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 two months, we went from zero to 20 million of ARR.
And we've already crossed 30 million of ARR with the current rate we're on.
Our forecast for the year is we want to get to 100 million of ARR.
This is just a non -stop wild shit.
How is this possible?
What has allowed you to grow this much, this fast, with such a small team?
Most importantly, it's been the people.
It's rare to find startups where you have kind of the core group of five, six, seven people that have been there for five years plus.
You basically were building a tech first and then looking for a problem to solve later, which is often what people tell you not to do.
I think that's the hard thing about being an entrepreneur.
They're here at the time where you have to make judgment calls that are not going to be the consensus view.
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 work before that.
It was kind of like you have both this overnight success seven years in the making.
Today, my guest is Eric Simons.
Eric is co -founder and CEO of StackBlitz, which makes a product called Bolt, which is currently neck and neck with Cursor for being the fastest -growing product in history.
They are currently the number one most popular web AI code app with over 3 million registered users.
Two months after launching last October they hit 20 million ARR.
At the time of this recording they're approaching 40 million ARR.
The story of Bolt is wild.
They actually started the company seven years ago and were about to run out of money and shut down.
But they realized the tech that they've been building for the past seven years called Web Container was perfectly suited for building AI product in the browser.
So they launched the product with a tweet.
And as Eric describes it, It was an overnight success seven years in the making.
If you'd like to better understand the cutting edge of AI coding apps and where things are going with AI and product building, this episode is a must listen.
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.
Also, if you become a yearly subscriber of my newsletter you now get a year free of So you can have Proplexity Pro, Notion, Linear, Grinnola, and Superhuman, check it out at Lenny's newsletter .com.
With that, I bring you Eric Simons.
This episode is brought to you by EPPO.
EPPO is a next -generation A -B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams.
Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp and DraftKings rely on EPPO to power their experiments.
projections. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features.
And EPPO helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous, deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does.
When I was at Airbnb, one of the things I loved most was our experimentation platform, where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own.
EPPO does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shape weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out -of -the -box reporting that helps you avoid annoying, prolonged analytic cycles.
Epo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the AB testing flywheel.
Epo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing.
Check out Epo at GetEpo .com slash Lenny and 10X your experiment velocity.
That's geteppo .com slash Lenny.
This episode is brought to you by the Fundrise flagship fund.
Full disclosure, real estate investing is boring.
Prediction markets are exciting, meme coins are a thrill ride, even the stock market can swing wildly on headline.
Hello Deepseek. But with real estate investing, there's no drama, or adrenaline, or excuses to refresh your portfolio every few minutes.
Just bland and boring stuff like diversification and dividends.
So you won't be surprised to learn that the FunRise flagship real estate fund is a complete snoozefest.
The fund holds 1 .1 billion dollars worth of institutional caliber real estate managed by a team of pros focused on steadily growing your net -worth for decades to come.
See, boring. That's the point.
You can start investing in minutes and with as little as $10 by visiting fundrise .com slash Lenny.
Carefully consider the investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses of the Fundrise flagship fund before investing.
Find this information and more in the fund's prospectus at fundrise .com slash flagship.
This is a paid ad. Eric, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.
Thank you for having me.
Yeah, I'm stoked to be here.
For folks that are not super familiar with Bolt, what is Bolt?
It's really simple.
You go there, there's a text box and you tell it what you want to build, whether it's a WAD or a mobile app.
And so it's one of these text to app building tools that become pretty popular over the past few months here.
And it's not just building a static site or something like that, but you could actually build full stack real software with databases and hosting and et cetera, just from prompting.
And in a ridiculously short period of time, it's not that you're spending hours and hours or days putting this together, you can get results like a minute.
Let's just share some numbers about the scale of what you're building.
The rate you're growing is absurd, you're kind of in this cohort of companies that are just growing at rates that we've never seen in the history of startups.
and you guys are at the edge of that.
Share some numbers about how things went when you launched and where they're at today.
Yeah, I mean when we launched I mean we… I mean the company was on the verge of going under when we launched Bolt, like our company Stackplants.
We've been around for seven years building web -based development environment stuff.
And so when we launched we were like this would be amazing if this added like 100K of ARR over the next couple of months, you know?
And what ended up happening is, in the first two months, we went from zero to 20 million of ARR.
And I think around like month four or four and a half or something like that at this point, and we've already crossed 30 million of ARR and we're on a verge across in 40.
Like by the time this comes out, it appears that we're gonna be at 40 million ARR.
So it's just like 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, We've added three million registered users just in the past few months here.
And monthly active users is around a million, I think, at this point per month.
So it's just, I mean, I've never seen anything, I've been doing startups for like 15 years.
I've never seen anything like this.
Everyone I've talked to, our investors, et cetera, there's not a lot of corollaries kind of what's going on here, you know.
And it's kind of extraordinary.
Cause I mean, like we'd, you know, our company wasn't doing AI stuff six months ago.
We had no AI products and just out of nowhere, we, you know, from almost death of the company to being the number one, by traffic, revenue, etc. Like, you know, AI code gen app that's on your web based in the world.
Like I think the only other like startup ahead of us is for co - Dom just in general be like cursor.
The option revenue at this point.
And so it's, yeah, it's been, it's been a heck of a ride.
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 hundred thousand customers and we got our support teams, like three people in our, so we're trying to scale as fast as we can.
So it was just kind of mind boggling just the, the scale of the.
that the demand and how we've had to, you know, turn things around to match the demand as best as we can.
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 week rise, I guess that's the current track rate that we're seeing for the site, yeah.
I think every guys have the fastest growing startup in history.
I mean, it, I think it depends on probably where you peg the number, right?
Yeah. Yeah. We're here to just like build great products.
Right. And, and just, you know, push the limits of like, what's possible with the technology.
And, you know, and, and I think that that, you know, we do our jobs.
Well, you know, it's kind of crazy things can happen.
But I mean, the current, And the current track rate we have, we're gonna be exceeding the forecast for Q1 with the current rate we're on.
And our forecast for the year is we want to get to a hundred million of ARR.
That would either be on par with CURSAOR or ahead of him or something like that.
And I think there's gonna be more things like this too.
I don't think that like, it's just that there's something really, I think a lot of people are in disbelief about it too, We were like, this is okay.
And this is from when we got to four million of ARR or five million in ARR in the first month, I would talk with people and they're like, okay, yeah, but like that could go to zero, right?
And then I went to 20, then I could go to zero and it ended.
But now we're closing on 40.
And so I just, and so from my view, I was also very skeptical as this.
Like I've never seen anything grow like this, right?
And so part of me, I was just, I was kind of for like a month, I was kind of waking up waiting for the day where it just was like, okay, so 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 you see this happening with cursor, you see this happening with a lot of these other AI startups.
And I, the value proposition is real like, the free market is filled is filled with rational actors, people are coming to these tools, because it is solving problems, they're, they're able to do way more for for way less cost than it would otherwise.
And so and that's why I said I think we're gonna see more of this, whether it's encoding or get other verticals or whatever, you know, in a sense, it's almost like then maybe the maybe the new normal, right for this AI just continues to get better.
But anyways, let's get to a demo of Bolt.
So people can actually see what this looks like in action.
And as you go through it, if you can even point out stuff that is different from other products in space, say, lovable of a zero replant that other folks have heard about.
That'd be useful. Awesome, cool.
Yeah, so this is bowl if you should go to bowl at new things that I think are really interesting about bowl.
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.
And there I think that the biggest difference between bowl and the other stuff out there, it's actually subtle.
It's not like something you'd necessarily they see in the UI.
