Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth - Replit CEO: How to build a $1B Company in 2 days | Amjad Masad

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

Amjad Masad, the founder and CEO of Replit, sits down with Marina Mogilko to discuss how AI is revolutionizing the future of business and how solopreneurs can now build a $1B company in just a few years.If you’ve ever wondered how to launch your own AI-powered business, what vibe coding really means, or how AI is changing the rules of entrepreneurship, this episode is for you!Links: Follow my Newsletter:⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠Companies & Products: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Marinamogilko.co⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠⁠⁠X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠⁠⁠⁠

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How far ahead you think is time when a solopreneur is going to build a billion dollar company? In the next few years, yeah. This is Amjad, founder and CEO of Rappled, an AI-powered coding platform that turns your ideas into apps. Our mission is not just to make software more accessible, but really make entrepreneurship more accessible because creating a business is really one of the best feelings in the world. But let's be real. Can anyone just sit down with AI and build a billion dollar company? Amjad says it comes down to three simple steps.

They turned Replit into $3 billion business. I tried those steps myself and what happened wasn't what I expected. Hello everyone and welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. We have an amazing guest. today. We have, I'm Jad, the founder of Replit. I talked about Replit a few times on this channel because I've personally been using it. And I'm just fascinated by your journey. I wanted to start with this question where you said, you're going to empower a billion software engineers or programmers in the next couple of years. But at the same time, I saw you say that in a couple

years, companies wouldn't need software engineers. Can you explain that? Yeah. I'm mostly talking about entrepreneurs like us. I think that bigger companies will always need software engineers. But people who have an idea, everyone has an idea. Like, you know, one experiment to do is go on the street and stop people. Like, do you have a business idea? Everyone has an idea. But for the most part, the thing that's stopping them is that they don't have the technical skills or they don't have someone, you know, as a programmer growing up, all my friends were like, oh, hey, can you program this idea for me? Well, now you can do it.

And so we're getting to a point where you can run a business. And it's difficult. It's still the technology needs to mature. But we have a lot of stories where people have built their dream apps. And they've had these ideas for like 20 years. We're talking about a CFO at a VC firm. He's a domain expert. Like, he knows how to manage a VC fund.

and he never found the right tools for him. And he had all these ideas on how to build them. But, you know, it's always hard to find engineering resources. So he used Replit in three months. He built his dream app. And he went out and sold it and got a lot of contracts. And I think he made, he's on his track to make $5 million, quit his job.

Now he's an entrepreneur. And he told us every time he's saying, well, at some point I need to onboard a software engineer. Maybe he does. But, you know, he got to $5 million in revenue, and still he didn't have to. Yeah. I'm sure, you know, meta and opening eye and us,

we're always going to need software engineers. But there could be a lot more entrepreneurship in the world, a lot more businesses, if that bottleneck that is making software goes away. Do you have, like, a screen here where you track your most important metric? And what's the most important metric? So every team has a screen. Infrastructure metrics, there's like product metrics. It's really depending on the team.

And almost every team has a screen. So what's one universal metric everyone's looking at? I mean, ARR. Okay. It's like everyone's responsibility. Can you share your recent era or? Yeah. Yeah?

160. Yeah. That's amazing. They've been grown like crazy. Like your graph is. Dream, white combinator, hockey stick. But especially if you plot it from like 10 years. Oh, yeah, right.

And it does that. And also, like, it's so encouraging for entrepreneurs who don't see progress right away. That's right. That's right. How many people are coding right now? Let's see. Is there about 50,000? 50,000 people? Right here, yeah. Do you know how many apps built and reptiles are actually active and running?

