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BigDeal by Codie Sanchez

AI CEO: How To Make A $10M Business With AI Employees (Amjad Masad, CEO of @replit)

My new book Own Or Be Owned is out now! I wrote Own or Be Owned to answer one question: How do you make more money, less miserably?

Amjad MasadguestCodie Sanchezhost

Jul 30, 20251h 34mWatch on YouTube

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CHAPTERS

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Chapter summaries

Learning to Code at Six in Amman
Codie Sanchez introduces Amjad Masad and her own excitement about AI, then asks about his childhood. Amjad describes his father's early computer in Jordan and the math app he built for his younger brother.
- •Codie says AI has split her business life into a before and an after
- •Amjad's father got a computer in Amman in the early '90s, before anyone he knew
- •He describes the feeling of creating something with only a machine as still giving him goosebumps
- •His first app taught his younger brother math, with a clap for right answers and a boo for wrong ones
- •His brother now works for him
Turning Down a Billion-Dollar Offer
Codie asks about the acquisition offer Amjad turned down when Replit was tiny. He explains the mission to create a billion coders and how investors including Marc Andreessen framed the decision.
- •Replit started in 2016 with the mission of a billion coders
- •The offer arrived around 2019 after Y Combinator and a bootstrapped stretch
- •Amjad feared the buyer would do nothing interesting with the company
- •Marc Andreessen asked whether he wanted to be a corporate employee or keep pursuing his mission
- •He says he felt the weight of Silicon Valley and his users on his shoulders
Nine Years of Struggle, Layoffs, and the Agent Launch
Codie points out that Replit took nine years to reach $10 million in revenue. Amjad recounts the 2024 plateau, laying off half the staff, moving out of San Francisco, and launching the coding agent that took revenue to $100M ARR.
- •In early 2024 growth had plateaued, with 130 staff and $200 million raised
- •Replit was too limited for professionals and not enough for beginners
- •The team was cut by almost half and moved to the South Bay suburbs
- •The agent launched in September 2024 and went viral from a low-production video
- •Revenue reached about $10M ARR that year and then $100M within six or seven months
What Replit Is: Empowering Owners Over Centralization
Codie ties Replit's mission to her own goal of creating millions of owners and asks what Replit is. Amjad describes the centralized-versus-decentralized visions of technology and how an AI coder lets domain experts build businesses, including a VC finance employee who got commitments for $5M ARR.
- •Technology has had two visions: centralized mega-corporations and empowered individual hackers
- •Replit is an automated AI coder that gives a prototype in about ten minutes
- •People often get quoted huge sums by agencies and give up on their ideas
- •A VC finance employee built his own portfolio platform and landed $5M ARR commitments before quitting
- •Amjad likens unmonetized domain knowledge to unmonetized space in homes before Airbnb
Can a Beginner Build a Million-Dollar Business? Grit and Vibe Coding
Codie asks whether a person with no coding experience can build a million-dollar business in weeks. Amjad gives an example, cautions that it is not magic and requires management skill, and explains vibe coding.
- •John Chaney built a learning management system and reached a million-plus run rate in weeks
- •Amjad says he isn't selling magic; users act as managers and must think and communicate clearly
- •Successful entrepreneurs usually hit a point where they decide to become an owner
- •Programmers spend about 80% of their time on deployment and infrastructure rather than on users and product
- •Vibe coding means trusting the AI to make decisions from your business goals, which Amjad says works 80 to 90% of the time
Grit, Domain Knowledge, and Turning Expertise into Scalable Software
Using Codie's house-building analogy and YouTube as examples, Amjad argues that once building is commoditized, what remains is charisma, creativity and grit. He shares more domain-expert stories, including an event-planning agent that earns while its creator sleeps, and Codie describes her own dashboard.
- •Having an online presence is now a commodity, leaving charisma, creativity and grit
- •Amjad advises showing up daily and improving 1% each day
- •Codie shares a friend's line that entrepreneurship is a trauma response
- •An event planner turned a non-scalable service into an AI agent that gets paid while she sleeps
- •Codie built a scoreboard-style dashboard with Replit
Where a Young Person Should Start: Finding Inefficiencies and the AI Arbitrage
Codie asks what a young person curious about AI should do. Amjad recommends getting a job, spotting inefficiencies, and building AI intuition. Stories of an employee who automated skincare operations and Codie's team's event site show the cost savings, and Amjad describes a window of arbitrage.
- •Amjad says to pick an industry, look for inefficiencies, and spend lots of time with AI tools
- •A skincare operations employee replaced a $150,000 quote by spending about $400 and now earns $30,000 a year selling the software to his boss
- •Codie's employee built an event site in about four and a half hours instead of a four-week, roughly $5,000 quote
- •Codie's '24-hour rule' tests whether weeks-long tasks can be done with AI in a day
- •Amjad says there is an arbitrage window before everyone learns of the technology, especially in cutting SaaS costs at inefficient businesses
Replit Hackathons and the Future Beyond Prompting
