The $9B Startup That Wants to Create a Billion New Developers

Replit is the leading no-code app builder for consumers and enterprise, letting anyone with an idea build real, deployed software using natural language. The company just raised a $400 million Series D at a $9 billion valuation. In this episode of Founder Firesides, co-founder and CEO Amjad Masad sat down with YC's Andrew Miklas to talk about Replit's 10-year journey from browser IDE to vibe coding platform, why the people getting the most value aren't traditional developers but founders and domain experts closest to the problem, and what Agent 4 unlocks with parallel agents, built-in design, and the ability to run your entire company on Replit.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Today, I'm joined by Amjad Massad, the CEO and co-founder of Replit. Replit is the leading no-code app builder 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.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Of course. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what Replit is?

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, 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 you need, can come in with an idea and can leave with an app that's deployed, that's hosted, that's getting traffic, that's can scale. They don't have to worry about any technical aspect of building that thing.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  And it's been a mission we're on for 10 years right now. So initially, we solved the development environment. That was the hardest thing, like setting up a development environment, then solve the 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, where 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, also design interactions. So you can write things, you can comment on things, you can drag and drop things in like a canvas.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  And we're thinking about a lot of different modalities for how people want to interact with agents, because I don't think it's always going to be just text. I think at some point, it's going to be multimodal, maybe video, maybe audio. But we want to create a natural place where people can express their ideas, and those ideas can turn almost magically into software that is real software. That is not like a toy software, real software, secure software, scalable software.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  One of the things that's most interesting to me about your company is that it really bridges the gap between a dev tool and not. 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 decision that you were going to do that? And who is your primary user today?

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, you know, I started coding at a very, very young age, but I was always interested 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 got in worse over time. So, you know, I started coding on BASIC. And you just start the BASIC command line interpreter, and you can just like type a little BASIC, and that's good. By the time I graduated from college, like, setting up, you know, a web app was like a nightmare, right? And so it created this desire to just like build tools that are, that are more joyful,

• 3:11Speaker 01

  more enriching, kind of focus on the act of creation as opposed to the accidental complexity of developer tools. And so I started building a lot of tools for myself. And eventually, I, you know, I built what would become the, kind of the first end 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 built a developer tool, I've approached it with the same thing. Can you apply design sensibilities in the same way that you would work on a consumer app? And that's been successful in many ways. But ultimately, when we started Replit, the goal was make programming accessible.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Later, we updated our mission to create a billion, billion new developers. As we progress in our, in our mission and in solving every part of the software development lifecycle, what we've noticed is a lot of developers actually like the pain.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  They like setting, you know, setting up things and they like configuring every aspect of it. It's sort of like, there's no knock against that, but like it's sort of like a crafts person kind of liking to build their own tools. And what we've noticed is that people that are getting the most value out of a product tend to be the more tech adjacent ones. Maybe people, product managers have written code many years ago, but don't worry about the development environment setup. Don't want to worry about the deployment setup. Then designers, designers who have ideas but are often blocked or bottlenecked by engineers. And they want to be able to build their own ideas.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  And later on, as we layered on AI and the product got better, entrepreneurs. And when I talk to these people, it reminded me of myself. Those are people with ideas, with passion, with fire in them, but they're getting hamstrung by just like the need to learn, to become technical. So at some point in 2023, 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 death toll company. 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.

• 5:37Speaker 01

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

• 5:44Speaker 00

  It's so interesting hearing you say this because it sort of reminds me, I learned to program on VB6. And that's, to me, that's a real, you know, this idea of the tools opening up and making it possible for people that couldn't code. I couldn't code. I learned to code in VB6. And I see sort of a very similar thing that you're exploring with this.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, VB6 was better than setting up React and Webpack.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  100%. I remember the transition, yes.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  It got worse over time, which is like net money things get worse in life, but programming got worse. And I wanted to bring it back, make programming great again, essentially.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  That's so interesting. Tell me about what people are building today in Replit.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's a few different categories. There's personal software, there's enterprise software, and then there's like entrepreneurs building products. One of the apps that I really liked recently was talking to a physical therapist and her husband. And she is a physical therapist that's built up so much deep knowledge in a subsection of physical therapy that is like around fascia and fascia release. And she has all these different methodologies and ways of tracking the progress for her clients. And she wanted to build an app that is very sophisticated, like being able to take scans

