Amjad Masad - The Future of Software Creation

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best.
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:17)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and founding partner of Positive Sum and the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of Positive Sum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (1:49)
My guest today is Amjad Masad. Amjad is the founder and CEO of Replit, whose mission is to bring the next billion software creators online. Replit has built a browser-based coding environment that makes coding more fun, collaborative and approachable. We discuss how that is possible and why the way most of us interact with computers today is suboptimal.
We then go into the effects of AI on software creation and its broader impacts on technology. Please enjoy my conversation with Amjad Masad.
So Amjad, I was trying to think of a fun place to begin and I've heard you talk elsewhere about the Steve Jobs Black Pill, which I think is such an interesting idea. Everyone loves Steve Jobs. Obviously he's an incredible, incredible designer. All the great things everyone says about him are true. But what is the Steve Jobs Black Pill interpretation?

**Amjad Masad** (2:37)
So Black Pill and internet nomenclature, if you're terminally online, you would know that from The Matrix, you get the green pill and red pill, red pill sort of reality.
The internet has expanded these concepts further. So now we have a white pill. White pill is like something that is optimistic and a black pill is something that is pessimistic or bad. So Steve Jobs legacy is obviously hugely positive, but I think there's some dark aspects of his impact that wasn't fully explored.
And I would say our relationship to computing is possibly changed forever because of his impact. Again, possibly and negatively. I'm gonna focus on the negative because that's what he asked me for. But computers in the early PC revolution and even before that, were not seen as this purely entertainment consumption devices. Even Steve Jobs said, Computer is the bicycle for the mind. It is this thing that helps you think. Where we are today is that a lot of people use computers and by computers, I mean broadly phones, anything that has a processor in a television like manner. I think most people are consumers.
Even when you sit on the desktop and you do your work, there's an aspect of it where you're actually just consuming someone else's software.
In the past, when you sat down, say in the 70s or 80s, when you sat down on your PC, you were writing programs. You were writing whatever it is, DOS, Command, Lisp, Fortran. Every professional that learned how to do computers and use software for work were making and creating software. Whereas today, even professionals are at the mercy of the designers of the software they're creating. Anytime you hit a limit with your software, you have two choices. You either go on Twitter and complain or you go switch to another piece of software. Whereas in the past, every piece of software is programmable in some sense. So that Steve Jobs' Black Bill is that he made computers so easy as to condition people that the relationship between them and their devices is a purely consumptive relationship and a relationship where you're dependent on the software creator and you don't really have the agency to make better use of your data, of your software, of your device. I mean, just a simple example, you buy $1,000 iPhone and say you want to program this thing. You just want to write code for it. You just bought this very expensive computer. Well, then you have to buy another expensive computer. You have to buy a $2,000, $3,000 MacBook.