# The Democratization of Software Engineering via AI

**Podcast:** a16z Podcast
**Published:** 2026-04-15

## Transcript

The world was built by people that are much much smarter than you.
Your job is to find the way of doing things that's most aligned where the world is headed.
I think it's the easiest time to get rich in the history of capitalism.
But couldn't afford a computer, which inspired him to make coding accessible for everyone.
You can cast almost any problem in life as a coding problem.
And I thought, okay, I'm gonna hack into a school and change my grades.
But when his company hit a billion dollar valuation, he refused every offer to sell, doubling down on his mission to turn the tech industry from a monopoly into a democracy.
How much were you offered to sell your company for?
When we're very small, not a lot of people, I think six people were offered a billion dollars.
And why'd you say no?
Because I think I can build a trillion dollar company.
In this episode, we'll give his exact blueprint to build a million dollar app in minutes.
Explore why the most powerful tech companies tried to kill his vision, and question whether AI will enslave us or empower everyone to escape the rap race.
Why do you think AI isn't going to kill us all?
For most of the internet era, building software required learning to code.
That bottleneck shaped who got funded, who got hired, and who got rich.
Run any programming language in your browser, no installation required.
That became Replit.
Today, Replit's AI agent produces a working app in under an hour.
And the company's revenue went from $2.5 million dollars to $250 million dollars in just over a year.
When a competitor offered to buy the company for one billion dollars at six employees, Masad said no, because he thinks he can build a trillion dollar one.
His argument, not having a coding background, is becoming an advantage.
The people who win now are the ones closest to the problem, not the ones who know the syntax.
In this conversation, previously aired on the Jack Neil podcast, Jack Neal speaks with Amjad Masad, CEO at Replit.
I'm Job Masad.
Welcome to the Jack Neal Podcast.
Thank you.
I'm Job.
You built a billion dollar company that makes apps just by talking to AI.
If you wanted to build a million dollar app in five minutes, how would you do it?
It depends on my context.
I would look around for problems to solve.
So no matter where you are in life, you're in college, you're in at work, there are people dealing with problems all around you.
Um is a is a is a finance guy, and he was on a plane, and next to him was uh was sitting an investment banker, just spending a lot of time building spreadsheets and building uh decks for clients.
Um, and he had an idea to automate a big part of that.
Um, and he told him, you know, I have an app for you, and he didn't have an app.
Can I come push it to you tomorrow?
Uh he said, yeah, I mean, if you can solve this problem, if you can make it faster for us to get to our clients.
He went home and he he's been using Replit just personally, just for fun websites, things like that.
He spent the night working on the app.
Next day went and pitched it, left there with half a million dollars of um letter of intent.
Um, and did this a few more times with other bankers.
And um, he's just raising at a $35 million valuation right now.
So it's more than one million, it's 35 that because he already has a lot of contracts right out the door.
Um, so it's very contextual.
We have an educator that's like a more of a um story from two years ago because the company's pretty big right now, half a billion dollars worth.
Uh, but he he's a teacher during COVID.
I think he just left his uh his his school and started playing around with AI, playing around with Replit, going in and trying his hand at coding with AI.
Um, and because he knows the problem space deeply, he was able to build a lot of tools for teachers, for grading students, for creating assignments uh with AI.
And education is one of like the hardest markets, but AI has this amazing ability to sell itself um and quickly grew the company to 10 million annual revenue, 20 million annual revenue.
And now it's like half a billion dollars worth company.
Uh, but there are a lot of smaller ones too.
Uh the other day I was on on Twitter, I saw this guy who created a an app quickly with with Replit to generate brands, kits and brand design material logos, all of that.
You enter your product name, you go through a simple flow, it's called anymark.co, and you pay, I think 40 bucks or something like that, and you get an entire brand kit generated with AI.
And so I see this stories every day.
And it's typically someone who has some domain knowledge in a certain thing, you know, they're um they realize there's a problem around them.
Maybe, you know, I see all my friends trying to start companies, but brands are really hard to build.
So let me automate that.
So just like look around you in the world and just see what what are the problems that people are dealing with that are that they're willing to pay for it.
And it's so easy to try things.
Uh because it's so easy and cheap to try things, you can iterate really quickly and arrive at a at an idea.
I think it's the easiest time to get rich online and in in his I think it's the easiest time to get rich in the history of capitalism but but certainly in the history of internet.
So if I'm someone with zero dev coding experience.
What problem did you guys solve here?
And like what are people missing about where AI's at?
Like you can kind of just speak apps into existence at this point.
Like how much editing of it do you have to do?
Like how much of this really is just it's done.
Month over month it's improving.
I will say at this point, we have an automated software engineer that is as good as a mid-level software engineer.
It would get a job at Facebook or Google.
Like it is really good.
Like you don't have to look at the code at all.
Actually, you know, initially Replet started as like, let's make coding easier.
So we there's still coding in the interface.
Increasingly, we're just removing the coding features because you don't need to code anymore.
Actually, even professional software engineers are not coding anymore.
So code is almost fully automated.
Um it depends on the specialty and the language, and there's some nuance to it.
But for the most part, people are not coding anymore.
It's it's become a more higher level thing.
So engineers still do some kind of engineering systems engineering, whatever.
But if you're a product builder, all you have to care about is who's the customer is, what the problem you're solving is, what's your core differentiator?
What do you understand about the world that other people don't?
And can you put that into co into an app?
Um, so if you go to an update right now, there's a prompt box like ChatGPT.
You type in your idea, like I want to create, you know, brand kit generator.
Uh, it'll go through a planning process.
I'll tell you, here's what I understand you want to build.
You can go back and forth on the plan.
And then you you tell it to go.
It'll work for for 10 minutes.
It'll get you a minimum viable product.
Obviously, that's probably not ready to ship yet.
Um, so you're you're gonna iterate on it, you're gonna ask it for adjustments, and there's a preview there, and there's the chat box there, and you're going back and forth.
So you're telling it something, it's going writing the code, uh, fixing the bugs, testing it even, we gave it, we gave it a browser.
So it can start a browser, it can look at the app itself, it can test it, uh, it can go to the internet, fetch information, it can integrate other AI models like uh image generation and things like that.
Um you go through this process, and I think within an hour or two, most people have an app that they're ready to put in front of a user.
It depends on the idea, obviously.
But for a lot of ideas, you can get something done that you can share with a friend or a target user and get feedback from them.
Um you don't need any development experience.
You need grits and you need to be like a fast learner.
You need to be like I will say if you're like a good gamer, if you can like jump in a game and figure it out really quickly, you're you're really good at this.
But even if you're not a good gamer, you'll figure it out eventually.
But people who are who grew up with technology who are like fast learners are are now like the best out of this.
I I will venture to say that not having a coding experience is it is becoming an advantage because coders get lost in the details.
Product people, people who are focused on solving a problem, on making money, they're gonna be focused on marketing, they're gonna be focused on user interface, they're gonna be focused on on all the right things.
So at some point, uh I think this year it's gonna flip, and I think not having a coding background is gonna be more advantageous for the entrepreneur.
You know, when the company grows and um and you're getting a lot of revenue coming in, at some point you'll hire engineers just to make sure the security and the infrastructure is scaling and rapidly continues to help with that as well.
But getting to market and generating a revenue, you should be able to do it in a matter of days.
So I guess just to zoom in a little bit and give people practical steps.
Um as someone with multi-billion dollar company, if you wanted to build an app that could get a million downloads in six months, like what are the five major steps you need if you could distill it?
Um a unique idea.
An idea that is not like a exact copy of something out there.
Because because that thing exists.
You need a spin on that idea that's that's interesting.
How do you find ideas?
I think that's actually the core skill in the AIH.
I think if if you want to work on a skill, it's gonna be about idea generation.
Because the cost of implementation of those ideas is going down rapidly.