But it's how fast it is, and how reliable it is.
And this is because of how we're actually doing the compute, because what's going on here is like, when you type into whether it's built 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 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 support to get it on, you know, and get it on stock and ready, right?
With Boll, we've like in 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 team and it's insanely fast and it's insanely reliable, right?
So if I wanna like just as a quick example of this, say, like make a clone, you know, of Spotify, right?
And just hit enter.
This thing's already getting to work.
And already on the right here, this is a full dev environment.
like this is an actual operating system running inside of my browser and I can, you know, run commands on it, etcetera.
And really, this is like what you're seeing down here, this terminal and kind of what's backing it?
This is what took us really like five, six, seven years to build and make so reliable 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 bi -directional communication with this operating system is writing code, it's running the Dev server for this thing, it's gonna go on and spin this up.
You can see how fast this is like you matter of 60 seconds, I said make me a Spotify clone, and now we have one, right.
And it looks pretty darn good.
That looks really good.
And so that's, and that's why the, you know, the other aspects around bold is like, this technology we made for the operating system side, the guys that have been working with us, you know, 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 BOL, we had just an incredible amount of in -house expertise on how to actually merge these two different technology sets to have this really reliable experience that produces really beautiful, really functional stuff.
That's based on what's really cool about the BOLT experience.
The other thing is a lot of these products, you can make something, but often you want to actually have a URL where you can share this.
Maybe even attach a domain to it or whatever have you.
With Bolt, we actually have built -in integrations with production -grade hosting providers like Netlify and for databases with Superbase.
So if I go and just click the deploy button here, this is actually going to run a production build of this project we made here.
Again, this is doing this entirely inside my browser.
So it doesn't cost us anything to do this.
So again, you can do this for free, right?
And it has gone ahead and deployed this on a real URL on Netlify.
This is live. I can share this with anyone.
And if I want to have like, you know, buy the domain SpotifyClone .com and pointed at this, I can click this link here, then I kick me in in Netlify and attach this to my account, buy domain pointed that thing.
And then from there on out, whenever I'm prompting Bolt to make changes to this application and hit deploy, that goes live on my public website dot.
So it's just, this is like the simplest way to build a web app that's ever existed, you know?
That's kind of one of the key realizations I had a couple of weeks into the thing.
I was seeing people use this for like personal use cases, like medical donation sites or weddings or whatever.
And I was like, don't see people know that Wix for Squarespace exists, should I tell them, you know?
And then it hit me, those things are so complicated to use.
I don't know if you've ever seen just the UI of these things, but they're crazy complicated.
And that's just for building a static website.
There's no way you could actually build a functional app.
And that's like with Bolt, if we were sitting here for another 30 minutes, we would have streaming, you'd be able to make playlists of different MP3 files or whatever.
You can just keep prompting this thing to keep adding functionality.
It's that kind of, I think it's sort of the cool core experience of Bold here.
I can show you something cool that we just launched.
If that would be of interest so it's like Web Apps, right?
It's like Web Apps are amazing, but often you want to have like a native app, you know, and it's hard to build Web Apps.
It's even harder to build native apps that can actually that you can then go put in the app store, right?
And so we partnered up with a company called Expo, and their entire business is making basically react -native tooling and this ecosystem that makes it super easy to build beautiful apps and actually get them in the app store.
And so I'm 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 yeah, let's make another Spotify clone that's an actual native mobile app.
Let's say make a Spotify clone, go ahead and hit Enter.
And what this thing's gonna do is actually, again, spin up the operating system here where it's gonna boot up the Expo tool chain and actually go and make a mobile app for us.
And what's cool about this is we can actually preview it just in the browser here.
But once this thing's done and it boots up, it's gonna show a QR code, we're gonna be able to scan it.
And in real time actually basically have like a test flight of this native application that we can try it on our phones.
And as we keep prompting, you'll see it making changes and stuff, right?
it's the first time, you don't have to be technical to make production grade web, full stack web and mobile apps.
At this point I've done nothing that requires developer knowledge to do any of this stuff.
I think that's what a lot of people are really excited about with this.
And a majority of our audience are people that are not developers, they're easiest.
They're PMs, they're designers, they're entrepreneurs, because these are people there that have always been great at building products.
And previously the only way they could get their ideas into coded software was through a developer's fingertips.
And now they can deal with their own through prone thing.
So you can see here, we've got this little QR code, I'm going to scan the thing.
I'm gonna do it too by the way love that you had just enough things to say until a finish that was Just as I flanned you know But so on my screen sits it's booting up it's it's bundling the the JavaScript of this thing I think beta we just launched this last week by the way So if you can't see on my screen here, I I actually have this spotify looking app, right?
Wow. That looks like exactly like spot.
It looks exactly like spot.
It looks like floating points, right?
It looks like floating points.
We're gonna be sued right now, so let's be, let's be.
Because you're doing too good a job with this.
No, that's amazing.
So it's pretty cool, right?
I mean, and so what's cool is that as you keep prompting on your device, it'll just keep reloading.
Like without you having to 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 feeling it.
Like, and putting it through its paces into 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 going to spend a lot of time on that.
Okay. This is an incredible, like this whole episode so far, as you just blowing my mind, imagine this term's mine just over and over and over.
I don't even know where to go with all this sometimes.
You made a really important point that you worked on this for seven years before you launched Bolt.
A lot of people see these stats zero to 40 million IRR in like five ish months.
And they sometimes don't see that there's also years and years of other of work before that.
And the reason that you guys have been so successful is all the work you did that allowed that build this web container technology it sounds like, is there anything there that's worth sharing.
You think it would just that part of the journey.
I know we'll go through like the origin at all where both came from, but I guess just that web container component specifically, that feels like a huge deal.
A hundred percent is, yeah.
And I would say this is surprisingly to me.
It's like still one of the contrarian viewpoints of our company.
like, you know, despite, despite, um, because over the years it was like, when we first, this is the, that the web container was the back that we made the company on, just to be clear, like Stackpills was like a deep tech browser based deep technology player on can we make a, you know, a web assembly based operating system that can like boot in the browser and like a hundred milliseconds and like run full onto the tool channel.
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 in Chicago put our code together at thirteen and build stuff ever since and we came out to the valley in 2012 and we just had the good fortune of bumping into dylan field and evan wallace when they were building figla in the early days and that was um i don't think a lot of people are like no that like figla was was also a browser based deep technology play that their first pitch for Figma,
they didn't have a design tool, their first pitch was this 3D ball dropping into water inside of a browser town.
And the pitch basically was, browsers have this new capability called WebGL and the predecessor to WebAssembly.
And with these things, for the first time, that you could actually create a graphics rendering engine that you could then build a design tool on top of.
but you're gonna have to write that rendering engine from scratch because nothing exists that can just compile into WebGL or whatever.
If you want the performance you need, et cetera.
It's gonna take us years to do, but if we do it, we think this will change everything for design.
And obviously we know how that story has panned out now.
And back in 2017, 2016, 2017, Albert, my co -founder and I saw the same sort of story you begin to play out for web development in like development environments.
And specifically, there is some stuff that landed in browsers like WebAssembly, shared memory, service recently, these different APIs.
And we were like, oh wow, like it should be possible theoretically, like you write an operating system that in WebAssembly that could, you know, run Node .js and MPM 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 pain for beginners.
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 you being onboarding to run that stuff on your computer and set up your environment, right?
And we're like we could just have that be something you click a link and it just boots in your browser that'd be huge.
It's also, if you look at the other productivity apps that have really worked on the web, they've all had this compute model, right?
