Pod Insights Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth Replit CEO: How to build a $1B Company in 2 days | Amjad Masad About this episode Amjad Masad, the founder and CEO of Replit, sits down with Marina Mogilko to discuss how AI is revolutionizing the future of business and how solopreneurs can now build a $1B company in just a few years. If you’ve ever wondered how to launch your own AI-powered business, what vibe coding really means, or how AI is changing the rules of entrepreneurship, this episode is for you!
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:56 Marina Mogilko? How far ahead you think is time when a solopreneur is going to build a billion-dollar company?
1:01 Speaker 02 In the next few years, yeah.
1:02 Marina Mogilko? This is Amjad, founder and CEO of Replid, an AI-powered coding platform that turns your ideas into apps.
1:10 Speaker 02 Our mission is not just to make software more accessible, but really make entrepreneurship more accessible because creating a business is really one of the best feelings in the world.
1:18 Marina Mogilko? 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 Replid into a $3 billion business. I tried those steps myself and what happened wasn't what I expected.
1:36 Marina Mogilko? 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 because I've personally been using it. And I'm just fascinated by your journey. I wanted to start with this question where you said you're going to 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?
2:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'm mostly talking about entrepreneurs like us.
2:11 Speaker 02 I think that bigger companies will always need software engineers. But people who have an idea, everyone has an idea. Like, you know, one experiment to do is go on the street and stop people. Like, do you have a business idea? Everyone has an idea. But 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. As a programmer, growing up, all my friends were like, oh, hey, 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 that technology needs to mature. But we have a lot of stories where people have built their dream apps. And they've had these ideas for like 20 years.
2:54 Speaker 02 We're talking about 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, you know, it's almost, it's always hard to find engineering resources. So 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, he's on his track to make five million R R, quit his job. Now he's an entrepreneur. And he told us every time, he's saying, well, at some point I need to onboard a software engineer. Maybe he does.
3:37 Speaker 02 But, you know, it's been, he got to five million revenue and still he, he didn't have to.
3:43 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
3:43 Speaker 02 I'm sure, you know, Meta and OpenAI and us, we're always going to 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 goes away.
3:56 Marina Mogilko? Do you have like a screen here where you track your most important metric? And what's the most important metric?
4:02 Speaker 02 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.
4:13 Marina Mogilko? So what's one universal metric everyone's looking at?
4:17 Speaker 02 I mean ARR.
4:20 Speaker 02 Like everyone's responsibility.
4:21 Marina Mogilko? Can you share your recent error or?
4:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
4:26 Speaker 02 One sixty.
4:26 Marina Mogilko? One sixty.
4:27 Speaker 02 Yeah.
4:27 Marina Mogilko? That's amazing. You've been, they've been growing like crazy. Like your graph is dream Y Combinator, hockey stick.
4:35 Speaker 02 But especially if you plot it from like ten years.
4:38 Marina Mogilko? Oh, yeah.
4:39 Speaker 02 And it does that.
4:40 Marina Mogilko? And also like it's so encouraging for entrepreneurs who don't see progress right away.
4:45 Speaker 02 That's right. That's right.
4:46 Marina Mogilko? How many people are coding right now?
4:49 Speaker 02 Is there about fifty thousand?
4:51 Marina Mogilko? Fifty thousand people?
4:52 Speaker 02 Right here. Yeah.
4:53 Marina Mogilko? Do you know how many apps built on Replit are actually active and running?
4:58 Speaker 02 About three hundred and fifty thousand like paid online apps. That's growing fast. That's growing twenty five percent month over month.
5:07 Marina Mogilko? Do you know how many of them actually generate revenue?
5:09 Speaker 02 We don't. I think those are more anecdotal, the stories that we hear. Pretty soon, we're gonna be helping you integrate with Stripe and monetize. So we'll be able to to track that.
5:19 Marina Mogilko? I think I already added my Stripe.
5:21 Speaker 02 So yeah, the agent knows how to do it. But we're gonna make it even more effortless, like one click. Our mission is not just to make software more accessible, but really make entrepreneurship more accessible because 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.
5:44 Marina Mogilko? 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, but then sometimes but see, service unavailable. That's, that's the recent bug I got. So it feels like it's.
6:03 Speaker 02 Interesting.
