"Meme Your Dream into Reality" | Replit CEO with a16z

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.

Some people ask, hey, how should I think about X versus other platforms?

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.

Does every CEO Need to become an influencer now?

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 the social media game. The product sort of speaks for itself. So I think it comes down to the—

Amjad, thank you for joining us.

Of course.

So Replit is a 10-year-old company. For the last 2 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. I mean, you're one of the best CEOs on X. You're also now getting big on Instagram and other platforms. What has the business impact been of your efforts going direct? And does every CEO need to become an influencer now? Or how have you sort of conceived of this?

Yeah, I think Reflow would have probably died if If I wasn't telling a story that is larger than the company itself. Like the company wasn't successful commercially, but we've been very successful at like fundraising, recruiting. And I think if you build a company that's successful right out of the gate commercially, like 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 we would've not existed because we had to do that for so many years before. I mean, it turns out everything I said was true, but at the time it wasn't real. It was a dream.

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 supernaturally to them and they have to make a decision of like, how do I get good? Am I gonna do this? And if so, how do I get good at it? What was your journey to saying, hey, I'm really going to invest in this and I'm gonna get good at this?

Well, I think the journey starts like 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 and when I first came to the States and I had a terrible stage fright, like I'd be sitting here and my heart rate would be like 150, I'd be sweating. And I thought like, Like, how do I deal with this? How do I get better at this? And I went and I 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 like 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 like blow up right out of the gate. It was this like very, like my personal profile had like this very linear growth to it. And so I could make mistakes with, you know, very little attention on me. So I, and I made a lot of PR mistakes. I think still, if you go to Hacker News, sort by the top 10, like we had like a PR crisis in Hacker News where I had an issue with, 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 like within the Hacker News community, which they still hate me, which is fine. They'll hate you anyways. That's like the rite of passage. Hacker News loves you, then they hate you, then you become successful. And then, so you kind of make mistakes and they're not at the public stage Just yet. And so the stakes gets higher as I'm able, it's sort of a progressive overload in powerlifting. You're sort of like carrying more weight, you know, it never gets easier, but you're able to do more and more over time. And so, you know, I feel for the founders that are just now kind of like their company's blowing up and they're in the public eye. And you can see founders of big, you know, now trillion-dollar companies, they're really fucking up on a massive stage. But getting the reps in. Has been super helpful.

And so is that your advice? People wanna get just exposure therapy, just, you know, like one tweet a day or something? Like what's the best way to get started to get really good at this?

Yeah, so I think a few things. One is the concept of build in public. It wasn't coined when I started doing that, but the idea is that, look, as a CEO, you're gonna do a good amount of, you know, writing and communicating to your employees, your investors. you could just do it publicly, right? I mean, I've always been this believer that there aren't really a lot of secrets that you need to keep inside a company. And so a lot of your otherwise writing that would be in private, you can put it public and that way you carry people in the journey with you and you're getting the reps in. So whenever there's a piece of communication or story I want to tell, and there's a choice between public and private, I might bias towards public. I often write something publicly and then paste it on Slack. I just say, you know, this is what I wrote. And so that's been helpful. The other thing is authenticity. I think like being really, being yourself is It's kind of like a big radical thing that maybe started happening with Elon maybe 10 years ago, but CEOs were supposed to be this very polished thing. They had to kind of be filtered through this prism of PR and journalists are kind of the way to get to the public. But you see kind of Elon being the first kind of building a public platform. And I think Zuck to some extent as well, just seeing Zuck At some point when journalists kind of turned on him, he started going direct and you start following their stories and it's like Zuck changed his— the entire narrative around him by just being himself and actually talking directly to people. And I think the story of Trump is also very illustrative. Like, I think, you know, Trump was successful despite the negative bias in the press and it was mostly Twitter initially. Like, People forget that, but Trump had amazing bangers. What was my favorite one? I've never seen a thin person drink Diet Coke, which is true. Or Kanye. Kanye's banger is like, I hate waking up in the plane and I see a bottle of water in front of me. Now I got to take care of this shit.

