Replit CEO Amjad Masad on hitting $100M revenue and how AI is making coding accessible to non-developers

wherever you are, you'll be able to stream Xbox games. So I'm very excited about this partnership. Excited for them go deeper and Microsoft early meta investor actually. There you go. So well we have in the studio get the hammer ready. Oh yes yes yes. Give us the number. What's the news? What's the new revenue 100 boom?

[Music] Let's go. Incredible. Congratulations. I thought it was going to be 100 uh 100 bangs. 100 bangs. We'll have to do it after the show, but I will give you one of these. Success. Classic overnight success. Replet. There we go. All right, John. I broke the hammer. He broke the hammer.

Uh, Replet's going so fast, the hammer broke. The hammer hammer breaking growth. Congratulations. How did you do it? What's the What's been What's the one simple trick? Yeah. Yeah. What's the secret to success? It's It's been easy, you know. Just did a little bit of work. Not Not too many years.

You know, I started working on on Replet back in college. Uh like I had the idea for it back in college and um actually the first implementation of it was open source and it went viral on Hacker News in 2011 and um and then I sort of we we left it for a while.

um didn't work much on it and then uh actually my wife Haya who's who's my co-founder kind of revived the project in 2016 we uh started as a company um and it was it was brutal. We barely were able to to raise money. We tried to sort of like bootstrap it initially.

Um during the pandemic we sort of took off especially as you know we were the only sort of collaborative editor in the cloud and when um when AI came on the scene we just knew this is the future of our company because our mission is to make programming more accessible so that anyone can do it.

Um, and with the launch of Replet agents back in September, uh, we created a category basically of prompt to application. Um, and and and that really sort of finally went from something that a lot of people use and love but don't pay for to something that's also commercially successful. Yeah.

I feel like your company is now maybe the only AI company that's appropriately hyped. Like it's not overhyped. you haven't raised the $10 billion round and you're paying the hund00 million salaries, but also the growth's been really serious and the business is really real. Uh, which is which is great to see.

Uh, how have the uh the crazy news of the hund00 million salaries been affecting you? Is it harder to hire these days? I know you've kind of changed the structure of the team, relocated the team, I believe. So walk me through the current hiring market for uh the type of engineers you're trying to hire.

Yeah, so a few things that's uh sort of different about Replet. One is the team is relatively small. We're still around the 70 75 people. Um we haven't been growing all that fast. We are not in San Francisco, which makes it a little harder to hire.

We're in Foster City, probably the only startup, perhaps maybe there's a couple others in in Foster City. Um and you know we just take a different approach to the culture and we like expect more commitment and want people to come to replet and work for a long time.

Um especially since you know I've been working on this for so long my mindset is that it's just going to take a long time and like San Francisco Silicon Valley culture has been increasingly about you know I'm going to go spend 12 months here 18 months there and um and so yeah we're building it more methodically um in terms of hiring definitely it's been it's been very competitive u and you know um I love OpenAI and and Sam and you know he he's talking about how Zuck is is doing that to them, but obviously OpenAI is doing it to the rest of us.

And so it's just a different scale. You know, they're trying to poach their employees for 100 million. They try to push everyone for 10 million. So, uh just a factor of like how much revenue I guess you're making. Uh but like but it's part of part of from a hiring standpoint because you're keeping the team small now.

revenue per employees over a million dollars per employ new valuations at some point will allow you to sort of have comp you know be competitive from a comp standpoint. Yeah, exactly.

Um and and you know the other thing about valuation is that I think startup employees should start thinking more about these things because a lot of companies can be profitable early on earlier on and um and so again we're trying to build the business for the long term and instead of like playing the the hype game when you've been building a company for as long as as you know I've been you know you've you've b you've been through so many ups and downs and hypes and lows that you just become very steady-minded about it.

Yeah. Totally. Um I guess like the bigger uh not to not to no pun intended, the meta question here is uh is are we in a new era of valuing the leverage that truly worldclass managers or AI engineers can have, the impact that they can have and reassessing the value.

We've talked a lot about this on the stream that uh Apple's culture doesn't seem to be receptive to paying an NBA level salary. And Tim Cook, he makes $75 million. He doesn't even No, he doesn't make doesn't even make 75. He only makes 74. 6. It's a big number, but it's tiny considering their market cap.

