Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz)

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

Eric Simons is the founder and CEO of StackBlitz, the company behind Bolt—the #1 web-based AI coding agent and one of the fastest-growing products in history. After nearly shutting down, StackBlitz launched Bolt on Twitter and exploded from zero to $40 million ARR and 1 million monthly active users in about five months.What you’ll learn:1. How Bolt reached nearly $40M ARR and 3 million registered users in just five months with a team of only 15 to 20 people2. How Bolt leverages WebContainer technology—a browser-based operating system developed over seven years—to create a dramatically faster, more reliable AI coding experience than competitors3. Why Anthropic’s 3.5 Sonnet model was the critical breakthrough that made AI-generated code production-ready and unlocked the entire text-to-app market4. Why PMs may be better positioned than engineers in the AI era5. How AI will dramatically reshape company org charts6. Eric’s wild founder story (including squatting at AOL’s HQ) and how scrappiness fueled his innovation—Brought to you by:• Eppo—Run reliable, impactful experiments• Fundrise Flagship Fund—Invest in $1.1 billion of real estate• OneSchema—Import CSV data 10x faster—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-bolt-eric-simons—Where to find Eric Simons:• X: https://x.com/ericsimons40• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-simons-a464a664/• Email: [e-mail]—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Eric Simons and StackBlitz(04:46) Unprecedented growth and user adoption(10:40) Demo: Building a Spotify clone with Bolt(15:28) Expanding to native mobile apps with Expo(19:09) The journey and technology behind WebContainer(25:03) Lessons learned and future outlook(29:15) Post-launch analysis(34:15) Growing fast with a small team(41:00) Prioritization at Bolt(45:51) Tooling and PRD's(48:42) Integration and use cases of Bolt(52:24) Limitations of Bolt(54:24) The role of PMs and developers in the AI era(59:56) Skills for the future(01:14:18) Upcoming features of Bolt(01:20:17) How to get the most out of Bolt(01:23:00) Eric’s journey and final thoughts—Referenced:• Bolt: https://bolt.new/• Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/• Wix: https://www.wix.com/• Squarespace: https://www.squarespace.com/• Dylan Field on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanfield/• Evan Wallace’s website: https://madebyevan.com/• WebGL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGL• WebAssembly: https://webassembly.org/• CloudNine: https://cloudnine.com/• Canva: https://www.canva.com/• StackBlitz: https://stackblitz.com/• Lessons from 1,000+ YC startups: Resilience, tar pit ideas, pivoting, more | Dalton Caldwell (Y Combinator, Managing Director): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/lessons-from-1000-yc-startups• Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/• Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/• Dario Amodei on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dario-amodei-3934934/• Linear: https://linear.app/• Notion: https://www.notion.com/• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/• Atlassian: https://www.atlassian.com/• Photoshop: https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/• Figma: https://www.figma.com/• Greenfield projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenfield_project• Gartner: https://www.gartner.com/• OpenAI researcher on why soft skills are the future of work | Karina Nguyen (Research at OpenAI, ex-Anthropic): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/why-soft-skills-are-the-future-of-work-karina-nguyen• Albert Pai on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertpai/• Bolt’s post on X about “Bolt Builders”: https://x.com/boltdotnew/status/1887546089294995943• Sonnet: https://www.anthropic.com/claude/sonnet• ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/• Breaking the Rules: The Young Entrepreneur Who Squatted at AOL: https://www.inc.com/john-mcdermott/eric-simons-interview-young-entrepreneur-squatted-at-aol.html• Imagine K12: http://www.imaginek12.com/• Geoff Ralston on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffralston/• AOL: https://www.aol.com/• Bolt on X: https://x.com/boltdotnew—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [e-mail].—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

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 error. This is just a nonstop wild shit. How is this possible?

What has allowed you to grow this much, this fast with such a small team? Most importantly, it's been the people. It's rare to find startups where you have kind of the core group of five, six, seven people that have been there for five years plus. You basically were building a tech first and then looking for a problem to solve later, which is often what people tell you not to do. I think that's the hard thing about being an entrepreneur. There are periods of time where you have to make judgment calls that are not going to be the consensus view.

You've got to have, like, confidence in your convictions on how to best play of the hand. A lot of people see these stats, and they sometimes don't see that. There was also years and years of work before that. It was kind of like, you know, bolts 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're currently the number one most popular web AI code app with over 3 million registered

users. Two months after launching last October, they hit 20 million ARR. At the time of this recording, they're approaching 40 million ARR. The story of Bolt is wild. They actually started the company seven years ago and were about to run out of money and shut down. But they realized the tech that they'd been building for the past seven years called Web Container was perfectly suited for building AI products in the browser, so they launched the product with a tweet.

And as Eric describes it, it was an overnight success seven years in the making. If you'd like to better understand the cutting edge of AI coding apps and where things are going with AI and product building, this episode is a must listen. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become a yearly subscriber of my newsletter, you now get a year free of Perplexity Pro, Notion, Linear, Granola, and Superhuman. Check it out at Lenny's newsletter.com. With that, I bring you Eric Simons.

This episode is brought to you by Epo. Epo is a next generation AB testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growths. Teams. Companies like Twitch, Muro, ClickUp, and Draft Kings rely on Epo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features. And Epo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous, deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I left most was our experimentation platform, where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Epo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time and accessible UI for diving deeper into performance and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying, prolonged analytics cycles. Epo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insight with your team, sparking new ideas for the A-B testing flywheel.

Epo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Epo at Getepo.com.com slash Lenny and 10x your experiment velocity. That's get-epppo.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. Mem coins are a thrill ride. Even the stock market can swing wildly on a headline. Hello, Deep Zeke. 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 snooze fest. The fund holds

$1.1 billion worth of institutional caliber real estate managed by a team of pros focused on steadily growing your net worth for decades to come. See, boring. That's the point. You can start investing in minutes and with as little as $10 by visiting fundrise.com 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.

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 tux box, and you tell it what you want to build. whether it's a web or a mobile app. And so it's kind of one of these, you know, text two app building tools that have become

pretty popular for the past few months here. And it's not just like building, you know, like a static site or something like that, but you can actually build full stack, real software with databases and hosting and et cetera, yeah, just from prompting. And, you know, in a ridiculously short period of time, it's not like you're spending, you know, hours and hours or days putting this together, you can get results from like a minute. Let's just share some numbers 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 that we've never seen in the history of startups and you guys are at the edge of that. Share some numbers about how things went when you launched and where they're at today. Yeah, yeah. I mean, when we launch, I mean, the company was on the verge of going under when we, when we launched Bolt. Like, you know, our company stackplets, we've been around for seven years. years building web-based development environment stuff. And so when we launched us, we were like,

this would be amazing if this added like 100K of ARR over the next couple of months. And what ended up happening is, you know, in the first two months, we went from zero to 20 million of ARR. And I think we're on like month four or four and a half or something like that at this point. And we've already crossed 30 million of ARR. And we're on average across in 40. By the time this comes out, it appears that we're going to be at 40 million AARR. 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. Like we've added, you know, three million registered users, you know, just in the past few months here. And, you know, monthly active users is, you know, around a million

