Amjad Masad

At the time, McDonald's was just,

opening in Jordan and I took my entire class to McDonald's and no one had McDonald's at the time so how much money did you make from I made like like 500 bucks okay which was amazing for me you know uh salaries in Jordan are not nowhere near the U.S.

and so it's like you know um

So, yeah, I felt rich and it felt good to make money and it felt even better to make money from something that I love doing.

And later on, you know, as I found more ways to make money with computers and programming, I bought an Xbox.

I was so happy because I'm able to buy things that, you know, my friends' parents buy for them, but I'm able to buy it myself even as a teenager.

So it felt empowering, right?

to make your own money.

But as part of that, like a lot of the painful part, which is like the tools, like I was a talent programmer and I was fighting with the tools all the time.

And you just, you have an idea, you have the right market, you have the right product idea,

and skills to build that, but you're still dealing with a lot of the problems with the tools.

So I was always motivated to make better programming and coding tools in order to, in order for me to build easier, more startups, more companies, more products, and for other people as well.

And I thought that the internet could be this great tool

wealth equalizer and generator.

Like, you know, there's no reason that Silicon Valley capture most of the wealth on the internet because it is the most distributed, decentralized, accessible technology in the world.

I think part of the reason is because the tools are hard.

And maybe there's like a intentional part that the tools are harder than they should be.

And so like the guiding mission for Replit became, how do you make coding tools so easy that you don't even need to be a coder to use them?

And what kind of world does that create in terms of accessibility to wealth generation, wealth creation?

Um, at some point I was offered when we're very small, not a lot of people, I think six people were offered a billion dollars.