The rate you're growing is absurd. You're from 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 2 months we it went from zero to 20 million of ARR and we've already crossed 30 million of AR with the current rate we're on. Our forecast for the year is we want to get to 100 million of AR. This is just a non-stop wild [ __ ] 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 5 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 going to be the consensus for you. You got to have like confidence in your convictions on how to best play the hands. A lot of people see these stats and they sometimes don't see that there was also years and years of of work before that. It was kind of like you 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 neckand-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. 2 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 7 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 7 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 7 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 Superhum. Check it out at lennisnewsletter.com. With that, I bring you Eric Simons. This episode is brought to you by EPO. EPO is a next generation AB testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. 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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 Black Fund before investing. Find this information and more in the fund's perspectus at fundrise.com/flip. 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 uh 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 uh you know text to app uh building tools that become pretty popular over the past few months here. And uh it's not just like building you like a static site or something like that, but you could actually build full stack real software with databases and hosting and etc. Yeah. Just from prompting and you know in in a ridiculously short period of time. It's not you're spending, you know, 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 uh about the scale of what you're building. It's the rate you're growing is absurd. you're kind of in this cohort of companies that are just growing at rates that have never seen we 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. Yeah, I mean when we launched I mean we I mean the the the company was on the verge of going under when we when we launched Bolt like you know our company stack blinds we've been around for seven years building web- based uh you know development environment stuff and um 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 um and what ended up happening is uh 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 uh already crossed 30 million of AR and we're on the verge of crossing 40 by the time this comes out. Um it it appears that we're going to be at 40 million AR. So it it's just like the the scale of the growth of 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 uh registered users, you know, just in the past few months here. And uh, you know, monthly active users is, you know, around a million, I think, at this point, per month. So, it's 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. Um, everyone I've talked to, you know, uh, our investors or, you know, etc. there there's there's not a lot of corlaries to kind of what's going on here, you know. Um, and it's kind of extraordinary because I mean like we you know our company wasn't doing AI stuff uh six months ago. We had no AI products and just out of nowhere we uh you know from almost death of the company to being you know the number one buy traffic revenue etc like you know AI codegen app uh that's web- based in in the world like it's I think the only other like startup ahead of us is you know for for codegen just in general would be like cursor on adoption revenue at this point and so it was 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 uh you know, we're going to be closing on like a 100,000 customers and we 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 mindboggling just the the scale of the the demand and and uh uh 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? Is like that that's the current track rate that we're seeing for the thing. Yeah. I think Are you guys the fastest growing startup in history? I I I mean I think it depends on probably where you peg the number, right? Yeah. We're Yeah, we're here to just like build great products, right? and and just um you know uh push the limits of like what's possible with the the technology um and um you know and and I think that that you we do our jobs well you know it's the kind of crazy things can happen but I mean the current the current track rate we have we're already we're going to be exceeding kind of the the forecast for Q1 um with the current rate we're on and you know our forecast for the year is we want to get to 100 million of AR and that would I you know I think there's been a couple I don't that that would either be on par with curser or ahead of him or something like that. But I mean it's and I think there's going to be more things like this too. I don't think that like uh you know it's just that this there's something really you know I think a lot of people are in disbelief about it too where like this is okay and this is from when we were got to four million of 5 million in the first month. We I would talk with people and they're like, "Okay, yeah, but like that could go to zero, right?" And then then it and then it went to 20 the next it could go to zero and it but now we're now we're closing on 40 and so I just I and and so from 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 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 you know what 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 CUR. You see this with a lot of these other AI startups and 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 would say I think we're going to see more of this whether it's encoding or get kind of 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 uh different from other products in the space, say Levable, Vzero, Repid, that other folks have heard about, that'd be useful. Awesome. Cool. Yeah. So, this is Bolt. If you just go to bolt.new. Um, things that I think are really interesting about Bolt. One is it's it's just like dead simple. Whether you're logged in or logged out, like this is it's the same UI. It's extremely simple. It's just a text box. Um, and the I think that the biggest difference between Bullet and the other stuff out there, it's actually subtle. It's not like something you 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 they those can take minutes to boot up and they often will run into issues and and then you can end up literally stuck, right? And have to contact sport to get it done, you know, get it unstuck or whatever, right? With Bold, we like for the past seven years, what our company's been doing has been building an operating system that runs inside of 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 and I can you know run commands on it etc. And uh 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. Like 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 birectional communication with this operating system. It's writing code. It's running the dev server for this thing. It's going to 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 and so that's and that's one of the, you know, the other aspects around Bold is like this technology we made uh 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 Bull, we had just an incredible amount of in-house uh 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 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 like maybe attach a domain to it or whatever have you. So with uh with bold we actually have built-in integrations with you know production grade hosting providers like Netlefi and for databases with Superbase. So if I go and just like click the deploy button here, this is actually going to run a production build of this project we made here, right? And again, this is doing this entirely inside my browser. So you know, it doesn't it doesn't cost us anything to do this. So again, you can do this for free, right? And it has gone ahead and deployed this on a real URL on Nellifi. This is live. I can share this with anyone. And if I