YouSaid · the spoken record

Amjad Masad

lines on the record: 124
first: 2026-04-15
most recent: 2026-04-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And this computer science dean comes and tells me like, hey, 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, you know, I'm going to build companies and things like that. It's like, no, you have to do it. Or I won't graduate. I was like, okay, I'll do it. And 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 defense, so you're sitting in front of the different deans and you're kind of getting a presentation. I told them how I built the security scanner. And by the way, I'm going to run in the university system. And yet we have.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. So 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. And so I had this implicit power. It was like notorious. It was really cool as well. I was getting recognition everywhere.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he gave me at the time the spider run 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.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 and all the systems they had and how I hacked into it and really like pulled out all the sobs and all the charisma to kind of try to impress them. And they were really impressed. So impressed and so kind of in the element of the technical discussion that I'm like, all right, now that I explain 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's 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.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was like true or false, whether you're disqualified for attendance. And they had these bad names for the field. I think bad programming on their part. But it's still I kind of missed something. So I... I had a choice. You lie and you kind of live with a 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 school to kind of share with you. So 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 whole night, stayed up all night trying to figure out what's the problem.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I changed my grades. Calculus and other things that I didn't want to go to school, but I passed. 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 college network and registration system. He's like, look, the entire network and the university is down. And whenever we look at the code, we see there's a bug in your record. 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.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, this is 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 like change my grades and actually get to graduate. And I still felt like it was the just thing to do. It was a fair thing to do, right?”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has less probably did that as well. And so I was like, yeah, I want to be able to work a lot and really hard and be really efficient. So 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. So I finally found a vulnerability, a way to get into the system.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Michelangelo, you know, the inventor, artist, one of the most highest output human beings in history probably ever to come. Would sleep 15 minutes every four hours because he was working nonstop.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My friends were graduating. I'm like five years and 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 use my skills to get over this problem. You can cast almost any problem in life as a... And I thought, okay, I'm going to hack into school and change my grades 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 like break into the systems there, I would like work on scripts and do network scans and all of that. And I implemented polyphasic sleeping. Do you know that”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I would skip class and I would like go work on my programming, go take a job. I always had jobs during school. And then I would study enough to just pass. And I almost always pass. In some cases in like math and computer science, I would like get good grades. The problem in my school and 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 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. I think we're going to move past, especially with AI.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I was going to university in Jordan, princess of my university for technology. Good computer science school. But 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. Just sit there. Just listen.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So over time, it just got better at talking to people and trying to communicate complex ideas simply because I think that's what a really good communication is about. And if you're good at that, then you're good at talking to AI and prompting it.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like throwing myself in the fire to get past that fear, so deprogram the fear by desensitization is a popular psychology method. I think whereas in such a soft world right now that like psychiatrist psychologists don't treat things like that. But it's always been the case if you're afraid of water, if your kid is afraid of water, throw him in the fucking water. That's why my dad did it. So 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 stories telling classes and I did a storytelling show I told a story about how I hacked into my school to change my grades. And so”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Communication in general, I would suggest doing public speaking. I had actually a stage fright. Growing up and 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 and be a leader, I thought that I need to get past that. Like, what is the hardest? Place I could put myself in.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 it, AI as an employee or an intern. Instead of thinking about, oh, how do I talk its language? No, 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.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't mean it in a way that you don't want to complete your work, but if you're naturally just 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 you could like the app that I'm building for myself. I could potentially put on the app store at some point because it is probably useful for other people who want to track their sleep.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 total replace, just like pull that information from there, ask 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. And one thing I would say about the age of AI, and this is back to this idea of like, how do you generate ideas? If you're lazy, that's going to be a virtue.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was like, why can't I take photos of these things as I'm doing them instead of forgetting and doing it later? So throughout the day, I can take photos of whatever I ate or have done. And then that AI will generate the content for the next morning.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like if you're someone who's interested in how health and do a lot of tracking of health, I like to track my sleep and at some point has some sleep issues. And my doctor gave me a sheet to track what I ate, what medications I took, if any, if I exercised, and then what time I slept, what time I woke up, any sleep interruptions. And like I would wake up in the morning and feel that she'd most of the time lazy. I'm like, I don't want to do it. I forget whatever. I'm like, you know, I can automate this. I took a photo of that sheet, put it in a replet. You can just give Raplet a screenshot and just say, like, make it into an app. Made it on an app. And now we've gone a little easier to like put in the, you know, all this information. But 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.