Amjad Masad, Founder of Replit | Keynote Session | T4P Bay Area Summit 2026

Thank you. Hello everyone.

Thank you for having me.

Uh, we're not responsible for that.

Yeah. So my father's family, my grandfather and grandmother, were in Haifa just before the Nakba. And my grandfather was a railroad engineer. There was trains in Haifa. Palestine has been a center for the Ottoman Empire at the time. It was very developed, it has very old civilization. So it's always this sort of mean joke that it was a land without people or they took a fully furnished place. But basically, yeah, my uncle had stores in Haifa. They were living their lives, and for the most part, they were very welcoming of Jewish refugees. And then sort of the Nakba happened, and my grandfather sent my grandmother to their ancestral village, and they stayed there to try to protect their homes, and ultimately they were kicked out at gunpoint. They went to Lebanon. And actually, one of my uncles stayed to fight, and he became a martyr. They stayed a little bit in Lebanon, but then they went to Syria. My father was born in Syria just shortly after that, and they lived in Syria for maybe six years. There was nothing really in Syria for my grandfather; again, they had all these stores, and he was an engineer. So they started hearing about Amman being developed and Jordan having opportunity. So they moved there, I think in the late '50s, and they got the Jordanian citizenship. My dad grew up there and contributed massively to the development of Amman and Jordan, which we're very proud of. My father started as an engineer in the municipality of Amman and rose all the way to become a city manager, one of the first Palestinians to really have a high place in government. And actually, it's not the topic today, but my mother is sort of a similar story. She's Algerian. They got exiled from Algeria during the French-Algerian war. They went to Syria, they started the Algerian Quarter in Syria, and then they migrated to Jordan. So both of them are the result of displacement because of colonialism, and they met in Jordan. I was born there.

Thank you. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know what possessed him, but in 1993, it wasn't really a thing to buy a computer back in Jordan, especially our family: kind of government employee, lower middle class, one working parent. And he decided that computers were going to be a very important thing for the future, and he was right. He took debts, actually, and bought a computer. It was one of my earliest memories that I remember him unboxing the computer, taking out this big manual, putting it at the table, opening it, learning how to type a few commands on MS-DOS. I remember just watching him behind his back and being fascinated that you can actually have this conversation with a computer, you can give it commands and it would do what you want. I figured out pretty quickly that I can sort of understand and simulate how computers might work. And so whenever my father would get frustrated enough and not be able to use a computer, he would leave, and I would go in and sneak in and start playing with the computer. Eventually, I figured out how to start programs, how to take it apart even. And one day he caught me there. I was sneaking in there and he was very mad, and I had took apart the computer. He was like, "Oh my god, this is all this money and you're destroying it!" I'm like, "No, I can put it back together." So they realized I had a talent for it early on, so they continued investing in it. I started programming pretty soon after that. My first company or my first startup or my first business was building software for internet cafes. I'm sure there's a lot of people from the Arab world here, but everyone remembers internet cafes. You go in there, you log into IRC, and you chat for hours. And so the problem with gaming cafes—if you play Counter-Strike or Red Alert—is that these computers are open to the public and anyone can install malware or ease up a lot of time without paying for it. So I built software to manage the entire thing, the security and all of that, and started selling it when I was 13 years old.

And so that's when I realized the power of programming. If you know how to make software, really the world is your oyster. I just thought, "Wow, this is like kind of easy money. I'm not going to have a problem making money in the future because I like what I do. Programming is like a game for me and it's fun." A lot of that early thoughts kind of inspired what Replit is today: how can you make that opportunity available for a lot more people? Certainly, our story, our family story, and the story in Palestine and other places is something I deeply care about, which is: can you actually give people tools to build things and improve their lives and make money, lift them out of poverty, and all of that?