want to have like, you know, buy the uh domain spotifyclone.com and point it at this, I can click this link here. that kick me into Netlifi. I can attach this to my account by domain point at that thing and then from air there there on out whenever I'm prompting Bolt to make changes to this application and hit deploy that goes live on my public website that right so it's just this is this is like the 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 weeks into the thing I was seeing people use this for like personal use cases like medical donation sites or weddings or whatever. And I was like, don't these people know that like Wix or 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 if you ever seen a 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 if we were to sit here for another 30 minutes, we would be have we would have streaming. You'd be able to make playlists of different MP3 files or whatever. that you can just keep prompting this thing to keep adding functionality, you know. So, that's kind of the I think some of the cool uh core experience of Bolt here. I can show you something cool that we just launched if that would be uh 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 uh 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 uh business is making uh 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 um right here I'll zoom in a little bit. We have this little build a mobile app with Expo. So if you click that we kind of instruct you on how to just prompt mobile apps into existence. So um yeah, let's make another Spotify clone that's an actual native mobile app. We'll say make a Spotify clone. Go ahead and hit enter. And what this thing's going to do is actually again spin up a operating system here where it's going to boot up uh the Expo tool chain and actually go and make a mobile app for us. And what's cool about this is uh we can actually preview it just in the browser here. But uh once this thing's done and it boots up, uh it's going to show a QR code. We're going to be able to scan it and in real time actually uh basically have like a test flight of this native application that we can try on our phones and as we keep prompting you'll see it making changes to stuff, right? Um this is the kind kind of the first time right that you know you don't 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 you 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 uh are people that are not developers that are using their PMs, uh they're designers, they're entrepreneurs because these are people that are have always been great at building products and but previously the only way they could get their ideas into coded software was through a developer's fingertips, right? And now now they can you could they can do it with their own, you know, through prompting. So, uh you can see here we got this little QR code. I'm going go and 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 finish. I was a pro just as I planned, you know. But um so on my screen, it's it's booting up. It's it's bundling the uh the JavaScript of this thing. It is beta. We just launched this last week, by the way. So uh if you kind of see on my screen here, I actually have this Spotify looking app, right? That um you know, that looks like exactly like Spotify. It looks exactly like Spotify, right? It's a good We're going to be sued right now. Sil, let's you're doing too good a job with this. No, that's amazing. So, it's it's it's pretty cool, right? I mean, and so what's cool is 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 and I were building an app together, you know, uh 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 and feeling it like and and and putting it through its paces. And so a lot of product teams um I mean this is changing how people do product development. You know, it's faster to do this than than design a whole bunch of Figma frames necessarily, right? So we're gonna we're gonna spend a lot of time on that. Okay, this is incredible. Like this whole episode so far is you just blowing my mind, I imagine listeners mind just over and over and over like I 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 Bold. A lot of people see these stats 0 to 40 million AR in like fiveish 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 built this web container technology it sounds like. Is there anything there that's worth sharing you think of just that part of the journey? I know we'll go through like the origin and how where Bolt came from but I guess just that web container component specifically that feels like a huge deal. It it 100% is. Yeah. And um I would say this is kind surprisingly to me it's like still one of the um contrarian uh viewpoints of our company like you despite despite um because over the years it was like when we first this is and that the web container was the bat that we made the company on just to be clear like the stack blitz was like a deep tech a browserbased deep technology play on can we make a you know a web assemblybased 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 came out to the valley, he and I like grew up down the street from each other at Chicago, learned how to code together at 13 and building 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 bu building Figma in the early days. And that was um I I don't think a lot of people are like know that like Figma was was also a browserbased deep technology play. Like when their first pitch for Figma, they they didn't have a design tool. Their first pitch was this uh 3D ball dropping into water inside of a browser tab. And the the the pitch basically was you know browsers have this new capability called WebGL and the predecessor predecessor to web assembly. And with these things uh for the first time like you could actually uh you know create a a graphics rendering engine that you could then build a design tool on top of but you but you're going to have to write that that rendering engine from scratch because you know nothing exists that can just compile into WebGL or whatever if you want the performance you need etc. um it's going to take us years to do but if we do it you know we think this will change everything for design and obviously we know how that story you know has panned out now and back in 2017 2016 2017 um Albert my co-founder and I uh saw the same sort of story begin to play out but for web development in like development environments and specifically there was some stuff that landed in browsers like web assembly shared memory service workers these different APIs and we were like oh wow like it should be possible theoretically like to write an operating system that uh in web assembly 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 onboarded to run that stuff on your computer, it's up 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 and so when you look at uh cloud IDEs like, you know, Cloud9 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 is 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 uh you know code text to app sort of tools work. They're all using cloud VMs and the problem is you know that on a small scale it can work but as you scale it up there I mean there's not even 100 million VMs to run 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 uh 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 you know zero latency transient cost to 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 ddoing 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 doesn't matter, right? So that's web container was the the key piece and this and what we struggled with it took us like four or five years something to build web container. what we struggled with for the the the years after that was just how to build a product around it that like that um because developers loved it but they they they weren't using it in ways that they would pay money for, you know, and um and as much as I the the nerd side of me wish that that would be enough that like building cool technology was enough, it's like it's not like this we're here to build a venture a venture scale company. Um and um and so that you know that was kind of why we were we were kind at the end of the journey where it's like you know we're taking shots on goal and we you know some point we just got a