. And I think for the first time, because the making software is cheaper, you can actually create a multi-million dollar business and not have to raise venture, not have to grow the team a whole lot. So local style businesses is very interesting. There's a guy in England that I think he's well on his way. He's 100,000 already in run rate. He's well on his way to a million. He is building software for ice rink management. So skating rinks and all of that. I think that you go around in your life and there's a lot of things that are just not computerized yet. There's no software running it. So that would be my first approach. Actually, that's what I did when I, my first business was building software for internet cafes and LAN gaming. And so that's always been a great place to start. Speaker 3: You remind me, in Paul Graham's, one of his essays about how to get startup ideas, he says, The easiest way to get startup ideas is just like, if you want to find the startup idea of the future, simply live in the future and then build what doesn't exist. It's like, okay, what the hell does that mean? He describes when Zuckerberg built Facebook, it's not because he was a normal guy thinking, hmm, what would the future look like? It's like, no, he was on computers all day. His social life was online. The problem was he only had certain tools available. So for him, the idea of social networking online It was not just like possible, it was completely normal. It was his preferred medium to actually exist in and you could just like lean into that rather than thinking you're the oddball. And I think, you know, that's sort of interesting because, you know, you built Replit. Partly because you grew up going to these internet cafes in Jordan and every time you'd come, you'd be on a different computer. So you kind of needed something that lived in the cloud. And so, you know, for you, what was completely normal was odd to other people. So I think that's a trick with startup ideas, right, is to sort of lean into Maybe the things you do that are a little bit more than normal or a little bit odd, and then just say, like, what would make my experience doing this odd thing a little bit better? Speaker 1: You know, another one I would say is being lazy. In programming, there's this old saying that laziness is a virtue. And the idea is to automate a lot of things. But now everyone is a programmer, essentially. So, you know, part of the reason why I made Replit is because I don't want to keep setting up the freaking IDE every time. You know, go about your life with this laziness attitude. What are the kind of things that are so annoying that you have to keep doing over and over again? There's probably a million, maybe a billion people that feel the same way. And perhaps you can make a piece of software to automate that. And more important than ever, this like lazy mindset of viewing things through the lens of automation. It's very important with AI because AI is truly like We have a magic automation machine. So not only you'll optimize your life, you'll become a lot more productive, but you might stumble on something that a lot of other people would want. Speaker 4: This is for the folks out there who have a business that does at least $3 million a year in revenue. Because around this point, that's when you're able to look up after being heads down for years building your company, and you realize two things. One, you've done something great, but you're still a long way from your final destination. And two, you look around and you realize, I am all alone. I've outrun my peers, which means you're now making $10 million decisions alone by yourself. And that is when mediocrity can creep in. My company Hampton, we solved this problem by giving a room of vetted peers of other entrepreneurs who are going to hold you accountable, call you out on your nonsense and help show you the way. Because the fact is, is that there's only a tiny number of people in your town who know what you're going through and who have been there. And they're hard to find. And if you can't find them, it's hard to have this explicit time, this explicit place where you sit down, where the rules are clear, that we are here to help each other and to be one another's board of directors. The biggest risk is not failing. You have a company and it's working. You're going to be fine. But the biggest risk is waking up 10 years from now and saying, shit, I barely grew in business and in life. And for people like you who are ambitious, wasted potential and regret is what we want to help you to avoid. We have made so many of these groups and we have a thousand plus members. And I know this stuff actually works, whether you work with Hampton or you get your own group on your own. But having a group like this, a group of people who you meet with in real life once a month, it can change your life. It changed mine and I know it will change yours. So check it out. Joinhampton.com. Speaker 2: Hey, can you give me your opinion on this? We were kind of joking, kind of not joking a while back with the guests and we were like, it's sort of like, we were asking ourselves, we're like, are we like in December of 2019 where we're just like three months away from like COVID happening and like America shutting down and we're just like, Yeah, I heard there's this virus in China, but whatever, no big deal. You know, are we sort of like that with AI where it's like, well, you know, like Square maybe laid off a lot of people, but like, that's probably not going to happen