Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:05:13 · Paul Graham, Amjad Masad
[00:05:13] S1: And when did you launch it? September 24. [00:05:15] S0: Okay. So when people saw it, like Andrej Karpathy said, this was like an AGI moment, like a field AGI moment because everyone was like, holy crap, like LMs could do that. It freaked me out. [00:05:27] S1: Yeah. I didn't like it at all. [00:05:31] S0: How do you feel about [00:05:32] S1: it right now? Because aesthetically, it was, like, very offensive for you. Yeah. I know. I know. Because the... Either way I program is the exact opposite of this. I like... I program... You know, I spend three years writing a thousand lines of code, and if I can get it down to nine eighty in the next month, so much the better. [00:05:49] S0: But you give me the principle for all of this, which is when you first invest in Replit, when you first back Replit, you said there is a super linear relationship between how easy it is to program and how many programmers you get. [00:06:04] S1: Yes, that's true. That's not just true for programming, that's true for anything consumers use. If you make it 10% easier, you don't just get 10% more people, you get twice as many. Yes. Yeah, remember that. I didn't mean make it this easy. [00:06:17] S0: It went too far. [00:06:18] S1: I mean, just talk in English and it spits out all this code. [00:06:21] S0: Well, so the realization I had is for Replit to be truly successful, we needed to go the whole way.
00:06:21 · Amjad Masad, Paul Graham
[00:06:21] S0: Well, so the realization I had is for Replit to be truly successful, we needed to go the whole way. [00:06:29] S1: Because you did know, you were one of the early people predicting AI, And like, were you predicting, you were essentially predicting vibe coding in something like 2015 or '17 or [00:06:39] S0: Yeah, 2015, 'sixteen, in our original deck, we talk about how if you build a platform where there's millions of people coding, you can train a machine learning model that predicts... [00:06:51] S1: I mean, that's crazy ahead of its time. Yeah. Right? This was before the Transformers paper. [00:06:56] S0: That was before Transformers. [00:06:58] S1: I'm starting to think that's not the visionary, that's just your nuts. [00:07:03] S0: If you're [00:07:03] S1: that early. [00:07:04] S0: Well, think I've been fairly good at predicting where [00:07:09] S1: I'm the just future joking, is you're not [00:07:10] S0: really- Well, even when I was a kid, I remember when I used my first Nokia phone, I was like, Oh my God, people are just gonna be stuck with a new computer. And it was literally like a flip phone essentially. And some of that experience also came to Replit, which is Replit was the first programming platform that had a mobile app. And everyone laughed at us, the idea that Programming on mobile. Programming on your phone. But I [00:07:41] S1: had an RFC for it. Yes. Not an RFC, an RFS. [00:07:45] S0: Well, you [00:07:45] S1: for startups. [00:07:46] S0: You actually... You told me you would fix bugs using the Hacker News Lyspropel from your phone.
00:07:46 · Amjad Masad, Paul Graham
[00:07:46] S0: You actually... You told me you would fix bugs using the Hacker News Lyspropel from your phone. [00:07:54] S1: That's right. Yeah. Not voluntarily. It was just the only way we could get internet access. [00:07:59] S0: But yes, since this podcast is about building the future, I think that people underestimate their ability to potentially predict where the future is headed and build towards it. You just have to think, sit down and think. I don't think many people sit down and think. [00:08:15] S1: No. This is what experts think. Experts think, all I do is I just sit down and think and I have the ideas. Right? You know? And like everybody else tries sitting in that... Sitting down and thinking and they don't [00:08:24] S0: have What's the secret? [00:08:25] S1: It's it's because you've been doing this idea Yeah. For like twenty years. When did you first start thinking about making something like Replit where you could [00:08:34] S0: sort of program online? Well, it's like when I was like... I had my Symbian smartphone and I was in class and I was like, you know, wish I could program. [00:08:44] S1: So how long ago was this? [00:08:45] S0: This was like 2008. Okay, so almost twenty years ago.
