AI CEO: How to build a $1B Company in 2 days | Amjad Masad @replit

Marina Mogilko 0:00 How far ahead you think is time when a solopreneur is gonna build a billion-dollar company?

Amjad Masad 0:05 In the next few years, yeah.

Marina Mogilko 0:06 This is Amjad, founder and CEO of Replit, an AI-powered coding platform that turns your ideas into apps.

Amjad Masad 0:14 Our mission is, hmm, not just to make software more accessible, but really make entrepreneurship more accessible, 'cause creating a business is really one of the best feelings in the world.

Marina Mogilko 0:22 But let's be real. Can anyone just sit down with AI and build a billion-dollar company? Amjad says it comes down to three simple steps. They turned Replit into a $3 billion business. I tried those steps myself, and, uh, what happened wasn't what I expected.

Marina Mogilko 0:40 Hello, everyone, and welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. We have an amazing guest today. We have Amjad, the founder of Replit. I talked about Replit a few times on this channel-

Amjad Masad 0:49 All right

Marina Mogilko 0:49 ... because I've personally been using it. Um, and, uh, I'm just fascinated by your journey. I wanted to start with this question, where you said, uh, you're gonna empower a billion software engineers or programmers in the next couple of years. But at the same time, I saw you say that in a couple of years, companies wouldn't need software engineers. Can you explain that?

Amjad Masad 1:09 Yeah. Uh, I, I'm mostly talking about entrepreneurs, like us. Um, I think that bigger companies will always need software engineers. But people who have an idea... And everyone has an idea. Like, you know, one experiment to do is just go on the street and stop people. Like, "Do you have a business idea?" Everyone has an idea. But, uh, for the most part, the thing that's stopping them is that they don't have the technical skills, or they don't have someone. You know, y- as a programmer growing up, all my friends were like, "Oh, hey, can, can you program this idea for me?" Well, now you can do it. And so we're getting to a point where you can run a business. And it's difficult. It's still... The technology needs to mature, but d- we have a lot of stories where people have built their dream apps, and they've had these ideas for, like, 20 years.

Marina Mogilko 1:58 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 1:58 We're talking about a CFO at a VC firm. He's a domain expert. Like, he knows how to manage a VC fund, and he never found the right tools for him, and he had all these ideas on how to build them, but, d- you know, you- it's almost... It's always hard to find engineering resources. So he, he used Replit, and in three months, he built his dream app, and he went out and sold it and got a lot of contracts, and I think he made, um... He's on his track to make 5 million ARR.

Marina Mogilko 2:32 Wow.

Amjad Masad 2:32 Quit his job. Now he's an entrepreneur. And he told us every time he th- he's saying, "Well, at some point, I need to onboard a software engineer." And maybe he does, but, you know, it's been... He got to 5 million in revenue, and still, he, he didn't have to.

Marina Mogilko 2:47 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 2:47 I'm sure, you know, Meta and OpenAI and us, we're always gonna need software engineers, but there could be a lot more entrepreneurship in the world, a lot more businesses, if that bottleneck that is making software

Amjad Masad 3:00 goes away.

Marina Mogilko 3:06 [music] Do you have, like, a screen here where you track your most important metric?

Amjad Masad 3:12 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 3:12 And what's the most important metric?

Amjad Masad 3:13 So every, every team has a screen. Infrastructure metrics, there's, like, product metrics. It's really depending on the, on the team, and almost every team has a, has a, has a screen. Um-

Marina Mogilko 3:25 So what's one universal metric everyone's looking at?

Amjad Masad 3:28 Um, I mean, ARR. [laughing]

Marina Mogilko 3:31 Okay. [laughing]

Amjad Masad 3:31 It's, like-

Marina Mogilko 3:32 Okay

Amjad Masad 3:32 ... everyone's responsibility.

Marina Mogilko 3:33 Can you share your recent ARR or-

Amjad Masad 3:35 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 3:36 Yeah?

Amjad Masad 3:36 Um, 160.

Marina Mogilko 3:38 160.

Amjad Masad 3:39 Yeah. [laughing]

Marina Mogilko 3:39 That's amazing. You've been- they've been growing like crazy.

Amjad Masad 3:42 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 3:42 Like, your graph is dream, Y Combinator-

Amjad Masad 3:45 Mm-hmm

Marina Mogilko 3:45 ... hockey stick.

Amjad Masad 3:46 Mm-hmm. But especially if you plot it from, like, 10 years-

Marina Mogilko 3:49 Oh, yeah, right

Amjad Masad 3:50 ... it does that. [laughing]

Marina Mogilko 3:51 That's... And also, like, it's so encouraging for-

Amjad Masad 3:54 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 3:54 ... entrepreneurs who don't see progress right away.

Amjad Masad 3:56 That's right. That's right.

Marina Mogilko 3:57 How many people are-

Amjad Masad 3:59 Success rate

Marina Mogilko 4:00 ... coding right now in these rooms?

Amjad Masad 4:00 Let's see. Is there... About 50,000.

Marina Mogilko 4:02 50,000 people?

Amjad Masad 4:03 Right here, yeah.

Marina Mogilko 4:04 Do you know how many apps

Marina Mogilko 4:06 built on Replit are actually active and running?

Amjad Masad 4:09 Yeah. Uh, about 350,000, like, paid online apps. That's growing fast. That's growing 25% month over month.

Marina Mogilko 4:18 Do you know how many of them actually generate revenue?

Amjad Masad 4:21 We don't. I think those are more anecdotal, the stories that we hear.

Marina Mogilko 4:24 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 4:24 Pretty soon, we're gonna be, um, helping you integrate with Stripe and monetize, so we'll be able to, to track that.

Marina Mogilko 4:31 I think I already added my Stripe token.

Amjad Masad 4:32 So yeah, we- the agent knows how to do it.

