Replit CEO: Why the SaaS Apocalypse is Justified & Why Coding Models are Plateauing | Amjad Masad

We’re approaching a certain plateau in how good coding models could get. The cost question is secondary to the performance question. When you focus on cost, you reach a certain asymptotic plateau in the S-curve. I think, for all intents and purposes, IDEs are dead. The name of the game is just staying 1, 2, 3, 4, 10 steps ahead.

Amjad, dude, I’m so excited for this. I’ve wanted to make this one happen for a while, so thank you so much for joining me once again today.

My pleasure. Great to be here.

We were just chatting about the desert Replit’s been through and the amazing position you’re in today. Did it take a long time for the world to see what Replit was, or did technology take a long time to catch up to your vision of what it could be?

1. Replit Makes Building Accessible

It’s more the latter. The core insight that I had, even before we started the company—maybe at this point 20 years ago—was that software is much more transformative than we actually think it is. Mark Andreessen wrote, “Software is eating the world,” and all of that, but I thought it was transformative for people’s lives and for the prospects of wealth creation, wealth distribution, entrepreneurship, all of that.

It’s my story: the impact it had on my life as a kid growing up in Jordan, coming to the US, and now running a multibillion-dollar company. I’d seen that even earlier than that. When I was 15, I built a little business. I was making hundreds of dollars, and that was an amazing amount of money for me. I took my entire class to McDonald’s when it opened up in Amman, and that was the core insight.

Initially, when I came to the US, I worked at Code Academy, and the goal was, “Let’s teach everyone how to code. Let’s make it as simple as possible.” I started seeing the stories back then, too. If a fitness guy learns a little bit of coding, launches an app on the App Store, and makes $1 million, it’s like, “Wow, this is amazing.”

When we started Replit in 2016, the goal was: How do you make programming more accessible? How do you get to a point where there are 1 billion developers, not just 20 million developers at the time? We started solving one problem at a time: the development environment, the hosting environment, package management, maintenance, iteration, version management, multiplayer.

But there’s one bottleneck, and that is that people don’t want to learn how to code. It took me a long time to really accept that because I became the learn-to-code guy. In March 2025, when I was in TPBN and said, “I no longer think you should learn how to code,” it went super viral. People were pissed. “How could you say that?”

It’s just the realization that there are people who are now successful—we were talking about Jason Lemkin from SaaStr earlier—who are building multimillion-dollar businesses solo with no developers. They don’t need to learn how to code. They need to learn how to create; they need to learn how to build.

The real unlock wasn’t just AI. It was AI that could take actions over a long horizon. We’ve had AI since 2021 and 2022 with GPT-3, but the unlock in 2024 was agentic AI. That was the first glimpse of it, and we had to build a lot of infrastructure around it to make it work.

2. Building Beyond The Models

Dick Coleman, how much of the magic is what you build versus the performance of models beneath you?

It is a dance, I would say. Think about Elon Musk when he did self-driving 1.0, before version 13 or whatever, when it became end-to-end. They had to write a lot of software. They had to write a lot of classical computer-vision-type software in order to make it work, but then they went to end-to-end learning.

There’s this thing that happens in AI, and as a founder, it’s really important to understand this. At any given point, you have to plug in a lot of holes in order to build the most advanced thing that you can build. In September 2024, we had to build a lot of infrastructure and guardrails in order to make agents work. In March 2025, when we released Agent V2, we had to delete a lot of that code because the models got a lot better at staying consistent.

But then you upgrade your vision. In September 2025, we released Agent 3, and that was the most autonomous agent on the market. It was the first to run for hours on end. Again, we had to write a lot of software in order to make it stay on track.

Now, since Opus 4.6, autonomy is built into the model. You have to understand what the model capability is and how much infrastructure you have to build in order to make it perform. You have to stay ahead of that in order for your product to stay the most innovative on the market.

