Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI

29:18Ultimately, for me, it came down to what I would regret more. Would I regret not selling or would I regret more not not achieving my and the company's potential. And I felt that would have been a bigger regret. Yes, I would be rich, but I would be yet another rich asshole. There's a lot of them. But building something meaningful that creates meaning not just in your life, but in other people's lives, whether it's like the team we built, the customers we serve, the entrepreneurs that we're creating, the worldview we're putting out, the mission we're putting out, the influence that comes from that, I thought it would be a loss not to try.

30:11Do you think big tech in general is threatened by your mission? Yes. You know, what's the saying? First, like, they, you know, they laugh at you, then they try to fight you, then they join you or something like that. They're saying it like that. We're at the, like, they're joining us right now. Like, they, initially, it was like oh rep let us this toy you know kids use it yeah we have a lot of kids using it we're proud of it it's so easy that kids use it um yeah it's like why is that a negative thing um it's probably a good sign it's a good sign yeah um and and then and then and then when they felt threatened by it they would like try to buy it um or like try to compete on the margins or try to like you know compete in the press or PR but not really on the product because they still don't believe in it but they want to counter the narrative that actually programming can be coding or making software can be something anyone can do and finally when we've we've grown so much like our revenue like 100x then they paid attention and they're like okay this is a real thing and people want it and now they're building actual competing products Do you see what you're doing as, I mean, essentially you see as the democratization of building software.

31:38Do you think we'll see something similar with tech that we saw with social media or with media in general, where the barrier to entry was so low that instead of, I mean, there's two versions of this. There's the big media like CNN, Fox, ABC to influencers. And then there's influencers to micro influencers. And there's tons of people making 10K a month of social media. Do you think that's where we're moving in tech where, I don't know, someone like my parents in Kentucky can build an app, make a nice couple thousand dollars a month, and then that's just their job? Yeah, I think that's like an age-old thing that's been happening with technology since the dawn of time.

32:24So think about literacy, right? Like during medieval Europe, like reading and writing was regulated, was only like priests were able to do it. And priests were like controlling the population, right? Before the Protestant Reformation. um and so there's like the priesthood control over uh the ability to read and write and then we had the gutenberg printing press and that was decentralized the ability to print books and have books available to the population people started learning how to read and then learning how to write um and that caused massive changes in the world uh and like leading up to revolutions and different religions and democracies and all of that happening because of reading.

33:10Like none of the world that we have today would not have happened without mass literacy, right? We have the big media companies, but you can have a Substack and there are people making millions of dollars on Substack. There are people making 10K on Substack. There are people making 2K on Substack. And so, you know, Instagram is the same thing. You had to be a professional photographer at some point, and only the professional photographers could make some money. And then later on, anyone could take photos and make money. Influencers is the same thing. Really, every skill and every profession goes through this, where it's usually an elite minority, and they're gatekeeping, and they don't want other people to do it.

33:58And certainly programmers in Big Tech felt threatened by Replit is because they make a lot of money. Like we were in this like really strange world over the past, you know, 15, 20 years where if you go to computer science school for four years, you're guaranteed like the best life and the best, you know, the upper echelon of income. And if you get a job at Google, you're set for life. And, you know, in four or five years, you're pulling a couple million dollars. and it's certainly threatening when like that skill can be democratized and anyone can do it anyone can build it it's also threatening to VCs and the way Silicon Valley works because Silicon Valley needed to build all this infrastructure in order to and raise all this capital in order to like fund you know companies need a lot of capital to build the software and market it and all of that But with social media, with tools like Replit, you don't need as much capital.

35:03And so I think every piece of technology in history has had this decentralizing and democratizing effect. And every time there's like a pushback from some group of people that are benefiting from the gatekeeping, but then the dam breaks and we live in a fundamentally new world, typically a much better world. And I think it's true of media. Like the democratization of media has been really good. I think that I, you know, I get my news more from social media than I do. And it has its challenges, obviously, but it's much better than getting propaganda. That's very true. That's super interesting comparison about the Gutenberg press with how religions evolved over time.

35:50because, I mean, it really was, I mean, it would be ignorant of me to say it was the big three, but I would say they were much more dominant and there wasn't so many branches of, I'm trying to think of the dating, but it's a very apt comparison.

36:08What do you think everyone is getting wrong about AI and jobs? um ai is seen as a a replacement as opposed to a tool that can be wielded by the most creative by the most ambitious people who want to make a fundamental change in their lives and their communities and their companies um obviously ai can automate a lot of work but to automate that work someone needs to build that system someone needs to be observant enough to look around their company or look around their school, whatever community they exist in. So we're doing a lot of BS things. There's a lot of bullshit work. There's actually a book called Bullshit Work, and it's like by David Graber.

36:58And it talks about how like most of the economy is kind of bullshit work. I mean, if you think about it, you know, post-industrial revolution, we created a world where machines were doing a lot, but not enough. And humans had to step in and act like machines. And so if you look at any office job, most of the time they're doing things that are easily automatable. They're putting data entry in Excel sheets. They're repeating the same process time and time again. and they know it's automatable or they're sending the same sort of email or they're doing the same kind of marketing. And you could say, okay, you know, we can get an AI system to like replace that person.

37:45But there's going to be more work to be done, not less. Because, you know, you get more revenue, get more users. You're going to have different challenges, different operational thing you should do. So it's a hamster wheel. But we can go much faster now. and the way to look at AI and jobs is how can I upgrade my workforce for them to become generalist business people that can wield AI for the benefit of our customers and our bottom line. And we see it in a lot of our enterprise customers where the most ambitious people are creating billions of dollars of value out of their company. So there's every company out there, every tech company for sure, there are people that are closest to the customer that feel that they have ideas that could make more revenue for the business, but they're often blocked by engineering.

