Replit CEO：为什么 SaaS 末日是应得的、编程模型为何进入平台期（20VC）
Replit CEO: Why the SaaS Apocalypse is Justified & Why Coding Models are Plateauing | 20VC
We're approaching a certain plateau in how good coding models could get. >> And so, we could not have a more relevant guest than Amjad Masad, co-founder and CEO at Replit, joining us in the hot seat. >> Cost question is secondary to the performance question. When you focus on cost is when you reach a certain asymptotic plateau in the S curve. >> is reshaping what it means to be a great product manager, product leader, and Replit is one of the leading vibe coding tools alongside the likes of lovable.
>> The name of the game is just staying one, two, three, four, 10 steps ahead. >> This was an incredible discussion with Amjad, and I'm really excited for you to hear it. >> For all intents and purposes, IDEs are dead. >> Ready to go? >> 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 kind of the desert that Replit's been through and like the amazing position 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? >> It's It's more of the latter, right? So, 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 than we actually think it is.
You know, Marc Andreessen wrote you know, software's eating the world and all of that, but I thought it's transformative for for people's lives and for the prospect of wealth creation, wealth distribution, entrepreneurship, all of that. Well, it's It's sort of my story, you know, the impact it had on my life, you know, as a kid growing up in Jordan, coming to the US and now running a multi-billion dollar company. And I've seen that even earlier than that.
When I was 15, I built I built a little a little business. I was making hundreds of dollars and that was amazing amount of money for me. I took my entire class to McDonald's when it when it when it opened up in Amman and and so that was the kind of the core insight. And initially when I came to the US, I was I worked at Code Academy. And the goal was like, let's teach everyone how to code. Let's make it as simple as possible.
And I started seeing the stories back then even. Like if a fitness guy learns a little bit of coding, launches an app on the App Store, makes a million bucks. I was like, wow. This is this is amazing. And so when we started the company Replit in 2016, the goal was how do you make programming more accessible? How do you get to a point where there's a billion developers, not just, you know, 20 million developers at the time.
But the And so we started solving one problem at a time, right? Solving the development environment. Replit was the first in-browser IDE. Solving the hosting environment, solving the package management, the maintenance, the iteration, the version management, the multiplayer we solved all these problems. But there's one bottleneck. And that is people don't want to learn how to code. And it took me a long time to really accept that because I I became the learn to code guy.
And in in I think March 2025, when I was in TBPBN and I said, "I no longer think you should learn how to code." It went super viral. People were pissed. How could you say that? And and and it's just a realization that there are people that are now successful. You know, we were talking about Jason Lemkin earlier from Saastr. People that are building multi-million 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. And and the real unlock wasn't just AI. It was AI that could do actions over long horizon, right? So we we've had AI since 21 22 with GPT-3. But the unlock in 2024 was agentic AI. And that was the first glimpse of it. And and we built we had to build a lot of infrastructure around it to make it work. >> Hey Koman, 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, you know, Elon Musk when he when he needed self-driving 1.0, you know, for version 13 or whatever, which was end-to-end. They had to write a lot of software, right? They had to write a lot of classical, you know, computer vision type software in order to make it work. But then they went to end-to-end learning. So there's this this thing that happens in AI, and as a founder it's really important to understand this.
You 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. So September 2024, we had to we had to build a lot of a lot of infrastructure, a lot of guardrails in order to make agents work. March 2025, when we released agent V2, we had to delete a lot of that code because the models got a lot better at at at staying consistent. But then you you you upgrade your vision, right?
And so 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. And again, we had to write a lot of software in order to, you know, make it stay on track. And now, since Opus 4.6, autonomy is built into the model. And so, you you have to understand what is the model capability and how much infrastructure you have to build in order to make it perform, and you have to stay ahead of that in order for your product to stay the most innovative on the on the market.
>> When you look at your model usage today, I've heard you say before when I was obviously listening to your prior shows that you have a preference for Anthropic. What does the model usage look like across different providers today? >> Yeah. So, Anthropic, the it you know, has been the sort of workhorse for for over over a year right now. It's it's like the the the core agent loop because it can run for a long time coherently.
