20Product: Replit CEO on Why Coding Models Are Plateauing | Why the SaaS Apocalypse is Justified: Will Incumbents Be Replaced? | Why IDEs Are Dead and Do PMs Survive the Next 3-5 Years with Amjad Masad

Amjad Masad is the Co-Founder and CEO of Replit, one of the leading "vibe-coding" platforms. Under his leadership, Replit has raised a total of $922 million in funding, recently raising at a whopping $9 billion valuation. Replit has over 50 million registered users and is used by employees at 85% of Fortune 500 companies. Replit's revenue jumped from $10 million to $100 million in nine months, and the company is on track to reach $1BN in ARR by the end of 2026. AGENDA: 00:00 — Why Coding Models are Hitting a Performance Plateau 07:21 — Is Most of the Value of Replit Not Anthropic Model Quality? 10:04 — Why Did Replit Decide to Not Build Their Own Model, Like Cursor Did? 11:58 — Why Product Quality Must Always Beat Cost Optimization 14:51 — How Do Replit Choose Which Model To Route To For Different Tasks? 24:43 — The SaaS Apocalypse: Why it is Fair and Just? 29:55 — What Will the Cost of Tokens Be in 5 Years? 31:09 — Is Cursor Dead? Debunking the Twitter Narrative 33:36 — Are IDEs Dead? 35:54 — Should Students Still Study Computer Science? 42:47 — Are US Companies Using CCP Subsidised Open-Source Chinese Models 56:59 — What Do No Founders Know About True Product-Market Fit

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We're approaching a certain plateau in how good coding models could get. Cost question is secondary to the performance question. When you focus on cost is when you reach a certain asymptotic plateau in the S curve. I think for all intents and purposes, ideas are dead. The name of the game is just staying one, two, three, four, 10 steps ahead.

• 0:24Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20 Product, the monthly show where we sit down with the best product minds to unpack the future of product, how the best product managers work and what that looks like in a world of AI. We could not have a more relevant guest than Amjad Masad, co-founder and CEO at Replit, joining us in the hot seat. The man is reshaping what it means to be a great product manager, what it means to be a great product leader. And Replit is one of the leading vibe coding tools alongside the likes of Lovable. This was an incredible discussion with Amjad and I'm really excited for you to hear it. But before we dive into the show today, have you ever felt a little stuck at work? Maybe you're stuck in back-to-back meetings, stuck without clear feedback, or trying to learn a new AI workflow?

• 1:05Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:50Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:31Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:14Harry Stebbings?

  a robust CMS built for SEO, and advanced analytics that include integrated A/B testing, so you're not just shipping pages, but you're maximizing what works. And when you're ready to ship, changes go live in seconds with one click: publish, without relying on engineering. Plus, Framer is built for scale, with premium hosting, enterprise-grade security, and 99.99% uptime SLAs. Whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full .com, Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site fast. Learn how you can get more out of your .com from a Framer specialist,

• 3:55Harry Stebbings?

  or get started building for free today at framer.com/20vc for 30% off, 30% off a Framer Pro Annual Plan. That's framer.com/20vc for 30% off. framer.com/20vc. Rules and restrictions may apply. You have now arrived at your destination. I'm Jad, dude, I'm so excited for this. I've wanted to make this one happen for a while, so thank you so much for joining me once again today.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  My pleasure. Great to be here.

• 4:25Harry Stebbings?

  We were just chatting about the dazzle that Raplet's been through and the amazing position today. Did it take a long time for the world to see what Raplet was? Or did technology take a long time to catch up to your vision of what it could be?

• 4:39Speaker 00

  It's more the latter, right? So the core insight that I had, even before we started the company, maybe at this point 20 years ago, was that software is much more transformative than we actually think it is. You know, Mark Anderson wrote, "Software's Eating the World" and all of that. But I thought it's transformative for people's lives and for the prospect of wealth creation, wealth distribution, entrepreneurship, all of that. Well, it's sort of my story, you know, the impact it had on my life. You know, as a kid growing up in Jordan, coming to the US and now running a multi-billion dollar company. And I've seen that even earlier than that. When I was 15, I built a little business, was making hundreds of dollars. And that was amazing amount of money for me.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  I took my entire class to McDonald's when it opened up in Amman. And that was the kind of the core insight. And initially, when I came to the US, I worked at Code Academy. And the goal was like, let's teach everyone how to code. Let's make it as simple as possible. And I started seeing the stories back then even. Like if a fitness guy learns a little bit of coding, launches an app on the App Store, makes a million bucks. It was like, wow, this is amazing. And so when we started the company Raplet in 2016, the goal was, how do you make programming more accessible? How do you get to a point where there's a billion developers, not just 20 million developers at the time? And so we started solving one problem at a time, right? Solving the development environment, solving the hosting environment, solving the package management,

• 6:08Speaker 00

  the maintenance, the iteration, the version management, the multiplier. But there's one bottleneck, and that is people don't want to learn how to code. And it took me a long time to really accept that because I became the learn to code guy. And in, I think, March 2025, when I was in TPVPN, and I said, I no longer think you should learn how to code. It went super viral. People were pissed. How could you say that? And it's just that. Realization that there are people that are now successful. You know, we were talking about Jason Lemkin earlier from Saster. People that are building multimillion dollar businesses solo with no developers. They don't need to learn how to code. They need to learn how to create. They need to learn how to build. And and the real unlock wasn't just AI.