It's gonna go to zero at some point.
Um the bottleneck becomes is like how fast can you generate ideas?
And that skill is about one perception, like just looking around you in the world and and and seeing what's what's happening, what are the trends?
Are you plugged in on social media?
What are uh people talking about what is like the the most interesting that thing that that's happening and is there is there a market for that maybe we'll we'll get to that later on but we were discussing this idea of um uh a looks maxing app, right?
I mean, uh it's it's your idea and I think it's a great idea because it's something in the ether right now people are discussing people are interested in it.
Can you build an app that gives you feedback on on your looks maxing progress that's that's really great.
I saw an app the other day that um uh judges uh like gives you allows you to track your um your hairline progress allows you to like you know uh uh gives you interventions to make in terms of like what medications to take and things like that and a lot and unless you take like a scan of your head and like um obviously it's past time for me, but uh if you're dealing with that early on, uh it can help you track your progress.
So that's very important.
Like I think a lot of young people now, your you know your generation, younger, care a lot more about this than say my generation.
Right.
I'd say that's the big the big trend of the past few months.
So being plugged in is super important.
Um and so you know, a lot of the vices that my like older generations think are vices might actually become advantages.
So if you're brain rotted, you know, terminally aligned person, that might be an advantage because you know what's happening in the world.
If you're someone who's also just like ADHD, really interested in novelty, want to try a lot of different things, that's actually an advantage because AI uh really benefits people who can try a lot of things really quickly.
Obviously, you can you need to get things to completion.
You need to have some grid at some point once you've got some validation.
But trying a lot of ideas is important.
So back back to your question.
I don't feel like I I answered.
How do you generate ideas?
It it's it's a it's practice, it's a skill.
Like generate ideas, put them out there.
I I really like to use Twitter.
I I I used to do with that a lot where I talk about ideas, I kind of share them and see what the feedback early on.
But now it like just make the app and see what the feedback is and learn from that and and go from there.
Um, and and think about ideas all the time.
I think it's a muscle.
Like just continuously thinking about okay, what if I built this?
What would happen?
Um, and so all there, there's all these different ways to be at a a better idea generator.
I do want to ask you some ideas you have specifically, but maybe we'll get on that later in the interview.
Uh so step-by-step process.
First one, get a good idea.
Get a good idea.
Uh typically tie to a trend.
Uh second, uh get uh break that break that idea down as much as you can into like say a paragraph with a bunch of bullets.
Like the app, um, the looks maxing app should um, you know, have a camera with an AI integrated, and it should be able to take a photo of my face uh on my phone or my laptop.
Uh, and it should um kind of draw, I know I'm just making this up, it should draw lines of it, like get specific, like imagine the user interface and get specific about that.
You don't have to write more than a paragraph because what's gonna happen then?
It'll give you the initial implementation and you'll react to that and see if it got it right or wrong.
And then you can like sort of nudge it in in different directions.
You're looking for your key use case.
Yes.
Yes.
You're looking for the main use case.
Don't overcomplicate it.
Don't like add a bunch of features.
You're just like, what is the core experience and how can you get really quickly to value?
Users, consumers these days just don't have a lot of attention span.
So they're gonna give your app like five minutes.
And so figure out what's the user journey to get to like a five minute value, aha moment.
Um and then once you once you do that, you got your MVP, go try it on someone.
Go try it on a classmate, on a friend.
Um before that though, so let's just assume for the sake of your company as RepLit, use Repli or tool like Replit.
And then how do you build it?
Like how simple is it?
Yeah, yeah.
You just put in the prompt, you hit start building.
Uh, it'll start the working environment.
Uh, it'll work for 10 minutes.
It'll show you a preview.
Uh, you can, if you want to use it on your phone, you can open that preview and the phone will give you a QR code.
Um, and then test the app.
If uh the app is not exactly what you want it, most likely it's not.
The first iteration is not.
Go type to the AI, tell it exactly what it got wrong.
It's like you misunderstood this.
And don't try to overcomp it.
Just talk to it, talk to it like you would talk to a person.
Just be as specific as you can.
So you misunderstood this.
I meant the AI should work in this or this other way.
Um and give it feedback, go through that iteration cycle a few times.
Um, and um, and then go try uh test the app.
It's really that simple.
Like, you know, you just need to be able to explain ideas well.
I think that's super helpful.
I don't think the marketing aspect is as important in this particular discussion, but because good products market themselves.
Well, I would say I would say it is it is important.
Like, yeah, good products are very important, especially if you're creating something totally novel.
Um but uh figuring out how to promote this is is gonna be important.
Um the the easiest places to to do it is find communities like on Reddit and other communities.
Um like if if you have a looks maxing app, there's probably a looks maxing Reddit to just like post it there, try to get some early users through there, go to the various Discords.
Um at some point, so that's like the early users, that's how to get like a hundred users.
Um at some point you need to scale that.
And that's when Instagram and TikTok uh comes into play.
If you're someone who's good at that, you have a superpower.
If you're someone who's able to like create these short clips and talk about products, you have a superpower.
But uh, if you're not, you can still go reach out to influencers and you can cut a deal with them.
You can get them um, you know, part of the subscription, part of the revenue.
Um, you can you can just pay them um and um and and then and then you go from there.
But I I would say that's like the first few weeks.
That's really interesting about the communities.
That's also a way to find ideas in general, is just scour Reddit, scour TikTok hashtags and see like what's a community of people, let's say example looks maxing, or let's say example uh like a specific sports team or like sports gambling, something like that.
Not promoting gambling, but uh you would look at the community, look at the problems they have and then kind of get ideas for what you could build.
It's really fascinating.
That's exactly right.
I mean the original when I posted Replet um on hacker news, that's how I got my first users.
Hacker News was still kind of is a very popular place for for for programmers, technical people in general before Repli became more uh possible for non-technical people to to use, it was more of a technical product.
Do you remember your headline?
Yeah.
Uh I said um try Python, JavaScript, all these different product language in your browser without installing anything, right?
And so it's 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 try to take a coding class in college.
It's really ridiculous how much uh you have to deal with uh in terms of just like writing any kind of code.
Um, and so I was like, why shouldn't I be able to like code in my browser?
Like my browser does, you know, I can do my email, I can write my docs there.
Should be able to code there.
Um, and I also like scouring these forums.
I'd already seen interest in that.
And that it's like small examples that weren't really working of people trying to build that.
So it was like, if I got it working, uh, I can really wow these people.
And and just like there's a there's a demo effect, right?
Like if you're it if you're building something novel, um, like i if you can make your looks maxing app uh like a truly cool experience, um, then then people would just be attracted to that as well.
And they're gonna promote it and tell their friends about it.
So in terms of the headline, yeah, just like what is the core value proposition.
Right.
And for me at the time was it's about coding in the browser.
That's 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, uh, 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.
Uh, let's build it really fast before someone steals it.
It really changed.
It really changed like even the past few months.
Um, that advice of is like called the lean startup advice.
I think started in like the mid-2000s.
There's a book called Lean Startups.
Uh, and the idea is that it was following from this um uh Toyota way of of building cars where they they they would um, you know, cars used to be manufactured and had like a you know, heavy industrial way where they kind of know exactly what they're gonna 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 like recalls or customer feedback.
And so Toyota kind of developed a way of like called lean manufacturing.
And so it was like borrowed from that as like how can you de-risk startups and like make it more iterative?
Um, but we're at a such a different place.
Like execution is no longer bottleneck.
If you have an idea, just like make the app and then go go uh go figure out the demand because it's a lot easier than just like talking about it.
I do want to ask uh as far as your mission goes and what you've built today.
What's the most important part or moment of your childhood to help us understand who you are and what you're working on?
Um, I grew up in in Jordan, um, kind of lower middle class family.
Um we didn't have a lot of money.
