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[music] >> Today I'm joined by Amjad Masad, the CEO and co-founder of Replit.
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Replit is the leading no-code app builder uh for consumers and enterprise.
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They just recently raised their Series D, a $400 million raise at a $9 billion valuation.
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Amjad, thank you very much for joining me and I'm excited to learn more about Replit.
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>> Thank you for having me. >> Of course.
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Why don't you tell us a little bit about uh what Replit is?
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>> Yeah, so um you know, our ambition is that anyone, no matter what level of skill they have, anyone who can read and write, basically, that's the skill that that you need, can come in with an idea and can leave with a an app that's deployed, that's hosted, that's getting traffic, that's can scale, and they don't have to worry about any technical aspect of the uh of building that thing.
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Um and it's been it's been a mission we're on for for 10 years right now.
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So, initially we solved the development environment.
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You know, that was the hardest thing is like setting up the development environment.
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Then solve the dev- deployment environment.
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Then what was left is like the coding part was still very intimidating for people.
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And September 2024, Replit became the first like what's called live coding product where uh we abstracted away code entirely.
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So, there's like a coding agent behind the scene, but you're just interfacing with AI using natural language.
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And more recently with Agent 4, uh also design interactions.
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So, you can write things, you can comment on things, you can uh drag and drop things in a like a canvas.
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And we're thinking about a lot of different modalities for how people want to interact with agents because I don't think it's always going to be just text.
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I think at some point it's going to be multimodal, maybe video, maybe audio.
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But we want to create a natural place where people can express their ideas.
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And those ideas can turn almost magically into software. That is real software.
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That is it's not like a toy software.
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Real software, secure software, scalable software.
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>> One of the things that's most interesting to me about about your company is that it really bridges the the gap between a dev tool and and and not.
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I I think it's the first dev tool I've seen but that's not marketed towards engineers.
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Like can you tell me more about how you came to that uh decision that you were going to do that and and and who is your primary user today?
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>> Yeah, so you know, I I started coding at a very very young age, but um I was always interested in in the act of creation.
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I was interested in entrepreneurship.
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I built like my first business when I was 13, 14.
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And I always thought that the developer tools were getting in the way.
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It actually gotten worse over time.
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So, you know, as I started you know, coding on basic and you just start the basic command line interpreter and you can just like type a little of basic and that's good. >> Yeah.
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>> By the time I graduated from college, like setting up, you know, a web app was like a nightmare, right?
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Um and so it created this desire to just like build tools that are that are more joyful, more enriching, kind of focus on the act of creation as opposed to the accidental complexity of of of developer tools.
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And so uh I started building a lot of tools for myself.
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Uh and eventually I you know, I built what would become the kind of the first in-browser IDE.
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Initially, it was like an open source project.
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Later on, I would also worked on React and React Native.
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And I approached every time I I built a developer tool, I've approached it with the same thing.
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Can you apply design sensibilities in the same way that we you would work on a a consumer app?
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Uh and that's been successful in in many ways.
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But ultimately, when we started Replit, the goal was make programming accessible.
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Later, we updated our mission to create a billion billion new developers.
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As we progress in our in our mission and in solving every part of the software development life cycle, what we've noticed is a lot of developers actually like the pain.
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They they like setting they they you know setting up things and they like configuring every aspect of it.
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It's It's sort of like There's no knock against that, but like it's sort of like a craftsperson kind of liking to build their own tools.
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And what we've noticed is the people that are getting the most value out of our product tend to be the more tech-adjacent ones.
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Maybe people who product managers have written code many years ago, but don't want to worry about the development environment setup, don't want to worry about the deployment setup. Um then designers.
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Designers who have ideas, but are often blocked or bottlenecked by engineers.
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And they want to be able to build their own ideas.
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Um and later on as we layered on AI and the product got better, entrepreneurs.
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And when when I talk to these people, it um it reminded me of myself.
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Those are people with with ideas, with passion, with fire in them, but they but they but they're getting hamstrung by by just like the need to learn to become technical.