I don't have a manager. I can't be managed.

Right. I can't be managed. You see these people come up and people start associating with them. And obviously they're very authentic. And we're like, okay, there's this shift in people's minds where they crave authenticity.

Hunter Biden.

Yeah, yeah.

You can do anything, but if you're a good poster, I mean, you can get away with it.

He can post his way to presidency for sure.

Yeah. It's funny you mentioned the intern thing because I remember that, but I also remember forgetting it too. And a lot of people say, oh, what if I say the wrong thing? What if I get my company into trouble and some sort of controversy or scandal? You know, is it just that attention spans are so short that it's just like the next situation? What do you say about that?

Well, you need to, I think it's deadly. Like PR can be, PR crisis can be deadly. Uh, if you retreat afterwards, like if you're not in the news. And I think the thing about, I think Trump, Elon, et cetera, is that there is the next thing. And by the way, the next thing could be worse, but just, but just the fact that you're still in there, you're still in the game. People will be like, oh, this guy's unkillable, uncancelable. And so being canceled is a choice. So 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. They're like, all right, I guess we can't do anything to this guy. Let's go to the next guy.

There's this great book, So You Think You've Been Shamed. And it chronicles the stories of a number of people who've gotten canceled over the past like 15 years. And that's basically the takeaway is that the people who are truly canceled are the ones who shut up, the ones who retreat, but the ones who just keep going and, you know, it's forgettable. I mean, there's so many people, you know, Bryan Johnson is an example, who shortly like revived their image or just presented a whole new image and people just forget the thing that they were, you know, almost canceled for.

I will say the mental aspect of it is pretty difficult.

I was gonna ask that next.

Yeah, because like, I think That's, you know, this story's been told a trillion times, but like in the ancestral village, if you become an outcast, that's pretty deadly. Like you can literally die, you can't find food. And so our limbic system, when you get this massive reaction online, you're kind of in this fight or flight and it can really affect you. Like you can't sleep, some people can't eat and it could get it could be really damaging. But I think again, exposure therapy helps a lot. Like the first one's really hard. The second one is like, ah, it'll blow over. But also having good principles. Like I think acting on principles is important. Like, you know, no matter what people think of what's happening at Anthropic, it's absolutely true, I think in my mind that they believe everything they're doing. They believe in safety, they believe in their mission. And I think that gives them Incredible strength to keep going in. And obviously, like, oftentimes principles and self-interest coincide, and you can— and that's a good thing. But you can ascribe what they're doing to some kind of cynical marketing ploy, but the strength that they have is based on their principles, and that That really keeps them going.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, earlier on you were alluding to the stakes are really high with these. What advice might you have for Anthropic or OpenAI in terms of like some of the communication challenges or opportunities?

It's obviously way above my grade. I've never battled with the United States government.

Not yet.

One day. Goals. But Look, I honestly think it's a kind of a win-win for them. Like it's really, if you game out what's gonna happen with Anthropic, Fable comes back, it's gonna be a huge flood towards Fable. It's kind of like, you know, this thing was banned by the government. Actually, Steve Jobs once did this ad. They had a Mac, I don't know, the big towers of Mac Pro, I think it's called, where they had tremendous compute power that was subject to export control.

Yeah.

this ad where it's like military tanks going and like surrounding the Mac and the Mac in the middle. And it's like showing that this thing is so powerful, the US government doesn't want you to have it, so you should go buy it. And so it's like a tremendous marketing opportunity for them. It's already kind of their reputation is pretty big. But even if they can't get Fable back on the market, they still win the PR game of like, we're a company that's kind of principled and doing the right thing and all of that. So I think just my advice would be not to stress out too much and not to honestly just sit back and let it play out.

You were describing the mental game as a lot of things we'll hear from CEOs is, oh, I don't want to have to tweet. And then I'm in meetings now, I think about the responses and I have to respond back. And now I'm in sort of conflict.