38:53Engineering don't think the idea is worth it or they have their own roadmap. They don't care about it. And now a lot of them are bringing in Repplet to work. They're building that idea and they're making the money for their company. And then they're getting promoted and then they're giving more power. And a lot of them go out and hire more people like them. I'm going to build a team of vibe quarters that are going to go around the company and find all the inefficiencies and go solve them. So we have a new role of this like generalist automator and they're less parochial than the engineer. The engineer is like really focused on systems and engineering.

39:32They're not as focused on one particular domain like sales and marketing. They can hold the context of the entire business in their head and they can find ways to increase efficiency or add revenue to the business. What's the most obvious AI automation that people should be doing today? in the context of companies, we see a lot of just like copy-pasting of data. Like you have data in Salesforce and you want to get it into an Excel sheet somewhere or you want to get it into some data lake or something like that. And we see a lot of data entry work that is like just copy-pasting because they don't know how to write code.

40:18engineers are busy, IT is busy. So just like anytime you find yourself copy-pasting things from one place to another and you do it regularly, like it's an obvious automation. Go to Repl. and just say, go pull the data from Salesforce and put it in Snowflake, right? So that's in the context of companies. I think there's a lot of data movement that happens manually and that really blows my mind. And even if there's like some process in between that you're doing some transformation in the data that you're doing, you can also have the AI do that. So for example, every company has this person that's called the deal desk person, every B2B company especially.

41:04And the deal desk person is responsible for generating quotes to give order forms to give salespeople. So the salespeople put in the deal content in Salesforce. The deal desk person pulls it from Salesforce, puts it in a PDF, and then posts it to Slack or some other chat group. They talk about it. They send it to the client. The client gives them feedback. They go. They regenerate that. A lot of companies end up hiring a lot of people doing just that. There's also entire complicated software systems that people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for quote configurators, right? So we hired a steel desk person and she automated all of that.

41:50Every time we get a new deal in a CRM, there's an AI that generates the order form directly, posts it in Slack. The salespeople take it like, you know, they send it to the client, they get feedback. In Slack, they give the bot feedback on the thing. It kind of updates it and they send it back. So a lot of that used to be manual copy pasting things and putting that from Excel to Word to CRM. So anyone listening to this, working at a company, if you want to get a promotion, just look around you and see what people are copy-pasting data around. And you can build a bot or you can build an AI or you can build a piece of software that can automate that.

42:29In personal lives, there's a lot of things that, like if you're someone who's interested in health and do a lot of tracking of health, like I like to track my sleep and at some point I had some sleep issues. And my doctor gave me a sheet to track what I ate, what medications I took, if I exercised, and then what time I slept, what time I woke up, any sleep interruptions. And I would wake up in the morning and fill the sheet. And most of the time I'm lazy. I'm like, I don't want to do it. I forget, whatever. I'm like, I can automate this. I took a photo of that sheet, put it in a replet. you can just skip wrap-up screenshot and just say like make it into an app made it on an app and now we've got a little easier to like put in the you know uh all this information then i was like i still forget what i ate or what medications i've took or you know whatever i've done that day so i was like why don't why can i like take photos of these things as i'm doing them instead of like forgetting and like doing it later so throughout the day i can like take photos of whatever I ate or have done.

43:42And then that AI will like generate the content for the next morning. And then I'm like, okay, but like I'm putting my time to go to sleep and what time I woke up and interruptions manually, but like my mattress, I use eight sleep, for example, or you can have a wearable, have all that information. So it's just like a total replica, just like pull that information from there. It asked me for some login information. I did that. So now the entire process is seamless and automated, and finally I can commit to it. So I think in people's lives, there's so many things that are manual, and they get lazy, and they don't want to do.

44:18And one thing I would say about the age of AI, and this is back to this idea of how do you generate ideas, if you're lazy, that's going to be a virtue. And I don't mean it in a way that you don't want to complete your work, but like if you're naturally just like don't want to do manual work you're going to go about your life and you're going to see all these places that are just like boring and you should be doing manually and just like go build an app for that and maybe that becomes a consumer app that I, you could like, the app that I'm building for myself, I could potentially put it on the app store at some point because it is probably useful for other people who want to track their sleep You've heard of Kalii, right?

44:57No. What is that? Really? Oh, that's, we had the founder on, I mean they do like, I think he made like 25 million from it in high school or maybe that was the valuation. It was just take a photo of food and tracks calories automatically. It just sounds like you built that for yourself as a personal. These things are easy. And it's not just that. It is, you know, it does sleep and does some of the other stuff. Yeah, I was like, that sounds more integrated. That's really interesting. Huh. That's a cool space to think about like all the wearable tech and like all the things that are tracking data and building apps that combine all these things in general.

45:36But what do you think separates someone who's bad at prompting AI from someone who's really good at it? You know, I kind of hate the word prompting AI because AI researchers spend a lot of time figuring out how to make AI respond to human queries. I would say what separates those people are the people who are good communicators. You need to just be a good communicator in general. Like prompting humans versus prompting AI. Are you someone who can manage an intern well? If you're someone who can manage an intern well, you can manage an AI well. Think about an AI as an employee or an intern. Instead of thinking about, oh, how do I talk its language?