Uh I was lucky enough to get good education, but also the hard thing about it is because I I had, you know, 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 like all the cool stuff they had that it didn't have, and that really fucking sucked.
And I I was always motivated to like make money.
A lot of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs would be like, oh, it's all about connecting the world or whatever.
Yes, I I care about all of that stuff, but my journey starts with I love programming.
I've always loved programming and understand like how computers work.
Um, 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 um, you can build businesses really quickly.
Ever since like I found the internet and in in the like 90s, I I wanted to like 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 could buy like 10 pixels and write Microsoft's logo, whatever 100 pixels.
Um there was this media, even at the time, it's like, okay, you can make money online.
Um, and I was uh going to the internet cafe because we don't have internet at home.
So I would like, you know, scrap whatever money we had uh finding couches or whatever to to go pay for like an hour of internet.
Uh and I would sit there and like look at different websites, look at what people are doing, different games, different ways I could like build something that could like make money.
Um and then the the main idea was sitting right under my nose, which is the internet cafe itself.
Uh 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, you know, 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're looking at the 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 like delete files, it could do whatever.
So I was like, okay, what if I built something that secures the system, makes it so that um there's like usernames and passwords, makes it that so that internet cafes need less employees because once you run out of time, it'll just like boot you out.
Um, so I built this internet cafe management system.
And because I 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 and I I sp I spent like, you know, a year or two trying to build this software for another cafes.
Uh and then went out and and sold it and made quite a bit of money from it.
At the time, McDonald's was just opening in in Jordan, and I took my entire class of McDonald's.
And no one had McDonald's at the time.
So how much money did you make from the I made like like 500 bucks.
Okay.
Which was amazing for me, you know.
Um salads and Jordan are not nowhere near the US.
And so uh it's like, you know, um so uh yeah, I I felt rich and it felt good to make money, and it felt even better to make money from something that I love doing.
Um later on, you know, as I found more ways to make money with computers and programming, I bought an Xbox.
I I was so happy because I'm able to buy things that, you know, my friends' parents buy for them, but I'm able to buy it myself even as a teenager.
So I felt empowering to make your own money.
Um, but as as part of that, like a lot of the painful part was just like the tools.
Like I would like I was a talented programmer and I the tool, I was fighting with the tools all the time.
And you you just you have an idea, you have the right market, you have the right product idea and and skills to build that, but you're still dealing with a lot of the problems with the tools.
So I 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 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 the internet.
Because it is the most distributed, decentralized, accessible technology in the world.
I think part of the reason is because the tools are hard.
And maybe there's like a intentional part that the tools are harder than they should be.
And so like the guiding mission for Replet became how do you make coding tools so easy that you don't even need to be a coder to use them?
And what kind of world does that create in terms of uh accessibility to wealth generation, wealth creation?
I want to hone in on that point.
How much were you offered to sell your company for?
Um 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.
And why'd you say no?
Because I think I can build a trillion dollar company.
Do you think Silicon Valley or whoever was offering?
Do you think the people offering to pay a billion dollars for your company were just gonna kill it?
Yeah, it was a competitor.
And implicit in any acquisition offer is a threat.
If you don't sell, we're gonna build something to compete with you.
Because they're interested in the product, they're instead of the market.
You have to make it better on yourself that if I'm not gonna sell, they're gonna go buy some other company, or they're gonna go build it themselves and they're gonna compete with me.
And do I first have the self-belief that I can go 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 uh achieving my and the company's potential?
And I thought that would have been a bigger regret.
Yes, I I I would be rich, but I would be yet another rich asshole.
There's a lot of them.
Uh 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 the worldview we're putting out, the mission we're putting out, the influence that comes from that.
Um I thought it would be a loss not to try.
Do you think big tech in general is threatened by your mission?
Yes.
You know, what's the saying?
First, like they, you know, they laugh at you, then they try to fight you, then they join you or something like that.
They're saying it like that.
We're at the like they're joining us right now.
Like they initially it was like, oh, rep let us this toy, you know, kids use it.
Yeah, we have a lot of kids using it.
We're proud of it.
It's so easy that kids use it.
Um, why is that a negative thing?
Um It's probably a good sign.
It's a good sign, yeah.
Um and then and then when they felt threatened by it, they uh they would like try to buy it, um, or or like try to compete on the margins, or try to like, you know, compete in the press or PR, but not really on the 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 uh we've we've grown so much, like our revenue, like a hundred X, then they paid attention and they're like, okay, this is a real thing, and people want it.
And now they're building actual competing products.
Do you see what you're doing as I mean, essentially you see it as the democratization of building software.
Uh do you think we'll see something similar with tech that we saw with social media where, or with media in general, where the barrier to entry was so low that instead of, I mean, there's two versions of this.
There's the uh big media like CNN, Fox, uh, ABC, two influencers, and then there's influencers to microinfluencers.
And there's tons of people making 10K a month of social media.
Do you think that's where we're moving in tech where I don't know, someone like my parents in Kentucky can build an app, make a nice couple thousand dollars a month, and then that's just their job.
Yeah, I 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, um, like reading and writing was was regulated, was only like priests were able to do it, and priests were like controlling the population, right?
Before the you know Protestant Reformation.
Um there's like the priesthood control over uh the ability to read and and write.
And then we had the Gutenberg uh printing press.
And that was decentralized the ability to print books and have books available to the population.
People started learning how to read and then learning how to write.
Um, and that caused massive changes in the world.
Uh uh, like leading up to revolutions and different religions and democracies and all of that happening because of reading.
Like none of the world that would that that's that we have today would not have happened without uh mass literacy, right?
We have the big media companies, but you know, 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 SubSack.
And so Instagram is the same thing.
You had to be a professional photographer at some point on only the professional photographers could make some money and then later on anyone could like take photos and make money.
Influencers is the same thing.
Really like every skill and every profession goes through this, where it's usually an elite minority and they're gatekeeping and they don't want other people to do it.
And certainly programmers and big tech felt threatened by by Replet is because they they make a lot of money.
Like we were in this like really strange world over the past you know 15, 20 years where if you go to computer science school for four years, you're guaranteed like the best life and the best in, you know, the upper echelon of income and and if you get a job at Google, you're set for life and you know in four or five years you're pulling a couple of million dollars.
And and it's certainly threatening when like that skill can uh can be democratized and anyone can can can do it, anyone can build it.
It's also threatening to to VCs and the and the way Silicon Valley works because Silicon Valley needed to build all this infrastructure in order to and raise all this capital in order to like fund every you know, companies needed a lot of capital to build the software and market it and all of that.
But with social media with tools like Replet, you don't need as much capital.
Right.
Um, 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, uh, but then that the the dam breaks and 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 has been really good.
I think that I, you know, I get I get my news more from social media than I do and it has its challenges, obviously, but it's much better than getting propaganda.
That's very true.
Um that's super interesting comparison about the Gutenberg press with how religions evolved over time, because I mean it really was.
I mean, it would be ignorant of me to say it was the big three, but I would say they were much more dominant and there wasn't so many branches of I'm trying to think of the dating, but uh it's a very apt comparison.
Uh what do you think everyone is getting wrong about AI and jobs?
Um AI is seen as a uh a replacement as opposed to a tool that can be wielded by the most creative, by the most ambitious people who want to make a fundamental change in their lives and their communities and their companies.
But to automate that work, someone needs to build that system.
Someone needs to be observant enough to call to look around their company or look around their school, whatever community they they exist in.
Say we're doing a lot of BS things.
There's a lot of bullshit work.
There's actually a book called Bullshit Work, and it's like a by David Graeber.
And it talks about how like most of the economy is kind of bullshit work.
I mean, if if you think about it, um, you know, post-industrial revolution, we we created a world where machines were doing a lot, but not enough.
And humans had to step in and act like machines.
Um so if you look at any office job, most of the time they're doing things that are easily automatable.
Uh 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.
