Amjad Masad on Going Direct, Building Replit, and the Future of Software

**Amjad Masad** (0:00)
Being canceled is a choice. You can choose to get canceled and retreat from the public eye, but I think if you're still out there, at some point, honestly, the haters kind of give up.

**Erik Torenberg** (0:09)
Some people ask, hey, how should I think about X versus other platforms?

**Amjad Masad** (0:12)
You have to understand the meta, because the way to go viral is to dress up your argument, your worldview in the current conversation. Twitter's influence is amazing, but it tends to be elite kind of inside group influence. I think Instagram, Facebook still, YouTube is where you get to the early majority.

**Erik Torenberg** (0:31)
Does every CEO need to become an influencer now?

**Amjad Masad** (0:33)
Look, I think there's so many paths to success. I don't think there's one. Replit would have probably died if I wasn't telling a story that is larger than the company itself. Dario is an example where he's not playing a social media game, the product sort of speaks for itself. So I think it comes down to the...

**SPEAKER_3** (0:50)
For years, Replit wasn't the overnight success people see today. Long before the company's recent growth, Amjad Masad spent years communicating a vision that many people thought was too ambitious, too early, or simply unrealistic. That experience shaped his belief that for founders, storytelling isn't separate from company building. In some cases, it's a prerequisite. Recorded live at the New Media Summit, Amjad and I discuss why founders should build in public, how to develop a public voice, and what it takes to communicate a vision before the rest of the world can see it.
We also talk about authenticity, social media, founder-led media, and why some of the most important company building happens long before the business itself is obvious.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:37)
Amjad, thank you for joining us.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:39)
Of course.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:40)
Replit is a 10-year-old company. For the last two years, it's gone absolutely vertical, but there was a period of time well before that where the company was in the zeitgeist, partially because of your Go Direct efforts. You're one of the best CEOs on X. You're also now getting big on Instagram and other platforms. What is the business impact been of your efforts going direct? Does every CEO need to become an influencer now? How have you conceived this?

**Amjad Masad** (2:05)
Yeah, I think Replit would have probably died if I wasn't telling a story that is larger than the company itself. The company wasn't successful commercially, but we've been very successful at fundraising, recruiting.
I think if you build a company that's successful right out of the gate commercially, you might not need to do all of that. But if you're trying to meme a dream into reality, I think you have to play that game. And so yeah, I think otherwise would have not existed because we had to do that for so many years before. I mean, turns out everything I said was true, but at the time it wasn't real. It was a dream.

**Erik Torenberg** (2:46)
Yeah.
And I mean, you at one point decided to go big on this. You weren't always big on Twitter. I mean, you started, and a lot of people here, a lot of people who are CEOs, maybe it doesn't come super naturally to them and they have to make a decision of like, you know, am I going to do this? And if so, how do I get good at it? What was your journey to say, hey, I'm really going to invest in this and I'm going to get good at this?

**Amjad Masad** (3:06)
Well, I think the journey starts outside of Twitter even, is like, how do you get good at communicating? How do you get good at public speaking? And so I always wanted to be able to be an influencer for lack of better words. And I remember I was in New York when I first came to the States and I had a terrible stage fright. I'd be sitting here and with my heart rate would be like 150 I'd be sweating.
And I thought, how do I deal with this? How do I get better at this? And I went and took improv classes in New York and then took a storytelling class. And I'm like a big fan of exposure therapy. Anything you're afraid of, just go do more of it until you're desensitized. And the best way to get desensitized is to just make a fool of yourself every day doing improv. And I ended up doing shows and got pretty good at it.
And then I think the benefit that I had is Replit didn't blow up right out of the gate. My personal profile had this very linear growth to it. And so I could make mistakes with very little attention on me. And I made a lot of PR mistakes. I think still, if you go to Hacker News, sort by the top 10, we had a PR crisis in Hacker News where I had an issue with some ex-intern at Replit, where I just totally botched that communication on that. But still, that wasn't large enough. I was still within the Hacker News community, which they still hate me, which is fine. They'll hate you anyways.