And what if you could come into Apple and move the needle 1% that's a $30 billion market cap move? could you capture 1% of that? That's still $300 million. And yet they're not valuing talent in that way. It feels like there's a change in strategy at Meta.

Um do you think that that's a do you think that that's a unique case in where we are in the technological roll out of AI or is it more that we're finally catching up to just understanding the economic dynamics and impacts like the NBA has for years? Yeah.

So you know the uh the buzzword in Silicon Valley for a long time has been the 10x engineer. About you know two two three years ago maybe in 22 I talked about the thousandx engineer. Yeah.

what you know highly kind of leveraged by uh autonomous agents when you right now people with replet cloud code and others they're spinning up multiple agents to work on their project as they're you know working on their main tasks and there's a lot of other explorations and tasks and prototyping happening everywhere and so you're really not just one person you're a team of engineers right and so you know we talked about engineering managers I think every engineer is a sort a manager right now.

And so, yeah, I mean, we're we're not at a thousandx yet, but we're we're going up. I think I think pretty soon the difference between a great engineer that knows how to use AI tools and an okay or good one, it's going to be 100x, I think, over the next 6 to 12 months.

So, the compensation structure, I assume, would start to to change to match that. How do you think about Replet's potential today?

uh it seems like every day in the timeline you know you know the obvious thing is everyone becomes an engineer and you know it's being able to create software is fully democratized but every day in the timeline I see people realizing how much they spend on different SAS products and thinking how much time would it really take for me to kind of make a version of this for myself that fits my very specific need like document signing talk to the CLA CEO about this yeah some some something along those lines.

And so, um, is part of of the potential that you see CEOs and companies everywhere sort of running that sort of buy verse build calculus in terms of all sorts of tooling that they're using internally, externally, etc.

, and seeing, you know, trillions, you know, or hundreds of billions of dollars of of market cap that that you guys could um ultimately replace. Yeah. I mean, look, right now there is sort of information asymmetry.

A lot of people in Silicon Valley and tech know how to use these tools, but a lot of people outside of here just aren't aware how much savings and how much productivity they can gain. Um, I met someone from Australia the other day here uh in Silicon Valley. He stopped me on the street. I was like, I love Replet.

He runs like a construction company and he's like, you know, I'm the CEO now and I'm the most productive engineer at the company. I like build all these tools and dashboards and I replace monday. com and all this other stuff with uh homebuilt stuff that is exactly bespoke and works exactly for my use case.

Another story, uh, guy, his name is, uh, Ahmad George. He works at a skincare company, I think, in in DC. And he's an operations manager. He's responsible for like the ERP systems and things like that.

They he had an intuition that they could automate, I don't know, big percentage of the work, 20 30% of the hours of human work. and um he went and got a quote from their from Netswuite to build this piece of software automation software. It was $132,000 to build.

So he went to Replet, spent $400, built it for their company, rolled it out, went to the CEO, told him, "Look at how much time and money I'm saving. " And the CEO gave him $32,000 for the Wow, that's awesome.

So um so yeah it's you know there's a period of time at some point you know the market will like equalize as everyone realizes that you can do this stuff but for now there's a massive arbitrage opportunity. Yeah. Uh as you build out agents and agentic workflows do you have are you limited by data for RL pipelines?

Are you are you buying any services from the scale AIS of the world or the merors of the world or are you able to sit at a higher level of abstraction and kind of let the foundation labs get their hands dirty with all that?

You know, having been uh a platform where millions of people coded over the years um actually we could be a supplier of data. Oh, interesting. So, uh so yeah, we we have all the all the data we need. Um, I think it's still early for us to try to exploit all of that and we're hiring as fast as we can.

So, if you want to come work on AI at Replet, I think we have a really exciting uh opportunities to to use data to kind of create amazing new capabilities. It's very cool. I have another question. Um, are you feeling the acceleration in software development?

I I was thinking about this easy when you refresh the Stripe dashboard and Yeah. No, no, no, no, no. I get that. I get that. But as a consumer, I was just thinking about like like the apps on my phone still haven't changed as fast as I've thought.

And there's there's in my in my business folks are using different tools but it doesn't it doesn't feel like the rate of like churning for most consumers like we like we like we're we're not rebuilding all the different consumer apps right now.

It feels like we're very much in like this exploration phase for like what the next it feels like we're almost pre-Cambrian explosion for consumer AIdriven apps or uniquely enabled by AI apps. There's a lot of creation tools. So like V3 is amazing.

