I got rejected from YC (4x)…. now my side hustle is worth $1.16B

26:37but then they say, upload a video, two or three minutes, you're talking about your startup. So that's the video part. And then the interview is 10 minutes where there's rapid fire. So you have like 10 minutes and it's like this make or break thing. It's less than a lunch, you know? Like there's less than a job interview. It's more intense. So you're waiting around for that. Yeah, I mean, my view was they recruited us to YC. Like, why are you making us do this stuff, right? And so - Yeah, I was going to ask that. Like they're acting like, you know, Paul Graham's like, maybe I could pull some strings.

27:08I know a guy. Yeah, you're the guy. So I don't understand what they're bullshitting. I don't get it. Well, I think they wanted to just go through the process. It's like the process applies to everyone. And I respect that. So they call us to the interview. and I walk in and there was Jared and Dora and all these amazing YC partners. And there was Michael. He was the CEO at the time. And I shake their hands and I shake Michael's hand and I felt like his grip was a little too hard. I was like, okay, that's fine. And then I go sit down on the chair and the moment I sit down, Michael looks at me. Why did you recall us?

27:57Oh my God. And I'm like, you know, we applied several times and I thought it'd be fun to do. And, you know, I thought this interview was just, you know, formality. And he's like, that's not how you get into YC. And he was very, very angry. Well, it turns out when we're sitting outside, they were getting rickrolled inside, right? So imagine their mindset, looking at the application and getting the Rick Roll song. And then they give us a very tough interview. In that moment, did you, it's like, and that's when I realized I fucked up. Did you realize how I'm coming across? What was your mindset there?

28:41I was nervous. I was very nervous. And I was regretful immediately. Yeah, because you probably, it's like, oh, here's this entitled, just another tech entitled guy. When they don't know, you're like immigrant from Jordan who's like scraped his way here, right? They don't, the reality and how you were coming across weren't connected in that moment. No, they weren't at all. And so, you know, we go outside and I tell, hi, okay, this is done. Let's call an Uber and get back to work. Like we don't need to get into YC. so I call an Uber and just before I arrive I receive a call and I take the call and it's like hey it's Adora you got in, come back the kickoff is about to start and I'm like what?

29:31are you sure? she's like yeah come back sign the paperwork and get started so I was stunned the whole day we go to the dinner and I'm like phased out and all but it was really exciting and you know people who who's never been to the yc office and and mountain view it's all orange like bright orange and and the lights and everything it feels like a cult-like environment and like isn't it like uh i think i've seen the inside doesn't it like a like a don't they have like a steeple or isn't like one of the rooms it like is a triangle like a church almost yeah yeah exactly and sound gets up and tells us what what the experience is going to be it's like this is the hardest time you're going to work.

30:13You better tell your friends and family that you're going to go away for three months. You can't help them move or all of that. You just got to be focused on work. So Haya and I took it very seriously. I was like, okay, these three months are very important for the success of the company. And we transformed the product in these three months. It went from a simple sort of editor output to a place where you can host applications and build real things and all in three months. And we were working 12-hour, 13-hour days. And it was only three of us at the time. Our first employee actually was sort of a runaway kid.

30:53He grew up in California, a little down south. And he didn't want to go to school. And so he leaves his home. He goes to Hack Reactor. And he becomes a programmer. And he was 18. he was looking for a job. I knew the guys at Hacker & Actor. They used Replit. And I'm like, send me your best programmer. And he's like, look, this kid is a little awkward, but he's the best. And so he comes in and he yells at our interview. Music to my ears. Yeah, and basically I like him because it mirrors kind of my life story a little bit. Where's this guy now? But we got him some liquidity after six years of working.

31:32I felt that's the right thing to do because he was kind of burnt out and didn't want to continue. So I called my brother in Jordan. I'm like, look, you got to come out here when YC. And he's a programmer. I taught him programming when he was a kid. And I was like, you got to come help us. And he's still with us today. And I called my friend from Code Academy, Moody. He's still with us today as well. I'm like, you got to help us. You could do it remotely. And so we assembled a team of five people, essentially. And so we go really hard. and we were like one of the hottest companies in YC at the time.

