Today, I'm joined by Amjad Massad, 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 can scale.
They don't have to worry about any technical aspects of building that thing. And 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, so setting up the development environment, then solved the deployment environment.
And what was left is the coding part was still very intimidating for people. And September 2024, Replit became the first what's-called-by-coding product where we abstracted away code entirely, so there's a coding agent behind the scene. But you're just interfacing with AI using natural language, and more recently with Agent 4, also design interactions. So you can write things, you can comment on things, you can drag and drop things on a canvas.
And 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. 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. There's real software, there'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. 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 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 my first business when I was 13, 14. And I always thought that the dev tools were getting in the way.
It had actually gotten worse over time. So I started coding on BASIC, and you just start BASIC command line interpreter, and you can just type a little over BASIC, and that's good. By the time I graduated from college, setting up a web app was like a nightmare. And 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 dev tools.
And so I started building a lot of tools for myself, and eventually I built what would become the first in-browser IDE. Initially it was an open-source project. Later on I would also have worked on React and React Native. And every time I built a dev 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. But ultimately when we started React, 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, 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.
Maybe people, the product managers have written code many years ago, but don't want to worry about the development environment setup. Don't want to 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 hamstered by just like the need to learn to become technical. So at some point in 2023, we just made it an explicit goal of like, we're not going after developers. They're still developers.
Like if you walk around Replica today, it looks like a death toll company. We're like building for creators, right? But they're not the traditional type of developers. There's a new generation of developers that are coming up right now because of AI.
But AI native developers that are creating software without having to worry about every component of 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. I 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. And like our programming got worse. And I wanted to bring it back, make programming great again.
That's so interesting. Tell me about what people are building today in Replica. 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.
One 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's like around faster and faster 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. And eventually they were frustrated by the entire process, took matters into their own hands, built it on Replica. And when I saw that, 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 products. Yeah, people who are closest to the problem can build up the products they need. I talked to a founder the other day that's building a SaaS solution for people who maintain pools. 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. I 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. And so here in Silicon Valley, we look around at 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 like, I think, a beautiful thing.
And a lot of wealth creation is going to happen practically again as well. Personal software is also really cool. Like, you know, I talked to a lot of families about like, you know, healthcare software. Like there's like a mom in Korea that built software that helped 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, an 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 in enterprise, it tends to be two different use cases. One is product development. So companies want to move a lot faster in 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 my 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 100 ideas but are able to only try five of them. Now they can try the 50, right?
So, 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's happening in this company.
Any role inside a company that's dealing with a lot of data flow, for example, think of RevOps, that have the nexus of a lot of different data flow from their CRM, from their data people, from Gong, from... And they want to be able to do things with this data. And typically, they're kind of bottom-knit by either engineering resources or the different SaaS tools that they want to buy. The problem with SaaS is, you onboard a new SaaS tool that creates a new silo data that you can't do with the program.
So now they're taking matters in their own hands and building things like, you know, code configurators and being able to say the company hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of dollars in 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, you know, 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 it's like a lot of YCDF tool companies has had, like, you know, Strike, PagerDuty.
Developers were empowered to be able to make decisions to bring software into the company at some point, like, in the last couple decades, right? That 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. But the moment you understand that you can solve a problem with code, it changes your mind. Now that shift is happening in a huge part of the population. And so, 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, deliver a program to all 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? Let's work with them to do a hackathon to create more champions inside the company. Let's teach your 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 people's doing. We still have enterprise sales that's more top-down where a company comes to us and we're like, hey, we're trying all the different byproducting tools that's good for our business, can you help us kind of evaluate Replit? We're going to 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.
Let'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 if you have a virtual machine, if you have a job purpose agent, if you have some technology you can bring that and you can build sophisticated things. But if you want to build things entirely bi-coded without worrying about technical details, we have so many examples on our website and what we talk about there are a lot of vertical SaaS products. There are people that are starting like Replit native agencies.
I was talking to someone from Iceland yesterday and he was telling me they're getting so much business because they're 60 to 70% cheaper and more effective than traditional agencies and they're all bi-coding on Replit. So they get a client, that client wants an application. Not everyone knows that they can build that 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 way.
