Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder & CEO of StackBlitz)

The rate you're growing is absurd. You're in this cohort of companies that are just growing at rates that we've.

Never seen in the history of startups. The company was on the verge of going under when we launched Bolt. And what ended up happening is in the first two months, we went from zero to 20 million of ARR. And we've already crossed 30 million of ARR with the current rate we're on.

Our forecast for the year is we want to get to 100 million of ARR. This is just a nonstop wild shit. How is this possible? What has allowed you to grow this.

Much, this fast, with such a small team? Most importantly, it's been the people. It's rare to find startups where you have kind of the core group of five, six, seven people that have been there for five years plus.

You basically were building a tech first and then looking for a problem to solve later, which is often what people tell you not to do.

I think that's the hard thing about being an entrepreneur. There are periods of time where you have to make judgment calls that are not gonna be the consensus view. You gotta have like confidence in your convictions on how to best play the hand.

A lot of people see these stats and they sometimes don't see that there was also years and years of work before that.

It was kind of like, you have both this overnight success, seven years in the making.

Today, my guest is Eric Simons. Eric is co-founder and CEO of stack Blitz, which makes a product called bolt, which is currently neck and neck with cursor for being the fastest growing product in history. They are currently the number one most popular web AI code app with over 3 million registered users. Two months after launching last October, they hit 20 million ARR. At the time of this recording, they're approaching 40 million ARR. The story of Bolt is wild. They actually started the company seven years ago and were about to run out of money and shut down. But they realized the tech that they'd been building for the past seven years called Web Container was perfectly suited for building AI products in the browser. So they launched the product with a tweet and as Eric describes it, it was an overnight success seven years in the making. If you'd like to better understand the cutting edge of AI coding apps and where things are going with AI and product building, this episode is a must listen. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become a yearly subscriber of my newsletter, you now get a year free of Perplexity Pro, Notion, Linear, Granola, and Superhuman. Check it out at lenny's newsletter.com With that, I bring you Eric Simons. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features. And Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous, deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform, where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more, with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying, prolonged analytic cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A/B testing flywheel. EPO powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out EPO at getepo.com/lenny and 10x your experiment velocity. That's getepo.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by the Fundrise Flagship Fund. Full disclosure, real estate investing is boring. Prediction markets are exciting. Meme coins are a thrill ride. Even the stock market can swing wildly on a headline. Hello, Deepak. But with real estate investing, there's no drama or adrenaline or excuses to refresh your portfolio every few minutes. Just bland and boring stuff like diversification and dividends. So you won't be surprised to learn that the Fundrise Flagship Real Estate Fund is a complete snooze-fest. The fund holds $1.1 billion worth of institutional caliber real estate managed by a team of pros focused on steadily growing your net worth for decades to come. See, boring. That's the point. You can start investing in minutes and with as little as $10 by visiting fundrise.com/lenny. Carefully consider the investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses of the Fundrise Flagship Fund before investing. Find this information and more in the fund's prospectus at fundrise.com/flagship. This is a paid ad. Eric, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me. Yeah, I'm stoked to be here.

For folks that are not super familiar with Bolt, what is Bolt?

It's really simple. You go there, there's a text box, and you tell it what you want to build, whether it's a web or a mobile app. And so it's, you know, kind of one of these, you know, text to app building tools have become pretty popular over the past few months here. And it's not just like building, you know, like a static site or something like that, but you can actually build full stack, real software with databases and hosting and et cetera, yeah, just from prompting. And in a ridiculously short period of time, it's not you're spending hours and hours or days putting this together. You can get results, I'm like, I'm in it.

Let's just share some numbers about the scale of what you're building. The rate you're growing is absurd. You're kind of in this cohort of companies that are just growing at rates that we've never seen in the history of startups. And you guys are at the edge of that. Share some numbers about how things went when you launched and where they're at today.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, when we launched, I mean, we, I mean, the company was on the verge of going under when we, when we launched Bolt, like, you know, our company Stackblitz, we've been around for seven years building web-based, you know, development environment stuff. And, and so when we launched this, we were like, this would be amazing if this added like 100K of ARR over the next couple of months, you know? And what ended up happening is, you know, in the first two months, we, you went from zero to 20 million of ARR. And I think we're on like month four or four and a half or something like that at this point. And we've already crossed 30 million of ARR and we're on the verge of crossing 40. Like by the time this comes out, it appears that we're going to be at 40 million ARR. So it's just like the scale of the growth, the revenue has been nuts. I mean, and of course, like kind of that correlates with like insane user growth as well. Like we've added, you know, 3 million registered users, you know, just in the past few months here, and, you know, monthly active users is, you know, around a million, I think, at this point per month. So it's just, I mean, I've, I've never seen anything. I've been doing startups for, like, 15 years. I've never seen anything like this. Yeah. Everyone I've talked to, you know, our investors or, you know, Etc. There's not a lot of corollaries to kind of what's going on here, you know? and it's kind of extraordinary because I mean, like we, you know, our company wasn't doing AI stuff six months ago. We had no AI products and just out of nowhere we, you know, from almost death of the company to being, you know, the number one by traffic revenue, et cetera, like, you know, AI CogJen app that's only web based in the world. Like it's, I think the only other like startup ahead of us is, you know, for CogJen just in general would be like Cursor. by adoption revenue at this point. And so, anyway, it's, yeah, it's been, it's been a heck of a ride, you know, and our team's like 15, 20 people, you know, so it's just dealing with, you know, we're going to be closing on like a hundred thousand customers and we've got, our support team's like three people, you know, we're, so we're trying to scale as fast as we can. So anyway, it's just kind of mind-blowing just the, the scale of the, the demand and, and, and, and How we've had to, you know, turn things around to match the demand as best as we can, you know.

Mind boggling is an excellent way to describe what you just shared. A million monthly active users, you're at 40 million annual recurring revenue, five months into the business. Is that right?

Yeah, with single digit week, yeah, single digit weeks, right? That's the current track rate that we're seeing for the site. Yeah.

I think are you guys the fastest growing startup in history?

I mean, I think it depends on probably where you peg the number, right? Yeah, we're here to just like build great products, right? And just, you know, push the limits of like what's possible with the technology. And, you know, and I think that that we do our jobs well, you know, it's kind of crazy things can happen, but I mean, the current track rate we have, we're already, we're going to be exceeding kind of the forecast for Q1. with the current rate were on. And, you know, our forecast for the year is we want to get to 100 million of ARR. And now, you know, I think there's been a company, I don't know, that would either be on par with cursor or ahead of them or something like that. But, I mean, it's, and I think there's gonna be more things like this, too. I don't think that, like, you know, it's just this, there's something really, you know, I think a lot of people are in disbelief about it, too. We're like, this is okay. Right. And this is from when we got to 4 million of ARR, 5 million of ARR in the first month. I would talk with people and they're like, okay, yeah, but like that could go to zero. And then it went to 20 the next week, I could go to zero. And now we're closing on 40. And so I just, I, and so from my view, I was also very skeptical, you know, as this, like I've never seen anything grow like this, right? And so part of me, I was just, I was kind of, for like a month, I was kind of waking up waiting for the day where it just was like, okay, it's a, you know, I mean, like it's, this, this, this, this crazy thing happened and now it's not, but, but that's just, that data just hasn't come. And, and, and, and you see this happening with Cursive, you see this happen with a lot of these other AI startups. And, I, the value proposition is real. Like the free market is filled, is filled with rational actors. People are coming to these tools because it is solving problems. They're, they're able to do way more for, for way less cost than it, than it would otherwise. And so, and that's why I said, I think we're gonna see more of this, whether it's encoding or other verticals or whatever, you know, in a sense it's almost like the maybe, maybe the new normal, right? For as AI just continues to get better.

But anyways, let's get to a demo of Bolt so people can actually see what this looks like in action. And as you go through it, if you can even point out stuff that is different from other products in the space, say Lovable, V0 Replid that other folks have heard about, That'd be useful.

Awesome. Cool.

Yeah.

So this is Bull, if you just go to bull.new. Things that I think are really interesting about Bull. One is it's just like dead simple. Whether you're logged in or logged out, it's the same UI. It's extremely simple. It's just a text box. And I think that the biggest difference between Bull and the other stuff out there, it's actually subtle. It's not like something you'd necessarily see in the UI, But it's how fast it is and how reliable it is. And this is because of how we are actually doing the compute. Because what's going on here is like when you type into, whether it's Bolt or another product, it has to spin up a dev environment to actually make that application. So there needs to be some operating system somewhere that's running it. Everyone else runs those things on cloud servers, which those can take minutes to boot up and they often will run into issues and then you can end up literally stuck, right, and have to contact support to get it done, you know, and get it on stock or over, right? with Bold, we've like in the past seven years, what our company's been doing has been building an operating system that runs inside your browser locally using your CPU. So we have a very permissive free tier and it's insanely fast and it's insanely reliable. Right? So if I want to like just as a quick example of this, say like make a clone, you know, of Spotify, right? And just hit enter. This thing's already getting to work and already on the right here, this is a full dev environment. Like this is an actual operating system running inside of my browser and I can run commands on it, et cetera. And really, this is like what you're seeing down here, this terminal, and kind of what's backing it. This is what took us really like five, six, seven years to build and make so reliable. There would not be a Bolt without this technology called Web Container that allows us to run an operating system in the browser. Because what's going on here is our AI agent for Bolt has bidirectional communication with this operating system. It's writing code, it's running the Dev Server for this thing. It's gonna go ahead and spin this up. you can see how fast this is in like a matter of 60 seconds. I said, make me a Spotify clone. And now we have one. Right. And it looks pretty darn good.