When you look at your model usage today, I’ve heard you say before, when I was listening to your prior shows, that you have a preference for Anthropic. What does the model usage look like across different providers today?

Anthropic has been the workhorse for over a year. It’s the core agent loop because it can run coherently for a long time. But a few things have changed. Google’s Gemini models are the best at price-performance, for example. Given their price, where do they sit on the Pareto frontier?

For tasks like code search, we might create a subagent that is cheaper and has good-enough performance, and we offload that from the main core loop. I wrote this thesis back in 2022. I called it “The Society of Models.” Now we use models from every provider. At some point, we were sending more tokens to Google than we were sending to Anthropic, despite Anthropic being the core workhorse.

There’s this concept of agent labs. We talk about AI labs, but there are agent labs—you know, us, Cursor, and some of these other companies.

Our goal is to start with the user problem: what are we trying to fix, what are we trying to build, and then walk back to the technology and use whatever model we need to use. In some cases, we build our own models.

That was going to be my question. Amjad, the reason why the show's become more and more successful is because I bluntly ask more and more direct questions. Cursor decided to build its own model. When we look at other players across different verticals, it's always been a mistake to build your own model. Was Cursor's decision to build its own model, and your decision to, in some cases, build your own model, a mistake, because equivalent model performance has just always come alongside you?

It ebbs and flows. Again, AI is such a changing landscape. The answer will change every 3 to 6 months.

When you're investing your team and your resources in that, you have to weigh whether it's worth that 3-month advantage, no?

Right. You do, and that's why it makes it so freaking hard and why you have to change your mind all the time, right? Because there's a lead-up time, but the most important thing is optionality. So, in 2023, when we were training models, we achieved better coding performance than the state-of-the-art models at the time, GPT-3.5, right? But then, since Sonnet came out, and later Opus, the gap has closed by a lot, and they were spending tens of billions of dollars, if not hundreds of billions of dollars, making agents work. That would've been a dumb strategy for us to go and try to compete on that.

But now I would say the opportunity has opened up again for other reasons. The open-source models are getting really good, and we're approaching a certain plateau in how good coding models could get. So you can use your data to fine-tune a model specifically for your use case. I don't know if you saw, but Intercom talked about its new model that is better at customer support than the frontier models. Maybe their model's going to be state of the art for 3 to 6 months, and maybe 6 months from now the models will zoom back ahead.

How do you analyze that? Is it better to be 3 months ahead and spend the money? How important is it to be ahead for 3 months?

It's very important. It's a matter of closing a large enterprise deal. We're constantly getting baked off against everything under the sun, right? We're winning most of our enterprise deals because our product is consistently ahead of the market.

The thing that I always hear is that we're using frontier models to basically set benchmarks. We're seeing where those benchmarks lie, and then we're switching to open source to get as close to them as possible with much more efficiency in terms of cost. Is that the future?

It depends, right? The cost question is secondary to the performance question, especially at a time when it's flush with capital. When you focus on cost is when you reach a certain asymptotic plateau in the S-curve. You don't foresee a massive improvement specifically in your domain.

Intercom might say, “We don't predict that models are going to get that much better at customer support for the foreseeable future. Therefore, we can focus on building our own, or there's a data flywheel that we can get, or there's a cost advantage that we get.” But if you focus on cost at the expense of performance, you're going to lose. It's similar to any era in tech, right? Whether it's cloud, mobile, or SaaS, there are moments in time where the goal is growth, performance, and being at the edge. Then, when things rationalize—Uber and Lyft, when things rationalize—you focus on your gross margins.

I think there's this idea, in all transparency, that your Replits, your Base44s, and your Lovables—and you might kill me for putting you in that bucket—but is it bluntly that, of every $100 that you make, $80 goes to the model providers?

For us, it's not 80. It's way less than that, but it is a significant portion, like anyone. Even Anthropic: every $100 they make, $60 goes to Nvidia. Their margins are public. It's 40%, right? They're also massively subsidizing their service.

