This is the first AI agent thing that has. I been a mind-blowing moment for me
where I am not a
programmer, I'm not a coder but I can now create
software. That's insane.
There are apps built on rapid agent. That otherwise would take calmly hundred thousand dollars of developer time and you can build it like in, you know, $25 pater Upland, it's pretty wild. How fast these companies are scaling. I don't think in the history of Silicon Valley, we've seen anything like that even in the like web.
I know Arrow. So what is like a fast? RAM for an AI company. What's impressive? That kind of broke the frame of what how long things would take? So I would say, reaching 10 million and three or
four months are are all my God.
Can I ask a blunt crude question? How can I use your software to become a billionaire? I would say, building. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to
Let's Travel never looking
back. Okay, so how do we want to start this? So I'm Josh, you you're awesome. So you have your today in a position that I think a lot of people want to be and you have, you're doing the Silicon Valley dream, you had to decide Iya. You go through R. I see. You've now raised hundreds of millions of dollars you're valued at a billion dollar valuation, so that's today. But then the cool thing about your story is it that didn't seem likely you know, ten years ago. Yeah.
Is it very unlikely success story and yeah you went through? I see. But you rejected a bunch of times like yeah, you're in Silicon Valley now but you started off coding in an internet cafe and Jordan that's what's interesting to me and we asked you before Henry like a what killer stories? Could you come on the podcast in town and you go, you wrote this, I'm going to read it word for word and I want you to tell us the story, you go rejected, four times and Rick Rolling into YC, raising tons of money and meeting a basic billionaires. Let's do the first part rejected. Four times and Rick Rolling into YC. Can you tell the story? Yes.
To I left my job at at Facebook and 20 2016 and you know, we're a plate has been a side project for a while and it's been it's been growing. I've been working on it like nights and weekends. It grew to a point where the like server cost was meaningful and I was like okay you know I have to guess I have to start up a company around it and so I went to my manager at Facebook. I was like look I have this side project can we make it like somehow a project had?
At Facebook. And we looked into that I send, uh, can email the time and he ignored me like, okay, I guess I have to start, I guess I have to start a company and so yeah, I quit, I quit, my job, I applied to y c. The first time we did, the whole thing, we did the form, and the video and and all of that. And we didn't even get a get a call or anything like that. It was just like we got the rejection letter and so I was like okay you know?
Oh, I have this Facebook stock, some savings, I sold the Facebook Stock, I put like half of in Bitcoin and then half of it into into the company or like, just just for us to kind of live and how much money was that it's like 70k or something like that. What was the original product for of replicate? So it was basically an editor and a console, you could type code there and you can run it, you can switch a language and that's it.
All right, so when I ran my company, the hustle, I think we had something like 2 million subscribers, and we made money through advertising. We didn't actually make that much money per person reading the newsletter, because advertising in general, is kind of a crappy business model. And so, I remember sitting down and I'm like, what are all the different ways that I can make money off the hustle that aren't advertising? And so to make sure that you don't make this mistake, Sean, me and the husband team we went and looked at a bunch of different ways to
To monetize your business and we put it all together in a really cool document Where We Lay It All Out, along with our research, and we call it very appropriately. We call it the business and monetization Playbook, go to the description of this episode. And you're going to see a link to that business, monetization, Playbook completely free. You just click the link and you can see it back to the episode.
But we Sam. Have you ever used droplet? I was using it today before this. It's magical and also your tweets describing what it is like. For example, your doctor saying, you know, he wants me to track my sleep. So I just uploaded the PDF that he wanted me to fill up, fill out into repla and it made an application, so I can upload it much easier. Yeah, it's like pretty magical. Sean, are you able to use it? It's definitely out of my league. Still, both me and Sam have joked around because we both have maybe five or six times false started of. Like, I'm gonna learn to
How'd this summer, it's like a New Year's resolution thing where you just keep saying you're gonna do it. You you do 20% of it, 30% of it and you give up, you know, we buy the udemy course. Learn Python the Hard Way. They you start doing it and nothing really ever stuck at one of the biggest problems was that nobody really talks about this. Do you think learning to code is like learning Spanish, like learning a language? You like, okay, so how do I need to say the thing? But before you could even do that, it's like, oh, I'm supposed to download this program. So I need to download an editor and I need to download all these packages to be able to run
I stopped and then you need and it's like just setting up the environment is so goddamn confusing to a beginner that you don't even get to do the the part where you actually write the code and be able to run in as I go, how do I run the code? I got to host it somewhere. Now I gotta learn how to do hosting it. Sir, what is that? And so there's all these things around at that were confusing replica. Solved all of that, which was amazing. And I actually did your, like hundred days of learning to code. Like it's actually made it really easy. You know, if I didn't have kids, I would just be doing a lot more because it's you solve that problem for me, and I know I'm
Can you about the YC, reject? I want to come back to that but to give Sam, maybe a little more of the context. I think, correct me if I'm wrong. Maybe I'm making this up. I think the reason you wanted to have this kind of like online editor online environment where it's all hosted there was because when you were younger, you were living in Jordan and I guess you used to go try to learn to code out of an Internet or go try to coat out of internet cafe but that means every time you go you have to set everything up for the first time because not your it's not your home base and at your home computer where you set it up once and it's there is that
True. Is that why you have? You felt the problem like 10x what a normal person would feel. Yeah. But basically, like every time I wanted to do a little homework, I have to like spend an hour or setting up the environment at the time. The web was moving so fast until we had Google Docs and we had Gmail. We had this, you know, client-side JavaScript application sort of a revolution and I'm like, okay, you know, why can't I type code into the browser and run it? And I started looking around and turns out.
Like nobody solved this problem. There are some experiments and it was kind of crazy to me because it was almost like, you know, finding a hundred dollar bill in New York Grand Central Station, right? Like it's like, oh, I found an idea that nobody's paying attention to and is that true because because it's kind of crazy out of the world's big a lot. There's a lot of programmers that seems like an obvious thing. I mean, I'm a total Outsider. So my question is like, well, there's some technical challenge to that because that seems like,
I got I guess it's easy to say things that are successful are obvious ideas looking back. But like Yeah, well yeah, that seems like our two things, right? There's the technical challenge of being able to make this all work in a browser, right? That that was, that was not obvious, but then there's seems like the second thing was I keep going back to the internet cafe thing because it's sort of like the hardship made the problems like unavoidable to you. Whereas anybody else who learns to code? If you're just doing it at home in America and your, you might do that setting up once maybe have a little bit of the
Um, but you're not running into it face First everyday as if you were, if you were working out of internet cafe. Yeah, absolutely. Right. I mean, you know, Paul ground talks about it and all the time. It's like, you know, the best startups are, you know, solving your own problem and I felt that problem really deeply and I started working on it. I discovered why it's hard well, it's hard to run different languages in the browser. You can run JavaScript but you can't run python for example. So we started writing interpreters.