But, a few things have changed. Google's Gemini is models have are the best at price performance, for example. You know, given their price, where do they sit on the Pareto frontier, right? And so, for tasks, for example, like tasks like code search, we might create a sub agent that is that is cheaper and has good enough performance and we offload that from the main core loop, right? So, we now we use and I wrote this thesis back in '22, I called it a society of models.
Now, we use models from every provider. Actually, at some point we were sending more tokens to Google than we were sending to Anthropic despite Anthropic being that kind of the core workhorse. And so, there's this concept of agent labs, right? We we talk about AI labs, but there's agent labs, you know, us, Cursor, 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 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, sir. And the reason why the shows have become more and more successful is because I I currently ask more and more direct questions. Um Cursor decided to build their own model. When we look at other players across different verticals, it's always been a mistake to build own model.
Was Cursor's decision to build own model and your decision to in in some cases a mistake because the equivalent model performance has just always come alongside you. >> It ebbs and flows. Again, like AI is such a change changing landscape, the answer will change every three or six months. So, in 2023 when we train >> when you when you're investing your team and your resources then in that, you have to weigh off is it worth that three-month advantage, no?
>> Right, you you do and that's why it makes it so 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're training models, uh we achieved better coding performance than the than the state-of-the-art models of the time, GPT 3.5, right? Um but then since Sonnet came out or later Opus, uh the the gap has closed by a lot and they were doing they were spending tens of billions of dollars if not 100 billion dollars making agents work.
And that would that would have been a dumb strategy for us to go and and try to compete uh on that. But now I would say the opportunity opened up again for other reasons. Uh the the open-source models are getting really good. And we're you know, we're approaching a certain plateau in how good coding models could get. And so, uh you can use your data to fine-tune a model specifically for your use case. We I don't know if you saw but um Intercom yesterday talked about their new model that is better at customer support than the frontier models.
And so, maybe their model is going to be state-of-the-art for three to six months. And maybe six months from now, the the the models will like zoom back ahead. >> How do you analyze that? Is is it better to be three months ahead and spend the money? Like how important is it to be ahead for three months? >> It's very important. It's uh you know, it's it's a it's a it's a matter of closing a large enterprise deal like you know, we're constantly getting baked off against everything under the sun, right?
And we're winning most of an enterprise deals because our product is is ahead of the market consistently. >> 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 as possible with much more efficiency in terms of cost. Is that the future? >> It depends, right? Like so cost question I think is secondary to the performance question, right?
Especially in a in a in a time when when it's flushed with capital. Uh I think when you focus on cost is when you reach a certain uh sort of asymptotic, you know, plateau in the S curve and you don't foresee um a massive improvement uh specifically in your domain. Like Intercom might say you know, we we don't predict that models are going to get that much better on customer support for the foreseeable future. Therefore, you know, we we can focus on on building our own or there's like a data flywheel that we can 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. Uh and so, you know, it's similar to any era in tech, right? Like it's cloud, it's mobile, it's a SaaS, whatever it is. The there are moments of time where where the goal is growth and performance and being at the edge and then when things kind of rationalize or Uber Lyft, when things rationalize, you you kind of focus on your gross margins.
>> I think there's this idea in all transparency that your Replits, your base 44s, your lovables and you might kill me for putting you in that bucket. But is it bluntly of $100 that you make, 80 bucks goes to the model providers. >> Uh for us it's not 80. It's it's it's way less than that. But but it is a significant portion like anyone like even like Anthropic every $100 they make 60 goes to Nvidia. Like you know their their margins are public it's 40% right?
I mean so and they're also massively subsidizing their their service. So it really >> Can I can I be blunt? What are your margins and how have they changed over time? >> They change quite a bit and there there are moments of time like I said last year like we were close to profitability. Uh and then and then we're like Agent Four is going to be this like massively parallel agent agent four is the most parallel agent in in the world right now.