32:09And can you give some sense of the scale of it now? Like, you know, I invested in it a year ago or two years ago, something like that. I don't know when, but the numbers were off. You had user growth. First, your graph looked like a hockey stick because you zoom out and it ignores all of the little like years where nothing was really going on. But you have this crazy growth, but the crazy thing about it is that your growth was developers. So it's like, one developer user is worth, I don't know, 10, 20 times just like a normal internet user. But you had this crazy hockey stick growth of developers.

32:45Can you talk about, can you just say a couple of, permission to brag, can you say a couple of brag-worthy stats that would impress us? Yeah, so Replit was very easy to get started with. And so people would start using it in college or high school and continue using it for many years. And so it was sticky for especially junior developers when they're starting out. And it was spreading on its own, like word of mouth. There was a viral component to it. People can share URL, and then suddenly you're in the same environment as them. And then we have this multiplier coding experience. And so people were collaborating.

33:24And also COVID was really great for us because we were, I think, the only collaborative of editor experience on the web at the time. And so a lot of people were remote and needed something to work with each other. And so Repl.io was adopted at the time. And so the growth was off the chart and the servers were going down. And the marginal user in any web app is sort of like zero, zero cost. But for us, it was, you know, we try to optimize it a lot, but it was still on the order of like one to$5, like a month. And the growth was off the charts But I have to admit it was hard to monetize at the time because developers are actually not used to pay for things.

34:08Now they kind of are paying for things because of AI. But at the time, they weren't paying. And then as we added limits and things like that, they felt like they can move on and set up their own developer environment. And so it took a lot of creative thinking to figure out how to charge for people. And ultimately, AI was the thing that people are paying for. And the reason is the productivity benefit of AI is obvious. And people are like, okay, this saves me time and makes me a better developer. And so people are paying for it right now. Well, can you give any indication on how many users or how much revenue the business does?

34:53You know, signups, we have like more than 30 million, I think 35 million users right now. In terms of active users, it kind of fluctuates, but, you know, two to three million a month, probably 100 ,000 apps hosted on Replit. Because you can build an app and deploy it all in one environment. In terms of revenue, I can't share right now, but like, especially this year, it's been exponential growth. Sam, check this out. This agent thing, I'm going to show you this. You haven't used this, right, Sam? No. All right, so watch this. So yesterday, I was like, I'm going to mess around. I was doing research for this, but I just got sucked into Replit and I started doing that, stopped doing research.

35:41So I go to Replit and it's changed because before when you would go, it would be like, here's a coding screen with a blinking cursor and it's like, write some code. and I'd be like, oh, cool. I don't really write code. So I don't know how to use this product exactly. Maybe I could learn to code. Maybe I could pay somebody to build something on here, but whatever, I was stuck. So now you open up Replit and it just, it's like chat GPT. It just goes, so what would you like me to create? And so I go on there, watch this. So I go, I'll give you the exact prompt. I said, build me an app that will text me every morning asking how I ate yesterday.

36:18Let me answer via text message and then track the results on a monthly calendar grid. If texting doesn't work, you could also use WhatsApp or something else. Okay, so basically on the right here is just like the chat. And it just goes, absolutely. Let me propose what we'll build. And then it just kind of like explains to me like a project manager. It goes, I'm going to help you create a food tracking app through SMS messaging with a calendar visualizations. We'll start with the SMS. Later, we can add WhatsApp as an alternative. It's like, okay, okay, prioritizing things. That's interesting. And then it goes, the Apple sent daily messages, blah, blah, blah.

36:48And then it goes, how would you like me to proceed? And it's like, there was like, you know, add more features, change the instructions, or like, go ahead and build the prototype. So I clicked build the initial prototype. And then literally, I don't know if you can see this, but like, it starts like auto scrolling as it's writing code. Like, this is all just a code it's generating. So like, you know, like, I'm not doing anything. I'm literally sitting back with popcorn while this is happening. So it's like, here's your calendar grid. And it's like, hey, I need, I'm going to use Twilio for the SMS.

