Replit CEO: How to build a $1B Company in 2 days | Amjad Masad

0:00This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more.

0:42Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. How far ahead do you think is time when a solopreneur is going to build a billion-dollar company? In the next few years, yeah. This is Amjad, founder and CEO of Replit, an AI-powered coding platform that turns your ideas into apps. Our mission is not just to make software more accessible, but really make entrepreneurship more accessible because creating a business is really one of the best feelings in the world.

1:22But let's be real. Can anyone just sit down with AI and build a billion-dollar company? Amjad says it comes down to three simple steps. They turned Replit into a$3 billion business. I tried those steps myself and what happened wasn't what I expected. Hello everyone and welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. We have an amazing guest today. We have Amjad, the founder of Replit. I talked about Replit a few times on this channel because I've personally been using it. And I'm just fascinated by your journey. I wanted to start with this question where you said you're going to empower a billion software engineers or programmers in the next couple of years.

2:03But at the same time, I saw you say that in a couple of years, companies wouldn't need software engineers. Can you explain that? Yeah, I'm mostly talking about entrepreneurs like us. I think that bigger companies will always need software engineers. But people who have an idea, everyone has an idea. Like, you know, one experiment to do is go on the street and stop people. Like, do you have a business idea? Everyone has an idea. But for the most part, the thing that's stopping them is that they don't have the technical skills or they don't have someone. You know, as a programmer growing up, all my friends were like, oh, can you program this idea for me?

2:42Well, now you can do it. And so we're getting to a point where you can run a business. And it's difficult. It's still that technology needs to mature. but we have a lot of stories where people have built their dream apps and they've had these ideas for like 20 years we're talking about a cfo at a vc firm he's a domain expert like he knows how to manage a vc fund and he never found the right tools for him and he had all these ideas on how to build them but you know it's almost it's always hard to find engineering resources So he used Replit and in three months he built his dream app and he went out and sold it and got a lot of contracts.

3:28And I think he's on his track to make$5 million in RR, quit his job. Now he's an entrepreneur. And he told us every time he's saying, well, at some point I need to onboard a software engineer. Maybe he does. But, you know, he got to$5 million in revenue and still he didn't have to. Yeah. I'm sure, you know, Meta and OpenAI and us, we're always going to need software engineers. But there could be a lot more entrepreneurship in the world, a lot more businesses, if that bottleneck that is making software goes away. Do you have like a screen here where you track your most important metric and what's the most important metric?

4:06So every team has a screen. Infrastructure metrics, there's like product metrics. It's really depending on the team and almost every team has a screen. So what's one universal metric everyone's looking at? I mean ARR. It's like everyone's responsibility. Can you share your recent ARR? Yeah. 160. 160. That's amazing. They've been growing like crazy. Like your graph is dream Y Combinator hockey stick. But especially if you plot it from like 10 years. Oh yeah, right. And it does that. And also, it's so encouraging for entrepreneurs who don't see progress right away. That's right. How many people are coding right now?

4:53Let's see. Is there about 50 ,000? 50 ,000 people? Right here, yeah. Do you know how many apps built on Reptile are actually active and running? Yeah, about 350 ,000 paid online apps. That's growing fast. That's growing 25 % month over month. Do you know how many of them actually generate revenue? We don't. I think those are more anecdotal, the stories that we hear. Pretty soon we're going to be helping you integrate with Stripe and monetize, so we'll be able to track that. I think I already added my Stripe. Yeah, the agent knows how to do it, but we're going to make it even more effortless, like one click.

5:32Our mission is not just to make software more accessible, but really make entrepreneurship more accessible, because that's really the thing I think that changes lives the most. You can make a piece of software and it's fun, but creating a business is really one of the best feelings in the world. So actually, I'm trying to build something with Replit right now. And the thing is, it's something that I'm encountering. So yes, it's building like a beautiful layout, but then sometimes, see, service and available. That's the recent bug I got. So it feels like it's... Interesting. Yeah. On the deployment.

6:10And so you can go to the logs here and understand why the service is unavailable. So you can see there's an error. You can copy that error and give it to the agent and tell it, when I deploy, I get this error. But basically what I'm realizing is that it's still a lot of work, right? It's work. If you have this data, how long does it take to build something that's actually working? What I'm trying to build here is a tool that's going to analyze my videos and let anyone analyze their videos on YouTube and determine videos that have potential if you change their title and thumbnail. You know how it works sometimes.

6:47You repackage a video and it just starts getting all the new views. And I'm trying to build something that's going to help me do that. But I've already spent like six hours and it's a process. Yeah, it is a process. You're still acting kind of like a software developer. You're acting like a software development manager. And so you have this powerful but easily distractible intern, and you need to manage him very well. So for example, you type this prompt, there's like only one sentence. I would have spent maybe another minute or two on it and just say, when I deploy the site, I'm getting this error, but I'm not getting it in the preview.