Can I be blunt? What are your margins, and how have they changed over time?

They've changed quite a bit. I said last year that we were close to profitability. In programming, there's an old saying: “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” As a programmer, if you think about performance and optimization early on, you're going to make the wrong decisions. So the reason margins keep moving around is that we're trying to build the best product. After we build the best product possible, we look around and say, “Okay, there are so many ways we can optimize.” Then we go into an optimization period.

When we think about price sensitivity, how do you think about essentially routing different behaviors, where some models are actually okay for certain things and some need the frontier? How do you think about intelligent model selection for different functions?

I would say that is the core competency and IP of an agent lab. If you think of yourself as an agent lab, you have this tacit knowledge of first evaluating models. I think about our AI engineers as psychologists in many ways. When a model comes out, the first thing they do is sit down with it for a day or two. They play around with it, plug it in, and say, “Okay, what are the limits? What can it do?”

That's more like the tacit aspect of it, which is very easy to underestimate. The reason Replit is able to build state-of-the-art performance when a new model comes out, sometimes even better than the lab itself, is that we're big partners with Google, and Gemini is one of the best models at design. I would say our products are better at design using Gemini than Google's products. It's because we know how to evaluate these models and get the best performance out of them.

Then we have a bunch of proprietary benchmarks that we use, and finally, we do a lot of A/B testing as well. That's really what you're doing as a company that is building on top of foundation models.

How concerned should we be about the proliferation of Chinese models in Silicon Valley companies?

I'm not sure about this question. Is their intention to actually innovate and play in the market fairly? Is their intention to destabilize? Is their intention to destroy the value of U.S. AI labs? I don't know. There are reasons to be careful, and there are reasons to be optimistic about the progress.

Would you have a moral issue with using a Chinese model?

I don't think there's a moral issue per se. I don't think they're using slave labor or anything like that. I would have a security issue, especially since we have enterprise customers that depend on us for sensitive data and things like that. So we haven't taken that step yet, but I wouldn't preclude taking it in the future.

I would love to see a U.S. corporation investing in open source. It looks like Nvidia is making moves in that regard. But open source is going to be very important for us to actually have a free market around AI, because if we end up in an oligopoly of AI companies, there's actually an economic theory of how they'll naturally collude on price, and prices will not go down as fast as possible.

They'll also control how we use these AIs. They'll also not provide everything through the API and keep some of the models for themselves. I think it would be bad if we're in a situation where AGI or AI is only controlled by a few corporations. Open source is going to be very, very important. I would venture to say that maybe the U.S. government should start a consortium of companies that are creating the best open-source national model, so that the market stays competitive.

We mentioned Jason Lemkin earlier. He said something brilliant to me, which is, “Inference is the new sales and marketing.” Obviously, free is a large part of your business and many others in the space. Do you agree with Jason that inference is the new sales and marketing, and how do we think about that?

If you think about the hype period that we got with Claude Code and Codex toward the end of 2025 and early 2026, a lot of it was driven by how many free tokens they were giving out. Every other day, they were saying, “Oh, it's 50% more tokens, or fewer rate limits,” and things like that. So it's clear that companies are using inference as a way to loop people in, and I think agentic development is addictive.

I think it's a better kind of addiction than social media or passive consumption. It's creative addiction, which is kind of good. Companies are realizing that a way to rope people in is through a lot of free tokens. Now, there is a question about retention, but I don't disagree fundamentally with the statement that you can use free tokens to acquire users.

3. Product Teams Become Builders

Enterprises will try things in certain respects. I was chatting to Jason Lemkin before, and he said, “Your number one ICP is product teams.” As product teams code or vibe more, what do they do okay in 2 to 3 years? How do they think about those functions?

There's a big question about how product teams will look in the future. If I were to make a prediction, I would say that we'll still have engineers inside the organizations.