• 7:12Speaker 01

  of your body, being able to scan your range of motion, and to track that on a 3D representation of your body. And they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars offshoring to developers 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 when I saw that app, it was like one of the best like health tech apps I've ever seen, and they're not.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, because the domain experts can now actually build the product.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, people who are closest to the problem can build the products they need. You know, I talked to a founder the other day that's building a SaaS solution for people who maintain pools. And he grew up in a household where their company, where their family business 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 software for sports clubs. And he was showing me pictures of the software they're using today, which is MS-DOS-based software.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  And so here in Silicon Valley, we look around us and we're like, oh, what else is left to build? But there's so many walks of life, there's so many 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 going to improve, and that's like, I think, a beautiful thing. And a lot of wealth creation is going to happen, productivity gain as well. Personal software is also really cool. Like, you know, I talked to a lot of families that built like, you know, healthcare software, like there's like a mom in Korea that built software that helped manage a very rare condition for her kid. A lot of people build like personal, like, you know,

• 9:03Speaker 01

  healthcare software, like tracking physical activity or ingesting data from all their wearables 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 the kids how they're ranking of their chores. And then there's the enterprise use case. And in enterprise, it tends to be two different use cases. One is product development. So companies want to move a lot faster in product development. Everyone now is feeling the pressure 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.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  We hear from clients, like one of my favorite stories, like Whoop is a client of ours. And they told us like, the amount of ideas they can try has grown by an order of magnitude, right? Like they used to, you know, get like a hundred ideas, but are able to only try five of them. But now they can try the 50, right? So, you know, companies become a lot more prolific. They can release a lot of new features, create new business lines, new products. And then there's like internal tools and, you know, line of business applications. There's a lot of sales automations that is happening at this company. Any, any role inside a company that's dealing with a lot of data flow,

• 10:29Speaker 01

  for example, think of RevOps, that are the nexus of a lot of different data flow from, from their CRM, from their data people, from Gong, from... And they want to 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 want to buy. The problem with SaaS is you onboard a new SaaS tool that creates a new silo of data that you can't really program. So now they're taking matters in their own hands and building things like quote configurators and being able to save the company hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars on SaaS tools and things like that.

• 11:02Speaker 00

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

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Well, the cool thing about the world we're in right now, and it's very similar to developers, I think the insight that a lot of YC DevTools companies has had, like Stripe, PagerDuty. Developers were empowered to be able to make decisions to bring software into the company at some point like in the last couple of decades. That shift is happening outside of development right now, 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. They're like, oh.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Well, the moment you understand that you can solve a problem with code, 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.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  I remember that when I learned to program.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And now that shift is happening in huge parts of the population. And so it's the PLG play, I think, is still the gold standard. Just make a product that's really good, that people want to recommend to their friends, and make it easy to refer others, build a referral 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. Let's work with you, let's teach your leadership about AI. So a lot of what our salespeople are doing is evangelism, is education.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  So 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, 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 there, we're often winning because Replit has built a history of just like being super trusted on security, on compliance, all that basic enterprise stuff you still, you still have to do.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  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 software engineering approaches to?

• 13:48Speaker 01

  I can confidently say to any entrepreneur out there that you can build a SaaS product, a consumer product, like an automation product on Replit comfortably. If you want to build like a new 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. 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 in our marketing.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  We, you know, there's so many success stories now that I can confidently tell an entrepreneur with no technical knowledge that they can build a piece of software. So there's a lot of consumer apps. There are a lot of, there are a lot of, you know, vertical SaaS products. There are people that are starting like Replit native agencies. I was talking to

• 14:51Speaker 01

  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. So 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, those tend to be kind of fairly simple programs, like you're building an internal org chart, you're building 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 to do that.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  How do those integrations work? Like, have you gone through and built integrations to all?

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. We spend a lot of time partnering with companies, building those integrations. And now there's the, what's happening with the skills, call it revolution, where, 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 the agent is like, it's sort of like Neo in the Matrix where like you download a new skill and you're like, oh, I know how to fly a helicopter now. So it's so cool to see the agent is like, oh, let me search this set of skills that I have and suddenly it knows how to do that.

• 16:24Speaker 01

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

• 16:27Speaker 00

  That makes sense, yeah. Having built a dev tool community, like, 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 you would have done it traditionally?