connected bat right there's a lot of really interesting lessons from this journey that I think are counterintuitive one is you 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 that something big that we think may 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-ounder and I had we had built a lot of unsuccessful startups before this like we spent most of the 2010s like turnurning through ideas on things and so we you know what we had conviction on is like this is this seems like a technology that that will be important like it seems like the web is the most ubiqu like kind the pitch or the theory in our head was like the web is the most ubiquitous platform in the world it but yet it has no you can't use the web to like build the web right like every other platform like Mac has uh uh you know uh Xcode, Windows has Visual Studio, the web had nothing and we were like you at a minimum Google should probably buy this thing from us. It seems like that they should probably be part of Chrome at at a minimum, right? And uh uh we thought, hey, this could you know this could be a huge enabler like we you know the vision of just making it as easy to build full stack applications as using Canva, right? It's like just seemed really compelling. Um and uh but when you when you do that sort of risky deep technology play it yeah you you need to and and we were very good about this. Like the previous company Albert and I did, we bootstrapped it um all the way through to acquisition. So we understood and we were like living handtomouth to like bootstrap that thing. So we understood how like how to how to have a low burn rate and take a lot of shots on goal and make every dollar stretch beyond what anyone would think is reasonable or possible. And that's how we played our hands with stack blitz, you know, like but we you know uh we didn't raise money for the first two or three years of you know of the company's life. We were you know bootstropping it. um when 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 bets and it doesn't make sense and I you know I would just say generally like until you see pull like and you 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 I just like keep the perimeter as low as possible because you need as many shots on goal as you can possibly get because you have no idea. Um and I think just generally for startups that's the right way in my view to approach it, you know. Um unless you're seeing again immediate demand and pull or whatever. Um but um yeah, I think uh uh I think that'd be kind of like maybe the extra context I 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 and and were things that were being you know uh you know with a lot of a lot of uh you know emotional force of like hey you guys ought to be doing this and and and I'm glad that we didn't heed the advice because it it you know if if our we tripled the company and kicked up the burn rate there would be no bolt you know that like we would have gone out of business a long time ago right so um I think that's that's the hard thing about being an entrepreneur I think is you kind 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 got to have like confidence or 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 just staying alive. Dalton came on the podcast. He's a partner 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 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. Yep. Yeah. Uh 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. into like the tweet, you know, we were like, "Wow, this is like, you know, one of the biggest things, you know, a launch day reception we've ever seen." And I think on the first day, you know, I think we added like 60k of AR 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 DevOps engineer like he was the one he would flagging. He's like, "Guys, we at 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 the classic startup sorrow. Yeah. I was like, "Listen, got you. I'm trying to like temper enthusiasm for the team." I'm like, "This is great. Got a lot of work to do." D um and then the next day, you know, we added 80 here, whatever it was, right? And it just kind of kept going. And um and you know, and all the while like the product we put out, we we we built the thing in 90 days. We built Bolt and so there's a lot of things that were missing in the product like basic stuff. Basic stuff. And which again like we you know we we we cut the right corners on the thing to get it online. But um we had this just growing influx of people using it going you know how is there not a mobile responsive view? Like how how are chat messages not we got to 20 million of error 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 5 or whatever. You know that was this was that was that this was that for us. It was like no mo. We looked at it on mobile, it was terrible, right? But there's like 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 the growing uh traffic and and and you know, there's there's there's a whole bunch. I mean, I could the list of problems that were happening every single day was nuts. I mean, like to start, we had never had a plan on stack.com uh you know, for more than $9. Like, we had one price, nine bucks, right? And so we launched B. We're like again we don't think they we think hopefully people like this but you know N 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 would you take my money? So it was like uh that within the week we we were just completely new pricing plans we could upgrade which which ended up has kind of now become this the standard. All the other guys in the space have copied this where uh 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? They're willing people want to pay for more inference because we've crossed this threshold where you know you can get a very tangible ROI like 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 he was like listen we just we don't have anything more to give you at the time 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 a crazy wild time and I mean it still is, you know, 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 R you get a year at least or something, you know, to kind of staff up often often decades. Yeah. You know, so it's, you know, that was hard. We go to people and kind of be like, what do we do? And the playbooks we get back are like take take six months or a year or something. And it's like this isn't going to work, you know, and which is fine. This is what it's all about, right? I mean, this is this is um um you know, it's at least for me. This is that level of intensity is is uh it's it's challenging fun challenges, you know. Wow. Okay. This is just a non-stop wild [ __ ] Um so you mentioned that your team was about 20 people through all this. You guys are growing at this insane rate. Uh 20 people. How is this possible? What 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 what has allowed you to to do this? Yeah. Yeah. I 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 the codeg genen you text to app space have have really been uh struggling a lot of it has been scaling their servers and stuff right because and and and you know it was kind of like you both this overnight success seven years in the making like all of this stuff like there's no way if you rewind like year two we can there's no way we could have we would not be at the the growth and uh on on DAUs and revenue or whatever, there's just no way. Um, and so a lot of it is the the technology we made and and most importantly, it's been the people like the people like the, you know, it's it's it's rare to find startups where you have uh 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 start for kind of year or two they kind of go to another you know I mean there 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 um just having uh 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 they have a lot of context. It's not like you know this person's completely in the dark in in some quarter of the company you know I mean the second thing everyone has agency to actually get stuff done front to back right and and there there's no political committee to get stuff approved by there's no d you know you so when you look at what kind of what happened with bold I mean we had engineers that were