The Hacker Who Democratized Code
How Amjad Masad Built Replit From a Rebellious Idea Into a Billion-Dollar Platform
Written by: Taylor Cromwell Original photography by Irina Logra
Summary
- Amjad Masad transformed a personal frustration into Replit, a browser-based coding platform now used by over 30 million people worldwide.
- His journey to "overnight success" actually spanned 15 years, from hacking his university's system in Jordan to bootstrapping Replit when most VCs passed on developer tools.
- In 2023, facing stagnation at $10 million ARR, Masad made a controversial all-in bet on AI agents that catapulted Replit to over $100 million ARR in less than a year.
- Masad's direct approach to building in public—choosing Twitter over PR teams and crowdfunding to 2,500 community members—reflects his belief in authentic communication and accessible wealth creation.
- His vision extends beyond professional developers to a future where anyone can build software through natural language, exemplified by coding sessions with his five-year-old son.
Introduction
On a Saturday morning in California, Amjad Masad’s five-year-old son turns to him with an idea: “I want to make a game where the characters turn into frogs if they touch lava.”
They open a browser. The child describes the rules. The machine listens. A few prompts later, they’re testing the first version.
For Masad, this is a glimpse of the future. A world where building software doesn’t require years of training, just curiosity and a clear idea. Where coding becomes something closer to storytelling. And where the right tools make the distance between imagination and execution almost invisible.
That belief is what drove him to build Replit, a browser-based coding platform now used by over 30 million people around the world. Not just by engineers, but by students, tinkerers, educators, gamers, and artists — people who may never have written a line of code before.
Today, Replit looks like a classic startup win: a big idea, millions of users, and a billion-dollar valuation. But of course, that’s never the full story. Replit didn’t start in Silicon Valley. It started with a kid in Jordan hacking on borrowed computers, frustrated that he had to reinstall his development environment every time he sat down to learn. A kid who believed that creating software should feel as simple and accessible as creating a document. That obsession became a side project. That side project became a movement.
This is the story of how Amjad Masad turned a rebellious idea into a billion-dollar platform. And why, in the age of AI and instant creation, the future won’t just belong to engineers but to anyone bold enough to build.
The Hacker's Manifesto Made Real
Masad’s fascination with systems was personal. In 2008, while studying computer science in Jordan, he constantly aced his coursework but struggled to attend class. Under university rules, missing too many lectures meant automatic failure, regardless of performance. After five years in a four-year program, he’d had enough.
So he hacked into the university’s system to change his grades.“I hacked into the university system,” he admitted years later in an interview with Joe Rogan. “I just wanted to see if I could do it and how it worked.”
What started as a personal rebellion turned into a full-on crash of the registration database. The anomaly — someone marked both “banned” and “passed” — set off alarms across the university. When the head of registration called Masad’s landline to ask if he knew anything, he owned up. The next day, he stood in front of a room of deans, diagramming on a whiteboard how he broke in.
Rather than expel him, the university asked him to spend the summer helping harden their systems. Later, he was recruited to do a sanctioned hack for a faculty member, and during his final defense, he publicly exposed a live vulnerability by decrypting a dean’s password on screen.
That moment — part defiance, part technical tour de force — captured the spirit of the Hacker Manifesto he’d grown up reading. The infamous manifesto is a short essay written in the 1980s that described hackers not as criminals, but as curious people who felt left out of the system and decided to build their own.
“There’s this hunger for knowledge,” he told us, explaining the hacker mentality. “This idea that information wants to be free. That society wasn’t built for us, so we built our own systems.”
That act — quiet, subversive, and generative — foreshadowed the spirit behind Replit. That same hacker mindset would become the foundation of his life’s work: creating tools that made powerful systems, like coding environments, developer tools, and even wealth creation, accessible to everyone.
From Counter-Strike Champion to Code Revolutionary
Before he mastered programming, Masad was leading Counter-Strike tournaments in Amman.
It was the early 2000s. E-sports wasn’t a thing yet. But Masad and his friends treated it seriously. They formed teams, held local competitions, and eventually made it all the way to an international tournament in Turkey, hosted by the Cyberathlete Professional League.
Although they were the best in the country, they were outmatched when it came to the top global teams. Instead of getting discouraged, Masad took the lesson and moved on. He realized he didn’t want to spend his life grinding in competitive games. What he really loved was the stuff behind the scenes, modeling games, building maps, and writing scripts. He was already writing code without even thinking about it as programming.