• 16:41Speaker 01

  It's a little different in that you need to show what's possible. I think with developers, with more traditional CS-trained developers, they know what's possible. They'll read your docs, they'll figure out what's possible. They're on Hacker News all the time and they'll generally are much more resourceful in knowing what's possible. With Replit, there's a lot of education that needs to be done. So we have like a DevRel team, but they're not the traditional DevRel. They're more like educators.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  They're like going and spending a lot of time just teaching people what's possible. Our documentation, I think, is a lot simpler than your typical DevTool documentation. So you have to be really good in content. Stripe got popular for this, being really good on documentation. If you're building a DevTools for non-developers, you have to go above and beyond on content. You have to produce a lot of video content as well. Also, the agent itself needs to be imbued with characteristics that is able to talk to non-developers and tell them what's possible and be a brainstorming partner. Also, this is why we also moved from purely just prompting to also a canvas and more visual interface

• 18:02Speaker 01

  so that people can explore things more easily. And we have buttons where it says like, "Create different variations of this." And so we're adding a lot of different shortcuts just to show people what's possible. On the enterprise side, when we go and we talk to leaders, we're like, "Reserve any judgment. Don't pay for Replit. We're going to come in, bring the group that's most excited about AI, and we're going to do a hackathon."

• 18:25Speaker 00

  How do you, when you see someone, how are you like, "Yes, this is going to be the person who's going to be so excited to use this"?

• 18:29Speaker 01

  We think a lot about that because typically when you think about ICPs, you're thinking about, "Oh, that's someone who's went to school for this degree" or someone who is a product manager or something, which is still true, you can do that. But oftentimes, because we're able to sell to sales departments, marketing, product, design...

• 18:51Speaker 01

  The set of traits that we think makes it like the champion, the person who's most excited about Replit, who's going to spread it inside the organization, who's going to build, who's going to do the education evangelism, they tend to be very entrepreneurial.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  They're the kind of person that could start their own company. But they're able to kind of be very influential internally. They're kind of like what Y C talks about, like P G essays, like resourceful. Someone who's not going to get blocked, who's going to figure out what other A I tool I need to integrate, what can I like go learn in order to figure it out. So that entrepreneurial kind of founder mindset, I think is very important.

• 19:25Speaker 00

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

• 19:36Speaker 01

  The main realization from Y C is how much you can get done in three months. So when we when we came in and Sam stood, 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 going to be missing. You're not going to be able to help them move. You're not going to be able. You'll come back into their lives later. But for the next three months, you need to be hyper focused on this company. And you're going to be able to achieve great things if you really go intensely into it. When we did Y C, we had the we had a whiteboard and a countdown to to Demo Day. And the number of like a just a very simple list of things we need to achieve. And every day we wake up,

• 20:18Speaker 01

  we erase that number and we change it to the countdown. And when Replit got into Y C, it was still a rappel. 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.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  We exited Y C, we already had like web development. We had like the initial aspect of hosting. We had code intelligence. We had like so many sort of I D features. It's like got a lot more feature complete just in three months. And that that is an empowered thing, sort of what we talked about with programming. Just the fact that like, oh, you can be so intensely focused and you 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, because some people are still kind of remote or other offices, bring everyone to the office. We provide breakfast, lunch and dinner, coffee 24 7.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  And we're like, we're just going to hit this like very, very. Ambitious goal, and that's like the YC mentality. Another thing is the compound growth, especially when you're 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% weekly or weekly growth is like a very good way to bootstrap a new product line. So we're constantly doing sort of, we're constantly going back to the YC basics and doing them and all of that we learned here.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  Tell me about, how did YC change your life?

• 21:48Speaker 01

  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 want to meet us. It was like, the doors were not really open for us. After YC, you immediately, first of all, Demo Day, you get to introduce a lot of VCs. And then we were lucky because we got rejected from YC three or four times. And then we got invited to do YC because Paul and Sam saw us on Hacker News. And so we got a direct relationship with Paul and Sam. And then at the end, I was like, I want an intro to Mark Andreessen.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  And you could still ask the partners here, like they'll try a lot to get you intros. But I was like bold enough to ask for that. And so they got my intro to him. I went and had breakfast at his house and pitched Replit and A16Z ended up leading our seed round.

• 22:43Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  And like my network just expanded tremendously after getting into YC. And I don't think we would have been as successful without YC. Perhaps we would have quit if we couldn't fundraise or so it gave our company life.

• 23:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, for us it was very similar. We were complete outsiders and I think having, having you know, somebody sort of welcome you in made an enormous difference.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  So you guys just announced Agent 4. So what is that, like the fourth major revision of your, of your product?

