Amjad Masad on vibe coding, AI agents, and the end of boilerplate

Amjad Masad 0:00 We have CEOs that finally feel unleashed, like they have Replit and they have an idea. They don't have to go beg someone to do it. They can, like, just vibe code it, bring it to a meeting, and, "Look what I built." We wanna get to a point where you don't have to code at all. You should be in a creative space. A lot of coding is minutia. A lot of coding is accidental complexity. It turns out there's actually research. Doctors who play video games have much better reaction times.

Aria Finger 0:23 [laughs]

Amjad Masad 0:24 So if you wanna do a surgery, always ask them if they're a gamer. [laughs]

Aria Finger 0:26 [laughs]

Reid Hoffman 0:27 Oh, not a gamer? Sorry.

Amjad Masad 0:28 [laughs]

Reid Hoffman 0:28 Where, where's the gamer here?

Aria Finger 0:30 [laughs]

Amjad Masad 0:30 Get the gamer.

Reid Hoffman 0:31 AI is reshaping how we work, learn, and create, and nowhere is that change more tangible than in coding. That's where today's guest comes in. If you've heard of vibe coding, you've heard of Amjad Masad, founder and CEO of Replit, the platform that lets anyone build software right from their browser.

Aria Finger 0:51 Amjad grew up in Jordan, where he taught himself to code before studying computer science and moving to the United States. He became a founding engineer at Code Academy and later led JavaScript infrastructure at Facebook. What you might not know is that he's also an empathetic, people-focused voice in the AI space, talking about issues and philosophy that others won't.

Reid Hoffman 1:13 I've used Replit myself, and it's clear to me this isn't what's next. It's what's happening right now. Replit makes building software as natural as writing an email, shifting the power of creation to anyone with an idea. So yes, this is an interview about coding and the fastest-growing programming language in the world, English. But even more broadly, it's about how AI is already forcing us to rethink how work and society function, told through the lens of one field that's transforming before our eyes.

Aria Finger 1:45 And we're thrilled to welcome to the show Amjad Masad.

Reid Hoffman 1:48 Amjad, I'm so glad this worked out. We've known each other for a number of years.

Amjad Masad 1:52 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 1:52 And part of the thing I love about doing podcast is people that I learn from.

Amjad Masad 1:56 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 1:56 And there's been a whole stack of things out of our conversations-

Amjad Masad 1:59 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 1:59 ... you know, mostly at The Grove, but other places as well.

Amjad Masad 2:01 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 2:02 So welcome to Possible. I'm so glad to have you here.

Amjad Masad 2:04 Thank you for having me. I'm really excited. I've been listening to the show recently, so happy

Amjad Masad 2:07 to be here.

Reid Hoffman 2:07 I'd like to start with a question about kind of you.

Amjad Masad 2:10 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 2:11 Right? Like, Replit's about making things-

Amjad Masad 2:13 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 2:13 ... and so you might even phrase this question of how are you made.

Amjad Masad 2:15 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 2:16 You know, tell me about your early experience playing video games-

Amjad Masad 2:19 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 2:19 ... and how video games-

Amjad Masad 2:21 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 2:21 ... kind of did your trajectory-

Amjad Masad 2:24 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 2:24 ... into-

Amjad Masad 2:25 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 2:25 ... where... And then we'll get into more depth in Replit.

Amjad Masad 2:27 Right. Yeah, so video games have been a huge part of my life. I started playing video games, I think, on the, like, Atari, may- maybe even before getting my first PC. Uh-

Reid Hoffman 2:36 I wonder how many people still know what Atari is. [laughs]

Amjad Masad 2:38 Yeah, maybe we have to actually describe what Atari is. [laughs] But here's a tidbit from history. Steve Jobs worked at Atari. Uh, it was, like, the Silicon Valley premier company for computers. And so, uh, I was... I, I just, like, was captivated by, by video games. And when I first got a computer, my first idea was, like, can you actually make a video game on this thing? Well, it turned out it was initially very, very hard. But, uh, I remember going to, every year back in Amman, Jordan, where I grew up, uh, there's a computer show that my father would, would take us to, and it's, like, really big place where they have all sorts of new computers, new devices, CD-ROMs, whatever. And I bought a, I bought a, a CD-ROM and a collection of, of CDs, and I went home, and I didn't know what's in them. One of them was, like, a fax program, whatever. I just bought a CDs. I just wanted to try it. One of them was, like, a visual programming experience that allowed you to build kind of game-like experiences. So one of the early games that I built was for my younger brother, uh, five years youn- younger than me, to teach him math.

Reid Hoffman 3:36 Mm.

Amjad Masad 3:36 I think I was maybe eight, and he was three or something like that.

Reid Hoffman 3:41 Mm.

Amjad Masad 3:41 And there'd be two boxes. It would be an equation. He'd have to, like, enter the right, the right number, like, you know, five plus blank equals six, and it's, like, one. If he gets it right, he gets applause. He gets it wrong, he gets a boo. And it worked so out so well, he now works at Replit, so [laughs]

Reid Hoffman 3:57 [laughs]

Amjad Masad 3:58 So I taught him math early on and programming.

Reid Hoffman 3:59 That's very early recruiting. [laughs]

Amjad Masad 4:01 Early recruiting, yes. Early recruiting worked out. The moment you give a user a program you made, it's, like, horrific because they'll put in things that you don't expect. Like, instead of one, they'll put an E, and it's like error.

Aria Finger 4:13 No edge cases, little bro. [laughs]

Amjad Masad 4:15 [laughs] Exactly. But then just the high of not only making something, but seeing other people getting value out of it just hooked me. And then video games just been through my journey since then. Uh, I got really into C- Counter-Strike, and I used to go to these LAN gaming cafes, and we would play Counter-Strike against each other. But all these cafes were kind of run by, you know, pen and paper. So you would go there. You'd pay for an hour or two. Y- They'll write your name and what time you came in, and they'll watch you, which computer you're in, and, like, they'll tap you on the shoulder when there's, like, when your time's up. And I was like, "That's so silly. Like, there's computers all over the place. I'm gonna go write a program for it." And I was maybe 13 at the time. It took me two years, but I built this, like, client-server application to manage the entire thing with security and everything, and you could, like, have user accounts and have gift cards, and I started selling it, and I got really... For the time, I felt like I got really rich. I got all my classmates, I took them to McDonald's when it first opened in Jordan.

Reid Hoffman 5:13 [laughs]

Amjad Masad 5:14 Uh, and so yeah, gaming has been, like, a recurring theme to kind of pull me more. And, and now Replit has a really fun gaming experience that you can, you can build games with it.

Reid Hoffman 5:22 So, you know, starting with your younger brother, how much is, like, a gaming background part of kind of the recruiting target, the, uh, cultural organization target, the-

Amjad Masad 5:32 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 5:32 ... the how do you talk to people in Replit?

Amjad Masad 5:35 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 5:35 In addition, of course, the dynamic of how the product operates itself.

Amjad Masad 5:38 Right.

Reid Hoffman 5:38 But how much does the gaming background inform that whole stack of the company?

Amjad Masad 5:43 Yeah, it w- it was, it was never explicit.

Reid Hoffman 5:45 Mm.

Amjad Masad 5:45 But I think for whatever reason, like, the way we design the product, the kind of people we attract, the kind of art we put together around the product-

Reid Hoffman 5:52 Mm

Amjad Masad 5:52 ... even the product itself kind of attracts those gamer mindsets.

Reid Hoffman 5:55 Mm.

Amjad Masad 5:55 Uh, and actually, you know, I've always intuited that people who played games early on Had a, you know, their clock speed was higher.

Reid Hoffman 6:03 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 6:03 They could, like, think faster, they could react faster. And turns out there's actually research around it.

Reid Hoffman 6:08 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 6:08 Like, doctors who play video games have much better reaction times.

Reid Hoffman 6:11 Oh.

Amjad Masad 6:11 So if you wanna go to a surgeon-

Reid Hoffman 6:13 Uh-huh

Amjad Masad 6:13 ... you wanna do a surgery, always ask them if they're a gamer. [laughs]

Reid Hoffman 6:16 [laughs] Oh, not a gamer? Sorry. Where, where's the gamer

Reid Hoffman 6:19 here? [laughs]

Amjad Masad 6:19 Get the gamer. Um, and then, uh, when we were designing a Replit agent, which it was, is our, like, vibe coding tool-

Reid Hoffman 6:26 Hmm

Amjad Masad 6:26 ... it codes on your behalf.

Reid Hoffman 6:28 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 6:28 I was playing this, uh, video game called Hades, and a lot of my colleagues were... I got, got them into it as well. And so in Hades, it is, like, a rogue-like game where every game you start starts with a different run, and it's actually a randomly-

Reid Hoffman 6:40 Hmm

Amjad Masad 6:40 ... generated game, essentially.

Reid Hoffman 6:42 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 6:42 And so it was a very important mindset when designing AI experiences-

Reid Hoffman 6:47 Hmm

Amjad Masad 6:47 ... because AI is stochastic.

Reid Hoffman 6:48 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 6:48 And so even the language that we use inside-

Reid Hoffman 6:50 Hmm

Amjad Masad 6:50 ... the company, like a, like an agent run is sort of like a-

Reid Hoffman 6:53 Hmm

Amjad Masad 6:53 ... like a game run, and so on and so forth. So it's a big part of the culture.

Reid Hoffman 6:56 So you've already described kinda your very first intensity code experiences.

Amjad Masad 7:01 Hmm.

Reid Hoffman 7:01 It's the, your younger brother, it's the-

Amjad Masad 7:03 Hmm

Reid Hoffman 7:03 ... manage the whole gaming land.

Amjad Masad 7:04 Hmm.

Reid Hoffman 7:05 How would you take the current kind of coding enablement?

Amjad Masad 7:10 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 7:11 Like, what... If your younger self had that coding enablement-

Amjad Masad 7:14 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 7:14 ... how would your younger self have done this differently?

Amjad Masad 7:16 Yeah. You know, the interesting thing about programming, and, and you know those, you know this very well, actually, I think my generation is the last generation where the tools were really a joy to use, and then it become, it became very industrialized. So-

Reid Hoffman 7:30 Hmm

Amjad Masad 7:30 ... when we were programming, like I started on, um, like my real programming experience when I built that business-

Reid Hoffman 7:35 Hmm

Amjad Masad 7:36 ... was in Visual Basic.

Reid Hoffman 7:37 Oh, yeah.

Amjad Masad 7:37 And Visual Basic was a very creative interface.

Reid Hoffman 7:39 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 7:39 At some point, I think in the mid-2000s, like, everything became, you know, this, like, Linux terminal.

Reid Hoffman 7:46 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 7:46 Even building a JavaScript app, you have to download all sorts of software and, like, uh, hook them together. And so at least I kind of grew up in a generation where coding was, like, a little more creative. And then because it became such a high-paying job, it kind of, I think, changed because of that. And so as we're building the product, we got a lot of criticism early on, even before AI, that Replit abstracts too much away from the environment. And we're like, "W- we abstract it, but it is there. Like, you can peer under the hood."

Reid Hoffman 8:13 Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

Amjad Masad 8:13 And I think that's what is important. Um, but if you make programming so complex at the top-

Reid Hoffman 8:19 Hmm

Amjad Masad 8:19 ... people lose interest.

Reid Hoffman 8:20 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 8:21 And that's why, you know, in CS classes, uh, in universities, but in schools as well, you can turn off a lot of people because they think it's a, it's this laborious IT task of like-

Reid Hoffman 8:30 Hmm. Hmm

Amjad Masad 8:30 ... you know, pip install and all of that stuff.

Reid Hoffman 8:33 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 8:33 Instead, what you wanna do is make things.

Reid Hoffman 8:35 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 8:35 So for kids nowadays growing up, for parents encouraging their kids to code, just go on Replit and, like, make things, and I promise you, your kids will learn programming by osmosis. Like, it, they can just, like, see... They're gonna get curious at some point. They run into a bug, they're gonna go Google around and ask ChatGPT, and that's how I think the organic learning process happens.

Reid Hoffman 8:55 Hmm. And say a little bit about how the gaming dynamic-

Amjad Masad 8:58 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 8:58 ... enhances that.

Amjad Masad 8:59 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 8:59 What's the way that y- the, the things you've learned from being a gamer to make that creative experience-

Amjad Masad 9:06 Yeah

Reid Hoffman 9:06 ... you know, kind of come alive?