Marina Mogilko 4:35 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 4:36 Uh, but we're gonna make it even more effortless, like one click. Our mission is n- not just to make software more accessible, but really make entrepreneurship more accessible, 'cause that's really the thing, I think, that changes lives the most. You can make a piece of software, and it's fun, but making, creating a business is really one of the best feelings in the world.

Marina Mogilko 4:56 Let's take a quick break. If Amjad's story with Replit fired you up, and you're tired of just watching people talk about AI instead of building something real, this is your chance. HubSpot just dropped something called the 10 Zero-to-Ship Vibe Code Prompts. It's a pick of 10 proven frameworks to help you turn a business idea into a working lead gen web app. No coding experience required. You'll get tools like Viral Hook Generator, Lead Quality Optimizer, Multi-Platform Deployment Assistant, and my favorite, the Replit Build Prompter, which acts like your own AI product manager. These prompts will help you define your perfect customer, build your prototype in Replit, generate viral hooks, names, and launch content. It will also help you benchmark your idea and plan how to turn it into scalable growth machine. No more waiting months or spending 20K a month on a dev team. This is what building with AI actually looks like in 2025. If you're ready to launch, download the 10 Zero-to-Ship Vibe Code Prompts for free. Link in the description. Big thanks to HubSpot for sponsoring this video.

Marina Mogilko 5:58 So actually, I'm trying to build something with Replit right now, and the thing is, it's something that I'm encountering. So yes, it's building, like, a beautiful layout-

Amjad Masad 6:07 Mm

Marina Mogilko 6:07 ... but then-... sometimes, but see, service unavailable. That's-

Amjad Masad 6:11 Mm.

Marina Mogilko 6:11 That's the recent bug I got.

Amjad Masad 6:13 Mm.

Marina Mogilko 6:13 So it feels like it's-

Amjad Masad 6:17 Oh, interesting.

Marina Mogilko 6:18 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 6:18 On the deployment, so you can go to the logs here and understand why the service is unavailable. So you can see there's an error.

Marina Mogilko 6:25 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 6:25 You can copy that error and give it to the agent, and tell it, um, "When I deploy, I get this error."

Marina Mogilko 6:32 Okay, let's try. But basically what I'm realizing, uh, is that it's still a lot of work, right?

Amjad Masad 6:41 Mm-hmm. It's, it's work.

Marina Mogilko 6:42 If you have this data, how long does it take to build something that's actually working? Like, what I'm trying to build here is a tool that's gonna analyze my videos and let anyone analyze their videos on YouTube, and determine videos that have potential if you change their title and thumbnail.

Amjad Masad 6:55 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 6:55 You know how it works sometimes. You repackage a video, and it just starts-

Amjad Masad 7:00 Right

Marina Mogilko 7:00 ... getting all the new views.

Amjad Masad 7:01 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 7:01 And I'm trying to build something that's gonna-

Amjad Masad 7:03 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 7:03 ... help me do that, but I've already spent, like, six hours [chuckles]

Amjad Masad 7:06 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 7:06 And it's, it's a process.

Amjad Masad 7:07 Yeah, it is a process. You're still acting kind of like a software developer. You're acting like a software development manager.

Marina Mogilko 7:14 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 7:14 And so you have this, um, powerful but easily distractible intern, and you need to manage him very well. So for example, you type this prompt

Amjad Masad 7:26 that is, like, only one sentence. I would've, like, spent maybe, like, another minute or two on it and just say, "When I deploy the site, I'm getting this error, but, you know, but I'm not getting it in the preview."

Marina Mogilko 7:38 Mm.

Amjad Masad 7:38 And so communicating in a more precise way is-

Marina Mogilko 7:43 Mm-hmm

Amjad Masad 7:43 ... is very important, so prompt engineering and prompting is not that different than programming. W- we just take away the syntax from it, right? Like, you don't have to understand the syntax and a lot of the underlying details, but you still have to be very precise, and actually, it helps when communicating with developers as well, to be able to talk that way. So, you know, an app like that will probably take a couple days, whereas previously, even a, you know, senior engineer, would have taken them, like, a couple weeks-

Marina Mogilko 8:12 Yeah

Amjad Masad 8:12 ... you know, before AI.

Marina Mogilko 8:13 $10,000, $15,000?

Amjad Masad 8:14 Yeah, something like that. It will cost you something like that, but I would- I would spend two, three days on it, and I think you'd be able to get it.

Marina Mogilko 8:20 How can I learn to be better at prompting?

Amjad Masad 8:24 We have a YouTube channel.

Amjad Masad 8:25 Uh, we have a great developer relations, uh, person who creates a lot of content. His name is Matt. Um, and so we try to train people on, on prompting and, and the underlying systems. So Replit has a DNA sort of education, so we- when we were talking about a billion developers, um, these billion developers need to learn. It's not gonna come for free, so there's a learning curve associated with it, and you need to be resourceful. So you need to go to YouTube, search, like, how to, how to prompt. You spend a lot of time and practice by building, changing your style. Some people go to OpenAI, for example, and, like, pick o3, or right now it's GPT-5 with Thinking, and give it the idea and, and, and tell it, "Hey, I want you to structure it into a really great prompt."

Marina Mogilko 9:16 Prompt it for me, something like that?

Amjad Masad 9:18 Yeah, yeah.

Marina Mogilko 9:18 Mm.

Amjad Masad 9:19 So I think, uh, you know, Paul Graham, uh, the founder of Y Combinator, you know, the best accelerator in the world, um, wrote this, uh, essay about being resourceful, and he talks about the qualities of founders, and one quality is relentlessly resourceful. So they, they- they're able to find resources to unblock themselves and be able to, um, you know, not hit a wall. Because I think a lot of what entrepreneurship is, is finding all these walls and really driving through them.

