179. Why Replit’s CRO is Hiring 200 GTM People in 12 Months ft. Ghazi Masood (Replit)

They’re using Replit to build a workday.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Isn’t workday like an enterprise enough type of solution?

Ghazi Masood:
Like, yeah, but if you’re, but if you’re a 50 person shop, you don’t

Josh Schachter [Host]:
need all the features.

Ghazi Masood:
You don’t need all of the features of workday.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, historically non technical users have been a little higher churn than more technical users for the PLG type of model. How do you, how do you, how do you maintain and grow adoption and expansion in that model? You’re listening to Unchurned, brought to you by the Gainsight podcast network. In 2025, REPL DOT went from $2 million in revenue to over 150 million in less than a year. How? By betting on something most enterprise software companies aren’t willing to say out loud that the next billion software creators aren’t developers. They’re the financial analyst, the rev ops manager, the HR director with a great idea and know when to build it. Ghazi Mazood is the chief revenue officer at Replit and he’s building the go to market machine to turn that bet into a billion dollars by the end of this year. I’m Josh Schachter and this is Unchurned. Subscribe to our substack at Unchurned.Gainsight.com where we go deep on every episode.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Like how one post sales team at cloudbeds built over 150 AI agents. That story and more at Unchurned Gains. Hey everybody, I’m Josh Schter, senior vice president of strategy and market development at Gainsight and welcome to this episode of Unchurned. You know, we try to get CROs on the show so that we can, you know, not only talk to customer success, but talk to all the go to market motions and CROs who are also overseeing customer success. And we also try to get really cool companies. Companies are doing some like awesome stuff in AI and agentic and all the things and I’ve got the confluence of both with me here today. Ghazi Masood is the CRO of Replit. He was formerly CRO of Retool, formerly CRO of Auth0 some really cool PLG to enterprise companies.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Ghazi, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah.

Ghazi Masood:
And excited to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Of course, of course. Okay, so, well, for those under a rock, what is relet? What do you guys do? That sort of thing.

Ghazi Masood:
So yeah, Replit, we are the Leading AI Vibe coding solution for the enterprise. We basically want to bring Vibe coding to the masses and we believe that there’s the next billion software creators. And the next billion software creators are people who don’t have any technical background. And we want to teach them how to build and bring their ideas to life irrespective of your technical knowledge. So that’s who we are. We have 50 million global users growing every single day, but a lot more to go to get to that billion dollar user mark.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
How long has the company been going now?

Ghazi Masood:
So the company’s actually been around for about 19 years. The company’s actually been around for 19 years. 19 or 10 years. Oh, wow.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Okay. But even still, nine or 10 years.

Ghazi Masood:
And we are one of the old long standing companies out there. And that’s actually part of the reason why we’ve been so successful. I think the company started off as a coding, you know, teaching the code solution way back when and then over there kind of pivoted into the education space, but over time, you know, really harnessed this global community that fell in love with the product. And then when agent came out on the market, that’s kind of when, you know, revenues and users have just skyrocketed through the means.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Wow. I imagine there were some little pivots or micro pivots there along the way, but they found their way to unicorn and beyond status. Yeah, yeah.

Ghazi Masood:
I mean, if you look at 2025, you know, the business went from 2 million to like 150 million in less than a year in revenue. And since then we’ve nearly doubled and are well, pacing ahead of where we want to be at a billion dollars by the end of this year. So.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Wow, that’s incredible. That’s incredible. And so you’re on month like four or five right now.

Ghazi Masood:
Right.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So you’re officially.

Ghazi Masood:
Yeah, I officially started in December, but I had been kind of onboarding with the CEO and the executive team through summer. Um, so it actually feels like an. But yeah, I’ve been here. Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So you got to do your a listening tour before. Before, like, like nice and casually before the, the pressure cooker stuff started.

Ghazi Masood:
That’s right. Listening to our helping with annual planning as we were entering kind of Q3 and Q4 and kind of getting the skids raised before I officially started the clock. Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What are your goals? We’re like, geez, we’re. For some people we’re almost near the end of Q1. That’s crazy. What are your goals for this year for replit? What are the company’s goals?