46:19No, just communicate well. Just take an idea, break it down to its parts. If its parts are so complicated, break them down further. It's all about breaking down things into individual components. And then giving precise feedback. And giving as much context and feedback as possible. Taking screenshots, taking images. If you want to get really good at just communication, in general, I would suggest doing public speaking. I had actually a stage fright growing up. and I would still do it because I just don't like to be held back by my fears. But when I first came to the US and I felt like I want to be able to start startups and be on podcasts, be a leader, I thought that I need to get past that.

47:13And so I thought, like, what is the hardest place I could put myself in? it's like throwing myself in the fire to get past that fear. So deprogram the fear by desensitization, right? It's a popular like psychology method. I think, you know, we're in such a soft world right now that like psychiatrists, psychologists don't treat things like that. But it's always been the case, like if you're afraid of water, if your kid is afraid of water, throw them in the fucking water. That's how my dad did it.

47:50So I took up, improv classes in New York. And improv, if you're bad at public speaking or thinking on your feet, you're going to do really bad at it. And then I took up storytelling classes. And I did a storytelling show where I told a story about how I hacked into my school to change my grades.

48:16And so... I don't have to hear that story, but continue your thought. So over time, I just got better at talking to people and like trying to communicate complex ideas simply because I think that's what really good communication is about. And if you're good at that, then you're good at talking to AI and prompting it. My last girlfriend, she was like, Jack, I'm such a bad communicator. Like, how do I like work on this? I was like, just go to an improv class. She didn't really love it, but like I said, I think it helped her a bit understand like the basic techniques. Yeah. I think it's super helpful.

48:48It is. So you hacked into your school to change your grades as a kid? Yeah. So I was going to university in Jordan, Princeton University for technology, good computer science school. But, you know, I don't know how to pay attention to things that I don't like. Like if I'm taking like a history class or econ class and I feel like whatever they're teaching me is not going to be useful for me in life or it's just not interesting the way they teach it. I just can't, it's like incredibly painful for me to just sit there and just listen. So I would skip class and I would like go work on my programming, go, you know, take a job.

49:32I always had jobs during school. And then I would study enough to just pass. And I almost always pass. And some cases in like math and computer science, I would like get good grades. the problem in my school is in a lot of schools around the world is that they count your attendance so if you missed class too many times in a row you get disqualified and so I I felt like it was kind of deep injustice especially for people like me who are like creative want to be doing things, they want to be sitting in class which I think is like a very outdated way of learning in general. And I think we're going to move past it, especially with AI.

50:21So all my friends were graduating. I'm like five years in, almost six years in school. School should have been three, four years. And I feel like life is passing me by. Like, you know, I had all these big dreams and ambitions. I want to build companies, make a lot of money, all of that. But I was like stuck. and so I thought I'd use my skills to get over this problem you can cast almost any problem in life as a coding problem and I thought okay I'm gonna hack into school and change my grades from when they fail me for attendance to like a passing grade so I spent two, three weeks in my parents' home in the basement trying to break into the systems there.

51:20I would work on scripts and do network scans and all that. And I implemented polyphasic sleeping. Do you know that? That sounds familiar. What is that? Michelangelo, you know, the inventor, artists. uh it's like one of the most highest output human beings in history probably ever to come uh would sleep 15 minutes every four hours because he was working non-stop tesla did a similar thing i remember tesla's probably yeah did that as well um and so i was like yeah i want to be able to like you know work a lot and really hard and be really efficient so i i did that as well so for two weeks just madness just going and like trying to map out the system and figure all that out.

52:08So I finally found a vulnerability, a way to get into the system. But I was worried about maybe I didn't have the right systems and so I had a neighbor who was going to the same school as me. I was like, hey, I have this thing that I can change grades. Can I test it on you? And so we test it We changed the grades, but actually turns out that I was doing that on a replica database, not on the master database. So when he went to kind of pull his grades, his transcripts, it wasn't reflected there. So I spent another two weeks and then found a way out of the actual system. And then I was confident that I could change my grades and actually get to graduate.

52:55And I still felt like it was the just thing to do. It was a fair thing to do, right? so I changed my grades calculus and other things I didn't want to go to school but I passed I know I you know but they failed me anyways for attendance so I changed my grades and I bought my gown went to the graduation parties took photos I was just graduating one day I'm at home and the telephone rings and I pick it up and it's like the person responsible for the uh, college network and registration system. And he's like, look, the entire network in the university is down. And whenever we look at the code, we see that there's a bug in your record.

53:41Um, there's a problem where it says you're disqualified from the final exam, but you're also passing. It turns out they had another field that I didn't know about that was, was like true or false, whether you're disqualified for, for attendance. And they had all these bad names for the field. So I think they're bad programming on their part. But still, I kind of missed something. So I had a choice. You lie and you kind of live with the lie. Or you come clean. And I just didn't want to lie. And I told him, look, I have something to tell you. I'm going to come tomorrow's school and kind of share it with you.

54:25So I went the next day and it was a much bigger deal than I expected. All the different deans were sitting there, the computer science dean, the engineering dean. They've been racking their brain a whole night, stayed up all night trying to figure out what's the problem. And so I'm like, this is my opportunity to make it a tech talk as opposed to an interrogation. And pull out the whiteboard and explain all the different problems, all the systems they had and how I hacked into it. and really like pulled out all the stops and all the charisma to kind of try to impress them. And they were really impressed.