That looks really good.

And so that's and that's one of the, you know, the other aspects around Bold is like this technology we made for the operating system side. The guys that have been working with us, you know, for past five plus years on it, before this, they were actually doing machine learning AI stuff. And so when it came time to write the agent for Bold, we had just an incredible amount of in-house expertise on how to actually like merge these two different technology sets to have this really reliable experience that produces really beautiful, really functional stuff. So that's kind of like, you know, based on like what's really cool about the Bolt experience. The other thing is, you know, a lot of these products, it's like you can like make something, but you know, often you want to like actually have a URL where you can, share this, like have it maybe even attach a domain to it or whatever have you. So with Bolt, we actually have built-in integrations with production-grade hosting providers like Netlify and for databases with Supabase. So if I go and just click the deploy button here, this is actually going to run a production build of this project we made here. Again, this is doing this entirely inside my browser. So it doesn't cost us anything to do this. Again, you can do this for free.

Right.

And it has gone ahead and deployed this on a real URL on Netlify. This is live. I can share this with anyone. And if I want to have like, you know, buy the domain, spotifyclone.com and point it at this, I can click this link here, then I kick me into Netlify, we can attach this to my account, buy domain, point at that thing. And then from there on out, whenever I'm prompting Bolt to make changes to this application and hit deploy, that goes live on my public website there. Right? So it's just this is this is like the simplest way to build a web app that's ever existed, you know, like that was kind of one of the key realizations I had a couple of weeks into the thing. I was seeing people use this for like personal use cases, like medical donation sites for weddings or whatever. And I was like, don't these people know that like Wix for Squarespace exists? Should I tell them, you know? And then it hit me this those things are so complicated to use. Like there's a there I don't know if you've ever seen just the UI of these things, but like, They're crazy complicated. And that's just for building like kind of like a static website. They can't, there's no way you could actually build like a functional app. And that's like with Bolt, if we were to sit here for another 30 minutes, we would be, we would have streaming. You'd be able to make playlists of different MP3 files or whatever. Like you can just keep prompting this thing to keep adding functionality, you know? So it's that kind of, I think some of the cool, core experience of Bolt here. I can show you something cool that we just launched if that would be, of interest. So this is like web apps, right? So like web apps are amazing, but often you want to have like a native app. you know, and it's hard to build web apps. It's even harder to build native apps that can actually, that you can then go put in the app store, right? And so we partnered up with a company called Expo and their entire business is making basically like React Native tooling and this ecosystem that makes it super easy to build beautiful apps and actually I'm in the app store. And so right here, I'll zoom in a little bit. We have this little build a mobile app with Expo. if you click that, we kind of instruct you on how to just prompt mobile apps into existence. So, yeah, let's make another Spotify clone that's an actual native mobile app. Let's say make a Spotify clone, go ahead and hit enter. And what this thing's gonna do is actually, again, spin up a operating system here where it's gonna boot up the expo tool chain and actually go and make a mobile app for us. And what's cool about this is we could actually preview it. just in the browser here. But once this thing's done and it boots up, it's going to show a QR code. We're going to be able to scan it. And in real time, actually, I basically have like a test flight of this native application that we can try out on our phones. And as we keep prompting, you'll see it making changes and stuff.

Right.

This is kind of the first time, right? That, you know, you don't have to be technical to make production grade web, full stack web and, and mobile apps, you know, like I, at this point, I've done nothing that is, that is, requires developer knowledge to do any of this stuff, you know? And that's, that's kind of, I think that's what a lot of people are really excited about with this. And, yeah, majority of our audience, are people that are not developers. They're easiest. They're PMs, they're designers, they're entrepreneurs. Because these are people that are, have always been great at building products, and the previously the only way they could get their ideas into coded software was through a developer's fingertips. Right? And now they can deal with their own through prompting. So you can see here, you've got this little QR code. I'm going to scan the thing.

I'm going to do it too. By the way, I love that you had just enough things to say until it finished.

That was a pro. Just as I planned, you know? But so on my screens, it's booting up, it's bundling the JavaScript of this thing. And it is beta. We just launched this last week, by the way. So if you can see on my screen here, I actually have this Spotify looking app, right?

That looks exactly like Spotify.

It looks exactly like Spotify.

We're going to be sued right now. So let's be quick. You're doing too good a job with this. No, that's amazing.

So it's pretty cool, right? I mean, like, and so what's cool is that, and as you keep prompting on your device, it'll just keep reloading, like without you having to like kill the app, it'll just, you know, you can actually see the functionality getting added. And so in this use case that you and I have right now, it's like, if I was, if you're not building an app together, you know, we could be on other sides of the planet and you could actually be not just seeing a screenshot of the thing, but actually touching it and feeling it and like, and putting it through its paces. And so a lot of product teams, I mean, this is just changing how people do product development. It's faster to do this than design a whole bunch of Figma frames necessarily, right?

So we're going to spend a lot of time on that. Okay, this is incredible. This whole episode so far is you just blowing my mind, imagine listeners' mind just over and over and over. I don't even know where to go with all this sometimes. You made a really important point that you worked on this for seven years before you launched A lot of people see these stats, zero to 40 million AR in like five-ish months. And they sometimes don't see that there was also years and years of other of work before that. And the reason that you guys have been so successful is all the work you did that allowed that build this web container technology, it sounds like. Is there anything there that's worth sharing? You think of it just that part of the journey. I know we'll go through like the origin of how where Bolt came from, but I guess just that web container component specifically, that feels like a huge deal.

It 100% is, yeah. And I would say this is kind of surprisingly to me, it's like still one of the contrarian viewpoints of our company. Like, you know, despite, because over the years it was like when we first, this is the web container was the bat that we made the company on, just to be clear. Like StackBlitz was like a deep tech, a browser-based, deep technology play. on can we make a, you know, a web assembly based operating system that can like boot in a browser in like 100 milliseconds and like run full on development tool chains? Like that was really it. And like the, we gotten the idea for this and kind of the insight that this might be possible because back when my co-founder and I, I came out to the valley, he and I like grew up down the street from each other at Chicago, learned to code together at 13 and built stuff ever since. And we came out to the valley in 2012 and we just had the good fortune of bumping into Dylan Field and Evan Wallace when they were building Figma. in the early days. And that was, I don't think a lot of people are like, no, that like Figma was also a browser-based deep technology play. Like when their first pitch for Figma, they didn't have a design tool. Their first pitch was this 3D ball dropping into water inside of a browser tab. And the pitch basically was, you know, browsers have this new capability called WebGL. and the predecessor to WebAssembly. And with these things, for the first time, you could actually create a graphics rendering engine that you could then build a design tool on top of. But you're gonna have to write that rendering engine from scratch, 'cause nothing exists that can just compile into WebGL or whatever. If you want the performance you need, et cetera, it's gonna take us years to do it, but we do it. We think this will change everything. and obviously we know how that story, you know, has panned out now. And back in 2017, 2016, 2017, Albert, my co-founder and I saw the same sort of story begin to play out, but for web development and like development environments. And specifically there was some stuff that landed in browsers like WebAssembly, shared memory, service workers, like these different APIs. And we were like, oh, wow, like it should be possible theoretically, like to write an operating system that in WebAssembly that could, you know, run Node.js and NPM and all the tool chains on top of it that you need to do to do web development. And that would be huge because setting up developer environments is, it's a, it's a pain for beginners. Um, like a lot of people churn out, they see, like the first thing you do when you learn how to code is not even learning how to code. It's how to set up your computer to even start writing the code. Right? If you go join Netflix or any of these other fan companies, the first month or two is, is you being onboarding to run that stuff on your computer instead of your environment, right? And we're like, if we could just have that be something, you click a link and it just boots in your browser, that'd be huge. It's also, if you look at the other productivity apps that have really worked on the web, they've all had this compute model, right? Figma, when you open a Figma document, there's not like some cloud VM that gets spun up for you. to render the documents you're dragging things around, it's using your CPU and your memory to do the work. Same thing with Google Docs, right? That's the only model that's ever scaled to a billion users. And so when you look at Cloud IDs, like, you know, Cloud Nine was the first one back in, you know, 2009 or so, the way these have always worked is that your browser is basically doing nothing when you go to them. It's every user that gets connected, there has to be a Cloud VM that gets spun up for them. And then your, your browser's just kind of like taking your keystrokes, sending it to the server, and then, you know, sending back the result of it. And that's how all these, these other AI, you know, code text to app sort of tools work. They're all using cloud VMs. And the problem is, you know, on a small scale, it can work, but as you scale it up, I mean, there's not even 100 million VMs to rent on the planet, but there are like a billion devices that you can run this stuff on. So that's kind of what we've seen with Bull, where, you know, it's, if you want to have build a product that's, that's going to be able to scale to that side, you have to kind of look at all factors and go, we have to build, make sure the technology provides the best experience, zero latency, transient cost. So there's a permissive free tier, right? Because the other problem with the server is like you end up, if you have a free tier, people are mining Bitcoin on it. They're DDOSing people using your servers, right? So inevitably you have to nerf these things and roll them back. But if it's all done on the end device, it doesn't matter. So that's Web Container was the key piece and what we struggled with. It took us like four or five years, something to build Web Container. What we struggled with for the years after that was just how to build a product around it. Because developers loved it, but they weren't using it in ways that they would pay money for, you know? and, and as much as I, the, the, the nerd side of me wished that that would be enough, that it's like a build the cool technology was not, it's like, it's not like this. We're here to build a venture, a venture scale company. And, and so that, you know, that was kind of why we were, we were high at the end of the journey where it was like, you know, we're taking shots on goal and we, you know, at some point we just kind of connected back. Right.