Figma, when you open a Figma document, there's not like some cloud VM that gets spun up for you to render the documents you're dragging things around.
It's using your CPU and your memory to do the work.
Same thing with Google Docs, right?
That's the only model that's ever scaled to a billion users.
And so when you look at cloud IDEs, like cloud nine was the first one back in 2009 or so, the way these have always worked is that your browser's basically doing nothing when you go to them.
It's every user that gets conducted, there has to be a cloud VM that gets spun up for them.
And then your browser's just kind of like taking your keystrokes, sending it to the server, and then sending back the results.
And that's how all these other AI texts, two app tools work, they're all using cloud VMs. And the problem is, on a small scale, it can work.
But as you scale it up, I mean, there's not even 100 million VMs to rent on the planet, but there are like a billion devices that you can run this stuff on.
Because that's kind of what we've seen with Bulb, where, you know, it's if you want to have build a product that's going to be able to scale to that side, you have to kind of look at all factors and go, we have to build, make sure the technology provides the best experience, zero latency, transient cost, so there's a permissive free tier, right?
Because the other problem with the service, if you end up, if you have a free tier, people are mining Bitcoin on it.
They're DDoS and people using your servers, right?
So now you have to nerf these things and roll them back.
But if it's all done on the end device, doesn't matter.
So WebController was the key piece and what we struggled with, it took us like four or five years or something to build WebController.
What we struggled with for the years after that was just how to build a product around it.
That like that, because developers loved it but they weren't using it in ways that they would pay money for, you know, And as much as the nerd side of me wished that that would be enough, there's like a building cool technology was not, it's like it's not like, we're here to build a venture scale company.
And, so that, that was kind of why we were high at the end of the journey.
Where it was like, you know, we're taking shots on goal and we, you know, at some point we just got a connected bat, right?
There's a lot of really interesting lessons from this journey that I think are counterintuitive.
One is, you basically were building a tech first, and then looking for a problem to solve later, which is often what people tell you not to do.
And it worked out in this case.
The other interesting takeaway here is it feels like AJ 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 maybe let's just work there for a while and see if something comes up.
And then I 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, fortunately my co -founder I had, we had built a lot of unsuccessful stars of criticism that you would spend most of the 20 times like churning through ideas on things.
And so we, you know, what we had conviction on was like, this is, this seems like a technology that will be important.
It seems like the web is the most ubiquitous.
With like kind of that the pitch or the theory at our, I was like, the web is the most ubiquitous platform in the world.
Yet it has note you can't use the web to like build the web, right?
Like every other platform, Mac has, you know, Xcode, Windows has Visual Studio, the web had nothing, and we were like, at a minimum, Google should probably buy this thing from us.
It seems like that they should probably be part of Chrome at a minimum, right?
And 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 just seemed really compelling.
And but when you do that sort of risky, deep technology play, it, yeah, you need to, and we were very good about this.
Like the previous company, Albert and I did, we bootstrapped it all the way through to acquisition.
So we understood, and we were living hand to mouth, to bootstrap that thing.
So we understood 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 StackBlitz.
You know, like we didn't raise money for the first two or three years of the company's life.
We were bootstrapping it.
We did raise money.
We barely spent it, you know, largely because it was like we need to just take a lot of smart bats and it doesn't make sense.
And I'd, you know, I would say generally like until you see pull, like, you know, just people pulling the product out of your hands, 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 a, you know, for half?
Like everything you buy, like just like keep the brewery as low as possible.
Cause you need as many shots on goal as you can possibly get, cause you have no idea.
And I think just generally, for startups, that's the right way, in my view, to approach it.
Unless we're seeing again immediate demand in polar or whatever.
I think that'd be kind of like maybe the extra context that's out on top is I think that we ended up doing a good job of being extremely conservative during a time in which during 2022, 2020, and 2021, which were times where exuberance and growing headcount was KPIs of companies, and we're things that were being with a lot of emotional force of like, hey, you guys ought to be doing this.
And I'm glad that we didn't heed the advice because if we tripled the company and kicked up the brewery, there would be no bowl.
We would go out of business a lot of time ago.
Right? So, I think that's the hard thing about being an entrepreneur, I think, is you kind of have to prepare at the time where you have to make judgment calls that are not going to be the consensus view.
And maybe years later, it'll become the consensus view, but you got to have like, confidence in your convictions on how to best play the hand, you know?
So - live. Dalton came on the podcast.
He's a partner. I see once.
And he just had this phrase, just don't die.
And it's exactly what you guys did.
Seven years of just trying it until something worked.
And I love that you actually were planning to shut down the company.
Right before you launched Bolt and I know you launched it with just like a tweet, right?
That was the last moment.
Yep. Yeah. Maybe talk about that moment of just after launch signs that okay, this is working.
Something's different.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So day one, it was like, there's a great reception select the tweet.
You know, we like, wow, this is like, you know, one of the biggest things, you know, I love a one day reception we've ever seen.
And I think on the first day, you know, I think we added like 60k of Arr or something, which was like, I mean, creative yeah, again, we were at 600.
So we added like 10%.
You know, and I remember our DevOps engineer, like, here's the one you would flag and he's like, guys, we have 60k today, like, this is crazy.
But like, this is launch day, like, it's the, the, the, there's, there's the TechCrunch peak of initiation or you know the classic startup.
Truffle Sorrow. Yeah.
I was like, listen.
Yeah, I'm trying to temper enthusiasm for the team.
I'm like, this is great.
Got a lot of work to do, da da da da.
And the next day, we added 80K, or whatever it was, right?
And it just kind of kept going.
And all the while, like, did the product we put out, we built the thing in 90 days.
We built BOLD. So, there's a lot of things that were missing in the product, basic stuff, basic stuff.
which, again, we cut the right corners on the thing to get it online, but we had this growing influx of people using it going, how is there not a mobile responsive view?
How are chat messages not...
We got the 20 million of ARR without a mobile responsive view by the way.
Just throwing that out there.
It was like the iPhone not having copy and paste until iPhone 5 or whatever, that was out for us.
So it was like, no mo, you'd looked at it on mobile.
It was terrible, right.
But there's like stuff like that.
So we had to just like, and there were a small team.
And so we're completely unprepared for just the growing traffic.
And you know, there's a whole bond.
I mean, the list of problems that were happening every single day was nuts.
I mean, like, to start, we had never had a plan on Staccas .com, you know, for more than $9.
like we had one price, nine bucks, right?
And so we launched Build.
We're like, again, we don't think they will think hopefully people like this, but you know, nine bucks doesn't get you a lot of inference.
And so people burn through nine bucks in like 48 hours, you know, and they're like, I want to buy more.
How do I buy more? Why won't you take my money?
So it's like that within the week, we just completely new pricing plans we could upgrade, which ended up has kinda now become this, the standard all the other guys in the space have copied this, where prior to bulk going online, co -pilot, all these previous AI things, everyone wanted this Netflix model where there's one price, it's like all you can eat or whatever.
And for us, if you do that, you want the inference costs to be low because you're expecting people to use it a lot, right?
And so you can't do these agentic experience things.
So it would be too expensive.
And what we ended up stumbling into is that, Okay, actually, people are willing to pay more.
People want to pay for more inferences because we've crossed this threshold where you can get a very tangible ROI.
You know that this is providing a tremendous amount of value to you, right?
Anyway, so that was one thing, and the servers were just melting.
Anthropic ran out of GPUs for us.
Dario emailed me. He was like, listen.
We just don't have anything more to give you at the time.
So we're like, how do we deal with...
it was just bananas for weeks.
It felt like in 300 when they're surrounded by 10 ,000 people.