Writing compilers to to run on JavaScript and then in you know it took us a couple years had like a few languages running. It was like pretty rough prototype but people started using it, my friends, and people at school. And I'm like okay this idea has legs. And so let me work on it more and then 2011 had a breakthrough and the Breakthrough was we were the first to compile python Ruby, a bunch of languages to JavaScript and run them straight in the
Into the browser and that went super viral like so we open source that we put her up and like on Hacker News and that was my first experience of like going viral and then or not, which is I was like, oh my God, this is this is like an amazing rush and I still feel that Rush. He put that in context for a non non engineer, which is the thing you guys did is it on a scale of like 12 Satoshi Nakamoto solving the like double spend problem. Like how hard of an invention was that that
Is like the nerdiest analogy you ever could have came up with, that's what I'm here for. So like was it, was it genius? Or was it just that nobody had taken an as much time as it would take to do that? Like, where was that breakthrough? How do we, how would you describe that breakthrough? It's definitely not on the order of like the double double spend problem where it's like a fundamental invention. It was like, you know, pushing like a huge Rock bolt, like upper upper mount.
It took so much grit and and just Obsession to be able to hack the browser in order to run things that the browser wasn't supposed to run wasn't designed to run. And so I would say it is solving hundreds of problems as opposed to solving like getting one one invention. Perfect. Perfect was fun. Yeah, so you're working on it as a side project for a number of years.
That's a long time by the way. Sean can you imagine like, having a side project? That's a hobby? That takes 3 hours, a night, with little, I mean, to you, do you have for two years is kind of a long time? No, dude. The only two things I've ever done that with is this podcast and my kids and there's really no way out of the kids thing. So you know, in the podcast was a hit right
away. I guess you gave me the
results right away. So it actually doesn't count you were doing this without the kind of like Financial Rewards or fame Rewards or any other major Awards during that time. How many years did you do this side project thing and what kept it going?
You know, 2009 was the original idea. 20 2011, I was the Breakthrough and you don't want viral on Hacker News and they're not in a I think that was the first time. I felt like a little bit of Fame, a little bit of return on investment. Like I remember Brendan eich the inventor of JavaScript and was the CTO of Mozilla like tweeting about it. I was like wow, this is amazing. Like, you know where your kid
And Jordan like made this like fundamental breakthrough. And like, you know, browser Tack and like I'm getting this recognition. That's pretty cool. And also, some articles wrote about it was people talked about her and conferences. And so, all that was evidence for my o1 Visa to come to the states. Basically, my entire adult life I'm working in this, which is crazy, right? Like, although you know, I am 36. Wow, I think and, you know,
Well, I need to be working on this since you're 2021 or I think. Yeah, so, anyway, yeah, that's, that's a while. That's your whole life. Your whole adult life and, you know, it continued to like, you know, incrementally, improve my life. So wasn't wasn't this, you know, working in a room for 11 years and nothing happened. So, I get this visa to the United States and they go work at code academy and they use the open source work that that we did, right? And a bunch of
Companies in the US there was like a dis boom, and like moocs if you remember that Udacity Coursera or whatever, and a lot of them used the open source version of droplet to create interactive courses, right? And it's not only like the World opened up, open up to me. I'm getting job offers all over the place and I have choices where to go. And so we decided to go into New York. Nepal has this great quote where he says, people always ask him about, like, you know, how to build a great Network or networking.
What
are your tips for networking? And he's like, my only tip for networking is do something great and watch your network will appear overnight. People will immediately come to you because you've done something great, right? You didn't go try to get a coffee with Brendan eich. You build something really cool that the creator of JavaScript and Mozilla browser was like, hey that's awesome. I want to reach out and get to know you and I think that's actually how you back to the why ceiling I think that's how you ended up getting into YC. Later was Paul Graham. Actually just thought what you were doing was cool but like let's go to the Y C part. So you you quit the Facebook job.
Half the money in Bitcoin half the money in your startup apply to YC rejected. That was the first rejection. What were the other ejections?
VC is kind of wouldn't wouldn't talk to us or, you know, we'd get meetings with VCS, some of them are like yawning, and and I think if one of them slept and it was just like not interesting to them. Dude, I had that happened one time as well. Like a guy literally felt it was like he was literally 80 and it was Friday at 4:00 and it was warm in the office. And he like fell asleep. B, b pitch. Like it was water. Yeah, it was like a cold day. It was warm inside. So,
Like yeah. We'd like what do you mean? But yeah because I was like you deserve this but dude what do they not see in you because like, it's so easy to be to look back in the past, but like you seem like you got the it factor, that seems like such an obvious idea. You worked on it for two years. Smart people are talking about it. Like what were you? What were you missing? What was the case against it? Well I think you know Silicon Valley is like probably the most meritocratic place in the world but it is also status driven at least then it
Very status driven, like if you look at the white people who got into YC like with Stanford, drop pots, and things like that. I think since then y c has improved and gets international people and all of that. But but you know, my background wasn't was a really interesting to them and I don't have any fancy colleges or any of that. Also being married couple was somehow like something that they thought it was a disadvantage. You didn't match the patterns, you didn't match the Stanford pattern.
You didn't match the co-founder relationship pattern. You didn't match the the trend of what categories have big exits you weren't on Trend at that time, right? Yeah. And so continue to apply to YC every season of voice. You will send in the the application and, you know, our thesis developed more and we felt like we had started making some money. Some people started paying for our service, we had an API, the time that people paid for a lot of Educators and
and people learning to code, sorry to pay for upload. What was the revenue when you got in like maybe ten Grand a month it was enough to sustain. I said that at that point it was like the ramen profitability but before y see that the person who actually the first one to to bet on us was Roy bahat from Bloomberg beta.
