How To Build The Future: Paul Graham & Amjad Masad

00:19:47 · Paul Graham, Amjad MasadPlay from here

[00:19:47] S1: Okay, now the agents just like generate the code and that's [00:19:49] S0: Now you can just give them a shell. You just give them a shell and they'll just write shell command. They can do everything with like cat and basic shell commands. They're very good [00:20:02] S1: at But you needed to have the IDE early on because the agents were bad. Yes. Yes. And so that was one of the things that enabled you to be so early. [00:20:10] S0: Yes. [00:20:11] S1: Could you have done it any earlier? No. Because you got it just at the point where it barely worked at Yes, [00:20:20] S0: and it barely worked. And like when we launched it, it was in beta, and I would say 50% of it. [00:20:26] S1: I remember I would go over to your house and you would show me things and they would not work. [00:20:30] S0: Yeah, maybe 50% is too harsh. Would say like, yeah, 30% of the time it would not work. [00:20:38] S1: Okay, so why would users tolerate that? [00:20:42] S0: Because it was such a magical experience. [00:20:44] S1: Oh, and also presumably when they were cutting and pasting stuff back and forth between chat, GPT, that also wouldn't work either. But if they couldn't program at all, then programming 70% of the time was

00:20:44 · Paul Graham, Amjad MasadPlay from here

[00:20:44] S1: Oh, and also presumably when they were cutting and pasting stuff back and forth between chat, GPT, that also wouldn't work either. But if they couldn't program at all, then programming 70% of the time was [00:20:57] S0: a huge improvement. Well, initial set of customers that started paying us a lot of money were people who would otherwise go on outsourcing sites and go get outsourced programmers. So now you you you either, like, pay, like, a $100,000 to get an app done for for, like, an engineer somewhere or you pay Replit, like, a thousand dollars. So it was like this two order of magnitude difference, still is today, between getting an engineer and having Replit do it. [00:21:26] S1: Yeah. Arguably, the whole existence of the outsourcing shops was evidence of a market there. Yes. Because I thought of them as just terrible. Like, who would ever want this? Right? Who would pay money to these people to make... Pay vast amounts of money to make this terrible software? Yes. But instead I should have thought, wow, that's a sign of demand. Yes. Yeah. Never thought. I would look at it [00:21:49] S0: like So a we try to satisfy this demand in a few ways. Initially, when we had all these teenage hackers on the platform, we built something called Replit Bounties. I don't know you [00:21:58] S1: remember I remember Replit Bounties. [00:22:00] S0: And it was trying to get at that. I was like, okay, AI is not there yet. [00:22:03] S1: They were gonna become the new outsourcing shops, just like piecemeal as a bunch of teenagers.

00:22:03 · Paul Graham, Amjad MasadPlay from here

[00:22:03] S1: They were gonna become the new outsourcing shops, just like piecemeal as a bunch of teenagers. [00:22:07] S0: Yeah. But like the insight there was that they're powered by the rudimentary AI we had on Replit back then, but that in itself was enough of an edge that they have. [00:22:18] S1: The people doing the Replit bounties were already using AI to write the stuff. [00:22:23] S0: Yeah, exactly. [00:22:23] S1: Oh, man. Exactly. [00:22:24] S0: And it grew really fast, then I looked at it and I was like, okay, if this is where the future's headed, that's like a dead business. So we shut it down. [00:22:33] S1: Why would it be dead? [00:22:34] S0: Because ultimately people would just ask agents for the entire thing. [00:22:39] S1: And not even use, not even go through the teenage kids asking the agents on their behalf. [00:22:44] S0: Yeah. Okay. Okay. I mean, that's the case right now. We go into big multinational corporations, banks, things like that. And they have a lot of SaaS software they pay $10,000,000 for or old software. And they find a few Vibe coders inside the company that have adopted Replit, and they're going in replacing all these different systems. And it starts with internal stuff. It starts with internal yes. And previously they would tell us that we've actually scoped this project out and it would have been $10,000,000 we spent $250,000 on Replit. And so it's happening all over the place. And I think really the outsourcing industry is sort of dead at this point.

