Inside Story of Replit

YC Startup School Session 4, July 6th, 2022

To see notes from other talks, go here: 2022 YC Startup School Table of Contents

Themes To Think About While Listening

● Founders are from Jordan → good example of how you don’t need to be American or in
Silicon Valley
● Launched in 2008… took 12 years to go from an idea to a successful companies
● First started as a side project; weren’t sure if it could be a successful company with
successful business model for a long time

Amjad & Haya

● Trying to bring the next billion software engineers online
● Recent milestones
○ Recently had their 5th billion run program on Replit
○ 50 million users have tried Replit
○ 15 million current users from all over the world

Chapter 1: How Replit Started

● 2008, Amjad was 22, studying CS & working multiple jobs
 ● Built 1st prototype j.REPL in a weekend and people started using it immediately
● 2011 big breakthrough: 1st company to compile languages into JavaScript
○ Posted on HackerNews, went viral
○ Several companies in the US started using the open source product, but VCs in
Jordan didn’t want to fund – would yawn; not interested in pushing technology
envelope
○ Amjad was suddenly for the 1st time getting job offers from Google, Amazon,
other Silicon Valley companies, etc
○ CodeAcademy was getting started and using Replit open source software to build
their MVP, wanted to recruit Amjad

Chapter 2: The Idea That Won’t Die

● Amjad went to work at CodeAcademy as a founding engineer, then Facebook, and they
were letting the Replit idea die
● Haya was struggling to find a job, so Amjad suggested she work on her own project for a
while to help build portfolio to get a job
● Haya decided to work on that old open source project, Replit, that had some users but
also lots of bugs and issues
● She added a button to the website to gauge the response… it was overwhelming
○ Apparently they had developers, users, teachers, students using it for
months/years, and were passionate about it
● Replit started to take off again
○ Couldn’t even afford to pay for the growth it was growing so much
● Haya was showing it off in interviews, and it was so impressive that companies were
asking if she was sure she didn’t want to do Replit full-time instead as a startup
● They hadn’t really seriously considered doing a startup partly due to a history of failed
startup experiences prior to CodeAcademy, and even CA was really challenging
○ Facebook was paying a lot of money :) hard to walk away, especially as 1st
generation immigrants
● Acknowledged a startup would require minimum 5+ year commitment
○ Asked themselves the question: do we care enough about the idea, the mission,
and what they want to accomplish to commit for 5+ years?
○ Will it work as husband/wife co-founders?
○ Had tried to bring in outside co-founders and CEOs
● Came down to a single question: if we did this for 5 years and failed, would it be worth 5
years of the most productive time of our lives, the blood, sweat and tears?
○ Answer was unequivocally yes largely because of the users, and how much they
saw Replit was already bringing real value to users
● Applied to YC, got rejected
● Started a project for classrooms for schools to become profitable
○ Thought teachers/schools would actually pay money
○ Started interviewing teachers (didn’t know how school system worked in US)
○ Started bringing in revenue
 ○ …But was a complete distraction from the core product of people building on
Replit, creating their own destiny writing software
● Dream was to support programmers/hackers, so they moved to Tenderloin into a small,
sketchy office (joked about needing an “office gun” to walk to the bathroom) to focus on
core products
● Having trouble raising VC money so they bootstrapped and focused on building the
product, adding new users

