Amjad Masad on Going Direct, Building Replit, and the Future of Software

0:00Being canceled is a choice. You can choose to get canceled and retreat from the public eye. But I think if you're still out there, at some point, honestly, the haters kind of give up. Some people ask, hey, how should I think about X versus other platforms? You have to understand the meta because the way to go viral is to dress up your argument, your worldview in the current conversation. Twitter's influence is amazing, but it tends to be elite kind of inside group influence. I think Instagram, Facebook still, YouTube is where you get to the early majority. Does every CEO need to become an influencer now?

0:33Look, I think there's so many paths to success. I don't think there's one. Replit would have probably died if I wasn't telling a story that is larger than the company itself. Dario is an example where he's not playing the social media game. The product sort of speaks for itself. So I think it comes down to the...

0:49Erik Torenberg:For years, Replit wasn't the overnight success people see today. long before the company's recent growth, Amjad Massad spent years communicating a vision that many people thought was too ambitious, too early, or simply unrealistic. That experience shaped his belief that for founders, storytelling isn't separate from company building. In some cases, it's a prerequisite. Recorded live at the New Media Summit, Amjad and I discuss why founders should build in public, how to develop a public voice, and what it takes to communicate a vision before the rest of the world can see it. We also talk about authenticity, social media, founder-led media, and why some of the most important company building happens long before the business itself is obvious.

1:37Erik Torenberg:Amjad, thank you for joining us. Of course. So Replit is a 10-year-old company. For the last two years, it's gone absolutely vertical. But there was a period of time well before that where the company was in the zeitgeist, partially because of your GoDirect efforts. I mean, you're one of the best CEOs on X. You're also now getting big on Instagram and other platforms. What has the business impact been of your efforts going direct? And does every CEO need to become an influencer now? Or how have you sort of conceived of this? Yeah, I think Refle would have probably died if I wasn't telling a story that is larger than the company itself.

2:11The company wasn't successful commercially, but we've been very successful at fundraising, recruiting. and I think if you build a company that's successful right out of the gate commercially, you might not need to do all of that. But if you're trying to meme a dream into reality, I think you have to play that game. And so yeah, I think otherwise we would have not existed because we had to do that for so many years before, I mean, it turns out everything I said was true, but at the time it wasn't real. It was a dream. Yeah.

2:47Erik Torenberg:And I mean, you at one point decided to go big on this. You weren't always big on Twitter. I mean, you started and a lot of people here, a lot of people who are CEOs, maybe it doesn't come super naturally to them and they have to make a decision of like, you know, am I going to do this? And if so, how do I get good at it? What was your journey to saying, hey, I'm really going to invest in this and I'm going to get good at this? Well, I think the journey starts outside of Twitter even is like, how do you get good at communicating? How do you get good at public speaking? And so I always wanted to be able to be an influencer for lack of better words.

3:20And I remember I was in New York when I first came to the States and I had a terrible stage fright. I'd be sitting here and my heart rate would be like 150. I'd be sweating. And I thought, how do I deal with this? How do I get better at this? And I went and took improv classes in New York and then took a storytelling class. And I'm like a big fan of exposure therapy. Anything you're afraid of, just go do more of it until you're desensitized. And the best way to get desensitized is to just make a fool of yourself every day doing improv. And I ended up doing shows and got pretty good at it. And then I think the benefit that I had is Replit didn't blow up right out of the gate.

4:00My personal profile had this very linear growth to it. And so I could make mistakes with very little attention on me. And I made a lot of PR mistakes. I think still, if you go to Hacker News, sort by the top 10. We had a PR crisis in Hacker News where I had an issue with some ex-intern at Replit where I just totally botched that communication on that. But still, that wasn't larger than I was still within the Hacker News community, which they still hate me, which is fine. They'll hate you anyways. That's like the rite of passage. Hacker News loves you, then they hate you, then you become successful.

4:36And then so you kind of make mistakes and they're not at the public stage just yet. And so the stakes get higher as I'm able, it's sort of a progressive overload in powerlifting. You're sort of carrying more weight. It never gets easier, but you're able to do more and more over time. And so, you know, I feel for the founders that are just now kind of like their company is blowing up and they're in the public eye. And you can see founders of big now trillion dollar companies. They're really fucking up on a massive stage. But getting the reps in has been super helpful.