There's a lot of really interesting lessons from this journey that I think are counterintuitive. One is you basically were building a tech first and then looking for a problem to solve later, which is often what people tell you not to do. And it worked out in this case. The other interesting takeaway here is it feels like Ajax, it's like a similar moment to when Ajax came out and then everyone's just like, wow, you can build new things here. So it feels like there's a lesson here of just if there's a new technology that has enabled something big that we think maybe let's just work there for a while and see if something comes up. And then I think the other lesson here is just as a founder, just survive as long as you can because you may find something that works. All great points. All great points, right?

Because what we, you're dead right, like for, and you know, fortunately, my co-founder and I had, we had built a lot of unsuccessful startups before this. Like we spent most of the 20 times like churning through ideas on things. And so we, you know, what we had conviction, I was like, this is, this seems like a technology that, that will be important. Like it seems like the web is the most ubiquitous, like the kind of the pitch or the theory at our house was like, the web is the most ubiquitous platform in the world. But yet it has no, you can't use the web to like build the web, right? Like every other platform, Mac has, you know, Xcode, Windows has Visual Studio. The web had nothing. And we were like, you know, at a minimum, Google should probably buy this thing from us. It seems like that, it should probably be part of Chrome at a minimum.

Right?

And we thought, hey, this could be a huge enabler. The vision of just making it as easy to build full stack applications as using Canva. It just seemed really compelling. But when you do that sort of risky deep technology play, you need to, and we were very good about this. The previous company, Albert and I did, we bootstrapped it all the way through. to acquisitions. We understood, and we were, like, living hand to mouth, like, food to bootstrapped that thing. So we understood how to, how to have a low burn rate and take a lot of shots on goal that make every dollar stretch beyond what anyone would think is reasonable or possible. And that's how we played our hands with stack blits. You know, like, we, you know, we didn't raise money for the first two or three years of the company's life. We were, you know, bootstrapping it. We did raise money. We We barely spent it, you know, largely because it was like, we need to just take a lot of smart bats and it doesn't make sense. And I, you know, I would just say generally, like, until you see pull, like, and you know, just people pulling the product out of your hands, you, you want to, you don't want to be spending money. You should be like default no. And like when you, when you go and buy software, you should be going, we're a tiny startup. Can you sell it for, you know, for half, like everything you buy, I just like keep the per unit as low as possible. 'Cause you need as many shots on goal as you can possibly get. 'Cause you have no idea. And I think just generally for startups, that's the right way, in my view, to approach it, unless you're seeing again immediate demand in pull or whatever. But yeah, I think that'd be kind of like maybe the extra context I'd add on top is like, I think that we ended up doing a good job of like being extremely conservative during a time in which, during 2020 through 2020 and 2021, which were times where exuberance and growing headcount was like KPIs of companies, right? And were things that were being, you know, with a lot of, you know, emotional force of like, hey, you guys ought to be doing this. And I'm glad that we didn't heed the advice because it, you know, if we tripled the company and kicked up the burn rate, there would be no bull, you know, they're like, we would have gone out of business a long time ago. Right. So, I think that's, that's the hard thing about being an entrepreneur, I think is you kind of have to, there are periods of time where, you know, you have to kind of, you have to make judgment calls that are, that are not going to be the consensus view. Maybe years later, people, you know, it'll become the consensus view, but, you know, you gotta have like confidence in your convictions on how, how to best play the hand, you know, so there's so.

Many great lessons here. I think just this idea of, of Just staying alive. Dalton came on the podcast. He's a partner at YC once and he just had this phrase, just don't die. And that's exactly what you guys did. Seven years of just trying it until something worked. And I love that you actually were planning to shut down the company right before you launched Bolt.

And I know you launched it with.

Just like a tweet, right? That was the launch moment. Yeah.

Yeah.

Maybe talk about that moment of just.

After launch signs that, okay, this is working, something's different. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So day one, it was like, there's great reception to the tweet. you know, we were like, wow, this is like, you know, one of the biggest things, you know, I love unlocked day reception we've ever seen. And I think on the first day, you know, I think we added like 60k of ARR or something, which was like, I mean, crazy. We were at, you know, again, we were at 600. So we added like 10% in a day. And I remember our dev ops engineer, like, he was the one who would flag, and he was like, guys, we have 60k today. Like, this is crazy. And I was like, yeah, yeah, but like, this is launch day. Like it's the, the, there's, there's the tech crunch peak of initiation or, you know, the classic startup. Yeah. I was like, listen, you know, I'm trying to like temper enthusiasm for the team. I'm like, this is great. Got a lot of work to do, da, da, da, da. And the next day, you know, we added 80K or whatever it was, right? And it just kind of kept going. And, you know, and all the while, like the product we put out, we, we, we built the thing in 90 days. We built Bold and so there's a lot of things that were missing in the product, basic stuff, basic stuff, and which again, like we, you know, we we cut the right corners on the thing to get it online. But we had this just growing influx of people using it and going, you know, how is there not a mobile responsive view? Like how, how are chat messages not, we got the 20 million of ARR without a mobile responsive view, by the way. Just throwing that out there. You know, this, it was like the iPhone not having copy and paste until like iPhone five or whatever, you know, that was, this was, that was, this is that for us. It was like, no, no, you looked at it on mobile, it was terrible, right? But there's stuff like that. So we had to just like, and then we're a small team and so we're completely unprepared for just the growing traffic. And, you know, there's a whole bunch, I mean, the list of problems that were happening every single day was nuts. I mean, like, to start, we had never had a plan on stackus.com for more than $9. Like we had one price, nine bucks, right? And so we launched both. We're like, again, we don't think they will think hopefully people like this, but, you know, nine bucks doesn't get you a lot of inference. And so people burn through nine bucks in like 48 hours, you know, and they're like, I want to buy more. How do I buy more? Why won't you take my money? So it was like that within the week we, we were just completely new pricing plans where you could upgrade, which, which ended up has kind of now become the standard. All the other guys in the space have copied this. where, you know, prior to Bolt going online, co-pilot, like all these previous AI things, everyone kind of wanted this like Netflix model where there's like one price, it's like all you can eat or whatever. And the problem is like, if you do that, like you can't really, like, you want the, the, the inference cost to be kind of low because you're expecting people to use it a lot. Right. And so you don't, you can't do these agentic experience things. It would be too expensive. And what we ended up stumbling into is that, okay, actually people are willing to pay more. Right. There really, people want to pay for more inference because we've crossed this threshold where, you know, you can get a very tangible ROI. You know that this is providing a tremendous amount of value to you, right? So anyway, so that was like, that was like one thing and, you know, the servers were just melting. Anthropic ran out of GPUs for us. Like Dario emailed me and he was like, listen, we just, we don't have anything more to give you at the times where we're like, how do we deal with, you know, It was just, it was just bananas, you know, for, for, for weeks. It felt like in 300, you know, when, when they're surrounded by like 10,000 people and, and our team is just like doing everything. Like it's, there's 15, 20 people just doing everything. Like my chief of staff and I were doing customer support 95% of the day, you know, just, anyways, so yeah, it was, it was a crazy wild time. And, I mean, it still is, we've had a little bit more time to kind of, grow into this. And usually, I mean, as a company to grow into like even 20 million ARR, you get a year at least or something, you know, it's kind of staff up.

Often decades.

Yeah, you know, so it's, you know, that was as hard as we go to people and kind of be like, what do we do? And the playbooks we get back are like, take six months or a year or something. And it's like, this isn't gonna work, you know? And which is funny, this is what it's all about, right? I mean, this is, this is.

You.

Know, it's, at least for me, this is, that level of intensity is, it's challenging. We fund challenges, you know?

Wow, okay. This is just nonstop wild, wild shit. So you mentioned that your team was about 20 people through all of this. You guys are growing at this insane rate. 20 people. How is this possible? What has allowed you to grow this much, this fast with such a small team? And this 300 visual is interesting. I imagine having these Spartans is a big part of it. Just what has allowed you to do this?