Amjad Masad 9:08 So there's no game in the world-

Reid Hoffman 9:09 Hmm

Amjad Masad 9:10 ... that starts with a manual.

Reid Hoffman 9:11 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 9:12 Right?

Reid Hoffman 9:12 Yes.

Amjad Masad 9:12 So if your program is starting with a manual, you've, you've already sort of lost.

Reid Hoffman 9:16 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 9:17 So the first thing, you wanna get to, um, dopamine really quickly.

Reid Hoffman 9:22 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 9:23 So w- with Replit getting you the first preview, getting you the first thing that you can see-

Reid Hoffman 9:28 Hmm

Amjad Masad 9:28 ... that immediately just, like, hooks you. Like, oh, I, I immediately made something. I put in a prompt. I, I, I made something. And then you wanna create a safe environment-

Reid Hoffman 9:37 Hmm

Amjad Masad 9:37 ... where it is easy to go back, right?

Reid Hoffman 9:39 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 9:39 In video games, if you think about save-

Reid Hoffman 9:41 Hmm

Amjad Masad 9:42 ... and load, it's a very important part of exploring a game.

Reid Hoffman 9:45 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 9:46 You don't wanna be in a position where you just, like, die and that's it, and you have to, you know, restart all over. So at Replit, we spend a lot of time working on checkpoint and

Amjad Masad 9:55 restore. So every action you make in the IDE, uh, and if I can get a little more technical-

Reid Hoffman 10:00 Mm-hmm. Yes

Amjad Masad 10:00 ... every action in the IDE is actually stored on a sort of ledger. So you make an action to the file system, to the database, to the runtime. All of that is stored on a ledger, and then any time you feel like you got into a weird spot-

Reid Hoffman 10:12 Hmm

Amjad Masad 10:12 ... you can always go back, or the agent did something you don't like, you can always go back to the previous one.

Reid Hoffman 10:17 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 10:17 So that's another, uh, principle. And then, uh, th- there's the aspect of, like, sharing and having other people use your thing.

Reid Hoffman 10:24 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 10:24 So publishing should be really easy, inviting other people.

Reid Hoffman 10:27 Hmm. Hmm.

Amjad Masad 10:27 So we designed the multiplier experience to be sort of like gaming as well. And really, I think the mindset g- g- goes a long way. Instead of thinking of the onboarding mindset, it's just thinking about it of how it's a unfolding experience of more complexity. The first experience is, like, sort of fractal. You can-

Reid Hoffman 10:46 Yeah. Mobile level one, level two, level three.

Amjad Masad 10:48 Exactly. Exactly.

Reid Hoffman 10:48 Gaming dynamics.

Amjad Masad 10:49 That's right.

Reid Hoffman 10:49 What's some of the places where you've been most surprised by what this unleash of early creativity has enabled?

Amjad Masad 11:00 Some of the medical things were really interesting. I, I... b- because it's so outside of the purview. I wouldn't have imagined it even. But, you know, the, there's a, there's a woman that had, like, a very, um, rare eye disease and required her to do, uh, certain exercises, and she, sh- she built an app that helps her do these exercises-

Reid Hoffman 11:18 Hmm

Amjad Masad 11:18 ... with her eyes every day.

Reid Hoffman 11:20 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 11:20 There's a woman in Korea, and her kid has also, like, a very rare disease-

Reid Hoffman 11:23 Hmm

Amjad Masad 11:23 ... and she built an app to, like, manage that disease-

Reid Hoffman 11:26 Wow

Amjad Masad 11:27 ... on a, on a day-to-day basis. So medical is one that's really fascinating. I think there's more to do there. And then something also so outside of my purview is, like, go to market-

Reid Hoffman 11:37 Hmm

Amjad Masad 11:37 ... and, like, uh, salespeople. You know, there's a role in these organizations that I've, I recently learned about is RevOps, is, uh, those people that are-

Reid Hoffman 11:45 Hmm

Amjad Masad 11:45 ... managing a lot of the data flow within mar- uh, go-to-market teams and building the tools and helping salespeople do their jobs. And those people, uh, tend to h- use a lot of SaaS software or a lot of other data sources.

Reid Hoffman 11:57 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 11:57 But they don't have anything to connect all these things together to create applications and make their salespeople more, more successful.

Reid Hoffman 12:05 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 12:05 So that's, uh, go to market. Uh, and then, um, finally, I think one thing that's- ... been really, really surprising is CEOs, and maybe that gets s- some engineers to hate us a little bit, but CEOs that feel disempowered because they've delegated a lot of things.

Aria Finger 12:23 Totally.

Amjad Masad 12:23 They, they, they don't have a- as much input on the, on the process. So, you know, uh, w- we have CEOs that finally feel unleashed, like they have Replit, and they have an idea. They don't have to go beg someone to do it. They can, like, just vibe code it, bring it to a meeting, and, "Look what I built," and, uh, "Why can't you do that in two weeks if I can do it in, in two days?" So that's another interesting one.

Aria Finger 12:44 I mean, you're talking so much about building, and you're also talking about sort of for kids, bringing them the whimsy and the creativity-

Amjad Masad 12:50 Mm-hmm

Aria Finger 12:50 ... and the fun. And as Reid knows, I hadn't programmed since, uh, freshman year CS.

Amjad Masad 12:56 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 12:56 Uh, uh, so a l- long time ago.

Amjad Masad 12:58 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 12:59 My coworker, Parth, sent me a Replit login-

Amjad Masad 13:01 Mm

Aria Finger 13:01 ... a few months ago.

Amjad Masad 13:02 Mm.

Aria Finger 13:02 And he's like, "Just play around." And literally within 20 minutes, I had built an app.

Amjad Masad 13:06 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 13:06 And, like, because I was so excited and because I could do it right away, like it's just so easy to get onboarded.

Amjad Masad 13:11 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 13:11 There's no barriers. Whether you're a CEO or a five-year-old-

Amjad Masad 13:15 Mm-hmm

Aria Finger 13:15 ... or someone who's a little rusty-

Amjad Masad 13:16 Mm-hmm

Aria Finger 13:17 ... you can get right in there. And I think Replit is sort of so closely associated with what might be the Silicon Valley word of the year, which is-

Amjad Masad 13:23 Mm

Aria Finger 13:23 ... vibe

Aria Finger 13:24 coding.

Amjad Masad 13:24 Yes.

Aria Finger 13:24 And so you've said that you don't love that word.

Amjad Masad 13:27 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 13:27 We all use that word.

Amjad Masad 13:29 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 13:29 How would you define vibe coding, and is there, are there other words that you would prefer-

Amjad Masad 13:34 Yeah

Aria Finger 13:35 ... to use when talking about sort of the full suite of what Replit does?

Amjad Masad 13:37 Yeah. Well, I, I've learned through my times in the Valley is not to f- fight the hype words.

Aria Finger 13:43 [laughs] Sure. Sure.

Amjad Masad 13:44 Uh, like I remember when cloud was controversial.

Aria Finger 13:46 [laughs]

Amjad Masad 13:46 A lot of people hated cloud, but it just stuck around, right?

Reid Hoffman 13:48 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 13:48 So, so although I have feelings about it, I, we, we kind of embrace it in many ways. So what vibe coding is, uh, it, it was coined by Andrej Karpathy.

Aria Finger 13:57 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 13:57 And he was the head of, uh, AI at, at Tesla at some point, and he talked about how, uh, when he's programming, he, especially when he's prototyping, he got to a point where he's no longer looking at the code, where he's typing in the prompts, a bunch of code comes out, and he hits Tab or Accept, and he just keeps going and trying to make as much progress as possible before it stalls out. He calls it, "This is no longer coding because I'm going by the vibes." Like whether the, if the vibes feel right, if the app is running, then it is working. And so that, that's how vibe coding, uh, come around. Now, I, I think that the reason that, you know, for us might not be really fitting is because, you know, a lot ... You can do coding, but a lot of times is you're not coding at all, and I think vibe coding might scare some people away because-

Aria Finger 14:41 Mm

Amjad Masad 14:41 ... the word coding is still in it. We wanna get to a point where you don't have to code at all. You should be in a creative space, right? A lot of coding is minutia. A lot of coding is accidental complexity. You know, the fact that I know that null is an object in JavaScript doesn't add anything to my life, right? But I had to learn all that stuff. I think there's gonna be a generation of programmers that don't have to learn that stuff.

Aria Finger 15:05 Mm.

Amjad Masad 15:05 I think that's fine. And, and that's the history of programming. Like when Grace Hopper, uh, the inventor of the compiler in the 1950s, invented the compiler, she was actually inventing a form of vibe coding. She said, "I want millions of people to experience programming 'cause it's such a wonderful thing and changes people's lives, changes businesses, and I want them to program in English." And she said that way before Karpathy-

Aria Finger 15:27 Wow

Amjad Masad 15:27 ... said that.

Reid Hoffman 15:28 Hm.

Amjad Masad 15:28 And then the machine code people were like, "Pitchforks."

Aria Finger 15:31 [laughs]

Amjad Masad 15:31 "Program in English?"

Reid Hoffman 15:32 [laughs]

Amjad Masad 15:33 "No, that's, you know, we can't do that. How can you understand how, you know, how much data you're putting into each register?" Whatever, right? But the history of humanity has been, "Let's abstract away the details so we can focus on the more creative things." Now, there was always specialists. There's-

Aria Finger 15:46 Mm-hmm

Amjad Masad 15:46 ... p- still people kind of looking at machine code, and there's people doing C, and there's people doing JavaScript, and I think there are people that are gonna be entirely programming in natural language.

Aria Finger 15:55 Hm.

Reid Hoffman 15:56 That's a great segue to one of the questions I've been thinking about is, like, what is the new literacy is the headline, 'cause obviously, you know, previously literacy was reading and writing, and part of how we get to a massive elevation of humanity-

Amjad Masad 16:08 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 16:08 ... is through a, as broad-based literacy amongst the billions of people as we possibly can.

Amjad Masad 16:13 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 16:13 Because what enables everything else enables learning, enables, uh, cultural evolution, enables patterns of thought. Now, with the, the no code code-

Amjad Masad 16:21 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 16:21 ... you know, kind of like the, the, the vibing-

Amjad Masad 16:24 Mm

Reid Hoffman 16:24 ... as opposed to vibe coding-

Amjad Masad 16:25 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 16:25 ... or the, you know, whichever, that's a new form of literacy.

Amjad Masad 16:29 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 16:29 So say a little bit about how you think about this new form of literacy, and then also add in a little bit is, like, one of the things I think is I think actually, in fact, everyone's going to be having a coding co-pilot-

Amjad Masad 16:41 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 16:41 ... whatever coding-

Amjad Masad 16:42 Mm. Yes

Reid Hoffman 16:42 ... vibe coding, because just like that CEO and also-

Amjad Masad 16:44 Mm

Reid Hoffman 16:44 ... it's like that's now part of just the way that you would also write.

Amjad Masad 16:47 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 16:47 Like write an email or anything else-

Amjad Masad 16:49 Yes. Yes

Reid Hoffman 16:49 ... as a way of doing it. So, so, so give a little bit of this kind of literacy-

Amjad Masad 16:53 Yeah

Reid Hoffman 16:53 ... and future of how everyone's gonna be navigating thinking-

Amjad Masad 16:56 Yeah

Reid Hoffman 16:56 ... and information spaces.

Amjad Masad 16:57 Yeah. Well, the first thing I will say is that, uh, uh, soft skills I think are more important than ever. So for a while in the, uh, in the US at least were all STEM, STEM, STEM. And STEM is-

Reid Hoffman 17:08 Mm

Amjad Masad 17:09 ... still really important, but I think, you know, you have a lot of engineers going to work right now, and they don't really, are not very good at communication, at, like, talking about ideas. They're good at writing the code, translating some of those ideas into code. But I think now the way we see our product being used by product managers, for example, product managers are some of the best vibe coders because they're really good at taking problems and breaking them down into their constituent parts, uh, and communicating them very well to the machine, and then, like, the machine can, can build them. So whatever we do, if it's, like, a question about education, in our education system, it needs to get better at much, much better at, like, being able to take problems and breaking them down. There was a hype word like I think 10, 15 years ago called, like, computational thinking.

Reid Hoffman 17:55 Mm.

Amjad Masad 17:56 And, like, people were building startups around teaching people computational thinking, and I think that's still important.

Reid Hoffman 18:00 Mm.

