This week on StrictlyVC Download, TechCrunch Editor-in-Chief Connie Loizos and StrictlyVC's Alex Gove spoke with with Amjad Masad, founder and CEO of Replit, fresh off the company's $250 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation. They discussed Replit's remarkable journey from hovering around $2.8 million in ARR for years to hitting $150 million—and how a controversial pivot away from professional developers made it all possible. Masad explained why targeting non-technical users actually requires more compute power than serving experienced coders, and how his company survived a viral production database disaster that briefly threatened to derail everything. They also dove into the challenges of AI agent "reward hacking," why Replit pits multiple LLMs against each other, and what it means to build autonomous coding agents that can work for hours without human intervention. Plus, Masad shared his vision for creating a billion software developers and why he believes solving hard problems around safety and security will become Replit's competitive moat—much like privacy became Apple's

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