• 6:51Speaker 00

  It was AI that could do actions over long horizon. So we we've had AI since twenty one, twenty two, GPT three. But the unlock in twenty twenty four was agentic AI. And that was the first glimpse of it. And we we had to build a lot of infrastructure around it to make it work.

• 7:07Harry Stebbings?

  Dick Comment, how much of the magic is what you build versus the performance of models beneath you?

• 7:12Speaker 00

  It is a dance, I would say. Think about Elon Musk when he did self driving one point oh, you know, for version thirteen or whatever, which end to end. They had to write a lot of software, right? They had to write a lot of classical computer vision type software in order to make it work. But then they went to end to end learning. So there's this this thing that happens in AI. And as a founder, it's really important to understand this. At any given point, you have to plug in a lot of holes in order to build the most advanced thing that you can build. So September twenty twenty four, we had to we had to build a lot of a lot of infrastructure, a lot of guardrails in order to make agents work.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  March twenty twenty five, when we released Agent V two, we had to delete a lot of that code because the models got a lot better at staying consistent. But then you upgrade your vision, right? And so September twenty twenty five, we released Agent three, and that was the most autonomous agent on the market. It was the first to run for hours on end. And again, we had to write a lot of software in order to make it stay on track. And now, since open four point six, autonomy is built into the model. And so you have to understand what is the model capability and how much infrastructure you have to build in order to make it perform. And you have to stay ahead of that in order for your product to stay the most innovative on the on the market.

• 8:29Harry Stebbings?

  When you look at your model usage today, I've heard you say before, when I was obviously listening to your prior shows, that you have a preference for Anthropic. What does the model usage look like across different providers today?

• 8:41Speaker 00

  So Anthropic has been the sort of Workhorse for over a year right now. It's just like the core agent loop because it can run for a long time coherently. But the few things have changed. Google's Gemini's models are the best at price performance, for example. You know, given their price, where do they sit on the perimeter frontier, right? And so for tasks, for example, like tasks like code search, we might create a sub-agent that is cheaper and has good enough performance and we offload that from the main core loop. So we now we use, and I wrote this thesis back in twenty two, I called it the society of models. Now we use models from every provider. Actually, at some point, we were sending more tokens to Google than we were sending Anthropic,

• 9:25Speaker 00

  despite Anthropic being that kind of the core workhorse. There's this concept of agent labs, right? We talk about AI labs, but there's agent labs, you know, us, Cursor, some of these other companies. Our goal is to start with the user problem. What are we trying to fix? What are we trying to build? And walk back to the technology and use whatever model we need to use. In some cases, we build our own models.

• 9:47Harry Stebbings?

  That was going to be my question, sir. Am, the reason why the shows have become more and more successful is because I I've done the ask more and more direct questions. Cursor decided to build their own model. When we look at other players across different verticals, it's always been a mistake to build own model. Was Cursor's decision to build own model and your decision to, in some cases, a mistake? Because the equivalent model performance has just always come alongside you.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  It ebbs and flows. Again, like AI is such a changing landscape. The answer will change every three or six months.

• 10:18Harry Stebbings?

  Well, when you, when you're investing your team and your resources then in that, you have to weigh off, is it worth that three-month advantage? No?

• 10:27Speaker 00

  Right, you, you do. And that's why it makes it so, so freaking hard and why you have to change your mind all the time, right? Because there's a lead-up time. But the most important thing is optionality. So in twenty twenty-three, when we're training models, we achieved better quoting performance than the state-of-the-art models at the time, GPT three point five, right? But then, since Sonnet came out of later Opus, the gap has closed by a lot and they were spending tens of billions of dollars, if not hundreds. Making agents work and that would have been a dumb strategy for us to go and try to compete on that. But now I would say the opportunity opened up again for other reasons. The open source models are getting really good and we're approaching a certain plateau in how good coding models could get.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  And so you can use your data to fine tune a model specifically for your use case. I don't know if you saw, but Intercom talked about their new model that is better at customer support than the frontier models. And so maybe their model is going to be state of the art for three to six months. And maybe six months from now, the models will like zoom back ahead.

• 11:34Harry Stebbings?

  How do you analyze that? Is it better to be three months ahead and spend the money? Like, how important is it to be ahead for three months?

