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

23:29Sam Parr:But I sort of, it's almost bad to talk about that. Not talk about it, but I don't think you should expect that because I think that most great companies have never had that. If you look at the subset of companies, most don't work. Some work okay. A handful work a little bit better. And then a very small percentage are amazing. And even amongst the amazing ones, what they're describing, what you guys are describing, they don't feel that. Like, for example, we were talking about like Mars candy the other day. Like that's been around for 150 years. And more likely than not, it was like a grind, a grind.

23:59Sam Parr:This year was not a grind. It kind of did pretty good. But this year it was kind of a grind. You know what I mean? Like there was never like this moment where it's like, we just grew to a billion in revenue from 2 million in 24 months. I think you're right. A, it doesn't happen right away, even for you, even though it happened super fast. It's like 10 years in. But there is a difference between push and pull. And I think the companies I've seen, which is a very small handful that actually have product market fit, it starts to feel like pull. In fact, Emmett, the CEO of Twitch, I remember asking him, you did Justin TV, then you guys pivoted to Twitch, wasn't obvious right away.

24:30And he basically said, product market fit's the main thing that matters. and he goes, basically, you feel like you're pushing a boulder up a hill every day. And then at some point, you kind of wake up and you realize it's like you didn't, you reached your hands out, but the boulder had already moved. And now you have to start running to catch up to it. And suddenly the whole game feels like a sprint catching up to the boulder going down the hill. It takes time, but there is a difference between like you are manually pushing the crank versus it starts to get pulled by the market. Let's just offer like a distinction between the different types of businesses.

24:59There are, you know, Clay Christensen's RIP passed away recently. Harvard Business School professor came up with this concept of disruption, right? Disruption became sort of a meme, but it's actually an economics theory almost about technology. And he talks about sustaining technology versus disruptive technology. You can be innovative on a sustained curve. You can make things incrementally better. But there are things that are disruptive. And those are like moment of time businesses or technologies that create this explosion of demand because for the first time it became possible, right? So if you're Mars Candy, there was a lot of other candy.

25:43Maybe you're really good in your recipe, you're really good in your execution. Most businesses are trying to compete in a more or less zero-sum market. So they're trying to capture market from existing demand on existing competitors. Now there are market creation moments. And I think for Replit, this was a market creation moment. And most internet companies, Whether it's PayPal, Facebook, Google, the reason you have this explosive growth is like you just invented something new and then everyone's rushing because this capability didn't exist before. And there's no other alternative, by the way.

26:25Sam Parr:That's a really good point. Then do you think that the right move for someone building a company is good? Okay, so on one hand, you could say, well, just have patience and just keep going, keep going, keep going. And with maybe the same thing. Um, whereas the other hand, would it be like pivot just like the 20 year old kids until you find that, that, that rock rolling down the mountain? I mean, it depends what you're trying to build. Are you innovating something new? Are you creating something that wasn't really possible? Or are you entering a business where you're like, okay, I know you've done the business plan, right?

27:01Here's, here's what the market size is. Here's how, how much we're going to capture from it. Here's how we're going to be better than competition. If that's the case, you're going to slog. And maybe every now and then you have some kind of innovation or some kind of breakthrough that gets you a bit of a jump over competitors. But prepare yourself to be very good at execution. Build an amazing team, build amazing processes. Just be very good at the day-to-day execution to outcompete your competitors. If you're a young guy trying to make something that didn't exist before, Or, you know, like Sean and some of the guys in social media, they're trying to create a new clubhouse or, you know, some kind of thing that I didn't know I would enjoy talking to people, you know, taking a walk on my earbuds.

27:52This is just like didn't occur to me. So if you're inventing something like that, you will, you know, the point is pivot, pivot, pivot until it hits. because if it's not hitting, you're not hitting on some human nature or element that you're finding or you're like finding a secret in the universe almost. You're a fun case study. Yeah, one of the reasons it's fun to talk to you is not only your business is interesting and you're interesting as a founder, but you're also a bit of a polymath. Like we were talking at the beginning of this about like the Paul LaRue, like Bitcoin. I feel like you know, you have like a bunch of these like little rabbit holes that you've gone down.

28:29I'm curious, like, what are those rabbit holes today? Because I've seen the original Replit deck, and this was, what, 2014, 2015, something like that? 2015, yeah. It's like, bro, you called your shot Babe Ruth style. So read this thing out. What was the master plan? So growth by building tools.

28:47Sam Parr:How about the fact that in your deck, you have a slide called master plan? So growing the product by building tools for education, essentially people learning how to code, and then build a simple network and AI-assisted interface that blurs the distinction between learning and building. That's essentially what Replita is today. Like you're learning how to make software, but you don't need to sit down and learn how to code. You're just like vibe coding and it's just happening as you go and you're kind of picking up these skills. And then evolve the platform into a place where people come to learn, build, explore, and host applications.

29:22So not only is it the development environment, but the hosting of the applications. And the hosting of the applications, I think I should have had another point because that unlocks the next step, which we're getting into now, which is monetization of those applications, scaling of those applications. Right now, if you go to Replit, you build something, you can just say, monetize it. And it will like integrate Stripe for you and all of that. And pretty soon, you should be able to say, market it. How big are the biggest apps that are built on Replit? Like, are we talking, guys are making hundreds of thousands of dollars, low seven figures.