Yeah. About 350,000, like, pay. online apps. That's growing fast. That's growing 25% month of a month. Do you know how many of them actually generate revenue? We don't. I think those are more anecdotal, the stories that we hear. Pretty soon we're going to be Helping you integrate with stripe and monetize so we'll be able to track that I think I already added my stripe So yeah, the agent knows how to do it But we're going to make it even more effortless like one-click our mission is not just to make software more accessible, but really make entrepreneurship more accessible, because that's really

the thing, I think that changes lives the most. You can make a piece of software and it's fun, but making, creating a business is really one of the best feelings in the world. So actually I'm trying to build something with Replit right now, and the thing is something that I'm encountering. So yes, it's building like a beautiful layout, but then sometimes, but see, service and available. That's the recent bug I got. So it feels like, it feels like, like it's interesting yeah on the deployment so you can go to logs here and understand why the service is unavailable so you can see there's an error you can copy that error and give it to the agent and tell it when I deploy I get this

error but basically what I'm realizing is that it's still a little work right it's work if you have this data how long does it take to build something that's actually working. Like, what I'm trying to build here is a tool that's going to analyze my videos and let anyone analyze their videos on YouTube and determine videos that have potential if you change their title and thumbnail. You know how it works sometimes. You repackage a video and it just starts getting all the new views. And I'm trying to build something that's going to help me do that. But I've already spent like six hours. And it's a process. Yeah, it is a process. You're still acting kind of like a software developer. You're acting like a software development manager.

And so you have this powerful but easily distractible intern, and you need to manage him very well. So for example, you type this prompt that's like only one sentence. I would have like spent maybe like another minute or two on it and just say, when I deploy the site, I'm getting this error, but, you know, but I'm not getting it in the preview. And so communicating in a more precise way is very important. So prompt engineering and prompting is not that different than programming. We just take away the syntax from it, right? Like you don't have to understand the syntax and a lot of the underlying details,

but you still have to be very precise. And actually, it helps when communicating with developers as well to be able to talk that way. So, you know, an app like that will probably take a couple of days, Whereas previously, even senior engineer would have taken them like a couple weeks before AI. $10,000, $15,000? Yeah, something like that. It will cost you something like that. But I would spend two, three days on it.

I think you would be able to get it. How can I learn to be better at prompting? We have a YouTube channel. We have a great developer relations, a person who creates a lot of content. His name is Matt. And so we try to train people on prompting and the underlying systems. So Replitt has a DNA and sort of education.

So when we were talking about a billion developers, these billion developers need to learn. It's not gonna come for free. So there's a learning curve associated with it. And you need to be resourceful. So you need to go to YouTube, search like how to prompt. You spend a lot of time in practice by building, changing your style.

Some people go to opening up. AI, for example, and like pick 03 or right now is GPD5 of thinking, and give it the idea and tell it, hey, I want you to structure it into a really great prompt. Prompted for me? Yeah. Yeah. So I think, you know, Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, you know, the best accelerator in the world, wrote this essay about being resourceful.

And he talks about the qualities of founders. And one quality is relentlessly resourceful. So they're able to find resources to unblock themselves and be able to not hit a wall. Because I think a lot of what entrepreneurship is is finding all these walls and really driving through them. And the way to do that is think of it as like a video game. In a video game, especially open world video games, you're often running into these problems where you don't know how to get to the next level. A lot of creative thinking, kind of moving around and finding the clue. or I think entrepreneurship and, you know, building software sort of similar to that.

Can you tell me what changed when you decided to start your company? What was this thought that was like, I need to build this? So there's starting the project versus starting the company. Starting the project was so obvious to me. Programming is hard. We need to make programming easier. That's like a very technical sort of view on things. Starting the business was less obvious because I had worked at startups.

I knew how painful they are. So I worked at Code Academy, for example, when I first came to the States. It was based on the open source version of Rapplet, but I saw how difficult it was, and it was really painful, a lot of hard work. So Rapplet was still a side project and started growing. And we really, I didn't want to start it into a business because, and I actually tried to sell it to Facebook where I was working back then. I wanted to stay there. I was very comfortable and happy there.

It's a scary feeling to leave your job and go heads down. But it was kind of de-risked because we had a platform that people really loved. We had 100,000 users plus a month. So after a lot of deliberation and really trying to think what matters to you, what creates meaning in your life and serving our customers and really achieving our mission, helping people create businesses and all of that felt very, very important. So I think it's about meaning partly. And it feels like with this tool, there are two problems in entrepreneurship.

about it used to be three, like coming up with idea, building the product and marketing. Now you're left with coming up with ideas and marketing. Right. What do you think is going to happen when everyone's building an app? Yeah. So when everyone's building an app, when that is, it's still a skill, right? It's still like we talked about. It's still a skill that you can develop.

