Replit CEO Amjad Masad on enterprise growth, open model routing, and a new multimodal design product

Speaker 2: Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And we got Amjad Masad from Replit, the CEO, the founder. You know him. You love him. He's been on the show multiple times, and he's back. How are you doing? Look at that. That's what we got on the on the shirt. Oh, and looking good. Thank you. Wow. Royalty.

Speaker 1: That's that's that's vintage.

Speaker 2: That's vintage. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. My pleasure. I haven't seen you in a while. It's been way too long. Yeah. I mean, we went to your office. We recorded an episode in your most people don't know this probably because there's just a blank wall in the background. But we recorded an episode in your office and we didn't actually get you on the show that day because we were just hanging out. But I'm so glad that we have you here. Catch us up to speed on what's happening in Replit World, the new the new launches, the AI powered creative suite, and then I have a million other questions to ask you. Awesome.

Speaker 3: Yeah. So, a few things are happening. One is you might have seen we signed this big letter with NVIDIA and Microsoft Yeah. Around Yep. Open models. We're really excited about open models. Yeah. Look. For two years, Anthropic was the undisputed king of coding agents. Mhmm. And and right now, actually, it's not just, GPT that's caught up, but also the open source models. K m e k three is an amazing model. Mhmm. It's at maybe quarter the price, sometimes even better. And it's also a fantastic design model. And so we have this new

Speaker 2: what's that? I saw the arena leaderboard. We were talking to Joe Wiesenthal about this an hour ago, that that Kimi k three really outperformed spiky on front end, which is

Speaker 3: we were talking about how it changes the conversation because if it spiked on bioweapon development, that would be a different conversation. But it's if we wanted to spike anywhere, front end is probably a good place for it to spike. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's a it generates beautiful aesthetics. It's the first model that I see that is actually trying to reason about design. Mhmm. Trying to, like if you read the traces Yeah. That's the cool thing about open models. They kinda show you the traces now, but those models don't show you the traces anymore. It thinks about page structure and layout and aesthetics and things like that. And so RepliDesign, for one, is the first product in the market that's purely multimodal. Mhmm. We kind of we evaled every model on the first of the Earth. Some of them are good at SVG. Others are good at animation. Other are good at CSS. And so we created an environment that brings up the best of these models. You can also select the model that you like. You wanna design purely with Kimi? Go ahead and do that. Sure. And so there's no other place on the Internet where you could do that. And and kind of the motivation behind that is, you know, we we've been on a now multi year crusade against slop. We don't wanna be purveyors of slop on the Internet. Right? I mean, we're all inundated with tech slop. I mean, LinkedIn is sort of unusable at this point. But also all the apps kind of look the same. Because I haven't logged in in

Speaker 1: months.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. It's it's not worth it, honestly. And so we're like, okay, how can we make it so that look. We think people largely have taste. It's hard for them to express how they want designs to look. And so we came up with this concept we're calling ambient intelligence Mhmm. Where you can design by point and click. And the way that happens is you sort of we we we well, first of all, we give you a mood board. We integrate it with Movin. It's typically a paid service. We're providing it for free. Mhmm. And so you can find inspirations from around the Internet, from the best UI UX websites and landing pages. You can drag and drop them into the canvas. Very cool. When you click on an artifact on the canvas, it gives you options to continue the design. It's like, let's design another page. Mhmm. Let's look at different vibes. Let's generate different variations. And so I'm someone who I I think I have a good taste. I know what looks beautiful, but I can't express it. I can't say, you know, it should be brutal style or whatever. I don't have the language. And so by just pointing and clicking and arriving at at really cool designs, like, I'm working with an architect on our new office, I I kind of know intuitively what I want my office to look like, but I can't go in Pinterest and search or whatever. So I went to her upload, you know, put an initial prompt for things I like, create a kind of a mood board I like, point to click, point to click. An hour later, I have something that exactly that I would like. I would never in a 100

Speaker 1: be able to express it. Mhmm. So it's it's really Well, that's the beauty. I mean, that's designed for non designers. That's sometimes you don't sometimes you don't have words for it, but you also just need to see every possible direction, and then you can really hone in. And to me, that's the it's so crazy to me. I used to go when I was, like a teenager, I'd go on the the freelance platforms and I'd do like a $5 project to make a logo and I'd have a bunch of people do it. I'd spend whatever. I'd spend $25.30 bucks on it. And I was so excited to get all these different kind of variations and now it's actually as simple as a single prompt. You can just put in the prompt. Make me 30 version you know, don't just make a a logo. Make 30 versions of the logo.