29:57Like, has anybody really broken out that are just, they were made on Replit and they still run on Replit? This one is a little controversial, but Medvi, the billion dollar one person business covered by the New York Times. Basically, they were a company that sold what? GLP One. And the reason it's controversial is because people don't like their marketing practices. The entrepreneur, I think, already fixed a lot of these issues that people are reacting to. But he runs a big part of his stack on Replit. And he says it's been a crucial part of their growth because it's not only just the core application, but the automations he's pin up day to day.

30:39So for example, he's working with a vendor and every day he does something manual, like a marketing vendor. He's like, okay, I'm going to build this website to you. You go and you speak to an agent, the agent will give you all the information you need. Or the agent will give you the assets. So he'll build interfaces for all the different parts of the business, all the back office stuff of the business. And he's the fastest person that go from idea to prompt. Even when he was on Twitter going viral, he was like building a game in the upload. And he built an experiment where, he sent me that experiment where you can scroll a site with your head so you can read something without looking at your screen.

31:13So I've never seen someone after like spending some time chatting with him, be so quick to create things. boom, create that, create that, like automate this, automate that. That's one example. There's been a lot that I've spoken about over the years. In the past, they used to have to migrate off of Replit because the platform was not complete. But now the platform app is actually complete and you can run a full business on it. We have a lot of venture-backed companies such as Spellbook, I think it's a multi-hundred million dollar company started on Replit. Magic School, I think a$500 business started in Replit.

31:50And many others. More recently, since Replit Asian, there hasn't been enough time for them to really hit massive scale, but there's a lot of multi-million dollar businesses. For example, recently, I think they just did a round, but there's a company that's building influencer marketing for local restaurants and local shops. So you're a local restaurant, you want someone to cover your restaurant, you go to the platform, you hire an influencer, where they actually physically walk to your restaurant, eat there, take a TikTok, whatever. Because now most people, especially Gen Z, they actually don't go to Google Maps anymore.

32:22If you ask the Gen Z, oh, let's find a restaurant. They're like, go to TikTok on search. And so that's already over 100 ,000 ARR, like a few weeks. What's that one called? Do you know the name?

32:32Sam Parr:Try Nearby. Dude, I still go to Yelp and my young employees were like, call me Greybush. They're like, you're so old, man. Like, what are you doing? You look, you open the yellow pages and call them when you want to order food. I was like, why not yell? Can someone move the sundial for me? It's surprising to me that the Google search queries keep going up. They just broke records. The revenue and search keeps going up. But yes, people around me, they're not using Google as much. Are there any cool trends that you're seeing? Like, you know, we have like a subset of like young, like 18, 19-year-old kids who listen to MFM and they like want to hear business ideas.

33:18Sam Parr:Are there any interesting trends that you're seeing in AI and on the repli platform where you're like, man, there's all these like cool, like one or five or$10 million businesses that could be created? Yes. Silicon Valley have always approached problems with like hyperscale in mind. And I think for the first time, because the making software is cheaper, you can actually create a multimillion dollar business and not have to raise venture, not have to grow the team a whole lot. So local style businesses is very interesting. There's a guy in England that I think he's well on his way. He's 100 ,000 already in run rate.

33:55He's well on his way to a million. He is building software for ice rink management. So skating rinks and all that. I think you go around in your life and there's a lot of things that are just not computerized at. There's no software running it. So that would be my first approach. Actually, that's what I did when my first business was building software for internet cafes and LAN gaming. And so that's always been a great place to start. You remind me of in Paul Graham's, one of his essays about how to get startup ideas. He says the easiest way to get startup ideas is to, like, if you want to find the startup idea of the future, simply live in the future and then build what doesn't exist.

34:39Yes. It's like, okay, what the hell does that mean? He describes when Zuckerberg built Facebook, it's not because he was a normal guy thinking, hmm, what would the next, what would the future look like? It's like, no, he was on computers all day. His social life was online. Right. The problem was he only had certain tools available. So for him, the idea of social networking online was not just like possible. It was completely normal. It was his preferred medium to actually exist in. And you could just like lean into that rather than thinking you're the oddball. And I think that's sort of interesting because you built Replit partly because you grew up going to these internet cafes in Jordan.

35:16And every time you'd come, you'd be on a different computer. So you kind of needed something that lived in the cloud. And so for you, what was completely normal was odd to other people. So I think that's a trick with startup ideas, right, is to sort of lean into maybe the things you do that are a little bit more than normal or a little bit odd and then just say, like, what would make my experience doing this odd thing a little bit better? You know, another one I would say is being lazy. In programming, there's this old saying that laziness is a virtue. And the idea is to automate a lot of things.

35:50But now everyone is a programmer, essentially. So, you know, part of the reason why I made Replit is because I don't want to keep setting up the freaking IDE every time. And so, you know, go about your life with this laziness attitude. What are the kind of things that are so annoying that you have to keep doing over and over again? There's probably a million, maybe a billion people that feel the same way. And perhaps you can make a piece of software to automate that. And more important than ever, this like lazy mindset of viewing things through the lens of automation is very important with AI because AI is truly like, you know, we have a magic automation machine.

36:29So not only you'll optimize your life, you'll become, you know, you'll become a lot more productive, but you might stumble on something that a lot of other people would want.

36:40Sam Parr:This is for the folks out there who have a business that does at least$3 million a year in revenue. Because around this point, that's when you're able to look up after being heads down for years building your company. And you realize two things. One, you've done something great, but you're still a long way from your final destination. And two, you look around and you realize, I am all alone. I've outrun my peers. Which means you're now making$10 million decisions alone, by yourself. And that is when mediocrity can creep in. My company Hampton, we solved this problem by giving a room of vetted peers, of other entrepreneurs who are going to hold you accountable, call you out on your nonsense and help show you the way.

