SaaStr 859: The $257 Employee: What Agents That Actually Work Look Like Right Now with Replit's CEO and Founder

**Jason Lemkin** (0:00)
Thanks for coming. We'll let folks stream in for a minute. But if you've been into the bunch of sessions today, we're going to have some fun.
So most of this all, as you guys know, is built on Replit. So thank you for building this platform. Thank you. It has been quite a journey. So much has changed. If you guys have been through this half day to kick off, I did this 101 I'm the first agent we ever built 14 months ago on Delphi. Amelia talked about building your own 10K on Replit. Now I want to take advantage of Amjad who co-founded Replit back in 2016 AI was a twinkle in your eye back then, right?

**Amjad Masad** (0:39)
Yes.

**Jason Lemkin** (0:39)
Was it even a twinkle in your eye in 2016?

**Amjad Masad** (0:41)
It was. There was a brief, people forget, but there was a brief language model. It wasn't a large language model, but there was a brief language model height where Facebook had this Messenger M product. There was a bunch of companies that were doing email bots. Everyone was doing human in the loop. Everyone was doing, you send a message, and we'll try with AI. It's usually just people behind the scene. It didn't last long, but there was a feeling in the air that language models are going to be significant.
There was a group of us that understood that language models are going to have a huge significance on software.

**Jason Lemkin** (1:24)
Yeah. Yeah.
If we have time, we'll go back to the beginning, getting Replit here, but I want to talk about the present. There aren't that many better futurists than Amjad, but I don't want to talk about 2028 I want to talk about the agents we built on Replit and maybe a little bit into the future.

**Amjad Masad** (1:42)
I think Jason, you live in the future. Yeah, I'm not saying that lightly. If you think about the recent agent hype, started around December 2025, you've been in it for three or four months, already understood the prospect of it. I think you and a lot of other Replit users understood that agents have arrived since agent three, I would say, September, October, that these things can run for an hour and refactor my entire app and do all that. Engineers actually figured out a little later.
There was a tweet by Elad recently, Elad Gill, saying, people at the labs are six months ahead of Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley is six months ahead of New York. In reality, actually, Replit users were like six months ahead of everyone else, even people in the labs because when we launch these agents, a lot of times we get researchers messaging us, it's like, oh, we didn't know Cloud was capable of running for 10 hours at a time, and we're learning a lot from you.

**Jason Lemkin** (2:40)
Yeah. We're living in the future, and I think if people, it's a good point, if people take anything out of it is that if you want, you can live in the future too.

**Amjad Masad** (2:48)
I actually think engineers are laggards.
Not all engineers, but a lot of engineers are because they're tied to their workflows, and I think you see it now with 10K agents like 10K, really no one is building agents like that. Yeah, that are actually employee like, and I've heard you're going to have someone reporting to them pretty soon.

**Jason Lemkin** (3:09)
That's the goal, yeah.

**Amjad Masad** (3:11)
But everyone talks about agents, the only agents that work are software agents, marketing agents, sales agents, all that haven't really worked very well. So 10K is an example of something that works.

**Jason Lemkin** (3:21)
Yeah.

**Amjad Masad** (3:21)
That's rare.

**Jason Lemkin** (3:22)
It's rare. Yeah.

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**Jason Lemkin** (3:57)
So I want to, there's a bunch of stuff I want to share with you, but first I want to get some of your reactions as one of the creators to all of this, to a few things. So just a reminder, I know you know a little bit. We built two. Well, we've actually built a third you haven't heard about. So 10K was the first one, becoming Autonomous Marketing, QB's customer success handled everyone out there, better than a human I want to show you. Then we have a third one, I know you're not going to like this, that manifested itself, that created itself on Replit, which I'll show you. Holy shit.