Amjad Masad 18:00 Because underlying all of this is still computational. So when you're describing an idea to an LLM to build it, you need to be able to talk about databases. You need to be able to talk about persistence. You need to be able to talk about lists and, and things like that. So if I'm designing a computer course for young people, I would focus more on the abstract concept of computation-

Reid Hoffman 18:21 Mm

Amjad Masad 18:22 ... as opposed to, again, null is not an object type of, type of thing.

Reid Hoffman 18:26 Part of that, to elaborate- Is not only is the baseline computation about what the three of us learned, even if it goes all the way back to freshman year-

Aria Finger 18:34 Long time ago

Reid Hoffman 18:34 ... CS, which it tends to be a very deterministic algorithmic-

Amjad Masad 18:38 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 18:38 ... data structures, memory management, other kinds of things.

Amjad Masad 18:41 Yeah.

Reid Hoffman 18:41 But also, I think what's gonna happen is we're going to bring in a set of other computational concepts. I think it'll be probabilistic concepts.

Amjad Masad 18:48 Mm-hmm. Yes.

Reid Hoffman 18:48 'Cause actually, most of like, where LLMs and everything else-

Amjad Masad 18:51 Right

Reid Hoffman 18:51 ... is very interesting, it's probabilistic.

Amjad Masad 18:52 Right.

Reid Hoffman 18:52 I think it'll be maybe even quantum.

Amjad Masad 18:55 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 18:55 But a bunch of other things where compute is not just like one plus one equals two. There, there's a richer sense of compute.

Amjad Masad 19:01 Yes.

Reid Hoffman 19:01 Have you seen any of that yet with Replit, or is that still kind of in the glimmerings of what's coming?

Amjad Masad 19:06 Well, we see the problems of not understanding it.

Reid Hoffman 19:08 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 19:09 We see the problems of user not understanding-

Reid Hoffman 19:11 Mm

Amjad Masad 19:11 ... that it's a probabilistic system, it's a-

Reid Hoffman 19:13 Yeah

Amjad Masad 19:13 ... stochastic system.

Reid Hoffman 19:14 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 19:14 They expect results to be reproducible and all of that stuff. So 100%, like I think the future-

Reid Hoffman 19:19 Mm

Amjad Masad 19:20 ... is understanding these concepts really well. And by the way, once you understand them, you can predict how these tools might work, and you can go from one tool to another and still have the same mental model understanding of it. In the same way that, you know, when I was growing up, I really understood how computers work, and that allowed me to build, you know, all these businesses and programs, whatever. Understanding how LLMs work is gonna be very, very important. Now, the problem is most people's experience is with ChatGPT that is trained to sound like a friend. You're not getting raw access into the LLM in order to like figure out how to program it. And so we just introduced a set of AI integrations, so now if you ask Replit, like, "Make me, uh, an app that takes a prompt, generates an image model, audio model, puts them together," or something like that. It's so simple. You don't have to do anything, just put in that prompt. It will tell you, "We're gonna use OpenAI for this. We're gonna use Gemini for this."

Reid Hoffman 20:06 Mm.

Amjad Masad 20:06 We'll take care of the billing, and we'll bill you on behalf them. But I feel like there needs to also be a, uh, s- sort of UI. I don't think we've invented the UI for how to mix and match these LLMs and how to program them. So as much as I am a big believer in natural language-based programming, I think at some point, as agents get better and they're like working most of the time in the background, we need to invent the new interfaces for how to program these machines.

Aria Finger 20:33 Well, also, I mean, you said that most people when they think of AI, they think of ChatGPT.

Amjad Masad 20:38 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 20:38 And so when I'm talking about my friends who are not technical or not at, you know, not in Silicon Valley, like that's their only thought-

Amjad Masad 20:45 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm

Aria Finger 20:45 ... about what AI is.

Amjad Masad 20:46 Yes.

Aria Finger 20:46 And so they can't even open their minds to anything else because that's the one experience they have. And I think one of the things we're excited about-

Amjad Masad 20:54 Mm

Aria Finger 20:54 ... is that with Replit and tools like it-

Amjad Masad 20:56 Mm

Aria Finger 20:56 ... we're gonna open up the possibility to build-

Amjad Masad 20:58 Mm

Aria Finger 20:58 ... to so many people. And so sort of a two-part question. One is, what is the ways that we can have more people experience AI-

Amjad Masad 21:04 Mm-hmm

Aria Finger 21:04 ... in this positive, agentic, like-

Amjad Masad 21:06 Mm

Aria Finger 21:07 ... super agency way? And then like what happens-

Amjad Masad 21:09 Mm

Aria Finger 21:09 ... when we open up these opportunities for more people to build?

Amjad Masad 21:12 Yeah, so, uh, Alan Kay, uh, has this essay that's, that's... Alan Kay, one of the, uh, computer pioneers, has this essay called "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet."

Aria Finger 21:22 Mm.

Reid Hoffman 21:23 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 21:23 And in it, he makes the case that literacy changed the world. We had democratic revolution, scientific revolution. You couldn't imagine any of those without literacy. Now, computational literacy, uh, or people being able to use a computer to its best ability, which is being able to program a computer, will change the world in fundamental ways. I think you need an entire generation of people-

Aria Finger 21:44 Mm-hmm

Amjad Masad 21:44 ... to grow up using these tools. Maybe I'm showing my bias because I have a history in kind of working in education. I was founding engineer at Code Academy. We taught millions of people-

Reid Hoffman 21:53 Hmm

Amjad Masad 21:53 ... how to code. Uh, and I like to help governments now. We did a deal with the government of Saudi Arabia where they wanna put vibe coding as part of their curriculum.

Reid Hoffman 22:00 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 22:00 Like an entire generation of people actually experientially, you know, learning how you use these tools will change the world in ways we haven't-

Aria Finger 22:08 Mm-hmm

Amjad Masad 22:08 ... predicted

Amjad Masad 22:09 just yet.

Reid Hoffman 22:10 One of my first public Replit experience and angles was we produced LinkedIn.

Amjad Masad 22:14 Yes. [laughs]

Reid Hoffman 22:14 We just did LinkedIn.

Amjad Masad 22:15 I saw that, yeah.

Reid Hoffman 22:16 Yes. Um, and it was partially 'cause it was kinda, you know, it was a bit of a memetic hack-

Amjad Masad 22:20 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 22:20 ... and everything else. Part of what I think both the AI revolution does and also what Replit does-

Amjad Masad 22:27 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 22:28 ... is expand the zone of your imagination-

Amjad Masad 22:31 Yes

Reid Hoffman 22:31 ... about what's doable. Walk us through kind of like, like what's a really... I mean, and obviously, like it's not a-

Amjad Masad 22:38 Hmm

Reid Hoffman 22:38 ... I'm not looking for a manual 'cause-

Amjad Masad 22:39 Yeah

Reid Hoffman 22:39 ... just like your gaming point.

Amjad Masad 22:40 Right.

Reid Hoffman 22:40 It's like a manual.

Amjad Masad 22:41 Right.

Reid Hoffman 22:41 But like what kind of imagination-

Amjad Masad 22:44 Right

Reid Hoffman 22:44 ... should people bring with them-

Amjad Masad 22:46 Yes

Reid Hoffman 22:46 ... to start learning Replit-

Amjad Masad 22:48 Yeah

Reid Hoffman 22:48 ... and bringing an idea to reality?

Amjad Masad 22:50 Such a good point because we still suffer... Although you don't need an onboarding or a manual, we still suffer from the blank page problem. So we see a lot of it. We talk to a lot of users that sign up to Replit and then sit there for a little bit and then leave. And we're like, "What happened?" And it's like, "I just didn't know what to type in there." And so of course, in retrospect, you know, us in Tech, living in Tech, it's like, "Oh, you're prompt. What do you mean?"

Reid Hoffman 23:14 [laughs]

Amjad Masad 23:15 But of course, you know, it's a, it's a skill. Now, before I go back to how we solve it, I think after people go through this hump, it's, it's an amazing experience because you become possessed. You walk around your day, and you're looking for software problems to solve.

Reid Hoffman 23:30 [laughs]

Amjad Masad 23:31 You're like, "Wow, I have this new hammer," and like, and now everything kinda looks like a nail. And once, once that clicks, it's pretty amazing. So now we're doing a lot of work at the top of the funnel, like figuring out what kind of educational experiences we give people, what k- when do we tell them about it. But the, the first thing I would say is don't complicate it. Like-

Aria Finger 23:51 Hmm

Amjad Masad 23:51 ... you know, have a, a very simple idea, an app that you would've liked existed. Like maybe e- every one of us has an idea for an app that, uh, you can't find it in the App Store, right?

Aria Finger 24:02 Totally.

Amjad Masad 24:02 Like I want something to do this or that for my kids. Having kids is a great way because-

Aria Finger 24:06 I was just thinking that.

Amjad Masad 24:07 [laughs]

Aria Finger 24:07 There are so many things. You're like, "Ah, just organize my camp schedule." [laughs]

Amjad Masad 24:11 Right. Exactly. Or I want this, you know, educational thing. I wanna be able to do this fun thing with my kids. And then talk to it like you would talk to a person.

Aria Finger 24:18 Mm.

Amjad Masad 24:18 Just say, "Well, I have an idea," and like, you know, just like- Don't worry about the grammars, all that. You'll get better at prompting, but initially, just really get in and with any kind of idea. If you want some sample ideas, I would just say like basic things, like just say, "I wanna build a collaborative whiteboard," and then just i- imagine if you've done improv, improv is like a good, good way to do it, just like word association. "I want a collaborative whiteboard," and then like look around the room, and you'll see a plant that, uh, allows me to like create a garden or something like that.

Aria Finger 24:50 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 24:50 So really just be generative-

Aria Finger 24:53 Yeah

Amjad Masad 24:53 ... and you'll get an experience, and you'll get a feeling of it.

Aria Finger 24:55 Do you know sort of who is the typical Replit user, and like what kinds of things are they building already?

Amjad Masad 25:01 Yeah.

Aria Finger 25:01 Is it, oh, 80% of people are building whatever, SaaS software?

Amjad Masad 25:05 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Amjad Masad 25:06 I think most of it is AI software, which is why we built this recent thing. It used to be that you have to go figure out how to get an API key from OpenAI or others, but people have AI ideas. Like they see-

Aria Finger 25:17 Mm

Amjad Masad 25:17 ... AI, and like a lot of people will be like, "Oh, I wish ChatGPT did this one thing."

Aria Finger 25:22 Mm.

Amjad Masad 25:23 Right?

Aria Finger 25:23 Mm.

Amjad Masad 25:24 Uh, and then, and then they wanna build AI experiences like chatbots, like Read AI is a great example.

Aria Finger 25:29 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 25:29 Obviously, Read AI is very advanced-

Aria Finger 25:31 Mm-hmm

Amjad Masad 25:31 ... uh, in that it has video and all of that. But you can build like, you know, Amjad AI, like go like tell Replit to like go look at your personal blog-

Aria Finger 25:40 Mm-hmm

Amjad Masad 25:40 ... or paste in your notes and just say, "I wanna create a chat experience that sounds like me based on these notes." And so AI is a, is a really big one. Another one is like people wanna build businesses.

Aria Finger 25:50 Mm.

Amjad Masad 25:51 And this is, you know, as I started thinking about our business more, there's two aspects of our business, I would say maybe three. There is the, uh, consumer aspect, which is, you know, building family stuff and building-

Aria Finger 26:03 Mm

Amjad Masad 26:03 ... personal things. And then there's the enterprise, which is like automating things at work, line of business applications-

Aria Finger 26:10 Sure

Amjad Masad 26:10 ... you know, rapid prototyping, product development inside businesses, larger businesses, and then entrepreneurs. And the way I started thinking about entrepreneurs is that everyone has domain knowledge in their head that is not monetized just yet. Similar to how, you know, Airbnb found that everyone has space in their room that's not monetized, there are people all over the world that have niche specific problems that they've run into that no one e-else has solved. I was talking to an entrepreneur on Replit the other day. His wife is a yoga teacher in rural England.

Aria Finger 26:44 Mm.

Amjad Masad 26:44 And she does these pop-up yoga events, and most of the communication's happening over WhatsApp. Payment is really hard to do. They use PayPal, all these different things, and so he wanted to build a platform for her, but other people like her. So she doesn't have a yoga studio that you can go to every day, but she does these events at backyards-

Aria Finger 27:02 Sure

Amjad Masad 27:02 ... and things like that. So he's built a platform, and he has users, and he has other instructors. And, and so the, the... every niche in our life, there are people that are experts in that previously were not entrepreneurs because they didn't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to go pay developers to do it. Now they can do it.

