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Adam Fishman (author of a top business newsletter on Substack with 11K+ subscribers) interviews executives, entrepreneurs, and company leaders in technology companies who are also fathers. They discuss the tough aspects of work, parenting, family, the mistakes made and lessons learned along the way. All episodes at www.startupdadpod.com.
[00:00:00] Ghazi Masood: There is technology available to you today that if you’re a young teenager, you could be spending your time in different ways and being much, much more productive than perhaps you could have been in the past. The technology exists and it’s important to expose people to the art of the possible and what is possible with technology like this.
[00:00:23] Adam Fishman: Welcome to Startup Dad, the podcast where we dive deep in the lives of dads who are also leaders in the world of startups and business. I’m your host, Adam Fishman. Today, I’m joined by Ghazi Masood, the chief revenue officer of Replit, who has mastered the art of work-life integration in a way that most people would find impossible. I reached out to Ghazi after a LinkedIn post he wrote about why your kids should start building rather than getting a job at McDonald’s, and it went viral. The responses were quite polarizing and didn’t appreciate the nuance of what he was saying. We unpacked that in today’s conversation in addition to talking about what he’s learned through 25 years of marriage, raising two teenage boys and being a revenue executive at some incredibly high growth and demanding companies. He’s learned to blend those roles, family life, and a three decades long passion for flying that takes him on nonprofit humanitarian missions helping those in need.
[00:01:21] Adam Fishman: I heard his thoughts on why rigid work-life balance creates more stress than it solves and how context switching can actually become a life skill. His approach to being available twenty four seven for work while never missing the moments that matter most to his family, how AI is transforming opportunities for this generation, his philosophy on preparing kids for launch into adulthood without being overly prescriptive about their paths, how he uses humanitarian flying as both personal fulfillment and a way to give back to the community, and why teaching entrepreneurial skills to teenagers might be more important than traditional summer jobs in today’s rapidly changing economy. He also talked about his partnership with his wife and how it’s evolved over 25 years and what they’ve learned about supporting each other through major life transitions. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to Startup Dad on YouTube or Spotify so you never miss an episode.
[00:02:13] Adam Fishman: You’ll find it everywhere you get your podcasts. I hope you enjoyed today’s conversation with Ghazi Masood. Welcome Ghazi Masood to Startup Dad. It’s my absolute pleasure having you here today. Thanks for joining me.
[00:02:26] Ghazi Masood: Yeah, excited to be here. Thanks for having me on.
[00:02:29] Adam Fishman: So you are the CRO at Replit, which is a huge job. You’ve been married almost 25 years. You’ve two teenage boys, one’s about to launch into college, which is exciting. And we’re going to get into this a little bit later. You’ve also been a pilot for 26 years, which I just ran through all those things and I’m like, “Man, how do you find the time?” But most people would listen to that list and they’d think, “God, there’s got to be something that gives in that list.” But I think you have an interesting take on work-life balance, which is you don’t believe in it. You’re probably more of an integration person. I’ve heard a lot on this show. So tell me a little bit about what you do differently in your life and how do you make all this stuff work, your job, your marriage, kids getting older?
[00:03:10] Adam Fishman: How do you fit it all in?
[00:03:12] Ghazi Masood: Yeah, I think it’s just part of the day in the life for me. It’s the part of the day in the life for me. In my job every single day at work, I do a lot of context switching. I mean, that’s just a part and parcel to being a revenue leader of a large organization and I’ve been in revenue leading teams of all shapes and sizes for almost 30 years. And you have to be good at context switching where your day goes from being in a very crazy deal negotiation to interviewing somebody to working on an internal escalation. Every single hour, you’re always context switching. And I think that’s kind of life in general. So life in general for me is about balancing all of those things and context switching things in my life, whether they’re my kids, spending time with my wife, making sure we spend time to go out on vacations together as a family.
[00:04:00] Ghazi Masood: I’m a pilot, which we can talk at lengths about where most of my flying these days is actually nonprofit flying where I actually give back to the community and take people who can’t afford medical treatment and I fly them around so they don’t have to go pay. But I find time for things that satisfy me, satisfy what the needs of other people are and just build it into my schedule. I mean, it’s that and everyone has a different schedule.
[00:04:24] Adam Fishman: Is this something that you actively talk to your boys about? Or I guess you’re young men at this point, they’re beyond boys, or is it something that you just try to model for them so they can see it?
[00:04:33] Ghazi Masood: We talk about it in a sense that if we’re at the dinner table and we may bring up the fact that, hey, the reason why I travel more than two weeks out of the month is the provider means for you all. Hopefully you all realize and appreciate that and they’re well beyond the point of appreciating and knowing that. So I think they see me now as more of a role model in what I go do out in the world and stuff that gets out there, whether it’s people that post stuff about me on LinkedIn or they see me in media or they see some of the stuff that’s happening at my work. They just take that and know that dad’s going at it in a different way. So it’s kind of self-understood now, but over the years we have talked about it where my wife, she was in IT when we first got married.
[00:05:15] Ghazi Masood: And when our youngest was two years old, she basically decided that she wanted to stay home for the kids for a period of time. So she had quit her work and she stayed home for our boys, raised them up until they were a little bit older, then went back to work. And I’ve always been on the road. I’ve always been on the road for the last 30 years. I haven’t really been around that much, but I do come around and partake in the most important things as they were growing up, whether it was their sports and things like that. But I think kids just kind of seeing that and understanding the nature behind it and over the years just telling them, “Hey, we do this to provide a livelihood for you all for you all and what are this others?” So it’s kind of a self-understood.
[00:05:54] Ghazi Masood: I don’t think we have to belabor it, but it’s kind of self-understood.
[00:05:56] Adam Fishman: You probably have met some people who struggle with trying to chase this idea of balance and they work themselves and twist themselves into a pretzel about this. What do you think people get wrong when they try to do too much balance and don’t maybe carve out those boundaries and stuff?
[00:06:13] Ghazi Masood: Yeah, I think if you’re too rigid around like, “Hey, I’m not going to answer any email after 5:00 PM and that is my family time.” I think it just gets hard to manage and you’re putting actually more stress on yourself than you kind of should is my view on it. Me being customer-facing in my professional life, I’m on twenty four seven, literally.
[00:06:39] Adam Fishman: Yeah, you’re the big boss, so somebody needs something.