Ghazi Masood:
Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned, we want to be at a billion dollars all up by the end of the year. We want to establish kind of our presence as the leading vibe coding solution for the enterprise by the end of this year. And that, you know, that that will require us to massively scale our team above and beyond where we are today. So we’re doing a significant amount of hiring in my org right now, specifically, you know, thinking about how we go outside of the US into the international markets where we have a ton of demand in places like Europe, Asia Pacific and India and Latin America. So a lot of building to go do, a lot of building to go do and a lot of hiring to go do.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So, so tell us a little bit about that. Like you’re, you’re, you’re going to grow massively this year, continue that growth trajectory. And your go to market team, you’re, you’re responsible for go to market. There’s people, there’s process and there’s products. What infrastructure do you have today and what are you laying down to get to that billion dollar mark by the

Ghazi Masood:
end of the year? Yeah, I mean, so from a rev ops perspective, we had hardly anything when I first came here, or we had tools that I wouldn’t, would not be using as we continue to go out and kind of build the organization. So, you know, we’re getting the fundamentals and kind of getting the core systems of record into our business as we speak right now. So we’re actually moving to Salesforce, we’re moving to gong. And then on top of that, we’re looking at productivity areas of where to invest and what to invest in. And the vast majority of all of that is actually being done and built on Replit. So the cool thing about Repl.it is we’re all users and it’s for everybody out there. And we internally kind of drink our own champagne. So the idea is we’re going to dog food the hell out of Replit and make sure that we use it across our stack.

Ghazi Masood:
And some early examples of that that I’ll tell you or I was like, you know, we’ve built, I mean, this is live already and we’re using it. We built kind of our version of Clary on Replit where you can do like forecasting and you know, the ability to go out and quantify the number of deals you have, you know, your top deals for the quarter, the forecast category. So we’re doing that. We built a very robust, no, no pun with gainsight. But A very robust, what I would kind of call a customer health dashboard as well that is just launching as we speak right now. We’re going to start doing some enablement on it with the team and then we’re going to start just.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I want to see that. By the way, I call dibs on a demo.

Ghazi Masood:
We’d love to show it to you and actually get your feedback on it. It was fully built on replit and one of our core internal champions who runs that organization just spent some time on it and it’s actually pretty phenomenal.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So again, yeah, let’s take that as an example, right. You got CS listeners out here. When you’re like, okay, we’re going to vibe our, our account health dashboard, who do you go to in the organization? Like, how do you spin that up?

Ghazi Masood:
Yeah, yeah. So again, you know what I mentioned earlier, the power of replit is anybody can go build. Like in previous organizations you probably had to kind of develop, you know, develop a prototype, do a mock up and then whatever you needed, you would take it to your engineer developer having to go build it. I mean replit, you don’t. So whoever has the idea and that brainchild of kind of coming up with this, they actually go build it. And that’s exactly what happened. And there’s a gentleman on the team who kind of runs our pre and post sales organization and he’s like, yeah, this is kind of my vision, what I want to go build it. He has people kind of their input as to what they want to see in it and literally went out and vibe cuttered it in replit and had a prototype within hours.

Ghazi Masood:
And then it took us some time to refine it, iterate on it and getting it to a point that our teams can go use it. But that’s how the idea came to life and that’s usually how it happens right now is like, you know, individual business owners have an idea of how things could be useful for their teams or their day to day and they socialize it and then they go produce that idea on their own.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. The reason I asked that, so this is Highlander rules, is what you’re, you’re operating by here. Every, every person on their own, they’re all like, I mean it’s organized chaos in some sense and it’s creative destruction or creative chaos in some sense. Like, but, but the reason I ask is, is yeah, like even at gainsight, I mean we’ve got, we’ve got many pockets of folks that are doing really cool stuff and want to be doing Real cool stuff. And have become power users of different AI applications and code bases and whatnot. And we right now are focused on structuring that into something that’s a little bit more programmatic. Now, honestly, you may not have all the answers. You guys are growing so quickly that you’re probably building the plane as you’re flying too, I would imagine, if I was to take a guess.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
But like, how either at replit or organizations that you work with or what you guide them to, again, it may not be what you, what you do yourselves, but like, how do organizations structure and manage all? Like when, when that innovation and a creation can go into the long tail of an organization and everybody can become a creator. Anybody can cook, anybody can code. How do you. How do you harvest that and at the same time create some organization around it at an organizational level?