6:04 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
6:05 Speaker 02 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. You can copy that error and give it to the agent and tell it, when I deploy, I get this error.
6:22 Marina Mogilko? Basically, what I'm realizing is that it's still a lot of work, right?
6:27 Speaker 02 It's work.
6:28 Marina Mogilko? 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. You know how it works, sometimes you repackage a video and it just starts getting all the new views. And I'm trying to build something that's gonna help me do that. But I've already spent like six hours and it's a process.
6:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, it is a process. You're still acting kind of like a software developer. You're acting like a software development manager. And so you have this powerful but easily distractible intern. And you need to manage him very well. So for example, you type this prompt, there's like only one sentence. I would have 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. And so communicating in a more precise way is very important. So prompt engineering and prompting is not that different than programming. We just take away the syntax from it, right?
7:39 Speaker 02 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 of days. Whereas previously, even, you know, a senior engineer would have taken them like a couple of weeks before AI.
7:59 Marina Mogilko? Ten thousand dollars, fifteen thousand dollars?
8:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, something like that. It will cost you something like that. But I would, I would spend two, three days on it. I think you'll be able to get it.
8:07 Marina Mogilko? How can I learn to be better at prompting?
8:10 Speaker 02 We have a YouTube channel. We have a great developer relations person who creates a lot of content. His name is Matt. And so we try to train people on prompting and the underlying systems. So Replit has a DNA in sort of education. So when we were talking about a billion developers, 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 need to spend a lot of time and practice by building. Changing your style.
8:50 Speaker 02 Some people go to OpenAI, for example, and like pick O3 or right now is GPT-5 with thinking. And give it the idea and tell it, hey, I want you to structure it into a really great prompt.
9:03 Marina Mogilko? Prompt it for me, something like that?
9:04 Speaker 02 Yeah. So I think, you know, Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, you know, the best accelerator in the world, wrote this essay about being resourceful. And he talks about the qualities of founders and one quality is relentlessly resourceful. So they they're able to find resources to unblock themselves and be able to, 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. And the way to do that is to 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 how to get to the next level.
9:48 Speaker 02 A lot is creative thinking, kind of moving around and finding the clues or. And I think entrepreneurship and, you know, building software are sort of similar to that.
9:56 Marina Mogilko? Can you tell me what changed when you decided to start your company? What was this thought that was like, I need to build this?
10:04 Speaker 02 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 technical 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 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. I was very comfortable and happy there.
10:45 Speaker 02 It's a scary feeling to leave your job and go heads down. But it was kind of de-risked because we had a platform that people really loved. We had a hundred thousand users plus a month. So after a lot of deliberation and really trying to think what matters to you, what creates meaning in your life? And serving our customers and really achieving our mission, helping people create businesses and all of that felt very, very important. So I think it's about meaning partly.
11:13 Marina Mogilko? And it feels like with this tool, there are two problems in entrepreneurship. Now, it used to be three, like coming up with idea, building product and marketing. Now you're left with coming up with ideas and then marketing.
11:24 Speaker 02 Right.
11:24 Marina Mogilko? What do you think is going to happen when everyone's building an app?
11:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, so when everyone's building an app, when that is, it's still a skill, right? It's still, like we talked about, it's still a skill that 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, you have excellent domain knowledge 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.
12:04 Marina Mogilko? But at the same time, OpenAI models are training on what I know. And then they're so much better at defining what a good YouTube video is.
12:14 Speaker 02 I think you still have tacit knowledge that is not necessarily expressed in all your videos and all the content out there. 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.
12:47 Marina Mogilko? But do you think there will ever be time when AI sees the problem, comes up with a solution, codes the app, doesn't need a human?
12:56 Speaker 02 You know, I might be a bit different in the Silicon Valley context in that I am quite skeptical about the AGI vision. I think we can build extremely competent agents, but you would always need the human as a driver. Because I think that The way large language models work is they train on the entire corpus of 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? Because they're not always learning, they're not continuously learning.
13:39 Speaker 02 They're within this closed box, that is their training corpus, right? It's almost like a library in a very reductive way. It is a library, 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 a special place.
14:02 Marina Mogilko? I love your answer, but still the fear inside me wants to push back by saying that,
14:07 Speaker 02 Please do.
14:07 Marina Mogilko? You know, all the ideas already exist in the world. Like when we're talking about new movies or new books, they take a pre-existing idea, but like changing characters, changing circumstances.