Aria Finger 27:19 I love that example because obviously there's entrepreneurs that you're serving that are building, you know, million-dollar, billion-dollar businesses that serve hundreds of thousands of customers, millions of customers. But I think the like solopreneur, the woman who has a yoga studio, like I think of my mom, who's a piano teacher.

Amjad Masad 27:35 Yeah.

Aria Finger 27:35 And she's always trying to figure out, how do I get my schedule straight? How do I get payment? How do I figure this out? And so there's so many, like she's an entrepreneur. The person who runs a yoga studio, the person who has like a bakery outside their house, like those are the people who would never be able to afford fancy coders, a fancy website.

Amjad Masad 27:53 Yeah.

Aria Finger 27:53 But Replit can empower them to do so much more.

Amjad Masad 27:55 Yes.

Aria Finger 27:55 So I love that.

Amjad Masad 27:56 And there's something about it that makes me really excited about the world to come. As much as I love Silicon Valley, we tend to flatten the world. We just like build one size fit all, and that, that means like, you know, your SaaS software tends to have all these buttons and configuration just to fit every use case. But instead, we're gonna explode that and decentralize it around the world, and every community might have a special business that does one specific niche thing.

Aria Finger 28:23 Wow.

Amjad Masad 28:23 That diversity, I think, is exciting.

Aria Finger 28:25 And as part of, um, that diversity and being fun-

Amjad Masad 28:30 Mm-hmm

Aria Finger 28:30 ... um, we'd like to play for you a short clip of one of the ways people have used Replit to build something important to them.

Amjad Masad 28:37 Okay, great.

Aria Finger 28:38 So...

Speaker 28:38 What if you turned boba into a game? I prompted a basic app and sketched out some boba. I made three different drinks, taro, milk tea, and matcha. I added logic so the pearls fall from the sky. If you miss three bobas, you lose. But the game was way too easy, so let's make it difficult and add some bombs and a scoreboard. I noticed the game was a bit glitchy, and I wanted to try it on mobile. So I'm at my favorite cafe. I added more colors, different fonts, and harder levels. The matcha level is actually-

Amjad Masad 29:01 That's the best thing. People can code on their phones right now, which is amazing.

Aria Finger 29:05 Exactly

Speaker 29:06 ... not done yet. What other features should I add?

Amjad Masad 29:08 That's, that's fantastic.

Aria Finger 29:09 [laughs]

Amjad Masad 29:09 That's, I mean-

Aria Finger 29:11 And we didn't just select it because she added it to her bio.

Amjad Masad 29:13 Right. [laughs]

Aria Finger 29:14 [laughs]

Amjad Masad 29:15 When we first started working on the, on the phone, people said we're just like crazy. Like, because back then there was no AI. Um, and we, we had to build a lot of things to make coding on the phone like a little bit easier. But I, but I always imagined... Because back in school, I remember that I had a Symbian phone. I was like, "I wish I could program it under my desk," [laughs] you know? Uh, so it's really cool to see people doing that now.

Aria Finger 29:40 So one of the things that as you dig into AI, it becomes, you know, one, the earlier question, which is how do you broaden your imagination? But also now, like what's, what's, what's a good way of optimizing? Like for example, you know, obviously you can do things that have huge token counts, and that's kinda like doesn't build a good business-

Amjad Masad 29:59 Right

Aria Finger 29:59 ... you know, et cetera. It might be fun as a one-off thing, but that kind of thing. What is, as we're in the game dynamics, the next level of-

Amjad Masad 30:05 Mm-hmm

Aria Finger 30:06 ... compute thinking, right?

Amjad Masad 30:07 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 30:07 Because it's like, okay, how does this work within the operational envelope-

Amjad Masad 30:11 Mm-hmm

Aria Finger 30:11 ... of like AI enabling it, being able to figure out what kind of interface elements.

Amjad Masad 30:15 Right.

Aria Finger 30:16 What's some of the, the things you've seen there in terms of, you know, kind of context optimization, managing the AI token outputs-

Amjad Masad 30:25 Right, right

Aria Finger 30:25 ... you know, help- helping people with that kind of compute thinking?

Amjad Masad 30:28 Yeah, I mean, there, there are two aspects of this. One is, uh, strategy. You wanna be able to do things that the big labs are not gonna do or eat your, eat your lunch, and like actually be able to build a good, good business. Um- And, and then the other thing, what can LLMs do right now, and what scaffolding do they need around them,

Amjad Masad 30:48 right? The scaffolding part is really important because this is where you can build the value on top of the LLMs. So the way I think about, uh, our business right now, we were in the business of training models.

Aria Finger 30:58 Mm.

Amjad Masad 30:58 Now we're, we use all the different commercial-

Aria Finger 31:00 Mm

Amjad Masad 31:00 ... models, and I see our business is to build the, the milieu, the environment around LLMs. If you think about LLMs as like a, as a person, you wanna live the ha- you wanna create the habitat for them, right?

Aria Finger 31:12 Mm.

Amjad Masad 31:12 So we built the best habitat, I think, for programming, right? So when we first did this pivot from, like, the human being of the programmer to the AI being the programmer, I took the same teams at the company, and I told them, "Now you're no longer build for humans, you're building for AI." So the editor team built editing tools for the AI. The cloud infrastructure teams that have built deployment tools for humans, they now build it for the AI. So I would s- look at any different vertical, and I would think this way. It, you know, if you wanna build, like, a financial agent, just think about what kind of environment you can build for that agent. Now, I see a lot of people, for example, like, trying to put LLMs into, into Excel sheets, whatever, which I think works okay, but can you build an Excel interface for the AI, right? Like, in a way it's sexual, it can use it in, uh, you know, based on that you wanna hit the right distribution of the, of the LLMs. You can pick any vertical, and if you wanna build, like, a really great business, just think about building your user, your first user as the LLM. Think about building that habitat for LLM to live in, to create, like, amazing experiences.

Aria Finger 32:15 Amazing things with the product.

Amjad Masad 32:16 Mm.

Aria Finger 32:16 The unlock of creativity-

Amjad Masad 32:17 Mm

Aria Finger 32:17 ... the unlocks of what does that mean for more personalization, things that work for individuals, businesses, you know, creative thinking is great. So let's talk a little bit about also kind of some of the business attributes.

Amjad Masad 32:28 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 32:28 And, like, one of them is, you know, you just mentioned that the, that, that, you know, part of what you've done as opposed to homegrown in your own models, you're now using a fleet of models.

Amjad Masad 32:38 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 32:38 But that obviously makes you somewhat dependent on them-

Amjad Masad 32:41 Right

Aria Finger 32:41 ... makes you more copyable-

Amjad Masad 32:43 Right

Aria Finger 32:43 ... et cetera, you know, business attributes. So one of the things that the people who listen to our podcast, a lot are entrepreneurs, you're navigating a business challenge-

Amjad Masad 32:50 Right

Aria Finger 32:51 ... that they need to learn from.

Amjad Masad 32:52 Yeah.

Aria Finger 32:52 So how do you think about that? What are the things that you're doing to build unique and enduring business?

Amjad Masad 32:57 Yeah.

Aria Finger 32:57 What are the kinds of considerations that go into that?

Amjad Masad 32:59 First thing I would say is user obsession. There's a massive platform called LLMs, right? That platform is useful on its own. People can use it directly. But for you to build a very valuable business on top of it, what kind of value are you creating? One is if you're really obsessive over certain types of users, OpenAI can't build for every type of view of the user in the world. So pick a user that you know very well.

Aria Finger 33:22 Mm.

Amjad Masad 33:22 Hopefully, it's you. You've had that experience.

Aria Finger 33:25 Mm.

Amjad Masad 33:25 You're, you're a salesperson. You were gonna build the best LLM for salespeople, right? That goes into UI, UX, all that. Now, second, and this, this is my comment. I'll go a little deeper on the comment about the environment around it. So w- you know, I said that people in, uh, using Replit should feel like they're in a safe environment.

Aria Finger 33:44 Mm.

Amjad Masad 33:44 Uh, it, it should feel like anything is reversible. Now, that turns out to be a huge technical challenge.

Aria Finger 33:49 Mm.

Amjad Masad 33:49 Now, you could easily kind of hack around it or say, you know, "We'll just, you know, restart the app. We'll do whatever." But what we did is we built a transactional file system-

Aria Finger 33:59 Mm

Amjad Masad 33:59 ... that allows undo. Like, we have proprietary file system that we spent two years building that every action is like an immutable part of a ledger-

Aria Finger 34:09 Mm

Amjad Masad 34:09 ... that anything can be rolled back and rolled for- forward. That ends up being like a time travel system, and now we're finding more use cases for it. For, for example, one way to make, um, models better and more performant is by doing sampling. Because models are stochastic, every time you run the model, you might get better results, uh, you might get worse results. Uh, and if there's a way to verify whether the result is good or bad, you can sample from the model. So what we do is because the system is immutable, has this characteristics of being very cheap to fork. So you can take a file system, you can fork it 100 times, run the same prompt w- with different parameters on, on these different, uh, forks, and then pick the best one. Do it repeatedly. Uh, obviously, that, that costs quite a bit of money, but for the advanced users, they're willing to pay it.

Aria Finger 34:58 Sure.

Amjad Masad 34:58 They, they will get the, the extra money. So two hard technical things on top of the models in the environment where the models are sitting, right? You wanna build technical advantage. It doesn't have to be in the model itself-

Aria Finger 35:11 Mm

Amjad Masad 35:11 ... because that costs billions of dollars. There are, you know, huge industries around it. You don't wanna be training models, at least not yet, when you're building, initially building a business. But you can do a lot of other hard technical challenges on top of it to make the models work a lot better. That's the second thing. Third is reaching scale.

Aria Finger 35:28 Mm.

Amjad Masad 35:29 Once you reach scale, you actually have negotiating, uh, negotiation advantages. Like, you can negotiate really large discounts with providers, similar to cloud.

Aria Finger 35:37 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 35:38 Uh, and you can pit them against each other [both chuckling] and so on and so forth. So, and venture capital is an amazing system to give you that initial money that, that allows you to get-

Aria Finger 35:49 Mm

Amjad Masad 35:49 ... to scale quickly, and then the business, you know, and then you can enter more of an optimization

Amjad Masad 35:55 phase of the business.

Aria Finger 35:55 So you have this great metaphor, uh, which is cathedrals-

Amjad Masad 36:00 Mm-hmm

Aria Finger 36:00 ... built from bazaars.

Amjad Masad 36:01 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 36:01 And so you wanna describe the tension-

Amjad Masad 36:03 Sure

Aria Finger 36:04 ... between open source and closed product design.

Amjad Masad 36:06 Mm.

Aria Finger 36:06 And the bazaar is this messy, collaborative, maybe fun-

Amjad Masad 36:10 Right

Aria Finger 36:10 ... bright, and that's where open source lives.

Amjad Masad 36:12 Right.

Aria Finger 36:12 And then you have the cathedral, and that is the top-down, that, that's sort of Apple-

Amjad Masad 36:16 Right

Aria Finger 36:16 ... where they live. And you said that you wanna build cathedrals from bazaars.

Amjad Masad 36:22 Right. Yeah.

Aria Finger 36:22 Tell us more about what that means to you.

Amjad Masad 36:24 Yeah, so I think that comes from Eric Raymond or some of the original-

Aria Finger 36:27 Mm

Amjad Masad 36:27 ... like Linux hackers, cathedrals versus bazaars. And there was a huge discussion early on in the, in the world of software. And so I- I gave a twist on it as cathedrals made of bazaars. Now, in the, uh, early 2010s when, uh, this idea of no code kind of emerged, there are a lot of different approaches. You know, there are amazing businesses built there, obviously. Uh, you know, Zapier, Airtable, Notion, you can all think of them as no code builders. Now, our approach, which for a while didn't work until AI kind of really made it work, the amazing, uh, hyper-competitive, diverse landscape of open source, of people building all these open source packages and components, what's happening there is, is b- it, it's like a bazaar. It's messy, but it's, it's very innovative, very... Can you build a facade on top of all of this that makes it feel as good as a user experience as, say, a Notion? And it wasn't obvious that you can do that, but the kind of abstractions you have to build on top of that, and you can still hook into the latest and greatest. Like, when a new package comes in open source, Replit has it on day one because, 'cause we built all this abstraction, like, to be able to go get the packages and install them and run, run them on the system. And so we're riding a huge wave. We're riding multiple waves. LLM's getting better. We're also riding open source getting better.