37:16It decides I'll use Twilio for the SMS. can you go to Twilio and give me your account and your phone number so that it'll, we use Twilio for sending SMS. So I go to Twilio, I give it my SMS, and then it's made. It literally made the thing exactly how I wanted it. So this works now? Yeah, I actually got stuck on the Twilio step because Twilio has to verify my phone number, so it hasn't verified it yet. But in Twilio, I see it tries to send me the message and it's just as awaiting Twilio verification to be able to use this. So I'm a little bit stuck there which is a common thing with agents, I feel.

37:50It's almost absolutely incredible and then kind of frustrating at some point where you have to fight through some walls. Well, I think he said, I want people to be able to build an app faster that they can just Google the answer to a question. And that's exactly what happened here. That's insane. So this screenshot is the agent looking at the result. It's trying to verify. This is not the running app. If you click run, you can hit the running app. It says at the top, took a screenshot, and then it shows it to me. is like, hey, is this how you want it? And I was like, oh, because before it had it where it was like not the right month on top.

38:23I go, oh, put the month on top. Like don't say monthly food tracking, right? December. And then it also said like, hey, would you like any other style improvements? I can make it broader. I can change the color scheme. And I'm like, dude, this is literally better than an employee, right? Like first it's instantaneous. Second, I could, you know, I don't have to pay somebody to sit in the desk to sit around waiting for me to do something. I had an idea on a whim, go to Repa and did the thing with the agent. This was a, like, there's been a few, like, mind-blowing moments for me in my, like, tech career.

38:54You know, like, I graduated 2010. So I'll start at that point, where it's like, the first time I took an Uber, I was like, holy shit, that was amazing. I pushed a button, a car showed up, the guy got in, I didn't even have to pay for, like, it just paid through my phone. That was magic. And I could see him on an app getting closer and closer to the restaurant. That was, like, one of them. You know, ChatGPT, for sure, was another, where I could just tell it to make something and write something and write it for me. This is another one of them. This is the first AI agent thing that has been a mind-blowing moment for me where I am not a programmer, I am not a coder, but I can now create software.

39:32This is amazing. Can I ask a blunt, crude question? How can I use your software to become a billionaire? Because I see this and I'm like, you know like the the the ridiculous analogy that i use is i'm like uh i feel like an artist sometimes where like i feel like i have the ability to conceptualize certain things but i can't paint it's like i can't fucking paint what i want to paint that's in my head like because i literally don't have that skill set sometimes and so like i'll be working on stuff and like dude i want this to do this but i gotta go talk to this developer and i don't want to have this conversation and that's just like a pain in the ass and so like you basically are making it so i can finally express myself easily.

40:12I like how you're on the first date. You're like, how can I get you to take the clothes off? You're like, how do I use your thing to get really rich? I mean, that's basically like you had on the document, you're like, here's the opportunities. Just use Replit to do X, Y, and Z. And I want to go through that because this is amazing. There's a viral clip on YouTube or Twitter, a bunch of places where it's like the headline, which we probably you've used, which is like billion-dollar one-person companies or something like this. You're the closest person to this, probably, to answer that question.

40:48Yeah, so there are apps built on Replit Agent that otherwise would take probably$100 ,000 of developer time. And you can build it like in$25 paid to Replit. I will say that there's limitations, right? It is not perfect. This is the worst it's going to be. It sometimes gets stuck with problems. You need to have some skill in prompting to coax it, to figure it out. And it sort of teaches you over time because it tells you what it's doing as it's editing the code. And so over time, you're learning how to use it. You're actually learning how code works. Maybe you're not learning how to exactly type code, but you're learning the different components in where things could go wrong.

41:36You're learning about database. We have a database. You can go in and look at the tables and look at what's happening. And so the vision for this is that that's all you need. That's all you need to build an entire startup. And every day we're inching towards that. And I talked about pushing the boulder up the hill. And I think that's one of my talents. It's like, okay, what are the problems that you can make progress on every day and every week such that in a year time, you have this exponential progress and the product is so much better. The other thing is we're riding this wave of the foundation models getting better.