like front to back we're on a call with someone running into an issue going and fixing it uh cooking up the UI on the spot and and and and landing the thing like without involving anyone else on the team, right? and you know that uh you know so I think it's the culmination of just high trust and you know people like we all just have enjoyed working together over the past I mean that's why that's the only reason anyone would ever stay right at a company for for that long or whatever and so uh those sorts of stressful situations I think can are 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 um that that are making this thing and supporting the thing. Yeah, I I I 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? Is it this idea that they can do a lot? They can do customer calls, they can do design, they can do engineering. Yeah, I think for us and even if the thoughts were hiring out, it's 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 people have like a career trajectory and that sort of thing, but it's like they they're they really are motivated by just working on cool things and um and are, you know, chucking their ego at the door and and they're there to like collectively build something great, not just just kind um, you know, be be the the the brilliant jerk, right? You know, most of the people that we've hired have been uh, you know, in Europe and you 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 and like a year into it, we were like, "What are we doing?" like 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 uh you know I think uh and and we have a you know one or two other people we've hired that are in the Bay Area at this point but um 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 and then the first people that we hired they the reason we found them is that they were users of stock blitz you know like that was that a lot of people that um the majority of people we hired at the have been people that actually came from our community basically. Um it's what we when we want to hire people, we put out a tweet and we say, "Hey, we're hiring an engineer." And then we get, you know, DMs or whatever, right? And but um 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 longtime 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 schema 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 SFP 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 road map and instead use something like one schema 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 one schema 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 want to learn more, head on over to onskeema.c co that's ones schema.co See how I want to ask a couple more questions about Bolt and then I want to zoom out and talk about where things are heading in the future. Let's talk about pertization. I imagine you guys are just like barged with as you described after you launched there like you're just barged with requests like you said it 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? Um, and so people aren't going to be like necessarily like explicitly asking for them. Um, 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 uh native mobile app support. like that's the the you know uh by reception like the biggest thing we've ever launched and it was something that even internally at the company uh you know some folks like this you know I don't know people are like yelling about these other things right and then and it's and is it's always this balance of like how much are we just triaging various things versus like new capabilities but it's like this is strikes me as an important one where we where we uh you know put some chips into the middle of the table on and the OKAD 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, so so there's kind of these things where it's like, hey, we should go and, you know, take bets here. But it's a there's kind of this it's um I think the best analogy would just be like it's it's kind of like I think you know you working at a restaurant being like a chef. It's like there there's some amount of there's feedback from the customers right of 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 going to like this you know I think this is a a killer dish and and so you kind of have to balance those things. Um and uh uh I think it's actually largely a function of just you know years of experience doing it. I think I if you kind of rewind like that 10 years ago I would had I really know I would have had the just the the years of getting my butt kicked by uh the free market to have kind of cultivated a sense of this stuff. You know you kind of have to build your own gun instate 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? 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 and we just kind of like a Zoom. Yep. Yeah. Every day at 8 a.m. Pacific, we're on a Zoom for like the whole company. Pretty much the entire company. Yeah. Wow. For an hour. Okay. Yeah. And we just go over everything. And and and I think we're going to probably start as you as the team's kind of growing, we're going to start, you know, splintering off into you, different um you know, syncs or whatever. But um the thing about just having everyone in the same room every day is that uh it's you know, a lot of people will complain that it's uh you know, uh this is you on Twitter, you'll see people say, "Oh, like it's the most expensive use of 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 is being audited front to back and being discussed front to back. Um and and so when you're in these times of just extreme growth, right? It's it's you you you want as close to 0%, you know, uh loss, right, on on communications. Um and so that's that's how we've that's how we've been doing it. um 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 context on you know and less heads um you know every person at the company is aware of everything else going on at the company right um so people can independently be making decisions that are generally by default more more often correct than not you That is so interesting. I've never heard that before, especially for a company growing like that is like yours. That is super uh interesting that that's what you do. I was I I don't think we're going to do that forever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. No, but that's that's I think that's a really cool thing to note that that's that works and has worked for you. Where do you So, say you talk about stuff, but then where do you put stuff? Where do you put your road map? Where do you plan just like what tools are kind of in the stack of the company's tool set? Yeah. On the engineering side, we use linear like heavily on kind of product uh you know road mapping. I think we're using notion and uh you kind of making like PRD type stuff in notion you know and then and we use Figma for like design and we actually we use bolt for a lot of design and prototyping at this point as as you can imagine. Um but um yeah, I think I think it you know the tooling is uh uh you nothing nothing crazy. There's nothing crazy sophisticated, you know, like I I think you're going to be investing a lot more in that especially as you start splintering people out of being on the same call every day. It's like 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 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 bold 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 whatever that is for you. Unless there's like something like that's very sophisticated that we're working on. Um, we we tend to keep 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 are going to be present when we get there. You know, because the thing is that when these things when these documents get really beefy, if you're looking at, 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. They're 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. And at least that's that's kind of our our approach to the thing. Um and you know, and often it's it's uh 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 and not just look like here's here's kind of a working demo of what it will effectively feel like, right? Um, and and B because that just, you know, if if a picture's worth, you know, a thousand words, like a live actual demo is is worth billions, you