S13E4: From Sleeping at AOL to Building Bolt with Eric Simons, Founder and CEO of Bolt.new

I'd been going in and working out of the AOL office because I had a card to get in there as part of this incubator. At 19, my bar for quality of life was very low. And I realized, okay, there's like a couch over there. There's like a gym with a shower. They even have the laundry. That's kind of all you need, right? Like, that's it. So I just ended up started like living there full time and I was like coding 14 hours a day. And then eventually got caught and thrown out and then the press got wind of it and it turned into this global story that was like on the front page of newspapers or whatever. That was my origins in Silicon Valley.

Welcome back to Season 13 of The Room Podcast. Claudia, can you believe we've been doing this this long?

No, it's been 5 years. So many episodes, so many incredible conversations telling the stories of some of the world's most iconic founders and funders. And whether our listeners are new for the first time today or have been with us from Season 1, we're so grateful for the community we've built.

Completely. We've had the mission to open the door to the room where it happens for those entire 5 years and have been able to do so over 120 episodes with hard-earned lessons from some of the top technology and consumer founders of our time.

And we've been through a lot personally as well.

We have indeed.

I built, scaled, sold my startup Pryve. You were our first investor, so you've been there through the entire journey. And you've also recently graduated from HBS. You're now building at Vercel. And through it all, we've brought the funder and founder perspective.

Yeah, it's really been an incredible journey, and I'm thrilled that I'm back full-time in San Francisco, and we're probably here to stay. That means that there's more for us in terms of growth, both inside and outside of the physical room. But what's important to have really out there is these stories, and we've been able to do so over incredible guests from the CEO and founders of Flexport, Perplexity, Particle, Zapier, Zillow, Vanta. I could go on. These guests and their enterprises have generated over $100 billion enterprise value and really, frankly, moved the markets.

And growing, especially in 2025 with everything that's going on in AI. So I'm so excited to share Season 13 stories that are maybe a little bit more AI-focused than past seasons.

Absolutely. And you can find us IRL and URL, especially with our events such as our annual conference, Inside Summit, or upcoming SF Tech Week events and beyond.

And if you want to get information around those events, subscribe to The Room podcast and subscribe to our newsletter at theroompodcast.com.

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This podcast is brought to you by Mercury, the banking platform businesses like The Room Podcast use to simplify their finances. It's time banking did more than hold your money. Now it can. With Mercury, you can pay bills in seconds, close the books faster, and even send invoices. Not only does Mercury do away with a patchwork of tools, it eliminates guesswork giving you complete and accurate visibility into your business's finances, all from one account. Apply in minutes at mercury.com. Welcome back to The Room podcast. Today in The Room, we're sitting down with Eric Simmons, the founder and CEO of Bolt.new, an AI-powered platform redefining what it means to build software. Eric's on a mission to make AI-assisted coding and development a reality, empowering builders to describe what they want and letting AI handle the rest. Think of it as the next evolution of product creation where design human intuition meets generative intelligence. Before Bolt.new, Eric spent years deep in the weeds of engineering and product development, watching teams drown in technical friction and slow iteration cycles. That frustration became the spark for a new kind of developer experience, one built for speed, creativity, and flow. In this episode, we explore how Eric turned that insight into Bolt.new's founding vision, the early breakthroughs that shaped its AI-native architecture, and his perspective on what human in the loop really means. In an era of automated creativity. We also get tactical, from how he builds culture in a company shipping at AI speed to the mental models guiding him through the next wave of product innovation. If you've ever wondered what it feels like to build at the speed of thought, this one's for you. Let's open the door.

Eric, thank you so much for joining us in the room today.

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

We're really thrilled to have you. We're gonna start at the beginning of your story. Where did you grow up and how has that shaped your view of the world?

I grew up in a suburb of Chicago called Naperville, but a lot of people come out of Naperville. So I actually like met my co-founder when I think like elementary school or middle school or something like that. And he and I learned how to program together when we were 13 back in the mid-2000s. So this is like before Codecademy and things like that really existed. So we, for our 13th birthdays, had our parents buy the O'Reilly programming books instead of an Xbox, because they're like $200 a pop, those things.

That's an expensive birthday gift at 13. I'm going to be honest.

Yeah. Yeah. We had to like make the formal request process to our parents that we'd like to divert the birthday funds to this book. And we learned how to program together and he and I have been building web apps together ever since for the past 20 years now. So yeah, so I grew up in the Midwest and I think in the Midwest folks are pretty genuine and nice and people tend to care a lot about the people around them. And so I think it shaped my worldview and that it's important to care about people. And certainly if you're building things, it's. Good to be intrinsically motivated just by wanting to build great stuff that's gonna help other people.