14:16 Speaker 02 There's always a novel idea. So think about Bitcoin. Bitcoin, are you like in crypto or Bitcoin?
14:22 Marina Mogilko? A little bit, yeah.
14:22 Speaker 02 So Bitcoin, it was based on a history of 20 years, people trying to build digital cash. And in the references, it's referencing hash cash. Proof of work was existing. Proof of work, the idea that, you know, the machine is solving these cryptographic problems in order to secure that the Bitcoin network was actually originally invented to fight spam. So there was the spam problem with the emails, we don't have spam filters or AI. And so when I'm sending an email, I solve a cryptographic problem that is expensive to show you that I'm not a spam agent, right?
15:03 Speaker 02 So Satoshi Nakamoto took all these ideas, and you're right, the existing ideas, and put them in a new package. But he added a novel idea, which is how to solve the double spend problem. 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 with his theories, there's always one novel insight, one really strong novel insight. It's almost like this divine intervention. There's something spiritual about having a really novel idea. And I'm sure you've experienced it in the past that I think is fundamentally human. I don't know where it comes from.
15:48 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, and also this feeling that you're the one to bring it to the world. I feel like AI likes that. Okay, let's see, let's see what's going on here.
15:59 Marina Mogilko? Should we go to overview and try again? No?
16:01 Speaker 02 So I had redeploy, it's asking you to redeploy. So it'll take a second to deploy. I'd be curious, a fixed session deceleration problem? Okay.
16:10 Marina Mogilko? Well, it's deploying. You said a gap between a Replink user and a senior Google engineer will disappear in two years. Should people still learn how to code or what's going to happen to the engineering job?
16:22 Speaker 02 I think the engineering job will continue to exist, especially in very domain-specific areas. Is 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 in them anywhere. It's 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 tolerant systems, if you're building provable systems, like I don't want my Tesla autopilot to be vibe-coded, right?
17:03 Speaker 02 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 exist. So 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 along the way, learn it. But but your mission is to build the thing. So I would start by building and like we said, being resourceful along the way goes a long way.
17:35 Marina Mogilko? So what should engineers who are building apps like this do now?
17:40 Speaker 02 Let's see, where is it?
17:42 Marina Mogilko? There we go. Okay. Sign in.
17:45 Speaker 02 We had a new issue.
17:47 Marina Mogilko? And it's like.
17:48 Speaker 02 Google authentication. But that's how software engineers work. This iteration.
17:54 Marina Mogilko? Got it.
17:55 Speaker 02 Yeah.
17:55 Marina Mogilko? So you think in two days.
17:56 Speaker 02 Yeah. And then get a new problem.
18:00 Marina Mogilko? Do you think it will ever get to the stage where I don't have to do this?
18:03 Speaker 02 Yes.
18:03 Marina Mogilko? Because it could actually run everything and test everything.
18:07 Speaker 02 Yes, so we.
18:09 Marina Mogilko? Is that what we're working on?
18:10 Speaker 02 Yes.
18:11 Marina Mogilko? Could you talk about it? Or not yet?
18:14 Speaker 02 Usually not yet, but let me give you some hints.
18:18 Marina Mogilko? Okay.
18:19 Speaker 02 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.
18:32 Marina Mogilko? Testing.
18:33 Speaker 02 Quality assurance and testing.
18:34 Marina Mogilko? Exactly, QA.
18:35 Speaker 02 So we're solving that.
18:36 Marina Mogilko? Okay, all right, you're launching something, right? Is there a lot of pressure on the team? How are they handling?
18:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, so we have an offsite next week. We're going to be going to LA on the beach. And at least that's like a sort of a relaxing environment. And we're going to be going really deep and working really hard. And then the week after that, we're going to be coming here. It's called Sprint Week. And we do it before every launch. And people typically work 14-hour days, nonstop.
19:03 Marina Mogilko? You too?
19:04 Speaker 02 Yeah.
19:04 Marina Mogilko? Your wife too?
19:05 Speaker 02 Yes, yes.
19:06 Marina Mogilko? Who takes? Who takes? Okay, there's a question coming from all the entrepreneurs have kids. Like, how do you balance this?
19:11 Speaker 02 So we, you know, there's, people talk about work-life balance. We talk about work-life harmony or work-life integration. And so, for example, like we'll have the nanny bring the kids to the office.