And our team is just doing everything.
It's just 15, 20 people just doing everything.
My chief of staff and I were doing customer support 95 % of the day.
Anyway, so yeah, it was a crazy, wild time.
It still is. We've had a little bit more time to grow into this.
And usually, I mean, as a company to grow into like even 20 million ARR, you get a year, at least or something, you know, it's kind of staff up.
Often a fun decades.
Yeah. You know, so it's, you know, that was, it was hard as we go to people and kind of be like, what do we do?
And the playbooks we get back are like, take six months, or a year or something.
And it's like, this isn't going to work, you know?
And which is funny, this is what it's all about, right?
mean this is this is you know it's it at least remain this is that level of intensity is inside it's it's it's challenging fun challenges you know wow okay this is just a non -stop wild wild shit so you mentioned that your team was about 20 people through all this you guys are growing at this insane rate.
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 the Spartans is a big part of it.
Just what what does it allow you to to do this?
Yeah, yeah, I think a lot of it me a lot of again.
I mean, if you kind of look at where a lot of the other folks in the like the code Gen your text app space have really been struggling.
a lot of it has been scaling their servers and stuff, right?
Because and it was kind of like, both this overnight success seven years in the making, like all of this stuff, like there's no way if you free wanted year two, there's no way we would not be at the growth and on DAUs and revenue or whatever, there's just no way.
And so a lot of it is the technology we made and most importantly it's been the people like the people, Like, they, you know, it's rare to find startups where you have kind of the core group of five, six, seven people, you know, that have been there for five years plus, right?
Like that's a pretty rare thing to see.
Like in Silicon Valley, it is usually folks are kind of at a job for, you know, startup for kind of a year or two.
They're gonna go to another one.
You know what I mean?
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 Bootstrap in the previous company like just having less people and more context per hide.
That's just been how we do it and we feel very strongly about it.
And the reason for that is, one, that you can have high levels of trust with anyone you're talking to because you know that they have a lot of contacts.
It's not like this person's completely in the dark in some corner of the company.
The second thing, everyone has agency to actually get stuff done front to back, right?
And there's no political community to get stuff approved by, there's no… So when you look at what happened with Bolt, we had engineers that were front to back, we're on a call with someone running into an issue, going and fixing it, cooking up the UI on the spot and landing this thing, like without involving anyone else on the team, right.
And, you know, that, so I think it was the culmination of just high trust and, you know, people like, we all just have enjoyed working together in the past, so that's why that's the only reason anyone would ever stay, right, in a company for that long or whatever.
And so those sorts of stressful situations I think can, are make or break, right.
like those are make or break for any team.
And so that I think that what's happened is really, it is a direct reflection of the strength and the bonds of the people that are making this thing and supporting the thing.
Yeah, I think that's such an 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, that for us and even if the folks were hiring us, hiring people that don't care about the titles and they don't care about people, of course, it's before people have a career trajectory and that sort of thing.
But it's like they really are motivated by just working on cool things and are checking their ego at the door.
And they're there to like collectively build something great not just just kind of following, you know, be the the the brilliant jerk, right.
You know, most of the people that we've hired have been, you know, but in Europe and you were fully remote company.
My co -founder and I are in the Bay Area.
It's funny, back in 2018, we rented an office in the south and we were commuting into it because we thought we'd hire people here and year into it, we were like, what are we doing?
You never come into an office for 10 people.
The people working for us are in Europe or across the US.
We have one or two other people we've hired that are in the Bay Area at this point.
but I think I think we kind of look for folks that are intrinsically just trying to build great stuff and are interested.
Then the first people that we hired, the reason we found them is that they were users of stock puts.
A lot of people that the majority people we hired at the company have been people that actually came from our community, basically.
That's what we want to hire people.
We put on a tweet and say, hey, we're hiring an engineer, And then we get dms or whatever, right?
But yeah, those are the general kind of qualities we look for though.
I'm excited to chat with Christina Gilbert, the founder of OneSchema, one of our long time podcast sponsors.
Hi, Christina. Yes, thank you for having me on, Lenny.
What is the latest with OneSchema?
I know you now work with some of my favorite companies like RAMP, Vanta Scale and Watershed.
I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from especially tricky systems like ERPs?
Yes. So, we just launched one scheme of file feeds, which allows you to build an integration with any system in 15 minutes as long as you can export a CSV to an SFTP folder.
We see our customers all the time getting stuck with hacks and workarounds.
And the product teams that we work with don't have to turn down prospects because their systems are too hard to integrate with.
We allow our customers to offer thousands of integrations without involving their engineering team at all.
I can tell you that if my team had to build integrations like this, how nice would it be to be able to take this off my roadmap and instead use something like 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 have laser focus on integration reliability to help teams end all those distractions that come up with integrations.
We have a built -in validation layer that stops any bad data from entering your system and 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 one schema dot co that's one schema dot co I want to ask a couple more questions about BOLD 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 barraged with as you described, after you launched Like you're just barrage of the request.
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's actually built?
There's a lot of things that you just don't even know are possible to do, right.
And so people aren't going to be like necessarily like explicitly asking for them.
And so there's been kind of a couple of these where we, you know, kind of use our gut instinct dumb like, hey, this, this, you know, it's asking this like in meaningful numbers, at least, but we think this is going to be a big deal.
Best example was last week with native mobile support, like that's the you know, by reception, like the biggest thing we've ever launched.
And it was something that even internally at the company, you know, some folks like this, you know, I don't know, people are like young about these other things, right?
And then it's in is it's always this balance of like, how much are we just triaging various things versus like new capabilities.
But it was like, this strikes me as an important one where we put some chips into the middle of the table on and the OK dead right.
It's just this mind blowing experience.
And now there's just thousands of mobile apps being created a day that weren't before.
And how does that change things?
I mean, that's, now there's small businesses that are, they would've never made an iPhone app before or made no sense?
It's super expensive.
Like, now that's not the case.
I mean, like, so you said, there's kind of these things where it's like, Hey, we should go and you know, take bets here, but it's, there's kind of this, it's, I think the best analogy should 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's some amount of their feedback from the customers.
Right? And like, this thing didn't taste good.
And then there's like, Hey, we've been kind of cooking something interesting and this this tastes, this yeah, I don't know this I think you're going to like this, you know, I think this is a killer dish.
And so you kind of have to balance those things.
And I think it's actually largely a function of just you know, years of experience doing a I think I if you kind of rerun like that 10 years ago, I would have had a really no I would have had the just the years of getting my butt kicked by the free market.
I had kind of cultivated a onto this stuff you know you kind of have to build your own gun and stick for it I guess is the best way putting 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 because 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're just kind of front to back.
A Zoom? Yep, yeah, every day at 8 a .m.
Pacific we're on a Zoom for like every day the whole company.
Pretty much the entire company.
Wow, for an hour, okay.
Yeah, and we just go over everything.
And I think we're gonna probably start, as the team's kind of growing, we're gonna start splintering off into different syncs or whatever, but the thing about just having everyone in the same room every day is that a lot of people complain that it's, uh, you know, uh, this is on Twitter, you'll see people say, Oh, like it's the most expensive use everyone's time, right?
But it's like, Yep.
But like there's 0 % fidelity loss in that like everything is everything every day is, is being audited front to back and being discussed front to back.
Um, and it's when you're in these times of just extreme growth, right.
It's, it's, you, you, you want as close to 0 % loss on communications.
And so that's how we've been doing, especially since Bolt went online and I think it was like the week after Bolt went online, until we're through this or whatever, we're all getting on a phone call every day and we're front to back doing this.