You can like create 20 agents and have them all coordinate and and run and build your product 10x faster. Um but but but but then you know that's when we work on so Uh in in programming there's like this old saying premature optimization is the root of all evil. Because as a programmer if you think about performance and optimization early on you're going to make the wrong decisions. So the reason margins like keep moving around is like we are trying to build the best product.
And then after we build the best product possible then we look around we're like okay there's 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 IP of an agent lab right? If you think of yourself as an agent lab, you have this tacit knowledge first of evaluating models. Like I think about our AI engineers as kind of psychologists in many ways. When a model comes out, the first thing they do, they like sit down with it for a day or two, right? They play around with it, they plug it in, and they're like, "Okay, what what are the limits?
What can it do?" And then we plug it and and and that's more like the tacit aspect of it, right? Which is very easy to underestimate. But the reason Replit, when a new model comes out, we're able to build state-of-the-art performance um even better than the lab itself. Like 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 how to evaluate these models, how to get the best performance out of them. And then we have a bunch of proprietary benchmarks that we use. And finally, we do a lot of AB testing as well. So 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.
Like you know, um I I I guess I you know, it's a little bit above my pay grade to to tell you how what are the intentions of the Chinese Communist Party with regards to AI. Is their intention to actually innovate and and play in the market fairly? Is their intention to destabilize? Is their intention to destroy the value of of US AI AI labs? I don't know. Um I think there's there are reasons to be careful and there are reasons to be optimistic about the the progress.
Like what I see from Twitter >> Would you have a moral issue with using Chinese model? >> I don't think there's a moral issue per se. Like I don't think they're using slave labor or anything like that to to to do that. I would have a security issue, especially since we have enterprise customers that that depend on us for sensitive data and things like that. So we haven't taken the step yet. I wouldn't preclude it from taking in the future.
I would love to see a US corporation investing in open source. It looks like Nvidia is making moves in that 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're going to end up in an oligopoly of AI companies, then they you know, 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 them for themselves. And so I think that it would be bad if we're in a situation where AGI or AI is only controlled by a few corporations. So open source is going to be very very important. I would venture to say like maybe the US government should start a consortium of companies that are like creating the best open source national open source model so that the market stays competitive.
>> We mentioned Jason Lampkin earlier. He said something brilliant to me which is he said 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 on inference as the new sales and marketing and how do we think about that? >> Yeah, if you if you think about the hype period that we got with like Claude [snorts] code and Kodak's towards the end of 2025 or early 2026, a lot of it was driven by how much free tokens they were giving out or how much you know, every other day they're like, oh, it's 50% more more tokens or less 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. It's It's a I think the better kind of addiction than like social media or passive consumption. It's like creative addiction, which is kind of good, but I think companies are realizing that a way to kind of rope people in is is through a lot of free tokens. Now, there's a question about retention, but I don't disagree fundamentally with the statement that uh that uh you can use um free tokens to to to acquire users.
>> And enterprises will kind of try things in in certain respects. See, I was chatting to Jason Lemkin before and he said your number one ICP is product teams. As product teams kind of code or vibe more, what do they do okay in 2 to 3 years? How do they think about those functions? >> There's a 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, uh embedded systems, you know, more more, you know, low-level engineering. And then you have product organizations. And product organizations will have people that are like tilted a little more technical and have people tilted a little more design, have people tilted a little more product, but you're not really calling them anything different. They're like a 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 they're kind of underserved. Like uh operations teams are are sitting at the nexus of a lot of data flow. And typically they'll buy a lot of SaaS software. They're typically not happy with it because there's all these SaaS softwares like siloing the data. They try a lot of automation software that doesn't very well.
They have a lot of Excel sheets, a lot of manual work. And so, you know, we see a lot of our customers are building, you know, quote you know, quote configurators for their sales team, automating their deal desk, um you know, automating support operations. And when they use Retool, the the return on investment is as good if not greater than product teams. With product teams, you're you're cutting down product development life cycle, which is hugely valuable.