Yeah, I think a lot of, I mean, a lot of, again, I mean, if you kind of look at where a lot of the other folks in the, like the co-gen, the attacks to app space have really been struggling, a lot of it has been scaling their servers and stuff, right? Because, and, you know, it was kind of like, you know, both this overnight success seven years in the making, like all of this stuff, like there's no way, if you've rewound like year two, we can, there's no way we could have, we would not be at the growth and on DAUs and revenue or whatever, there's just no way. And so a lot of it is the technology we made. and, and most importantly, it's been the people. Like, the people like, they, you know, it's, it's, it's rare to find startups where you have kind of the core group of five, six, seven people, you know, that have been there for five years plus. Right. Like, that's, that's a pretty rare thing to see. Like, in Silicon Valley, it is usually folks are kind of at a job for, you know, start for a kind of year or two. They kind of go to another one. Yeah. I mean, the, and the problem with the turnover like that is that you can't take like really long bets like the one we did. And so we've had kind of from the get-go again, this comes back from bootstrapping the previous company, like just having, you know, less people and more context per head. Like that's just, that's just been, that's just been how we do it. And we feel very strongly about it. And the reason for that is, is one, that you can have high levels of trust with anyone you're talking to because you know that they have, they have a lot of context. It's not like, you know, this person's completely in the dark and, in some quarter of the company you know what I mean? the second thing everyone has agency to actually get stuff on, Ft to back, right? And and you there's no political committee to get stuff approved by, there's none no dot, you know. so when you look at what kind of what happened with Bull, I mean, we had engineers that were, like, front to back were on a call with someone running into an issue, going and fixing it, but cooking up the UI on the spot, and and landing the thing. like, without involving anyone else on the team. Right. And, you know, that, you know, so I think it was the culmination of just high trust and, you know, people, like, we all just have enjoyed working together over the past. I think that's why, that's the only reason anyone would ever stay right at a company for that long or whatever. And so those sorts of stressful situations, I think, can are make or break, right? Like those are make or break for any team. And so that I think that what's happened is really, you know, it is a direct reflection of the strength and the bonds of the people that are making this thing and supporting the thing.

Yeah, I think that's such a important point that you guys have been working together for many years. Most people won't have that benefit when you're hiring people, when you hire this initial team. Is there anything you look for that you think maybe people aren't looking for enough? Anything you prioritize when you're hiring new folks? this idea that they can do a lot. They can do customer calls, they can do design, they can do engineering.

Yeah, for us, and even if the folks were hiring us, like hiring people that are, that, that don't care about the titles and they don't care about, you know, it's not like they're, they're people, of course, it's where people have like a career trajectory and that's what thing, but it's like they, they're, they really are motivated by just working on cool things and, and, , you know, checking their ego at the door and, and they're there to like collectively build something great, not just, just kind of, you know, be, be the, the, the brilliant jerk, right? You know, most of the people that we've hired have been, you know, but in Europe and we're a fully remote company. Um, like, you know, I, my co-founder and I are in, are in the Bay Area. It's funny, like back in 2018, we, we like rented an office and stuff. and we were like commuting into it because we thought we'd hire people here in like a year into it. We were like, what are we doing? You and I are coming to like an office for 10 people. We've hired the people working for us are, you know, in Europe, across the US. And, you know, I think, and then we have a, you know, one or two other people we've hired that are in the Bay Area at this point. But, yeah, I think, I think we kind of look for folks that are, that are intrinsically just trying to, trying to build great stuff and are interested and then the first people that we hired were what they, the reason we found them is that they were users of stock plots, you know? Like that was the, a lot of people that, the majority of people we hired at the company have been people that actually came from our community, basically. That's what we, when we want to hire people, we put out a tweet and say, hey, we're hiring an engineer, and then we get, you know, DMS or whatever. Right. And, but, yeah, those, those are the, those are the general, like, kind of, kind of qualities we look for, though, you know?

I'm excited to chat with Christina Gilbert, the founder of One Schema, one of our long time podcast sponsors. Hi, Christina.

Yes. Thank you for having me on, Lenny.

What is the latest with One Schema? I know you now work with some of my favorite companies like Ramp, Vanta, Scale, and Watershed. I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from especially tricky systems like ERPs.

Yes, so we just launched one scheme of file feeds, which allows you to build an integration with any system in 15 minutes, as long as you can export a CSV to an SFTP folder. We see our customers all the time getting stuck with hacks and workarounds, and the product teams that we work with don't have to turn down prospects because their systems are too hard to integrate with. We allow our customers to offer thousands.

Of integrations without involving their engineering team at all. I can tell you that if my team had to build integrations like this, How nice would it be to be able to take this off my roadmap and instead use something like OneSchema and not just to build it, but also to maintain it forever?

Absolutely, Lenny. We've heard so many horror stories of multi-day outages from even just a handful of bad records. We are laser focused on integration reliability to help teams end all of those distractions that come up with integrations. We have a built-in validation layer that stops any bad data from entering your.

System, and OneSchema will notify your team immediately of any data that looks incorrect. I know that importing incorrect data can cause all kinds of pain for your customers and quickly lose their trust. Christina, thank you for joining us. And if you wanna learn more, head on over to oneschema.co. That's oneschema.co. I wanna ask a couple more questions about Bolt, and then I wanna zoom out and talk about where things are heading in the future. Let's talk about privatization. I imagine you guys are just like barraged with, as you described after you launched, like you're just barraged with requests. Like you said, there's a million monthly active users. I can't even imagine the feature requests you guys are getting, plus all the stuff you know you want to build. Just how do you go about deciding.

What to prioritize and what to actually build? There's a lot of things that you just don't even know are possible to do, right? And so people aren't going to be necessarily explicitly asking for them. And so there's been kind of a couple of these where We, you know, kind of use our, our gut instinct on like, Hey, this, this, no one's asking for this, like in meaningful numbers at least, but we think this is going to be a big deal. Best example was last week with, native mobile app support. Like that's the, the, you know, by reception, like the biggest thing we've ever launched. And it was something that even internally at the company, you know, so folks like this, you know, I don't know, people are like, y'all about these other things, right? And then, and it's, and it is, it's always this balance of like, how much are we just , triaging various things versus like that new capabilities, but it's like, this is, strikes me as an important one where we, where we, you know, put some chips into the middle of the table on and the okay dead right. Like it's, it's, it's just this mind blowing experience. And now just, there's just, you know, thousands of mobile apps being created a day that weren't before. And, and how does that change things? I mean, like that's, that now there's, you know, there's small businesses that are, you know, they would have never made an iPhone app before. It made no sense. It's super expensive. Like, now that's not the case. I mean, like, they said, so there's kind of these things where it's like, hey, we should go and, you know, take bets here. But so there's kind of this. It's, I think the best analogy would just be like, it's kind of like, I think, you know, you working at a restaurant, being like a chef, it's like there's some amount of there's feedback from the customers.

Right.

They're like, this thing didn't taste good. and then there's like, hey, we've been kind of cooking something interesting. This, this tastes this. Yeah, I don't know. This, I think people are gonna like this. You know, I think this is a, a killer dish. And, and so you kind of have to balance those things. And I think it's actually largely a function of just ex, you know, years of experience doing it. I think I, if you kind of rewind, like, that 10 years ago, I would have had, I really know, I would've had the, just the, the years of getting my butt kicked by the free market. to have cultivated a son to this stuff, you know? You kind of have to build your own gun and stick for it, I guess, is the best way of putting it, you know?

To unpack this a little bit further, do you have kind of a cadence you guys work through to decide what to build and ship? Do you have like a weekly meeting every week? Cause I know, like, the answer is probably really, it's just like chaos constantly and fires. We're putting out constant, like, I know that's a lot of it, but is there some kind of process that you guys have for deciding what to build and how to, share it and just, you know, work with the team.

We all meet like every day, like pretty much the entire team gets on a call.

They would just kind of meet like a Zoom.

Yep. Yeah. Every day at 8 a.m. Pacific, we're on a Zoom for like every day, the whole company. Pretty much the entire company. Yeah.

Wow. For an hour. Okay.

Yeah. And we just go over everything. And I think we're going to probably start as the team's kind of growing, we're going to start splintering off into different sinks or whatever. But the thing about just having everyone in the same room every day is that a lot of people will complain that it's, you know, this is, you know, on Twitter, you'll see people say, oh, like it's the most expensive use everyone's time, right? But it's like, yep, but like there's 0% fidelity loss in that. Like everything is everything every day is being audited front to back and being discussed front to back. And so when you're in these times of just extreme growth, right, it's you want as close to 0% loss, right, on communications. and so that's, that's how we've, that's how we've been doing since, especially since bolt went online. And I think it was like the week after bolt went online, we were like, every day, we're, until, until we're through this or whatever, we're all getting on a phone call every day and we're, we're front to back doing this. But again, another reason why more content or more context on, you know, and less heads, you know, every person at the company is aware of everything else going on at the company. Right. So people can independently be making decisions that are generally by default more often correct than not.

That is so interesting. I've never heard that before, especially for a company growing like that is like yours. That is super interesting that that's what you do.