anymore. Like, do you think that we are like months or 12 months or something like that away from like the world changing dramatically? Speaker 1: I think we are in the singularity, like the original idea of a singularity. I think Werner Weng, one of the early computer pioneers and sci-fi authors, talked about the singularity, borrowed this concept from physics. In physics, it's like the black hole. And anything that happens after the black hole is undefined. So we actually don't know what happens. It's like not knowable. So anything that is beyond that point, you can't even have formulas for because it's literally undefined. You know, a lot of the early AI thinkers talked about this moment of singularity, 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. And so I think this is the moment we're in where, you know, in 22, you know, we got GPT-4 at the time and, you know, GPT-2 had come out in 2019, GPT-3 in 2020. So every two years we were getting a model. And now it feels like every few weeks we're getting a model, sometimes every day. And there are these fundamental capability shifts that happen either in autonomy or cybersecurity or computer use or what have you. And every one of those capability shifts have 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 go figure out how to Create, make them into products, right? And this is why it's an explosive time for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship is because we have this potential energy that needs to be harnessed. Now, the reason why there's like a delay is because we have this capability overhang. The world will change, but it's really hard to know whether I can't tell you in 12 months, like all entry level jobs will be gone. Speaker 2: Well, what if you had to make a bet? Speaker 1: My bet would be that I don't think unemployment numbers will move a whole lot. Perhaps they'll marginally increase. I think Dario, the CEO of Anthropic, said we're going to get to 20% unemployment or something like that. I don't know if I'm misquoting him, but he said... Speaker 2: He's a doomer basically, though. He's on the far end. Speaker 1: Yeah. What I'm seeing from our customers, we have some customers that automate a lot of things and 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. And so net-net, I think there's going to be a lot of new AI companies, a lot of companies that make use of AI and want to hire more people. So net-net, I think the unemployment question, I think will probably be neutral. Speaker 3: How do you think this sort of Game of Thrones AI war plays out, right? You've got, you know, the King of the North. You got Elon up there. He's trying to come down. You got the OpenAI kingdom over here. Google, you know, they were in denial, but now they're here. You know, they're making it happen. What do you think? How do you think this plays out? Speaker 1: I like business theory. It's not always useful, but it often is useful. Hamilton Hemler wrote this book called The Seven Powers. And everyone talks about moats. Seven Powers is the theory of moats. The moat of these LLMs is the technology fundamentally commoditizable, right? It seems to be very easy to replace these models. Like, you know, a lot of developers every day, professional developers are switching between these models. In some cases, if you're in Cursor, it's like literally one click away to switch to the next model. And I think a lot of the fighting It has to do with this fact that it is hard to find a way to zoom heads too far ahead of the competition. You're always sort of neck and neck competing with others. So you might want to try to block them in different ways, whether it's in the court or with the government or regulations or things like that. Whereas I think in the past, If you're Microsoft and you achieve this dominance on the PC, it's really hard to unseat you, right? And so there's this natural monopolies that used to emerge and they're protected by certain moats, such as network facts, economies of scale. We haven't seen any of those moats sort of emerge from these foundation model companies. And so my My hypothesis is that maybe the one natural moat is capital. You need not just one-time capital to enter the market. You need continuous capital to train the current model, the next generation model, and the next generation model. And then you need enough install-based revenue to cover your costs. But that is not enough moat to keep the other big players away. All the big companies have a fighting chance and all the big governments can also participate in this. And maybe China as a place where you can't really distinguish between country and company, and maybe the country is going to be doing to the foundation model market what they did to the EV market. Well, they'll subsidize the hell out of it in order to have a competing chance and maybe even destroy the market globally by subsidizing it. All of this to say is I think it is good for entrepreneurs because if we ended up with a monopoly or just oligopoly and you're building on top of it, it is actually very hard to build a successful business because like you said, they'll come for you. But if it ends up being a technology that's kind of easy to replace, I mean, there is a place for a lot of entrepreneurs to participate. Speaker 2: Shaan, remember you were telling that story about the Anthropic CEO and he was like, yeah, things are booming. But like in a weird way, I feel like I'm always like a few months or a few quarters away from running out of money because we're growing so fast. We have to buy 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 more and is profitability in sight? Speaker 1: No, to the first question. We're not burning nearly as much cash as foundation company and model companies. And like, you know, sometime last year, profitability was in sight. We had something like, you know, 30 years of runway or something like that. Since then, we decided to spend a lot more on specialty sales and marketing. And my theory on this is or like my thesis is that There are a lot of businesses that will need help adopting this technology and adopting Replit broadly. And also there's this imbalance between supply and demand that I talked about. So I thought, OK, we just need to scale the sales team. 