Replit founder Amjad Masad isn’t afraid of Silicon Valley

[ramon156]

I know this isn't very on the topic, but these articles make me cringe physically.

> “You should compete,” I suggested.

> He smirked. “I always compete.”

Feels like a vocal jerk-off. Just tell me the details, idc how tuff the interview was.

[simonw]

This is a style of writing called "narrative journalism" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_journalism

I find it pretty distracting too.

[ActionHank]

These pieces are usually just advertising with more words. They want to frame Replit and their hero founder as being rebels who don't follow the rules or fear goliath.

This is fantasy fiction for VCs, founders, AI bros, and anyone else who isn't actually looking for information.

[paglaghoda]

replit is actually quite popular among teenagers and basically third world youngsters trying to spin off a service or a "product" of their own.

- i mean yes u cannot make money out of teenagers but damn replit's Vibe coding tool is fucking good. Better than Lovable or Bolt any day.

just to give u a perspective from a 20year old kid from a 3rd world county

[mbesto]

I think this is exactly it. Replit is a cheap and easy way to get an MVP off the ground ASAP. However, their audience is inherently hackathon attendees, not real businesses. Whether these can turn into real businesses (en masse to justify low churn and consistent SaaS ARR) or not is the real question.

[epiccoleman]

thanks for sharing, that's an interesting perspective actually. It's easy for us "pro devs" to kind of ignore platforms like Replit as "training wheels." I look at it and think "why would I use that, I have all my own stuff set up the way I like it locally".

But us older guys (i'm not that old, 34, but still) can easily forget how valuable and exciting it is to have tools that make the publication / deploy easy. It's cool to hear what the younger, less experienced crowd gravitates towards in the modern dev tool landscape. Thanks for sharing!

[jokethrowaway]

Why don't you just use Claude?

I don't get all these vibe coding tools when Claude is better than any of them

[jimmySixDOF]

If your optimizing for simple, powerful, and on mobile then Replit is hard to beat.

[truetraveller]

which country are you from?

[coffeemug]

Know Amjad from years ago. We're on the opposite sides of ideological barricades, but he's no terrorist sympathizer. Just a man who loves his people. He seemed extremely pragmatic too-- if he ran Gaza it'd be an economic paradise by now.

[bko]

He doesn't seem pragmatic because everything I read about him or any time I hear from him it's about this geopolitical issue. Doesn't he have a company to run? What's the point of making this front and center part of your personality. His thoughts on the war in Gaza is literally the only thing I know about him. That and him firing an intern about a weekend project. It's all just exhausting.

How is that pragmatic? If you want to do good things, build a business and donate money or whatever. Getting into Twitter wars with internet strangers and spending on PR to tell everyone what you think about geopolitics strikes me as anything but pragmatic.

[SwtCyber]

So success buys you ideological latitude

[ramon156]

Do you know how many politicians switch sides once they have lost their power? (well, not many have been in that situation, but still!)

As a powerful figure, you become a literal puppet in front of the public. Your opinions don't matter

[overfeed]

Billionaires wouldn't run their mouths, if that wasn't the case.

[mikestorrent]

What's the minimum threshold for that, I wonder?

[adolph]

Effect weakly linked to Affect

[terespuwash]

It's fascinating to read how Hacker News helped make Replit successful. I hope everyone will try this tool! I wonder if Masad still scrolls here nowadays.

[nerdsniper]

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=amasad

Yep. Seems like he posts a bit more thoughtfully with deliberation ever since the "suing my intern over a weekend project" debacle.

Having other close friends from Jordan, it's not surprising that he's outspoken on the topic of Israeli occupation - it's very difficult to spend a significant amount of time in the affected regions and not come away with a very strong opinion.

[jwblackwell]

I absolutely love the idea of Replit and I think it's an awesome platform and idea.

I do wonder how sustainable it is as a business though. I expect Replit is sending the majority of that money to the big AI labs through API costs

As soon as anything becomes serious you're going to try and take it off Replit and use something like Claude Code and AWS etc

[kelvinjps10]

I remember learning to code with replit, the people from the course recommended replit because there was no setup to do

[jamesbelchamber]

I used to teach with it - at classroom-scale it was really good. Unfortunately they shut all that down a little while back, and there wasn't really a good replacement. Which was a shame.

