Replit's CEO On The Only Two Jobs Left In The Company Of The Future

1. 0:00 – 0:28

   Intro

   1. AMAndrew Miklas0:00

      [upbeat music] Today I'm joined by Amjad Masad, the CEO and co-founder of Replit. Replit is the leading no-code app builder, uh, for consumers and enterprise. They just recently raised their Series D, a $400 million raise at a 9 billion valuation. Amjad, thank you very much for joining me, and I'm excited to learn more about Replit.

   2. AMAmjad Masad0:25

      Thank you for having me.

   3. AMAndrew Miklas0:26

      Of course. Why don't you tell

2. 0:28 – 2:14

   Anyone Can Build Software

   1. AMAndrew Miklas0:28

      us a little bit about, uh, what Replit is?

   2. AMAmjad Masad0:30

      Yeah, so, um, you know, our ambition is that anyone, no matter what level of skill they have, anyone who can read and write, basically, that's the skill that, that you need, can come in with an idea and can leave with a, an app that's deployed, that's hosted, that's getting traffic, that can scale, and they don't have to worry about any technical aspect of the, uh, of building that thing. Um, and it's been, it's been a mission we're on for, for 10 years right now. So initially we solved the development environment. You know, that was the hardest thing, is like setting up a development environment. Then solved the deve- deployment environment, and what was left is like the coding part was still very intimidating for people. And September 2024, Replit became the first like what's called vibe coding product-

   3. AMAndrew Miklas1:24

      Mm

   4. AMAmjad Masad1:24

      ... where, uh, we abstracted away code entirely. So there's like a coding agent behind the scene, but you're just interfacing with AI using natural language, and more recently with Agent 4, uh, also design interactions. So you can write things, you can comment on things, you can drag and drop things in a, like a canvas. And we're thinking about a lot of different modalities for how people wanna interact with agents, because I don't think it's always gonna be just text. I think at some point it's gonna be multimodal, maybe video, maybe audio. But we wanna create a natural place where people can express their ideas, and those ideas can turn almost magically into software, that it's real software. That it's not like a toy software. Real software, secure software, scalable software.

   5. AMAndrew Miklas2:08

      One of the things that's most interesting to me about, about your company is that it really bridges the, the gap between a dev tool

3. 2:14 – 4:52

   The Rise of AI-Native Builders

   1. AMAndrew Miklas2:14

      and, and not. I, I think it's the first dev tool I've seen, but that's not marketed towards engineers. Like, can you tell me more about how you came to that, uh, decision that you were gonna do that and, and, and who is your primary user today?

   2. AMAmjad Masad2:28

      Yeah, so you know, I, I started coding at a very, very young age, but, um, I was always interested in, in the act of creation. I was interested in entrepreneurship. I built like my first business when I was 13, 14. And I always thought that the developer tools were getting in the way. It actually gotten worse over time. So you know, so I started, you know, coding on Basic, and you just start the Basic command line interpreter, and you can just like type a little Basic in, that's good.

   3. AMAndrew Miklas2:55

      Yeah.

   4. AMAmjad Masad2:56

      By the time I graduated from college, like setting up, you know, a web app was like a nightmare, right? Um, and so it created this desire to just like build tools that are, that are more joyful, more enriching, kind of focused on the act of creation as opposed to the accidental complexity of, of, of developer tools. And so, uh, I started building a lot of tools for myself, uh, and eventually I, you know, I built what would become the kind of the first in-browser IDE. Initially it was like an open source project. Later on I would also worked on React and React Native. And I approached every time I, I built a developer tool, I've approached it with the same thing, can you apply design sensibilities in the same way that we, you would work on a commer- a consumer app? Uh, and that's been successful in, in many ways, but ultimately when we started Replit, the goal was make programming accessible. Later we updated our mission to create a billion, a billion new developers. As we progress in our, in our mission and in solving every part of the software development life cycle, what we've noticed is a lot of developers actually like the pain. [laughs]

   5. AMAndrew Miklas4:12

      Interesting.

   6. AMAmjad Masad4:12

      They, they like setting, they a- the, you know, setting up things.

   7. AMAndrew Miklas4:17

      Mm-hmm.

   8. AMAmjad Masad4:17

      And they like configuring every aspect of it. It's, it's sort of like, there's no knock against that, but like it's sort of like a craftsperson kind of liking b- to build their own tools.

   9. AMAndrew Miklas4:27

      Yeah.

   10. AMAmjad Masad4:27

       And what we've noticed is the people that are getting the most value out of our product tend to be the more tech adjacent ones. Maybe people, product managers who have written code-

   11. AMAndrew Miklas4:35

       Yeah

   12. AMAmjad Masad4:35

       ... many years ago, but don't wanna wor- worry about the development environment set up, don't wanna wor- worry about the deployment set up. Um, then designers, designers who have ideas but are often blocked or bottlenecked by engineers, and they wanna be able to build their

4. 4:52 – 7:18

   Not Just Developers Anymore

   1. AMAmjad Masad4:52

      own ideas. Um, and later on as we layered on AI and the product got better, entrepreneurs. And when, when I talk to these people, it, um, it reminded me of myself.