Marina Mogilko 9:51 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 9:51 And the way to do that is... So think of, think of it as like a video game. In a video game, especially open world video games, you're often running into these problems where you don't know what- how to get to the next level. A lot of it is creative thinking, kind of moving around and finding the clues or... And I think entrepreneurship and, you know, building software is sort of similar to that.

Marina Mogilko 10:10 Can you tell me

Marina Mogilko 10:11 what changed when you decided to start your company? What was this thought that was like, "I need to build this?"

Amjad Masad 10:18 So there's starting the project versus starting the company. Starting the project was so obvious to me. Programming is hard. We need to make programming easier. That's, like, a very tactical sort of view on things. Starting the business was less obvious, because I had worked at startups. I knew how painful they are. Like, so I worked at Code Academy, for example, when I first ca- came to the States. It was based on the open source version of, of Replit, but I saw how difficult it was, and it was really painful, a lot of hard work. So Replit was still a side project and started growing, and we really- I didn't want to start it into a business because... And I actually tried to sell it to, to Facebook, where I was working back then. I wanted to stay there.

Marina Mogilko 10:57 Mm.

Amjad Masad 10:57 I was very comfortable and happy there.

Marina Mogilko 10:59 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 10:59 It's a scary feeling to leave your job and-

Marina Mogilko 11:02 Yeah

Amjad Masad 11:02 ... and go heads down. But it was kind of de-risked, because we had a platform that people really loved. We had 100,000 users plus a month. So after a lot of deliberation, and, and really trying to think what matters to you, what, what, what creates meaning in your life-

Marina Mogilko 11:16 Mm

Amjad Masad 11:16 ... and, uh, you know, serving our customers and really achieving our mission, helping people create businesses and all of that, felt very, very important.

Marina Mogilko 11:24 Mm.

Amjad Masad 11:24 So I think it's about meaning, partly.

Marina Mogilko 11:26 And it feels like with this tool, there are two

Marina Mogilko 11:30 problems in entrepreneurship. Now, it used to be three, like, coming up with idea, building the product, and marketing.

Amjad Masad 11:34 Yes.

Marina Mogilko 11:34 Now, you're left with coming up with ideas and then marketing.

Amjad Masad 11:38 Right.

Marina Mogilko 11:38 What do you think is gonna happen when everyone's building an app? [chuckles]

Amjad Masad 11:41 Yeah, so when everyone's building an app, when that is... It's still a skill, right? It's still, like, like we talked about, it's still a skill that you can- you can develop, and I think grit is very important. So resourcefulness, grit, like, not quitting, like, not quitting after six hours, like, spending another day or two on it at least. I think domain knowledge is very important, so if you're- y- you have excellent domain knowledge on, on YouTube, and so you need to imbue, you need to give that domain knowledge into the agent. You need to prompt it in a certain way so that you're downloading your domain knowledge, and that is your competitive advantage.

Marina Mogilko 12:18 But at the same time, w- OpenAI models are training on, on what I know-... and then they're so much better at defining what a good YouTube video is.

Amjad Masad 12:28 I think you still have tacit knowledge that is not necessarily expressed in all your videos and all the content out there. Um, that CFO at the VC firm has a lot of knowledge and skills he built up over the years that he can make into an app, that you can't find on blogs, and you can't find online. And so I think every one of us, as we go through life, we build up a lot of experiences that LLMs do not get to experience because they're not embodied.

Marina Mogilko 13:00 But do you think there will ever be time when AI

Marina Mogilko 13:05 sees the problem, comes up with a solution, codes the app, doesn't need a human?

Amjad Masad 13:09 You know, I, I, I might be a bit different in the Silicon Valley context, in that I am, uh, quite skeptical about the AGI vision. I think we can build extremely competent agents, but you would always need the human as a driver.

Marina Mogilko 13:24 Mm.

Amjad Masad 13:24 Uh, because I think that the, the way large language models work is they train on the entire corpus of, um, texts on the internet, texts in books, all of that stuff. That is text of the past, of what has happened, right? What people have put in. But can it come up with novel ideas, creative ideas, ideas based on what's changing in the world right now? 'Cause they're not always learning. They're not continuously learning. They're within this closed box that is their training corpus-

Marina Mogilko 13:58 Yeah

Amjad Masad 13:58 ... right? It's almost like a library in a very reductive way. It is a, it is a li- a, a library has a lot of ideas, and it can remix and mix and match ideas, but a net new idea is something that I think still humans have, have a special place.

Marina Mogilko 14:15 I love your answer, but still the fear inside me [chuckles] -

Amjad Masad 14:18 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 14:18 ... wants to push back by saying that-

Amjad Masad 14:20 Please do

Marina Mogilko 14:21 ... you know, all the ideas already exist in the world. Like, when we're talking about new movies or new books, they take a preexisting idea, but, like, changing characters, changing circumstances.

Amjad Masad 14:30 There's always a novel idea. So think about Bitcoin. Bitcoin- Are you, like, in crypto or Bitcoin?

Marina Mogilko 14:35 A little bit, yeah.

Amjad Masad 14:36 Yeah, so Bitcoin, it was based on a history of 20 years, people trying to build digital, uh, cash. Uh, and in the references, it's referencing Hashcash. Proof of work was existing. Uh, proof of work, the idea that, uh, you know, the machine is solving these cryptographic problems in order to secure the, the Bitcoin network, was actually originally invented to fight spam. So there was the spam problem with emails. We didn't have spam filters or AI, and so when I'm sending you an email, I solve a cryptographic problem that is expensive to show you that I'm not a spam, uh, agent, right? So Satoshi Nakamoto took all these ideas, and you're right, did existing ideas and put them in a, in a new package. But he added an, a novel idea, which is how to solve the double spend problem.

Marina Mogilko 15:28 Mm.