Seems to have worked out for them, mind!

[bdcravens]

Some criticize that approach, suggesting that you're not learning important skills, but I applaud that approach. Anyone who's ever been in a workshop at a conference, where you have limited time to learn a topic, knows how much time is wasted doing initial setup.

[mannanj]

So I got excited and used Replit because I heard about it in a Diary of a Ceo podcast. Spent days working on my project, it was working in their unique tech stack and when I did local git commits it locked some files and conflicted with their replit agent also doing git operations and got stuck in a loop where the fix was to do a git reset --hard and reset the state.

Unfortunately their tooling locks me out from doing that and I wouldn't get help from their team after asking twice and getting moved to several different support members of their team. They just ghosted me and so I left and took my business elsewhere. Doesn't seem like it was made for advanced users.

Unfortunate.

[danpalmer]

Unsurprising, the Diary of a CEO guy is a snake oil salesman. Awful interviewer, but very good at self promotion.

[jrochkind1]

The idea of "advanced users" of vibe coding is interesting.

[indigodaddy]

exe.dev is already miles better already than what replit is attempting to do with it's AI things

[kaicianflone]

Replit with vercel starter templates and supabase is amazing. I even have it do all my migrations and RLS policies. Also playwright automated testing in github action CI/CD.

I have it originated from a master prompt project I have architected with shadcn suggestions and how I like my app router setup.

I'm hooking this up to comet to be fully agentic with Linear tasks and human-in-the-loop approvals with up to 5 UI versions per feature. And ts contract request/responses for my nextJS api endpoints.

I also host a "LangChain" similar like tool in Azure C# minimal API in a shared replit secret. It's so nice to be able to re-use secrets for Radar, etc across all my apps.

[foobarian]

In the immortal words of Peter Stormare in the VW ad, "what does this do??"

[sd9]

The title is a non-sequitur.

“Terrorist sympathizer” and “successful businessperson” (or “rich person”) are completely orthogonal. Building a successful business does not necessarily change your terrorist sympathisation status. You can be a rich terrorist sympathiser.

[terespuwash]

Your comment fails to mention that the accusations of sympathy for terrorism are lies.

[tim333]

It was kind of the focus of the article though - how his pro Palestinian politics interacted with being a SV founder.

It also fitted with some @paulg twitter stuff. He wrote a fair bit about both Gaza and Replit.

[tdeck]

Just look at Tal Broda for one example.

[sillyfluke]

As far as I can tell, nowhere does the article argue that being "terrorist symphathizer" and being a successful business person are mutually exculsive, so you seem to be arguing against a point no one made.

What is obvious is that people should be outraged if a successful businessperson is actually a "terrorist sympathizer", because most people, whatever their ideology, would simply consider it to be an outrageous and ridiculous state of affairs if a successful businessperson was allowed to function unimpeded in western society and its business world if they themselves considered the businessperson to be an unapologetic "terrorist sympathizer".

The title is clearly an enagement ploy by the editor because it forces the reader to decide whether they themselves believe the founder is actually a terrorist sympathizer or not. If they don't think so, then it's outrageous that he's been libelled in a such a manner. If they think he is a terrorist sympathizer then it would be outrageous to them that he is allowed to operate unimpeded in western society and its economic realm.

That's why this comment sounds disingenously pedantic and your follow-up comment's detached tone doesn't feel sincere frankly. The article does list specific reasons why he was called a "terrorist sympathizer" and forces the reader to decide whether they themselves would consider the founder a "terrorist sympathizer" given the context in order to come to a conclusion about him in general.

[a456463]

Nothing like paying someone to shill for you.

[internet_points]

well, it's not a high bar – these days anyone who says "I support Palestine Action" or "she was murdered by ICE" is called a terrorist sympathizer

[flumpcakes]

> these days anyone who says "I support Palestine Action"

They have a video of people from this group attacking police with sledgehammers. It is strange how much of this 'direction action' is harming Ukraine support and not Israel. If people wanted to support Palestine they can do it without attacking their own countries' military - which is not operating in Israel at all.

