00:30:43 · Haya Odeh, Aditya Agarwal, Ruchi Sanghvi, Amjad Masad
[00:30:43] S1: What sucks? Can someone tell me what suck about it? Because if I know, I would be like more fulfilled, to [00:30:50] S2: be honest. I mean, Ruchi, you say you don't wanna put this on the wall, but that describes you completely. It does. Like every time we have a victory lap about SPC, you kinda smack me down with this 10 things that are not yet great about it. Or mean, you could be better. Could be better, exactly. [00:31:05] S3: You could [00:31:05] S1: be better. Can I add another layer into it? Please. It comes also from like discipline in the army. It's like when you are operating as a soldier, it's very important to just like keep going and showing up every single day. And like sometimes, feelings has its own time, but sometimes you just need to do what it needs to be It's really, [00:31:29] S3: yep. [00:31:30] S0: Counterintuitively seeking pain reduces pain because I think most companies delay pain and that accumulates over time, like a pivot that is really hard or conversation or firing someone that, yeah, firing someone was always painful and most people delay it and becomes more painful over time. And so I think it actually over the long term just reduces pain. [00:31:57] S3: So one other thing, and this is especially relevant for our founders here, that in the early days, Replit hired from hackathons, very niche communities, indie game worlds. Where do you think elite talent still hides? [00:32:13] S0: That's it. I mean, Haya mentioned the Army. Actually, a lot of our salespeople are like Marines and all sorts of
00:32:13 · Amjad Masad, Ruchi Sanghvi, Haya Odeh, Aditya Agarwal
[00:32:13] S0: That's it. I mean, Haya mentioned the Army. Actually, a lot of our salespeople are like Marines and all sorts of [00:32:21] S3: I'm mostly asking this because it's really difficult to hire people. And usually people tend to ignore these areas for recruiting. So army is one. [00:32:29] S0: If I'm being honest, that awkward young sort of engineer, a lot of companies still overlook them. And now there's this mindset around new grads that you don't need them or you don't want them. And I think there's a lot of amazing new grads that are coming up right now that there isn't a lot of demand on them. So I think you can find a lot of young people. I think it keep changes. It's sort of like Moneyball. If you haven't watched this movie, it's about a baseball team that assembles the weirdest people that have some kind of value, but they're not in demand in the market. So every moment of time sort of changes. I do think that it's shifting to... There's so much doom and gloom about younger new grads, new talents that I think is probably a good place to go look. [00:33:22] S1: So when Aditya came to Replit to speak, I wish you were there, he spoke about hunger. Like people needs to be really hungry all the time to fit in the culture. That stuck with me so much. So I was like, how can we create principles when we are interviewing people? Because I'm still in the top [00:33:43] S2: of the
00:33:43 · Aditya Agarwal, Haya Odeh, Amjad Masad, Ruchi Sanghvi
[00:33:43] S2: of the [00:33:43] S1: funnel when a designer, we're interviewing them, they meet me first, right? Because I'm the most opinionated person. So where do we find them? They must use Replit. They are from the Replit community and they need to be hungry. [00:34:02] S2: Hungry. [00:34:03] S1: And when I like, okay, how do you measure hunger? And I'm like, okay, I kept thinking about that. It's like, do they have site projects? Are they actually opinionated about this AI world? Do they wanna add impact in Replit? So that's a venue that we, and hackathons that we are partnered with hackathons. So we like, oh, this is a really cool project. You should come join Replit. [00:34:29] S2: Yeah. I mean, for what it's worth, my take is if you're trying to hire an engineer today for your startup and that person cannot immediately pull up 10 things that they have built over the last just two weeks for their personal life to optimize stuff, to look up. It would be insane if you haven't done that. That demonstrates a fundamental lack of either hunger or curiosity, both of which [00:34:51] S0: are just critical to, I think, early stage engineers. Here's a sort of a mispriced asset right now. Silicon Valley always sort of looked down on consultants. Actually think consultants probably are very well set up for the AI age because I think AI benefits the journalists and who's the ultimate journalist is sort of like the consultant types. [00:35:17] S3: I'm skeptical, but [00:35:20] S2: what happens think next you're gonna say MBAs, okay. [00:35:23] S0: Well, I mean, maybe MBAs too.
00:35:23 · Amjad Masad, Aditya Agarwal
[00:35:23] S0: Well, I mean, maybe MBAs too. [00:35:25] S2: Actually, it's not crazy. [00:35:26] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Started a team of VibeCoders and they're doing fantastic. We give them this mission of like, just go around the company, find inefficiencies and solve them. They're doing amazing work. They went to our support team, our CSAT score went up, our recruiting team, they're helping them. And so you get to just hire journalists and give them all the AI tools and just say, Help me make more revenue or make the company run better.
00:35:52 · Aditya Agarwal
[00:35:52] S2: It's interesting, Amjad and Haya, your Replit as a company, the hiring strategy, the people that you have reminds me a lot of Facebook early on, which is there's a bunch of folks. Facebook did a fantastic job. Early on, Facebook was just given so much grief, like, oh, you guys are a simple PHP kind of crud website that allows kids to essentially go and upload things. And nobody took us seriously. And our take was that we will hire a bunch of folks who are well credentialed, have gone to the schools, but we'll also, anybody who hacks into the website, fantastic, you can come work at Facebook. This is how we got kids from high school dropouts Louisiana. From From Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who basically were going to kind of a community college in Louisiana, or like somebody from Atlanta, Georgia. And all these people who we otherwise wouldn't have hired, Facebook also did one of the first kind of essentially coding puzzles on the internet. And the thing I remember about all these people were that they were so hungry. They would come in with a chip on their shoulder with something to prove, and they just worked like 10x harder than anyone else. It was incredible. And coming to Replit, I got that same energy, and I think that's amazing. It's so hard to capture.
00:37:05 · Haya Odeh, Amjad Masad, Aditya Agarwal
[00:37:05] S1: The champions in Replit, they are the people who couldn't find a job. Like when they are looking, they need to put them in a bucket. It's like, you are a designer. You only design. You don't vibe code. You don't code. You don't do PM. Or like all of the other things. You're a PM, you just do X, Y, Z. When And they come to me, I was just like, I actually don't know what I wanna do, but I can do it. I was like, welcome to Replit, this is the perfect place for you to be. [00:37:30] S0: A meta point here. So I think we're sort of rolling back the hyper specialization that happened during the industrial era. You create the eraser on the pencil in the factory line, right? That was like a very specific thing for a very specific time. And I think we're headed to a place of more generalists. Like the titles will just get shorter where your title could be just product. You're doing product management, design, engineering, doesn't really matter. Your title is just product. [00:38:00] S2: I always get asked this question, which is what is it like to work with your significant other? How do you weather the ups and downs? How does that kind of like, is that something you would recommend? So I get the chance to, I don't often get the chance to ask this question, but what is it like working together? [00:38:20] S0: Do you like that question [00:38:21] S2: when you get asked that? You know, I have my stock answer, I can kind of, I'll give the answer after you give your answer, okay, yeah. [00:38:28] S0: That's fantastic, what do you think?