Amjad Masad 15:28 And this is the blockchain, right? So I think it's easy to think about, there's no- "nothing new under the sun," I think that's the expression. But I think if you look carefully, if you look at what Einstein did, right, like, uh, with his theories, um, there's always one novel insight, one really strong, novel insight. It's almost like this divine intervention. It's, uh, there's something spiritual about having a really novel idea, and I'm sure you've experienced it in the past, uh, that I think is, is fundamentally human. I don't know where it comes from.

Marina Mogilko 16:02 Yeah, and also this feeling that you're the one to bring it to the world. I feel like AI likes

Marina Mogilko 16:08 that. Okay, let's see. Let's see what's going on here. Uh, should we do overview and try again?

Amjad Masad 16:14 So-

Marina Mogilko 16:14 No?

Amjad Masad 16:15 So I hit redeploy. It's asking you to redeploy, so it'll take a second to deploy. I'd be curious, uh, fixed session deserialization problem. Okay.

Marina Mogilko 16:24 While it's deploying, um, you said a gap between a Replit user and a senior Google engineer will

Marina Mogilko 16:30 disappear in two years. Should people still learn how to code, or what's gonna happen to the engineering job?

Amjad Masad 16:35 I think the engineering job will continue to exist, especially in, um, very domain-specific areas. It's basically what we're talking about. There are a lot of things that are not very well represented in the data. If you're a platform engineer at Google dealing with a billion users, there are knowledge and things that you understand and have learned on the job that LLMs do not know because no one's written them anywhere.

Marina Mogilko 16:59 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 16:59 This is this tacit knowledge, and so I think those engineers will continue to exist. If you're an engineer at NASA and you're building fault-, uh, tolerant systems, if you're building provable systems... Uh, like, I don't want my Tesla Autopilot to be vibe coded, right?

Marina Mogilko 17:17 Absolutely.

Amjad Masad 17:17 Like, there are a lot of life and death systems that we want engineers that are very low level and very almost mathematical about it to, to exist. So there, there's a lot of situations in which engineers will continue to exist, but if you're a product builder, I would say just go ahead and build the product. Like, don't wait. Like, if you need to learn coding a- along the way, learn it, but, but your mission is to build the thing. So I would start by building, and, and like we said, being resourceful along the way goes a long way.

Marina Mogilko 17:49 So what should engineers who are building apps like this do now?

Amjad Masad 17:53 Um, let's see. Where is it? There we go.

Marina Mogilko 17:56 Oh, there we go. Okay. Sign in. Okay, it's like-

Amjad Masad 17:59 We hit a new issue.

Marina Mogilko 18:00 Again, and it's like- [chuckles]

Amjad Masad 18:02 Google authentication not configured.

Marina Mogilko 18:03 Okay.

Amjad Masad 18:03 But that's, that's how software engineers work.

Marina Mogilko 18:05 Okay. This is-

Amjad Masad 18:06 Right?

Marina Mogilko 18:06 That's-

Amjad Masad 18:06 This iteration.

Marina Mogilko 18:08 Got it.

Amjad Masad 18:08 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 18:09 So you've taken two days-

Amjad Masad 18:09 So you solve a problem-

Marina Mogilko 18:10 Yeah

Amjad Masad 18:11 ... and then, and then you get a

Amjad Masad 18:13 new problem. But, but-

Marina Mogilko 18:13 Do you think it will ever get, get to, to the stage where I don't have to do this?

Amjad Masad 18:16 Yes, so-

Marina Mogilko 18:17 'Cause it could actually run-

Amjad Masad 18:19 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 18:19 ... everything and test everything.

Amjad Masad 18:20 Yes, so we, um-

Marina Mogilko 18:22 Is that what we're working on?

Amjad Masad 18:23 Yes. [chuckles]

Marina Mogilko 18:24 Okay. Could you talk about it, or, or not yet?

Amjad Masad 18:27 Uh, usually not yet, but, uh, let me give you some, some hints.

Marina Mogilko 18:31 Okay.

Amjad Masad 18:32 Um-... every vibe coding platform today automates generation of code and all of that stuff, which is great, but leaves a job for you that is actually very routine, and uncreative, and annoying, which is-

Marina Mogilko 18:46 Testing

Amjad Masad 18:46 -quality assurance and testing.

Marina Mogilko 18:47 [chuckles] Yeah, exactly. QA. [chuckles]

Amjad Masad 18:49 So we're, we're solving that.

Marina Mogilko 18:50 Okay. All right, you're launching something, right?

Amjad Masad 18:52 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 18:53 Is there a lot of pressure on the team? How are they handling it? [chuckles]

Amjad Masad 18:55 Yeah, so we have an off-site next week, where we're gonna be going to, uh, LA, uh, on the beach, and, uh, at least that's, like, a sort of a relaxing environment.

Marina Mogilko 19:06 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 19:06 And we're gonna be going really deep and working really hard, and then the week after that, we're gonna be coming here. It's called Sprint Week, and we do it before every launch, and people typically work 14-hour days nonstop.

Marina Mogilko 19:17 You, too?

Amjad Masad 19:17 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 19:18 Your wife, too?

Amjad Masad 19:18 Yes, yes.

Marina Mogilko 19:19 Who takes-

Amjad Masad 19:20 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 19:20 Who takes... Okay.

Amjad Masad 19:20 So-

Marina Mogilko 19:21 There's a question coming from-

Amjad Masad 19:22 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 19:22 ... all the entrepreneurs have kids.

Amjad Masad 19:23 Right, right.

Marina Mogilko 19:23 Like, how do you balance this?

Amjad Masad 19:25 So we... You know, there's... People talk about work-life balance. We, we talk

Amjad Masad 19:30 about work-life harmony-

Marina Mogilko 19:31 Mm-hmm

Amjad Masad 19:31 ... or work-life integration. And so, for example, like, we'll have, ah, the nanny bring the kids to the office. We'll have a-

Marina Mogilko 19:40 So they can vibe code? [chuckles]

Amjad Masad 19:41 They can vibe code.

