AI CEO: How to build a $1B Company in 2 days | Amjad Masad @replit

0:00 How far ahead you think is time when a solarpreneur is going to build a billion dollar company >> in the next few years? Yeah. >> This is Amjad, founder and CEO of Revlet, 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 cuz 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 Replet into a $3 billion business. I tried those steps myself and uh what happened wasn't what I expected.

0:40 Hello everyone and welcome to Silicon Valley girl. We have an amazing guest today. We have Jad the founder of Replet. I talked about Replet a few times on this channel because I've personally been using it. Um and uh I'm just fascinated by your journey. I wanted to start with this question where you said uh you're going to empower a billion software engineers or programmers in the next couple 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?

1:09 >> Yeah, I I I'm mostly talking about entrepreneurs like us. Um I think that bigger companies will always need software engineers but people who have an idea and 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 uh 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 can you program this idea for me well now you could do it. And so we're getting to a point where you can run a business and it's difficult. It's still that 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.

1:58 >> We're talking about um 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 almost it's always hard to find engineering resources so he he used Replet and 3 months he built his dream app and he went out and sold it and got a lot of contracts and I think he made um he's on his track to make 5 million quit his job now he's an entrepreneur and he told us every time he he's saying well at some point I need to onboard a software engineer and maybe he does but you know it's been he got to 5 million in revenue and still he he didn't have to >> I'm sure you know Meta and Openi 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 way.

3:03 [Music] >> Do you have like a screen here where you track your most important metric and what's the most important metric? >> So, every every team has a screen, infrastructure metrics, there's like product metrics. It's really depending on the on the team and almost every team has a has a has a screen. Um, >> so what's one universal metric everyone's looking at? >> Um, I mean, ARR Okay. >> Like everyone's responsibility.

3:33 >> Can you share your recent era or >> Yeah. Um 160 >> 160. >> Yeah. >> That's amazing. You've been they've been growing 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. >> That's 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 >> right now? Let's see. Is there about 50,000?

4:02 >> 50,000 people >> right here. Yeah. >> Do you know how many apps built on rapullet are actually active and running? >> Yeah. Uh about 350,000 like paid online apps. That's growing fast. That's growing 25% month over 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 gonna be uh helping you integrate with Stripe and monetize. So we'll be able to to track that.

4:31 >> I think I already added my Stripe to >> So yeah, the agent knows how to do it. >> Uh 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, it's fun, but making creating a business is really one of the best feelings in the world.

4:56 >> Let's take a quick break. If Amjad's story with Replet fired you up and you're tired of just watching people talk about AI instead of building something real, this is your chance. HubSpot just dropped something called the 102 ship vibe code prompts. It's a pick of 10 proven frameworks to help you turn a business idea into a working lead genen web app. No coding experience required. You'll get tools like viral hook generator, lead quality optimizer, multiplatform deployment assistant, and my favorite, the replet build prompter, which acts like your own AI product manager. These prompts will help you define your perfect customer, build your prototype in replet, generate viral hooks, names, and launch content. It will also help you benchmark your idea, and plan how to turn it into scalable growth machine. No more waiting months or spending 20K a month on a DAV team.

5:45 This is what building with AI actually looks like in 2025. If you're ready to launch, download the 10 zero to ship VIP code prompts for free. Link in the description. Big thanks to HubSpot for sponsoring this video. So, actually, I'm trying to build something with Replet right now. And the thing is, it's something that I'm encountering. So, yes, it's building like a beautiful layout, but then sometimes but see service unavailable. That's that's the recent bug I got. So, it feels like It's >> oh interesting.

6:18 >> 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 um when I deploy I get this error. >> Okay. >> But basically what I'm realizing uh is that it's still a little work, right? >> It's 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.

6:55 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 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 um powerful but easily distractable intern and you need to manage him very well. So for example, you type this prompt there'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 is very important. So prompt engineering and prompting is not that different than programming.

7:50 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 days, whereas previously even, you know, senior engineer would have taken them like a couple weeks, you know, before AI >> $10,000, $15,000.

8:15 >> Yeah, something like that. It will cost you something like that. But I would I would spend two, three days on it. I think you'll be able to get it. >> How can I learn to be better at prompting? >> We have a YouTube channel. Uh we have a great developer relations uh person who creates a lot of content. His name is Matt. Um and so we try to train people on on prompting and and the underlying systems. So Replet has a DNA and sort of education. So we when we were talking about a billion developers, um these billion developers need to learn. It's not going to 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 how to prompt. You need to spend a lot of time and practice by building changing your style. Some people go to open AAI for example and like pick 03 or right now it's GP5 with thinking and give it the idea and and tell it hey I want you to structure it into a really great >> it for me something like that.