Reid Hoffman 37:48 Mm.

Amjad Masad 37:49 New programming language comes out, we can run it on day one. And that required a lot of investments up front, and there are a lot of competitors that are not doing this.

Reid Hoffman 37:55 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 37:56 And it might be short term easier, uh, for them to do, but I know how the landscape programming works. Things will shift.

Reid Hoffman 38:04 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 38:05 Like the other day, we saw a new, uh, JSON format called Tune that is more efficient. It's, I think, token optimized-

Reid Hoffman 38:13 Mm

Amjad Masad 38:13 ... uh, format that is more efficient for LLMs. And so again, like, programming will continue to improve, and we want to, to be the platform where you can program anything with LLMs.

Reid Hoffman 38:25 Let's think a little bit also about kind of how the future of work is going to evolve. You know, most people's experience right now is with chatbots, so they, they put in something, they get out something, they put in something, they get out something. So they're kind of directing the work in some ways, but it's kind of iteratively from what they're doing. So how do you imagine this trend, Replit, others, in this kind of everyone working with, you know, kind of that power of code? Because it's got a... You need a combination of that individual creativity, imagination, you know, broadening imagination and drive, but also standardization for work processes.

Amjad Masad 38:58 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 38:58 It's one of the reasons why the classic industrialization, I fill out this form, and then I hand the form to you, and, you know, da, da, da, da.

Amjad Masad 39:03 Right.

Reid Hoffman 39:03 As we were doing it. So I'm certain that you've been thinking about what this means-

Amjad Masad 39:06 Yes

Reid Hoffman 39:06 ... for the future of-

Amjad Masad 39:07 Yeah

Reid Hoffman 39:07 ... of corporate work. What are some of the observations you might share?

Amjad Masad 39:11 Yeah. When I first came to the corporate world, one thing that I found extremely depressing is, uh, how atomized and siloed people are.

Reid Hoffman 39:22 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 39:23 So, you know, over time, uh, you know, with capitalism sort of emerging, you have the original, I think, Adam Smith, like how do you make a pencil, right? Like someone make an eraser. And so people become sort of cogs in a machine.

Reid Hoffman 39:37 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 39:37 And I don't think that is conducive to the human spirit. Like, I think humans are fundamentally creative. I think anytime we assume the shape of a machine, I think people are actually not happy in their lives. I'm not a Marxist, but I've read some Marx, and Marx has the theory of alienation and the theory of the... I think Marx was right on a lot of the critique of capitalism.

Reid Hoffman 40:00 Yeah. [chuckles]

Amjad Masad 40:00 Maybe not the solutions.

Reid Hoffman 40:01 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 40:02 Um-

Reid Hoffman 40:02 Definitely not the solutions.

Amjad Masad 40:03 Yeah. [laughs]

Reid Hoffman 40:05 Yes. Yes.

Amjad Masad 40:05 The, one of his critiques is alienation, is that you don't, uh, you don't see the fruits of your work. You, you, you build one part of, one part of, one part of, part of a larger supply chain of, of things, right? And that doesn't make people proud of like, like I said, when I was a kid, when I built this entire thing, and my, my brother used it. That's amazing. That's, I think, what, uh, what being human is about. And so I think now we're at an oppor- Well, there's an opportunity in the workplace to a lot of that standardization stuff to be taken care of by agents.

Reid Hoffman 40:38 Absolutely.

Amjad Masad 40:38 By work process automation and all that stuff. And what's left for people, yes, we'll have broad swim lanes. Like I'm generally in design, but I can code. I can write a, you know, PRD using ChatGPT or whatever. I can even have a marketing idea.

Reid Hoffman 40:55 Mm.

Amjad Masad 40:55 I can like use all the tools and like, "Hey, I built like this, this marketing package." And that to me is a lot more exciting.

Reid Hoffman 41:02 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 41:02 So we, we have, for example, one of our, uh, customers, large enterprise, one, one person had an idea. Uh, it's a, it's a, you know, real estate, uh, marketplace where they connect, uh, real estate buyers with real estate agents. Had an idea on how to optimize that algorithm and couldn't get engineering resources.

Reid Hoffman 41:22 Mm.

Amjad Masad 41:22 Now, previously, it was just dead. The idea is dead. Although he's in the business, he understands it. He talks to real estate agents all the time. Instead, he went to Replit. He built a new routing algorithm that drove tens of millions of dollars, if not $100 million to the business, and that person got promoted m- again and again and again and again. And, and, and now he's sitting, he's sitting with the board members guiding their AI strategy. Entrepreneurship, I think, in my opinion, is not just about building businesses. You can be an activist entrepreneur. You can be a humanitarian entrepreneur. You can be an entrepreneur inside a large business.

Reid Hoffman 41:54 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 41:55 And I promise you, your life will, will, will be a lot more interesting, exciting. You'll meet a lot more exciting people. You'll have a better reputation. You'll have a halo around you. So my hope for the future of corporate work, but humanity in general, is that as the boring things, the automated things actually taken care of by machines, we're left to be more entrepreneurial and more creative.

Reid Hoffman 42:18 Obviously, totally hope that's the case. It goes back to my very first book, "The Startup of You."

Amjad Masad 42:22 Mm-hmm. Yes.

Reid Hoffman 42:23 So it's like it's, it's a definite strong 'cause it's like it's not that we all have to start businesses, but that kind of creativity, entrepreneurship, engagement with it, the exact passion-

Amjad Masad 42:31 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 42:31 ... that you had with your brother. Um, one micro thing that I think is an important thing for people to focus on 'cause it's part of the general lack of context awareness

Aria Finger 42:41 ... that current agents have.

Amjad Masad 42:42 Yeah.

Aria Finger 42:42 What do you see as the kind of the longest unsupervised work that agents can currently do?

Amjad Masad 42:48 I, I think it's more possible than our tools allow it to be.

Aria Finger 42:54 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 42:54 So I think state-of-the-art LLMs, uh, especially Gemini has done a great job at a million context, million token context. Uh, but others have 200,000-

Aria Finger 43:04 Mm

Amjad Masad 43:04 ... or, or, or somewhere there. You know, the easy thing is, like, to fit every, all history inside a context, but that's not, that's not feasible. There are a few components, if you put them together, then you can run agents a lot longer. Uh, one component is verification. The work needs to be verified. It's a form of supervision.

Aria Finger 43:21 Mm.

Amjad Masad 43:21 If the AI agent is going on a path and doesn't have feedback from the environment, from the work, from the human, for someone, then it will very likely stray off the ba- path and do something really... Like, if you make one mistake, it'll just compound over time. So Replit Agent 3 came out in September. We now boot up a browser for the agent, have the agent use it to test the application for you.

Aria Finger 43:45 Mm.

Amjad Masad 43:45 Uh, and we have another agent that's adversarial, that's, like, reviewing the code and giving you feedback. And because of that, we went from Agent 1 ran for two minutes unsupervised. After that, it didn't work very well.

Aria Finger 43:58 Mm.

Amjad Masad 43:58 Agent 2 is 20 minutes. Agent 3 w- you know, 200 minutes. We're seeing 200-minute runs-

Aria Finger 44:04 Wow

Amjad Masad 44:04 ... that are actually really, really useful. Um, there's, there's still mistakes and all of that. Now we've introduced an autonomy selector inside Replit. So depending on your risk appetite, you can go all the way high autonomy.

Aria Finger 44:17 Mm.

Amjad Masad 44:17 And some people run it for 10 hours. Now, I don't recommend it to everyone. Now, if you have a lot of disposable income, you should-

Aria Finger 44:22 Sure [laughs]

Amjad Masad 44:22 ... definitely do it. But you know, we have medium autonomy, and it can run for, you know, 100 minutes. High autonomy, it can run for 200, 300 minutes. So I, I think it's possible. In, in terms of the context, so the verification's very important. So you pass from one agent to, to another, and so, uh, y- you know, one agent does a unit of work. Another agent gets a prompt and says, "Test the app." You don't have to give it the entire thing. So it's a multi-agent system.

Aria Finger 44:47 Mm.

Amjad Masad 44:47 And then after the testing is done, pass back, but you don't pass it back using the old existing context. You kind of summarize and give the next a- it's almost like passing the baton to the next one. Again, ideally, you would put everything in the agent, but I'm not sure we're gonna be there anytime soon.

Aria Finger 45:03 So I think this sort of relates back to what we were saying, how the difference between programmers and non-programmers is collapsing-

Amjad Masad 45:10 Yeah

Aria Finger 45:10 ... because if everyone has a Replit agent, you don't need to be a programmer. And I think so many people are talking about, and you said yourself, you worked at Code Academy. The last 15, 20 years, we were telling everyone-

Amjad Masad 45:20 Yeah

Aria Finger 45:20 ... like, "Parents, teach your kids to program."

Amjad Masad 45:23 Yeah.

Aria Finger 45:23 "Learning to code is the future." You recently said you-

Amjad Masad 45:27 Yeah

Aria Finger 45:27 ... don't think-

Amjad Masad 45:28 Yeah

Aria Finger 45:28 ... uh, people should learn how to code. And so I'm all for the democratization of this-

Amjad Masad 45:33 Yeah

Aria Finger 45:33 ... for people who are not coders now to be able to use Replit to do amazing things.

Amjad Masad 45:36 Right.

Aria Finger 45:37 Yet at least right now, I feel like the people who are most adept at using AI for anything are actually the people who have learned how to code.

Amjad Masad 45:45 Yeah.

Aria Finger 45:45 So I would say to you, do you think we're at a moment in time, or will that continue to be true? You're a parent.

Amjad Masad 45:51 Right.

Aria Finger 45:51 Will you want your kid to learn how to code in the traditional sense-

Amjad Masad 45:54 Yeah

Aria Finger 45:54 ... or that's gonna be a, a skill that's not important soon?

Amjad Masad 45:57 Look, similar to, uh, what Grace Hopper said, you know, 75 years ago, she said, "Specialists will exist, but we want this technology to be ge-" So my advice would apply to 99% of people.

Aria Finger 46:10 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 46:11 Like, uh, you know, I don't think you... Most people who wanna make things with software and computers don't need to learn how to code.

Aria Finger 46:17 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 46:17 It's gonna be a huge cost on them. It's gonna take a lot of time. But instead, just jump into making things. And if it's your cup of tea, if you're looking at the agent traces, and you're seeing the code, and you're like, "Okay, I'd like to learn what it's doing," then go learn it. I think it will take you further for sure, uh, this time along. But if you believe in AI, as I do, and we're gonna continue to make progress on AI agents, and all the labs, billions of dollars, perhaps trillions of dollars, are going towards optimizing code specifically-

Aria Finger 46:47 Yep

Amjad Masad 46:48 ... then we're gonna get to a point where it's, again, specialists exist. We need them. If we're sending people to the moon, I don't want them to be on a vibe coding-

Aria Finger 46:56 [laughs] Sure

Amjad Masad 46:57 ... uh, you know, a computer. But for the vast majority of applications, I think vibe coders will be able to make them. Now, to the question about my kids, I've struggled with this a little bit. I've never wanted to admit that there's a temperament to coding, but there is.

Aria Finger 47:10 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 47:10 There is a certain temperament to coding. Do my kids have that temperament? I'm not entirely sure.

Aria Finger 47:15 What do you think is the temperament that, uh, that a coder needs?

Amjad Masad 47:17 Basic thing, like the ability to sit in front of the computer for 12 hours.

Aria Finger 47:20 Hmm. Sure.

Amjad Masad 47:21 I think coding is actually bad on your health, and if you're okay with that [laughs]

Aria Finger 47:24 [laughs]

Amjad Masad 47:25 Like, you really... I mean, I don't know any programmer that didn't go through periods of life where they're, like, really spending a lot of time in that, in front of their computer with Diet Coke or whatever, and, like, just, like, coding all the time and, like, learning every aspect of it. Do you enjoy that? A lot of people don't, and that's fine. Like, again, diversity. Like-

Aria Finger 47:44 Mm-hmm

Amjad Masad 47:44 ... the people come with all sorts of temperaments, and some people want visual things, wanna interact with visual s- things. Some people wanna work with other people all the time. But if you're someone who's comfortable, like I was, and I am, I am, like, totally... Like, my wife's not the same. Like, I have an insane ability to be alone. Like-

Aria Finger 48:03 Mm

Amjad Masad 48:03 ... I can be alone for a year.