5:11Erik Torenberg:And so is that your advice? People want to get you just exposure therapy, just one tweet a day? Or what's the best way to get started to get really good at this? Yeah, so I think a few things. One is the concept of building public. It wasn't coined when I started doing that. But the idea is that, look, as a CEO, you're going to do a good amount of writing and communicating to your employees, your investors. You can just do it publicly, right? I mean, I've always been this believer that there aren't really a lot of secrets that you need to keep inside a company. And so a lot of your otherwise writing that would be in private, you can put it public.

5:50And that way you carry people in the journey with you. and you're getting the reps in. So whenever there's a piece of communication or story I want to tell and there's a choice between public and private, I might bias towards public. I often write something publicly and then paste it on Slack. I just say, this is what I wrote. And so that's been helpful. The other thing is authenticity. I think being yourself is kind of like a big radical thing that maybe started happening with Elon maybe 10 years ago, but CEOs were supposed to be this very polished thing. They had to kind of be filtered through this prism of PR and journalists are kind of the way to get to the public.

6:33But you see kind of Elon being the first kind of building a public platform. And I think Zuck to some extent as well, just seeing Zuck at some point when journalists kind of turned on him, he started going direct and you start following their stories and it's like Zuck changed the entire narrative around him by just being himself and actually talking directly to people. And I think the story of Trump is also very illustrative. I think Trump was successful despite the negative bias in the press. And it was mostly Twitter initially. People forget that, but Trump had amazing bangers. What was my favorite one?

7:12I've never seen a thin person drink Diet Coke, which is true. Or Kanye. Okay, Kanye's banger is, I hate waking up in the plane and I see a bottle of water in front of me. No, I got to take care of this shit. I don't have a manager. I can't be managed. Right, I can't be managed. You see these people come up and people start associating with them. And obviously, they're very authentic. And we're like, okay, there's this shift in people's minds where they crave authenticity. Hunter Biden. Yeah, yeah. He's on fire now.

7:45Erik Torenberg:But if you're a good poster, you can get away with it. He can post his way to presidency for sure. Yeah. It's funny you mentioned the intern thing because I remember that, but I also remember forgetting it too. And a lot of people say, oh, what if I say the wrong thing? What if I get my company into trouble in some sort of controversy or scandal? Is it just that attention spans are so short that it's just like the next situation? What do you say about that? Well, I think it's deadly. Like PR crisis can be deadly if you retreat afterward. If you're not in the news, and I think the thing about, I think, Trump, Elon, etc., is that there is the next thing.

8:20And by the way, the next thing could be worse. But just the fact that you're still in there, you're still in the game, people will be like, oh, this guy's unkillable, uncancellable. Being canceled is a choice. so you can choose to get canceled and retreat from the public eye but I think if you're still out there at some point honestly the haters kind of give up they're like alright I guess we can't do anything to this guy let's go to the next guy

8:44Erik Torenberg:there's this great book So You Think You've Been Shamed and it chronicles the stories of a number of people who've gotten canceled over the past 15 years and that's basically the takeaway is that the people who are truly canceled are the ones who shut up and the ones who retreat but the ones who just keep going and forgettable. I mean, there's so many people, Brian Johnson is an example, who just revived their image or just presented a whole new image. People just forget the thing that they were almost canceled. I will say the mental aspect of it is pretty difficult. I was going to ask that next.

9:14Yeah, because I think that this story has been told a trillion times, but like in the Assessor Village, if you become an outcast, that's pretty deadly. Like you can literally die. You can't find food. And so our limbic system, when you get this massive reaction online, you're kind of in this fight or flight and it can really affect you. Like you can't sleep, some people can't eat and it could be really damaging. But I think, again, exposure therapy helps a lot. Like the first one is really hard, the second one is like, ah, it'll blow over. But also having good principles. Like I think acting on principles is important.

9:51No matter what people think of what's happening at Anthropic, it's absolutely true, I think, in my mind that they believe everything they're doing. They believe in safety. They believe in their mission. And I think that gives them incredible strength to keep going in. And obviously, oftentimes, principles and self-interest coincide, and that's a good thing. But you can ascribe what they're doing to some kind of cynical marketing ploy. But the strength that they have is based on their principles, and that really keeps them going.