42:16So every time they get better, we plug in a new foundation model and the product is suddenly better. So you're riding this two exponential curves, which is like the engineering we're doing, but also the underlying models and infrastructure is getting better. So I think in a year's time, it's going to be really mind-blowing. In a couple of years time, I think we're going to see stories like someone getting super rich, making an app on Replit that sort of goes viral. And so we're adding Stripe integration right now. You can already use kind of Stripe on Replit, but we're adding integration that makes it super easy to start monetizing your app.

42:58Hey, quick message here, because you know that feeling when you send a wire and it actually works? No friction? Well, I've used Mercury for years now, and let me tell you, it just works. And that's why I use it for not one, not two, but eight of my companies. From credit cards to invoices, I have everything in one place. There's no janky dashboard. I'm never told, please visit a local bank branch. None of that tomfoolery. And a few months ago, I landed a big client. And the first thing I did, I sent them a clean branded invoice. Boom, deal closed, cash in the door. That's the kind of banking experience I want.

43:27And that's why I use Mercury. So if you're running a startup and you want banking that feels like it's built in this century, well, go to mercury.com and get started in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Bankless services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column A, and Evolve Bank & Trust members, FDIC.

43:45So Sam said, how do I get rich? And you're like, disclaimer, it's not fully there yet. But now you still have to answer the question. I mean, the question is like, what kind of applications? It's like, what are the ideas? What kind of applications you can build? I would say AI applications are growing really fast. The revenue ramp in some of those AI applications is kind of crazy. Can you tell the story of Magic School? I thought this was really interesting. Yeah. So Magic School is like an AI application for educators. It's basically like helping them use foundation models and LLMs to do their work, to do assignments, for kids to have an interactive AI experience.

44:29And so it's like a full suite of AI for educators. The guy who created it was a teacher, right? The guy who created it was a teacher. He took some time during COVID to learn how to code, and he started using Replit. And him and I think another person built the initial thing totally on Replit. Because you can go from an idea all the way to deployment, and it immediately started growing.

44:58These AI apps, when the adoption starts happening, It goes super viral. You don't need a ton of marketing. And the revenue ramp was one of the craziest ones I've seen, especially for education. Yeah, it was like a known thing. It was like hardest thing you could do, selling into schools, into teachers. They're overworked, they're underpaid, they don't have the time to like figure out your new tool. But this thing is great. So if you go to it, it's basically like, because a teacher spends a lot of their time not in the classroom. It's after school is done, they have to grade papers. They have to create the lesson plan for the next day.

45:29they have to create the quizzes or the multiple choice tests and they have to like so they have to constantly do this and there was these platforms like teacher pay teachers where i could just if i don't want to make it myself because i'm tired after the school day i might be able to go buy one for nine bucks from another teacher who teaches fifth grade science in some other state and i would take that and i would i would buy it that way what magic school did was it was like cool generate a you just say like i want to i teach you know fifth grade biology i want to do a pop quiz about how mitosis works.

46:01And then it'll basically create either a lesson plan or a quiz or a student interactive workbook that they need to create or whatever. And so it lets a teacher not have to spend four hours a night creating the materials that they need just to teach class because AI can do it for them. And this thing looks, I don't know these guys, I don't know anything about them, but it says over 4 million educators are using this, which are 4 million educators and their students, which I don't know if they're counting both. Well, if you go on similar web, they have millions of monthly uniques. So that's a pretty big thing.

46:33I think they raised like$20 million too off this idea. Yeah, so that's a pretty huge signal. So they launched in, I want to say, July 2023. So then a little over a year. And do you know that these SaaS metrics are like, how long to get to whatever, like$100 million or whatever. The AI apps, and I would say Magic School is on that trajectory, is just like that. The curve is all the way straight up. This is kind of weird, but maybe this is a feature of yours that you helped this company become potentially one of the faster growing companies of all time and you only earned$20 a month from that. Yeah, so Replit had always a problem of value capture.

47:21Partly that's why VCs struggled with it for a long time, so that there's some logic for why it is hard to monetize these things and capture some of the value. I will say I invested in Magic School, so there's some of that. And with AI, I think we're going to be able to capture at least a little bit more of that value. If people are monetizing these apps on Replit via the agent, there's a way I think where we can potentially take a cut out of that especially if we make it super simple to start monetizing an app. Also, once we reach scale it is like ChatGPT you don't need a lot of skill to do that and it's going to get easier and easier.