7:29And so communicating in a more precise way is very important. So prompt engineering and prompting is not that different than programming. We just take away the syntax from it, right? Like you don't have to understand the syntax and a lot of the underlying details, but you still have to be very precise. And actually it helps when communicating with developers as well to be able to talk that way. So, you know, an app like that will probably take a couple of days. Whereas previously, even a senior engineer would have taken them a couple of weeks before AI. $10 ,000,$15 ,000? Yeah, something like that.

8:06It will cost you something like that. But I would spend two, three days on it. I think you'll be able to get it. How can I learn to be better at prompting? We have a YouTube channel. We have a great developer relations person who creates a lot of content. His name is Matt. and so we try to train people on prompting and the underlying systems. So Replit has a DNA sort of education. So when we were talking about a billion developers, these billion developers need to learn. It's not going to come for free. So there's a learning curve associated with it and you need to be resourceful. So you need to go to YouTube, search how to prompt.

8:48You spend a lot of time and practice by building, changing your style. Some people go to OpenAI, for example, and pick O3 or right now is GPT-5 with thinking, and give it the idea and tell it, hey, I want you to structure it into a really great prompt. Prompt it for me? Something like that? Yeah. So I think Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, the best accelerator in the world, wrote this essay about being resourceful. And he talks about the qualities of founders. And one quality is relentlessly resourceful. So they're able to find resources to unblock themselves and be able to not hit a wall.

9:35Because I think a lot of what entrepreneurship is, is finding all these walls and really driving through them. And the way to do that, think of it as like a video game. In a video game, especially open world video games, you're often running into these problems where you don't know how to get to the next level. A lot is creative thinking, kind of moving around and finding the clues. And I think entrepreneurship and building software is sort of similar to that. Can you tell me what changed when you decided to start your company? What was this thought that was like, I need to build this? So there's starting the project versus starting the company.

10:11Starting the project was so obvious to me. Programming is hard. we need to make programming easier. That's like a very technical sort of view on things. Starting the business was less obvious because I had worked at startups. I knew how painful they are. Like, so I worked at Code Academy, for example, when I first came to the States. It was based on the open source version of Replit, but I saw how difficult it was and it was really painful, a lot of hard work. So Replit was still a side project and started growing. And we really, I didn't want to start it into a business because, and I actually tried to sell it to Facebook where I was working back then.

10:46I wanted to stay there. I was very comfortable and happy there. It's a scary feeling to leave your job and go heads down. But it was kind of de-risked because we had a platform that people really loved. We had a hundred thousand users plus a month. So after a lot of deliberation and really trying to think what matters to you, what creates meaning in your life. And serving our customers and really achieving our mission, helping people create businesses and all of that felt very, very important. So I think it's about meaning, partly. And it feels like with this tool, there are two problems in entrepreneurship.

11:21There used to be three, like coming up with idea, building product, and marketing. Now you're left with coming up with ideas, marketing. What do you think is going to happen when everyone's building an app? Yeah. So when everyone's building an app, when that is, it's still a skill, right? It's still like we talked about. It's still a skill that you can develop. And I think grits is very important. So resourcefulness, grits, like not quitting, like not quitting after six hours, like spending another day or two on it at least. I think domain knowledge is very important. So you have excellent domain knowledge on YouTube.

11:57And so you need to imbue, you need to give that domain knowledge into the agent. You need to prompt it in a certain way so that you're downloading your domain knowledge. And that is your competitive advantage. But at the same time, OpenAI models are training on what I know. And then they're so much better at defining what a good YouTube video is. I think you still have tacit knowledge that is not necessarily expressed in all your videos and all the content out there. That CFO at the VC firm has a lot of knowledge and skills he built up over the years that he can make into an app that you can't find on blogs and you can't find online.

12:40And so I think every one of us, as we go through life, we build up a lot of experiences that LLMs do not get to experience because they're not embodied. But do you think there will ever be time when AI sees the problem, comes up with a solution, codes the app, doesn't need a human? You know, I might be a bit different in the Silicon Valley context in that I am quite skeptical about the AGI vision. I think we can build extremely competent agents, but you would always need the human as a driver. because I think that the way large language models work is they train on the entire corpus of texts on the internet, texts on books, all of that stuff.

13:27That is text of the past, of what has happened, right? What people have put in. But can it come up with novel ideas, creative ideas, ideas based on what's changing in the world right now? Because they're not always learning. They're not continuously learning. They're within this closed box that is their training corpus. It's almost like a library in a very productive way. A library has a lot of ideas and it can remix and mix and match ideas. But a net new idea is something that I think still humans have a special place. I love your answer. But still the fear inside me wants to push back by saying that all the ideas already exist in the world.