So I knew him from my code academy days and and it was such a demeaning with him was so refreshing. Like he was like just a straight shooter, he would tell me. Like, here's where I think, you know, the idea or the category is hard. You know, here is where I think the valuation should be and it was like the first meeting, he just gave me everything. He was thinking about, he didn't off secure anything and I was feeling really good about it. And so, yeah, he gave us
Five hundred thousand dollars on a six million valuation. So that was the first check. We got nice and whatever that had the, how did you eventually get into? I see. So basically, you know, we're grinding and and and the product was getting better every every week and I started writing articles about what we're solving. So case we're solving pretty hard problems. And so this articles kept going and Hacker News and hacking is really
What about what we're doing and pull? G breeds hacker knows a lot. Probably still to this day and one day like December 2017. I wake up. There's a DM on my phone and it is Sam Altman and he's like hey I run YC and we're interested in what you're doing. I'm like dude I know you are yes to tell me Runway see and he's like okay let's let's meet you know come to this address and it wasn't the way. I see a dress I was like a little confused and so
I go there and it was the open a.i. Office in the mission. And so I meet him there and you know, we talked a little bit and then he's like he turns his computer around his like this is this Paul's email, he emailed him and told him this, this company is very important, you should reach out to them and he's like, okay, talk to PG. I'm going to give you as email, talk to him and then maybe you can, maybe we can work on something to get you into YC. So,
I started this email relationship with with Paul which was really fascinating. I mean, he's a great writer, right? And so we talked about, we talked about a ruffler, we talked about the problems of setting up an environment, the problems of hosting an application and turns out after he sold via web, he started working on on something like R applet. He started working on like an editor. You write some list of course, because he likes this, this very obscure programming languages. And, but by the way, to pull G, the
Founder Lysa. The time he was starting to retire and Sam was running away. See and and so you know we had this email relationship where he wrote me as is essentially on the problem. We're solving by the way were you were you intimidated? You know, Paul Graham writing, essays to you privately, are you like is that high-stakes replies there for you? Yes. Like I would spend hours kind of profiting that I emails and I'm trying to like be as good of a writer as like
But you know, one thing about me is like I was never like nervous about meeting like famous and established people and I think that helped me overtime because like you know, I can be myself and I can talk to them at the same level as opposed to like being a fan boy or young, why was that? What were you just oblivious to it? Or you just had a different mindset about it. What was the reason?
yeah, I I felt like my life was was taking on this trajectory that was not to be too superstitious but like it was this force and I felt like everything's going to be great and you know, we're it's going to be hard but you know I'm meeting all these people, things are opening up to us and and so when I go and meet people my mindset as like I want to impress them and I
Able to get money from them or like I have a goal, and I think having a goal when you're when you're meeting, someone actually puts you in a very different mindset than then again like fanboying and run. Just being very excited about the meeting. Have you guys seen that? You guys know the director Guy Ritchie he's like British director, he's got this great story, he was on some podcasts and video Rogan and he was like, you know, I just want to be the director of my own life and I want to live my life like a movie.
She and what you're describing is sort of like that where you're like, I just I am destined for greatness and like we are taking on this amazing problem and like we are going to do wonderful things and it will be hard, but we will Triumph. And I think that's actually great. That's a great story to tell yourself and I think it's very motivating and it makes life more exciting. I think that's really cool. Yeah. So I actually wrote a blog post the title is do what makes the best story and, and the
Years. Like, when you're faced with decisions where there's no obvious answer, like the fork in the road, where the pros and cons are sort of the same. The, here's the guy used in my life is like, what is a more interesting story? It obviously, like Elon talks about this, like, the most, the most entertaining outcome is most likely. Yeah, it wasn't. He about it, in terms of entertaining, but in terms of like, what makes the story interesting, if, if my life was a movie,
What would what would be exciting about about that story?
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For example, when when I was in college, I was like cutting all the time and it wasn't really going to class. And so, so I was feeling a lot, not because I was feeling the exam because, you know, there would bar me from the exam because I wasn't showing up and in a decided to, to hack the university to change my grades, and we're not talking like metaphorically, like a lie? No, no, you actually hacked into the servers and changed your grade. Is that what happened? Yeah.
Yeah, I went into into the basement, I spent like two weeks I did. The, what's his name? The famous inventor Michelangelo or something like that. I did this sleep polyphasic, sleep wherever you work for hours, and then you see 15 minutes. And it was, it was sort of like I was writing on the wall. I was like, it was like a full-on Insanity. Were you angry? What, who why did you decide to? I know so many smart people who work so much harder to cheat or get around the thing that just doing the
Ed and there's like a fifty percent of the time they end up being like losers and then 50% of the time, they are in fact, like the greatest there on this podcast. Yeah. Well I think it is like some ADHD, right? Like you can sit, you can sit in class. But if you're interested in something you're going to have like hacking like, work on it a ton, right? And I almost got away with it but the servers at the at the University crashed and it crashed on my
occurred. So the one of the administrators there, give me a call and he said, look, there's like this. There's some anomaly and your end and the record of your exam and school and it's crashing. Our databases do you know anything about it and I was like, what's the anomaly? And he's like you know there's a field in the database that says you're barred from the exam and your grade
Should be should be 35. That's that's the default grade of failing the exam. And instead my grades were like, you know, 75 90 whatever Dusty, that's what I entered into there. And I didn't understand that there was another field by the way that, you know, that's not good. Good design for a database it since then I, you know, I had a, there was a fork in the road, I could lie and I think I could get away.
With it. And, you know, and just say that that's a bug on your side. And but I was like, what's the most interesting story is they they catch me and it becomes a story that people talk about and I was like, okay, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna like, come clean and just tell them what I did. So like better better than getting. The grade would be getting the reputation. Yes, exactly. So you tell them and then what happened to kick you out? No. So
You know, I am kind of a convincing person so I go to the next day and it's like all the Deans there and the discussing my case and the like trying to find out what what I did and and they're all computer science Dean's. So I went in there and I changed the subject to technical aspects of the hack and I drew on the Whiteboard and show them what I did and and all of that and they were very impressed like a Good Will Hunting moment.
Yeah and like my reputation back then is like I'm a loser. I'm failing. I'll have everything right? I don't show up to class and it is this kind of like Good Will Hunting and then you know, they say okay you have to go talk to the president because I think he's going to make the final call. So I go to the president and and he's a very intellectual person and we talked and I, you know, I tell him like look, you know, I have this talent and I feel like it was undiscovered. And I feel like I was treated
Unfairly and and I used it the, you know, I use the university as my sandbox. Like I didn't like you know, I came clean and I didn't mean to do anything anything bad and and and and he gave me the Spider-Man line. He's like with great power comes great responsibility and it actually affected me and I was like, okay, you know, I you know, I think, you know I you know, I I need to do something in order to kind of pay back and I told
Told him. I'm going to work this summer for free to make sure I secure your databases and so they they let me off the hook and the likes. Awesome. Yeah. What a great story, dude. That is an amazing story. Sam. By the way, would you ever want to compete with object at anything? No. This is like this mentality. This is it's scary. Like yeah, we don't want to be like, excuse me, Dean have you heard of the word prodigy? You like you like
My talents haven't been used well at this University. I accept your
apology be all, dude. Who's like why are you failing
me? Yes, yes, that's so good. Okay, so I love the principal do what makes the best story? I love the hack story. That's, that's amazing where we, how did we get here? We were talking about. Why? See why I say? Okay, sorry, let's get to the story of ICU because that's where we started. Okay. So Sam's like yeah you should do. I see actually the batch starts tomorrow.