48:05Once we reach scale and you have millions of people paying for this, and it's not just like 20 bucks, you're going to pay incremental after you finish your credits. So we give you monthly credits and then afterwards if you want to continue you can buy more credits. Are there other companies like Magic School, like cool companies that you've seen that maybe we haven't heard of that are using AI? Yes. So I'm very excited about agents right now. And I think I predicted earlier this year on a podcast that this is going to be the year where agents are born and next year is where agents are going to scale.

48:44So there's this company called 11X. and 11X creates AI SDRs. And so basically, you don't need to hire SDRs. There are some companies that feel like they can bootstrap their sales without SDR. You can have one AE and that AE account executive is running these tens of AI SDRs. And the revenue ramp on 11X was also crazy. It's pretty wild how fast these companies are scaling. I don't think in the history of Silicon Valley we've seen anything like that, even in the like web 2.0 era. So what is like a fast ramp for AI, maybe not 11X specifically, but just for an AI company? What's impressive that kind of broke the frame of how long things would take, but you've seen it now?

49:35Yeah. So I would say reaching a 10 million in three or four months era. Oh my God. That's wild. Yeah, I invested in Jasper, which was one of the early kind of chat GPT wrapper type of companies where they was like, hey, marketing, you need to write a blog post. You need to write a description for a product or whatever. And so you could use it for writing any kind of marketing copy. And their graph was, I'd never seen it. It was like in 10 months or 11 months, they scaled like 50 million in annual recurring revenue. It was like, I've never seen anything even remotely close to that. it brought up a question, like, is this sustainable?

50:17Is this, like, what is happening here? It doesn't compute, but it definitely broke my frame of what is possible because I'd been working in Silicon Valley since 2011, 11, 12, and that just, that wasn't a thing. You would never see a graph like that. What are some other companies that have gotten to that like 10-ish million or similar trajectory in three-month type of businesses? Yeah, so this is, I wanted to kind of give a, disclaimer about this, which is the big question in the investor community right now is the most question. And that started around the time that ChatGPT came out and there was these GPT wrappers, sort of this condescending way of looking at a lot of these companies.

51:02It's like, if you can create a GPT wrapper in a month, then a lot of other people will create GPT wrappers in a month and you're going to be competing on price and the margins go down. And yes, the ARR is great, but Anthropic is capturing or OpenAI is capturing most of the ARR, not you. You're kind of like a middleman and you're going to have a hard time having margins. And I think it's totally a valid question. Now, I think modes develop over time through strategy and technical excellence. So, I mean, some of these companies can go down pretty fast and there are examples of that right now. But I think if you, you know, you can start building technical.

51:49Like with Replit, again, this like idea of like pushing a bull up a hill. You know, we have this runtime environment. We have like this infrastructure. We have the deployment. We have databases. We have all these integrations. I mean, it's the only one in the world that is like an end-to-end environment to make software. To catch up with that, it's going to take years. But technical advantage is also not a long-term moat. And so, again, it's a big question. I don't think it's answered yet. There are strategic things you could do if you reach scale. If the switching costs are high, that may be a way to have sustainable moats.

52:29But it is definitely a big question. You know what's crazy, Sean? I hate using the D word, democratize. I think that's such an overused Silicon Valley word. Don't do it. But this is actually one of those few examples where for the longest time, building a website or a web app, you just literally couldn't. And so now you are making the technology that everyone can do it. And so what I think is guys like Sean and me or people like us who have an audience, it's like, why aren't we constantly launching companies using this technology? Because our ability to get users, because we just get on the microphone and talk about it.

53:08That's like actually a competitive advantage. Whereas being technical is no longer, it's still an advantage, but it's not as much as before. It's like getting customers now is actually the only hard part, which is still hard, but it's way easier if you're popular. Yeah, so the playbook I would use is like, I would go into some inefficient market or industry. So a deal from Magic School went into this hugely inefficient industry, which is schools and education. And by the way, another product is Synthesis Tutor, which is also going viral right now. And they have also this revenue ramp that's kind of crazy.

