The $9B Startup That Wants to Create a Billion New Developers

**Andrew Miklas** (0:05)
Today, I'm joined by Amjad Masad, the CEO and co-founder of Replit.
Replit is the leading no-code app builder for consumers and enterprise. They just recently raised their Series D, a $400 million raise at a $9 billion valuation. Amjad, thank you very much for joining me, and I'm excited to learn more about Replit.

**Amjad Masad** (0:25)
Thank you for having me.

**Andrew Miklas** (0:26)
Of course. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what Replit is?

**Amjad Masad** (0:30)
Yeah, so, you know, our ambition is that anyone, no matter what level of skill they have, anyone who can read and write, basically, that's the skill that you need, can come in with an idea and can leave with an app that's deployed, that's hosted, that's getting traffic, that's can scale. They don't have to worry about any technical aspect of building that thing.
It's been a mission we're on for 10 years right now. So initially, we solved the development environment. That was the hardest thing, is like setting up the development environment, then solve the deployment environment. Then what was left is like the coding part was still very intimidating for people. September 2024, Replit became the first, what's called live coding product where we abstracted away code entirely. So there's like a coding agent behind the scene. But you're just interfacing with AI using natural language, and more recently with Agent 4 also design interactions. So you can write things, you can comment on things, you can drag and drop things like a canvas. We're thinking about a lot of different modalities for how people want to interact with agents, because I don't think it's always going to be just text. I think at some point it's going to be multimodal, maybe video, maybe audio.
But we want to create a natural place where people can express their ideas and those ideas can turn almost magically into software that is real software. It's not like a toy software. Real software, secure software, scalable software.

**Andrew Miklas** (2:08)
One of the things that's most interesting to me about your company is that it really bridges the gap between a dev tool and not. I think it's the first dev tool I've seen, but that's not marketed towards engineers. Can you tell me more about how you came to that decision that you were going to do that, and who is your primary user today?

**Amjad Masad** (2:27)
Yeah.
I started coding at a very, very young age, but I was always interested in the act of creation. I was interested in entrepreneurship. I built my first business when I was 13, 14, and I always thought that the developer tools were getting in the way. It actually gotten worse over time, so I started coding on basic, and you just start the basic command line interpreter, and you can just type a little basic, and that's good. By the time I graduated from college, like setting up a web app was like a nightmare, right? So it created this desire to just build tools that are more joyful, more enriching, kind of focus on the act of creation as supposed to the accidental complexity of developer tools. So I started building a lot of tools for myself, and eventually I built what would become kind of the first in-browser IDE. Initially, it was like an open-source project. Later on, I would also work on React and React Native, and I approached every time I built a developer tool, I've approached it with the same thing. Can you apply design sensibilities in the same way that you would work on a consumer app? That's been successful in many ways, but ultimately, when we started Replit, the goal was make programming accessible. Later, we updated our mission to create a billion new developers. As we progress in our mission and in solving every part of the software development lifecycle, what we've noticed is a lot of developers actually like the ping.
They like setting up things, and they like configuring every aspect of it. It's no knock against that, but it's like a craftsperson liking to build their own tools. What we've noticed is that people that are getting the most value out of our product tend to be the more tech-adjacent ones. Maybe product managers have written code many years ago, but don't worry about the development environment setup, don't worry about the deployment setup. Then designers, designers who have ideas but are often blocked or bottlenecked by engineers, and they want to be able to build their own ideas.
Later on, as we layered on AI and the product got better, entrepreneurs, and when I talk to these people, it reminded me of myself. Those are people with ideas, with passion, with fire in them, but they're getting hamstrung by just like the need to learn to become technical. So, at some point in 2023, we just made it an explicit goal of like, we're not going after developers. They're still developers. Like, if you walk around Replit today, it looks like a death toll of companies. We're like building for creators, right? But they're not the traditional type of developers. They're like a new generation of developers that are coming up right now because of AI. They're AI native developers that are creating software without having to worry about every component in the system.