On when startups become corporations, the future of open source, and doing what makes the best story.
Amjad Masad is the CEO and founder of Replit, an online programming environment that makes coding more fun and approachable. On Replit you can build and host apps without leaving the IDE. Think of it as google docs for coding.
Before that he was a tech lead on the JavaScript infrastructure team, which he helped start, at Facebook. Before still, he was the first employee at Codecademy. He did some tech-leading, and built product and infrastructure. Earlier, he was briefly at Yahoo. And before that I was going to college and on the side I worked in cybersecurity.
He’s into powerlifting and grilling steaks. He also likes to read and is mostly interested in philosophy and Artificial General Intelligence. He’s of the opinion that good Hollywood movies are on the decline.
Alex: [00:00:00] Amjad Masad is the CEO and founder of Replit, an online programming environment that makes coding more fun and approachable. On Replit you can build and host apps without leaving the IDE. Think of it as Google docs for coding. Before that, he was a tech lead on the JavaScript infrastructure team, which he helped start at Facebook. Before still, he was the first employee at codecademy. He did some tech leading and built product and infrastructure. Earlier, he was briefly at Yahoo and before that, and he was going the college and on the side, he worked in cybersecurity. He's into powerlifting and grilling steaks. He also likes to read and is mostly interested in philosophy and artificial general intelligence. He's of the opinion that good Hollywood movies are on the decline.
Today we talked about when startups become corporations, the future of open source and doing what makes the best story.
I think a good place to start off would be where things started for you. Cause you grew up what, in Jordan, right?
Amjad: [00:01:01] Yeah. Some parts of it were, were challenging and, and some parts of it were, were really interesting and and unique and gave me a special perspective. I think The- you know, the, the conditions for my family were quite interesting.
Broadly speaking, my father's family is a little bit. You know they they're well off mostly, you know, they're mostly engineers and doctors. And and my father was actually is the youngest of that family. So he, he's the one that, you know, a lot of his brothers and sisters has accumulated wealth by going to the Gulf and working in Saudi Arabia and these places and yeah.
So he, he, he was the, he was kind of this struggling, you know, young guy in that family, but on my mom's side they they were like, a lot of them are really poor, not all of them, but a lot of them are really poor. Both sides were immigrants, refugees. They ended up in Jordan, my mom and dad met in Jordan. And so growing up, we have this duality where one side of the family were better off. And the other side where were kind of poor. We were, we were on the, on the poorer side, I would say starting out like my father was such a hard worker. He had two jobs and you know, he would work like nine to five and then come home for an hour and then go to his own business that he started with his brothers and work another Shift essentially, come back at midnight and then sleep and then repeat the whole thing again.
And then he worked on one day of the weekend as well on the business. And so we just watching them improve has an, our financial situation over the years. And so. That was like a great lesson and and sort of hard work. And for us, I think it was really good to be able to have a foot in each sort of socioeconomic status.
And so you sort of understood what is it like to struggle and be poor and work multiple jobs just to get by. And we also were able to kind of socialize with people who are better off and had expensive hobbies and expensive toys and and in computers and access to technologies and things like that.
And My father was very into technology. So he, he, he spent, you know, a lot of money to, to be able to acquire computer really early on. So I think it was 1993 was, I was six years old and that was like my, my introduction to computers. And my father got a computer home. I think it was IBM or that with a Microsoft dos on it.
And he would, he would spend the night kind of learning like how to code a little bit and how to like run the computer. And I would just look over his shoulder and just learn. And then when he steps away, I'll go and, and just like flex my, my muscle, what I learned. And eventually they, they saw me do that and they were very impressed and very supportive of that.
And so I continue using the computer. And so that was that was really, yeah. Early on in my life and had a, had a great impact on me. And so I think yeah, so I think that there were many, many lessons, many unique insights and opportunities. So I definitely cherish that. So so yeah, there was like very, a unique aspects of it that I think that I think right. Enough determination and drive to, to just keep going and like never quit. And in you sort of have this idea of, it was like, okay, you know, You know starting from somewhere where it's really hard on this far might as well, just like, you know, keep going, see how far we can take it. And so just, you know, this kind of mindset is very unique.
Alex: [00:04:57] Definitely. And I mean, it sounds like you came from sort of a long line of talented engineers, but it took you a lot of places. So you were at Codeacademy for awhile. I study computer science so that's been an immensely helpful tool for me. Not to mention replit which we'll get into in a bit.
