On July 6th 2022, I attended a live talk given by Amjad Masad, CEO of @Replit, as part of YC Startup School – He went through the full story of Replit and their early days.
🗝 Key concepts that helped shape Replit to what it is today:
1/ Side Project Mentality
Replit began its journey in 2008 as a mere weekend side project. A weekend project turned a billion-dollar startup. If he didn't adopt "start small", it wouldn't have happened.
2/ Commitment to Life’s Work
Replit became Amjad's everything. Not because it was making money, but because it had meaning. A purpose.
3/ Super Niche Target Start
They didn't shoot for the moon, they shot for a small part of it. They started by catering solely to foreign software developers in small markets. The idea of “small markets” is not new – But they did it so well.
4/ Rolling with Rejection
Replit got rejected from YC not once, but TWICE. Most people would've thrown in the towel. Discipline is pivotal to almost every story.
5/ Idea Compounding
One idea won't cut it. It's a pool of ideas, compounding, evolving, strengthening. From a weekend project, to a platform to teach coding, to a billion-dollar company
6/ Readiness + Opportunity = Big Things
For what we know, Readiness + Opportunity = Luck, and with all kind of clues on how to maximize your luck surface area, good preparation aligned with a good opportunity is often the biggest factor behind someone’s luck translating into big things in the real world.
“Chance favors the prepared mind.”
7/ Reframing Setbacks
Setbacks are feedback loops in the “build, learn, iterate” cycle. Replit’s failure was really just invaluable for succeeding iterations.
8/ Call to Adventure
Creating an effective “Call to Adventure” is counterintuitive because highlighting risk is essential to its strategy.
Most influential people, at least once in their career, they had a calling, something that urges them to move forward at the cost of any background noise.
A classic but critical component of risk.