Replit’s Amjad Masad on the Cursor deal, fighting Apple, and why he’d rather not sell
Replit’s Amjad Masad on the Cursor deal, fighting Apple, and why he’d rather not sell
Replit 创始人 Amjad Masad 谈 Cursor 收购传闻、对抗苹果以及为何他倾向于保持独立
Amjad Masad has been building Replit for a decade, but the last 18 months have been something else entirely. The AI coding assistant company went from $2.8 million in revenue in all of 2024 to tracking toward what Masad describes as a billion-dollar annual run rate. Amjad Masad 打造 Replit 已经十年了，但过去 18 个月的经历却截然不同。这家 AI 编程助手公司在 2024 年全年的营收仅为 280 万美元，而如今正朝着 Masad 所描述的“十亿美元年度运行率”迈进。
At TechCrunch’s sold-out StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday night, we covered a lot of ground in a short time, beginning with the question everyone in the industry is asking right now: in a world where rival Cursor is reportedly in talks to be acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion, is Replit also bound to sell? 在周四晚上于旧金山举行的 TechCrunch StrictlyVC 活动上，我们在短时间内探讨了许多话题。首先便是目前业内每个人都在问的问题：在竞争对手 Cursor 据传正与 SpaceX 洽谈以 600 亿美元被收购的背景下，Replit 是否也注定会被出售？
We also talked about Replit’s net revenue retention — a measure of how much existing customers expand their spending — which Masad says is reaching as high as 300%, his willingness to take Apple to court over what he called outright lies in its App Store battle with Replit, and the possibility of the company beginning to invest in its own customers. 我们还讨论了 Replit 的净收入留存率（衡量现有客户支出增长的指标），Masad 表示该指标已高达 300%。此外，他还谈到了在与苹果的 App Store 之争中，他愿意为了对方所谓的“公然谎言”而诉诸法庭，以及公司未来投资其自身客户的可能性。
On the question of independence, Masad was firm. Unlike Cursor, which he said has been operating at negative 23% gross margins, he argued Replit has the economics to make that path viable — even if he stopped short of ruling out a sale entirely. 在独立性问题上，Masad 的态度非常坚定。他指出，与据称毛利率为负 23% 的 Cursor 不同，Replit 拥有实现独立发展的经济基础——尽管他并未完全排除未来被收购的可能性。
TC: Cursor’s reported SpaceX deal was the talk of the industry last week. What did you make of it? TC：上周关于 Cursor 被 SpaceX 收购的传闻是业内热议的话题。你怎么看？
AM: It’s kind of hard being an independent, smaller AI company that’s building on foundation models, especially if you’re burning a ton of cash. Part of the reporting suggested Cursor has negative 23% margins, and if you’re also wanting to invest in training models, that makes it incredibly hard to stay independent. AM： 作为一家基于基础模型构建的独立小型 AI 公司，生存确实很艰难，尤其是当你还在大量烧钱的时候。有报道称 Cursor 的毛利率为负 23%，如果你还要投入资金去训练模型，那么保持独立将变得极其困难。
For us at Replit, partly because we target a different customer set, we’ve been able to run the business more rationally. We’ve been gross margin positive for over a year. We’re slightly more expensive, but we provide a lot more. Our audience tends to be mostly non-technical users who previously haven’t been able to create any software. We provide an end-to-end platform — from the prompt all the way to a deployed application that can scale. We handle security, databases, database migration. And we’ve been doing this long enough that we’ve built a lot of those primitives into the platform. 对于 Replit 来说，部分原因是我们瞄准了不同的客户群体，因此我们能够更理性地经营业务。我们已经实现毛利转正超过一年了。我们的产品价格稍高，但提供的价值也更多。我们的用户群主要是那些以前无法开发任何软件的非技术人员。我们提供的是一个端到端的平台——从提示词输入一直到可扩展的应用程序部署。我们处理安全、数据库和数据库迁移等问题。我们深耕此领域已久，已经将许多底层基础功能内置到了平台中。
Is Replit for sale? I would assume you are talking with potential acquirers all the time; it’s your fiduciary responsibility. Replit 会出售吗？我假设你一直在与潜在收购方接触；这是你的受托责任。