37:18Sam Parr:Because the fact is, is that there's only a tiny number of people in your town who know what you're going through and who have been there. And they're hard to find. And if you can find them, it's hard to have this explicit time, this explicit place where you sit down, where the rules are clear that we are here to help each other and to be one another's board of directors. The biggest risk is not failing. You have a company and it's working. You're going to be fine. But the biggest risk is waking up 10 years from now and saying, shit, I barely grew in business and in life. And for people like you who are ambitious, wasted potential and regret is what we want to help you to avoid.

37:52Sam Parr:We have made so many of these groups and we have a thousand plus members. And I know this stuff actually works, whether you work with Hampton or you get your own group on your own. But having a group like this, a group of people who you meet with in real life once a month, it can change your life. It changed mine and I know it will change yours. So check it out. Joinhampton.com. Hey, can you give me your opinion on this? We were kind of joking, kind of not joking a while back with the guests. And we were like, it's sort of like we were asking ourselves, we're like, are we like in December of 2019 where we're just like three months away from like COVID happening and like America shutting down?

38:31Sam Parr:And we're just like, yeah, I heard there's this virus in China, but whatever. No big deal. You know, are we sort of like that with AI where it's like, well, you know, like Square maybe laid off a lot of people, but like, yeah, it's probably not going to happen anymore. Like, do you think that we are like months or 12 months or something like that away from like the world changing dramatically? I think we are in the singularity, like the, you know, the original idea of a singularity. I think Werner Winge, one of the early computer pioneers and sci-fi authors, talked about the singularity, borrowed this concept from physics.

39:08In physics, it's like the black hole. And anything that happens after the black hole is undefined. So we actually don't know what happens. It's like not knowable. So anything that is beyond that point, you can't even have formulas for because it's literally undefined. You know, a lot of the early AI thinkers talked about this moment of singularity, whereas it is incredibly hard to predict what happens after because the pace of innovation is not only fast, it is accelerating as fast as it already is, meaning it is the second derivative is exponential. And so I think this is the moment we're in where, you know, in 22, Two, we got GPT-4 at the time.

39:59And GPT-2 had come out in 2019, GPT-3 in 2020. So every two years we were getting a model. And now it feels like every few weeks we're getting a model, sometimes every day. And there are these fundamental capability shifts that happen either in autonomy or cybersecurity or computer use or what have you. And every one of those capability shifts have a lot of downstream applications that yet need to be discovered. We haven't actually productized it yet. So it's almost like you get a bundle of energy. That's how I think of models. They're potential energy that entrepreneurs need to go figure out how to make them into products, right?

40:44And this is why it's an explosive time for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. It's because we have this potential energy that needs to be harnessed. Now, the reason why there's like a delay is because we have this capability overhang. The world will change, but it's really hard to know whether, I can't tell you in 12 months, like all entry-level jobs will be gone. Well, what if you had to make a bet? My bet would be that I don't think unemployment numbers will move a whole lot. Perhaps they'll marginally increase. I think Dario, the CEO of Anthropix, said we're going to get to 20 % unemployment or something like that.

41:19I don't know if I'm misquoting him, but he said all the time.

41:21Sam Parr:He's a doomer, basically, though. He's on the far end. Yeah. Like, I don't think we're, because what I'm seeing from our customers, we have some customers that automate a lot of things, end up laying off some people. We have other customers that automate a lot of things, make more revenue, and want to hire more people to automate more things and create more products. And so net-net, I think there's going to be a lot of new AI companies, a lot of companies that make use of AI, want to hire more people. So net net, I think the unemployment question, I think, will probably be neutral. How do you think this sort of Game of Thrones AI war plays out, right?

42:00You've got, you know, the King of the North. You got Elon up there. He's trying to come down. You got the open AI kingdom over here. Google, you know, they were in denial, but now they're here. You know, they're making it happen. What do you think? How do you think this plays out? I like business theory. It's not always useful, but it often is useful. Hamilton Hamler wrote this book called The Seven Powers. And everyone in Silicon Valley talks about moats. Seven powers is the theory of moats. The moat of these LLMs, is the technology fundamentally commoditizable, right? Like, it seems to be very easy to replace these models.

42:46Like, you know, a lot of developers every day, professional developers are switching between these models. In some cases, if you're in cursor, it's like literally one click away to switch to the next model. And I think a lot of the fighting has to do with this fact that it is hard to find a way to zoom heads too far ahead of the competition. You're always sort of neck and neck competing with others. So you might want to try to block them in different ways, whether it's in the court or with the government or regulations or things like that. Whereas I think in the past, you could, if you're Microsoft and you achieve this dominance on the PC, it's really hard to unseat you, right?

43:36And so there's this natural monopolies that used to emerge. And they're protected by certain modes, such as network facts, economies of scale. We haven't seen any of those modes sort of emerge from these foundation model companies. And so my hypothesis is that maybe the one natural mode is capital. You need not just one-time capital to enter the market, you need continuous capital to train the current model, the next generation model, and the next generation model. And then you need enough install-based revenue to cover your costs. But that is not enough mode to keep the other big players away.

44:17So you can imagine all the big companies have a fighting chance and all the big governments can also participate in this. And maybe China as a place where you can't really distinguish between country and company, and maybe the country is going to be doing to the foundation model market, what they did to the EV market, well, they'll subsidize the hell out of it in order to have a competing chance and maybe even destroy the market globally by subsidizing it. All of this to say is I think it is good for entrepreneurs because if we ended up with a monopoly or just oligopoly and you're building on top of it, it is actually very hard to build a successful business because like you said, they'll come for you.