• 11:43Speaker 00

  It's very important. It's a matter of closing a large enterprise deal. We're constantly getting baked off against everything under the sun, right? And we're winning most of our enterprise deals because our product is is ahead of the market consistently.

• 11:57Harry Stebbings?

  The thing that I always hear is that we're using frontier models to basically set benchmarks. We're seeing where those benchmarks lie and then we're switching to open source to get as close to them as possible with much more efficiency in terms of cost. Is that the future?

• 12:10Speaker 00

  It depends, right? Like, so cost question is secondary to the performance question, especially in a time when when it's flush with capital. When you focus on cost is when you reach a certain asymptotic plateau in the S curve. You don't foresee a massive improvement, specifically in your domain. Intercom might say, we don't predict that models are going to get that much better on customer support for the foreseeable future. Therefore, we can focus on building our own or there's like a data flywheel that we can we can get, or there's a cost advantage that we get. But if you focus on cost at the expense of performance, you're going to lose. It's similar to any era in tech, right?

• 12:55Speaker 00

  Like it's cloud, it's mobile, it's SaaS, whatever it is, there are moments of time where the goal is growth and performance and being at the edge. And then when things kind of rationalize or Uber lift, when things rationalize, you kind of focus on your gross margins.

• 13:12Harry Stebbings?

  I think there's this idea in all transparency that your Replit, your base 44s, your lovable's and you might kill me for putting you in that bucket. But is the bounty of a hundred dollars that you make, 80 bucks goes to the model providers?

• 13:25Speaker 00

  For us, it's not 80, it's way less than that, but it is a significant portion like anyone, like even Anthropic, every hundred dollars they make, 60 goes to Nvidia. Like, you know, their, their margins are public, it's 40%, right? I mean, so, and they're also massively subsidizing their, their service.

• 13:42Harry Stebbings?

  Can I be blunt? What are your margins and how have they changed over time?

• 13:45Speaker 00

  They changed quite a bit. I said last year, like, we were close to profitability. In programming, there's like this old saying, premature optimization is the root of all evil. Because as a programmer, if you think about performance and optimization early on, you're going to make the wrong decisions. So the reason margins like keep moving around is like, we're trying to build the best product. And then after we build the best product possible, then we look around and we're like, okay, there's so many ways we can optimize. Then we go into an optimization period.

• 14:14Harry Stebbings?

  When we think about price sensitivity, how do you think about essentially rooting different behaviors? Where some models are actually okay for certain things and some need the frontier. How do you think about intelligent model selection for different functions?

• 14:30Speaker 00

  I would say that is the core competency IP of an agent lab. If you think of yourself as an agent lab, you have this tacit knowledge first, evaluating models. I think about our AI engineers, it's kind of psychologists in many ways. When a model comes out, the first thing they do, they like sit down with it for a day or two. They play around with it, they plug it in, they're like, okay, what are the limits? What can it do? And that's more like the tacit aspect of it, right? Which is very easy to underestimate. But the reason Replit, when a new model comes out, we're able to build state of the art performance even better than the lab itself. Like, we're big partners with Google and Gemini is one of the best models at design.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  I would say our products are better at design using Gemini than Google's products. It's because we know how to, how to evaluate these models, how to get the best performance out of them. And then we have a bunch of proprietary benchmarks that we use. And finally, we do a lot of A B testing as well. So that's really what you're doing as a company that is building on top of foundation models.

• 15:34Harry Stebbings?

  How concerned should we be about the proliferation of Chinese models and Silicon Valley companies?

• 15:39Speaker 00

  I'm not sure about this question. Like, you know, is their intention to actually innovate and play in the market fairly? Is their intention to destabilize? Is their intention to destroy the value of of US AI labs? I don't know. There are reasons to be careful and there are reasons to be optimistic about the the progress. Like what I see from.

• 16:00Harry Stebbings?

  Would you have a moral issue with using a Chinese model?

• 16:03Speaker 00

  I don't think there's a moral issue per se. Like, I don't think they're using slave labor or anything like that. I would have a security issue, especially since we have enterprise customers that that depend on us for sensitive data and things like that. So we haven't taken the step yet. I wouldn't preclude it from taking in the future. I would love to see a US corporation investing in open source. It looks like Nvidia is making moves in that in that regard. But open source is going to be very important for us to actually have a free market around AI. Because if we're going to end up in an oligopoly of AI companies, there's actually an economic theory of how they'll naturally collude on price and prices will not go down as fast as possible. They'll also control how we use these AIs.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  They'll also not provide everything through the API and keep some of the models for themselves. And so I think that it would be bad if we're in a situation where AGI or AI is only controlled by a few corporations. So open source is going to be very, very important. I would venture to say like, maybe the US government should start a consortium of companies that are like creating the best open source, national open source model so that the market stays competitive.

