We have CEOs that finally feel unleashed like they have Replit and they have an idea. They don't have to go beg someone to do it. They can just vibe code and bring it into a meeting and say, 'Look what I built.' We want to get to a point where you don't have to code at all. You should be in a creative space. A lot of coding is minutia. A lot of coding is accidental complexity. And turns out there's actually research. Doctors who play video games have much better reaction times. So if you want to do a surgery, always ask them if they're a gamer.
Oh, not a gamer. Sorry. But where's the gamer here? Get the gamer.
AI is reshaping how we work, learn, and create. And nowhere is that change more tangible than in coding. That's where today's guest comes in. If you've heard of Vibe Coding, you've heard of Amjad Masad, founder and CEO of Replit, the platform that lets anyone build software right from their browser.
Amjad grew up in Jordan, where he taught himself to code before studying computer science and moving to the United States. He became a founding engineer at Codecademy and later led JavaScript infrastructure at Facebook. What you might not know is that he's also an empathetic, people-focused voice in the AI space, talking about issues and philosophy that others won't. I've used Replit myself and it's clear to me this isn't what's next, it's what's happening right now. Replit makes building software as natural as writing an email, shifting the power of creation to anyone with an idea. So yes, this is an interview about coding and the fastest growing programming language in the world, English. But even more broadly, it's about how AI is already forcing us to rethink how work and society function, told through the lens of one field that's transforming before our eyes.
And we're thrilled to welcome to the show, Amjad Masad.
Amjad, I'm so glad this worked out. We've known each other for a number of years. And part of the thing I love about doing a podcast is people that I learn from. And there's been a whole stack of things out of our conversations, mostly at the Grove, but other places as well. So, welcome to Possible. It's so glad to have you here.
Thank you for having me. I'm really excited. I've been listening to the show recently. So, happy to be here.
I'd like to start with a question about you. Replit's about making things. So you might even phrase this question of how are you made? Tell me about your early experience playing video games and how video games kind of did your trajectory into where you are, and then we'll get into more depth on Replit.
Yeah. So video games have been a huge part of my life. I started playing video games on the Atari, maybe even before getting my first PC.
I wonder how many people still know what Atari is.
Yeah, maybe we have to actually describe what an Atari is. But here's a bit from history. Steve Jobs worked at Atari. It was the Silicon Valley premier company for computers. And so I was just captivated by video games. And when I first got a computer, my first idea was, can you actually make a video game on this thing? Well, it turned out it was initially very, very hard. But I remember going every year back in Amman, Jordan, where I grew up, to a computer show that my father would take us to. It's a really big place where they have all sorts of new computers, new devices, CD-ROMs, whatever. And I bought a CD-ROM in a collection of CDs. I went home and I didn't know what was in them. One of them was like a fax program, whatever. I just bought CDs. I just wanted to try one. One of them was a visual programming experience that allowed you to build kind of game-like experiences. So, one of the early games that I built was for my younger brother, five years younger than me, to teach him math. I think I was maybe eight and he was three or something like that. There would be two boxes. It would be an equation. He'd have to enter the right number, like five plus blank equals six. And it's like one. If he gets it right, he gets applause. If he gets it wrong, he gets a boo. And it worked out so well. He now works at Replit. So, I taught him math early on.
It's very early recruiting.
Early recruiting. Yes, early recruiting. Worked out. The moment you give a user a program you made, it's horrific because they'll put in things that you don't expect. Like instead of one, it'll put an E. And I was like, 'No edge cases, little bro.' But then just the high of not only making something, but seeing other people getting value out of it just hooked me. And video games have been through my journey since then. I got really into Counter-Strike and I used to go to these LAN gaming cafes and we would play Counter-Strike against each other. But all these cafes were kind of run by pen and paper. So you would go there, you'd pay for an hour or two. They'll write your name and what time you came in and they'll watch which computer you're on and they'll tap you on the shoulder when your time's up. And I was like, that's so silly. There's computers all over the place. I'm going to go write a program for it. I was maybe 13 at the time. Took me two years, but I built this client-server application to manage the entire thing with security and everything. You could have user accounts and gift cards. I started selling it and I got really rich for the time. I took all my classmates to McDonald's when it first opened in Jordan. So yeah, gaming has been a recurring theme to kind of pull me more, and now Replit has a really fun gaming experience that you can build games with it.