That obsession with gaming easily transitioned to an obsession with programming (that same obsession is a recurring theme in Masad’s story).
“I immediately ran into this problem when you want to learn a programming language; you have to spend hours and hours setting up the development environment.” There was a major problem, though: he didn’t have a laptop at home. Every time he wanted to code, he had to walk to a café, borrow a computer, and spend time reinstalling everything just to get started.
That frustration became a seed. What if you could just open a browser and start coding?
He started to imagine something new: a coding environment built for speed, simplicity, and access. A platform built for anyone who wanted to learn, experiment, or build something.
Gaming had taught him how to think strategically. Hacking taught him how to dig into systems. Now, he was ready to combine both, to build something that didn’t exist yet.
“I thought, how hard could it be?” he told us. “Turns out… it’s really hard.”
The 15-Year Journey to “Overnight Success”
In 2009, he and a few friends (including Haya Odeh, who would later become his wife and cofounder of the company) worked on the problem. “It took me two years of banging my head against a problem until I had a bit of a breakthrough.”
They figured out how to compile programming languages into JavaScript so the code could run directly in a browser. When they released it in 2011 as an open-source project, it went viral, especially on Hacker News. People saw the potential. Masad had proven it could be done.
That moment opened doors.
“I wanted to build a startup,” Masad said, “but there wasn’t a lot of venture capital back in Jordan. There weren’t a lot of startups.”
So instead, he ended up joining Codecademy, which was using the software at the time. He moved to New York on an O-1 visa — a rare path for people with “extraordinary ability” — and started helping millions learn to code using browser-based tools.
It was validation of his idea, but it wasn’t the end goal. He was helping people learn at Codeacademy, but he knew that he wanted to help people build.
Replit was officially created in 2016, just a few years later. The mission for the company at the time was to make programming more accessible and to solve the development environment, deployment, and hosting issue, he explained. “I wanted a place where you could go from your first line of code to building a startup.”
However, they faced a lot of headwinds. “There were a lot of things going against us at the time. People don't remember this, but there was a bit of a bear market in Silicon Valley in 2016, so we were going out to raise in economic conditions that weren't really great,” he said.
They ended up raising $600,000, barely enough to build the product, let alone take the scale up route. Instead, Masad had to bootstrap and try to get customers early on.
The irony is that by the time most people started to notice Replit, Masad had been working on the problem for more than a decade.
Amjad with co-founder and wife, Haya Odeh, VP of Design
Rather than obsessing over vanity metrics, he zeroed in on one metric many VCs overlooked: fun. “One of the best predictors of Replit’s success was how much fun people were having on the platform,” Masad has said. Early on, students and hobbyists using Replit were enjoying coding — they found it approachable and even game-like — and this engagement was a leading indicator of the community that would form.
"Overnight success, it turns out, often just means staying obsessed with a problem long enough that the world catches up."
Building in Public: The Anti-PR Approach
Most CEOs have a press team. Masad has Twitter.
It’s been both a risky bet and a strategic play (again both themes that are recurring in Masad’s story). When we asked him about his strategy for his direct communication style, he said that it was “part necessity” and “part a vision for where the future is headed.”
“I grew up on YouTube and Facebook,” he explained. “It always felt like this magnificent thing where you can reach enormous numbers of people without mediation.”
He also watched as media companies grew increasingly antagonistic toward tech. “Tech was eating into their business,” he explained, “and the coverage went from glorifying startups to at best being empathetic at a time.”
So he decided to skip the gatekeepers. Instead of pitching outlets or polishing press releases, Masad built his own platform — one tweet at a time.
“I enjoy talking directly to people, interacting with people, and controlling the message. As well as being authentic. I always hated that kind of faceless corporate style of talking.” He tweeted openly about engineering challenges, product updates, team milestones, even company missteps. And when people disagreed with a decision — like a pricing change — he didn’t hide from the criticism. He explained the thinking behind it.
That kind of transparency comes with risk. “Being authentic might mean that you're offending some people sometimes,” Masad admitted. “But the world has been trending towards my style of communication for a long time. I think it's more normalized now for CEOs and others to be more authentic. And the world has become a little more forgiving for sometimes expressing things in the wrong way.”
Masad’s definition of authenticity also extends to his politics. As a Palestinian, he’s spoken publicly about injustice, even when it drew backlash. But for him, the stakes are bigger than business.