• 17:12Harry Stebbings?

  We mentioned Jason Lemkin earlier. He said something brilliant to me, which is, he said, inference is the new sales and marketing. Obviously, free is a large part of your business and many others in the space. Do you agree with Jason on inference is the new sales and marketing? And how do we think about that?

• 17:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, if you think about the hype period that we got with like Claude Code and Codax towards the end of 2025 or 26, a lot of it was driven by how much free tokens they were giving out, how much, you know, every other day they're like, oh, it's 50% more tokens or less rate limits and things like that. So it's clear that companies are using inference as a way to loop people in. And I think agentic development is addictive. It's, I think they're better kind of addiction than like social media or passive consumption. It's like creative addiction, which is kind of good. But I think companies are realizing that a way to kind of rope people in is through a lot of free tokens. Now, there is a question about retention, but I don't disagree fundamentally with the statement

• 18:11Speaker 00

  that you can use free tokens to acquire users.

• 18:15Harry Stebbings?

  Enterprises will kind of try things in certain respects. See, I was chatting to Jason Lampkin before, and he said, your number one ICP's product teams, as product teams kind of code or vibe more, what do they do okay in two to three years? How do they think about those functions?

• 18:33Speaker 00

  There's a big question about how product teams will look in the future. If I were to make a prediction, I would say that we'll still have engineers inside the organizations. Those engineers are responsible for more infrastructure, AI, ML, embedded systems, you know, more, more, you know, low level engineering. And then you have product organizations and product organizations will have people that are like tilted a little more technical and have people tilt a little more design, have people tilt a little more product. But you're not really calling them anything different. They're product builders and their responsibility is to figure out what to build next. I agree with Jason that a lot of the ICP right now is product. But one thing I'm really excited about is operations teams and they're, they're kind of underserved.

• 19:15Speaker 00

  Operations teams are sitting at the nexus of a lot of data flow. Typically, they'll buy a lot of SaaS software. They're typically not happy with it because there's all these SaaS softwares like styling the data. They try a lot of automation software that doesn't work very well. They have a lot of Excel sheets, a lot of manual work. And so we see a lot of our customers are building quote configurators for their sales team, automating their Desk, you know, automatic support operations. When they use Replit, the return on investment is as good, if not greater than product teams. With product teams, you're you're cutting down product development lifecycle, which is hugely valuable. With operations teams, you're you're actually being more efficient. You're selling more, you reduce headcount or you need less, less people.

• 19:59Harry Stebbings?

  You said, you said ops have a lot of tools that they're not happy with. That has led to the SaaS apocalypse and a lot of people believing kind of deterioration of value in a lot of these public companies. Is that over exaggerated? Or is it a just cause for concern that they have lost the market caps they have?

• 20:17Speaker 00

  I'll tell you what we're seeing in enterprise. We're not seeing people rip out Salesforce, Workday or like really fundamental. I think the hype term is system of record type SaaS tools. And instead they're building on their APIs and we're creating MCPs and hooks into the hotspots of the world and Salesforce and all of that. But there's also another side where we have this great partnership with Databricks. And people are skipping the SaaS tools entirely and like building on top of their data warehouse. So, you know, there's another view on this where the system of record is actually your data warehouse. And this is like a way to be bullish on on Databricks and companies in that space.

• 20:55Harry Stebbings?

  Well, that goes to a statement that Jason has said, though, which is like, then it is justified. Because what you're seeing is like the maiming of SaaS company growth. If you have twenty, thirty percent of customers or users who are using Databricks as their warehouse. And that maims that audience for the corp, like SaaS, public companies. That's enough to cause the growth to decline significantly.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  I would agree with that. Now, a lot of vertical SaaS is in trouble as well, where, you know, maybe it's, you don't think of it as like a system of record or like, like there's a lot of survey SaaS software. And we see that getting replaced wholesale with with Replit. And then the other side of this, there's a lot of micro entrepreneurs. And it's starting on Replit today and they're undercutting the price of a lot of SaaS companies out there. Especially, you know, kind of vertical point solutions. And then there's another pricing pressure there as well.

• 21:50Harry Stebbings?

  What about the traditional incumbents in our space who is thinking of Squarespace, Wix? What happens to them?

• 21:58Speaker 00

  I mean, if you look at the behavior of Wix, they look like they're like they're pouring everything into Base44. So it seems like-

• 22:04Harry Stebbings?

  Is Wix now Base44, basically?

• 22:06Speaker 00

  I don't know much about their company, but it looks like they're spending a lot of ads definitely behind, behind Base44.

• 22:12Harry Stebbings?

  What did you think of the Super Bowl?

• 22:14Speaker 00

  You know, I haven't heard that many people talk about it, but I think it's, it's good that people are getting vibe coding out there and, and more people are talking about it. But I don't think it's still in the public consciousness.

