"Meme Your Dream into Reality" | Replit CEO with a16z

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.

Some people ask, “Hey, how should I think about X versus other platforms?” You have to understand the meta, because the way to go viral is to dress up your arguments, your worldview, in the current conversation. Twitter’s influence is amazing, but it tends to be an elite, inside-group influence. I think Instagram, Facebook still, and YouTube are where you get to the early majority.

Does every CEO need to become an influencer now?

Look, I think there are so many paths to success. I don't think there's one. Replit 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 speaks for itself. So I think it comes down to—

Amjad, thank you for joining us. Replit is a 10-year-old company. For the last 2 years, it's gone absolutely vertical, but there was a period of time well before that when the company was in the zeitgeist, partially because of your go-direct efforts.

You're one of the best CEOs on X. You're also now getting bigger on Instagram and other platforms. What has the business impact of your efforts going direct been? Does every CEO need to become an influencer now, or how have you conceived of this?

I think Replit would have probably died if I wasn't telling a story that was larger than the company itself. The company wasn't successful commercially, but we've been very successful at fundraising and recruiting. 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.

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

You at one point decided to go big on this. You weren't always big on Twitter. A lot of people here, and a lot of people who are CEOs, may not find it very natural. They have to make a decision: How do I get good at this? 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 it”?

I think the journey starts outside of Twitter. How do you get good at communicating? How do you get good at public speaking? I always wanted to be an influencer, for lack of a better word.

I remember I was in New York when I first came to the States, and I had terrible stage fright. I'd be sitting here, and my heart rate would be 150. I'd be sweating. I thought, “How do I deal with this? How do you get better at this?” I went and took improv classes in New York, and then took a storytelling class.

I'm a big fan of exposure therapy. Anything you're afraid of, just go and do more of it until you're desensitized. The best way to get desensitized is to make a fool of yourself every day doing improv. I ended up doing shows and got pretty good at it.

The benefit I had was that Replit didn't blow up right out of the gate. My personal profile had this very linear growth to it, so I could make mistakes with very little attention on me. I made a lot of PR mistakes. If you go to Hacker News and sort by the top 10, I think we had a PR crisis on Hacker News where I had an issue with an ex-intern at Replit. I totally botched that communication, but I was still within the Hacker News community, which still hates me. That's fine. They'll hate you anyway.

That's like the rite of passage. Hacker News loves you, then they hate you, then you become successful.

The stakes get higher as you're able to do more. It's sort of progressive overload in powerlifting: You're carrying more weight. It never gets easier, but you're able to do more and more over time. I feel for the founders whose companies are just now blowing up and who are suddenly in the public eye. You can see founders of big, now trillion-dollar companies really [__] up on a massive stage. Getting the reps in has been super helpful.

Is your advice to people who want to get good at this just exposure therapy? One tweet a day or something? What's the best way to get started and get really good at this?

I think there are a few things. One is the concept of building in public. It wasn't coined when I started doing that, but the idea is that, as a CEO, you're going to do a good amount of writing and communicating to your employees and investors. You can just do it publicly, right?

I've always believed that there aren't really a lot of secrets you need to keep inside a company. A lot of the writing you would otherwise do in private, you can put in public. That way, you carry people along on the journey with you, and you're getting the reps in. Whenever there's a piece of communication or a story I want to tell, if there's a choice between public and private, I might bias toward public. I often write something publicly and then paste it on Slack. I just say, “This is what I wrote.” That's been helpful.

The other thing is authenticity. Really being yourself is a radical thing. That maybe started happening with Elon 10 years ago, but CEOs were supposed to be this very polished thing. They had to be filtered through this prism of PR, and journalists were the way to get to the public.

You see Elon being the first to build a public platform, and I think Zuckerberg to some extent as well. At some point, when journalists turned on Zuckerberg, he started going direct. You follow their stories, and it's like Zuckerberg changed the entire narrative around him by just being himself and actually talking directly to people.

I think the story of Trump is also very illustrative. 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 it? My favorite one was, “I've never seen a thin person drink Diet Coke.”

Which is true. Or Kanye. Kanye's banger is, “I hate waking up on the plane and I see a bottle of water in front of me. Now I got to take care of [__].”

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

Right. “I can't be managed.” You see these people come up, and people start associating with them. Obviously, they're very authentic.

Yeah.

There's a shift in people's minds where they crave authenticity.

Hunter Biden.