I think at this point per month. So it's just, I mean, I've, I've never seen anything. I've been doing startups for like 15 years. I've never seen anything like this. Everyone I've talked to, you know, our investors or, you know, et cetera, there's not a lot of correlaries to kind of what's going on here, you know. And it's kind of extraordinary because I mean, like we, you know, our company wasn't doing AI stuff the six months ago. We had no AI products. And just out of nowhere we, you know, from almost death of the company to being, you know, the number one buy traffic, revenue, et cetera, like, you know, AI, co-jun app that's like a web based in the world. Like it's, I think the only other like startup ahead of us is, you know, for for

co-jun, just in general, it would be like cursor, by adoption or revenue at this point. And so, it's, yeah, it's been, it's been a heck of a ride. You know, and our team's like 15, 20 people, you know, so it's just dealing with, you know, we're going to be closing on, like, 100,000 customers and we've got our support team's like three people. You know, so we're trying to scale as fast as we can. So it's just kind of mind-boggling just the scale of the demand 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. That right? Yeah, with single digit week. Yeah, single digit weeks, right? That's that's the current track rate that we're safe for the site. Yeah. I think of you guys are the fastest growing startup in history. I mean, 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 just, you know, push the limits of like what's possible with the technology. And, you know, and I think that that, we do our jobs well

it's 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 forecast for Q1 with the current rate we're on and our forecast for the year

is we want to get to 100 million of error and now I think it's been a couple that would either be on par with cursor or ahead of them or something like that but I mean it's and I think there's going to be more things like this too I don't think they like

you know it's just there's something really, you know, I think a lot of people are in disbelief about it, too, we're like, this is okay, right? And this is from when we got to four million of error or five million of our 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 it, and then I went to 20. The next one that I could go to zero and it, but now we're closing on 40. And so I just, I, 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, I was kind of for like a month, I was kind of waking up waiting for the day where it just was like, okay, it's a, I mean, like it's this, 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, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, it's filled, is filled, is filled with rational actors. People are coming to these tools because it is.

solving problems, they're able to do way more for way less cost than it would otherwise. And so, and that's why I said, I think we're going to see more of this, whether it's encoding or get kind of other vehicles or whatever, you know, in a sense, it's almost like the maybe the new normal, right, for as AI just continues to get better. But anyways, let's get to a demo of Bolt so people can actually see what this looks like in action. And as you go through it, If you can even point out stuff that is different from other products in the space, say, Love a Bull v Zero Replit that other folks have heard about, that would be useful. Awesome. Cool. Yeah. So this is Bull. If you should go to Bolt.com.

Things that I think are really interesting about Bull. 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 I think that the biggest difference between Bull 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 can take minutes to boot up. And they often will run into issues. And then you can end up literally stock right and have to contact support to get done, you know, get on stock a rubber, right? With bold, we, 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-toe, 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, a 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, et cetera. And really, this is like what you're seeing down here, this terminal and kind of what's backing it. This is what took us really like five, six, seven years to build and make so reliable. 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 bold has bidirectional communication with this operating system. It's writing code. It's running the

dev server for this thing. It's going to go on. I didn't spin this up. You can see how fast this is in a matter of 60 seconds. I said, make me a Spotify clone. And now we have one, right? And it looks pretty darn good. That looks really good. And so that's, and that's one of the, you know, the other aspects around Bold is like this technology we made for the operating system side, the guys that had been work with us, you know, for past five plus years on it, before this, they were actually doing machine learning AI stop. And so when it came time to write the agent for Bull, we had just an incredible amount of in-house expertise on how to actually, like, merge these two different

technology sets to have this really reliable experience that produces really beautiful, really functional stuff. So that's, that's kind of like, you know, based on like what's really cool about the Bolt experience. The other thing is, you know, a lot of these products, it's like, you can, like, make something. But, you know, often you want to, like, actually have a URL where you can share this. Like, have it, like, maybe even attach a domain to it or whatever have you. So with, with bowl, we actually have built-in integrations with, you know, production grade hosting providers like Netlify and for databases with Superbase. So if I go ahead and just like click the deploy button here, this is actually going to run a production build of this project

we made here, right? Again, this is doing this entirely inside of 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 Netlify. This is live. I can share this with anyone. And if I want to have like, you know, buy the domain Spotify clone.com and point it at this, I can click this link here. Then I kick me in a Netlify. You can attach this to my account by domain, point at that thing.

And then from there on out, whenever I'm prompting Bolt to make changes to this application and hit deploy, that goes live on my public website. Right. So it's just this is, this is like. the simplest way to build a web app that's ever existed, you know, like, that'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 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, they're, I don't have you ever seen just the UI of these things, but like, they're crazy complicated. And that's just for building a kind of like a static website. They can't, there's no way you could actually build like a functional app. And that's like with Bolt, if we were to sit here for another 30 minutes, we would be, we would have streaming. You'd be able to make playlists of different MP3 files or whatever. Like you can just keep prompting this thing to keep adding functionality, you know?

So it's that kind of, I think, some of the cool, uh, core experience of Bolt here. I can show you something cool that we just launch, 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 it's hard to build web apps. It's even harder to build native apps 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 I'm in the app store. And so right here, I'll zoom in a little bit. We have this little build a mobile app with Expo. So if you click that, we kind of instruct you on how to just prompt mobile apps

into existence. So let's make another Spotify clone that's an actual native mobile app. Let's say make a Spotify clone. Go ahead and 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 the Expo tool chain and actually go and make a mobile app for us. And what's cool about this is we could actually preview it just in the browser here. But once this thing's done and it boots up, it's going to show a QR code. we're going to be able to scan it. And in real time, actually, I basically have like a test flight of this native application that we can try it on our phones.

And as we keep prompting, you'll see it making changes and stuff. This is kind of the first time, right, that, you know, you don't have to be technical to make production grade web, full stack web and mobile apps. You know, like at this point, I've done nothing that is, that is, requires developer knowledge to do any of this stuff. And that's, that's kind of, I think that's what a lot of people are really excited about with this.

And the majority of our audience are people that are not developers, they're using us. They're PMs, their designers, they're entrepreneurs, because these are people that are, oh, have always been great at building products. And the previously,

the only way they could get their ideas into coded software was through a developer's fingertips, right? And now, now they can, they can deal with their own. Yeah, through PR thing. So you can see here, you've got still a QR code.

I'm going to scan the thing. I'm going to do it too. By the way, I love that you had just enough things to say until I finish. That was a pro. Just as I planned, you know. But so on my screen, it's booted up. It's bundling the JavaScript of this thing. It is beta.

