Replit CEO on Vibe Coding and the Future of Software Development w/ Amjad Masad, Dave Blundin & Salim Ismail | EP #196

Amjad Masad (0:00)

Throw away most of the advice that your parents and your society shouldn't give you, because it's such a dynamic world right now, and conforming is the worst thing that you could do.

Dave Blundin (0:07)

Amjad is founder and CEO of Replit, which was a YC 2018 company.

SPEAKER_3 (0:12)

I am not a programmer, I am not a coder, but I can now create software.

Amjad Masad (0:16)

I came to Silicon Valley to start the company, and that was Replit. We knew for a fact that there are a lot of people, a lot of ideas, and there's so many barriers in the way. The barrier of programming, and the power of how hard it is to write software.

Dave Blundin (0:29)

We're very quickly going to get through all of the code out the legacy garbage part of society.

Amjad Masad (0:34)

The idea is to be able to talk ideas into creation. Programs are no longer static. You can buy a machine with zero software in it, and you can vibe code all of it by just like talking to the machine.

Peter Diamandis (0:45)

The career of the future is entrepreneur. That's the only career that I think is going to survive.

Amjad Masad (0:49)

If you have access to computers and the Internet, you should be able to build something great. And we're going to find talent all over the world. Those who are having the most impact will rise to the top.

Salim Ismail (0:58)

What a profound opportunity for everybody in the world to make a massive difference.

Dave Blundin (1:05)

Now that's a Moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

Peter Diamandis (1:14)

Welcome, everybody. Allow me one second to just bring onto the stage my two Moonshot mates, Dave Blundin. Dave is the creator, CEO of Link Ventures, Link Exponential Ventures, runs a little over a billion dollars out of MIT. No comment to Stanford here on investing in companies in AI space. An amazing guy, built one of the very first, if not the very first, neural net machine learning company, exited for a billion dollars and it's been uphill since then. He and I and Mike Saylor are roommates together at our fraternity. So it was quite a corner of the house. Salim Ismail over here, another Moonshot mate, is the creator of exponential organizations. He was effectively my co-founder along with Ray Kurzweil at Singularity University and has been the author of a number of extraordinary books and we'll learn more about him. Amjad, a pleasure. No one needs introduction of you, the CEO founder of Replit. A pleasure to have you here.

Amjad Masad (2:23)

Nice to meet you. It's such a pleasure for me.

Peter Diamandis (2:26)

If I were to summarize your life, I would go coding an Internet cafe in Jordan, rejected three times by YC, finally gets in, builds Replit, and is now helping a billion people code. Is that right?

Amjad Masad (2:41)

That's a good summary.

Peter Diamandis (2:44)

Not bad. One of the things that Dave, Salim and I talk about a lot because it's what we care about deeply is helping entrepreneurs take Moonshots, and having a Moonshot that's part of a massive transformative purpose. We talk about the idea that an individual today can positively impact the lives of a billion people. What an extraordinary world to be in. I love the fact that your Moonshot, and sounds like your massive transformative purpose, has been to enable a billion people to code. When did you first have that vision?

Amjad Masad (3:27)

I used to go code in Internet cafes back in Jordan, and one thing I realized that they had computers all over the place, but they were not using software to manage the system. So everything was paper and pen. And I decided to build software to manage the store, and that was my first company. And the thing that I noticed is that the idea was so powerful, and I felt like I could build it very quickly. And it took me two or three years to get the software done. And it took me another month, up to a year, to figure out how to actually deploy the thing, how to like burn it into CDs, how to get it to the cafe, how to install it there, how to manage the thing. And I felt there's so much, there's such a big barrier between having an entrepreneurial idea and actually deploying it into the world. That's when I started thinking about, okay, how do you make that process easier?

Peter Diamandis (4:20)

And I can I show you, can I show you easy? Can we get the slide up on the screen here? So this is me this morning. I am I am flying from Santa Monica Airport. I've got the laptop open in my lap, obviously. You can see a Starlink Contenna on the dashboard over there. And I'm coding on Replit on the way up here.