55:01So impressed and so kind of in the element of the technical discussion that I'm like, all right, now that I've explained it, I'm headed home. I'll see you guys later. And I opened the door. I was like, wait, where are you going? Like, we got to deal with you. You just did this thing to our school. You just hacked into the school. We can't let you go. Luckily, the president of the university was someone who was like really enlightened and saw the talent that I had. And they could have easily derailed my life, you know, but I, you know, I explained like my reasoning for why I did this. And he was understanding.

55:35And he gave me at the time the Spider-Man line. He's like, you have a great talent, great power, but with power comes responsibility. I was very sincere about it. He said, we're going to let you go, but you're going to have to spend the summer working for the university trying to fix the vulnerabilities and the security issues. And so I was like, that's no problem. I would love to do that. So I show up in the summer and the programmers there hate my guts because I hacked into their system and they wouldn't let me in. Like I would go knock at the door where they work and I can see them and they wouldn't let me in.

56:11so they didn't give me a chance to contribute and fix the system and by the way everyone was cutting me slack I think all the professors just was worried I'm going to hack into their emails so I had this like implicit power and it was like notorious it was really cool as well I was getting recognition everywhere and this computer science dean comes in and tells me like hey you know I helped you a lot to get past this problem so for your graduation project you need to work with me and what we're going to do is we're going to hack into the school again. I'm like bro I'm past that, I'm not even working on security and hacking I'm just like I'm going to build companies and things like that.

56:52It's like no you have to do it or I won't graduate you. So it's like okay I'll do it. So I'm like okay but this time I'm going to build a system I'm not going to go hack directly into it. So I built a piece of software that scans any system for vulnerabilities and sure enough I found some vulnerabilities in the system so my graduation defends so you're sitting in front of the different deans and you're kind of getting a presentation and I told them how I built the security scanner and by the way I'm going to run it on the university system and yet we have a bunch of vulnerabilities here and then different dean of engineering was like you're lying and I was surprised that he said that I'm like why do you think I'm lying and he's like because we fixed the system I was responsible for fixing the system and we fixed the system I was like clearly you didn't it was like prove it I'm like okay I also built like something in my system where you can automatically execute the vulnerabilities so I get a shell access to the database I'm like okay what do you want us to find your password or your salary or how do you want to...

58:06I was like, okay, get my password. So with a query, I get his password. And it was some embarrassing password. I forgot what it was right now, but people have all sorts of embarrassing passwords. And his face turned red and he got really angry and he got up, shook my hand and left. Well, it turns out I was like a pawn in this rivalry between the two different deans. So he, the other dean, like one dean was given the responsibility to secure the system. The other one wanted to kind of make sure I re-hacked the system to prove it. But anyways, at the end, I graduate.

58:47And I now have like really great relationship with the university. That's a great story, genuinely. It seems like some type of commonality with really successful founders in your space is like this kind of hacker, black hat, white hat background. Just on this concept of learning in general, cheating, hacking the system, how do you think we should be using AI to become smarter? And how do you do it personally? I think that there's a mindset here. There's a mindset of, first of all, the world was built by people that are not much smarter than you. And there are a lot of rules that are accidental, that are there for historical reasons.

59:44And your job is to find a path to the future, find the way of doing things that's most aligned where the world is headed. Because the advice your teachers, your parents are going to give you are just not valid anymore. My generation, like millennials, the advice that the boomers would give us is that you work hard, you get into good university, you check this box, this other box, you get a job, you buy a house and a car, get a family, that's it, you know, a few years in, like 20 years later, you're a millionaire because your house property went up value, and you retire and live happily ever after.

1:00:29That doesn't exist. That does like existed for like 20, 30 years post-World War II, and then it's gone.

1:00:41So it's not about cheating. It's about figuring out how the system is rigged against you. And how do you actually hack it? How do you get past it? How do you do things in a way that is more native and true to where the world is headed today? AI is a great tool for that. Just the fact, if you're someone who just understands how these tools work and understand how you have an amazing time advantage, you can do things a lot faster. Again, there are a lot of programmers that are still doing programming the old way and they're going very, very slow and they're going to continue to go very slow until they get obsoleted.

1:01:25But there are a lot of new builders coming up today and they're like, I'm going to just make things with RapBlet or tools like that and I'm going to go just a lot faster. I'm going to iterate faster, make better ideas, build better companies and systems. So

1:01:48I would reemphasize this virtue of laziness.

1:01:58Like, I think a lot of what we're taught in school is not worth it. It's not worth our time. And my approach to school was like, how do you get around it? Like, I needed a college education to get to the United States. otherwise I would have dropped out if I was in the US I would have dropped out and it's probably a good idea for a lot of people to drop out and not go to college and so but I needed to do that in order to get a visa to get here right and so think about your circumstances and think about ways around them and there's probably ways in which AI could help you get there faster and do things better.

1:02:48And realize that if you truly understand how the technology works, if you're up to speed on it, if you can do things better and faster than other people, you have an advantage and just lean into that. I think that's super helpful. What is it Hormozy says? It's volume times feedback loops and AI helps you build things faster, iterate faster. On the concept of jobs, what do you think will be the highest paying jobs in the age of AI? Entrepreneur. Entrepreneur. Like

1:03:23my mindset has always been about building wealth as opposed to getting salary. Right. There are a lot of different ways to build wealth but all of them revolve around ownership as opposed to getting salaries. When I got my first job in the U.S., working for Code Academy, a company that sold for half a billion dollars. I told them, you can just pay me enough to eat. Just give me as much equity as you can give me. I was paid$70 ,000 in New York City. You know how painful that was? I was living in a studio with other people. But who cares? If you're young and scrappy, you can eat anything, you can sleep a few hours, you can sleep on the ground.