Why don't you fill an application? It's just a just a you know process you have to do any. We can do it later interview tomorrow and I'm like, fuck. I want to fill the application again. Like you made me do it like four times like I don't want to do it again and so, you know, I kind of do a bare-bones application about about roughly and then there's the video. I don't like yeah, man. I don't wanna, I don't wanna do the video. So I pasted a YouTube link and I we go the next day higher and I
By the way, for people who don't know the y z applications, like, one page, it's like six or seven questions but then they say, upload a video two or three minutes you talking about your startup. So that's the video part. And then the interview is 10 minutes where there's rapid fire. So you have like 10 minutes and it's like this make or break thing it's less than a lunch. You know, like there's less than a job interview, it more intense. So you're waiting around for that. Yeah. I mean my view was they recruited us who I see it like why are you making us? Do this stuff right? And and so, yeah, I was gonna ask
Ask that like they're asked there acting like, you know, Paul G. Like, you know, maybe I could pull some strings, like, I know a guy. Yeah. Like you're the guy. So, yeah. I don't understand what they're what they're bullshitting. Well, I don't get it. Well, I think they wanted to to just like go through the process as like the process applies to everyone and I respect that. So you know the they call us to today interview and I walk in
And there was a Jared and Adora and all these amazing voice he partners and there's Michael, he was the CEO at the time and I shake their hands and I shake Michaels hand and and I felt like his grip was a little too hard. I was like okay that's fine and then I go sit down in the chair and the moment I said down, Michael looks at me. Why did you recall us? Oh my God. And, and I'm like, you know, we applied several times.
And I thought it'd be fun to do. And and you know, I thought this this interview was just, we're just, you know, formality and and and he's like, that's not how you get into YC. And he was, he was very, very angry. Well, turns out when we're sitting outside door getting rickrolled inside, right? So they say imagine their mindset looking at the application and and, and getting the the recrawl song and and then they give us a very tough interview in that moment.
Did you? It's like, and that's when I realize, I fucked up like, you, did you realize like, yes how I'm coming across? Like, what was your mindset there? Like damn, I was thinking, and I was nervous. I was very nervous and I was regretful immediately. Yeah, because you probably, it's like, oh, here's this entitled. Just another, just another tech entitled guy. When they don't know you're like immigrant from Jordan, who's like scraped his way here, right? They don't live in reality and how you were coming across more connected in that moment.
No, they weren't at all and and so and so I, you know, we go outside and and I tell, hi, okay. This is done, let's call an Uber and get back to work. Like we don't have we don't need to get into YC. So I call an Uber and just before it arrived, I receive a call. And and I take the call and it's like, hey, it's a Dora. You got an come back. The the kickoff is about to start. And I'm like, what are you sure? This is like, yeah, come
Backside, sign the paperwork and get started. So, I was stunned the whole day. Like it was, you know, we start, we go to the dinner and I'm like, you know, phased out and and, and all, but like, it was really exciting. And, you know, people who's never been to the YC office and Mountain View, it's all orange, like, bright orange, and the lights and everything. It feels like a cult-like environment. And like is that like I think I've seen the inside, doesn't it? Like a they have a caste people or is it like one of the rooms it like is a
Triangle like a church. Almost. Yeah, exactly. It sound gets up and tells us what what the experience is going to be as like, this is the hardest time we're going to work, you know, you better tell your friends and family that you're gonna go away for three months, you can't help them move or all of that. You just got to be focused on work so high and I like, took it very seriously. Okay. I was like okay, this these three months are are very important for the success of the company and we transformed the product in these three months I went from
Simple sort of editor, output to a place where you can host applications and build the real things, and all the three months over working 12 hour, 13, hour days. And, and, and it was, it was only three of us at a time. Our first employee actually, was, was sort of a runaway kid. He grew up in California little down south and, and he didn't want to go to school and so he leaves his home. He
He goes to hack reactor and and he becomes he becomes a programmer and he was 18. He was looking for a job. I knew the guys that hacker actor, the use droplet and I'm like, send me your best programmer. And he's like look this kid is little awkward but he's the best and so he comes their emails are interview music to my ears. Yeah. And basically I like him because, you know, it mirrors, kind of my life story. A lot of it. Where is this guy now? But we got him. We got him some liquidity. Be after six years of working, I felt
The right thing to do and because he was kind of burnt out and don't want to continue. So, I called my, I called my brother in Jordan. I'm like, look, you gotta, you gotta come out here when y see you need to, and he's a program. I taught him programming when he was a kid and I was like, you gotta. Yeah. Come help us. And he's still with us today and I called my friend from codecademy Moody, he's still with us today as well. And like, he got, you gotta help us like, like, you know, you could do it remotely. And so we assembled like a team of five people essentially.
So we go really hard and we were like one of the hottest companies and YC at the time and can you give some sense of the scale of it now like, you know, I invested in it for like a year ago or so, two years ago, something like that. I don't know when. But the numbers were off, the you had user growth first year of graph look like a hockey stick because he has zoom out and you, you you ignores all of the little, like years or nothing was really going on, but you have this crazy growth, but the crazy thing
About it is that your growth was developers so it's like you know one developer user is worth. I don't know 10 20 times just like a normal internet user when you had this crazy hockey stick growth of developers, can you talk about? Can you just say a couple of like permission to brag? Can you say a couple of Bragg worthy stats that would impress us? Yeah. So so roughly was very easy to get started with. And so people would start starting caught using it in college or high school and continue using it for many years. And so it was sticky for
Especially Junior developers when they're starting out and and it was it was spreading on its own like Word of Mouth. You know, there was a viral component to it. People can share your L and then suddenly you're in the same environment as them, right? Like and then we have this like multiplier coding experience and so people were collaborating and and also covered was really great for us because we were I think the only collaborative editor experience on the web at the time.
So a lot of people were remote and, and needed something to work with, with each other and so rubs, it was adopted at the time and so the grows was off the chart and the servers were going down and the marginal used or any web app is sort of like zero zero cost. But for us it was you know we try to optimize it a lot but it was still on the order of like 125 dollars like a month and your the growth was off the charts. But I you know, I have to admit, it was hard to monetize.
Sighs at the time because developers are actually not used to pay for things. Now they kind of are paying for things because of a I but at the time but they they weren't during paying and then you know, as we added limits and things like that, they felt like they can like move on and set up their own developer environment. It took a lot of, you know, creative thinking to figure out how to charge for people and ultimately, I
I was the thing that people are paying for and the reason is like the productivity benefit of AI is like, it's like obvious. And people are like, okay, this saves me time and makes me a better developer. And so people are paying for it right now. Well, can you give any indication on how many users, or how many, how much revenue the businesses, you know? Signups we have like more than 30 million, I think 35 million users right now. In terms of active users is kind of fluctuates. But
You know, 3 to 23 million a month, probably 100,000 apps hosted hosted a droplet because you can build an app and deploy it all in one environment in terms of Revenue. I can't share right now but like, especially this year it's been like exponential growth Sam, check this out. This agent thing I show you this, so you haven't used this, right?