Absolutely. No, we've had a few conversations with people from geographic diversity, such as the Midwest, including the Zapier founders, and that definitely was a tone that they brought up as well, just kind of where they grew up and that kind of idea of Midwestern values. So, thank you so much for showing that. And it sounds like I might already know the answer to this question given the coding book quest at 13, but I'm curious in that vein of early identity, did you always think you were gonna become a founder?

I think I was definitely interested in it. There's a lot of things I was interested in though, as I grew up, whether it was like music or acting or skateboarding. I went through an awkward skateboarding phase, maybe like in second grade. I wanted to do software, build a software business, and it is like the height of Microsoft. So I was like, I just thought what Bill Gates did was insanely cool. I think I always had the itch to do it. And by the time I got to high school, it became, I guess maybe out of just process of elimination, a lot of the other things I was interested in, I wasn't as good at. So, um, you know, I liked computers. I was pretty good at them. I wasn't as good at football. I wasn't as good at most of the sports things, but I was good at software and building things and thought I had a business sense.

It's cool to see some of these threads of earlier interest in your life. My head's jumping to actor, which you mentioned. Not surprised many of us maybe aren't the best actors. I also had a theater high school experience and I was not good enough to hit Broadway. However, now today, so much of what we do is storytelling, right? And for you as well with your product-led growth motion with Bolt, which we're gonna cover, a lot of it is Eric. I get emails from you every day, by the way, with my Bolt account. So it's fun to see those things come together.

Yeah, totally. Now that you say it, it's like I can see that. I can see the previous acting experience in the way in which you talk. And, and that's actually like, for me, one of the things that in the past decade as I've been an entrepreneur, it's been kind of a superpower to have experience doing not just like public speaking, but like where you have to like show emotion in the way in which you say things, because it, it allows you to convey ideas and generate excitement in ways that I think are just not natural if you haven't Unless you're like born with it or whatever, but if you haven't done a lot of acting and that sort of thing, there's just so much that's directly applicable. That's why it's great, like when you're young, just explore a ton of different things because you just don't know how this stuff is gonna be useful to yourself in the future. But it's, it's one of the things that's been huge for myself in my career.

So you gained unconventional fame through being known on the internet as the AOL squatter. I'm gonna be honest, I know what AOL is, but I think a lot of people might not even know. So let's start with how did you become this infamy, maybe with what is AOL and also building your first startup. How did you get there on that experience?

Back when I was a kid is when AOL was like relevant, like '90s, really like mid to late '90s and like a little bit in the early 2000s. But AOL was how you got on the internet, kind of like Comcast today, except AOL had a whole bunch of stuff built into your subscription, like, you know, a chat, so like AOL Instant Messenger or AIM. And so that was like the original, one of the original social networks of the internet was AIM and the AOL email system and blah, blah, blah. A lot of the companies in the dot-com era didn't make it past the dot-com era and AOL was one of these. And, but they were still a large company. Like they still had a lot of properties where they were selling ads and stuff. Fast forward to 2011, AOL was on its last legs as an independent company. And so they started renting office space out in their Palo Alto office to try to startups to try and infuse new young ideas into the company. That was kind of the idea. Let's just get started working here and it'll rub off on the other people that work for us and we'll rise to our former glory from 20 years ago or whatever. That was like the idea, not a bad idea, but, and so at the same time, I was 19. I had come out to Silicon Valley from the Midwest. Uh, I was broke and I got through one of these incubators that was actually based out of AOL's headquarters because they, again, they were renting office space to like startups and accelerators. At that time, I think that accelerator gave us like $20,000, which in the Bay Area lasts 3 months or 4 months or something. Something. And so hit the end of the 4 months and I'd been going in and working out of the AOL office because I had a card to get in there as part of this incubator. And at 19, my bar for quality of life was very low. And I realized, okay, there's like a couch over there. There's like a gym with the shower. They even have the laundry machine there. Ramen. That's kind of all you need, right? Like that's it. So I just ended up started like living there full time and I was like coding 14 hours a day. Plus, and then eating ramen and sleeping on the couch and showering. And I did that for like, I think like 4 or 5 months and then eventually got caught and thrown out. And yeah, it was, it was, it was a whole thing. And then the press got wind of it and it turned into this global story that was like on the front page of newspapers or whatever. That was my origins in Silicon Valley.