That got me to install the Gemini app and I paid for that and I enjoy generating my my poultry. Three video queries per day, sir. May I have some more? Sundar, please. Maybe you can help me. I think don't you know him? We're good partners. But yes, Tik Tok feed is 100% AI now. And maybe because I like them so much.

I've been into the Bigfoot. Yeah.

So maybe that's like the instantiation of the consumer adoption of AI is like you're a consumer through Tik Tok as opposed to through like it's a very 2010 mindset to think that my home screen apps would change and instead the 2025 mindset is what is happening inside of those apps is changing.

Is that the right framework? Yeah, I I think I think you're right. I I do think that Apple is probably holding back the ecosystem. I mean, Apple really has been attacks on startups, has been attacks on innovation.

I love this company as much as anyone would love Apple, but but they they are they are sort of like a government in a way that there like old and moving slow and they just like put up so much barriers like when I you know when I want to ask my phone to I go to perplexity like 100 times a day like I should be able to like press a button just like talk to it talking to me but you know it's it's not working that way and it is frustrating but look I I think you know AI I uh adoption is moving as fast faster than any technology adoption we've seen in the past, faster than faster than mobile, but it still doesn't feel fast enough like you say.

And by the way, this is an interesting kind of data point on, you know, the the folks that are really worried about AGI and things like that. The limiting factor to adoption is really humans and corporations and governments and all of these things are very very slow.

Yeah, this is kind of the Tyler Cowan take of like how AGI will be rolled out is there's a lot of sticky industries that just won't adopt it for a long time and there will be lots of barriers. Is there anything else on the Apple side?

Uh my takeaway from WWDC was that ondevice inference could be a catalyst for uh an app store explosion, an AI app explosion. Uh then there's the ruling about third-party uh payment processing things that that like like the tax is becoming less of a requirement. Maybe you can work around it.

And so maybe the barriers are dropping ever so slightly. Yeah. And I feel like I feel like you would you would see this earlyt developers become really excited about this sort of effectively free inference where they can launch an app that goes viral without worrying about, you know, running up some bill with OpenAI.

Yeah. I mean I mean look the uh Apple has held back the web quite a bit as well. Like there's no reason why native apps should be much better performing than uh than web apps really. There's no fundamental physics reason for that.

I've actually um the head of product at our Jordan Walk and and myself worked on uh React Native. He's the inventor of React and React Native at at Facebook.

And the the reason we worked on that is we felt at Facebook we felt sort of like oppressed by Apple like they controlled what we launched when we launched it and they would like you know reject you we'd have a launch and it was delayed by Apple and so the idea behind it is like can we ship over the air updates very very quickly and and yes you can but again Apple kind of like makes it a lot harder and so I think look I think AI has an opportunity to create an alternative platform entirely because the form factor of computing is on the precipice of changing.

I saw you guys talking about VR, AR is another one. A is another one. You know, we've seen all these toy companies like Rabbit and things like that come and go, but there's but there's like an intuition there that's correct. I think everyone's feeling that that the form factor needs innovating.

And I think this is how you break out of the like Apple jail. Wald garden. Yeah. Yeah. This is great. You got to come back on. We could yap about all different news stories. Do you have anything else, Jordy, you want to get right now? No, we we got to get you on regularly. Yeah. Yeah.

This last time I was here, I got cancelled. So, no, we went that was the most viral clip of that month, I think. What What happened? I think Well, I asked I asked, "Should people learn to code? " And he gave kind of a controversial answer saying like, "No, you shouldn't learn to code anymore.

" And it got like millions and millions of views. So, I bet it drove I bet it drove some some signups for sure. For sure. Learn to vibe code. You gave a very nuanced answer. I don't think there was anything that crazy about it. The internet does not understand nuance. Cancelled and viral are two sides of the same coin.

Like doesn't matter anymore. Doesn't matter. Yourself, you know, haters going to hate. Yeah. Just don't get deplatformed from Gemini because otherwise the the three VO prompts will be zero and it will and your life will be miserable because you got to prompt those. Thanks guys. You do great work.

Really appreciate the show. Yeah. Well, come come back on at 200. At this rate, it'll probably be next week. Next week. Let's do it. We're ready with the gongs. Ready to go. Yeah. We'll get a new hammer, so we'll be ready. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. Uh, next up, we have Dirt. Dirt man.

Uh, another anonymous account. Uh, I don't know why he's anonymous, but he's