[00:06:43] Ghazi Masood: I mean weekends I’m doing calls, evenings I’m doing calls. But again, if I’ve got an important family thing going on at the same time, I’m going to adjust when I can show up and talk to somebody there in my professional network. So you just have to know what to go accommodate for and just make it your own. Obviously, if my son is graduating middle school and I need to be there and there’s three people breathing down the neck wanting to talk to me at that same time, I’m going to say, “Hey, can I call you later? I’m in something pretty important right now.” And 99% of the time that’s perfectly just fine. So that’s just the way I’ve gone about it versus set. I’m not one of those people that says, “Hey, I’m not going to respond to any select messages after 8:00 PM. Those are off limit.” I’ve never operated that way.
[00:07:28] Ghazi Masood: I just got to just blend it in.
[00:07:29] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Now there’s probably something that falls below the line in your life, something that you used to do that you realized I just can’t fit this in anymore because you’ve put other priorities in place. Is there something that you’ve had to give up from your past when this all stuff happened?
[00:07:46] Ghazi Masood: There’s always. So one of the things I’ve done over the years is I’ve built a pretty good solid network of people in the investment community and early stage founders that I typically go advise around go-to-market and things like that. And that’s obviously taken a backseat right now just because I don’t have the time and energy being a full-time operator, juggling my family life, juggling my travel schedule to give as much time back to the investment in the early stage founder community as I typically would have. Usually if I’m in between jobs and I have time to go do that, I would go do that. But right now that’s very hard to go do right now just given my schedule. So that has definitely taken kind of a step back. And I get a lot of passion out of that by the way, because early stage founders, they mainly come from a technical background.
[00:08:32] Ghazi Masood: And when it comes time to navigate go-to-market, they usually appreciate the advice that someone like me could actually offer them. And I get a lot of satisfaction out of that so I would like to do more of that. I just don’t have the time and bandwidth right now to take on more of that stuff right now.
[00:08:45] Adam Fishman: That makes sense. And you may find that you do in the next few years or something like that. Who knows? So everything’s a season, I guess. So in a little bit, I want to come back to the reason that I reached out to you in the first place, which is this very cool LinkedIn post that you wrote about you have two teenagers and how you think that they should be spending their time or how you would do it differently now versus when you were a kid. And I think every parent that’s got somebody in the 13 to, I don’t know, 18-year-old range is going to want to hear it. So we’ll get back to that in a second. But before that, I want to talk a little bit more about your life. So you and your wife, Yasmin, have been married almost 25 years, you mentioned to me.
[00:09:22] Adam Fishman: She’s originally from Toronto and moved to Seattle after you got married, which I assume is very far from her family obviously. There’s probably still many of them in Toronto. So what did you two have to figure out together in the first few years to make that work living clear across the country from her support network?
[00:09:39] Ghazi Masood: It was hard. I mean, obviously since then her family situation has changed. Her mother passed away years ago, so it’s just her dad and her sisters. But yeah, I mean the big adjustment was the frequency of travel that she would go do with her family and how frequent she would go do that. And early on it was quite frequent back when we didn’t have kids where we would make pretty regular trips to Toronto and they would come to Seattle as well. So that was really, really important to her. And even her extended family of just making sure that she was part of her extended family and just the gatherings there. So that was kind of a big adjustment. And then when she moved here, I mean she was very well employed in Canada at her position as well. She kind of gave that up to find a new role here internally in Seattle and she had to go find a new job and she did.
[00:10:23] Ghazi Masood: She worked for a really great company called Expeditors right after we got married. And that was hard anytime you were job hunting from starting fresh. So those were all the big life adjustments that I think she had to go deal with initially.
[00:10:36] Adam Fishman: And I imagine the two of you, you’ve been married, like you said, almost 25 years now, and you’ve had two boys in that process who are now almost grown men. How would you compare the partnership that you have with your wife now to year one of first getting married? You probably learned a lot.
[00:10:51] Ghazi Masood: It’s way better. It’s way better. Going back 20 plus years later, it’s way better. Don’t ever look back, have zero regrets in any of my decisions of meeting her, getting married and having the family we do right now. And we just know each other really well. We know our strengths, we know our weaknesses, and we play really well together. She’s my best friend and we spend all of our time together and we just adapt. We just adapt and that’s how we get doing it. So sometimes people go, yeah, in hindsight, I wish I did. I have zero regrets looking back and I don’t think I would’ve done anything differently. There’s one thing I wish I would’ve done differently with my boys, which we can talk about later. But as far as the marriage goes, no regrets at all.
[00:11:33] Adam Fishman: Awesome. So we’ll come back to what Yasmin does for a living because it’s actually really interesting given what you do and the role of Replit. And we’re going to revisit learning and technology a little bit later in the show. So I want listeners to hold onto that thought. Before we talk about that, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about your kids and your oldest ones. So you have an 18-year-old and a 15-year-old, and your 18-year-old’s set to graduate from high school, which is very exciting. Congratulations, you’ve done it. So he’s getting ready to launch. What does that next chapter look like for him? And then what’s going to change for you and your wife when he leaves the house?
[00:12:08] Ghazi Masood: Yeah. I mean, so he went out and applied to 17 schools, this crazy kid. And he’s a very ambitious perfectionist, if you will. And he applied to a lot of schools and he was chasing a lot of he wanted the best of the best. He wanted the best of the best. We weren’t ever Ivy League parents, by the way. We never groomed our kids to like, “Hey, you must go to Harvard.” We never operated that way. We basically just said, “Hey, we want to raise our kids, have them be educated, do well in their work, and go strive for the best school that’s there for them.” So anyways, he applied to 17 schools and he had every school from the Midwest to the East Coast to the West Coast on his list. And as acceptance letters started coming in, he was basically hitting them all.
[00:12:57] Ghazi Masood: He got accepted into most of his schools. And then there was one school very local to us, which was the University of Washington, which is a very, very competitive school right now. Kids with 4.0s and president of their class and created this crazy viral. They’re not getting it right now. And my son, he’s a good student. He graduated with north of almost like a 3.9 GPA. He played varsity tennis, so he had a good profile. But if you stack rank him with some of the other kids that are out there, which is so competitive, he didn’t create his own startup or created an app that went viral. He never did any of that stuff. So from that perspective, he was the minority, but from a grade perspective there. So we actually ruled UW out. We had actually ruled UW out and we were leaning towards some of the Midwest schools.