• 22:25Harry Stebbings?

  How do you think about maintenance in this case? You have ops teams building tools, you have entrepreneurs building tools. You've got to maintain these fuckers. It's hard enough running a business. I've got to maintain this now?

• 22:36Speaker 00

  This is where Replit shines. And, you know, if you talk to Jason or some of our other customers, Replit goes way further than any other vibe coding product on creating more maintainable software. And part of the reason Replit has been slightly more expensive than, than others is that we do a code review for every, you know, code change that we make. So we spend a lot of tokens on maintenance as much as we spend on creating that software. Replit is, also has a built-in tester. So if you enable all the power features, whenever the agent writes code, goes into a testing phase, spins up a browser, tests everything in the, in the app, goes into a code review session, reviews that, kicks it back to the coding agent, gives a feedback, you know, the test failed here, the code review is not

• 23:20Speaker 00

  good. And people enjoy looking at the code review agent because it's kind of a dick. It's like, this looks like AI-generated slop. It'll actually say that. And then, and then it goes back. We're also building agents that are sitting in production software. So we already have security agents right now that are sitting in enterprise deployments and are monitoring activity. And they're monitoring packages, monitoring for supply chain attacks. The thing about AI, any problem AI creates, there's more AI that you can build to solve that problem.

• 23:52Harry Stebbings?

  Have you been surprised by how price sensitive people are around security and code reviews?

• 23:57Speaker 00

  Not in our segment. I would say in the engineering segment, and we have some engineers use a replit, but seventy five percent are non engineers. Engineers are more price sensitive because they have a lot of options. They can use a lot of different products on the on the market. Now, when when you're an operations manager using replit and you just saved ten thousand dollars on a SaaS software, you've saved another two hundred thousand dollars on on headcount and you're spending an additional thousand dollars to just make sure that the software is more secure, that's like a no brainer. The ROI has been a hundred fold for companies we work with. On the consumer side, there's more price sensitivity,

• 24:37Speaker 00

  especially if I'm an entrepreneur just dipping my toes, which is why we reduce the price on our core plan. So I think there's gonna be, and you you you hinted at that earlier, there's gonna be this different models for different use cases or different parts of your journey. If you're just starting out, you don't want to be hit with a thousand dollar bill. You don't want to be able to play around with twenty, thirty dollars before you commit.

• 25:00Harry Stebbings?

  Is Core a loss leader? Are you like, hey, I'm willing to lose money on Core for the conversion to Pro?

• 25:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's it's sort of like become a kind of a bit of a the new freemium because you can't totally run of like an amazing free tier because tokens are still very, very expensive. So you want people to pay something to recoup some of the losses. But as the percentage of of our revenue becomes more enterprise, more pro, then we're willing to, you know, subsidize the cost of Core a little more.

• 25:32Harry Stebbings?

  Token costs today, how do they change over the next three years? Is it like they get fifty percent cheaper? Or like ten times cheaper?

• 25:41Speaker 00

  It's an interesting question because there's different ways to slice it. You can look at the price of intelligence. The price of intelligence have gone down tremendously. It's really hard to quantify it. But like, everyone's spending way more on opens than they were spending on G P T four, but they're getting way more intelligence, way more productivity out of that. Pure unit price is not going down as much. People expected it to go. And I think part of it is we're living in a world where the true frontier models is actually just between G P T five and Claude. And so there's not a lot of pricing pressure. Now, we're seeing Gemini catch up. We're seeing the open source models catch up. And so maybe as there gets more pricing pressure, we'll see token, unit token prices go down.

• 26:23Speaker 00

  Also, the other thing is, I don't think these companies are all that profitable, partly because the underlying chips are not all that cheap. And there isn't a lot of competition. We have sort of at bottom, everyone's running in Nvidia. And there's not much competition there. And Nvidia has amazing margins, especially for a hardware company. What is it, eighty percent?

• 26:44Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, it's pretty phenomenal. It's what is the world's most valuable company. I I'm confused with something. I'm confused with cursor. Can you help me? And this is Jason's question, so you can blame him. All the shit hard questions, just blame Jason.

• 26:57Harry Stebbings?

  Twitter says cursor is completely dead. I don't have a single portfolio company that uses cursor. But they shit two billion in revenue. Is cursor dead? Or is this narrative completely bullshit?