> "she was murdered by ICE"

They have a video of her being shot, pretty much needlessly. I'd say that should be manslaughter at a minimum.

[reliabilityguy]

> these days anyone who says "I support Palestine Action"

You mean the group that sneaked in and damaged a bunch of UK Military’s planes on a military base? Was this the action that put them into the terrorist category?

[lingrush4]

Why are you surprised that people who sympathize with terrorists are called terrorists sympathizers?

Roughly 75% of Palestinians support terrorism (the number changes with every survey but it's consistently over 50%).

The lady in Minneapolis was using her car as a weapon to impede law enforcement operations. That's not really terrorism; insurrection would be a more accurate description. But she certainly wasn't a good person deserving of any sympathy.

[veeti]

I'll do you one better: Palestine Action is bankrolled by notorious pro-Russia tankie Fergie Chambers, who supports Vladimir Putin's genocidal campaign in Ukraine. So please add genocide sympathizer to your list.

[1] https://lamag.com/news/cox-family-heir-james-fergie-chambers...

[uhhhd]

"Palestine Action" is terrorism.

[eltondegeneres]

> Masad, 38, has felt obliged to speak out about Gaza ever since, calling out those in tech who, in his view, have supported Israel’s “genocide” of the Palestinian people.

This sentence would be better without the scare quotes. Something like "calling out those in tech who support what he views as a genocide."

[kiliantics]

The phrasing in the article shows very strong bias towards Israel in general

[metabagel]

I agree with you that it’s a genocide, but that is not universally accepted, so I think the scare quotes are OK. This article isn’t seeking to litigate the genocide in Gaza.

Scare quotes don’t mean that it’s not true.

[nailer]

[flagged]

[gameboy45]

interesting hearing his justification for working w Saudi but not Israel: He says he would never work with Israel now. “I think it’s an illegitimate and criminal government,” he told me during our gun safety training. “I mean, [Benjamin] Netanyahu is a war criminal.”

When I pointed out that Saudi Arabia has its own abysmal human rights record, Masad drew a contrast.

“I just think about how Replit is going to be used. Like, Israel is actively committing genocide and ethnic cleansing, and if you sell to the government there, it’s possible that they’re going to use it for that,” he said, pointing to the country’s use of Microsoft cloud services to track Palestinians’ phone calls. (After an investigation by The Guardian, Microsoft said it disabled the services that made the tracking possible in September."

[hiyer]

Seems like a silly excuse. If his concern is that Israel could use Replit for military purposes, then SA is perfectly capable of doing the same. And SA has - directly or indirectly - killed more people in Yemen than Israel has in Gaza.

[davedx]

If your primary cause is Palestine then it's pretty internally consistent?

[imp0cat]

Pecunia non olet.

[didibus]

Reading through this piece and all I can think of is how he's just the other side of the same coin. Simply a different color of the same elitism that our world is moving into as money concentrates and starts to meddle more and more with our political spheres while accountability slowly errodes to zero.

[cholantesh]

I found the piece rambling and incoherent, but I don't really see how this follows. This is an individual Jordanian founder who made a political statement. That's not really the same thing as the deep integration between the Israeli state, Zionist organizations, and big tech.

[throw310822]

> is how he's just the other side of the same coin.

Yes. And one side of the coin supports and justifies colonialism, apartheid and even genocide; the other side fights against it.

[AlexandrB]

It's ridiculous to frame an opinion that's extremely common and popular as some kind of expression of rebellion against "the man". What a puff-piece.

[_bohm]

Two people got black bagged by the federal government less than a year ago for expressing this opinion

[dcreater]

Replit seems to be another company that doesn't justify it's valuation in this bubble

[SwtCyber]

Replit has been around for years, has real users, and now reportedly real revenue

[riku_iki]

My bet is they sold lots if data for llm training

[primitivesuave]

Public opinion on Amjad shifted quite a bit in 2021 when he threatened to sue a former intern for his open-source project.

https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/

[bitbasher]

This was the first thing I remembered about Amjad. I have never thought highly of him since.