And I think grits is very important. So resourcefulness, grits, like not quitting, like not quitting after six hours, like spending another day or two on it at least. I think domain knowledge is very important. So if you're, you have excellent domain knowledge on YouTube. And so you need to imbue, you need to give that domain knowledge into the agent. You need to prompt it in a certain way so that you're downloading your domain knowledge. And that is your competitive advantage.

But at the same time, open AI models are training on what I know. And then there's so much better at defining what a good YouTube video is. I think you still have tacit knowledge that is not necessarily. expressed in all your videos and all the content out there. That CFO at the VC firm has a lot of knowledge and skills he built up over the years that he can make into an app that you can't find on blogs and you can't find online. And so I think every one of us, as we go through life, we build up a lot of experiences that LLMs do not get to experience because they're not embodied. But do you think there will ever be time when AI sees the problem, comes up with a solution, codes the app, doesn't need a human?

You know, I might be a bit different in the Silicon Valley context in that I am quite skeptical about the AGI vision. I think we can build extremely competent agents, but you would always need the human as a driver. because I think that the way large language models work is they train on the entire corpus of texts on the internet, texts on books, all of that stuff. That is text of the past of what has happened, right, what people have put in. But can it come up with novel ideas, creative ideas, ideas based on what's changing in the world right now? Because they're not always learning.

They're not continuously learning. they're within this closed box that is their training corpus, right? It's almost like a library in a very reductive way. A library has a lot of ideas and it can remix and mix and match ideas. But a net new idea is something that I think still humans have a special place. I love your answer. But so the fear inside me is to push back by saying that all the ideas already. exist in the world. Like when we're talking about new movies or new books, they take a pre-existing

idea, but like changing characters, changing circumstances. There's always a novel idea. So think about Bitcoin. Bitcoin, are you like in crypto or Bitcoin? A little bit. Yeah. So Bitcoin, it was based on a history of 20 years people trying to build digital cash. And in the references, it's referencing hash cash. Proof of work was existing. Proof of work, the idea that You know, the machine is solving these cryptographic problems in order to secure the Bitcoin network was actually originally invented to fight spam. So there was this spam problem with the emails, but they don't have spam filters or AI. And so when I'm sending an email, I solve a cryptographic problem that is expensive to show

you that I'm not a spam agent, right? So Satoshi Nakamoto took all these ideas, and you're right, did existing ideas and put them in a new package. But he added a novel idea, which is how to solve the double spend problem. And this is the blockchain, right? So I think it's easy to think about there's nothing new under the sun. I think that's the expression. But I think if you look carefully, if you look at what Einstein did, right, like with his theories, there's always one novel insight, one really strong novel insight. It's almost like this divine intervention. There's something spiritual, about having a really novel idea,

and I'm sure you've experienced it in the past, that I think is fundamentally human. I don't know where it comes from. Yeah, and also this feeling that you're the one to bring it to the world. I feel like AI likes that. Okay, let's see. Let's see what's going on here.

Should I go to overview and try again? No? So I had redeploy. It's asking you to redeploy. So it'll take second to deploy. I'd be curious. A fixed session. utilization problem? Okay.

While it's deploying, you said a gap between a replic user and a senior Google engineer will disappear into years. Should people still learn how to code or what's going to happen to the engineering job? I think the engineering job will continue to exist, especially in very domain-specific areas, is basically what we're talking about. There are a lot of things that are not very well represented in the data. If you're a platform engineer at Google dealing with a billion users, there are knowledge and things that you understand and have learned on the job that LLMs do not know because no one's in them anywhere.

