Amjad Masad did not own a computer. As a student in Amman he walked to an internet cafe, borrowed a machine, and reinstalled his tools each time he wanted to write code. He has described this in HubSpot's startup magazine.
He led Counter-Strike teams in the early 2000s, good enough to reach an international tournament in Turkey. He moved on to modding games, then to programming. His father, a civil engineer with the Jordanian government, came from a Palestinian refugee family; his mother, he has said, instilled his commitment to Palestine.
University was five years of a four-year degree, because missing lectures meant automatic failure.
University was five years of a four-year degree, because missing lectures meant automatic failure. What almost nobody knows is what he did to the grading system. He hacked into it to change his grades, he has said, to see whether he could and how it worked. When it was discovered, he admitted it. The university asked him to help harden its systems. He later exposed a live vulnerability during his own defense.
He graduated in 2010. With little venture capital in Jordan, he joined Codecademy in New York on an O-1 visa for people of extraordinary ability. His open-source in-browser coding tool had gone viral on Hacker News in 2011. After Codecademy came Facebook, then Replit in 2016, with his brother Faris and his wife, Haya Odeh. Most investors passed. The company raised about $600,000 before Y Combinator in 2018 and an Andreessen Horowitz seed, and a 2020 crowdfund brought in about 2,500 community investors.
The low point was not about money. In 2019 he paused the company to be with his mother, who was dying of cancer. Jordanian doctors would not let visitors into the ICU until he begged and yelled, and they eventually relented on a do-not-resuscitate order. He told the San Francisco Standard he was so angry at modern medicine. She died.
The company he came back to nearly stalled. Growth slowed in 2023, the education product was cut, 30 people were laid off in 2024, and then the AI agent changed everything. Replit raised $250 million at $3 billion in September 2025 and $400 million at $9 billion in March 2026. In July 2025 its agent deleted a customer's database in a code freeze.
After October 2023 his public statements on Gaza cost him some friendships and, reportedly, some investors. He has not stepped back.
The boy who needed an internet cafe built a tool so no one else would have to. A founder can take a plain lesson: the system you hack to prove you can is the one you may be asked to fix.