1:04:10Who cares? You know, you're very resilient when you're in your 20s and, you know, early 30s. Things get a little worse after that, but you're very resilient. And your job is to build equity. And the best way to build equity is to start a business. The second best way to build equity is to join a business that someone else are and get equity in it. And then third is if you already have capitals to invest and build equity that way. and I've done all these different things. I started by joining a startup that was growing fast, got as much equity in it as possible, worked as if I was a founder. Then I started a business, got some liquidity from that, started investing in other businesses.

1:04:59By the way, a lot of early Replit employees are already rich. A lot of early Replit employees already got some liquidity out. We let them sell some shares. Some early Replit investors sold some shares as well. If you invested in Replit when you were at like, you know, six million valuation, and we were like, many order of magnitudes, more than that right now, you made a lot of money, right? So if you're surrounded by really smart people, you don't have to have the best ideas. You can join their ideas. You can also like figure out a way to invest in your friends and join in their venture. Or if you have a certain skill, let's say you're an influencer and you want to partner with an entrepreneur, try to get equity.

1:05:46You can get a lot of cash for sure, but what you're going to do, you're going to get taxed 50 % on that cash. You're going to spend it on nonsense. Instead, try to get equity and build that equity up. It seems like the only two ways to get rich are build a cash flow business and move to Puerto Rico or Dubai and revoke your citizenship, hate your life for a few years, and sell a company. Well, you don't have to hate your life. Like, you can have fun building a business. Right. That's fair. I guess hate your life in terms of not have excess cash to spend on stuff, just kind of like living below your means to an extent.

1:06:28But if you build the business properly, I guess you would have excess cash. Yeah, we'd have excess cash at some point. And like, it's a lot more fun later in life to like pulling a six figure salary like you're not gonna it's not an exciting life I think having wealth is a lot more like just the the calmness on your nervous system that you've escaped the rat brace that itself is worth it and so I don't know I've never like yeah I've went out and partied and experienced all of that and you can do that with not a lot of money. Back in Jordan we used to like drive to Beirut and like go clubbing for like you know 20 bucks you know it's like you can have fun with not that much money but then there's like a huge dead zone in terms of like how much quality of life and how much hedonism or fun if that's what you're interested in up until you get to upper echelon of wealth.

1:07:33Like there isn't that much difference between like a student going out, like some of the best fun you could do just like going out to clubs or traveling or whatever, going to like low-income places and like having fun there. And then it's not that much better when you're pulling, you know, a few hundred grand a year. It's like you're kind of stuck at that point. But what you want to focus on is building enough equity and up until to the point where you're just like starting to build a family because that's when you're going to have to like settle down a little bit. You're not going to have as much time and so on and so forth.

1:08:11So I would just like focus on building equity. That's super helpful. Yeah, the first startup I was at, I had equity. I did the same thing as you. I like took a lower salary to try to get as much equity as possible. But I think I fell victim to the sentiment like, oh, bet on yourself. I didn't even like pay the strike price to invest my shares. And I looked at it the other day and the company had sold. And I was like, shit, I didn't know how much for. But yeah, if someone gives you the opportunity for equity, it's usually worth it. If you think they have a good chance of selling, especially if people are building to sell, like it feels like some people are building to sell quickly versus some people are building to sell like on a longer time horizon.

1:08:56I do want to ask you, what do billionaires know about money that people just starting out in entrepreneurship don't realize? Like what's something you wish you knew about the way money works itself or things you can do with your money like two years ago, four years ago? Money is money, like cash, like dollars are worthless. They are depreciate, fast depreciating assets. like they depreciate faster than your 1976 Honda Civic, right? Like it's like don't hold cash. Like again, that's why I emphasize equity. It's like assets, like buying assets. Like all the assets go up. Like gold right now is just ripping like a shit coin.

1:09:45So assets go up, cash doesn't. And do stocks really go up though? like if you're just doing S &P or is it just kind of like a wealth maintenance thing from your perspective? Okay. I mean, over the past couple of years, the S &P has been dominated by a few companies and they've gone up a lot. Like, if you invest in an S &P, what is it? Like 20, 30 % in 2025? That's huge. Is it 20, 30 %? I'm not entirely sure. I think the average is 10 % with accounts for inflation and be like 5 % returns. Oh, really? That's it? Okay. Um... I don't know. I do have some money with like a money manager that is like just like trying to maintain wealth.

1:10:32But I also do buy stock. I buy, I invest in startups. I buy stock in the companies that I really like. I bought Tesla like a long time ago because I really liked the product. It's like the grog brain approach to investing. It's like buy stocks you like. I don't know. I don't want to give like too much of financial advice because like a lot of this is like very, very selective. But like the main idea here is assets, like understanding inflation, how inflation works and how the dollar is like continuously being printed. Really every currency out there is like continuously being printed. And if you're optimizing for cash, you're really losing wealth and you're not really building wealth.

1:11:18Wealth is through accumulation of assets and those assets tend to, there's certain assets that tend to compound. I bought Bitcoin. When I left Facebook to start Replit, I sold my Facebook shares, which I could have held onto them and they've done really well. But I bought Bitcoin and put the rest in my company. And so understanding inflation is core and like go research that and really understand how the system is working on debt and quantitative easing and all that stuff. You don't have to understand it that much in depth, but the main lesson is, the economy is running on inflation. And the rich don't hold cash, they hold assets.