53:56Both Sean and I invested in that company. I think all three of us did. Yeah. Yeah, and for a while they had this thing where they had educators on the payroll and whatever. They replaced all of that with AI. Now the kids sit in front of the iPad and they're talking to the AI and learning really fast. And it's much better than the previous product. So basically find an industry where you're familiar with and just build a GPT wrapper to automate some of the work there. And you could do it like a hundred times and one of them will take off. Yeah, it's the era of the idea guy now. It's our turn. It's our turn to shine, right?

54:38Because now the limits and the kind of the value creation is, do you understand a problem well enough to know how to take this really powerful magic wand and point it at that problem and be able to make that more efficient? And then, of course, do all of the other hard things, go get customers, make it sustainable, build a good team, you know, like do all the normal entrepreneurship stuff. But it seems like more than ever, having a great idea is the kind of like key unlock to doing these things because building has become easier. And I'll give you kind of my personal epiphany that I had while I was doing this.

55:09So I invested in Replit mostly when I just thought, you seemed really smart. And I saw a growth curve of developers using it. And I thought, oh, cool. Like, I've experienced this problem before. a one-stop place where I can come in, write the code, host it, all the stuff you talked about. Don't have to download Java, don't have to do any of that shit. That appealed to me at the time. I think actually in the same way that Synthesis took AI and actually almost really 10xed the value prop of the business, I think you guys are doing the same. Here's my quick pitch, which is now that I think of Replit as

55:48basically what Shopify was for creating online stores, I think Replit is that for creating software. So to me, you guys are - Dude, his eyes just brightened when you - You're Shopify for software. So I'll give you my example. I recently celebrated a milestone that was both, I was proud of it and really embarrassed also. So a few years ago, I started an e-commerce brand and we just crossed 50 million in revenue, kind of like cumulative lifetime revenue. Half of it was like this year, but 50 million total. And I was like, wow, like 50 million, that's great. I had never created a business that had done$50 million in revenue.

56:22So that was a personal pride point. At the same time, I was telling it to a friend of mine who's not an entrepreneur. He's like, yeah, man, I would love to learn how to make websites and make products and manufacturing. And I was like, I don't know how to do any of that. I was like, this brand that is on$50 million in revenue for me, I just stacked Alibaba times Shopify. I've never manufactured a product in my life, still don't know how to. And I've never made a website that's like, you know, actually used by customers, still don't know how to. But I was able to skip all the work and get to the brand part, like do the thing where we created a product that people liked and, you know, it's a successful company now.

57:03And I thought, wow, Replit's going to do that for the software space. And I was like, it used to be that the job was software engineer. And now it's going to be software creator. It's like, I can be a creator of software without being a programmer myself. That little shift is a big shift because the way I think about it, I don't know how many developers there are. I think GitHub has like 100 million or 200 million accounts. So I'll just use that. Like there's 200 million, let's say, software engineers in the world. Well, now there's going to be 2 billion people that can create software. Because if you got the internet, you got your phone, you can create software now.

57:40You can just tell the agent, make me an app that does this. Make a tool that does this. And so you 10x the number of people that can create software in the same way that Shopify and Alibaba 10x or more the number of people who could create products and go sell them, like hard goods. That's how I see what you're doing. Yeah. So even at the start of Repl.led, there's our initial seed deck. And the deck kind of has this Elon Musk-style master plan. And it was like, we build a platform, we grow it, and then AI is going to make the thing a lot more accessible. Because our mission was make programming accessible.

58:22Then we updated our mission. It was create a billion programmers. And then so the moment that even GPT-3 came out, I was like, this is the thing. And I wrote this thread on Twitter about how AI agents will just change how programmers work. This is the DEX. So 2015, I don't even know if OpenAI was a research lab at that time, maybe. Definitely, there was no chat GPT, but this was your master plan deck. So we're going to grow by building tools for teachers and students. We're going to build a simple network and AI-assisted interface that blurs the distinction between learning and building. Evolve into a platform where people can learn, build, explore, and host applications.

