replit
will you leave if things get rough?
Y Combinator Founding Partner, Paul Graham, attributes YC picking a lot of great founders to his wife, Jessica Livingston, also a YC Founding Partner.1 Jessica runs a podcast called The Social Radars with Carolynn Levy, YC’s Managing Director of Legal, who invented and wrote the SAFE template that many startups and VCs use today.2 They’ve interviewed some great founders before, like Brian Chesky of Airbnb, the Collison brothers from Stripe, and Amjad Masad & Haya Odeh of Replit.
I first encountered Replit after I left my last full-time job and had more free time to do some self-learning. I decided to try an online coding course (which I never finished after having a baby and starting to work again hah) but it helped me feel more “productive” and the course I took had us use Replit.
Replit, as the company, was founded in 2016, though the open source side project dates back to 2011. Their revenue was essentially flat until September 2024, when AI models could enable agents to work well, and it jumped from US$ 2M ARR to $70M ARR within 6 months. The decade-long, continuously-building persistence is admirable.
The Social Radars podcast interviewed the co-founders Amjad and Haya, who also happen to be husband and wife, similar to Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston. I find this to be really inspiring given that my husband and I started off as coworkers.
Here’s some of their story in building Replit:
Amjad’s background is in computer science, but he felt that learning programming was starting to get really difficult in the 2000’s where you had to study it in school in order to code. He mentioned that it wasn’t always that way, for example, when Lisp was the common programming language, it was easy to pick up and make a website, but over time, it got more and more complicated. He modeled Replit off of how that used to be; when you could go to a website with a console and start programming straight away.
Back in 2008, he found it to be quite surprising that nothing like this existed yet. It took him a few years to make the application more useful and open sourced it to Hacker News in 2011.3 He was dating Haya at the time and recruited her to help him build it, since she was studying to be a designer.
Amjad originally had dreams to be a founder, but then he got a really good opportunity to work on CodeAcademy, and when he got the job offer, he decided to propose to Haya. Haya mentioned that getting engaged was a very practical decision where they both knew that they were unlikely to break up, so it made sense to get married.
In late 2013, Amjad wanted to do something more technical, as he was mostly more on the leadership and hiring side at that point in time, and he had also seen Facebook do some very inspiring work. Zuck was talking about how everyone was going to be connected and the internet was going to change the world. Amjad himself had seen how the internet had changed his life and democratized the world, so he joined Facebook and got back into dev tools, and he realized that the tools were still so bad even for a big company. In 2016, he started getting the itch to do something new.
At the same time, Haya was trying to chase the American dream while they were both living in NYC, but she was also competing with the best designers, since it was NYC. She kept practicing her trade, finding different gigs, doing a stint in the MENA region, joining bootcamps, working on side projects, but she felt she was barely scratching the surface. Amjad encouraged her to stop searching for a job for a year and they both decided to try to figure out what it takes to become a designer at Facebook. All the designers at Facebook had side projects that were very interesting, so they focused on what Haya could work on. A fitness app? A lifestyle app? But wait…what happened to Replit?
Haya had really enjoyed working on Replit before, so she decided to continue the project, talking to users and asking them to do interviews and surveys, and she found out there was so much love from their small base of users. While she was working on Replit, she was interviewing at different companies, and one of them asked her why she wanted the job if she was so into Replit, and she had an epiphany moment to commit to it full-time.
Haya and Amjad both decided to make the plunge into working on Replit, so they came up with a master plan to go all in. They initially applied to YC as an education startup but got rejected. They raised elsewhere at US$500K, which helped them reach profitability, and then in late 2017, they got a DM from Sam Altman telling them that YC was interested in them. Amjad laughs about it, asking Sam why they they weren’t originally accepted, but anyway, Paul Graham had found them on Hacker News in 2017 and asked Sam to invite them into YC.
Amjad and Haya had always wanted to evolve the product outside of just education. Amjad wanted to build a great programming platform, and while it should teach people, he wanted people to be able to build real things with Replit. Joining YC gave them the license to go big, because of the energy it gives. The orange aesthetics of the coworking space, the way people talk making founders feel like they’re doing something meaningful, constantly being surrounded by great people. It also felt competitive, which kicked things up a couple of notches for Amjad and Haya.
A big part of developing Replit was figuring out how to get it in the hands of non-technical people. How do we get non-engineers to understand it and for it to be simple enough to start building?
Another interesting variable that made Replit strong was its security. It isn’t something most people think about when it comes to using their product, but to them, it was so important that people could build without the fear of fraud, hacks, or malicious behaviors. They referenced Steve Jobs’ “connecting the dots backwards” concept when they think about this. Amjad has a security-related background, and even though there are other competitors now in the same space as Replit,raising big rounds with a large team, what makes Replit stand out is that they built in security features from the beginning. That’s also something they liked about their YC experience, where those on the outside know what’s hot and what to copy, but they don’t actually know the secret sauce to its success, for example for Replit, it was their security.
Amjad and Haya also talked about working as spouses. Of course, there are many challenges, like in the early days when they would ping pong responsibilities and couldn’t really rest, and in general, investors have a bias against couples as founders. That’s a reason they also really liked YC, because Paul and Jessica understood. Being married and also being co-founders tells you a lot about how decisions are made, whether at home or in the company. It’s like a second kind of marriage: will you leave if things get really rough? Sometimes, Amjad and Haya even had to bring their kid to work, because they had their first kid during the pandemic while they were scaling like crazy and didn’t have access to childcare. It was the toughest period of their lives, because they were growing fast but were still broke.
They shared about how some of their users are now using Replit, those who wanted to be entrepreneurs but didn’t have the technical background to do it, and now with Replit, they can. They have a user who built a product to US$1M ARR even though his background is in photography. Another user was a PM at Microsoft and built a PowerPoint alternative with Replit, then quit to do that full-time.
I thought their story was cute. It had a lot of elements I learned about in the startup journey, like not giving up, like healthy co-founder relationships, like finding a small group of users that love your product (rather than a large base who’s not so committed).
I never finished that coding course I started. I do plan to someday, even just to understand the theoretical concepts of working with computers, but as a lifelong procrastinator, this will take some time.
Y Combinator is the first ever and most successful startup accelerator program in the world. It’s based in the Bay Area. Some well-known startups that went through their program include: Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit, Coinbase, OpenAI, and Twitch.
SAFE stands for Simple Agreement for Future Equity, created around 2013 to replace convertible notes as a simpler, founder-friendly fundraising instrument. Convertible notes are debt instruments with maturity dates, interest rates, and legal complexity that created unnecessary friction for early-stage deals. Carolynn wanted something that captured the economics of early investing without the debt overhead (no maturity date, no interest, no obligation to repay.) It converts to equity at a future priced round. It became the standard early-stage instrument across the startup world in part because YC open-sourced it.
Hacker News is a text-only forum run by YC where founders, engineers, and tech people share links and discuss startups, technology, and ideas. There are some heated but well-reasoned debates on there.