You don't have to respond back. That's the thing, right? You don't have to respond back at all. I mean, that's another thing you have to learn is to like not feed the trolls. It's, you know, that reply is like, oh, I gotta get back. It's like, what's that? I think New Yorker comic was like, babe, come to bed. It's like, no, something's wrong on the internet. And it's like, it's very tempting. But actually it's kind of the baller thing to do is like, oh yeah, yeah, the plebs can fight in my comments. I don't need to worry about it. So I think it's a trap to think that anything you put out, you need to immediately defend. Obviously if something is getting a lot of airplay and people are misunderstanding you, I think you should correct it. And again, you should do it in the principled way. You should do it because, hey, this is what I actually believe. Here's what you got wrong, but don't be overly defensive about it. Like, don't appear that, oh, this is something that you're getting emotional about. Because again, anytime publicly, if you— anytime you show weakness publicly, it actually feeds the trolls and feeds the haters because they feel like they can get to you.

Yeah. What advice would you give for when companies are being dragged by someone on Twitter or in the press or when to respond versus when not to engage?

Yeah, I think that's like an art thing. And I think it comes down to like business impact. Like, will it actually have business impact on my business? You know, for example, like, Last year in July, we had this story with the founder of SaaStr, Jason Lemkin, where Jason had just started vibecoding, had never vibecoded or coded anything before. And as he's working with a Replit agent, the Replit agent sort of misunderstood him or something like that and then deleted the database. At the time, we didn't have production development Separation. And so the production database now, like we actually separate them by default, like the Replit agent can't even write to production database. It can only read. And we have backups, we have snapshots. You can go back to a certain day or time or whatever. So the mistake that the Replit agent did was one click away from being fixed. But from his perspective, he didn't know that. And Replit Agent started freaking out. Models at the time used to get really anxious, especially Claude. And he tweeted the screenshot where Replit Agent was going kind of nuts. And it started gaining traction, gaining traction, gaining traction. And in my mind, I know we already fixed this issue, but the story has become so massive And obviously it's going to have business impact and it's going to be in the press. And so I could go out and fight and just say, well, we did nothing wrong. We had backups. I could say it's a user error, whatever. But I think the right thing to do was to own up to it. The fact that we didn't have development production separation is a bad thing. And 2 days later, we rolled out that fix. And so my response got a lot of positive interaction and got a lot of airplay because I started with, hey, we messed up and this is what we could have done better. But sometimes you can give attention to things that you don't want to give attention to, especially once your profile grows.

Especially if you apologize.

Yeah, especially if you apologize. So I would say just kind of focus on the business impact.

Yeah. The, and you mentioned earlier—

And by the way, Jason is a huge fan now. He runs his entire SaaS business, multimillion dollar business with him, another employee and like 10 agents based on, based on Replit agents.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

The, you mentioned earlier that you sort of developed a desire for this, for CEOs who are so locked in, they're just not that interested in doing this. Would you recommend that they cultivate the desire to do it? Or would you recommend that someone else on the team can do it? Does it have to be the CEO or how would you think about this?

Look, I think there's so many paths to success. I don't think there's one. Like, yeah, there are a lot of companies where it's not the CEO that's out there, like Groq with a Q, and like Sunny is the person on Twitter, but the CEO is kind of not on there. And they've done a great job. And obviously they kind of, the company's great, IP is great, but they also, they memed it to kind of into success. 'Cause I think part of the story that's not being told there is that they actually had a lot of trouble fundraising in Silicon Valley. They had to kind of go to Saudi and all of that. And so that's an example where the CEO's not out there. You look at Dario as an example where he's not playing the social media game, kind of the product sort of speaks for itself and he's writing these big essays. So I think it comes down to the predisposition of the CEO. Like, do you actually enjoy it? Do you think you can be good at it? I think forcing people to do it when they can come out and be totally cringe and like be actually net negative on the brand. Obviously they can learn over time and do it, but it really depends on the situation.

Have you gotten any leverage or way to lower the activation energy in terms of any help doing it? And is it possible for others too, or is it just all you, just whenever you think something?

Well, I think I have the benefit of this long period of incubation. I think that if your company is already high profile, you don't want to kind of practice in public. And so maybe getting some coaching earlier on.