00:22:44 · Amjad Masad, Paul GrahamPlay from here

[00:22:44] S0: Yeah. Okay. Okay. I mean, that's the case right now. We go into big multinational corporations, banks, things like that. And they have a lot of SaaS software they pay $10,000,000 for or old software. And they find a few Vibe coders inside the company that have adopted Replit, and they're going in replacing all these different systems. And it starts with internal stuff. It starts with internal yes. And previously they would tell us that we've actually scoped this project out and it would have been $10,000,000 we spent $250,000 on Replit. And so it's happening all over the place. And I think really the outsourcing industry is sort of dead at this point. [00:23:29] S1: So is it mostly not very technical companies that you're talking to? Companies that don't specialize in technology. They wouldn't call themselves tech companies, [00:23:39] S0: We have a lot of tech companies as customers. I think that that's not where we have the biggest impact because I think they can fish for their own, but the sort of the banks, know, Ordinary companies, companies. Need something like Replit. Otherwise, they'll shoot themselves in the foot. [00:24:02] S1: And really, it's driven mostly by people internally who, like, are sort of ambitious, like some guy who's in charge of sales and wants to write some tool for his sales department.

00:24:02 · Paul Graham, Amjad MasadPlay from here

[00:24:02] S1: And really, it's driven mostly by people internally who, like, are sort of ambitious, like some guy who's in charge of sales and wants to write some tool for his sales department. [00:24:13] S0: Yes. So, you know, this created a bit of a, you know, identity question inside Replit. Was like, well, like, the enterprise, like, that... That's, like, not part of our mission. But what I tell my team is that those aren't entrepreneurial people. Those are ambitious people. Ambitious people building businesses. This feels very core to what we do. Those are scrappy people within companies too. Exactly. [00:24:38] S1: Yeah. Even if the companies aren't scrappy, the people are. [00:24:41] S0: The people are, and they tend to get promoted. A lot of people who bring Replit into their organization will get promoted because they are having great impact. [00:24:49] S1: And also because especially now, all these companies are thinking, we got to use AI. I keep reading how AI has taken over the world. We ought be using AI within our... Who within our company understands anything about AI? Who's using it? And here's the person using Replit to make stuff. They're going be the ones that they trust. [00:25:05] S0: Exactly. So it's a continuation of that, but there's a bit of a, what do you call it, like schlep? [00:25:14] S1: Schlep blindness [00:25:15] S0: or just schleps? Just like there's a lot of boring work to be enterprise ready. Oh, that you [00:25:23] S1: have to do? Yeah. Well, you have practice doing that Yeah, kind of yeah, It's just like systems programming.

00:25:23 · Paul Graham, Amjad MasadPlay from here

[00:25:23] S1: have to do? Yeah. Well, you have practice doing that Yeah, kind of yeah, It's just like systems programming. [00:25:29] S0: Is it like systems programming? Yeah, a little bit. I mean, a lot of it is also just like giving admins and IT a lot of controls over what people could do and setting budgets and [00:25:40] S1: Oh, they want to have rules. Rules. Well, it's Yeah. Sort of like sandboxing for humans. [00:25:47] S0: Yeah. It's like the principal actor problem, right? Like, you know, the end users are not actually decision makers for the buyer, like, for who buys software, which is why I think most of history of tech industry enterprise software has sucked. But now I think people have a lot more say on what they want to use, and therefore products that are really good are winning in the enterprise. But that problem still exists. Where sometimes IT and security will force you to make the product worse for the users. Do [00:26:19] S1: you think the answer is give them what they want? Like, they want to do stupid things, let them do the stupid things? Or do you think the answer is secretly you're working on behalf of the ambitious, scrappy people in the company and you secretly want to give them a way to get around the