   2. AMAndrew Miklas5:03

      Mm.

   3. AMAmjad Masad5:04

      Those are people with, with ideas, with passion, with fire in them, but they, but they, but they're getting hamstrung by, by just like the need to learn to become technical.

   4. AMAndrew Miklas5:14

      Mm.

   5. AMAmjad Masad5:14

      So at, at some point in 2023, um, we just made it an explicit goal of like we're not going after developers. They're still developers. Like if you walk around Replit today, it looks like a dev tool company.

   6. AMAndrew Miklas5:27

      Mm-hmm.

   7. AMAmjad Masad5:27

      We're, we're like building for creators, right? But they're not the traditional type of developers. There's like a new generation of developers that are coming up right now because of AI.

   8. AMAndrew Miklas5:37

      Yeah.

   9. AMAmjad Masad5:37

      They're AI native developers that are creating software without having to worry about every component in the system.

   10. AMAndrew Miklas5:44

       It's so interesting hearing you say this because it, it sort of reminds me, I learned to program on VB6.

   11. AMAmjad Masad5:50

       Mm-hmm.

   12. AMAndrew Miklas5:50

       And, and that's, uh, to me, that's a, a real- You know, th- this idea of the tools opening up and making, making it possible for people that couldn't code. I couldn't code. I learned to code in VB6. And, and I see sort of a very similar thing that you're exploring with this.

   13. AMAmjad Masad6:06

       Yeah. VB6 was better than setting up React and Webpack. [laughs]

   14. AMAndrew Miklas6:11

       100%. I remember the transition, yes.

   15. AMAmjad Masad6:14

       It's, it's... It, it got worse-

   16. AMAndrew Miklas6:16

       Yes

   17. AMAmjad Masad6:16

       ... over time-

   18. AMAndrew Miklas6:16

       Yes

   19. AMAmjad Masad6:16

       ... which is, like, not many things get worse in life-

   20. AMAndrew Miklas6:19

       Yeah

   21. AMAmjad Masad6:19

       ... but programming got worse-

   22. AMAndrew Miklas6:20

       Yeah

   23. AMAmjad Masad6:20

       ... and I wanted to bring it back, make programming great again-

   24. AMAndrew Miklas6:24

       Yeah

   25. AMAmjad Masad6:24

       ... essentially. [laughs]

   26. AMAndrew Miklas6:26

       [laughs] That's so interesting.

   27. AMAmjad Masad6:27

       Yeah.

   28. AMAndrew Miklas6:28

       Uh, tell, tell me about what people are building today in, in Replit.

   29. AMAmjad Masad6:31

       Yeah. I mean, there's a few different categories. There's personal software, there's enterprise software, and then there's, like, entrepreneurs building-

   30. AMAndrew Miklas6:39

       Yeah
5. 7:18 – 10:36

   What People Are Actually Building

   1. AMAmjad Masad7:18

      of your body. And they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars offshoring, uh, to developers-

   2. AMAndrew Miklas7:24

      Mm

   3. AMAmjad Masad7:24

      ... around the world, and eventually they kind of were frustrated by the entire process, took matters into their own hands, built it on Replit, and I... when I saw the app, it was, like, one of the best, like, health tech apps I've ever seen-

   4. AMAndrew Miklas7:36

      Yeah

   5. AMAmjad Masad7:36

      ... and, and they're not-

   6. AMAndrew Miklas7:37

      Yeah, because the domain experts-

   7. AMAmjad Masad7:38

      The domain experts

   8. AMAndrew Miklas7:39

      ... can now actually build the product.

   9. AMAmjad Masad7:41

      Yeah. People who are closest to the problem-

   10. AMAndrew Miklas7:43

       Mm-hmm

   11. AMAmjad Masad7:43

       ... can build the, the, the, the products they need. You know, I, uh, talked to a founder the other day that's building a SaaS solution for, um, for people who maintain pools. Like-

   12. AMAndrew Miklas7:56

       Okay

   13. AMAmjad Masad7:56

       ... and he grew up in a, in a household where their comp- where their family business is, is a pool business, and so it's like there's so much software to build in the world. I also met a founder yesterday who's building, uh, software for sports clubs, and he was showing me pictures of the software they're using today, which is MS-DOS-based software.

   14. AMAndrew Miklas8:19

       Oh, wow.