With operations teams, you're you're actually being more efficient, you're selling more, you're you reduce head count, or you need less less people. >> You said ops have a lot of tools that they're not happy with. That has led to the SAS apocalypse and a lot of people believing in kind of the deterioration of value in a lot of these public companies. Is that over exaggerated, or is it a just cause for concern that they have lost the market caps they have?
>> I'll tell you what we're seeing in enterprise. We're not seeing people rip out Salesforce, Workday, or like really fundamental I think they the hype term is uh system of record type SAS tools. And instead, they're building on their APIs and we're creating MCPs and hooks into the HubSpots of the world and Salesforce and all of that. But there's also another side where we have this great partnership with Databricks.
And people are skipping the SAS tools entirely and like building on top of their data warehouse. So, so you know, there's another view on this where the system of record is actually your data warehouse. And this is like a way to be bullish on on Databricks and companies uh in that in that space. Um where we're seeing >> goes to the statement that goes to the statement that Jason has said though, which is like then it is justified because what you're seeing is like the maiming of SAS company growth.
If you have 20 30% of customers or users who are using data bricks as their warehouse. And that means that audience for the core for the core like SAS public companies, that's enough to cause the growth to decline significantly. >> agree with that. I would agree with that. Now, a lot of vertical SAS is is in in trouble as well where, you know, maybe it's you don't think of it as like a system of record where like like a there's a lot of survey SAS software and we see that getting replaced wholesale with with Replit.
And then the other side of this, there's a lot of micro entrepreneurs and it's starting on Replit today and they're undercutting the price of a lot of SAS companies out there, especially, you know, kind of vertical point solutions. And then there's another pricing pressure there as well. >> What about the traditional incumbents in in our space who we're thinking of Squarespace, Wix. What happens to them? >> I mean, if you look at the behavior of Wix, they look like they they're like they're pouring everything to Base 44.
So, it seems like they're pouring everything to Base 44. Basically, I don't know much about their company, but it looks like they're spending a lot of ads definitely behind behind Base 44. >> What did you think of the Super Bowl? >> You know, I haven't heard that many people talk about it. I think it's it's good that people are, you know, getting vibe coding out there and and more people are talking about it, but I don't think it's public consciousness >> How do you think about maintenance in this case?
You have ops teams building tools. You have entrepreneurs building tools. You got to maintain these [ __ ] >> This is This >> Not enough running a business. I got to maintain this now? >> This is where Replit shines and and, you know, if you talk talk to Jason or some of our other customers, Replit goes way further than any other vibe coding product on creating more maintainable software. For example, and part of the reason Replit has been slightly more expensive than than others is that we do a code review for every for for every, you know, code change that we make.
So, we spend a lot of tokens on maintenance as much as we spend on creating that software. Replit is also has a built-in tester. So, if you enable all the power features, whenever you whenever the agent writes code, goes into a testing phase, spins up a browser, tests everything in the in the app, goes into a code review session, reviews that, kicks it back to the coding agent, gives it feedback, you know, the test failed here, the code review is not good.
And people enjoy looking at the code review agent cuz it's kind of a dick. It's like, this looks like AI-generated slop. It'll actually say that. >> >> And then and then it it goes back. We're also building um agents that are sitting in production software. So, we already have security agents right now that are sitting in enterprise deployments and are monitoring activity. And and they're monitoring packages, monitoring for supply chain attacks.
And so, the thing about AI, any problem AI creates, there's more AI that you can build to solve that problem. So, I think >> 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, um and we we have some engineers who use Replit, but 75% are non-engineers. A engineers are more price sensitive because they have a lot of options.
They can use a lot of different products on the on the market. Now, when when you're an operations manager using Replit, and you just saved $10,000 on a on a SaaS software, you've gained you've saved another, you know, $200,000 on on head count, and you're spending an additional thousand dollars just to make sure that the software is more secure, that's like a no-brainer. The ROI has been a hundredfold for for for companies we work with.