19:26 Marina Mogilko? So they can vibe code.
19:28 Speaker 02 They can vibe code. I sometimes sit down with my kid and like do a little bit of coding, but so we can see them, right? Like, so. And next week for the trip, everyone here could bring their families as well. So, you know, Replit not being super young startup, we're not that young. There's a lot of people with families. So we try to like create that integration.
19:49 Marina Mogilko? Do you think it works? Honestly, or do you feel like you're missing out on your kids?
19:54 Speaker 02 I don't feel like I'm missing out. Like honestly, I don't feel like I'm missing out.
19:57 Marina Mogilko? That's good.
19:57 Speaker 02 You know, just having a bit of freedom in your schedule. So I spend like mornings with them, like I wake up at seven, eight and I get to the office by ten, right? But I, you know, stay late here. We have dinners 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. I'm always on my phone, working obviously and responding and phone calls and things like that. But I feel like I'm present.
20:25 Marina Mogilko? What about your wife? Similar schedule?
20:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, she's, she has a less intensive schedule. I think CEO's schedule is like a little more 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 that I don't really.
20:42 Marina Mogilko? All the time.
20:43 Speaker 02 Yeah.
20:43 Marina Mogilko? Because they're back from school right now.
20:45 Speaker 02 Right.
20:46 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, but I also love to do this.
20:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. So I, I don't know what to speak to that. But I feel like, all things considered, we feel fairly involved in their lives.
20:56 Marina Mogilko? 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, have all of these tools. We're gonna let you do the same thing. How do you see yourself being different and how do you survive mentally as an entrepreneur?
21:11 Speaker 02 So we're gonna be the first to do what I just talked about.
21:14 Marina Mogilko? And it's launching in September.
21:15 Speaker 02 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 you're building, every workspace is backed by 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 wanna build the idea from scratch, it'll take you two, three years to build.
21:59 Speaker 02 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 when you talk to developers that are using Replit, often moved from the other platforms. 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, to store my files. Replit chips with a database, has an object storage component, has authentication component. Like, I know you're trying to set up Google authentication, but you can also ask the agent, implement Replit authentication, has a built-in authentication system.
22:42 Speaker 02 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.
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23:48 Marina Mogilko? Have you seen any big mistakes that people make when building something with Raplet? Because I know a lot of entrepreneurs are looking and they're probably like, okay, I'll build it up, but what's next? Like, any tips for marketing or any lessons that you've seen along the way?
24:00 Speaker 02 First of all, what we talked about with prompting, over-communicate. Over-communicate, be a resource. Raplet 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 have, you don't want to learn prompt engineering, just, just be over-communicative. And then on, on marketing, I think that's the next.
24:26 Speaker 02 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?
24:36 Marina Mogilko? Exactly. And like, why would someone buy something like this if they can just go to Replit? And vibe code the same thing, right?
24:43 Speaker 02 Yeah.
24:44 Marina Mogilko? It was like an easy app.
24:45 Speaker 02 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. 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. 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 this was gonna be big.
25:29 Speaker 02 I, I, I still know 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.
25:36 Marina Mogilko? It's amazing. Congratulations.
25:38 Speaker 02 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.
25:45 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
25:45 Speaker 02 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, you can spend four hours on TikTok, be endlessly entertained, right?
26:00 Speaker 02 So that's one. On marketing, there are a few, few things I could say here. One is launch, launch, launch. Just keep launching.
26:09 Marina Mogilko? New products, iterate.
26:11 Speaker 02 Even the same product. Like, make another.
26:14 Marina Mogilko? Another tweak.
26:15 Speaker 02 Another tweak. Show it in a different way. Iterate on your messaging. Do another video. Try to reach out to influencers to partner with them.
26:25 Marina Mogilko? Go on podcasts.
26:27 Speaker 02 Replit, I launched it three or four different times with different messaging and different things.
26:31 Marina Mogilko? Interesting. So the first three times didn't work?
26:33 Speaker 02 First few times didn't work. I think when we got on Hacker News the first time, it was when I said, you can try all these different languages. And I listed the languages, try Python. That was before AI. And that was a hit because of the title change. And so again, it's grit, relentless, resourcefulness, and just iteration, iteration, iteration.