So, starting with your younger brother, how much is a gaming background part of the recruiting target, the cultural organization target, the way you talk to people at Replit? In addition, of course, to the dynamic of how the product operates itself, but how much does the gaming background inform that whole stack of the company?
Yeah, it was never explicit, but I think for whatever reason, the way we design the product, the kind of people we attract, the kind of art we put together around the product, even the product itself, kind of attracts those gamer mindsets. And actually, I've always intuited that people who played games early on had a higher clock speed. They could think faster, react faster. And turns out there's actually research around it. Doctors who play video games have much better reaction times. So if you want to go to a surgeon, if you want to do a surgery, always ask them if they're a gamer.
Oh, not a gamer. Sorry. Where's the gamer here?
Get the gamer. And then when we were designing Replit Agent, which is our AI coding tool that codes on your behalf, I was playing this video game called Hades, and a lot of my colleagues got into it as well. In Hades, it's a roguelike game where every game starts with a different run, and it's a randomly generated game essentially. So it was a very important mindset when designing AI experiences because AI is stochastic. Even the language that we use inside the company, like an agent run, is sort of like a game run, and so on. So it's a big part of the culture.
So you've already described your very first intense coding experiences: your younger brother, managing the whole gaming LAN. How would you take the current kind of coding enablement? What if your younger self had that coding enablement? How would your younger self have done this differently?
Yeah. The interesting thing about programming, and you know this very well, I think my generation is the last generation where the tools were really a joy to use, and then it became very industrialized. When we were programming, my real programming experience when I built that business was in Visual Basic. Visual Basic was a very creative interface. At some point in the mid-2000s, everything became this Linux terminal. Even building a JavaScript app, you have to download all sorts of software and hook them together. So I grew up in a generation where coding was a little more creative. And then because it became such a high-paying job, it changed because of that. As we're building the product, we got a lot of criticism early on, even before AI, that Replit abstracts too much away from the environment. And we're like, we abstract it, but it is there. You can peer under the hood, and I think that's what's important. But if you make programming so complex at the top, people lose interest. That's why in CS classes in universities and schools, you can turn off a lot of people because they think it's this laborious IT task of pip install and all of that stuff. Instead, what you want to do is make things. So for kids nowadays growing up, for parents encouraging their kids to code, just go to Replit and make things. I promise you your kids will learn programming by osmosis. They'll get curious at some point. They run into a bug, they'll go Google around and ask ChatGPT. And that's how the organic learning process happens.
And say a little bit about how the gaming dynamic enhances that. What's the way that the things you've learned from being a gamer make that creative experience come alive?
There's no game in the world that starts with a manual. So if your program starts with a manual, you've already lost. The first thing you want to get to is dopamine really quickly. With Replit, getting you the first preview, getting you the first thing that you can see immediately hooks you. 'Oh, I immediately made something. I put in a prompt. I made something.' And then you want to create a safe environment where it is easy to go back. In video games, save and load is a very important part of exploring a game. You don't want to be in a position where you die and that's it and you have to restart all over. So at Replit, we spend a lot of time working on checkpoint and restore. Every action you make in the IDE is actually stored in a sort of ledger. So you make an action to the file system, to the database, to the runtime, all of that is stored in a ledger. Anytime you feel like you got into a weird spot, you can always go back, or if the agent did something you don't like, you can always go back to the previous one. That's another principle. And then there's the aspect of sharing and having other people use your thing. Publishing should be really easy, inviting other people. So we designed the multiplayer experience to be sort of like gaming as well. I think the mindset goes a long way instead of thinking of the onboarding as a manual, just thinking about it as an unfolding experience of more complexity, like level one, level two, level three.
