I got rejected from YC (4x)…. now my side hustle is worth $1.16B

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
This is the first AI agent thing that has been a mind-blowing moment for me, where I am not a programmer, I am not a coder, but I can now create software.

**Sam Parr** (0:10)
Well, that's insane.

**Amjad Masad** (0:11)
There are apps built on Replit agents that otherwise would take probably $100,000 of developer time, and you can build it in $25 paid to Replit. It's pretty wild how fast these companies are scaling. I don't think in the history of Silicon Valley, we've seen anything like that, even in the Web 2 era.

**Shaan Puri** (0:30)
So what is a fast ramp for an AI company? What's impressive that broke the frame of how long things would take?

**Amjad Masad** (0:36)
So I would say reaching 10 million in three or four months, ARR.

**Shaan Puri** (0:42)
Oh my God. That's wild.

**Sam Parr** (0:46)
Can I ask a blunt, crude question? How can I use your software to become a billionaire?

**Amjad Masad** (0:51)
I would say building.

**Shaan Puri** (1:02)
Okay. So how do we want to start this? So Amjad, you're awesome. So you're today in a position that I think a lot of people want to be in. You're doing the Silicon Valley dream. You had this idea, you go through YC, you've now raised hundreds of millions of dollars, you're valued at a billion dollar valuation.
So that's today, but then the cool thing about your story is that didn't seem likely, you know, 10 years ago. It is a very unlikely success story. And yeah, you went through YC, but you were rejected a bunch of times. Like, yeah, you're in Silicon Valley now, but you started off coding in an internet cafe in Jordan. That's what's interesting to me. And we asked you beforehand, we're like, hey, what killer stories could you come on the podcast and tell? And you go, you wrote this. So I'm going to read it word for word, and then I want you to tell us the story. You go, rejected four times and Rick rolling into YC, raising tons of money and meeting a basic billionaire. So let's do the first part. Rejected four times and Rick rolling into YC. Can you tell the story?

**Amjad Masad** (1:59)
Yeah, so I left my job at Facebook in 2016 And, you know, Replit has been a side project for a while, and it's been growing. I've been working on it like nights and weekends.
It grew to a point where the server cost was meaningful. And I was like, OK, you know, I have to, I guess I have to start a company around it. And so I went to my manager at Facebook and I was like, look, I have this side project. Can we make it like somehow a project at Facebook? And we looked into that. I sent Zuck an email at the time and he ignored me. Like, OK, I guess I have to start. I guess I have to start a company. And so, yeah, I quit my job, applied to YC the first time. We did the whole thing. We did the form and the video and all of that. And we didn't even get a call or anything like that. It was just like we got the rejection letter. And so I was like, OK, I have this Facebook stock, some savings. I sold the Facebook stock. I put like half of it in Bitcoin and then half of it into the company or like just for us to kind of live.

**Sam Parr** (3:12)
And how much money was that?

**Amjad Masad** (3:13)
It was like 70K or something like that.

**Sam Parr** (3:17)
What was the original product of Replit?

**Amjad Masad** (3:20)
So it was basically an editor and a console. You could type code there and you can run it. You can switch a language and that's it.

**Sam Parr** (3:33)
All right. So when I ran my company, The Hustle, I think we had something like 2 million subscribers and we made money through advertising. We didn't actually make that much money per person reading the newsletter because advertising in general is kind of a crappy business model. And so I remember sitting down and I'm like, what are all the different ways that I can make money off the hustle that aren't advertising? And so to make sure that you don't make this mistake, Sean, me and the HubSpot team, we went and looked at a bunch of different ways to monetize your business. And we put it all together in a really cool document where we laid it all out along with our research. And we call it very appropriately. We call it the Business Monetization Playbook. Go to the description of this episode and you're going to see a link to that Business Monetization Playbook. It's completely free. You just click the link and you can see it. Back to the episode.