The internal tools, automations, those have 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. We have a lot of MCP integrations that allows us to do that. How do those integrations work? Have you gone through and built integrations to all?
Yes, yes. We spend 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 Replit and you're like, I want to integrate Stripe. So we already built a set of skills and set of code and things like that.
We'll search a database, we'll bring all that in and now it's in context and other agents is like, sort of like Neo in the Matrix where you download a new skill and you're like, oh, I know how to fly a helicopter now. So it's so cool to see the agent who's like, oh, let me search the 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 this 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. They'll read your docs, they'll figure out what's possible, they're on hack 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 dev rel team, but they're not the traditional dev rel.
They're more like educators. They're like, you know, going and spending a lot of time just teaching people what's possible. Our documentation, I think it's a lot simpler than your typical dev tool documentation. So you have to be really good at content.
You know, Stripe got popular for this being really good at documentation. With, if you're building dev tools for non-developers, you have to go above and beyond our 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 as like create different variations of this. And so we're adding a lot of different shortcuts just to show people what's possible. On the enterprise side, when we go and we talk to leaders, we're like, reserve any judgment. Don't pay for replet.
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 see someone? How are you like, yes, this is going to be the person that we're able to sell to sales, marketing, product, design. The set of traits that we think makes it like the champion, the person who's most excited about replet, who's going to spread inside the organization, who's going to build, who's going to do the education evangelism, they tend to be very entrepreneurial.
They'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 PGSA is 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 go learn in order to figure it out. So that entrepreneurial kind of founder mindset I think is very important.
I mean, while we're on the topic of YC, I'd love to hear about your experience here. Like how did YC influence how replet started and what it became? The main realization from YC is how much you can get done in three months. So when we came in and 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 have a move. You'll come back into their lives later. For the next three months, you need to be hyper-focused. company and you're gonna achieve great things if you really go intensely into it when we did yc we had the we had whiteboard and a countdown to to demo day uh and the number of like a 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 um and when we got into yc it was still a rappel that's the name like it was still just like a command line with like you just have a little code and run it yeah we actually do yc we already had like uh web development we had like the initial aspect of hosting we had code intelligence we had like so many sort of e-features like got a lot more feature complete just in three months and that that's an empowered thing sort of what we talked about with programming uh just the fact like oh you can be so intensely focused and you can work so hard and achieve so much of three months and now every agent release there is it's not three months it's more like four weeks where we bring everyone because some people still kind of remote or other offices bring everyone to office we provide breakfast lunch and dinner coffee 24 7 and we're like we're 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 new initiative this idea of like i don't know where you came up with the number seven but like seven percent of growth is like a very good way to bootstrap a new new product line so we're constantly doing sort of we're constantly going back to the yc basics and doing all that we learned here tell me about um how did yc change your life a few ways one is before we got into yc we couldn't raise all that much money we raised maybe five hundred thousand dollars and you know vcs did not want to meet us it was like the doors were not really open for us uh after yc you immediately first of all them a day you got introduced a lot of vcs um and then we were lucky because we got rejected from yc four three or four times and then we got invited to yc because paul and sam saw some hacker news uh and so we got a direct relationship with paul sam and then at the end i was like i want an intro market reason and you can still ask the partners here like they'll try a lot to get you interest but i was like bold enough to ask for that and so they got my intro and i went and had breakfast at his house and pitched rapplet and it ended up bleeding our seat around nice uh and like my network just expanded tremendously after getting to yc and i don't think we would have been as successful with yc perhaps we would have quit if we're going to 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 having you know somebody sort of welcoming you in made an enormous difference yeah 100 so you guys just announced uh agent four so what's that like the fourth major revision of your um of your product yeah so we have an act of trying to predict the future and based on what we've seen at the time starting kind of 2024 we thought that broadly the ai capabilities have massive step changes uh twice a year uh so if you think about 2025 um there was like a revolution that happened earlier in 2025 and then there was the you know the autonomous revolution that happened in uh late 2025 with opus 4.6 that led to open claw and things like that uh but i can tell you the same thing happened 2024 mid 2024 clock came out and um uh for the first time it generated like a lot of code especially like tp3.5 which has that laziness component um and then late 2024 we started seeing initial signs of the labs kind of um doing long horizon reasoning