Yeah. Mobile level one, level two, level three gaming dynamics.
What are some of the places where you've been most surprised by what this unleashing of early creativity has enabled?
Some of the medical things were really interesting because it's so outside of my purview. I wouldn't have imagined it even. There's a woman that had a very rare eye disease and required to do certain exercises, and she built an app that helps her do these exercises with her eyes every day. There's a woman in Korea whose kid has a very rare disease, and she built an app to manage that disease on a day-to-day basis. Medical is one that's really fascinating. I think there's more to do there. And then something also so outside of my purview is go-to-market and sales people. There's a role in these organizations that I recently learned about called RevOps. Those people are managing a lot of the data flow within go-to-market teams, building the tools, and helping sales people do their jobs. Those people tend to use a lot of SaaS software and other data sources, but they don't have anything to connect all these things together to create applications and make their sales people more successful. So that's go-to-market. And then finally, one thing that's been really surprising is CEOs. Maybe that gets some engineers to hate us a little bit, but CEOs that feel disempowered because they've delegated a lot of things, they don't have as much input on the process. We have CEOs that finally feel unleashed. They have Replit and they have an idea. They don't have to go beg someone to do it. They can just vibe code and bring it into a meeting and say, 'Look what I built. Why can't you do that in two weeks if I can do it in two days?' So that's another interesting one.
I mean, you're talking so much about building and also about bringing kids the whimsy and the creativity and the fun. As Reed knows, I hadn't programmed since freshman year CS, so a long time ago. My coworker Parth sent me a Replit login a few months ago and he's like, 'Just play around.' And literally within 20 minutes, I had built an app. Because I was so excited and because I could do it right away, it's just so easy to get onboarded. There's no barriers, whether you're a CEO or a 5-year-old or someone who's a little rusty, you can get right in there. And I think Replit is sort of so closely associated with what might be the Silicon Valley word of the year, which is 'vibe coding.' And you've said that you don't love that word. We all use that word. How would you define vibe coding? And are there other words that you would prefer to use when talking about the full suite of what Replit does?
Yeah. Well, I've learned through my times in the Valley is not to fight the hype beasts. I remember when cloud was controversial. A lot of people hated the cloud, but it just stuck around. So although I have feelings about it, we kind of embrace it in many ways. So what vibe coding is, it was coined by Andrej Karpathy, and he was the head of AI at Tesla at some point. He talked about how when he's programming, especially when he's prototyping, he got to a point where he's no longer looking at the code. He's typing in the prompts, a bunch of code comes out, and he hits tab or accept, and he just keeps going and tries to make as much progress as possible before it stalls out. He calls it, 'This is no longer coding because I'm going by the vibes.' If the vibes feel right, if the app is running, then it is working. So that's how vibe coding came around. Now, the reason that it might not be really fitting for us is because a lot of times you're not coding at all. And I think vibe coding might scare some people away because the word 'coding' is still in it. We want to get to a point where you don't have to code at all. You should be in a creative space. A lot of coding is minutia. A lot of coding is accidental complexity. The fact that I know that null is an object in JavaScript doesn't add anything to my life, but I had to learn all that stuff. I think there's going to be a generation of programmers that don't have to learn that stuff. I think that's fine. And that's the history of programming. When Grace Hopper, the inventor of the compiler in the 1950s, invented the compiler, she was actually inventing a form of vibe coding. She said, 'I want millions of people to experience programming because it's such a wonderful thing and changes people's lives, changes businesses, and I want them to program in English.' She said that way before Karpathy said that. And then the machine code people were like, 'Program in English? No, you can't do that. How can you understand how much data you're putting into each register?' But the history of humanity has been to abstract away the details so we can focus on the more creative things. There's always specialists. There's still people looking at machine code, people doing C, people doing JavaScript, and I think there are people that are going to be entirely programming in natural language.