Marina Mogilko 19:42 [chuckles]

Amjad Masad 19:42 I sometimes sit down with my kid and, like, do a little bit of coding, but so we can see them-

Marina Mogilko 19:47 Yeah

Amjad Masad 19:47 ... right? Like, so... And next week, for the trip, uh, everyone here could bring their families as well. So, you know, Replit not being super young, a startup or not, that young, there's a lot of people with families, so we try to, like, create that integration.

Marina Mogilko 20:02 Do you think it works, honestly, or do you feel like you're missing out on your kids?

Amjad Masad 20:07 I don't feel like I'm missing out.

Marina Mogilko 20:08 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 20:08 Like, honestly, I don't feel like I'm missing out.

Marina Mogilko 20:10 That's good. Yeah.

Amjad Masad 20:10 So i- you know, just having a bit of freedom in, in your schedule, so I spend, like, mornings with them. Like, I wake up at 7:00, 8:00, and I get to the office by 10:00, right? But I, you know, stay late here.

Marina Mogilko 20:22 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 20:22 We have dinners, uh, here. But, you know, I have these two hours in the morning, at least. Sometimes I'm there for dinner as well, and on the weekend. I'll work a little bit, like, Sunday afternoon. Uh, I'm always on my phone, working, obviously, and responding, and phone calls, and things like that, but I feel like I'm present.

Marina Mogilko 20:38 What about your wife? Similar schedule?

Amjad Masad 20:40 I thi- yeah. No, she's- she has a less intense of a schedule. I think CEO schedule is, like, a little more, um, intense, and I think, I think this is, this is... You probably can relate to that. I think being a mom, there's, like, a more sense of guilt [chuckles] that I don't really-

Marina Mogilko 20:56 All the time. All the time.

Amjad Masad 20:57 Yeah, I don't really-

Marina Mogilko 20:57 'Cause they're back from school right now.

Amjad Masad 20:58 Right.

Marina Mogilko 20:59 Yeah, but I also would love to do this.

Amjad Masad 21:01 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 21:02 You know?

Amjad Masad 21:02 Yeah, so I, I, I don't know how- what to speak to that-

Marina Mogilko 21:04 Mm

Amjad Masad 21:04 ... but I feel like, all things considered, we feel f- fairly involved in their lives.

Marina Mogilko 21:10 That's good. Talk to me about your mindset. Like, you're coming up with all these new things, but at the same time, we have Lovable, Cursor-

Amjad Masad 21:16 Mm

Marina Mogilko 21:16 ... we have all of these tools. We're gonna let you do the same thing.

Amjad Masad 21:20 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 21:21 How do you see yourself being different, and how do you survive mentally as an entrepreneur?

Amjad Masad 21:25 So we're gonna be the first to do what I just talked about-

Marina Mogilko 21:27 Mm-hmm

Amjad Masad 21:27 ... the absolute first.

Marina Mogilko 21:28 And it's launching in September?

Amjad Masad 21:29 Yep. And last year, we're the first agent on the market, and so we're always three, six... I think this feature that we're building is probably gonna be a year ahead of anyone else, and that's because it's built on 10 years of innovation, infrastructure innovation. Like, every app that we're building, every workspace is backed by, um, a cloud virtual machine built on a file system that we innovated. We even patched the Linux kernel to, to, to make things work for Replit, and so all that infrastructure allows us to always be ahead. We'll come up with an idea. Sometimes it takes two, three months to build. If you want to build the idea from scratch, it'll take you two, three years to build.

Marina Mogilko 22:12 Mm.

Amjad Masad 22:12 And so I think Replit will actually start to diverge pretty soon. All these applications kind of look the same because they all generate a website, but, um, when you talk to developers that are using Replit, often moved from the other, uh, platforms, uh, they're saying that, "Yeah, I mean, these tools got me a, like a pretty website pretty quickly, but, you know, a month in, I'm just blocked. I can't... It can't manage my database. I want a place to do, uh, to store my files." Replit ships with a database, has a object storage component, has authentication component. Like, I know you're trying to set up Google Authentication, but you can also ask the agent to implement a Replit authentication, has a built-in authentication system. We built up this massive amount of infrastructure, and within the next six months to 12 months, I think it'll be really obvious how Replit differentiates.

Marina Mogilko 23:05 Have you seen any big mistakes that people make when building something with Replit? 'Cause I know a lot of entrepreneurs are looking, and they're probably like, "Okay, I'll build an app, but what's next?" Like, any tips for marketing or any lessons that you've seen along the way?

Amjad Masad 23:18 First of all, what we talked about with prompting, over-communicate. Over-communicate, be resourceful. Re- Replit environment gives you a lot of tools, like the logs and things like that. Try to over-communicate with the agent. I think that's the first tip that I would give. Even if you don't ha- you don't wanna learn prompt engineering, just, just be over-communicative. And then on, uh, on marketing, uh, I think that's the next big bottleneck for entrepreneurs, right? Let's say building a product becomes easier, and easier, and easier. How do you go get it to market and communicate your value proposition, all of that?

Marina Mogilko 23:54 Exactly. And, like, why would someone buy something like this if they can just go to Replit [chuckles] and vibe code the same

Marina Mogilko 24:00 thing, right?

Amjad Masad 24:00 Yeah. Uh, I-

Marina Mogilko 24:01 If it's, like, an easy app.

Amjad Masad 24:03 There, there's definitely marketing is a, is a big part of the answer, but also, like I said, domain knowledge that you have. Like, just think about the things that you know deep in your heart of hearts that not many people in the world know.

