Bolt’s Eric Simons on Enabling Everyone to Generate Websites with AI

Speaker 1 Hi listeners, welcome back to No Priors.

Speaker 1 Today we're hanging out with Eric Simons, the co-founder of Stacklitz and the makers of Bolt.new, a new AI tool that enables everyone, from developers to designers to non-technical folks, to build full stack real applications entirely in their browser.

Speaker 1 Eric has spent the last decade and a half thinking about how to make development more accessible. And since its launch, Bolt has taken off like lightning.
Is it over for site builders?

Speaker 1 We'll talk about AI code generation, creative community, and if everyone really wants to build websites. Eric, good to see you.

Speaker 2 Good to see you too, Sarah.

Speaker 1 You have had a wild

Speaker 1 two months since you guys launched Bolt.new. Can you explain what it is? Like zero to 20 million of ARR?

Speaker 1 I have... I don't think ever seen that sort of crazy growth.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I haven't either. It's been kind of surreal.
It's kind of far beyond any of our expectations here.

Speaker 1 So for anybody who hasn't seen it yet, what is Bolt?

Speaker 2 Bolt is, it's kind of similar to like ChatGPT or Claude, except you use Bolt to build full stack web applications.

Speaker 2 So you can come and just prompt, if you want a landing page, a blog, or even like a, you know, any type of full stack web app where you have authentication, you can log in.

Speaker 2 And, you know, you can use it effectively instead of going to like a web development agency or shop. You can come here, put in your idea, hit enter, and get a real production website for you.

Speaker 2 If you look at the world, there's 25 million developers, I think, globally.

Speaker 2 And to date, last week we had almost 200,000 software composers, we like to call them, that use Bolt to build web applications. And we think that that number should be 100 million.

Speaker 2 And we're on this growth clip.

Speaker 2 It seems like

Speaker 2 maybe we'll get there sooner or later. Bolt is really enabling folks to build real software, not just kind of drag and drop sort of static sites,

Speaker 2 the previous era of how the web was made.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of code generation tools out there. You can do this, you know, directly in the core model products as well.
What do you think people are finding special about Bolt?

Speaker 2 Yeah, totally. Yeah, what's special about Bolt, and it kind of comes to the origins of our company, but in short, we've written an operating system in WebAssembly that can run in your browser.

Speaker 2 And that's really important because if you want to run dev environments,

Speaker 2 you need to be able to install arbitrary packages and run different tool chains right whether it's next.js or v or anything else it's very complicated uh and expensive to typically do this if you're going to use servers so it's very valuable to like do it in the browser because it's extremely fast there's no latency you're not paying by the minute you know for some cloud what we've done um has kind of married these frontier models with this technology we've been making um and then when you kind of look at the other stuff in the market there there's uh you know like a cloud artifacts is you know probably one of the first things that uh that hit the market that did a really good job of this where you could say hey build me a ui and it will do it.

Speaker 2 The problem comes when you actually want to build stuff that's more meaningful.

Speaker 2 Like, it's very good if you're saying, Hey, like, yeah, I use Claude every week for just kind of generating graphs based on numbers or whatever. Very good for that sort of use case.

Speaker 2 But if you want to say, Hey, a pre-day landing page where people can log in and like do some type of functionality, you can't go npm install, you know, Firebase or Superbase or whatever have you and plug all that up and actually deploy it.

Speaker 2 So that's what Bolt specifically is, you know, uniquely capable of doing without any other setup. Um, it's just all kind of baked in.

Speaker 1 A common

Speaker 1 engineer, investor, tech person pushback. Hey, like these code generation tools are often the same.

Speaker 1 You guys have this web container technology that allows you to, you know, abstract away the backend and allow that to run locally without handling that developer environment mess yourself.

Speaker 1 There's this concept of like a GPT wrapper.

Speaker 2 company, right?

Speaker 1 And so I think there were a number of companies that were less generously like some system prompts and like a well-SEO'd website.

Speaker 1 You guys open sourced your system prompts. So and like a lot of the code for Bolt.
Can you explain that strategically?

Speaker 2 As we were building Bolt,

Speaker 2 yeah, I mean, over the past couple of years, there's been a ton of more simple sort of wrappers that have come out around these frontier models.

Speaker 2 And the problem is like whenever the next model comes, whenever, you know, one of the AI labs eventually integrates that into their chat products or whatever,

Speaker 2 those companies kind of tend to go away pretty quickly.

Speaker 2 So, when we were working on Bolt, I mean, one of the big advantages we have is we've been building this web container technology for five years, and it's like pretty, pretty difficult stuff to do.