45:02But if it ends up being a technology that's kind of easier to replace, I mean, there is a place for a lot of entrepreneurs to participate.

45:11Sam Parr:Sean, remember you were telling that story about the Anthropics CEO and he was like, yeah, things are booming, but like in a weird way, I feel like I'm always like a few months or a few quarters away from running out of money because we're growing so fast. We have to buy inventory, GPUs. Are you in a similar position where even though you're making all of this money, you're having to spend more and more and more and is profitability in sight? No, to the first question, we're not burning nearly as much cash as foundation companies, model companies. And like, you know, sometime last year, profitability was in sight.

45:47We had something like, you know, 30 years of runway or something like that. Since then, we decided to spend a lot more on specialty sales and marketing. And my theory on this is, or like my thesis is that there are a lot of businesses that will need help adopting this technology and adopting Gramplet broadly. And so we, and also there's this imbalance between supply and demand that I talked about. So I thought, okay, we just need to scale the sales team. And so the sales team was like four reps or something like that. by the end of last year, I think it's going to be more than half the company by the end of this year, which is very surprising for me to say because I was always like a sort of a tech.

46:31Yeah, how's that feel to be around a bunch of regional sales managers? I f***ing love it. I didn't know. Because I think I'm weird. I'm a sales bro. I am a sales bro. I am a sales bro. I think I'm weird as far as tech nerds.

46:45Sam Parr:Why do you love it? This is actually really, we laugh because it's funny, but this is actually quite interesting. He was deadlifting before it's cool. He likes sales before it's cool. He's got range. My guy's got range. Well, why do you like it? Because I used to hate salespeople. Then I realized that salespeople, like all these whining and dining, it actually works and they do create demand. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm like, oh, okay. You serve a purpose. It's more of a contact support than consumer. Like a consumer, you do something and then you do an A-B test. and maybe two weeks later, you'll find out whether it worked or not.

47:23And there's this huge delay and there's so many things outside of your control. There's like hype in the market that affects you. Someone writes about you, you go viral and then you die down. Or it's like, there's almost like the weather. You can't really control a lot of it. Sales is much more, like I said, contact support. Like I can apply effort and whether we get the win or not is somewhat much more within our control. And so if I hear like some kind of deal is at risk, it activates me so much because the idea of like losing to some kind of comeback competitor is like the worst living in the world.

48:02And like I'll call whoever I need to call. I'll show up to their office. We'll do whatever we need. And we rarely lose deals. In the few times there was like a potential of losing a deal, we just pulled out all the punches. And the company just, because Haya and I, you know, Haya, my co-founder, my wife is also a hybrid competitor. She also lifts and does boxing and all of that. Haya and I, like, built a culture that's incredibly competitive and so we get activated by this and then when we win, it just feels good. It's very real. It's, like, very different than seeing a number go up later. You know?

48:35Sam Parr:Wait, so, I had heard about this. Your wife is your partner or business partner. That's pretty, that's pretty cool, I think. I mean, it's cool when it's cool. What do you get? It's cool, yes. Yeah. What is tragic is a disaster. How's that? I think that having Replit being so hard, as hard as it is, and it was, if we weren't in it together, I think it would have definitely driven a wedge between us. Because you're both entrepreneurs. You know how much of your life energy startups take. Like they literally take your vitality, your age. Did you know? I had hair when we started the company. And so in life, you have limited amount of energy and you direct it towards your spouse, your kids, your work, you know, things like that.

49:32But then if something is like this sucking energy, the sucking everything, time and energy, eventually it'll just strain your relationships. And I, you know, for a long time, like a lot of my friends just didn't hear from me. Like I kind of disappeared in many ways and still in many ways. You know, I would love to spend more time kind of checking in with friends and keeping connections alive. But the fact that we're in it together, I think, made our relationship stronger because those darts.

50:02Sam Parr:And having all the shares in the family. I mean, that is pretty cool. That's cool. No, I mean, I'm not being funny. That's cool. Well, I think Sean used to work with this guy, Michael Birch, and him and his wife started a company and they sold it for like, I don't know, six or$800 million. And it was, so it was like their family, like, you know, got two times rewarded. But you have to be careful. A few things. You have to be careful not to like make these mission decisions on the weekend and show up and I was like, hey, decision done. I have to be careful not to bring, you know, the tone you bring at home to the office.

50:35Don't make it awkward around other people. It was very easy to make it awkward around other people. You have to work harder to ensure that this is meritocracy because, you know, I come from a world that is less meritocratic, that is more based on who you know, what you know. And family business are very common in that world. The problem with them is that people join the business and they expect if they're not part of the family, they're not really going to, their work is not going to matter as much. Right. And so you have to be very clear about performance and set high expectations for yourselves and be communicative about it.

51:16And also always open to the potential that, you know, there are other people that are better at running the company than you are. You said you read a ton of biographies and especially with this kind of shift into sales mode and being like, oh, I get to play full contact startup. This is amazing. Who are the founders that either most resonate with you in their style or you respect something about them? Or a story that you find yourself retelling a bunch or telling yourself, telling your team that's been kind of inspirational for you? I think Ben Horowitz and like The Hard Things About Hard Things is a very good book and inspiration for especially like a more sales driven business.

