From Jordan to Tech: A Journey of Inspiration

Amjad Masad set out more than a decade ago to pursue the dream of unleashing 1B software creators around the world. With millions of Replit users pre-ChatGPT, that vision was already becoming a reality. Turbocharged by LLMs, the vision of enabling anyone to code—from 12-year-olds in India to knowledge workers in the U.S.—seems less and less radical. In this episode, Amjad explains how an explosion in the developer population could change the economy, society and more. He also discusses his early days programming in Jordan, his unique management approach and what AI will mean for the global economy.

Hosted by David Cahn and Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital 

Mentioned in this episode:

On the Naturalness of Software: 2012 paper on applying NLP to code 

Attention Is All You Need: Seminal 2017 paper on transformers

I Am a Strange Loop: 2007 follow up to Douglas Hofstadter’s 1979 classic Gödel, Escher, Bach that explores how self-referential systems can describe minds

On Lisp: Paul Graham’s 1993 book on the original programming language of AI