[00:13:41] Ghazi Masood: He got into UIUC, Purdue, Northeastern, all great schools. And then lo and behold, the UW acceptance came in, he got accepted into the University of Washington High School program, which is a very, very amazing program. So from a program perspective what he had, it was one of the better programs. So long story short, that’s where he’s going. He’s going to UW in the fall. He’ll live on campus. So my wife is extremely ecstatic that he gets to stay close and he’s fine too, because while he wanted to go out of state and do that, he also knows that UW is also a very prestigious program and a good school out there. So he’s pretty happy about it too. So yeah, that’s where he’s going in the fall. And he’s going to be majoring in informatics is the major that he’s going to go do in the iSchool and that’s where he’ll be starting in September.
[00:14:26] Adam Fishman: So when he goes, there’s going to be a void in your house. I know he’s close. He’s not going to be too far away, but how are you all feeling about that? How are you getting ready for that void?
[00:14:37] Ghazi Masood: Yeah, I think it’s going to mainly affect my wife probably the most. It’s going to affect me too, for sure. But when I’m out traveling, it’s the three of them on the road and I travel a lot. I travel a lot for work. So more than two weeks out of the month, I’m usually kind of gone. So I think it’s going to be a big adjustment for her where the oldest, which is kind of playing my role when I’m usually not home, he’s taking the garbage out, he’s helping out around the house, not going to be there. So I think that’s going to be a void mainly for her. And he’ll come home during the weekends, I’m sure, and other weekends there, which I think will be nice, but it’ll be an adjustment. Instead of just us going out to dinner as a family, it’s going to be the three of us now, not the four of us.
[00:15:17] Ghazi Masood: And I think we’re just going to have to go navigate that. But I think it does help that he’ll be close, which I think will be nice.
[00:15:23] Adam Fishman: And a good opportunity for your 15-year-old to step up and take on some new responsibilities.
[00:15:28] Ghazi Masood: Yeah. Well, that’s my wife, the joke inside our house is like, “Hey, now all my attention is going to be focused on you.” And that’s the last thing he wants because he’s been kind of flying under the radar for so many years because all the attention’s been of the oldest to make sure his profile is all set and he’s ready for college. Literally, my wife and I have spent all our energy on the oldest. But now with him being out of the house, the energy and focus is going to go immediately to the 15-year-old, which I’m sure he does not want.
[00:15:56] Adam Fishman: No, the spotlight turns. The eye of Sauron turns. So after raising kids for almost 20 years, how would you say that’s changed you as an executive at a company? What’s it done for you as a leader?
[00:16:08] Ghazi Masood: Well, I think you always want to use the perspective of family into your work around being empathetic with people, understanding everyone’s situation is different and what they are and just adapting to that. Everyone has a different situation going on at home. And then also I think the discipline you do with your kids, I think it’s very similar to the way I run my business and the way I run my teams. I’ve never been a dictator type manager or a leader. I’ve always led from the front. I’ve always led by example and I’ve always shown the people what it means to lead. And that’s kind of the same way I raised my family. I’ve never been a hard-ass dad that yells at my kids and then I basically just show them the way I do it and why I do it and why it’s important. So I think there’s a lot of similarities between that and how you run your business.
[00:17:06] Ghazi Masood: So that’s for me, how it’s been operating. Yeah.
[00:17:09] Adam Fishman: Sort of modeling for your employees and your kids the behaviors that you want to see them do, right? That’s
[00:17:15] Ghazi Masood: Right. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, that’s really how it works out there. Yeah, could I wish my kids would’ve done something earlier and faster and had a bit more motivation on their own? Yeah. I mean sometimes they’re boys, they’re lazy, they need a kick in the butt to get going. And I look at dose of reality and that definitely is part of the course, but you want to do it in a way where they actually understand and they appreciate it on their own.
[00:17:39] Adam Fishman: So you alluded to this, and I mentioned it too at the beginning of our conversation, that you’re also a pilot. You’ve been a pilot for 26 years, going on three decades, and you do a lot of humanitarian nonprofit missions in your spare time. I would imagine most people who know you as the CRO of Replit have no idea about this. So we’re going to talk about that in a second. Because you are the CRO of possibly one of the most active coding platforms on the internet, I’m curious because you also have two boys. What are you seeing with AI and building for younger people that the typical parent might not see?
[00:18:19] Ghazi Masood: I am seeing kids at a very, very young age build some amazing things utilizing AI that I have not seen before and just unwarranted people just experimenting on their own and coming up with ideas. I’ve seen young teenagers start a business that they’re posting on social that they’re actually making money on utilizing vibe coding. There’s examples of even people that are older that are starting their own businesses that have actually built their entire business on a vibe coding technology like Replit from start to finish, two, three person operators and those businesses are valued at millions of dollars right now. And me personally, I’ve got a personal story with vibe coding. So before Replit was even in the picture, just a funny anecdote, if we can go off on a tangent for a second. So my oldest son, as I’m getting a break for college, one of the things was he had an internship at a company, a startup internship that he actually did.
[00:19:16] Ghazi Masood: It was a free internship. And at the end of the internship, he had to go basically pitch to his company what he learned during the summer. It was a marketing type of internship. So he had to go build a marketing analytics dashboard. And my oldest son, while he’s technical, he doesn’t know how to go code. He doesn’t know how to go code. He doesn’t know how to go do that. So he’s like, “Oh my God, how am I going to go build this thing?” So lo and behold, he went on and went to Google and searched it and found Replit and basically built his entire marketing analytics dashboard on Replit. And then when Replit had actually come into the picture for me as a professional career, he was the biggest fan because he had already used Replit way back when. I didn’t even tell him to go do that, so he had done that.
[00:19:54] Ghazi Masood: And now my youngest son, he literally, every two weeks, people just send me a random text when I’m on the road and goes, “Hey dad, look, I’ve got a great idea of something I want to go do.” And his latest idea was he built an app to basically teach people who are going to remodel their home. They project an estimate of what a home remodel would be depending on what you’re remodeling. If you’re remodeling a kitchen or if you’re remodeling an office or you’re remodeling your backyard or you’re remodeling your basement or your garage, you could actually input it in there. And so just because he had an idea in his head, he went and built that. So then I’m like, okay, what are you going to do? What are you going to do with it? How are you going to go market it now?