9:18 >> Yeah. So I think uh you know Paul Graham uh the founder of Y Combinator you know the best accelerator in the world um wrote this uh essay about being resourceful and he talks about the qualities of founders and one quality is relentlessly resourceful. So they they they're able to find resources to unblock themselves and be able to um you know not hit a wall because I think a lot of what entrepreneurship is is finding all these walls and really driving through them.

9:51 >> And the way to do that is so think of 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 is creative thinking kind of moving around and finding the clues or and 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?

10:18 >> 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. Like so I worked at code academy for example when I first came to the states. It was based on the open source version of of replet but I saw how difficult it was and it was really painful a lot of hard work. So replet 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 to Facebook where I was working back then. I wanted to stay there. I was very comfortable and happy there.

10:59 >> It's a scary feeling to leave your job and and go heads down. >> But it was kind of derisked because we had a platform that people really loved. We had 100,000 users plus a month. So after a lot of deliberation >> and and really trying to think what matters to you, what what what creates meaning in your life and uh you know 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 used to be three like coming up with idea building 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?

11:41 >> Yeah. So when everyone's building an app when that is it's still a skill right it's still like like we talked about still a skill that you can you can develop and I think grit is very important. So resourcefulness, grit, 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 in on YouTube and so you need to imbue you need to give that domain knowledge into the agent. You need to prompt in a certain way so that you're downloading your domain knowledge and that is your competitive advantage. But at the same time, what OpenAI models are training on on what I know and then they're so much better at defining what a good YouTube video is.

12:28 >> I think you still have tacet knowledge that is not necessarily expressed in all your videos and all the content out there. um 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?

13:09 >> You know, I I I might be a bit different in the Silicon Valley context in that I am uh quite skeptical about the AGI vision. I think we can build extremely competent agents, but you would always need the human as a driver. uh because I think that the way large language models work is they train on the entire corpus of um texts on the internet, text and books, all of that stuff that is text of the past of what has happened, right?

13:40 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 way. It is a it is a li 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 have a special place.

14:15 >> I love your answer. But so the fear inside me wants to push back by saying that you know 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 uh cash. Uh and in the references it's referencing hash proof of work was existing uh proof of work.

14:51 The idea that uh you know the machine is solving these cryptographic problems in order to secure the the Bitcoin network was actually originally invented to fight spam. So there was the spam problem of the emails. We don't have spam filters or AI. And so when I'm sending you an email, I solve a cryptographic problem that is expensive to show you that I'm not a spam uh agent. Right. So Satoshi Nakamoto took all these ideas and you're right existing ideas and put them in a in a new package, but he added a 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 no 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 uh with his theories, um there's always one novel insight, one really strong novel insight. It's almost like this divine intervention is that there's something spiritual about having a really novel idea. And I'm sure you've experienced it in the past. uh that I think is is fundamentally human. I don't know where it comes from.

16:02 >> 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. Uh should I go to overview and try again? No. >> So I hit redeploy. It's asking you to redeploy. So it'll take a second to deploy. I'd be curious. So fixed session decentralization problem. Okay. while it's deploying. Um, you said a gap between a Republic user and a senior Google engineer will disappear in two years. Should people still learn how to code or what's going to happen to the engineering job?

16:35 >> I think the engineering job will continue to exist especially in um 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 written them anywhere. It's this task of knowledge.

17:01 >> And so I think those engineers will continue to exist. If you're an engineer at NASA and you're building fault uh tolerant systems, if you're building provable systems, uh 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 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 but your mission is to build the thing. So I would start by building and and like we said, being resourceful along the way goes a long way.

17:49 >> So what should engineers who are building apps like this do now? >> Um let's see. Where is it? >> There we go. >> Oh, there we go. Okay. Sign in. Okay. like >> we had a new issue >> and it's like >> Google authentication not but that's that's how software engineers work >> okay this is this iteration >> got it so you think >> solve a problem >> and then and then get a new problem but >> do you think it will ever get get to to the stage where I don't have to do this >> yes >> because it could actually run >> everything and test everything >> yes so we uh >> is that we're working on >> could you talk about it >> or or not yet >> uh usually Not yet. But uh let me give you some some hints. Okay. Um >> 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.

18:47 >> Exactly. QA. >> So we're solving that. >> Okay. All right. You're launching something right? Is there a lot of pressure on the team? How are they handling? >> Yeah. So, we have an offsite next week where we're going to be going to uh LA uh on the beach and u 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.

19:17 >> You too? >> Yeah. >> Your wife too? >> Yes. Yes. >> Who takes who takes? Okay. There's a question coming from all the entrepreneurs have kids like how do you balance this? So we, you know, there's people talk about work life balance. We we talk about work life harmony or work life integration. And so, for example, like we'll have uh the nanny bring the kids to the office. We'll have >> so they can vibe code.

19:41 >> They can v 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, uh, everyone here could bring their families as well. So, you know, Replet not being super young a startup, we're 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?