But again, another reason why more context in less heads, every person at the company is aware of everything else going on at the company.
So, people can independently be making decisions that are generally by default, more often correct than not, you know?
That is so interesting.
I've never heard that before, especially for a company that is like yours.
That is super interesting that that's what you do.
I don't think we're going to do that forever.
I think that's a really cool thing to note, that that works and has worked for you.
where do you, so say you talk about stuff, then where do you put stuff, where do you put your roadmap, where do you plan just like what tools are kind of in the stack of the company's toolset?
Yeah, on the engineering side, we use linear like heavily on kind of product, road mapping, I think we're using notion and kind of making like PRD type stuff in notion.
You know, and then we use Figma for like design.
And we actually, we use Bolt for a lot of design and prototyping at this point, as you can imagine.
I think the tooling is nothing crazy.
There's nothing crazy sophisticated.
Like, I think we're investing a lot more.
And especially as we start splintering people out of being on the same call every day.
So 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 work and evolve.
I love that you guys use PRD.
I love that you even use that term.
There's a lot of talk of just like, oh, we got Bald now, we got all these tools.
We don't need PRDs, we're just gonna create a prototype immediately, that's it.
Talk about just like, why you still find that useful and just what you put into your PRD, whatever that is for you.
Unless there's like something that's very sophisticated that we're working on, we tend to keep them pretty light.
I like to just have the minimal amount of context possible that just ensures everyone's on the same page and that the key outcomes for whatever feature that we're working on are gonna be pressing what we get.
You know, because the things that when these things when these documents get really beefy, if you look at it, God, there's so much stuff to decipher, you know, the problem is a lot of people are going to gloss over it, when it gets kicked to development or design or whatever, they're it's just gonna 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 approach to the thing.
And you know, and often it's, it's some of these things are like, here's linked to a bolt.
Here's what it might look like.
Yeah. Like, here's a...
And not just look like here's kind of a working demo of what it will effectively feel like.
Right? And then be.
Cause that just, you know, if a picture is worth, you know, a thousand words, like a live actual demo is worth millions.
Yeah. Like you can feel it.
It's real. And that's what we're seeing like, a lot of the, you know, the businesses that are adopting Bolt.
Now that's the use case that they're using this for is high fidelity prototyping, because it's like now faster to make real prototypes, using bolt and they writing, you know, before, it's too expensive.
Like you did the idea of like, let's prototype the baggie.
They did the engineers code a prototype.
It's like, that would take forever, it would be expensive.
Now it's faster to do this with bold in code and have a real working software products than dragging around frames and figma to actually make a static version of it.
So let's actually talk about that.
Just 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 sales force, Atlassian -style companies that scale.
Just what are some examples of products people have built with Bolt that would surprise people just how far they've gotten.
Yeah, I mean, especially when you're starting Greenfield stuff, I mean, you can use Bolt to build on the Salesforce, it's an example, right?
One of the first people that signed up for Bull was this guy named Paul.
And he's an entrepreneur and doesn't know how to code, built a CRM in three weeks.
It has AI built into it and Stripe for billing, et cetera.
He had gotten a quote from an agency for this, it was going to be 30 grand and take six months.
He had it done in three weeks and then he spent like $300 on Bull for the fact.
So it's like, this is like anything he's making money off of this, like this is his start, all right?
Okay. So he built this and he's selling it, like people are paying to use it.
Yeah. Yeah. And then there are many such cases of this, right?
If you're looking at Greenfield projects 100%, like today with this current state of frontier models, you could absolutely build production grade software, right?
You're not going to get a zero shot, but you're going to spend a couple of days, weeks, whatever.
But the cost reduction there, 30 grand versus $300, it's 99 % cheaper, six months versus three weeks.
I mean, it's like order of magnitude, sort of a fast food delivery on the phone.
And those numbers have helped for the people that we talk to that are building these full -stack apps like people that they go to OPwork, they get a quilt for five grand.
They haven't done within 50 bucks.
It's just nuts on what you're able to do with this thing.
I think on the flip side, a lot of the existing companies, there are very legitimate use cases where things are greenfield spot up.
Good examples like public websites, marketing pages, landing pages, whatever have you, folks are adopting Bolt to just power those instead of using Webflow.
for example, because this is simpler to use than Mupflow and it integrates with the existing design system of the company and et cetera, right.
And the marketers can update it without knowing how to code, you know, whatever.
But then for product development teams, this is, most commonly for, again, existing software businesses.
They're using this to just accelerate the product development process in, and in a way where it's not just a greenfield wholesale here we're building the entire thing in Bolt or whatever, right.
Can Bolt integrate with your existing code base So yeah, we can actually open up repos in bold.
So you can, like, go and use bold on your code base.
And it kind of depends on your setup, right?
Like we do have companies, again, that like have marketing sites of using the SOD or like, you know, their admin panel or whatever.
And I think it's going to be a use case that we see a lot more people orienting towards.
These LLMs are not great, depending on how big your application is, though, right?
But these things are not quite there where if you have something that's a thousand files or something or more, where you're going to be able to have a really reliable, super reliable experience per se within a year, with chat a year from now, I suspect the answer is going to be different.
But so it kind of depends on the size of the app, the scale of the app, and if it's too bag, you're looking at the prototyping, like just just pure acceleration, right of product development.
If it's not, then then you're you can just do it the entire way right from bowl.
So this is useful. So what are the what would you say the major limitations of bowl today, where people should just know Okay, it's not going to get you here yet.
Maybe in the future at will so sounds like you have just like a really large existing code base, probably not the best tool yet.
What else should people know?
I would say that's a probably the mean one, you know, because I think if you have a large existing code base, you're need something like cursor.
And you're going to need to be a developer meaningfully to be editing that stuff.
I think outside of that, there's just like using any other productivity tool like Photoshop or Figma or like a DSLR or whatever.
There's some level of kind of education and just kind of like using the tool and learning how to use it.
That's required to really unlock a lot of the maximum capabilities of the thing.
The people that we see that are most successful with Bold, like outside of developers.
The people we see are most successful are people that are amazing PMs for example, because these are people that understand enough about how the technology works typically.
And their job is to direct developers on how to go and improve the product and go and like look into how to actually spec this thing out in a way that's like executable without, you know, without lossiness in the communication.
And when you think about, okay, how would you best interact with an AI developer agent?
It's basically that, you really want to be good at defining scope and helping it go and debug various things or whatever have you.
So there's a huge overlap of the skill set of just like being a rock star or PM and being really good at using, frankly, any of these text to apps or code gen tools.
I love that you made that point, that's exactly the point I've been trying to make.
I have a newsletter post about this.
Because when all these tools came out, there's so many people saying, okay, PM's are dead, we don't need them anymore.
We can just build things and they'll 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 a 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 PM's think about, so I completely agree.
Basically feels like PM's are and there's a lot of PM's listed this.
So they'll love hearing this.
To me it feels like PM's are the best position role to thrive in this world?
Zero question. I mean, that was like, as bold was growing, and like, we were like, because we were a 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%, 60 % percent of our users are not developers at this point.
And when I started talking to these folks, first it was just like weird or whatever, it was like, well, what's going on here?
But that is what it just kind of clicked.
It's like, Oh, well, this is this is, this is, this is going to change everything.
The entire software world order is going to get re written here because like the way that companies are organized to build software today, totally going to change, right?
Like the idea that again, like PMs are the people that really understand like to the pixel level, like what matters in making a great product experience?
And often they're having to listen, I'm going to, I've been developed for myself.
they have to go and harangue the developer.