• 27:07Speaker 00

  Well, I'll tell you a few principles. One is the market is so large. The market for software is not, it's not just the market for SaaS, although it's part of that. It is an expanding market. There's no existing TAM. You can say this is the TAM we're going after. Some people will say, like, I think Sequoia at some point said it's like the labor TAM, right? The like knowledge worker labor TAM. That could be that. But it's not like we're displacing labor. We're actually supercharging labor. So companies are becoming more productive. And so it's like an ever-expanding TAM, and it's going to be perhaps as big as the internet, if not more. And that's like, I'm talking about just software generation broadly. It's vibe coatings, A I powered coding is fully agentic coding.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  Coding generation in general, I think it's a hugely valuable market. And the world is large, and a lot of different companies will prefer different products. There are people at Replit today that still prefer to review every piece of code. And some thought that cursor is good, good for that because it's still sitting in the I D E. So there's a portion of the market that still really likes that. And the other thing is, I think Cursor has done well at enterprise sales. And enterprise is a very sticky customer. And once they adopt something, it has to really fall tremendously behind. Perhaps like GitHub Copilot in order for people to replace it. And I don't think Cursor fell that that far behind, right? They still use the the latest agents.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  They have like a good agent harness. I think Twitter is a distortion machine and Twitter is like the inside of inside of inside baseball. It is the people at the edge of like the adoption of AI. So I think if you're constantly Twitter, which why I think VCs don't have the best information landscape. Because a lot of them just live on on Twitter. But the world is much larger than that.

• 28:55Harry Stebbings?

  ID is dead. Will we have IDs in two years?

• 28:59Speaker 00

  I think I think for all intents and purposes, IDs are dead. I think they'll they'll limp along because again, some engineers just love that control. But there's no future in them in that there's no one's gonna be asking for like the latest feature of like intelligence. Or what were IDs like IDs? One part were like the code intelligence. We call it intelligence. It wasn't very intelligent. And so all of that is is irrelevant. The autocomplete, the click to symbol, all of that stuff is irrelevant. So in that sense, IDs are dead because AI has like eaten all of that. But in terms of like, you know, people who wanna see the code. I think there's still a population of users that want that.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  I think there's still engineers that are working with software that they wanna actually verify that it works. For example, life or death software. If I'm writing like mission critical software for self driving cars or or a NASA or SpaceX mission. I think there's always gonna be a need for some kind of ID.

• 29:59Harry Stebbings?

  Be pretty pissed if my autopilot on my plane had problems because of a vibe coded.

• 30:06Harry Stebbings?

  With no ID.

• 30:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, that would be pretty sad. I mean, even in planes, those kind of software that we're talking about, they never adopted JavaScript. And the reason they never adopted JavaScript is because JavaScript is the original sort of vibe language. Because JavaScript didn't have types, you could like run into errors. But the reason why we adopted JavaScript is because web software was not going to kill anyone. Your Gmail, if someone pushes a bug to Gmail, not going to die. Maybe it'll be down for an hour and that's fine. So there's different risk appetites. And I think vibe coding follows the same, the same thing where it's on the sort of less risky type of software.

• 30:41Harry Stebbings?

  So if you're a student listening to this, should you not study engineering at university? Should you not study CS? How does this inform how you think about advising young people?

• 30:51Speaker 00

  So before 2005, right? Let's say, which is when I went to school, people who went to computer science were very intrinsically motivated in understanding computer science and understanding exactly how computers work. And they were like hackers and really interested in programming, right? And then after that, computer science became a hyped up field because it's the easiest place to make money. And we had the boot camps and we had this whole thing. And computer science departments exploded because of that. Now, if you're not into computer science, if you don't feel like you're drawn to it, like a fly drawn to a light, then don't go into it because someone told you you're going to make a boatload of money working for Google.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  That's gone. So that it's pretty dumb to like tell people to go into computer science if they're not really intrinsically interested in it. Now, if you're interested in it, I think there's still ways to contribute. You could get into ML and AI and go work at like the big labs or a company like ours.

• 31:53Harry Stebbings?

  But if you're, if you're thinking about university, the curriculums are not able to move at the pace of model progression. What would you advise me as a student?

• 32:01Speaker 00

  Well, I will say the field of computer science where you're like learning about your data structures and algorithms, that's not going to change. And there's always going to be need for people to understand. Understand the underpinnings of computer science because we still need kind of those people.

• 32:19Harry Stebbings?

  And do you think universities are the best place to learn that?

• 32:22Speaker 00

  Depends on the person. I think there are people who are autodidacts. I would consider myself someone who is very good at teaching myself. And so it depends on on you. Like if you're really good and you can learn on the job and you can open the textbooks and you have the the discipline to do that, you don't have to go to university. But if you're someone who likes the structure, who likes to meet other students and work with them and likes the discipline of the university forces on you, then I think there's still a place for university.

• 32:50Harry Stebbings?

  Our company is going to be so much smaller in the future. When you look at the capabilities of individual people, do you buy the ideological Silicon Valley? We're just going to do more and we're going to be so much more capable. Or are you actually like, no, we we will have dramatically smaller engineering teams?