20:07 >> 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 in your schedule. >> So, I spend like mornings with them. Like I wake up at 7, 8, and I get to the office by 10:00, right? But I, you know, stay late here. We have dinners uh 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. Uh I'm always on my phone working obviously and responding and phone calls and things like that, but I feel like I'm present.

20:38 >> What about your wife? Similar schedule, >> I think. Yeah. No, she's she has a less intense of a schedule. I think CEO schedule's like a little more um intense. 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 because they're back from school right now, >> right? >> Yeah. But I also would love to do this.

21:01 >> Yeah. Yeah. So I I I don't know how 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?

21:25 >> 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 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 um a cloud virtual machine built on a file system that we innovated. We even patched the Linux kernel to to to make things work for Replet. And so all that infrastructure allows us to always be ahead. We'll come up with an idea.

22:06 Sometimes it takes two three months to build. If you want to build the idea from scratch, it'll take you two three years to build. And so I think Replet will actually start to diverge pretty soon. All these applications kind of look the same because they all generate a website. But um when you talk to developers that are using Replet often moved from the other uh platforms uh they're saying that yeah I mean these tools got me a 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 uh to store my files. Replet ships with a database has an 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 replet authentication has a built-in authentication system. We built up this massive amount of infrastructure and within the next 6 months to 12 months I think it'll be really obvious how Replet differentiates.

23:05 >> Have you seen any big mistakes that people make when building something with Replet? cuz I know a lot of entrepreneurs are looking and they're probably like okay I'll build an app 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 resourceful replet environment gives you a lot of tools like the logs and things like that try to overcommunicate with the agent I think that's the first tip that I would give even if you don't have you don't want to learn prompt engineering just just be overcommunicative And then on uh on marketing uh 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 replet and v code the same thing right >> yeah uh >> it's like an easy >> there's definitely marketing is a 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 just you know not quitting after 6 hours is 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 Replet back in 2010 and I just didn't quit. I knew this was kind of big. I I 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.

24:54 >> It's amazing. Yeah. Congratulations. >> Thank you. But it's just not 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. >> Yeah. >> Just showing up is a is a big differentiator. Most people don't you know it's things are hard and life is full of easy things like you know you can spend four hours on TikTok be endlessly entertained right >> um so that's one on marketing there are a few few things I could say here one is launch launch launch just keep launching go launch >> iterate or >> even the same product >> uh like m make another uh >> another tweak >> another tweak show it in a different way. Iterate on your messaging. Do another video. Uh try to reach out to influencers to partner with them.

25:42 >> Podcast. I launched it three or four different times with different messaging and different things. >> Interesting. So the first three times didn't work. >> Uh first few times it didn't work. Uh I think when we got on Hacker News the first time, uh it was when I said uh you can try all these different languages and I listed the languages. Try Python, Ruby. That was before AI. Uh, and that was a hit because of the because of the title change. And so again, it's grit, relentless resourcefulness, and just iteration, iteration, iteration.

26:11 >> Okay. What are your top three favorite AI apps? >> Of course, >> yeah, we'll leave that aside. >> Uh, Plexity, you know, I just like going to Google and spending five minutes clicking on links. I can just get it really fast with Plexity. I like to do deep research with the perplexity. So that's something I can't live without without uh chat. Um I go to perplexity when it's like more research. I want something from the web. Chatip when I'm like brainstorming and and Claude and the other ones too. Um and let's see >> give me something specific like I know for a specific problem if you use anything maybe build your own AI agents >> like naming uh like naming products.

26:53 >> Yeah. Nameless or what do you use? >> No I I I'm using chat. >> Oh are you using I like to prompt right. I like to prompt it and I like to kind of start different. >> This is how you you kind of build differently because you like prompting. Uh so you just use chat GP for basically anything because you can prompt it. >> No, I I sometimes build rapid apps as well for certain things.

27:11 >> Oh, what did you what did you build for yourself? >> Well, recently uh do you know Kindle Scribe? >> So you know Amazon's new notebook thing. It has a web browser and sometimes I don't want to use my phone. My phone's somewhere else. I'm on my Kindle reading. I want to look something up. >> I try to open chat. It actually doesn't render because the e in browser kind of is like a very old school browser. So I built a chatgbt that doesn't have any JavaScript.

27:35 >> Uh that's very >> and it took like an hour with replet to to build. So I'm often spinning up these small tools. Anytime I find that's the thing about replet it becomes addictive once you know that you can make certain pieces of software you'll immediately see a problem. It's like oh that shaped like a problem I could solve. >> Yeah. You mentioned hard moments. Talk to me about the hardest moment building this. >> Oh man. Um, I mean there's a bit of recency bias to this, but last year we did a we did a layoff and replet culture, you know, you'll get it from from working walking around is is very positive. Uh, people really like each other here. Uh, 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.