Get things to be how they really ought to be to the smallest levels and how this is going to work.
If you fast forward one, two, five years, whatever.
PMs are they're going to be writing, 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 the intellectually challenging tasks that all alarms are not well suited for and still being augmented by alarms to do it, but PMs are going to be able to go in and just make the changes themselves.
And just what blew my mind is that is not priced in to any of these companies out there, and it's not reflected in the org charts of all the software companies in the world right now.
That is going to completely change.
The winners at least, the org charts are going to completely change and how they approach building products and shipping products completely.
You know and it's starting yeah, 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 PM's that also applies to founders like product thinking founders similar all and then I think it's also important to know like if you also have engineering skills and design skills you will be At an advantage like that only helps you But if you're like looking at this triangle of the triad of product engineering PM It feels like the PME skills are the ones that will be most important and valuable.
Although, it would be great if you could also be in code and if you could also design really well.
Absolutely. And to me, it's like the most exciting mix.
I think PMs, designers, and entrepreneurs that are non -technical, that's the most exciting thing to move to just because it's a brand new market that's being unlocked here.
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 gonna change everything that is changing everything so you talk about how org charts are gonna change what are you imagining there is it just like fewer engineers mostly or what is what are the future org charts look like good question and I bet you there's gonna be uh you know there's going to be like some Gardner analysis some day, you know, a year now, or whatever, that's like, here's like, how the best some term is applied
to how the best companies are organizing, you know, but I mean, yeah, I mean, I think, I think that we're gonna, you know, I think that you're going to see developers probably being pulled off of a lot of the generally speaking, pulled off of a lot of, you know, user interface type work, I would imagine, except for the most complicated of those things.
And you're going to see designers and PMs really, really leading the charge of being responsible for crafting those experiences.
And perhaps having a developer attached to be reviewing the code and making sure that the extra, the guiding, the code that they're writing, reviewing those pull requests and et cetera, and I think maybe even the engineers are, like you pointed out, having engineering skills is not going to hurt you.
It's going to make you way more effective.
The leverage that the front engineer is going to have is it is now insane, it's only going to get more so.
I could see there just being fewer front engineers attached to you.
I've seen more product and design folks with one or two engineers or something and really having a larger matching of pods like that.
Something like that strikes me as probably how this is going to start trending towards.
This touches on, we had a researcher from OpenAI on the podcast.
She actually started her career.
She worked at Anthropic first as a front -end engineer and said that once you saw what Clyde could do for front -end engineering, she was like, I need to move to a different function.
And so she moved into research because she saw that role disappearing potentially and that's exactly what you're saying Yeah, so let me ask you this.
I don't know if you have a clear thesis on this yet But say you just had a kid so your kid is kind of 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 may be popular now and be less popular I understand how to leverage these AI tools is key.
Like I wouldn't necessarily, I think maybe getting a basic understanding of like how programming works, you know, et cetera, right is like is great, right.
Just like technical foundations, just understanding how systems work, how exciting works.
Exactly. Right? But it doesn't have to be, like, I think back to like, you know, if Bolt existed, like Albert and I say this to each other all the time, like, you know, since the get -go stack, that we've been building the thing that we wish we had when we were 13.
And a hack for everything we've built since then, and especially with Bolt.
I mean, it's like, I don't know if I would have gone as deep as I did on learning how to code and being an engineer if that had been a rama.
The whole reason we got into it is we had ideas for products and businesses that we wanted to build.
And coding was just like a necessary requirement in order to do that.
And that said, it's like I think people need to follow their intrinsic interest.
The folks are really interested in really getting the nitty -gritty of how computers work and project leaders work in compilers or whatever they go for.
I think it's, I don't know if we're going to really have, maybe we'll see, but to the degree that there's AGI, where it's like we don't have to think about anything ever again.
I don't know. That's always the answer here.
Do we know anything?
Yeah, it's like if we're at that point, I don't know, I'm not sure.
But 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 people are still gonna, there's still going to be places to specialize then really go deep.
But I think 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.
I just think that's generally not a good...
My co -founder and I, we didn't go to college.
My co -founder dropped out of college after a semester or something.
But I didn't go because I was like, we're coding, We were doing contracting at the time, making money.
There's a lot of, I would've been like 100 grand of debt at the end of the thing just for like four years in state tuition at U of I, 120 grand I think at that time.
And lo and behold, there's a huge issue with this, where people are kind of...there is a prevailing thought...societally, going to college in the early 2010s or late 2000s, 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.
And I think that's just going to continue to be the case.
But you have to not deter people from doing it, but it's like you have to go into it living 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?
Like that your answer to your kids gonna be like, don't even, don't even go to college potentially.
Unless they want to, right?
I think an 18, it's a huge ask.
I mean, it's a huge ask, not even at 18, it's like it's 17 because you have to go apply for college.
It's just such a huge, like a six -figure debt commitment to someone who's making zero dollars or negative dollars and that young, it just unless you really have conviction, it's, it's, it costs nothing to go and explore and learn for free online.
I want to come back to the skills that you think are going to be most important.
And let me try to mirror back a few things you said that I very much agree with.
So it feels like if you want to be successful in the world where AI can build things for you more and more, What I'm hearing is get good at figuring out what people need and want, what problems they need solved, get good at articulating it really well to the AI tools.
And there's this talk, you don't need to be a great prompt engineer, you don't need to work on prompting, but it feels like it's more and more important because you tell it something and it goes off and builds the thing and like, if you're clear about it, it'll save you a lot of time.
So it's 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.
It feels like that's still going to be a need because Bolt's not going to go and find, like, you know, I can see that surrounding paid ads and stuff like that, 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 two weeks ago I think we announced this like program called like Bolt Builders and it's basically the genius bar at the Apple store where as folks are building on Bolts that are they're not developers they will they'll run into some some uh you know nook or cranny where the AI just you know cannot figure it out or whatever and I think it's I think it's just going to continue to be the case of time to come that's our position and that's why we spun up this this program and these are humans that These are these are then people that were like certifying and so you
know when in bolt and then you know coming weeks or whatever, I there's gonna be a button where you can just say, hey, connect me with you know, that certifying like expert and you can chat with them live and they'll help you get unstuck and you pay, you know, 50 bucks an hour, whatever it is.
Right. And then you get unjammed in and you keep keep prompting, you know, but again, it's like, I just think the stuff is it just all seems like gravy to me like engineers get to focus on like difficult challenges is not like cookie cutter, let's make another crud app stuff.
They get to like, debugging is challenging and they're in fun, and work on intellectually stimulating tasks and all this stuff that's just copy pasta, over and over all this era rap.
It's just like, let the AI do all that crud, right?
You know? This is a potentially new job, 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 I love that it's like Now, AI first and person second versus person building the thing and then AI, when CoPilot launch, she was just like, cool, here's a little suggestion for this function, and now it's flipped.
Here's everything and then, oh, 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 co -pilot is flipping it.
Totally, yeah. Yeah, and that's what's wild, I think SANA was really the first model that flipped the equation because that was really us and all the cursor and all these other things.
The rapid growth started the second sauna went on one, right?
Like we actually tried building bull like almost exactly a year ago with a kind of the frontier models at the time, spend like a week or two building it.
It just didn't work, like the output to code output was not reliable enough.
It would just, it would constantly just, it would be a broken app or look ugly or whatever.
And then we got a sneak peek of the sauna stuff in May and we're like, oh, okay, like we should take that Project back off the shelf and greenlining because this might be Yeah.
And, and you know, lo and behold, that's exactly what has happened, you know?
But yeah, that's the big deal.
That is kind of under the hood.
