The $9B Startup That Wants to Create a Billion New Developers

0:04Today I'm joined by Amjad Masad, the CEO and co-founder of Replit. Replit is the leading no-code app builder for consumers and enterprise. They just recently raised their Series D, a$400 million raise at a$9 billion valuation. Amjad, thank you very much for joining me and I'm excited to learn more about Replit. Thank you for having me. Of course. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what Replit is? Yeah, so our ambition is that anyone, no matter what level of skill they have, anyone who can read and write, basically that's the skill that you need, can come in with an idea and can leave with an app that's deployed, that's hosted, that's getting traffic, that's can scale and they don't have to worry about any technical aspect of building that thing.

1:02And it's been a mission we're on for 10 years right now. So initially we solved the development environment. That was the hardest thing, setting up a development environment, then solve the deployment environment. And what was left is the coding part was still very intimidating for people. and September 2024, Repli became the first like what's called live coding product where we abstracted away code entirely. So there's like a coding agent behind the scene, but you're just interfacing with AI using natural language and more recently with agent four, also design interactions. So you can write things, you can comment on things, you can drag and drop things in like a canvas.

1:44And we're thinking about a lot of different modalities for how people want to interact with agents because I don't think it's always going to be just text. I think at some point it's going to be multimodal, maybe video, maybe audio. But we want to create a natural place where people can express their ideas and those ideas can turn almost magically into software that is real software. It's not like a toy software. Real software, secure software, scalable software. One of the things that's most interesting to me about your company is that it really bridges the gap between a dev tool and not. I think it's the first dev tool I've seen, but that's not marketed towards engineers.

2:21Like, can you tell me more about how you came to that decision that you were going to do that? And who is your primary user today? Yeah, so, you know, I started coding at a very, very young age, but I was always interested in the act of creation. I was interested in entrepreneurship. I built like my first business when I was 13, 14. And I always thought that the developer tools were getting in the way. It actually gotten worse over time. So I started coding on BASIC and you just start the BASIC command line interpreter and you can just type a little BASIC and that's good. By the time I graduated from college, setting up a web app was like a nightmare.

3:03And so it created this desire to just build tools that are more joyful, more enriching, kind of focus on the act of creation as opposed to the accidental complexity of developer tools. And so I started building a lot of tools for myself. And eventually I built what would become kind of the first in-browser IDE. Initially it was like an open source project. Later on I would also work on React and React Native. And I approached every time I built a developer tool, I approached it with the same thing. can you apply design sensibilities in the same way that you would work on a consumer app? And that's been successful in many ways.

3:51But ultimately, when we started Repl.it, the goal was make programming accessible. Later, we updated our mission to create a billion new developers. As we progress in our mission and in solving every part of the software development lifecycle, cycle, what we've noticed is a lot of developers actually like the ping. They like setting up things and they like configuring every aspect of it. It's sort of like, there's no knock against that, but it's sort of like a craftsperson kind of liking to build their own tools. And what we've noticed is that people that are getting the most value out of a product tend to be the more tech adjacent ones.

4:32Maybe people, product managers have written code many years ago, but don't worry about the development environment setup. Don't worry about the deployment setup. Then designers, designers who have ideas but are often blocked or bottlenecked by engineers and they want to be able to build their own ideas. And later on as we layered on AI and the product got better, entrepreneurs. And when I talk to these people, it reminded me of myself. Those are people with ideas, with passion, with fire in them, but they're getting hamstrung by just the need to learn, to become technical. So at some point in 2023, we just made it an explicit goal of we're not going after developers.

5:22They're still developers. If you walk around Replit today, it looks like a dev tool of companies. We're like building for creators, right? But they're not the traditional type of developers. There's like a new generation of developers that are coming up right now because of AI. They're AI native developers that are creating software without having to worry about every component in the system. It's so interesting hearing you say this because it sort of reminds me, I learned to program on VB6. And to me that's a real, you know, this idea of the tools opening up and making it possible for people that couldn't code.