“What's interesting is a lot of times immigrants to America understand American ideals more than natural-born citizens,” he said. “Because it is easy to forget — it is easy to not understand how profound the concept of freedom of speech is. It's the only country in the world that has the First Amendment.
“And if you don’t use it, you will lose it.
“I love this country. I'm very critical of our foreign policy and other things, but I think at its core, the Constitution and some of the basic ideals are some of the best in the world. There's been a lot of progress, and I think the reason there's been a lot of progress over the years is because those ideals exist. It's important to practice those rights, practice the right to vote, practice the right to free speech.”
That willingness to speak plainly — and stand up for what he believes — has shaped more than Masad’s personal brand. It’s shaped Replit’s culture.
“We attract a lot of people,” he said, “whether it’s investors, customers, or employees, that are interested in working at a place that’s principled.”
The Funding Rollercoaster: From Bootstrap to Billions
The founding story of Replit – from a personal pain point to a globally used platform – underscores a key startup lesson: some of the most impactful products come from solving a problem the founder deeply knows and refuses to give up on, even when gatekeepers initially don’t believe.
Masad wanted to code anywhere, without having to reinstall environments every time he got access to a new computer. So he built a solution. And then he kept building.
But turning that solution into a company? That was the hard part.
When he tried raising money for Replit in 2016, most investors passed. It wasn’t just the timing — Silicon Valley was in a downturn. It was the category. Developer tools, at the time, weren’t delivering big returns. And the idea of coding in a browser sounded more like a toy than a venture-scale business.
Still, Masad persisted. In 2018, Replit got into Y Combinator. It helped that Paul Graham (the world-renowned computer scientist and YC Cofounder) had noticed the project early and believed in it. Masad didn’t take the traditional route — his YC application included a RickRoll instead of a standard pitch. But the product spoke for itself.
From there, things started to move faster.
“After getting into Y Combinator, fundraising became a lot easier,” he said. “Still, as any entrepreneur will tell you, fundraising is hard at any point. But from there, we raised the seed round from Andreessen Horowitz, and we were off to the races.”
Then in 2020, Masad made an unconventional move: he opened up a $5 million crowdfunding round on WeFunder. Over 2,500 community members joined as investors.
“We had taken off. We had a lot of really excited community members,” he said. “Replit has always been about making things accessible, and I always thought that angel investing and investing in general was something that more people could be doing.”
Masad had seen firsthand how wealth creation in tech was often limited to insiders. He wanted Replit’s supporters to have a real stake in its growth.
By 2023, Replit had raised over $270 million across multiple rounds from firms like a16z, Coatue, and Y Combinator. The company hit a $1.16 billion valuation. And in its latest round, the focus wasn’t even on operations — it was on providing liquidity to employees.
It’s a long way from bootstrapping and rejection emails. But through every stage, the mission stayed constant: make software creation accessible to anyone, anywhere.
And Masad never stopped betting on the builders the industry overlooked.
The Bet That Changed Everything
Replit hit a crossroads at the end of 2022.
The platform had grown steadily over several years, earning millions of users and a loyal community. But behind the scenes, Masad knew something wasn’t working.
“Revenue was not growing at a rate which you'd want a venture-backed company to grow,” he said. “We had built a lot of technology and we were proud of our platform, but it was in this awkward place—easy enough to get started, but not powerful enough to build important things.”
Developers preferred more advanced local IDEs (integrated development environment). Hobbyists and citizen developers found Replit still too complex to use. The product sat in a messy middle: too lightweight for professionals, too intimidating for newcomers.
It was an existential issue. If Replit didn’t evolve, it risked stagnation. Masad faced a choice: double down on power users and compete directly with Microsoft, or return to Replit’s original mission — make programming accessible to everyone — and chart a new path entirely.
He chose the latter.
That meant a controversial bet: to go all-in on AI agents.
“There was no indication it was possible,” Masad said. “There were no other products on the market.”
Still, he saw something others didn’t. He had spent years watching AI’s progression, reading papers, testing early tools, and absorbing what was coming. It wasn’t certainty, but it was enough conviction to act.
“Entrepreneurship is about making bets,” he said. “And bets have risk.”
The decision wasn’t met with universal support. “A lot of people disagreed inside the company,” Masad said. “A lot of people left.”
But he and the remaining team pressed forward. They took everything Replit had built over the last eight years — its infrastructure, its browser-based IDE, its runtime environment — and layered an AI agent on top.
The result was radical. Users could now build full apps by simply describing what they wanted. They didn’t need to learn syntax or set up dev environments. They just had to express ideas clearly and iterate.