Speaker 3: So Yeah. It's not even a prompt. It's it's two clicks on on Raflat. Mean, we're actually we talk a lot of about the post prompting world. Like, I think we're entering in a period where prompting is no longer needed. Some people will still do it, But it's not just in design. I'm sure you're kinda following the narrative around loops where you specify a high level intent, and then agents prompt other agents. Mhmm. And so this is something we're increasingly focused on because, again, people are really not good at prompting. It is, like, you know, we went from coding, which is a very low level kind of task, to prompting higher level, but it's still somewhat low level from how people think. The way people think is they they specify an intent. Like, I wanna I want my, you know, sales leads to to get responses in five minutes. Sure.

Speaker 1: I don't wanna say I want the routing to be that way, and that way agents should be able to figure it out. Yeah. How are you thinking about John wanted to, like, a large kind of lever, like a slot machine to not have to prompt anymore. Just pull the lever. You know? Yes. If you could use that to start a new loop, that would be a very satisfying

Speaker 3: user experience. How are you thinking about It'll be like these Vegas casinos where all Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. It's a game.

Speaker 2: How are you thinking about game development? There's been some very impressive web based games. There's been some acceleration in what I'm seeing on Steam with little niche games, and it feels like that's a place where you're particularly just well set up. And I feel like a lot of I don't I don't want to characterize the the replica community too precisely because it's huge. But it feels like there's a lot of folks who want to build a business. They go to Reddit. They want to build a tool. They go to Replit. If they want to build a game, they might be going there too. They probably already are, but it feels like that's the next thing to really fall, really get polished, really get deployed into the mobile app stores, into Unreal Engine, and there's more harness there and partnerships that I could imagine you creating a really amazing product around.

Speaker 3: Yeah. I will say last week has been a huge week for AI for game developments. Right? I mean, for a long time we actually spent some time about a year and a half ago building a game dev stack, which still exists in Replit, but it wasn't very good. The models were really bad at three d reasoning. Sure. And I think between KME k three, Opus five now, they're starting to actually be good at at three d. Yeah. And so it's it's something that we're we're paying attention to. There's actually already a large, you know, community of people who do a lot of three d and games things on Replit. We we recently launched a CAD integration. Mhmm. So you can, like, make real physical products. Mhmm. And and we actually have some folks in the office that designed something on Replit and actually went and and produced it. Yeah. And so it's not just games. I think it'll start affecting robotics. Mhmm. It'll start affecting kind of physical industrial design. And so it's a it's a very exciting time, and we're we're sort of we're paying attention to that.

Speaker 2: What's been the biggest source of growth for you this year? Right? There's a lot of companies that are doing, you know, direct response advertising, influencer marketing, channel partnerships. There's so many different ways, just just SEO, GEO. What stuck out to you as a particular particularly valuable marketing

Speaker 3: strategy that's grown the platform? We do all of the above. I I think we have one of the best performing UGC ads right now. Yeah. I'm sure I don't know if you saw that, but we have, like, a bunch of, bunch of videos where people there's, like, one that's really going viral right now where, where, let's say, like, typically a woman are is getting, like, an app from Replit, like a Replit built app, about, like, you know, asking her out on a date. Oh, I think I have seen this. Yeah. Yeah. 25,000,000 views and and all of that. And then now a lot of our competitors are copying it. But the biggest source of growth has been enterprise.

Speaker 4: Interesting. And

Speaker 3: I think Replit differentiates in many ways, but one of the ways we differentiate is because we've been building the platform for a long time, we we actually have a really deep stack. Like, when you buy Replit, you get a hosting environment, deployment environment, security agents, you get, admin controls, get all this enterprise stuff, And we've been growing really fast in in enterprise because, you know, vibe coding has been kinda proven out, and now we've went from kind of the consumer excitement that happened last year and now real adoption in enterprise affecting real impact on how people actually work. And the really cool thing is, you know, when we talk to our enterprise customers, it's like, this is the most impactful tool more so than the the CoWorks of the world where you're sort of like you're doing the same thing. You're sitting in Excel or whatever. It's it's saving you ten minutes here, fifteen minutes there. This is actually automating entire, workflows where it's like, I used to do this for twenty hours a week. Yeah. Now I built an app, and I do it for zero hours a week. Yeah. And so you can automate entire work. And and we have a bunch of products and launches coming up around this idea of loops and really automating, work coming coming soon. And so enterprise has been the largest growing segment for us. We're still growing consumer, prosumer, and all of that. Are enterprises asking you to sort of act as a de facto router?