Marina Mogilko 24:17 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 24:17 And the other thing is, like I said, grit. Like, just, just, you know, not quitting after six hours is, is very differentiating. Actually, most people just quit. And so just keep going and not quit. Like, I've been building this business for 10 years. Before that-... back in Jordan, I had this idea when I was 22. Uh, and I started working on it. Actually, there was an open-source project called Replit back in 2010, and I just didn't quit. I knew it was gonna big. I, I, I still know it's, it's gonna be a trillion-dollar company at some point in the future. Right now, we're like a $3 billion company, which is still huge.

Marina Mogilko 24:54 It's amazing, yeah.

Amjad Masad 24:55 Uh-

Marina Mogilko 24:55 Congratulations.

Amjad Masad 24:55 Thank you. But it's just not, not quitting. I think a big part of it- I mean, you know, people talk about it all the time, just show up every day.

Marina Mogilko 25:02 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 25:03 Just showing up is a, is a big differentiator. Most people don't, you know? It's- things are hard, and life is full of easy things like, you know, s- you can spend four hours on TikTok, be endlessly entertained-

Marina Mogilko 25:15 Oh, yes [chuckles]

Amjad Masad 25:15 ... right? Um, so that's one. On marketing, there, there are a few,

Amjad Masad 25:20 few things I could say here. One is launch, launch, launch. Just keep launching.

Marina Mogilko 25:26 New products.

Amjad Masad 25:26 Go launch on Reddit.

Marina Mogilko 25:27 Iterate, or-

Amjad Masad 25:28 Even the same product.

Marina Mogilko 25:30 Mm.

Amjad Masad 25:30 Uh, like, make, make another, uh-

Marina Mogilko 25:32 Mm, another tweak

Amjad Masad 25:33 ... another tweak. Uh, show it in a different way, iterate on your messaging, do another video. Uh, try to reach out to influencers to partner with them.

Marina Mogilko 25:42 Go on podcasts.

Amjad Masad 25:43 Go on podcasts.

Marina Mogilko 25:44 I've seen you go on a podcast. [chuckles] Yeah.

Amjad Masad 25:44 Replit, I launched it three or four different times with different messaging and different things, and-

Marina Mogilko 25:48 Interesting. So the first three times didn't work?

Amjad Masad 25:50 Uh, first few times didn't work. Uh, I think when we got on Hacker News the first time, uh, it was when I said, uh, "You can try all these different languages," and I listed the languages. "Try Python, uh, Ruby." That was before AI. Uh, and that was a hit because of the- because of the title change. And so again, it's grit, relentless resourcefulness, and just iteration,

Amjad Masad 26:10 iteration, iteration.

Marina Mogilko 26:11 Absolutely. Okay, what are y- your top three favorite AI apps?

Amjad Masad 26:15 Uh-

Marina Mogilko 26:15 Of course, Replit. [chuckles]

Amjad Masad 26:16 Yeah. Yeah, we'll leave that aside.

Marina Mogilko 26:18 [chuckles] Yeah.

Amjad Masad 26:18 Uh, Perplexity. You know, I just like going to Google and s- spending five minutes clicking on links. I can just get it really fast with Perplexity. I like to do deep research with Perplexity, so that's something I can't live w- without. Uh, ChatGPT. Um, I go to Perplexity when it's, like, more research, I want something from the web. ChatGPT, when I'm, like, brainstorming, and, and Claude and the other ones, too. Um, and let's see-

Marina Mogilko 26:45 Give me something specific, like I know for a specific problem, if you u- use anything, maybe you build your own

Marina Mogilko 26:50 AI agent or something.

Amjad Masad 26:50 Like naming, uh, like naming products.

Marina Mogilko 26:53 Yeah. NameXL, or what do you use?

Amjad Masad 26:54 No, I u- I, I'm using ChatGPT for that.

Marina Mogilko 26:56 Oh, you're using... Oh, okay.

Amjad Masad 26:57 I, I like to prompt, right?

Marina Mogilko 26:58 Yeah.

Amjad Masad 26:58 I like to prompt, and I like to kind of start different chats, and-

Marina Mogilko 27:01 This is how you b- you, you kind of build differently because you like prompting.

Amjad Masad 27:04 Yes.

Marina Mogilko 27:04 Uh, so you just use ChatGPT for basically anything 'cause you can prompt it?

Amjad Masad 27:08 No, I s- I sometimes build, uh, Replit apps as well-

Marina Mogilko 27:10 Mm

Amjad Masad 27:10 ... for certain things.

Marina Mogilko 27:11 Oh, what did you, what did you build for yourself?

Amjad Masad 27:14 Well, recently, uh, d- do you know Kindle Scribe?

Marina Mogilko 27:17 Mm-hmm.

Amjad Masad 27:17 Uh, so you know, Amazon's new notebook thing. It has a web browser-

Marina Mogilko 27:20 Yeah

Amjad Masad 27:20 ... and sometimes I don't want to use my phone. My phone is somewhere else. I'm on my Kindle reading. I wanna look something up. I try to open ChatGPT, it actually doesn't render, 'cause the E Ink browser kind of is, like, a very old-school browser. So I build a ChatGPT that doesn't have any JavaScript.

Marina Mogilko 27:35 Oh. [chuckles]

Amjad Masad 27:35 Uh, [chuckles] so-

Marina Mogilko 27:35 Okay, that's very... [chuckles]

Amjad Masad 27:37 And it took, like, an hour with the Replit to, to build. So I'm often spinning up these small tools anytime I find... That's the thing about Replit, it becomes addictive. Once you know that you can make certain pieces of software, you'll immediately see a problem, it's like: "Oh, that's shaped like a problem I could solve."

Marina Mogilko 27:52 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 27:53 You'd mentioned hard moments. Talk to me about the hardest moment building this.

