Amjad Masad

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.

Sam

Some people ask, hey, how should I think about X versus other platforms?

Amjad Masad

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 get to the early majority.

Sam

Every CEO need to become an influencer

Amjad Masad

now look, I think there's so many paths to success, I don't think there's one. Repl 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 for itself. So I think it comes down to

Podcast Host

the for years, Replit wasn't the overnight success people see today. Long before the company's recent growth, Amjad Massad 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.

Sam

Amjad, thank you for joining us. Of course. So replit 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 is 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 started, conceived this?

Amjad Masad

Yeah, I think Refl 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 have to play that game. And so, yeah, I think otherwise we would've not existed because we had to do that for so many years before. I mean, turns out everything I said was true, but at the time, it wasn't real. It was a dream.

Sam

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?

Amjad Masad

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. Frightened 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 I get better at this? And I went. I 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 X intern at Replit, where I just totally botched that communication on that. But still, that wasn't large enough. 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 rite 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 get 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 company's blowing up. They're in the public eye and you can see founders of big now trillion dollar companies, they're really fucking up on a massive stage. But getting the reps in has been super helpful.

Sam

And so is that your advice? People want to get just exposure therapy, just one tweet a day or what's the best way to get started to get really good at this?

Amjad Masad

Yeah, so I think a few things. One is the concept of build in public. It wasn't coined when I started doing that, but the idea is that, look, as a CEO, you're going to do a good amount of writing and communicating to your employees, 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 story I want to tell and there's a choice between public and private, I might bias towards public. I often write something publicly and then paste it on Slack. I 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 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 a public platform. And 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 bottle of water in front of me. No, I gotta take care of this shit.

Sam

I don't have a manager. I can't be managed.

Amjad Masad

Right. I can't be managed. You see, these people come up and people start associating with them, and obviously they're very authentic. And we're like, okay. There's this shift in people's minds where they crave authenticity.

Sam

Hunter Biden.

Amjad Masad

Yeah. Yeah.

Sam

But if you're a good poster, I mean, you can get away with it.

Amjad Masad

He can post his way to presidency for sure.

Sam

Yeah. 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 it's just like the next situation? What do you say about that?

Amjad Masad

Well, I think it's deadly. Like, PR crisis can be deadly if you retreat afterwards, 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, the next thing could be worse. But just the fact that you're still in there, you're still of the game, people will be like, oh, this guy's unkillable. Uncancellable. 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.

Sam

There's this great book, so youo Think youk'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 are 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, like, just revived their image or just presented a whole new image, and people just forget the thing that they were almost canceled.

Amjad Masad

I will say the mental aspect of it is pretty difficult.

Sam

I was going to ask that next.

Amjad Masad

Yeah. Because I think that the story's been Told a trillion times. But like in the ancestor village, if you become an outcast, that's pretty deadly. Like you can literally die, you can't find food. Unse 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.

Sam

Yeah, I mean early on you were alluding to. The stakes are really high with these. What advice might you have for an anthropic or OpenAI in terms of like some of the communication challenges or opportunities?

Amjad Masad

It's obviously way above my grade. I've never, you know, battled with a United States government, not yet one day goals.

Sam

But.

Amjad Masad

Look, I, I think, I, I honestly think it's a kind of a win win for them. Like it's really, if you, if you game out, what's going to happen with anthropic Fable comes back, it's going to be huge flood towards Fable. It's kind of like, you know this, this thing was banned by the government actually Steve Jobs once did this ad. They had a Mac, I don't know the big towers of Mac Pro I think it's called, where they had tremendous compute power that was subject to export control. So they had this ad where it's like military tanks going and surrounding the Mac and the Mac in the middle. And it's showing that this thing is so powerful the US government doesn't want you to have it so you should go buy it. And so it's like a tremendous marketing opportunity. You know, for them it's already kind of, their reputation is pretty big. But, but even if, but even if they can't get Fable back on the, on the market, you know, they still win the PR game of like we're a company that's kind of principled and doing the right thing and all of that. So I, 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.

Sam

You were describing the memo game is 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.

Amjad Masad

You don't have to respond back. That's the thing.

Sam

Right?

Amjad Masad

You don't have to respond back at all. I mean, that's. That's another thing you have to learn is to. Is to like, not feed the trolls. It's, you know that that reply was like, oh, I gotta get back. It's like, what's that? I think New Yorker comic. It was like, babe, come to bed. It's like, no, someone's wrong on the Internet. And it's like, it's very tempting, but actually it's kind of the baller thing to do is like, oh, yeah, yeah, the plebs can fight. In 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, 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. This is something that you're getting emotional about. Because again, anytime publicly, if you, Anytime you show weakness publicly, it actually feeds the trolls and feeds the haters because they feel like they can get to you.

Sam

Yeah. What advice would 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?