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every time we get a new deal in a CRM, there's an AI that generates the order form directly, puts 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. 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 could build a bot or you could build an AI or you can build a piece of software that can automate that. In personal lives, there's a lot of things that”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Process in between that you're doing some transformation in the data that you're doing, you can also have AI do that. So for example, Every company has this person that's called the deal desk person, every B2B company especially. And that 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 like 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 the steel dust person and she automated all of that.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Engineers 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 Replin, just say go pull the date of him 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 some”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to build a team of vibe quitters 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 generalist automator and they're less parochial than the engineer. The engineer is like really focused on systems and engineering. They'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.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That feel that they have ideas that could make more revenue for the business, but they're often blocked by engineering. Engineering, 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 Rapt 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.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 over their company. So every company out there, every tech company for sure, there are people that are closest to the customer.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 replace that person. There's going to be more work to be done, not less, because you get more revenue, get more users, you're going to have different challenges, different operationals you should do. So it's a hamster wheel. But we can go much faster now. And the way to look at AI is.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI is seen as 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, in their communities, in their companies. 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 Yet, bullshit work. There's actually a book called Bullshit Work, and it's like by David Raber. And it talks about how most of the economy is kind of bullshit work. I mean, if you think about it,”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And 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 damn 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 get my news more from social media than I do. And it has these challenges, obviously, but Much better than getting propaganda.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“15, 20 years, where if you go to computer science school for four years, you're guaranteed the best life and the upper echelon of income. And if you get a job at Google, you're set for life and in four or five years you're pulling a couple million dollars. And it's certainly threatening when 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 raise all this capital in order to fund companies need a lot of capital to build the software and market it and all of that. But with social media, with tools like Rapt, you don't need as much capital.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we have today would not have happened without mass literacy. 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 subsac. And so 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, whereas usually an elite minority and their gatekeeping, they don't want other people to do it. And certainly programmers in big tech felt threatened by Replit is because they make a lot of money. Like we were in this really strange world over the past.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's like an age old thing that's been happening with technology since the dawn of time. So think about literacy, right? Like during medieval Europe, like reading and writing was regulated was only priests were able to do it and priests were like controlling the population before the Protestant Reformation. And so there's like the priesthood control over 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. And that caused massive changes in the world leading up to revolutions and different religions and democracies and all of that happening because of reading. Like none of the world”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a good sign. Yeah. And then when they felt threatened by it, they would like try to buy it or try to compete on the margins or try to 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 could do. And finally, when 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.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Where they're joining us right now, like they, And it's like, why is that a negative thing?”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was a competitor. And. Implicit in any acquisition offer is a threat. You don't sell, we're going to build something to compete with you. Because they're interested in the product, they're interested in the market. You have to make a bet on yourself that if I'm not going to sell, they're going to go buy some other company or they're going to go build it themselves and they're going to compete with me. And do I first have the self-belief that I can Against the juggernauts, go against the big incumbents and win. Ultimately, 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 thought 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.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At some point, I was offered when we're very small, not a lot of people, I think six people were offered a billion dollars.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Products and for other people as well. And I thought that the internet could be this great. Wealth equalizer and generator. Like, you know, there's no reason that Silicon Valley. Capture most of the wealth on that or not because it is the most distributed, decentralized, accessible technology in the world. I think part of the reason is because the tools are hard. Maybe there's like an intentional part that the tools are harder than they should be. And so the guiding mission for Raplet became how do you make coding tools so easy that you don't even need to be a coder to use them? What kind of world does that create in terms of accessibility to wealth generation, wealth creation?”