On the consumer side, there's more price sensitivity, especially if I'm [snorts] an entrepreneur just dipping my toes, which is why we reduced the price on our core plan. So, I think there's going to be and you you you you hinted at that earlier, there's going to be this 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 thousand dollar bill.
You want to be able to play around with twenty, thirty dollars before you commit. >> Totally get that. Is core a loss leader? Are you like, "Hey, I'm willing to lose money on core for the conversion to pay to pro?" >> Yeah, it's it's sort of like become a kind of a bit of a the new freemium because you can't totally run off like an amazing free tier. Because tokens are are still very very expensive. So, you want people to pay something to recoup recoup some of the losses.
But as the percentage of of a revenue becomes more enterprise, more pro, then we're willing to, you know, uh subsidize the cost of core a little more. >> Token costs today, how do they change over the next three years? Like, is it like they got 50% cheaper or like ten times cheaper? >> It's an interesting question because there's different ways to slice it. Um you can look at the price of intelligence. The price of intelligence have gone down tremendously.
It's really hard to quantify it, right? But like, everyone's spending way more on opens than they were spending on GPT-4, but they're getting way more intelligence, way more productivity uh out of that. Pure pure unit price is not going down as much as people expected it to go. Um and I think part of it is I think we're living >> Why is that? >> I think part of it is we're living in a world where the true frontier models is actually just between GPT-5 and and and Claude.
Um and and so there's not not a lot of pricing pressure. Now we're seeing Gemini catch up, we're seeing the open-source models catch up. And so maybe as as there become gets more pricing pressure, we'll we'll see we'll see token unit token prices go down. Also, the other thing is I don't think these these companies are all that profitable partly because you know, the underlying um chips are not all that cheap. Uh and there isn't a lot of competition.
We have sort of at bottom everyone's running in Nvidia and there's not much competition there. And Nvidia has amazing margins, especially for a hardware company. What is it? 80%? >> Yeah, it's pretty phenomenal. Uh it's why it's one of the most valuable company. Um I I'm confused with something. I'm confused with Cursor. Can you help me out? And this is Jason's question, so you can blame him. All the [ __ ] hard questions, just blame Jason.
Um Uh Twitter says Cursor is completely dead. I don't have a single portfolio company that uses Twitter. I don't know anyone that uses uh that uses Cursor, sorry. Um but they hit 2 billion in revenue. Is Cursor dead or is this narrative completely [ __ ] >> I'll tell you a few principles. One is the market is so large. The market for software is is not it's not just the market for SaaS, although it's part of that.
It is a market for 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 like I think Sequoia at some point said it's like the labor TAM, right? The the like knowledge worker labor TAM. That could be that. But it's not like we're displacing labor, we're actually supercharging labor. So companies are becoming more productive. Uh and so, it's a like an ever-expanding time and it's going to be perhaps as big as the internet.
Uh if if not if not more. And that's like I'm talking about just software generation broadly. It's five codings, AI-powered coding, is fully agentic coding. Coding generation in general, I think it's a it's a hugely valuable market. So, I think a lot of and the world is large and a lot of different companies will prefer for different products. There are people at Replit today that still prefer to look review every piece of code.
And something like Cursor is good good for that because it's it's still sitting in an in the IDE, right? So, there's a portion of the market that still really uh really likes that. And the other thing is I think um Cursor has done well at enterprise sales. And enterprise is a very sticky customer. Uh and once they adopt something, it has to really fall tremendously behind, perhaps like GitHub Copilot, in order for people to replace it.
And I don't think Cursor fell that that far behind, right? They still use the the the latest agents. They have like a good agent harness. Um and so, I think I think the I think Twitter is a distortion machine and Twitter is like the inside of inside of inside baseball. It is the people at the edge of like the adoption of of AI. So, I think if you're constantly Twitter, which why I think VCs uh don't have the best I think information landscape because a lot of them just live on on Twitter.