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 like a sort of a tech. Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 2: How's that feel to be around a bunch of regional sales managers? Speaker 1: I love it. Unknown Speaker: I didn't know. Speaker 1: Because I think I'm a sales bro. Speaker 3: I am a sales bro. Speaker 1: I think I'm weird as far as tech nerds. Speaker 2: Well, why do you love it? This is actually really weird. We laugh because it's funny, but this is actually quite interesting. Speaker 3: He was deadlifting before it's cool. He likes sales before it's cool. He's got range. My guy's got range. Speaker 2: Well, why do you like it? Because I used to hate salespeople. Then I realized that salespeople, like all these whining and dining, it actually works and they do create demand. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 2: And I'm like, oh, OK, you serve a purpose. Speaker 1: It's more of a contact sport than consumer. Like a consumer, you Do something and then you do an A-B test and maybe two weeks later you find out whether it worked or not and there's this huge delay and there's so many things outside of your control. There's like hype in the market that affects you. Someone writes about you, you go viral and then you die down or it's like there's almost like the weather. You can't really control a lot of it. Sales is much more, like I said, contact support. Like I can apply And whether we get the win or not is somewhat much more within our control. And so if I hear like some kind of deal is at risk, It activates me so much because the idea of losing to some kind of scumbag 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. And we rarely lose deals. In the few times there was a potential of losing a deal, we just pulled out all the punches. And the company just, because Haya and I, Haya, my co-founder and my wife, is also a hybrid competitor. She also lifts and does boxing and all that. I built a culture that's incredibly competitive. And so we get activated by this. And then when we win, it just feels good. It's very real. It's like very different than seeing a number go up like that. Speaker 2: 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. When it's tragic, it's a disaster. How's that? Speaker 1: I think that having Replit being so hard, as hard as it is and it was, if we weren't in it together, I think it would have definitely driven a wedge between us because You're both entrepreneurs. You know how much of your life energy startups take. They literally take your vitality, your age. I had hair when we started the company. And so in life, you have a limited amount of energy and you direct it towards Your spouse, your kids, your work, you know, things like that. But then if something is like this sucking energy, the sucking everything, time and energy, eventually it'll just strain your relationships. And I, you know, I for a long time, like a lot of my friends just didn't hear from me. Like I kind of disappeared in many ways and still in many ways. You know, I would love to spend more time kind of checking in with friends and keeping connections alive. But the fact that we're in it together, I think, made our relationship stronger because those dark times. Speaker 2: And having all the shares in the family. I mean, that is pretty cool. Speaker 1: That's cool, too. Speaker 2: No, I mean, I'm not being funny. That's cool. I think Shaan used to work with this guy, Michael Birch, and him and his wife started a company and they sold it for like, I don't know, six or eight hundred million dollars. And it was so it was like their family, like, you know, got two times rewarded. Speaker 1: You have to be careful. A few things. You have to be careful not to, like, make these mission decisions on the weekend and show up and it's like, hey, decision done. I have to be careful not to bring the tone you bring at home to the office. Don't make it awkward around other people. It's very easy to make it awkward around other people. You have to work harder to ensure that this is meritocracy because I come from a world that is less meritocratic, that is more based on who you know, what you know, and family business are very common in that world. The problem with them is that people join the business and they expect if they're not part of the family, their work is not going to matter as much. You have to be very clear about performance and set high expectations for yourselves and be communicative about it. And also always open to the potential that, you know, there are other people that are better at running the company than you are. Speaker 3: You said you read a ton of biographies and especially with this kind of shift into sales mode and being like, oh, I get to play full contact startup. This is amazing. Who are the founders that either 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 kind of inspirational for you. Speaker 1: I think Ben Horowitz and like The Hard Things About Hard Things is a very good book and inspiration for Especially like a more sales driven business. I read it a while back and it has a lot of really interesting stories about doing deals and losing deals and hiring salespeople. And then, you know, after I watched Pirates of the Silicon Valley, I started learning about Bill Gates. This is another really good old school, very unknown biography hard drive. It's like 90s about Bill Gates. After reading about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and these guys, I just knew that I wanted to be part of that, part of Silicon Valley. It just seems the most exciting thing possible. 