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so 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 twice a year. So if you think about 2025, there was the like vibe coder revolution that happened in earlier 2025. And then there was the, you know, the autonomous revolution that happened in late 2025 with Opus 4.6 that led to OpenClaw and things like that. But I could tell you the same thing happened in 2024, mid 2024, Claude came out and Claude's on it.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  And for the first time, it could generate like a lot of code as opposed to like GPT 3.5, which has that laziness component. And then late 2024, we started seeing initial signs of the labs kind of doing long horizon reasoning. And so that observation, we're like, okay, we want to align our roadmap to AI capabilities. And so every six months, we release a new agent version.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  And it's an act of 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 knew that autonomy was coming and we're like, okay, we want to be able to run the agent for like two, three, four hours. People should be able to put in a big prompt, go to lunch, come back and see the software fully built. And so, okay, what do we need to do to update our platform? For example, like we had to rewrite everything on the backend to have these long running containers in the background doing work while the user is not in front of the computer. And so we did all of that work. And although autonomy didn't arrive until like maybe like true autonomy until like

• 25:16Speaker 01

  November and December, Repli Agent had demonstrated where the world is headed by September. With Agent 4, There were a few things. One, parallel agents. We thought that was finally potentially possible to do parallel agents. 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. Like, what do you do next? Okay, so that question, what do you do next? You should be able to design. You should be able to kick off other type of work. You should be able to chat with your agent and plan for other things. And so we wanted a more asynchronous nature to the product.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  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 to make that work. Also, as the agent is building, we want to also unblock you from designing. So we also had a kind of a more asynchronous design agent. And we're like, okay, what is the best interface for that? So we designed this canvas. So now we have a built-in design capability inside Replit 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 that off into another thread. And it starts. So people are now sitting in front of Replit and just experiencing the state of flow.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Because agents are slow, that's fine, but they can work in the background. And finally, teamwork. Once you solve parallel agents, you've also solved teamwork. Because every time someone jumps into the session, you can start an entirely new, you can fork 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 we'll figure out how to make all that work. And because we had the canvas, it's such a joy to just see other cursors and people. The product just becomes a lot, a lot more live. So all these components became agent four. Oh, final one, I forgot.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  We wanted it so that when you make a mobile app, when you make a website, when you make 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, a different tool for a mobile app. So now with Replit, like you built a really cool web app. So maybe I, maybe I need an app. You could just say, make a mobile app. Like generate mobile app or lay it out on the canvas. When you hit deploy, it deploys your web app to the web. It deploys your app to test flight or your Android, whatever it is. So now you can run your entire company on Revlit.

• 28:04Speaker 00

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

• 28:23Speaker 01

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

• 28:29Speaker 01

  And you can sense that in the sort of open claw and all the derivatives. And the way people are using it, they're more giving it high level goals like optimize my marketing funnel, you know, things like that. So prompting will be there. It's like a layers of skills. Prompting will be there whenever you want to do more interactive type work. But also you should be able to give your agent high level commands. So I think perhaps agent five or maybe sooner, you should be able to tell Revlit every day, build me a SaaS company and like try to market it and see what works and make me some revenue. Like, should be able to give it like-

• 29:03Speaker 00

  That's pretty high level.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Yes. I think we're almost there in order to be able to do that. So what kind of skills do you need? Understanding what is possible is going to be important. So playing with these tools a lot, having this like playful mindset of adopting these tools, playing around with it, being plugged in is super important. At some point, I think it was kind of a drawback or a flaw to be someone who's like constantly reading the news or being online. But actually now it's very important to know what's happening, what's coming down the line.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  I think- Not giving up is important. Like the thing that you try to do today that AI cannot do, try it again in a month.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  And I tell some Replit users, 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. And so that mindset of like, I'm gonna keep trying is important. Idea generation is still gonna be important. Obviously, we're gonna get to a point where AI is gonna be really good at helping you generate ideas. But being generative, just constantly thinking about problems you wanna solve, and just being creative and like figuring out what does the world need right now? And being generative is important because, let's say you're a small-time entrepreneur,

• 30:31Speaker 01

  like you know Peter Levels type of entrepreneur, or like this guy's 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, but then that product's no longer relevant. So you need to be generative and creative in order to continuously do that. And you can make millions of dollars doing that.