No. All right. So let's watch that. So yesterday I was like, I'm going to mess around. I was doing research for this, but I was like, I just got like sucked into replica. And I started doing that, stop doing research. So I go and I go to Red Bull and it's changed because now, when you before, when you would go, it would be like, here's a coding screen with a blinking cursor and it's like write some code and I'd die off. Cool, I don't really write code. So I don't know how to use this product. Exactly. Maybe I could learn to code. Maybe I could, you know, pay somebody to build something.
On here. But whatever I was stuck. So now you open up, relat replica and it just sits like chat GPT, it just goes. So, what would you like me to create? And so, I go on their watch this. So I go, I'll give you the exact prompt. I said, build me an app, that will text me every morning asking how I ate yesterday. Let me answer via text message and then track the results on a monthly calendar grid. If texting doesn't work, you could also use WhatsApp or something else, okay? So basically look on the right here is just like the chat and it just goes absolutely let me propose what will
And then it just kind of like explains to me like a project manager, it goes. I'm gonna help you create a food tracking app, through SMS messaging with a counter visualisations. We'll start with the SMS later, we can add WhatsApp as an alternative like, okay, okay, prioritizing things, that's interesting and then it goes, the Apple sent daily message, blah blah blah. And it goes, how would you like me to proceed? And it's like there was like, you know, add more features changed the destructions or like go ahead and build the Prototype. So I clicked build the initial prototype and then literally, I don't know if you can see this but like it starts like Otto
Scrolling as it's writing code, like this is all just a code, it's generating. So like, you know, like I'm not doing anything. I'm literally sitting back with popcorn while this is happening. So it's like here's your calendar grid and it's like, hey, I need, I'm going to use twilio for the SMS it decides. I'll use Twitter for the SMS. Can you go to twilio and give me your account and your phone number? So that it'll be like we used to Leo for sending sms. So, I go to toilet, I'll give it my SMS and then it's like it's made. It literally made the thing.
See how I will this works now? Yeah, I actually got stuck on the twilio step because Twitter is a verified my phone number so it like it hasn't verified yet, but I can go into it until I see it tries to send me the message and it's just as a waiting till the verification to like be able to use this. So I'm like a little bit stuck there which is like, a common thing with agents. I feel it's like almost absolutely incredible and then kind of frustrating at some point where you have to like, you know, fight through some walls. Well, I think I'm just tweeted. I think he said I want people to be able to build an app,
Faster than they could just Google the answer to a question and that's exactly what happened here. That's insane. So this screenshot is the agent. Looking at the result is trying to verify this. It is not a running app. If you click run you can just as a top took a screenshot and then it shows it to me it's like, hey is this how you want it? And I was like oh because before it had it where it was like not the right month on Taco. Oh put the month on top, like don't say monthly food tracker, right? December. And then it also said like hey would you like any other style improvements? I can make it broader I
Change the color scheme. And I'm like, dude, this is literally better than an employee right? Like first, it's instantaneous second, I could, you know, I don't have to pay pay somebody to sit in the desk to sit around waiting for me to do something. I had an idea on a whim, go to repla and did the thing it with the agent is this was a like there's been a few, like, mind-blowing moments for me and my like, Tech Career, you know? Like I graduated 2010. So I'll start at that point where it's like, the first time I took an Uber, I was
Like, holy shit. That was amazing. I pushed a button, a car, showed up, the guy got in, I didn't even have to pay for like it. Just paid through my phone, that was magic and I could see it all. I could see him on a nap getting closer and closer to the restaurant that was like one of them, you know, chat GPT for sure was another where I could just, you know, tell it to make something to write something a ready for me. This is another one of them. This is the first AI agent thing that has. I been a mind-blowing moment for me. Where I am not a programmer. I'm not a coder but I can now
Create software. This is like, amazing. Can I ask a blunt crude question? How can I use your software to become a billionaire? Because like I say this and I'm like, you don't like the the ridiculous analogy that I use. Is I'm like I feel like an artist sometimes where I like, I feel like I have the ability to conceptualize certain things but I can't paint. It's like a kept fucking paint. What I want to paint this in my head like because I literally don't have that skill set. Sometimes it's like I'll be working on stuff. I'd like dude I want this.
This to do this, but I gotta go talk to this developer. And I don't want to have this conversation, and that's just like a pain in the ass. It's like, you basically are making it so I can finally express myself easily. I like how you're on the first date? You like, how can I get you to take the clothes off? Look, you're like, how do I use your thing to get really rich? Yeah, that'd be. That's basically, like, like at you had on the document. You're like, here's just, here's the opportunities. Just use repla to do, X, Y, and Z. And I want to go through that because this is like a maze.
This is actually, you know, there's like there's like the viral clip on YouTube or Twitter account all bunch of places where it's like the headline which we probably have used which is like billion dollar, one person companies or something like this. You're the closest person to this. Probably to that question to answer that question. Yeah. So there are apps built on record agent that otherwise would take probably a hundred thousand dollars of developer time and you can build it like in
You know, $25 pay to repli'd. I will say that there's limitations, right? It is not, it is not perfect. This is like the worst. It's going to be it. Sometimes gets stuck with problems. You can you need to have some skill in prompting to coax it to like figure it out and it's sort of like teaches you over time because it tells you what it's doing is its editing the code. And so over time you're learning how to use it. You're actually learning how code Works. You're learning how maybe you're not learning how to exactly.
You type code, but you're learning the different components in where things could go wrong. You learning about database, we have like, database, you can go in and look at the tables and look what's happening. And so you know, the division for this is that that's all you need. That's all you need to build an entire startup and you know every day we're inching towards that, you know. And I talked about like pushing the boulder up the hill and I think that's one of my one of my talents is like, okay, what are the
problems that you can make progress on every day and every week, such that, you know, in the year time, you have this exponential progress and the product is so much better. The other thing is, we're riding this wave of the foundation models getting better. So every time they get better, we plug in if a New Foundation model and the product is suddenly better. So you writing this, you know, to exponential curves which is like the engineering we're doing. But also the underlying models on infrastructure is is getting better. So I think in
in a year's time it's going to be really mind-blowing in a couple years time. I think we're going to see stories like someone getting super rich making an app and replicate that sort of goes viral. And so we're adding stripe integration right now you can you can already use kind of stripe button on droplet but we're adding integration that makes it super easy to start monetizing your app.