It's funny, there's always this narrative of startup founders living in their offices, living in big tech. It started with you. You totally established that stereotype.

I probably was, if not the first, probably one of the first of these things that broken the news, but yeah, it was very early in the, the second age of Silicon Valley after the dot-com boom.

It was funny. I was talking to a friend who's a few years younger than me the other day, and we were talking about our AIM usernames, and she didn't even know what AIM was. Like, it was a group with two other people that were my age. So truly, I'm glad we did the AOL call-out here.

I say that because I actually feel, of course I knew what AOL was. I did not know that it stood for America Online for a too embarrassingly long of a time. And when I found that out, I just thought it was so funny. Imagine an AI startup today being like, we are all of America AI. Like, that would just be hilarious.

It's a good point. I mean, like, in that time, it's like, I guess it kind of makes sense because I guess if you think about what OpenAI is, maybe not a good example of the mission being the name because the models are closed source now. But it's like that though, where I don't know if you rewind to that time in the name itself of that company was really the mission of like bring all of America to the internet because that was not the case. That was like, that was a radical idea at that time. In the same way that maybe like Facebook is a good example of it's like the college Facebook, right? That was what they called it. And, and then shortened AOL and then it became bigger than that. But yeah, it's crazy. And I never really had thought about that though, of like how actually genius of a name that was for a company at that time of what's the mission. It's like to bring America online, right? It's cool.

Speaking of company names. I see StackBlitz right behind your head on the video screen. So let's talk about that because I assume that's what you were spending 14 hours a day coding on. And it was a big idea. I remember my intro to computer science course freshman year of college. I almost dropped my CS major because setting up development environments was an incredibly daunting task. And there were so many different things to install and virtual Linux machines, so on and so forth. And with StackBlitz, You completely reimagined the development environment through no installs, just instant dev in the browser. Tell us, what was the original aha moment for this?

It's going to sound like it's going to end on a good note, and then it's like not, and then it's good again. But the original insight we had that started StackBlitz is like, Albert and I have been building lots of web apps. Like when we came out to the Valley, like what we were building at AOL ended up not really working. Like it was an education company. And we ended up trying out probably like a dozen different ideas from 2011 to 2016, 2017. Most of which didn't work. The company we did before StackBlitz, it worked in the sense of the lifestyle-sized business that we had founded. But really the key idea with StackBlitz is we had been building the cutting edge of web applications for over a decade at that point. And when we came up to the Valley, we'd had the good fortune of just bumping into Dylan Field and Evan Wallace when they were originally creating Figma. The original pitch of Figma was not a design tool. It was just like a 3D ball dropping into water in a browser tab. And their pitch was like, browsers have become very powerful. You can do complex graphics rendering that wasn't possible before. And because of that, you could actually make a design tool that would be browser native in the same way that like Google Docs and Gmail brought document editing and email to the browser. That would be huge. And obviously we know that story has now played out for them. And back in 2017, we saw the same thing begin to play out for development environments. So allowing people to create full stack applications. As easy as using Figma or Canva, right, for making designs. The key thing there just being eliminating the need to download stuff and set stuff up on your computer to actually start coding, right? What it required was really building out that core technology that runs in the browser. For us, it took, I think, 3 or 4 years. Figma took a similar amount of time actually to originally build the core technology there. And so then we launched, we had a lot of developers love what we were building. The big issue though is developers are pretty sophisticated. Once they know how to get something set up locally, there's not a huge amount of impetus to shift to something that's in the browser. We actually had a lot of trouble getting people to buy the product. We had millions of free users using the thing, but like monetizing it was extremely difficult. Leads us up to the end of last year when we were like getting ready to shut down the company. We can get to the next part of the story or whatever, but happy to like dig in on any of that though.

There's so much to dig in there and the highs and then lows and highs are just the classic founder story. So I'm excited to hear a little bit more of that. But let's start with the early product market fit piece of StackBlitz, web container-based browser OS. It's wild to most people. This is way before the AI boom. How did you convince early investors and engineers that this was even possible, let alone venture scale?