26:54 Marina Mogilko? Okay, what are your top three favorite AI apps? Of course, Repl.
26:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, we'll leave that aside. Perplexity, you know, I just like going to Google and spending five minutes clearing 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 without. ChatGPT, I go to Perplexity when it's like more research. I want something from the web. ChatGPT when I'm like brainstorming and Claude and the other ones too.
27:27 Speaker 02 And let's see.
27:28 Marina Mogilko? Give me something specific, like I don't know, for a specific problem. If you use anything, maybe you build your own AI agents.
27:33 Speaker 02 Like naming, like naming products.
27:35 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, Namelex or what do you use?
27:37 Speaker 02 No, I'm using ChatGPT.
27:38 Marina Mogilko? Oh, you're using, okay.
27:40 Speaker 02 I like to prompt, right? I like to prompt and I like to kind of start different chats.
27:43 Marina Mogilko? This is how you kind of build differently because you like prompting?
27:46 Speaker 02 Yes.
27:47 Marina Mogilko? So you just use ChatGPT for basically anything because you can prompt it?
27:50 Speaker 02 No, I sometimes build Replit apps as well for certain things.
27:54 Marina Mogilko? Oh, what did you, what did you build for yourself?
27:56 Speaker 02 Well, recently, do you know Kindle's Scribe? So you know, Amazon's new notebook thing, it has a web browser. And sometimes I don't want to use my phone, my phone is somewhere else. I'm on my Kindle reading, I want to look something up. I try to open ChatGPT, it actually doesn't render because the E Ink browser kind of is like a very old school browser. So I build a ChatGPT that doesn't have any JavaScript.
28:18 Marina Mogilko? Okay, that's very.
28:19 Speaker 02 And it took like an hour with Replit 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 problems like, oh, that's shaped like a problem I could solve.
28:35 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, you'd mentioned hard moments. Talk to me about the hardest moment building this.
28:39 Speaker 02 Oh, man. I mean, there's a bit of recency bias to this, but last year we did a layoff. And Replit culture, you know, you'll get it from walking around, is very positive. People really like each other here. 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 people. And so it was very heartbreaking to have to cut the team because the business wasn't doing well. Before we launched Replit Agent, 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.
29:21 Speaker 02 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. And so 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 such as yourself. But at the time, we had 130 employees, we're 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 going to be really big. I knew we're building the right thing. But we came here, we were burning all this money, and then we just had to do the layoff
30:04 Speaker 02 and we cut the team. And I think we cut 30, 40% of the team. But then a lot of people started leaving because the office is like empty, it was like a really dark place.
30:17 Marina Mogilko? Was that when you were making like 2 million a year revenue? 2024, last year?
30:21 Speaker 02 Right, last year. And you walk around here, it's very gloomy, no one's really happy. I used to come here and I was like, I can't wait to go home. And I think anyone, most people in our place at the time would just call it quits and try to sell the company and do something like that. But instead, the people that are working on Agent, we motivated them. We told them, we think this is the thing that's going to work. And we told them, look, if this doesn't work... There's no future. We have to make this work. And so the core team that was working on an agent, everyone stayed and worked 12, 14 hour days. And.
30:58 Marina Mogilko? And you got to 144 million.
31:00 Speaker 02 Yes, in less than a year.
31:02 Marina Mogilko? I heard this story that Peter Thiel fast on investing, but then you sent him your graph. Did he ever reply?
31:09 Speaker 02 He didn't reply.
31:09 Marina Mogilko? Never.
31:10 Speaker 02 Peter Thiel invested in our Series B round in 2021. But then I went to pitch him in 2022 or 23, just before ChatGPT. I was trying to tell him, hey, AI is very important. It's going to change the nature of coding and programming. And he said, 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. And so he was like, when you're saying AI, it's meaningless. It's almost like saying computers, you know, don't come here with these buzzwords. And he basically said I was just engaging in hype. You know, we had raised that a big valuation. I'm trying to justify that valuation. And the entire meeting, I'm trying to tell him, hey, just like, look at the demo.
31:55 Speaker 02 And he wouldn't look at the demo. And then I remember four months later, 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.
32:07 Speaker 02 And, you know, to his credit, he changed his opinion and then.
32:12 Speaker 02 Flanders Fund invested a big amount in cognition, which is another agent, a coding company. But I did send him an email saying, after they invested in cognition and 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 felt like I was doing something wrong. But I hope you can see that I, at the moment, I saw the future where things were headed.