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 like Pseudo-scientific documentaries coming out. There was one called What the Bleep Do We Know? It's like about quantum physics and visualizations. Speaker 2: Like if you put the vibration out, the universe will reward you. Speaker 1: I kind of believe that in a weird way and I can't really disprove it. Tell you a few stories. I wanted to be on Rogan's show. I've done all these shows. I've done Tucker's show, My First Million, all these shows. I was like, I want to be a Rogan. The big guy. Speaker 2: I'm sick of the JVs. Unknown Speaker: You guys are amazing. Speaker 1: But how do you even get on Rogan? I started like sort of visualizing it. I was like, what would I talk about? What would I tell him? How would the interaction be? And things like that. A few weeks later, I get a message from two people. Mark Andreessen and Lex Friedman, and they both asked me the same question. Hey, I have a friend whose daughter is entering a entrepreneurship competition and wants her app, wants to make an app. And do you know anyone who can help her? Like, can you help her? It's like, that's odd. And I remember replying to Lex Friedman, then he goes to me and replied to Mark. And it's really odd. I got the same message from Lex. Who's this person? It's like, yeah, you know, it's Joe Rogan. It's his daughter. And I said, you know, I'd like to help her. Like, I'll freaking build the app for her. Like, he introduced me. So he introduced me to Rogan. Rogan introduced me to his daughter. And I say, let's get on Zoom. I get on a Zoom call and it's like four high school girls. And they're like, they're very bright. They have a business idea to connect Gen Z to local businesses for jobs. And they're like, you know, I'm going to teach you how to make applications and you're going to make it. And so I open Replit and like, here's Replit. Here's what you do. You just, you know, type in your prompt and Let's check in next week. Next week we check in and they already made like half the app. And by the way, Replit Asian was early on, it was still running into some problems. So every now and then I'll jump in and like help them with one thing. But for like 95% of it, they built it themselves. And I'm always of the belief of like, just provide value and like, just don't ask for anything in return. It wasn't like, okay, I'm doing this to get on the show. I think that would be the bad mindset too. To have, I kept mentoring her and I gave her advice on how to win the competition. It's like, look, no one, none of your peers will have an app. You're the only one that's going to have an app. Everyone will have slideshows. Before you do the pitch, go send the app to all the judges. And that way they'll know you're the only one that actually went above and beyond. And they actually, they present it and they win the competition. And by the way, Joe, I think might've thought I am some kind of contractor. Like he didn't know I didn't introduce myself. So I sent you a nice letter and I told him, nice messages, told him, look, I'm, you know, very, very bright daughter. I'm so glad I could be part of this. I would love just five minutes of your time to kind of introduce myself and my story. And so he's like, OK, I'll, you know, I'll call you tomorrow or whatever. Tomorrow comes. He didn't call me and then text him. I didn't hear back. So I gently told his daughter, I was like, I would just like a phone call with your dad. And so she's like, OK. And then the phone rings and it's you again. And it's like. About 90 seconds in, we're talking about MMA. I like you're kind of a you're you're you. You're not. It's like the same guy. I'm not a big MMA guy. But on the on the call, I just was like, I just told him about myself. Speaker 3: It's a lot of pressure to do that quick, right? Speaker 1: Yes. Yes. You have to be calm. I'm actually the calmest And I think I could learn this from gaming. I slow down a lot under pressure. Like when pressure comes, you have gaming, racing, anytime there's like incredible pressure and any mistake might kill you. In this case, not literally kill you, but like kill your chances. Actually, I experienced 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. Speaker 3: By the way, weightlifting is a great place to practice this. 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 basically, if you could practice poise, And 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, you know, your body kind of thinks you're dying. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 3: When you're when you're under the under the weights and you're shaking and you don't know what to do. So your body can simulate pressure that way. Speaker 1: There's so many lessons from from powerlifting. Actually, one day I was at the gym in San Francisco and I saw Brian Chesky lifting weights. He's usually jacked. Speaker 4: He's a former bodybuilder. Speaker 1: 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 like 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. Like I, you know, I remember being a big fan of Tucker during the lockdowns when like nothing made sense in the world. And like I had this anger in me because like, you know, I came to the United States for freedom. And like, I feel like I can't say what's on my mind. I can't leave my house. I have to like put a muzzle on my mouth and I have to take a shot. Like this is a scam. And I remember him like. I started watching Fox News. Speaker 3: You got radicalized. Speaker 1: But one day I see Martin Shkreli on his podcast and I had helped Martin race around. I learned finance from Martin. Speaker 2: Dude, he used to stream on Shaan's platform. I used to watch him on Shaan's thing all the time. Speaker 3: He's like one of the best teachers and he's super entertaining for finance stuff. Speaker 2: He still does it on YouTube. They're really good. Speaker 3: Shout out to the Shkreli Pill channel. It's on YouTube. It takes his long live streams. Just cuts it, the most interesting kind of 20, 30 minutes. Shkreli Pill is just doing God's work out there. Speaker 1: Yeah, and I knew nothing about personal finance. I knew nothing about the financial markets. I didn't know how money worked even. And so I remember just watching his channel and just getting educated. And when he got out of jail, I was like, oh, that's cool. Oh, Shkreli's out of jail. And I went and watched his stream and I see him coding and I see him opening Replit. And I sent him a tweet and I'm like, hey, I see you. I saw you opening Replit. I'm like a big fan. Be great to connect. So I connect with him. He tells me he's starting a startup. Speaker 2: The doctor one. Speaker 1: So he started a company. It's like a holding company. And he started the doctor one. At the same time, he started the Bloomberg Terminal one. He started three other things. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: He started Audio, AI one. But the one that took off is the Bloomberg Terminal, I think. And they are now like multi-million dollar revenue. Speaker 3: 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 to 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 Maxi. 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? Speaker 1: First of all, I'm personally like very principled and very careful. The only problems with the law I had was racing cars. I'm like a big fan of second chances. And the thing I love about America is there's some forgiveness here. You can have a second and a third act. I saw his side of the story, and it just seemed like he did his time. This is the system we live in, is that you do something, you get punished, you do your time, and then you believe. I think society should treat you with a blank slate. Early on in Replit, 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 2: I pitched those guys years ago. I thought they said no, but I pitched them. Speaker 3: So through my bullshit. Speaker 1: 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. What's interesting about Roy is Blooming Beta is both the investment vehicle, but also just things he's fascinated in, he'll just go do. 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 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. One exercise, and maybe you could say it's a BS woke exercise, but like, They lined up everyone on a line and then the inmates on another line. And someone was saying, if you grew up in a household where there's like crime and drugs, stay forward if you did not step back. And then like, you know, 95% of the non inmates step back and then of the inmates, maybe 5% step back. So just like inversion. And the exercise was to show you how much The life of crime is sort of like somehow predetermined by... I don't fully believe that. Speaker 2: I believe in personal responsibility a lot, but maybe there are like people are born in just maybe harder situations. Speaker 3: You can believe in agency and personal responsibility as well as probability. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 3: Right? And influence. Speaker 1: Yes. Yes. And so, you know, 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 2: One of my favorite, I love, I married into an immigrant family. Shaan comes from a family of immigrants. What's it feel like 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? Speaker 1: I think America's vision of itself, at least the kind of liberal America's vision of itself was like about tolerance and inclusivity. And there's there's a lot of truth to that. Like, you know, 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. 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. 