• 30:53Speaker 00

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

• 30:58Speaker 01

  I mean, I made a lot of mistakes along the way.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  So if I was starting Replit today, I'd probably hope not to make as many mistakes. So, you know, culture is very important. You know, at some point, we screwed that up and we had to do, we had to do a reset and layoff and all of that stuff.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  I think being really honest with yourself about like product-market fit is very important. It's very easy to delude yourself. Getting any kind of user is an amazing achievement. Getting any 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 entirely different. It's like an explosive thing.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 31:40Speaker 01

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

• 31:46Speaker 00

  Maybe it's working.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Maybe it's working, and like you keep going down that path.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  But in reality, you should have changed directions a little earlier.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, when it works, it really works and you know it. In terms of AI development, AI technology, what is something that you were waiting for? Where you're like, this is going to unlock so much.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  You know, I've been waiting for computer use models to get better. They're slowly getting better. They're like one of the things that is actually kind of disappointing.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  It's surprising to me that it's so hard to build them. Because you'd think it would be the easiest thing in the world to get data for. And do you have a sense of why that is?

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Well, language is a lot easier. Language also like much more can be compressed down into like some kind of high dimensional space. A lot easier than like a video feed, right? But still, like if we can make progress on self-driving, surely we can make progress in moving the mouse and clicking on things. So I think it's a little bit of a mystery. That being said, coding and coding agents turn to be a workaround and hack. Because a lot of things that you could do in front of the computer, you could do with code. Including scripting in Excel sheet, right? The reason Excel sheet agents got better is because coding got better.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  The reason like, you know, some commerce agents are starting to work is because they can call APIs and they can. So coding turned out to be a bit of a hack or workaround computer use agents. But there's still a lot of software in the world that's like very legacy software that computer use agents would be really good at. Also, when you're when you're creating a vibe coding platform like Replit, you want to be able to test the apps that people are making. And you want to be able to be discerning as well, like things that are functionally right, but also UX is not very well. You want to be able to give the user feedback on that. But the models are not very good at that.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  So this is the taste question, I take it?

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Taste question. So we spent a lot of time prompting and augmenting computer use models in order to make them good at testing because Replit has like a testing testing agent.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  So that's one that I think will unlock a lot of different capabilities once we get to computer use agents.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  I think like.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's become a buzzword, but like continual learning. Like the way we're hacking around it right now is we're writing to files. Like the agent will learn some kind of skill and like will write a skill MD file or something like that. But true learning on the job has like not been unlocked yet.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  And so for us to be able to like deploy an agent inside an organization. And for that agent just to get better for that org itself is such a powerful thing. But that just still seems far away.

• 34:48Speaker 00

  You know, I think, you know, one of the common themes I'm hearing here is, is like, hey, we're gonna have like, or we already have today with Replit, like agents to build software. And you talked about how we're increasing the abstraction until finally you can just say, hey, I want a company that just makes money. How is this gonna work? Like, how, what does that leave left for people? And what does the company of the future look like if it's all just agents all the way down?

• 35:15Speaker 01

  I think the company of the future is made of builders and salespeople broadly. Sales will change and sales will be more like, let's help companies transform. Let's use the technology that we're building here to help companies transform. So when salespeople are more like, I mentioned it earlier, like more like evangelists, more like educators. But I don't think that part is gonna go away because a lot of other companies will want to talk to someone. Will want to learn from someone, right? That's how a lot of people learn. And they want, they trust other humans. And so the sales probably part is like one of the more defensible jobs.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  And then builders, there's always more to automate. There's always, I think our job will continuously like get higher and higher level. I mean, that's already the case that with computers, we became a lot more higher levels. Like, computers were literally humans, right? Like, there was like, you know, a bunch of people like doing computations.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  Tables of numbers.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  Tables of numbers. And then we're like, 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. And There was a lot of still manual work in order to make that computer do interesting things, the software, and now we have an agent that's using that computer to use. So, you know, different layers of abstractions. I don't know when you have a fully autonomous company. Maybe at some point, there's certain styles of companies that could be fully autonomous. But I think you need business generalists that understand customers, understand what

• 37:05Speaker 01

  people need, understand the economy, understand where the world's headed, understand AI technology, have some vision, and you want to give them. So 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? And then they go around the company, finding problems to solve, and then creating or deputizing agents in order to go solve these problems. Already seeing that. We actually have a team, like a vibe coding and residency team at Replant. And they have a very vague mission, unlike like a product team or a sales team where

• 37:46Speaker 01

  it's very clear, like go around the company, make it better. So they went to the support team and was like, okay, you're using Zendax 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 support queue. 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 visualize that and a way to like create more priority queues. And they spent some time with the support team and the CSAT score started going up.

• 38:29Speaker 01

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

• 38:57Speaker 00

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

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Appreciate it. Thank you.