Codie floats a no-coding hackathon, and Amjad describes hackathons as Replit's go-to-market strategy. The conversation then turns to what prompting is, why Amjad calls it a bug rather than a feature, and the skills that will matter.
- •HG Capital executives built applications in a two-hour hackathon
- •Amjad says prompting means crafting precise instructions and sometimes psychological tricks
- •He wants AI to do the prompting, so working with it feels like working with a colleague
- •Clarity of thought, product requirement documents and systems thinking are the key skills
- •He suggests using ChatGPT itself to learn these skills
The AI Talent War and Acqui-Hires
Codie asks about the AI talent war and the Windsurf drama. Amjad explains how salary bands gave way to star-player pay, Meta's reasoning, Google's acqui-hire structure, and why he thinks it harms startup employees and the ecosystem.
- •Amjad says HR salary bands reward experience rather than impact, while star talent now commands hundreds of millions
- •He explains Zuckerberg's bet that a few researchers could drive a huge increase in Meta's value
- •Google took the Windsurf leadership and researchers and left behind a shell company
- •Amjad says this makes startup employees doubt joining, and he sees antitrust avoidance as part of the motive
- •He cites a book on second-order effects to argue that blocking acquisitions can hurt innovation
Keeping Talent, Tech Rumors, and Staying Out of Big Tech's Crosshairs
Amjad explains how Replit keeps employees through secondary sales and a restrained valuation. He then talks about tech WhatsApp groups, why big tech sees Replit as a toy, and why he avoids PR firms.
- •Replit turns down acquisition approaches and occasionally lets employees sell shares
- •Its valuation is under 10x revenue, preserving upside for new hires
- •Tech rumors circulate in WhatsApp and Signal groups
- •Cursor and Windsurf go after professional engineers, while big tech sees Replit as a toy
- •A $30,000 PR retainer produced little, and one tweet outperformed the story, so Amjad does his own PR
Embracing the Underdog Mentality
Codie shares the George Lucas and Reddit-Yahoo stories about being underestimated. Amjad says he loves being the underdog and wants Replit users to adopt the same chip on the shoulder.
- •Codie says Star Wars was dismissed by critics as lowbrow and mass market
- •Amjad says he loves being the underdog and views business as war
- •He cites the meme 'Who uses Replit?' as fuel
- •Codie recounts Reddit printing Yahoo's 'rounding error' remark on its office
- •He wants Replit users to prove doubters wrong and change their lives
Venture-Scale Pain, Silicon Valley Culture, and Replit's Operating Principles
Codie asks what it took to scale to $100M revenue. Amjad says venture-scale companies bring a lot of pain and criticizes Bay Area culture, then explains the 'seek pain' principle, deadline crunches, and his emphasis on being upfront with candidates.
- •Amjad says venture-scale companies are hard and not the best path for just getting rich
- •He calls Silicon Valley expensive and boring, with the same AI conversations at every party
- •The 'seek pain' principle means seeking out what isn't working, such as churn and underperformance
- •Product managers present users' worst complaints at weekly all-hands meetings
- •He says delaying pain builds a larger debt of pain, so seeking it reduces it
- •Replit is open about deadline crunches and publishes reasons not to join or invest
Mentorship, Conformity, and Peter Thiel's AI Miss
Codie asks about mentors. Amjad recounts Paul Graham's 'life's work' advice, reflects on meeting heroes, and names non-conformity as the key trait of successful founders, with the Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel stories as illustrations.
- •Paul Graham asked if Replit was his life's work, a framing that helps Amjad endure stress
- •Some heroes are even better in person, while others are miserable or merely human
- •Amjad says the anti-trait is conformity, though he says contrarianism as a personality can also mislead
- •Zuckerberg turned down Yahoo's billion-dollar offer despite an executive exodus
- •Peter Thiel dismissed AI as hype in 2022 and later invested in the category
What Scares Amjad About AI: Sycophancy and Psychosis
Codie asks what scares him about AI. Amjad says fear is natural and warns about sycophantic chatbots, describing a VC's apparent psychotic break. Codie raises friends who treat GPTs like companions, and Amjad urges understanding that these are mimicking machines.
- •Amjad notes the instinctive human unease with things that are human-like but not human
- •AI can mirror users and reinforce narcissism
- •He recounts a VC who seemed to have a psychotic break after a ChatGPT conversation drifted into a sci-fi role-play
- •He says models are trained on online data and only remix knowledge, so they can't offer supernatural truth
- •Codie describes friends naming their GPTs and forming parasocial relationships
- •Amjad says protection comes from knowing it's a machine with no consciousness or lived experience, and criticizes the utopian 'space communism' vision of some AI leaders
Why America Is Still the Best Place to Build
Codie quotes Amjad's tweet about arriving in the US with credit card debt and asks why he is hopeful. Amjad cites free speech, markets, access to capital, rule of law and the cloud, and says he's bullish on AI renewing the country.
- •Amjad says only the US has real freedom of speech
- •He cites the right to arm yourself, liberal markets and an entrepreneurial immigrant culture
- •Capital is easier to get and business proceeds are rarely stolen thanks to rule of law
- •Non-residents can incorporate in the US with Stripe Atlas and sell to US customers
- •He is bullish on AI helping remake the country in a decentralizing direction

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