5:59I couldn't code. I learned to code in VB6. And I see sort of a very similar thing that you're exploring with this. Yeah, VB6 was better than setting up React and Webpack. 100%. I remember the transition, yes. It got worse over time, which is like not many things get worse in life, but programming got worse. And I wanted to bring it back, make programming great again, essentially. That's so interesting. Tell me about what people are building today in Replit. Yeah, I mean, there's a few different categories. There's personal software, there's enterprise software, and then there's like entrepreneurs building products.

6:40One of the apps that I really liked recently was talking to a physical therapist and her husband. And she is a physical therapist that's built up so much deep knowledge in a subsection of physical therapy that is like around fascia and fascia release. And she has all these different methodologies and ways of tracking the progress for her clients. And she wanted to build an app that is very sophisticated. like being able to take scans of your body, being able to scan your range of motion, and to track that on a 3D representation of your body. And they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars offshoring to developers around the world.

7:25And eventually they kind of were frustrated by the entire process, took matters into their own hands, built it on Replit. And when I saw that app, it was like one of the best health tech apps I've ever seen. and they're not. Yeah, because the domain experts can now actually build the product. Yeah, people who are closest to the problem can build the products they need. You know, I talked to a founder the other day that's building a SaaS solution for people who maintain pools. Like, and he grew up in a household where their family business is a pool business. And so it's like there's so much software to build in the world.

8:07I also met a founder yesterday who's building software for sports clubs. And he was showing me pictures of the software they're using today, which is MS-DOS-based software. Oh, wow. And so here in Silicon Valley, we look around us and we're like, oh, what else is left to build? But there's so many walks of life. There's so many things that are kind of a blind spot for us. And so suddenly when anyone can make software, a lot of parts of the economy is just going to improve. And that's, I think, a beautiful thing. And a lot of wealth creation is going to happen, productivity gain as well. Personal software is also really cool.

8:46We talk to a lot of families that build healthcare software. There's a mom in Korea that builds software that helps manage a very rare condition for her kid. A lot of people build like personal like you know healthcare software or like tracking physical activity or ingesting data from all their wearables and doing something with it. A lot of software for families like a mom built like a chore hero software iPad that's like on the wall that shows the kids how they're ranking on their chores and then there's the enterprise use case and an In enterprise, it tends to be two different use cases. One is product development.

9:31So companies want to move a lot faster on product development. Everyone now is feeling the pressure of AI. We need to move faster, faster, faster. And they're realizing that it doesn't fall just on their engineers. Their product people can now build software. Their designers can build software. We hear from clients, like one of our favorite stories, like Whoop is a client of ours. and they told us like the amount of ideas they can try has grown by an order of magnitude, right? Like they used to, you know, get like a hundred ideas but are able to only try five of them. But now they can try the 50, right?

10:08So, you know, companies become a lot more prolific. They can release a lot of new features, create new business lines, new products. And then there's like internal tools and, you know, line of business applications. There's a lot of sales automations that is happening at this company. Any role inside a company that's dealing with a lot of data flow, for example, think of RevOps, that are the nexus of a lot of different data flow from their CRM, from their data people, from Gong, and they want to be able to do things with this data. And typically, they're kind of bottlenecked by either engineering resources or the different SaaS tools that they would want to buy.

10:45The problem with SaaS is you onboard a new SaaS tool that creates a new silo of data that you can't really program. So now they're taking matters into their own hands and building things like quote configurators and being able to save the company hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars, on SaaS tools and things like that. How are you finding these users? Like, how do you market to them? How do you get them to try it out? And then I assume for enterprises, it's got to be a very complicated sales cycle, like getting into the company. Like, how does all that work? Well, the cool thing about the world we're in right now, and it's very similar to developers, you know, I think the insight that a lot of YC dev tool companies has had like, you know, Stripe, PagerDuty, developers were empowered to be able to make decisions to bring software into the company at some point like in the last couple of decades, right?

11:40That shift is happening outside of development right now where the product manager, the designer, the operations manager is empowered to bring software. So the consumer use case, the personal use case is often overlapping with the work use case in that people are playing with these tools on the weekend. They're building their own personal apps. They're like, oh, look, the moment you understand that you can solve a problem with code, it changes your mind. Like almost there's like a neurological shift where you start looking at the world differently. where they go around and they're like, oh, I can solve this.

