Replit CEO：CEO 如何通过公开表达与真实性打造影响力

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. So 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 elite kind of inside group influence.

I think Instagram, Facebook [music] still, YouTube is 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. 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 [music] for itself.

So I think it comes down to the Amjad, thank you for joining us.

So Repl is a 10-year-old company. Uh for the last 2 years it's gone absolutely vertical, but there was a a period of time well before that where the company was in the zeitgeist, um partially because of your go-direct efforts. I mean you're one of the best CEOs on X. You're you're also now get get getting bigger on Instagram and other platforms. What is the business impact uh been of your efforts going direct? And and does every CEO need to become an influencer now?

Or how have you sort of conceived of this?

Yeah, I I think Repl would have probably died if uh uh if I wasn't telling a story that is larger than the company itself. Like the company wasn't successful commercially, but we've been very successful at like fundraising, recruiting, uh and I I think if if you build a company that's successful right out of the gate commercially, like 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 um so yeah, I I think I think otherwise we would have would have not existed because we had to we had to do that for so many years before I mean, turns out everything I said was true, but at the time it was it was uh it wasn't real. It was a dream. Yeah.

And I mean, you at one point decided to go go big on this. You weren't always big on Twitter. I mean, you you started and a lot of people here a lot of people, you know, who are CEOs maybe it doesn't come supernaturally to them and they have to make a decision of like, how do I get good you know, am I going to do this? And if so, how do I get good at it? What was your journey to say, "Hey, I'm really going to invest in this and I'm going to get good at this?"

Well, I I think the journey starts like outside of Twitter even is like, how do you um how do you get good at communicating? How do you get good at public speaking? Um and so, I always wanted to be able to to be um be a influencer for lack of better words uh and I remember I was in I was in New York and uh when I first came to the States and I had a terrible stage fright. Like, I'd be sitting here and then my heart rate would be like 150.

I'd be sweating. Uh and I thought like like, how do I deal with this? How do you get better at this? And I went and 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 and do more of it until you're desensitized and like the best way to get desensitized is to just make a fool of yourself every day doing improv. Um and I ended up do doing shows and got got pretty good at it.

Uh and um and and then I think the benefit that I had is Repl.it didn't like blow up right out of the gate. It was this like very like my personal profile had like this very linear growth to it. And so I could make mistakes with you know very little attention on me. So I and I I made a lot of PR mistakes. I think still if you go to Hacker News sort by the top 10 like we had a like a PR crisis in Hacker News where I had a where I had an issue with with with some ex ex-intern at Reply it where I I just totally botched that communication on that.

But still that wasn't largely I was still like within the Hacker News community which they still hate me which is fine. They'll hate you anyways.

[laughter]

That's like the right of passage. Hacker News loves you then they hate you then you become successful. And then so so you kind of make mistakes and and they're not at the public stage just yet. And so the stakes gets higher as I'm able it's sort of a progressive overload in in powerlifting. You're sort of like carrying more weight. You know 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 and they're in the public eye and you can see founders of big you know now trillion dollar companies they're really [ __ ] up on a massive stage.

But but getting the reps in has been has been super helpful. And so is that your advice people want to get you just exposure therapy just you know like one tweet a day or something what's the best way to to get started to get really good at this? Yeah so I think a few things. One is the concept of building public wasn't coined when I started doing that but the idea is that look as as a CEO you're going to do a good amount of you know writing and communicating to your employees to 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 to keep inside 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 uh in the journey with you. And you're you're getting you're getting the reps in. So whenever there's a piece of communication or story I want to tell uh and there's a choice between public and private, I might bias towards public.

I I often write something publicly and then paste it on Slack. I just say, you know, this is what I wrote. And um uh and so uh that that's been that's been helpful. The other thing is um authenticity. I think like being really being yourself uh is is kind of like a big radical thing that, you know, maybe started happening with Elon maybe 10 years ago, but CEOs were supposed to be this, you know, very polished thing. They had to kind of be filtered through this um prism of of of PR uh 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 uh at some point when journalists kind of turned on him, he started going direct. And you you start following their stories and it's like Zuck changed his the entire narrative around him by just being himself and actually uh talking directly to people. And I think the story of Trump is also very illustrative.

Like I think, you know, Trump was successful despite the negative bias in the in the press and it was mostly mostly Twitter initially. Like people forget that, but Trump had like amazing bangers on What was it? My favorite one? I've never seen a thin person drink Diet Coke.

[laughter]

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

[laughter]

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

Right. I can't be managed. Like, you know, you see these people come up and people start associating with them and obviously they're they're very authentic.

Yeah.

And like, okay, there's there's this shift in people's minds where they crave authenticity.

Hunter Biden.

Yeah. 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 presidency for sure.

Yeah. The um You is it funny you mention the intern thing bec

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