[00:20:33] Ghazi Masood: So I’m kind of pushing him to think beyond. So one is just building the idea, but then you got to go do something with it. But again, these types of things, everything that I just talked about, that just was not feasible just a few years ago. You just could not fathom or do that and he never had the technology available to go do that. Previously to go build things like that, you needed to know how to code. You needed to know how to develop websites. You needed to know how to go publish it. I mean, it was hard work. Now it’s just very, very simple for the average person to go to.
[00:21:07] Adam Fishman: This is the natural evolution. We started with you used to have to have hardware in your garage to deploy something and then we moved to the cloud and that became a little bit easier. And now you don’t even need to know how to use the software. You literally just talk to it or type. So it’s pretty amazing and kudos to your kids for doing that. I also love that you, because you’re a CRO, you’re like, “All right, what are we doing with this thing? How are we going to monetize it? What’s the business model here?”
[00:21:33] Ghazi Masood: Yeah, because I’m like, “I mean, he’s got a great idea. Go test it out with a handful of people. Go test it out with a handful of people, get their feedback on it.”
[00:21:40] Adam Fishman: So obviously your boys are pretty steeped in experimenting with AI and technology. How have you talked to them maybe even before AI was a thing or as they were starting to get online themselves? Have you talked to them about the role that technology and now AI should play in their lives as they go into becoming an adult or off to college and things like that?
[00:22:01] Ghazi Masood: I mean, to be honest with you, it was hard with my oldest to steer him in the right direction. I mean, listen, there is a lot of unknowns right now. I mean, it’s true that a lot of recent grads that are graduating right now are having a tough time finding a job. That’s definitely true. Where it is four years from now, it’s hard to speculate. And my oldest, by the way, he’s more of the STEM guy. My youngest is more of the business-minded person, but my oldest is more of the techie. If I gravitated and pushed him towards coding, he would go there. Computer science, he would actually go there. But we actually steered him away from that. We basically said, “Hey, don’t go hardcore CS. Don’t go hardcore data. Kind of go the adjacent route where you still get a bit exposure to tech, but you also get the human aspects of it.
[00:22:50] Ghazi Masood: “And that’s why we stumbled across this informatics major, which we think is a good balance of what they teach you. And part of it is also who knows is also part of it. I mean, you can only speculate so much and steer them in the right direction and see what happens over the next few years. And at the end of the day, the advice I give my kids and what I’m giving my oldest is like, “Hey, ultimately, you want to go learn, you want to graduate, and you want to get your first job. And once you get your first job, the rest is history.” Then it’s like how well you do in that job? That’s where it’s going to open up opportunities for the next iteration and iteration after that. So I said, “Don’t get fixated on what that first job is going to go be.
[00:23:32] Ghazi Masood: Use your traits and skills to go do that.” And listen, I mean, we’re all fortunately very, very blessed and very well-connected in the industry out there where we can also help our kids in doing those things out there.
[00:23:44] Adam Fishman: I love that as advice to a young person moving out into the world, which is like just get started, get your foundation in place, and then you can build on that foundation by your own hard work and energy and effort. That’s how you demonstrate the thing that’s going to get you to the next place, the next place, and so on and so forth. So I love that. I love that idea. Okay. I said we’re going to talk about your LinkedIn post, which is the reason I reached out to you in the first place. Now, one thing I want to caveat about this is posting online, even on LinkedIn doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for nuance. So everybody has a very concrete take and I realized that your take, there is a nuance to it. And so that’s why I wanted to talk to you about it.
[00:24:26] Adam Fishman: So I want to deconstruct a little bit what you shared because I personally thought it was interesting and it somehow found its way into my feed because we weren’t connected before that. Here’s how the post read. So you opened with a statement, “Don’t push your teenager to work at McDonald’s. Get them building with Replit,” or i.e. Something like Replit. So you’re not saying don’t work hard, don’t do gritty jobs, because you and I talked about this beforehand. We both had service jobs when we were kids, but make the case for why now is different than maybe when we were kids and why a different approach makes more sense.
[00:25:01] Ghazi Masood: Yeah. I mean, listen, I worked in a Mexican restaurant. I bagged the groceries. I did car washes. I delivered newspapers back where there. So I had all those jobs as a kid growing up. And that’s not a knock to anyone who has a public facing job out there. I think those jobs teach you different skillsets that are lifelong skills and those should definitely be there. My point of the post was there is technology available to you today that if you’re a young teenager, you could be spending your time in different ways and being much, much more productive than perhaps you could have been in the past. And utilize an experiment with that to see. And again, it’s not going to be for everybody. That’s not to say that every single teenager out there is going to go vibe code and earn pocket money on the side.
[00:25:51] Ghazi Masood: That’s not what I’m saying either. But I’m saying the technology exists and it’s important to expose people to the art of the possible and what is possible with technology like this. This time that we’re living in right now is the easiest time for anyone to go monetize and start up something on their own, whether it’s a side hustle, a personal project, a hobby, something much more professional like your own startup. It is the best time for people to go do that because this type of technology did not exist a few years ago and it was much more labor-intensive to go do that. So that was my point of the post is if I were to rewind the tape to back when I was growing up and I had access and these type of tools available to me, I would’ve probably done things perhaps differently and approached it differently.
[00:26:45] Ghazi Masood: So that was my point of the post. And this isn’t to say that I want every single teenager to go build on Replit and whatnot. That’s not about it. It’s like there’s a lot of technology out there, experiment with it. Experiment with it and use it and see what you can make from it.
[00:27:00] Adam Fishman: One other thing you mentioned in the post was that a kid who spends a year learning to build on the internet comes out with skills that keep paying off and sort of compound. What did you mean by that piece? What are those compounding skills that you think hacking on Replit will give you?
[00:27:16] Ghazi Masood: Because I think you’re staying up to speed on the technology. You’re staying up to speed on the technology that’s available to the vast majority of individuals today. And those are skills that I think that people want to know about. People want to know about if you’re familiar with the technology out there and you can actually use those skills to actually teach others about it as well. So I think the more you immerse yourself and the more you experiment with what’s out there. I mean, listen, I’ve got my tool bag of AI tools that I use personally beyond Replit. Obviously I use a lot of Replit, but there’s a lot of other AI technology that I use. I personally went out and researched it and started using it on my own and they’re game-changing tools for me personally. And just because I know about it, I can advocate about it to others that I talk about.