1:12:01I don't know. I mean, I don't really think about money all that much. And I don't say it in a way to like, you know, to brag or anything. It's just like for me, it's like build cool shit and money will come. Like build poor things, hold ownership in those things that you build or invest in important things and products and services that you think are just the future, try to predict where the future is headed. Be plugged in enough to figure out where the future is headed. Follow the tech news, follow the trends, and form a prediction about the future and then bet on that and then evaluate that over time and continue to figure out.

1:12:47like when you hear about a new thing don't be cynical about it like you hear about like you know a lot of my generation like heard about Bitcoin a lot of them I was like what is this but if you pay a little bit of attention you're like okay and you understand the system you understand that this is an alternative asset to cash and like you know a lot of people are looking for alternative assets and so you have some hypothesis about the future so have some predictions and some beliefs about the future and try to bet behind them and again most importantly build things. I think that's the best way to gain wealth is to build useful things.

1:13:23You're one of the few AI billionaires that has a, it's funny that it's even a contrarian perspective on the future of AI, but why do you think AI isn't going to kill us all?

1:13:40A lot of my peers in Silicon Valley have this like very mechanistic view of life. they think of humans as you know meat robots and I think fundamentally I think there's something more than that there's something there's some spark about consciousness about humanity that's different and that's special and that life is important maybe it's a religious view but even without like a very concrete religious view you can arrive at the same answer by just being perceptive, like just looking at the world around you, like how can, how can this all be an accident? Like just like, even through science, like when you look at, you know, you see these videos of like how DNAs work and just like this insane engineer, micro, like nano engineering, just like, it doesn't feel like an accident.

1:14:36So there's something about the mystery of life, the mystery of creation, the mystery of why we're here that I try to struggle with. And I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley, a lot of people in tech have this very dry physicalist view. Like we're automaton, it's input-output. And therefore, the natural conclusion is that humans are not very special. We're going to build a more intelligent being. That intelligent being is going to be so much more intelligent that it's going to treat us like ants in the same way we treat ants. But no, I think there's something special about humans. And I believe in, like, I'm, like, I'll tell you something about my personal life that I think is very interesting.

1:15:28I think a lot of success comes down to, like, mindset and visualization. Why does that work? Why does visualization work? It does work. A lot of people swear by it. like if you like visualize yourself as successful, I used to like visualize the cars that I want to drive. And invariably I would get those cars some way or another. I would like, if I want to meet someone, I would like have this intent about meeting this person and eventually I will meet them somehow and it's like random circumstance.

1:16:05Like whether it was like people in tech that are irrespective, whether it's Paul Graham, Mark Andreessen, Um, I always wanted to meet Paul Graham. Uh, I always had this intent of like, I would like imagine the conversation we would have. Paul Graham's the founder of Y Combinator. Um, and like, he also founded the site Hacker News and I was reading that a lot. And he wrote a lot about programming and things like that. I really respected how he thought. Um, and you know, one, one morning, obviously like I, I do things in the world. I don't sit there and just visualize. Like you act. one morning in 2017, I get a message from Sam Altman on Twitter.

1:16:46And he's like, hey, I'm Sam. I run YC. Dude, I know who you are. So Sam, before opening, I was running Y Combinator, the premier startup accelerator. And it's like, I'd like you to come meet me. And so I went and met him. And he gave me this address. I'm like, where is this? This is not Y Combinator. I know my commentator is my interview. And I walked into this place, and it was called OpenAI. And next to it was Neuralink. It was like a small Elon fiefdom in the mission in San Francisco when Elon was still involved in OpenAI. So I met Sam there, and when we sat down, he said, he had his laptop in front of him and turned him around, and he's like, read this email.

1:17:25It was an email from Paul Graham, and he says, there's this site repli. It's really cool. It's something I've thought about for a long time, where we can make it really easy to code and host applications. And we should reach out to them and get them into the YC batch. And we had tried to apply to YC many, many times before. But I had this intention that I'm going to meet Paul Graham and he's going to know about it right now. We're going to discuss it and he's going to get really excited about it. And that happened. And two years ago, I was a totally different person, totally different industry.

1:18:01so it'd be really cool to meet Tucker Carlson. I respect him a lot. I respect how brave and courageous he is and how he can speak his mind and how inspiring his view of America is and what it could be. And through a series of accidents, I ended up meeting him. Do you know Martin Shkreli? Pharma bro? That sounds a little familiar, but no. You should definitely look up Martin Shkreli. Martin Shkreli is a pharma entrepreneur that went to prison for some financial reasons, but he became very notorious for a few things. One is he bought a Wu-Tang album that was one in production, and he became hated because he hoarded that.

1:18:50But also, he was the initial social media troll and got under everyone's nerves and all of that. but anyways I used to watch his stream because he would like put out a lot of really cool financial material we talked about financial literacy and I learned a lot from him and when he got out of prison one day he was like coding online he was coding a replet and so like I sent him a message I'm like hey like I saw you were coding a replet it would be called like I sent him a tweet so he responded we got on the phone whatever I ended up investing in his new startup and you know introduced him to a few other people in Silicon Valley and then And one day he's like, you know, I owe you, man.

1:19:33You know, it's really cool how you've been able to help me get back into the startup game. What can I do for you? I'm like, you know, you were on Tucker the other day, invited you on the show. I would love to meet him. And then he made that connection and we got on a call. I have a very similar story with Joe Rogan as well. I got on Joe Rogan's show. So, I mean, I'm kind of digressing a lot. But all I'm saying is that there's like more mystery to life. And I've experienced a fair amount of affecting the world in a very indirect sort of mental way. And there's something to that. And like a lot of people just don't struggle with the fact that there's more to life than just like mechanistic physics of it all.