   15. AMAmjad Masad8:20

       And so here in Silicon Valley, we look around us and we're like, "Oh, what else is left to build?" But, but there's so many walks of life, there's so many, um, things that are kind of a blind spot for us. And so suddenly when anyone can make software, a lot of parts of the economy is just gonna improve, and that's, like, I think, a beautiful thing. And a lot of wealth creation's gonna happen, productivity gain as well. Personal software is also really cool. Like, you know, talk to a lot of families that build, like, you know, healthcare software. Like, there's, like, a mom in Korea that built software f- uh, that helped manage a very rare condition for her kid. Um, yeah, a lot of people build, like, personal, like, uh, you know, healthcare software or, like, tracking, uh, physical activity or ingesting data from all their wearables-

   16. AMAndrew Miklas9:10

       Mm-hmm

   17. AMAmjad Masad9:10

       ... and, and doing something with it. A lot of software for families. Like, a mom built, like, a chore hero software iPad that's, like, on the wall that shows-

   18. AMAndrew Miklas9:20

       Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah

   19. AMAmjad Masad9:20

       ... the kids how they're ranking on their chores. And then there's the enterprise use case. In an enterprise, it tends to be two different use cases. One is, uh, product development.

   20. AMAndrew Miklas9:31

       Yeah.

   21. AMAmjad Masad9:31

       So companies wanna move a lot faster on product development. Everyone now is feeling the pressure of, of AI. We need to move faster, faster, faster. And they're realizing that it doesn't fall just on their engineers. Their product people can now build software. Their designers can build software. We hear from clients, uh, like one of our favorite stories, like, uh, Whoop is a, uh, is a client of ours.

   22. AMAndrew Miklas9:52

       Mm.

   23. AMAmjad Masad9:53

       And they told us, like, the amount of ideas they can try has grown by an order of magnitude.

   24. AMAndrew Miklas9:58

       Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

   25. AMAmjad Masad9:59

       Right? Like, they used to, you know, get, get, like, 100 ideas but are able to only try five of them.

   26. AMAndrew Miklas10:04

       Right.

   27. AMAmjad Masad10:04

       But now they can try the 50, right?

   28. AMAndrew Miklas10:07

       Yeah.

   29. AMAmjad Masad10:07

       Um, so, uh, you know, companies become a lot more prolific. They can release a lot, new features, create new, new business lines, n- new products. And then there's, like, internal tools and l- you know, line of business applications. Um, there's a lot of sales automations that, that, that is happening in this company. Any, any role inside a company that's dealing with a lot of data flow, for example, think of RevOps, they're at the nexus of a lot of different data flow-

   30. AMAndrew Miklas10:33

       Yeah
6. 10:36 – 14:02

   How Replit Is Spreading Everywhere

   1. AMAmjad Masad10:36

      Gong, from... And they wanna be able to do things with this data, and typically they're kind of bottlenecked by either engineering resources or the different SaaS tools that they would wanna buy. The problem with SaaS is you onboard a new SaaS tool, that creates a new silo of data that you can't really-

   2. AMAndrew Miklas10:50

      Yes

   3. AMAmjad Masad10:50

      ... program. So now they're taking matters into their own hands and building things like, you know, quote configurators and-

   4. AMAndrew Miklas10:56

      Yeah

   5. AMAmjad Masad10:56

      ... um, and being able to save the company hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions of dollars on SaaS tools and things like that.

   6. AMAndrew Miklas11:02

      How, how are you finding these users? Like, how do you market to them? How do you get them to, to try it out? And then I, I assume for enterprises it's gotta be a very complicated sales cycle, like, y- you know, getting, getting into the company. Like, how does all that work?

   7. AMAmjad Masad11:16

      Well, the cool thing about the, the world we're in right now, and it's very similar to developers, you know, I think the insight that a lot of YC dev tool companies has had, like, you know, Stripe, you know, PagerDuty, um, you, uh, you, uh... Developers were empowered to be able to make decisions to bring software into the company-

   8. AMAndrew Miklas11:36

      Yes

   9. AMAmjad Masad11:36

      ... at some point, like, in the last couple decades, right? Um, s- that, that shift is happening outside of development right now-

   10. AMAndrew Miklas11:43

       Mm

   11. AMAmjad Masad11:43

       ... where the product manager, the designer, the operations manager is empowered to bring software. So the consumer use case, the personal use case is often overlapping with the work use case in that people are playing with these tools on the weekend. They're building their own personal apps.

   12. AMAndrew Miklas12:00

       Yeah.

   13. AMAmjad Masad12:00

       They're like, "Oh, I- Look, the moment you understand that you can solve a problem with code, it, it changes your mind. Like, almost there's, like, a neurological shift where you start looking at the world differently, where you go around and you're like, "Oh, I can solve this. I can fix this."

   14. AMAndrew Miklas12:16

       I remember that when I learned to program.

   15. AMAmjad Masad12:17

       Yeah, exactly.