Aria Finger 48:04 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 48:05 Uh [laughs] , but, but other people can, and, you know, that's, that's fine. We should be okay with people of different temperaments.

Aria Finger 48:12 That is actually really illustrative to me-

Amjad Masad 48:14 Yeah

Aria Finger 48:14 ... because I love math. I love logic.

Amjad Masad 48:16 Uh-huh.

Aria Finger 48:16 I loved AP Computer Science in high school, but I'm an extrovert.

Amjad Masad 48:20 Yep.

Aria Finger 48:20 I couldn't... I can't do that. I can't sit with code for 12 hours.

Amjad Masad 48:24 Right.

Aria Finger 48:24 Okay.

Amjad Masad 48:24 Yeah.

Aria Finger 48:24 So people like me are okay in the future.

Amjad Masad 48:27 Yes [laughs] .

Aria Finger 48:27 Uh, they'll find other jobs.

Amjad Masad 48:28 I know that soft

Amjad Masad 48:29 skills are important.

Aria Finger 48:29 Exactly.

Amjad Masad 48:30 Yeah, yeah.

Aria Finger 48:30 Soft skills are important.

Amjad Masad 48:31 Yeah.

Aria Finger 48:31 Well, so I feel like we're in this time where some of us see Replit and see AI, and we're like, "Oh my God, it is so empowering." We're helping small business owners.

Amjad Masad 48:40 Mm.

Aria Finger 48:40 We're helping young people. But when you actually look at the numbers, it's like more Americans are nervous about AI-

Amjad Masad 48:47 Mm-hmm

Aria Finger 48:47 ... or scared about AI than are excited about it. And so if you're talking to someone like that, like, what do you say to them? Like, what's your sort of go-to line to be like, "No, this is why-

Amjad Masad 48:58 Hmm

Aria Finger 48:58 ... we have excitement coming forward and in the future, even though we understand that there are risks"?

Amjad Masad 49:02 I think there's, like, a various distribution of intent. Some people just wanna get famous by writing like-

Aria Finger 49:06 Sure, sure

Amjad Masad 49:07 ... sci-fi sounding.

Aria Finger 49:08 [laughs]

Amjad Masad 49:09 Like, you know, just to be concrete about it, like, I don't think anything that Eliezer Yudkowsky read, for example, uh, Eliezer Yudkowsky, big AI, maybe he doesn't describe himself as a doomer. I would say AI doomer, wrote a lot about how AI could end the world and kill literally everyone. Like, I can't, like, you know, every, every time you try to read some of those n- like, there's insane loops in logic, and really it doesn't compute for me, like, how that actually-

Aria Finger 49:36 Sure

Amjad Masad 49:36 ... ends up happening. And I think it's, like, a fundamental misunderstanding of the world. Anyone who's tried to build a business understand there are bottlenecks that are not just intelligence in the bu- there are regulatory bottlenecks, there are so s- all sorts of things. So without getting too deep into that, I think some of it we just have to counter intellectually and-

Aria Finger 49:53 Mm-hmm

Amjad Masad 49:53 ... and, like, we, you know, the AI optimists have to be out there, like, arguing with these people. I don't have time to do that.

Aria Finger 49:59 [laughs]

Amjad Masad 49:59 I did that for a little bit, but it's important. And I, I know they're out there in DC kind of scaring politicians and, and all of that, and I think that's really bad because, like, you know, we can get to a point where, you know, AI is regulated in a way that allow us-- that doesn't allow the US to be competitive. And so there's aspect of it that I think we really need to, to, to, to battle. Uh, there are aspects of it that I think is on the creative art film front.

Aria Finger 50:26 Mm-hmm. Sure.

Amjad Masad 50:27 Like, you know, everyone thinks about Skynet and Terminator and things like that, but who's, who's producing, like, really optimistic visions about sci-fi human? I, I love reading mid-century sci-fi because it's a lot more optimistic. Something have happened in our culture, and we don't have really good sci-fi anymore. Um, so that's another part. Now, third part, now this is the more pragmatic. I'm worried about my job.

Aria Finger 50:53 Right. Absolutely.

Amjad Masad 50:53 I'm worried about my, I'm worried about my kids.

Aria Finger 50:55 These are just everyday concerns that people have that aren't sort of fantastical, that maybe are sort of based in reality.

Amjad Masad 51:01 I worry about it for my kids a lot. Like, the idea of it's really hard to go out in the world and make friends and have people like you.

Aria Finger 51:08 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 51:09 It's really easy to have an AI like you.

Aria Finger 51:10 Mm.

Amjad Masad 51:11 I mean, y- and, and humans tend to take the, you know, shortest, the, the easiest path, and, like, I worry about this AI friend thing becoming a really problem. My eternal optimist is always like, "Well, look, you know, we had a period, uh, of history where, you know, eating junk food was, was acceptable and, like..." But I think there's, like, um, societal antibodies. I think healthy societies have antibodies around, you know, smoking. You know, smoking is, like, you know, when I grew up in Jordan, everyone smoked. I smoked. I came to the US, none of my friends smoked, and I just felt like an outcast, and I stopped smoking. I think society is, like, you know-

Aria Finger 51:52 It's, like, truly one of the greatest public health battles of our time.

Amjad Masad 51:55 Right.

Aria Finger 51:56 And to your point, a lot of it was we solved it with culture.

Amjad Masad 51:59 Yes. Culture. Culture. I, I think religion used to play a role-

Aria Finger 52:03 Mm

Amjad Masad 52:03 ... uh, as well, and, uh, I don't know whether it will in the future or not, but, like, government is such a blunt instrument.

Aria Finger 52:10 Right.

Amjad Masad 52:10 You can't, you can't do everything. So I think it's, it's l- leadership. It is, uh, culture. It is incumbent on all of us to just say, like, "No, ChatGPT is not your friend."

Aria Finger 52:22 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 52:22 Like, it's friendly, and you can use it for therapy. You can use it for all sorts of things, and the- those are fraud as well. But, like, if, if someone is saying to you, it's like, "I'm spending all my time talking to ChatGPT," hey, hey, man, that's not really healthy [laughs] . You know?

Aria Finger 52:35 Absolutely.

Amjad Masad 52:35 So I think, I think a lot of it is about culture and society.

Reid Hoffman 52:38 Well, I do think that, like, there's, like, two points that I think are very important. One is the friends point. Completely agree. Um, part of the reason why I like with, you know, Inflection's Pi, you know, you kind of engage, it says, "You're my best friend."

Amjad Masad 52:50 Mm.

Reid Hoffman 52:50 It's like, "No, no, no, I'm your companion. I'm here to help you."

Amjad Masad 52:53 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 52:54 "Have you talked to your friend Amjad recently?"

Amjad Masad 52:56 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 52:56 You know, "What, what's life with him?" Or, or you, you catch up, and I think that, that, that helping, especially for young people-

Amjad Masad 53:02 Yes

Reid Hoffman 53:02 ... where they might be encountering difficulty and so on, I think it's like, uh, tying you back into the community, tying you back into connecting with other human beings. 'Cause by the way, part of actual real friendship is not just saying, "Oh, Amjad, you're so great."

Amjad Masad 53:14 Right.

Reid Hoffman 53:14 "Oh, Amjad, I just, I, I, I was waiting to, to, for the, for all year to talk to you," et cetera.

Amjad Masad 53:20 Right.

Reid Hoffman 53:20 It's like, no. It's, it's the, that, that thing of, like, where I might show up thinking, "Oh, I've had a bad day. I wanna talk to Amjad about it," and then I hear about your day, I'm like, "Oh, we're talking about Amjad's day."

Amjad Masad 53:28 Right. Right.

Reid Hoffman 53:29 That is actually part of how you evolve-

Amjad Masad 53:31 Yeah

Reid Hoffman 53:31 ... part of how you elevate, part of how you learn compassion, wisdom-

Amjad Masad 53:34 Yes

Reid Hoffman 53:34 ... empathy, and it's really important, and that's part of the reason I also share with you. It's not impossible to make AI friends, but it's not what's happening right now.

Amjad Masad 53:42 Right.

Reid Hoffman 53:42 And it's not-

Amjad Masad 53:43 Destructive

Reid Hoffman 53:43 ... you know, anything that, that is, that is, that is illusory that way is actually, in fact, destructive.

Amjad Masad 53:49 That's why it's causing psychosis and things like that.

Reid Hoffman 53:51 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 53:51 Like, um, you know, there's, uh, high-profile cases, uh, where, uh, uh, people have psychotic breaks because they have, like, delusions of grandeur and things like that, and ChatGPT is, like, reinforcing that, and that's, like, really bad. And I think it's incumbent on the, uh, labs as well to, like, start a program pushback into these machines as well,

Amjad Masad 54:13 right?

Reid Hoffman 54:13 Yeah. There was this funny thing that a friend of mine showed me, which is by only listening to, you know, AI agents, you end up in a desert by yourself drinking a glass of milk thinking the whole world's out to get you.

Amjad Masad 54:23 Right.

Reid Hoffman 54:23 You know, so it's like-

Amjad Masad 54:24 Right

Reid Hoffman 54:24 ... nah, that's, that's the, the wrong long path. Now, back to the jobs thing. People ideally love to say, "I'd like to have an elevation of my life, but I'd like to have no strain." And unfortunately, those aren't the times we're in.

Amjad Masad 54:38 Yeah.

Reid Hoffman 54:38 We're in the similar times to the Industrial Revolution now that it's the cognitive industrial revolution, and so many, many jobs will change, right?

Amjad Masad 54:44 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 54:44 Like, if you said, "My, my job is I'm a form filler for digital marketing-"

Aria Finger 54:50 Like, yeah, that's not really gonna be... You better start thinking about other things.

Amjad Masad 54:54 Right.

Aria Finger 54:54 Now, AI can help you with that.

Amjad Masad 54:56 Right.

Aria Finger 54:56 It can help with like, okay, well, what can I learn? What can AI help me do, et cetera? What we have to embrace is that kind of, that entrepreneurial mindset. People say, "Well, but I don't want to. I just wanna keep doing what I'm doing."

Amjad Masad 55:05 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 55:05 It's like, well, so did the c- horse groomer back when there were lots of horses, and that was all the transport.

Amjad Masad 55:11 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 55:11 That's not the way it works.

Amjad Masad 55:12 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 55:13 Right? And by the way, if you try to lock that in-

Amjad Masad 55:16 Mm-hmm

Aria Finger 55:16 ... you're essentially going to be stealing your children's future-

Amjad Masad 55:20 Mm-hmm

Aria Finger 55:20 ... because the other society will move ahead, and then yours will now have put them in a very disadvantaged position.

Amjad Masad 55:26 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 55:26 So the important thing, like almost like that Adam Smith specialization thing-

Amjad Masad 55:30 Mm-hmm

Aria Finger 55:30 ... you were talking about. The important thing is to say, "Look, I understand that it can be painful for me."

Amjad Masad 55:34 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 55:34 "But I'm gonna own this, this change-

Amjad Masad 55:36 Mm-hmm

Aria Finger 55:36 ... because I'm helping my children, my community's children-

Amjad Masad 55:40 Mm-hmm

Aria Finger 55:40 ... the future generations." And by the way, like own it as an adventure.

Amjad Masad 55:44 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 55:45 Right? Yes, like sometimes you don't choose to go on the adventure-

Amjad Masad 55:48 Mm-hmm

Aria Finger 55:48 ... but sometimes you just find yourself on it, and own it as the adventure, and how do you shape it and make that happen? And so in this vein, one of the things that, you know, companies are starting to look for is what is AI native talent? What kind of pointers, heuristics, thoughts, lenses might you offer to people to say, "Here's how you can think about becoming AI native talent."

Amjad Masad 56:08 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 56:08 "Here's what companies should look for in hiring-

Amjad Masad 56:11 Mm-hmm

Aria Finger 56:11 ... AI native talent."

Amjad Masad 56:12 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 56:13 'Cause, you know, you live in AI nativity.

Amjad Masad 56:15 Mm-hmm. On the previous point-

Aria Finger 56:17 Mm

Amjad Masad 56:17 ... briefly, like, um, I, I s- I, I say version that you said very articulately, uh, ad- advice to people, like on the YouTube comments that I unfortunately sometimes read.

Aria Finger 56:27 [laughs]

Amjad Masad 56:28 Uh, hey, be nice.

