Amjad overcame severe stage fright by taking improv and storytelling classes in New York and using repeated public exposure to desensitize himself, which let him build his public speaking skills gradually while his profile was still small.
Amjad describes overcoming stage fright through improv classes and 'exposure therapy,' benefiting from Repl.it's slow early growth which let him make mistakes at low stakes before the audience got big. ✦ AI generated
Amjad Masad · a16z Podcast · 2026-07-17 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 2:59
“What was your journey to say, "Hey, I'm really going to invest in this and I'm going to get good at this?"”
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.
verbatim transcript · starts at 2:59
2:59I 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
3:20class 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
3:45up 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
4:10where 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.
4:31And 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
4:57just 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