Yeah. We have amazing partners, and they sometimes bring up these topics. But we’re going to try to stay independent. I would love for us to remain an independent company. We’ve been around for 10 years, before it was even accepted that you could make apps just from ideas. We were talking about creating a billion software creators back in 2018 at YC, and people sometimes actually laughed at that dream. Now that dream is possible, and we kicked off this revolution with our agentic coding experience in September 2024. It just feels like we can take it much further. 是的。我们有很棒的合作伙伴，他们有时会提起这些话题。但我们会努力保持独立。我非常希望我们能保持独立公司的身份。我们已经存在了 10 年，早在“仅凭想法就能开发应用”这一概念被大众接受之前，我们就已经开始了。早在 2018 年在 YC 时，我们就谈论过要创造十亿软件开发者，当时人们甚至会嘲笑这个梦想。现在这个梦想已成为可能，我们在 2024 年 9 月推出的智能体（agentic）编程体验开启了这场革命。我觉得我们还能走得更远。
You work closely with Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. If you had to rank them — who’s doing it best? 你与 Anthropic、Google 和 OpenAI 合作密切。如果让你排名，谁做得最好？
Anthropic is still undefeated on the core agentic loop. They have the best tool calling; the agent can stay coherent much longer. GPT-5 is catching up quickly. Google’s Flash family of models is just amazing on price-performance. If you want something fast and cheap, they’re actually beating open source right now. We use all three, and honestly I wouldn’t discount the newer labs either. Reflection AI is coming out with open-source models we’re hearing great things about. And the Chinese models are impressive — Kimi is as good as an Anthropic-generation model from January, so it’s only about three months behind. Anthropic 在核心智能体循环（agentic loop）方面依然无敌。他们的工具调用能力最强；智能体能保持更长时间的连贯性。GPT-5 正在迅速追赶。Google 的 Flash 系列模型在性价比方面非常惊人。如果你想要快速且廉价的方案，他们目前实际上已经超越了开源模型。我们三家都在用，老实说，我也不会低估那些新兴实验室。Reflection AI 即将推出的开源模型口碑很好。中国的模型也令人印象深刻——Kimi 的水平已经达到了 Anthropic 一月份模型的水平，所以它只落后了大约三个月。
When you’re in a bake-off for an enterprise deal, what wins it for you? 当你在企业级订单的竞标中时，是什么让你胜出？
Most of our sales are inbound or organic — very product-led. We’ve acquired customers like Zillow and Meta purely through people adopting the product and then raising their hand to buy an enterprise plan. When it does go top-down and there’s a formal bake-off, we usually win on product. But even in cases where we might be missing a feature, once it hits the C-suite and the IT group, Replit wins on security. A lot of vibe-coding tools will generate a website and connect it to an external database — great products, but it makes security much harder, because the database is open to the public and you need to configure row-level security, which is especially difficult for non-technical builders. Replit being full stack, with the database built into the project and not open to the public — that makes the app inherently more secure. We also spent 10 years battling crypto scammers and hackers, so our cybersecurity function is as good as a dedicated cybersecurity startup. Every time you deploy an app on Replit, we create an entirely new isolated project on Google Cloud. We inherit Google’s security model. 我们的大部分销售来自入站或自然增长——非常依赖产品驱动。我们获得 Zillow 和 Meta 这样的客户，纯粹是因为人们采用了我们的产品，然后主动提出购买企业版计划。当涉及到自上而下的正式竞标时，我们通常凭借产品胜出。即便在某些功能缺失的情况下，一旦进入高管和 IT 部门的决策环节，Replit 也会因安全性而胜出。许多“感觉编程”（vibe-coding）工具会生成一个网站并将其连接到外部数据库——产品很棒，但这让安全性变得非常困难，因为数据库是对公众开放的，你需要配置行级安全，这对非技术开发者来说尤其困难。Replit 是全栈式的，数据库内置于项目中且不对外公开，这使得应用天生更安全。我们还花了 10 年时间与加密货币诈骗者和黑客作斗争，因此我们的网络安全功能不亚于专业的网络安全初创公司。每次你在 Replit 上部署应用时，我们都会在 Google Cloud 上创建一个全新的隔离项目。我们继承了 Google 的安全模型。
Can we talk about churn? How long do you hold onto customers if the best prototypes eventually get rebuilt into a company’s existing stack? 我们能谈谈流失率吗？如果最好的原型最终被重构到公司现有的技术栈中，你们能留住客户多久？
Churn is very, very low, and net retention is incredibly high — 300% in some cases. What we actually hear from customers is that when engineers get nervous and try to rebuild an app into their own stack, they often make it worse. 流失率非常、非常低，净留存率高得惊人——在某些情况下达到了 300%。我们从客户那里得到的反馈是，当工程师感到不安并试图将应用重构到他们自己的技术栈中时，他们往往会把事情搞砸。