There is a risk in which we stop understanding the systems.
Why, of all the places in all the world, did you open in London?
We need to take it seriously that agents are really powerful. Can tokens replace humans?
I do worry about the risk of AI. Like, I think AI used in warfare is already causing human suffering and destruction.
Hello and welcome to the interview from Times Tech. I'm Katie Prescott.
And I am Danny Forson. And this week I have been speaking to Amjad Masad, the founder and CEO of Replit.
And Replit is a really big deal in Silicon Valley, right? They're a vibe coding platform, a little bit like our Lovable over here. So I guess the idea is you can tell them what you want it to build, an app or a piece of software, and then it just spins it up.
Yes, exactly. And Amjad speaks a lot about how we've kind of lost the fun in computing because no one programs anymore. In fact, he says we are all, quote, at the mercy of Silicon Valley tech. And he has some really interesting things to say about, you know, this whole doomer vibe that is so dominant right now. And he knows of what he speaks. He's been in this world for a very long time. And he explains why he thinks tech companies should face penalties when their agents go rogue, which again is just like, what a concept. But I think you're really going to enjoy the conversation. Amjad's great. So, here he is. Amjad Masad from Replit.
Well, Amjad, thank you so much for taking the time. I know Replit because I'm based out here in Silicon Valley and I cover tech. But for those who don't, what is Replit and how long have you been hacking away at this particular cold face?
Replit is the best way to bring software ideas to life. I think if you've ever had an idea for an app or an automation or software agent, you know, now you can build it and you can build apps of any complexity. And especially important on Replit, you can scale them, you can monetize them, and there is increasingly little difference between what any ordinary person is capable of and a trained software engineer. I've been working on this as a company for 10 years, but as an idea perhaps for 15. It started with my frustration with programming tools being so hard to use, so inaccessible, so archaic. Surprisingly, they still are, even with AI.
I mean, the fact that you have to open a terminal to use something like Claude Code, I think is just a travesty.
Terminals, or as they're like, terminal emulators, right? So they're emulating 1950s technology. So it's like, what the hell, right? And so like, software development has always been stuck in the past, which is weird because software engineers are building the future. And so there's always been a frustration that I had with like, software tools. Software programming tools should be joyful. It should be collaborative. It should be fun. It shouldn't be any different than Canva or using design tools. And finally we're there. I think Replit is a lot of fun to use.
So, can we go back to, you know, you said you've been thinking about this idea for 15 years. You've been working on it for 10. And we all know the ChatGPT moment and kind of what's happening now when you hear Anthropic talking about basically, you know, coders are doing less and less coding. And it does feel like, you know, that Rubicon has been crossed. But like, the idea of allowing me, deeply untechnical, or anyone else, kind of create software, create tools, do whatever they want to do without that expertise. What did that look like 10 years ago? Because it feels like that's almost an impossibility, right? If you kind of go back in time before ChatGPT.
Actually, we can go back way more in time. And if you think about the early computing pioneers, they never saw a difference between a trained software engineer and a computer user. The idea of using computers was that you would program them. That's what computers are for. And that was true when you bought a computer, I think in the 80s, like a Commodore 64. When you bought it, it booted up to a BASIC interpreter and you're expected to program it in order to use it. And I think starting, I think popularized by Steve Jobs, this idea of like computers should be more intuitive to use, which is, I kind of, it was a reasonable idea, but the unintended consequences of it, that it created two classes of computer users. There's supercomputer users, the programmers, and there's computer consumers, the rest of the world, where you're reliant on computer programmers to build all the software you need to use your computer. And this has all sorts of consequences, like there's commercial economic consequence where we had like a very big thriving software industry. You might think that's good or bad depending on your view, but that's one. But it created, I think, potentially social and political impact that I think is negative, where the idea of, you know, manipulating people and their opinions and their views, I think is a direct consequence of people not having the freedom to program their computers. And they are at the mercy of kind of Silicon Valley big tech companies to kind of feed you all the information and the software you need to kind of do something. And so, by no stretch of the imagination, I'm the first one to kind of articulate these problems, but you know, I felt them sort of intensely. And I felt like the way to use a computer was actually to program. And that's how I used computers. And then when Windows and Mac, you know, came on the scene, I just, it felt very indefinite. When iOS and iPhone came on the scene, you're like, I don't even own this computer. Like, it is a computer, but I can't program it. Like, I have to go to this like app store thing to download apps, and they're mostly junk.