Those engineers are responsible for more infrastructure, AI, ML, embedded systems, and low-level engineering. Then you have product organizations, and product organizations will have people who tilt a little more technical, people who tilt a little more toward design, and people who tilt a little more toward product, but you're not really calling them anything different. They're product builders, and their responsibility is to figure out what to build next.

I agree with Jason that a lot of the ICP right now is product, but one thing I'm really excited about is operations teams, and they're kind of underserved. Operations teams are sitting at the nexus of a lot of data flow. Typically, they'll buy a lot of SaaS software. They're typically not happy with it because there are all these SaaS tools siloing the data.

They try a lot of automation software that doesn't work very well. They have a lot of Excel sheets and a lot of manual work. We see a lot of our customers building quote configurators for their sales team, automating their deal desk, and automating support operations. When they use Replit, the return on investment is as good as, if not greater than, it is for product teams.

With product teams, you're cutting down the product development lifecycle, which is hugely valuable. With operations teams, you're actually being more efficient. You're selling more, reducing headcount, or needing fewer people.

4. The SaaS Apocalypse Is Justified

You said ops have a lot of tools that they're not happy with. That has led to the SaaS apocalypse and a lot of people believing in a deterioration of value in a lot of these public companies. Is that exaggerated, or is it just cause for concern that they've lost the market caps they have?

I'll tell you what we're seeing in enterprise. We're not seeing people rip out Salesforce or Workday, or really fundamental—I think the hype term is “systems of record”—type SaaS tools. Instead, they're building on their APIs, and we're creating MCPs and hooks into the HubSpots of the world, Salesforce, and all of that.

But there's also another side where we have this great partnership with Databricks, and people are skipping the SaaS tools entirely and building on top of their data warehouse. There's another view on this where the system of record is actually your data warehouse, and this is a way to be bullish on Databricks and companies in that space.

Well, that goes to a statement that Jason has made, though, which is that it is justified, because what you're seeing is the maiming of SaaS company growth. If you have 20–30% of customers or users using Databricks as their warehouse, and that maims that audience for the corp like SaaS public companies, that's enough to cause growth to decline significantly.

I would agree with that. A lot of vertical SaaS is in trouble as well. Maybe you don't think of it as a system of record; there's a lot of survey SaaS software, and we see that getting replaced wholesale with Replit.

On the other side, there are a lot of micro-entrepreneurs starting on Replit today, and they're undercutting the price of a lot of SaaS companies out there, especially vertical point solutions. There's another pricing pressure there as well.

What about the traditional incumbents in our space? I'm thinking of Squarespace and Wix. What happens to them?

If you look at the behavior of Wix, it looks like they're pouring everything into Base44.

Is Wix now Base44, basically?

I don't know much about their company, but it looks like they're spending a lot on ads, definitely behind Base44.

What did you think of the Super Bowl?

I haven't heard that many people talk about it, but I think it's good that people are getting vibe coding out there and more people are talking about it. I don't think it's in the public consciousness yet.

5. Maintenance Makes Agents Useful

How do you think about maintenance in this case? You have ops teams building tools. You have entrepreneurs building tools. You have to maintain these fuckers. It's hard enough running a business. I have to maintain this now?

This is where Replit shines. If you talk to Jason or some of our other customers, Replit goes way further than any other vibe-coding product in creating more maintainable software. Part of the reason Replit has been slightly more expensive than others is that we do a code review for every code change that we make. We spend as many tokens on maintenance as we spend on creating the software.

Replit also has a built-in tester. If you enable all the power features, whenever the agent writes code, it goes into a testing phase, spins up a browser, and tests everything in the app. It goes into a code review session, reviews that, kicks it back to the coding agent, and gives it feedback: “The test failed here. The code review is not good.”

People enjoy looking at the code review agent because it's kind of a dick. It will say, “This looks like AI-generated slop.” It will actually say that. Then it goes back.

We're also building agents that are sitting in production software. We already have security agents sitting in enterprise deployments, monitoring activity, monitoring packages, and monitoring for supply-chain attacks. The thing about AI is that any problem AI creates, there's more AI that you can build to solve that problem.