52:01I read it a while back, and it has a lot of really interesting stories about doing deals and losing deals and hiring salespeople. And then, you know, after I watched Pirates of Silicon Valley, started learning about Bill Gates. This is another really good old school, very unknown biography, hard drive. It's like in the 90s about Bill Gates. After reading about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and these guys, I just knew that I wanted to be part of that, part of Silicon Valley. It just seems the most exciting thing possible. You can have the most impact. And that is a blessing because I look at a lot of my friends and they're now almost 40 and they really haven't found the thing that they want to get after.

52:45And I think it creates this crisis of meaning in a lot of people. I'm also a big fan of visualization. There was a period of time where there was a lot of like pseudoscientific documentaries coming out. There was one called What the Bleep Do We Know? It's like about quantum physics and visualizations.

53:08Sam Parr:Like if you put the vibration out, the universe will reward you. Yeah, I kind of believe that. I do too. In a weird way. And I can't really disprove it, but to tell you a few stories, you know, I wanted to be on Rogan's show. I was like, you know, I've done all these shows. I've done Tucker's show, My First Million, all these shows. I was like, I want to be a Rogan. The big dog. The big guy. I'm sick of the JVs. I mean, you guys are amazing. But how do you even get on Rogan? I started like sort of visualizing it. I was like, what would I talk about? What would I tell him? How would the interaction be?

53:50And things like that. And a few weeks later, I get a message from two people, Mark Andreessen and Lex Friedman. And they both asked me the same question. Hey, I have a friend whose daughter is entering a entrepreneurship competition and wants her app, wants to make an app. And do you know anyone who can help her? Like, can you help her? It's like, that's odd. and I remember replying to Lex Freeman and then he ghosted me and then I replied to Mark and it's really odd. I got the same message from Lex. Who's this person? It's like, yeah, you know, it's Joe Rogan. It's his daughter. And I said, you know, I'd like to help her.

54:34Like, I'll freaking build the app for her. Like, he introduced me. So he introduced me to Rogan. Rogan introduced me to his daughter. And I said, let's get on Zoom. I get on a Zoom call and it's like four high school girls. And they're like, they're very bright. They have a business idea to connect Gen Z local, Gen Z to local businesses for jobs. And they're like, you know, I'm going to teach you how to make applications and you're going to make it. And so I opened Replit and like, here's Replit. Here's what you do. You just, you know, type in your prompt and let's check in next week. Next week we check in and they already made like half the app.

55:11And by the way, Replit Asian was early on. It was still running into some problems. So every now and then I'll jump in and like help them with one thing. But for like 95 % of it, they built it themselves. And I'm always of the belief of like just provide value and like just don't ask for anything in return. It wasn't like, okay, I'm doing this to get on the show. I think that would be the bad mindset to have. I kept mentoring her and I gave her advice on how to win the competition. It's like, look, no one, none of your peers will have an app. You're the only one that's going to have an app. Everyone will have slideshows.

55:46before you do the pitch, go send the app to all the judges. And that way they'll know you're the only one that actually went above and beyond. And they actually, they presented and they win the competition. And by the way, Joe, I think, might've thought I am some kind of contractor. Like he didn't know, I didn't introduce myself. And so I sent Joe a nice letter and I told him a nice message. I told him, look, I'm, you know, very, very bright daughter. So glad I could be part of this. I would love just five minutes of your time to kind of introduce myself and my story. And so he's like, okay, I'll call you tomorrow or whatever.

56:25Tomorrow comes, he didn't call me. And then text him, I didn't hear back. So I gently told his daughter, I was like, I would just like a phone call with your dad. And so he's like, okay. And then phone rings and it's here again. And it's like, about 90 seconds in, we're talking about MMA. I'm like, you're kind of a, you're you. You're not, it's like the same guy. I'm not a big MMA guy. But on the call, I just, it was like, I just told him about myself. It's a lot of pressure to do that quick, right? Yes, yes. You have to be calm. I'm actually the calmest moments. And I think I could learn this from gaming.

57:13I slow down a lot under pressure. Like when pressure comes, you have to, gaming, racing, anytime there's like incredible pressure and any mistake might kill you. In this case, not literally kill you, but like kill your chances. Actually, I experience time slow down. And I think you can train this in yourself. And I think a lot of race drivers talk about this as well. weightlifting is a great place to practice this. Yeah. Because it's low stakes. But like at the end of the set is when you're shaking, you're at the most fatigue. Maybe you're shaking. Maybe you don't know if you could do it. What most people do is they rush to finish and they've sacrificed form.

57:53And basically, if you can practice poise in the last few reps, you're doing that now every day in the gym. It's like you can get a lot of reps and practice in the gym as a metaphor for life that you can't get that. You can't simulate that pressure in other ways. But your body kind of thinks you're dying when you're under the weights and you're shaking and you don't know what to do. So your body can simulate pressure that way. There's so many lessons from powerlifting. Actually, one day I was at the gym in San Francisco and I saw Brian Chesky lifting weights. It's hugely jacked. And I remember – He's a former bodybuilder.

58:30Yeah, I struck up a conversation with him about powerlifting and startups. That was a lot of fun. Actually, I've had visualization and that feeling of, oh, I want this thing to happen. And then that happened like way too many times. And it doesn't always happen in podcasts, but I think this is what's on my mind right now. Even the interview I did with Tucker, like I, you know, I remember being a big fan of Tucker during the lockdowns when like nothing made sense in the world. And like, I had this anger in me because like, you know, I came to the United States for freedom. and like I feel like I can't see what's on my mind.