1:20:23So when you start from this premise. and I can talk about all the different, I can like have a technical debate about AI as well, but just like at rock bottom, I feel like there's something special about humans. There's something about the mystery of the world that we haven't really figured out. By that same token, just to clarify, because I think this is fairly high level thinking, but I understand what you're saying about it, is basically you feel as though you're the type of individual that thinks there's magic to life and you will things into existence. And this is something that it is your logical view as well as it is the view that you want to have for humanity.

1:21:02But do you think that these other individuals that have this AI doom thesis are trying to will that reality into existence? I think there is a sense in which intentions matter and you can get into a self-fulfilling theories of the world, right? And we've seen that throughout history. Predicting doom and bringing about crisis happens a lot. And so I think it is important to be optimistic. And I think if you have a doomer mindset and it is dangerous for that reason for sure. And so I do think like people who are naturally depressed and like not very optimistic do kind of gravitate towards like a more Doomer mindset.

1:21:59It's so fascinating because with you in particular, I spoke with another AI founder about this. I was like, it's so interesting that Amjad's thesis is like AI won't kill us all. And like you would assume that would be the thesis of all the billionaire AI founders. Like, oh, it's not going to kill us all. And it's like, oh shit, it might actually. But it's really like they're all saying it is, but it's actually not. And I think the only other person that's really in the space with these individuals that has a similar thesis to you is Naval Ravikant. There's probably a few others that I just haven't consumed their content.

1:22:42But what's the main logical reason for it? Just to give people some hope because I've had a lot of doomers on my show and I haven't had anyone in your position. So think about how machine learning models are trained. Right now, machine learning models are trained by consuming super large corpus of content, essentially all of content on the internet. And then simulating, creating algorithms, so they would learn by creating internal algorithms, essentially that's a good way to understand machine learning, to simulate how a human might respond to a query. You can go really far with that. It's amazing that it works.

1:23:35But If you give a query to an AI for something it doesn't have an algorithm for, it will fail at. And there's a bunch of research showing that. It's called like added distribution queries or context. So, you know, if a machine learning model is not trained on a certain like language or flavor of math or something like that, it will struggle to give you like a reasonable output and you end up in hallucination and end up with all sorts of problems. The reason AI is really good at coding because coding has a binary outcome. It's either true or false. Anything that is soft or requires like reasoning through the problems, not based on prior material, AI right now is not doing very well at.

1:24:38And AI companies are having to buy more and more proprietary data to get better at these things. So the way they're training models is they'll buy, you know, they'll go into an industry, oh, let's target accounting. We're going to go buy all the data that exists out there. We're going to scrape all the data that exists out there. We're going to buy all the data. We're also going to get accountants in Africa that are going to sit down all day and they're going to do spreadsheets and they're going to like talk over how they're doing spreadsheets. And they did that in coding as well. And they're targeting biotech, accounting, science, everything in order to do that.

1:25:12And that's a very repeatable process. And you can create AIs that are very good at doing jobs that people are currently doing. But that is not like a general intelligence that you can drop it, like you would drop a human into any sort of environment and they can like learn efficiently. So self-recursive improvement is kind of a fallacy to you, like when it comes to things that aren't binary? I think we need to struggle with the question of consciousness because consciousness I think is an important ingredient of generality in how humans reflect on their decisions and their questions. And, you know, we come up with these ideas that seemingly come out of nowhere.

1:25:56We call them inspiration, uses whatever people call them. It's like, oh, suddenly I'm struck by this idea like eureka, right? And we don't know how it works in order to build it into machines. All of like science come, a lot of the scientific, big scientific discoveries come from these eureka moments. That is not based on prior, on strict prior training. That is a fundamental paradigm shift, a huge jump that comes from somewhere. We don't know where it is. And by the way, all the original scientists in antiquity and history talked about this in spiritual terms. I remember reading Bertrand Russell's book about the history of Western philosophy and things like that, and he was talking about Pythagoras.

1:26:44Pythagoras was running a religious cult. He was not running a mathematics club. And they came up with all these different theories. And if you look at the current state of humanity, we're actually not having that much scientific breakthroughs. And I think counterintuitively, because we've become so mechanistic in our thinking and less spiritual, less open to mystery and mysticism, that degraded the quality of science. Because science became an industrial process. It became a bureaucracy. It became government funded. It became all of these different things as opposed to people seeking true knowledge or original knowledge and trying to seek it in all of these different ways and arriving at it in all sorts of random and interesting and mystical ways.

1:27:42Science used to be more spiritual, is what you're saying? Yes. I mean, Pythagoras, correct me if I'm wrong, he basically invented this whole religion of numerology, right? That's probably true. I think Newton spent most of his life, like, Newtonian physics was a side project. Most of his life was spent in studying religious text and doing things like alchemy and random things like that. Tesla said that all of his ideas came from dreams. Yeah. Like, spirit world. Einstein, too. Like Einstein was like, I was sitting in his chair and like dreaming the whole time. And so we kind of lose something about what is essential to us as humans and what is true discovery and inspiration when you think about the world in purely mechanistic ways.

1:28:31And I doubt that without struggling with these questions that we're going to be able to replicate that into machines and have machines going to go discover new discoveries. They're going to do amazing things for science, like protein folding is an exact kind of problem that you want to direct an AI on. It's a computational intractable problem. It's really hard for us to solve in many different explicit ways. It is a large data problem, big data problem. And so we're going to use AI to advance science in all sorts of exciting ways. Those original paradigm shifting ideas, I think are human in a way that is hard to describe.