know, like you can you can feel it. It's 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 highfidelity prototyping because it's it's like now faster to make real prototypes using uh bolt and writing you know before was too expensive like the idea of like let's prototype it by having the engineers code a proto it's like that it would take forever it would it would be expensive now it's faster to do this with both 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 uh what's like what are some examples of products people have built with Bolt that are maybe s would surprise people and just how far they've gotten? Yeah, I mean especially when you're starting green field stuff you I mean you can use Bolt to build you know like on the like Salesforce as an example, right? um one of the the the first people that signed up for uh Bull was this guy named Paul and he's an entrepreneur uh and does you know doesn't know how to code built a CRM in three weeks that has like AI built into it and Stripe for billing etc. He had gotten a quote from an agency for this. It was like going to be 30 grand and take six months. He had it done in three weeks and I think he spent like 300 bucks on both the thing and so it's like this is like and he's and he's making money off of this like this is his startup, right? Okay. So, so he built this and he's selling it like people are paying to use it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and then then and there's many such cases of this, right? When you if you're looking at green field projects 100%. Like there's today with this current state of frontier models, you could absolutely build production grade software, right? It you're not going to get zero shot, but you're you're going to spend a couple days, weeks, whatever. But the cost reduction there, 30 grand versus $300 mean 99% cheaper 6 months versus 3 weeks. I mean it's like order of magnitude sort of fashion delivery on the and that and those numbers have helped for the people that we talk to that are building these full stack uh you know ass like people they go to Upwork they get a quote for five grand they have it within 50 bucks you know it's just nuts um what you're able to do with this thing um 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 green field spun up good examples like public websites like marketing pages, landing pages, whatever have you. um you folks are adopting bolt to just power those instead of using web flow for example you know because it's like this is simpler to use than web flow and it integrates with the existing design system of the company and etc right um and the marketers can update without knowing how to code you know whatever but then for product development teams this is and most commonly for again existing software businesses they're using this to just accelerate the product development process you know and uh in a way where it's not just like a green field wholesale hey we're building the entire thing in Bolt or whatever, right? Can Bolt integrate with your existing codebase or not yet? So, yeah, we can actually open up uh repos in Bolt. So, you can like go and use Bolt on your codebase and it kind of depends on your setup, right? Like we, you know, and we we do have companies again that like have marketing sites using this on or like you know, their admin panel or whatever. Uh and I think it's 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? They're it's these things are not quite there where if you have something that's, you know, uh a thousand files or something or more, um where you're going to be able to have a really uh uh reliable super reliable experience per se, right? Within a year if you chat a year from now, I suspect the answer is going to be different. But you know, so it kind of depends on this the size of the app, the scale of the app, and um yeah, if it if it's if it's too big, you're looking at the prototyping like just just like pure acceleration, right, of product development. Um and if it's not, then then you're you can just do it entirely, right, from B. So this is useful. So what are the 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 sounds like if you have just like a really large existing codebase, 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 codebase, you're going to need something like cursor. Um, and you're gonna need to be a developer meaningfully to be 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 there's some level of kind of education and just kind of like and and using the tool and like learning how to use it that's required to like really unlock a lot of the the the maximum capabilities of the thing right and you know the people that we see that are most successful with bold like outside of developers the the people we see that are most successful are are people that are amazing PMs for example because these are people that understand enough about how the technology works typically um And their job is to like direct developers on how to go and improve the product and go and like look into like how to make how to actually spec this thing out in a way that's like executable without uh you know without lossiness in the communication. And when you think about okay how to 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 uh helping it go and debug various things or whatever have you. And so so it's it's there's a huge overlap of the skill set of just like being a rockstar PM and uh being really good at using frankly any any of these texture to apps or codegen tools. I love that you made that point. That's exactly the point I 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, IPMs 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 feels like PMs are and there's a lot of lot of PMs listen to do 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 that was like you and as Bull was 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 um you know when we when I started talking to these folks at first I was just like weird or whatever you know I 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 like 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 are the people that that really understand like to the pixel level like what matters into making a great product experience and often they're they're having listen I'm a I'm a developer myself they have to go and herang the developers to like get things to be how they really ought to be like to to the smallest levels. And now like how this is going to work if you fast forward you know one two five years whatever like PMs are are they're going to be writing quote quote unquote instead of just writing a Jira ticket and waiting for a developer to do it. the developers are going to be able to work on, you know, intellectually challenging tasks that that LLMs are not well suited for, right? And still being augmented by LMs to do it, but PMS are going to be able to go in and just make the changes themselves. And and then just the what blew my mind is it's that is not it's not priced into it's not priced in into 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 that the winners at least the org charts are going to completely change and how they approach building products and shipping products completely you know and it's starting this this is 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 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 I feel like looking at this triangle of the triad of product engineering PM, it feels like the PM skills are the ones that will be most important and valuable. Although it'd be great if you can also be in code and if you could also design really well. AB: Absolutely. And to me, it's like the most exciting mix. I think like PMs, designers, and and entrepreneurs that are non-technical, that's the most exciting thing to me just because it's a it's a brand new market that's being unlocked here, you know, like they 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 that is that's that's 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 I bet you there's going to be uh you know there's going to be like some gardener analysis someday. you know, a year 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 going to uh you know, I think that you're going to see developers uh 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 