Ghazi Masood:
Yeah, no, that’s a great question. And so let me answer that a couple of different ways of like, internally, what we’re doing and then also like what I hear from customers around that, because it’s a very common question. So internally, you know, the power of everyone building is like, you get your ideas into life and into the real world pretty quickly versus how it was done the old way. The challenge of it, there could be duplication of efforts. There could be stuff that is not sanctioned. You know, there could be stuff that just is not functional. So there’s a whole host of challenges out there. For us internally as we’re building, our biggest challenge is duplication of resources and duplication of efforts.

Ghazi Masood:
You know, three or four people having the same idea, basically building it, not talking to each other, and then you’ve got four versions of the exact same thing. So that’s why we’re actually building and doing like a catalog library. So we actually have a GTM catalog library that we’re basically housing, you know, for. Whether it’s pre sales, sales, sales, development partners, customer success, whatever it may be, we’re housing the list of our assets. So everyone quickly kind of goes in there and seeing what’s available there. And if it’s a gap, then they go build. If it’s already there, then we have a discussion and a conversation. So that’s how internally we’re doing it right now, is by having that catalog library.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Who, who’s involved in that? Who, who, who’s. Who owns that initiative? Is there a control tower that’s owned

Ghazi Masood:
by my Rev Ops team? That’s owned by my Rev Ops team. They own it. And then we basically just told our team about it. And that is basically our, you know, our system of record that we go check in first before we actually go build what we want to go do. And, and that’s just to really avoid duplication of effort.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, and then they build it, do they? There’s their show and tell. Is there some kind of like.

Ghazi Masood:
Well first we first, first we talk about, you know, people build it, they put it in there and then if it’s something, you know, there’s a lot of stuff that I don’t think it’s going to be used and consumed by everybody out there. It may be specific to individuals, right. So it also depends what’s being built. Like if someone built like a commissions based calculator to calculate commissions, you know, that’s a great tool. We probably have to bring finance on board, everybody on board for the use of that tool. Right. But if somebody basically built like a meeting tracker that meeting trackers for that individual specifically may not be. So there are different variation of what’s being built.

Ghazi Masood:
But the idea is we want to catalog, put it in a catalog so people already know what all the great assets are for them to either leverage on their own. And if some are like really meaningful that are really, really core to our business like this customer health dashboard, then we kind of use that as a core tool that we actually rally around, train and we do some enablement around it. So that’s how we’re doing it. Enterprise customers the biggest concern in question from enterprises, specifically IT organizations is what type of governance guardrails and audit guardrails and security guardrails can I put on what’s being built? So that’s one of the big differentiators. With repl.it with some of the other technologies out there, we are fully enterprise grade ready, right. Where we actually do provide a fairly robust set of governance audit capabilities. Right off of the bat we actually have a built in security scanner that if like whatever reason your app doesn’t pass security, you can’t go any further, right. So you have different, a variation guardrails you can actually put on what’s being done.

Ghazi Masood:
You can actually also control who can build. You can actually control like who can build and how much they can go build. So if you’re an organization, you can only limit it to certain teams, certain individuals, certain certain credits per user. So there’s a lot of fine grain controls that are available to organizations and we typically have those discussions with a lot of them. You know, we’re in rarely high regulated customers. We have everybody from large financial services Organizations to people in the government that are using us. So you can imagine the amount of security scrutiny we go to before we close deals like that.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And that’s gone through the proper channels. I mean, because you guys are PLG as well. But those have been sanctioned programs.

Ghazi Masood:
Yeah, yeah. And these are. I’m referring to specifically our enterprise contract, where customers are signing enterprise annual contracts. You know, we go through security assessments, security reviews, governance reviews before we get product.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I was gonna. I would say, like, how many years did it take you to get through those? But you haven’t been around, you know, in this instance, that’s that long.

Ghazi Masood:
No, no, no, it’s not. It’s not. It doesn’t take years. Like, you know, we just closed a large credit card issuer a few weeks ago. It took us like a few weeks and a month to kind of get past their security.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I think that’s really important to reinforce because, I mean, I’m not here to do your. Your pitching for you, but, like, that’s probably first thing that comes to mind for any CISOs that are listening out there is, oh, great, like, we’d love to use a replit, but there’s no way that that would fly in my organization, my enterprise organization. But you’re saying, no, no, no, no. Financial institutions are using it, government’s using it, so can you.