Amjad Masad 27:57 Oh, man. Um, I mean, uh, there's a bit of recency bias to this, but last year we did a- we had a layoff. And Replit culture, you know, you'll get it from, from working- w- walking around, is, is very positive. Uh, people really like each other here. Um, you know, you ask a lot of people why you're here, some will tell you the technology, the mission. A lot of people will tell you the people. They really enjoy working with the, with the people, and so it was very heartbreaking to have to cut the team because the business wasn't doing well. Before we launched Replit Agents, we were in this very awkward place, you know, that's a marketing observation, where we weren't good enough for the senior engineer, and we weren't good enough for people like you. It wasn't easy enough. We're in the middle, so you learn how to code, use Replit a little bit, but then you graduate off of it. Uh, and so the, the- we had to add more platform features, like all the databases and things we added, but also we had to make it easier so we can have access to a larger group of people, uh, such as yourself. But at the time, we had, we had 130 employees, we were burning money like crazy, and we had to lay off the team, and we had just actually come to this office, and this office is huge. Because I was so optimistic about our future, I knew that AI is gonna be really big. I knew we were building the right thing. But we came here, we were burning all this money, and then we just had to do the layoff, and we, we, we cut the team, and I think we, we cut 30, 40% of the team.

Marina Mogilko 29:28 Mm.

Amjad Masad 29:28 But then a lot of people started leaving because, well, the office is, like, empty. It was, like, a really dark place. Uh-

Marina Mogilko 29:34 Was that when you were making, like, $2 million a year-

Amjad Masad 29:36 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 29:36 ... revenue? 2024, last year.

Amjad Masad 29:38 Right, last year. Um, and you, you walk around here, it's very gloomy. No one, no one's really happy. I used to come here and I was like: "Can't wait to go home." [chuckles]

Marina Mogilko 29:46 Wow.

Amjad Masad 29:47 And I think anyone- most people in, in our place at the time would just call it quits and try to sell the company-

Marina Mogilko 29:53 Yeah

Amjad Masad 29:53 ... and do something like that. But instead, the people that are working on Agent, we motivated them. We told them, "This is- we think this is the thing that's gonna work." And we told them, "Look, if this doesn't work, there, there's no future, and we have to make this work." And so the core team that was working on Agent, everyone stayed and worked 12, 14-hour days. And, um-

Marina Mogilko 30:15 And you got to 144 million. [chuckles]

Amjad Masad 30:18 Yes.

Marina Mogilko 30:18 Right?

Amjad Masad 30:18 In less than a year.

Marina Mogilko 30:19 I

Marina Mogilko 30:20 heard this story that, uh, Peter Thiel passed on investing, but then you sent him your graph.

Amjad Masad 30:25 [chuckles]

Marina Mogilko 30:25 Did he ever reply?

Amjad Masad 30:26 He didn't reply.

Marina Mogilko 30:27 Never? [chuckles]

Amjad Masad 30:28 Peter Thiel invested in our Series B round in 2021, but then I went to pitch to him in 2022 or '23, just before ChatGPT. I was trying to tell him, "Hey, uh-... AI is very important. It's gonna change the nature of coding and programming. And he said, uh, you know, Peter Thiel is very skeptical of buzzwords, and he's known to be a contrarian, so he doesn't like anything that's popular. [chuckles] And so he was like, "When you're saying AI, it's meaningless. It's almost like saying computers."

Marina Mogilko 30:56 Mm.

Amjad Masad 30:56 "Uh, you know, don't come here with these buzzwords." And he basically said I was just engaging in hype. Uh, you know, we had raised at a big valuation, and I'm trying to justify that valuation. And the entire meeting, I'm trying to tell him, "Hey, just, like, look at the demo."

Marina Mogilko 31:12 Mm.

Amjad Masad 31:12 And he wouldn't look at the demo. And then I remember four months later, uh, I saw him on TV talking about ChatGPT, and saying, "Oh, it's actually a fundamental innovation." I was like, "I tried to tell you." [chuckles]

Marina Mogilko 31:23 I told you.

Amjad Masad 31:23 [chuckles] Um, and, um, you know, to his credit, he changed his opinion, and they in- inv- uh, Founders Fund invested a big amount in Cognition, which is another agent, uh, coding company. Uh, but I did send him an email saying... After they inve- invested in Cognition, I told, told him, "Well, you know, I have a lot of respect for you, and that conversation was, was actually very hard to take in because I, I felt like I was doing something wrong. Uh, but I hope you can see that I- at that moment, I saw the future, where things were headed."

Marina Mogilko 31:52 And I'm glad you pushed further and built whatever you built.

Amjad Masad 31:55 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 31:56 Right? Because it's so demotivating to hear things like that from people who are super respected and super smart.

Amjad Masad 32:01 Exactly. It's, it's both demotivating, but can be motivating. It's about how you frame it, right?

Marina Mogilko 32:06 Mm.

Amjad Masad 32:06 I've become one where I'm actually more motivated to prove pe- doubters wrong.

Marina Mogilko 32:15 Love it.

Amjad Masad 32:15 Haters, doubters, whatever. [laughing]

Marina Mogilko 32:16 You transform that energy-

Amjad Masad 32:18 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 32:18 ... into changing the world.

Amjad Masad 32:19 It's like there's nothing better than having a lot of doubters and people, naysayers, and actually proving them wrong. It, it's a great feeling, and I recommend it to everyone. I re- I, I wish for all the entrepreneurs, I wish that you're gonna have a lot of doubters, because then when you succeed, that's when, that's when the feeling [laughing] comes in.

Marina Mogilko 32:41 [laughing]

Amjad Masad 32:41 Yes. I mean, if you look-

Marina Mogilko 32:42 That's awesome

Amjad Masad 32:42 ... if you talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, and you say,

Amjad Masad 32:45 "What is meaningful about your life?" What... And they say, "The money's cool." You know, money does change your life, and, and it allows you more time to, and more resources to build and do more things. But the things that a lot of entrepreneur kind of come back to is who they were, what they were before they created this thing. They keep remembering it was, like, the struggle. "Everyone doubted me, but I persisted, and I succeeded, and that's the best feeling in the world."