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So, at some point in 2023, um we just made it an explicit goal of like we're not going after developers.
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They're still developers.
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Like if you walk around Replit today, it looks like a dev tool company.
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We're like building for creators, right?
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But they're not the traditional type of developers.
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They said like a new generation of developers that are coming up right now because of AI.
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They're AI-native developers that are creating software without having to worry about every component in the system.
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>> It's so interesting hearing you say this because it it sort of reminds me I learned to program on VB6 and >> [clears throat] >> and that's to me that's a real you know this idea of the tools opening up and making making it possible for people that couldn't code I couldn't code I learned to code in VB6 and and I see sort of a very similar thing that you're exploring with this.
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>> Yeah VB6 was better than setting up React and Webpack.
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>> 100% [laughter] I remember the transition yes.
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>> It's it's it got worse over time which is like not many things get worse in life like programming got worse and I wanted to bring it back make programming great again.
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>> [laughter] >> Yeah that's so interesting.
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Tell tell me about what people are building today in Replit.
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>> Yeah I mean there's a few different categories there's personal software there's enterprise software and then there's like entrepreneurs building building products.
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One of the apps that I really liked recently I was talking to a physical therapist and her husband and she is physical therapist that's built up so much deep knowledge in a subsection of physical therapy that's like around fascia and fascia release
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and she has all these different methodologies and ways of tracking the progress for her clients and she wanted to build an app that is very sophisticated like being able to take scans of your body being able to to scan your range of
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motion and to track that on a 3D representation of your body and they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars offshoring to developers around the world and eventually they kind of were frustrated by the entire process took matters into their own hands built it on
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Replit and I when I saw that app it was like one of the best like health tech apps I've ever seen and and they're not >> Yeah because the domain experts can now actually build the products. >> Yeah people who are closest to the
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>> Yeah people who are closest to the problem can build up the the the products they need.
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You know, I talked to a founder the other day that's building a SaaS solution for um for people who maintain pools.
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Like and he grew up in a in a household where their where their family business is is a pool business.
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And so it's like there's so much software to build in the world.
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Also met a founder yesterday who's building uh software for sports clubs.
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And he was showing me pictures of the software they're using today, which is MS-DOS-based software. >> Oh, wow.
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>> And so here in Silicon Valley, we look around us and we're like, "Oh, well, what else is left to build?"
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But but there's so many walks of life, there's so many um things that are kind of a blind spot for us.
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And so suddenly when anyone can make software, a lot of parts of the economy is just going to improve and that's like I think a beautiful thing and a lot of wealth creation is going to happen, productivity gain as well.
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Personal software is also really cool.
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Like, you know, talked to a lot of families that built like you know, healthcare software.
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Like there's like a mom in Korea that built software for that helped manage a very rare condition for her kid.
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Um a lot of people build like personal like you know, healthcare software like tracking physical activity or ingesting data from all their wearables and and doing something with it.
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A lot of software for families.
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Like a mom built like a chore hero software on iPad that's like on the wall that shows the kids how they're ranking of their chores.
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And then there's the enterprise use case.
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And in enterprise, it tends to be two different use cases.
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One is product development.
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So companies want to move a lot faster in product development.
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Everyone now is feeling the pressure of of AI.
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We need to move faster, faster, faster.
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And they're realizing that it doesn't fall just on their engineers.
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Their product people can now build software.
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Their designers can build software.
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We hear from clients like one of my favorite stories like Whoop is a is a client of ours and they told us like the amount of ideas they can try has grown by an order of magnitude. Right?
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Like they used to, you know, get get like 100 ideas but are able to only try five of them.
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But now they can try to 50, right?
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Um so you know, companies become a lot more prolific.
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They can release a lot new features, create new new business lines, new products.
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And then there's like internal tools and you know, line of business applications.
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Um there's a lot of sales automations that are that that is happening at these company.
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Any any role inside a company that's dealing with a lot of data flow, for example, think of RevOps.
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They're at the nexus of a lot of different data flow from from their CRM, from their data people, from Gong, from And they want to be able to do things with this data.