So, I'm obsessed with being transparent about money, particularly with ultra high-net-worth people. The reason being is that there's not a lot of information on this demographic and so, because I own Hampton, which is a community for Founder's, I have access to thousands of young and Incredibly High, net worth people. We have people worth hundreds of millions, sometimes billions of dollars inside of Hampton. And so every year we do, this thing called the Hampton wealth report where we survey over a thousand entrepreneurs, and
We asked them all types of information about the personal finances. We asked them about, how they're investing their money. What, their portfolio looks like we asked them about their monthly spending habits. We asked them how they've set up their estate. How much money they're going to lead to charity. How much money they keep in cash, how much money? They're paying themselves from their businesses. Basically, every question that you want to ask a rich person, we went and we do it for you, and we do it with hundreds and hundreds of people. So if you want to check out the report it's called the Hampton Walt report, just going to join him. To.com, click our menu and you're going to
To see a section called reports and you're gonna see it. All right, there is very easy. So, again, it's called the Hampton wealth report. Go to join Hampton.com, click the menu, and then click the report button, and let me know what you think.
So Sam said, how do I get rates in her like disclaimer? It's not fully there yet, but now you still have to answer the question. I mean, the question is like what kind of applications? And it's like, what are the ideas? What kind of applications you can build up to AI applications are growing really fast like the revenue ramp in some of those AI applications is kind of crazy. Can you, can you tell the story of Magic School? I thought this was really interesting. Yeah, so magic school is like an AI application.
And for educators it's basically like helping them use Foundation models and lme's to do their work to do, assignments for for kids to have an interactive like a I experience. And so it's like a full Suite of AI for educators. The guy who created is it was a teacher, right? The guy who created was a teacher, he took some time during kova to learn how to code and he started using repli'd and him and and I think another person,
Built the initial thing, totally unwrap blood, and because you can go for my idea all the way to deployment. And, and immediately started growing like, you know, people these AI apps, like, when the adoption starts happening, it goes Super viral. You don't need a ton of marketing and the revenue ramp was one of the craziest ones I've seen specially for Education. Yeah it was like a known thing. It was like hardest thing you do selling into schools into teachers they're overworked or underpaid.
That they don't have the time to like, figure out your new tool, but this thing is great. So if you go to it, it's basically like because teacher spends a lot of their time, not in the classroom, it's after class. After school is done, they have to grade papers that to create the lesson plan. For the next day they have to create the quizzes or the multiple choice tests and they have to like. So they have to cause they do these. And there was these platforms like Teachers Pay Teachers, where I could just, if I don't want to make it myself because I'm tired after the school day, I might be able to go by 149 bucks from another
Teacher, who teaches fifth grade science in some other state. And I would take that and I would buy it that way. What magic school did was like cool, generate a quick you just say like I want to, I teach fifth grade biology. I want to do a pop quiz about, you know, how this how mitosis works. And then it'll basically create either a lesson plan or a quiz or, you know, a student like interactive like, you know, workbook that they need to create or whatever. And so it lets a teacher not have to spend, you know, four hours a night.
Night creating the materials that they need just to teach class because a I can do it for them. And this thing looks I don't know these guys, I don't know anything about them but it says you know over 4 million educators are using this, which our formula Educators and their students. What I don't know if they're counting will be gone similarweb. They have millions of monthly unique, so that's like a really big thing. They raised like 20 million bucks to off. Yes, I mean, that's a pretty huge signal. So they launched in like I want to say, July 20 23 so that a like a little over
Over a year and do you know these like SAS metrics like how long to get to whatever like 100 million or whatever? They AI apps. And I would say magical ice on that trajectory is like just like that, you know, the curve is like you know all the way straight up. This is kind of weird but maybe this is a feature of yours that you helped this company become potentially, one of the faster growing companies of all time and you only earn $20
Month from that. Yeah, so repli'd had you know always a problem of value capture falsely. That's why I like VCS struggled with it for a long time. So that there's some Logic for why the why it is hard to monetize these things and like capture some of the value. I will say you know I invested in magic school so this is some of that and with a I think we're going to be able to capture at least a little bit more of that.
If people are monetizing these apps on droplet Via the agent, there's a way I think where we can potentially take a cut out of that especially if we make it like super simple to start monetizing an app it also. Like if once we reach scale, you know it is like chatty Beauty, like you don't need a lot of skill to do that and it's going to get easier and easier. Once we reach scale and you have your millions of people paying for those. And it's not just like 20 bucks, you're going to pay incremental after you finish your credit. So we give you a quick
Monthly credits and then afterwards, if you want to continue, you can like buy more credits. Are there other companies like magic school? Like cool companies like that. You've seen that, maybe we haven't heard of that are using AI. Yes. So, you know, I'm very excited about agents right now and, you know, I think I predicted earlier this year on a podcast that, you know, this this going to be the year were like agents are born. And next year is like, we're agents are gonna scale
Is this company called 11 ax, + 11 x creates a is DRS. And so, basically, you don't need to hire as the Arts. Like there are some companies that feel like, you know, they can, they can bootstrap their sales without us. The are you can have like one a and that a account executive is like running. This like tens of AI as the ours and in the revenue rampone, 11 axe was also crazy.
See it's pretty wild, how fast these companies are scaling. I don't think in the history of Silicon Valley, we've seen anything like that, even in the like Web 2.0 era. So what is like a fast ramp for a eye for an eye? Maybe not 11x specifically, but just for an AI company, what's like, what's important? What's impressive? That kind of broke the frame of what, how long things would take, but you've seen it now. Yeah, so I would say reaching a 10 million and three or four months here are all my God. That's wild.
Yeah, we invested in Jasper which was like one of the early, kind of chat, GPT rapper type of companies where there's like a like marketing. You know, you need to write a blog post, you need to write a description for a product or whatever and so you could use it for writing any kind of marketing copy and their graph was, I'd never seen it was like, in 10 months or 11 months. They scaled like 50 million in annual recurring revenues. It was like I've never seen anything even remotely close to that. It was it.
Brought up a question. Like is this sustainable? Is this like what is happening here? Like this is I've just doesn't compute, but it definitely broke my frame of what is possible because I had been working, you know, in Silicon Valley since, you know, 2011 11 12, and that just did, that wasn't a thing. You you would never see a graph like that. What are some other companies have gotten to that like 10 ish or tennis million or similar trajectory in three month type of businesses? Yeah, so this is I wanted to kind of give it a, you know, sort of
Clamor about this, which is the big question in the investor Community right now is like the most question and that started around the time that you attach it to you kind of came out. And there was these GPT rappers sort of this condescending way of looking at a lot of these companies. So I got if you can create Gypsy rapper, you know, and a month than, you know, a lot of other people will create GPT wrappers and a month and you're going to be competing on price in the margins. Go down. And yes, the air.
Our is great, but your but anthropic is capturing or opening is capturing was so there are not you, your kind of a, you kind of like a middleman and you have like hard time havin having margins and I think it's totally valid question. You know, I think you know, most develop over time through strategy and Technical Excellence. So I mean some of these companies can go down pretty fast and there are examples of that right now but
But I think if you, you know, you can have you can start building technical it like with the repli'd. Again, this like idea of like pushing a boulder up a hill, you know, we have this runtime environment, we have like this infrastructure, we have the deployment, we have databases, we have all these Integrations. Any it's the only one in the world. That is like an end-to-end environment to make software. Like to catch up with that, it's going to take years, right? But technical Advantage is also
Not a long-term moat.