That's a great segue to one of the questions I've been thinking about: what is the new literacy? Because obviously, previously literacy was reading and writing, and part of how we get to a massive elevation of humanity is through as broad-based literacy amongst the billions of people as we possibly can, because it enables everything else. It enables learning, cultural evolution, patterns of thought. Now with the no-code, the vibing as opposed to vibe coding, that's a new form of literacy. So say a little bit about how you think about this new form of literacy. And also add in a little bit: one of the things I think is that everyone is going to be having a coding co-pilot, because that's now part of the way that you would write an email or anything else. So give a little bit of this literacy and future of how everyone's going to be navigating thinking and information spaces.
Well, the first thing I will say is that soft skills are more important than ever. For a while in the US at least, we were all STEM. STEM is still really important, but I think you have a lot of engineers going to work right now and they are not very good at communication, at talking about ideas. They're good at writing the code, translating some of those ideas into code. But now the way we see our product being used by product managers, for example, product managers are some of the best vibe coders because they're really good at taking problems and breaking them down into their constituent parts and communicating them very well to the machine, and then the machine can build them. So whatever we do, if it's a question about education in our education system, it needs to get much better at being able to take problems and breaking them down. There was a hype word about 10 or 15 years ago called 'computational thinking,' and people were building startups around teaching people computational thinking. I think that's still important because underlying all of this is still computational. When you're describing an idea to an LLM to build it, you need to be able to talk about databases, persistence, lists, and things like that. So if I'm designing a computer course for young people, I would focus more on the abstract concept of computation as opposed to 'null is not an object' type of thing.
Part of that is not only is the baseline computation about what the three of us learned, even if it goes all the way back to freshman year CS, which tends to be very deterministic algorithmic data structures, memory management, other kinds of things. But also I think what's going to happen is we're going to bring in a set of other computational concepts. I think it'll be probabilistic concepts because actually most of where LLMs and everything else is very interesting, it's probabilistic. I think it'll be maybe even quantum, but a bunch of other things where compute is not just like 1 plus 1 equals 2. There's a richer sense of compute. Have you seen any of that yet with Replit, or is that still kind of in the glimmerings of what's coming?
We see the problems of not understanding it. We see the problems of users not understanding that it's a probabilistic system, a stochastic system. They expect results to be reproducible and all of that stuff. So 100%, I think the future is understanding these concepts really well. And by the way, once you understand them, you can predict how these tools might work and you can go from one tool to another and still have the same mental model understanding of it. In the same way that when I was growing up, I really understood how computers work, and that allowed me to build all these businesses and programs. Understanding how LLMs work is going to be very, very important. Now the problem is most people's experience is ChatGPT, which is trained to sound like a friend. You're not getting raw access into the LLM in order to figure out how to program it. So we just introduced a set of AI integrations. Now if you ask for, 'Make me an app that takes a prompt, generates an image model, audio model, puts them together,' it's so simple. You don't have to do anything. Just put in that prompt. It will tell you we're going to use OpenAI for this, we're going to use Gemini for this. We'll take care of the billing. We'll build it on behalf of them. But I feel like there needs to also be a UI. I don't think we've invented the UI for how to mix and match these LLMs and how to program them. So as much as I am a big believer in natural language based programming, I think at some point, as agents get better and they're working most of the time in the background, we need to invent the new interfaces for how to program these machines.
Well, also you said that most people when they think of AI, they think of ChatGPT. So when I'm talking to my friends who are not technical or not in Silicon Valley, that's their only thought about what AI is. They can't even open their minds to anything else because that's the one experience they have. And I think one of the things we're excited about is that with Replit and tools like it, we're going to open up the possibility to build to so many people. So a two-part question. One is what are the ways that we can have more people experience AI in this positive, agentic, super-agency way? And then what happens when we open up these opportunities for more people to build?