12:15I can fix this. I remember that when I learned to program. Yeah, exactly. And now that shift is happening in huge parts of the population. And so it's, you know, PLG play, I think, still the gold standard. Just make a product that's really good, that people want to recommend to their friends and make it easy to refer others, you know, build a referral program, do all of that stuff. And then on the sales side, a lot of it is very kind of sales-assisted. So someone brings it to work, we talk to them, they're the champion, we help them. It's like, okay, what do you need to convince your boss in order to bring this to work?

12:48Let's work with them to do a hackathon, to create more champions inside the company. Let's teach you leadership about AI. So a lot of what our salespeople are doing is evangelism, is education. So it's a different kind of sales motion, I think, than the previous one. We still have enterprise sales that's more top-down where a company comes to us, we're like, hey, we're trying all the different Vibe coding tools. We heard it's good for our business. Can you help us kind of evaluate Replit? And we go into that. And there we're often winning because Replit has built a history of just like being super trusted on security, on compliance, all that basic enterprise stuff you still have to do.

13:31Let's talk about sort of what the limits are today of what you can do with a product like Replit. Like what kind of systems can you build in Replit and what do you still need to have sort of traditional software engineering approaches to? I can confidently say to any entrepreneur out there that you can build a SaaS product, a consumer product, like an automation product on Replit comfortably. If you want to build like a new cloud platform or you want to build like a new machine learning system, that's not exactly what we're focused on today. Some people still figure it out. Replit is a versatile tool.

14:11We give you a virtual machine. We give you a general purpose agent. And if you have some technical knowledge, you can bring that and you can build sophisticated things. But if you want to build things entirely vibe coded without worrying about the technical details, we have so many examples on our website and what we talk about in our marketing. There's so many success stories now that I can confidently tell an entrepreneur with no technical knowledge that they can build a piece of software. So there's a lot of consumer apps. There are a lot of vertical SaaS products. There are people that are starting like Replit native agencies.

14:48I was talking to someone from Iceland yesterday and he was telling me they're getting so much business because they're 60 to 70 percent cheaper and more effective than traditional agencies and they're all vibe coding on repli. So they get a client that that client wants an application. Not everyone knows that they can build the application themselves so they're going in it's probably a period of time and they're able to make a lot of money that that way. You know the internal tools, automations, those tend to be kind of fairly simple programs, like you're building an internal org chart, you're building a CPQ system, like a quote configurator, where it's like pulling from HubSpot or Salesforce.

15:32We have a lot of MCP and integrations that allows to do that. How do those integrations work? Like, have you gone through and built integrations to all? Okay. Yes, yes. We spent a lot of time partnering with companies, building those integrations and now there's what's happening with the skills called revolution where companies are putting out skills and MCPs and we just vet them and integrating into the product. So as you're talking to a rep plan and you're like, I want to integrate Stripe. And so we already built a set of skills and sometimes code and things like that. And we'll search a database, we'll bring all that in and now it's in context and the agent is like, it's sort of like Neo and the Matrix where like you download a new skill and you're like, oh, I know how to fly a helicopter now.

16:18So it's so cool to see the agent is like, oh, let me search this set of skills that I have and suddenly it knows how to do that. But we spend a lot of time just making sure they're secure and they're safe. That makes sense, yeah. Having built a dev tool community, like how is that different? How do you build the sort of like groundswell of support to pull yourself into those organizations? Is it different than how you would have done it traditionally? It's a little different in that you need to show what's possible. I think with developers, with more traditional CS trained developers, they know what's possible.

16:56They'll read your docs, they'll figure out what's possible, they're on Hacker News all the time, and they'll generally kind of are much more resourceful in knowing what's possible. With Repli, there's a lot of education that needs to be done. So we have like a DevRel team, but they're not the traditional DevRel. They're more like educators. They're like going and spending a lot of time just teaching people what's possible. Our documentation, I think, is a lot simpler than your typical DevTool documentation. So you have to be really good in content. Stripe got popular for this being really good on documentation.