Speaker 2 And so, when we were going to build, to actually launch Bolt, when we were building the system prompts and kind of the user interface around it, when we looked out there, there's not a lot of other folks doing this where they actually could open source their system prompts and kind of open source their products so you could see how it's actually made.

Speaker 2 And for us, you know, we just, we felt that it was inevitable that someone would

Speaker 2 get our AI model to dump out our system prompts anyways. But also,

Speaker 2 we felt there's kind of something missing in the open source world where we see like we come from a web development background, right? Open source is key for innovation for everyone.

Speaker 2 And to date, a lot of these companies in the AI space have been looking at their system prompts and kind of their specific, you know, glue code as the secret sauce.

Speaker 2 And it just seems there's a whole lot that was being left on the table by not just putting this stuff out there and letting people fork it and improve it and contribute to it.

Speaker 2 You know, if we're going to build a great business here, what's going to allow us to win is

Speaker 2 growing extremely quickly, building the best end-to-end product experience that really works incredibly well.

Speaker 2 It's not going to be, you know, the system prompts kind of a, you know, for those who have done web development, it's kind of like view sourcing on a web page.

Speaker 2 Like you can go to google.com, google.com, you can view source.

Speaker 2 No one so far has kind of done that and built another trillion-dollar company that took out Google by doing that, right?

Speaker 2 You can learn a lot, but it's not actually, you're kind of building this cohesive end-to-end product business experience is a totally different thing.

Speaker 1 Why is the community valuable to you?

Speaker 1 I mean, you've always been like very committed to the developer community and to open source, but have you learned anything from the community that improves, as you said, the end-to-end Stackblitz system?

Speaker 1 Or is there like an ongoing way that happens?

Speaker 2 100%. Yeah.
This has actually been one of the most interesting things for Boltz.

Speaker 2 I mean, Stackblitz, the company, we've been investing in open source a ton over the past, you know, five, seven years or whatever have you.

Speaker 2 When we put Bolt out in open source, we were really curious to see, does anyone find this valuable?

Speaker 2 And the answer is like, yeah, actually. And

Speaker 2 there's kind of a couple of key things kind of worth calling out on this.

Speaker 2 One, from a general community standpoint, for I would say just AI tools in general.

Speaker 2 One of the biggest problems that a company like us has that's building an AI experience with AI models and heck, even the AI labs themselves, is educating folks on how to best use the tool.

Speaker 2 Because the problem with AI models is that they're non-deterministic. It's not like instructing someone, hey, here's how you send an email and Gmail.

Speaker 2 You hit the compose button, you type, you hit send. If you go to a chat product,

Speaker 2 prompt engineering is something that folks have to be educated on and learn how to use properly because it costs money every time you send a message.

Speaker 2 And so one of the interesting things I think we've done a good job of is really investing in the community and having it be a place where folks are sharing their knowledge and how to best use the tool.

Speaker 2 Because that's actually, you're going to see a lot of churn in your product if folks are coming, can't figure out how to use it and leave.

Speaker 2 And we're finding we are learning, we are actually not even the experts on how to use our own product at this point. Our power users.
have actually know more.

Speaker 2 And so we're bringing them on live streams to actually show, hey, what's working for you and your workflows?

Speaker 2 And to the degree that we can upstream what they're doing by typing prompts into the product, we're doing that.

Speaker 2 So I think from a, if you're building an AI tool, it's critical to be building out a community and actually be directly engaging with them and like giving them a place to share their knowledge, because otherwise everyone else on the product

Speaker 2 is, there's going to be a high amount of churn, which is exactly what you've seen happening with these AI apps.

Speaker 2 churn on these things can be like 60 70 percent for folks that are not doing what i'm describing and that's kind of like that seems to be the most common case with a lot of AI applications that are kind of in their earlier stages.

Speaker 2 It's just crazy high churn rate.

Speaker 1 Oh, I was just going to draw a parallel to what David Holtz had done and the Midjourney team overall,

Speaker 1 in that I think that the fact that there are like obsessive, creative, really capable power users of Midjourney that are teaching the entire community how to use Midjourney models and demonstrating like what can be created is like a huge part of their position versus like the many other image generators that are out there.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 that I think is just an interesting parallel.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think that's an excellent example and probably the best example that I've seen.

Speaker 2 There's surprisingly not a ton of, at least very visible examples of this, but I think it's going to be extremely important.

Speaker 2 I think for the companies, especially the startups that really want to win big here, this is, I mean, just a critical community more than ever, right?

