Founders in Arms

Immad and Rajat go deep with Chris Best on how the written media landscape is rapidly evolving and how Substack's business model could transform the way we consume and build relationships with creators Follow the Curiosity Podcast on:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/curiositypod101/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@curiosity_podcast101?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CuriosityPodcast Substack: https://curiositypodcast.substack.com/

Immad and Raj have a wide-ranging conversation on how nuclear tech will revolutionize the future of energy with Yasir Arafat, MARVEL Chief Designer & Project Lead at Idaho National Laboratory.Follow the Curiosity Podcast on:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/curiositypod101/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@curiosity_podcast101?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CuriosityPodcast Substack: https://curiositypodcast.substack.com/

Immad and Raj have a wide-ranging conversation on how AI will impact creative roles with the CEO of rapidly growing Jasper.AI, Dave Rogenmoser.Follow the Curiosity Podcast on:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/curiositypod101/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@curiosity_podcast101?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CuriosityPodcast Substack: https://curiositypodcast.substack.com/

ollow the Curiosity Podcast on:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/curiositypod101/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@curiosity_podcast101?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CuriosityPodcast Substack: https://curiositypodcast.substack.com/ Follow the Curiosity Podcast on:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/curiositypod101/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@curiosity_podcast101?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CuriosityPodcast Substack: https://curiositypodcast.substack.com/ Transcription:Amjad Masad (00:00:00):Pain and pleasure are like core features of consciousness and they seem important for humans operating in the world. Can you actually construct that in a machine?Immad Akhund (00:00:27):Hi everyone. Welcome to the first ever podcast recording of curiosity podcast where we go deep with an expert in their field. The tagline is Delivering 10,000 hours of learning in one hour. So that's a <laugh> ambitious tag line. I'm ial, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Mercury. I've been doing kindness startups and investing in startups since 2006.Raj Suri (00:00:49):I'm Raj Suri. I'm the founder and CEO of Presto Automation, which delivers AI type applications for for traditional industries like restaurants. Also co-founded Lyft and yeah, very excited to be cotting this with you. Mad. This is an opportunity to go really deep into some really interesting areas with some of the smartest people and you know, most thoughtful people on the planet. So excited to be able to explore, you know, in depth.Immad Akhund (00:01:14):Yeah. And today we have Amjad Masad with us. He's the co-founder CEO and I believe now head of engineering at Relet. What's the one line of relet? Mjad.Amjad Masad (00:01:27):It's the fastest way to make software. We have a platform that provides an online programming environment that's collaborative and we have large community of developers making things for each other, for other people. And we're getting into supporting teams of developers in the same way that say, you know, Figma is a collaborative design program replica is kind of that for programming.Immad Akhund (00:01:54):What's kind of interesting is it started relatively small, right? This was like an ID online and I think you were like compiling whatever programming to JavaScript and running it on the browser, right? But now it's this kinda hosted package combined with the teams combined with like learning and template. Like was that always your vision that you're gonna like progressively get to this level of like product or was it kinda incremental?Amjad Masad (00:02:21):I actually sort of saw a lot of it in my mind's eye pretty early on and a lot of it is like pretty obvious stuff. I'm actually surprised that no one had built it because I started working on it in college in like 2009, something like that. And then when I came to the US based on an Oprah source project that's related, I worked at Code Academy as a founding engineer and used this sort of the same technology that I built to like make browser coding possible and then left that and went to work at Facebook, worked on React and React Native was founding engineer on React native. React native is like the best way to make cross-platform mobile apps. And in 2016 revisited the idea and had found that basically nobody had built it, which was really surprising. It is the opposite or efficient market hypothesis, like why is in the market not producing this?(00:03:20):And I actually did not wanna start a startup, but I was so compelled by this thing and I knew that this idea had to exist. Well it turns out I think the answer that why nobody had built it is because it's incredibly hard. But yeah, in terms of execution it was started very simple. But in terms of vision it was always, you know, I was an early GitHub user, like perhaps in their beta. I think I was so excited by GitHub. I was also so disappointed by how little they evolved beyond the initial sort of kernel of an idea. So I always thought about making collaborative developer community that's like more exciting that you can ma do more things in it. And yeah, you know, I've always imagined a lot of the features that we're building. Of course with time just what became available in terms of technology, we started adding a lot of these things that I didn't really think about at the start. But overall, like even like now we have this tipping mechanism where you can tip developers. That was like, I've thought about that like fairly early on. It was actually kind of frustrating cuz like as a founder developer, you're sort of like, everything feels like it's like one weekend of hacking away and it's like turns out, no, it's actually more than a decade <laugh> of hacking <laugh>.Raj Suri (00:04:36):Mj it's a really interesting description. You talked about the fastest way to make software, right? Is the primary user ba