We just launched this last week, by the way. So if you kind of see on my screen here, I actually have this Spotify. looking app, right? That time, you know. That's, that looks like exactly like Spotify. It looks exactly like Spotify, right? We're going to be sued right now. So let's be, you're doing too good a job with this. No, that's amazing. So it's, it's pretty cool, right? I mean, like, and so what's cool is it, and as you keep prompting on your device, it'll just keep reloading, like, without you have 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 know, we're building an app together, you know, but 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. And so a lot of product teams, I mean, this is just changing how people do product develop, you know, it's faster to do this than than design a whole bunch of figma frames necessarily, right? So we're going to, we're going to spend a lot of time on that. Okay, this is incredible, like this whole episode so far as you just blowing

my mind, I imagine, listeners mind just over and over and over. I don't even know where to go with all this sometimes. You made a really important point that you worked on this for seven years before you launched Bolt. A lot of people see these stats, zero to 40 million IR in like five-ish months. And they sometimes don't see that. There was also years and years of other 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 it just that part of the journey. I know we'll go through like the origin

at all where Bolt came from, but I guess just that web container component specifically. It feels like a huge deal. It 100% is. Yeah. And I would say this is kind of surprisingly to me, it's like still one of the contrarian

viewpoints of our company. Like despite because over the years it was like when we first this is, and that web container was the bad. that we made the company on, just to be clear. StackBlitz was like a deep, a browser-based, deep technology play on can we make a, you know, a web assembly-based operating system that can, like, boot in a browser

and like 100 milliseconds and like run full on development toolchains. Like, that was really it. And like we'd 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 grew up down the street from each other in Chicago, put it under code together at 13 and building stuff ever And we came out to the Valley in 2012, and we just had the good fortune of bumping into Dylan Field and Evan Wallace when they were building Figma in the early days. And that was, I don't think a lot of people are like, no, that like Figma was also a browser-based

deep technology play. Like when their first pitch for Figma, they didn't have a design tool. Their first pitch was this 3D ball dropping into water inside of a browser tab. And the pitch basically was, you know, browsers have this new capability called WebGL and the predecessor to WebAssembly. And with these things, for the first time, you could actually, you know, create a graphics rendering engine that you could then build a design tool on top of. But you're going to have to write that rendering engine from scratch because, you know, nothing exists that can just compile into WebGL or whatever. if you want the performance unit, et cetera, it's going to take us years to do, but we do it. 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, Albert, my co-founder and I saw the same sort of story begin to play out, but for web development in like development environments. And specifically, there is some stuff that landed in browsers like web assembly, shared memory, service workers, like these different APIs. and we were like, oh, wow, like, it should be possible theoretically, like to write an operating system that in WebAssembly that could, you know, run Node.js and NPM and all the tool chains on top of it that you need to do to do web development. And that would be huge because setting up

developer environments is, it's a pain for beginners. Like a lot of people churn out. The first thing you do when you learn out of code is not even learning out of code is 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, if we could just have that be something, you click a link and it just boots in your browser, that'd be huge. It's also, if you look at the other productivity apps that have really worked on the web, they've all had this compute model, right? Figma, when you open a Figma document, there's not like some cloud VM that gets spun up for you to render the documents you're dragging things around. it's using your CPU and your memory to do the work.

Same thing with Google Docs, right? That's the only model that's ever scaled to a billion users. And so when you look at cloud IDs, like Cloud 9 was the first one back in 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 browser's just kind of like taking your keystrokes, saying it to the server, and then, you know, sending back the results of it. And that's how all these other AI, you know, code,

text two apps, sort of tools work. They're all using cloud VMs. And the problem is, you know, on a small scale, it can work. But as you scale it up, I mean, there's not even 100 million VMs to rent on the planet. But there are like a billion devices that you can run this stuff on. Is that kind of what we've seen with Bull where, you know, it's if you want to have, build a product that's going to be able to scale to that, So 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 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 DDoS and people using your servers, right? So inevitably you have to nerf these things and roll them back. But if it's all done on the end device, it doesn't matter, right? So that's the web container was the key piece and what we struggle with. It took us like four or five years something to build web container. What we struggled with for the years after that was just how to build a product around it. Because the developers loved it, but they weren't using it in ways that they would pay money for. And as much as I, the nerd side of

me wish that that that would be enough, that it's like a building cool technology was not. It's like, it's not. Like this, we're here to build an adventure, a venture scale company. And so 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 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 a, 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 think the other lesson here is just as a founder, just survive as long as you can because you may find something that works. All great points, all great points, right? Because what we, you're dead right. Like for, and you know, fortunately, my co-founder had, we had built a lot of unsuccessful startups before this.

You spent most of the 20-tens, like, turning through ideas on things. And so we, you know, what we had conviction, I was like, this is, this seems like a technology that will be important. Like, it seems like the web is the most ubiquitous, like, the kind of the pitch or the theory at R, I was like, the web is the most ubiquitous platform in the world. But yet it has no, you can't use the web to, like, build the web, right? Like, every other platform, like, 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. It should probably be part of Chrome. And at a minimum, right? And we thought, hey, this could, you know, this could be a huge enabler.

Like, you know, the vision of just making it as easy to build full stack applications as using Canva. Right? It's like, 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 it. And we were like living hand to mouth. It's like to bootstrap that thing. So we understood out like how to how to have a low burn rate and take a lot of shots on goal that make every dollar stretch beyond what anyone would think is reasonable or possible. And that's how we played our hands with stacklets.

You know, like we, you know, we didn't raise money for the first two or three years. That's what it. You know, the company's life. We were, you know, bootstrapping it. We did raise money. We'd 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 just say generally, like, until you see pull, like, and you 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 go and buy software, you should be going, we're a tiny startup. Can you sell it for, you know, for half? Like, everything you buy. I just, like, keep the perimeter as low as possible. Because you need as many shots on goal as you can possibly get. Because you have no idea.

And I think just generally for startups, that's the right way, in my view, to approach it, you know? Unless you're seeing, again, immediate demand and poll or whatever. But, yeah, I think, I think that'd be kind of like maybe the extra context that out on top is, like, I think that we ended up doing a good job of, like, being extremely conservative during 18, time in which during 2020 to 2020 and 2021, which were times where exuberance and growing headcount was like KPI's of companies, right? And were things that were being, you know, with a lot of, a lot of, you know, emotional force of like, hey, you guys ought to be doing this. And, and I'm glad that we didn't heed the advice because it, you know, if we tripled the company and kicked up the burn rate,

there would be no bull. You know, they're like, we, we would have got out of business a lot of time ago, right? So, um, I think that's, that's the hard thing about being an entrepreneur, I think is you kind of have to, there are period 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, you know, it'll become the consensus view, but, you know, you got to have like confidence in your convictions on how, how to best play the hand, you know, so. There's so many great lessons here. I think just this idea of just staying alive, Dalton came on the podcast.