Speaker 2 More than ever, I would say, community strategy and real investment is going to be key for success in building

Speaker 2 this type of product

Speaker 2 and user base.

Speaker 1 You guys are what, like 10, 12 people right now?

Speaker 2 Yeah, like 15 to 20. I don't know what the exact number is, but

Speaker 1 15, okay, to 20. That's that's better.

Speaker 1 I'm a little out of date. I think the

Speaker 1 like the idea of like, let's have 200,000 plus users and growing growing be using this every week and tell us what works in a world where like there aren't evals that are you know from academia or or standard that are useful in terms of like what real world applications can you build with your system right and so uh i i think that that um virtuous cycle seems really powerful

Speaker 2 and you guys also like i think a big part of the bolt theory is like make anyone a developer right versus you guys are all developers you also need to see how non-technical humans build with this stuff yeah 100% and that's like the majority of people using Bolt at this point are you know non-technical um and it's interesting the most successful people that are using bolt are actually people that have had to interact with or manage development teams so think like entrepreneurs uh pms et cetera because it turns out kind of managing uh an ai is extremely similar to managing actual software developers, right?

Speaker 2 And one of the things you just mentioned on the eval, so this is actually the kind of the second piece regarding, you know, how, like, why we open source.

Speaker 2 And one of the most interesting aspects that's popped out of it is that, like I mentioned earlier, there's not a lot of

Speaker 2 good open source AI tools today, like real world AI tools.

Speaker 2 And especially ones where products that clearly are providing a lot of value to the degree they're growing quickly and, you know, both by revenue and usage.

Speaker 2 We're like maybe one of, you know, the only of the few or something like that what's kind of happened is that as you mentioned the eval suites are we're very good the past couple years of kind of generally measuring how good are these models at coding but the problem that folks are kind of running into now when you talk about building a real world product around these things the eval suites that exist today are

Speaker 2 very specific and not representative of like hey i want to go build a landing page or i want to build xyz there's nothing in there that that in those suites that can you can actually test against and so what's ending up happening is what's going on with our open source version of Bolt is Bolt Local is becoming kind of like one of the main ways people are testing out new code gen models when they're coming out.

Speaker 2 Like I think there's one that was released by Nvidia recently, and there's one called Quorum that was released recently.

Speaker 2 And some of the folks, like I think over at like Hugging Face, have been basically just, one of the first things they're doing is taking Bolt Local.

Speaker 2 and dropping that in saying, okay, how good is this thing versus Sonnet 3.5 or whatever? Right.

Speaker 2 And so that's been kind of an interesting, it reminds me for those that were like into video games in like the 2000s, if you, you know, can it run crisis, right?

Speaker 2 Like as far as like measuring your PC performance, like it's, it's kind of becoming that. People are, you know, asking, okay, can this run bulk? You know, like, how, how well can this run bulk?

Speaker 2 They drop in like, okay, you know, yep, can't really do da-da-da, you know?

Speaker 2 So I think, um, I think that's to me one of the most interesting things that's going on as far as the open source side and the community there for us.

Speaker 2 And we've got some stuff we're announcing on that end that's going to kind of further bolster this.

Speaker 2 But already it's, it's, it's, there's, there's kind of some benchmarks being set up around this thing where the latest, the latest AI models have a way to actually get tested

Speaker 2 in a real product that's, that's actually pretty sophisticated.

Speaker 1 um with you know use cases they're not just hey can it can it write hello world you know yeah yeah or you know this very well specified sweet bench problem right yeah i think it would useful just to paint a picture of like some of your favorite use cases of things people have built that you feel like are real, because that is definitely, I mean, correct me if you feel differently, that is a new development this year that you can use any sort of code generation tool to get to a useful application in any sort of end-to-end way.

Speaker 2 100%. 100%.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 What's your favorite use case? What are people building that's cool?

Speaker 2 What's really cool to me is folks are actually able to build real world products.

Speaker 2 And then so, you know, we've been online for just under two months now, and we've already had the first startups launch out of this thing.

Speaker 2 You know, they've used Bolt to build their startup and are making money, like, you know, charging on Stripe or whatever have you. Um, so a couple of examples, uh, just off the top of my head.

Speaker 2 Um, one is from uh this gal in Thailand, uh, she's a PM in a software banking company, and uh, her company is uh viralhooks.ai.

Speaker 2 And so, she launched this project, um, you know, by herself on the side, just moonlighting it. And the product is actually pretty cool.
So the general idea is

Speaker 2 when you make like a TikTok or something, I'm not a TikToker, but I've had aspirations.