14:14Like when we're talking about new movies or new books, they take a pre-existing idea by changing characters, changing circumstances. There's always a novel idea. So think about Bitcoin. Bitcoin, are you like in crypto or Bitcoin? A little bit. So Bitcoin, it was based on a history of 20 years people trying to build digital cash. And in the references, it's referencing hash cash, proof of work was existing. So proof of work, the idea that the machine is solving these cryptographic problems in order to secure the Bitcoin network, was actually originally invented to fight spam. So there was this spam problem with the emails, but they don't have spam filters or AI.

14:57And so when I'm sending you an email, I solve a cryptographic problem that is expensive to show you that I'm not a spam agent. Right. So Satoshi Nakamoto took all these ideas and you're right, did existing ideas and put them in a new package. But he added a novel idea, which is how to solve the double spend problem. And this is the blockchain. Right. So I think it's easy to think about there's nothing new under the sun. I think that's the expression. But I think if you look carefully, if you look at what Einstein did, right, like with his theories, there's always one novel insight, one really strong novel insight.

15:40It's almost like this divine intervention. There's something spiritual about having a really novel idea, and I'm sure you've experienced it in the past, that I think is fundamentally human. I don't know where it comes from. Yeah. And also this feeling that you're the one to bring it to the world. I feel like AI likes that. OK, let's see. Let's see what's going on here. Should we go to overview and try again? No? So head redeploy is asking you to redeploy. So it'll take a second to deploy. I'd be curious. Fixed session de-cellularization problem. OK. Well, it's deploying. You said a gap between a Repli user and a senior Google engineer will disappear in two years.

16:22Should people still learn how to code, or what's going to happen to the engineering job? I think the engineering job will continue to exist, especially in very domain-specific areas is basically what we're talking about. There are a lot of things that are not very well represented in the data. If you're a platform engineer at Google dealing with a billion users, there are knowledge and things that you understand and have learned on the job that LLMs do not know because no one's written them anywhere. It's this tacit knowledge. And so I think those engineers will continue to exist. if you're an engineer at NASA and you're building fault-tolerant systems, if you're building provable systems, like I don't want my Tesla autopilot to be vibe-coded, right?

17:07Like there are a lot of life-and-death systems that we want engineers that are very low-level and very almost mathematical about it to exist. So there's a lot of situations in which engineers will continue to exist. but if you're a product builder, I would say just go ahead and build the product. If you need to learn coding along the way, learn it. But your mission is to build the thing. So I would start by building. And like we said, being resourceful along the way goes a long way. So what should engineers who are building apps like this do now? Let's see. Where is it? There we go. Oh, there we go.

17:47Okay. Sign in. We had a new issue. And it's like... Google authentication. But that's how software engineers work. This iteration. Got it. So you think in two days... So you solve a problem, and then you get a new problem. Do you think it will ever get to the stage where I don't have to do this? Yes. Because it could actually run everything and test everything. Yes. So we... Is that what we're working on? Yes. Could you talk about it? Or not yet? Usually not yet, but let me give you some hints. Every Vibe Coding platform today automates generation of code and all of that stuff, which is great, but leaves a job for you that is actually very routine and uncreative and annoying, which is quality assurance and testing.

18:38Exactly, QA. So we're solving that. Okay. All right. You're launching something, right? Is there a little pressure on the team? How are they handling it? Yeah, so we have an offsite next week where we're going to be going to LA on the beach. And at least that's like a sort of a relaxing environment. And we're going to be going really deep and working really hard. And then the week after that, we're going to be coming here. It's called Sprint Week. And we do it before every launch. And people typically work 14-hour days nonstop. You too? Yeah. Your wife too? Yes, yes. Okay, there's a question coming from all the entrepreneurs who have kids.

19:14Like, how do you balance this? So we, you know, there's people talk about work-life balance. We talk about work-life harmony or work-life integration. And so, for example, like we'll have the nanny bring the kids to the office. So they can vibe code. They can vibe code. I sometimes sit down with my kid and like do a little bit of coding, but so we can see them, right? Like so, and next week for the trip, everyone here could bring their families as well. So, you know, Replit not being super young startup, we're not that young. There's a lot of people with families. So we try to, like, create that integration.

19:53Do you think it works? Honestly? Or do you feel like you're missing out on your kids? I don't feel like I'm missing out. Like, honestly, I don't feel like I'm missing out. So, you know, just having a bit of freedom in your schedule. So I spend, like, mornings with them. Like, I wake up at 7, 8, and I get to the office by 10, right? But I, you know, stay late here. We have dinners here. But, you know, I have these two hours in the morning at least. Sometimes I'm there for dinner as well and on the weekend. I'll work a little bit like Sunday afternoon. I'm always on my phone working, obviously, and responding and phone calls and things like that.