I was like obsessed with it. Yeah, I don't know. Like, I don't know if you ever had something in your life where a goal or something you have, you're like, I want to do this. I want to complete this thing. And in the case of this one, it's like something like no one had ever done this before, like this specific technology. So it makes it very lonely because you're like the only person that really thinks it's like possible. But once you know something is possible and like something that no one else is aware of and it's not priced in to what the world is doing, you just, you can't let it go, especially if you think it's something like worthwhile and valuable, right? So I think to me, when I would talk to the first, the founding engineers that we hired to the company and like the first investors, I think it probably was clear to them that I had spent a lot of time thinking about this and like the questions that they would ask, presumably I had good answers to them. Right. I think it's like where you get yourself into trouble as an entrepreneur is you like have an idea and you're like, okay, you kind of convince yourself it's a good idea. And then when people like start asking you questions, it's clear you have not actually done the research on it. You haven't obsessed about it. And it's not everything that you're thinking about. It's hard to discern that, right? Once you've been thoroughly obsessed with something, you'll know, you'll know what the difference is for future, what the bar is. But yeah, I think that's the main thing is when you've gone and researched something inside and out and really 'Cause for me it was like, how has no one figured this out yet? How has no one done this? So I like searched everywhere and I was like, okay, is there like something that I'm just not seeing on the surface that would prohibit this from working? And so I'd go dig into various browser APIs and create little proofs of concept with this thing or that thing. Nope, those work. Okay. I think because of that, I just had a lot of confidence in the convictions around this is a big deal. It hasn't been done before, not because it isn't valuable, but because legitimately no one is taking it seriously.

So you figured out this technical breakthrough and then the next part is how do you get users using this product? How do you monetize? How do you scale? And you kind of hinted that was a big conundrum for you. How did your quest to build revenue inform who your ICP ultimately was?

We went through a couple of phases of this. There's StackBlitz, the web-based IDE product. To get users, we like, we built out a lot of really cool functionality that made it easy for open source projects to adopt and That led to a lot of adoption in very highly trafficked open source libraries, which led to us getting millions of users per month. For monetization, we tried like a prosumer thing. People just weren't willing to pay. We did enterprise. They were willing to pay. It was just too small of a market. A lot of it was just in that phase was listening to our users, going and experimenting, trying things. We had never done enterprise sales before. So that was a multi-year effort to like build software that you can deploy into an enterprise environment and actually sell it to them and everything that goes into that. Which is amazing because that's in the DNA of our company now, but ultimately it was not fruitful to the degree of a venture-scale company. So like we were getting ready to spin down the company because despite kind of this like a lot of traffic and stuff and a lot of users, we couldn't figure out how to really monetize the product. The product was not in a position where it could really capture a lot of value from end users. So we ended up doing was trying out a whole bunch of different experiments. So I took our core web container technology and built out new types of products. That would be really interesting, or so we thought. We're not just like an IDE for developers. And all of them didn't work except for Bolt. The idea with Bolt was like, what if ChatGPT had a built-in dev environment? So like, as you said, hey, build me a web app, it just did it. And it could actually like run it for you live and let you keep prompting to actually make modifications to it. And this is a capability that like a lot of products now have that did not really exist a year ago. And Bull was really the first product that actually did this. That was like the last thing we were launching. Like we launched it in October, a month after that was the board meeting where we were going to start shutting down the company. And what ended up happening though is that we launched Bull in the first month we did, I think we went from $0 to $4 million of ARR. And then the month after that, we went to $20 million. And before we launched Bull, after 7 years, we were at $0.7 million of ARR. And so it was just like crazy, right? What ended up happening. But it was a heck of a process.

Heck of a process. As a former B2B SaaS founder selling enterprise software, I know how hard that ARR climb is and you feel like you're at the top of the world once you break past that $1 million, let alone $4 million in just a few months. I speak to a lot of founders that find themselves, especially in kind of this AI revolution, a little bit at a crossroads between, okay, they've invested, call it 4 or 5 years building something. They're starting to see a little bit of a plateau in terms of growth. There's a question. Marks around the ultimate market size, and they're faced with this feeling of, do we shut down? Are we not taking big enough of a swing? Do we shift gears and kind of figure out how we can pivot into AI? It sounds like you had some really hefty topics on that boardroom agenda. What advice would you have for founders that find themselves in this conundrum where they want to keep building, but all signs point to maybe winding down the company and the instantiation it currently is in?