Speaker 2 When you make a TikTok, you need to have like a viral hook to kind of get people to keep watching.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 And so she's actually trained up some models from OpenAI or whatever have you to actually help you write great viral hooks for your videos and kind of reverse engineer how their great creators have done that.

Speaker 2 So you can go check it out, viralhooks.ai.

Speaker 2 And so what was kind kind of mind-blowing and it's beautiful site like awesome product and um what was mind-blowing about this is a week before we launched bolt uh she went on to upwork and listed this project said hey i want to build this product da da da asked for quotes on the thing um she got a quote for five thousand dollars um from i think it was devin like you created or something uh estimated timeline two to three months right it seems like considering the app i just described kind of reasonable sounds cheap honestly for what it is yeah it's like a pretty like not not a bad price and not a, not an unrealistic timeframe.

Speaker 2 And the next week, Bolt came out. She signed up for our $50 plan.
And in two weeks, she had built and launched the entire thing.

Speaker 2 The cost savings there means a 99% reduction in cost from $5,000 to $50,000.

Speaker 2 And then a five times faster delivery, you know, two weeks versus, you know, months. And the alpha is just like insane, you know? And this is not, it's not actually like a one-off case.

Speaker 2 Like she was, I think, I think the first person we had chatted with that had done this end-to-end, another guy named Paul. He launched an entire CRM called Chill CRM.

Speaker 2 He's just been on a tear making a ton of different types of tools.

Speaker 2 But, like, this is like fully featured CRM, like calendar, contacts. He has a chat bot built into the thing, you know, an AI chatbot, et cetera.

Speaker 2 Same deal. Like, he actually, he's been running web dev agencies for, I think, like 20 years.
And so, you know, to build the CRM he made, it was like a $30,000 quote.

Speaker 2 He did that on our $200 a month plan, you know, in one month. Right.
So again, same sort of cost savings, et cetera.

Speaker 2 So I think a lot of a lot of folks, you know, especially in the web dev shops, et cetera, they're just,

Speaker 2 they're able to punch out incredible web applications faster than ever before for clients and are able to charge the same price. Right.
And so

Speaker 2 there's one tweet I saw online where

Speaker 2 one of these folks was like,

Speaker 2 this is the most incredible arbitrage opportunity in web involvement ever.

Speaker 2 And it's true. I mean, it's unbelievable.

Speaker 2 So I think what's really cool is just seeing people be able to take their ideas, launch them into reality for a fraction of the cost way faster than ever before.

Speaker 1 I have,

Speaker 1 for a number of reasons,

Speaker 1 been

Speaker 1 long-term skeptical of like no-code tools in the traditional sense, right? Like a

Speaker 1 GUI-based editor for people to

Speaker 1 build

Speaker 1 simple applications or more complex applications in a closed ecosystem.

Speaker 1 I'm just like, ah, like for anybody who's coming from engineering, that's really scary because I'm basically trapped in your platform without the ability to leverage the entire developer ecosystem, the open source world, like frameworks, anything we

Speaker 1 might need because I don't know where the bounds of your system is.

Speaker 1 Like, how do you, you clearly believe that there's some version, I mean, it is working, but like, there's some version of no code and development for non-developers that is going to happen.

Speaker 1 Like, what, what changes? Like, why, why should it work?

Speaker 2 Yeah, good point. I mean, and to be clear, like, you know, like six months ago, I, I shared the same viewpoint and, you know, and maybe even like three months ago, I would have shared it.

Speaker 2 But there's some, some key things that, that have meaningfully changed.

Speaker 2 And just from a technical perspective, AI code gen models, there's a tipping point, specifically with Sonnet 3.5, there's a chasm that's been crossed here as far as AI models are

Speaker 2 have gotten over the tipping point of being good enough to really write real applications that are like production grid. And it's only going to get better from here.

Speaker 2 But this, but up because, you know, kind of some inside baseball, earlier this year, I think like in February, we had the idea for Bolt.

Speaker 2 We tried to build it with some of the, you know, frontier models available at that time.

Speaker 2 Wasn't possible to do.

Speaker 2 The models just did not spit back quality, accurate code that was constantly breaking, which ruins the experience. It doesn't work, right? So we put the project on the shelf.

Speaker 2 And then once we kind of got an early preview of the new Sonnet stuff, we're like, wow, this, okay, this is, this changes everything.

