My name is Amjad Masad.

I'm the CEO and founder of Replit, an online coding environment that makes coding more fun, approachable, and social. Starting a new project goes from countless hours of setting up a development environment to the two seconds it takes to start up a new repl in your browser.

Computers are the most powerful tools to exist in the history of humanity. Sadly most people are mere consumers of these machines. Only a relative few -- the professional software developer -- can use this superpower to its fullest extent. It’s creating an unbalanced world where there are programmers, and then there are those who are programmed. The situation is analogous to literacy before the printing press, where only the powerful had access to books and written communication. The invention of the printing press led to democratic, scientific, and industrial revolutions, but it took about a century from creation to revolution, which meant that an entire generation of people to grow up with new skills, outlooks, and ways of learning and communicating.

Replit will bring the next billion software creators online, and will accelerate the shift towards a world where software and the internet are truly The Great Equalizer. Soon anyone, regardless of place or economic status, will be able to create software and generate wealth on the internet. If we’re successful, anyone who's willing to learn and generate good ideas will be wealthy.

If this mission speaks to you, you should consider working with us.

Before founding Replit, I was a tech lead on the JavaScript infrastructure team (which I helped start) at Facebook. We built and maintained open source tools that made JavaScript development easier, accessible, and generally better. We built and/or maintained things like the Babeljs compiler, Jest, and the React Native packager. Some form of this team is still going strong and now are doing even more amazing things like the Yarn package manager.

Before that I was #1 employee at Codecademy. I did some tech-leading, built product and infrastructure. Being that early at a high-growth consumer startup is a great, albeit compressed, learning experience.

Before that I was briefly at Yahoo. And before that I was going to college and on the side I worked in cybersecurity.

As for non-work stuff, I'm into powerlifting and grilling steaks. I also like to read and mostly interested in philosophy of mind and AGI. Understanding and potentially simulating the mind is what kept me interesting in computers as a kid. I'm also interested in tradition and paleoanthropology. There is so much that's great about the modern world but there is also so much to be desired when it comes to living a fulfilling and healthy life. And I think the past holds more wisdom than people like to admit.

I enjoy scifi movies, especially old ones. Some of my favorites include The Forbidden Planet, Brazil, and Colossus: The Forbin Project. I'm of the opinion that good Hollywood movies are on the decline.

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