1:29:11Is there any spiritual practice you do to come up with ideas, be more creative, or just do better in business? I do cold plunges. And when I do a cold plunge, it shuts down this constant thinking, talking mind that I have. and suddenly I become more receptive to inspiration and ideas outside of me. I don't know. I think you can replicate some of that in meditation. I haven't done that very well, but I find physical shock to my body tends to create stillness. And so cold plunge is one of the big ways. You can get it with exercise as well. like exercise the exhaustion to a way like you can't really think a lot and a lot of people find that but I think you can replicate in different religious practices and things like that but for me like I found that cold plunges forces my mind in a certain way and I've and it just like creates this clarity and sometimes there's like really exciting ideas that comes out of that it's all about creating state changes and kind of split testing like what ideas or I guess even personalities, communication styles like come out of those.

1:30:42But do you feel like I gave you a good answer for like the doomerism question? I really did want to touch on the cult, but I'll say this. The aspect of Amjad's thesis on AI doomerism doomerism that I found most fascinating was in his interview with Tucker Carlson, where he talked about the cult, the Silicon Valley of these AI doomers. And when I realized that there's some propaganda involved, maybe some weird spiritual shit, I was like, yeah, I don't really entirely believe in this AI doom thesis. So I'd definitely recommend checking that out. But by the way, part of the reason why I didn't focus on that is because I think their influence is waning.

1:31:33When I did that interview in 2024, it was at the height of the influence of the effective altruisms. And I think luckily through various things that happened, including tech people responding to it, their influence is sort of waning. But certainly, I mean, in that interview, I talk at length about the self-serving nature of their thesis and how they use that to manipulate people and to gain all sorts of favors and weird things that are happening there. But luckily, they're not as important. Theoretically, do you suspect intelligence agencies or the military have some involvement with AI development?

1:32:22it. The cool thing about large language models is that it doesn't really matter because it is a very simple process. Being at the frontier is very hard, like creating GPT 5.3 or Opus 4.5 or whatever. GPT-2 at some point was the frontier. Now you can train GPT-2 on your phone. so there isn't enough of a gap that they can create to have proprietary technology this technology is decentralizing and becoming more accessible really really quickly in order months now we have open source models from china coming out and maybe there's involvement in the government there but they coming out that are as good as like the you know models that came out three months ago from Anthropic and OpenAI.

1:33:19So maybe, but it doesn't really matter because once we learn what they've done in the latest generation of things, and as compute gets cheaper, anyone can replicate these things at home. And that's the cool thing about what's happening in the world today. These companies are trying to create enough of a moat around data and compute and things like that in order to block competitors and create more proprietary technology and create an oligopoly around it. But so far, they haven't been successful, luckily. So you would suspect that the top models are at most a few months ahead of what's publicly accessible?

1:33:59Okay. That's fair. I think a lot of people have suspicions that, oh, they're gatekeeping this technology that's 10 years ahead. You can download Kimi 2.5 on your computer and run it. And you would get a model that is as good as, you know, GPT-5 when it first came out. Amjad, you've built a billion-dollar company by making tools more accessible to the everyday person. If you could distill everything you've learned, what's the one piece of advice you would give to make sure anyone listening could find success? I would start with intention, with intention and focus and perseverance. Like if you're really intent on finding success, you're going to find success, no matter who you are.

1:34:52Like I think if you just like visualize it, you put your mind into it, you have the right mindset, you don't have limiting beliefs, I can meet whoever. Like I can, there's no difference between me and some other billionaire. I can learn all the skills needed. No one is like better than me. Start with these beliefs and you're going to be unstoppable. I think at some point, the hard thing about scaling a company from like a billion dollars to a hundred billion dollars to a trillion dollars is the game changes fundamentally. And that's what I'm going through right now. You know, you become resource rich, but time poor.

1:35:49That's like the worst feeling. Like you don't have enough time to do things manually and you have to like delegate a lot. You have to learn how to like build a team and hire and do all these different things. those are all very important but I think getting the initial set of success it's all about being really good at believing in yourself not quitting, not taking no for an answer keep going, keep going, never quit I think those are really the only necessary ingredients in order to achieve enough success to potentially retire or like escape the rat race. I love that. I've been wanting someone to give that advice for a while.

1:36:40It's kind of like this idea that people say you get what you deserve, but it's really like you get what you want. And to find the success, you have to really genuinely want it. And if you don't have it, then you actually don't want it. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's right. You have to really, really want it. here's the irony of life. At some point, you're going to get to a position where you're like, do I really want it? And that's when, you know, you have to grow and change your mind. And that's what I'm saying is scaling past that is a different thing. Like, there isn't any material thing that I really want right now.

1:37:18I'm not that liquid of a rich person, right? Like on paper, I have large wealth. Like I can't buy everything that I want. But I also bought enough things to know that that's not what life is about. And I wish that for everyone. I wish for everyone to get to a point that they find that the material world is just like not all that worth it. I think money is great in so many ways, but you buy a car and you're like, all right, that's cool. It's like it's not gonna, really at some point you're like, okay, what do I really want? And that question is actually a lot harder. But if you're starting from zero, So, you know, fix your mind on whatever it is, a car, success, status, whatever it is, and drive really hard at it and you're going to get it.

1:38:03Beautiful. Well, everyone, this has been your guest. I'm Jamisad. This is the Jack Neal Podcast. I appreciate you coming on. Thank you.

1:38:16Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our sub stack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.

1:39:06Thank you.