00:08:45 · Amjad Masad, Paul Graham
[00:08:45] S0: This was like 2008. Okay, so almost twenty years ago. [00:08:51] S1: This is why when you just sit down and think, you come up with the future, right? Because your whole brain has been thinking about this for twenty years. Right, right? Obsessively. You were trying to build Replit before it was called Replit for years and years and years, right? This has always been the big thing. So of course you thought of stuff before everybody else. So you knew back to that famous demo, right, in the summer of twenty twenty four. [00:09:20] S0: When you called me a Bond villain. [00:09:21] S1: Well, you seem like a Bond villain. That's what I felt like that I was being shown this frightening thing. Because I remember, I still remember what you said. Don't look at that. Don't look at the code. That's object code, right? And I'm like, oh no, the whole stuff that I make, the whole stuff I've spent decades making is just object code. [00:09:42] S0: No, everyone's realizing that. I think, yeah, I've been seeing engineers that were also repulsed by that. I remember your tweet was very controversial when you tweeted that. [00:09:54] S1: That guy who generated vast amounts of code using AI, yeah. [00:09:57] S0: Well, even that tweet about me being the one villain and object code and all of that was also controversial, but now all engineers are... I think with AI, everyone will have to go through this period of denial and then sort of later on depression and then eventually acceptance. Yeah. I've had it in 2020. [00:10:25] S1: Really?
00:10:25 · Paul Graham, Amjad Masad
[00:10:25] S1: Really? [00:10:25] S0: And so it just makes it easier for me. I had the grief of the craft that I love is gone. I've already grieved [00:10:36] S1: You felt that too? Yeah. Okay. So you knew what I was feeling I knew what you were feeling. You showed me that demo. Yes. [00:10:42] S0: But you had to feel it so that you can let go. [00:10:46] S1: I think everybody got convinced at the end of last year, At the end of 2025 is when everybody realized, Okay, AI is going to write all the code. [00:10:55] S0: It's always surprising to me what is the trigger for these kind of things because, again, it seemed obvious to me. [00:11:05] S1: Well, for Replit users, I think they already knew. For Replit users The thing that convinced the rest of the world might have been Claude Code, right? Don't you think? [00:11:13] S0: I think Open Claw. Okay. I think... Claude Code partly, but OpenClaw I think was the first time people experienced this idea of LMs running into completion, where you give it a task and it's able to go all the way until it's [00:11:28] S1: Which you had been doing for a year and a half at that point. [00:11:30] S0: Yes, but I think the form factor of OpenClaw well-being, you could text it and all of that, I think, I sort of underestimate the power of a form factor, especially for everyday people. [00:11:44] S1: Did it influence what you've done with Replit? Did you learn anything from it?
00:11:44 · Paul Graham, Amjad Masad
[00:11:44] S1: Did it influence what you've done with Replit? Did you learn anything from it? [00:11:48] S0: Not yet. I've just learned that lesson. Yeah, I think it will influence things in the future, which is like, I just assume that I go out and like put out a vision and like build a product and everyone will be like, oh, yeah, that's obvious. But I think in reality, think you need to tinker a lot with how people experience it. [00:12:08] S1: Do you still watch users using Replit and sort of see what they're doing and are surprised by it? [00:12:16] S0: Yes. I actually didn't like to do that, but HYA kind of forced me to do it early on. And I would like be kicking and screaming because I would like feel like intense pain when like users are confused by the software or hit a bug or whatever. Yeah. I would be, like, hesitant. Like, I would actually be be, you know, physically [00:12:41] S1: It's it's mortifying It is mortifying. Watch users use your stuff. Yeah. It really is. But you know why it's mortifying? Because till now, you were in denial about the horrors that were being perpetrated daily out there. Right. [00:12:52] S0: And so... But but but our our company culture became a lot about being very close to our users, primarily thanks to Aya, kind of having that that mentality of you just need to constantly talk to them. [00:13:05] S1: She also made you very cool looking. That was one of the really unusual things about Replit early on. Amazing, like, mind bending graphic design. [00:13:15] S0: Right. Yes.