I don't think we're going to do that forever. Yeah, of course.

No, but that's, I think that's a really cool thing to know that that works and has worked for you. Where do you, so say you talk about stuff, then where do you put stuff? Where do you put your roadmap? Where do you plan? Just like what tools are kind of in the stack of the company's toolset?

Yeah. On the engineering side, we use linear, like heavily, on kind of product, you know, road mapping. I think we were using Notion and, you know, kind of making like PRD type stuff in Notion, you know, and then we use Figma for like design. And we actually, we use Bolt for a little while. design and prototyping at this point, as you can imagine. But yeah, I think the tooling is, nothing crazy. There's nothing crazy sophisticated. I think we'd be investing a lot more and especially as you start splintering people out of being on the same call every day. That's where this stuff really starts to matter because you don't have a time where you're able to dynamically catch things that weren't going to be brought up.

I love that you guys use PRDs. I love that you even used that term. There's a lot of talk of just like, oh, we got Bolt now. We got all these tools. We don't need PRDs. We're just going to create a prototype immediately. That's it. Talk about just like why you still find that useful and just what you.

Put into your PRD, whatever that is for you. Unless there's something that's very sophisticated that we're working on, we tend to keep them pretty light. I like to just have the minimal amount of context possible. that just ensures everyone's on the same page and that the key outcomes for whatever feature that we're working on are going to be present when we get, you know, because the things that when these things, when these documents get really beefy, if you're looking at it, God, there's so much stuff to decipher. You know, the problem is a lot of people are going to gloss over it when it gets kicked to development or design or whatever. It's just going to start snowballing into a lot of stuff. It's just better to keep it as simple as you possibly can. at least that's, that's kind of our, our approach to the thing. Um, and, you know, and often it's, it's, some of these things are like, here's a link to a bolt.

Here's what it might look like.

Yeah, like here's, you, not just look like, here's, here's kind of a working demo of what it will effectively feel like. Right. Um, and, and be, because that just, you know, if, if a picture is worth, you know, a thousand words, like a live actual demo is worth billions, you know, like you can, you can feel it. It's real. And that's what we're seeing, like a lot of the, you know, the businesses that are adopting Bolt now, that's the use case that they're using this for is high fidelity prototyping because it's like now faster to make real prototypes using Bolt and they're writing, you know, before it was too expensive, like the idea of like, let's prototype the behavior that Yeah, the engineers code a prototype. It's like that it would take forever, it would be expensive. And now it's faster to do this with Bolt in code and have a real working software product than dragging around frames in Figma to actually make a static version of it.

So let's actually talk about that. Just how, how far have companies gotten with Bolt? Like, prototypes is where everyone's kind of imagining these tools are at. I know that the goal isn't just to make prototypes, it's to build full scale. I imagine long-term Salesforce, you know, Atlassian style companies that scale. Just what's like, what are some examples of products people have built with Bolt that are maybe would surprise people just how far they've gotten?

Yeah, I mean, especially when you're starting Greenfield stuff, you, I mean, you can use Bolt to build, you know, like, on the, like, Salesforce is an example, right? One of the, the first people that signed up for Bolt was this guy named Paul, and he's an entrepreneur. and doesn't know how to code, built a CRM in three weeks that has like AI built into it and Stripe for billing, et cetera. He had gotten a quote from an agency for this. It was gonna be 30 grand and take six months. He had it done in three weeks and at least spent like 300 bucks on both for the time. And so it's like, this is like anything he's making money off of this, like this is his startup. Right?

Okay, so he built this and he's selling it. Like people are paying to use it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's many such cases of this, right? When you, if you're looking at Greenfield projects 100%, like there's the, today with this current state of frontier models, you can absolutely build production grade software, right? You're not gonna get a zero shot, but you're gonna spend a couple of days, weeks, whatever, but the cost reduction there, 30 grand versus $300, I mean, 99% cheaper, six months versus three weeks. I mean, it's like, order of magnitude sort of fashion delivery on the thing. And that, and those numbers have helped for the people that we talked to that are building these full stack, you know, apps like people that they go to op work, they get a club for five grand. They have it within 50 bucks, you know, it's just nuts what you're able to do with this thing. And so I think on the flip side, you know, a lot of the, like, existing companies. Yeah, they will, there are very legitimate use cases where things are greenfield, spot up. Good examples like public websites, like marketing pages, landing pages, whatever have you. Folks are adopting Bolt to just power those instead of using Webflow, for example, because it's like this is simpler to use than Webflow and it integrates with the existing design system of the company and et cetera. And the marketers can update without knowing how to code, whatever. But then for product development teams, this is most commonly for Again, existing software businesses, they're using this to just accelerate the product development process. And in a way where it's not just like a greenfield wholesale, hey, we're building the entire thing in Bolt or whatever, right?

Can Bolt integrate with your existing code.

Base or not yet? So yeah, we can actually open up repos in Bolt. So you can like go and use Bolt on your code base. It kind of depends on your setup, right? Like we, you know, and we do have companies again that like have marketing sites of using the SOD or like, you know, their admin panel or whatever. And I think it's going to be a use case that we see a lot more people orienting towards. These LLMs are not great, depending on how big your application is though, right? These things are not quite there where if you have something that's, you know, a thousand files or something or more, where you're going to be able to have a really reliable, super reliable experience per se. Within a year, if we chat a year from now, I suspect the answer is gonna be different. But, you know, so it kind of depends on the size of the app, the scale of the app, and if it's too big, you're looking at the prototyping, like just pure acceleration, right? Of product development. And if it's not, then you can just do it entirely, right, from Bolt.

So this is useful. So what would you say are the major limitations of Bolt today where people Should just know, okay, it's not going to get you here yet. Maybe in the future it will. So if it sounds like if you have just like a really large existing code base, probably not the best tool yet.

What else should people know? I would say that's probably the main one, you know, because I think if you have a large existing code base, you're going to need something like Cursor. And you're going to need to be a developer meaningfully to be editing that stuff. You know, I think outside of that, it's, there's a, just like using any other productivity tool like Photoshop or figma or like a dslr or whatever. There's some level of kind of education and just kind of like, and using the tool and like learning how to use it that's required to like really unlock a lot of the, the maximum capabilities of the thing. Right. And, you know, the people that we see that are most successful with both, like outside of developers, the people we see that are most successful are people that are amazing PMs. for example, because these are people that understand enough about how the technology works typically. And their job is to like direct developers on how to go and improve the product and go and like look into how to actually spec this thing out in a way that's like executable without, you know, without lossiness in the communication. And when you think about, okay, how did how what how would you best interact with an AI developer agent? It's basically that you really want to be good at defining scope and helping it go and debug various things or whatever have you. There's a huge overlap of the skill set of just like being a rockstar PM and being really good at using, frankly, any of these text-to-apps or co-gen tools.

I love that you made that point. That's exactly the point I've been trying to make. I have a newsletter post about this because when all these tools came out, there's so many people saying, Okay, PMs are dead. We don't need them anymore. We could just build things and build things so quickly and easily. What's the point? But I completely see the world the way you see it. The hard part now is now it's easy to build the thing. Now it's, what the hell should we build? Can we clearly articulate what it is we want to build? And then can we just have the taste to know, is this right? Is this correct? Is this good? Is this going to solve the problem? And then it's like, grow it, which is something also PMs think about. So I completely agree. Basically it feels like PMs are, and there's a lot of PMs listening to this, so they'll love hearing this. To me it feels like PMs are the best positioned role to thrive in this world.

Zero question. I mean that was like, you know, and as Bull was growing and like we were like, who, because we were developer product before this. And so we expected the audience to be 100% developers that were using this. And we just kept seeing more and more and more people that were not developers using it. to the point where it's like 70, 67% of our users are not developers, right, at this point. And, you know, when we, when I started talking to these folks, at first I was just, like, weird or whatever, you know, it was like, well, what's going on here? But then it, what, it just kind of clicked is like, oh, well, this is, this is, this is, this is going to change everything. The entire software world order is going to get Rewritten here because, like, the way that companies are organized to build software today, totally going to change, right? Like, the idea that again, like PMs are the people that really understand, like, to the pixel level, like, what matters into making a great product experience. And often they're having, listen, I'm a developer myself. They have to go and harang the developers, so like, get things to be how they really ought to be, like, to the smallest levels. And now, like, how this is going to work. If you fast forward, you know, one to five years, whatever, PMs are, they're gonna be writing quote, unquote, instead of just writing a Jira ticket and waiting for a developer to do it. The developers are gonna be able to work on, you know, intellectually challenging tasks that LLMs are not well suited for, right? And still being augmented by LLMs to do it. But PMs are gonna be able to go in and just make the changes themselves. And then just what blew my mind is that is not, it's not priced into It's not priced in to any of these companies out there, and it's not reflected in the org charts of all the software companies in the world right now. That is going to completely change. The winners, at least, the org charts are going to completely change in how they approach building products and shipping products completely, you know? And it's starting. This is the beginning.