Have you been surprised by how price-sensitive people are around security and code reviews?

Not in our segment. I would say in the engineering segment—we have some engineers who use Replit—but 75% are non-engineers. Engineers are more price-sensitive because they have a lot of options. They can use a lot of different products on the market.

When you're an operations manager using Replit and you just saved $10,000 on SaaS software, you've saved another $200,000 on headcount, and you're spending an additional $1,000 just to make sure that the software is more secure, that's a no-brainer. The ROI has been a hundredfold for companies we work with.

On the consumer side, there's more price sensitivity, especially if I'm an entrepreneur just dipping my toes in, which is why we reduced the price on our Core plan. I think there's going to be different models for different use cases or different parts of your journey. If you're just starting out, you don't want to be hit with a $1,000 bill. You want to be able to play around with $20 or $30 before you commit.

Is Core a loss leader? Are you saying, “I'm willing to lose money on Core for the conversion to Pro”?

Yeah, it's sort of become a bit of the new freemium, because you can't totally run an amazing free tier when tokens are still very, very expensive. You want people to pay something to recoup some of the losses. But as a greater percentage of revenue comes from enterprise and Pro, we're willing to subsidize the cost of Core a little more.

Token costs today: how do they change over the next 3 years? Do they get 50% cheaper or 10 times cheaper?

It's an interesting question because there are different ways to slice it. You can look at the price of intelligence. The price of intelligence has gone down tremendously. It's really hard to quantify, but everyone's spending way more on opens than they were spending on GPT-4, and they're getting way more intelligence and way more productivity out of that.

Pure unit price is not going down as much as people expected it to, and I think part of it is that we're living in a world where the true frontier of models is actually just between GPT-5 and Claude, so there's not a lot of pricing pressure. Now we're seeing Gemini catch up, and we're seeing open-source models catch up, so maybe as there becomes more pricing pressure, we'll see token unit prices go down.

I also don't think these companies are all that profitable, partly because the underlying chips are not all that cheap, and there isn't a lot of competition. At the bottom, everyone's running on NVIDIA, and there's not much competition there. NVIDIA has amazing margins, especially for a hardware company. What is it, 80%?

Yeah, it's pretty phenomenal. It's why it's the world's most valuable company. I'm confused about something. I'm confused about Cursor. Can you help me? This is Jason's question, so you can blame him. All the hard questions—just blame Jason.

Twitter says Cursor is completely dead. I don't have a single portfolio company that uses Cursor, but they just hit $2 billion in revenue. Is Cursor dead, or is this narrative completely bullshit?

I'll tell you a few principles. One is that the market is so large. The market for software is not just the market for SaaS, although that's part of it. It is an expanding market.

There's no existing TAM. You can say, “This is the TAM we're going after.” Some people will say—I think Sequoia at some point said it's the labor TAM, right? The knowledge-worker labor TAM. That could be it, but it's not like we're displacing labor. We're actually supercharging labor, so companies are becoming more productive.

It's an ever-expanding TAM, and it's going to be perhaps as big as the internet, if not more. I'm talking about just software generation broadly.

It’s vibe coding, AI-powered coding, fully agentic coding generation in general. I think it’s a hugely valuable market, and the world is large, and a lot of different companies will prefer different products. There are people at Replit today who still prefer to review every piece of code, and something like Cursor is good for that because it’s still sitting in an IDE. So there’s a portion of the market that still really likes that.

The other thing is, I think Cursor has done well at enterprise sales, and enterprise is a very sticky customer. Once they adopt something, it has to really fall tremendously behind, perhaps like GitHub Copilot, in order for people to replace it. I don’t think Cursor fell that far behind, right? They still use the latest agents, and they have a good agent harness.