He's a partner, Y, C, once, and he just had this phrase, just don't die. And that's exactly what you guys did. Seven years of just trying it until something worked. And I love that you actually were planning to shut down the company right before he launched Bolt. And I know you launched it with just like a tweet, right? That was the launch 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 to like the tweet. You know, we were like, wow, this is like, you know, one of the biggest things, you know, I loved a lot 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, great, 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, here's the one he would flagging. He was like, gosh, we had 60K today. Like, this is crazy. And I was like, yeah, yeah. But like, this is the launch day. Like, it's the, there's the tech. crunch peak of initiation or, you know, the classic startup. Trafalsoor. Yeah. I was like,

listen, yeah, I'm trying to like temper enthusiasm for the team. Like, this is great. Got a lot of work to do. Da-da-da-da. And the next day, you know, we added 80K or whatever it was, right? And it just kind of kept going. And, you know, and all the while, like the product we put out, we built the thing in 90 days. We built Bolton. So there's a lot of things that we're missing in the product, basic stuff, basic stuff. And which again, like we, we, you know, we, we cut the right corners on the thing to get it online. But we had this just growing influx of people using it going, you know, how is there not a mobile responsive view?

Like how is how are our chat messages not? We got the 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, this was that was out for us. It was like no, you 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 growing traffic. And, and, and, you know, there's, there's a whole bond. 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 stackus.com, you know, for more than $9. Like, we had one price, nine bucks, right? And so we launched Bull, we're like, again, we don't think they, well, 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 wouldn't you take my money? So it's like that within the week, we just completely new pricing plans where you could upgrade, which ended up has kind of now become the standard. All the other guys in the space have copied this where, you know, prior to Bolt going online, co-pilot, like all these previous AI things, everyone kind of wanted this like Netflix model where there's like one price, it's like all you can eat or whatever. And the problem is like we do that. Like you can't really like, you want the inference cost to be kind of low because you're expecting the able 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? People want to pay for more inference because we've crossed this threshold where, you know, you can get a very tangible ROI. You know that this is providing a tremendous amount of value to you, right? So anyway, so that was like that was like one thing. And, you know, the servers were just melting. Anthropic ran out of GPUs for us.

Like Dario emailed me. He was like, listen, we just, we don't have anything more to give you at the time. So we're like, how do we deal with? You know, it was just, it was just bananas, you know, for, for weeks. It felt like in 300, you know, when, when they're surrounded by like 10,000 people. And our team is just like doing everything. Like there's 15, 20 people. It's just doing everything.

Like my chief of staff and I were doing customer support 95% of the day. You know, just say, anyways. So yeah, it was, it was a crazy wild time. And,

I mean, it still is. I remember 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 in ARR, you get a year at least or something,

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

I mean, this is, this is, you know, it's, at least for me, this is, this is that level of intensity is, is, it's, it's challenging, fun challenges, you know. Wow. Okay. This is just a nonstop 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 has allowed you to grow this much, this fast with such a small team?

This 300 visual is interesting. I imagine having these Spartans is a big part of it. Just what has allowed you to do this? Yeah, 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 co-gen your text app space have really been

struggling, a lot of it has been scaling their servers and stuff, right? Because, and, you know, it was kind of like, you know, both this overnight success seven years in the making. Like, all of this stuff, like, there's no way, if you've rewined year two, we can, there's no way we could have,

we would not be at the growth on on you DAUs and revenue or whatever. There's just no way. And so a lot of it's 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, start for a kind of year or two. They kind of go to another. Yeah, 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 bootstrapping the previous company, like, just having, you know, less people and more context per head. Like, that's just, that's just been, that's just been how we do it and we feel very strongly about it. And the reason for that is, is one that you can have high levels of trust with anyone you're talking to because you know

that they have a lot of contacts. It's not like, you know, this person is completely in the dark and in some quarter of the company. You know what I mean? The second thing, everyone has agency to actually get stuff done, front to back, right?

And there's no political community to get stuff approved by. There's no to die, you know, so when you look at what kind of what happened with Bull, I mean, we had engineers that were like front to back. 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, yeah, so I think it was the culmination of just high trust and, you know, people, like, we all just have enjoyed working together on the past. I mean, that's why that's the only reason anyone would ever stay, right, at a company for that long or whatever. And so those sorts of stressful situations, I think, can, are, or, are,

or break, right? Like, those are make or break for any team. And so that I think that what's happened is really, you know, it is a direct reflection of the strength and the bonds of the people that are making this thing and supporting the thing. Yeah. I think that's such 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, for us, and even if the folks were hiring out, it's like hiring people that are, that don't care about the titles and they don't care about,

you know, it's not like they're, people, of course, it's where you'll have like a career trajectory and that's what thing, but it's like they, they really are motivated by just working on cool things. and are, you know, checking their ego at the door and they're there to like collectively build something great, not just, just kind of, you know, be the brilliant jerk, right?

You know, most of the people that we've hired have been, you know, in Europe and we're a fully remote company. Like, you know, I, my co-founder and I are in the Bay Area. It's funny. Like, back in 2018, we, like, we, like, we, like, 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?

You and I were coming to like an office for 10 people. We've hired the people working for us are, you know, in Europe or across the U.S. And, you know, I think, and then we have one or two other people we've hired that are in the Bay Area at this point. But yeah, I think I think we kind of look for folks that are that are intrinsically just trying to build great stuff and are interested. And then the first people that we hired were, the reason we found them is that they were users of stock puts, you know? Like, that was that a lot of people that, the majority of people we hired at the company have been people that actually came from our community, basically.

That's what we want to hire people, we put on a tweet and say, hey, we're hiring an engineer. And then we get, you know, DMs or whatever, right? But, yeah, those are the, those are the general, like, 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 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 forward 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 one, schema.co. That's one schema.co. 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 prioritization. I imagine you guys are just barraged with as you described after you launched. Like you're just barraged with requests. Like you said, there's a million monthly active users. I can't even imagine the feature request 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 on like, hey, this, this, you know what's asking to this like in meaningful numbers at least, but we think this is going to be a big deal. Best example was last week with native mobile app support. Like that's the, you know, bioreception, like the biggest thing we've ever. launched. And it was something that even internally at the company, you know,

so forth was like this, you know, I don't know, people are like, y'all know about these other things, right? And it's, it's always this balance of like how much are we just triaging various things versus like, not new capabilities, but it's like, this strikes me as an important one, where we, where we, you know, put some chips into the middle of the table on. And the OK, 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 worked before. And how does that change things? I mean, like, that's that now there's, you know, there's small businesses.