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And typically they're kind of bottlenecked by either engineering resources or the different SaaS tools that they would want to buy.
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The problem with SaaS is you onboard a new SaaS tool that creates a new silo of data that you can't really program.
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So now they're taking matters into their own hands and building things like, you know, quote configurators and and being able to save the company hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions of dollars on SaaS tools and things like that.
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>> How how are you finding these users?
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Like how do you market to them?
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How do you get them to to try it out?
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And then I I assume for enterprises it's got to be a very complicated sales cycle like, you know, getting getting into the company.
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Like how does all that work?
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>> Well, the cool thing about the the world we're in right now, it is very similar to developers.
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You know, I think the insight that a lot of YC dev tool companies has had like, you know, Stripe, you know, PagerDuty, you you uh Developers were empowered to be able to make decisions to bring software into the company at some point like in the last couple decades, right?
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Um that that shift is happening outside of development right now where the product manager, the designer, the operations manager is empowered to bring software.
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So, the consumer use case, the personal use case is often overlapping with the work use case in that people are playing with these tools on the weekend.
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They're building their own personal apps.
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And they're like, "Oh, but the moment you understand that you can solve a problem with code, it changes your mind like almost there's like a neurological shift where you start looking at the world differently.
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Where you go around and you're like, "Oh, I can solve this. I can fix this."
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>> I remember that when I learned to program. >> Yeah, exactly.
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[laughter] And now that shift is happening in a huge parts of the population.
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And so, it's you know, PLG play I think still the gold standard.
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Just make a product that's really good that people want to recommend their to their friends.
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And make it easy to refer others, you know, build a referral program, do all of that stuff.
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And then on the sales side, a lot of it is very kind of sales assisted.
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So, someone brings it to work, we talk to them.
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They're the champion, we help them it's like, "Okay, what do you need to convince your boss in order to bring this to work?
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Let's work with them to do a hackathon to bring create more champions inside the company.
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Uh let's work with you let's teach your leadership about AI, what So, a lot of what our sales people are doing is evangelism, is education.
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So, it's it's a different kind of sales motion I think than the previous one.
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We still have enterprise sales that's more top-down where a company comes to us we're like, "Hey, we're trying all the different live coding tools.
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We heard it's good for our business.
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Can you help us kind of evaluate Replit?"
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We go into that and um and there we're often winning because Replit has built um uh a history of just like being uh super trusted on security, on compliance, all that basic enterprise stuff you still you still have to do.
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>> Let's talk about sort of what what the limits are today of what you can do with a product like Replit.
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Like what what kind of systems can you build in Replit and what do you still need to have sort of traditional uh software engineering approaches to?
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>> I can confidently say to any entrepreneur out there that you can build a SaaS product, a consumer product, um like an automation product on Replit comfortably. >> Mhm.
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>> If you want to build like a new car platform or you want to build like a new machine learning system, that's not exactly what we're focused on today.
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Some people still figure it out.
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Replit is a versatile tool.
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We give you a virtual machine.
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We give you a general purpose agent.
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If you have some technical knowledge, you can bring that and you can build sophisticated things.
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But if you want to build things entirely by coded without worrying about the technical details, we have so many examples on our website and what we talk about in our marketing.
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Uh we you know that there's so many success stories now that I can confidently tell an entrepreneur with no technical knowledge that they can build >> Right.
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>> uh a piece of software.
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So there's a lot of consumer apps, there are a lot of there there are a lot of you know vertical SaaS products.
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There are people that are starting like Replit native agencies.
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I was talking to uh someone from Iceland yesterday and he was telling me they're getting so much business because they're 60 to 70% cheaper and more effective than traditional agencies and they're all vibe coding on Replit.
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So they they get a client that that client wants an application.
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Not everyone knows that they can build the application themselves.
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So they're going in it's probably a period of time and they're able to make a lot of money that that way.
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You know, the internal tools, automations, those tend to be kind of fairly simple uh programs like you're building an internal org chart, you're building, um, a CPQ system, like a quote configurator, where it's like pulling from HubSpot or Salesforce.