Aria Finger 56:29 [laughs]

Amjad Masad 56:29 Um, people, "Ah, it's easy for you to say. You're rich," right? Um, and I, I think that Silicon Valley has a responsibility to do something. I don't know if it is some kind of like nonprofit where we have like, you know, tr- retraining and upskilling, or maybe it's a government thing. I'm not entirely sure. But I think there's a responsibility to do that because it is, it is hard for people. Like, people who've done like marketing, form filling for like, you know, 30 years, it is hard to break out of that. But I think there are potential to create like AI education programs. Now, on the, on the question of how to become a AI native, you know, we were at a CEO event earlier, and even the CEOs are struggling with it themselves, and really amazing CEOs built, you know, $100 billion plus companies, and they're like, "I take a week every few months to kind of learn AI, but I'm constantly behind." And what I said, if you, if you're a programmer or have technical ability, go, go really deep. Go read the papers. Go build a fundamental understanding of how LLMs work. Um, maybe even build an LLM yourself. Uh, like Karpathy has like this really nice GitHub repo that you can go explore and t- try to train your own LLM. Now, this, this, you conditional on the fact that you have some technical background. If you don't, um, I would say using tools like Replit to build LLM experiences. So kind of think about ideas for how LLMs could like improve your job, and go try your hand, uh, at building them. That's one. Two, just like train your algorithms and feeds to give you AI news.

Aria Finger 58:15 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 58:16 Uh, one of the first things that I've, I did when I just like committed our company to AI is like I went and followed all these like different AI people. My YouTube is all AI [laughs] content. There's a wealth of information out there, and so many of us consume content passively. You can be consuming information and learning. And this is... And by the way, TikTok can be certainly disruptive. I see it as a, as a skill to actually like train my TikTok algorithm. So like they try to bait me with like-

Aria Finger 58:42 [laughs]

Amjad Masad 58:42 ... you know, different content, and I'll just scroll really fast. [laughs] And I pitched this to E- Elon, and I think he responded to me at one. So I said like, "You should, you should be able to prompt your feed."

Aria Finger 58:52 Mm.

Amjad Masad 58:52 "I want only AI content today-

Aria Finger 58:54 Mm-hmm

Amjad Masad 58:54 ... to be able to consume." But like this passive consumption that we all do, you can fill it with useful information.

Aria Finger 59:00 And so this next question, Reid, I do want you to weigh in on it. Um, but you and Replit, uh, recently passed 100 million ARR.

Amjad Masad 59:07 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 59:07 Congratulations.

Amjad Masad 59:09 Thank you.

Aria Finger 59:09 A huge milestone. And you guys have been building for a long time, but right now in the Valley, there are so many companies that are getting to both enormous valuations, but also enormous revenue very quickly.

Amjad Masad 59:20 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 59:20 So my question for you is, what do you think about this time where it seems like everyone has to get to insane revenue numbers immediately? Is this good? Is that true? And like what, what is sort of the new kind of era we're in, sort of building in an AI era?

Amjad Masad 59:35 So one of the reasons... Uh, there, there are a few reasons that happened that, that made it so that these revenue ramps are really high. One obvious one is the ROI is really clear. When, when we make an application for someone, then we put a paywall, like they really like the application. They want it. They'll, them, uh, they're much more likely to pay. But also just like credit card penetration across the world-

Aria Finger 59:56 Mm-hmm

Amjad Masad 59:56 ... has like reached, uh, certain heights. Internet stability and connectivity. There's all these confluence of factors that got us to a point where you can grow revenue fast. That being said, like AI revenue can go up as easy as it goes fa- down. You know, we've seen businesses... I think Jasper is now like an enterprise business, but at some point they had like a really amazing consumer business that they lost all of it to ChatGPT, right? Like, so y- if you're not an AI business, if you're a SaaS business and, and your investor's like, "Oh, why don't you have AI revenue?" Well, I mean, the other thing is like s- you know, easy come, easy go. [laughs]

Aria Finger 1:00:30 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 1:00:30 You know? So, uh, and we spent like eight, nine years building all this infrastructure to get to a point where, where the company took off, but we're also still very paranoid. Like Google just released another vibe coding thing today.

Aria Finger 1:00:42 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 1:00:42 And they're a close partner of ours, and obviously they're gonna do it. But so many companies are interested in, in the vibe coding space right now, and it, and so it's- Very, very competitive. And so if you can build a business, um, that is lasting, that is-- grows slower and compounds over time, I th- I think there's still a lot of value in it. Now the question is, like, are there a lot of investors that wanna pour a lot of capital into that? Well, maybe you don't need a lot of capital-

Aria Finger 1:01:09 Mm-hmm

Amjad Masad 1:01:09 ... uh, anymore. And so, yes, a lot of the capital is going into AI. But, like, you can build SaaS businesses today that are cash flowing-

Aria Finger 1:01:15 Mm-hmm

Amjad Masad 1:01:15 ... that can grow over time.

Aria Finger 1:01:17 What do you think your moat is? Is it your brand? Is it your existing consumers? Like, how do you make sure that you're not, you know, subject to that?

Amjad Masad 1:01:25 I, I think there are less moats these days than, than-

Aria Finger 1:01:28 Sure

Amjad Masad 1:01:28 ... th- than before. I mean, one of my favorite books is, uh, Seven Powers, uh, by Hamilton and Hamler, and it just talks about there are seven moats, right?

Aria Finger 1:01:36 Right.

Amjad Masad 1:01:36 You know, network effects, economies of scale, you know, um, so on. Um, I, I think that we have a technology lead in that, like, we built all this technology for so many years. We built a hyper-competitive, uh, amazing team that will continue to produce these, uh, technology, uh, advancements. Uh, we launch a new breakthrough version of Agent every few months. Elon said this a long time ago, "The only moat is continued innovation, rapid, uh, progress," and I think that's true in, in AI today. I think at some point, when you reach certain scales, there are certain decisions that you can make that really create structural moats.

Aria Finger 1:02:17 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 1:02:18 W- we're not there yet.

Aria Finger 1:02:19 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 1:02:19 But I think, you know... I would say the Big Labs achieved economies of scale, obviously, right? And that's, that's a moat for them. Now, it's very competitive between, like, the five of them.

Aria Finger 1:02:28 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 1:02:29 Um, but I think it is a game that will play over time. So I would just-- a CEO is just constantly thinking about what are the degrees of freedom that we have in order to position our business in a way to create lasting advantage.

Reid Hoffman 1:02:41 Your earlier question was, like, almost, like, the classic blitzscaling question.

Aria Finger 1:02:45 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 1:02:45 Right? And part of the reason why, and now I'm trying to remember how many years ago I wrote "Blitzscaling," but it was kind of the lessons from Silicon Valley and China about how the technology companies of the future are built.

Aria Finger 1:02:56 Yeah.

Reid Hoffman 1:02:56 If anything, it's five X, 10X true as when I did it.

Amjad Masad 1:02:59 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 1:02:59 It's like it's the trend of where it's kinda going to. Now, that doesn't mean that everyone has to go to, you know, amazing revenue, 10X employee growth in, like, six months, 12 months, et cetera. The thing in blitzscaling, which, you know, Chris and I wrote about, was it depends a lot on what the nature of the market is, what the nature of competition is, et cetera. And if you're going up against blitzscalers, it's very hard to succeed without also blitzscaling because the blitzscaling will set the market. It may blow up, but will set the market, and if it blows up, it'll probably blow you up with the market.

Amjad Masad 1:03:30 Like the scooter market-

Reid Hoffman 1:03:31 Yes

Amjad Masad 1:03:31 ... or yeah.

Reid Hoffman 1:03:31 Exactly.

Amjad Masad 1:03:32 Yeah.

Reid Hoffman 1:03:32 And it doesn't matter that you were kind of, you know-

Amjad Masad 1:03:35 Yeah

Reid Hoffman 1:03:35 ... not minding your operating margins, and, you know, kinda which-

Amjad Masad 1:03:38 Right

Reid Hoffman 1:03:38 ... it just, it just gets swamped. And so, so you have to look at what's happening in the market. You have to look at what happened with competition. There are definitely opportunities where you can build more like, you know, like one of the ones from the Greylock portfolio is Roblox.

Aria Finger 1:03:52 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 1:03:52 Where, like, for many years, it's kinda like, "Yeah, yeah, out in the wilderness," and then boom, all of a sudden it's the amazing new thing.

Amjad Masad 1:03:58 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 1:03:59 And you can build towards that, and that kind of phase can come. So-

Amjad Masad 1:04:02 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 1:04:02 ... you have to kinda make an evaluation of where you're at. Now, if you're going kind of where the zeitgeist is, where everyone currently recognizes it, you'd better be moving-

Amjad Masad 1:04:10 [chuckles]

Reid Hoffman 1:04:10 ... pretty fast-

Amjad Masad 1:04:11 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 1:04:11 ... because everybody's recognizing it.

Amjad Masad 1:04:13 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 1:04:13 And so, so that's a little bit of kind of the, the, the reason, like with, like with Monas AI, we could say, "Hey, we can actually take a, like, some time to think about exactly and, and build iteratively to what the AI pieces are, are for doing for the drug discovery," because most of the people don't realize what are the things you need to do. And so you can take more time to build that. You don't have to go, you know, like it's basically do extreme uncertainty risks-

Aria Finger 1:04:37 Right

Reid Hoffman 1:04:37 ... trying to capture a market. So th- there's a nuanced answer there. But-

Aria Finger 1:04:41 Right

Reid Hoffman 1:04:41 ... there's a number of markets where that speed and that speed to revenue scale... By the way, speed to revenue scale is not just revenue for you, not just what comes in as capital. It also comes into what happens with hiring employees and a bunch of other things, and there's a whole set of compounding things that get to that. So it's-- you, you have to make a kind of strategic decision. And by the way, you may have to change your strategic decision-

Amjad Masad 1:05:01 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 1:05:01 ... as you're going.

Amjad Masad 1:05:02 One thing on that-

Reid Hoffman 1:05:03 Mm-hmm

Amjad Masad 1:05:03 ... is that what's interesting is once you hit an infliction point, inflection point, then other people pay attention, and now it's blitzscaling because they notice the revenue, and they wanna go after it. [chuckles]

Reid Hoffman 1:05:12 Yes.

Aria Finger 1:05:12 So they see you being successful-

Reid Hoffman 1:05:14 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 1:05:14 Yes. Yeah

Aria Finger 1:05:14 ... and all of a sudden that becomes the hot industry-

Reid Hoffman 1:05:16 Right.

Amjad Masad 1:05:16 That's right.

Reid Hoffman 1:05:16 Yes

Aria Finger 1:05:16 ... and so you have to change your stance.

Reid Hoffman 1:05:17 Yes.

Amjad Masad 1:05:17 Yeah.

Reid Hoffman 1:05:18 And that's the other thing that-

Amjad Masad 1:05:18 And that's what happened with us, right?

Reid Hoffman 1:05:20 Yeah. [chuckles]

Amjad Masad 1:05:20 Like, you know, so like, you know, Replit Agent was kind of the first vibe coding-

Reid Hoffman 1:05:24 Yeah

Amjad Masad 1:05:24 ... thing that anyone could use, and suddenly every- everyone poured into it.

Reid Hoffman 1:05:29 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 1:05:29 Yeah.

Reid Hoffman 1:05:29 And this is one of the things that people don't understand about the blitzscaling side, which is it's not that you start blitzscaling from day one, and it's not that you blitzscale forever.

Amjad Masad 1:05:37 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 1:05:38 By the way, if you don't end blitzscaling at some point... I think that the seven powers-

Amjad Masad 1:05:42 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 1:05:42 ... because I, you know... Great book, great call-out. Um, maintain. I also think that the configurations of how business models come together will still actually get to different kinds of moats. Now-

Amjad Masad 1:05:53 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 1:05:53 ... we have speculation on what those moats are. Are the moats only scale now? Are the moats brand? Are the moats network effects?

Amjad Masad 1:06:00 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 1:06:01 You know, are, are the moats data now? Like, and then it'll be in different combinations of different things in terms of-

Amjad Masad 1:06:06 But you have to be okay with the uncertainty of it-

Reid Hoffman 1:06:08 Yes

Amjad Masad 1:06:08 ... in the moment.

Reid Hoffman 1:06:08 And you're gonna-

Amjad Masad 1:06:09 Yeah

Reid Hoffman 1:06:09 ... and you're gonna be iterating through it.

Amjad Masad 1:06:10 Right. Yeah.

Reid Hoffman 1:06:10 And you should be thinking about what those moats are.