32:35 Marina Mogilko? And I'm glad you pushed further and build whatever you built.
32:38 Speaker 02 Yeah.
32:38 Marina Mogilko? Right? Because it's so demotivating to hear things like that from people who are super respected and super smart.
32:44 Speaker 02 Exactly. It's, it's both demotivating, but can be motivating. It's about how you frame it, right? I've become one where I'm actually more motivated to prove doubters wrong.
32:58 Speaker 02 Haters, doubters.
32:59 Marina Mogilko? You transform that energy into changing the world.
33:02 Speaker 02 It's like, there's nothing better than having a lot of doubters and people, naysayers, and actually proving them wrong. It's a great feeling, and I recommend it to everyone. 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 the feeling comes in. I mean, if you talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, and you say, "What is meaningful about your life?", and they say, "The money's cool. Money does change your life, and it allows you more time and more resources to build and do more things." But the things that a lot of entrepreneurs kind of come back to is who they were, what
33:45 Speaker 02 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.
33:56 Marina Mogilko? Exactly. Let's talk about the future. I have two small kids, and yesterday I unlocked another AI fear for me, because I stumbled 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, entry-level jobs, but 30% more applications.
34:14 Speaker 02 Yeah.
34:15 Marina Mogilko? And I'm like, "Oh, my goodness." So I'm worrying about myself, and I also have to worry about my kids. What do you think about your kids' future? What are you teaching them?
34:22 Speaker 02 Look, I think there's a deep question about where we're headed as a society, what is Silicon Valley's 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 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 that are most memorable, like Leonardo da Vinci, for example.
34:58 Speaker 02 Did a lot of things. Was an engineer, was an artist, was all sorts of things, right? And the kind of elite education used to be about understanding a lot of things, about spending a lot of time learning about 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 going to go back to a moment of time where there's a lot more opportunities for entrepreneurship.
35:42 Speaker 02 Even when you join a company, you're going to be judged by how much of a real business impact you're going to have as opposed to how task oriented you are.
35:53 Marina Mogilko? What would you say to, for example, girls, right? I have two girls. And 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. And you're saying that everyone is 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?
36:17 Speaker 02 Well, my wife is my co-founder. I think we both, Hya and I, share a background of being misunderstood and being, you know, growing up in a culture that we didn't feel like really fit our way of thinking and we were different. And so maybe that shaped how we are and our attraction to entrepreneurship and to trying to change how people do certain things or change the world. I think there is a lot that, you know, culture imbues on sort of gender roles, but I don't think girls are fundamentally like sort of predisposed to a certain type of job.
37:00 Speaker 02 And so I think a lot of it is about upbringing and what we tell our kids and how we educate them. And so I think my advice will apply 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 moment of time that's very different. It's very different from when I grew up, from 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 going to have to learn and the way you're going to have to adapt to this world is going to be very different. It's going to be very difficult, but we're here for you. And we're going to try to figure it out together.
37:41 Marina Mogilko? How far ahead you think it's time when a solopreneur is going to build a billion dollar company?
37:46 Speaker 02 Is it a billion dollar in revenue or is it a billion dollar valuation?
37:50 Marina Mogilko? It's a valuation.
37:51 Speaker 02 Valuation, so let's say.
37:52 Marina Mogilko? This is a hundred million in revenue. This is a 10x.
37:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'll say 20x, so maybe a 50 million in revenue.
38:01 Speaker 02 I don't think it's that far. Like if someone like John Chaney was able to build a 2 million, 2, 3 million ARR revenue.
38:07 Marina Mogilko? It's very niche B2B, high check. I feel like a 50 million company is a B2C company, which requires data.
38:15 Speaker 02 But why not? Like he has these enterprise seats. He goes, you know, who goes into his companies, you know? He has a platform with a lot of content that he's selling. I could see it be a 50 million ARR business.
38:29 Marina Mogilko? In the next couple of years?
38:30 Speaker 02 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.
38:36 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, I love it. Thank you so much.
38:38 Speaker 02 My pleasure.
38:38 Marina Mogilko? It was amazing. I'm craving it.
38:39 Speaker 02 Thank you for coming.
38:40 Marina Mogilko? Thank you.
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