I want to follow that thread, but first of all, I want to also add, and correct me if you disagree with this, I think when we talk about PMs, it also applies to founders, like product thinking founders. 100%. Very similar role. And then I think it's also important to note, like if you also have engineering skills and design skills, you will be at an advantage. That only helps you. But if you're looking at this triangle of the triad of product engineering, PM, it feels like the PME skills are the ones that will be most important and valuable, although it'd be great if you could also be in code and if you could also design really well.

Absolutely. And to me it's like the most exciting mix. I think PMs, designers and entrepreneurs that are non-tactical, that's the most exciting thing to move just because it's a brand new market that's being unlocked here. You know, like for the first time ever, these folks can like directly code and build the product themselves, like their vision directly into the software itself. That is, that's going to change everything. That is changing everything.

So you talk about how org charts are going to change. What are you imagining there? Is it just, like, fewer Engineers mostly, or what? What is, what are the future org charts look like?

Good question. And I, I bet you there's gonna be, you know, there's gonna be, like, some Gardener analysis someday, you know, years from now or whatever. That's like, here's, like, how the best, some, some, some term is applied to how the best companies are organizing, you know? But, I mean, yeah, I mean, I think, I think that we're gonna you know, I think that you're going to see developers probably being pulled off of a lot of the, and generally speaking, pulled off of a lot of, you know, user interface type work, I would imagine, except for the most complicated of, of those things. And you're going to see designers and PMs really, really leading the charge and being responsible for crafting those experiences and perhaps having a developer attached to, like, be reviewing the code and making sure, you know, like the extra, the guiding, you know, the code that they're writing, reviewing those pull requests and et cetera. And I think maybe even the engineers are, you know, they're, like you pointed out, having engineering skills is not going to hurt you. It's going to make you way more effective. Right. So I think the engine, but I do think there's going to be, you know, there's going to be the leverage that the front engineer is going to have is, is in it is now insane. It's only to get more so. And so I could see, I could see there just being fewer front engineers attached to, I've seen more product, you know, in design folks with, you know, one or two engineers or something and, you know, really having a larger, a larger matching of, like, kind of pods like that, you know, that's that. Something like that strikes me as probably how this is going to start trending towards.

This touches on, we had a researcher from OpenAI on the podcast. She actually started her career. She worked at Anthropic first as a front-end engineer and said that once she saw what Claude could do for front-end engineering, she's like, I need to move to a different function. And so she moved into research because she saw that role disappearing potentially. That's exactly what you're saying.

Yep.

So let me ask you this. I don't know if you have a clear Thesis on this yet, but say you just had a kid. Say your kid is gonna, in the future, starting school. Let's say your kid was starting college soon. Do you have thoughts on just what skills slash areas you think they should go into versus avoid that maybe are popular now and be less popular?

Understanding how to leverage these AI tools is key. Like I wouldn't necessarily, I think, I think maybe getting a basic understanding of like how programming works, you know, et cetera, right, is like, is, is great, right?

Just like technical foundations, just understanding how things, how systems work, how it's all working. Exactly.

Right. And, but it doesn't have to be, because I think back to, you know, if Bolt existed, like Albert and I say this to each other all the time, like, you know, since the get-go of Stack, so we've been building the thing that we wish we had when we were 13. And heck for everything we've built since then. And, and especially with Bolt, I mean, it's like, I don't know if I would have gone as deep as I did on, you know, learning how to code and being an engineer if that had been a problem. You know, like the whole reason we got into it is we had ideas for products and businesses that we, that we wanted to build. And coding was, was a, it was just like a necessary requirement, you know, in order to do that. So. you know, I think, I think that, and, and that said, it's like, I think people need to follow their intrinsic interests. If folks are really interested in, you know, really getting into nitty gritty of how computers work and programming languages work and compilers or whatever, like, go for it. Like, I think it's still going to be relevant, you know, like it's, I, I don't know if we're going to really have, hey, we'll see, but, you know, to the degree that there's like.

AGI where it's like, we, we don't.

Have to think about anything ever again. Yeah, that's always the answer here.

Do we need to do anything?

Yeah, it's like if we're at that point, it's kind of, I don't know, I'm not sure, but I think from what at least I feel like seems like the next at least five years of what we're looking at, it's like, I think people are still gonna, there's still gonna be places to specialize and become and really go deep. But I think you wanna go into it with the idea not like, I'm gonna go and learn computer science because I'm gonna get a job for sure out of it. I just think that's like generally, you know, not a good, this is like my co-founder and I, like we, we didn't, we didn't go to college. And my co-founder dropped out of college after like a semester or something. But like, I, I didn't go cuz I was like, I just, you know, we're coding, like we're kind of, you were doing contracting at the time, making money. And it was like, you know, this, there's like a lot of, you know, I would have been, you know, been like a hundred grand of debt and by the end of the thing just for like four years at in state tuition at U of I, 120 grand, I think, at that time. And it's like, and I, and lo and behold, I mean, there's a huge issue with this where people are, you know, kind of, there was a, there was a prevailing thought, you know, by society, like, that going to college in, in the early 20s, yeah, early 20s or late 2000s, like, you're gonna get a job on the other that's going to be high paying. And that just has not been the case for a lot of people. So I think that's just going to continue to be the case. Right. And so it's, but, you know, they get not to deter people from doing it, but it's like, you have to go into it living like, I, for sure, this is what I want, and I'm, I want to go and be the best in, you know, that I can possibly be at this thing.

You know what I mean? Yeah. So I like the transcript to your kids can be like, don't even, don't.

Even go to college potentially. Unless they want to.

Right.

It's like, I think in 18, it's a huge ask. I mean, it's a huge ask. And not even at 18, it's like it's 17 because you have to like, you prepare, you can go apply for colleges. It's just such a huge, like a six figure debt commitment to someone who's making zero dollars or negative dollars and, you know, and that young, it just, unless you really have conviction, you know, it's, it's, you know, it costs nothing to go and explore and learn for free online. You know, so I'm gonna come back.

To the skills that I, you think are gonna be most important. Let me try to mirror back a few things you said that I very much agree with. So it feels like if you want to be successful in the world where AI can build things for you more and more, what I'm hearing is get good at figuring out what people need and want, what problems they need solved, get good at articulating it really well. to the AI tools. And there's this talk, you don't need to be a great prompt engineer. You don't need to work on prompting, but it feels like it's more and more important because you tell it something and it goes off and builds a thing like that. Just if you're clear about it, it'll save you a lot of time. So it's figure out, be good at figuring out problems. People need to all figure out how to articulate that problem well and ask for a clear solution. Figure out how to grow the thing. Feels like that's still gonna be A need, because Bolt's not gonna go and find, like, you know, I could see that's the running paid ads and stuff like that, but it feels like that's gonna be ongoing need. And then I feel like there's this kind of unstuck step, like helping AI get unstuck. And it feels like that's where maybe engineering skills will come in more and more. Thoughts on just that skill?

Oh, totally. Yeah, I mean, so we actually, two weeks ago, I think we announced this program called Bolt Builders. And it's basically the genius bar at the Apple Store. where, you know, as folks are building on Bolt that are not developers, they will, they'll run into some, you know, Nook or Cranny, where the AI just, you know, cannot figure it out or whatever. And I think it's just going to continue to be the case of time to come. That's our position. And that's why we spun up this program.

And these are humans that help you out.

These are humans. These are, these are, and people that were like certified. And so, you know, when in Bolt in the, you know, coming weeks or whatever, there's going to be a button where you can just say, hey, connect me with, you know, a certified like expert and you can chat with them live and they'll help you get unstuck and you pay, you know, I don't know, 50 bucks an hour or whatever it is. Right. And then you get on jammed and you keep keep prompting, you know, and again, it's like, I just think this stuff is it just all seems like gravy to me. Like engineers get to focus on like difficult challenges, not like cookie cutter, let's make another CRUD app stuff, you know, like they get to like debugging is challenging and fun, you know, and like going and and work on intellectually stimulating tasks and like all this stuff that's just copy pasta over and over, all this error raps, just like let the AI do all that, that crap, right?

Like, you know, this is like a potentially new job for, for now at least just unstuck the AI, which I think over time, it'll get better and better and we maybe won't need these people, but, but I love that it's like now AI first and person second versus person building the thing and then AI, like when Copilot launched, it was just like, cool, here's a little, suggestion for this function and now it's flipped. Here's like everything and then, oh, we, I don't know what to do here. Help us here. And then it's like a human suggestion. Isn't that interesting? It's like human copilot is flipping, flipping it.

Totally. Yeah. Yeah. That's what's wild is, you know, I think Sauna was, you know, Sauna was really the, the first model that flipped the equation because that was really us and all cursor and all these other things. the rapid growth started the second sauna went online. Right? Like, we actually tried building both, like, almost exactly a year ago with the kind of the frontier models at the time, spent like a week or two building it. It just didn't work. Like, the output, the code output was not reliable enough. It would just, it would constantly just, it would be a broken app or look ugly or whatever. And then we got a sneak peek at the sauna stuff in May, and we were like, oh, okay, like, we should take that project back off the shelf and greenlight it, because this, this might be it. and lo and behold, that's exactly what has happened. But yeah, that's the big deal. That is under the hood, what's going on here is a very critical threshold has been passed with LLM's ability to write production-grade code and apps that actually look beautiful and actually function well. It's not perfect, but there's kind of this zero-to-one moment that's happened where it's like, okay, Now, yeah. Now the AI is the first thing, and then you're kind of popping developer at every now and then versus the other way around. I did not know that.