so so that observation like we want to align our roadmap to ai capabilities um and so every six months we release a new uh a new agent version um 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 on the market we knew that time 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 launch come back and see the software fully built and so okay what do we need to do to be a platform for example like we have to rewrite everything in the back end to have these long-running containers in the background doing work while the user's not in front of the computer and so we did all of that work and although autonomy didn't arrive until like maybe like like true autonomy until like uh november and december repli agent had demonstrated where the world is headed by september with agent four 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 like what do you do next okay so that question what do you do next should be able to design should be able to kick off other type of work um should be able to chat with your agent and plan for other things and so we wanted a more asynchronous nature to the product uh 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 like okay what's the best interface for that so we designed this canvas so now we have a built-in design capability inside repli to um to be able to explore the next page you're going to build the next feature we're going to build while the agent's building and then once you're ready you'll kick that off into another thread and it starts so people are now sitting in front of repli and just experiencing the state of flow because agents are slow that's fine but they can work in the background and finally uh teamwork once you solve parallel agents you've also solved teamwork because every time someone jumps into the session you can start and probably you you can work on a 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 and because we have the canvas it's it's such a joy to just see other cursors and people the product just becomes a lot a lot more live so all these components became agent four 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 that should have the context of your project previously on repli and now every other tool it's basically you need different tool for a website different tool for a mobile app so now with repli like you build a really cool web app so maybe i maybe i need an app you just say make a mobile app like a mobile app laid out on the canvas when you deploy it deploys your web app to the web it deploys your app to test flight or the uh or uh or android whatever it is so so now you can run your entire company on repli what what kind of skills do people need to develop to be able to make the most of products like yours like what is the you know what people need to practice at like in your mind is it is it people 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 like a post-prompting world um and you can sense that in the sort of open claw and all the derivatives and the way people are using it they're more giving it high level goals like optimize my marketing funnel you know things like that so prompting will be there it's like layers of skills prompting will be there whenever you want to do more interactive type work but also you should be able to give your agent high level commands so i think perhaps agent five or maybe sooner you should be able to tell repli every day build me a sass company and like try to market it and see what works and make me some revenue like i think we're almost there uh in order to be able to do that so what kind of skills do you need understanding what is possible is going to be important so playing with these tools having this like playful mindset of adopting these tools playing around with it being plugged in is super important at some point i think it was kind of a drawback or a flaw to be someone who's like constantly reading news or being online but actually now it's very important to know what's happening what's coming down the line um i think um not giving up is important like the thing that you try to do today that ai can't do try it again in a month yeah and i tell some repli users if whatever you're trying to build repli couldn't build today try it in a couple weeks it might be able to build it um and so that mindset of like i'm going to keep trying is important id generation is still going to be important obviously we're going to get to a point where ai is going to be really good at helping you generate ideas um but being generative just constantly thinking about problems you want to solve um and being creative and like figuring out what what what what does the world need right now and um and being generous is important because let's say you're a small-time entrepreneur um like you know peer levels type of entrepreneur or like this guy's very famous on twitter who built these products oftentimes the products go through cycles like we build like a product that is really good for that moment and you can generate like a couple million dollars but then that product is no longer relevant so you need to be generative and creative in order to continuously do that and you can make millions of dollars doing that if you were starting repli today what would you do differently i mean i made a lot of mistakes along the way uh so if i started today i probably hope not to make as many mistakes so you know culture is very important you know at some point we screw that up and we have to do we have to do a reset and layoff and all that stuff um i think being really honest with yourself about like product market fit is very important it's very easy to delude yourself getting any kind of user is an amazing achievement getting any money from users is also an amazing achievement and you should celebrate every one of those moments but true product market fit is entirely different it's like an explosive thing and so being honest about that because we've had periods where like oh it looks like that's successful maybe it's working and you like you keep going down that path but in reality you should have changed directions a little earlier yeah it works it really works you know it in terms of ai development ai technology what is something that you were waiting for where you're like this