Marina Mogilko 33:13 Exactly. Let's talk about the future. You have two small kids.

Amjad Masad 33:16 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 33:16 And yesterday, I unlocked another AI fear for me, 'cause I stumbled

Marina Mogilko 33:20 upon an article that said that recent graduates, just graduated from college, they're struggling to find their first jobs because there are 15% less jobs-

Amjad Masad 33:28 Yeah

Marina Mogilko 33:29 ... uh, entry-level jobs, but 30% more applications.

Amjad Masad 33:31 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 33:32 I'm like, "Oh, my goodness," so I'm worrying about myself, and [chuckles] I also have to worry about my kids. What do you think about your kids' future? What are you teaching them?

Amjad Masad 33:39 Look, I, I think there's deep question about where we're headed as so- society. What is Silicon Valley's, um, responsibility? What is the responsibility of the government? And I think we can have hours discussion on that. I don't think anyone has a good, um, grasp on these problems. But locally, when I'm thinking about my kids and what we're gonna do in the future, I think about this idea of being more of a polymath, right? Like, if you think about, you know, even before the Industrial Revolution, the people, the most memorable, uh, like Leonardo da Vinci, for example, did a lot of things. He was an engineer, was an artist, was all sorts of things, right? And the, the kind of elite education used to be about understanding a lot of things, about spending a lot of time learning about every- everything. And I think this is where the education needs to be headed, where the Industrial Revolution created a world where humans are treated like machines. If you think about corporations or factories, factories are one big machine, and every individual person kind of doing the assembly of one thing is a part, and I think it was very dehumanizing. And I think we're gonna go back to a, to a moment of time, uh, where there's a lot more opportunities for entrepreneurship. Even when you join a company, you're, y- you're gonna be judged by how much of a real business impact you're gonna have, as opposed to how task-oriented you are.

Marina Mogilko 35:11 But what would, would you say to, for example, girls, right? I have two girls, and, uh, the way a lot of girls are brought up are like, "Find a job that's sustainable, find something long-term, find something that's safe."

Marina Mogilko 35:24 And you're saying that everyone is ba- basically needs to become a generalist and also an entrepreneur to generate ideas. What would you say to those women watching? How do you change your mindset?

Amjad Masad 35:34 Well, my wife is a, is, is, is my co-founder. I think we both, uh, Hai and I, share background of being misunderstood and being, um, uh, you know, uh, growing up i- in a, in a culture that we didn't feel like really fit our way of, of thinking, and we were different. Uh, and so m- maybe that shaped how, how we are and our attraction to entrepreneurship and to trying to change how people do certain things or change the world. I t- I think there's a lot that, you know, culture imbues on, on sort of, uh, j- uh, gender roles, but I don't think girls are fundamentally, like, sort of predisposed to, to a certain type, type of job, and so I think a lot of it is about upbringing and what we tell our kids and how we, how we educate them. A- and so I, I think my advice will apply to, to both genders. I think that teaching them to be resourceful, you know, actually, like, not hiding from them the fact that the future is very uncertain. We're in a mono- moment of time that's very different. It's very different from when I grew up, from my- when your grandparents grew up or their grandparents grew up. There was a lot more certainty about the world. Right now, the world is very uncertain, and the way you're gonna have to learn and the way you're gonna have to adapt to this world is gonna be very different. It's gonna be very difficult, but we're here for you-

Marina Mogilko 36:56 Yeah

Amjad Masad 36:57 ... and we're gonna try to figure it out together.

Marina Mogilko 36:58 How far ahead you think is time when s- a solopreneur is gonna build a billion-dollar company?

Amjad Masad 37:04 Is it a billion-dollar in revenue, or is it a billion-dollar valuation?

Marina Mogilko 37:07 It's a valuation.

Amjad Masad 37:08 Valuation. So, so let's say-

Marina Mogilko 37:10 So it's 100 million in revenue.

Amjad Masad 37:12 Let's say-

Marina Mogilko 37:12 It's a 10X. [chuckles]

Amjad Masad 37:13 Yeah, let's say 20X, so maybe a 50 million in revenue.

Marina Mogilko 37:17 Okay.

Amjad Masad 37:17 Um, I don't think it's that far. Like, like if someone like John Chaney was able to build a 2 million, two, 3 million ARR revenue-

Marina Mogilko 37:24 He's very niche B2B.

Amjad Masad 37:26 Mm.

Marina Mogilko 37:26 High check.

Amjad Masad 37:27 Mm-hmm.

Marina Mogilko 37:27 I feel like a 50 million company is a B2C company-

Amjad Masad 37:30 Mm

Marina Mogilko 37:31 ... which requires databases.

Amjad Masad 37:32 But why not? Like, he, he has these enterprise seats. He go-

Marina Mogilko 37:35 Mm

Amjad Masad 37:35 ... you know, he goes into his companies. You know, he, he has a platform with a lot of content that he's selling. I s- I could see it be a $50 million ARR business.

Marina Mogilko 37:46 In the next couple years?

Amjad Masad 37:47 In the next few years, yeah. I don't see why not. But again, it's not just about the software, it's about the domain knowledge that he has.

Marina Mogilko 37:53 Yeah, I love it.

Amjad Masad 37:54 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 37:54 Thank you so much.

Amjad Masad 37:55 My pleasure.

Marina Mogilko 37:56 It was amazing.

Amjad Masad 37:56 Yeah.

Marina Mogilko 37:56 Great meeting you.

Amjad Masad 37:57 Thank you for coming.

Marina Mogilko 37:58 Thank you.