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 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?
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...
I'm... thank you for joining us. 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 go-direct 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 this?
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 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 not have 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. 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 you know who are CEOs, maybe it doesn't come supernaturally to them, and they have to make a decision of like, how do I get good? 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 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 able 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 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 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 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 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 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, like we had a PR crisis on Hacker News where I had an issue with some ex-intern at Replit where I just totally botched that communication. But still, that wasn't large enough. 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. And 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 progressive overload in powerlifting. You're sort of 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 fucking up on a massive stage. But getting the reps in has been super helpful.
And so, is that your advice? People want to get just exposure therapy, just, you know, like one tweet a day? Or like, 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 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 bias 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, you know, 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.
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.
I don't have a manager. I can't be managed, 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.
You can do anything, but if you're a good poster, I mean, you can get away with it.
He can post his way to presidency for sure.
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 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.
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 cancelled over the past like 15 years. And that's basically the takeaway, is that the people who are truly cancelled are the ones who shut up. They're the ones who retreat. But the ones who just keep going, you know, it's forgettable. I mean, there's so many people, you know, Brian Johnson is like an example of someone who wholly revived their image or just presented a whole new image, and people just forget the thing that they were, you know, almost cancelled.
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 ancestral 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, 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, 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.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, earlier on you were alluding to the stakes are really high with these. What advice might you have for Anthropic or OpenAI in terms of like some of the communication challenges or opportunities?
It's obviously way above my grade. I've never battled with the United States government. Not yet. One day, goals. But look, I honestly think it's 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 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 Fable 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're 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 have to think about the responses, and I have to respond back, and now I'm in sort of...
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 on 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, oh, 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. 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. Like, will it actually have business impact on my business? You know, for example, 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 at the time we didn't have production-development separation. And so the production database... now, like, we actually separate them by default. Like, the Replit Agent can't even write to the 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 Replit Agent 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 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.
Especially if you apologize.
Especially if you apologize. No, I would say just kind of focus on the business impact.