is going to unlock so much you know i've been waiting for computer use models to get better they're slowly getting better they're like one of the things that's actually kind of disappointing it's surprising to that it's so hard to build it because you think it'd be the easiest thing in the world to get data for and do you have a sense of why that is well language is a lot easier uh language also like much more can be compressed down into like some kind of high dimensional space a lot easier than like like a video feed right but still like if we can make progress in self-driving surely we can make progress in moving a mouse and clicking on things so i think it's a little bit of a mystery that being said coding and coding agents turned to be a workaround and hack because a lot of things that you could do in front of the computer you could do with code including you know scripting an excel sheet right the reason excel sheet agents got better is because coding got better the reason like you know some commerce agents are starting works because they can call apis and they can so coding turned out to be a bit of a hack or work around computer use agents but there's still a lot of software in the world that's like very nice software that computer use agents would be really good at also when you're when you're creating a platform like like replet you want to be able to test the apps that people are making and you want to be able to be discerning as well like things that are functioning right but also ux is not very well you want to be able to give the user feedback on that but the models are not very good at that so we spend a taste question i take this question so we spend a lot of time prompting and augmenting computer use models in order to to make them good at testing because replet has like a testing testing agent um so that's one that i think will unlock a lot of different capabilities once we get to computer use agents um i think like yeah i think it's become a buzzword like continual learning like the way we're hacking around it right now is we're writing files like the agent will learn some kind of scale and like we'll write a scale mp file or something like that but true learning on the job has like not been unlocked yet yeah and so for us to be able to like deploy an agent inside an organization and for that agent just get better before that org itself is such a powerful thing but that just still seems far away you know i think you know one of the common things i'm hearing here is it's like we're gonna have like we already have today with replet like agents to build software and you talked about how we're increasing the abstraction until finally you can just say hey i want a company that just makes money how how is this going to work like how what is that we've left for people and what does the company of the future look like if it's all just agents all the way down um i think the company of the future is made of builders and sales people broadly and sales will change and sales will be more like let's help companies transform let's use the technology that we're building here to help companies transform so people are more like i mentioned earlier like more like evangelists more like educators but i don't think that part's gonna go away because a lot of other companies will want to talk to someone will want to learn from someone right that's how a lot of people learn um and they want they trust other humans and so the sales probably part is like one of the more defensible jobs um and then builders uh there's always more to automate there's always i think our job will continue to like get higher and higher level i mean that's already the case that with computers we become a lot more higher levels like computers were literally humans right like there's like you know a bunch of people like doing computation numbers and then we're like you take that entire room you put in a box that's computer and now there's my job as like the operator of the computer to use it for productive use uh and there was a lot of so manual work in order to make that computer do interesting things uh software and now we have an agent that's using that computer to you so you know different layers of abstractions i don't know when you have a fully autonomous company maybe at some point there's certain uh styles of companies that could be fully autonomous but i think you need business generalists that understand customers understand what people need understand economy understand where the world's headed understand ai technology have some vision and you want to give them so here's like the abstract vision of a future company it's like almost everyone's a founder they wake up in the morning and they think how can i make the company more successful how can i make the company make more revenue and then they go around the company finding problems to solve and then creating or deputizing agents in order to go solve these these problems we're already seeing that we actually have a team like if i'm quoting a resident team and they have a very vague mission unlike like a product team or sales team where it's very clear like go around the company make it better so they went to the support team it was like okay you know you're using index and all these other tools what are the main problems we're like well we don't have a good way to prioritize our uh support queue um for example like our customers are paying much more than other customers and there are customers that you know have more urgent tickets and so they built like a way to to visualize that visualize that and a way to like create more priority queues um and just spend some time with the support team and the csat score started going up and then they go around they go around the hr team what are the problems well onboarding is a problem there's no place where people to know all the benefits and everything that we have well let's build an hr internal hr platform so they do that and i think that kind of role is more is more where the future is headed and more more people inside the company will be more generalist entrepreneurs that are trying to make a business successful well thank you very much for joining me a pleasure to have you here at yc appreciate it thank you