Replit founder Amjad Masad grew his AI coding platform from $2.5M to $250M revenue in one year, then toward $1B. He reveals the brutal founder experience—layoffs, team departures, and the darkest hour—before Replit Agent's viral launch made $1M on day one and proved AI agents could build end-to-end software. Replit Agent achieved $1M revenue on launch day by being the first AI product to write code, debug it, create databases, and deploy to cloud end-to-end, solving a genuine capability gap the industry didn't know was possible.