Eric Simons: How WebContainer fueled Bolt's 40M ARR breakout

1. 0:00 – 4:46

   Introduction to Eric Simons and StackBlitz

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky0:00

      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.

   2. ESEric Simons0:05

      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, we went from 0 to 20 million of ARR. And we've already crossed 30 million of ARR with the current rate we're on. Our forecast for the year is we want to get to 100 million of ARR.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky0:22

      This is just nonstop wild shit. How is this possible? What has allowed you to grow this much this fast with such a small team?

   4. ESEric Simons0:30

      Most importantly has 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.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky0:38

      You basically were building a, a tech first, and then looking for a problem to solve later, which is often what people tell you not to do.

   6. ESEric Simons0:44

      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 gonna be the consensus view. You gotta have, like, confidence in your convictions on how to best play the hand.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky0:53

      A lot of people see these stats, and they sometimes don't see that there was also years and years of, of work before that.

   8. ESEric Simons0:59

      It was kind of like, you know, Bolt's this overnight success seven years in the making.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02

      (instrumental music) Today, my guest is Erik Simons. Erik is co-founder and CEO of StackBlitz, which makes a product called Bolt, which is currently neck and neck with Cursor for being the fastest growing product in history. They are currently the number one most popular web AI code app, with over three 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 WebContainer, was perfectly suited for building AI products in the browser, so they launched the product with a tweet. And as Erik 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 in 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 lennysnewsletter.com. With that, I bring you Erik Simons. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features, and Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytic cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A/B testing flywheel. Eppo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com/lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by the Fundrise Flagship Fund. Full disclosure, real estate investing is boring. Prediction markets are exciting. Meme coins are a thrill ride. Even the stock market can swing wildly on a headline. Hello, DeepZeke. 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 Fundrise Flagship Real Estate Fund is a complete snoozefest. The fund holds 1.1 billion dollars’ worth of institutional caliber real estate managed by a team of pros focused on steadily growing your net worth for decades to come. See? Boring. That's the point. You can start investing in minutes and with as little as 10 dollars by visiting fundrise.com/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/flagship. This is a paid ad.

2. 4:46 – 10:40

   Unprecedented growth and user adoption

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky4:47

      Erik, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

   2. ESEric Simons4:52

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

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky4:54

      For folks that are not super familiar with Bolt, what is Bolt?

   4. ESEric Simons4:57

      It's really simple. You go there, there's a text box, and you tell it, uh, what you want to build, whether it's a web or a mobile app. And so, it's, you know, kind of one of these, uh, you know, text to app, uh, building tools that's become pretty popular over the past few months here. And, uh, 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, you know, just from prompting. And, you know, in, 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 in, like, a minute.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky5:36

      Let's just share some numbers, uh, about the scale of what you're building. It's... The rate you're growing is absurd. You're kind of in this cohort of companies that are just growing at rates that have never seen... We've, 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.

   6. ESEric Simons5:53

      Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when we launched, I mean, we... I mean, the, the, the company was on the verge of going under when we, when we launched Bolt. Like, you know, our company, StackBlitz, we'd been around for seven years building web-based, uh, you know, development environment stuff.And, um, and so when we launched this, we were like, "This would be amazing if this added, like, 100K of ARR over the next couple of months."

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky6:11

      (laughs)

   8. ESEric Simons6:12

      You know? Um, and what ended up happening is, uh, you know, r- in the first two months, we, you know, went from zero to 20 million of ARR. And I think we're on, like, month four or four and a half or something like that at this point, and we've, uh, already crossed 30 million of ARR and we're on the verge of crossing 40. Like, by the time this comes out, um, it l- it appears that we're gonna be at 40 million ARR. So, it, it's just, like, these, the scale of the growth and the revenue has been nuts. I mean, a- and of course, like, kind of that correlates with, like, insane user growth as well. Like, we've added, you know, three million, uh, registered users, you know, just in the past few months here. And, uh, you know, monthly active users is, you know, uh, around a million, I think, at this point per month. So, it's, it's just b- I mean, I've, I've never seen anything l- I've been doing startups for, like, 15 years. I've never seen anything like this. Um, yeah, e- everyone I've talked to, you know, uh, our investors or, you know, et cetera, uh, th- there's, there's not a lot of corollaries to kind of what's going on here, you know? Um, and it's kind of extraordinary, because, I mean, like, we, you know, uh, our company wasn't doing AI stuff, uh, six months ago. We had no AI products and just out of nowhere, we, uh, you know, from almost death of the company to being, you know, the number one by traffic revenue, et cetera, like, you know, AI code gen app, uh, that's totally web-based in, in the world. Like, it's, I think the only other, like, startup, uh, ahead of us is, you know, for, for code gen just in general would be, like, Cursor on adoption and revenue at this point. And so, I was, it's, yeah, it's been, it's been a heck of a ride. (laughs) You know, and, and our team's, like, 15, 20 people, you know? So it's just dealing with, uh, you know, we're gonna be closing in on, like, 100,000 customers, and we've got, our support team's, like, three people, you know? We're, so we're trying to scale as fast as we can. So, anyways, it's just kind of mind blo- boggling, just the, the scale of the, the, the demand and, and, uh, uh, and, and, and how we've had to, you know, turn things around to match the demand as best as we can, you know?

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky8:14

      (laughs) mind boggling is an e- (laughs) excellent way to describe what you just shared. A million monthly active users, you're at 40 million annual recurring revenue five months into the business? Is that right?