and perhaps having a developer attached to like be reviewing the code and making sure you know like the the extra the guiding you know the the code that they're writing reviewing those pull requests and etc. And I think maybe even the engineers are uh you know the 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 I think that engine but I do think there's going to be you know there there's going to be the leverage that a 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 seeing more product uh you know and 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 um that's that something like that strikes me as probably how this is going to start trending towards this touches on we had a a researcher from open AI on the podcast she actually started uh her career she worked at anthropic first as a front front end engineer and said that she once she saw what Clyde could do for front-end engineering she's like I need to move to a different different function and so she moved into research because she saw that role disappearing potentially and that's exactly what you're saying. Yep. So let me ask you this. I don't know if you have a clear uh thesis on this yet but say you just had a kid. Say your kid is going to 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 you think they should go into versus avoid that maybe are popular now and be less popular? Understanding how to leverage these AI tools um is key. Uh like I wouldn't necessarily I think I think maybe getting a basic understanding of like how programming works you know etc. Right. Is like is is great right. So like technical foundations just understanding how things how how systems work how coding works. Exactly. Right. And and but but it doesn't have to be like because I I think back like you know if bold existed like my Albert and I say this to each other all the time like you know since the getgo stack so we've been building the thing that we wish we had when we were 13. Um and heck for everything we've built since then and especially with bull. I mean it's like I don't know if I would have gone as deep as I did on uh you know learning how to code and being an engineer if if that had been around that 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 um 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 um and and that said, it's like I think people need to follow their intrinsic interest. If folks are really interested in, you know, really getting into the nitty-gritty of how computers work and program leaders work and compilers or whatever, like go for it. Like I think that's still going to be relevant, you know, like it's I I don't know if we're going to really have We'll see. Well, 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. Yeah. Do we need to know anything? Yeah, it's like if we're at that point, it's kind I I don't know. I you know, I'm not sure. But I I think from what at least what I feel like seems like the next at least five years of what we're looking at, it's like I think I think people are still going to there's still going to be uh places to specialize and become and you know uh really go deep. Uh but I think you you want to go into it with the idea not like I'm going to go and learn computer science because I'm going to get a job for sure out of it. You know, I just think that's like a generally, you know, not a a good um this is like my co-founder and I like we we didn't we didn't go to college and my my co-founder dropped out of college after like a semester or something, but like I I didn't go because I was like I just you know, we're coding like we're kind of you we're doing contracting at the time making money and it was like you know this this is like a lot of you know I I would have been you know been like 100 grand of debt at by the end of the thing just for like four years at instate tuition at U ofi. um 120 grand I think at that time and um 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 uh you know uh so society like that going to college in in the early 20 yeah early 2010s or late 2000s like you're going to get a job on the other side 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 Right. And so it's but you again not to deter people from doing it but it's like you have to go into it being like I for sure this is what I want and I want to go and be the best and you know that I can possibly be at this thing. You know what I mean? Um so I like that your answer to your kids going to be like don't even don't even go to college potentially unless they want to right. It's like I think at 18 it's it's a huge ask. I mean, it's a huge asset. And not even at 18. It's like it's 17 because you have to like prepare. You go apply for colleges at the it's 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 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. Um so I want to come back to the skills that I you think are going to 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. Uh what I'm hearing is get good at figuring out what people need and want, what problems they need solved. Get good at uh articulating it really well to the AI tools. Uh and if 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 just if if you're clear about it, it'll save you a lot of time. So, it's uh figure out be good at figuring out what problems people need to solve. 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 going to be uh a need cuz Bolt's not going to go and like find like you know I could see that still running paid ads and stuff like that but but it feels like that's going to 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 uh two weeks ago, I think we announced this like program called like Bolt Builders, and it's basically at the the Genius Bar at the Apple store where, you know, as folks are building on Bolt that are that are not developers, they will they'll run into, you know, some some uh you know, nook or cranny of like where the AI just, you know, cannot figure it out or whatever. And I think I think that's just going to continue to be the case time to come. That's our position and that's why we spun up this this program. And these are humans that help these are humans. These are these are and people that were like certified and so um you know when in bolt uh in the you know coming weeks or whatever uh there's gonna 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 unjammed and and you keep keep prompting you know um but and again it's like I 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 they get to like debugging is challenging and and fun, you know, and like going and and work intellectually stimulating tasks and like all this stuff that's just copy pasta over and over all this error rapid just like let the AI do all that 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. And we're that's what's wild is, you know, I think Sonnet was, you know, Sonnet was the really the the first model that flipped the equation because that was really us and old cursor and all these other things. The rapid growth started the second Sonnet went online, right? Like we actually tried building Bull like almost exactly a year ago with like kind of the frontier models at the time. Um, 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 it would be a broken app or it would look ugly or whatever. And then we got a sneak peek of 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 and you know, lo and behold, that's exactly what has happened, you know. But yeah, that's that's the big deal. that is kind of under the hood like this is what's going on here is a 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. Um it's not perfect, but it but but we there's kind of this this zero to one moment that's happened where it's like okay so like now yeah now now we're now the AI is the first thing and then you're kind of popping a developer in every now and then versus the other way around. You know I did not know that. I didn't realize that so much of this was unlocked with like it's sitting on top of anthropics work and specifically sonnet. That was the first model you're saying that could code well enough. Yeah. And it zero question. Zero question. That is fascinating. Just like the amount of uh uh I don't know revenue and business and e e-commer commerce that that one