00:00:00 · Amjad Masad, Haya Odeh, Aditya Agarwal
[00:00:00] S0: From the moment I was a teenager, I was making money just because I was good at coding. I'm like, wow, this should be available to more people. Right now, every day I hear of a user that's making a million dollars on Replit, right? Yesterday, there was someone tweeted out that they were making $8,000,000 [00:00:13] S1: And every time someone is shipping something and they're saying, Oh, this is working. Yay. And I'm like, Can you tell me what's not working? [00:00:21] S0: I think we're headed into a post prompting world. And the next phase is about [00:00:28] S2: Let's dive right into it. Okay. Amjad, you came to The United States when you were 23 with a bunch of credit card debt and no job, think, right? [00:00:40] S0: No, I had an offer from Codecademy at the time, yeah. [00:00:43] S2: Oh, you did have an offer? [00:00:44] S0: Yes, yes. [00:00:44] S2: Okay, okay, well, no job. So it's technically accurate. One of the things that I think is super hard at the minus one stage, and frankly even at the early stages, is everyone talks in Silicon Valley about how persistence, resilience, grit is a feature, right? But there's a fine line between being incredibly kind of stubborn and also kind of like sometimes being like, this idea is just not that good. So how have you thought about that? It's kind of taken you nine years. Mean, thinks about Replit today as an incredibly successful company, but it's taken you nine years to get there.
00:01:18 · Amjad Masad, Aditya Agarwal
[00:01:18] S0: Well, more than that, right? When I came to The United States, Replit was already kind of side project. It was an open source side project. So twenty years. But the story on the credit card debt is interesting. So I had this job offer from Codecademy, but I didn't have any money to get to The United States. On my way out of Jordan, I had an O-one visa. No one had heard of O-one visas at the time. But right now they're so easy, but at the time it was hard. The airport, they saw me, they're like, this visa is like, what is this visa? It's some kind of scam? It's like, no, it's like a work visa. They're like, No, you have to buy a return ticket because it's not an immigrant visa. And they made me buy that. And so that was all my money. And I got there and the founders of Codecademy were like 20 years old and I was their first employee. And so I got there, I didn't have any money. And they were like out in Silicon Valley fundraising. So I'm here in New York, literally on my own, don't have any money. I had this credit card that I started back in Jordan and I understood how credit card worked. I thought I had some money in it. I thought it would work like a debit card. And so the more I swiped it, I saw that I was looking at the balance. I understood that the negative negative is [00:02:27] S2: giving money to me.
00:02:28 · Amjad Masad
[00:02:28] S0: Yeah, it's like, and so it got so bad, I think I racked up like $15.20000. And my father calls me one day and he's like, The police is looking for you back in Jordan. It's like, Why? It's like, You're defaulted on your debt. And then eventually I paid it off. But in terms of like, just the idea, I mean, part of it is could be insane. Like you could definitely be insane and like be going after an idea for fifteen years and like not succeed. I mean, there's so many stories of entrepreneurs, maybe some of them eventually succeed, maybe some of them just never succeed. But like, I think the thing that really drove me is I felt like I saw something about the future. And that is, I saw what programming and being good at coding did to my life, to our life, changed how, grew up from, came from very humble background. And from the moment I was a teenager, I was making money on my own just because I was good at coding. I'm like, wow, this option should be available to more people. So the thing that always motivated Replit is how do you make programming more accessible? And if you make programming more accessible, that incredibly valuable thing, because people can make money, can get jobs. And so surely you can find a way to like monetize it, get value out of it. I just didn't know how. And that took a lot of different paths. And the thing about Replit, even ten years ago, we've always had success stories. They were like, They were minor, but over time, right now, every day I hear of a user that's making a million dollars on Replit, right? Yesterday, there was someone that tweeted out that they were making $8,000,000 solo entrepreneur, which is amazing. But even back then, someone it was like, oh, learned to code a little bit of Replit. I'm like a fitness instructor. And then I figured out how to do an iOS app and now I'm making a thousand dollars in the app store. Like, woah, that's amazing. So how can we create a million people like that? And so there was always something that showed us that this could be a big idea, and that kept us moving. The thing that really excites us, the charts up into the right, they're amazing. And when we talk to users and when you're building something that enables people, that's the best feeling. I mean, you two know it, right?
00:04:47 · Amjad Masad, Ruchi Sanghvi
The returns, I'm sure, are amazing, but when we see a founder that came out of here that is crushing it, that's the thing that makes it all worth [00:04:56] S3: So I actually want to check-in with Haya. So you were a designer. I think he asked you to design the logo for Replit. And then you decided to join him full time on this journey. Guess way back then, I'm guessing he didn't have the Messiah complex then, but way back then, what [00:05:17] S0: did you [00:05:17] S3: see in Replit? Why did you decide to do that?
00:05:17 · Ruchi Sanghvi, Haya Odeh
[00:05:17] S3: see in Replit? Why did you decide to do that? [00:05:20] S1: Yeah, so I had a job, and Amjad came to me. He didn't have a job. He was working on Replit. He was a student. And he was like, I need a logo and I need a UI. And I was like, for what? And he says, I have this side project going on. It's called Replit. Had no idea what is Replit even means. I was like, okay, what does Replit even means? So we have to ask many questions as designer. We can be a little bit too much, but it's part of the job. So he says, well, it's a Repl, you know? Was like, I but don't I can imagine stuff. I can make up stuff. So I imagined like a water Repl, and I created a logo for that, but I didn't know what I was doing. So I created the UI and I pushed, he pushed the UI. Of course he changed the UI, and then he came back to the same UI that I developed for him. It's the designer engineer relationship, you know? They think they know better, but they were like, oh, this actually looks good. Like, oh, you mean exactly like this, how it looked like before? So fast forward, my story with Replit, the reason why I started Replit with Amjad, because I wanted to find a job. [00:06:43] S3: Should we move on to AI? I mean, this is a weird question to ask you guys, but it feels like a lot of the momentum is swinging back to local development. And as someone building cloud native, prompt to deploy sandboxes, how do you think about the resurgence of local AI tools?
00:07:02 · Amjad Masad
[00:07:02] S0: Well, I think there is the question of the absolute numbers versus the share. I think in absolute numbers, all of coding is growing, whether it's cloud, whether it's local. I do think that there's some fundamental limitations to local. So for example, there was a supply chain attack in the JavaScript ecosystem just yesterday, and it's pretty bad. If you installed very massive one of the most popular libraries that does requests in JavaScript, it would take over your computer. It would literally remote takeover of your computer. It was insane. Yeah. So if you're in Replit, you're not exposed at all because not only is it a cloud environment that is not connected to your local computer, we also block post install scripts. We also have a minimum age limit for a package. So we don't allow packages that were just published. And it was caught in a few hours, but even a few hours, many millions of people installed it. And so I think things shift. Hype comes and goes. And at some point, Replit Agent was the only agent on the market, September 2024. And now we started our entire evolution. We're proud of that. At some point, we're going to do something fundamentally new no one else did. That will start again. And then we feel very proud that we've always been on the cutting edge of what's possible. At the same time, if you believe in something, just do what you think is right. And for example, the enterprise side of the business right now is taking off primarily because of the security and reliability features, because enterprises is like, Ah, I don't want people installing OpenClaw and all this stuff on their computers. I want these cloud environments that are safe and secure and been battle tested for many years.