Amjad Masad 1:06:13 Right.

Reid Hoffman 1:06:13 And you can't go, "Well, we..." You know, because Silicon Valley went for maybe even two decades-

Amjad Masad 1:06:18 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 1:06:18 ... and I was one of the architects of this, you know, gaga over network effects-

Amjad Masad 1:06:22 Right

Reid Hoffman 1:06:22 ... as the moat.

Amjad Masad 1:06:22 Right. Right.

Reid Hoffman 1:06:22 And by the way, network effects are still very valuable.

Amjad Masad 1:06:24 Right.

Reid Hoffman 1:06:25 But they're changing in the shape-

Amjad Masad 1:06:26 Yeah

Reid Hoffman 1:06:26 ... and how they establish and what happens-

Amjad Masad 1:06:28 Yeah

Reid Hoffman 1:06:28 ... and so forth. And that's, that's, that, that reinvention, like people tend to think, oh, the most central thing is you reinvent your product or service. And by the way, of course, it's really important.

Amjad Masad 1:06:37 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 1:06:38 By the way, it's also reinvent your go-to-market.

Amjad Masad 1:06:40 Right.

Reid Hoffman 1:06:40 Oh, and by the way, it's also reinvent your business model.

Amjad Masad 1:06:42 Right.

Reid Hoffman 1:06:43 Oh, and by the way, it's also reinvent what the moats are-

Amjad Masad 1:06:45 Right

Reid Hoffman 1:06:45 ... behind this, and it's all of these kind of different things. Like Google Search doesn't have network effects From its search engine, it has scale effects at work-

Amjad Masad 1:06:56 From the ads network

Reid Hoffman 1:06:56 ... but it's-

Amjad Masad 1:06:56 Yeah

Reid Hoffman 1:06:56 ... AdWords-

Amjad Masad 1:06:57 Yeah, AdWords

Reid Hoffman 1:06:57 ... is where the network effects.

Amjad Masad 1:06:58 Yeah.

Reid Hoffman 1:06:58 And then what it does is it buys distribution-

Amjad Masad 1:07:01 Right

Reid Hoffman 1:07:01 ... from Apple and other people-

Amjad Masad 1:07:02 Right

Reid Hoffman 1:07:02 ... through that-

Amjad Masad 1:07:03 Yeah

Reid Hoffman 1:07:03 ... is the way that it ki- And so how do these things kind of come together?

Aria Finger 1:07:06 And actually, sort of per our conversation in the car, Amjad, one of the things I've really appreciated is that your willingness to speak out-

Amjad Masad 1:07:12 Mm-hmm

Aria Finger 1:07:13 ... about things that matter in our society, whether it's Gaza-

Amjad Masad 1:07:16 Mm-hmm

Aria Finger 1:07:16 ... human rights, et cetera.

Amjad Masad 1:07:17 Mm-hmm.

Aria Finger 1:07:17 And it can be difficult for people to speak out, especially when they're CEOs of companies. You're fighting for talent. Why do you think it's important for people in the space, specifically in technology, to speak out about human rights and things like that?

Amjad Masad 1:07:28 I, I don't do it because of this. I do it because of principles, and because, you know, we also have a family history, and I, I understand what people, uh, in, in Gaza are going through right now, and I really care about that. But I also think that, um, you know, the, the corporate world, the market has, has changed in that when you stand for something, I think there's actually, there, there's an effect where maybe you, you might be, certain people don't wanna work with you or don't wanna-

Aria Finger 1:07:55 Yeah

Amjad Masad 1:07:55 ... invest in you, but there are other people that might be attracted to that, right?

Aria Finger 1:07:59 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 1:07:59 So I think the, you know, people are no longer sort of attracted to these, you know, bland corporate brands, and the faces behind these companies, I mean, thanks to LinkedIn and things like that, are becoming more important than the brands themselves. And as humans, we care about things, and if you're, if you just have no opinions and you're just... No one has no opinions, right?

Aria Finger 1:08:22 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 1:08:22 And so, uh, I, I think a lot of people come to work at Replit because they know I care about these things.

Aria Finger 1:08:28 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 1:08:28 And people wanna invest in Replit because they know we stand for certain things. And, and I think Silicon Valley is no longer the underdog as well.

Aria Finger 1:08:38 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 1:08:38 Like, Silicon Valley is now the mainstream. People look to us for leadership, but they also, when we do certain things that are not conducive to society, they're gonna, they're gonna-

Aria Finger 1:08:47 Mm

Amjad Masad 1:08:47 ... come and try to burn us at the stake. And so it's important for, for us to kind of take that, uh, the role that we're playing seriously.

Reid Hoffman 1:08:54 Yeah, I, I completely agree, and I think actually part of how you think of it is think of humanity first.

Amjad Masad 1:08:59 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 1:09:00 And that's part of the principles of, you know, f- uh, alleviate suffering, uh, economic enablement.

Amjad Masad 1:09:06 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 1:09:06 Part of what I love about Replit is economic enablement-

Amjad Masad 1:09:08 Mm-hmm

Reid Hoffman 1:09:08 ... across the entire world. Then society. What's the organization on which we live together and so on? And then industry.

Amjad Masad 1:09:14 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 1:09:14 By the way, industry is super important.

Amjad Masad 1:09:15 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 1:09:16 I've... You know, it's been my entire life. But thinking about those, even when you're a industry leader, you should not abandon the fact that you're also a humanist and you're also a member of society.

Amjad Masad 1:09:26 That's right. Absolutely.

Reid Hoffman 1:09:28 On that basis of frame, what are some of the really important things we should do as leaders in Silicon Valley and the tech industry to make sure that technology is spreading compassion, too? And one of the problems with some of the social networks is it's, you know, rage and engagement, clickbaiting and so then... But yet that is not who we aspire to become-

Amjad Masad 1:09:50 Yeah

Reid Hoffman 1:09:50 ... as individuals in society. So what do we do to grow empathy, to grow compassion?

Amjad Masad 1:09:57 Mm-hmm.

Reid Hoffman 1:09:57 What, what, what are some of the ideas that you might have kicked around on this?

Amjad Masad 1:10:00 Well, one thing I try to do in our business is, uh, align our business model with something that allows us-

Reid Hoffman 1:10:06 Mm

Amjad Masad 1:10:06 ... to be good in the world. Um, and so, you know, Replit benefits when people's lives improves through, you know, that software that, that they're building or they're creating, or the business they're creating or how they're improving their business.

Reid Hoffman 1:10:19 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 1:10:19 And so I've always been really inspired by businesses that create, like, a game theoretic win-win-win situation, right? Like, when you think about platforms, like, you know, Shopify is an amazing business where the company's winning, the entrepreneurs are winning, and consumers are winning. Not every business is like that. There's a lot of businesses where consumers are losing or s- someone's getting exploited. But by the way, the best businesses are the win-win-win businesses, right?

Reid Hoffman 1:10:46 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 1:10:47 Um, so I think one of the... You know, speaking of moats and things like that, one of the early strategic decisions that you can make is what is the business model.

Reid Hoffman 1:10:53 Mm.

Amjad Masad 1:10:54 Uh, and try to, try to actually kind of write down, it's usually, you know, different constituents, uh, usually the company, the users, may- maybe the, uh, the developers, whatever kind of business that you have. What situations or what business models allow you to create that, that joint

Amjad Masad 1:11:12 winning?

Reid Hoffman 1:11:12 So now we're moving to our rapid fire. That doesn't mean you have to answer rapid fire. These are just questions we, we ask all of our guests. Um, is there a movie, song, or book that, uh, fills you with optimism for the future?

Amjad Masad 1:11:25 You know, a, a, a book that I think is, is, is amazing that it pulls together everything that I love. I really love learning about theory of consciousness-

Reid Hoffman 1:11:35 [chuckles]

Amjad Masad 1:11:35 ... theory of mind, the philosophy of that. I like computers and math and physics and all of that. I like the human aspect, human stories. Um, I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas, uh-

Reid Hoffman 1:11:47 Mm-hmm

Amjad Masad 1:11:47 ... Hofstadter is, is an amazing book. It's partly about his, a book about his wife dying and their kids and, and how, how his personal story in that. It's also a book about him struggling with the concept of soul and kind of trying to understand it in, like, a more secular way, in a, in, like, mathematical way. It, it goes through vignettes about, like, Gödel's incompleteness theor- theorem or what that says about, um, about how consciousness is potentially, like, a loop. And it's, it's, it's an amazing book that tells you that, like, really everything is interconnected, and we can't be technical or innovators without actually caring about all the other things that happens in our world.

Aria Finger 1:12:29 What is a question that you wish people would ask you more often?

Amjad Masad 1:12:32 Hmm. I mean, this question is really fascinating.

Aria Finger 1:12:34 [laughs]

Amjad Masad 1:12:34 I mean, I, I don't get to talk a lot about, you know, literary or philosophical, uh, ins- inspiration, so that, that's a great one.

Reid Hoffman 1:12:43 Yeah, one, The Strange Loop, is awesome. So where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry, you know, tech, you know, kind of AI, um, vibe coding applications, that inspires you?

Amjad Masad 1:12:55 You know, I, this is very fresh on my mind, but I, I took a, uh- demo, a tour of a, of a plane, and I was so surprised that they got to full automation. This is a TBM 960, a turboprop plane.

Reid Hoffman 1:13:12 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 1:13:12 Um, and it, everything's automated, including landing.

Reid Hoffman 1:13:16 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 1:13:16 And there's not one neural network in it.

Reid Hoffman 1:13:18 Hmm.

Aria Finger 1:13:19 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 1:13:19 And so it, it's surprising because, like, you know, uh, in Silicon Valley we think that we sort of tapped out on classical deterministic systems in terms of what you can do in terms of automation. But actually, there are industries that are just slogging along. They just don't wanna use neural networks. It's, like, too probabilistic to... So that was really fascinating, and it's like there's, there's a lot more to go even in the classical systems and the traditional technology that we have.

Aria Finger 1:13:44 So always our final question, uh, can you leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible if everything goes humanity's way in the next-

Amjad Masad 1:13:53 Hmm

Aria Finger 1:13:53 ... 15 years, and what's the first step to get there?

Amjad Masad 1:13:55 The thing I think a lot about, and this is driven by my, my history, m- my family, is that anyone who has ideas should potentially be wealthy.

Aria Finger 1:14:05 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 1:14:05 Anyone who has ideas and can follow through and has the grits and has the moral upstanding and ha- and can do the right things should be ab- I, I think, I think that's the true promise of capitalism, and I think, you know, it's very easy to imagine the world where it's, like, certain corporates that are controlling everything, and the business models are not aligned with humanity in such a way that it's like it's all based on spying on us and selling us the worst things that we desire. But instead, in a world where, uh, where the tools create the decentralized power, ability to generate wealth for everyone in the world, the entire world is sort of interconnected. I think people waking up in the morning and feeling, like, tap dancing to work-

Reid Hoffman 1:14:52 Hmm

Amjad Masad 1:14:52 ... like Jeff Bezos.

Aria Finger 1:14:53 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 1:14:53 Like, most, 99% of people don't tap dance to work, right?

Reid Hoffman 1:14:56 Hmm.

Amjad Masad 1:14:56 Like, so i- including me, like, I love my job a lot, but I hate email. Like, why hasn't-

Reid Hoffman 1:15:01 [laughs]

Amjad Masad 1:15:01 ... anyone solved that, right? Like, the technology's there-

Reid Hoffman 1:15:05 Hmm

Amjad Masad 1:15:05 ... but, like, we, you know, the tools have not, uh, are not there just yet. So, uh, rewarding work, work that is more human, allows us to, uh, to relate with one another more creatively, and, uh, and less siloing and less politics at work, but also the ability for anyone to generate ideas and build businesses. That's something I'd be really excited about.

Aria Finger 1:15:25 Amen.

Reid Hoffman 1:15:25 Yeah. Amjad, it's a great pleasure. We could have gone on for hours. Thanks for being here.

Amjad Masad 1:15:30 Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Aria Finger 1:15:31 Thank you.

Reid Hoffman 1:15:31 Possible is produced by Pallet Media. It's hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Tanasi Delos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmore, Emo Zu, Trent Barboza, and Tafadzwa Nemarundwe.

Aria Finger 1:15:47 Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sabieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Rellis. And a big thanks to Ben Casnocha and the Village Global team, Philip Smith and Actionhouse, Lorenzo Davis and Will Whiteley at Static, and Caitlin Norad and the team at Replit.