The a16z Show - Amjad Masad on Going Direct, Building Replit, and the Future of Software

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

Recorded live at the New Media Summit, Erik Torenberg sits down with Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad to discuss founder-led storytelling, building in public, and the role of media in company building. Masad reflects on Replit’s decade-long journey, including the years before the company’s recent breakout growth, and explains why communicating a vision can be just as important as executing on it. He argues that for many founders, especially those building ambitious products ahead of the market, telling a compelling story is often necessary to attract talent, capital, and early believers. The conversation explores social media, authenticity, public communication, company-building, and how founders can develop a voice that resonates beyond their product. Along the way, Masad shares lessons from building Replit, navigating controversy, and why he believes founders should think carefully about when to go direct and what story they're trying to tell.   Resources: Follow Amjad Masad on X: https://x.com/amasad Follow Erik Torenberg on X: https://x.com/eriktorenberg Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Being canceled is a choice. You can choose to get canceled and retreat from the public eye, but I think if you're still out there, at some point, honestly, the haters kind of give up. Some people ask, hey, how should I think about X versus other platforms? You have to understand the meta, because the way to go viral is to dress up your argument, your worldview in the current conversation.

Twitter's influence is amazing, but it tends to be elite kind of inside group influence. I think Instagram, Facebook still, YouTube is where you. you get to the early majority. Does every CEO need to become an influencer now? Look, I think there's so many paths to success. I don't think there's one. Replit would have probably died if I wasn't telling a story that is larger than the company itself.

Dario is an example where he's not playing the social media game. The product sort of speaks where it's off. So I think it comes down to the... For years, Replit wasn't the overnight success people see today. Long before the company's recent growth, Amjad Masad spent years communicating a vision that many people thought was too ambitious, too early, or simply unrealistic. That experience shaped his belief that for founders,

storytelling isn't separate from company building. In some cases, it's a prerequisite. Recorded live at the new media summit, Amjad and I discuss why founders should build in public, how to develop a public voice, and what it takes to communicate a vision before the rest of the world can see it. We also talk about authenticity,

social media, founder-led media, and why some of the most important company building happens long before the business itself is obvious. Amjad, thank you for joining us. Of course. So RepLid is a 10-year-old company. For the last two years, it's gone absolutely vertical. But there was a period of time well before that

where the company was in the zeitgeist, partially because of your go-direct efforts. I mean, you're one of the best CEOs on X. You're also now getting big on Instagram and other platforms. What has the business impact been of your efforts going direct And does every CEO need to become an influencer now? Or how have you sort of conceived of this? Yeah, I think reflu would have probably died if I wasn't telling a story that is larger than the company itself.

The company wasn't successful commercially, but we've been very successful at fundraising, recruiting. And I think if you build a company that's successful right out of the gate commercially, you might not need to do all of that. But if you're trying to meme a dream into reality, I think you're, you have to play that game. And so yeah, I think otherwise we would have not existed because we had to do that for so many years before, I mean, it turns out everything I said was true, but at the time it wasn't real. It was a dream.

Yeah. And I mean, you at one point decided to go big on this. You weren't always big on Twitter. I mean, you started, and a lot of people here, a lot of people who are CEOs, maybe it doesn't come supernaturally to them and they have to make a decision of like, you know, am I going to do this and if so how do I get good at it? What was your journey to saying, hey, I'm really going to invest in this and I'm going to get good at this? Well, I think the journey starts outside of Twitter even is like how do you get good at communicating? How do you get good at public speaking?

And so I always wanted to be able to be an influencer, for lack of better words. And I remember I was in New York when I first came to the States and I had a terrible stage fright. I'd be sitting here and my heart rate would be like 150, I'd be sweating. And I thought, how do I deal with this? How do you get better at this? And I went and took improv classes in New York and then took a storytelling class and I'm like a big fan of exposure therapy. Anything you're afraid of, just go do more of it until you're desensitized. And the best way to get desensitized is to just make a fool of yourself every day doing improv. And I ended up doing shows and got pretty good at it. And then I think the benefit that I had is Replit didn't blow up right out of the gate.

My personal profile had this very linear growth to it. And so I could make mistakes with very little attention on me. And I made a lot of PR mistakes. I think still if you go to Hacker News, sort by the top 10, we had a PR crisis in Hacker News where I had an issue with some ex-intern at Replit where I just totally botched that communication on that. But still, that wasn't largely, I was still within the Hacker News community, which they still hate me, which is fine. They'll hate you anyways. That's like the right of passage. Hacker News loves you, then they hate you, then you become successful. And then so you kind of make mistakes, and they're not at the public stage just yet. And so the stakes gets higher as I'm able, it's sort of a progressive overload in powerlifting. You're sort of carrying more weight. It never gets easier, but you're able to do more and more over time. And so, you know, I feel for the founders that are just now kind of like their companies blowing up, they're in the public eye.