Um you could say, okay, you know, we can get an AI system to like replace that person.
But there's gonna be more work to be done, not less, because you know, you get more revenue, get more users, you're gonna have different challenges, different operational thing you you should do.
So it's a hamster wheel.
But we can go much faster now.
And the way to look at AI is um and jobs is how can I upgrade my workforce for them to become generalist business people that can wield AI for the benefit of uh our customers and our uh on our bottom line.
Um and we see it in a lot of our enterprise customers where um the most ambitious people um are creating millions of dollars of value of the company.
Um there's every every company out there, every tech company for sure, there are people that are closest to the customer that feel that they have ideas that could make more revenue for the business, but they're often blocked by engineering.
Engineering don't think the idea is is worth it, or they have their own roadmap, they don't care about it.
And now a lot of them are bringing in repli to work.
They're building that idea, and they're making the money for the company, and then they're getting promoted, and then they're giving more power.
And a lot of them go out and hire more people like them.
I'm gonna build a team of vibe coders that are gonna go around the company and find all the inefficiencies and go solve them.
So we have a new role of this like generalist automator.
Uh, and they're less parochial than the engineer.
The engineer is like really focused on systems and engineering.
Um 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.
What's the most obvious AI automation that people should be doing today?
In the context of companies, um 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 any time you find yourself copy pasting things from one place to another and you do it regularly, like it's an obvious automation.
Go to Rapplet and just say go pull the data from from um 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.
Uh and even if there's like some process in in between that you're doing some transformation in the data that you're doing, um, you can also have the AI do that.
So, for example, like um uh every every company has this person that's uh called the like the deal desk person, every you know, B2B company specially.
And the deal desk person is responsible for uh generating quotes um to give like 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, uh, and then like posts it to like 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.
In a lot of companies end up hiring a lot of people doing just that.
Like, you know, that there's also entire complicated software systems that people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for called uh quote configurators, right?
So we hire this deal desk person and she automated all of that.
Um every time we get a new deal in a CRM, there's an AI that generates the order form directly, posts it in Slack.
The salespeople take it like you know, they send it to the client, they get feedback.
In Slack, they give the bot feedback on the on the thing.
It kind of updates it and 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 to to CRM.
So anyone working 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 can build a piece of software that can automate that.
In in personal lives, there's a lot of things that like i if you're someone who's interested in in in in health and do a lot of tracking of health, like I I like to track my sleep and at some point has like some sleep issues.
And and my doctor gave me like a sheet to um to track like you know 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 and like I would wake up in the morning and like feel the sheet yeah and and most of the time lazy and 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 in a RAPLI, you can just give RapLeps screenshot and just say like make it into an app.
Made it on an app and now it got a little easier to like put in the you know uh 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.
So I was like, why don't why can't I like take photos of these things as I'm doing them instead of like forgetting and like doing it later.
So throughout the day, I can like uh take photos of of whatever I ate or or have done.
Um, and then and then that that AI will like generate the content for for the next morning.
And then I'm like, okay, but like I'm putting my time to go to sleep and what time I woke up and then 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 told the rep like, just like pull that information from there, ask me for some you know, login information.
I did that.
So now the entire process is seamless and automated, and finally I can like commit to it.
So I think in people's lives, there's so many things that are manual and they like 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 gonna be a virtue.
And I I don't mean it in a in a way that you don't want to complete your work or the, but like if you're naturally just like don't want to do manual work, you're gonna go about your life and you're gonna see all these places that are just like boring and you should be doing manually and just like go build an app for that.
And maybe that becomes a consumer app that I I you could like the app that I'm building for myself, I could potentially put it on the app store at some point because it is probably useful for other people who want to track their sleep.
You've heard of Cali, right?
No.
What is that?
Really?
Oh, that's uh we had the founder on.
I mean, they did like I think he made like twenty-five million from it in high school, or maybe that was the valuation.
It was just take a photo of food and uh chucks calories automatically.
It just sounds like you built that for yourself as a personal.
These things are easy.
And it's not just that, it is it, you know, it it it does sleep and does some some of the other stuff.
I was like, that sounds more integrated.
That's really interesting.
Huh.
That's that's a cool space to think about like all the wearable tech and like all the things that are tracking data and building apps that combine all these things in general.
But what do you think separates someone who's bad at prompting AI from someone who's really good at it?
You know, I kind of hate the word prompting AI because AI researchers spend a lot of time figuring out how to make AI respond to human queries.
Um 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 internal model, you can manage an AI well.
Think about an AI as an employee or an intern.
Instead of thinking about, oh, how do I talk its language?
No.
Just communicate well.
Just take an idea, break it down to its parts.
If it's parts are so complicated, break them down further.
It's all about breaking down things into individual components.
Um and then giving precise feedback and giving as much context and feedback as possible, taking screenshots, taking images.
If you want to get really good at just communication uh in general, I would suggest like doing public speaking.
Right.
I had a actually stage fright.
Uh growing up.
And I would still do it because I just don't like to be held back by my fears.
But when I first came to the US and I felt like I want to be able to start startups and be on podcasts and be a leader, I thought that I need to get past that.
And so I thought, like, what is the hardest place I could put myself in?
Like throw myself in the fire to get past that fear.
So deprogram the fear by desensitization, right?
It's a popular like psychology method.
I think, you know, whereas in such a soft world right now that like psychiatrists, psychologists don't treat things like that.
But it's always been the case, like if you're afraid of water, if your kid is afraid of water, throw them in the fucking water.
Let them soon.
That's how my dad did it.
Um so I took up uh improv classes in New York.
Um, and improv is i if i if you're bad at public speaking or or or thinking on your feet, you're gonna do really bad at it.
And then I took up storytelling classes and I I did a storytelling show where I told a story about how I hacked into my school to to change my grades.
Um and so I'll have to hear that story, but then you continue to taught.
So um over time I just got better at talking to to people and like trying to communicate complex ideas simply because I think that's what really good communication is about.
And if you're good at that, then you're good at talking to AI and prompting it.
My last girlfriend, she was like, Jack, I'm such a bad communicator.
Like, how do I like work on this?
It's like just go to an improv class.
She didn't really love it, but like I said, I think it helped her a bit um understand like the basic techniques.
Yeah.
I think it's super helpful, but it is.
So you hacked into your school to change your grades as a kid.
Um, yeah.
So I was um uh going to university in Jordan, um, Princess Summa University for technology.
Good, good computer science school.
But you know, I 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 gonna be useful for me in life, or it's just not interesting the way they teach it.
I just can't, it's like incredibly painful for me to just sit there and just listen.
So I would skip class and I would like go work on my programming, go you know, take a job.
I always had jobs during school.
And then I would um study enough to to just pass, and I almost always pass.
And some cases in like math and computer science, I would like get good grades.
The problem in my school is that or in a lot of schools around the world, is that if you it they count your attendance.
So if you missed class too many times in a row, you get you get disqualified.
Um and so I uh I I felt like it was kind of deep injustice, um, especially for for people like me who are like creative, want to be doing things, don't want to be sitting in class, uh, which I think is a like a very outdated way of of learning in general.
I think we're gonna move past, especially with AI.
So um my friends were graduating.
I'm like five years in, almost six years in school.
School should have been three, four years.
Uh and I feel like like life is passing me by.
Like, you know, I had all these big dreams and ambitions.
Uh I want to build companies, make a lot of money, all of that, but I was like stuck.
Um, and so I thought I'd use my my skills to get over this problem.
You can cast almost any problem in life as a coding problem.
And I thought, okay, um, I'm gonna hack into school and and change my grades from from when they fail me for attendance to like a passing grade.
Uh so I spent um two, three weeks in in my parents' uh home in in the basement, um trying to like break into the systems there.
Uh I would like work on like scripts and do network scans and all of that.
And I implemented um polyphasic sleeping.