But the but the world is much larger than that. >> Are IDEs dead? Will we have IDEs in two years? >> I think I think for all intents and purposes, IDEs are dead. Uh I think they're they're you know, they limp along because again, some engineers just love that that control. But there's no future in them and that there's no one's going to be asking for like the latest feature of like intellisense or like what were IDEs like IDEs like one part were like the code intelligence.
We call it intelligence, it wasn't very intelligent. And so all of that is is is irrelevant. Like the auto complete, the click to symbol, all of that stuff is irrelevant. So in that sense, IDEs are dead cuz AI has like eaten all of that. But in terms of like you know, people who want to see the code, I think there's still a population of users that want that. I think there's still, you know, engineers that are working with software that they want to actually verify that it works.
For example, life or death software. If I'm writing like mission-critical software for self-driving cars or or 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 my autopilot on my plane had problems because of a vibe coded >> >> with no with no IDE. >> Yeah, that'll be pretty sad. I mean, is so I mean, even in planes and you know, those kind of software that we're talking about, they never adopted JavaScript.
And the reason they never adopted JavaScript is because JavaScript is a is the original set of vibe language because JavaScript didn't have types. You could like run into errors. But the reason why we adopted JavaScript is because web software was not going to kill anyone. Your Gmail, if someone pushes a bug to Gmail, not going to die. Maybe it'll be down for an hour and that's fine. So there's different risk appetites and I think vibe coding follows the same the same thing where it's it's it's on the sort of 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 CS? How does this inform how you think about advising young people. >> Before 2005, right? Let's say, which is when I went to school, uh people who went to the computer science were very intrinsically motivated in understanding computer science and understanding exactly how computers work, and they were like hackers and really interested in programming, right?
And then after that, computer science became a hyped-up field because you can it's the easiest place to make money, right? And we had the boot camps and we had this whole thing, and computer science uh 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 drawn to to a light, then don't go into it because someone tell told you you're going to make boatload of money working for Google.
That's gone. So, that it's pretty dumb to like tell people to go into computer science if they're not really intrinsically interested in it. Now, if you're interested in it, uh I think there's still ways to contribute. I think we You know, there's uh you can you can get into ML and AI and go work at at at like the big labs or or company like ours. You can get But if you're 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? Well, I I will say if if computer science is like this the field of computer science where you're like learning about um you know, data structures and algorithms, uh that's not going to change. So, if you And there's always going to be need for people to understand the underpinnings of computer science because we still need kind of those people. Uh but not >> universities are the best place to learn that?
>> Depends on the person. I think there are pers- there are people who are autodidacts. I would I would consider myself someone who is very good at teaching myself. And so it depends on on you. Like if you're really good and you can learn on the job and you can open the textbooks and you have the the discipline to do that, you don't have to go to university. But if you if you if you're someone who likes the structure, who likes to meet other students and work with them and and like the discipline of the university forces on you, then I think there's still place for 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 oh, you know, we're just going to do more and we're going to be so much more capable or are we actually like no, we we will have dramatically smaller engineering teams? >> I see I see both. So so Jason is someone who's who wants to work with a very lean team.
He's doing better at more than when we had when he had people on staff. Yesterday I met an entrepreneur at a conference in DC that's using Rap I think he sells board games online and he says it's been so transformative on my business. We've saved so much money on on SAS. We're selling more that I decided to use the increased revenue and efficiency to hire more people. He hired eight more people. There's a customer case study we actually published on our site, Firecrown Media, like a $60 million media company that owns magazines, different properties and they've been so successful using Rap for marketing automations and all sort of things like that that decided to hire more people that know how to do vibe coding in order to to to to to to sell more and do more and build more.
So it depends really on the kind of company, but we see companies that were like we want to get leaner and we want less people and I think it it'll come down to the entrepreneur, the level of ambition, what they want to run their company. For for for us at Repl it I think what we want to try to eliminate is uh or or reduce is a lot of supporting roles. We want builders, right? We want uh we want builders and we want sales people cuz I think sales people are like people just like really want to talk to someone to sell them software and to teach them how to use it.