It's this tacit knowledge. And so I think those engineers will continue to exist. If you're an engineer at NASA and you're building fault-tolerant systems, if you're building provable systems, like I don't want my Tesla autopilot to be vibe-coded, right? Like there are a lot of life-and-death systems that we want engineers,

that are very low-level and very almost mathematical about it to exist. So there's a lot of situations in which engineers will continue to exist. But if you're a product builder, I would say just go ahead and build the product. Like, don't wait. Like if you need to learn coding along the way, learn it. But your mission is to build the thing. So I would start by building. And like we said, being resourceful along the way, it goes a long way.

So what should engineers who are building apps like this do now? Let's see, where is it? Oh, there we go. Okay. Sign in. We had a new issue. And it's like... Google authentication.

But that's how software engineers work. Okay, this is iteration. Got it. Yeah. So you solve a problem. Yeah. And then get a new problem. Do you think it will ever get to the stage where I don't have to do this?

Yes. Because it could actually run everything and test everything. Yes. So we... Is that we're working on? Yes. Could you talk about it? Or not yet?

Usually not yet, but let me give you some hints. Okay. Every vibe coding platform today automates generation of code and all of that stuff, which is great. But leaves a job for you that is actually very routine and uncreative and annoying, which is quality assurance and testing. Exactly. QA. So we're solving that. Okay. All right.

You're launching something, right? Is there a little pressure on the team? How are they handling? Yeah, so we have an offside next week where we're going to be going to L.A. on the beach. And at least that's like a sort of a relaxing environment. And we're going to be going really deep and working really hard. And then the week after that, we're going to be coming here.

It's called Sprint Week. And we do it before every launch. And people typically work 14-hour days non-stop. You too? Yeah. Your wife, too? Yes, yes. Who takes, okay.

There's a question coming from all the entrepreneurs have kids. Right, right. Like, how do you balance this? So we, you know, there's people talk about work-life balance. We talk about work-life harmony or work-life integration. And so, for example, like, we'll have the nanny bring the kids to the office. So they can vibe code. They can vibe code.

I sometimes sit down with my kid and, like, do a little bit of coding. But so we can see them, right? Like so and next week for the trip, everyone here could bring their families as well. So, you know, Replitt not being super young, a startup or not that young. There's a lot of people with families. So we try to like create that integration. Do you think it works? Honestly?

Or do you feel like you're missing out on your kids? I don't feel like I'm missing out. Like honestly, I don't feel like I'm missing out. So, you know, just having a bit of freedom on your schedule. So I spend like mornings with them, like I wake up. up at seven, eight, and I get to the office by 10, right? But I, you know, stay late here. We have dinners here.

But, you know, I have these two hours in the morning at least. Sometimes I'm there for dinner as well. And on the weekend, I'll work a little bit like Sunday afternoon. I'm always on my phone working, obviously, and responding and phone calls and things like that. But I feel like I'm present. What about your wife? Similar schedule? Yeah, no, she has less intense of a schedule.

I think CEO's schedule is like a little more intense. tense. And I think, I think this is, this is, you probably can relate to that. I think being a mom, there's like a more sense of guilt that I don't really, all the time. Yeah, I don't really, because they're back from school right now. Right. Yeah, but I also love to do this. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I, I don't know what to speak to that, but I feel like all things considered, we feel fairly involved in their lives. That's good. Talk to me about your mindset. Like, you're coming up with all these new things. But at the same time, we have lovable cursor. We have all of these. tools, we're going to let you do the same thing.

How do you see yourself being different and how do you survive mentally as an entrepreneur? So we're going to be the first to do what I just talked about. And it's launching in September. Yep. And last year we're the first agent on the market. And so we're always three, six, I think this feature that we're building is probably going to be a year ahead of anyone else. And that's because it's built on 10 years of innovation, infrastructure innovation.