Chapter 3: Committing to the Vision

● YC reached out to them
○ Sam Altman sent a Twitter DM to Amjad
○ Met at OpenAI; Sam says Paul Graham actually found them
○ Starts dialogue with PG that goes on for 2-3 months
○ Not necessarily thinking they even need YC anymore because they’re profitable
and growing
● Same day that YC W18 is starting, Sam says they have to decide if they want to join the
batch
● Joined because Sam/PG sold them on YC progressing the vision… still made them
submit an application for the 4th time, and go through standard YC interview process
○ Amjad thought it was a formality so he submitted the Rick Roll video
● Walked into the interview room and felt tension; sensed Michael Seibel was angry about
the Rick Roll video
● Most difficult interview they ever had; walked away thinking, “Fuck YC, we don’t need
them!”
● Sat down next to OpenSea founders at the YC acceptance dinner
● Sam Altman was like a military general – told them the next 3 months they’d be working
the hardest they’ve ever worked in their life
● First thing they did when they got into YC was moved offices to somewhere safer
● Mustered up a team of hackers
● Decided to refactor their codebase – exactly what YC says not to do :)
○ YC says ship product every week and talk to users
○ Instead, 1st thing they did was rewriting the app/infrastructure – spent half of YC
on this
● After that, though, they were able to bang out highly valuable, popular weekly features
● What they did during YC became the basis of their roadmap for the next 3 years
● Raised a round from a16z on Demo Day – thought it was their big break
● After YC, had hardest 2 years of the startup
○ Started getting tons of abuse because of free compute
■ Crypto miners
■ Using Replit to sell attacks on the Dark Web → people could hack Replit
to spin up thousands of servers for an attack, and get paid in bitcoin
● Did counter-attack, reporting abusers
■ Multi-month fight to plug Replit holes, ended with Replit being much more
secure
● Has added advantage of being a barrier to entry for Replit
competitors because they’d have to face those same challenges
○ Personal challenges at the same time - Amjad’s mom diagnosed with cancer; 3
of 5 employees go back to Jordan to spend time with her
○ Cultural issues – realized they’d hired the wrong people, had to fire for the 1st
time
○ Turned down a $1B acquisition offer from a giant tech company; the company
threatened to compete with Replit
■ Wanted to do something meaningful with their lives – once you reach a
threshold of money, you don’t need more money
■ Knew they were having an impact on the world and an acquisition would
threaten that
● In 2020, hit a good hiring pace, things were improving
○ Developed multiplayer features during COVID that spiked growth
● Raised new round with Peter Thiel, PG, a16z, etc - $80M at $800M valuation
● Next goals are to scale to being something companies can really scale with
○ Build Replit increasingly on Replit
● Digital city / digital economy
○ Want to support creators
○ Want people to be able to make a living on Replit
Q&A
● What challenges did you face as married founders and how did you overcome them?
○ People think it’s more exotic than it really is
○ Doing a startup without your spouse becomes lonely
○ Better to do it together
○ Any 2 co-founders have agreed to “marry” each other, so why not your marital
partner too?
● Early signs of potential for successful business?
○ Always was making money; all business models working to some extent
○ e.g. API business model was bringing in thousands of dollars of revenue
○ Kept drifting business models to be more congruent to the vision
○ If 1 person will pay for your thing, then probably there’s 1000 people who will pay
○ Think about strategy… how to capture market share. TAM is a good exercise -
but not always because can create new markets
○ Books Amjad recommends:
■ Innovator’s Dilemma
■ 7 Powers & How To Build a Competitive Edge
○ How can I get from my 1st dollar to my billionth dollar?
○ Have some kind of rational plan in place
● Surprises
○ A parent on Twitter was criticizing Replit because it was taking all their kid’s time
when they were supposed to be going to college. The kid is really interested in
programming and would spend every waking hour on Replit learning. The kid
ended up getting a job in a single month as an 18 year old and making more
money than their family combined.
■ Also wrote a website on Replit that went viral to mitigate COVID, so was a
positive humanitarian impact on world, too, even as a kid
○ In 2015 Haya came across a kid that loved programming but felt like they had no
friends… inspired Haya’s vision for Replit community
● Distribution channels
○ You should be a spam bot as a founder
■ HackerNews, Reddit, Twitter, literally everywhere
■ Didn’t work the 1st time on HN, keep doing it again and again until they
tell you to stop
○ Be a fanatic, evangelical for your thing
○ Be borderline annoying
● Did your experience at CodeAcademy influence Replit?
○ The creativity at CodeAcademy and tools they were using focused on learning…
but people always wanted to be building things
○ They bent over backwards to eliminate restrictions on Replit
■ e.g. don’t ban infinite loops
○ The more you make things accessible, there’s an exponential relationship with
how many users you’ll get – make it easy, give a creative platform, give a tool for
self-expression