SaaStr: “In June 2025, Replit CEO Amjad Masad dropped a bombshell on X: his company had crossed $100M ARR, up from just $10M at the end of 2024. That’s 10x growth in less than 6 months—making Replit one of the fastest B2B scale stories in recent history. But here’s what makes this story truly remarkable: Replit didn’t just grow fast. It and other leaders in the space fundamentally changed what it means to build software, pioneering the “vibe coding” movement where anyone can create production apps using natural language. No (or relatively little) coding expertise required. And allowing more experienced developer to ship far faster. This isn’t just another software success story. It’s the emergence of a new category that’s attracting billions in investment and fundamentally disrupting the $500B+ software development market.”
Amjad Masad: “In Silicon Valley, you hear a lot of talk about the 10x engineer Think of some of these A.I. researchers as 1,000x engineers. If you can add one person who can change the trajectory of your entire company, it’s worth it.”
Bloomberg: “For as long as most of us can remember, business has been able to call on a ready supply of foreign workers. The giants of Silicon Valley, farmers and food processors, hotels and restaurants, housebuilders and megastores: All have dealt with labor shortages by recruiting immigrants. One result has been an astonishing demographic transformation: 16% of the British population, 20% of the Swedish population, 19% of the German population and 14.3% of the US population were born abroad. This golden age for employers is coming to an end. Popular discontent with mass immigration is rising, anti-immigrant parties are flourishing and mainstream parties are finally taking note.”
Arnold Kling: “Sports gambling is an example of a predatory business model. The entire business is designed to find psychologically weak people and exploit them. Maybe 95 percent of sports gamblers do it for fun and don’t hurt themselves, but the point of the business is to capture the other 5 percent. Or so I believe. To really know whether sports gambling is predatory, I propose that either a government agency or a consumer organization conduct a business model audit for each firm in the industry. This would look at all of the business processes involved—product design, marketing, customer relations, etc. The goal would be to identify practices that either intentionally or unintentionally select for and take advantage of the customers who are least able to fend off exploitation.”