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We have a lot of MCP and integrations that allows, uh, to do that.
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Um, >> And how how do those integrations work?
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Like have you gone through and built integrations to all Okay. >> Yes, yes.
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We spent a lot of times partnering with companies, building those integrations, and now there's the what's happening with the skills call revolution, where you know, companies are putting out skills and MCPs, and we just vet them and integrating into into the product.
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And so as you're talking to a Replit and you're like, "I want to integrate Stripe."
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And so we already built a set of skills and sometimes code and things like that.
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We'll search a database, we'll bring all that in, and now it's in contacts and now the agent is like, It's sort of like Neo in the Matrix, where like you you download a new skill and you're like, "Oh, I know how to fly a helicopter now."
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So it's so cool to see the agent is like, "Oh, let me search this set of skills that I have."
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And suddenly it knows how to do that.
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But we spend a lot of time just making sure they're secure and they're safe.
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>> That makes sense, yeah.
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Having built a dev tool community, like how how is that different?
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How do you build the sort of like groundswell of support to pull yourself into those organizations?
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Is it different than how it how you would have done it traditionally?
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>> It's it's a little different in that you need to show what's possible.
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I think with with developers, with more traditional, you know, CS trained developers, they know what's possible.
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They read your docs, they'll figure out what's possible, they're on Hacker News all the time, and they'll generally kind of are much more resourceful in knowing what's possible.
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With Replit, there's a lot of education that needs to be done.
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So we have like a devrel, uh, team, but they're not the traditional devrel.
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They're they're more like educators. >> Yeah.
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>> They're like, you know, going and spending a lot of times just teaching people what's what's possible.
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Our documentation, I think, is a lot simpler than the your typical dev tool documentation.
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So, you have to be really good on content.
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You know, Stripe got, you know, popular for this you know, being really good on documentation.
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With if you're building a dev tools for non-developers, you have to go above and beyond on content.
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You have to produce a lot of video content as well.
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Um also, the agent itself needs to be imbued with characteristics that is able to talk to non-developers and tell them what's possible and be a brainstorming partner.
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Also, this is why we also moved from purely just prompting to also uh a canvas and more visual interface so that people can explore things uh more easily and we have buttons where it says like, create different variations of this.
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And so, we're adding a lot of different shortcuts just to show people what's possible.
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On the enterprise side, when we go and we talk to leaders, we're like, reserve any judgment. Don't pay for Replit.
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We're going to come in, bring the group that's most excited about AI, and we're going to do a hackathon.
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>> How do you when you see someone, how are you like, yes, this is going to be the person who's going to be so excited to use this?
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>> We think a lot about that because you know, typically when you think about ICPs, you're thinking about, oh, that's someone who's went to school for this degree or someone who's a product manager or something.
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Which is still true, you can do that.
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But oftentimes because we're able to sell the sales department marketing product design, the set of traits that we think makes that like the champion, the person who's most excited about Replit, who's going to spread it inside the organization, who's going to build, who's going to do the education evangelism, they tend to be very entrepreneurial. >> Yeah.
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>> They're the kind of person that could start their own company.
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But they're able to kind of be very influential internally.
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They're kind of like what YC talks about, like PG&E essays, like resourceful.
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Someone who's not going to get blocked, who's going to figure out what other AI tool I need to integrate, what can I like go learn or to figure it out.
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So that entrepreneurial kind of founder mindset I think is very important. >> Got it.
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I mean, while we're on the topic of YC, you know, I'd love to hear about your your experience here.
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Like how how did YC influence, you know, what how Repl it started and what it became?
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>> The main realization from YC is how much you can get done in 3 months.
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So when we when we came in and Sam stood when he was still running it, Sam stood in front of the batch and said, "For the next 3 months, tell your friends you're going to be missing.
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You're not going to be able to help them move.
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You're not going to be able to You'll come back into their lives later, but for the next 3 months, you need to be hyper focused on this company and you're going to be able to achieve great things if you really go intensely into it."
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When we did YC, we had the we had a whiteboard and a countdown to to demo day.