And you can see founders are big now trillion-dollar companies that are really fucking up on a massive stage. But getting the reps and has been super helpful. And so is that your advice? People want to get just exposure therapy, just one tweet a day? What's the best way to get started to get really good at this? Yeah. So I think a few things. One is the concept of building in public.

It wasn't coined when I started doing it. But the idea is that, look, as a CEO, you're going to do a good amount of writing and communicating to your employees, to your investors. You can just do it publicly, right? I mean, I've always been this believer that there aren't really a lot of secrets that you need to keep inside a company. And so a lot of your otherwise writing that would be in private, you can put it public. And that way you carry people in the journey with you.

and you're getting the reps in. So whenever there's a piece of communication or a story I want to tell and there's a choice between public and private, I might buy a source public. I often write something publicly and then paste it on Slack. They just say, this is what I wrote.

And so that's been helpful. The other thing is authenticity. I think being yourself is kind of like a big radical thing that maybe started happening with Elon maybe 10 years ago, but CEOs were supposed to be. be this very polished thing. They had to kind of be filtered through this prism of PR and journalists are

kind of the way to get to the public. But you see kind of Elon being the first kind of building in public platform. I think Zuck to some extent as well, just seeing Zuck at some point when journalists kind of turned on him, he started going direct. And you start following their stories. And it's like Zuck changed the entire narrative around him by just being himself and actually talking directly to people. And I think the story of Trump is also very illustrative. I think Trump was successful

despite the negative bias in the press. And it was mostly Twitter initially. People forget that, but Trump had amazing bangers. What was my favorite one? I've never seen a thin person drink Diet Coke. Which is true. Or Kanye,

Kanye's banger is, I hate waking up in the plane and I see a water in front of me. No, I got to take care of this. I don't have a manager. I can't be managed. Right. Can't be managed.

You see these people come up and people start associating with them and obviously they're very authentic. Yeah. And we're like, okay, there's this shift in people's minds where they crave a authenticity. Hunter Biden. Yeah. Yeah.

He's on fire now. You can get away with it. He can post his way to presidency for sure. Yeah. It's funny. You mentioned the intern thing because I remember that. But I also remember forgetting it too. And a lot of people say, oh, what if I say the wrong thing?

What if I get my company into trouble in some sort of controversy or scandal? Is it just that attention spans are so short that is just like the next situation? What do you say about that? Well, I think it's deadly. Like, PR crisis can be deadly if you retreat afterward. If you're not in the news. And I think the thing about, I think, Trump, Elon, et cetera, is that there is the next thing. And by the way, then actually it could be worse.

But just the fact that you're still in there, you're still in the game, people will be like, oh, this guy's unkillable, uncannelable. Being canceled is a choice. So you can choose to get canceled and retreat from the public eye. But I think if you're still out there, at some point, honestly, the haters kind of give up. They're like, all right, I guess we can't do anything to this guy. Let's go to the next guy.

There's this great book, so you think you've been shamed. And it chronicles the stories of a number of people who've gotten canceled over the past 15 years. And that's basically the takeaway is that the people who are truly canceled, just the ones who shut up, they're the ones who retreat, but the ones who just keep going and forgettable. I mean, there's so many people, Brian Johnson, is an example. They've just revived their image or just presented a whole new image.

People just forget the thing that they were almost canceled. I will say the mental aspect of it is pretty difficult. I was going to ask that next. Yeah, because I think that the story's been told a trillion times, but like in the Assister of Village, if you become an outcast, that's pretty difficult. deadly. Like, you can literally die. You can't find food. And so our limbic system, when you get this massive reaction online, you're kind of in this fight or flight, and it can really affect

you. Like, you can't sleep. Some people can't eat, and it could be really damaging. But I think, again, exposure therapy helps a lot. Like, the first one is really hard. The second one is like, ah, it'll blow over. But also having good principles. Like, I think acting on principles is important. no matter what people think of what's happening at Anthropic, it's absolutely true, I think, in my mind that they believe everything they're doing. They believe in safety. They believe in their mission. And I think that gives them incredible strength to keep going in.