   16. AMAndrew Miklas12:18

       Yeah.

   17. AMAmjad Masad12:18

       And now that shift is happening in a huge part of the population.

   18. AMAndrew Miklas12:22

       Yeah.

   19. AMAmjad Masad12:22

       And so it's the, you know, PLG play I think is still the gold standard.

   20. AMAndrew Miklas12:26

       Mm-hmm.

   21. AMAmjad Masad12:26

       Just make a product that's really good that people wanna recommend their, to their friends.

   22. AMAndrew Miklas12:30

       Mm-hmm.

   23. AMAmjad Masad12:30

       And make it easy to refer others, you know, build a refer program, do all of that stuff. And then on the sales side, a lot of it is very kind of sales assisted, so someone brings it to work, we talk to them, they're the champion, we help them. It's like, okay, what do you need to convince your boss in order to bring this to work? Let's work with them to do a hackathon to bring, create more champions inside the company.

   24. AMAndrew Miklas12:53

       Yeah.

   25. AMAmjad Masad12:53

       Uh, let's work with y- let's teach your re- leadership about AI, what... So a lot of what our salespeople are doing is evangelism, is education. So it's, it's a different kind of sales motion, I think, than the previous one. We still have enterprise sales that's more top-down where a company comes to us and we're like, "Hey, we're trying all the different vibe coding tools. We heard it's good for our business. Can you help us kind of evaluate Replit?" And we go into that, and, um, and there we're often winning because Replit has built, um, uh, a history of just, like, being, uh, super trusted on security, on compliance, all of that basic enterprise stuff you still, you still have to do.

   26. AMAndrew Miklas13:31

       Let's talk about sort of what, what the limits are today of what you can do with a product like Replit. Like, what, what kind of systems can you build in Replit, and what do you still need to have sort of traditional, uh, software engineering, uh, approaches to?

   27. AMAmjad Masad13:48

       I can confidently say to any entrepreneur out there that you can build a SaaS product, a consumer product, um, like an automation product on Replit comfortably.

   28. AMAndrew Miklas13:59

       Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

   29. AMAmjad Masad14:00

       If you want to build, like, a new

7. 14:02 – 19:22

   What You Can Build (and What You Can’t)

   1. AMAmjad Masad14:02

      cloud platform or you want to build, like, a new machine learning system, that's not exactly what we're focused on today. Some people still figure it out.

   2. AMAndrew Miklas14:09

      Yeah.

   3. AMAmjad Masad14:09

      Replit is a versatile tool. We give you a virtual machine, we give you a general purpose agent. And if you have some technical knowledge, you can bring that and you can build sophisticated things. But if you want to build things entirely vibe coded without worrying about the technical details, we have so many examples on our website and what we talk about our, uh, in our marketing. Uh, we, you know, th- there's so many success stories now that I can confidently tell an entrepreneur with no technical knowledge that they can build-

   4. AMAndrew Miklas14:36

      Right

   5. AMAmjad Masad14:36

      ... uh, a piece of software. So there's a lot of consumer apps. There are a lot of, um, the, there are a lot of, uh, you know, vertical SaaS products. There are people that are starting, uh, like Replit native agencies. I was talking to, uh, someone from Iceland yesterday, and he was telling me they're getting so much business because they're 60 to 70% cheaper and more effective than traditional agencies, and they're all vibe coding on Replit.

   6. AMAndrew Miklas15:03

      Hmm.

   7. AMAmjad Masad15:03

      So they, they get a client that that client wants an application. Not everyone knows that they can build the application themselves, so they're going in, it's probably a period of time, and they're able to make a lot of money that, that way. You know, the internal tools, automations, th- those tend to be kind of fairly simple, uh, programs, like you're building an internal org chart.

   8. AMAndrew Miklas15:24

      Yeah.

   9. AMAmjad Masad15:24

      You're building, um, a CPQ system, like a quote configurator where it's, like, pulling from HubSpot or Salesforce. We have a lot of MCP and integrations that allows, uh, to do that. Um, we're-

   10. AMAndrew Miklas15:38

       How, how do those integrations work? Like, have you gone through and built integrations-

   11. AMAmjad Masad15:41

       Yes

   12. AMAndrew Miklas15:41

       ... to all? Okay.

   13. AMAmjad Masad15:42

       Yes, yes. We spend a lot of time partnering with companies-

   14. AMAndrew Miklas15:44

       Yeah

   15. AMAmjad Masad15:45

       ... building those integrations. And now there's the, what's happening with the skills call it revolution, where the, you know, companies are putting out skills and MCPs and we just vet them and integrating into, into the product. And so as you're talking to Replit and you're like, "I want to integrate Stripe." And so we already built a set of skills and sometimes code and things like that, and we'll search a database, we'll bring all that in, and now it's in context and now the agent is like... It's sort of like Neo in The Matrix where, like, you d- you download a new skill and you're like-

   16. AMAndrew Miklas16:16

       Yeah

   17. AMAmjad Masad16:16

       ... "Oh, I know how to fly a helicopter now."