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Uh and the number of like a just a very simple list of things we need to achieve.
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And every day we wake up, we erase that number and we change it to the countdown.
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Um and and when Repl it got got into YC, it was still a Repl, that's the name, right?
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It was still just like a command line with like you just type a little bit of code and run it. >> Yeah, yeah.
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>> We exited YC, we already had like um web development, we had like the initial aspect of hosting, we had code intelligence, we had like so many sort of IDE features is like got a lot more feature complete just in 3 months.
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And that that is an empowering thing, sort of what we talked about with programming.
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Uh just the fact that like, "Oh, you can be so intensely focused and you can work so hard and achieve so much in 3 months."
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And now every agent release, there is it's not 3 months, it's more like 4 weeks where we bring everyone cuz some people are still kind of remote or other offices, bring everyone to the office.
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We provide breakfast, lunch, and dinner, coffee 24/7.
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And we're like, we're just going to hit this like very very ambitious goal.
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And that's like the YC mentality.
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Another thing is the compound growth.
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Especially when you're spinning up a new product or a new initiative, this idea of like, I don't know where PG came up with the number seven, but like 7% week-over-week growth >> Mhm.
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>> is a like a very good way to bootstrap a new new product line.
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So, we're constantly doing sort of we're constantly going back to the YC basics and doing them and all all of that we learned here.
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>> Tell me about how how did YC change your life? >> There are a few ways.
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One is before we got into YC, we couldn't raise all that much money.
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We raised like maybe $500,000.
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And you know, VCs did not want to meet us.
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It was like the doors were not really open for us.
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Uh after YC, you immediately, first of all, Demo Day, you get to introduce a lot of VCs.
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Um and then we were lucky because we got rejected from YC four three or four times, and then we got invited to do YC because Paul and Sam saw us on Hacker News. >> Yeah.
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>> Uh and so we got a direct relationship with Paul and Sam.
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And then at the end I was like, I want an intro to Marc Andreessen.
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And you can still ask the partners here.
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Like they'll they'll they'll try a lot to to get you intros.
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But I was like old enough to ask for that.
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And so they got me an intro to him.
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I went and had breakfast at his house and pitched Repl.
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it, and A16Z ended up leading our seed round. >> Nice.
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>> Uh and it and it like it my network just expanded tremendously after getting into YC.
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And I don't think we would have been as successful without YC.
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Perhaps we would have quit if we couldn't fundraise or so it gave it gave our our company life. >> Yeah.
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Yeah, for us it was very similar.
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We were complete outsiders and I think having having, you know, somebody sort of welcome you in made made an enormous difference. >> Yeah, 100%.
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>> So, you guys just announced Agent 4.
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So, what is that like the fourth major revision of your of your product?
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>> Yeah, so we kind of an act of trying to predict the future and base in what we've seen at the time starting in kind of 2024, we thought that broadly the AI capabilities have massive step changes uh twice a year. >> Mhm.
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>> Uh so, if you think about 2025 um there was the like Viper coding revolution that happened in earlier 2025 and then there was the the you know, the autonomous revolution that happened in late 2025 with Opus 4.
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6 that led to open claw and and things like that.
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Uh but I can tell you the same thing happened in 2024, mid-2024 Claude came out and um Claude Sonnet for the first time we could generate like a lot of code as opposed to like GPT-3.
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5 which has that that laziness component.
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Um and then late uh 2024 we started seeing initial signs of the labs kind of um doing long horizon reasoning.
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And so, so that observation we're like, okay, we want to align our road map to AI capabilities.
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Um and so, every 6 months we release a new uh a new agent version.
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Um and it's an act of predicting what's possible.
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It's also pushing the edge of what's possible.
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So, for example, Agent 3 was the most autonomous agent on the market.
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We We knew that autonomy was coming and we're like, okay, we want to be able to run the agent for like 2 3 4 hours.
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People should be able to put put in a big prompt, go to lunch, come back and and see the software fully fully built.
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And so, okay, what do we need to do to update our platform?