59:07I can't leave my house. I have to like put a muzzle in my mouth and I have to take a shot. Like this is a scam. And I remember him like, I started watching Fox News. He got radicalized. But one day I see Martin Shkreli on his podcast and I had helped Martin raise around. I learned finance from Martin. Dude, he used to stream on Sean's platform. Yeah.

59:38Sam Parr:I used to watch him on Sean's thing all the time. He's like one of the best teachers and he's super entertaining for finance stuff, right? He still does it on YouTube. They're really good. Shout out to the Shkreli Pill channel. It's on YouTube. It takes his long live streams. It cuts it the most interesting kind of 20, 30 minutes. Shkreli Pill is just doing God's work out there. Yeah, and I knew nothing about personal finance. I knew nothing about the financial markets. I didn't know how money worked even. And so I remember just watching his channel and just getting educated. And when he got out of jail, I was like, oh, that's cool.

1:00:12Oh, it's Carly's out of jail. And I went and watched his stream and I see him coding and I see him opening Reflit. And I sent him a tweet and I'm like, hey, I see you. I saw you opening Reflit. I'm like a big fan. It'd be great to connect. So I connected with him. He tells me he's starting a startup. The doctor one? So he started a company as like a holding company. And he started the doctor one. At the same time, he started the Bloomberg Terminal one. He started three other things. Yeah. He started Audio, AI one. But the one that took off is the Bloomberg Terminal, I think. And they're now like multi-million dollar revenue.

1:00:47With stuff like this, I'm always curious, right? Because when somebody literally comes out of jail and then you're like, you could, I like to streams too. But then in terms of like investing, there's obviously a big, you know, you kind of got to do your diligence of like, this guy went to jail for some sort of wire fraud type of deal. Am I going to be a part of that? Like, I guess I'm just curious how you mentally think about it. Are you basically like, it's retard-maxing, you don't overthink it? Or do you go and you kind of go get first principles answers for yourself? Like, what do you do? First of all, I'm personally like very principled and very careful.

1:01:20The only problems with the law I had was racing cars. I'm like a big fan of second chances. And the thing I love about America is there's some forgiveness here. You can have a second and a third act. And I saw his side of the story, and it just seemed like he did his time. And this is the system we live in, is that you do something, you get punished, you do your time, and then you leave. And I think society should treat you with a blank slate. Early on at Replit, our first investor, Roy Behat from Bloomberg Beta. Roy is another very interesting character. He's like, Bloomberg Beta is an amazing investment firm.

1:02:02They have great returns.

1:02:03Sam Parr:I pitched those guys years ago. I thought they said no, but I pitched them. So through my bullshit. When Roy says no, he will just tell you exactly. He might even tell you this idea sucks. He's the straightest shooter in Silicon Valley, I think. He'll tell it like it is. What's interesting about Roy is Blooming Beta is both the investment vehicle, but also just things he's fascinated in, he'll just go do. He has this conference about the future of work. But one thing they did at the time is they did a trip to a prison facility. And we went there and it was us mentoring inmates about entrepreneurship.

1:02:48and they wanted to start businesses internally. Some people were starting businesses inside and we were supposed to mentor them. That experience was very touching. And one exercise, and maybe you could say it's a BS woke exercise, but like they lined up everyone on a line and then the inmates on another line. And someone was saying, if you grew up in a household where there's like crime and drugs, stay forward if you did not step back. And then like, you know, 95 % of the non-inmates step back. And then of the inmates, maybe 5 % step back. So like this like inversion. And the exercise was to show you how much of the life of crime is sort of like somehow predetermined by, I don't fully believe that.

1:03:41I believe in personal responsibility a lot. But maybe they're like,

1:03:44Sam Parr:people are born in just maybe harder situations. You can believe in agency and personal responsibility as well as probability. Yes. Right. And influence. Yes. Yes. And so, you know, for all these reasons, I've, you know, I'm open to talking and potentially working with people who have done things in the past, but then they paid their dues and moved on. And so it just felt like this is someone who helped me indirectly learn valuable skills and I want to help them. One of my favorite, I love, I married into an immigrant. family, Sean, it comes from a family of immigrants. What's it feel like from, you know, you're an immigrant to like be living the American dream.

1:04:25Sam Parr:Do you think that there's something about the Americans? What about the American experience do you think is different from other countries? I think America's vision of itself, at least the kind of liberal America's vision of itself was like about tolerance and inclusivity. And there's there's a lot of truth to that. Like, you know, I think it is very easy to be anywhere else, maybe in Europe, perhaps the UK is an exception, and feel like an outsider. But in the US, especially in New York, San Francisco, these places, you just feel like anyone else. You just feel like you're accepted and you have as much of a chance to make it as someone who was born here.

1:05:15And that's incredible. And I don't think that's fully appreciated, especially because America is so self-critical when it comes to these things. But there is a lot of tolerance for difference in this country. And then there's just this spirit of innovation and openness to ideas. Like ask anyone who grew up anywhere else, literally quite literally anyone else. And the experience of entrepreneurs there is to have an idea and the likelihood of your friend telling you you're retarded after you told them that idea is like 90 % plus. And that was always my experience. I always safeguarded ideas, not because I don't want other people to copy them, but more like to protect those because like they're fragile beings.

1:06:03America and San Francisco Silicon Valley, especially a place where you talk about these ideas and they grow. And the problem is like they grow too much and they become radical. Let's start a ship island country. They've got all these like weird things.