   18. AMAndrew Miklas16:18

       Yeah, yeah.

   19. AMAmjad Masad16:18

       So it's so cool to see the agent that's like, "Oh, let me search this set of skills that I have," and suddenly it knows-

   20. AMAndrew Miklas16:23

       Yeah

   21. AMAmjad Masad16:23

       ... how to do that. But we spend a lot of time just making sure they're secure and they're safe.

   22. AMAndrew Miklas16:27

       That makes sense. Yeah. Having built a dev tool community, like, how, how is that different? How do you build the sort of like groundswell of support to pull yourself into those organizations? Is it different than how it, how you would've done it traditionally?

   23. AMAmjad Masad16:41

       It's, it's a little different in that you need to show what's possible.

   24. AMAndrew Miklas16:48

       Okay.

   25. AMAmjad Masad16:48

       I think with, uh, with developers, with more traditional, you know, CS trained developers, they know what's possible. They, uh, they'll-

   26. AMAndrew Miklas16:56

       Yes

   27. AMAmjad Masad16:56

       ... read your docs, they'll figure out what's possible. They, they're on Hacker News all the time, and they'll generally kind of are much more resourceful in knowing what's possible. With Replit, there's a lot of education that needs to be done.

   28. AMAndrew Miklas17:09

       Yeah.

   29. AMAmjad Masad17:09

       So we have, like, a DevRel, uh, team, but they're not the traditional DevRel. They're, they're more like educators.

   30. AMAndrew Miklas17:18

       Yeah.
8. 19:22 – 23:18

   YC, Growth, and Early Lessons

   1. AMAmjad Masad19:22

      So that entrepreneurial kind of founder mindset I think is very important.

   2. AMAndrew Miklas19:25

      Got it. I mean, while we're on the topic of YC, I'd, you know, I'd love to hear about your, your experience here. Like, how, how did YC influence, you know, what, how Replit started and what it became?

   3. AMAmjad Masad19:36

      The, the main realization from YC is how much you can get done in three months. So when we, when we came in and Sam stood, uh, uh, when he was still running it, Sam stood in front of the batch and said, "For the next three months, tell your friends you're gonna be missing. You're not gonna be able to help them move. You're not gonna be able- You'll come back into their lives later-

   4. AMAndrew Miklas19:57

      Yeah

   5. AMAmjad Masad19:57

      ... but for the next three months, you need to be hyper-focused on this company, and you're gonna be able to achieve great things if you really go intensely into it." When we did YC, we had the, we had a whiteboard-

   6. AMAndrew Miklas20:08

      Mm-hmm

   7. AMAmjad Masad20:08

      ... and a countdown to, to demo day.

   8. AMAndrew Miklas20:11

      Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

   9. AMAmjad Masad20:12

      Uh, and a number of, uh, like a, just a, just a very simple list of things we need to achieve.

   10. AMAndrew Miklas20:17

       Yep.

   11. AMAmjad Masad20:17

       And every day we wake up, we erase that number, and we change it to the countdown. Um, and, and when Replit got, got into YC, it was still Replit. That's the name, right? It was still just, like, a command line with, like, you just type a little bit of code and run it.

   12. AMAndrew Miklas20:31

       Yeah, yeah.

   13. AMAmjad Masad20:31

       We exited YC, we already had, like, w- um, web development. We had, like, the initial aspect of hosting. We had code IntelliSense. We had, like, so many sort of IDE features. It was like, got a lot more feature complete just in three months. And that, that is an empower thing, sort of what we talked about with programming. Uh, just the fact that, like, oh, you can be so intensely focused, and you w- can work so hard and achieve so much in three months. And now every agent release, there is, it's not three months, it's more like four weeks where we bring everyone, 'cause some people are still kind of remote or other offices, bring everyone to the office. We provide breakfast, lunch, and dinner, coffee 24/7, and we're like, we're just gonna hit this, like, very, very ambitious goal, and that's, like, the YC mentality. Another thing is the compound growth, especially when you're s- spinning up a new product or a new initiative. This idea of, like, I don't know where PG came up with the number seven, but, like, 7% week over week growth-

   14. AMAndrew Miklas21:33

       Mm-hmm

   15. AMAmjad Masad21:34

       ... is a, like, a very good way to bootstrap a new, new product line. So we're constantly doing sort of, we're constantly going back to the YC basics and doing them and all, all of that we learned here.

   16. AMAndrew Miklas21:45

       Yeah. Tell me about, um, how, how did YC change your life?