And also the sales role is changing in that it sales people are becoming more like educators and uh transformation sort of consultants. They go into companies, tell them how to use the product, and and and what's the best way to leverage this technology. Um but >> With the with the removal of other parts or with with less engineers or with removal of other parts of the org, reducing head count cost 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?
>> It depends. There's a lot of companies that now have self-serve enterprise, right? Uh especially in AI because there's so much there's so much demand that you can sort of justify that. But let's say, you know, traditional SMBs still want need some some hand-holding. And uh you know, typically the the cost of sale is higher because you have so much supporting staff. But if you can have a commercial uh AE that that is you know, you're willing to spend like an hour or two talking to a customer and onboarding them, and perhaps a few few hours, um you know, for the rest of the year supporting them, and the contract size is like $10,000, $15,000, I think I think you're right.
It's it's possible that becomes more of a thing. >> What worries you today? Are you are you positive I I'm genuinely Are you positive about the future? Are you negative? And just So there not just about software development, about life. I know it sounds weird and macro. >> Well, actually let me tell you about Replit first and like what works with me there. We've gone through this, you know, first they laugh at you and then they I forgot the quote exactly, but we're at the point where like then they attack you, right?
Where, you know, it's now been publicly reported that, you know, Apple is is is sort of blocking the 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 running it in a in a browser window. Suddenly they're saying that we are you know, we're 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. And 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 other other apps in the category are also getting getting affected. >> I'm sure what the reasoning behind that is they they Sorry, I'm being disrespectful to you. They think that your apps are not as high quality and that AI is slop and that they're making discovery harder and harder.
>> us we're not in compliance with their guidelines and we've showed them repeatedly >> But like peeling that back one layer more, it's like they're fearful that it's going >> 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. There's the acceptance rate is very high. If they think that what we're generating is slop, they could have said that and and second, they wouldn't have accepted the apps that are being made with Replit.
So it doesn't seem like >> So then So then what is the reason I'm like you're a small dude, I'm a hopefully relatively small dude. Like there is a reason behind that. >> I I I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. I don't want to say that perhaps they're trying to figure out what is their posture here and perhaps the delays is just because they're trying to figure out figure that out. Um >> Posture with regards to what?
How do you >> to vibe coding. With regards to vibe coding and and how people are going to be using that on the App Store. Look, maybe they are 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 categories that do that and they looked at the category as all was like, okay, let's put a pause on this. But we're not doing that. We're not building an App Store.
We are just making it possible for people to make apps. And so if they are concerned and maybe that's their concern that 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 that additional barrier challenge? Is that like [ __ ] >> [panting] >> Or is that like We'll we'll get over face money before.
>> Yeah. Yeah, you know, like I I I've been on this mission again for for over a decade now and uh I've building this company for for a decade and you know, the fact that we're such a important force in the in the world in the culture in in how the world is like reacting to this technology is a good thing. And it means that we are achieving our mission. We're important. Now, I I never thought it was going to be easy and I'm ready for the challenges to come.
And I actually like like challenges, you know, life is much more interesting when there's a little bit of fight into it. >> I think it's important to have a common enemy in a team. I'm glad [clears throat] you can shoot one. Claude code, lovable or base 44, which one do you shoot? >> I don't really think that way. >> If it's not a name, I'm going to go 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 road map for everyone. Uh and that's fine. That's fine by me. But what I really like is innovation. It's like building building the next thing that can really change how people think about software. And and I feel very proud that this agentic revolution was really kick-started by Replit agents in 2024. So, it just the name of the game is just staying one, two, three, four, 10 steps uh ahead.
>> All right, dude. We're going to do a quick fire round. I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? >> Yep. >> What have you changed your mind on most in the last 12 months? >> Um how fast uh to scale our sales organization. I always wanted to build like a hyper-efficient company. Replit is extremely efficient for our size and valuation. But um I think that given how much interest we have in the market, uh I think we should hire as many sales people as we can to go sell these these people.