I think Twitter is a distortion machine, and Twitter is like the inside of inside baseball. It is the people at the edge of AI adoption. I think if you’re constantly on Twitter—which is why I think VCs don’t have the best information landscape, because a lot of them just live on Twitter—the world is much larger than that.

6. IDEs Are Dead

Are IDEs dead? Will we have IDEs in 2 years?

I think, for all intents and purposes, IDEs are dead. I think they’ll limp along because, again, some engineers just love that control. But there’s no future in them in that no one’s going to be asking for the latest feature of IntelliSense or whatever. One part of IDEs was code intelligence. We call it intelligence, but it wasn’t very intelligent.

The autocomplete, the click-to-symbol—all of that stuff is irrelevant. So, in that sense, IDEs are dead because AI has eaten all of that. But in terms of people who want to see the code, I think there’s still a population of users who want that. I think there are still engineers working with software that they want to actually verify works.

For example, life-or-death software: if I’m writing mission-critical software for self-driving cars or for a NASA or SpaceX mission, I think there’s always going to be a need for some kind of IDE.

I’d be pretty pissed if the autopilot on my plane had problems because of vibe coding with no IDE.

Yeah, that would be pretty sad. Even in planes, those kinds of software never adopted JavaScript, and the reason they never adopted JavaScript is because JavaScript is the original sort of vibe language. JavaScript didn’t have types, so you could run into errors.

But the reason why we adopted JavaScript is because web software was not going to kill anyone. If someone pushes a bug to Gmail, your Gmail isn’t going to die. Maybe it’ll be down for an hour, and that’s fine. So there are different risk appetites, and I think vibe coding follows the same thing, where it’s on the less risky type of software.

So if you’re a student listening to this, should you not study engineering at university? Should you not study computer science? How does this inform how you think about advising young people?

Before 2005, let’s say—which is when I went to school—people who went into computer science were very intrinsically motivated to understand computer science and exactly how computers work. They were hackers and really interested in programming.

After that, computer science became a hyped-up field because it was the easiest place to make money. We had the boot camps, and we had this whole thing, and computer science departments exploded because of that. Now, if you’re not into computer science, if you don’t feel like you’re drawn to it like a fly drawn to a light, then don’t go into it because someone told you you’re going to make a boatload of money working for Google. That’s gone.

It’s pretty dumb to tell people to go into computer science if they’re not really intrinsically interested in it. If you’re interested in it, I think there are still ways to contribute. You could get into ML and AI and go work at the big labs or a company like ours.

But if you’re thinking about university, the curriculums are not able to move at the pace of model progression. What would you advise me as a student?

I will say that the field of computer science, where you’re learning about data structures and algorithms, isn’t going to change. There’s always going to be a need for people to understand the underpinnings of computer science because we still need those people.

And do you think university is the best place to learn that?

It depends on the person. I think there are people who are autodidacts. I would consider myself someone who is very good at teaching myself, so it depends on you. If you’re really good, you can learn on the job, open the textbooks, and have the discipline to do that, you don’t have to go to a university.

But if you’re someone who likes the structure, who likes to meet other students and work with them, and likes the discipline that the university forces on you, then I think there’s still a place for a university.

Are companies going to be so much smaller in the future when you look at the capabilities of individual people? Do you buy the ideological Silicon Valley view that we’re just going to do more and be so much more capable? Or are you actually saying, “No, we will have dramatically smaller engineering teams”?

I see both. Jason is someone who wants to work with a very lean team. He’s doing better than when he had people on staff. Yesterday, I met an entrepreneur at a conference in DC who’s using Replit. I think he sells board games online, and he says, “It’s been so transformative for my business. We’ve saved so much money on SaaS. We’re selling more, so I decided to use the increased revenue and efficiency to hire more people.” He hired 8 more people.

There’s a customer case study we actually published on our site: Firecrown Media, a $60 million media company that owns magazines and different properties. They’ve been so successful using Replit for marketing automations and all sorts of things like that, they decided to hire more people who know how to do vibe coding in order to sell more, do more, and build more.