• 33:06Speaker 00

  I see both. So so Jason is someone who's who wants to work with a very lean team. He's doing better more than when he had people on staff. Yesterday, I met an entrepreneur at a conference in D C that's using Replit. I think he sells board games online. And he says, it's been so transformative on my business. We've saved so much money on on SaaS. We're selling more that I decided to use the increased revenue and efficiency to hire more people. He hired eight more people. There's a customer case study we actually published on our site, Firecrown Media, like a sixty million dollar media company that owns magazines, different properties. They've been so successful using Replit for marketing automations and all sorts of things like that,

• 33:48Speaker 00

  that decided to hire more people that know how to do vibe coding in order to to sell more and do more and build more. So it depends really on the kind of company. But we see companies that were like, we want to get leaner and we want less people. I I think it it'll come down to the entrepreneur, the level of ambition, how they want to run their company. For us at Replit, I think what we want to try to eliminate or reduce is a lot of supporting roles. We want builders, right? We want builders and we want salespeople because I think salespeople, it's like people just like really want to talk to someone to sell them software and to teach them how to use it. And also the sales role is changing in that. Salespeople are becoming more like educators and transformation sort of consultants.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  They go into companies, tell them how to use the product and what's the best way to leverage this technology.

• 34:35Harry Stebbings?

  With the removal of other parts or with with less engineers or with removal of other parts of the org, reducing headcount cost in those areas, are you able to justify sales reps moving down ACV categories or ranges because you don't have the cost elsewhere in the business?

• 34:53Speaker 00

  It depends. There's a lot of companies that now have self-serve enterprise, right? Especially in AI because there's so much demand that you can sort of justify that. But let's say, you know, traditional SMBs still need some some handholding. And typically, the cost of sale is higher because you have so much supporting staff. But if you can have a commercial AE that is, you know, you're willing to spend like an hour or two talking to a customer and onboarding them and perhaps a few few hours, you know, for the rest of the year, supporting them. And the contract size is like $10,000, $15,000. I think I think you're right. It's possible that becomes more of a thing.

• 35:37Harry Stebbings?

  What worries you today? Are you positive about the future? Are you negative? And just not just about software development, about life. I know it sounds weird and macro.

• 35:46Speaker 00

  Well, actually, let me tell you about Replit first and like what worries me there. We've gone through this, you know, first they laugh at you and then they, I forgot the quote exactly, but we're at the point where like then they attack you, right? Where it's now been publicly reported that Apple is is sort of blocking the the Replit app. Replit has been on the App Store since 2022, doing exactly the same thing, allowing people to generate or write code and running it in a in a browser window. Suddenly they're saying that we are not complying with their guidelines. And we've been stuck in app review for now three months. We haven't been able to push an update. And again, we've been on there for four years. We've passed 100 Apple App Store reviews.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  And suddenly, Apple has decided that they don't want this other other apps in the category also getting getting affected.

• 36:35Harry Stebbings?

  I'm sorry, the reasoning behind that is they, they, sorry, I'm being disrespectful to you. They think that your apps are not as high quality in their AI slop and that they're making discovery

• 36:44Speaker 00

  They're just telling us we're not in compliance with their guidelines and we've show them repeatedly.

• 36:49Harry Stebbings?

  But peeling that back one layer more, it's like they're fearful that it's gonna...

• 36:53Speaker 00

  I don't know, because they're accepting apps made on Replit, they're accepting them into the App Store. I tweeted about one yesterday, the acceptance rate is very high. If they think that we're generating a slop, they could have said that. Second, they wouldn't have accepted the apps that are being made with Replit. So it doesn't seem like...

• 37:10Harry Stebbings?

  So then what is the reason, Amjad? You are a smart dude, I'm a hopefully relatively smart dude. There is a reason behind that.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  I, I, I wanna give them the benefit of the doubt. I wanna say that perhaps they're trying to figure out what is their posture here? And perhaps the delays is just because they're trying to figure out, figure that out.

• 37:27Harry Stebbings?

  Posture with regards to what?

• 37:29Speaker 00

  With regards to vibe coding, with regards to vibe coding and, and how people are gonna be using that on the App Store. Look, maybe they are concerned that people are gonna be circumventing the App Store rules. That's not what we do. Maybe there are other apps in the categories that do that and they looked at the category as well. It was like, okay, let's put a pause on this, but we're not doing that. We're not building an App Store. We are just making it possible for people to make apps. And so if they're concerned, and maybe that's their concern, that people are gonna be making apps and getting around the App Store, that is not what we do.

• 37:58Harry Stebbings?

  How detrimental is that to your business? When you think about Apple putting that additional barrier challenge, is that like, fuck? Or is that like, we'll, we'll get over it, face money before?

• 38:10Speaker 00

  You know, look, I've been building this company for, for a decade. And the fact that we're such a important force in the world, in the culture, in how the world is like reacting to this technology is a good thing. And it means that we are achieving our mission, we're important. Now, I never thought it was gonna be easy and I'm ready for the challenges to come. And I actually like challenges, you know? Life is much more interesting when there's a little bit of fight into it.