It's a good question. I think entrepreneurship is largely just a game of probabilities, like an enterprise sales pipeline. If you're trying to close like $1 million of pipeline or something, you don't go and just take one sales call that quarter. You're probably going to be taking like a couple hundred. And with entrepreneurship, it's the same way where, you know, it's, it's purely about how many shots on goal can you take? And also what types of shots on goal are you taking? Because in the years prior to last year, we had been purely trying to make the IDE thing work. And it was really the forcing function of us going, okay, this is not working. And we're either gonna, we either gotta figure out something else or shut down. Was like a good forcing function for us to look beyond it. At least from my perspective, it was, how will I walk away from this not feeling like regret in the future in some way? The only way I will not have regret is if we tried literally everything that came to mind and gave it our best, like whatever ideas we think would be useful, valuable, whatever, because like Bolt was just like a random shower thought I'd had 6 months prior to us even starting working on it. You know, it was like, it was, this was just something I thought would be cool, which tends to be the best sources of ideas of all the things I've ever worked on. It's always been the things that are just random that I thought would be cool versus something that I've tried to like, oh, this, like, this is the trend in the market. We could go and go after blah, blah, blah. But so my thought would be just be real about the situation and It's okay to be like, hey, this current thing isn't working. And so what are all the stones you want to turn over over the next year? If none of them turn up, that's okay. And we'll go acquired or get jobs or whatever. Because then you just feel, you don't feel the pressure of like, oh my God, this has to work. It's like, you can just go have fun. That tends to be where the best stuff comes from.

Absolutely. And that does lead us to where Bolt is today. And so we'd love to just give our listeners a sense of what is Bolt. You mentioned an IDE, which is definitely a very popular thing that's being re-envisioned today. But Bolt isn't just thought. So maybe give us your definition of what Bolt is.

It's totally not an IDE. Like, the target market of this is not developers. The people that are using Bolt are entrepreneurs, PMs, designers, and some developers use it, certainly. Simply put, you go to bolt.new. Think of it as ChatGPT for building production-grade web and mobile applications. There's just a, a text box where you tell it what you wanna build and you hit enter and it'll get to work building the thing. And you can keep iterating on it just by prompting and not having to go and write any code. You don't have to know how to code at all. But that's effectively the idea of what Bolt is.

Awesome. Yeah, I think people are calling this the vibe coder movement, and it's definitely something, you know, love or hate the term, I would definitely attribute my own ability to build and write code today to this shift, which is super helpful to your point about who your core customer is. I was not lucky enough to major in CS like Claudia, so I've been learning as I go. And StackBlitz was a much more technical product and community, and you yourself, of course, are technical. So how have you navigated that shifting conversation with telling the story of Bolt as you broaden out what is the definition of a developer?

Really good question because when we launched Bolt, we thought it was going to be developers using this thing. And then it was primarily like overnight, it was not like it was, we were like, what is going on? Like we have just the most random people seemingly using this product and the tune of tens of thousands of customers. For us, it's been an active effort to refresh on our sites and et cetera, just because of this problem, which is we really have to be very intentional about Speaking about the product and how you can use it in a way that people that have never developed anything before will understand and be able to like grok. It's a very interesting challenge. I give all the companies that are in the Vibe Coding space, anyone that's trying to build tools for non-developers, at least it's challenging because never before in history have you had to really try and give people the ability to control software development that don't understand a lot of the underpinnings. And there's limitations of these models. So how do you deal with that when Users try to push it in a certain way that's just not going to be possible. It's a very complicated user experience problem, much less just how you package it and brand it to people.

Yeah, absolutely. That has been my experience working in a bunch of these tools. And as someone who is not natively a coder, but definitely has been in tech for the last 7 years, knows enough to be dangerous and navigating all of that. And the good news is it's working. You mentioned some really exciting revenue numbers and it's nice when the venture capitalists agree, right? So you've raised the Series B, which huge congratulations, most recently at a $700 million valuation with participation from Emergence, GV, and Madrona. We're curious, who was the first person to saying yes to you in this company and as an entrepreneur, really?

The main person that comes to mind is Sarah Guo. Like she was the first to check into Staffblitz when she was at Greylock. I've said this online publicly before, but like she's had like a founding level impact on the company. She believed when like We had nothing. We had none of the proof points around the technology, but she's brilliant from all facets of both a technology perspective, business and marketing. And she understood why what we were doing was interesting and unique back way before we were doing anything around Bull. And as the company grew and we, and when we went to launch Bull, like Sarah had left Greylock, started her own fund called Conviction, which is really, as far as I'm aware, is the seed stage AI fund at this point. It's like she's in everything. and when we went to launch Bold, I mean, her advice and guidance was like critical for us. Sarah's been, you know, if to name one person, it would certainly be her.

That's incredible.

We'll have to give her a shout out and thank you for sharing that.

I know just the fundraising environment has changed so much from 2020, 2021 when I was fundraising and now rounds are looking very different. Proof points are looking different. What advice would you have to our listeners that are maybe thinking about a pre-seed or seed raise in 2025?