Amjad Masad

Yeah, I think that's like a art thing. And I think it comes down to like, business impact. Like, will it actually have business impact on my business? 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, Repl 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 like we actually separate them by default. Like the, the replit agent can't even write to production database, it can only read. And, and we, we have backups, we have snapshots. You can go back, you know, to a certain day or time or whatever. So the, the mistake that the replit agent did was one click away from being fixed. But from his perspective, he didn't know that. And replit agent started freaking out. Models at the time like used to get like really anxious, especially Claude. And he tweeted this screenshot where replied age was like going kind of nuts. And you know, it started gaining traction, gaining traction, gaining traction. And in my mind I knew like we already fixed this issue but like the story has become so massive and 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 we did nothing wrong, we had backups. 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, my response got a lot of positive interaction and, and got a lot of airplay because I started with, hey, we messed up and this is what, 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 grows.

Sam

Especially if you apologize.

Amjad Masad

Yeah, especially if you apologize. So I, I, I would say just kind of focus on the business impact.

Sam

Yeah, the, and you mentioned earlier, by

Amjad Masad

the way, Jason is a huge fan now. He runs his entire sasser business, multimillion dollar business with him, another employee and like 10 agents based on, based on replant agents.

Sam

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

Amjad Masad

Look, I think there's so many path to, to success. I don't think there's one. Like, yeah, there are a lot of companies where this, it's not the CEO that's out there like Grok with a Q and like Sunny is the person on Twitter, but the CEO is kind of not, not on there. And they, they've done A great job and obviously they kind of the company's great IP is great, but they also, they memed it 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. 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 when they, they can come out and be totally cringe and like be actually net negative on the brand, obviously they can learn over time and do it, but, but it really depends on the situation.

Sam

Have you gotten any leverage or way to lower the activation energy in terms or any help doing it? And is it possible for others to, or is it just all you just whenever you think something?

Amjad Masad

Well, I, I, 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, some coaching earlier on.

Sam

So some people ask, hey, how should I think about X versus other platforms, you know, maybe their customers aren't on X, et cetera. How do you think about that?

Amjad Masad

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, 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, 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, you know, YouTube is where you get to the early majority. And I think I was late to YouTube to sort of to Instagram. Like, you know, I just started focusing on it and like maybe February or something like that, and we're getting insane amount of views and the followership kind of.

Sam

You started to build this clips machine.

Amjad Masad

Yeah.

Sam

Of yours, your interviews.

Amjad Masad

Yeah.

Sam

The podcast. Interesting. Because it's a medium that can be turned into every other format.

Amjad Masad

Right, right. So I, I feel like I, I should have maybe done Instagram like a year or two ago.

Sam

Yeah.

Amjad Masad

So I was like a little late on that. I, I thought it was going to be harder. Well, it turns out, yeah. Can just like, you know, do these clipping and just grow. Grow. Not just your account. You can grow a lot of different accounts that way. And, but, but, but I would, I would start with Twitter because the, again, that's where the news starts to happen. This is where you can have outsized influence.

Sam

And are you, are you bullish on the platform? Do you, do you think that in the next, you know, three to five years that will stay the same?

Amjad Masad

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 like less transparency than Twitter 1.0. So it is a little risky. But I think the platform has so much staying power, it's really hard to replace. You can change the name, you can destroy the brand, and the platform will still be very valuable. It is one of those things that I think there's no way you can avoid it.

Sam

Who are some CEOs or leaders that inspire you in terms of how they go direct or that you've learned from looking at what they do.

Amjad Masad

Obviously, we were all in the school of Biology, Biology and Lulu. We had this group in a pandemic. What was it called?

Sam

Yeah, Dingo and Director.

Amjad Masad

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, that was very, very useful. I think biology was the kind of early of 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, like, you can actually be friends with them and they can be positive towards you. You can help them out. They're just 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

Sam

Palmer, Alex, Karp, Elan.

Amjad Masad

Obviously I mentioned Elon. You know I think Satya is doing such a great job.

Sam

What about what he's doing you?

Amjad Masad

I think it is much less tweet length things, but he's able to put out very well reasoned arguments that play into the zeitgeist in a very smart way and advance their point of view. Like the the essay he put out over the weekend, you know, got 2030 million views. Like very few essays kind of get get that much attention. But it, it comes at a time where everyone is thinking about token costs. Everyone is thinking about and this is important thing about going direct. You can go direct and get zero views. Like it's really easy to like not not pay attention to you. You have to understand the meta and I think that's the thing that's more time consuming 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. Yeah, and I thought that what Satya did with his essays is very much at the heart of like what the discussion is today. And then he advanced the point of view of Microsoft.

Sam

Yeah, I think it's a good place to wrap. Please give it up.

Amjad Masad

Ramjan thank you.

Sam

Thanks

Podcast Host

thanks for listening to this episode of the A60D 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 Podcasts and Spotify. Follow us on x16z and subscribe to our substack@a16z.substack.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 disclosures

Sam

Sam.