And so, what it looked like in like 2016 when we started the company was, let's actually remove one barrier at a time. So what's the first barrier? Setting up the development environment. And that meant opening the terminal, downloading Python or Java or whatever, and setting it up. That's actually quite a big barrier. You have to download gigabytes of code. And you have to learn how to use a terminal. And so we're like, okay, let's create a website. So we call it Replit. It's a homage to actually the first interactive programming environment that's called a REPL. And we put it in the browser and you go to this website. Initially, we didn't even have a login screen. You just go to this website and there's like a code editor and you can run the code. And I actually didn't have a lot of expectations. I didn't know how people would use it. I think like me, people will just start exploring programming languages and things like that. But the initial kind of product market fit turned out to be education.
So people learning to code, you remove that barrier. So only so many people want to learn to code, and so a lot of people signed up to Replit to learn to code. And then the next thing was like, okay, you wrote a program, how do you actually host it? How do you deploy it? There was some innovation. You might remember Heroku, which Salesforce bought and eventually killed. But that was like, hey, if you wrote a program locally, you can type a few commands and suddenly it's on the web. It's like AWS, but like a lot simpler. And so we sort of built a similar functionality right in the browser. So you write a program, you hit deploy, and suddenly it's on a public domain and you have an app. I was like, okay, now that you have an app, you need to store data and then you need to do user authentication. So we went down the line and we've sort of like solved all these different problems, including security and abuse problems, which are actually very topical now that agents are breaking out of sandboxes. So we've done that for a long time. And then when AI came on the scene, and I sort of predicted that actually, we published my slide deck from 2016. I talk about how AI is going to change software and make it more accessible. But it was obvious to me the moment I saw GPT-2, actually in 2019. We started building GPT integration. In 2023, we had like a chat interface similar to ChatGPT where you can like talk to your IDE, to your programming environment. In 2024, we invented, I think, what's called now vibe coding, which we made this radical decision, which was very controversial at the time. It's like you don't even need to see the code. And I remember people online about it. And three, four months, maybe five months after that, Karpathy came out and kind of coined the term vibe coding. And then sort of...
I remember that tweet and everybody was like, oh my god, the world has changed. Everybody can vibe code now.
Yeah, exactly. But it's great. I mean, that's why I've been dreaming on for a long time. But now sort of the mission of Replit sort of evolved. I think we've achieved the mission of like anyone can program. I think it is more like how do you deploy your creation? How do you share them? How do you scale them? How do you maintain them in the enterprise? How do you govern them? How do you control costs? There's so many second-order effects and complications that come with giving that power to a lot more people, and now we're solving those.
I'm curious because, you know, you've been doing this for so long, and the thing that strikes me, and we'll get into a little bit of like the AI doomerism and all of that stuff and what it means for society and jobs and all that stuff, but it seems like the big kind of unlock of AI is that it's kind of expertise on tap, right? It's like you don't have to be a coder to code, right? And so I'm curious, you know, one, do you code anymore? What do you think this means for software? Because part of the narrative is like, look, no one needs to code anymore. But also, you still need coders, I would guess, because you also need to be like, well, something's going wrong here. Something's not working. I need to like, you know, you need the mechanic. You need somebody to open the hood and be like, oh, okay. Hey, it's your carburetor or it's your fan belt or whatever. But I'm just curious of like how you think about that and what you're seeing out there in the world.
I think you'd need coders because there is a risk, I don't think that's talked about much, but there is a risk in which we stop understanding the systems. And I think you still need people to understand the systems. I think that if you fully vibe coded an app and like you said, there's something that's really deeply wrong, I think you can still get out of it with enough prompting and AI and enough tokens at the problem, but it's probably better if you have people that can peer under the hood. But I don't know for how long that will last because I think at some point, right now we have this bit of inefficiency where AI is writing high-level programming languages. High-level programming languages were invented for humans. And at some point I think it cuts the middleman and goes straight to object code or some other invention where it's like more efficient. And so I think we're at some point that the whole way the AI codes will change and then maybe you don't need coders at all.
No, no, I build a lot of things just by prompting.