59:00Talking about AI back in 2015 in your actual pitch deck. Dude, it's also clear how Code Academy was highly influential to you. because I remember years ago, Sean said, everyone tries to learn how to code. I used Code Academy and it was a pretty cool interface and it's very similar to what you're describing. You know, at some point I kind of lost hope in courses because like, you know, we have 100 days of code. We're telling users that to use our application, you need to invest 100 days. That's kind of crazy. Like there isn't any like successful company in the world you need 100 days to learn it.

59:41And so that's when I kind of changed my mindset and I said, okay, it needs to be ChatGPT-like. It needs to be just a prompt. And we started building that earlier this year. And now that's all we're focused on. We want to create new programmers. Existing developers, great, they have a lot of tools. But we want to go after the citizen developer, right? Everyone is a developer. And I think that's what you're talking about. You go from like 100 million developers of the world, well, I think it overstates the number. It's probably more 30 million. And then you 10x that. And so what does the world look like when anyone with an idea could make something?

1:00:23And one of my favorite books is The Sovereign Individual. The thing I really was excited about is this idea of ideas become wealth. And so you no longer have the bottleneck of making something. That's where we're headed. And this is what you're talking about, Sean, is like the, it's the time for idea guy. And like, maybe that's, you know, tongue in cheek. And like, maybe the way to talk about it in more precise terms is that people who can find these gaps in markets, people who have expertise in certain areas that they can tell there's inefficiency and they can create an AI application that can immediately plug that.

1:01:08I saw this video on Twitter the other day. It was of a snake that got its head chopped off and it floated around and bit the tail of its own body. And then the body reacted. Your employees, are they thinking that they're sort of doing that to themselves? Like when you make jokes. Dark. Or like when you talk, you don't need to hire all these programmers to do all this stuff? Are they sitting there with their hands in their pocket? Does that mean us? I always wanted the company to be super lean. And so for a long time, we're like 10 people. But now we're like 70 people. That's still nothing. Yeah, so I'd rather not hire a lot more people because I think that, again, the efficiency for programmers...

1:01:58So look, citizen developers are going to go from zero to, say, 10x. but also existing software engineers are going to go from 10x to 100x. And so they're going to become more and more productive. The moment we automate all of software engineering, I think that's sort of like the moment of AGI. So I think it's a little far away. And the reason I say this is because once you automate software, then the agents can rebuild themselves. and you go into this loop of increased intelligence. Every version builds its next version, builds its next version. And so this is what they call intelligence explosion that would lead to the singularity, right?

1:02:42So it's like a pretty crazy time when we automate all of software engineering. And so I think it's coming. I don't know if it's 10 years or 15 years, but I think that's the time where the world really radically changes. Have you met anybody in kind of the tech industry that blew you away, either personally or maybe you've read about them, maybe met a friend of a friend, told you a story? Because I saw a picture of you with Jensen. You've met Paul Graham. I know that you're connected in the AI circles. You met Sam Altman. In addition to building the tech, I love the characters and I love the stories.

1:03:17This is why every Elon snippet of how he runs his companies goes viral and shit like that. What are your favorite kind of inspiring stories or crazy stories that you've either experienced directly or read? One of the craziest stories when we're raising from A16Z, Mark invites me to breakfast at like 10 a.m. at his house. And so I go there and I expect I'm going to talk about the business. And so we spend like two or three hours talking about politics and the world and all sorts of things that are interesting to him. and I thought this guy is more than just a technologist. He's a philosopher. And so right now he's going out and he's talking about this stuff.

1:03:58His Joe Rogan interview went super viral and he's always had these interesting ideas about the world. And the interesting thing about A16Z is his partner Ben is sort of like the executor, sort of the executive. He wrote the hard thing about hard things where he teaches you about what it means to run a company. It's painful. It's hard. And what it means to hire executives or what it means to scale a company. And so you have this duo of the doer and the philosopher. And I think that's really amazing. And I think they have really big plans. And if I was the doer, I would just hate the philosopher.

1:04:38I'd be like, are you going to do anything? What are you talking about politics for right now? It's got to be the worst to be the doer and the doer philosopher relationship.