Like every app that you're building, every workspace is backed by a cloud virtual machine built on a file system that we innovated. We even patch the Linux kernel to make things work for Replit. And so all that infrastructure allows us to always be ahead. We'll come up with an idea. Sometimes it takes two, three months to build. If you want to build the idea from scratch, I'll take you two, three years to build. And so I think RAPL will actually start to divert.

pretty soon. All these applications kind of look the same because they all generate a website. But when you talk to developers that are using Replit often moved from the other platforms, they're saying that, yeah, I mean, these tools got me like a pretty website pretty quickly, but you know, a month in, I'm just blocked. I can't, it can't manage my database. I want a place to do, to store my files. Replit ships with a database has a the object storage component, has authentication component. Like, I know you're trying to set up Google authentication, but you can also ask the agent implement a Replit authentication,

has a built-in authentication system. We built up this massive amount of infrastructure, and within the next six months to 12 months, I think it'll be really obvious how Replit differentiates. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed-sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more.

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Get a quote or find an agent today at thehartford.com slash small business. Have you seen any big mistakes that people make when building something with Replit? Because I know a lot of entrepreneurs are looking and they're probably like, okay, I'll build an up, but what's next? Like any tips for marketing or any lessons that you've seen along the way? First of all, what we talked about with prompting, overcommunicate. Overcommunicate. Be a resource or replant environment gives you a lot of tools like the logs and things like

that, try to over-communicate with the agent. I think that's the first tip that I would give. Even if you don't want to learn prompt engineering, just be over-communicative. And then on marketing, I think that's the next big bottleneck for entrepreneurs, right? Let's say building a product becomes easier and easier and easier. How do you go get it to market and communicate your value proposition, all of that? Exactly. And like why would someone buy something like this if they can just go to Replit and VipGoate the same thing, right? Yeah. If it's like an easy app.

There's definitely marketing is a big part of the answer. But also, like I said, domain knowledge that you have. Like, just think about the things that you know deep in your heart of hearts that not many people in the world know. And the other thing is, like I said, grit, like just, you know, not quitting after six hours is very differentiating. Actually, most people just quit. And so just keep going and not quit.

Like I've been building this business for 10 years. Before that, back in Jordan, I had this idea when I was 22. And I started working on it. Actually, there was an open source project called Replit back in 2010. And I just didn't quit. I knew it was kind of big. I still know it's going to be a trillion-dollar company at some point in the future. Right now we're like a $3 billion company, which is still huge.

It's amazing. Congratulations. Thank you. But it's just not quitting. I think a big part of it, I mean, you know, people talk about it all the time. Just show up every day. Just showing up is a big differentiator. Most people don't. You know, it's, things are hard. Life is full of easy things. Like, you know, you can spend four hours on TikTok, be endlessly entertained, right? So that's one. On marketing, there are a few things I could say here. One is launch, launch, launch. Just keep a lot. launching. New products, iterate. Even the same product. Like make another, another tweak, show it in a different way, iterate on your messaging, do another video, try to reach out to influencers to partner with them, go on podcasts. I've seen you're going on a lot of podcasts. I launched it three or four different times with different messaging and different things. Interesting. So the first three times didn't work? First few times didn't work. I think when we got on

hacker news the first time. It was when I said, you can try all these different languages. And I listed the languages, try Python. Ruby. That was before AI. And that was a hit because of the title change. And so again, it's grit, relentless, resourcefulness, and just iteration, iteration, iteration, iteration. Okay, what are your top three favorite AI apps?

Of course, Rep. Yeah, we'll leave that aside. Proplexity. You know, I just like going to Google and spending five minutes cleaning on links. I can just get it really fast with Porexity. I like to do deep research with the Porexity. So that's something I can't live with that. Chat Chipti.

I go to Proplexity when it's like more research. I want something from the web. Chat Tip T when I'm like brainstorming and Claude and the other ones too. Let's see. Give me something specific, like I know for a specific problem if you use anything. Maybe you build your own AI agents. Like naming, like naming products. Yeah. NameLix or what are you used?

No, I'm using ChatGPT for- Oh, you're using? I like to prompt, right? I like to prompt it and I like to kind of start different chats. This is how you can build differently because you like prompting. Yes. So you just use ChatGPD for basically anything because you can prompt it. No, I sometimes build Replit apps as well for certain things. Oh, what did you build for yourself?

Well, recently, Gino Kindles Scribe. So, you know, Amazon's new, no It has a web browser. And sometimes I don't want to use my phone. My phone somewhere else. I'm on my Kindle reading. I want to look something up. I try to open chat chiptip.

