Amjad Masad on Building Replit in Public

Being canceled is a choice. You can choose to get cancelled 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 world view 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?

Look, 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 predisposition of the CEO.

Yeah, I think Replit would have probably died if I wasn't telling a story that is larger than the company itself. Like the company wasn't successful commercially, but we've been very successful at like fundraising, recruiting, and I think if you build a company that's successful right out of the gate commercially, like 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, turns out everything I said was true but at the time it wasn't real. It was a dream.

Well, I think the journey starts like 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 an influencer for lack of better words. And I remember I was in New York when I first came to the states and I had a terrible stage fright. Like I'd be sitting here and my heart rate would be like 150. I'd be sweating. And I thought like how do I deal with this? How do I get better at this? And I went, I 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 like 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 like blow up right out of the gate. It was this like very, my personal profile had like this very linear growth to it. And so I could make mistakes with you know very little attention on me. So I made a lot of PR mistakes. I think still if you go to Hacker News, sort by the top 10, like we had like 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 large enough. I was still like 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. And so you kind of make mistakes and they're not at the public stage just yet. And so the stakes gets higher as I'm able, it's sort of a progressive overload in powerlifting. You're sort of like carrying more weight. You know, 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's blowing up and they're in the public eye. And you can see founders of big, you know, now trillion dollar companies, they're really messing up on a massive stage, but getting the reps in has been super helpful.

Yeah. So, I think a few things. One is the concept of build in 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, to 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 and 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 buy a source public. I often write something publicly and then paste it on Slack and just say, you know, this is what I wrote. And so that's been helpful.

The other thing is authenticity. I think like being really yourself is kind of like a big radical thing that you know 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. But 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. Like I think you know Trump was successful despite the negative bias in the press and it was mostly Twitter initially. Like people forget that but Trump had like amazing bangers on what was it, my favorite one, 'I've never seen a thin person drink Diet Coke.'

Or Kanye. Kanye's banger is like 'I hate waking up in the plane and I see a bottle of water in front of me now I got to take care of this yet.'

Right? I can't be managed. Like, you know, 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.

Yeah. Yeah. You can do anything, but if you're a good poster, I mean, you can get away with it.

Yeah. The, 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. You know, is it just that attention spans are so short that it's just like the next situation? What do you say about that?

Well, you need to, I think it's deadly like PR crisis can be deadly if you retreat afterwards. Like 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 and 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. And so being cancelled is a choice. You can choose to get cancelled 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, 'All right, I guess we can't do anything to this guy. Let's go to the next guy.'

I will say the mental aspect of it is pretty difficult. I was going to ask that next. Yeah, because like I think that you know this story has been told a trillion times, but like in the ancestor 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's 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. Like I you know no 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. And obviously like often times 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.

It's obviously way above my grade. I've never, you know, battled with a United States government. Not yet. One day, goals. But look, I honestly think it's a kind of a win-win for them. Like it's really if you game out what's gonna happen with Anthropic, if Claude comes back, it's gonna be huge flood towards Claude. It's kind of like, you know, this thing was banned by the government. Actually, Steve Jobs once did this ad where they had a Mac, I don't know, the big towers of Mac Pro, I think it's called, where that 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 like showing that this thing is so powerful the US government doesn't want you to have it so you should go buy it. And so it's like a tremendous marketing opportunity for them. It's already kind of their reputation is pretty big. But even if they can't get Claude back on the market, you know, they still win the PR game of like 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.

You don't have to respond back, that's the thing. You don't have to respond back at all. I mean that's another thing you have to learn is to not feed the trolls. It's you know that reply was like oh I got to get back, it's like what's that I think New Yorker comic was like babe come to bed it's like no something's wrong in the internet. And it's like it's very tempting, but actually it's kind of the baller thing to do is like, oh yeah, yeah, the plebs 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 this is something that you're getting emotional about. Because again, anytime you show weakness publicly, it actually feeds the trolls and feeds the haters because they feel like they can get to you.

Yeah, I think that's like an art thing and I think it comes down to business impact. Like will it actually have business impact on my business? You know for example like last year in July we had this story with the founder of SaaStr, Jason Lemkin, where Jason had just started vibe coding, had never vibe coded or coded anything before and as he's working with Replit Agent, Replit Agent sort of misunderstood him or something like that and then deleted the database. And the time we didn't have production development separation. And so the production database, now we actually separate them by default, like the replication can't even write to production database. It can only read. And we have backups, we have snapshots, you can go back, you know, to a certain day or time or whatever. So the mistake that the replication did was one click away from being fixed. But from his perspective, he didn't know that. And Replit Agent started freaking out. Models at the time used to get like really anxious, especially Claude. And he tweeted the screenshot where Replit Agent was like going kind of nuts. And you know, it started gaining traction, gaining traction, gaining traction. And in my mind I know like we already fixed this issue but the story has become so massive and you know obviously it's going to have business impact and it's going to be in the press and so I could go out and fight it and just say well we did nothing wrong we had backups, you know, 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 fix. 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.