Like this is what's going on here is a very critical threat has been passed with LLM's ability to write production grade code and apps that actually look beautiful and actually function well.
It's not perfect, but it would be if there's kind of, this zero to one moment that's happening where it's like, Okay.
So, now, yeah. Now, now we're, now the AI is the first thing and then you're kind of popping developer at every now and then versus the other way around, you know.
I did not know that.
I didn't realize that so much of this was unlocked with it 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's your question.
Zero question. I mean, it's absolutely - Just like the amount of, I don't know, revenue and business and e -commerce, that one model has unlocked is insane.
I didn't realize that.
It is. And in retrospect, you know, for the… I'd mention, like we'd never done any AI products at Stack voice.
It's tempting because it's like when moonshot GBT went online, everyone started kind of adding AI to their products.
We're just like… We just didn't see like a clear place for like really on in value.
Right. I was not super bullish on, a lot of people are like, like, the AGI is going to be here in 2023.
There's all this stuff that was being said, and I was like, I just don't know if I necessarily buy how fast people say this is going to move.
And to a certain degree, that was the correct view.
What I didn't really think about though is if AI, if LLMs are going to get better at a specific vertical, what's you're going to be the the things that it would be.
And if you look at law, for example, you want to make the best outline for looking at cased law.
The problem with that stuff is it's not deterministic.
The judge's ruling is dependent on society's view of things at the time, political stuff, the jury.
There's a ton of things that it's not deterministic.
And so you can't really create a lot of training data that's going to be like super reliable.
And produce really good results.
And you can't just like make up cases and say theoretically the judge would say this.
I mean, it's like, it just doesn't work.
Software is deterministic.
When you write code and you hit run, either runs or it doesn't.
And that's the key insight an anthropic really had.
They just went deep.
And this is what they're doing.
is just reinforcement learning, and basically permuting every type of app you could ever build, and just spinning up tens of thousands of course, whatever to do that.
Just building tons of training data and doing reinforcement learning and making their LLMs the best in the world at building beautiful, reliable applications.
I'm extremely bullish.
I mean, it makes technical cool sense why of anything, LLMs are going to get insanely better at writing code than probably most other types of applications for LLMs, simply because it's something that can be extremely deterministic and permuted thousands and thousands and thousands of times, per second, right?
And so I think the broader trend here is SANA has woken everyone up like Google and open the eye, everyone is now gunning for coding because how big is the market opportunity to rewrite the software world order?
It's trillions of dollars or something, right?
Like the world runs on software, so I think that just kind of the macro, kind of the highest macro view and why we went and raised money for a bowl.
It's like this is, this seems like an extremely clear shot.
You can kind of separate the hype of what people say and blah, blah, blah.
When you break it down, technically, this makes sense.
It makes sense what's going to happen here.
And so, and for us we are just so happy to be well positioned to like go and enable people to like kind of ride this way of the innovation that is here in Adams and he's going to just keep coming and therefore enabled more people to build even crazier amazing software right so that's that's that's our world to you at least of kind of what's going on here at like the Macworld and when did Sun it even come out it's been a while right I think I think they officially they was in June when they officially okay so since June like this this is the worst they 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 launch 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, if this is gonna get crazy.
I agree. Yeah, it's that it's it's been like kind of again, like it's not, there's no blog posts that lay all this out for us.
It's just been kind of this like you just noticed the code was really good basically.
And from there, which is we've been piecing together all this other stuff.
It's been the thrill of a murder mystery of like, what is going on here?
Oh, really? Yeah. Just piece them together, what you've seen on throbic releasing?
Is that what you mean?
What have you been noticing murder mysteries?
And then the impacts of Bulborts where it's like we have people that are not technical use issues.
How are they using it?
Why are they doing this?
Then all the stuff we've talked about in this podcast has been the result of nine months of R &D and seeing the results of it, they go out and what, you know, again, and then digging in, doing another thing, then going, what again?
And then it just keeps happening because there's no charted course for us, you know.
It's like an anthropology, or as if that's the right term of just like watching.
It's like an emergent discovery.
It sounds like versus you have a strategy here.
We're going to do this, where you press on it's a lunge.
This thing will happen.
Yeah. 100%. I think that that's the best way to put it.
It's the best way to put it.
It's exactly that. And so, it's very interesting to just, you know.
To watch him 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.
It's not going to work with your existing code.
It's not going to scale.
It's important to note just what we talked about, this is a model from last June that you're, this is possible on, and everybody's working on the next cutting -edge model that will make this even better and that's going to come real soon.
Okay. Amazing. Okay.
And just have a few more questions to kind of close out this conversation.
One is just what is coming next for Bolt?
What are some of the cool new features that'll be launching before this comes out, maybe right after this comes out and maybe in mid -March?
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So by the time, and you know, I'm going to go back to tell our engineers, like I said this.
So - I have time committed.
Sorry, guys. This is, I found actually being a leaky faucet on, you know, talking on podcasts and stuff is, Our minder is like, how could you tell them?
Like you just have to ship it faster now.
Like you've got to make it real, right?
Or I'll get a eye on it.
No, no. Yeah, but it's, I think for us, it's like, again, we've seen a lot of PM's, designers, entrepreneurs, et cetera, using Bolt.
And so we're really looking at how to a better, you're kind of better fitting with the tools that folks are using to do those things today.
We're like, Bolt's not gonna like replace them or something.
And for, if you're working at a company, how do you integrate this stuff with your existing business, your existing product and code base?
Because that's the question we often get for people is, how do I open my ...
We were talking to one of the fan companies the other day, how do we open our production code base?
And that's 20 years old.
I'm like, you don't.
That's not, none of this stuff.
What you do, this is for rapid product development in your use case.
So the features that we're going to be shipping, I'm pretty stoked about this one.
So we've worked on this for a while and we've partnered up with a company called the Anima to do this, but basically, on any Figma URL, when you're looking at like a design that you've made, if you just put bolt .new in front of the 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 out of the box.
That is genius. Yeah.
It's amazing. It's gonna be nuts.
Yeah, I mean, it's like, it's really fun to use.
Cause, you know, like when your, you know, whether you're a developer, designer or whatever, going and taking that and turning it into an actual coded out.
And the thing is, once it's in the bullet, you can just keep prompting from there, like, yeah, we'll have another page here.
So it's like, you can have like things that where you want pixel perfect design.
You can have it and it'll translate one to one.
Like, you know, it's splitting out the assets like anima's been doing this since 2017, like, you know, Figma to code, they've got the best agent in the world for like, they're the number one Figma plugin, you know, or whatever.
And into nbull, like, it's just gonna just work, like it's just deeply integrated.
bolt that new slash the Figma URL to the design.
Yep, that's all you do is an nbull, we're gonna have also a little figma icon in the chat, they still like mutable itself, you can like click in and paste the URL or whatever.
But yeah, it's like just, but it's like that.
It's like from Figma to Fullstack app in a click literally, that's crazy.
So that was pretty cool.
And then kind of the other one that we're working on is like an integration with Slack.
Cause often you know, when you're talking about Figma's, like Figma Links or whatever at a company, you're in Slack or whatever.
And so you're like having conversations about, hey, you know, we should really add a page to this that does, duh, duh, duh, duh.
And so, we're actually creating a, you know, like a Bolt, like Slack bot, that's 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 add a home page.
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, if you're on that thread or whatever, it'd be like, okay, cool.
So, you kind of want me to like take this Figma URL, which I can convert automatically thanks to the future 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 in some where they kind of kick this thing out, and you're just like, I'll make this thing real quick, you know?