Speaker 2 And so I think, you know, if you kind of think about these no-code site builder things that have existed to date, the only reason that

Speaker 2 these exist, that they had to make, you know, custom WYSIWYG GUIs and stuff, is because how else can you get an end user that's non-technical to like turn their idea into code the best middleman tool or interface to do that to date was like drag and drop wix style sort of stuff which comes with all the problems you just mentioned lock-in how do you expand this like how do you you know it's like you want to actually do add real development to this at some point how do you do that right and so these things kind of be these you know end up as these walled you know ecosystems um that can't really get mainlined into building real stuff on top of, you know, over time.

Speaker 2 That changes now because of this, this tipping point in the AI AI models.

Speaker 2 Now the best interface, I mean, we have people coming to Bolt that, you know, like with the week we launched, we had a salesman, I think from Dallas that he tweeted us and said, thank you so much for making this tool.

Speaker 2 You know, I used this to make a website for my daughter because she has like a medical condition. She has to find donors as she travels.

Speaker 2 And so I made this website for her so she can send it ahead of, you know, her travels. And it was an incredibly touching use case.
But my first thought was was like

Speaker 2 should i tell this guy that like wix exists you know like there's other things that can do this and then i i realized you know wix and squarespace are really complicated to use like back the only time i've used squarespace was for to build my wedding website back in 2021 at first i wanted to do it myself i'm a developer and so i was like honey i this is important to me i need to build this thing and i i spent the saturday on it and wasn't done and then you know i'm running a startup at the same time i have other things going on so she finally just bought an account and said it in this thing.

Speaker 2 And, you know, it's pretty complicated. Whereas you compare that against bullet, it's a text box.
You say, Hi, I'm having my wedding on this date. Here's the details.

Speaker 2 Here's the RSVP. Hit enter.
Boom, zero shot.

Speaker 2 There's a production website ready for you.

Speaker 2 And like to degree, my 71-year-old mom built and launched her first website ever two weeks ago, three weeks ago. Yeah.
And so, but it just kind of goes to show, like,

Speaker 2 it's way simpler, right? To build a real and the stuff that's being, the code that's being punched out is, is, uh, you know, the same stuff that developers would work with.

Speaker 2 It's like Next.js or Remix or Astro or Vee or whatever have you.

Speaker 2 So, and what's actually happening right now in the community is as folks are trying to do more and more complicated stuff, they're raising their hand in our Discord or on Twitter and they're saying, hey, is there anyone who can like come and help me debug this or build this thing out?

Speaker 2 And folks are like by the hour saying, hey, yeah, you book a time with me and, you know, I'll come and help you develop this thing, et cetera.

Speaker 2 So, it's kind of this really beautiful mix of the best of both worlds that's happening, right? So, I think that to me is what's changed.

Speaker 2 What's changed is like AI CodeGen has gotten good enough where you can go and take your ideas, put them into your fingertips, hit enter, get a great result.

Speaker 2 And for things where you need to bring in actual professional developers to tidy up or fix bugs or really expand, you know, more difficult capabilities, they can because it's like any other code base that they come into, right?

Speaker 2 So, I think it's a very, very, very

Speaker 2 interesting and kind of mind-blowing point in time because

Speaker 2 I don't think anyone saw this coming, you know, years ago. So.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I find that very inspiring because I think that there are plenty of entrepreneurs or even just individuals who like are not one of the 25 million professional software developers in the world, but want to make software or have a web presence of some kind.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 this is the first time they can do it in a way that like, to me, makes sense where I'm like, okay, if you if you succeed, or lots of actual, like existing professional engineers use Bolt too, but it is because it's not a dead end, right?

Speaker 1 Because like you can go, you know, iteratively do development or even use the Stacklits ecosystem of developers or whatever over time, which is, which I think is like step function different.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think, and for existing devs, I mean, it's like, this is just like every other developer tool or innovation, you know, the past 20, 30 years, this is just allowing them to focus on the actual high value work that they do you know it's just it's it's kind of not worth their time to punch out a ui you know um and so that's that's what they're coming here to do is just rapidly iterate on on uis and pull in data etc and um and some folks you know some developers just using this as a primary way to launch their startups or whatever um or if they did if they need to pull it into cursor they do that and they can bring it back to bold they you know it's it they can kind of use the best of both worlds um but certainly for non-technical people this is huge that was an interesting thing that we learned actually is there is a large, there is, and there was and is a large number of people that have been downloading cursor that are not developers because it let them meaningfully dip their toes into kind of like clicking accept change, except change, except change from the AI.

Speaker 2 And when we first launched Bold, I mean, there's just, I mean, there's still, they're still coming, all these YouTube videos that are like cursor and you know, bold, it kills cursor.

