Amjad Masad

Repl.it

I believe that one of the highest leverage skills one could have is the command over software and computers. Our world is increasingly driven by software yet creating software is a power held by only a few. We started our company to get more people into programming by simplifying and making more accessible the tools necessary to write and distribute software.

The uncertainty can be frustrating. It's hard to know ahead of time whether what you built is useful and if people are willing to use it and pay for it. The flipside is that when you make something useful that delights people it's one of the best feelings in the world.

They start something they don't care about. Don't look to start a startup. Look for problems to solve. Things you care about. The startup comes later.

- Be kind: it's a competitive market and it's incredibly hard to attract the best talent, investors, and customers if people can't trust.
- Knowing what to innovate on and what to go with the standard. As a startup, there is a temptation to everything differently but you have only a limited amount of creativity that you should apply to core problems you're trying to solve.
- The long game is incredibly hard. It's one thing to flip a startup in a couple of months or a year. It's another to do it for 5-10-20 years. It's incredibly hard to survive and it's very easy to give up. Having passion and conviction is what keeps you going.

Didn't really choose to, was just forced to because we saw a problem that needs to be solved. We didn't set out to start a company, we set out to solve the problem, it just so happens that the best way to do it is to start a company.