So it's like those two things, I think it's, again, you start thinking about how our company's going to change how their, how they're currently doing product development.
And even they're just like, Hey, well, we need to spin up a marketing site.
Here's the thing with like, Can you do that poll?
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 they're going to be, I think it's going to be well -received, and folks should be stoked about it and hoping, you know, not to work.
Those are awesome features.
It's, I love the Slack piece because when I think about agents there's all talk about agents.
To me, like the simplest way to understand it is just a Slack bot, just the AI can talk to you like they're a person in Slack.
And I love that's exactly what you're doing.
And this is this agentic feature of just like, this engineer now that can go build stuff for you?
Let me actually ask you a question along these lines that I was meaning to ask, but I forgot is just how much your engineering team, how much, what are they using to build Bolt?
I imagine it's a lot of cursor.
Like how much is Bolt at this point involved in building Bolt?
And is there any other tools that you they found useful, find useful bet are worth highlighting?
Yeah, good question.
Yeah, we definitely use cursor.
Our folks use cursor a lot.
We use bolts a lot for the product development process That's like a ton, we're using it.
And when we're doing basically the flow that described or like things that need to be pixel perfect we're writing a Figma for, and then after we're taking that and we're pulling that into Bolt, cause we've got access to the integration today.
So, pull 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 unit, you dot, dot, dot.
Other AI tools that the developers are using, I think those are like the primary ones.
I think we've got a subscription to Claude and like JWT and things like that, but I think for development, it's like Cursor is like the main thing.
Yeah. It's quite a few tools, like there's so many AI tools and it's interesting how few people actually end up using.
It's like Cursor, Claude, JWT, and then maybe another tool like Ult.
Yeah, totally. Okay.
Final -ish question.
Say somebody is opening a bolt for the first time.
What's something that you - Imagine you could sit next to every new user that's just trying both for the first time.
You could whisper a tip in your ear to be successful with Bolt.
What would that tip be?
And this is like, because we have a lot of different types of use.
I'd imagine that you talk about like, PMs or designers.
That's two PMs, that's a good one.
That's a lot of the audience here.
I would say talk to this thing like you do linear ticket or a geo ticket.
That would be my advice is in your order and talk to this, you're talking to one of the developers on your team.
And what that means is be specific on things that matter.
And on things where, also, you can let it be creative.
You can go to and just say, hey, they get prettier.
And it does a good job.
It actually she does a really good job.
And you like, give it just vibes, you know?
And so, I think for like PMs, it's like, you have the skillset, 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, cause these tools are so easy, just go in and it's like tell her thing and then he'll go ahead and website and just like code and boom, done.
And what I'm hearing here is take a little time to craft your ask.
And it may be tempting to just like start, go build me a serum.
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 im 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 would recommend everyone to do whenever they if it's your first time trying bulling you're like, what should I have a do?
And I don't have an idea, tell it to build you a personal website, like there's, it's there's something like magic, like you take your LinkedIn copy and paste your LinkedIn bio and work experience it's just like, select text, copy pasted, I did a website my name is so -and -so, here's my LinkedIn history, my favorite color is blue and I like dogs.
Paste, right? Make a predator.
Yeah, and then, you know what I mean, and then you can hit deploy, and if you don't have a dot com yet, now you can, right?
Like I mean, now you have a real personal...
It's like, I think there's kind of a moment around now where it's like, okay, wow, like this, you know, it's 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've taken you an hour on Wix, if not more.
And that gives you the taste of like, okay, cool.
If I really take the time to think this through and like make a PRD and then kind of put that in piece by piece into this thing, this guy is the limit.
Eric, this has been just insane on so many levels.
I have so much to process I think a lot of listeners do, too.
Maybe as an actual final question, I saw this story about how when you were starting Stack Blitz or maybe even before Stack Blitz, you lived, you like squatted in the AOL office.
Cause you had some badges that still worked.
Maybe just tell that story.
Yeah. Yeah. That was like the thing I was most known for, that happened like 2012 and I was like 19 years old.
So I, it's been a very long time, I think like 33 now or so.
The statute of limitations are expired.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
But yeah, for a while, I actually do something more notable then living at AOL.
This can't be what I'm known for.
For now people are like, oh, wait, you're the stock guy and you're the earwold guy.
So yeah, when I first came out to Silicon Valley, we got into building a K -12 education startup at the time.
And this is back during the days where YCommenator, they only gave you like 20 grand.
And so there was this offshoot of YCommenator called Imagine K -12 is Jeff Ralston who I think he was CEO of YC, a couple of years back.
And then Imagine K -12 merged into Y Combinator a couple of years after I went through it.
But anyway, they had an office space in AOL.
Like at the time AOL was trying to reinvigorate the company.
And okay, we should get young startup blood in here so let's rent out office space to teenagers basically.
And so I was there and we ended up running out of money, like 20 grand doesn't go very far in the valley.
So like three or four months in, we're like, Oh, God, we're you know, what do we do?
And I was going to the AOL office a couple of multiple times a week because we had access cards to get into to get to the investors offices.
And I realized I was like, you know, like, they have like couches here.
And I 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 a law figure this out." I'll just live out of here.
That's what I ended up doing for like four or five months.
I was living out of this headquarters over on Page Mill in Pao Alto, and then I got away with it for a while just because the guards, the security guards, they worked 12 -hour shifts.
The guys that I was there at night, I was coding all day, every day, basically.
The guys at NYTRIS were like, this guy works really hard.
Then in the morning they'd be like, wow, this guy is working really hard.
I became friends with some of them.
Then eventually I think there are also a bunch of Stanford students that they think they put bunks in one of the audience was just like, started getting out control.
I think they started cracking down then one morning at four in the morning, guard came in and threw me out.
I from Chicago, I don't know anyone, at that point I'm like, I know no one in in the Bay Area, so I went to a Starbucks, which was not open, I just like, I slept on the table outside of the three.
I think I hit up one of the other entrepreneurs that was in the program.
It was like, do you have a couch?
I think I kinda need it at this point.
Yeah. The Prescott wind event was just 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, at that time, and - What did you use that dollar for?
That is back when McDonald's had the dollar menu.
Literally. So it was like, I would occasionally we'd go and get a cheeseburger or whatever.
And yeah, it was ultimate, ultimate scrappiness.
Like you're technically homeless.
From homeless to one of the fastest growing startups in history.
Erik, 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 my journey.
And I'm thankful that you made time to share it with us.
It's always good to just have the perspective of, you should start companies to keep the mindset that you're doing to have fun, right?
And so, it's stoked to see where this goes, one way or the other, it's gonna be, it's gonna be interesting.
Eric, Final questions, working folks, finding out line if they wanna reach out, maybe follow up on some stuff you shared.
And how can listeners be useful to you?
Yeah, totally. I mean, so bolt .news, the website, over on Twitter, I'm Eric Simons, 40, on Twitter, and I think our Twitter account is bolt .new, not with a period.
It's like B -O -L -T -D -O -T -N -E -W.
I'm very curious to hear.
I'm curious to hear what folks think.
I mean, this is again like we're… We are learning so much from the people that are coming and trying this thing out and giving their feedback.
And within the first week of it going online, we were not the experts, or how to use the tool anywhere.
And it's been that way ever since.
And so I love hearing from folks on what they wanna see next and how this is helping them and where they run into problems, where we need to go and fix things.
So my email address is irk .stackbullets .com, that's Eric with C.
So I'd love to hear anyone from anyone, whether it's a DM on Twitter or an email.
amazing Eric thank you so much for being here awesome thank you so much for having me this a blast bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast calm see you the next episode.