Speaker 2 And we're like, that's, they're two different products, you know? But to non-technical people, they, they, you know, they aren't.

Speaker 2 It's actually like, this is, this thing solves the problem of me not being able to code and et cetera.

Speaker 1 Maybe we can back up a little bit and just talk about like

Speaker 1 Stack Blitz and the story as a company.

Speaker 1 I think it's very funny when companies suddenly have overnight success, right? Because it's like, oh, well, they were, you know, Notion was working on.

Speaker 1 developing their point of view and trying different ideas to refine it for five years. And then they made Notion.

Speaker 1 And you guys have been working on this for, you know, five plus years as well.

Speaker 1 Can you talk a little bit about the origin of Stack Blitz and you and Pai and

Speaker 1 when you decide to do both?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so I co-founded Stackblitz with one of my childhood best friends. His name's Albert Pai.
He and I grew up in a suburb of Chicago together.

Speaker 2 And when we were 13,

Speaker 2 we had ideas. We and I were always very interested in computers.
We were building PCs. And we wanted to learn how to write web applications.
This is like the mid-2000s.

Speaker 2 So like for our 13th birthdays, we asked for the O'Reilly books because they're like 200 bucks a pop instead of an Xbox, you know, and we learned how to code together.

Speaker 2 And really, and it was, it was painful. I mean, get to, at that time, there was not like Code Academy and all the stuff that's for free online.

Speaker 2 There wasn't really online communities around these things. But he and I really wanted to, we had, we thought we had cool ideas for products or whatever.

Speaker 2 And we really wanted to build them and launched it. And I think, and

Speaker 2 that's really, I think,

Speaker 2 that's why, you know, we've been building stuff together for 15, 20 years. It's been about that.

Speaker 2 You know, coding was really a way to you know a necessary part of of how you bring these things to life you know anyways um fast forward albert and i have done a couple of different startups over the years um but back in 2016 2017

Speaker 2 we had this realization that browsers had gotten really powerful like we've been building web apps you know at that point for a decade and a half or so

Speaker 2 And we had this realization that the browser had gotten really powerful.

Speaker 2 And it had hit this new inflection point where you could actually basically like run an operating system in a browser tab that was like really fast etc

Speaker 2 and uh and that was really cool because that means that you could actually use the web to build the web if you look at every other platform that's ever existed that's been an important capability of you know every platform that's ever succeeded in a meaningful way you know windows can build windows apps macs can build mac apps The web does not have a built-in way to do that.

Speaker 2 So there's kind of this nerd instinct of ours. We're like, this is important.

Speaker 2 This seems very valuable to solve, right? And so we kind of set out to go and do this. And part of this was that, like, we had actually seen this story play out

Speaker 2 six, seven years earlier with Dylan Field and Figma. When they, their first pitch for Figma was not like a design tool.
They didn't have a design tool.

Speaker 2 They had a demo, like a WebGL demo of a 3D ball dropping into one. And the pitch was, what browsers have gotten powerful enough to do meaningful 3D graphics rendering.

Speaker 2 And because that is true, that means you can build a design tool that lives entirely in the browser. That was the pitch.

Speaker 2 And that was that we saw that same sort of story playing out for web development. Like browser gotten powerful enough to run entire development environments in a browser tab.

Speaker 2 That means you can build an entirely new product experience that's web native, you can share it instantly.

Speaker 2 It can be viral because there's no cost to spinning up VMs or something.

Speaker 2 Incredible experience, no latency. So that was really the origins of it.
And we built in, that technology took us

Speaker 2 four years, I think, to build end-to-end. It's called web containers.

Speaker 2 We hired a couple of people on, specifically one guy in particular, Dominic Elm from Germany, has been leading the engineering on that project and now our AI stuff.

Speaker 2 But really, we got the, I think we're doing like 3 million developers a month using Stackblitz today. And the original product was,

Speaker 2 if you imagine web development prior to

Speaker 2 the AI revolution, how do you do it? In an IDE. So that was like, it was basically VS Code in a browser, powered by a web container technology,

Speaker 2 and became pretty popular in the open source world and for enterprise use cases.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I remember when we first met, I was lucky enough to also be an early investor in Figma and just believe in the power of the web and see the gap that you describe without knowing what the actual valuable product was.

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 this era is funny because there's been,

Speaker 1 it's sort of longstanding wisdom that nobody ever makes money on anything that looks like an IDE. Doesn't doesn't feel exactly true anymore.
But I still remember like my first impression of you was

Speaker 1 like we met and I was like, oh, this guy seems like a cracked engineer. And then he really seems to care about the web.
And then also like there was like real,

Speaker 1 even the first company was like a.

