“Seek Pain” | How Replit has grown in the age of AI | Featuring Haya Odeh, Co-Founder and Head of Design
There are fewer companies hotter than Replit right now. This wide-ranging coversation with co-founder and head of design Haya Odeh covered how Replit has navigated massive product and company-level change since its founding… from redefining who they build for, to surviving a near-death moment, to finding product-market fit again through a bold AI bet.
If you’d been there, here’s what you’d still be thinking about:
“Seek Pain” as a way of building (and leading)
One of Replit’s core values is “Seek Pain,” inspired in part by David Goggins’ You Can’t Hurt Me. But as Haya described it, this isn’t a motivational slogan; it’s a concrete way of operating.
In product, “seek pain” means resisting the instinct to only listen to people who love what you shipped. Instead, the real work is going out of your way to find:
the users who struggled
the sessions where things broke
the moments of confusion, friction, or abandonment
Those painful signals are the fastest path to clarity and improvement. Haya also framed this as a leadership mindset: seeking discomfort in feedback, conversations, and decisions because that’s where growth actually happens.
The AI switch forced uncomfortable clarity about the user
When the “AI switch” happened, Replit hit a fundamental question: who is this actually for?
Internally, there was debate. Is it for developers? Non-technical users? Everyone?
Haya’s take was blunt: definitions like “users who can’t code” are too vague to build a sharp product. When teams aren’t aligned on the user, they ship something mushy and the end result is a product that tries to be everything and ends up resonating with no one.
Historically, Replit had served “citizen developers.” But Haya sharpened that even further with a provocative framing: Replit is for designers; people who need an environment to build, not engineers who are happy wiring everything up locally themselves.
“It’s Jeff.” Alignment through a real person
To break internal ambiguity, Haya anchored the team around a real human archetype: Jeff, Replit’s partnerships lead.
Jeff isn’t a developer. He’s not “non-technical” either. He’s someone who:
doesn’t take no for an answer
will brute-force solutions until they work
teaches himself whatever he needs — code, design, ops
has enormous grit and patience for rough edges if the product solves a real problem
By rallying around Jeff, the team could finally align on who they were building for.
How work actually gets done at Replit: DRIs and demos
Replit’s internal culture reinforces this bias toward action and ownership.
The company runs on DRIs (Directly Responsible Individuals). If you believe in an idea, you don’t write a memo or lobby in meetings; you demo it.
Demos are how ideas earn buy-in. DRIs recruit collaborators, move work forward, and often operate like mini-founders. Product managers exist, but largely to help socialize work, coordinate, and communicate, not to gate progress.
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