[laweijfmvo]

Definitely was the end of Replit for me. I have that open source project (Riju) bookmarked though and use it from time to time.

[siltcakes]

My opinion on him shifted because along with Paul Graham, they're the only tech leaders who have stood up for Palestinians. I don't agree with Graham on everything either, but I've gained a lot of respect for him speaking out against Zionism. They're rich, but it still is difficult to go against the entire venture capital industry to do the right thing.

[renewiltord]

All these things are so amusing. Amjad Masad dislikes Israel and is fine with Saudi Arabia. Palmer Luckey will spend his life doing rainman calculations on the angle of the car in Minneapolis. One is a “terrorist”, other is a “fascist”.

But you can tell it’s all motivated reasoning. Standing with your tribe. It’s not much of a matter of honour. It’s just flashing your banners.

In the end, they are wealthy, but they are just people. And they have all these things and why do I really care what Ja Rule has to say about the new cyclone.

[nebula8804]

Excellent reference at the end, thanks for making me feel old. :)

[intalentive]

I respect him for standing up for his people. It’s honorable, in my opinion. It would be dishonorable (and easy) to be a mercenary, profit-seeking individual with loyalty to no one but himself.

[redwood]

I'm not a fan of a guy who builds a brand around politics. It will come around.

[lostlogin]

Like it has to other business guys who have built a brand around politics?

[anonzzzies]

Of all the tools I try and review, replit remains to be simply the worst in my opinion. I struggle to do anything useful with it except trivial hello world type of stuff. The bubble is real.

[wombat-man]

replit worked really well as a way to play with code ideas. Going from 0 to running code on their site is very handy. I can try something out in python without much setup, as someone who rarely uses the language.

I tried their AI coding feature a few months back, and it was quite bad, but it was interesting to watch it iterate.

[pamcake]

Are we still doing these kinds of lionizing puff pieces after SBF, Holmes, Musk and all the others? By now, I consider being featured in one a negative signal.

[gulfofamerica]

Model Y and Falcon 9 are fakes?

[nephihaha]

You've got to admit Holmes is an interesting character though.

[kburman]

You can be a controversial figure politically and still build a generation defining product. The market rewards utility, not ideological purity.

The headline frames this as a paradox, as if these two things are incompatible. But they aren't mutually exclusive, he can be both.

[jjsullivan5196]

This guy isn't a mold-breaking radical, he's just a garden variety sociopath https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/

[throwaway290]

This was making rounds on hn but I think no one bothered to connect the dots. most people cheering for that guy probably outraged over the same guy that time.

[leoh]

Yup.

[aerodog]

"was called" - who was behind that?

[qart]

Weasel words, basically. All too common in journalism. It's also common on Wikipedia but Wikipedia acknowledges it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word

[appled232]

that quotes attributed to "investors," according to Masad. but some of the most heinous stuff people said to him is public: https://x.com/rabois/status/1943804360863232513 "your friends should have not raped murdered and killed kids."

[thedelanyo]

"one being so good that anyone can become a software engineer".

Of course, smartphones' cameras are so good and accessible, but not anyone who became a professional photographer?

And of course, isn't software engineering far beyond than simply writing code in any form - whether in English or in symbols?

[conception]

Yes but smartphones decimated photography jobs, especially on the low end.

[SwtCyber]

Smartphone cameras didn't turn everyone into a professional photographer, but they did radically expand who can take usable photos, experiment, and occasionally produce something valuable without years of training

[WalterBright]

Programming is mostly a craft. Engineering would be more like designing algorithms.

[thesmtsolver2]

Just like word processing software and LLMs meant anyone can become a journalist. /s

[user723432754]

“Masad insists he speaks up even when it hurts his business. In that regard, ‘I’m probably the only contrarian in Silicon Valley.’”

[jerlam]

The only contrarian, just like everyone else.

[uhhhd]

GPT wrapper.