Yeah. So Alan Kay has this essay called 'The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet.' In it, he makes the case that literacy changed the world. We had democratic revolution, scientific revolution. You couldn't imagine any of those without literacy. Now, computational literacy, or people being able to use a computer to its best ability, which is being able to program a computer, will change the world in fundamental ways. I think you need an entire generation of people to grow up using these tools. Maybe I'm showing my bias because I have a history of working in education. I was a founding engineer at Codecademy. We taught millions of people how to code. And I like to help governments. We did a deal with the government of Saudi Arabia where they want to put vibe coding as part of their curriculum. An entire generation of people experientially learning how to use these tools will change the world in ways we haven't predicted just yet.
One of my first public Replit experiences was reproducing LinkedIn. I saw that. Part of what I think both the AI revolution does and also what Replit does is expand the zone of your imagination about what's doable. Walk us through what kind of imagination should people bring with them to start learning Replit and bringing an idea to reality.
Such a good point. Because we still suffer from the blank page problem. We talk to a lot of users that sign up to Replit and then sit there for a little bit and then leave. We're like, 'What happened?' And it's like, 'I just didn't know what to type in there.' Of course, in retrospect, for us living in it, it's like, 'Are you kidding? Just prompt. What do you mean?' But of course, it's a skill. Now, before I go back to how we solve it, I think after people go through this hump, it's an amazing experience because you become possessed. You walk around your day and you're looking for software problems to solve. You're like, 'Wow, I have this new hammer and now everything looks like a nail.' Once that clicks, it's pretty amazing. So now we're doing a lot of work at the top of the funnel, figuring out what kind of educational experiences we give people. But the first thing I would say is don't complicate it. Have a very simple idea, an app that you would have liked existed. Maybe every one of us has an idea for an app that you can't find in the app store. I want something to do this or that for my kids. Having kids is a great way because there are so many things you're like, 'Ah, just organize my camp schedule.' Or I want this educational thing, I want to be able to do this fun thing with my kids. And then talk to it like you would talk to a person. Just say, 'I have an idea.' Don't worry about the grammar and all that. You'll get better at prompting, but initially just get in with any kind of idea. If you want some sample ideas, I would just say basic things like, 'I want to build a collaborative whiteboard.' And then just imagine, if you've done improv, it's a good way to do it. Just word association. 'I want a collaborative whiteboard.' And then look around the room and you'll see a plant that allows me to create a garden or something. So really just be generative, and you'll get an experience and you'll get a feeling of it.
Do you know who is the typical Replit user and what kinds of things are they building already? Is it 80% of people building SaaS software?
Yeah. I think most of it is AI software, which is why we built this recent thing. It used to be that you had to go figure out how to get an API key from OpenAI or others. But people have AI ideas. They see AI and a lot of people will be like, 'Oh, I wish ChatGPT did this one thing.' And then they want to build AI experiences like chatbots. Read AI is a great example. Obviously, Read AI is very advanced in that it has video and all of that. But you can build like, 'Go tell Replit to go look at your personal blog or paste in your notes and just say I want to create a chat experience that sounds like me based on these notes.' So AI is a really big one. Another one is people want to build businesses. As I started thinking about our business more, there are two aspects of our business, maybe three. There is the consumer aspect, which is building family stuff and personal things. Then there's the enterprise, which is automating line of business applications, rapid prototyping, product development inside larger businesses. And then entrepreneurs. The way I started thinking about entrepreneurs is that everyone has domain knowledge in their head that is not monetized just yet. Similar to how Airbnb found that everyone has space in their room that's not monetized. There are people all over the world that have niche specific problems that they've run into that no one else has solved. I was talking to an entrepreneur on Replit the other day. His wife is a yoga teacher in rural England and she does these pop-up yoga events. Most of the communication is happening over WhatsApp. Payment is really hard to do. They use PayPal, all these different things. So he wanted to build a platform for her and other people like her. She doesn't have a yoga studio that you can go to every day, but she does these events at backyards and things like that. So he built a platform and he has users and other instructors. Every niche in our life, there are people that are experts in that previously were not entrepreneurs because they didn't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to go pay developers to do it. Now they can do it.
