We're excited to announce that Jassim Latif will be joining the Replit executive team as our Vice President of Operations.
What does that mean? Who is he? Take a minute to get to know Jassim in his own words.
In your own words, who are you? (Identity, location, interests, etc.)
I lived in three countries before I turned five, but my family’s last stop was Los Angeles. I was the kid who loved skating to Sharper Image and Fry’s to play around with gadgets. After a stint at a rib restaurant post college, I found myself in the Bay Area by stumbling into a job in tech in the early 2000s, and I never left. I’ve wandered the halls of familiar big tech names for way too long, dabbled at a VC firm, worked at small startups, and even tried my hand as a founder. My most formative professional experience was joining Slack as its first Business Development hire and helping the company grow and scale over nearly six years.
What will you be doing at Replit?
I’m focused on all things operations and corporate strategery - Business and Corporate Development (ie - how can partnerships accelerate Replit’s mission?), general Operations (ie - how do we make sure we’re all heading in the same direction?), and People + Talent (ie - how do we help our people reach their potential?).
What were you doing before you joined Replit?
I was a co-founder of a small seed stage startup that I started with a few colleagues from Slack.
What made you want to join Replit?
My truth of the world: whether you're making financial decisions for your family, playing a game, making music, or writing a book, your actions are dictated by the creative possibilities of software and computers.
If we can expand those possibilities by increasing the amount of software and what that software can do, we can build a more creative world.
To get more software out in the world, we need more people technically capable of making it.
Hence, Replit. We have the opportunity to increase the creativity of creators all over the world.
Also, it’s pretty cool that my girls use the product and get it.
What are you most excited to accomplish at Replit?
We have a large mission and huge ambition: to bring the next billion coders online. And from there, we want to help people make something great.
To be successful, we need to bring along our employees, our customers, our partners, our investors, and our community to make this happen. My piece of the mission is to make sure we get the best out of our people and keep everyone heading in the same direction.
What is your favorite repl?
SwordBattle.io is a great one. It went viral and has over 250k runs on Replit. It's received significant enough traffic that the builder, Guatum Anand, has monetized it through ads.
What's the coolest thing you've built on Replit?
I haven’t launched this yet, but I’m working on a little project to help me keep track of my favorite restaurants with a few key tags on what I like about those places to make it easy to share with family and friends.
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