The Rise of the Self-Driving Company

In 1937, British Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase asked: Why do firms exist? His answer was transaction costs. It’s often cheaper to organize economic activity inside a company than to coordinate it through markets.

But companies have their own coordination costs: management, meetings, departments, reporting, and bureaucracy.

For more than a century, we've accepted these costs as the price of doing business.

In 2011, Marc Andreessen wrote that software was eating the world.

In 2016, we built Replit around the belief that everyone should be able to create it.

Software transformed entire industries, but companies still depend on people to operate that software and coordinate work across teams.

AI promises an even bigger shift. As agents take on more of the execution and coordination, companies can work more efficiently, and their people can pursue more ambitious goals. Realizing that potential will require companies to rethink how they organize and make decisions.

Companies built around this new way of working will be Self-Driving Companies. At Replit, that shift is already underway.