I love that example because obviously there's entrepreneurs that you're serving that are building million-dollar, billion-dollar businesses that serve hundreds of thousands of customers, millions of customers. But I think the solopreneur, the woman who has a yoga studio, I think of my mom who's a piano teacher and she's always trying to figure out how to get her schedule straight, how to get payment, how to figure this out. There's so many like her. She's an entrepreneur. The person who runs a yoga studio, the person who has a bakery outside their house, those are the people who would never be able to afford fancy coders or a fancy website, but Replit can empower them to do so much more. So I love that. And there's something about it that makes me really excited about the world to come. As much as I love Silicon Valley, we tend to flatten the world. We just build one size fits all. SaaS software tends to have all these buttons and configuration just to fit every use case. But instead, we're going to explode that and decentralize it around the world. Every community might have a special business that does one specific niche thing. That diversity is exciting. And as part of that diversity and being fun, we'd like to play for you a short clip of one of the ways people have used Replit to build something important to them.
What if you turn boba into a game? I prompted a basic app and sketched out some boba. I made three different drinks: taro, milk tea, and matcha. I added logic so the pearls fall from the sky. If you miss three bobas, you lose. But the game was way too easy, so let's make it difficult and add some bombs and a scoreboard. I noticed the game was a bit glitchy and I wanted to try it on mobile. So, I'm at my favorite cafe. I added more colors, different fonts, and harder levels.
It's the best thing. People can code on their phones right now, which is amazing.
Done yet. What other features should I add?
That's fantastic. And we didn't just select it because she added it to her bio.
When we first started working on the phone, people said we were crazy. Because back then there was no AI. And we had to build a lot of things to make coding on the phone a little bit easier. But I always imagined, because back in school I had a Symbian phone, I was like, 'I wish I could program it under my desk.' So it's really cool to see people doing that now.
One of the things as you dig into AI, it becomes the earlier question: how do you broaden your imagination? But also now, what's a good way of optimizing? For example, obviously you can do things that have huge token counts and that doesn't build a good business. It might be fun as a one-off thing. What is, as it were in the game dynamics, the next level of compute thinking? How does this work within the operational envelope of AI enabling it, being able to figure out what kind of interface elements? What are some of the things you've seen in terms of context optimization, managing the AI token outputs, helping people with that kind of compute thinking?
Yeah, I mean there are two aspects of this. One is strategy. You want to be able to do things that the big labs are not going to do or eat your lunch, and actually be able to build a good business. And the other thing is what can LLMs do right now and what scaffolding do they need around them? The scaffolding part is really important because this is where you can build the value on top of the LLMs. The way I think about our business right now, we were in the business of training models. Now we use all the different commercial models. And I see our business as to build the milieu, the environment around LLMs. If you think about LLMs as a person, you want to create the habitat for them. So we built the best habitat for programming. When we first did this pivot from the human programmer to the AI being the programmer, I took the same teams at the company and I told them, 'Now you're no longer building for humans, you're building for the AI.' So the editor team built editing tools for the AI. The cloud infrastructure teams that built deployment tools for humans, they now build it for the AI. So I would look at any different vertical and I would think this way. If you want to build a financial agent, just think about what kind of environment you can build for that agent. I see a lot of people trying to put LLMs into Excel sheets, which I think works okay, but can you build an Excel interface for the AI? In a way it's textual, it can use it. Based on that, you want to hit the right distribution of the LLMs. You can pick any vertical and if you want to build a really great business, just think about building your first user as the LLM. Think about building that habitat for the LLM to live in to create amazing experiences and products.
The unlock of creativity, the unlocks of what that means for more personalization, things that work for individuals, businesses, creative thinking is great. So, let's talk a little bit about some of the business attributes. You just mentioned that part of what you've done is, instead of home-growing your own models, you're now using a fleet of models. But that obviously makes you somewhat dependent on them, makes you more copyable. Business attributes. One of the things that the people who listen to our podcast, a lot of entrepreneurs, you're navigating a business challenge that they need to learn from. So how do you think about that? What are the things that you're doing to build a unique and enduring business? What are the kinds of considerations that go into that?
