Behind the product: Replit | Amjad Masad (co-founder and CEO)

**Amjad Masad** (0:00)
The idea behind Replit is that making software today is very difficult. We want to make it easier. People view this as a developer in their pocket, essentially. We have 34 million users globally. There's people everywhere learning to code on Replit, building startups, building personal software, personal tools for people building products.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:22)
They're product managers, founders. Like, what skills do you see will matter more, matter less?

**Amjad Masad** (0:27)
Typically, you're bottlenecked where your ideas are not fitting in because, like, they need to be made and they need to be made quickly. Now, you open up that bottleneck. So now, like, actually making things is a lot easier. Actually, you become limited by how fast you can generate ideas.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:44)
I think people are unaware of just how far things have gone.

**Amjad Masad** (0:47)
I could imagine, whatever, five years from now, someone running a billion-dollar company with zero employees where it's like the support is handled by AI, the development is handled by AI, and you're just building and creating this thing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:01)
Man, the future is wild.
Today, my guest is Amjad Masad. Amjad is the co-founder of Replit, an AI-powered software development and deployment platform for building and shipping software. It's one of the fastest growing developer communities and AI products in the world. There's a lot of talk these days about how AI is changing, how products will be built, how product teams are gonna operate, which functions will be more and less valuable over time. But I feel like very few people have actually seen what modern AI tools can do, and have fully grasped how much you can get done with very little technical skill now and in the future. And so I'm gonna do an experiment with this podcast where I'm gonna do a series of behind-the-product episodes where we go deep on important products that product builders should be aware of and should probably start playing with. In our conversation, Amjad does a demo of what you can do with Replit today, which is gonna blow your mind. And then we spend most of the conversation talking about the implications of this podcast on the future of product development, on the future of product management, and on the future of startups and founders. It's a very exciting time. It's also a very scary and destabilizing time for a lot of people. And my thinking is the more you are aware of what's possible today and where things are going, the better position you'll be in to thrive in this very wild and crazy future that is coming very fast. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Amjad Masad. Amjad, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

**Amjad Masad** (2:46)
It's my pleasure.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:47)
I thought it'd be great to start with just having you explain what is Replit, what's the vision, where is this going, what job does it do for people?

**Amjad Masad** (2:56)
The idea behind Replit is that making software today is very difficult. And we want to make it easier. One of the reasons for the difficulty is that it is very fragmented. So you would need to download what's called an IDE. It's basically a code editor. You need to download the runtime, basically Python or JavaScript. You need to figure out a package manager to configure your kind of open-source packages. And once you've done all of that, you need to figure out how to deploy it, how to share it.
And so it's a very hard process. And that's one of the ways where people get stuck and never learn how to code, because it just feels like this cumbersome IT process. And so the vision for Replit has always been, it's like, okay, making software is fun, is great. More people should do it. But so for more people to do it, it needs to be easier to do. It needs to be in one place and it needs to be learnable. It's easy to learn. And so that's the product today. It is, I think, one of the more easier IDEs slash environment slash deployment environment on the Internet. And I think we make it really easy for people to just jump in even without prior experience of coding, especially now with the new AI products that we built.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:21)
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