It actually doesn't render because the e-ink browser kind of is like a very old-school browser. So I build a chat chitpdee that doesn't have any JavaScript. Oh, okay, that's very much. And it took like an hour with Replet to build. So I'm often spinning up these small tools. Anytime I find, that's the thing about Replett. It becomes addictive. Once you know that you can make certain pieces of software, you'll let me.

you'll immediately see a problem, like, oh, that's shaped like a problem I could solve. Yeah, you mentioned hard moments. Talk to me about the hardest moment building this. Oh, man. I mean, there's a bit of recency bias to this, but last year we did a layoff. A replet culture, you know, you'll get it from walking around.

It's very positive. People really like each other here. You know, you ask a lot of people why you're here. Some will tell you the technology, the mission. A lot of people will tell you the people. They really enjoy working with the people. And so it was very heartbreaking to have to cut the team because the business wasn't doing well.

Before we launched Replit agents, we were in this very awkward place. You know, that's a marketing observation where we weren't good enough for the senior engineer and weren't good enough for people like you. It wasn't easy enough. We're in the middle. So you learn how to code, use Replett a little bit,

but then you graduate off of it. And so we had to add more platform features, like all the databases and things we added, but also we had to make it easier so we can have access to a larger group of people such as yourself. But at the time, we had 130 employees. We're burning money like crazy. And we had to lay off the team. And we had just actually come to this office. And this office is huge.

Because I was so optimistic about our future. I knew that AI is going to be really big. I knew we're building the right thing, but we came here. We were burning all this money. And then we just had to do the layoff. And we we cut the team. And I think we cut 30, 40% of the team. But then a lot of people started leaving because, well, the office is like empty. It was like really dark place. Was that when you were making like $2 million a year? Yeah. 2000, 24 last year. Last year. And you walk around here. It's very gloomy. No one's really happy. I used to come here and I was like, I can't wait to go home. And I think anyone, most people in our place at the time, would just call it quits and try to sell the company and do something like that.

But instead, the people that are working on agent, we motivated them. We told them, we think this is the thing that's going to work. And we told them, look, if this doesn't work, there's no future. We have to make this work. And so the core team that was working on an agent, everyone stayed and worked 12, 14-hour days. And you got to 144 million. Yes, in less than a year. I heard this story that Peter Thiel fast on investing, but then you send him your graph. Did they ever reply? He didn't reply. Peter Thiel invested in our series B round in 2021. But then I went to pitch him in 2022 or 23.

Just before Chad Cheptie, I was trying to tell him, hey, AI is very important. It's going to change the nature of coding and programming. And he said, you know, Peter Thiel is very skeptical of buzzwords. And he's known to be a contrarian. So he doesn't like anything that's popular. And so he was like, when you're saying AI, it's meaningless. It's almost like saying computers. You know, don't come here with these buzzwords. And he basically said I was just engaging in hype. You know, we had raised that a big valuation. I'm trying to justify that valuation. And the entire meeting, I'm trying to tell him, make, just look at the demo. And he wouldn't look at the demo.

And then I remember four months later, I saw him on TV talking about Chat Chiptie and saying, oh, it's actually a fundamental innovation. I was like, I try to tell you. And, you know, to his credit, he changed his opinion. And the Fenders Fund invested a big amount in Cognition, which is another agent coding company. But I did send him an email saying,

after they invested in cognition and told him, well, you know, I have a lot of respect for you. And that conversation was actually very hard to take in because I felt like I was doing something wrong. But I hope you can see that I, at that moment I saw the future where things were headed. And I'm glad you pushed further and build whatever you built. Yeah. Right?

Because it's so demotivating to hear things like that from people who are super respect and super smart. Exactly. It's both demotivating but can be motivating. It's about how you frame it, right? I've become one where I'm actually. more motivated to prove doubters wrong. Hators, doubters, whatever. You transform that energy into changing the world.