Good question. I have not raised one of these in a long time. The general sense that I get from people that I talk to is on the earlier stage side, you can use tools like Bolt to go and make really high fidelity MVPs to prove out your concept. So if you're walking in without some type of working demo, like I would not expect good results at this point. I would use vibe coding tools to go and build stuff yourself, especially if you don't have a technical co-founder. Maybe at the seed level and certainly like Series A is the level of revenue growth that AI tools like Bolt and Cursor and whatever are proving even from early stages has, I think, changed a bit of the dynamic around like before you could go and raise without any revenue proof. And it would be okay if you kick that down to maybe the Series B or whatever. At this point, it's just given what's happening, I think the revenue proof points are getting pulled forward more and more, which I think is a good thing because it's just, there's validation of actual money. Being paid, like value is being delivered, is good to know as an entrepreneur. Like you're sinking a lot of your life into this. You want to be sure that there's something actually here. So that's, that'd be my thought is probably the things that are going to be shifting on the earlier stage side.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, you mentioned this a little bit with this moment at your board meeting, but we're wondering if you could peel back the curtain as well on the conversation you had with your initial investors on when you went to make this pivot, to the extent you're comfortable sharing. Claudia asked for those who are maybe thinking of doing the same thing and have a board meeting coming up, how might they approach it? Because you did it so successfully.

It all sounds great in retrospect, but I think at the time, listen, it sucks. It's easy to do the updates, like your investor updates when things are going amazing. It sucks to be like, hey, things are sucking. And, and like saying that, cause it's like, it doesn't feel good. I think people's tendencies are going to be a little bit to avoid reality. And what that looks like is one, just not consistently sending updates to investors or whatever, but two, not diverging from a path that's clearly not working because sometimes you just have to, you have to walk in and go, hey, this isn't working. And this is like, I think one of the good things about, about having board meetings, even as an earlier stage company, it's helpful to have a check-in where you have to like say things that make business sense. Otherwise, people that are business people are looking at you going, what is wrong with You know, because like it forces you to wake up if you're not actually embracing reality. For us, it was like when we went into the board meeting of, I think it was like December of '23, we had set a target for our enterprise, where we wanted our enterprise stuff to be that year. And we hadn't hit it, you know, or whatever. And, and so going in, it was like, listen, we either have to make the enterprise revenue machine work or we're going to have to look at what the alternatives will be. And we laid out, okay, what do you think is reasonable? We're going to give ourselves 6 months to really see some level of results given what we have here. And then after that, TBD. At that point, maybe we'll like, we will actually begin entertaining what it'd look like to spin down the company. And so we went to the board meeting and it was reasonable what we were saying. So if you say things that are reasonable, generally people are going to agree. And there was feedback and pushback on various things. It was like, well, maybe we should shorten the timeframe or whatever. Sure. But who cares if it's 9 months versus 12? We're just going to go do this and we're going to check in every quarter. That's my general thought. It's helpful to look at it through the lens of the investors and board members, honestly, because that viewpoint is not one that's mired in the details and hardships that are being worked on at the company day to day, which is valuable because it means that you're being forced to think about this from a purely objective standpoint, but from people that are literally invested in the company, are literally invested in the company.

It's always so stressful having to have some of these like really weighty conversations with investors, but there's a reason why monthly updates are helpful and grounding things and stuff that is logical and reasonable and aligns with everyone's interest, the conversation becomes less emotional and more, okay, here are the cards we've been dealt. This is the situation. Let's get the show on the road. So I guess advice to founders, never be scared to talk to your investors about what's actually going on.

Especially the situations we're talking about, it can be very stressful and like emotional. And it's important to like try and remain as non-emotional as possible on these things, especially when you're interacting with the other board members and whatever. And largely because you may not agree with people, but I mean, assuming the board members are not bozos, and unfortunately on ours, like our, everyone that we've worked has been extremely smart. When we talk about things that are reasonable, it's everyone gets on the same page. When I'm not being reasonable, I have a viewpoint that hasn't been researched, like I will get called on it. And as I should, if you get emotional about something, that's going to dictate how you approach the conversations about what to do about it. You're not going to have good times in the sense of you're not going to get what you want, which is a successful company, right? It doesn't matter if the board agrees or not. That's indicative that you've got a bigger issue with yourself, you know?

Thank you so much for opening the door to the boardroom dynamics within Bolt and Stocklets. You know, it's a room that we often hear people want more insight into, and especially these days with so much happening interestingly at the M&A layer with different startups. I would love to be a fly on the wall in some boardrooms these days.