They're, 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 there's kind of these things where it's like, hey, we should go and, you know, take bets here. But there's kind of this, it's, 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's some amount of their feedback from the customers, right? Like, this thing didn't taste good. And then there's like, hey, we've been kind of cooking something interesting. This, this taste, this, I don't know, this, I think people are 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 it. I think if you kind of reround like 10 years, years ago, I would have had, I would have had the, just the years of getting my butt kicked by the free market to have kind of cultivated a cent of this stuff, you know? You kind of have to

build your own gun and stay for it, I guess, is the best way I put 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? Because I know, like, the answer is probably really, it's just like chaos constantly in fires. We're putting out. We're putting out. 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 front to back. Like a Zoom? Yep. Yeah. Every day at 8 a.m. Pacific, we're on a Zoom for like

every day, the whole company. Pretty much the entire company. Yeah. Wow. For an hour. Okay. Yeah. And we just go over everything. And I think we're going to probably start as you, as the team's kind of growing. We're to start, you know, splintering off into, you know, sinks or whatever. But the thing about just having everyone in the same room every day is that it's, you know, a lot of people will complain that it's, you know, this is, you know, on Twitter, you'll see people say, oh, like, it's the most expensive use of everyone's time, right? But it's like, yep, but like there's zero percent fidelity loss in that. Like, everything is everything, every day is being audited front to back and being discussed front to back. And so when you're

in these times of just extreme growth, right? It's, it's, you, you, you, you, you, you want as close to 0%, you know, a loss, right, on on communications. And so that's how we've, that's how we've been doing since, especially since Bolt went online. And I think it was like the week after Bolt went online, we're like every day. 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 on, you know, in last heads, you know, every person

that the company is aware of everything else going on at the company, right? So people can independently be making decisions that are generally by default, more often correct than not, you know? That is so interesting. I've never heard that before, especially for a company growing, like, that is like yours. That is super interesting, that that's what you do. I don't think we're going to do that forever. Yeah, yeah, of course.

No, but that's, that's, I think that's a really cool thing to know that that's, that works. and that has worked for 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 with tools are kind of in the stack

of the company's tool set. Yeah, on the engineering side, we use linear, like heavily. I'm kind of product, you know, roadmaping. I think we're using Notion

and you're kind of making like PRD type stuff in Notion, you know, and we use Figmin for like design. And we actually, we use Bolt for a lot of design and prototyping at this point. It says you can imagine.

but yeah I think I think you know the tooling is I you know nothing nothing crazy there's nothing crazy sophisticated you know like I think we're going to be investing a lot more and especially you just 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 that work can be brought off I love that you guys use PRDISA you love that you even use that term there's a lot of talk of just like oh we got bolt now we got all these tools. We don't need PRDs.

We're just going to create a prototype immediately. That's it. Talk about just like why you still find that useful and just what you put into your PRD, whatever that is for you. Unless there's 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 it just ensures everyone's on the same page and that the key outcomes for whatever feature that we're

working on are going to be present when we get, you know? Because the things like when these things, when these talk about just 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. 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 kind of our approach to the thing. And, you know, and often it's, some of these things are like,

here's a link to a bolt. Here's what it might look like. Yeah. Like here's a you, you, not just look like. Here's, here's, here's kind of a working demo of what it will effectively feel like, right? And then be, because that just, you know, if a picture is worth, you know, a thousand words, like a live actual demo is, is worth millions, 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 high fidelity prototyping because it's, it's like, now faster to make real prototypes using Bolt and they're writing, you know, before it's too expensive. Like, you did the idea of like, let's prototype it by having you. The engineers code a prototype. It's like that it would take forever. It would be expensive. Now it's faster to do this with Bolt in code and have a real working software products than dragging around frames in Figma to actually make a static version of it. So let's actually talk about that. Just how

how far have companies gotten with Bolt? Like prototypes is where everyone's kind of imagining these tools are at. I know that the goal isn't just to make prototypes, it's to build full scale. I imagine long-term Salesforce, you know, Atlassian style companies that scale. Just what's like, what are some examples of products people have built with Bolt that are maybe would surprise people, just how far they've gotten. Yeah, I mean, especially when you're starting Greenfield stuff, you, I mean, you can use Bolt to build, you know, like on the sales force is an example, right? One of the first people that signed up for Bull. was this guy named Paul, and he's an entrepreneur and does not a code, built a CRM in three weeks that has like AI built into it, stripe for billing, et cetera.

He had gotten a quote from an agency for this. It was like going to be 30 grand and it takes six months. He had done in three weeks and at least spent like 300 bucks on bulk for the time. And so it's like, and he's making money off of this. Like this is his start. Right. Okay. So he built this and he's selling it. Like people are paying to use it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there's many such cases of this, right? When you can, if you're looking at Greenfield projects, 100%. Like there's 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, they're 30 grand versus $300. I mean, it's 99% cheaper, six months versus three weeks. I mean, it's like order magnitude sort of fashion delivery on the phone. And those numbers have held for the people. that we talk to that are building these full stack, you know, ass. Like people, they go to op work. They get a quote for five grand. They have a 10 within 50 bucks, you know, it's just nuts what you're able to do with this thing. And so I think on the flip side, you know, a lot of the existing companies, yeah, they will, there are very legitimate use cases where things are greenfield

spot up. Good examples like public websites, like marketing pages, landing pages, whatever have you. folks are adopting Bolt to just power those instead of using Webflow, for example. Because it's like, this is simpler to use the Webflow. 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. And in a way where it's not just like a green field wholesale here.

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 repos in Bolt. So you can, like, go and use Bolt on your code base. And it kind of depends on your setup, right? Like we, you know, and we do have companies, again, that, like, have marketing sites of using this on 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 LMs are not great. Depending on how big your application. though, right? These things are not quite there where if you have something that's, you know, a thousand files or something or more, where you're going to be able to have a really reliable, super reliable experience per se, right? Within a year, we chat a year from now, I suspect the answer is going to be different.

But, you know, so it kind of depends on the size of the app, the scale of the app. And if it's too big, you're looking at the prototyping, like just pure accelerating. right of product development. And if it's not, then you're, you can just do it the entire way, right, from BOL. So this is useful. So what are the, what would you say the major limitations of Boll today

where people should just know, okay, it's not going to get you here yet. Maybe in the future will. So it sounds like if you have just like a really large existing code base, probably not the best tool yet, what else should people know? I would say that's probably the main one, you know, because I think if you have a large existing code base,

you're going to need something like cursor. And you're going to need to be a developer meaningfully to be 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's some level of kind of education and just kind of like, and using the tool and like learning how to use it that's required to like really unlock a lot of the maximum capabilities of the thing, right?

And, you know, with the people that we see that are the most successful with both, like, outside of developers. The people we see they are most successful are people that are amazing PMs, for example. Because these are people that understand enough about how the technology works typically. And their job is to, like, direct developers on how to go and improve the product

and go and look into how to actually spec this thing out in a way that's, like, executable without, you know, without lossing this 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. And so there's a huge overlap of the skill set of just like being a rock star PM and being really good at using, frankly, any of these

text your apps or a cogent tools. I love that you made that point. That's exactly the point. I've been trying to make. I have a newsletter post about this. Because when all these tools came out, There's so many people saying, okay, PMs are dead. We don't need them anymore. We just build things and build things so quickly and easily. What's the point? But I completely see the world the way you see it. The hard part now is now it's easy to build the thing.

Now it's, what the hell should we build? Can we clearly articulate what it is we want to build? And then can we just have the taste to know, is this right? Is this correct? Is this good? Is this going to solve the problem? And then it's like grow it, which is something also PMs think about. So I completely agree.