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For example, like we had we had to rewrite everything on the back end to have these long-running containers in the background doing work while the user is not in front of the computer.
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And so we did all of that work and although autonomy didn't arrive until like maybe like like true autonomy until like uh November and and December, Replit Agent had demonstrated where the world is headed by by September. >> Right.
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>> With Agent 4, >> there were a few things. One, parallel agents.
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We thought that was finally potentially possible to do parallel agents.
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>> The the the The thing that sucks about autonomy is that you can put in a big prompt and you're kind of sitting back and just like watching it work.
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Like what do you do next? >> Mhm.
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>> Okay, so that question, what do you do next?
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Should be able to design.
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Should be able to kick off other type of work.
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Um should be able to chat with your agent and and plan for other things.
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And so we wanted a more asynchronous nature to the product.
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Uh so we started building towards a multi sort of agent architecture and parallel agent architecture.
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We had to solve merge conflicts and so many things to make that work.
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Also, as as the agent is building, we wanted also unblock you from designing.
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So we also had a kind of a more asynchronous design agent and we're like, "Okay, what what is the best interface for that?"
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So we designed this canvas. >> Yeah.
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>> So now we have a built-in design capability inside Replit to um to be able to explore the next page you're going to build or the next feature we're going to build while the agent's building.
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And then once you're ready, you'll kick that off into another thread >> seeing. >> and it starts.
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So people are now sitting in front of Replit and just experiencing the state of flow. >> Yeah, yeah.
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>> Cuz agents are slow, that's fine, but they can work in the background.
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And finally, uh teamwork.
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Once you solve parallel agents, you've also solved teamwork >> Mhm.
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>> because every time someone jumps into the session, you can start an entirely new you can fork entirely new VM for them and they can work in parallel to you.
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And also because the orchestrator knows how to subdivide tasks, you can also prompt in the same chat window and we'll figure out how to make all that work.
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And because we had the canvas, it was is it's such a joy to just see other cursors and people the the product just becomes a lot a lot more live.
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So all these components became >> for Oh, final one I forgot.
27:22
We wanted it so that when you make a mobile app, when you make a website, when you make uh a deck, when you make a video, all of that should have the context of your project.
27:34
Previously on Replit and now every other tool, it's basically you need different tool for a website, different tool for a mobile app.
27:40
So now with Replit, like you built a really cool web app.
27:42
So you go, maybe I maybe I need an app.
27:44
You can just say make a mobile app.
27:47
Yeah, we'll like generate a mobile app, we'll lay it out on the canvas.
27:48
When you hit deploy, it deploys your web app to the web.
27:51
It deploys your app to TestFlight or the uh or uh or or your Android, whatever it is.
28:00
So so now you can run your entire company on Replit.
28:04
>> What What kind of skills do people need to develop to to be able to make the most of of products like yours?
28:10
Like what what is the you know, what do what do people need to practice at?
28:14
Like in your mind, is it is it people have to get good at prompting or is it more that the system is going to get better at just understanding whatever it is you're asking it to do?
28:23
>> I actually think we're headed to like a post-prompting world.
28:28
Um and you can you can sense that in those sort of open claw and all the derivatives.
28:32
And the way people are using it, um they're more giving it high-level goals.
28:36
Like optimize my marketing funnel, you know, you things like that.
28:39
So prompting will be there.
28:40
It's like a layers of skills.
28:42
Prompting will be there when you want to do more interactive type work, but also you should be able to give your agent high-level commands.
28:50
So, I think perhaps agent five or maybe sooner, you should be able to tell Replit "Every day, build me a SaaS company and like try to market it and see what works and make me some revenue."
29:02
Like she would be able to give it like >> high-level.
29:04
>> [laughter] >> I think we're almost there in order to be able to do that.
29:08
So, what kind of skills do you need?
29:11
Understanding what is possible is going to be important.
29:14
So, playing with these tools a lot, having this like playful mindset of adopting these tools, playing around with it, being plugged in >> Mhm. >> is super important.
