Future of coding in India and on mobile
My chat with Amjad Masad, Founder & CEO of Replit
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Replit enables programmers to build software collaboratively from anywhere, on any device, without setup time or effort. It recently announced it’s committed to growing in India and announced a mobile app for coding.
I talked to Replit’s founder & CEO, Amjad, to discuss the vision, learnings, and challenges around those developments.
Sar: India is the second largest market after the States for you. India is the second largest English-speaking country in the world. Can you walk me through how you see the future of software development in India and what role Replit wants to play in accelerating that future?
Amjad: India has one of the largest developer populations in the world.
India used to be an outsourcing hub where you would get bugs fixed or software maintained. In the past decade, we've seen an explosion in India's startup ecosystem. There’s a generation of Indian hackers working on products from the ground up. They will go on to start companies or lead engineering at larger companies.
India is about to become ground zero for building new products for the world. In SaaS, everyone knows about Zoho and Freshdesk, but that was just the start. Postman, Browserstack, and Hasura have become household names in devtools, and I bet most developers don't know they're Indian startups.
We think we can supercharge India's growing developer population with accessible tools. Historically, to start learning how to code, you had to buy a laptop and set up a development environment. If you're lucky, you'd have a teacher or learning content to guide you. That discourages many people from starting, or at least they wait until college.
With Replit, all you need is a computing device. As long as you have an internet connection and India is leading the world in connectivity, you can learn how to code. We create and curate high-quality learning content, including in Hindi.
While coding is fun and edifying, most people want to build a career and earn income. Historically, that process would take years before someone could build enough of a resume to get a job. Not anymore. Replit Bounties is compressing the time it takes to make a buck down to literal hours. We've seen teens from India make thousands of dollars hacking on bounties. They’ve also built a great track record and connections.
Sar: What have you found to be uniquely Indian bottlenecks in software development?
Amjad: India has to supplement their education with content online. You find a massive shortage of computer science teachers in the country. That's the case in most places worldwide, but it seems to hit India the hardest.
Add to that the problem of a centralized curriculum, which means that students are not learning what employers need and potentially learning outdated concepts. That led to the explosion in coding boot camps to supplement the brokenness in the education system.
Kids in India who aren’t allowed to bring their laptops into lectures code under their desks while the professor is teaching something they think is irrelevant. While we hope the education system gets reformed, we're not waiting for that to happen. Instead, we're just embracing self-learning as the primary use-case by students for Replit.