Like when a new package comes on open source, Replit has it on day one because we built all this abstraction to be able to go get the packages and install them and run them on the system. So we're riding a huge wave. We're riding multiple waves. LLMs are getting better. We're also riding open source getting better. New programming language comes out, we can run it on day one. And that required a lot of investments up front. And there are a lot of competitors that are not doing this. And it might be short-term easier for them to do, but I know how the landscape of programming works. Things will shift. Like the other day, we saw a new JSON format called Tune that is more efficient. It's token optimized format that is more efficient for LLMs. And so again, programming will continue to improve and we want to be the platform where you can program anything with LLMs.
Let's think a little bit also about how the future of work is going to evolve. You know, most people's experience right now is with chatbots. So they put in something, they get out something, they put in something, get out something. So they're kind of directing the work in some ways, but it's kind of iterative from what they're doing. So how do you imagine this trend, Replit and others in this kind of everyone working with that power of code? Because it's a combination of that individual creativity, imagination, broaden imagination, drive, but also standardization for work processes. It's one of the reasons why the classic industrialization is I fill out this form and then I hand it to you and you do it. So I'm certain that you've been thinking about what this means for the future of corporate work. What are some of the observations you might share?
Yeah, when I first came to the corporate world, one thing that I found extremely depressing is how atomized and siloed people are. So, you know, over time, with capitalism sort of emerging, you have the original, I think Adam Smith, like how do you make a pencil, right? Like someone makes an eraser. And so people become sort of cogs in the machine. And I don't think that is conducive to the human spirit. Like I think humans are fundamentally creative. I think anytime we assume the shape of a machine, people are actually not happy in their lives. I'm not a Marxist, but I've read some Marx and Marx's theory of alienation. And I think Marx was right on a lot of the critique of capitalism. Maybe not the solutions. Definitely not the solutions. One of his critiques is alienation, that you don't see the fruits of your work. You build one part of one part of one part of a large supply chain of things, right? And that doesn't make people proud. Like I said, when I was a kid, I built this entire thing and my brother used it. That's amazing. That's what being human is about. And so I think now we're at an opportunity in the workplace for a lot of that standardization stuff to be taken care of by agents, by work process automation and all that stuff. And what's left for people is broad swim lanes. Like I'm generally in design, but I can code. I can write a PRD using ChatGPT or whatever. I can even have a marketing idea and I can use all the tools and say, 'Hey, I built this marketing package.' And that to me is a lot more exciting. So we have, for example, one of our customers, a large enterprise, one person had an idea. It's a real estate marketplace where they connect real estate buyers with real estate agents. He had an idea on how to optimize that algorithm and couldn't get engineering resources. Previously, that idea is dead. Although he's in the business, he understands it, he talks to real estate agents all the time. Instead, he went to Replit. He built a new routing algorithm that drove tens of millions of dollars, if not a hundred million dollars, to the business. And that person got promoted again and again and again, and now he's sitting with the board members guiding their AI strategy. Entrepreneurship, I think, is not just about building businesses. You can be an activist entrepreneur. You can be a humanitarian entrepreneur. You can be an entrepreneur inside a large business. And I promise you, your life will be a lot more interesting, exciting. You'll meet a lot more exciting people. You'll have a better reputation. You'll have a halo around you. So my hope for the future of corporate work, but humanity in general, is that as the boring things, the automated things, are taken care of by machines, we're left to be more entrepreneurial and more creative.
Obviously, I totally hope that's the case. It goes back to my very first book, The Startup of You. So it's a definite strong belief because it's not that we all have to start businesses, but that kind of creativity, entrepreneurship, the engagement with it, the exact passion that you had with your brother. One micro thing that I think is an important thing for people to focus on because it's part of the general lack of context awareness that current agents have.