I didn't realize that so much of this was unlocked with, like, it's sitting on top of Anthropic's work and specifically Sonnet. That was the first model you're saying that could code well enough.

Yeah.

Zero question.

Zero question. I mean, it's fascinating.

That is fascinating. Just like the amount of, I don't know, revenue and business and e-commerce that that one model has unlocked is insane. I did not realize that. It is. And in retrospect, you know, for the.

You know, like I'd mentioned, like we'd never done an AI product in stockpiles. And, you know, it's like, it's tempting because it's like when, you know, kind of a bunch of GPT went online, everyone started kind of adding AI to their products. We're just like, we just didn't see like a clear place for like a really on it value. Right. So I was not super bullish on, you know, a lot of people like, hey, AGI is gonna be here in 2023, you know, I mean, like there's all this stuff that was being said. I was like, I just don't know if I necessarily buy how fast people say it's gonna move. And to a certain grade, like that was like the correct view. What I didn't really think about though is like, if AI, if LLMs are gonna get better at a specific vertical, kind of like, which are gonna be the things that it would be. and if you look at law, for example, you want to make the best LLM for looking at case law or the problem with that stuff is it's not deterministic. The judge's ruling is dependent kind of on society's view of things at the time, political stuff going on. The jury, there's a ton of things that it's not deterministic. And so you can't really create a lot of training data that's gonna be like super reliable, right? And you produce really good results. And you can't just like make up cases and say, theoretically the judge would say this, this, you know, I mean, it's like it just doesn't work. Software is deterministic. When you, when you write code and you hit run, it either runs or it doesn't. And, and that is, that's the key insight Anthropic really had. They just went deep. And then this is what they're doing is just reinforcement learning on basically permutating Every type of app you could ever build and just spinning up tens of thousands of course or whatever to do that, just building tons of training data and doing reinforcement learning and making their LLMs the best in the world at building beautiful, reliable applications. I'm extremely bullish, right? I mean, it makes technical sense why of anything, LLMs are going to get insanely better at writing code. Then probably most other types of applications for LLMs, simply because it's something that, that can be, extremely deterministic and permuted thousands and thousands and thousands of times per second. Right. And, and so, so that, I think the broader trend here is, and, and Sana has woken everyone up, like Google and OpenAI, all the, everyone is now gunning for coding cuz the, how much is, how big is the market opportunity to rewrite the software world order? It's, it's trillions of dollars or something, right? Like the world runs on software, you know? So I think, I think that just kind of in a macro, the kind of the highest macro view and why we went and raised money for gold, it's like this is, this, this seems like an extremely clear shot. There's not this, like, you can kind of separate the hype of what people say and blah, blah, blah. When you break it down technically, this makes sense. It makes sense what's going to happen here. And so, you know, it, and for us, we're like, we, you know, we, we are just so happen to be well positioned to like, go and enable people to like, kind of ride this wave of, of the innovation that is here in Alums and is going to just keep coming and, and therefore enable more people to build even crazier, amazing software, right? So that's our worldview, at least, of kind of what's going on here at like the mackerel.

And when did Sonnet even come out? It's been a while, right?

I think they officially, I think it was in June when they officially came out. In June.

Okay. So since June, this is the worst it will ever be, the state of AI coding. And it's already this good. And there hasn't been anything, like they haven't launched their new model. So this tells us just how quickly things are gonna start moving once they, once they launch their next model. And as you said, everyone's gunning now for this cuz they realized we're behind on the coding piece. So, wow, this is gonna get crazy. I agree. Yeah, it's, that, it's, it's been like.

Kind of, again, like it's not, there was no blog post that laid all this out for us. It's just been kind of this, like.

You just noticed the code was really good, basically.

And, and from there, it's just, we've been piecing together all this other stuff. And so it's been, it's been a, kind of like a, the thrill of, like, a murder mystery of, like, what is going on here, you know? Oh, really?

Yeah. You know, piecing together, like, what you've seen anthropic releasing. Is that what you mean?

Like, what have you been noticing? Murder mystery. Well, and then the impacts of, like, bold, where it's like, we have people that are not technical using this. How, how are they using it? Why are they doing this? You know, it's, and then you kind of, all the stuff we've talked about in this podcast has been the result of, you know, nine months of just you know, R&D and seeing the results of it, then going, what? You know, and then, and then digging in, doing another thing and going, what again? And then it just keeps happening because there's, there's no charted course for this, you know?

It's like an anthropology or is if that's the right term of just like watching the, it's like an emergent discovery, it sounds like versus you have the strategy here, we're going to do this.

We'Re a person into launch, this thing will happen. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I think that that's the best way to put it. It's the best way to put it. It's, it's, it's exactly that. Um, And so it's very interesting to just, you know, to watch in and.

Be a part of it, I imagine.

Yeah, yeah, you know.

And I think as people say, okay, these are just toys, they're prototypes, like it's not gonna work with your existing code, it's not gonna scale. Like it's important to note just what we talked about. This is a model from last June that you're, this is possible on, and everybody's working on the next cutting edge model that will make this even better. And that's going to come real soon. Okay. Amazing. Okay. I just have a few more questions to kind of close out this conversation. One is just what is coming next for Bolt? What are some of the cool new features that'll be launching before this comes out, maybe right after this comes out, and maybe in mid March?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So by the time and, you know, I'm going to go back and tell.

Our engineers, like I said this, I committed, sorry guys.

This is, I found actually being a leaky fawcett on, you know, talking on podcasts and stuff is, you know, my engineers like, how could you tell them, like, you should have to ship it faster now? Like, you gotta make it real, right?

We're gonna get AI on it.

No, no, yeah, but it's, you know, I think for us, it's like, again, we've seen a lot of PMs, designers, entrepreneurs, et cetera, using Bolt. And so we're really looking at how to a better you kind of better fitting with the tools that folks are using to do those things today. We're like, we're Bolt's not gonna like replace them or something, right? And for like, you know, if you're working at a company, like, how do you like integrate this stuff with your existing like business and your existing product and come a base? Because that's the question we often get from people is how do I like open my, you know, like we're talking to, you know, one of the fan companies the other day, like, how do we open our production co base? And that's, you know, that's like 20 years old. I'm like, you don't. That's not, like, none of this stuff. Like, that's not. But you do, this is for like rapid product development in your use case. So the features that we're going to be shipping, I'm pretty stoked about this one. So we've worked on this for a while and we've partnered up with a company called the Anima to do this. But basically, so on any Figma URL, when you're looking at like a, you know, a design that you've made, if you just put bolt.new in front of that URL and hit enter, it's going to suck that design into Bolt. and turn it into a full stack app or mobile app.

Just that is genius. Yeah.

It's amazing. It's gonna be nuts. Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's, it's really fun to use. Cause, you know, like when you're, you know, as a, whether you're a developer, designer, whatever, going and taking that and turning it into an actual coded app. And the thing is, once it's in bullet, you can just keep prompting from there. You're like, yeah, we'll add another page here. Do this. So it's like you can have like things that where you want pixel perfect design. you can have it, it'll translate one to one. Like, you know, where it's, and it's splitting out the asset. It's like anima's been doing this since 2017, like, you know, Figma to code, they've got the best agent in the world for, like, they're the number one Figma plugin, you know, or whatever. And, and so in Bolt, like, it's just gonna just work. Like, it's just deeply integrated.

So it's bolt.bolt.new slash the Figma URL to the design.

Yep. That's all you gotta do. And in Bolt, we're gonna also have a little Figma icon in the chat thing. So, like, you go to Bolt. itself, you can click it and then paste the URL or whatever. But yeah, it's like just, but it's like that. It's like from Figma to Full Stack App in a click, literally, that's crazy. So that one's pretty cool. And then kind of the other one that we're working on is like an integration with Slack. Because often, when you're talking about Figma's, like Figma Links or whatever, at a company, you're in Slack or whatever. And so you're having conversations about, hey, we should really add a page to this, us, dun dun dun dun dun da. And so we're actually creating a bolt Slack bot whose job is to basically act like a developer on your team. And so you can be like, in a thread, you can be like, hey, I think we should have a homepage. It's like, yeah, okay, like, Apple, can you whip this up real quick? And it'll go and just suck down the entire conversation history so far in your Slack on that thread or whatever. It'll be like, okay, cool. So you kind of want me to take this Figma URL, which I can convert automatically thanks to the future I just mentioned right For this, I can just go and convert that thing out of the box and then you want me to add a page to it and then do this thing. Got it. I'm gonna go do that. Oh, here's the URL where you can open it up and like keep prompting. Yeah, I mean, so it's like, it's, it's, it's like having a developer and just really kind of kick this thing out and just like, go make this thing real quick, you know? So it's like those two things, I think it's, again, you start thinking about how our company's going to change how they're, how they're currently doing product development and even they're just like, Hey, we need to spin up a marketing site. Here's the thing we're like, can you do that? Yep. Let me go do that. You know, I mean, that's why I'm kind of excited about those two in particular, because I think, I think they're gonna be, I, I think it's gonna be well received, you know, and folks should be stoked about it.