And so it's again, it's a big question. I don't think it's answered yet, you know, their strategic things you could do if you reach scale, if the switching costs are high, you know, that that maybe like a way to, to have sustainable modes, but it is definitely a big question, you know, it's crazy. Sean like for the law. I hate using the d word democratize. I think that's like, such an overused like Silicon Valley, right? Don't do it. But this is actually one of those fuses few examples where, like, for the longest time, building a website or a web
Like you just literally couldn't and so now you are making the technology that everyone can do it. And so what I think is like guys like Sean and me are people like us who have an audience. It's like, why don't we just, why don't we like constantly launching like companies using this technology because like our ability to get users because we just get on the microphone and talk about it. That's like actually a competitive Advantage, whereas being technical is no longer, it's still an advantage but it's not
As much as before it's like getting customers. Now is actually the only hard part which is still hard, but it's way easier if you're popular. Yeah. So you know the Playbook I would use as like I would go into some inefficient Market or industry. So a deal from for magic school went into this hugely inefficient, you know, industry which is which is your schools and education and right by the way, another product
The synthesis tutor which is which is also going going viral right now and and they have also this Revenue ramp that's kind of crazy, both Shawn and I invested in that company. Think all three of us. Yeah, yeah. And for a while, they had like this this thing where like, you know, they had Educators on the payroll and whatever they replace all of that with a I now like, you know, the kids sit in front of the iPad and they're talking to the AI in like learning really fast and it's
Much better than the previous product, right? It's basically like find an industry where you're familiar with and just like build the deep-sea rapper to like automate some of the work there and you could do it like a hundred times and one of them will take off. Yeah, it's the era of the idea guy. Now, it's our turn, it's our turn to shine the, right? Because now the limits and the kind of the value creation is, do you understand a problem? Well, enough to know how to take this really powerful magic wand and pointed at
Problem and be able to make that more efficient. And then, of course, do all of the other hard things go. Get customers. Make it sustainable built a good team, you know, like, do all the normal entrepreneurship stuff, but it seems like more than ever having. A great idea, is the kind of like key unlock to doing these things, because building has become easier and I'll give you a kind of my, my personal Epiphany that I had while I was doing this. So I invested in replicate mostly when I just thought you seemed really smart and I saw a growth curve of developers using it and I thought
So cool. Like I've experienced this problem before like a One-Stop place where I can come in, right? The code host it all the all the stuff you talked about like don't have to download Java. Don't have to do any of that shit. I did that, that appealed Ben's time. I think actually in the same way that synthesis like took Ai. And actually almost like really like 10 x to the value prop of the business. I think you guys are in the same. So here's my Quick Pitch which is now that I think of replicate as
Like basically, what Shopify was for creating, you know, like online stores, I think, replicas that for creating software. So to me you guys are, it is eyes. Just frightened when you Shopify for software. So like I'll give you my example. I recently celebrated a milestone that was both. I was proud of it and really embarrassed also. So, few years ago, I started a eCommerce brand and we just crossed 50 million in Revenue like kind of like cumulative lifetime. Every half of it was I, you know this year but but
Million
total and I was like, wow, like 50 million. That's great. Like that's I had never created a business, I had done 50 million in Revenue so that was like a personal Pride point at the same time. I was telling it to us to a friend of mine who's not an entrepreneur. He's like, yeah man, I would love to learn how to, you know, like make websites and like make Products Manufacturing. But I was like, I don't know how to do any of that. Like I was I was like this this brand that is 150 million in revenue for me. I don't I just stacked Ali Baba, time shopping.
If I, I've never manufactured a product in my life, still don't know how to. And I've never made a website that's like, you know, actually used by customers. Still don't know how to. But I was able to, I was able to skip all the work and get to the brand part. Like, do the thing where we created a product that people liked and you know, it's a successful company now and I thought wow, replicas going to do that for the software space and I was like, it used to be that the job was software engineer and now it's going to be software creator as I can be a creator of
Without being a programmer. Myself, that little shift is a big shift because the way I think about it, I don't know how many developers there are. I think GitHub has like 100 million or 200 million accounts. I'll just use that. Like there's 200 million. Let's say developer software engineers in the world. Well now there's going to be two hundred two billion people that can create software, because if you got the internet, you got your phone, you can create software now, you just tell the agent, make me an app that does this make a tool that does this? And so you 10x the
Number of people that can create software in the same way that Shopify and Alibaba 10x, or more the number of people who could create products and go sell them like hard Goods. That's how I see what you're doing. Yeah, so, you know, even at the start of repli'd, you know, there's our initial seed Dock and the dock, it kind of has this little musk style like, you know, master plan. And it was like, we build a, you know, we build a platform, we grow it, and then
Eyes going to make the thing, a lot more accessible because our mission was make program accessible. Then we updated our mission was create a billion programmers. And then so the moment that, you know, you know, even GT3 came out. I was like, this is this is the thing and I wrote This Thread no Twitter about how AI agents will just change how programmers were this? Is the deck that 2015 this is I don't even know if opening I was a research lab at that time maybe. Yeah, definitely.
There was no chat GPT but this is your master plan deck. So we're going to grow by building tools for teachers and students. We're going to build a simple Network and a I assisted interface that blurs. The distinction between learning building evolve a new platform where people can learn build explored host applications like talking about AI, back in 2015 in your in your actual pitch deck. Dude, it's also clear how code academy was a highly influential to you? Because I remember years ago, Sean said everyone tries to learn how to code, I used code academy and it was a pretty cool interface and it's very
To what you're describing, you know, I had some point, I kind of lost hope in courses because like, you know, we have 100 days of code, we're telling users that to use our application. You need it. You need to invest 100 days. That's kind of crazy. Like, there isn't any like successful company in the world? Will you need 100 days to learn it? And, and so, that's when I kind of changed my mindset and I said, okay, it needs
Has to be Chatty Patty. Like it needs to be just a prompt and we started building that earlier this year and and now that's all we're focused on. We're going to create new programmers, you know, existing developers great. They have a lot of tools but we want to, we want to go after the citizen developer, right? Everyone is a developer and I think that's, you know, that's what you're talking about. You go from like a hundred million developers of the world. Well, I think it over states that on Mars, probably more 30 million and then you,
An axe. That is it what? What does the world look like? When anyone with an idea, could could make something? And one of my favorite books is the sovereign individual. The thing I really was excited about is this idea of ideas to become wealth and so you no longer have the bottleneck of making something that's where we're headed. And this is what you talking about Shawn is is like the the it's the time for idea guy and like maybe that's, you know, tongue and cheek.