28:17 They really enjoy working with the 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 Replet 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 we 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 Rep, but then you graduate off of it. Uh and so that that 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 uh such as yourself. But at the time we we had 130 employees were 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 we cut the team. And I think we we cut 30 40% of the team.

29:28 >> 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 revenue? 2024. Last year. >> Last year. Um and you you walk around here, it's very gloomy. No, no one's really happy. I used to come here. I was like, I can't wait to go home. >> Wow. >> And I think anyone most people in in our place at the time would just call it quits and try to sell a company and do something like that. But instead, the people that are working on Asian, we motivated them. We told them this is 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 and 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 um >> and you got to 144 million.

30:18 >> Yes. In less than a year. >> I heard this story that uh Peter Teal passed on investing, but then you sent him your graph. Did they ever reply? >> He didn't reply. >> Never. Peter Teal invested in our series B round in 2021. But then I went to pitch him in 2022 or 23 just before Chad GPT. I was trying to tell him, hey, uh, AI is very important. It's going to change the nature of coding and programming. And he said, you know, Peter is very skeptical of buzzwords and he's known to be a contrarian. So he doesn't like anything that's popular.

30:50 And so he was like, when you're saying AI, it's meaningless. It's almost like saying computers. uh you know don't come here with these buzzwords and he basically said I was just engaging in hype uh you know we had raised at a big valuation I'm trying to justify that valuation and the entire meeting I'm trying to tell him hey just like look at the demo and he wouldn't look at the demo and then I remember four months later uh I saw him on TV talking about chat and saying oh it's actually a fundamental innovation I was like I tried to tell you >> told you >> um and um you know to his credit, he changed his opinion and they in uh Fanders Fund invested a big amount in Cognition, which is another agent uh coding company. Uh but I did send him an email saying after they in invested in Cognition and told told him, well, you know, I have a lot of respect for you and that conversation was was actually very hard to take in because I I felt like I was doing something wrong. Uh, but I hope you can see that I at that moment I saw the future where things were headed.

31:52 >> And I'm glad you pushed further and built whatever you built. Right. Because it's so demotivating to hear things like that from people who are super respected and super smart. >> Exactly. It's 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 people doubters wrong. haters, doubters, >> transform that energy into 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 It's a great feeling and I recommend it to everyone. I re 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 when the feeling comes in. Yes. I mean if you if you talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and you say what is meaningful about your life what and they say the money is cool you know money does change your life and 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 was like the struggle everyone doubted me but I persisted did and I succeeded and that's the best feeling in the world.

33:13 >> Exactly. Let's talk about the future. You 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, uh, entry- level jobs, but 30% more applications. >> 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 I think there's deep question about where we're headed as society. What is Silicon Valley's um 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 um 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 that are most memorable uh like Leonardo da Vinci for example did a lot of things was an engineer was an artist was all sorts of things right and the the kind of elite education used to be about understanding a lot of things about spending a lot of time learning about every 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 and I think we're going to go back to a to a moment of time uh where there's a lot more opportunities for entrepreneurship.

35:00 Even when you join a company, you're 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. >> But what what would you say to for example girls, right? I have two girls and uh the way a lot of girls are brought up are like find a job that's sustainable, find something long-term, find something that's safe. And you're saying that everyone is basically needs to become a generalist and also an entrepreneur to generate ideas. What would you say to those women watching?

35:33 How do you change your mindset? >> Well, my wife is a is as is my co-founder. I think we both uh Haya and I share background of being misunderstood and being um uh you know uh growing up in in a in a culture that we didn't feel like really fit our way of of thinking and we were different uh and so maybe that shaped how how we are and our attraction to entrepreneurship and to trying to change how people do certain things or change the world. I I think there's a lot that, you know, culture imbuss on on sort of uh uh gender roles, but I don't think girls are fundamentally like sort of predisposed to to a certain type type of job. And so I think a lot of it is about upbringing and what we tell our kids and how we how we educate them. And so I I think my advice will apply to 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 mon moment of time that's very different.

36:40 It's very different from when I grew up from my 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 world 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 dollar company?

37:04 >> Is it a billion dollar in revenue or is a billion dollar valuation? >> That's a valuation. >> Valuation. So, so let's say >> so 100 million in revenue 10x. >> Yeah, I'll say 20x. So maybe a 50 million in revenue. >> Um I don't think it's that far like like if someone like John Cheney was able to build a 2 million 2 three million revenue. >> It's very niche B2B high tech. I feel like a 50 million company is a BTOC company >> which requires data.

37:32 >> Why not? Like he he has these enterprise seats. He go, you know, who goes into his companies, you know, he he has a platform with a lot of content that he's selling. >> I I could see it be a $50 million AR business >> in the next couple 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.

37:53 >> Yeah. I love it. Thank you so much. My pleasure. It was amazing. >> Thank you for coming.