[00:28:01] Ghazi Masood: Well, one plug that I’ll mention just on this call again, no association with Replit, but a game-changing AI tool for me just because how much email and Slack I get is a tool you use, Wispr Flow. I don’t know if you’ve used Wispr Flow. I love Wispr Flow. The amount of messages I can just crank out in the evenings on Slack and email using Wispr Flow is just amazing. And a lot of people may not even know what the hell I’m talking about. But again, it’s the point of experimenting and when you experiment and you know what the art of the possible is, I think it just kind of helps you.
[00:28:34] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Oh, Wispr is awesome. For people who don’t know, it basically lets you talk and dictate and it does translation in creation so much better than any other tool. I don’t know what secret sauce they have in that product, but it is amazing.
[00:28:47] Ghazi Masood: You can format your emails in the way you want. So yeah, it’s amazing.
[00:28:51] Adam Fishman: And you can change the tone. I mean, I could talk about Wispr forever. I’ve been a customer for a long time, so very, very great product. So one thing I also want to revisit is when you think about CEOs of companies today, half of them are folks like you who worked a service job as a kid. And so do you think there’s a world that we end up in that’s not the case or do you think there’ll always be sort of barbell situation here?
[00:29:18] Ghazi Masood: So listen, this is again, a piece of advice I give my kids all the time. I think the importance of communication and the importance of showing up and how you show up is extremely important because that’s ultimately what’s going to determine whether you land your first job or not. And I think that’s a challenge today with the world we live in with kids where they’re so fixated on digital and they have that immediate need for gratification of TikTok, Snapchat, things like that. They forget how to communicate out there. So again, whether you say, “Oh, you must do a service job to gain that communication skills.” I think there’s other ways you can effectively be a better communicator. That could be doing stuff for the community, doing something more in your school and just being much more vocal on it. So I do think of the art of communication and communication skills a trait that you have to have as you grow and mature even in the tech world we live in today.
[00:30:19] Ghazi Masood: And what I mean by that is, just to be really clear, is you could be the master AI user of technology and create your best AI apps and do that, but if you can’t communicate well and you don’t show up well, that’s not going to take you pretty far. It’s not going to take you pretty far.
[00:30:37] Adam Fishman: Distribution is everything, right? So yeah. So one of the things I wanted to ask about is let’s say that somebody has a teenager at home who’s not drawn to this type of stuff. And you mentioned that this is a thing, right? Tons of kids out there aren’t interested in coding or they’re not naturally drawn to it or they’re intimidated by it. Even adults, what do you say to those folks to get them started tinkering with this stuff? How do you help them overcome the fear of the unknown?
[00:31:09] Ghazi Masood: Yeah, I mean I think part of it is just try it. And I could do the same thing with my wife. She’s not a user of AI. She hears me talk about it all the time, but she never used it. I just got her. I said, “Hey honey, it’s literally just tell it what’s on your mind to go do it.” And once you see what it can go do, I think it gets you pretty hooked. It gets you pretty hooked because then you’re trying to get it to go do more things out there. So I think experimentation is key and you can start off with fun things. We have examples of people that are building games. I experimented and I’m an ’80s Space Invaders Galaga type of a guy. So I went out and experimented of basically building that using Replit and came up with a pretty cool little prototype of a Galaga and a Space Invaders version of it.
[00:32:05] Ghazi Masood: And I mean it’s something very silly that’s not going to go anywhere, but that got me exposed to using the technology. So I would just say just get started in a way that kind of makes sense for you. That’s not to say you’re going to go start your business day one utilizing vibe coding, but do something fun that you do in your personal life and go try using AI for it and seeing what it does for you, whether it’s tracking your fitness. I mean, there’s a lot you can imagine the use cases. I mean, there’s so many different ideas, use cases that are there.
[00:32:34] Adam Fishman: So you talked about some of the things that your sons are doing with AI, which is awesome. And then you also mentioned in your post that hundreds of teenagers over the last 90 days, hundreds and hundreds of teenagers are signing up for this. What other things are you observing like kids building on the platform?
[00:32:49] Ghazi Masood: From an influencer ambassador standpoint, I mean it’s crazy right now. If you go to Instagram, TikTok and others, you see these young influencers of either a brand or whatever it is that are just putting their sons out there, they’re doing that. I’ve seen examples of people basically building the iteration of the kid who would come mow your lawn, but the neighborhood service type person, but they’re having their Stripe account connected to it. So I literally saw one click, they’re getting money into their Stripe account by doing that. I’ve seen small projects get started of collectibles and buying, selling of technology in the marketplaces that are there right now, like Facebook Marketplace and an iteration like that. People are creating their own version of things like that. I mean, there’s countless examples. I mean, if you go search online right now, Google will spit out a list of 20, 30 things that you could go read on, which will kind of just blow your mind.
[00:33:41] Adam Fishman: That’s cool. So let’s talk about school and AI for a second. So I mentioned that your wife has a job that’s sort of very interesting in the intersection of your career and her career and that is, so she works in the school curriculum, the district curriculum department. And when I saw that about her, I was like, “Ooh, this is going to be a really fun part of this conversation.” Because this is a raging debate in schools right now, especially K through 12. Obviously colleges are struggling with it, but really K through 12 is struggling with this. So you’re writing posts that are talking about school still matters, but building also matters and maybe even a little bit more. One, is there any tension at the dinner table about this? What kind of discussions have you had with your wife as you think about this?
[00:34:25] Ghazi Masood: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there is a pretty interesting discussion. So my wife is in the curriculum department for the high school, so it’s K through 12. And there definitely is kind of a harder stance in K through 12 of basically guardrailing the use of AI in certain things, because I think what kids are doing is sometimes they’re using AI to write their entire homework assignment or essays. And that is not a good use of doing that where you’re going using that. So there are limits and guidelines and policies in place for not only our school, but many other K through 12 schools around the use of AI in your homework and follow-up and essay stuff. So that’s around there today and that’s nothing new. And I think that’s good. I think that’s good. And when you take it further into universities, I think it’s a different thing that we’re experiencing.
