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?
00:38:28 · Amjad Masad, Aditya Agarwal, Haya Odeh
[00:38:28] S0: That's fantastic, what do you think? [00:38:32] S2: You say, and you Beat that, okay. Shit. [00:38:39] S1: I met Amjad at work. At the beginning it was like a lot of conflicts, but at work, because I'm a designer, he's an engineer. But then later on when he asked me for the logo, I like the guy, so I did the logo for him for free. But then fast forward, I mean, for real, long time for free. But the point is I kept enjoying doing work with Amjad, games, designing with him, and like problem solving. And part of my journey of finding Replit, because I wanted to find a job, I couldn't find a job. I mean, I immigrated to The United States without having an opportunity that lasted for so many years. So I had to find a side project, and that happened to be Replit, and Amjad helped me in building Replit, and that my side project became the company. Like I didn't know that I was creating a product. So we always worked together, and then when it was time to create the company together, we were ready. It was a hard decision, but we were already been working and designing. And to his experience in Codecademy as an entrepreneur, I never understood what they're doing. He spends nights, weekends, like, what are you guys are doing? Drugs. It was stuff like, why are you sleeping at work? And I only understood when we created Replit together. I feel that it brought our relationship closer. And I like to do things with my family. I like to be with them at every single minute. I feel like life is too short. So anyway, that's getting
00:38:39 · Haya Odeh, Aditya Agarwal
[00:38:39] S1: I met Amjad at work. At the beginning it was like a lot of conflicts, but at work, because I'm a designer, he's an engineer. But then later on when he asked me for the logo, I like the guy, so I did the logo for him for free. But then fast forward, I mean, for real, long time for free. But the point is I kept enjoying doing work with Amjad, games, designing with him, and like problem solving. And part of my journey of finding Replit, because I wanted to find a job, I couldn't find a job. I mean, I immigrated to The United States without having an opportunity that lasted for so many years. So I had to find a side project, and that happened to be Replit, and Amjad helped me in building Replit, and that my side project became the company. Like I didn't know that I was creating a product. So we always worked together, and then when it was time to create the company together, we were ready. It was a hard decision, but we were already been working and designing. And to his experience in Codecademy as an entrepreneur, I never understood what they're doing. He spends nights, weekends, like, what are you guys are doing? Drugs. It was stuff like, why are you sleeping at work? And I only understood when we created Replit together. I feel that it brought our relationship closer. And I like to do things with my family. I like to be with them at every single minute. I feel like life is too short. So anyway, that's getting [00:40:25] S2: I mean, I actually think you have covered a lot of what
00:40:25 · Aditya Agarwal, Amjad Masad, Ruchi Sanghvi
[00:40:25] S2: I mean, I actually think you have covered a lot of what [00:40:28] S0: I gave in my longer answer. My son, our son, Shams, recently, six years old, came up to me. He's like, you should hire more students. I was like, Who are you? [00:40:41] S2: He wants to work at Replit? He wants to work at Replit. [00:40:45] S0: You should hire more students. And he wears the Replit logo everywhere he He it. And my younger brother also works at Replit, he's a engineer. But look, Haya talked about all the good things. The challenging thing is other people, like other people's experiences of you, right? Like, I think that, are they gonna be comfortable giving her feedback about me or giving me feedback about her? How do you create this comfort level? How do you not make it awkward, like in meetings and things like that? And that's the thing to make sure that it's something to work on. The other thing is you want to make sure that the company is meritocratic. So anyone can get fired, right? And at some point I did fire my brother, I brought him back, but he's working really hard now, so he's good. Yeah, I [00:41:41] S3: mean Seek the pain. Yes. [00:41:43] S2: But [00:41:45] S0: the problem with family, there's a lot of good things about family business, but part of the problem is like, a lot of us come from countries where nepotism is like a big problem. You need to be aware of that. Like you shouldn't approach this with a nepotistic mindset. It should actually be meritocratic. Everyone should be putting their best.