So some people ask, hey, how should I think about X versus other platforms? You know, maybe their customers aren't on X, et cetera. How do you think about that?

Well, I think, X is very good for the sort of Silicon Valley, for tech, for kind of the in-group messaging, for maybe one hop outside of Silicon Valley, which is kind of the early adopter if you're targeting early adopters. And so I would also cluster Hacker News within that as well. But it actually, once you want to go to late adopters, Or like early majority, if you think about this kind of bell curve of adoption, Twitter becomes actually not very impactful there. It can still be very important where, like, you know, just this morning, journalists reached out to me to ask to talk to me about a tweet that I made about some of the stuff that's happening with Anthropic. And so like Twitter can still be a place where it is It is the start of stories. And that's another thing, back to the conversation of why this is important is the landscape shifted so much that journalists report on Twitter. So it kind of starts on Twitter. So 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. And I think I was late to YouTube, to Instagram. You know, I just started focusing on it in like maybe, uh, February or something like that.

Yeah.

And we're getting an insane amount of views and the followership kind of—

You started to build this clips machine of just your interviews. The podcast is interesting because it's a medium that can be turned into every other format.

Right.

Right.

So I feel like I, I should have maybe done Instagram like a year or two ago.

Yeah.

So I was like a little late on that. I thought it was going to be harder. Well, it turns out Yeah. You can just like, you know, do these clipping and just grow, grow, not just your account, you can grow a lot of different accounts that way. And, but I would start with Twitter because the, again, that's where the news starts to happen. This is where you can have outsized influence.

And are you bullish on the platform? Do you think that in the next, you know, 3 to 5 years that will stay the same?

I think it is. actually kind of risky because the algorithm changes so much and, you know, you might do something that angers the powers that be and, you know, very, you know, without anyone knowing, things might change for you in terms of your reach on X. And so I think there's like less transparency than Twitter 1.0. So it is a little risky, but I think the platform has so much staying power. Like it's really hard to replace. Like you can change the name, you can destroy the brand and the platform will still be very valuable. Like it is one of those things that I think there's no way you can avoid it.

Who are some CEOs or leaders that inspire you in terms of how they go direct or that you've learned from looking at what they do?

Obviously we were all in the School of Biology and Lulu. We had this group in the pandemic. What was it called? The Going Direct, I think.

Yeah, the Going Direct. Yeah.

And so we kind of talked about strategies and kind of critiqued Some of our approaches or other people's approaches. So that was very, very useful. I think Balaji was kind of early to this stuff. I think where I might disagree with Balaji is that I don't think you should be antagonistic to reporters. There's no reason to. You can actually be friends with them and they can be positive towards you. You can help them out. They're just humans at the end of the day and they respond to incentives. And I think we've done pretty well in maintaining our relationships with, and obviously Sharon Oz recently joined us and that up-leveled our game with reporters and more of that type of media. So I think, but studying that is very important. I think there's enough content out there to get started with. But let's see who else.

Palmer, Alex Karp, Elon.

Obviously I mentioned Elon. You know, I think Satya's doing such a great job.

What about what he's doing?

I think it is much less tweet-length things, but he's able to put out very well-reasoned arguments that play into the zeitgeist in a very smart way and advance their point of view. Like the essay he put out over the weekend, you know, got 20, 30 million views. Like very few essays kind of get that much attention, but it comes at a time where everyone is thinking about token costs. Everyone's thinking about, and this is important, thinking about going direct. You can go direct and get zero views. It's really easy to not pay attention to you. You have to understand the meta. And I think that's the thing that's more time-consuming than posting. Posting is not time-consuming. The thing that's time-consuming is understanding what is the larger debate, because the way to go viral is to couch or dress up your argument, your worldview in the current conversation.

Yeah.

And I thought that what Satya did with his essays is very much at the heart of like what the discussion is today. And then he advanced the point of view of Microsoft.

Yeah. I think it's a good place to wrap. Please give it up for Ram Jadhav.

Thank you. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.