Replit's CEO on Vibe Coding, Wealth Building, and What Most People Get Wrong About AI

**Amjad Masad** (0:00)
The world was built by people that are not much smarter than you. Your job is to find the way of doing things that's most aligned where the world is headed. I think it's the easiest time to get rich in the history of capitalism, but certainly in the history of internet.

**Jack Neel** (0:15)
Growing up in Jordan, today's guest was fascinated by programming, but couldn't afford a computer, which inspired him to make coding accessible for everyone.

**Amjad Masad** (0:23)
You can cast almost any problem in life as a coding problem. And I thought, okay, I'm gonna hack into school and change my grades.

**Jack Neel** (0:30)
But when his company hit a billion dollar valuation, he refused every offer to sell, doubling down on his mission to turn the tech industry from a monopoly into a democracy. How much were you offered to sell your company for?

**Amjad Masad** (0:41)
When we were very small, not a lot of people, I think six people were offered a billion dollars.

**Jack Neel** (0:46)
And why'd you say no?

**Amjad Masad** (0:47)
Because I think I can build a trillion dollar company.

**Jack Neel** (0:50)
In this episode, we'll give his exact blueprint to build a million dollar app in minutes, explore why the most powerful tech companies tried to kill his vision, and question whether AI will enslave us or empower everyone to escape the rat race. Why do you think AI isn't going to kill us all?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:07)
For most of the internet era, building software required learning to code. That bottleneck shaped who got funded, who got hired, and who got rich. Replit was built to break it. In 2011, Amjad Masad posted a simple idea to Hacker News. When any programming language in your browser, no installation required. That became Replit. Today, Replit's AI agent produces a working app in under an hour, and the company's revenue went from $2.5 million to $250 million in just over a year. When a competitor offered to buy the company for $1 billion at six employees, Masad said no, because he thinks he can build a trillion dollar one. His argument, not having a coding background, is becoming an advantage. The people who win now are the ones closest to the problem, not the ones who know the syntax. In this conversation, previously aired on the Jack Neel Podcast, Jack Neel speaks with Amjad Masad, CEO at Replit.

**Jack Neel** (2:15)
Amjad Masad, welcome to the Jack Neel Podcast.

**Amjad Masad** (2:18)
Thank you.

**Jack Neel** (2:19)
Amjad. You built a billion-dollar company that makes apps just by talking to AI. If you wanted to build a million-dollar app in five minutes, how would you do it?

**Amjad Masad** (2:31)
It depends on my context. I would look around for problems to solve. So no matter where you are in life, you're in college, you're at work, there are people dealing with problems all around you.
One of my very recent start-ups that came out of Replit is a finance guy, and he was on a plane, and next to him was sitting an investment banker, just spending a lot of time building spreadsheets and building decks for clients. And he had an idea to automate a big part of that. And he told him, you know, I have an app for you. And he didn't have an app. Can I come pitch it to you tomorrow? He said, yeah, I mean, if you can solve this problem, if you can make it faster for us to get to our clients. He went home, and he's been using Replit just personally, just for fun websites, things like that. He spent the night working on the app. The next day, went and pitched it, left there with half a million dollars of blood of intent, and did this a few more times with other bankers. And he's just raising at a $35 million valuation right now. So it's more than one million, it's 35 that, because he already has a lot of contracts right out the door. So it's very contextual. We have a educator, that's like a more of a story from two years ago, because the company is pretty big right now, half a billion dollars worth. But he's a teacher during COVID. I think he just left his school and started playing around with AI, playing around with Replit, going in and trying his hand at coding with AI. And because he knows the problem space deeply, he was able to build a lot of tools for teachers, for grading students, for creating assignments with AI. And education is one of the hardest markets, but AI has this amazing ability to sell itself. And quickly grew the company to 10 million annual revenue, 20 million annual revenue. And now it's like half a billion dollars worth company. But there are a lot of smaller ones too. The other day, I was on Twitter, I saw this guy who created an app quickly with Replit to generate brand kits and brand design material, logos, all of that. You enter your product name, you go through a simple flow. It's called anymarket.co. And you pay, I think, 40 bucks or something like that, and you get an entire brand kit generated with AI. And so, I see these stories every day. And it's typically someone who has some domain knowledge in a certain thing.