Hope, you know, not gonna work. Those are, those are awesome features. It's, I, I love the Slack piece because when I think about agents, there's always talk about agents. To me, like the simplest way to understand it is just a Slack bot. Just the AI can talk to you like they're a person in Slack. And I love that's exactly what you're doing. And this is this identic feature of just like, Hey, you just have this engineer now that can go build stuff for you. Let me actually ask you a question along these lines that I was meaning to ask, but I forgot, is just how much your engineering team, how much, what are they using to build Bolt? I imagine it's a lot of cursor. Like how much is Bolt at this point involved in building Bolt? And is there any other tools that they found useful, find useful that are worth highlighting?

Yeah, good question. Yeah, we definitely use cursor. Our folks use cursor a lot. We use Bolt a lot for the product development process, like a ton. We're using it. And when we're doing basically the flow that I described, we're like things that need to be pixel perfect, we're going to Figma for. And then, and after we're taking that and we're pulling that into Bolt, because we've got access to the integration today, to pull that into Bolt and we're saying, hey, go add these things or whatever, or just saying, hey, here's a screenshot of our UI. Go do you need to do da-da-da-da. Other AI tools that the developers are using. I think those are like the primary ones. I mean, I think we've got like a subscription to Claude and like ChatGPT and things like that. But, you know, I think, I think like for development, it's like cursor is like the main thing.

Yeah, it's cool how few tools, like, there's so many AI tools and it's interesting how few people actually end up using it's like cursor Claude ChatGPT and then maybe another tool like ult.

Okay.

Final-ish question. Say somebody is opening a Bolt for the first time. What's something that you, if you, imagine you could sit next to every new user that's just trying Bolt for the first time, you could whisper a tip in their ear to be successful with Bolt. What would that tip be?

And this is like, because we have a lot of different types of users. I imagine you're talking about like PMs or designers. That's DPMs.

That's a good one. a lot of the audience here.

I would say talk to this thing like you do a linear ticket or a geo ticket. That would be my advice. And talk to this like you would, like you're talking to one of the developers on your team. And what that means is be specific on things that matter, and on things where also you can let it be creative. , you know, you can go to and just say, Hey, like, make it prettier, you know, and, and it'll take a, it'll, and it does a good job. Like it actually does a really good job and you like give it just vibes, you know? And so, hey, so I, but I think for, for like PMs, it's like you have the skill set, you know how to do this. This is just think of this as.

Your coworker, your developer coworker, you know? I love that. And the, like what, cuz these tools are so easy, you just go in and it's like, tell a thing and then they'll cool you have a website. It's like coded, boom, done. And what I'm hearing here is take a little time to craft your ask. It may be tempting to just like start, cool, build me a CRM. And then you're stuck with that first version and then you're like, oh, well, okay, I didn't mean that. So it sounds like your advice is.

Take some time to craft the ask and be clear about what you want. Yeah, totally, right? Especially if you have a clear vision of what you're trying to build, right? It's something that's like reasonably sophisticated. And I, what I recommend everyone to do whenever they if it's your first time trying bull and you're like, what should I have a do? And I don't have an idea. Tell it to build you a personal website. Like, there's, it's, there's something like magic. Like, you take your LinkedIn, copy and paste your LinkedIn bio and, and work experience. Just, like, select text, copy, paste it. I need a website. My name is so and so. Here's my LinkedIn history. My favorite color is blue, and I like dogs. Paste. Right. Make it pretty. Yeah. And, and then, and, you know, I mean, and, and then you can hit deploy and. And if you don't have a.com yet, now you can't, right? Like, I mean, now you have a real personal. It's like, I think there's kind of a moment around that where it's like, okay, wow. Like this, you know, it zero shot, zero shot, 99.999% of the time, like you're getting a beautiful personal website that you didn't have before that would have taken you an hour on Wix, if not one. Right. And that gives you the taste of like, okay, cool. So if I really take the time to think this through and like make a PRD and like, and then kind of in put that in piece by piece into this thing, this guy is the limit, you know?

Eric, this has been just insane on so many levels. I have so much to process. I think a lot of listeners do too. Maybe as an actual final question, I saw this story about how when you were starting Stack Blitz, or maybe even before Stack Blitz, you lived, you like squatted in the AOL office because you had some badge that still worked. maybe just tell that story.

Yeah, yeah, I know. And that was like, you know, kind of the thing I was, like, most known for. That happened, like, 2012, and I was, like, 19 years old. So it's been a very long time.

I think I'm, like, 33 now or something.

But the statutes of limitations are expired. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But, yeah, for a while, I was like, I have to do something more notable than. Than living in AOL. You know, this can't be what I'm, like, known for. Right. For now, people are like, oh, like, wait, you're. You're the stock guy, and you're the air well guy, so. Yeah, so yeah, when I first came out to Silicon Valley, you know, we got into a, I was building a K 12 education startup at the time. And this is back during the, the days where Y Combinator, they only gave you like 20 grand. And, and so there was this, offshoot of imagine or of Y Combinator called Imagine K 12. It was, Jeff Ralston, who I think he was CEO of YC a couple of years back. But, and imagine K 12 merged into Y Combinator, a couple years after a round went through it. But anyways, they had an office space at AOL. Like at the time AOL was trying to like reinvigorate the company and hey, we should get like young startup blood in here. So let's like rent out office space to, you know, to, to, you know, to teenagers basically. And it's always there and I mean we ended up running out of, you know, money, like 20, 20 grand doesn't go very far in the valley. So like three or four months in we were like, oh God, we're, you know, what do we do? And I was going to the AOL office a couple, multiple times a week because we had access cards to get into, to get to the investors offices. I realized I was like, you know, like they have like couches here and they have food, like there's ramen that you can microwave and there's a gym where there's like a shower and even you can do laundry. And then so I was like, you know, I don't know, I mean maybe, maybe I'll figure this out, I'll just live out of here. And so that's, that's what I ended up doing for, I think like four or five months, I was like living out of this, this headquarters. over on page Mill in El Camino in Palo Alto. And then, you know, I got away with it for a while just because, you know, the, the, the, the guards, you know, the security guards, you know, they, they weren't, you know, 12 hour shifts. And so the, the guys that, when I was there at night, I was coding, like, all day, every day, basically. So the, the guys at night just were, like, ding, this guy works really hard, you know? And, and then in the morning, they'd be like, wow, this guy This guy's working really hard, right? So then I became friends with some of them. And then eventually I think they, you know, there were also a whole bunch of Stanford students that, I think they like put bunks in one of the, it was just like, starting to get out of controls. I think they started cracking down. Then one morning at like four in the morning, guard came in and threw me out. And I'm from Chicago. I don't know anyone at that point. I'm like, I know no one in the Bay Area. So I went to a Starbucks, which was not open. I just like, I slept on the table. outside of the food. And then, and I think I hit up one of the other entrepreneurs that was in the program. It was like, you have a couch? Like, I think I kind of need it at this point. Yeah, the Prescott Windham is this like, you know, worldwide story, but I lived on a dollar a day. That was the crazy thing. My burn rate was a dollar a day at that time.

And what did you use that dollar for?

This is back when McDonald's had the dollar menu. Literally. So I was like, you know, I would, you know, occasionally would go and, you know, get a cheeseburger or whatever. And, yeah, it was, you know, ultimate, ultimate scrappiness, you know, like you're technically.

Homeless from homeless to one of the fastest growing startups in history. Eric, what a journey. This is such an interesting point in time of your life and of Just tech, like no matter what happens, I'm sure you'll be extremely successful, but it's such an interesting just point in that journey. And I'm thankful that you made time to share it with us.

It's always good to just have the perspective of, you know, you should start companies to keep the mindset that you're doing it to have fun, right? And so stoked to see where this goes, one way or the other. It's gonna be interesting.

Eric, final questions. Where can folks find you online if they wanna reach out, maybe follow up on stuff you shared and how can listeners be useful to you?

Yeah, totally. I mean, yeah, so bolt.on is the website over on Twitter. I'm @ericsimmons40 on Twitter and I think our Twitter account is bolt.new, not with a period, it's like B-O-L-T-D-O-T-N-E-W. And yeah, I mean, I'm very curious to hear, I'm curious to hear what folks think. Like, I mean, this is, again, like we're, We are learning so much from the people that are coming and trying this thing out and giving their feedback. And, you know, within the first week of it going online, we were not the experts on how to use the tool anymore. And it's been that way ever since. And so I love hearing from folks on what they want to see, you know, next and how this is helping them and, and where they run into problems, like where we need to go and fix things. So my email address is eric@stackblitz.com. That's Eric with the sea. So I'd love to hear anyone from anyone, whether it's a DM on Twitter or, or an email. Amazing.

Eric, thank you so much for being here.

Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.

This is a blast. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a of you, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com See you in the next episode.