10:27Erik Torenberg:Yeah. I mean, earlier on, you were alluding to the stakes are really high. What advice might you have for an anthropic or open AI in terms of like some of the communication challenges or opportunity? It's obviously way above my grade. I've never, you know, battled with a United States government. Not yet. One day. Goals.

10:53Look, I honestly think it's a kind of a win-win for them. Like, it's really, if you game out what's going to happen with Anthropic, Fable comes back, it's going to be a huge flood towards Fable. It's kind of like, you know, this thing was banned by the government. Actually, Steve Jobs once did this ad, they had a Mac, I don't know, the big towers, Mac Pro, I think it's called, where they had tremendous compute power that was subject to export control. So they had this ad where it's like military tanks going and surrounding the Mac and the Mac in the middle. And it's showing that this thing is so powerful, the US government doesn't want you to have it, so you should go buy it.

11:38And so it's like a tremendous marketing opportunity. For them, it's already their reputation is pretty big. But even if they can't get Fable back on the market, they still win the PR game of we're a company that's kind of principled and doing the right thing and all of that. So I think just my advice would be not to stress out too much and not to honestly just sit back and let it play out.

12:13Erik Torenberg:You were describing the mental game. A lot of things we'll hear from CEOs is, oh, I don't want to have to tweet and then I'm in meetings. Now I think about the responses and I have to respond back. And now I'm in sort of conflict. You don't have to respond back. That's the thing. Right. You don't have to respond back at all. I mean, that's another thing you have to learn is to, like, not feed the trolls. It's, you know, that reply is like, oh, I gotta get back. It's like, what's that, I think, New Yorker comic who's like, babe, come to bed. It's like, no, someone's wrong on the internet. And it's like, it's very tempting.

12:44But actually, it's kind of the baller thing to do is like, oh, yeah, yeah, the plubs can fight on my comments. I don't need to worry about it. So I think it's a trap to think that anything you put out, you need to immediately defend. Obviously, if something is getting a lot of airplay and people are misunderstanding you, I think you should correct it. And again, you should do it in the principled way. You should do it because, hey, this is what I actually believe. Here's what you got wrong. But don't be overly defensive about it. Like don't appear that, oh, this is something that you're getting emotional about.

13:25Because again, anytime publicly, anytime you show weakness publicly, it actually feeds the trolls and feeds the haters because they feel like they can get to you.

13:36Erik Torenberg:Yeah. What advice would you give for when companies are being dragged by someone on Twitter or in the press or when to respond versus when not to engage? Yeah, I think that's like an art thing. And I think it comes down to business impact. Will it actually have impact on my business? For example, last year in July, we had this story with the founder of Saster, Jason Lemkin, where Jason had just started Vibe Coding, had never Vibe Coded or coded anything before. and as he's working with a replet agent, the replet agent sort of misunderstood him or something like that and then deleted the database.

14:26At the time we didn't have production development separation and so the production database, now we actually separate them by default. The replet agent can't even write to production database. It can only read.

14:43And we have backups. We have snapshots. so you can go back to a certain day or time or whatever. So the mistake that the RepliDation did was one click away from being fixed. But from his perspective, he didn't know that, and RepliDation started freaking out. Models at the time used to get really anxious, especially Claude. And he tweeted this screenshot where RepliDation was going kind of nuts. And it started gaining traction, gaining traction, gaining traction. And in my mind, we already fixed this issue, but the story has become so massive. And obviously, it's going to have business impact, and it's going to be in the press.

15:28And so I could go out and fight and just say, well, we did nothing wrong, we had backups. I could say it's a user error, whatever. But I think the right thing to do was to own up to it. The fact that we didn't have development production separation is a bad thing. And two days later, we rolled out that fixed. And so my response got a lot of positive interaction and got a lot of airplay because I started with, hey, we messed up and this is what we could have done better. But sometimes you can give attention to things that you don't want to give attention to, especially once your profile grows.

16:09Erik Torenberg:Especially if you apologize. Yeah, especially if you apologize. So I would say just kind of focus on the business impact. Yeah. And you mentioned earlier... By the way, Jason is a huge fan now. He runs his entire SaaS business, multi-million dollar business, with him, another employee, and like 10 agents based on Replit agents. That's awesome. Yeah. You mentioned earlier that you sort of developed a desire for this. For CEOs who are so locked in, they're just not that interested in doing this, would you recommend that they cultivate the desire to do it? or would you recommend that someone else on the team can do it?