17:35with if you're building a dev tools for non-developers, you have to go above and beyond on content. You have to produce a lot of video content as well. Also the agent itself needs to be imbued with characteristics that is able to talk to non-developers and tell them what's possible and be a brainstorming partner. So this is why we also moved from purely just prompting to also a canvas and more visual interface so that people can explore things more easily. And we have buttons where it says, like, create different variations of this. And so we're adding a lot of different shortcuts just to show people what's possible.

18:13On the enterprise side, when we go and we talk to leaders, we're like, reserve any judgment. Don't pay for Replit. We're going to come in, bring the group that's most excited about AI, and we're going to do a hackathon. How do you, when you see someone, how are you like, yes, this is going to be the person who's going to be so excited to use this? We think a lot about that because, you know, typically when you think about ICPs, you're thinking about, oh, that's someone who's went to school for this degree or someone who's a product manager, which is still true. You can do that. But oftentimes because we're able to sell the sales departments, marketing, product, design, the set of traits that we think makes it, like the champion, the person who's most excited about Replit, who's going to spread it inside the organization, who's going to build, who's going to do the education evangelism, they tend to be very entrepreneurial.

19:03They're the kind of person that could start their own company, but they're able to kind of be very influential internally. They're kind of like what YC talks about, like PGSAs, like resourceful, someone who's not going to get blocked, who's going to figure out what other AI tool I need to integrate, what can I like go learn in order to figure it out. So that entrepreneurial kind of founder mindset, I think, is very important. Got it. I mean, while we're on the topic of YC, I'd love to hear about your experience here. How did YC influence how Replit started and what it became? The main realization from YC is how much you can get done in three months.

19:41So when we came in and Sam stood, when he was still running it, Sam stood in front of the batch and said, for the next three months, tell your friend you're going to be missing. You're not going to be able to help them move. You'll come back into their lives later. But for the next three months, you need to be hyper-focused on this company. And you're going to be able to achieve great things if you really go intensely into it. When we did YC, we had a whiteboard and a countdown to demo day. And a number of, like, just a very simple list of things we need to achieve. And every day we wake up, we raise that number, and we change it to the countdown.

20:21down. And when Repl.it got into YC, it was still a REPL, that's the name, right? It was still just like a command line with like, you just type a little bit of code and run it. Yeah, yeah. We actually, at YC, we already had like web development, we had like the initial aspect of hosting, we had code intelligence, we had like so many sort of IDE features, it's like got a lot more feature complete just in three months. And that is an empowered thing sort of what we talked about with programming, just the fact that like, oh, you can be so intensely focused and you can work so hard and achieve so much in three months.

20:56And now every agent release, there is, it's not three months, it's more like four weeks where we bring everyone, because some people are still kind of remote or other offices, bring everyone to the office. We provide breakfast, lunch, and dinner, coffee 24-7. and we're like, we're just going to hit this like very, very ambitious goal. And that's like the YC mentality. Another thing is the compound growth, especially when you're spinning up a new product or a new initiative. This idea of like, I don't know where PG came up with the number seven, but like 7 % week of a week of growth is like a very good way to bootstrap a new product line.

21:38So we're constantly doing sort of, we're constantly going back to the YC basics and doing them. and all of that we learned here. Tell me about how did YC change your life? There are a few ways. One is before we got into YC, we couldn't raise all that much money. We raised like maybe$500 ,000. And VCs did not want to meet us. It was like the doors were not really open for us. After YC, you immediately, first of all, demo day, you get introduced to a lot of VCs. and then we were lucky because we got rejected from YC for three or four times and then we got invited to do YC because Paul and Sam saw us on Hacker News and so we got a direct relationship with Paul and Sam and then at the end I was like I want an intro to Marc Andreessen and you could still ask the partners here like they'll try a lot to get you intros but I was like bold enough to ask for that and so they got me an intro to him I went and had breakfast at his house and pitched replet and a16z ended up leading our seat around.