Ghazi Masood:
Exactly. And it’s the. You can lock it down as much as you want. Right. So that’s the beauty. Or that you can. You can have like, no guardrails and have it be a free for all. I would not recommend that.

Ghazi Masood:
And most organizations don’t do it that way. Or you can basically say, hey, I want to initially start and roll it out to my product and design team, and I want to see what they’re going to go do. Right. And if that goes well, then I’ll open it up to my HR organization or my marketing organization. That’s. So that’s usually. That’s our playbook. Usually we start in with a team and a division and get them ultra successful and comfortable using replit, and they see the productivity advantages and gains for themselves.

Ghazi Masood:
And it naturally grows over time from there.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Join me at Pulse this May in Las Vegas. I’d love to meet our listeners. Come say hi. And your daiquiri in that tall fluorescent cup is on me. Seriously. Use code unchurned for a special rate@gainsightpulse.com can we talk about Claude and OpenAI for a second? You know, I’ve heard a lot about them recently. You know, in 2026 of improvements to Claude’s latest model for coding. And a lot of folks are using them at the.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
They’re. They’re all, they’re both going enterprise as well. Are those legitimate headwinds for you where some of these labs are going?

Ghazi Masood:
No, not. They’re noise and they’re stuff we have to deal with. But from a competitive perspective, I. E Like losing deals to them and things like that. They’re not right. Because it’s like cursor and cloud for code. They’re for the engineering developer Persona and they’re basically tools to make engineers and developers more productive. A cursor basically makes engineers more productive, so does cloud for code.

Ghazi Masood:
Right. You know, OpenAI Codex. Same same thing right there. Our Persona, 90% of our users are non developers and non engineers. So we are for the knowledge workers. Right. We are for the average knowledge workers of people that actually sit in HR teams, in rev ops teams and finance organizations, sales, product design people who don’t know how to code that have a lot of great ideas and us enabling them to go build without having to go to it. So yeah, that’s.

Ghazi Masood:
So we don’t really face them. I mean we get questions like the one you just asked us, but we don’t really like lose a deal to that. Obviously if we’re talking to an engineering organization and we’re talking to a developer, yeah, they will. They may go by cursor over replit and that’s probably a better tool to go do that. But if you’re talking to a finance analyst who doesn’t know anything about cursor, they wouldn’t ever select cursor.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So you’re going to market teams, operational teams, that’s, that’s your bread and butter.

Ghazi Masood:
Effectively the knowledge workers and organizations.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Knowledge workers, yeah.

Ghazi Masood:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
That’s a large enough TAM for you to, to be, to be doing well for a while. Yeah. Who’s your economic buyer in that case? Who’s your buyer? Who’s your champion?

Ghazi Masood:
Yeah, I mean, so it depends on like which organization we start with. Right. You know, so if we start with like the product organization, it would probably roll up to like the chief product officer. Right. If we start in finance, probably goes up through like the cfo. So it kind of depends on the team we get engaged in first and kind of their reporting hierarchy.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And you guys are, you’re kind of like this effort based pricing. Right. Because you’re the people are paying for compute, they’re not paying for seats. It’s you know, outcome driven. Yeah, how does that change the model? You know, once you’re in there as far as.

Ghazi Masood:
Yeah, it’s not really outcome based, it’s like usage based. So we actually on the enterprise side we were seat based and we are now just evolving to a usage based type model where essentially you know, if you’re a customer, depending on the size of customer you are, you have a platform fee that kind of gives you access to the platform and, and then you pre buy basically credits that you think you would need for the next 12 months. And those credits can be consumed by anybody in the company. Right. So obviously we’re just starting in a small team, we’re going to buy a smaller number of credits. But if there’s multiple teams and multiple divisions using us, then there’s you know, larger number of credits that people commit to. So it’s a super, super easy model to roll out. Doesn’t really put any handcuffs on who can use it, who can’t use it.

Ghazi Masood:
It’s just up to the customer how they want to serve.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
How does that impact your, your post sales strategy? I mean historically non technical users have been a little higher churn than more technical users for the PLG type of model. How do you, how do you, how do you maintain and grow adoption and expansion in that model?