And obviously, oftentimes principles and self-interest coincide, and that's a good thing. But you can ascribe what they're doing to some kind of cynical marketing. ploy, but the strength that they have is based on their principles, and that really keeps them going. Yeah. I mean, earlier on, you were alluding to the stakes are really high with these. What advice might you have for

an anthropic or open AI in terms of like some of the communication challenges or opportunity? It's obviously way above my grave. I've never, you know, battled with a United States government. Not yet. One day goals.

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

that was subject to export control. So they had this ad where it's like military tanks going and like surrounding the Mac and the Mac in the middle. And it's like showing that this thing is so powerful. The US government doesn't want, you know, doesn't want you to have it.

So you should go buy it. And so it's like a tremendous marketing opportunity. For them, it's already kind of their reputation is pretty big. But even if But even if they can't get Fable back on the market, you know, they still win the PR game of like where a company is kind of principled and doing the right thing and all of that. So I think just my advice would be not to stress out too much

and not to honestly just sit back and let it play out. You were describing the mental game as a lot of things we'll hear from CEOs is, oh, I don't want to have to tweet, and then I'm in meetings. Now I think about the responses and I have to respond back. And now I'm in sort of conflict. You don't have to respond back. That's the thing. Right.

You don't have to respond back at all. I mean, that's another thing you have to learn is to, like, not feed the trolls. It's, you know, that reply is like, oh, I'm going to get back. It's like, what's that, I think, New Yorker comic was like, babe, come to bed. I was like, no, someone's wrong in the internet. And it's like, it's very tempting. But actually, it's kind of.

of the baller thing to do is like, oh, yeah, the clubs can fight on my comments. I don't need to worry about it. So I think it's a trap to think that anything you put out, you need to immediately defend. Obviously, if something is getting a lot of airplay and people are misunderstanding you, I think you should correct it. And again, you should do it in the principled way. You should do it because, hey, this is what I actually believe. Here's what you got wrong.

But don't be overly defensive about it. Like, don't appear that, oh, this is something that you're getting emotional about. Because, again, anytime publicly, if you, any time you show weakness publicly, it actually feeds the trolls and feeds the haters because they feel like they can get to you. Yeah. What advice you give for when companies are being dragged by someone on Twitter or in the press or when to respond versus when not to engage. I think that's just like a arts thing and I think it comes down to like business impact. Like will it actually have business impact on my business? You know, for example, like last year in July,

we had this story with the founder of Saster, Jason Lemkin, where Jason had just started vibe coding, had never vibe coded or coded anything before. And as he's working with Replit agent, the Replit agent sort of misunderstood him or something like that and then deleted the database. And the time we didn't have production development separation. And so the production database, now we actually separate them by default.

Like the Replit agent can't even write to production database. You can only read. And, and, and, we have backups. We have snapshots. You can go back to a certain day or time or whatever. So the mistake that the Replit Asian did was one click away from being fixed. But from his perspective, he didn't know that.

And Replit Asian started freaking out. Models at the time used to get really anxious, especially Claude. And he tweeted the screenshot where Replit Asian was like going kind of nuts. And, you know, it started gaining traction. gaining traction, gaining traction. And in my mind, I know, like, we're already fixed his issue. But, but like the story has become so massive. And, you know, obviously it's going to have business impact and it's going to be in the press.

And so I could go out and fight and just say, well, we did nothing wrong. We had backups. You know, I could say it's a user error, whatever. But I think the right thing to do was to own up to it, the fact that we didn't have development production separation. is a bad thing. And two days later, we rolled out that fixed. And so my response got a lot of positive interaction and got a lot of airplay because I started with, hey, we messed up. And this is what we could have done better. But sometimes you can give attention to things that you don't want to

give attention to, especially once your profile grow. Especially if you apologize. Yeah, especially if I apologize. So I would say just kind of focus on the business impact. Yeah. And you mentioned earlier. By the way, Jason is a huge fan now. He runs his entire Sasser business, multi-million dollar business. With him, another employee in like 10 agents based on replant agents.

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

Look, I think there's so many paths to success. I don't think there's one. Like, yeah, there are a lot of companies where this is not the CEO that's out there. Like, Grock with a cue and like Sonny is the person on Twitter. But the CEO is kind of not on there. And they've done a great job. And obviously, they kind of, the company is great. IP is great, but they also, they memeed it down into success

because I think part of the story that's not being told there is that they actually had a lot of trouble fundraising in Silicon Valley. They had to kind of go to Saudi and all of that. And so that's an example where the CEO is not out there. You look at Dario as an example where he's not playing the social media game, kind of the product sort of speaks for itself, and he's writing these big essays. So I think it comes down to the predisposition of the CEO,

Do you actually enjoy it? Do you think you can be good at it? I think forcing people to do it where they can come out and be totally cringe and be actually negative on the brand. Obviously, they can learn over time and do it, but it really depends on the situation. Have you gotten any leverage your way

to lower the activation energy in terms of any help doing it? Is it possible for others too? Or is it just all you, just whenever you think something? Well, I think I have the benefit of this long period of incubation. I think that if your company is already high profile, you don't want to kind of practice in public.