Basically, it feels like PMs are, and there's a lot of, a lot of PMs listed in this, so they'll love hearing this. To me, it feels like PMs are the best position role to thrive in this world. Zero question. I mean, that was like, as Bull was growing and like we were like, because we were a developer product before this. And so we expected the audience of 100% developers that were using this. And we just kept seeing more and more and more people that were not developers using it.

To the point where it's like 70, 67% of our users are not developers, right, at this point. And, you know, when I started talking to these folks, at first I was just like weird or whatever, you know, it was like, well, what's going on here. But then what it just kind of clicked is like, oh, well, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is going to change everything. The entire software world order is going to get rewritten here because like the way that companies are organized to build software today, totally going to change, right? Like the idea that, again, like, PMs are the people that, that really understand, like, to the pixel level, like, what? matters into making a great product experience. And often they're having, listen, I'm a developer myself. They have to go and harangue the developers so like get things to be how they really ought to be,

like to the smallest levels. And now, like, how this is going to work. If you fast forward, you know, one, two, five years, whatever, like PMs 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 all ofums are not well suited for, right? And still being augmented by all arms to do it.

But PMs are going to be able to go in and just make the changes themselves. And what blew my mind is 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, 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 is the beginning.

I want to follow that thread, but first of all, I want to also add, and correct me if you disagree with this, I think when we talk about PMs, it also applies to founders, like product thinking founders. 100%. 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. 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 can 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 like PMs, designers and entrepreneurs that are non-technical. That's the most exciting thing to move just because it's a brand new market that's being unlocked here, you know? Like for the first time ever, these folks can like directly code and build the product themselves, like their vision directly into the software itself. That is, that's, that's, that's going to change everything.

That is changing everything. So, when you talk about how org charts are going to change? What are you imagining there? Is it just like fewer engineers mostly or what is, what do the future or charts look like? Good question. And I, I bet you there's going to be, you know, there's going to be like some gardener analysis someday, you know, years from now or whatever that's like, here's like how the best

some, some term is applied to how the best companies are organizing, you know. But, I mean, yeah, I mean, I think that we're going to, you know, I think that you're going to see developers probably being pulled off of a lot of the, and generally speaking, pulled off of a lot of, you know, user interface type work, I would imagine, except for the most complicated of those things. And you're going to see designers and PMs really, really leading the charge and being responsible for crafting those experiences. and perhaps having a developer attached to, like, be reviewing the code and making sure, you know, like the extra, the guiding, you know, the code that they're running, reviewing those pull requests and Acceler. And I think maybe even the engineers are, 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 think the engine, but I do think there's going to be, you know, there's going to be, the leverage of the front engineer is going to have is, is, 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 you. I've seen more product, you know, in design folks with, you know, one or two engineers or something. And, you know, really having a larger, a larger matching of, like, kind of pods like that, you know.

That's that. Something like that strikes me is probably how this is going to start trending towards. This touches on. We had a researcher from Open AI in the podcast. She actually started her career. She worked at Anthropic first as a front-end engineer and said that once she saw what Clyde could do for front-end engineering, she's like, I need to move to a different function. And so she moved into research because she saw that role disappearing potentially. And that's exactly what you're saying.

Yep. So let me ask you this. I don't know if you have a clear thesis on this yet, but say you just had a kid. Say your kid is kind of in the future starting school. Let's see your kid was starting college soon. Do you have thoughts on just what skills slash areas you think they should go into versus avoid that maybe you're popular now and be less popular? I understand how to leverage these AI tools is key. Like I would necessarily, I think maybe getting a basic understanding of like how programming works, you know, etc.

Right. It's like is great, right. It's like technical foundations, just understanding how things, how systems work. how it's coding works. Exactly. Exactly, right. But it doesn't have to be, like, because I think back to like, you know, if Bold existed, like, Albert and I say this to each other all the time, like, you know, since the get-go stack, so we've been building the thing that we wish we had when we were 13 and heck for everything we built since that. And especially with Bull. I mean, it's like, I don't know if I would have gone as deep as I did on, you know, learning how to code and being an engineer, if that had been a problem. You know, like the whole reason we got into it is we had ideas for products and businesses that we wanted to build. And coding was a, it was just like a necessary requirement, you know, in order to do that. So, you know, I think that, and that said, it's like, I think people need to follow their intrinsic interest. And folks are really interested in, you know, really getting the nitty gritty of how computers work and pro relators work and compilers or whatever. go for it. Like, I think it's still going to be relevant, you know, like it's, I don't know if we're

going to really have, hey, we'll see, well, but, you know, to the degree that there's like AGI where it's like, 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 of, I, I don't know. I'm, I, you know, I'm not sure, but I think from what, at least, but 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 places to specialize and become and, you know, 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 minute. I just think that's like generally,

you know, not a good, this is like my co-founder and I. Like we didn't, we didn't go to college. And my co-founder dropped out of college after like a semester or something. But like I didn't go because I was like, I just, you know, coding, like we're kind of, you know, 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 would have been, you know, it would have been like 100 grand of debt at by the end of the thing just for like four years in-state tuition and you have I. 120 grand, I think at that time.

And it's like, and I, and lo and behold, I mean, there's a huge issue with this where people are, you know, kind of, there is a, there is a prevailing thought, you know, by society. Like, but going to college in early 20 times or late 2000, it's 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 case, right? And so it's, but, you know, they get not to deter people from doing it, but it's like you have to go into it 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?

Yeah. So I like that your answer to your kids are going to be like, don't even, don't even go to college. Potentially. I don't they want to, right? It's like, I think in 18, it's a huge ask. I mean, it's a huge ass. And not even at 18. It's like, it's 17 because you'd feel like you prepare,

you can go apply for colleges. 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 that young. It just, unless you really have conviction, you know, it's, it's, you know, it costs nothing to go and explore and learn for free online, you know, so. I'm going to come back to. with the skills that 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, what I'm hearing is get good at figuring out what people need and want, what problems they need solved, get good at articulating it really well to the AI tools. And there's this talk, you don't need to be a great prompt engineer. You don't need to work on prompting. but it feels like it's more and more important because you tell it something and it goes off and builds a thing

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, problems with me, 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 a need because Bolt's not going to go and like find, like, you know, I could see that, starting 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, you know, as folks are building on bolt that are not developers, they will, they'll run into, you know, some, you know, nook or cranny of like 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 program. And these are humans that help you out. These are, these are, and people that were like certifying. And so, you know,

when in Bolt, in the coming weeks or whatever, there's going to be a button where you can just say, hey, connect me with, you know, a certified like expert. And you can chat with them live and they'll help you get unstock.

And you pay, you know, I don't know, 50 bucks an hour or whatever it is, right? And then you get on jammed and you keep prompting, you know? But again,

it's like, I just think this stuff is, it just all seems like gravy to me. Like engineers get to focus on like difficult challenges, not like cookie cutter, let's make another crud app stuff. You know, like they get to like debugging is challenging and they're in fun, you know, and like going and work on intellectually stimulating tasks and like all this stuff that's just copy pasta over and over all this air app. It's just like let the AI do all that, that crap, right?