   17. AMAmjad Masad21:49

       There are a few ways. One is before we got into YC, we couldn't raise all that much money. We raised, like, maybe $500,000 and, you know, VCs did not wanna meet us. It was like the, the doors were not really open for us.

   18. AMAndrew Miklas22:04

       Mm.

   19. AMAmjad Masad22:04

       Uh, after YC, you immediately, first of all, demo day, you get introduced to a lot of VCs. Um, and then we were lucky because we got rejected from YC four, three or four times, and then we got invited to do YC because Paul and Sam saw us on Hacker News.

   20. AMAndrew Miklas22:21

       Yeah.

   21. AMAmjad Masad22:22

       Uh, and so we got a g- direct relationship with Paul and Sam, and then at the end I was like, "I want an intro to Marc Andreessen." And you could still ask the partners here, like, they, they'll, they'll try a lot to, to get you intros. But I was, like, bold enough to ask for that, and so they got me an intro to him.

   22. AMAndrew Miklas22:37

       Yeah.

   23. AMAmjad Masad22:37

       I went and had breakfast at his house and pitched Replit, and a16z ended up leading our seed round.

   24. AMAndrew Miklas22:42

       Nice.

   25. AMAmjad Masad22:43

       Uh, and it, it, like, my network just expanded tremendously after getting into YC, and I don't think we would've been as successful without YC. Perhaps we would've quit-

   26. AMAndrew Miklas22:55

       Yeah

   27. AMAmjad Masad22:55

       ... if we couldn't ra- fundraise or... So it gave, it gave our, our company life.

   28. AMAndrew Miklas23:01

       Yeah. Yeah, for us it was very similar. We were complete outsiders-

   29. AMAmjad Masad23:04

       Mm

   30. AMAndrew Miklas23:04

       ... and I think having, having, you know, somebody sort of welcome you in made, made an enormous difference.
9. 23:18 – 29:44

   From Vibe Coding to Autonomous Agents

   1. AMAmjad Masad23:18

      we kind of, an act of trying to predict the future and based on what we've seen at the time, starting in kind of 2024, we thought that broadly the AI capabilities have massive step changes, uh, twice a year.

   2. AMAndrew Miklas23:34

      Mm-hmm.

   3. AMAmjad Masad23:35

      Uh, so if you think about 2025, um, there was the, like, vibe coding revolution that happened in earlier 2025, and then there was the, the, you know, the, the autonomous revolution that happened in-

   4. AMAndrew Miklas23:48

      Yeah

   5. AMAmjad Masad23:48

      ... uh, late 2025 with Opus 4.6 that led to OpenClau and, and things like that. Uh, but I can tell you the same thing happened in 2024. Mid-2024, Claude came out and, um, uh, Claude Sonnet, and for the first time it could generate, like, a lot of code as opposed to, like, GPT-3.5 which has that, that laziness component. Um, and then late, uh, 2024 we started seeing initial signs of the labs kind of, um, doing long horizon reasoning.

   6. AMAndrew Miklas24:16

      Mm-hmm.

   7. AMAmjad Masad24:16

      And so the, so that observation, we're like, "Okay, we wanna align our roadmap to AI capabilities." Um, and so every six months we release a new, uh, a new Agent version. Um, and it's an active- Predicting what's possible, it's also pushing the edge of what's possible. So for example, Agent 3 was the most autonomous agent on the market. We wanted-- We knew that autonomy was coming, and we're like, "Okay, we wanna be able to run the agent for like two, three, four hours. People should be able to put, put in a big prompt, go to lunch, come back and, and see the software fully, fully built." And so okay, what do we need to do to update our platform? For example, like we had, we had to rewrite everything on the back end to have these long-running containers in the background doing work while the user's not in front of the computer. And so we did all of that work, and although autonomy didn't arrive until like maybe like, like true autonomy until like, uh, November and, and December, Replit Agent had demonstrated where the world is headed by, by September.

   8. AMAndrew Miklas25:21

      Right.

   9. AMAmjad Masad25:22

      With Agent 4, th- the- there were a few things. One, parallel agents. We thought that was finally potentially possible to do parallel agents. The, the, the, the thing that sucks about autonomy is that you can put in a big prompt, and you're kind of sitting back and just like watching it work.

   10. AMAndrew Miklas25:39

       Mm-hmm.

   11. AMAmjad Masad25:39

       Like what do you do next?

   12. AMAndrew Miklas25:40

       Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

   13. AMAmjad Masad25:41

       Okay, so that question, what do you do next? Should you be able to design? Should you be able to kick off other type of work? Um, should you be able to chat with your agent and, and plan for other things? And so we wanted a more asynchronous nature to the product. Uh, so we started building towards a multi sort of agent architecture and parallel agent architecture. We had to solve merge conflicts and so many things-

   14. AMAndrew Miklas26:07

       Mm

   15. AMAmjad Masad26:07

       ... to make that work. Also, as, as the agent is building, we wanna also unblock you from designing. So we also had a kind of a more asynchronous design agent, and we're like, "Okay, what, what is the best interface for that?" So we designed this canvas.