• 38:41Harry Stebbings?

  I think it's important to have a common enemy in a team. Amjad, you can shoot one, Claude Code, Lovable or Base44, which one do you shoot?

• 38:49Speaker 00

  I don't really think that way.

• 38:50Harry Stebbings?

  If it's not a name, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna tell Jason. The, the next word is a name, Amjad.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  I'll tell you that they're all going to copy what Replit does. Replit is setting the roadmap for everyone. That's fine by me, but what I really like is innovation. It's like building, building the next thing that can really change how people think about software. And I feel very proud that this agentic revolution was really kickstarted by Replit Agent in 2024. It just, the name of the game is just staying one, two, three, four, 10 steps ahead.

• 39:24Harry Stebbings?

  Right, dude, we're going to do a quick fire round. I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

• 39:28Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 39:29Harry Stebbings?

  What have you changed your mind on most in the last 12 months?

• 39:32Speaker 00

  How fast to scale our sales organization. I always wanted to build like a hyper efficient company. And Replit is extremely efficient for our size and valuation. But given how much interest we have in the market, I think we should hire as many salespeople as we can to go sell these, these people.

• 39:49Harry Stebbings?

  Who would you most like to have on the board who you don't have on it yet?

• 39:53Speaker 00

  I, I would like to have an, an operator that's two decades ahead of me or something like that. Like a CEO that's been in the weeds and building a company from scratch, but reached, went public and reached way past where, where, what I've done. Because we have a lot of VCs and they're amazing, but no one who's actually an, an operator.

• 40:13Harry Stebbings?

  Tell me, when I say high performance, who do you think of first and why them?

• 40:18Speaker 00

  I mean, it's, it's, it's such a cliche, but like obviously Elon. And the reason is like the amount of things that you can do at the same, at the same time. Like the number of things and before that Steve Jobs running Pixar on Apple. I am like dead by the end of the week, running one company. How can you do two? That, that is an enigma to me. How can you do five?

• 40:43Harry Stebbings?

  What do you invest in for yourself that has been a game changer? I hope it's not too personal, but you've lost a lot of weight. You look fantastic, dude. Tell me about that.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  Losing the weight, it's actually been three years. I decide I always yo-yoed my weight depending on my stress level at the company. And I decided in 2023, I'm going to take three years to, to get healthy. And instead of like sprinting and working out five days a week and then burning out, I'm going to work out. One day a week and I started working out one day a week and then my energy levels improved. I lost some weight. Okay, now I'm gonna add another day a week and okay, now I'm gonna add another habit. Let's add a walk. Let's add like a bit of a stretching and it's so slow. It's sort of like, I don't wanna, I wanna get healthy over the next five years and that's been a major game changer. So I'll just like add another habit every once in a while. It's like they're simple stuff.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  Let's add a walk. Let's add a sauna once a week. So I really love sauna and cold, hot and cold. It's like a reset. It forces you, I'm someone who's like constantly thinking and I tried meditation, all that stuff. And it's really hard for me. When I go into a sauna and get burnt and then go into like ice cold water, you can't think, your, your mind freezes and that forces me into a meditative state for the next like hour or so.

• 41:59Harry Stebbings?

  What's the biggest advice to a new parent, given all you know now about parenting?

• 42:06Speaker 00

  Don't stress out. Do you know, I think, I think it's the, it's the difference between the first kid and second kid. And every parent will tell you, let alone the third kid, is like the first kid is like, oh, it's nap time. We gotta go, you know, do the nap thing. We gotta do exactly that, measure this and that. And you're measuring everything, you're doing everything. Like babies are quite resilient. You know, humans have been around for whatever, hundred thousand years, you know, we, we know instinctively how to raise a child. And I think taking it a little easy on yourself, probably the best advice.

• 42:36Harry Stebbings?

  Final one for you. What do you know now that you wish you'd known when you started Replit?

• 42:41Speaker 00

  I mean, the feeling of product market fit. You, you can deceive yourself into thinking you had product market fit at different points. You'll get a few customers like, oh, this product market fit, real product market fit. And like people will say it, you can't really internalize it is, is the idea that like the product is getting pulled out of your hand. You can't even provide it fast enough. You know, I thi- I think if I understood that earlier on, perhaps I would have searched for it faster or harder or, or things, things like that. So as an entrepreneur, wanting to build not a lifestyle business or small business, wanting to build a venture scale business, you have to find that moment. You have to keep pivoting and changing. Perhaps you don't change your vision, but keep kind of searching until you find that explosive demand.

• 43:23Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, I've so enjoyed this. I so appreciate you letting me go wayward, but you've been fantastic. So thank you so much for joining me.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  Appreciate it, man. Thank you.

• 43:32Harry Stebbings?

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• 45:01Harry Stebbings?

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