1:06:17Sam Parr:So there's like an opposite problem of they snowball and they become. Yeah, but that's a better that's a better problem than, you know, I've got a lot of my buddies. they say back home, I tell people about my ideas and they're like, shut up, dude. Let's just be plumbers. Like don't stand out. Don't stand out. Exactly. That's the usual thing. When I moved to San Francisco, because it's not even just America as a whole, like San Francisco specifically is on the extreme edge. I remember I had just moved there, so I didn't have a place to work. So I just sat in a coffee shop. And in San Francisco, the coffee shop is like, you know, dating, speed dating for investments, right?

1:06:51So the table next to me just kept turning over every 30 minutes with another founder pitching another stupid-ass idea to another investor who was hearing him out. And I just remember by the eighth hour of her, you know, 15 of these pitches, and I just remember thinking, wow, every one of those ideas sounded terrible. And yet it was totally normal and common and accepted to be a little bit crazy like all those people were just now. What's normal here is crazy elsewhere and vice versa. So I went to a meetup that night to go meet some people, and there was a guy there was working at J.P. Morgan and he introduced himself in shame.

1:07:29He was like, I work at J.P. Morgan, but I'm leaving soon. I just need to, you know, that's a small, the normal, in other cities, you have to apologize. You have to be, you have to add all this context if you're choosing the unconventional path of doing a startup. And in San Francisco, you had to add all this disclaimer, legalese, if you had a normal job. Because it's like, what the hell are you doing, man? Why are you doing that stupid thing? Why aren't you living for real like the rest of us? Yeah, and it's easy to get cynical about it. And it's like, oh man, this place sucks. And then make fun of it and all of that.

1:08:01But there's something truly unique about it. The other part is like rubbing shoulder with billionaires. Like when you're literally worth nothing. You know, Larkin Driessen is one who's like, makes friends on Twitter. And he goes on podcasts where like there's two listeners. And he'd like, he'll become friends with people that he find intellectually interesting and stimulating. Paul Graham's the same. Like wherever he goes, he's on vacation to Stockholm and he did like a YC meetup there. And he's just meeting all these kids that want to start companies. And so people get energy here from, less from showing off their wealth and more from being intellectually stimulated.

1:08:44Sam Parr:You know who's like the unsung hero of San Francisco? Meetup.com. Yes. Oh my God. They're the tugboats of the Silicon Valley scene. They don't get enough credit. They're the best. Yeah, I met a lot of amazing people just going to meetups when I first came to Silicon Valley. Is it still going? Well, I'm too old to use it, so I don't use it. But it is still going. It was sold. I think Kevin Ryan, who started Business Insider and Guild Group at MongoDB, I think he bought it. But the founder of meetup.com has this crazy story. He like worked at McDonald's and now he's working at Amazon, but as like a driver.

1:09:22Sam Parr:He's an activist. He's like an Amazon. Yeah, I talked to him. He is a worker rights union guy. And the reason he started Meetup was not to like get rich San Francisco kids to meet up, but to actually organize. And so he's back to his passion now. So he goes and he takes a job at Amazon and he likes to give people tools to unionize. And the most frustrating. Why would they hire him? Dude, he'd be like a casino card counter if it was up to me. I'd be like, oh, he's here. How does he have a lost? He's going to come out and get this guy out of here. Do they still have all of his fingers? What are these companies doing?

1:10:02Sam Parr:They should be like, dude, you are way too rich to work here.

1:10:07Dude, isn't it crazy that there is like this corporate espionage shit going on? Like it sounds like conspiracy, but it's, you also have to logically think, It can't be zero. Does that happen to you, Amjad? Is there espionage? He wouldn't know. Yeah. Is it here in the room with you right now? I think you have to be careful about it. I think you have to build the right systems and processes and all of that. And even if it is not an adversarial company, it could be an adversarial state, especially if you have model weights or something that they can steal. And there's been a couple of stories where they kind of caught foreign agents trying to steal LM models.

1:10:50Sam Parr:But why foreign agents? I guess if you have a company that grew from$2 billion to$1 billion and that fast, I would think that there'd be someone who'd be like, hey, can you go get a job there? Hey, you work there. I'll bribe you to tell me X, Y, and Z. Probably, you know, we're a target probably, but we're not an easy target. We had someone from the FBI come give us a talk about these things, some of these stories, how to protect ourselves. And the broader point is more interesting now with AI. Both social engineering and cybersecurity risk has gone up tremendously. You can have bots that are very good at convincing you of certain things.

1:11:31So phishing has gotten a lot scarier. And also you can do hacking and privileged escalation. Like the Vercel hack is kind of crazy. Do you guys know the entire chain of events? I didn't understand what happened. I saw a couple of tweets where they were like kind of doing the thing where you say, hey, this happened, just be aware. You know, you have to come out and say it at some point. But what was it? What happened? There's an employee at this company called Contacts.ai. and it's one of those provide context to your AI companies that downloaded a Roblox cheat software and that Roblox cheat software was infected with some kind of backdoor.

1:12:10And then that company became fully compromised and someone at Vercel installed context to the AI through Google OAuth on their workspace. And then they had an entry through context into Vercel and then inside Vercel, they've done a bunch of hacks to escalate privileges and get access to their databases. And this was all planned by someone? I mean, I don't know if it's planned end to end. I assume they infected Context AI and they knew it was an attack vector for a lot of other companies. And what did the creator, what did they get? They get data. They're trying to sell on the internet of companies.