Do you know that?
That sounds familiar.
What is that?
Um Michelangelo, you know, the the inventor artist, uh one of the most highest output human beings in history, probably ever to come, uh, would sleep 15 minutes every four hours because he was working nonstop.
Tesla did a similar thing, I remember.
Tesla probably, yeah, did that as well.
Um so I was like, yeah, I want I want to be able to like you know work a lot and really hard and be really efficient.
So I I I did that as well.
So for two weeks, just madness, just going and like trying to map out the system and figure all that out.
Um so I finally found a vulnerability, a way to get into uh to the system.
But I was worried about maybe I didn't have the right systems.
And so I had a neighbor who was going to the same school as me.
I was like, hey, you know, I have this uh this this thing that I can change grades.
Can I test it on you?
And so we I uh we we test it, um, we changed the grades, but uh actually turns out that I I was doing that on a replica database, not on the master database.
So when he went to kind of pull his grades for uh this his transcripts, it it wasn't um it wasn't reflected there.
So I spent another two weeks and then found a way out of the actual system and then uh 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 the just thing to do.
It was a fair thing to do, right?
Um so I changed my grades.
I calculus and other things that I didn't want to go to school, but I passed.
I know I, you know, but they failed me anyways for attendance, so I changed my grades and I bought my gown, went to the graduation parties, took photos, I was just graduating.
One day I'm at home and the telephone rings and I I I pick it up and it's like the person responsible for the uh college uh network and and registration system.
He's like, look, the entire network and the university is down.
And whenever we look at the code, we see the there's a bug in your record.
Um there's a problem where it says you're disqualified from the final exam, but you're also passing.
So it turns out they had another field that I didn't know about that was was like true or false, whether you're disqualified be for for attendance.
And and they had all b these bad names for the field.
So I I think they're bad programming on their part, but it's still I I kind of missed something.
So I um I had a choice.
You lie and you kind of live with a lie, or you can't you come clean and and I just didn't want to lie.
And I told him, look, I, you know, I have something to tell you.
I'm gonna come tomorrow's school, kind of share it 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.
And so I'm like, this is my opportunity to make it a tech talk as opposed to uh to an interrogation and pull out the whiteboard and explained all the different problems and all the systems they had and how how I hacked into it and really like pulled out all the all the stops 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 explained it, I'm headed home.
I'll see you guys later.
And I opened the door, I was like, wait, where are you going?
Like, we got to deal with you.
You just did this this thing to our school, you just hacked into the school, we can't let you go.
Um luckily the president of the university was someone who's like really enlightened and saw the talent that I had.
And they they could have easily derailed my life, you know.
But um I I, you know, I explained like my reasoning for why I did this, and he was understanding.
And he gave me at the time the the Spider-Man line.
It's like you have a great talent, great power, but with power comes responsibility.
Uh I was very sincere about it.
And he said, I'll uh we're gonna let you go, but you're gonna have to spend the summer working for the university trying to fix the uh vulnerabilities and the security issues.
Um 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.
Uh so they didn't give me a chance to contribute and and fix the system.
And by the way, everyone was cutting me slack.
I think all the professors just was worried I'm gonna hack into their emails.
And so I had this like implicit power.
And it was like notorious.
It was really cool as well.
I was getting recognition everywhere.
Uh and this computer science dean uh comes and and tells me, like, hey, you know, I I helped you a lot to to get past this problem.
So for your graduation project, you need to work with me.
And what we're gonna do is we're gonna hack into the school again.
I'm like, bro, I'm not I'm past that.
I'm not even working on security and hacking.
I'm just like, you know, I'm gonna build companies and things like that.
It's like, no, you have to do it.
Or, you know, I won't graduate you.
So I was like, okay, I'll do it.
Uh and so I I I'm like, okay, but this time I'm gonna build a system.
I'm not gonna 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 you're sitting in front of the different deans and you're kind of getting a presentation.
And I told them how I built the security scanner.
Um, and by the way, I'm gonna run it in the university system, and yeah, we have a bunch of vulnerabilities here.
And then a different dean of engineering was like, you're lying.
Uh and I was surprised that he said that.
I'm like, why why do you think I'm lying?
And he's like, because we fixed the system.
I was responsible for fixing the system and we fixed the system.
I was like, clearly you didn't.
It was like, prove it.
I'm like, okay.
I also built like something in my system where you can automatically execute the vulnerabilities.
So I get a shell access to the database.
I'm like, okay, what do you want us to find?
Your password or your uh or your salary, or how do you want us to prove it?
Okay, get get my password.
So with a query, I get his password.
And it was some embarrassing password I forgot about what it was right now, but people have all sorts of embarrassing passwords.
And his his face turned red and he got really angry and he got up, shook my hand and left.
Um well, turns out I was like a pawn in this rivalry between the two different deans.
So he, the other dean, like one dean was given the responsibility to secure the system.
The other one wanted to kind of make sure I re-hacked the system to prove it.
But anyways, I at the end I I graduate.
Um I now have like really great relationship with the university.
That's a great story, genuinely.
Um It seems like some type of commonality with really successful founders in your space is like this kind of hacker, black hat, white hat background.
Just on this concept of learning in general, cheating, hacking the system.
How do you think we should be using AI to become smarter?
And how do you do it personally?
I think that there's a mindset here.
There's a mindset of, first of all, the world was built by people that are not much smarter than you.
And there are a lot of rules that are accidental, that are there for historical reasons.
And your job is to find the path to the future, find a the way of doing things that's most aligned where the world is headed.
Because the advice your teachers, your parents are gonna give you are just not valid anymore.
My generation, like millennials, the advice that the boomers would give us is that you work hard, you get into good university, you check this box, this other box, you go get a job, you buy a house and a car, get a family, that's it.
You know, a few years in, or like you'll, you know, 20 years later, you're a millionaire because your house property went up value, and you retire, live hap happily ever after.
That's that doesn't exist.
That does like existed for like 20, 30 years post-World War II, and then it's gone.
So it's not about cheating, it's about figuring out how the system is rigged against you.
And how do you actually hack it?
How do you get past it?
How do you do things in a way that is more native and true to the where the where the world is headed today?
AI is a great tool for that.
Um just the fact if you're someone who just understands how these tools work and understand how you have an amazing time advantage, you can do things a lot faster.
Again, there are a lot of programmers that are still doing programming the old way and they're going very, very slow, and they're gonna continue to go very slow until they get obsolete.
But there are a lot of new builders coming up today, and they're like, I'm gonna just like make things with with RapBLID or tools like that, and I'm gonna go just a lot faster.
I'm gonna iterate faster, make make better ideas, build better um companies and systems.
Um I would I would re-emphasize this this virtue of laziness.
Like I think a lot of what we're taught in school is it's not worth it.
It's not worth our time.
And my approach to school was like, how do you get around it?
Like I needed a college education to get to the United States.
Otherwise, I would have dropped out.
If I was in the US, I would have dropped out.
And it's it's probably a good idea for a lot of people to drop out and not go to college.
Um, but but I needed to do that in order to get a visa to get to get here, right?
And um so think about your circumstances and think about ways around them.
And there's probably ways in which AI could could help you get there faster um and do things better.
And realize that if you truly understand how this technology works, if you're up to speed on it, if you can do things uh better and faster than other people, you have an advantage and just look lean into that.
I think that's super helpful.
What is it, Hormosy says it's volume times feedback loops, and AI helps you build things faster, iterate faster.
On the concept of jobs, what do you think will be the highest paying jobs in the age of AI?
Entrepreneur.
Entrepreneur.
Like my mindset has always been about building wealth as opposed to getting salary.
Right.
There are a lot of different ways to build wealth.
But all of them revolve around ownership as opposed to getting salaries.
When I got my first job in the US, uh working for Code Academy, a company that sold for half a billion dollars, I told them you can just like pay me enough to eat.