It's like there's nothing better than having a lot of doubters and people, naysayers, and actually proving them wrong. It's a great feeling, and I recommend it to everyone. I wish, for all the entrepreneurs, I wish that you're going to have a lot of doubters because then when you succeed, that's when, that's in the feeling. comes in, yes. I mean, if you talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and you say, what is meaningful about your life? And they say the money's cool. You know, money does change your life and it allows you more time to and more resources to build and do more things. But the things that a lot of

entrepreneur kind of come back to is who they were, what they were before they created this thing. They keep remembering it. It was like, the struggle. Everyone doubted me. But I persisted and I succeeded. And that's the best feeling in the world. Exactly. Let's talk about the future. I have two small kids. And yesterday I unlocked another AI fear for me

because I stumbled upon an article that said that recent graduates, just graduated from college, they're struggling to find their first jobs because there are 15% less jobs. Yeah. I'm like, oh my goodness. So I'm worrying about myself

and I also have to worry about my kids. What do you think about your kids' future? What are you teaching them? Look, I think there's deep question about where we're headed as society. What is Silicon Valley's responsibility? What is the responsibility of the government? And I think we can have hours discussion on that. I don't think anyone has a good grasp on these problems.

But locally, when I'm thinking about my kids and what we're going to do in the future, I think about this idea of being more of a polymath, right? Like, if you think about, you know, even before the Industrial Revolution, the people the most memorable, like Leonardo da Vinci, for example, did a lot of things. It was an engineer, was an artist, was all sorts of things, right? And the kind of elite education used to be about understanding a lot of things, about spending a lot of time learning about everything. And I think this is where the education needs to be headed, where the Industrial Revolution created a world, where humans are treated like machines. If you think about corporations or factories,

factories are one big machine, and every individual person kind of doing the assembly of one thing is a part. And I think it was very dehumanizing. I think we're going to go back to a moment of time where there's a lot more opportunities for entrepreneurship. Even when you join a company, you're going to be judged by,

how much of a real business impact you're going to have as opposed to how task-oriented you are. What would you say to, for example, girls, right? I have two girls. And the way a lot of girls are brought up or like find a job that's sustainable, find something long-term, find something that's safe. And you're saying that everyone basically needs to become a generalist

and also an entrepreneur to generate ideas. What would you say to those women watching? How do you change your mindset? Well, my wife is my co-founder. I think we both, Haya and I share background of being misunderstood and being, you know, growing up in a culture that we didn't feel like really fit our way of thinking and we're different. And so maybe that shaped how we are and our attraction to entrepreneurship and to trying to change how people. do certain things or change the world. I think there's a lot that culture imbues on sort of gender roles,

but I don't think girls are fundamentally, like, sort of predisposed to a certain type of job. And so I think a lot of it is about upbringing and what we tell our kids and how we educate them. And so I think my advice will apply to both genders. I think that teaching them to be resourceful, you know, actually, like, not hiding from them the fact that the future is very uncertain. We're in a moment of time that's very different.

It's very different from when I grew up, from when your grandparents grew up, or their grandparents grew up, there was a lot more certainty about the world. Right now, the world is very uncertain. And the way you're going to have to learn and the way you're going to have to adapt to this wall is going to be very different. It's going to be very difficult, but we're here for you and we're going to try to figure it out together. How far ahead you think is time when a solopreneur is going to build a billion dollars? company. Is it a billion dollar in revenue or is a billion dollar valuation? Valoration. So let's say... This is a hundred million in revenue.

I'll say 10x. Yeah, I'll say 20x, so maybe a 50 million in revenue. I don't think it's that far. Like if someone like John Cheney was able to build a two million, two, three million hour revenue. It's very niche B2B, high check. I feel like a 50 million company is a B2C company, which requires data. Why not? Like, He has these enterprise seats, you know, who goes into his companies, you know, he has a platform with a lot of content that he's selling. I could see it be a $50 million dollar ARR business. In the next couple of years?

In the next few years, yeah, I don't see why not. But again, it's not just about the software, it's about the domain knowledge that he has. Yeah, I love it. Thank you so much. My pleasure. It was amazing. Great meeting. Thank you for coming.

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