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 the spirit of innovation and openness to ideas. Like ask anyone who grew up anywhere else, literally quite literally anyone else. And the experience of entrepreneurs there is to have an idea and the likelihood of your friend telling you you're retarded after you told them that idea is like 90% plus. And that was always my experience. I always safeguarded ideas, not because I didn't want other people to To copy them, but more like to protect those because they're like they're fragile beings. America and San Francisco, Silicon Valley, especially a place where you talk about these ideas and they grow. And the problem is like they grow too much and they become radical. Let's start a f***ing ship island country. They've always like weird things. So there's like an opposite problem of they snowball and they become. Speaker 2: Yeah, but that's a better that's a better problem than, you know, I've got a lot of my American buddies. They say back back home, I tell people about my ideas and they're like, Shut up, dude. Let's just be plumbers. Don't stand out. Speaker 1: Don't stand out. Exactly. That's the usual thing. Speaker 3: When I moved to San Francisco, because it's not even just America as a whole, like 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 like, you know, 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 them out. And I just remember by the eighth hour of her, you know, 15 of these pitches, And I just remember thinking, wow, every one of those ideas sounded terrible. And yet it was totally normal and common and accepted to be a little bit crazy like all those people were just now. What's normal here is crazy elsewhere and vice versa. So I went to a meetup that night. To go meet some people and there was a guy there was working at JPMorgan and he introduced himself in shame. He was like, I work at JPMorgan, but you know, but I'm leaving soon. I just need to, you know, that's a small, the normal, 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 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 1: Yeah. And it's easy to get cynical about it. And it's like, oh, man, this sucks. And then make fun of it and all 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, you know. Lark Andreessen is one who makes friends on Twitter and he goes on podcasts where there's two listeners and he'll become friends with people that he finds intellectually interesting and stimulating. Paul Graham is the same. Like wherever he goes, he's on vacation in Stockholm and he did like a YC meet up there. 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 Being Intellectually Stimulated. Speaker 2: You know who's like the unsung hero of San Francisco? Meetup.com. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: Oh, my God. They're the tugboats of the Silicon Valley scene. They don't get enough credit. They're the best. Speaker 1: Yeah. I met a lot of amazing people just going to meetups when I first came to Silicon Valley. Is it still going? Speaker 2: 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 Guild Group at MongoDB, I think he bought it. But the founder of Meetup.com has this crazy story. He worked at McDonald's and now he's working at Amazon, but as a driver. Speaker 1: He's an activist. Speaker 2: Yeah, I talked to him. Speaker 1: He is a worker rights union guy. And the reason he started Meetup was not to get rich San Francisco kids to meet up, but to actually organize. And so he's back to his passion now. So he goes and he takes a job at Amazon and he likes to give people tools to unionize. Unknown Speaker: And the most frustrating... Speaker 2: Why would they hire him? Speaker 3: Dude, he'd be like a casino card counter. If it was up to me, I'd be like, oh, he's here. Get this guy out of here. Speaker 2: Does he still have all of his fingers? Speaker 3: What are these companies doing? Speaker 2: They should be like, dude, you are way too registered to work here. Speaker 3: 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. Speaker 2: Does that happen to you, Amjad? Does, like, is there espionage? Speaker 3: He wouldn't know. Speaker 2: Is it here in the room with you right now? Speaker 1: 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 kind of caught foreign agents trying to steal LLM models. Speaker 2: But why foreign agent? I guess if you have a company that grew from 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. I'll bribe you to tell me X, Y, and Z. Unknown Speaker: Yeah. Speaker 1: We're a target probably, but we're not an easy target. We had someone from the FBI come give us a talk about These things, some of these stories, how to protect ourselves. 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. Phishing has gone A lot scarier. And also, you can do hacking and privilege escalation. Like the Vercel hack, it's kind of crazy. Do you guys know the entire chain of events? Speaker 3: I didn't understand what happened. I saw a couple of tweets where they were like, kind of doing the thing where 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? Speaker 1: There's an employee at this company called Contacts.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 some kind of backdoor. And then that company became fully compromised. And someone at Vercel installed Context.ai through Google OAuth on their workspace. And then they had an entry through Contacts into Vercell. And then inside Vercell, they've done a bunch of hacks to escalate privileges and get access to their databases. Speaker 2: And this was all planned by someone? Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know if it's planned end-to-end. I assume they infected Contacts AI and they knew it was an attack factor for a lot of other companies. Speaker 2: The creator, what did they get? Speaker 1: They get data. They're trying to sell on the internet of companies. Speaker 3: What would you get from Vercel? Database data? Speaker 1: Database, database passports, source code. Speaker 2: And then you go to that person and you ransom it? Speaker 1: 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 3: That's for Vercel because, you know, what did they do in this situation, right? Speaker 1: I think the thing about Vercel, there are a few things. Look, every company has issues and this is not a knock on them, but there's one thing that was odd that they were storing the database secrets in clear text. They had a way recently to make them sensitive and encrypt them, but they weren't encrypted at rest. So once you get access to the database, you got access to every other customer database. Speaker 3: I see. Speaker 2: Has your life changed now that you're a billionaire? Are you afraid of your security? Speaker 1: Yes, unfortunately. I have protection. I don't know, man. I don't feel like a billionaire. What do you feel like? I just feel like a guy. Speaker 3: A lowly millionaire? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: I definitely feel like a millionaire for sure. It took me a while to feel that, but after the lifestyle upgrade and 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 and I don't like to upgrade my lifestyle too quickly. Speaker 3: Was there any upgrade that you did do that was pretty cool where you're like, oh, money does have some utility. This actually brought me. 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. Speaker 1: When I sold some second, we did some secondary sale a couple of years ago, I think most of it comes down to Honestly, living a healthier lifestyle and saving time. So a chef is pretty. It's pretty awesome being able to eat exactly what you want and eat healthy. Even when you go to DoorDash and you try to search for the healthiest food, it's still shit. Speaker 2: It's a pain in the ass. Speaker 1: And so it just makes you feel better. 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 that you like. Getting someone who shows up at your door. You're creating that lifestyle. A lot of it is about hiring other people, but you can't overdo it. And at some point, I think we overdid it a little bit. And you want to be also careful with, you mentioned 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. So I think you can expose yourself to like too many too many people. Your house also starts feeling like like the office, a hotel, the office, people working out of there. I'm like, oh, man, like I want my kids to have like a normal life like we grew up. Speaker 2: You know what's crazy? I just Googled it. How many billionaires are under the age of 40? There's only 71. Really? Yeah. So of the, I don't know how many, 7 billion people, you are in probably the top I'm having mixed feelings, Shaan. Speaker 1: It is very interesting. Speaker 2: Well, you are in the 1000, probably of all the people under 40, you are probably in the top 1000 richest ever. Speaker 1: Well, that shows you I haven't really reflected on this all that much. I'm just like, keep going. Yeah, build more. Speaker 2: Yeah, you're like, I know how much I want. And the answer is more. That is the perfect answer. Speaker 1: 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. 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. Speaker 4: What did you get? Speaker 1: I got an AMG GT Black Series. Speaker 2: I got an AMG E63 wagon when I got mine. Speaker 1: AMG is I think underrated because it has the luxury but also the class. Speaker 3: I bought an e-bike with a burly wagon behind it and my kids fit in that. That's what I ride around everywhere. Speaker 1: Amazing. I think there is, you know, now there's like a lot of I hate 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 much. But I think it just becomes more inauthentic. Like when you when you look at the ballers on TikTok or Instagram and you look at the comments, people love them. We're balling. But you look at the comments when some tech CEO is saying some dumb shit, like everyone's going to lose their job. It's like 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 like. Speaker 2: We love having you on, man. You have this perfect balance of being wise, but also being audacious and fun to hang out with, and yet you got the CEO sensibility. Speaker 3: And a little bit intimidating also. He's a formidable guy. Speaker 2: You're a blessing and we're so happy. We sort of got to see you a little bit in the before phase and that's really exciting for us. Speaker 1: 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 just it's incredibly exciting time that wealth is accessible to more people. Speaker 3: We're just trying to get rich. Speaker 1: Yeah, 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. Speaker 2: And they use we hope they use Replit along the way, dude. Speaker 1: Thank you, guys. Speaker 2: You're a blessing. We appreciate you. That's it. Speaker 4: That's a pot. Unknown Speaker: I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. Speaker 3: Hey, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about a podcast that you could check out. It is called The Science of Scaling by Mark Roberge. He was the founding CRO of Hubspot, and he's a guest lecturer at Harvard Business School. The guy's smart, and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like Klaviyo and Vanta and OpenAI, and he's asking about their strategies, their tactics, and how they're growing their companies as head of sales or chief revenue officer. If you're looking to scale a company up, if you're a CRO or a head of sales that's looking to level up in your career, I think a podcast like this could be great for you. Listen to The Science of Scaling wherever you get your podcasts.