Yeah, he's still there.

But if you're a good poster and you can get away with it—

He can post his way to the presidency, for sure.

Yeah. The intern thing is funny because I remember that, but I also remember forgetting it. A lot of people say, “What if I say the wrong thing? What if I get my company into trouble or into some sort of controversy or scandal?” Is it just that attention spans are so short that people move on to the next situation? What do you say about that?

I think it can be deadly. A PR crisis can be deadly if you retreat afterward. If you're not in the news, I think the thing about Trump, Elon, and so on is that there is a next thing. By the way, the next thing could be worse. But the fact that you're still in there, still in the game, means people will think, “Oh, this guy's unkillable, uncancelable.”

Yeah.

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, then 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.”

There's a great book, So You Think You've Been Shamed, that chronicles the stories of a number of people who've gotten canceled over the past 15 years. That's basically the takeaway: The people who are truly canceled are the ones who shut up. They're the ones who retreat. The ones who just keep going become forgettable.

There are so many people—Brian Johnson, for example—who have revived their image or presented a whole new image. People just forget that they were almost canceled.

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

I was going to ask that next.

Yeah, because I think this story has been told a trillion times about how, in the ancestral village, if you become an outcast, that's pretty deadly.

You can literally die. You can't find food. And so our limbic system, when you get this massive reaction online, you're kind of in fight-or-flight, and it could really affect you. You can't sleep; some people can't eat, and it could be really damaging.

But I think, again, exposure therapy helps a lot. The first one is really hard; the second one is like, “Ah, it'll blow over.” But also, having good principles. 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.

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.

Yeah. Earlier on, you were alluding to the fact that the stakes are really high with these. What advice might you have for Anthropic or OpenAI in terms of some of the communication challenges or opportunities?

It's obviously way above my pay grade. I've never battled with the United States government—not yet. One day. Goals.

Look, I honestly think it's kind of a win-win for them. If you game out what's going to happen with Anthropic, if Claude comes back, it's going to be a huge flood toward Claude. It's kind of like, “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, the Mac Pro, I think it's called—where they had tremendous computer power that was subject to export control.

So they had this ad where military tanks were going and surrounding the Mac, with the Mac in the middle. It was showing that this thing was so powerful, the U.S. government didn't want you to have it, so you should go buy it. And so it's a tremendous marketing opportunity for them. Their reputation is already pretty big.

But even if they can't get Fable back on the market, they still win the PR game of, “We're a company that's principled and doing the right thing,” and all of that. So I think my advice would be not to stress out too much and, honestly, just sit back and let it play out.

You're describing that the mental game is tough. A lot of things we'll hear from CEOs are, “Oh, I don't want to have to tweet, and then I'm in meetings. Now I have to think about the responses, and I have to respond back, and now I'm in sort of a conflict.”

Respond back. That's the thing. You don't have to respond back at all. I mean, that's another thing you have to learn: not to feed the trolls. That reply is like, “Oh, I got to get back.” What's that New Yorker comic? It was like, “Oh, babe, come to bed.” He's like, “No, someone's wrong on the internet.”

It's very tempting, but actually it's kind of the baller thing to do: “Oh, yeah, yeah, the plebs can't 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 correct it. Again, you should do it in a 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. Don't appear that this is something you're getting emotional about.

Because any time you show weakness publicly, it actually feeds the trolls and feeds the haters, because they feel like they can get to you.

Yeah. What advice do you give for when companies are being dragged by someone on Twitter or in the press, and when to respond versus when not to engage?

Yeah, I think that's an art thing, and I think it comes down to business impact. Will it actually have a business impact on my business?

For example, last year in July, we had this story with the founder of SaaStr, Jason Lemkin, where Jason had just started vibe coding—he had never vibe coded or coded anything before—and as he was working with Replit Agent, Replit Agent sort of misunderstood him or something like that, and then deleted the database.

At the time, we didn't have development-production separation, and now we actually separate them by default. Replit Agent can't even write to the production database; it can only read. We have backups and snapshots. You can go back to a certain day or time or whatever.

So the mistake that Replit Agent made was 1 click away from being fixed. But from his perspective, he didn't know that, and Replit Agent started freaking out. Models at the time used to get really anxious, especially Claude. And he tweeted the screenshot where Replit Agent was going kind of nuts.

It started gaining traction, gaining traction, gaining traction. In my mind, I knew we had already fixed this issue, but the story had become so massive, and obviously it was going to have business impact and be in the press.

