Amjad Masad (@amasad) says AI model suppliers may become their customers’ competitors. Replit is building a way around that risk. “There's like a risk that when you work closely with the foundation model companies is that they're going to move into your business.” “It's harder to partner with them because their ambition is such that they want to be, they want to subsume a big part of the economy.” “Replit is becoming more of an independence layer inside enterprises where we create a layer of indirection between you and the models and we get you the best token at the cheapest price.” “But also we also create an abstraction layer on top of the cloud as well.” - Amjad Masad, founder and CEO of Replit, in an a16z interview published October 3.

Amjad Masad’s Replit allows users to build apps together like they’re doodling on a white board. It also made the Jordanian immigrant a billionaire along the way. Read more: 📸: Cody Pickens for Forbes

Patrick Collison with Amjad Masad on why AI will be like food: essential to everything, and still not where most of the value goes. Amjad: "There's also this trend of saying that the foundation lab companies are gonna be able to capture a big part of at least new business creation, but perhaps the economy. It's like there's no reason to compete with ChatGPT or Claude because they're just gonna roll over us." Patrick: "Without food, there really would not be much economy or humanity. It is a truly necessary ingredient in production. And yet, most of the economy is not captured by food producers." "The idea that AI is going to be hugely important and abundant in the future does not necessarily mean that all the value is gonna be captured by these AI labs." "The value of any company is in proportion to what its customers can pay it. And so if there's one company in the economy, that's in fact not a very valuable company... Prices and value accrue to that which is scarce." "I think it would be a terrible reason not to start a company because you think that... any given company or sector will gobble everything up. That's not how things have worked through history." Full conversation: @patrickc @stripe @amasad @Replit

Talking to Amjad yesterday, I realized Replit is more important than I'd previously thought. It's the way AI pervades organizations. Organizations can become somewhat aligned with AI by using AI-powered apps, but the deepest change takes the form of code.

Replit CEO Amjad Masad (@amasad) built an email app with Replit, then stopped using it and had a coding agent work on Gmail directly. "We're thinking about what that does to our business because we famously make apps." "And I think increasingly we're starting to get our agents to solve the problem directly. So oftentimes you might put a prompt that's shaped like an app, but actually you want the agent to just do it." "Recently I built an app with Replit to kind of manage my email ... it's really hard to manage, especially with all the AI slop that people send me." "And I actually stopped using that app and I started using Replit directly to kind of write code against my Gmail and like do everything I need to do via the coding agent." - Amjad Masad, co-founder and CEO of Replit, on The Times Tech Podcast. Uploaded October 4, 2026. Replit sells the coding agent in this example.

Replit CEO Amjad Masad (@amasad) says friends told him someone left an AI agent running overnight and woke up to $10,000 of wasted tokens. "We've seen a lot of companies where CFOs and CTOs have gone publicly and said, we're just burning tokens for no reason." "Someone used $10,000 of tokens, and they had no idea because they put the agent to run and they went to sleep." "And the next day it was like $10,000 worth of tokens, just like in the garbage." "And so I think token capital needs to be managed very rationally." - Amjad Masad, co-founder and CEO of Replit, on The Times Tech Podcast. Uploaded October 4, 2026.

Replit CEO Amjad Masad on the “most gangster story in Silicon Valley” In September 2021, Replit founder Amjad Masad tweeted: “The most gangster story in Silicon Valley is Steve Jobs buying Pixar for $5m, investing $50m, operating at a loss for a decade — so much so he had to cut personal checks every month to make payroll and somehow turning it around to exit for $7B to Disney.” He expands on this in his interview on the My First Million podcast: “The thing I like about the Steve Jobs story is when he was lost in the desert for 10 years. He was fired from Apple, and then he created two companies that were failing the whole time. NeXT Computer and Pixar were literally failing, and he was investing more and more of his own money. At that pace he was going to go broke, but he kept going for 10 years. How do you do that?” Eventually the success of Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated feature film, helped make Pixar’s 1995 IPO one of the the most successful of the decade. And Apple used the NeXt operating system as the foundation for macOS. But both ventures took the better part of 10 years. Interestingly, the 12 “wilderness years” between getting fired at Apple and coming back was the most pivotal period of Steve Jobs’s life. His work with Pixar and NeXT helped him grow into the leader capable of taking Apple to unimaginable heights when he returned. Source: @myfirstmilpod @amasad (Dec 2024)