But also you were a software engineer at Facebook. How for anyone that might be listening that's interested in just sort of the differences between engineering roles at a startup versus somewhere like Facebook. How did those sort of compare and contrast for you? How are those experiences different?
Amjad: [00:05:29] Yeah. I mean, Facebook, when I joined it it was, it was interesting because Facebook, even after the IPO, they kind of, for a couple of years, they maintain that startup pace. Which was, you know, which just super interesting. I don't think companies these days are able to do that. So when I joined 2013, I got to experience that kind of move fast break things aspect of it.
And that was at least for two years, like I think 2015 was a bit of a turning point, especially around the Trump campaign. Where, where the company. I think there's a couple of holy shit moments at Facebook maybe irrelevant to this conversation, but the Arab spring and the Trump campaign where it was like, oh my God, like Facebook is such a powerful tool and can, can can, can do, can do amazing positive things, but also destructive things.
And so I got to experience that, but then I would say around 20 15, 16, which is kind of why I left. Yeah. You know, the legal privacy stuff compliance stuff became you know, overburdening. It was hard to, to kind of just hack on stuff. The management bureaucracy start showing it started resembling Google in a lot of ways.
And I think today it's practically the same, like I think Facebook and Google are practically the same. And and you know, that's, that's that's to be expected. In terms of a startups yeah, code academy. It was, it was definitely the the kind of crazy, crazy pace you'd expect from startup. And again, actually like early last decade the startups used to be a lot more intense than, than, than today, especially today because, you know I think there's more level headedness around startups, not every startup.
Like you, you still see, you still see the craziness in crypto, but after Uber kind of blew up and Zenefits and like, I dunno, a couple of these stories there there's, there's, there's a lot more scrutiny from, from like media and from just larger tech community and like, And I and some of it is good.
But I would say like our, my experience at codecademy was, was, was at the height of the intensities of, of startups, of like, you know, work hard, play hard type thing. And it was, it was an amazing thing, but I think I think we. We, we push it really hard. We were like, you know, really great hackers and and ended all that stuff.
But I think, you know, right now codecademy is like a profitable business and growing really fast. And I think it took them, it took them a while and they had to change their ways in order to, to get to, to where they are today. But it was, it was an amazing experience, you know, a lot of hard work, a lot of...
learned a lot about how to, how to recruit, how to lead, how to scale and it's such a compressed period of time as well. And, and again, there was a lot of growing pains, a lot of drama, a lot of intensity, a lot of highs and lows and all of that stuff. Facebook was, was a lot more stable experience, but you know, it was a different experience because, you know, when I worked on react it was like this open source project that that it ended up kind of changing the world as well. Like the, you know, now you have really big apps like discord, Shopify apps and all these apps written in react native. And so it was, it was different breed of experience of creating infrastructure and open-source and tools and libraries for developers.
Open sourcing that and seeing the feedback from the community and, and just like learning how to build a tool and scale it and get adoption and get mind share and all of that stuff. So that was that was super interesting as well. And then, and then, you know, Replit is different from both of those experiences,
Alex: [00:09:30] But I mean, I'm sure those definitely had a lot of impact in what Replit or creating Replit and sort of what it's turned into. I mean, I, I think I remember first hearing about Replit like just a couple years ago. When I started taking computer science courses and talking with friends about, you know any of the projects we had to be working on and someone brought up, oh, you should go to Replit.
Like it's this really cool thing. I think he described it as like Google docs for coding or something. But, but obviously it's, it's, you know, Maybe a surface level someone might just see it and think, oh, it's just like an IDE. I can just code in it, whatever. But you look at a lot of the stuff that it's capable of, especially things that you guys have been doing more recently.
And it's quite a bit deeper than that. So I'm curious, how do you describe it to people when they first ask?
Amjad: [00:10:16] Yeah. So so I think we haven't really figured out how to describe it very well yet. We knew we needed to figure it out. But but I mean, look it's like it's like Amazon was, was selling everything. And it was still like, the homepage was still saying like, you know, a bookstore, right. Everyone thought it was still a bookstore will into well into it's like, you know, taking over entirety of e commerce market. But so it's you know, I think Google docs for code is, is, is a perfectly okay kind of way to, to pitch it. I think. That's what most people come to replica to, to experience just a quick instant environment to start coding portable anywhere. And you can code with it with other people.