I could go out and fight and just say, “Well, we did nothing wrong. We have backups.” I could say it was a user error or whatever. But I think the right thing to do was to own up to the fact that we didn't have development-production separation, which was a bad thing. And 2 days later, we rolled out that fix.

My response got a lot of positive interaction and a lot of airplay because I started with, “Hey, we messed up, and this is 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.

Especially if you apologize.

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

Yeah. And you mentioned earlier—

By the way, Jason is a huge fan now. He runs his entire SaaStr business—a multimillion-dollar business—with him, another employee, and like 10 agents based on revenue agents.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

You mentioned earlier that you sort of developed a desire for this. For CEOs who are so locked in and just aren't 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?

Look, I think there are so many paths to success. I don't think there's one. There are a lot of companies where it's not the CEO who's out there—like Groq, with a Q, where Sunny's the person on Twitter, but the CEO is kind of not on there. They've done a great job, and obviously the company's great and their IP is great, but they also memed it into success.

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. So that's an example where the CEO is not out there.

But you look at Dario as an example, where he's not playing the social media game, and 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 can come out and be totally cringe and actually negative on the brand—obviously, they can learn over time and do it, but it really depends on the situation.

Have you gotten any leverage or a way to lower the activation energy in terms of—or any help doing it? Is it possible for others, too, or is it just you, whenever you think of something?

Well, I think I have the benefit of this long period of incubation. If your company is already high-profile, you don't want to practice in public, so maybe get some coaching earlier on.

Some people ask, “Hey, how should I think about X versus other platforms? Maybe their customers aren't on X, et cetera.” How do you think about that?

I think X is very good for the Silicon Valley set, for tech, for in-group messaging, and maybe one hop outside of Silicon Valley, which is the early adopter, if you're targeting early adopters. I would also cluster Hacker News within that as well.

But once you want to go to late adopters or the early majority, if you think about this bell curve of adoption, Twitter becomes not very impactful there. It can still be very important when, 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. Twitter can still be a place where it is the start of stories.

And that's another thing. Back to the conversation of why this is important, the landscape shifted so much that journalists report on Twitter. It kind of starts on Twitter. Twitter's influence is amazing, but it tends to be elite, inside-group influence.

I think Instagram and Facebook still, and YouTube, are where you get to the early majority. I think I was late to YouTube—sorry, to Instagram. I just started focusing on it in maybe February or something like that, and we're getting an insane amount of views.

You started to build this clips machine of yours around your interviews. The podcast is interesting because it's a medium that could be turned into every other format.

Right. So I feel like I should have maybe done Instagram like a year or 2 ago. I was a little late on that. I thought it was going to be harder. Well, it turns out you can just do this clipping and grow—not just your account; it can grow a lot of different accounts that way. But I would start with Twitter because, again, that's where the news starts to happen. This is where you can have outsized influence.

Are you bullish on the platform? Do you think that in the next 3 to 5 years that will stay the same?

I think it is actually risky because the algorithm changes so much, and you might do something that angers the powers that be. Without anyone knowing, things might change for you in terms of your reach on X. So I think there's less transparency than with Twitter 1.0. It is a little risky, but I think the platform has so much staying power.

Yeah. 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.

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

Obviously, we were all in the school of biology. Balaji and Lulu—we had this group in the pandemic. What was it called?

The Going Direct thing.

Yeah, and so we talked about strategies and critiqued some of our approaches or other people's approaches. So that was very useful. I think Balaji was kind of early to this stuff. I think where I might disagree with Balaji is that I don't think you should be antagonistic to reporters. There's no reason to. You can actually be friends with them, and they can be positive toward 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 reporters. Obviously, Shervin Naz recently joined us, and that up-leveled our game with reporters and more of that type of media. So I think studying that is very important. I think there's enough content out there to get started with. But let's see who else.

Palmer Luckey, Alex Karp, Elon Musk.

Obviously, I mentioned Elon Musk. I think David Sacks is doing such a great job.

What about what he's doing?

I think it's much less about 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. The essay he put out over the weekend got 20–30 million views. Very few essays get that much attention, but it comes at a time when everyone is thinking about token costs.

And this is an important thing about going direct: you can go direct and get 0 views. It's really easy not to 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 the larger debate is, 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 Nadella did with his essays was very much at the heart of what the discussion is today, and then he advanced the point of view of Microsoft.