Totally.

It's only gotten more interesting since we've launched Bolt, that's for sure. Most people don't talk about this stuff too, and how you approach it. A lot of founders, I think, don't like board meetings, and I get why they don't, but it's like a good forcing function, right? To check on the health of the business and the health of the operators thinking about it.

Absolutely. It's been an exciting year and a half since this reinvention into what is Bolt. We talked at the top of this call around your being the world's biggest hackathon, Guinness World Record to verify in the near future. Tell us a little bit about that, the early momentum, how you thought about that viral spark, and also translating that ultimately into durable long-term traction for Bolt?

It all actually started, it wasn't our idea. So there's this guy named KP on Twitter. He, I think he runs the startups program over at Paddle, but he had pitched the idea like, you know, if I was the CEO of Bolt, I would throw the world's largest hackathon with a big prize pool to attract people in because most people don't know that they can actually build software. The challenge is like getting people to come and try these tools and discover like what they have superpowers now, right? And so they get during the world's largest hackathon, have Guinness actually verify the thing, big giant magnet to get people in to try out the product and fall in love with what they can do with it. And so I replied back and I was like, I love it. Let's do it. So I like tweeted it. I quote tweeted it and was like, all right, so how big should the prize pool be? Like $100,000. And within it was like an hour or two, we had a million dollars of sponsors lined up. And so I called up my chief of staff and And he was like, hey, yeah, I saw this, like, the tweet about the hackathon thing. That's great job on that. And I was like, yeah, so I'm calling you because, like, I need you to run the world's largest hackathon. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I was like, yeah, so it turns out there's a reason, there's a reason I'm calling you right now. You got to figure out how to do this. He ended up taking lead on that. And then we actually ended up hiring one of my good friends from Naperville back in the day. She actually is leading our brand and social marketing. So she took it over and for the entire month of June, we ran the world's largest hackathon. We had 100,000, 130,000 people. They came in and participated in the thing. And a couple of days ago we actually announced the winner. So like over $1 million in prizes were given out. And it's like for us, like been the most effective marketing campaign we've ever done, period. Really cool experience to see all the amazing stuff that folks build from all around the world. And it's like a life-changing kind of amount of money for the folks that actually won the prizes in the competition where they're like starting their startups now with this 0% equity capital that they're getting for the winnings.

I want to hear some of those companies and follow along in them, possibly invest in them. It's so cool that the product that you're building is giving back to the ecosystem that you started in. It's really a bigger pie theory, which we love over here. I'm curious because of those 130,000 hackers, how many were on Bolt prior? How many new customers did you get from this? How have you thought about then onboarding those new customers and then translating them into sustainable revenue?

I don't know how many people were already part of Bolt, but I know that we added We had like 30,000 active subscribers. That doesn't include people that like signed up and have churned or whatever. It's been over a month now, so we kind of know who are the durable ones. And so 30,000 people that durably are now customers of Bolt. Through the whole hackathon, we brought on a couple dozen experts from the community that have software development experience and know Bolt inside and out, that have helped people build their projects and learn how to push the product to its limits. And so that's been really helpful, I think, as far as when folks have run into problems, we have, we saw the best support now. Of any of these tools to help people actually find success with their own building and products.

That's awesome. And also efficient to have your own customers QA your own product in this safe space of a hackathon. Very smart.

Yeah. And we learned a ton from that because again, and these folks are really nice where they like wrote up all the different things they ran into and we were, so that's being fed to our engineering and product teams. We're shipping fixes, et cetera. So for us, it was like, it was a really, it was a great experience to be closer with our end users and customers, really see not just whether they tried to build, but like, why are they here and how can we better help them do They're not just coming to build a web app, they're coming to start a business, right? So how can we help them do that in a more holistic way than just writing the software? You know, it's like maybe giving them a spotlight in, in our public marketing so they can get users for their products or whatever, right? There's lots of things that we can do and lots of ways we can improve our product to make it a better experience for them.

That's awesome. I love that hackathons are cool again?

Question mark?

I feel like maybe there's a negative connotation if you think they're for nerds. Honestly, I'm a nerd and so I love it, but I feel like they're back in the zeitgeist.

Mistake.

That was like the key insight KP had with this whole thing is most people never participated in a hackathon. They don't even know what a hackathon is, right? And so that's why it's cool again, because this is the first time most people are hearing about this or being able to do this, you know?