Like, you know. This is like a potentially new job for for now at least, just unstuck the AI. which I think over time it'll get better and better and we maybe won't need these people but I love that it's like now AI first and person second versus person building the thing and then AI

like when co-pilot 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 co-pilot is flipping flipping it

totally yeah yeah that's what's wild is you know I think Sonnet was, you know, the sonnet 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 sonnet went on one, right? Like we actually tried building bull like almost exactly a year ago with like kind of the frontier models at the time. It spent like a week at you building it. It just didn't work. Like the output, the code output was not reliable enough. It would just, it would constantly just, it would be a broken app or look ugly or whatever. And then we got a

sneak peek at the son and stuff in May, and we're like, oh, okay, like, we should take that project back off the shelf and greenlining 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 very critical threshold has been passed with LLM's ability to write production grade code and apps that actually look beautiful and actually function well. It's not perfect. But it, but we, there's kind of this, 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 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 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. I mean, that is fascinating. Just like the amount of, uh, uh, I don't know, revenue and business and a commerce that that one model has unlocked is insane. I did not realize that. It is. And in retrospect, you know, for the, you know, I'd mentioned like we'd never done an AI product in stack plates.

And, you know, it's like, it's tempting because it's like when, you know, kind of bunch out of ChbT 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 added value. Right. So I was not super bullish on, you know, a lot of people like, hey, the AGI is going to be here 20, 23. You know, I mean, there's all this stuff that was being sent. I was like, I just don't know if I necessarily buy how fast people say that's going to

move. And to a certain degree, like, that was like the correct view. What I didn't really think about, though, is like if AI, if LOMs are going to get better at a specific vertical kind of like, which are going to be the things that it would be. And, you know, if you look at like law, for example, you want to make the best outline for you know, looking at case law or, or the problem with that stuff is it's not deterministic. Like, the judge's ruling is dependent kind of on society's view of things at the time, right?

Political stuff, like the jury, there's a ton of things that it's not deterministic. And so, and so you can't really create a lot of training data that's going to be like super reliable, right? 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 is what I, that's the key insight, Anthropic really had.

They just went deep. And then this is what they're doing. It's just reinforcement learning. I'm basically permutating every type of app you could ever build and just spinning up tens of thousands of course for whatever to do that, just building tons of training data and doing reinforced for learning and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, making their LMs the best in the world at building beautiful, reliable applications. I'm extremely bullish, right?

I mean, it makes technical sense why of anything LMs are going to get insanely better at writing code than probably most other types of applications for LMs, simply because it's something that can be extremely deterministic and permutated thousands and thousands and thousands of times per second, right? And so I think the broader trend here is, and SOTA has woken everyone up. Like, they 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 I think, I think that just kind of in a macro, the kind of the highest macro view and why

we went and raised money for gold, it's like, this is, this, this seems like an extremely clear shot. There's not this like, you can kind of separate the hype of what people say and blah, blah, blah. When you break it down technically, this makes sense. It makes sense what's going to happen here. And so, you know, and for us, we, you know, we are just so happen to be well positioned to like go and enable people to like kind of ride this way of the innovation that is here in elements and is going to just keep coming and therefore enable more people to build even crazier, amazing software, right? So that's our world view, at least, of kind of what's going on here at like the McRole. And when did Sodomite even come out? It's been a while, right?

I think they officially, I think it was in June, what they officially put it online. 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 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,

And from there, it's just we've been piecing together all this other stuff. And so it's been, it's been a, uh, kind of like a, the thrill of like a murder mystery of like what is going on here, you know? Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. Just piecing together like what you've seen anthropic releasing. Is that what you mean? Like, what have you been, like, what are you been? And then the impacts of like bull where it's like we have people that are not technical use in this. How, how are they using it? Why are they doing this? You know, it's like all the stuff we've talked about on this podcast has been the result of, you know, nine months of just, uh, you know, R&D and seeing the results of it and going, what? You know, 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 us, you know? It's like an anthropology or is if that's the right term of just like watching.

It's like an emergent discovery, it sounds like, versus you have this strategy here. We're going to do this, where he pursuant to lunch, this thing will happen. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I think 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 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 know 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 will be launching before this comes out, maybe right after this comes out, maybe in mid-March. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So by the time and, you know, I'm going to go back and tell our engineers, like, I said this. I've committed. Sorry, guys. This is I found actually being a leaky faucet on, you know, talking on podcasts and stuff is, you know, my engineers like, how could you tell them? Like, you shut your ship it faster now. Like, you've got to make it real, right? We're all good eye on it. No, no, yeah.

But it's, you know, I think for, for us, it's like, again, we've seen a lot of PMs, designers, entrepreneurs, et cetera, using Bolt. And so we're really looking at how to a better, you're kind of better fit in with the tools that folks are using to do those things today. We're like, we're, Bolt's not going to like replace them or something, right? And for like, you know, if you're working at a company, like, how do you like integrate great this stuff with your existing, like business and your existing product and co-based. Because that's the question we often get for 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 and like, how do we open our production co-based and that's, you know, that's like 20 years old. I'm like, you don't. That's not like none of this stuff. Like that's not what you do. This is for like rapid product development in your use case. So I did the, 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, we've, we've, partnered up with a company called the Enema to do this. But basically, so on any Figma URL, when you're looking at like a, you know, a design that you've made, if you just put bolt.new in front of that URL and hit enter, it's going to suck that design into

bold and turn it into a full stack app or mobile app just out of the box. Yeah. It's amazing. It's going to be nuts. Yeah. I mean, it's like it's really fun to use because, you know, like when you're, 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 a bullet, you can just keep prompting from there. You're like, yeah, we'll add another page here. 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, and it's splitting out the assets. Like, Anima's been doing this since 2017, like, you know, Figma to Code. They've got, you know, the best agent in the world for, like, they're the number one.

Figma plugin, you know, or whatever. And so in bold, like, it's just going to just work. Like, it's just deeply integrated. So it's bold. Bolt. That news slash the Figma URL to the design. Yep. That's all you got to do.

And in bold, we're going to also have a little Figma icon in the chat. So, like, if you go to Boll itself, you can, like, click it and then paste the URL or whatever. But, yeah, it's like just, but it's like that, it's like from Figma to full stack app in a click, literally. You know, like, 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.