16:43Erik Torenberg:Or does it have to be the CEO? Or how would you think about this? Look, I think there's so many paths to success. I don't think there's one. Like, yeah, there are a lot of companies where it's not the CEO that's out there. Like Grok with a Q and like Sonny is the person on Twitter, but the CEO is kind of not in there. And they've done a great job. And obviously they kind of, the company's great, IP is great, But they also, they memed it into success because I think part of the story that's not being told there is that they actually had a lot of trouble fundraising in Silicon Valley. They had to kind of go to Saudi and all of that.

17:21And so that's an example where the CEO is not out there. You look at Dario as an example where he's not playing the social media game. Kind of the product sort of speaks for itself and he's writing these big essays. So I think it comes down to the predisposition of the CEO. Do you actually enjoy it? Do you think you can be good at it? I think forcing people to do it where they can come out and be totally cringe and be actually negative on the brand. Obviously, they can learn over time and do it, but it really depends on the situation.

17:58Erik Torenberg:Have you gotten any leverage or way to lower the activation energy or any help doing it? Is it possible for others too, or is it just all you, just whenever you think something? Well, I think I have the benefit of this long period of incubation. I think that if your company is already high profile, you don't want to kind of practice in public. And so maybe getting some coaching earlier on. Some people ask, hey, how should I think about X versus other platforms? Maybe their customers aren't on X, etc. How do you think about that? Well, I think X is very good for the sort of Silicon Valley, for tech, for kind of the in-group messaging, for maybe one hop outside of Silicon Valley, which is kind of the early adopter, if you're targeting early adopters.

18:54I would also cluster hacker news within that as well. But it actually, once you want to go to late adopters or like early majority, if you think about this kind of bell curve of adoption, Twitter becomes actually not very impactful there. It can still be very important where, like just this morning, journalists reached out to me to ask to talk to me about a tweet that I made about some of the stuff that's happening with Anthropic. And so Twitter can still be a place where it is the start of stories. And that's another thing, back to the conversation of why this is important is the landscape shifted so much that journalists report on Twitter.

19:40So it kind of starts on Twitter. So Twitter's influence is amazing, but it tends to be elite kind of inside group influence. I think Instagram, Facebook still, YouTube is where you get to the early majority. And I think I was late to YouTube, to Instagram. I just started focusing on it in maybe February or something like that. And we're getting an insane amount of views and the followership kind of - You started to build this clips machine

20:09Erik Torenberg:of your interviews. The podcast's interesting because it's a medium that can be turned into every other format. Right, right. So I feel like I should have maybe done Instagram like a year or two ago. Yeah. So I was like a little late on that. I thought it was going to be harder. Well, it turns out I could just like, you know, do this clipping and just grow, not just your account. You can grow a lot of different accounts that way. Um, and, but, but I would, I would start with Twitter because the, again, that's where the news starts to happen. This is where you can have outsized influence. And are you, are you bullish on the platform?

20:47Erik Torenberg:Do you, do you think that in the next, you know, three to five years that that will stay the same? I think it is actually kind of risky, uh, because the algorithm changes so much and you know you might do something that angers the power that powers that be and you know very you know without anyone knowing things might change for you in terms of your reach on x and so i think there's like less transparency than twitter 1.0 um so it is it is a little it is a little risky but i think the platform has so much staying power yeah like it's really hard to replace You can change the name, you can destroy the brand, and the platform will still be very valuable.

21:34It is one of those things that I think there's no way you can avoid it.

21:44Erik Torenberg:Who are some CEOs or leaders that inspire you in terms of how they go direct that you've learned from looking at what they do? obviously we were all you know in the school of biology biology and lulu we had this group in a pandemic what was it called to go and direct it yeah yeah and so we kind of talked about strategies and and kind of critiqued uh some of our approaches or other people's approaches so that was that was very very useful i think uh biology was the kind of earlier this stuff i think Where I might disagree with biology is that I don't think you should be antagonistic to reporters.

22:25There's no reason to. You can actually be friends with them and they can be positive towards you. You can help them out. They're just humans at the end of the day and they respond to incentives. And I think we've done pretty well in maintaining our relationships with, and obviously Shernaz recently joined us and that up-leveled our game with reporters and more of that type of media.

22:53So I think, but studying that is very important. I think there's enough content out there to get started with. But let's see who else.