[kogasa240p]

> Palestinian man is ok working with the Saudis At least it isn't the UAE but... really? Still happy for him though.

[lingrush4]

What kind of dumbass title is this? 99.99% of the world is not afraid of silicon valley.

[wtcactus]

What an interesting tile. Is the value of his AI company expected to overcome the 'terrorist sympathizer' allegation? Is this how it works always or just when the person is inside the present Overton Window?

Let's try Elon Musk then: "He was called a 'fascist'. Now, his tech company is valued $1.5T"

This is the way, right?

[blks]

“Terrorist sympathiser” doesn’t mean much these days. People call Ms. Rachel a “terrorist sympathiser” and “antisemite of the year” for not wanting kids to die or become amputees

[gosub100]

I'd say SBF takes that title, followed by holmes and the wework clown

[artninja1988]

A reminder that antizionism is not antisemitism

[flyinglizard]

It's in consensus, even by Hamas themselves.

[oceanplexian]

What are you even talking about? My family is Argentine and 100% assimilated, speak English, love and embrace American culture and values. No one has ever treated us any differently in any context both in middle America and on the coasts.

It’s not a racial issue either, because my friends who are first generation Asian, Indian, etc, would all share the same sentiment. America is the most welcoming place on Earth for immigrants who are willing to put up even the smallest effort to assimilate into the culture.

[siltcakes]

I don't understand this comment. Are you saying that Masad is not assimilated into the US because he doesn't support Israel's genocide against his people? Israel is not the US and supporting it is an increasingly unpopular position in the US. If anything he's more assimilated due to his position.

[renewiltord]

The majority of Americans are of British ancestry and the polarization between Dems and Reps is pretty high. You think that a coastal elite immigrant British descendant and Asian-American are farther apart than the same chap and a similar counterpart in Appalachia? I doubt it.

[tehjoker]

I will remind you that most of the world and many Americans consider what is happening in Gaza a genocide: the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part. Israel intends ethnic cleansing by genocidal means and continues to attack civilians despite a "ceasefire". Just today I got a terrified text message from a teacher as they airstriked in her camp while she lives in a partly destroyed house that cannot be repaired. They previously bombed the ppl in tents outside who had run from the north with nothing.

I hope there is some humanity left in this country.

[dyauspitr]

He seems assimilated as fuck. What are you talking about?

[jeanlou]

It's funny how when talking about Israël's wrongdoings, everything is just "allegedly". Facts already confirms genocide, but hey, they don't want to land in hot water.

[camillomiller]

A very good, albeit involuntary, reminder that in Silicon Valley your good or bad opinions and beliefs don’t matter as long as you’re a good vessel to multiply investment and add value to a billionaire’s already obscene wealth.

[throw310822]

The article clearly states that he lost business and risked bankruptcy.

[chinathrow]

Stopped reading after "shooting range".

[frumplestlatz]

> “Should I wear a keffiyeh to the shooting range?”

I'll give the writer this -- they conveyed a lot of information in just one short first sentence. I read a bit farther, but it didn't tell me anything I couldn't already guess from that sentence.

[tomhow]

Please don't comment like this. It's not a substantive contribution to the discussion to tell us that you stopped reading the article, and it's generally fulmination or curmudgeonliness or a shallow dismissal or something else that's against the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[thinkindie]

I don't understand why the word genocide is quoted, as if it was an odd opinion of the person they are writing the profile about.

[hopelite]

Considering circumstances all over the West, pretty soon everyone will be “terrorist sympathizers” or a sympathizer of whatever the next enemy boogeyman du jour is of the abusive ruling class. And it’s not your favorite political sport team that is good and never does that, while the other team always does it and is evil. It’s being done in the US and it is being done in the EU as well as in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; not even to mention Israel, but that can’t be considered the West.

[Bluescreenbuddy]

Replay will implode once the AI mania cools off

[Alex_L_Wood]

Well, he still is a terrorist symphatizer, just rich now.

[nikanj]

Who in this current political climate hasn't been called a 'terrorist sympathizer'? Feels like 80% of the population qualify