[00:35:14] Ghazi Masood: We’re now experiencing universities and programs that actually want to teach people how to use AI and actually inject that as part of their curriculum. So we, as an example, at Replit, we’re talking to several universities about being injected into their programs. We’re working with the Khan Academy as well to actually inject Replit into their programs. So we’re doing that at a scale just more as a learning and educational tool of doing that. So it’s different there, but from K through 12, I think it’s more around guardrail. So yeah, the talks at the dinner table oftentimes is when our kids get through their homework and get through their stuff in literally minutes, we question them, “Hey, did you use AI for this? Let me go read it. Hopefully you didn’t go use AI for that and it’s not a good use of technologies.” We have debates and conversations like that pretty often.
[00:36:03] Adam Fishman: I don’t know if you ever have conversations with other parents in your community. Certainly some people know what you do for a living. Has that come up? Do you have parents reaching out to you, parents of your kids, friends and stuff that are like, “What do we do here? How do we think about it?”
[00:36:18] Ghazi Masood: I have parents reaching out more around giving them advice and ideas of things their kids could be doing using AI. Not so much about, “Hey, my kid is using AI in school. How can I stop them?” I don’t get into conversations there. It’s more about like, “Hey, we know AI exists. What would be a good use case for my son or daughter to get started with the use of AI? And how can I get them exposed to the technology?” I have more of those conversations.
[00:36:48] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Great. Great. All right, I want to talk about your life as a pilot. You have been a pilot for almost three decades and you fly a lot of nonprofit, what I would call missions now in your free time, which I know is not abundant. So first of all, how does someone who is the CRO of a very fast-growing AI company, obviously you came into this way before that, but how did you get started on this journey as a pilot?
[00:37:14] Ghazi Masood: So I’ve been just very fascinated with aviation at a very young age. So my father, back when I was growing up in Karachi, Pakistan, that’s where I was born, he was in flight operations working for Swissair. He had a great career working in flight operations for Swissair. So we were always around airports and planes and going on trips with him in the plane. And he wasn’t a pilot, but he would get to sit in the cockpit. So we would always get exposure to that. So I was just very fond of aviation at a very, very young age as a result of that. And in fact, I was so fond of it. I actually wanted to go make a career of being a professional pilot back when I was growing up. And my father actually steered me away from it, said that, “Hey, you’ll never be home.
[00:37:52] Ghazi Masood: You’ll never make the livelihood from an earning standpoint as a pilot back then because to be a senior pilot takes years and years and years to do that.” So anyways, he steered me away from that, but I always had a passion. So when I was in my mid-20s and I had some free time on my hands, I said, “I’m going to go do this for myself.” And I got my private pilot’s license that are done in about seven months. And the rest is history after that. Obviously when you first get your pilot’s license, you’re doing a bunch of scenic hops from here to there going out to eat. I think they call an aviation called a $100 hamburger because you would go get a burger and it would cost you $200 to go get the burger at different airports. It’s a very well-known term in aviation, the $100 hamburger trip.
[00:38:31] Ghazi Masood: So I’ve done a lot of recreational flying like that. And now 25 years later, I just want to give back. So I fly mainly for an organization called Angel Flight West, which is a group of pilots up and down the West Coast. And we basically provide the plane, we fly the money on our time to take people who need medical treatment to and from their medical appointments. People who either can’t afford it or the car ride is too long for them to go to their weekly chemo treatments, whatever it is, and they can’t bear the car ride, we use our plane to go take them to appointments. So I do two of those. My goal, I try to hold to this as much as I can with my schedule. If I can check off two of those a month, that satisfies my flying itch and that also satisfies my itch of just giving back to the community itch and it kind of keeps me engaged.
[00:39:18] Ghazi Masood: So that’s my goal is to do two of those missions a month. And usually with my schedule, I can usually pick up definitely one for sure a month. And two, sometimes those schedules match and they’re on the weekends or weeks that I’m not traveling.
[00:39:31] Adam Fishman: That’s awesome. I’m amazed that you can fit this in. This is very cool. What does flying give you that nothing else in your life does?
[00:39:39] Ghazi Masood: Yeah, well for me, it uses the other completely opposite side of my brain because with flying, you are just immersed into the whole thing. So flying is very a checklist oriented type of a thing and it’s very procedural driven. If anything out of the procedure doesn’t work, I have a pretty high limit of when I go fly and when I don’t go fly. If something is out of whack and not following the procedure that I actually have, I won’t go fly. And whether that’s me not feeling well, whether it’s the weather, whether it’s something with my plane, whether it’s the way I show up at the airport. So it uses a completely different side of the brain. So I experience that and I love it. And when I’m up there, usually on one of these legs, one of the legs is I’m flying people and usually the other leg is I’m by myself flying back.
[00:40:30] Ghazi Masood: So when I’m up there by myself, sometimes up for two hours, if it’s a long flight, it’s like meditation really for me to just unplug and just be in a totally different world than my day-to-day of being an operator at a company like Replit. I’m not even thinking about that. I’m thinking about something totally, totally different. And it’s just a zen moment for me personally.
[00:40:54] Adam Fishman: Oh, very cool. Very cool. Summer looks like your meditation. That’s interesting. What does your wife think of your flying? Does it make her nervous or is she a big fan?
[00:41:02] Ghazi Masood: Yeah, I mean, it definitely makes her nervous. It definitely makes her nervous. Yeah. I mean, we have protocols on whenever I take off, I text her where I’m going and the moment I land, I text her. We have protocols like that. And in fact, when our kids were very young, there was a period of time that she wouldn’t go flying with me when the kids were very young. But now trusts me, we do family trips. If we go on a weekend trip or something over Labor Day, we usually go fly with the whole family. But yeah, to say it’s not nerve-wracking for her, it definitely is.
[00:41:32] Adam Fishman: It sounds like you have a high bar for getting off the ground though, so that’s good. Oh,
[00:41:38] Ghazi Masood: Yeah. As a pilot in aviation, there’s a thing called setting your personal limits and every pilot should have their personal limits of what has to be met in order for them to go fly. So yeah, I’m pretty cautious there.
[00:41:52] Adam Fishman: What’s the best $100 hamburger you’ve ever had? Which airport has the best
[00:41:55] Ghazi Masood: One? Up here in the area where we have a great beautiful spot. It’s called the San Juan Islands up in Seattle. And to get there by car, you have to take a ferry, you have to drive, it’s about a four to five-hour duration to get up to the islands. Whereas with the plane, you can get up there in 27 minutes. So I go up there in the plane in 27 minutes, get my fish and chips at Downriggers on Friday Harbor, which has the best amazing fish and chips and burgers. And you spend the day up there and literally you’re back the same day or same afternoon.