Ghazi Masood:
Yeah, so fundamentally like the way we’re designing kind of I, I call our post sales motion if you will, it’s a bit different and unique than how you and I probably are used to it in the B2B SaaS world of like you know, classic CSMs and you know, renewal managers and you know, expansion and expansion AES and all of the above. Right. So the way building it out is kind of with this AI first mindset, right? Where from a post sales perspective we have dedicated folks, we internally or calling them account managers, but externally they’re called replit product advocates. They’re called replit product advocates and basically you, you will get assigned a replit product advocate the moment you become a customer. And it’s the replit product advocate’s job to onboard you successfully and then work with our field engineering organization to continuously bring value of additional things you could be doing and building on replit. So they’re playing, you know, a combination of them and the field engineer they’re playing, they’re playing a variety of different roles. They’re playing this, the classic CSM role, they’re playing the classic renewal manager’s role of, you know, making sure the customer is retentive and they’re also playing the Role of like an expansion account executive. So that’s how we’re doing it.

Ghazi Masood:
And you know, depending on the segment you’re in, whether you’re an enterprise entity or more of a midsize account, you know, you’ll get a ratio number of like how many accounts our product advocate can go support.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Is it a little bit of an FTE type of model as well in there?

Ghazi Masood:
Yeah, it is. It’s kind of like that. Right, so you’ve got, we have our field engineers and our field engineers are like in the old world you would refer to them as SES and solution architects. So that’s one role that we’re calling as a field engineer. And they go both pre and post sales. The good news in the AI world is you don’t need a lot of pre sales help because as AES replit is so easy to go show that oftentimes our AES just show the product on their own. They don’t need an SE to come along to do a demo. And I can do a demo.

Ghazi Masood:
Anybody can do a demo. Right. So the amount of pre sales help our FE spend, it’s there and we definitely have it. But a lot of their time is going to be spent post sales and working with our customers to make sure they’re getting the most value and growing old Dutch over time.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So I’m going to put this into a little bit of Gainsight’s framework. So you know, we as a business, as a platform focus on kind of these three stools, these three legs of the stool that is of post sales, which is your, your most important customers that you’re very high human touch with. Then you’ve got your, your more middle segment which is more of the digital scale and then you’ve got maybe your longer, longer scale. Long. You know, what am I trying to say? I don’t know, I’m trying to say you’re longer scale. That is agentic. What are the different types of plays that you’re leveraging for post sales across each of their different segments?

Ghazi Masood:
Yeah, I mean I think for us it’s more around like segment. So, so there’s work to do. Right. I mean, so the way we, the way we build our books is based on the segment. You basically get a book. So if you’re like down market and commercial, you, you know, your book is actually larger. It’s probably about 30 to 40 accounts right now. Right.

Ghazi Masood:
And then if you’re enterprise and you’re working the larger organizations, you’ve got more of a fine build of like maybe 10 to 20 customers because they’re larger organizations. So that’s the way we’re continuing to staff it. But I think there’s a lot of lot of work that we have to go do in kind of looking at, like, repeatable assets and things to go do. Like, for instance, you know, like, based on icp, I would love to kind of come up with a list of use cases that we actually have at our disposal that this team can actually go bring to our customers. Where, you know, if you’re a product designer, you know, you may have an idea of the first five things to go build on replit, but after that, you may get stalled. You’re like, okay, what more can I go do? We want to have a laundry list of things that a product designer can go do on replit. Same thing if you’re in rev ops. You know, we want to have a catalog of assets you can go build.

Ghazi Masood:
If you’re a marketer, we want to have a catalog of assets that you can go build. We that that’s work to do. We haven’t really gone down that path, but that’s the vision that I have of how we want to build this organization and a team up.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Well, how many folks are you hiring this year?

Ghazi Masood:
Well, sales and marketing, all up. I don’t have marketing, but S and M all up. We want to be north of 230people by the end of the year. And we’re a team of about, what, 40 right now.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
How do you hire 200 people in

Ghazi Masood:
a year where it’s going to be? We’re trying to make an attempt to go do that. It’s a crazy amount of hiring across the board, very lofty goals. But we’ve got a ton of recruiting help and a ton of folks internally that are referring us. And obviously news like the news we had yesterday around our funding and our new launch definitely helps too. Or just inbound. Yesterday in a single day was like insane of people just going to our website applying for jobs.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Oh, I’m sure there’s no shortage of inbound interest that you’re getting from folks.