This turned out to be one of the most significant turning points of Replit’s story.
Replit leapt from $10 million in ARR to over $100 million in less than a year.
Masad could’ve taken the safer route, competing for a slice of the professional market. Instead, he went bigger — betting on a future where anyone, not just trained engineers, could build software.
And he hasn’t looked back.
The Future According to Amjad
Replit has grown into one of the world’s largest developer platforms, reshaping who gets to build software — and how.
Ask Masad what the future looks like, and he won’t talk about AI in abstract terms. He’ll tell you what it looks like on a Saturday morning at his house, when his five-year-old son sits beside him and says: “I want to make a game where the characters turn into frogs if they touch lava.”
They open Replit. The child explains. The machine interprets. Together, they build.
That scene might sound charming, but to Amjad, it’s a preview of the next era of computing, where anyone with an idea and basic digital fluency can create working software. No engineering degree required.
In the past, working with computers meant knowing how to talk like a machine. Syntax. Commands. Gatekeeping. Now, thanks to language models, the most valuable skill is the ability to express and refine ideas.
“In the future, your job won’t be to write every line of code,” he said. “Your job will be to direct intelligent agents, review their output, and guide the system toward what you want.”
That future is already unfolding. Today, Replit users can describe an app in plain language, and an AI agent can build and deploy it. Soon, those agents will run independently for hours — or even days — working on goals while their human counterparts sleep, then returning with prototypes and updates.
Eventually, Masad envisions a world where users manage an entire software team of AI agents: one for frontend, one for backend, one for QA, one for growth. Each running in the background. Each surfacing progress like a human teammate.
“In the future,” he said, “if you're in sales, you could go build an SDR agent that scours the web and finds leads for you. Or if you're in marketing, you might realize there's a piece of your job you do every day — and you can go to Replit and build software to automate it. People are going to be more generalist. They’re going to have so many tools at their disposal that they’ll make an impact not just in their domain, but across the business.”
This shift, he believes, won’t just change how software is built. It will change who builds it. If Masad has his way, the next wave of builders won’t come just from Stanford or Y Combinator.
They’ll come from bedrooms. Classrooms. Public libraries. And sometimes, gaming cafés in Amman.
Because code, in the hands of someone who cares, is power. And when it’s this accessible, that power no longer belongs to the few.
It belongs to everyone.
Leadership Lessons from an Accidental CEO
Amjad Masad didn’t set out to become a CEO. He didn’t study leadership frameworks or map out org charts. Like many technical founders, he started with a problem he couldn’t stop thinking about — and built Replit to solve it.
But when asked what the real job of a CEO is, he didn’t hesitate.
“Growth,” he said. “And not just revenue. I mean personal growth. Emotional growth. You are forced to confront yourself. Your weaknesses, your blind spots.”
So he worked on himself like it was part of the job — because it was.
He had to tackle procrastination. Build systems. Learn to delegate. Face down the unsexy parts of running a company: compliance, hiring, documentation, investor updates, performance reviews. “I am very excited, energetic, but I just don't like to do chores, and there's a lot of chores you have to do as CEO,” he said, “so I had to figure out ways to get over that.”
He also had to protect his energy. He started journaling. Practiced mindfulness. Embraced cold plunges. Built rhythms that kept him steady when things got hard, like during the 2023 growth crisis, when internal tension peaked and team members left.
“As a CEO, you need to be the optimist,” he said. “Everyone’s looking at your emotional state. Even in the hardest times, you have to maintain clarity of thought and optimism.”
Beyond mindset, Amjad also became a student of strategy. He reads voraciously — not just business books, but biographies, blog posts, research papers. He credits one book in particular, 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer, with shaping how he thinks about defensibility.
“The idea behind it is that for any business to be a massively successful business it has to have one of those 7 powers — in Silicon Valley we call them moats,” he said. “It continues to be an inspiration for the strategy of the business. What markets to go after, what technology to build, what roadmap to have in order to have the best competitive advantage on the market.”
Author: Taylor Cromwell
Taylor is a writer, interviewer, and founder of Creator Diaries, a newsletter digging into how real people turn ideas into income. Her editorial work spans HubSpot, beehiiv, Just Go Grind, Confluence VC, and more — covering founder strategy, content marketing, and the business side of the creator economy. When she’s not writing about building businesses, she’s probably wandering an antique market, walking with a podcast, or scheming her next countryside escape.