Well, Lovable recently mentioned in the news they have hit $100 million in revenue, which is an insane number. You teased some numbers earlier. I heard $20 million. Any numbers you wanna share around growth metrics on your end?

Yeah, so the $20 million was in 2 months. That was like month 2 for us. And we've been growing at a rapid clip. And so I think Lovable and Rappler and us, like, we've all been growing at a pretty healthy clip. And so I think we'll probably have some announcements shortly. I think that we'll share on this stuff. We've been on a bit of a tear, just like these other guys.

Love to hear it.

And we'll hopefully link some more numbers when the episode goes live in a few weeks. I guess wrapping up this topic around growth and just the general AI space more broadly, taking a step back, there's this popular term of being AI native. How do you think about that? Would you consider Bolt AI native and what does that mean to you?

I think certainly, I think like Bolt is definitely like an AI native product and I think our team looks at the product and how we build it, right, is very AI native. I guess what it means to me is after ChatGPT launched, every company was like adding AI to their product in some way, but it was largely like tick a box of like, hey, we have an AI thing, not because it was actually useful. And we didn't do that. Like we, Bolt was the first AI thing we ever did. And the only reason we did it is because we actually saw a unique experience that we could go and put out there in the market that we had not seen anyone do at that point. We ended up basically just creating a new product from the ground up using some of our existing technology like WebContainer, but like really an entirely new packaging and product surface to expose it. And I think to me, so that is that like when I think about AI native, like that's what it means is like you really, Start from, hey, what if we were building this today with what is going on with the capabilities with LLMs and whatever have you? And then you work backwards from there. And like an example of this, talking against my own book maybe, is what Airtable recently did where like they changed the experience of Airtable where it starts with a Bolt-like experience of, hey, what do you want to build? Or what do you, what do you want to do with your Airtable data? And it builds an app around that data. That's an, I think to take credit to them, is product pivot in a pretty short period of time since this stuff has started where That's a pretty, uh, a huge— they clearly are like taking being AI native actually very seriously. They're not adding a feature into Airtable that's AI. They have changed like the homepage. It looks like Bolt. It's the same core product experience. That's really what it means is you're completely rethinking what the default experience of your product is, which is a scary thing to do, you know?

We spoke a lot about the journey of StackBlitz into Bolt, what you guys are really achieving today. What is something that you're personally really excited about for Bolt this year, as well as for yourself personally?

Ooh, good question. For Bolt, I'm very excited. We've been working on a lot of large updates that we're going to be rolling out over this quarter and next. And a lot of it is just really around vertically integrating a lot of the experience together for things normally, if like you use other tools for like hosting or databases or domains or whatever, and that's all going to be just built into the product. And it's going to be just this insanely simple experience. Like if you want to start a startup, you can go to Bolt and be like, hey, I want to start I want to start a site for selling cookies online. And it'll say, okay, do you have a domain name yet? No. How about like mycookiesonlineshop.com? Great. Okay. We have the domain. Here's the options for your landing page. Would you want this? This thing? It'll just, it's like this kind of like co-founder basically that you can work with. We're going to have you go and sign up for a whole bunch of other things to actually get a live business on the internet. And then for me personally, I want to like go and beat my marathon time. That's my current thing. So in a couple of months, I'm going to be running the Long Beach Marathon. I want to run it in under 3:30. We'll see if I can do that. But there's people that, that do these things in like a couple of hours. It's like, that's like, you know, not even on the impressive end of like what one could do. But that's like my current goal. And so we'll see.

That's pretty impressive from where we're sitting.

In this group of 3, you're the fastest. Let's be clear.

It was funny. I like yesterday went to go on my like 2-mile jog and I bumped into just the 26-mile mark of the SF Marathon because I live near the Embarcadero and I was just like, Yeah, this is not the run that I signed up for, but okay. As we come up on time, Eric, we'd love to ask you the hero question of The Room Podcast. And that question is, who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you and your career?

I think my wife is actually, I would not have been able to do StackBlitz without her. She's actually played a really important role from like really the foundation of when we formed the company all the way through now. And so definitely like would was here, but also like from the business sense, I, I think Sarah, she's really been like the key person who's helped, you know, me sharpen my spear of how to start a company and scale it, et cetera. And just an absolute wealth of knowledge on that end of things.

It's incredible. We'll have to tag her when we post this episode. Eric, thank you so much for joining us on The Room today. It's been such a delight having you on, hearing about your story, and cannot wait to chat a little bit more at Insight Summit.

Awesome. Yes, I'm stoked. Thank you for having me.

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