Ghazi Masood:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What’s the future of SaaS software, Kazi?

Ghazi Masood:
Good question.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah.

Ghazi Masood:
Depending on who you talk to out there, you know, some there. There’s a camp that is doom and gloom. SaaS is dead. Stock prices, you know, valuations are dropping. Stocks are crazy. This is my personal viewpoint, and this is just based on evidence of what I see by talking to a lot of customers and engaging in customer conversations and kind of seeing what’s happening. And by the way, I’m like this whole space of being here at Replit, I’ve seen the evolution of like low code no code. I was like a very early low code no code pioneer when low code no code first came out back with a company called K2 Software that got acquired.

Ghazi Masood:
And I’ve seen low code no code evolve with Retool where we were going to purpose built for developers. And now I’m seeing low code no code kind of transitioning into the AI first mindset. Right. So I’ve kind of seen the evolution of customer mindset, customer maturity and kind of where things are at. And here’s what I say to this SaaS question you have. I think in like large organizations and I’m talking like you know, Fortune specific enterprise customers, you’re not going to go get rid of their ERP system or their, you know, their Salesforce system or their CRM system. You’re just now they’re just too big and there’s too much investment going on in that. So what I’m seeing in that segment I’m seeing a lot of wrappers and a lot of like additional capability being built on solutions like Replit and others to basically enhance the functionality of their systems of record so they can be used in a much more agile way and a much more flexible way.

Ghazi Masood:
So that’s happening right now. Like customers are basically putting like UI dashboards and UI apps on top of their Salesforce and enterprises. So they’re still using Salesforce but in a day to day fashion. It’s much more customer friendly with what we go out and build on rep. So that’s happening today in Enterprise.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
When you say on top of you don’t mean literally on top of. It’s like kind of a side swivel. They’ve got a dashboard that’s separately that sits on top of the data from Salesforce.

Ghazi Masood:
It pulls from data Salesforce but it’s a separate dashboard. It’s a completely separate dashboard. They’re doing it but it’s. But yes, it’s pulling from Salesforce and it’s pulling from other systems of record that are out there. So that’s what I see in the Enterprise. However down market in the SMB I have, I can you know, count on my hands, on both hands. Examples of customers that have actually replaced traditional SaaS and built on Replit, I have an, I have an example of a customer who basically built their instance of workday on Replit. I have examples of, you know, many smaller CRM but that’s still, that is

Josh Schachter [Host]:
still system of record software. So it’s not the software that’s, but it’s the, it’s the customer that’s smaller that can do this.

Ghazi Masood:
The customer that’s smaller. But they’re instead of buying workday, they’re using replit to build workday.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Isn’t workday like an enterprise enough type of solution? Like.

Ghazi Masood:
Yeah, but if you’re, but if you’re a 50 person shop, you don’t need

Josh Schachter [Host]:
all the features, you don’t need all

Ghazi Masood:
of the features of workday.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, right.

Ghazi Masood:
And if you can get by 90% of what workday does. So we have examples of that. You know, I mentioned the CRM example. The other one is like tableau, like down, you know, down market. If you look at like a BI dashboard and things like that, you know, a lot of that stuff is being built on replay. So down market and SMB. The answer is different. Down market and SMB.

Ghazi Masood:
I am seeing SaaS spend, kind of start gravitating towards solutions like replit upmarket in large enterprises. I think there’s coexistence of both. That’s.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
How does any startup survive right now? At the same time you’ve got this, this, this mushrooming of different AI startups out there. And I mean I know myself, I was a founder not too long ago and it was kind of, I felt like it was musical chairs of which ones would make it, which ones wouldn’t. Yeah, yeah.

Ghazi Masood:
I mean it’s an interesting time. Right? I mean it’s, again, this is my personal belief. I think you know, like obviously LLMs are going to get commoditized and you know, hopefully pricing comes down and we become cheaper and people can use us more. But you know, these, these vertical AI companies, you know, that are like domain experts in you know, a specific vertical. I think those are the companies that will survive is my opinion. And you know there’s a lot of examples of, you know, companies that are a, you know, AI agents for legal or AI agents for real estate, AI agents for, you know, IT service management. You know, people who are kind of very, very specific in their domain and, and doing that domain. I think there’s a huge, huge opportunity

Josh Schachter [Host]:
because they have domain expertise for very, very specific workflows and, and they’re constantly learning on those and, and they also probably accruing some, some domain intelligence as well in their models.