Like maybe the way to talk about it in more precise terms is that people who kind find these gaps and markets people who have expertise in certain areas that they can tell their, there's an efficiency and they can like create an AI application that can immediately plug that. Like, I saw this video on Twitter the other day, it was a of a snake that got his head chopped off and it like floated around and bit the
it's a bit like the tale of its own body and then like the body like, reacted, your employees are they thinking that this they're sort of doing that to themselves when they're like, like what do you make jokes? Dark are like weird. Would you like talking like you know like you don't need to hire all these programmers to do all this stuff? Are they like sitting there with the hands of their pocket? Like like does that be nice? You know I always wanted the company to be super lean.
And so for a long time, we're like 10 people but like now we're like 70 people that's still nothing. Yeah. So I'd rather not hire a lot more people because I think that again the efficiency for programmers. So look, it's citizen developers are going to go from zero to like, say 10x, but also existing software engineer are going to go from 10x 100x, right? And so, and so, they're going to become more and more productive. The moment we
We automate all of software engineering. I think that's sort of like the moment of AGI, so I think so look a little far away. And the reason I say this is because once you automate software, then the agents can rebuild themselves and you go into this into this Loop of, you know, increased intelligence every version builds as its next version, built as next version. And so this is what they call intelligence explosion that would lead to the singularity, right? So it's like
Pretty crazy time when we automate all of software engineering. And so, I think, I think it's coming. I don't know if it's 10 years or 15 years, but I think that's the time where the world Leaf, radically changes. Have you met anybody in kind of the tech industry that blew you away, either personally, or maybe read about them, maybe meant friend of a friend, told you a story because I saw a picture of you with Jensen, you know, you've met Paul Graham? I know that you're like connected. In the AI circles. You met Sam Altman.
In addition, to building the tech, I love the characters. And I love the stories is why every, you know, Ilan snippet of how he runs his company's goes viral and shit like that. What are your favorite kind of inspiring stories or crazy stories that you've either experienced directly or red? You know, one of the Carrie's Story when we're raising from a 16z Mark invites me to breakfast like 10 a.m. at his house and so so I go there and I expect like I'm going to talk about the business.
And so we spend like two or three hours talking about politics and the world and like, all sorts of things that are interesting to it to him. And I felt like this guy is like, is like more than just a technologist. He's like a philosopher. And so right now he's going out and he's not talking about the stuff like his Joe Rogan interview went super viral and he's been always have like these interesting ideas about about the world and the interesting thing about a 16 Z is his partner. Ben is sort of like the executor some of the
Get a fight, he rode the hard thing about hard things where like he teaches you like about what it means to run a company, it's painful, it's hard. And what it means to hire executive is what it means to scale a company. And so you have this Duo of like they were and the like the philosopher. And I think I think that's really amazing. And I think they're there. They have really big plans and I was getting around it. I would just hate the Philosopher's of like are you gonna do anything? But every what are you talking about politics for
Right now, it's got to be the worst to be the doer and the door philosopher. Like she's, you know, I think I think Sam is it was interesting to kind of meet him, talk to him because he's very effective like, he, like, the first time I met. I met him or like, maybe not the first time, but like, he was on his computer as I'm talking. And so I'm talking, it was like, I had, we're fundraising, I want to talk to, you know, a 16z. I'm like really
You big fan of Marc and he was typing his computer, okay. I introduced you to Mark and and and then, you know, when you send some emails is like pretty quickly replies with like, you know, a couple of words, like a couple sentences. So I saw how effective and fast you can be and that that I'm not like that, you know. I'm trying to be more like that. But I'm someone who really values the quietness I'd like to think.
Think about ideas and to think about strategy, and things like that. So, I'm not always in top of communication, actually, makes me like a little, you know, it's overwhelming, but but, but I think, I think seeing these people, at least, you know, inspired me to be a little more like that. You, you tweeted out the story that I loved about, you said the most gangster story in Silicon Valley is Steve Jobs, buying Pixar, 45 million, investing 50 million in operating at a loss for a decade. So much, so that
Accept personal checks to make payroll and somehow turning it around to a seven billion dollar exit. Why did you like that story? You know, there are people who are overrated in Silicon Valley and I think there are people who are underrated. Like, I think people think about Steve Jobs in terms of like yeah the flashy things iPhone, and iPod, you know, coming and stage and doing that. The thing I like about the Steve Jobs story is when he was lost in the desert for 10 years. So he left
He was fired from Apple and then he created two companies that were failing the whole time. Like next Computing, that computers and Pixar. Were literally feeling like they didn't do anything. If there weren't selling, he would just like investing more and more of his money like to, I think it was gonna go broke. If but he kept going for 10 years, like, how do you do that? And I, you know, I'm a person who like, we talked about my story, where I want to be able to go the distance.
Distance. I think Going the Distance is an advantage for for entrepreneurs and Pixar. Became this hugely valuable company and it goes from making no Revenue to making billions of dollars and going public over over a couple of years. And next, next next computers saved, apple, apple was having a problem with OS like until you know, they had the chip before. I don't know, they made it internally or something like that.
And then everyone was moving to Intel until was the best Computing chip and they wanted their computers to be fast and so they needed not a new operating system and they try to buy. Did they went to the market that try to acquire companies? They kind of find a great operating system. And next Computing had had a great operating system and that became Mac OS. So they bought. I didn't know that. I thought next was just a failure. I didn't, I didn't even realize it actually, contrary. I thought they just bought Steve back akwa higher, but it wasn't an act. Like it wasn't
Just a choir. No. I mean, it Objective, C, for example, you know, next Computing was really obsessed with this idea of object-oriented programming and they innovated a lot and what that means. And, you know, it is based on Unix, but it has a lot of interesting features on top of that. So app, they it saved Apple because Apple was, otherwise not going to be competitive without these new Chips, right? Well, do I know we kept you half an hour over? I apologize for that but this was amazing. This was one of my favorite.
So it's in a long time and I'm not just saying that you can go check out all the other officers. I don't say that at the end. So this was awesome. Thanks so much for coming on. Where should people Twitter is the best place to follow you? Yeah, Twitter a Mossad on Twitter and and the rough blood handle on Twitter as well justjust repl, dude, thank you very much. You're the
best, of course, of course, my pleasure. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to
Never looking back.
Everyone, a quick break. My favorite podcast guests on my first million is Dar, Mesh. Door, mesh founded HubSpot, he's a billionaire. He's one of my favorite entrepreneurs on Earth and on one of our podcast recently, he said the most valuable skill that anyone could have when it comes to making money, and business is copywriting. And when I say copywriting what I mean, is writing words that get people to take action and I agree, by the way, I learned how to be a copywriter in my 20s. It completely changed my life. I ended up
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