So it depends really on the kind of company. We see companies that are like, “We want to get leaner, and we want fewer people.” I think it’ll come down to the entrepreneur, the level of ambition, and how they want to run their company.

For us at Replit, I think what we want to try to eliminate or reduce is a lot of supporting roles. We want builders, right? We want builders, and we want salespeople because I think salespeople are still important. People really want to talk to someone to sell them software and teach them how to use it.

The sales role is also changing in that salespeople are becoming more like educators and transformation consultants. They go into companies, tell them how to use the product, and explain the best way to leverage this technology.

With the removal of other parts, or with fewer engineers, or with the removal of other parts of the organization and reduced headcount costs in those areas, are you able to justify sales reps moving down ACV categories or ranges because you don’t have the cost elsewhere in the business?

There are a lot of companies that now have self-serve enterprise, especially in AI, because there’s so much demand that you can justify that. But traditional SMBs still need some hand-holding, and typically the cost of sale is higher because you have so much supporting staff.

If you’re willing to spend an hour or 2 talking to a customer and onboarding them, and perhaps a few hours for the rest of the year supporting them, and the contract size is $10,000 or $15,000, I think you’re right. It’s possible that becomes more of a thing.

What worries you today? Are you positive about the future? Are you negative? And not just about software development—about life. I know it sounds weird and macro.

7. Apple Blocks Replit

Actually, let me tell you about Replit first and what worries me there. We’ve gone through this: first they laugh at you, and then they—I forgot the quote exactly—but we’re at the point where then they attack you, right?

It’s now been publicly reported that Apple is sort of blocking the Replit app. Replit has been on the App Store since 2022, doing exactly the same thing: allowing people to generate or write code and run it in a browser window. Suddenly, they’re saying that we’re not complying with their guidelines, and we’ve been stuck in app review for now 3 months. We haven’t been able to push an update.

Again, we’ve been on there for 4 years. We’ve passed 100 Apple App Store reviews, and suddenly Apple has decided that they don’t want this category. Other apps in the category are also getting affected.

I’m sorry. What is the reasoning behind that? They think that your apps are not as high quality, that they’re AI slop, and that they’re making discovery harder in the App Store?

They’re just telling us we’re not in compliance with their guidelines, and we’ve shown them repeatedly—

But peeling that back one layer more, it’s like they’re—

They're fearful that it's going to—

I don't know because they're accepting apps made on Replit. They're accepting them into the App Store. I tweeted about one yesterday. The acceptance rate is very high. If they think that what we're generating is slop, they could have said that. Second, they wouldn't have accepted the apps that are being made with Replit. So it doesn't seem like—

So then what is the reason, Amir? You're a smart dude. I'm a hopefully relatively smart dude. There is a reason behind that.

I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, and I want to say that perhaps they're trying to figure out what their posture is here, and perhaps the delay is just because they're trying to figure that out.

Posture with regard to what? How they—

With regard to vibe coding.

How many?

With regard to vibe coding and how people are going to be using that on the App Store. Look, maybe they're concerned that people are going to be circumventing the App Store rules. That's not what we do. Maybe there are other apps in the category that do that, and they looked at the category as a whole and were like, “Okay, let's put a pause on this.” But we're not doing that.

We are just making it possible for people to make apps. If their concern—and maybe that's their concern—is that people are going to be making apps and getting around the App Store, that is not what we do.

How detrimental is that to your business? When you think about Apple putting up that additional barrier or challenge, is that like, “Fuck,” or is that like, “Eh, we'll get over it. We've faced many before”?

I've been building this company for a decade, and the fact that we're such an important force in the world, in the culture, and in how the world is reacting to this technology is a good thing. It means that we are achieving our mission. We're important.

I never thought it was going to be easy, and I'm ready for the challenges to come. I actually like challenges. Life is much more interesting when there's a little bit of fight in it.