I'm curious how that interaction is for you again as a professional and somebody building a company like this. OpenAI recently came out with their ad for their Astra model and we were talking about it on the pod the other week. And what was really interesting, it was kind of a subtle, not so subtle choice of like they were showing people interacting with the model. No one was sitting at a computer. Everybody was just talking to the machine, right? No one was typing anything. And I thought that was a really interesting thing because, you know, the voice, you know, transcription and instant transcription is so good now that they're like, yeah, a lot more people are just talking to their machines and it opens up this whole new universe of what a computer is and how we interact with it. I'm just wondering if that's what you're seeing. Is that how things happen inside your company or not? There's some voice, but I don't see a lot of that.
I think a lot of people would prefer to just talk to their computers. And I mean, you know, you start to see that with Siri. You know, I remember like seeing like just older people who interact with their iPhone entirely through Siri, although it doesn't work half the time, but you know, it's just like much easier for them. And I think there's going to be large parts of the population that will just talk to their devices. And I think we're going to have new devices. I don't know if it's the new OpenAI device, but there's going to be new devices that are entirely operated by voice. That's for sure. I think the movie Her is a good prediction of where the future is headed, especially for like deeply personal devices. I think professionals will always have a keyboard. Like especially with open offices, imagine like you walk around, everyone's like talking. Doesn't make a lot of sense.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't want to dictate that email to HR out loud in the office necessarily.
Yeah, exactly. But I think there's an important point underlying your question, which is I think what Astra, the big thing that I think about Astra that wasn't covered very well is that finally computer use models are good. Like we've had computer use models since 2024 and they've been terrible. Now for the first time, Astra actually can operate an Excel sheet, can operate PowerPoint, can operate all these things. And so the big change, whether it's voice or chat, is that less and less people will open apps. And that's going to be a very interesting change because you can just talk to the agent.
Right, because the app economy is quite large. I mean, if you look at, you know, the Apple services arm alone is like a Fortune 50 company and it's all basically the app store.
100%. And, you know, we're thinking about what that does to our business because we make, you know, famously make apps. And I think increasingly we're starting to get our agents to solve the problem directly. So oftentimes you might put a prompt that's shaped like an app, but actually you want the agent to just do it. You know, recently I built an app with Replit to kind of manage my email, which has become really hard to manage, especially with all the AI slop that people send me. And I actually stopped using that app and I started using Replit directly to kind of write code against my Gmail and like do everything I need to do via the coding agent and the other computer use agents.
Right, right. And just a bit about the company, you raised a bunch of money. I think it was 400 million. Is that right? It was your latest round.
And I was stunned. Not at the number. That's like, you know, that's like small potatoes these days. But 400 million is a lot of money. And it was a Series D, i.e. your fourth funding round in a decade. Which I was like, wow. You know, because we're getting into the H's, J's, K's, you know, for some of these bigger companies. And I was looking at some of the coverage and it looks like you guys are headed toward about a billion dollars in annual run rate for revenue. What are you seeing in terms of just the uptake of this? And like, is there an example that kind of captures what you're unleashing? Like, I'm making this up. A fisherman in Louisiana who's like, let me create a website or an app that helps me do this or sell my fish or whatever. What does this actually look like on the ground?
Actually, there is a fishing sports company in the UK that's entirely built on Replit that's, you know, according to the founder, it's probably worth $20 million now.
Yeah. So, just give me, it's like improv. Give me a word. I'll tell you an example of a company I've seen. Speaking of the UK, because we were just there opening our office, there's a teacher that built an app for her students, but turns out it is actually much more useful than just for her students. And now, like, first day on the App Store, 2,000 downloads on it, I think a lot more right now. I don't think she's monetizing it yet, but I think she will. And we've had people who made millions of dollars. You know, I don't know if you saw the New York Times coverage of the like two brothers that were headed to a billion.
Oh, is this selling GLP-1s?
Yeah, at least a portion of that is like managed through Replit. And then there's like a lot of social impact apps that are not necessarily monetized. There is, you know, recent fires in Canada and someone built like a community app where people coordinated help each other. There was also an issue, I think a flood in Dagestan, people built an app for that. The, you know, Gaza flotilla project, the app kind of was built on Replit. And there's a lot of like political civic engagement type of applications that's pretty cool. And then there's the enterprise applications. At an enterprise, the use cases tend to be from we're building a fundamentally new app. And so we want our product people to kind of go prototype and figure out what's the next business or application that we're going to build. Or we're trying to make our business more efficient. So we're building a lot of internal tools to kind of make sure or like automations to make the business run better. I know some of our customers are Visa, AAX, Zillow, Meta, and a few others.