29:24
At some point I think it was kind of a drawback or a flaw to be someone who's like constantly reading news or being online, but actually now it's very important to know what's happening, what's coming down the line. >> Yeah.
29:39
>> Um I think um not giving up is important.
29:42
Like the thing that you try to do today, the day I cannot do, try it again in a month. >> Yeah.
29:50
>> And I tell some Replit users if if whatever you're trying to build Replit cannot build today, try it in a couple weeks.
29:55
It might be able to build it.
29:57
Um and so that that mindset of like I'm going to keep trying is is is is important.
30:02
Idea generation is still going to be important.
30:04
Obviously, we're going to get to a point where where AI is going to be really good at helping you generate ideas.
30:09
Um but being generative, just constantly thinking about problems you want to solve, um and just being creative and like figuring out what what what what what does the world need right now?
30:25
And um and being generative is important because let's say you're a small-time entrepreneur, um like you know, Peter Levels type of entrepreneur or like this guy's very famous on Twitter who built these products.
30:37
Oftentimes the products go through cycles.
30:40
Like we built like a product that is really good for that moment and you can generate like a couple of million dollars, but then that product is no longer relevant.
30:45
So, you need to be generative and creative in order to continuously do that and you can make millions of dollars doing that.
30:53
>> were starting RepliT today, what would you do differently?
30:58
>> I mean, I made a lot of mistakes along the way.
31:01
Uh so, if I was starting RepliT today, I'd probably hope not to make as many mistakes.
31:04
So, you know, culture is very important.
31:06
Uh you know, at some point we screwed that up and we had to do we had to do a reset and lay off and all of that stuff.
31:15
Um I think being really honest with yourself about like product market fit is very important.
31:21
It's very easy to delude yourself.
31:25
Getting any kind of user is an amazing achievement.
31:26
Getting any any kind of money from users is also an amazing achievement and you should celebrate every one of those moments.
31:34
But true product market fit is entirely different.
31:36
It's like an explosive thing. >> Yes.
31:40
>> And so, being honest about that because we've had periods where we're like, "Oh, it looks like that's successful. Maybe it's working."
31:48
And then like you keep going down that path, but in reality you should have changed directions a little earlier. >> Yeah.
31:55
When it works, it really works and you know it.
31:57
In terms of AI development, AI technology, what is something that you are waiting for where you're like, "This is going to unlock so much?"
32:05
>> You know, I've been waiting for computer use models to to get better.
32:07
They get there slowly getting better.
32:10
They're like one of the things that is actually kind of disappointing.
32:14
>> It's surprising to me that it's so hard to build them cuz you'd think that'd be the easiest thing in the world to get data for.
32:17
And do you do you have a sense of why that is?
32:21
>> Well, language is a is a lot easier.
32:21
Uh language is also like much more can be compressed down into like some kind of high-dimensional space a lot easier than like like a video feed, right?
32:37
>> But still like if we can make progress on self-driving, surely we can make progress on moving the mouse and clicking on things.
32:41
So, I think it's a little bit of a of a mystery.
32:43
That being said, coding in coding agents turned to be a workaround and hack because a lot of things that you could do in front of the computer, you could do with code, including, you know, scripting an Excel sheet, right?
33:01
The reason Excel sheet agents got better is because coding got better.
33:05
The reason, like, you know, some commerce agents are starting to work because they can call APIs and they can So, coding turned out to be a bit of a hack or workaround computer use agents.
33:15
But there's still a lot of software in the world that's like very legacy software that computer use agents would would be really good at.
33:24
Also, when you're when you're creating a vibe coding platform like like Replit, you want to be able to test the apps that people are making.
33:33
And you want to be able to be discerning as well, like, things that are functioning right, but also UX is not very well, you want to be able to give the user feedback on that. >> Mhm.
33:42
>> But the models are not very good at that.
33:44
So, we spend a lot of time >> question, I take it? >> Taste question.
33:46
So, we spend a lot of time prompting and augmenting computer use models in order to to make them good at testing because Replit has like a testing testing agent.
