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.
00:08:55 · Aditya Agarwal, Amjad Masad
[00:08:55] S2: I was gonna say, I mean, I love our cloud overlords, but this local development makes zero sense. Like, it actually is so much easier to do everything in the cloud remotely managed in a way that's secure but also auto scales. Like, I literally walk around San Francisco and whatever Uber I'm in with my laptop open so the thing keeps on running. It makes zero sense, right? So I'm hoping that we come to our senses about that. Here's a question. So one thing that, as a founder today, is super disorienting is the pace of change. Like, you are both trying to build something on top of foundations and abstractions that are incredibly powerful but constantly shifting in a way that they're both enabling more things, but then also kind of taking away what you are building and kind of swallowing them into themselves. So how do you deal with that at Replit? Because obviously, you're kind of trying to be at the forefront, and the agent stuff is a good example. But at the same time, some of what you're building is getting integrated into the platforms themselves. So how do you almost visualize that race in your own head in a way that makes you confident about kind of where you want to go? [00:10:09] S0: Yeah, we were talking about this actually earlier, but I'm gonna say two things that are contradictory, and you guys figure out how to cohere them. [00:10:17] S2: Two truths, one lie, okay. Do
00:10:20 · Amjad Masad
[00:10:20] S0: you remember when Marc Andreessen went viral for quote unquote retard maxing and saying that he doesn't introspect on Twitter the other day, and that was like super controversial. And I think there's like deep wisdom in that, in that as a founder, you have to kind of be stupidly executing on a day to day basis. And the question is, is the company growing? Are you adding customers? Are you selling your product? And that is true for us every single day. And if not, if there's something wrong, just talk to customers. They're gonna tell you it is competition. They're gonna tell you it is something else and handle these problems locally. And then if you do that enough days in a row, you're gonna end up in a much better place, right? So in some sense, you want to shut off the entire world and you want to focus on your customers and people using your product, right? That's number one. Number two, that is totally opposite, is every now and then try to predict where the future is headed and try to predict your place in it. I think actually predicting the future is much easier than most people think. Like my TED AI talk twenty twenty three, I came up and said, software is gonna be solved in the next couple of years. Here's what software development looks like. And I sketch out vibe coding for the next two years. We actually just completed the roadmap that I sketched out. Like one of the last elements was parallel agents, how you can put in a prompt and it becomes four different tasks. For example, Replit now, I think is the best parallel agent on the market. That was like looking forward, like three years. And so we have some deep beliefs about where the future is headed. And so we're trying to position Replit in a way strategically making few key bets that will pay off in the next six to twelve months based on where we think the world is headed. But on a day to day basis, I think if you're consumed by these questions, you're not gonna be able to execute.
00:12:29 · Aditya Agarwal, Ruchi Sanghvi, Amjad Masad
[00:12:29] S2: To kind of perhaps echo this point back to everyone here who's an early stage founder, I actually think that this is one of the key contradictory things you have to become good at in today's day and age, which is that how do you find of like north stars and kind of like essentially philosophical groundings that you feel confident about? And also ignore the day to day shit that you will hear around you but also not ignore it to the point that you are actually ignoring the good information. But I don't think anybody has figured this out. So I think if it makes you feel better, I think that this is a problem in today's day and age that all of us have to figure out as founders. And I think it's a really hard problem to figure out. [00:13:11] S3: So if you're holding both states in your head and you've just accomplished what laid out in 2023, what have you laid out for the next three years? [00:13:21] S0: Oh, I don't know if I wanna say it here. These guys are gonna compete with us. [00:13:25] S3: You just tell us one thing.