[00:42:24] Adam Fishman: Okay. Well, now I need to go get my fish and chips from this place. I got to figure this out. Have your boys expressed any interest in flying?
[00:42:31] Ghazi Masood: My youngest has, not my oldest. My oldest doesn’t want anything to do with it. Actually, he’s a big aviation guy with commercial airplanes. He loves that, but he doesn’t want anything to do with flying. My youngest has shown some interest, so I’m hoping he’s the one who carries the legacy.
[00:42:47] Adam Fishman: Carries the torch. Is that something you’ll maybe do together with him, get started on that?
[00:42:52] Ghazi Masood: I hope so. Yeah, I hope so. Yeah, he’s definitely expressing an interest in that as well. And he asked me a lot of pretty technical questions about it, which we’ll see how it goes. But yeah, that would be something fun.
[00:43:03] Adam Fishman: Okay. So we’re getting close to the end here. Before we wrap, I want to ask you about advice. So you’re a dad who has two teenagers who you’ve raised them for a long time. You’ve been through the trials and tribulations. You’ve had young kids and worked a hard driving career, you’ve had older kids and done it. So if you were talking to a younger executive who’s about to become a dad, what piece of advice would you offer for them? Or how would you talk to them about this?
[00:43:34] Ghazi Masood: I would say if you’re about to have a kid, you’re about to become a dad, spend the right time during the early years. Those are the precious years of when you have a newborn and being around that and dedicating the proper amount of time and energy to that with the family because those are moments you don’t ever get a second shot at replicating. So I would say take your time in doing that. Work will always be there and you can create your work schedule to accommodate that, but spend the time early in dedicating and devoting to your family and getting the roundings and the bearings that are actually there. And then the other part of it is just around the work-life aspect of it. There’s moments as I was raising my kids that I wouldn’t ever take back of the time that I was actually here with them and spending it there.
[00:44:25] Ghazi Masood: And there’s no job in the world where they are not accommodating to what you need to go do with your family. And if that’s the case, you’re probably not on the right job. So I’ve never in my years and early part of my career I was working at big tech like Avaya, Microsoft, Oracle and others, big, big companies that I’m in startups. You can accommodate pretty much anything you want to give time and dedicate to your family in the right ways that are out there. So I would say come up with a balance and come up with a model that works for you and integrate that into your life. And then be aware of the special moments, the birthdays, the sports events that you got to be here for, the graduation parties, all the milestones that you have as your kids grow up. You got to be there for those.
[00:45:12] Ghazi Masood: You got to be there for those and work around those areas out there. But what I always tell people that are having their first child is don’t rush back to work. Use those early times to form the bonds and experience those joys of having your first child because those are the moments you’re never going to get back.
[00:45:30] Adam Fishman: Well, to end, how can people follow along with you or learn more about what you and the team are building at Replit or be helpful?
[00:45:39] Ghazi Masood: Yeah, I mean, I travel quite a lot at a lot of different events out there. You can always just get ahold of me. My contact email is fine. I get a lot. It’s just ghazi@replit.com is my email address and I do respond to a lot of inquiries I get. I get a lot of people wanting jobs or wanting advice and things like that. And I do try to read as many of those personally as I can every single night so you can get ahold of me there and if we can be helpful in any which way, definitely reach out. And I tend to post a lot these days on LinkedIn too, just around various different topics. So if you’re not following me there, follow me there and you can get a dose of some of that stuff.
[00:46:17] Adam Fishman: All right. Well, we appreciate that generosity. So I will send people your way should they want to chat about all things AI. Sounds good. All right, do you have a few minutes for lightning round? The bookend of the show. Yes. So here we go. What is the most indispensable parenting product you’ve ever purchased?
[00:46:35] Ghazi Masood: I mean way back when it was our swing. For putting my kid to sleep, it was a night vertigo deal. That was a life changer, game changer building for us.
[00:46:47] Adam Fishman: I would agree with that.
[00:46:48] Ghazi Masood: Yeah.
[00:46:48] Adam Fishman: What is the most useless parenting product you’ve ever purchased?
[00:46:52] Ghazi Masood: Probably like a baby bottle cleaner. Those were the
[00:46:55] Adam Fishman: Things
[00:46:56] Ghazi Masood: You got. I mean you don’t need overkill. If I wash your baby bottle, just finding a dishwasher without that stuff.
[00:47:01] Adam Fishman: Yep. What is the strangest thing you’ve ever found in one of your kids’ pockets?
[00:47:06] Ghazi Masood: Strangest thing I’ve found in my kids’ pockets. Oh my God. I mean, I found teeth. I’ve found teeth in their kids’ pockets before. So I don’t know why a tooth would be in their pockets, but I’ve found tooths in their pockets. I would just discount
[00:47:24] Adam Fishman: It. I mean, when you lose a tooth, where else does it go? I guess in your
[00:47:27] Ghazi Masood: Opinion. Yeah, I guess.
[00:47:27] Adam Fishman: That’s amazing. That may be a first for this show is teeth. Okay. True or false, there’s only one correct way to load the dishwasher.
[00:47:36] Ghazi Masood: If I were to load it, yes, that’s true. If you were to ask my wife, she disorganizes and changes it her way. Yes. But the rule in the house is if you want me to load the dishwasher, I’m loading it on
[00:47:47] Adam Fishman: My way. I’ll do it my way.
[00:47:48] Ghazi Masood: Yeah.
[00:47:49] Adam Fishman: Awesome. Okay. What is your signature dad’s superpower?
[00:47:53] Ghazi Masood: Probably just showing my kids just how life works. There’s nothing for free and just kind of imparting some wisdom on them. Whether it’s doing anything, I don’t know, but I’ll continue to do so as I grow older.
[00:48:09] Adam Fishman: Okay. What is your favorite way to spend time with each one of your boys?
[00:48:14] Ghazi Masood: Nowadays, it’s actually great. Out of all the years, both my kids played crazy amount of sports growing up and I was a big tennis player. My son never got into tennis late, but my oldest and I, he loves tennis now within the varsity team. So he and I just going out on hitting balls. I love that. And then my youngest, he took on golfing. And I’m not a great golfer just because I don’t have the time to go golf right now, but sometimes I just go in the cart with him and see him play. So we actually spend a lot of time golf and tennis right now.