33:59
Um So, that's one that I I think we'll unlock a lot of different capabilities once we get to computer use agents.
34:08
Um I think, like, yeah, I think it's become a buzzword, but like continual learning.
34:17
Like, the way we're hacking around it right now is we're writing to files.
34:21
Like, the agent will learn some kind of skill and like we'll write a skill MD file or something like that.
34:27
But true learning on the job is like not been unlocked yet. >> Yeah, yeah.
34:32
>> Uh and so for us to be able to like deploy an agent inside an organization and for that agent just to continues to get better for that org itself is is is such a powerful thing.
34:45
But but that just still seems far away.
34:48
>> You know, I I I think, you know, what one of the common themes I'm hearing here is is like we're hey, we're going to have like or we already have today with Replit like agents to build software and and you talked about how we're increasing the abstraction until finally you can just say hey, I I want a company that just makes money.
35:04
How how is this going to work?
35:06
Like how what does that leave left for people?
35:09
And and what does the company of the future look like if it's all just agents all the way down?
35:14
>> Um I think I think the company of the future is made of builders and sales people broadly.
35:23
And but sales will change and sales will be more like let's help companies transform.
35:29
Let's use the technology that we're building here to help companies transform.
35:33
So when sales people are more like I mentioned it earlier, like more like evangelists, more like educators.
35:42
But I don't think that part is going to go away because a lot of other companies will want to talk to someone, will want to learn from someone, right?
35:49
That's how a lot of people learn.
35:52
Um and they want to you they they trust other humans.
35:55
And so the sales probably part is like one of the more defensible jobs. >> Interesting.
36:01
>> Um and then builders uh there's always more to automate.
36:05
There's always I think our our job will continuously like get higher and higher level.
36:09
I mean, that's already the case that with computers we became a lot more uh higher levels.
36:16
Like computers were literally humans, right?
36:17
Like there was like a you know, bunch of people like doing computations. Tables of numbers.
36:24
And then we're like would you take that entire room and you put it in a box, that's a computer.
36:28
And now there's my job as like the operator of the computer to use a computer for productive use.
36:34
Uh and there was a lot of still manual work in order to make that computer do interesting things. Uh software.
36:41
And now we have an agent that's using that computer to use So, you know, different layers of abstractions.
36:48
I don't know when you have a fully autonomous company, maybe at some point there's certain uh styles of companies that could be fully autonomous.
36:58
But I think you need business generalists that understand customers, understand what people need, understand the economy, understand where the world is headed, understand AI technology, what what have some vision, and you want to give them So, here's like the abstract vision of a future company.
37:18
It's like almost everyone is a founder.
37:21
They wake up in the morning and they think, "How can I make the company more successful?
37:23
How can I make the company make more revenue?"
37:27
And then they go around the company finding problems to solve and then creating or deputizing agents in order to go solve these these these problems. I'm already seeing that.
37:36
We actually have a team, like a vibe coding in residency model at Replit.
37:41
And they have a very vague mission, unlike like a product team or sales team or very clear.
37:46
Like, "Go around the company, make it better."
37:51
So, they went to the support team.
37:51
It was like, "Okay, you know, you're using Zendesk and all these other tools.
37:54
What are the main problems?"
37:57
And we're like, "Well, we don't have a good way to prioritize our uh support queue.
38:05
Um for example, like there are customers that are paying much more than other customers and there are customers that, you know, have more urgent tickets.
38:12
And so, they built like a way to to visualize that visualize that and and uh a way to like create more priority queues, um and they spend some time with with the support team and the CSAT score started going up.
38:28
And then to go around, they go around their HR team. What are the problems?
38:32
Well, onboarding is a problem.
38:34
There's no place for people to to know all the benefits and everything that we have.
38:39
Well, let's build an HR internal HR platform. So, they they do that.
38:44
And I think that kind of role is more it is more where the future is headed and more more people inside a company will be more generalist entrepreneurs that are trying to make the business successful.
38:57
>> Well, thank you very much for joining me.
38:58
Pleasure to have you here at YC. >> Appreciate it. Thank you. >> [music]