Replit spent eight of its first ten years just searching for product-market fit. Then it 100x’d its revenue in a single year. In this episode of The Product Podcast, Carlos (CEO at Product School) sits down with Amjad Masad, founder and CEO of Replit, to unpack how a decade of patience turned into one of the fastest growth stories in software, and why he thinks not knowing how to code is becoming an advantage.

What you’ll learn:
- Why the classic product-market-fit timeline was a SaaS-era myth, and what patience really takes
- The four long-term trends Amjad bet the company on: cloud, AI, mobile, and collaboration
- How Replit Agent (the first coding agent) was built right after a layoff, and why conviction held
- What 100x revenue in a year, 50M+ users, and a $9B valuation actually came from
- Why 75%+ of Replit users are non-engineers, and why not knowing how to code can be an advantage
- Why frontier models reward simple prompts, and why micromanaging the AI makes results worse
- How to keep oversight of parallel agents without falling back into micromanagement
- Why Amjad thinks “code,” not “chat,” is the real AI breakthrough for getting work done
- Why Replit went compute-maximalist with built-in code review and security to earn trust
- Why the future of building a company looks more like an open-source community

Guest: Amjad Masad, Founder and CEO, Replit
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amjadmasad/

Host: Carlos, CEO at Product School
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/villaumbrosia/

About Replit: Replit is an AI-powered software creation platform where anyone can build, deploy, and run apps from the browser, powered by Replit Agent. It serves over 50 million users, from individual creators to enterprises and governments.

About the Product Podcast: Product School’s podcast brings you candid conversations with the founders and product leaders shaping tech.

Social Links:

• Find out more about Product School here
• Follow our Podcast on TikTok here
• Follow Product School on LinkedIn here

Mr. Beast makes YouTube videos the way most companies ship software: with product reviews before, retros after, and a daily build cycle. In this episode of The Product Podcast, Carlos (CEO at Product School) sits down with Shiva (Chief Product and Technology Officer at Beast Industries) to unpack how a channel with 520M+ subscribers and 1.6B views in the last 90 days treats every video like a product launch, and how AI is now rewiring the whole operation.

Shiva has built products inside some of tech’s most iconic platforms (Google, Spotify, WeWork, Uber), but this role is fundamentally different: here the product is the output itself, not just the platform that enables it. He explains why that lets his team do something a platform never could, get deep into the actual workflow and change it, and why off-the-shelf enterprise SaaS kept falling short for a company that regularly attempts first-ever-in-the-world productions. So, about three months ago, they started building their own internal operating system instead, and now they ship every day.

He and Carlos get into the mechanics that make that possible: forward-deployed engineers embedded inside functions (the studio, marketing) who prototype solutions overnight and ship the next day, why it’s now so cheap to try ten versions of something and throw away the nine that don’t work, and how an issue spotted on set at midnight becomes a meeting that night, a vibe-coded prototype, and a live feature by morning. Shiva also reframes what AI really unlocks for product people: not just speed, but the superpower of exploration, the ability to build three variants instead of betting on one, which finally fixes the oldest failure mode in product (shipping what the founder wants instead of what users need). He shares how working with Jimmy (a creator who thinks like a product manager, breaking creative wins into analytical recipes) shapes the culture, how he builds an institutional memory layer so one person’s hard-won knowledge becomes available to everyone on day one, and how the business thinks about turning attention into revenue through a new consumer app, sponsorships, merch, and testing monetization differently across markets like the US and India.

What you’ll learn:
- Why MrBeast runs every video like a product launch, with reviews before and retros after
- What changes when the product is the output itself, not the platform behind it
- Why they ditched off-the-shelf SaaS and built their own internal operating system in three months
- How forward-deployed engineers prototype overnight and ship to the team the next day
- Why “try ten, keep one, throw away the rest” is now a viable way to build
- How AI gives product teams the superpower of exploration, not just speed
- Why founders so often ship products built for themselves, and how AI finally fixes that
- How to build an institutional memory layer so knowledge isn’t trapped in one person’s head
- What it’s like to work with Jimmy, a creator who thinks like a product manager
- How Beast Industries thinks about converting attention into revenue across global markets

Connect with Shiva:
Chief Product and Technology Officer, Beast Industries
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shivar/

Host:
Carlos, CEO at Product School
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/villaumbrosia/

About Beast Industries: Beast Industries is the company behind MrBeast, the world’s most-subscribed YouTube creator, spanning its flagship channels, a growing studio of new channels, and consumer products.

About the Product Podcast: Product School’s podcast brings you candid conversations with the founders and product leaders shaping tech.

Social Links:

• Find out more about Product School here
• Follow our Podcast on TikTok here
• Follow Product School on LinkedIn here

Deel found over $140 million in ARR through AI optimizations, work equivalent to 600 employees, now done by agents. In this episode of The Product Podcast, Carlos (CEO at Product School) sits down with Aaron Goldsmid, SVP of Product at Deel, to unpack what that actually looks like in practice, and how a company goes from roughly $250 million to $1.5 billion in ARR across 150+ countries while staying profitable for nearly three years.

What you’ll learn:
- The story behind the stat: $140M in ARR and 600 people’s worth of work now handled by AI agents
- Why software was “the last artisanal craft,” and what changes when building gets cheap
- Why building is easy but maintaining is hard, and why the rewrite is now a real tech-debt strategy
- How Deel scaled from ~$250M to $1.5B ARR and stayed profitable for nearly three years
- Why growth and profitability aren’t opposite ends of a pendulum, and the “always do the math” discipline
- Why the signal a leader receives gets more filtered at scale, and how to fight it
- How every-two-weeks business reviews kill pairwise conversations and improve decisions
- How Aaron scales himself with a chief of staff, internal bots, and a semantic layer
- Why Deel’s real AI moat is compliance expertise and a global-work corpus, not the model
- Why no company is as sticky as it used to be, and why judgment is the ultimate differentiator

Connect with Aaron Goldsmid, SVP of Product, Deel
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/aarongoldsmid

Host: Carlos, CEO at Product School
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/villaumbrosia/

About Deel: Deel is a global work platform that helps companies hire, pay, and manage teams anywhere, spanning payroll, employer of record (EOR), compliance, and contractor management across 150+ countries.

About the Product Podcast: Product School’s podcast brings you candid conversations with the founders and product leaders shaping tech.

Social Links:

• Find out more about Product School here
• Follow our Podcast on TikTok here
• Follow Product School on LinkedIn here