Ghazi Masood:
Yeah, and what’s happening now is like now there’s like initially there was a single company doing it, but now there’s copycats of like five, six companies doing it. So you know that it’s harder to kind of pick your horse there. But the fact is, you know, there’s immediate cost benefit of utilizing like a vertical AI agent solution in some of these old archaic type industries that have been running for a long time.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, I mean, listen, I share the same sentiment as you. People ask me all the time about gainsight, how are things going? And they’ve got like a little wink in their eye and I’m like, no, no, they’re going, well, like we’re enterprise, you know, we’re the system of record. And I speak to, to CSOPs leaders who are tinkering and playing with tools like Replit in the background and they’re thrilled to be doing that. And they show me their dashboards of the different modules. All the module dashboards seem to be the same look, by the way, it’s like these tiles, but that’s a common code pattern. But they, they, but they’re using that to, to supplement the system of record. You still need the system of record. Right.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I think is what we’re seeing as well.

Ghazi Masood:
So.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s going to be interesting.

Ghazi Masood:
See how it plays out.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It’s going to be interesting. It’s going to be interesting. Any, any final lessons that, you know, it feels like you actually are the perfect person for this job since you, you know, we’re running sales and go to market at at Retool, which like you said, was the low code tool, you know, auth0 as well. What are you taking from those roles that you’re bringing now to Replit?

Ghazi Masood:
Yeah, I mean, so at ODD zero, we were kind of in hyper, hypergrowth mode where we went through a burst of like aggressive hiring. Obviously nowhere close to what we’re doing here at Replit. But there’s learnings there, right? You know, anytime you hire as fast as we want to go higher, you have to invest in enablement of making sure all the people we hire are properly enabled and trained and ready to go have the talk track in their various disciplines. So enablement is just as important as the speed of hiring. So that’s a learning. You know, we have that at ODD zero, which was a huge differentiator for us that still holds true in, in our world. So that’s absolutely true. I think product passion and especially in the AI world, you know, the people we bring on into the business, you know, how passionate are they about the product or our mission and the ability to explain the art of the possible to customers.

Ghazi Masood:
So we, we give a lot of, a lot of bad bats to people who may not have the, you know, five, ten years of sales experience, but they’re so deep and passionate about AI, our mission, our product. And we think if they can parlay that into a customer conversation and you know, are relationship oriented, they can do it like extremely well. And we have examples of that so

Josh Schachter [Host]:
that, so let me ask, let me, let me end on this here, that I asked questions I’m not going to ask you like your phone number, your email address for people to contact you if they want a job, but because I’m sure you’re already flooded. But if folks are out there, they’re, you know, unfortunately it’s still a tough market. Right. So lots of folks are out there looking for the next thing and you’re gonna get a lot of interest in working at replit. What would make somebody stand out to you if they came across your desk?

Ghazi Masood:
The excitement and passion for who we are and our mission would be one and how effectively they communicate and convince me that they’re the right person for the job.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And what’s the right person for the job or. It just depends.

Ghazi Masood:
It depends on the job. I mean, it depends on, it depends on the job, right? Like for, in, in sales you have to be able to communicate and present yourself well, you know, and you have to go and you know, if you parlay that with your product passion, that’s usually kind of a win, win out there. So. Yeah, I mean every job, you know, as a field engineer, you gotta be pretty technical, right? And you have to kind of understand all the technical aspects of that and you know that. So it kind of varies for the job, but like for us, product passion and the excitement for our mission and what we’re doing and the world of AI that is like important across all roles, not just EEs. It’s important for SDRs, it’s important for AES, our, you know, our product advocates that I mentioned, our field engineers. That is like table stakes. If you don’t have that, like you’ve never built on replit, you don’t know who we are.

Ghazi Masood:
Chances are, you know, you won’t do well here.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. Ghazi Masoud, to say that you are on a rocket ship this year is an understatement. I wish you all the very best, you and Replit, for the great things ahead in 2026 and beyond. Thank you so much for joining the show.

Ghazi Masood:
Appreciate it. Josh, thank you so much for having me. It.