   16. AMAndrew Miklas26:21

       Yeah.

   17. AMAmjad Masad26:22

       So now we have a built-in design capability inside Replit to, um, to be able to explore the next page you're gonna build or the next feature we're gonna build while the agent's building, and then once you're ready, you'll kick th- that off into another thread.

   18. AMAndrew Miklas26:36

       It starts, yeah.

   19. AMAmjad Masad26:36

       And it starts. So people are now sitting in front of Replit and just experiencing the state of flow.

   20. AMAndrew Miklas26:41

       Yeah.

   21. AMAmjad Masad26:41

       'Cause agents are slow, that's fine, but they can work in the background. And finally, uh, teamwork. Once you solve parallel agents, you've also solved teamwork.

   22. AMAndrew Miklas26:51

       Mm-hmm.

   23. AMAmjad Masad26:51

       Because every time someone jumps into the session, you can start an entirely new-- you can fork an entirely new VM for them, and they can work in parallel to you. And also because the orchestrator knows how to subdivide tasks, you can also prompt in the same chat window, and it will figure out how to make all that work. And because we had the canvas, it was, is, it's such a joy to just see other cursors and people.

   24. AMAndrew Miklas27:14

       Yeah.

   25. AMAmjad Masad27:14

       The, the, the product just becomes a lot, a lot more live. So all these components became, uh, Agent 4. Oh, final one, I forgot. We wanted it so that when you make a mobile app, when you make a website, when you make, uh, a deck, when you make a video, all of that should have the context of your project. Previously on Replit, and now every other tool, it's basically you need different tool for a website, different tool for a mobile app. So now with Replit, like you built a really cool web app, it's like, oh, maybe I, maybe I need an app. You could just say, "Make a mobile app."

   26. AMAndrew Miklas27:47

       Yeah.

   27. AMAmjad Masad27:47

       It will like generate a mobile app. It'll lay it out on the canvas. When you hit deploy, it deploys your web app to the web. It deploys your app to TestFlight or the, um, uh, or, uh, or your Android, whatever it is. So, so now you can run your entire company on Replit.

   28. AMAndrew Miklas28:05

       What, what kind of skills do people need to develop to, to be able to make the most of, of products like yours? Like what, what is the, you know, what do, what do people need to get practice at? Like i- in your mind, is it, is it people have to get good at prompting, or is it more that the system is gonna get better at just understanding whatever it is you're asking it to do?

   29. AMAmjad Masad28:23

       I actually think we're headed to like a post-prompting world.

   30. AMAndrew Miklas28:27

       Mm.
10. 29:44 – 36:12

    The Future: Everyone Becomes a Builder

    1. AMAmjad Masad29:44

       Like the thing that you tried to do today, the day I cannot do, try it again in a month.

    2. AMAndrew Miklas29:49

       Yeah.

    3. AMAmjad Masad29:50

       And I tell some Replit users, if, if whatever you're trying to build, Replit couldn't build today, try it in a couple of weeks. It might be able to build it. Um, and so that, that mindset of like, "I'm gonna keep trying," is, is, is, is important. Idea generation is still gonna be important. Obviously, we're gonna get to a point where, where AI is gonna be really good at helping you generate ideas. Um, but being generative, just constantly thinking about problems you wanna solve, um, and just being creative and like figuring out what, what, what, what, what does the world need right now and, um- And being generative is important because let's say you're a small-time entrepreneur, um, like, you know, Peter Levels type of entrepreneur or like th- these guys very famous on Twitter who built these products. Oftentimes, the products go through cycles. Like we built like a product that is really good for that moment, and you can generate like a couple of million dollars.

    4. AMAndrew Miklas30:45

       Yeah.

    5. AMAmjad Masad30:45

       But then that product's no longer relevant.

    6. AMAndrew Miklas30:47

       Interesting.

    7. AMAmjad Masad30:47

       So you need to be generative and creative in order to continuously do that, and you can make millions of dollars doing that.

    8. AMAndrew Miklas30:53

       If you were starting Replit today, what would you do differently?

    9. AMAmjad Masad30:58

       I mean, I made a lot of mistakes along the way. Uh, so if I was starting Replit today, I'd probably hope not to make as many mistakes. So, you know, culture is very important.

    10. AMAndrew Miklas31:08

        Mm.

    11. AMAmjad Masad31:08

        Uh, you know, at some point we screw that up, and we had to do, we had to do a reset and lay off and all of that stuff. Um, I think being really honest with yourself about, like, product market fit-

    12. AMAndrew Miklas31:21

        Mm

    13. AMAmjad Masad31:21

        ... is very important. It's very easy to delude yourself. Getting any kind of user is an amazing achievement. Getting any mon- uh, kind of money from users is also an amazing achievement, and you should celebrate every one of those moments. But true product market fit is enti- entirely different. It's like an explosive thing.