1:04:47You know, I think Sam was interesting to kind of meet him, talk to him, because he's very effective. Like the first time I met him, maybe not the first time, but he was on his computer as I'm talking. And so I'm talking, I was like, yeah, we're fundraising. I went to talk to A6 and Z. I'm like really big fan of Mark. And he was typing on his computer. Okay, I introduced you to Mark. And then when you send Sam emails, it's like pretty quickly replies with a couple of words or a couple of sentences. So I saw how effective and fast you can be. And I'm not like that. I'm trying to be more like that, but I'm someone who really values the quietness, like to think about ideas and to think about strategy and things like that.

1:05:45So I'm not always on top of communication. It actually makes me like a little, you know, it's overwhelming. But I think seeing these people at least, you know, inspired me to be a little more like that. You tweeted out this story that I loved about, you said, the most gangster story in Silicon Valley is Steve Jobs buying Pixar for$5 million, investing$50 million and operating at a loss for a decade, so much so that he had to cut personal checks to make payroll and somehow turning it around to a$7 billion exit. Why did you like that story? You know, there are people who are overrated in Silicon Valley, and I think there are people who are underrated.

1:06:26Like, I think people think about Steve Jobs in terms of like, yeah, the flashy things, the iPhone, the iPod, you know, coming on stage and doing that. The thing I like about the Steve Jobs story is when he was lost in the desert for 10 years. So he left, he was fired from Apple. And then he created two companies that were failing the whole time. Like Next Computing, Next Computers, and Pixar were literally failing. Like they didn't do anything. They weren't selling. He was just like investing more and more of his money. Like I think he was going to go broke. But he kept going for 10 years. Like how do you do that?

1:07:05And I'm a person who, like we talked about in my story, where I want to be able to go the distance. I think going the distance is an advantage for entrepreneurs. And Pixar became this hugely valuable company. And it goes from making no revenue to making billions of dollars and going public over a couple of years. And Next computers saved Apple. Apple was having a problem with OS. Like Intel, they had the chip before. I don't know, they made it internally or something like that. And then everyone was moving to Intel. Intel was the best computing chip, and they wanted their computers to be fast.

1:07:47And so they needed a new operating system. And they tried to buy, they went to the market, they tried to acquire companies, they couldn't find a great operating system. And Nex Computing had a great operating system. And that became Mac OS. So they bought - I didn't know that. I thought Nex was just a failure. I didn't even realize it actually - I thought they just bought Steve back, Aquihire, but it wasn't just Acquire. No, I mean, Objective-C, for example, you know, Next Computing was really obsessed with this idea of object-oriented programming, and they innovated a lot on what that means. And, you know, it is based on Unix, but it has a lot of interesting features on top of that.

1:08:27So it saved Apple, because Apple was otherwise not going to be competitive without these new chips. Right. Well, dude, I know we kept you half an hour over. I apologize for that. But this was amazing. This was one of my favorite episodes in a long time. And I'm not just saying that. You can go check all the other episodes. I don't say that at the end. So this was awesome. Thanks so much for coming on. Where should people... Twitter is the best place to follow you? Yeah, Twitter. AmosHod on Twitter. And the Replit handle on Twitter as well. Just R-E-P-L. Dude, thank you very much. You're the best.

1:09:04Of course. Of course, my pleasure. world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

1:09:23All right. This episode is brought to you by Mercury. They are the finance platform of choice for over 200 ,000 companies. Shouldn't be surprised because I use it myself for not one, not two, but I have eight different Mercury accounts. I have seven for different companies that I'm a part of. And then I have my own personal account because now they have personal banking, which is a really cool feature. I highly, highly recommend it. Like I said, I use it myself. And the reason why is because the way that Mercury works is beautiful. It's very intuitive. And you could tell that it's actually made by a startup founder.

1:09:50It's an entrepreneur. You could tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and annoyances and decided to actually fix it himself. And really any type of entrepreneur you are, let's say you're an agency. Well, One of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices, easily create them, send them to customers, and stay current on your balances with all your customers. Well, you can do that inside Mercury. And so I think that Mercury is great. Highly recommend you check it out. And thank you for sponsoring the show.

1:10:16For more information, check out Mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.