Replit's Three-Time YC Journey

A story about how Amjad, growing up in Jordan without consistent computer access, created Replit which became a major cloud-based programming platform.

"Amjad grew up in Jordan and loved programming but didn't have his own computer at first. He would go to internet cafes to borrow computers, but the problem was every time you go to a different computer, none of your stuff is saved from last time. When you learn to code, you first have to set up your environment - install your IDE, install all the packages for the language you're using, save files somewhere, host it somewhere.

He was so disenfranchised by this friction that as a side project, he created a cloud-based programming environment. He saw Google Docs and thought it was amazing - instead of having Microsoft Office and files on your computer, you could go to any computer and access everything through the website. He wanted to do that for coding.

He worked on it as a side project while at Yahoo, Facebook, and Codecademy. It got some momentum with about 100,000 users. Codecademy discovered his project and realized their customers could code right in the browser without needing their own setup.

He applied to YC three times and got rejected three times. After the third rejection, he was discouraged. But developers thought what he built was technically impressive because he had to write his own compilers to make it work in the browser with any language.

Paul Graham discovered Replit on Hacker News and really liked it. He told Sam Altman to check it out. This led to Amjad trading emails with Paul about the philosophical foundation of Replit - enabling 10x more programmers in the world by decreasing friction. Even in his original 2014 seed deck, he planned for AI-assisted coding before AI was mainstream.

Now Replit has grown to 20 million developers, and they've executed exactly what was in that original master plan from 10 years ago."