The people that go deeper into the site, they discover a social network aspect of it. They discover way to host and ship applications and demos and things like that really quickly And they discover community of very engaged, very talented, very driven, mostly young developers that are learning to build and building to learn and sharing everything they're doing.
And and that's, that's become more and more you know interesting aspect of, of the site. So part of it is educational. Yeah, for the kind of use cases that you mentioned, you know college students use it, high school students teachers use it for that. Then part of it is, is for building and I think it's the easiest way to spin up a small application right now.
Just like you can just import flask or express and just write a server. We have a database. We have an auth service. You can spin up a small app in like 30 minutes. And and that's, I don't think that's ever been done before. And and so we're seeing a lot of entrepreneurs now using it to, to start businesses.
And and so, you know, it's becoming a place where you write, your first line of code. And you go all the way up to your first app and in some cases through your first business or first startup, or first at least prototype of your startup. And so that's, that's the aspect where we're really excited about.
And then there's a lot of things about the infrastructure that's quite unique to, to Replit. And we're still discovering what they mean. So the, the network aspect of it as, as quite interesting, not only the social network in terms of people coding together, forking each other application, commenting, reacting, running all of that stuff, but also the network of, of, of code.
You know, if you think about git hub, git hub is very interesting in that it's a network of people, but it's also a network of code. Although it's static code. Replit is live code. And that brings a new kind of breed of collaborating software. And so we're seeing a lot of interesting ways, new ways of collaborating, where people are publishing certain apps and libraries and APIs and other people hooking into them and, and writing their own apps.
And so you started getting a network of live code. You know Alan Kay is a as this famous computer scientist and he actually invented, invented object oriented programming. The oriented programming that we know today is, you know, what's you know, what's famous with Java and other systems like that.
And he, he thinks it's not really a materialization of his actual vision. The way he described objects on your programming is more like a biological system or a network of, of objects or network of machines. So I think this is the th the, the interesting part of like how Replit could unlock a new way of collaborating of software, just having this network of people and live code and applications that could hook and reference each other.
Alex: [00:14:11] What do you think that looks like at a macro scale? Cause I, I think you know, I think generally software development, coding, and all of this stuff is much more inherently collaborative than people realize. So it's interesting that you point out like the community aspect and the social aspect that, you know, you, you really like seeing, and in Replit, I'm curious what you think the future of open source looks like more broadly and maybe how Replit sort of fits into that narrative.
Amjad: [00:14:37] Yeah. So what I, what I get really excited about what I think about. You know, open source and more broadly just collaboration and software is a way for people to be able to more easily build on each other's work and also benefit economically from that, you know, right now, you know, what's dubbed as the open source sustainability problem, right? People are talking about funding. You know, we have, you know, for example, like libraries that are core parts of the infrastructure of the internet that are barely maintained, you know, there was the Heartbleed bug and the thing open it, SSL library. And like when people looked into it, it was like a one guy side project and all the internet, it powers the internet backbone.
So there's something, there's something about. Open Source that's, that's, that's broken. You know, although it's been an amazing phenomenon and will continue to be an amazing phenomenon, but what I'm really excited about is is there a way to, for people to be able to you know make software and, and easily.
Capture some of the economic value that they're providing to the world. You know, I don't exactly know what it's gonna look like, but that's definitely something we're, we're looking into at Replit and it kind of goes back to my point about this network of, of people and machines and life code. Like, is there a way for people to easily monetize their, their creation?
And you know, if you think about it that, you know one of the things is you know, any hacker experiences as you get into programming, I was like, wow, this is super fun, super intellectually stimulating. You get into it. You, you get addicted and then when you make your first book from it is also.
A fricking damn great, amazing thing. Like feeling like, wow, not only is this fun, but I can actually make money. And so it just fits this. Another thing that fits into the, into the Replit story is that I write my first line of code. I learn how to code. I write my first app and maybe I monetize my app as well.
Alex: [00:16:58] So maybe just a more practical sort of question. I don't think there's anybody that would be. Cooler to hear this from than you, to be honest. And that's just how you would give advice to people who are trying to learn how to code. I know you told the story of you sort of looking over your dad's shoulder on the computer.
I talked to Troy Osinoff, like not too long ago. And he always tells the story of him having, having his dad drive him to the library so he could like copy down JavaScript code and then put it into his computer when he got back home. But obviously things have changed. So I'm curious, how would you really go about advising someone who's looking to get into something like this?