[00:48:42] Adam Fishman: All right. If your kids had to describe you in one word, what would it be?
[00:48:47] Ghazi Masood: Proud.
[00:48:48] Adam Fishman: Oh, okay.
[00:48:50] Ghazi Masood: Yeah.
[00:48:50] Adam Fishman: Awesome.
[00:48:50] Ghazi Masood: I think they would both say that. Yeah.
[00:48:52] Adam Fishman: Okay. How many dad jokes do you tell on average each day?
[00:48:58] Ghazi Masood: I don’t do many dad jokes, but my youngest, I still treat him like my baby. I still treat him like my baby. And even
[00:49:07] Adam Fishman: Though
[00:49:08] Ghazi Masood: He’s hairy and grown up and a teenager, he’ll still be the little baby of the house.
[00:49:15] Adam Fishman: And
[00:49:16] Ghazi Masood: I don’t think he appreciates that as much
[00:49:17] Adam Fishman: Anymore. Well, maybe this is a good segue to my next question, which what would your kids say is the most embarrassing thing that you’ve ever done in front of them?
[00:49:28] Ghazi Masood: Oh God, this is one for sure. So my youngest one had those electric e-bikes that most
[00:49:34] Adam Fishman: Kids
[00:49:34] Ghazi Masood: Have these
[00:49:35] Adam Fishman: Days? So
[00:49:35] Ghazi Masood: My youngest had his early first stage e-bike. He had taken down from the car. He didn’t have a bike rack. We put it there. And as I was leaving to drop him off at his friend’s house, I actually backed into his e-bike and basically tore off the stand that went off of it right in front of his friends.
[00:49:55] Adam Fishman: Oh, no. So
[00:49:56] Ghazi Masood: That was pretty embarrassing.
[00:49:57] Adam Fishman: Oh, no. Yeah. I’m sure you heard about that for weeks afterwards. Yeah. What is the most absurd thing that one of your kids has ever asked you to buy for them?
[00:50:08] Ghazi Masood: My son, as he started getting into golf, he wanted me to buy him a $10,000 golf simulator. You know those golf simulator?
[00:50:18] Adam Fishman: Yeah.
[00:50:18] Ghazi Masood: I’m like, “There’s no way I’m putting that thing in my house right now.” So that was pretty absurd. And he approached it like, “Hey, I know what you can get me for my birthday.” I’m
[00:50:25] Adam Fishman: Like,
[00:50:26] Ghazi Masood: “Okay, sure.” Then he lobbed his golf simulator. I said, “Uh-uh. Think twice, man. We’re not
[00:50:32] Adam Fishman: Getting that
[00:50:32] Ghazi Masood: Right now.”
[00:50:33] Adam Fishman: You can go to Topgolf for 50 bucks and get the same thing, man.
[00:50:36] Ghazi Masood: Exactly.
[00:50:36] Adam Fishman: Exactly. What is your favorite kid’s movie?
[00:50:40] Ghazi Masood: Our kids’ movie is Cars. Both my boys. The amount of repeat we watched Cars growing up when they were kids was crazy. Yeah, Cars comes to mind.
[00:50:51] Adam Fishman: Okay. Was there a nostalgic movie that you forced your kids to watch as soon as they were old enough?
[00:50:57] Ghazi Masood: Top Gun.
[00:50:58] Adam Fishman: Oh, good. Yeah. Hands
[00:51:00] Ghazi Masood: Down. And my
[00:51:01] Adam Fishman: Wife
[00:51:01] Ghazi Masood: Was like, “Oh my God, it’s too early for them to watch it.” But it was my favorite movie growing up as a kid. I mean, I watched that movie when it first came at 12 years old in the movie theater. So yeah, that was the first movie we got them exposed to.
[00:51:16] Adam Fishman: Just a couple left. What is the worst experience you’ve ever had assembling a kid’s toy or a piece of furniture?
[00:51:23] Ghazi Masood: Assembling their bed and just getting it backwards, the Ikea bed and just getting the parts backward and having to disassemble it and putting
[00:51:31] Adam Fishman: It back together. It’s always the bed.
[00:51:34] Ghazi Masood: I hate that. Yeah, I hate that.
[00:51:36] Adam Fishman: Okay. How often do you tell your kids back in my day stories?
[00:51:40] Ghazi Masood: Quite a lot. I don’t know if it does anything. In fact, just this morning or last night, we were having an argument about the amount of texts I get about putting money in my account for food or putting money in my account for X. I go, “Guys, we had none of this growing up. We figured it out.
[00:51:59] Adam Fishman: We
[00:51:59] Ghazi Masood: Figured it out on our own.” So yeah.
[00:52:03] Adam Fishman: Yeah, you couldn’t move money digitally back in the day.
[00:52:06] Ghazi Masood: No.
[00:52:06] Adam Fishman: Yeah. All right, final question. What is your take on minivans?
[00:52:11] Ghazi Masood: I’ll never have one.
[00:52:12] Adam Fishman: Never. Okay.
[00:52:13] Ghazi Masood: I’ll never have one. My wife drives an SUV and we’re perfectly content with that, but I don’t think we need a minivan for the purposes of it. I mean, although the new Volkswagen minivans, the ones that have come back, the ones that - Oh, the
[00:52:29] Adam Fishman: Buzz.
[00:52:30] Ghazi Masood: They
[00:52:30] Adam Fishman: Look pretty
[00:52:30] Ghazi Masood: Cool. They look pretty cool.
[00:52:32] Adam Fishman: They are pretty cool. They’re all electric. Yeah. Yeah. I might drive one just for fun, but I don’t think I would own one. Yeah. All right, cool. Well, Ghazi, thank you so much for joining me on Startup Dad today. This is a great conversation and I wish you your son who’s about to head off to college and your whole family the best for the rest of this year. So thank you. I
[00:52:51] Ghazi Masood: Really appreciate it, Adam. No, I really, really appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks for having me on.
[00:52:54] Adam Fishman: All right. Thank you for listening to today’s conversation with Ghazi Masood. You can subscribe and watch the show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Visit www.startupdadpod.com to learn more and browse past episodes. Thanks for listening and see you next week.