And so maybe getting some coaching earlier on. Some people ask, hey, how should I think about X versus other platforms? Maybe their customers aren't on X, et cetera. How do you think about that? Well, I think X is very good for the sort of Silicon Valley, for tech, for kind of the in-group messaging, for maybe one hop outside of Silicon Valley, which is kind of the early adopter, if you're targeting early adopters. And so I would also cluster hacker news within that as well.

But it actually, once you want to go to late adopters or like early majority, if you think about this kind of bell curve of adoption, Twitter becomes actually not very impactful there. It can still be very important where, like, you know, just this morning journalists reached out to me to ask to talk to me about a tweet that I made about some of the stuff that's happening with Anthropic. And so, like, Twitter can still be a place where it is the start of stories.

And that's another thing, you know, back to the conversation of why this is important is the landscape shifted so much that journalists report on Twitter. So it's kind of starts on Twitter. So Twitter's influence is amazing, but it tends to be elite kind of inside group influence.

I think Instagram, Facebook still, YouTube is where you get to the early majority. And I think I was late to YouTube, to Instagram. Like, you know, I just started focusing on it and like maybe February or something like that.

Yeah. And we're getting an insane amount of views and the followership kind of... You started to build this clips machine of your interviews. The podcast's interesting because it's a medium that could be turned into every other format. Right, right. So I feel like I should have maybe done Instagram like a year or two ago. Yeah. So I was like a little late on that.

I thought it was going to be harder. Well, it turns out you could just like, you know, do these clipping and just grow, not just your account. You can grow a lot of different accounts that way. And but I would start with Twitter because the again, that's where the news starts to happen. This is where you can have outsized influence. And are you bullish on the platform? Do you think that in the next three to five years that will stay the same?

I think it is actually kind of risky because the algorithm changes so much. And you know, you might do something that angers, the power that powers that be. and, you know, very, you know, without anyone knowing, things might change for you in terms of your reach on X. And so I think there's less transparency than Twitter 1.0. So it is a little, it is a little risky. But I think the platform has so much staying power. Yeah.

Like, it's really hard to replace. Like, you can change the name. You can destroy the brand. And you, and the platform will still be, yeah, very valuable. Like it is, it is, it is one of those things that I think there's no way you can avoid it. Who are some CEOs or leaders that inspire you in terms of how they go director that you've learned from looking at what would they do? Obviously, we were all, you know, in the school of Bologi and Lulu, who we had this group in a pandemic. What was it called?

To go indirect. Yeah, then go indirect. Yeah. And so we kind of talked about strategies and kind of critiqued some of our approaches or other people's approaches. So that was very, very useful. I think biology was kind of earlier this stuff. I think where I might disagree with biology is that I don't think you should be antagonistic to reporters. There's no reason to.

You can actually be friends with them and they can be positive towards you. You can help them out. humans at the end of the day and they respond to incentives. And I think we've done pretty well in maintaining our relationships with, and obviously Sharon Oz recently joined us and that up-leveled our game with reporters and more of that type of media. So I think, but studying that is very important. I think there's enough content out there to get started with.

but let's see who else Palmer, Alex Carp, Elon. Obviously, I mentioned Elon. You know, I think Sotcha's doing such a great job. What about what he's doing you? I think it is much less tweet-length things, but he's able to put out very well-reasoned arguments

that playing to the side guys in a very smart way and advance their point of view, like the essay he put out over the weekend, you got 20, 30 million views. Like, you very few essays kind of get that much attention. But it comes at a time where everyone is thinking about token costs. Everyone's thinking about, and this is important thing about going direct. You can go direct and get zero views.

Like, it's really easy to not pay attention to you. You have to understand the meta. And I think that's the thing that's more time, than posting. Posting is not time-consuming. The thing that's time-consuming is understanding what is the larger debate because the way to go viral

is to couch or dress up your argument, your worldview in the current conversation. And I thought that what Sartia did with his essays is very much at the heart of what the discussion is today and then he advanced

the point of view of Microsoft. Yeah. I think it's a good place to wrap. Please give it up for a job. Thank you, man. Thanks, Alan. See sure. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast.

If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcast, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our substack at A16Z.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only. Should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund.

Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com forward slash disclosures.