Speaker 2: Because because you're model agnostic and you understand the different pros and cons Yeah. There's a world where if I have a workforce that's pretty deeply integrated into the Replit ecosystem, I could either go to you or maybe even enforce a rule that says, hey, for front end, we we're using Kimi because it's cheaper and and this meets our standards. So at this company, we want you to for that. Okay.

Speaker 3: And they're asking for that granular control on a user and a group level. So I want my designers to be on QEMI. I want my front end to be on that. Yeah. They want that deeper controls. And what we're seeing from enterprise customers is that they're saying, like, look. I know the big AI labs trying to lock me into these big contracts where I'm just using them, and there's this whole token maxing thing that was happening, and everyone was sort of burnt by it. And there's, like, really deep mistrust Because also a lot of the big AI products, don't put guardrails around their product. And so a lot of employees, you know, you you have instances where employees are spending like, one employee could spend, like, ten, twenty thousand dollars a week or, like, a month doing that. And so they're asking us for control on models, on spend, for routing. But also, I think more importantly is, I think the guardrails that we build in Teruplift. So when you're doing design, you're in design mode. The agent is a designer. It doesn't go off veer off and do a lot of random things. When you're building an app, we have the guardrails around building apps. And and even with that model routing, Ruffler is a lot more outcome focused and actually cheaper. And we see a lot of companies now ripping out, you know, say say Claude they they gave everyone Claude Claude. Right? Yeah. And they're like, okay. My engineers are great at it. But actually, people in legal and finance, they're burning tokens for no reason. Yeah. So let me let me implement Replit and let them be focused on a certain task.

Speaker 2: Yeah. There's a remarkable story in the chat. In the chat says that two years ago, were in 50 they were $50,000 in debt. They would meet business owners at restaurants and build them products in real time with Replit, and that got them out of crushing debt. I'm sure you hear those stories all the time. White Yeah. Total White Bell. Thank you for your service. Yeah. That's What advice do you have for young people who are nervous about the job market AI? How how can they take advantage?

Speaker 3: Look. Look. The the AI narrative has been totally warped. Like, you know, the the politicians, you know, the just the discussion and debate in our country has been about job loss. It's been about, you know, spend. It's been about all the stuff. Stories like this, someone who has $50,000 in debt discovered Droplet and got out of debt and perhaps is making more money than that. Those stories are not getting told. And I understand, like, you know, negative headlines get get get more attention. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a per perverse incentive for some of the players in this space to generate the negative headlines because you can create regulations coming out of that. And we know the story of regulatory capture that's been happening. It's a story as old as capitalism. Right? And so kind of my advice to people is kind of a, first of all, mindset shift. AI is incredibly empowering. Look. Even for me, you could say, oh, it's easy for you to say you're you've been always, a technical programmer guy. I've never trained a machine learning model. Now I'm training models with with Replit. I'm doing a Replit agent. I actually trained a chess model that's on its way to become the best chess LM model. It's actually already beating, you know, state of the art GPT models and Yeah. And these kind of models. And so I feel huge empowerment. And and to me, it's like, fuck. There's nothing I could not do. Like, I can I was thinking, like, this math thing that's happening? I've never done math. I wanna go find some fruits, you know, and with, like, biome Conjecture, Max. Yeah. Do do you Conjecture, Max. Do you know there's there's this video where, BDD, I guess I guess, you know, he could not be named now, but there's this video where, he's, he closes the deal. He's on the phone. He closes the deal. He he he he hangs up the phone. He's like, what what can't you do? I can do. And he gets spooked for Yeah. It's unfortunately it's unfortunate that he is

Speaker 1: that is him in the video because it's a great it's a great

Speaker 3: it's a great video. It's a great video. Okay. It's a great video. And I feel the same way with AI. It's like,

Speaker 2: what what's out there? Let me go let me go do it. World is your always there. I think that mindset is important. I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, breaking it down. Congrats. Awesome to awesome to see you. Always great to see you guys. Always Have a good rest to see you, dude. We'll talk to you Goodbye.

Speaker 1: Let me tell you Someone should use AI to take that video of he who shall not be named and put Amjad in the video. That might be worse. I don't know.

Speaker 2: Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.