Speaker 1 It was some sort of like JavaScript education thing, right? Like a code academy like precursor thing. I was like, okay, he's like committed.

Speaker 1 He like has the authentic understanding of community, having grown up on the web himself. But the weirdest thing I remember was, I was like, I googled Eric

Speaker 1 and the previous company name and whatever, and you were like living in an AOL building because it had free food and showers.

Speaker 1 I was like, okay, this person is insane, but at least it is like high, high beta bet.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, that. Yeah, I was 19.
So I'm 33 now. So I spent a minute.

Speaker 1 And do you have a house? Do you have an apartment now?

Speaker 2 I have a place to live.

Speaker 2 I've got a dog and a daughter and a wife. So, you know, we got to

Speaker 2 living out of an office building would be tough, I think, with this whole crew. But yeah,

Speaker 2 I was 19 when I came out of Silicon Valley. I came out here with literally like zero dollars, was part of

Speaker 2 this incubator called Imagine K-12 that ended up getting picked up into Y Combinator itself.

Speaker 2 And they had access cards to get into AOL because at that time, AOL was trying to reinvent themselves and get startups into the building, et cetera.

Speaker 2 I think they shut that down after the press story about me came out, but sorry about that, everyone who is going to AOL. Yeah,

Speaker 2 I was bootstrapping this K-12 educational company. And

Speaker 2 I'd run out of money. And so I was sleeping on couches.
I was going to the AOL gym every morning, taking a shower.

Speaker 2 literally eating kind of the leftovers of the when teens would order food in and put it in the fridge and they were done with it and they would get thrown out i would eat it there's a quote from me in the article at the time, pretty sure it was a dollar a day.

Speaker 2 I think that's why I got my burn rate down to, um, which, which is pretty wild. Uh, but yeah, that's that's um, that's kind of my origins uh in Silicon Valley.

Speaker 1 Well, it's nice to be working on, uh, you know, a cash generating business now, right?

Speaker 2 100%,

Speaker 1 but you're still, you're still nuts. I remember like we were

Speaker 1 talking

Speaker 1 maybe,

Speaker 1 maybe

Speaker 1 six months ago, ago, maybe seven months ago. And like, honestly, like the company was in a bit of a tough place, right?

Speaker 1 Like you weren't about to run in, run out of cash anytime soon, but it was unclear what the growth-oriented revenue-generating product would be. And you're running a bunch of experiments.

Speaker 1 I remember you also being like, oh, yeah. Well, I.

Speaker 1 You have to tell me what the original reason to do this was, but going from that to, we're going to launch this new product. I'm going to run a marathon.
I'm not a runner.

Speaker 1 I guess I'll do an Iron Man too. Like, what are you thinking, man?

Speaker 2 It's a good question. A lot's changed in the past seven months.
But yeah, I mean, I think.

Speaker 1 Oh, you had a newborn? Sorry, I forgot that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot, a lot has changed.
Yeah. And so I think at the beginning of this year, I knew that I was my, you know, I was going to have a daughter in April.

Speaker 2 And anyone that's been a parent, you know, will has, you know, will tell you

Speaker 2 it's stressful, you know, especially the first months of life there.

Speaker 2 And at the same time, on the business side, I mean, I think us and everyone else in our space

Speaker 2 was having a tough time. And we were no exception.
And we were kind of looking at the future and, you know,

Speaker 2 kind of, you know, looking, where do we fit in here? Things are changing really quickly.

Speaker 2 And, you know, a lot of a handful of the other folks in the space have either gotten acquired or shutting down or whatever have you.

Speaker 2 And some have actually kind of gone and leaned into the AI stuff in a similar way to us, a very, if a few, a smaller number. But,

Speaker 2 you know, there, there's just, there are, there's kind of storms on the horizon. And there, there's this, this quote,

Speaker 2 you know, I think it comes from the military, but,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 fate whispers to the warrior, you can't weather this storm. And the warrior whispers back, I am the storm.

Speaker 2 And so it's just kind of like, you know, if the, and that would be my general advice to anyone is like, if, if the universe is going to try and crush you, just make it try harder.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so I think back right after my daughter was born,

Speaker 2 you know, one day I woke up and I was like, I'm going to do an Iron Man this year, like a full Iron Man. I don't know why.
That was just kind of thought hit my head.

