Returning to New Adventures
I've written enough about myself and my career that I think I've created an unrealistic expectation (in my mind, and maybe in yours) that there is some kind of overarching story that explains everything in my life. As humans we are creatures of narrative and we can't help ourselves from making stories to explain things, and while this is in general a good thing it just isn't always true. There's not always a story for everything. Sometimes it's not 5D chess, it's just regular chess, and even in two dimensions you're not very good at it.
(While we're on the topic of chess, I've played 2,000+ games on Chess.com over the last ~year and it turns out, once you've learned how to play it's really just a contest of who's going to mess up first, and is your opponent going to punish your mistakes. The analogy is left as an exercise to the reader.)
Anyway, the reason for this introspection is that I have returned to Replit, nearly 4 years to the day after I joined the first time. My start date in 2021 was October 27th and in 2025 it was October 29th. I'm very excited to be returning to the team I left 15 months ago and pushing forward the state of art in vibe coded apps.
Why the switch? Basically, my reasons for leaving last year turned out to be wrong. I thought Replit was going to fail, or that at minimum it was going to take a ten year slog before anything came of it. I pride myself on being a pretty good investor but I don't think I've ever been more wrong about any company in my life. Replit went from effectively nothing to being the number 3 app that startups spend money on. And I believe this is just the beginning. For the first time Replit has a clear path to being as big as the SaaS giants (Salesforce, DataDog, Palantir) or perhaps even bigger.
There's another part to the story about how the last year at Remi has gone for me. First off, Remi is a wonderful business and the team was a joy to work with. The hard truth is that I was simply not the best engineering manager for that group of people at that time. I think I did a pretty good job all things considered but it wasn't a role where I was doing my best work. The team deserves someone more suited to the position and I'm certain they'll find it. I'm sure I'll revisit the decision to become a manager in the future but as for right now I'm happiest and most effective as an IC working on large-scale distributed systems.
I would also be remiss not to mention that I had the opportunity to rejoin my team at Meta that I left back in 2021 and seriously considered taking it. They gave me an amazing offer and a part of me really, really wanted to accept it. In fact, I made the mistake of verbally accepting before I was quite ready. But when the time came to sign the offer, there was something inside me that kept saying it wasn't the right move. As excited as I was at the thought of working with my old team again, leaving the world of startups and going back to big tech wasn't a decision I could come to peace with.
Anyway, I think that's enough navel-gazing for now. I hope to post about interesting technical projects in the future so it's not all me this and me that. Stay tuned and I look forward to selling you my Replit shares when we go public at a $200B+ market cap.