model has unlocked is 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 at stack blitz and you know it's like it's tempting because it's like when you know kind of as GBT went went online everyone started kind of adding AI to their products and we were just like we just didn't see like a clear place for like really added value right so I I was not uh super bullish on you know a lot of people like hey AGI is going to be here in 2023 you know 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 going to move and and and to to a certain degree like that was like the correct view. What I didn't really think about though is like if if AI if LLMs are going to get better at a specific vertical kind of like which are going to be the the things that it would be and you know if you look at like law for example you want to make the best LM for you know looking at case law or whatever the problem with that stuff is it's not deterministic like the the judge's ruling is dependent kind of on society's view of things at the time right political stuff going like the jury there's a ton of things that it's not deterministic and and so and so you can't really create a lot of training data that's going to be like super reliable, right? And and produce really good results and you can't just like make up cases and say theoretically the judge would say this this you 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 and this is what they're doing is just reinforcement learning. I'm basically permutating every type of app you could ever build and and just spinning up tens of thousands of cores or whatever to do that. Just building tons of training data and doing reinforcement learning and and and making their LM the best in the world at building beautiful reliable applications. I am I'm extremely bullish, right? I mean, it makes it makes technical sense why uh of anything LMS are going to get insanely better at at writing code than probably most other types of applications for LMS simply because it's something that that can be uh extremely deterministic and permutated thousands and thousands and thousands of times per second, right? And and so so that I think the broader trend here is and sonnet has woken everyone up like Google and open the eye all the everyone is now gunning for coding because that 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 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 It's like this is this this seems like an extremely clear shot. There's not this like you can you 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. Um and so you know it it and and for us we're like we you know we we are just so happy 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 LMS and is going to just keep coming and and therefore enable more people to build even crazier amazing software right um so that's kind that's that's our worldview at least of kind of what's going on here at like the mackerel and when did set even come out it's been a while right I think I think they officially We I think it was in June when they officially put it in June. Okay. So since June like this 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 since last June. So this tells us just how quickly things are going to start moving once they once they launched their next model. And as you said everyone's gunning now for this because they realized we're behind on the coding piece. So wow. This is going to 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? Yeah. You know, piecing together like what you've seen anthropic releasing. Is that what you mean? Like what have you been noticing murder mysteries? Well, and then 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 just kind of all the stuff we've talked about in this podcast has has been the result of you know uh nine months of just uh you know R&D and seeing the results of it and going what you know and then and then digging in doing another thing then 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 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 your son to 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 um and so it's it's it's it's very interesting to just um you know uh 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 going to work with your existing code. It's not going to scale. Like it's important to note just what we talked about the 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 by the time and you know I'm going to go back and tell our engineers like I said this on this podcast committed. Sorry guys. This is this is I found actually being a leaky faucet on uh 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 got to make it real right AI on it. No, no. Yeah. But it's um uh you know I think for for us it's like uh again we've seen a lot of PMs uh designers uh entrepreneurs etc using Bolt. And so we're really looking at how to better you kind of better fit in with the tools that folks are using uh to do those things today. We're like we're Bolt's not going to like replace them or something, right? and and and and for like you know if 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 code baser 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 codebase in this you know that's like 20 years old like you don't like that's not like none of this stuff like that's not what you do this is for like rapid product development um in your use case so I the the the features that we're going to be shipping being I'm pretty stoked about this one. So, we've we've been working on this for a while and we've we've uh partnered up with a company called to do this. But, uh basically, so on any Figma URL, when you're looking at like a you know, a design that you've made, uh 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 out of the box. Yes. Yeah. Amazing. It's going to be nuts. Yeah. I mean it's like it's it's really fun to use because you know like when you're you know as a whether you're a developer designer whatever going and taking that and uh turning it into an actual coded app and the thing is once it's in bullet you can just keep prompting from there like 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 assets like been doing this since 2017 like you know Figma to code um they've got you the the best agent uh in the world for like they're the number one Figma plugin, you know, or whatever. Um and um and so in Bolt, like it's just going to just work like it's just deeply integrated. So it's bold bolt. The Figma URL to the design. Yep. That's all you got to do. And in bold, we're going to have also have a little Figma icon in the chat thing. So like if you go to bolt itself, you can like click it and then paste the URL or whatever. But um yeah, it's like just but it's like that. It's like from Figma to full stack app in in a click literally, you know, like that's crazy. Uh, 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, you know, when when you're talking about Figma's, you know, like Figma links or whatever at a company, you're in Slack or whatever. And so you're like having conversations about, hey, you know, we should really add a page to this that does dah. Um, and so we're actually creating a a uh you like a a bolt like Slack bot that's uh 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 at Bolt, like can you like whip this up real quick?" And it'll like go and just kind of suck down the entire conversation history so far in your Slack, you know, on that thread or whatever. It'll be like, "Okay, cool. So, you kind of want me to like take this Figma URL, which I can convert automatically, thanks to the feature I just mentioned right before 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 going to go do that. Oh, here's the URL where you can open it up and like keep prompting. You know what I mean? So, it's like it's it's it's like having a developer kind of kick this thing out and just like go make this thing real quick, you know? So, so it's like those two things. I think it's again you start think about how our companies going to change how they're how they're currently doing product development and even like hey we need to spin up a marketing site here's the Figma like can you do that bolt yep let me go do that you know what I mean and that's why I'm kind of excited about those two in particular