20:28But I feel like I'm present. What about your wife? Similar schedule? Yeah, no, she has a less intense of a schedule. I think CEO schedule is like a little more intense. And I think this is, you probably can relate to that. I think being a mom, there's like a more sense of guilt that I don't really... All the time. Yeah. Because they're back from school right now. Right. Yeah, but I also would love to do this. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know what to speak to that, but I feel like all things considered, we feel fairly involved in their lives. That's good. Talk to me about your mindset. Like you're coming up with all these new things, but at the same time, we have Lovable, Cursor, we have all of these tools.

21:08We're going to let you do the same thing. How do you see yourself being different and how do you survive mentally as an entrepreneur? So we're going to be the first to do what I just talked about. And it's launching in September. Yep. And last year, we're the first agent on the market. And so we're always three, six. I think this feature that we're building is probably going to be a year ahead of anyone else. And that's because it's built on 10 years of innovation, infrastructure innovation. like every app that you're building every workspace is backed by a cloud virtual machine built on a file system that we innovated we even patched the linux kernel to to to make things work for replet and so all that infrastructure allows us to always be ahead we'll come up with an idea sometimes it takes two three months to build if you want to build the idea from scratch It'll take you two, three years to build.

22:03And so I think Replit will actually start to diverge pretty soon. All these applications kind of look the same because they all generate a website. But when you talk to developers that are using Replit, often moved from the other platforms, they're saying that, yeah, I mean, these tools got me a pretty website pretty quickly. But a month in, I'm just blocked. I can't manage my database. I want a place to store my files. Replit ships with a database, has an object storage component, has authentication component. Like I know you're trying to set up Google authentication, but you can also ask the agent, implement Replit authentication, has a built-in authentication system.

22:46We built up this massive amount of infrastructure. And within the next six months to 12 months, I think it'll be really obvious how Replit differentiates. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify.

23:26When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Have you seen any big mistakes that people make when building something with Replit?

24:00Because I know a lot of entrepreneurs are looking and they're probably like, okay, I'll build it up, but what's next? Like any tips for marketing or any lessons that you've seen along the way? First of all, what we talked about with prompting, over-communicate. Over-communicate, be a resourceful. Replit environment gives you a lot of tools like the logs and things like that. Try to over-communicate with the agent. I think that's the first tip that I would give. Even if you don't want to learn prompt engineering, just be over communicative. And then on marketing, I think that's the next big bottleneck for entrepreneurs, right?

24:36Let's say building a product becomes easier and easier and easier. How do you go get it to market and communicate your value proposition, all of that? Exactly. And like, why would someone buy something like this if they can just go to Replit and And Vibe code the same thing, right? Yeah. It was like an easy app. There's definitely marketing is a big part of the answer. But also, like I said, domain knowledge that you have. Just think about the things that you know deep in your heart of hearts that not many people in the world know. And the other thing is, like I said, grit. Just not quitting after six hours is very differentiating.

25:15Actually, most people just quit. and so just keep going and not quit. Like I've been building this business for 10 years. Before that, back in Jordan, I had this idea when I was 22 and I started working on it. Actually, there was an open source project called Replit back in 2010 and I just didn't quit. I knew this was kind of big. I still know it's going to be a trillion dollar company at some point in the future. Right now, we're like a$3 billion company, which is still huge. It's amazing. Congratulations. Thank you. But it's just not quitting. I think a big part of it, I mean, people talk about it all the time, just show up every day.

25:53Just showing up is a big differentiator. Most people don't. Things are hard and life is full of easy things. You can spend four hours on TikTok, be endlessly entertained, right? So that's one. On marketing, there are a few things I could say here. One is launch, launch, launch. Just keep launching. Go launch on Reddit. New products. Iterate. Even the same product. Like make another... Another tweak. Another tweak. Show it in a different way. Iterate on your messaging. Do another video. Try to reach out to influencers to partner with them. Go on podcasts. I've seen you go on a podcast. Reflor, I launched it three or four different times with different messaging and different things.

26:39So the first three times didn't work? The first few times it didn't work. I think when we got on Hacker News the first time, it was when I said, you can try all these different languages. And I listed the languages. Try Python, Ruby. That was before AI. And that was a hit because of the title change. And so again, it's grit, relentless resourcefulness, and just iteration, iteration, iteration. OK, what are your top three favorite AI apps? Of course, Repli. Yeah, we'll leave that aside. Yeah. Perplexity. You know, I just like going to Google and spending five minutes clicking on links. I can just get it really fast with Perplexity.