22:42Nice. Like my network just expanded tremendously after getting into YC and I don't think we would have been as successful without YC. Perhaps we would have quit if we were getting a fundraise or so it gave it gave our our company life. Yeah yeah for us it was very similar we were complete outsiders And I think having somebody sort of welcome you in made an enormous difference. Yeah, 100%. So you guys just announced Agent 4. So what is that, like the fourth major revision of your product? Yeah, so we kind of an act of trying to predict the future. And based on what we've seen at the time, starting in kind of 2024, we thought that broadly the AI capabilities have massive step changes twice a year.

23:35So if you think about 2025, there was the like VibeCoder revolution that happened in earlier 2025 and then there was the autonomous revolution that happened in late 2025 with Opus 4.6 that led to OpenClaw and things like that. But I can tell you the same thing happened in 2024. Mid 2024, Clawd came out and Clawd saw it and for the first time it could generate like a lot of code as opposed to GPT 3.5, which has that laziness component. And then late 2024, we started seeing initial signs of the labs kind of doing long horizon reasoning. And so that observation, we're like, okay, we want to align our roadmap to AI capabilities.

24:23And so every six months, we release a new agent version. And it's an act of predicting what's possible. It's also pushing the edge of what's possible. So for example, Agent 3 was the most autonomous agent on the market. We knew that autonomy was coming and we're like, okay, we want to be able to run the agent for like two, three, four hours. People should be able to put in a big prompt, go to lunch, come back and see the software fully built. And so, okay, what do we need to do to update our platform? For example, we had to rewrite everything on the back end to have these long running containers in the background doing work while the user is not in front of the computer.

25:05And so we did all of that work. And although autonomy didn't arrive until maybe, like true autonomy until November and December, Repl.Agent had demonstrated where the world is headed by September. Right. With Agent 4, there were a few things. One, parallel agents. We thought that was finally potentially possible to do parallel agents. The thing that sucks about autonomy is that you can put in a big prompt and you're kind of sitting back and just like watching it work. What do you do next? Okay, so that question, what do you do next? You should be able to design. You should be able to kick off other type of work.

25:48should be able to chat with your agent and plan for other things. And so we wanted a more asynchronous nature to the product. So we started building towards a multi sort of agent architecture and power agent architecture. We had to solve merge conflicts and so many things to make that work. Also, as the agent is building, we want to also unblock you from designing. So we also had a kind of a more asynchronous design agent and we're like, okay, what is the best interface for that? So we designed this canvas. So now we have a built-in design capability inside Replit to be able to explore the next page you're going to build or the next feature we're going to build while the agent's building.

26:33And then once you're ready, you'll kick that off into another thread and it starts. So people are now sitting in front of Replit and just experiencing the state of flow. because agents are slow, that's fine, but they can work in the background. And finally, teamwork. Once you solve parallel agents, you've also solved teamwork because every time someone jumps into the session, you can start an entirely new, you can fork entirely new VM for them and they can work in parallel to you. And also because the orchestrator knows how to subdivide tasks, you can also prompt in the same chat window and we'll figure out how to make all that work.

27:08And because we had the canvas, it's such a joy to just see other cursors and people. The product just becomes a lot more live. So all these components became Agent 4. Oh, final one, I forgot. We wanted it so that when you make a mobile app, when you make a website, when you make a deck, when you make a video, all of that should have the context of your project. Previously on Repl.it and now every other tool, it's basically you need different tool for a website, a different tool for a mobile app. So now with Repl.it, like you built a really cool web app, so maybe I need an app. You could just say, make a mobile app.

27:47Like generate a mobile app, lay it out on the canvas. When you hit deploy, it deploys your web app to the web. It deploys your app to TestFlight or Android, whatever it is. So now you can run your entire company on Repl.it. What kind of skills do people need to develop to be able to make the most of products like yours? What do people need to practice at? In your mind, is it people have to get good at prompting, or is it more that the system is going to get better at just understanding whatever it is you're asking it to do? I actually think we're headed to a post-prompting world. And you can sense that in the open claw and all the derivatives.