because I think I think they're going to be I I think it's going to be wellreceived you know and folks can be stoked about it I hope you know nothing work those are those are awesome features it's 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 a 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 thisic future 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 uh what are they using to build Bolt? I imagine it's a lot of cursor. Is uh 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 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 and when we're doing basically the flow that I described like things that need to be pixel perfect, we're going to Figma for and then and often we're taking that and we're pulling that into bolt because you know we've got access to the integration today. So pulling that into bold and we're saying, "Hey, go add these things or whatever." Or just saying, "Hey, here's a screenshot of our UI. Go to da da." Um, other AI tools um 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 Chacht and things like that, but you know, I I think I think like for development, it's like cur cursor is like the main thing. Yeah, it's cool how few tools it like like there's so many AI tools and it's interesting how few people actually end up using. It's like cursor cla and then maybe another tool like totally. Okay, finalish 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 and then this is like because we have a lot of different types. I imagine you have like like PMS or designer. Let's do PM. That's a good one. That's a lot of the audience here. I would I would I would say talk to this thing like you do a a linear ticket or a Jira ticket. That that would be my that would be my advice is like or or talk to this like you would like you're talking to one of the developers on your team, right? And uh and and what that means is um be specific on some on things that matter, right? And 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 it'll 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 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 because these tools are so easy. You just go in, it's like tell a thing and then cool you have a website just like coded boom done. And what I'm hearing here is take a little time to uh 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 I I totally right. Especially if you have a clear vision of what you're trying to build, right? It's something that like reasonably sophisticated. And I what I recommend everyone to do whenever they if it's your first time trying bold and you're like, "What what should I have it 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 just take your LinkedIn copy and paste your LinkedIn bio and 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. Um my favorite color is blue and I like dogs. Paste. Right. Make it pretty. Yeah. And and then and you know what I mean? And and and then you can hit deploy and and if you don't have a.com yet, now you can, right? Like I mean now you have a real personal. So it's like I think there's kind of a moment around 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 if not more. 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, you know, put that in piece by piece into this thing, the sky's is the limit, you know? So, 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, uh 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. Uh because you had some badge that still worked. Maybe just tell that story. Yeah. Yeah. I know. And that that was like um you know kind of the thing I was like most known for that happened in like 2012 and I was like 19 years old. So it's been 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. Um but um uh yeah, for a while I was like I have to do something more notable than than living in AOL. Uh 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 Stackless guy and you're the AOL guy. So yeah, so yeah, when I first came out to Silicon Valley, you know, we I we got into a I was building a K12 education startup at the time. And this is back during the uh the days where Y Cominator, they only gave you like 20 grand. Um and and so there was this uh offshoot of Imagine or of Y Combinator called Imagine K12. It was uh Jeff Rston who I think he was CEO of YC a couple of years back but and Imagine K12 merged into Y Combinator a couple years after Rob went through it. But hey, 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 London here. So let let's like rent out office space to you know to to uh you know to to teenagers basically. And um and so I was there and and we we ended up running out of you know money like 20 20 grand doesn't go very far in the valley. So, I think 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 O office a couple multiple times a week because we had access cards to get in to get to the investor's offices and I realized I was like, you know, like they have like couches here and uh they have you 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 I was like, you know, I don't know. I mean, maybe maybe if I 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 um over on Page Mill and Al Camino in Palo Alto. Um and then uh you know I got away with it for a while just because you know the the the the uh guards you know the security guards you know they they worked you know 12 hour shifts and so the the guys that when I was there at night and I was coding like all day every day basically. So the the the guys at night just were like, "Ding, this guy works really hard." You know, and and then in the morning they would be like, "Wow, this guy this guy's working really hard, right?" So I became friends with some of them and 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 in uh one of the it was just like started getting out of control. So I think they started cracking down. Then one morning at like 4 in the morning um guard came in and and threw me out. And uh I'm from Chicago. I don't know anyone at that point. And I'm like I know no one in the Bay Area. So I went to a Starbucks which was out open. I just like I slept on the table outside of the thing and then I think I I hit up one of the other entrepreneurs that was in the program. I was like you have a couch like I I think I kind of need it at this point. Yeah. The Prescott Windan is this like you know worldwide store but I lived on a dollar a day. That was the crazy thing. My burn rate was a dollar a day um at at that time. And what did you use that dollar for? Uh that this is back when McDonald's had the dollar menu literally. So it was like uh you know I would you know occasionally would go and you know get a cheeseburger or whatever. Um and uh 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 make time to share it with us. It's always good to just have the perspective of, you know, you should you should start companies if to keep the mindset that you're have you're doing it to have fun, right? And so stoked to see where this goes one way or the other. It's going to be it's going to be interesting. Eric, final questions. Where can folks find a line if they want to reach out, maybe follow up on some stuff you shared, and how can listeners be useful to you? Yeah, totally. I mean, yeah. So, uh, bolt.news the website. Um, over on Twitter, uh, I'm, uh, Eric Simons40, uh, on Twitter, and I think our our Twitter account is bolt.new, not with a period. It's like bt ne um, and, um, yeah, I mean, I'm very curious to hear, you know, I'm curious to hear what folks think. Like I mean this is again like we're we are learning so much um 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 and it's been that way ever since. And so I I love hearing from folks on 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're where we need to go and fix things. So my email address is uh ericstackblitz.com. That's er with C. So, I'd love love to hear anyone from anyone whether it's a DM on Twitter or uh 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. 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Eric Simons · StackBlitz（Bolt.new）创始人兼 CEO
深入 Bolt：从濒死到史上增长最快的产品之一
→ 在 AI 访谈库中阅读（可切换中英、记录进度）复盘 StackBlitz 险些关门后靠 Bolt 五个月从零冲到约 4000 万美元 ARR、百万月活的全过程，团队只有 15-20 人。看点：Claude 3.5 Sonnet 是让 AI 生成代码达到'生产可用'的临界点，叠加七年打磨的浏览器内操作系统 WebContainer，才真正引爆了 text-to-app 市场。