Yeah. Well, my grandma had my uncle Omar's photo right in the center of her home, and he was a martyr. He died fighting the Israelis, and I was always curious about it. I asked her about it—I was very close to my grandma—and she told me the story. My mom was one of the biggest advocates for Palestine, and she really carried the cause. She used to tell us about the story of the struggle, and she taught us a lot about what was really happening there on the ground. So my family always had an awareness there that permeated from a very young age. Like, I remember the deep sense of injustice that I felt when I was five or six years old. I still remember it to this day. How can this be possible when I'm watching cartoons all day long, and in all the cartoons everything is going well, justice always wins, and all of that? So there was this sense of cognitive dissonance from the start that we kind of live in this world where actually there is tremendous injustice and lies and all of that. So that awareness was there. Look, Jordan is my home. I love Jordan, and I'm deeply grateful for the leaders there for creating a life for us and many Palestinian refugees. At the same time, yes, they would let you know it. Arabs are just naturally tribal people. So whenever you meet someone, they'll ask you where you're from. And you'll say, "I'm from Amman, that's where we grew up." It's like, "No, where are you from from?" I mean, people here say it, too. Like, "Okay, I'm Palestinian." And then if they're more tribal people, you could sense, especially if you get in trouble—I used to get in trouble a lot with the police and things like that—and if you're Palestinian, you get more in trouble and it's harder for you to get out of trouble. Whereas if you're from a tribal origin, you can call your tribe and they'll come and storm the police and get you out. So there was this tribal justice, and as Palestinians, we didn't have that, and you felt that deeply.

Yeah. I think I was lucky in that by the time I got here in 2012, I didn't really feel a lot of the post-9/11 world perhaps that many of you grew up under. I was never apologetic or hiding my Palestinian identity. A lot of people who came up in tech in the previous generation—which I totally understand why they would do that—they would take up Anglo-sounding names, like if you're Sami, you become Sam; everyone's named Adam somehow, like so many Adams; and Mo and things like that. But for me, it wasn't a calculus. Certainly we felt the bias against Palestinians, my wife and I. But I was also unapologetic about it back in Jordan. It got me in trouble: during the Intifada, we would go and protest and get in altercations with the cops and all of that. I guess I'm attracted to a little bit of trouble and drama. So I would get into intense debates with people at work about the situation in Palestine. And I just realized how brainwashed Americans were on the question of Palestine: this idea again of the land without people; this idea that Arabs in Palestine were somehow the colonizers. The whole thing is twisted, and you realize that the sort of story that's told here is such a massive, bold-faced lie. And thankfully now, of course at a huge cost, but post-genocide people are getting more educated about what actually happened there, who are the people there. There are genetic studies that show that Palestinians have been there forever, going all the way back to the Canaanites and even before that. So I think there's enough science and evidence. And by the way, there's some historians in Israel that played a big part in changing the canon—the so-called New Historians: Ilan Pappé, obviously, *The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine*, a great book, everyone should read it; but even ultra-Zionists like Benny Morris had a little bit of honesty to them that they were able to talk about the ethnic cleansing and things like that. So there was enough of this written, there was enough of that that now we're seeing all of that come out, and the truth is starting to come out. But to your question about tech, I felt it intensely in the startup world—not as much when I was working at Codecademy, but at Facebook it was insane. The moderation was entirely based on just a Zionist agenda. I remember during the 2014 Gaza proto-genocide, there was a lot of Palestinian activists and groups organizing on Facebook and trying to influence public opinions. There was a lot of Palestinian people in Gaza that were organizing via Facebook groups that were getting banned, and so we organized internally. There was a few Arabs and Muslims that helped, and we started going into the issue trackers. The good thing about Facebook is that there was some openness there and so you could do some influence, and so we would push back against the moderation where they would say, "Oh, this is a terrorist," when it's clearly someone asking for food or something like that. And so we would get people unbanned, and it escalated all the way to Sheryl Sandberg, who's kind of the worst on these things, and that's saying it kindly. Obviously, she said some very nasty things about us and what we were doing.