Because often, you know, 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 done. And so we're actually creating a, a, you 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 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, if on that thread or whatever, you'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. Yeah, I mean, so it's like, it's like having a developer and you're kind of kick this

out and just like, go make this thing, okay, you know? So it's like those two things. I think it's, again, you start thinking about how are companies going to change how they're, how they're currently doing product development and even just like, hey, we need to spin up a marketing site. Here's the thing we'll like, do you do that. Yep. Let me go do that. Yeah, I mean, 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, you know, and folks can be stumped about it. I hope, you know, not to work. Those are, those are awesome features. I love the slack piece because when I think about agents, there's all stock. about agents. To me, like, the simplest way to understand it is just a Slack bot. Just the AI I 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 gigantic feature of just like, hey, you just have this engineer now that can go build stuff for you. Let me actually ask you a question along these lines that I was meaning to ask, but I forgot is just how much your engineering team, how much, what are they using to build

bolt? I imagine it's a lot of cursor. Like, how much is bolt at this point involved in building bolt? And is there any other tools that they found useful, find useful that are worth highlighting? Yeah, good question. Yeah, we definitely use cursor. Folks use cursor a lot. We use Bolt a lot for the product development process, like a ton. We're using it. And when we're doing basically the flow that described, we're 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, because 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 UriGo, you need to do dot, dot.

Other AI tools that the developers are using, I think those are like the primary ones. I mean, I think we've got like a subscription to Claude and like Jach TBT and things like that. But, you know, I think, I think like for development, it's like cursors like the main thing. Yeah. It's cool how few tools. Like there's so many AI tools and it's interesting how few people actually end up using. It's like cursor, Claude, Jach, VT, and then maybe another. another tool like bolt.

Totally. Final is 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 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 imagine I should have about like PMs or designers. That's a good one. That's a lot of the audience here. I would, I would, I would, I would say, talk to this thing like you do a linear ticket or a GER a ticket. That would be my advice.

And talk to this like you would like you're talking to one of the developers on your team. Right. And what that means is be specific on things that matter. And on things where also you can let it be creative. You know, you can go to and just say, hey, make it prettier, you know. And it'll take it. It does a good job. It actually 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 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, because these tools are so easy. Just go in and it's like, the other thing. And then they'll cool have a website.

It's like coded, boom, but done. And what I'm hearing here is take a little time to craft your ask. 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, totally, right?

Especially if you have a clear vision of what you're trying to build, right? It's something like, like, reasonably sophisticated. And I recommend everyone to do whenever they, if it's your first time, try and bowl, and you're like, what should I have a do and I don't have an idea? Tell it to build you a personal website. Like there's, it's something like magic. Like you take your LinkedIn, copy and paste your LinkedIn bio and work experience. It's just like select text, copy, paste it.

I eat a website, my name is so-and-so. Here's my LinkedIn history. My favorite color is blue and I like dogs. The paste, right? Make it pretty. 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't, right?

Like, I mean, now you have a real personal. It's like, I think there's kind of a moment around that where it's like, okay, wow, like this, you know, zero shot, zero shot. 99.99% of the time, like, you're getting a beautiful personal website that you didn't have before that would have taken you an hour on Wix, if not. 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 put that in piece by piece into this thing, this guy 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, I saw this story about how when you were starting StackBlitz or maybe even before StackBlitz. You lived, you like squatted in the AOL office because you had some badge that still worked. Maybe just tell that story.

Yeah. Yeah. That was like, you know, kind of the thing I was like most known for, that happened like 2012 and I was like 19 years old. So it's been a very long time. I think I'm like 33 now or something. But the statute of limitations are expensive. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But yeah, for a while, I was like, I have to do something more notable than living in AOL.

Wow. This can't be what I'm like known for, right? Now people are like, oh, like, wait, you're the stack this guy and you're the year well ago. So yeah, so yeah, when I first came out to Silicon Valley, you know, we got into a, I was building a K-12 education startup at the time. And this is back during the days where Y Cominer, they only gave you like 20 grand. And so there was this offshoot of Imagine, or of Ycomini or called Imagine K-12. It was Jeff Ralston, who I think he was CEO of YC a couple of years back. But then Magic H-12 merged into Y Combinator a couple of years after a row went through it. But, it was they had an office space at AOL.

Like at the time, AOL was trying to like reinvigorate the company. And okay, we should get like young startup blood in here. So let's like rent out office space to, you know, to teenagers, basically. And so I was there. And I mean, we ended up running out of, you know, money like 20, 20 grand doesn't go very far in the valley. So like three or four months in, we're like, oh, God, we're, you know, what do we do? And I was going to the Awell office. couple, they had multiple times a week because we had access cars to get into, to get to the

investors offices. And I realized, I was like, you know, like, they have like couches here. And 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 a lot of figuring this out, I'll just live out of here. And so that's, that's what I ended up doing for, maybe like four or five months. I was like living out of this headquarters over on Page Mill and Al Camino in Palo Alto. And then, you know, I got away with it for a while just because, you know, the guards, you know, the security guards, you know, they worked, you know, 12-hour shifts.

And so the guys that when I was there at night, and I was coding like all day, every day, basically. So the guys at night just were like, ding, this guy works really hard, you know. And then in the morning, they'd be like, wow, this guy is working really hard, right? So I became friends with some of them. And then eventually I think they, you know, there were also a lot of Stanford students that, I think they like put bunks in one of the, it was just like started getting out controls. I think they started cracking down.

Then one morning at like four in the morning, guard came in and threw me out. And I from Chicago, I don't know anyone at that point. I'm like, I know no one in the Bay Area. So I went to a Starbucks, which was not open. I just like, I slept on the table outside of the thing. And then I think I hit up one of the other entrepreneurs that was in the program. I was like, do you have a couch? Like I think I kind of need it at this point.

Yeah, the Prescott Windavon is this like, you know, worldwide store. I lived on a dollar a day. That was the crazy thing. My burn rate was a dollar a day at that time. What did you use that dollar for? This is back when McDonald's had the dollar menu. Literally. So I was like, you know, I would, you know, occasionally.

would go and, you know, get a cheeseburger or whatever. And yeah, it was, you know, ultimate, ultimate scrappiness, you know. Like, you're technically homeless. From homeless to one of the fastest growing startups in history. Eric, what a journey. This is such an interesting point in time of your life and of just tech. Like, no matter what happens, I'm sure you'll be extremely successful, but it's such an interesting just point in that journey. And I'm thankful that you make time to share it with us. It's always good to just have the perspective of, you know, you should start companies to keep the mindset that you're doing it to have fun.

Right. And so I'm stoked to see where this goes, one way or the other. It's going to be interesting. Eric, final questions. Where can folks find out if they want to reach out, maybe follow up on some stuff you share it? And how can listeners be useful to you? Yeah, totally.

I mean, yeah, so bolt on news, the website over on Twitter. I'm Eric Simons 40 on Twitter and I think our Twitter account is bolt. Not with a period. It's like, B-O-L-T, D-O-T, N-E-W. And yeah, I mean, I'm very curious to hear if I'm curious to hear what folks think. Like, I mean, this is, again, like we're, we are learning so much from the people that are coming and trying this thing out and giving their feedback.

And, you know, within the first meeting that going online, we were not the experts. I don't use the tool anywhere. And it's been that way ever since. And so I love hearing for folks on what they want to see, you know, next and how this is helping them. And where they run into problems? Like, where we need to go and fix things. So my email address is Eric at Stackblitz.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 is a blast. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening.

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