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Later on, you know, as I found more ways to make money with computers and programming, I bought on Xbox. I was so happy because I'm able to buy things that my friend's parents buy for them, but I'm able to buy myself even as a teenager. So it found empowering to make your own money. But as part of that, like a lot of the painful part, it's like the tools. I was talented programmer and I was fighting with the tools all the time. And you just, you have an idea, you have the right market, you have the right product idea and skills to build that, but you're still dealing with a lot of the problems with the tools. So I was always motivated to make better programming and coding tools in order to, in order for me to build easier, more startups, more companies, more”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I made like 500 bucks. Which was amazing for me, you know. Salars and Jordan are not nowhere near the US. And so it's like, you know, So, yeah, I felt rich and I felt good to make money and it felt even better to make money from something that I love doing.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It could do whatever. So I was like, okay, what if I built something that secures the system, makes it so that there's usernames and passwords, makes it so that internet cafes need less employees because once you run out of time, it'll just like boot you out. So I built this Internet cafe management system. Because I knew it. And this is the, I keep coming back to this idea of the way to build businesses, to build things you know about, either trends you're plugged in or problems around you in the world. So I was 12 or 13 and I spent like, you know, a year or two trying to build this software for Antarctica cafes. And then went out and sold it and made quite a bit of money from it. At the time, McDonald's was just opening in Jordan and I took my entire class of McDonald's and no one had McDonald's at the time.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so there was this media even at the time. It was like, okay, you can make money online. And I was going to the internet cafe because we don't have internet at homes. I would like, you know, scrap whatever money we had find in couches or whatever to go pay for like an hour of internet. And I would sit there and look at different websites, look at what people are doing, different games, different ways I could build something that could make money. And then the main idea was sitting right under my nose, which is the Internet Cafe itself. I was like, well, Internet Cafes make a lot of money, but they don't use software to manage their business. Like their business is you go in there, you pay a buck or two, you get an hour on the computer. And when you're sitting on the computer, they have to keep track of you. They're like every hour. They look at the clock and they're like, okay, your time is up. They tap you on the shoulder. Also, when you're on the computer, you can like install a virus. You can delete files.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was always motivated to make money. A lot of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs be like, oh, it's all about connecting the world or whatever. Yes, I care about all of that stuff. But my journey starts with, I love programming. I've always loved programming and understand how computers work. But at the same time, I was also always motivated to make money with computers. And I felt like we're at a moment in time where you can build businesses really quickly ever since like I found the internet in the like 90s. I wanted to build websites to like make money. And there was like a bunch of ideas. There's a bunch of examples of people making money really quickly. There was this idea of like a million dollar homepage where someone was like selling pixels and you can like be Microsoft, you can buy like 10 pixels and write Microsoft's logo, whatever, 100 pixels.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I grew up in Jordan, kind of lower middle class family. We don't have a lot of money. I was lucky enough to get good education, but also the hard thing about it is because I was in a class with kids that had a lot more money than us. And so I saw their PlayStations, their Air Jordans, their all the cool stuff they had that they didn't have and that really fucking.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Startups and like make it more iterative. But we're at such a different place, like execution is no longer bottleneck. If you have an idea, just like make the app and then go figure out the demand, because it's a lot easier than just talking about it.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really changed. It really changed even the past few months. That advice of it's called the Lean Startup Advice, I think, started in mid-2000s. There's a book called Lean Startups. And the idea is that it was following from this Toyota way of building cars where they would, you know, cars used to be manufactured in like a heavy industrial way where they kind of know exactly what they're going to build and like they'll, you know, they have all the schematics and they'll like create the factory pipelines. And it's very inflexible. They can't react to demand. They can't react to changes. They can't react to recalls or customer feedback. And so Toyota kind of developed a way of called lean manufacturing. And so it was borrowed from that. It's like, how can you derive?”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So fascinating about what you've built because Something I discussed with a lot of young entrepreneurs that built these multimillion dollar AI apps or startups was like this concept of making short form content before you even build out your MVP or like your minimum viable product and then just seeing if there's interest in it but with your company and where AI is at, just build it instantly and you don't really have to worry about the moat of, oh, this thing does work, let's build it really fast before someone steals it.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a demo effect, right? If you're building something novel, if you can make your looks maxing app like a truly cool experience, then people will just be attracted to that as well. And they're going to promote it and tell their friends about it. So in terms of the headline, yeah, just like what is the core value proposition For me at the time, it's about quitting in the browser.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I said try Python, JavaScript, all these different programming language in your browser without installing anything, right? And so it's like gets to the core value proposition. At the time, to write any piece of code you had to download insane amount of software. Maybe you tried to take a coding class in college. It's really ridiculous how much you have to deal with in terms of just like writing any kind of code. And so I was like, why shouldn't I be able to code in my browser? Like my browser, I could do my email. I can write my docs there. Should be able to code there. And I also like scouring these forums. I'd already seen interest in that. And that was like small examples that weren't really working of people trying to build that. So it was like if I got it working, I can really wow these people.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly right. I mean, the original, when I posted Replet on Hacker News, that's how I got my first users. Hacker News was still kind of is a very popular place for programmers, technical people in general before Replit became more possible for non-technical people to use. It was more of a technical product.”
2026-04-15 · a16z Podcast · Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source