I think it's important to have a common enemy in a team. Amjad, you can shoot one: Claude Code, Lovable, or Base44. Which one do you shoot?

I don't really think that way. We—

If it's not a name, I'm going to tell Jason. The next word is a name, Amjad.

I'll tell you that they're all going to copy what Replit does. Replit is setting the roadmap for everyone. That's fine by me, but what I really like is innovation—building the next thing that can really change how people think about software.

I feel very proud that this agentic revolution was really kick-started by Replit Agents in 2024. The name of the game is staying 1, 2, 3, 4, 10 steps ahead.

Right, dude. We're going to do a quick-fire round. I'll say a short statement, and you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

Yep.

What have you changed your mind on most in the last 12 months?

How fast to scale our sales organization. I always wanted to build a hyper-efficient company, and Replit is extremely efficient for our size and valuation. But given how much interest we have in the market, I think we should hire as many salespeople as we can to go sell to these people.

Who would you most like to have on the board who you don't have on it yet?

I would like to have an operator who's 2 decades ahead of me or something like that—a CEO who's been in the weeds building a company from scratch, but went public and reached way past where I've gotten. We have a lot of VCs, and they're amazing, but no one who's actually an operator.

Tell me, when I say “high performance,” who do you think of first, and why them?

It's such a cliché, but obviously Elon. The reason is the amount of things that you can do at the same time—the number of things. Before that, Steve Jobs running Pixar and Apple. I'm dead by the end of the week running 1 company. How can you do 2? That is an enigma to me. How can you do 5?

What do you invest in for yourself that has been a game changer? I hope it's not too personal, but you've lost a lot of weight.

Yeah.

You look fantastic, dude.

Yeah.

Tell me about that.

Losing the weight has actually been 3 years. I always yo-yoed my weight depending on my stress level at the company, and I decided in 2023 that I'm going to take 3 years to get healthy.

Instead of sprinting and working out 5 days a week and then burning out, I'm going to work out 1 day a week. I started working out 1 day a week, and then my energy levels improved. I lost some weight. Okay, now I'm going to add another day a week. Now I'm going to add another habit. Let's add a walk. Let's add a bit of stretching.

It's so slow. I want to get healthy over the next 5 years, and that's been a major game changer. I'll just add another habit every once in a while. It's very simple stuff. Let's add a walk. Let's add a sauna once a week.

I really love sauna and cold—hot and cold. It's like a reset. It forces you—I'm someone who's constantly thinking, and I tried meditation and all that stuff, and it's really hard for me. When I go into a sauna and get burnt and then go into ice-cold water, you can't think. Your mind freezes, and that forces me into a meditative state for the next hour or so.

What is the biggest piece of advice to a new parent, given all you know now about parenting?

Don't stress out. I think it's the difference between the first kid and the second kid, and every parent will tell you, let alone with the third kid. The first kid is like, “Oh, it's nap time. We have to go do the nap thing. We have to do exactly that and measure this and that,” and you're measuring everything. You're doing everything.

Babies are quite resilient. Humans have been around for 100,000 years. We know instinctively how to raise a child, and I think taking it a little easy on yourself is probably the best advice.

Final one for you. What do you know now that you wish you'd known when you started Replit?

The feeling of product-market fit. You can deceive yourself into thinking you had product-market fit at different points. You'll get a few customers: “Oh, that's product-market fit.”

Real product-market fit—and people will say it, but you can't really internalize it—is the idea that the product is getting pulled out of your hand. You can't even provide it fast enough. I think if I understood that earlier on, perhaps I would have searched for it faster, harder, or things like that.

As an entrepreneur wanting to build not a lifestyle business or small business, but a venture-scale business, you have to find that moment. You have to keep pivoting and changing. Perhaps you don't change your vision, but keep searching until you find that explosive demand.

Dude, I've so enjoyed this. I so appreciate you letting me go wayward, but you've been fantastic, so thank you so much for joining me.

Appreciate it, man. Thank you.