>> Who would you most like to have on the board who you don't have on it yet? >> I I would like to have an an an operator that's that's like, you know, two decades ahead of me or something like that. Um like a CEO that's been um been in the in the in the weeds and building a company from scratch but reached went public and reached, you know, uh way past where where what I've done. Because we have a lot of VCs and they're amazing, but no one who's actually an an operator.
>> Call Aneel Bhusri. He's a beast. >> Who's that? >> He was the CEO of Workday. And and now he's at Sequoia as a as a partner, but he was CEO for a long time. So, and he was at Adobe for many, many years. Um, tell me, when I say high performance, who do you think of first and why them? >> I mean, it's it's it's such a cliche, but like obviously Elon. And and the reason is like the amount of things that you can do at the same at the same time.
Like the number of things. And and before that, Steve Jobs running Pixar and Apple. Like I can like I am like dead by the end of the week running one company. How can you do two? That that is an enigma to me. How can you do five? >> My favorite thing is the difference between mine and your answer to that one. Mi- mine was Federer. >> >> But yeah, sure. I totally agree. Yeah. I was thinking about like, you know, just winning 20 Grand Slams and consistently being [ __ ] awesome.
>> Exactly. I think I think CEOs are are in a way it's it's like you should be an athlete. >> Oh, I 100% agree. Like I'm 100% editing this out, but like I I don't do midweek sleepovers with my girlfriend cuz it impacts like my sleep and that's like performance. Like 100 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. You look fantastic, dude.
>> Thank you. >> Tell me about that. >> You know, I I Losing the weight has actually been been like 3 years. I decided I always yo-yoed my weight depending on my stress level at the company. And I decided in 2023, I'm going to take 3 years to to get healthy. And I'm And instead of like sprinting and working out 5 days a week and then burning out, I'm going to work out 1 day a week. And 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 a a week. And okay, now I'm going to add another habit. Let's add a walk. Let's add a like at a bit of a stretching. And it's so slow. It's sort of like I don't want to get I want to get healthy over the next 5 years, and that's been a major game-changer. So, I'll just like add another habit every once in a while. It's like they were simple stuff.
Let's add a walk. Let's add a sauna uh once a week. So, I really love sauna and and cold [snorts] um hot and cold. It it it's like a reset. It forces you I'm I'm someone who's like constantly thinking, and I tried meditation, all that stuff, and it's really hard for me. When I go into a sauna and get burnt and then go into into like ice cold water, you can't think. Your your mind freezes, and that forces me into a meditative state for the next like hour or so.
>> What's the biggest advice to a new parent given what you know now about parenting? >> You don't [clears throat] stress out. Like you know, I think I think it's the it's the difference between the first kid and second kid, and every parent will tell you, let alone the third kid, is like the first kid is like, "Oh, it's nap time. We've got to go you know do the nap thing. We've got to do exactly that. Measure this and that."
And you're measuring everything, you're doing everything. Like babies are quite resilient. You know, humans have been around for whatever, like 100,000 years. You know, we we know instinctively how to raise a child. And I think taking a little easy on yourself is is probably the best advice. >> Final one for you. What do you know now that you wish you'd known when you started Replit? >> I mean, the feeling of product market fit is you can deceive yourself into thinking you had product market fit at different points.
You'll get a few customers. Like, "Ah, this product market fit." Real product market fit. And like people will say it. You can't really internalize it is is the idea that like a product is getting pulled out of your hand. You can't even provide it fast enough. You know, I think I think if I understood that earlier on, uh perhaps I would have searched for it faster or harder or or thing things like that. So, as an entrepreneur wanting to build not a lifestyle business or small business, wanting to build 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 changing the different keep keep keep kind of searching until you find that explosive demand. >> Dude, I've so enjoyed this. I so appreciate you letting me go wayward. Uh but you've been fantastic. So, thank you so much for joining me. >> Appreciate it, man. Thank you.