Just give me as much equity as I as it can give me.
I was paid $70,000 in New York City.
You know how painful that was?
I was living in a studio with other people.
Right.
But who cares?
Like, you know, if you're young and scrappy, like, you know, you just you can eat anything, you can sleep a few hours, you can sleep on the on the ground.
Who who cares?
You know, you're very resilient when you're in your 20s and you know, early 30s, and things get a little worse after that.
But you're very resilient.
And uh your job is to build equity.
Um, and the best way to build equity is to start a business.
The second best way to build equity is to join a business that other someone else saw and get equity in it.
And then third is if you already have capitals to invest and build equity that way.
And I've done all these different things.
I started by joining a startup that was growing fast, got as much equity in it as possible, worked as if I was I was a founder.
Um then um I started a business, got some liquidity from that, started investing in other businesses.
By the way, a lot of early Rep Little employees are already rich.
A lot of early Rep Little employees already um got some liquidity out.
We let them sell some shares.
Uh some early REPL investors sold some shares as well.
If you invested in Replet and when you were at like, you know, six million valuation, and we were like many order magnets, more than that right now, you made a lot of money, right?
So uh if you're surrounded by really smart uh people, you don't have to have the best ideas.
You can join their ideas.
You can also like figure out a way to invest in your friends and join in their venture.
Or if you have a certain skill, let's say you're an influencer and you want to partner with an entrepreneur, try to get equity.
You can get a lot of cash for sure, but what you're gonna do, you're gonna get taxed 50% on that cash.
Um, you're gonna spend it on nonsense and try to get equity and build that equity up.
It seems like the only two ways to get rich are build a cash flow business and move to Puerto Rico or Dubai and revoke your citizenship.
Uh hate your life for a few years and sell a company.
Well, you don't have to hate your life.
Like you can you you can have fun building a business.
Right.
That's fair.
I guess hit your life in terms of not have excess cash to spin on stuff.
Just kind of like living below your means to an extent.
But if you build the business properly, I guess you would have excess cash.
Yeah, we'd have access to cash at some point.
Like it's a lot more fun later in life to to like pulling a six-figure salary.
Like you're not gonna, it's not an exciting life.
I think having wealth is a lot more like just the the calmness on your nervous system that you've escaped the rat race, that itself is worth it.
Um and so I I don't know.
I've never like, yeah, I've I've went out and partied and experienced all of that.
And you could do that with not a lot of money.
We're in back in Jordan, we used to like drive to Beirut and like go clubbing for like, you know, 20 bucks.
You know, it's like you can you can have fun with not not that much money.
But then there's like a huge dead zone in terms of like how much quality of life and how much hedonism or fun if that's what you're interested in, up up until you get to operational out of wealth.
Like there isn't that much difference between like a student going out, like some of the best fun you could do, just like going out to to to to clubs or traveling or whatever, going to like low-income places and like having fun there.
Um and then, and then it's not that much better when you're pulling, you know, a few hundred grand a year.
It's like you're kind of stuck at that at that point.
But so what you want to focus on is building enough equity and um up until to the point where you're just like starting to build a family, because that's when you're gonna have to like sell down a little bit, you're not gonna have as much time and so on and so forth.
So I would just like focus on building equity.
That's super helpful.
Uh yeah, I the first startup I was at, I had equity.
I did the same thing as you, I like took a lower salary to try to get as much equity as possible.
But I think I fell victim to the sentiment, like, oh, bet on yourself.
I didn't even like pay the strike price to vest my shares.
Um, and I looked at it the other day and the company had sold and I was like, shit.
I didn't know how much for, but uh yeah.
If someone gives you the opportunity for equity, uh, it's usually worth it if you think they have a good chance of selling, especially if people are building to sell.
Like it feels like some people are building to sell quickly versus some people are building to sell like on a longer time horizon.
Uh I do want to ask you, what do billionaires know about money that people just starting out in entrepreneurship don't realize?
Like what's something you wish you knew about the way money works itself or things you can do with your money uh like two years ago, four years ago.
Money is money, like cash, like dollars are worthless.
Uh they are depreciate fast appreciating assets.
Like they depreciate faster than your 1976 Honda Civic, right?
Like it's like don't hold cash.
Like again, that's why I emphasize equity.
Um it's like assets, like buying assets.
Like all the assets go up.
Like gold right now is just ripping like a shit coin.
So assets go up.
Um cash doesn't.
And do stocks really go up though, like if you're just doing SP, or is it just kind of like a wealth maintenance thing from your perspective?
Okay, I I I mean, over the past couple of years, the SP has been dominated by a few companies, then they've gone up a lot.
Like if you invest in an SP, what is it, like 20, 30% in 2025?
That's huge.
Is it 20, 30%?
I'm not entirely sure.
I think the average is 10% with accounts for inflation and be like 5% returns.
That's it.
Okay.
Um I don't know.
I I yeah, I do have some money with like a money manager that is like just like trying to maintain wealth.
Um, but I also do buy stock.
I buy um, I invest in startups.
I buy stock into companies that are really like I bought I bought Tesla like a long time ago because I really like the product.
It's like the grog brain approach to to investing is like buy stocks you like.
Um I don't know.
I don't want to give like too much of financial advice because like a lot of this is like very, very selective, but like the the main idea here is is assets.
Uh like understanding inflation, how inflation works and how the dollars like continuously being printed.
Really every currency out there is like continuously being printed.
Um, and if you're if you're optimizing for cash, you're really losing wealth and you're not really building building wealth.
Um wealth is through accumulation of of assets.
And those assets tend to, there's certain assets that tend to compound.
I bought Bitcoin when I left Facebook to start Replit, I sold my Facebook shares, which I could have held on to them and though they've done really well.
But I bought Bitcoin and put the rest in my company.
And so understanding inflation is is core and like go research that and really understand how the system is working on debt and quantitative easing and all that stuff.
You don't have to understand it that much in depth, but the main lesson is the economies run on inflation.
Like, and the rich don't say it in a way to like, you know, to to brag or anything.
It's just like for me, build cool shit and and money will come.
Right.
Like build poor things, hold ownership in those things that you build, or invest in like important things and products and services that you think are just the future.
Try to predict where the future is headed.
Be plugged in enough to figure out where the future is headed.
Like follow the tech news, follow the trends and form a prediction about the future and then bet on that and then evaluate that over time and continue to like figure out.
Like when you hear about a new thing, don't be cynical about it.
Like you hear about like, you know, a lot of my generation like heard about Bitcoin.
A lot of them was like, what is this?
But if you pay a little bit of attention, you're like, okay, and you understand the system, you understand that this is an alternative asset to cash.
And like, you know, a lot of people are looking for alternative assets.
And so you have some hypothesis about the future.
So have some predictions and some beliefs about the future and try to bet behind them.
Um again, most importantly, build things.
I think that's that's the best way to get to gain wealth is to build things, build useful things.
You're one of the few AI billionaires that has a it's funny that it's even a contrarian perspective on the future of AI, but why do you think AI isn't going to kill us all?
I a lot of my peers in Silicon Valley have this like very mechanistic view of life.
They think of humans as, you know, meat robots.
And I think fundamentally, I think there's something more than that.
There's something, there's some spark about consciousness, about humanity that's different and that's special and that life is important.
Maybe it's a religious view, but even without like a very concrete religious view, you can arrive at the same answer by just being perceptive, like just looking at the world around you.
Like how can this all be an accident?
Like just even through science, like when you look at, you know, I see this video as if like how DNAs work and just like this saying engineer, micro, like nanoengineering.
It's just like it doesn't feel like an accident.
So there's something about the mystery of life, the mystery of creation, the mystery of why we're here that I try to struggle with.
And I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley, a lot of people in tech have this very dry physicalist view.
Like we're automaton, it's input-output.
And therefore the natural conclusion is that humans are not very special.