1:12:53What would you get from Vercel? Like database data? Database. database passwords, source code. And then you go to that person and you ransom it? I don't think they did ransom. They just posted it. It's like, hey, I'm selling it for like a million dollars. That's for Vercel because, you know, what did they do in this situation, right? I think the thing about Vercel, there are a few things. I mean, look, every company has issues and it does not knock on them. But there's one thing that was odd that they were storing the database secrets in clear text. They had a way recently to make them sensitive and encrypt them, but they weren't encrypted at rest.

1:13:30So once you get access to the database, you got access to every other customer database. I see.

1:13:35Sam Parr:Has your life changed now that you're a billionaire? Like, are you afraid of your security? Yes, unfortunately. I have protection. I don't know, man. I don't feel like a billionaire. Like maybe, what do you feel like? I don't know. I feel like a guy. A little early sent to a millionaire? Yeah. What do you? I definitely feel like a millionaire for sure. Okay. All right. It took me a while to feel that, but like, you know, after like the lifestyle upgrade and all, I guess because I didn't have the lifestyle upgrade of a billionaire. Like I don't have a house of a billionaire. I'm not a realized billionaire.

1:14:11And I don't like to upgrade my lifestyle too quickly. Was there any upgrade that you did do that was pretty cool where you're like, oh, money does have some utility. This actually brought me joy, freedom in some way. I think most people should talk a little bit more about what spending actually moves the needle for you. Because most people have very low imagination with their own money. Yeah, that's, you know, when I sold some secondary, we did some secondary sale like a couple years ago. I think most of it comes down to honestly living a healthier lifestyle and saving time. So a chef is pretty awesome.

1:14:53Being able to eat exactly what you want and eat healthy. Like even when you go to DoorDash and you try to search for the healthiest food, it's still shit. It's a pain in the ass, yeah. And so it just makes you feel better. It just becomes effortless to maintain your weight and maintain your discipline. Getting a coach, you'll have to cycle through a few to find someone that you like. Getting someone who shows up at your door. And so creating that lifestyle, a lot of it is about hiring other people. But you can overdo it. And at some point, I think we overdid it a little bit. And you want to be also careful with, you mentioned security, but there's a lot of people who want to leech in different ways and scam you and do all sorts of nasty things.

1:15:38So I think you can expose yourself to too many people. Your house also starts feeling like the office. A hotel. A hotel, the office, people working out of there. I'm like, oh, man, like I want my kids to have like a normal life like we grew up.

1:15:54Sam Parr:Did you, you know, it's crazy. I just Googled it. How many billionaires are under the age of 40? There's only 71. Really? So, yeah. So of the, I don't know how many people, 7 billion, you know, people like you are in He just made his day. Look at that smile. You are in the, probably the top, like, you know, 1 ,000. I'm having mixed feelings, Sean. He's, it is very interesting. Well, you are in the 1 ,000, probably of all the people under 40, you are probably in the top 1 ,000 richest ever. Well, that shows you I haven't really reflected on this all that much. I'm just like, keep going. Build more.

1:16:30Sam Parr:Yeah, you're like, I know how much I want. And the answer is more. That is the perfect. Not in terms of wealth and money more. It's in terms of success, impact, and enough reserve to actually have an impact on the world and do the things that I want to do that I think are positive. By the way, getting a really kick-ass car, the moment you get any kind of money is the most important thing you could do. What did you get? I got an AMG GT Black Series. Nice. I got an AMG E63 wagon when I got mine. Love it. AMG is, I think, underrated because it has the luxury, but also the class. I bought an e-bike with a burly wagon behind it, and my kids fit in that.

1:17:16That's what I ride around everywhere. Amazing. I think there is, you know, now there's like a lot of hate. Some of it is deserved for Silicon Valley. But part of it is because, like, you think people like potentially hit us because of our wealth. And we should dress down and not show our wealth as much. But I think it just becomes more inauthentic. When you look at the ballers on TikTok or Instagram and you look at the comments, people love them. They're like, balling. But you look at the comments when some tech CEOs saying some dumb shit, like everyone's going to lose their job, it was like hating them.

1:18:01and I think it's just like being a little more normal and the normal thing to do is when you come about some money it's like buy some cool shit.

1:18:10Sam Parr:We love having you on, man. You have this perfect balance of like being wise but also being audacious and fun to hang out with and yet you got this Yoda sensibility. And a little bit intimidating also. He's a formidable guy. He's got it all, man. No, you're a blessing and we're so happy. You know, we sort of got to see you a little bit in the before phase. And that's really exciting for us. I love that I'm coming here at different stages of my life. And I get to look back on that and reflect. And you guys are doing amazing things. I think we share the same mission of empowering people. I think that it's an incredibly exciting time that wealth is accessible to more people.

1:18:56We're just trying to get rich. Yeah, I hope a lot more people get rich. I hope a lot more people get their first million and come on here and talk about it.

1:19:03Sam Parr:And we hope they use Replit along the way, dude. Thank you, guys. You're a blessing. We appreciate you. That's it. That's the pod.

1:19:18Hey, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about a podcast that you could check out. It is called The Science of Scaling by Mark Roberge. He was the founding CRO of HubSpot. and he's a guest lecturer at Harvard Business School. The guy's smart. And he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like Klaviyo and Vanta and OpenAI. And he's asking about their strategies, their tactics, and how they're growing their companies as head of sales or chief revenue officer. If you're looking to scale a company up, if you're a CRO or a head of sales that's looking to level up in your career, I think a podcast like this could be great for you.

1:19:50Listen to The Science of Scaling wherever you get your podcasts.