Amjad: [00:17:39] So yeah, I think it was programming just you know, the, the idea behind code academy was, was a really sound idea, which, which led to success society learn by, by doing learn by, by writing. You know, it kind of like, you know, mathematics, you can, you can read math all day, but you just gotta sit down and do problems to be able to.
To grok and, you know, same with, with physics and really any science and technology, subject coding is more extreme than that. I would say it's, it's one of those things where where the best way to learn it is to sit down and do it. My favorite way to recommend these days is to, you know, free code camp and other youtube channels have these like five hour, three hour like coding tutorials.
So open up re-upload and go to one of those, like multiple hour YouTube tutorial, some of them already use Replit for Python or something like that, and just go through the whole thing. And I promise you that if you just sat down, concentrate, For maybe do it over multiple days, but for like 10 hours, you're going to be able to understand and write very basic programs.
And and then let your curiosity sort of guide you. So then then maybe you go and do the rest of free code camp or you do code academy or you do. Udemy or you buy a course you're on there, or you find a free course online and you follow the, the whole thing. But the most important aspect is like to get into it, to get inspired by it.
And then once you get, once you get the like coding bug in a way, you're just going to be driven by curiosity, and it's going to be super easy for you to just continue learning. And then the first thing people get stuck on is like, okay, I've learned a fair amount. Like I want to build. Right. And then you know, what are the ideas of things that I can build and you know, sometimes to start thinking about like really sophisticated things that they want to build immediately, I want to build a 3d game.
I want to build something like that. And I think, you know, make sure to make sure to to pace yourself. And so the first program that you did that you want to ride, maybe a very simple utility program for you. Automate something simple, maybe a simple program you send to a friend, right? Maybe tic TAC toe maybe like whatever it is, just like small projects.
And there are a ton of ideas online. We made this programming environment for game creation called the Kaboom. And Kaboom is really made for that sort of first project I want to make it's in JavaScript and super easy to load. And and then, you know, you made your first project and you share that and maybe you share it, you publish it on Replit apps or something like that.
And that's going to be super fun, rewarding, gratifying, because you just learn how to code maybe a few days to a week or two weeks, and you made something and that you could share and show other people. And again, that's, that's going to be motivating, I think, where people lose. Where people lose hope or lose motivation is when they take on take on like advanced books or, or advanced projects.
And they don't really pace themselves. I think that the name of the game just to have Meaning milestones so that you ha you continue having the motivation and drive to keep learning.
Alex: [00:21:06] Absolutely. Sort of to wrap us up. I know you're a busy guy. You have some really, really interesting writing on your website.
I've read a few of them, really cool stuff. But there's a few that stand out to me that I'd love to just. Your input on your thoughts on one is do what makes the best story, which sort of seems to be this framework for like regret minimization, if anything else, is that something that you live your life by would you say?
Amjad: [00:21:30] Yeah. I mean, I think I had to add a warning cause it was. It was like usually misinterpreted especially on hacker news, which I think everything is misinterpreted on hacker news. They're just, yeah. There. But you know, I, I think it's yeah, it's, there's something about life and the universe that rewards interestingness Like if you look at. History. If you look at what's happening, typically, typically probabilistically, I would say the most interesting thing tends to happen or like or like interestingness, like let's say, you know, an event has equal probability.
And there's no other you know, you don't have any other information about what could transpire. But one of them has a more interesting story to it. Meaning more interesting to a human observer. I would say that's, that's, that's going to be slightly more probable to happen. And I don't know the reason why, and by the way, Elon has been talking a lot about this, and that's why he's investing in Doge It's like you know, he talks about like you know, how the most amusing outcome happens. And I'd actually wrote this before he started talking about it, but it's, it's sort of the same thing. You start noticing that there's something about LA and I talk about it in the story. Is that the more interesting you are, the more people you attract, the more status you attract, the more friends you attract them.
You know, financing you attract that do all of that stuff. And people like to talk about interesting stories. And and so there's, there's something about optimizing in some capacity for interestingness, don't make it a contrived, right? Don't contrive don't contrive things. And don't do stunts and all of that stuff, but but if you're faced with a choice.
And one of them is more interesting to you or to an observer, I would say, would go with that. And like, you don't have any other reason, maybe even if it's a little bit riskier, I would go with a more, a more interesting story.
Alex: [00:23:39] I appreciate you putting up with the little dropouts that we had, but it was really a pleasure. Thank you so much for doing this.
Amjad: [00:23:46] Absolutely. Yeah, my pleasure.
Thanks for having me.