Speaker 2 And yeah, so I think it was like six months from then was when the full was going to be, which is in October, just like a month ago.

Speaker 2 And so to do that, you know, two weeks after that, I had, you know, I never ran a marathon before.

Speaker 2 I'd never done all the things that are in an Iron Man. It's like a two and a half mile swim, 110, 112 mile bike, and then a, you know, full 26.2 mile marathon.
I'd never done any of that.

Speaker 2 And so a couple of weeks after I had the idea for the Iron Man, I just went and did a marathon with my brother-in-law.

Speaker 2 Um, and then, uh, you know, it was just throughout the summer was just training and ended up getting um coached. Like, he had formerly been on the U.S.
uh, Olympic team for this stuff.

Speaker 2 And so, I think it was like two months from when I was gonna go and do the Iron Man, he was like,

Speaker 2 This is a this is a bad idea. You should not, you shouldn't do this.

Speaker 2 He was like pretty concerned about it, and um,

Speaker 2 uh, but he, he, he had some really, you know, really uh great points on where I need to improve, et cetera. And so, uh, in October, I did it.

Speaker 2 I did the whole thing and got, I think I was in the top 25% of all the people that finished. And

Speaker 2 that was pretty wild. But yeah, that's just, that's kind of how I approach problems in my life.

Speaker 1 You make them harder.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's just, you kind of bring full intensity, especially like when, if there's things that are mentally stressful, having something like some physical challenge.

Speaker 2 is an incredible way to balance it out because you you the intensity you bring to it you can kind of feed off of it from both sides.

Speaker 2 And so as when I was running the Iron Man was like two weeks after Bullhead came online and it was, we were scaling up at a crazy rate.

Speaker 2 So it was, it was just, that was nuts, kind of what was going on then. But I think it kind of kept me safe, you know, during that time.

Speaker 2 And I think it was important, you know, as far as getting this thing online. That's how my brain works, at least.

Speaker 1 In terms of inspiring others that may not yet be prepared to commit to the Iron Man with the newborn and the product launch,

Speaker 1 what do you predict in terms of like what we can imagine for developers or for code gen, maybe just for the next like six, 12 months? Because I think past that in AI is really tough.

Speaker 2 The one thing that I'm very convinced of is that

Speaker 2 to date, a lot of the AI code gen stuff has been like tab completion, sort of like line completion stuff, things like cursor taking a little bit further. Agentic workflows are here.

Speaker 2 And I think Bolt has been one of the most visible ones that's really, really worked well.

Speaker 2 I think we're going to see a lot more of folks. There's like this kind of this term being thrown around of like software composer.

Speaker 2 I think engineers are going to more and more just be instructing these things at a higher level than just, hey, tab, complete this thing. It's like, hey, go and do X, Y, Z and send it off.

Speaker 2 You know, so I think that's going to be a major one.

Speaker 2 And I think the other thing too, and this is a big part of the reason that we made the bet on Bolt, was that I've got a lot of conviction that AI models are going to get better at code gen specifically.

Speaker 2 And it kind kind of makes sense. Like it kind of, you know, when you kind of look at the other things that folks are trying to use AI for in their project or are using successfully, I should say,

Speaker 2 one of the hard things

Speaker 2 about training these models is obviously like, how do you, how do you, you need to get more data to train it and, you know, to improve it over time, but it has to be accurate.

Speaker 2 Like, you know, and it's hard to do that for things that are not easy to be deterministic about. When it comes to software, it is.

Speaker 2 It's either this thing, this code you wrote executed without errors or it didn't. This thing actually created a landing page you can, you know, capture an image and, you know, analyze, et cetera.

Speaker 2 And so I think when you look at what the Frontier AI labs are doing, they're doing the best job of this stuff. It's their mission is to just go and

Speaker 2 create every permutation of every application you could ever build, put it into the training data and make these models incredible.

Speaker 2 That strikes me as obviously a very long tail goal there, but I mean,

Speaker 2 just

Speaker 2 for what we have now, it's unbelievable what can be done and it's only going to keep getting better.

Speaker 2 So I think that's the main thing is, you know, for, I think folks have been kind of concerned about are we hitting kind of limits of this stuff, et cetera. And

Speaker 2 no, I don't, I don't think so.

Speaker 2 In the specific realm of code gen, I think we're going to see, I think we're going to see a lot of improvements pretty rapidly, which is what we've been seeing over the past year.

Speaker 1 Okay. Awesome.

Speaker 1 I think that's a great note to end on. Thanks, Eric, for doing this.

Speaker 2 Thank you for having me. This has been a blast.

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