We're gonna build a more intelligent being.
That intelligent being is gonna be so far so much more intelligent that it gets treat us like ants in the same way we treat ants.
But no, I think there's something special about humans.
And I I believe in like I I'm like I'll tell you something about my personal life that I think is is very interesting.
Um I think a lot of success comes comes down to to like mindset, uh, and visualization.
Why does that work?
Why does visualization work?
It does work.
A lot of people swear by it.
Like if you like visualize yourself as successful, I used to like visualize the cars that I want to drive.
And invariably I would those get those cars some way or another.
Um, I would like, if I want to meet someone, I would like have this intent about meeting this person.
And eventually I will meet them somehow.
And it's like random circumstance.
Um, like, um, whether it was like people in tech that are respected, whether it's Paul Graham, Mark Andreessen.
Um, I always wanted to put to meet Paul Graham.
Uh, and I always had this intent of like, I would like imagine the conversation we would have.
Paul Graham is the founder of Why Combinator.
Um, and like he also founded the site, Hacker News, and I was reading that a lot.
And he wrote a lot about programming and things like that.
I really respected how he thought.
Um, you know, one one morning, obviously, like I do things in the world.
I don't sit there just virtualized.
Like you you act.
One morning in 2017, I get a message from Sam Altman on Twitter.
Uh, and he's like, Hey, I'm I'm Sam, Iran O I see, dude.
I know who you are.
So Sam, before OpenAI was running Y Combinator, the premier startup accelerator.
And he's like, uh, I'd like you to come meet me.
And so I went uh and met him, and uh, he gave me this address.
I'm like, where is this?
This is not Y Combinator.
I know my Y Commerce Man View.
And I walked into this place and it was called OpenAI.
And next to it was Neuralink.
It was like a small Elon thiefdom in the mission in San Francisco when Elon was still involved in OpenAI.
So I met met Sam there, and when we sat down, he said he he had his laptop in front of him and turning around.
He's like, read this email.
It was an email from Paul Graham, and he says, like, there's the site replic.
It's like really cool.
It's something I've thought about for a long time, where we can like make it really easy to code and host applications.
Um we should like reach out to them and get them into the YC batch.
And we had like tried to apply to YC many, many times before.
Um, but it like I had this intention that like I'm gonna meet Paul Graham and he's gonna like know about a rap that we're gonna discuss it, and he's gonna get really excited about it.
Uh and and that happened.
And like two years ago, I was like, totally different person, totally different industry.
So I think it'd be really cool to meet Tucker Carlson.
I I respect him a lot.
I respect how how brave and courageous he is and how he can uh speak his mind and how how inspiring his like view of America is and what it could be.
Um and through a series of accidents, I ended up meeting him.
Uh Tina Martin Schreli, pharma bro.
That sounds a little familiar, but no.
You should definitely look up Martin Schreli.
Um Martin Strali is um a pharma entrepreneur uh that went to prison for some like financial reasons, but he became very notorious for a few things.
One is like he bought a Wu Tang album that was like one in production.
Uh and like he became hated because like he he hoarded that.
But like also he just like was like the initial like social media troll and like got into under everyone's nerves and all of that.
But anyways, I used to watch his stream because he would like put out a lot of really cool financial material.
We talked about financial literacy and I learned a lot from him.
Uh and when he got out of prison one day, he was like coding a line.
He was quoting a raplet.
And so like I sent him a message.
I'm like, hey, like I saw you were coding a raplet, be called like I sent him a tweet.
So he responded, we got on a phone, whatever.
I ended up investing in his uh new startup.
Um and it, you know, introduced him to a few other people in Silicon Valley.
And then one day he's like, you know, I owe you, man.
You know, it's really cool how have you been able to help me get back into into start the startup game.
What what can I do for you?
I'm like, you know, you were on on Tucker the other day, invited you on the show.
I would love to meet him.
And then he he made that connection and we got on a call.
Uh kind of I have very similar story with Joe Rogan as well.
I got on Joe Rogan's show.
So I mean, I'm I'm kind of digressing a lot, but all I'm saying is that there's like more mystery to life.
And uh I've experienced if uh fair amount of affecting the world in an in a very indirect sort of mental way.
Um there's something something to that.
And like a lot of people just don't struggle with the fact that there's there's more to life than just like mech mechanistic physics of it all.
So when you start from this premise, and I I can talk about all the different I can like have a technical debate about AI as well.
But just like at rock bottom, I feel like there's something special about humans.
There's something about the mystery of the world that we haven't really figured out.
By that same token, just to clarify, because I think this is fairly high-level thinking, but I understand what you're saying about it, is basically you feel as though you're the type of individual that thinks there's magic to life and you will things into existence.
And this is something that it is your logical view as well as it is the view that you want to have for humanity.
But do you think that these other individuals that have this AI doom thesis are trying to will that reality into existence?
I think there is a sense in which intentions matter and you can you can get into a self fulfilling theories of the world, right?
Uh, and we've seen that throughout throughout history.
Predicting doom and bringing about crisis, you know, happens a lot.
Um so I think it is important to be optimistic.
And I think if you have a like a doomer mindset, and um it is it is dangerous for that for that reason for sure.
And so I I do think like people who are naturally depressed and like not very optimistic do kind of gravitate towards like a more doomer mindset.
It's so fascinating because with you in particular, I spoke with another AI founder about this.
Uh I was like, it's so interesting that Amjard's thesis is uh like AI won't kill us all.
And like you would assume that would be the thesis of all the billionaire AI founders, like, oh, it's not gonna kill us all.
And it's like, oh shit, it might actually.
But it's really like they're all saying it is, but it's actually not.
And I think the only other person that's really in the space with these individuals that has a similar thesis to you is Naval Ravi Kant.
There's probably a few others that I just haven't consumed their content.
But what's the main logical reason for it?
Just to give people some hope?
Because I've had a lot of Doomers on my show.
Uh, and I haven't had anyone in your position.
So th think about how machine learning models are are trained.
Right now, machine learning models are trained by consuming super large corpus of content, essentially all of content on the internet.
Uh and then simulating creating algorithms so they would learn by creating internal algorithms, essentially that's a good way to understand machine learning to simulate how a human might respond to a query.
But if you give a query to an AI for something it doesn't have an algorithm for, it will fail at.
And there's a bunch of research showing that it's called like out of distribution uh queries or context.
So, you know, if if if a machine learning model is not trained on a certain like language or flavor of math or something like that, um, it will struggle to give you like a reasonable output.
And you end up in hallucination and end up with all sorts of problems.
The reason AI is really good at coding because coding has a binary outcome.
It's either true or false.
Um anything that um is soft, more requires uh uh like reasoning through through the problems, not based on prior material.
AI right now is not doing very well at.
And AI companies are having to buy more and more proprietary data to get better at these things.
So the way they're training models is they'll buy, you know, they'll go into an industry.
Oh, let's target accounting.
We're gonna go buy all the data that exists out there, we're gonna scrape all the data that exists out there, we're gonna buy all the data.
We're also gonna get accountants in Africa that are gonna sit down all day and they're gonna do spreadsheets and they're gonna like talk over how they're doing spreadsheets.
And they did that in coding as well.
And they're targeting biotech, accounting, science, everything in order to do that.
And that that's a very repeatable process.
And you can create AIs that are very good at doing jobs that people are currently doing.
Um, but that is not like a general intelligence that you can drop it like you would drop a human into any sort of environment and they can like learn efficiently.
So self-recursive improvement is kind of a fallacy to you, like when it comes to things that aren't binary.
I think we need to struggle with the question of consciousness, because consciousness, I think, is an important ingredient of generality and how humans reflect on their decisions and their questions.
And, you know, we come up with these ideas that seemingly come out of nowhere.
We call them inspiration, um, uses whatever people call them.