    14. AMAndrew Miklas31:39

        Yes.

    15. AMAmjad Masad31:40

        And so being honest a- about that because we've had periods where we're like, "Oh, it looks like that's successful."

    16. AMAndrew Miklas31:46

        Maybe it's working.

    17. AMAmjad Masad31:47

        Maybe it's working.

    18. AMAndrew Miklas31:48

        Yeah.

    19. AMAmjad Masad31:48

        And you, like, you keep going down that path. But in reality, you should've changed directions a little earlier.

    20. AMAndrew Miklas31:55

        Yeah.

    21. AMAmjad Masad31:56

        But-

    22. AMAndrew Miklas31:56

        When it works, it really works

    23. AMAmjad Masad31:57

        When it works, really

    24. AMAndrew Miklas31:57

        ... and you know it. In terms of AI development, AI technology, what is something that you are waiting for where you're like, "This is gonna unlock so much"?

    25. AMAmjad Masad32:05

        You know, I've been waiting for computer use models to, to get better. They're, they're slowly getting better.

    26. AMAndrew Miklas32:11

        Yeah.

    27. AMAmjad Masad32:11

        They're like one of the things that is actually kind of disappointing.

    28. AMAndrew Miklas32:14

        It's surprising to me that it's so hard to build them 'cause you'd think that it'd be the easiest thing in the world to get data for.

    29. AMAmjad Masad32:18

        Yeah.

    30. AMAndrew Miklas32:19

        And do you, do you have a sense of why that is?
11. 36:12 – 39:10

    What Skills Matter Now

    1. AMAmjad Masad36:12

       already the case that with computers we became a lot more, uh, higher levels. Like, computers were literally humans, right?

    2. AMAndrew Miklas36:19

       Yeah.

    3. AMAmjad Masad36:19

       Like, there was, like, a f- you know, bunch of people, like, doing computations.

    4. AMAndrew Miklas36:23

       Tables of numbers.

    5. AMAmjad Masad36:24

       Tables of numbers. And then we're like, we- you take that entire room, and you put it in a box. That's a computer, and now there's my job as, like, the operator of the computer to use a computer for productive use.

    6. AMAndrew Miklas36:34

       Yeah.

    7. AMAmjad Masad36:35

       Uh, and- There was a lot of still manual work in order to make that computer do interesting things, uh, the software, and now we have an agent that's using that computer to use. So, you know, different layers of abstractions.

    8. AMAndrew Miklas36:49

       Yeah.

    9. AMAmjad Masad36:49

       I don't know when you have a fully autonomous company, maybe at some point there's certain s- uh, styles of companies that could be fully autonomous. But I think you need business generalists that understand customers, understand what people need, understand the economy, understand where the world's headed, understand AI technology, where, where... Have some vision. And you wanna give them... So h- here's, like, the abstract vision of a future company. It's like almost everyone is a founder. They wake up in the morning and they think, "How can I make the company more successful? How can I make the company make more revenue?"

    10. AMAndrew Miklas37:26

        Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    11. AMAmjad Masad37:27

        And then they go around the company finding problems to solve, and then creating or deputizing agents in order to go solve these, these, these problems. We're already seeing that. We actually have a team, like a vibe coding and resident team at Replit.

    12. AMAndrew Miklas37:41

        Mm-hmm.

    13. AMAmjad Masad37:41

        And they have a very vague mission, unlike, like, a product team or a sales team where it's very clear. We're like, "Go around the company, make it better." [laughs] So they went to the support team and was like, "Okay, you know, you're using Zendesk and all these other tools. What are the main problems?" And we're like, "Well, we don't have a good way to prioritize our, uh, support queue." Um, for example, like there are customers that are paying much more than other customers, and there are customers that, you know, have more urgent tickets. And so they built, like, a way to, to visualize that, visualize that and, and, uh, a way to, like, create more priority queues. Um, and they spent some time with, with the support team, and the CSAT score started going up.

    14. AMAndrew Miklas38:29

        Hmm.

    15. AMAmjad Masad38:29

        And then they go around, they go around the HR team. What are the problems? Well, onboarding is a problem. There's no place for people to ex- to know all the benefits and everything that we have. Well, let's build an HR, internal HR platform. So they, they do that. And I think that kind of role is more, it is more where the future is headed, and more and more people inside a company will be more generalist entrepreneurs that are trying to make the business successful.

    16. AMAndrew Miklas38:57

        Well, thank you very much for joining me. A pleasure to have you here at YC.

    17. AMAmjad Masad39:01

        Appreciate it. Thank you. [outro music]

Episode duration: 39:11