Amjad Masad
Amjad Masad started coding in an internet cafe in Jordan because he didn’t have a computer at home. That detail explains everything about why he built Replit — and why no one else did first.
The Problem That Could Only Be Felt
Every time Masad went to the cafe to code, he spent an hour setting up the environment. New session, new setup, from scratch. It was the same friction every time: download this package, configure that path, try to remember what you installed last time.
Most people learning to code in America set up their environment once, struggle a little, and move on. Masad hit it face-first every single day. That’s Paul Graham’s theory of great startups made concrete: you felt the problem ten times more intensely than the person who eventually would have built a solution anyway.
His insight: the web was already running Google Docs, Gmail, all these client-side applications. Why couldn’t you just type code into the browser and run it? In 2009 he started working on it. In 2011, Replit had a breakthrough: they were the first to compile Python, Ruby, and other languages to JavaScript and run them in the browser. Brendan Eich — the inventor of JavaScript, then CTO at Mozilla — tweeted about it.
A kid from Jordan had just made a fundamental breakthrough in browser technology, working on a problem he cared about because it made his daily life difficult.
Four YC Rejections and a Rick Roll
Masad quit his job at Facebook in 2016 to work on Replit full-time. Applied to YC. Rejected — didn’t even get a call. Applied again. Rejected. VCs yawned. One fell asleep mid-pitch.
He wasn’t matching the pattern: no Stanford credential, no solo dropout narrative, married with a co-founder (somehow treated as a disadvantage), not building in a trending category.
By December 2017 he had a direct message from Sam Altman. “I know who you are,” Masad responded. Altman showed him an email from Paul Graham saying Replit was important. An email exchange with PG followed — Masad spent hours crafting each message.
When Altman said the batch was starting the next day and told him to fill out an application, Masad submitted a bare-bones form. For the required video, he pasted a YouTube link.
It was a Rick Roll.
At the interview, Michael Seibel was angry. The panel had been arguing about it. Masad immediately recognized the gap: “They must be thinking I’m just another entitled tech guy. They don’t know I’m an immigrant from Jordan who scraped his way here.”
They got in anyway. Adora called as the Uber was arriving to take them home.
Replit’s Growth and the AI Wave
Through YC, Masad and his co-founder transformed the product from a simple editor-output tool into a platform where you could host real applications. His brother in Jordan and his friend from Codecademy — both still with the company today — joined during that sprint.
COVID was, as Masad put it, “really great for us” — Replit was probably the only collaborative editor on the web when everyone suddenly needed one. Servers went down from the traffic surge. Then AI changed the value proposition entirely.
The demo Shaan ran live on the episode — describing in plain English an SMS food-tracking app and watching Replit’s agent write the code, configure Twilio, explain the next steps — was the moment Sam called “another mind-blowing moment in my tech career,” alongside his first Uber ride and ChatGPT. Masad had tweeted the goal: “I want people to be able to build an app faster than they can Google the answer to a question.”
As of the episode: 35 million signups, 2 to 3 million monthly active users, 100,000 apps hosted on Replit.
Shopify for Software
Shaan’s framing: Replit is to software creation what Shopify was to creating online stores.
“I’ve never manufactured a product in my life. I’ve never built a website used by customers. But I was able to skip all that work by stacking Alibaba and Shopify.” The same collapse of expertise barrier is happening in software. There will be 300 million people who can create software — up from 30 million software engineers — because the bottleneck shifts from building to understanding problems.
Sam’s corollary: in that world, distribution is the scarce resource. “Guys like you and me who have an audience — why aren’t we constantly launching companies using this? Our ability to get users is a competitive advantage.”
Matt Mazzeo, who invested in Replit through Lowercase Capital, described Amjad this way: “True believer, technical enough to build it, clear on the pain because he’d lived it, and willing to be an endurance athlete about it. Years of building tools for teachers, years of infrastructure — before it was sexy.”
The Steve Jobs Parallel
Masad’s favorite story about his own industry involves the decade Jobs was lost in the desert: fired from Apple, building NeXT and Pixar, both failing, cutting personal checks to make payroll.
“People think about him in terms of the flashy things — the iPhone, the keynotes. But the thing I like is when he was lost in the desert for 10 years.”
Pixar became hugely valuable. NeXT — widely dismissed as a failure — had an operating system that Apple needed. It became macOS. Objective-C, from NeXT’s obsession with object-oriented programming, is embedded in everything Apple builds on today. “Not just an acqui-hire. Going the distance is an advantage for entrepreneurs.”
Masad has been working on Replit since 2009. He’s 36. He’s been at this since he was 21.