It's like, oh, suddenly I'm struck by this idea, like eureka, right?
Um, and we don't know how it works in order to build it into machines.
All of like science come a lot of the scientific big scientific discoveries come from these eureka moments that is not based on prior uh on strict prior training, that is a fundamental paradigm shift, a huge jump that comes from somewhere.
We don't know where it is.
And by the way, all the original scientists in antiquity and and history talked about this in spiritual terms.
Um, you know, uh I remember reading Bertrand Russell's book about like the history of like Western philosophy and things like that.
And he was talking about Pythagoras.
Like Pythagoras was running a religious cult.
It was not running a mathematics club.
Uh and they they came up with all these different, different theories.
And if you look at the current state of humanity, we're actually not having that much scientific breakthroughs.
And I think counterintuitively, because we've become so mechanistic in our thinking and less spiritual, less open to mystery and mysticism, that uh that degraded the quality of science.
Right.
And because science became an industrial process, it became a bureaucracy.
It became government-funded, it became all of these different things as opposed to as people seeking true knowledge or original knowledge and trying to seek it in all of these different ways and arriving at it in all sorts of random and interesting and mystical ways.
Science used to be more spiritual, is what you're saying.
Yes.
I mean, Pythagoras, correct me if I'm wrong.
He basically invented like this whole religion of numerology, right?
That's probably true.
I think Newton spent most of his life, like Newtonian physics was a side project.
Most of his life was spent in studying religious text and doing things like alchemy and random things like that.
Tesla said that all of his ideas like came from dreams.
Yeah.
Like spirit world.
Einstein, too.
Like Einstein was like, oh, sitting in his chair and like dreaming the whole time.
And so we we kind of lose something about what is essential to us as humans and what is true discovery and inspiration when you think about the world in purely mechanistic ways.
And I um I I doubt that without struggling with these questions, that we're going to be able to replicate that into machines and have machines kind of go discover new discoveries.
They're going to do a lot of amazing things for science.
Like protein folding is an exact kind of problem that you want to direct an AI on.
It's a computationally intractable problem.
It's really hard for us to solve in many different explicit ways.
It is a large data problem, big data problem.
And so we're going to use AI to advance science in all sorts of exciting ways.
Those original paradigm shifting ideas, I think are human in a way that is hard to describe.
Is there any spiritual practice you do to come up with ideas?
Be more creative or just do better in business.
I do cold plunges.
And when I do a cold plunge, I it shuts down this like constant thinking, talking mind that I have.
And suddenly I become more receptive to inspiration and ideas outside of me.
I don't know.
I think you can replicate some of that in meditation.
Having done that very well, but like I find like physical shock to my body tends to create stillness.
And so cold plunge is one of the big ways.
You can get it with exercise as well.
Like exercise to exhaustion to weight, like you can't really think a lot.
And a lot of people find that.
But I think you can replicate in different religious practices and things like that.
But for me, like I found that cold plunges forces my mind in a in a certain way.
And I've and it's just like it creates this clarity.
And sometimes there's like really exciting ideas that comes out of that.
It's all about creating state changes.
Um kind of split testing, like what ideas or I guess even personalities, communication styles, like come out of those.
But do you feel like I've I gave you a good answer for like the doomerism question?
I really did want to touch on the cult, but I'll say this.
Uh the aspect of Amjot's thesis on AI doomerism that I found most fascinating was in his interview with Tucker Carlson, where he talked about uh the cult, the Silicon Valley of these AI doomers.
And when I realized that there's some propaganda involved, maybe some uh weird spiritual shit, I was like, yeah, I don't really entirely believe in this AI doom thesis.
So I'd definitely recommend checking that out.
Uh but by the way, part of the reason why I didn't focus on that is because I think their influence is waning.
When I when I did that interview in 2024, it was at the height of the influence of the effective altruisms.
Um and I think luckily through various things that happened, including like, you know, tech people responding to it, uh, their influence is sort of waning.
But but certainly, I mean, in that interview, I talk at length about um the self-serving nature of their thesis and how they use that to like manipulate people and to to gain all sorts of like favors and weird things that are happening there.
So uh but luckily they're not as important.
Theoretically, do you suspect intelligence agencies or the military have some involvement with AI development?
The cool thing about large language models is that it doesn't really matter because it is a very simple process.
Being in the frontier is very hard, like creating GPT 5.3 or Opus 4.5 or whatever.
GPT 2 at some point was the frontier.
Now you can train GPT on your phone.
So there isn't enough of a gap that they can create to have proprietary technology.
This technology technology is decentralizing and becoming more accessible really, really quickly on order of months.
Um now we have open source models from China coming out, and maybe there's involvement in the government there, but they uh coming out that are as good as like the you know, models that came out three months ago from Anthropic and OpenAI.
So maybe, but it doesn't really matter because once we learn what they've done in the latest generation of things, and as compute gets cheaper, um anyone can replicate these things at at home.
And that's the cool thing about what's happening in the world today.
These companies are trying to create enough of a moat around data and compute and things like that in order to block competitors and create more appropriate technology and create an oligopoly around it.
But so far they haven't been successful, luckily.
So you would suspect that the top models are at most a few months ahead of what's publicly accessible.
Okay.
That's fair.
I think a lot of people have suspicions that, oh, they're kid keeping this technology that's 10 years ahead.
Uh you can download Kimi 2.5 on your computer and run it.
And you would get a model that is as good as you know, Jeep T5 when it first came out.
And John, you've built a billion-dollar company by making tools more accessible to the everyday person.
If you could distill everything you've learned.
What's the one piece of advice you would give to make sure anyone listening could find success?
I would start with intention, with intention and and focus and not and and and and perseverance.
Like if you're really intent on finding success, you're gonna find success, no matter who you are.
Like I think if you if you put if you just like visualize it, you put your mind into it, you have the right mindset, you don't have limiting beliefs.
I can meet whoever.
Like I can, there's no difference between me and some other billionaire.
I can I I can learn all the skills needed.
Um one is like better than me.
Uh start with these beliefs, and you're gonna be unstoppable.
I think at some point, the hard thing about scaling a company from like a billion dollars to a hundred billion dollars to a trillion dollars is it the game changes fundamentally.
And that's what I'm going through right now.
You know, you you become resource rich but time poor.
That's like the worst feeling.
Like you don't have enough time to do things manually, and you have to like delegate a lot, you have to learn how to like build a team and hire and do all these different things.
Those are all very important.
But I think getting the initial set of success, it's all about being really good at believing yourself, not quitting, not taking no for an answer, keep keep going, keep going, never quit.
I think those are really the only necessary ingredients in order to achieve um enough success to potentially retire or like escape the rat race.
I love that.
I've been wanting someone to give that advice for a while.
It's kind of like this idea that people say you get what you deserve, but it's really like you get what you want.
And to find the success, you have to really genuinely want it.
And if you don't have it, then you actually don't want it.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
That's right.
You have to really, really want it.
Here's the irony of life.
At some point you're gonna get to a position where you're like, do I really want it?
And that's when, you know, you have to grow and change your your your mind, your that's what I'm saying is scaling past that is a different thing.
Like there isn't any material thing that I that I really want right now.
And I'm not that liquid of a rich person, right?
Like on paper, I've I've large wealth, like I can't buy everything that I want.
But I also bought enough things to know that that's not what life is about.
And I wish that for everyone.
I wish for everyone to get to a point that they find that the material world is just like not all that worth it.
Um I think money is is great in so many ways, but you you know, you buy a car and you're like, all right, that's cool.
It's like it's not gonna really at some point you're like, okay, what do I really want?
And that question is actually a lot harder.
But if you're starting from zero, you know, fix your mind on whatever it is, a car success, status, whatever it is, and drive really hard at it, and you're gonna get it.
Beautiful.
This is the Jack Yale Podcast.
I appreciate you coming on.
Thank you.
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