   10. ESEric Simons8:26

       Yeah, we're, we're, we're, with single-digit week, yeah, single-digit weeks, right? Is like, that's, that's the current track rate that we're seeing for the thing, yeah.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky8:33

       I think, are you guys the fastest-growing startup in history?

   12. ESEric Simons8:36

       I, I, I mean, it, it, I think it depends on probably where you peg the number, right?

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky8:39

       Yeah.

   14. ESEric Simons8:39

       'Cause I, yeah, we're work, yeah, we're here to just, like, build, like, great products, right? And, and just, um, you know, uh, push the limits of, like, what's possible with the, the technology. Um, and, um, you know, and, and I think that that, you know, we do our jobs well, you know, and it's, it's k- kind of crazy things can happen. But I mean, the current, the current track rate we have, uh, it, it, we're already, we're gonna be exceeding kind of the, the forecast for Q1, um, with the current rate we're on. And, you know, our, our forecast for the year is we want to get to 100 million of ARR. And now, it, I'd, you know, I'd, I'd, I think there's been a company, I don't, that, that would either be on par with Cursor or, or ahead of them or something like that. But, I mean, it's, and I think there's gonna be more things like this too. I don't think that, like, uh, you know, and it's just th- this, 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 were at, got to 4 million in ARR or 5 million ARR in, in the first month, we, I would talk with people and they're like, "Okay, yeah, but like, that could go to zero, right?" (laughs) And then it, and then it went to 20 the next, we're like, "Ah, it could go to zero," and it's like, and it, but now we're, now we're closing in on 40. And so it, I just, I, I, and, and so from, from my view, I was also very skeptical, you know, as, as this, like, I've never seen anything grow like this, right? And so, uh, part of me, I was just fr- I'm, 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 over." Right? (laughs) You know what I mean? Like, it's, this, this, this, this crazy thing happened and now it's not. But, but that's just, that day just, just hasn't come. And, and, and, and you see this happening with Cursor, you see this happen with a lot of these other AI startups. And, uh, it, uh, the value proposition is real. Like, the free market is filled, is filled with rational actors. People are coming to these tools because it is solving problems. They're, (laughs) they're able to do way more for, for way less cost than it, than it would otherwise. And so, and that's why I said I think we're gonna see more of this, whether it's in coding or, you know, kind of other verticals or whatever, you know? In a sense, it's almost like the, maybe the, maybe the new normal, right? For, as AI just continues to get better, but

3. 10:40 – 15:28

   Demo: Building a Spotify clone with Bolt

   1. ESEric Simons10:40

      anyways.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky10:40

      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 could even point out stuff that is, uh, different from other products in the space. Say, Lovable, v0, Repl.it that other folks have heard about. That be useful?

   3. ESEric Simons10:57

      Awesome. Cool. Yeah, so this is Bolt. You just go to bolt.new. Um, eh, things that I think are really interesting about Bolt. One is, it's, it's just, like, dead simple. Whether you're logged in or logged out, like, this is, it's the same UI. It's extremely simple. It's just a text box. Um, and there, the, I think that the biggest difference between Bolt and the other stuff out there, it's actually subtle. It's not, like, something you'd 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, 'cause 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 c- they, those can take minutes to boot up, and they often will run into issues, and, and then you can end up literally stuck, right, and have to contact support to get it done, you know, and get it unstuck or whatever, right? With Bolt, we, like, and for the past seven years, what our company's been doing has been building an operating system that runs inside of your browser locally using your CPU, so we have a very permissive free tier. And it's insanely fast, and it's insanely reliable, right? So, if I wanted to, like, just as a quick example of this, say, like, make a clone, you know, of Spotify, right? And just hit enter.This thing's already getting to work. And already, on the right here, this is a full dev environment. Like, this is an actual operating system running inside of my browser. And, and I can, you know, run commands on it, et cetera. And, uh, really, this is, like, what you're seeing down here, this terminal and kind of what's backing it, this is what took us really, like, five, six, seven years to build and make so reliable. Like, there would not be a Bolt without this technology called web container, that allows us to run an operating system in the browser. 'Cause what's going on here is our AI agent for Bolt has bidirectional communication with this operating system. It's writing code. It's running the dev server for this thing. It's gonna go ahead and spin this up. You can see how fast this is. In like, uh, you know, a matter of 60 seconds, I said, "Make me a Spotify clone," and now we have one, right? And it looks pretty darn good.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky12:55

      That looks really good.

   5. ESEric Simons12:57

      And s- and so that's, and that's why the, you know, the other aspects around Bolt is, like, this technology we made, uh, for the operating system side, the guys that have been working with us, you know, for the past five plus years on it, before this they were actually doing machine learning AI stuff. And so when it came time to write the agent for Bolt, we had just an incredible amount of in-house, uh, expertise on how to actually, like, merge these two different technology sets to have this really reliable experience that produces really beautiful, really functional stuff. So that's, that's kind of, like, you know, uh, based on 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 wanna, like, actually have a URL where you can share this. Like have a, like, maybe atta- attach a domain name to it or whatever have you. So with, uh, with Bolt, we actually have built-in integrations with, you know, production grid hosting, uh, providers like Netlify and for databases with Supabase. So if I go ahead and just, like, click the deploy button here, this is actually gonna run a production build of this project we made here, right? And 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 wanna have, like, you know, buy the, uh, domain spotifyclone.com and point it at this, I can click this link here and that'll kick me into Netlify, I can attach this to my account, buy domain, point at that thing, and then from er- thereon out, whenever I'm prompting Bolt to make changes to this application and hit deploy, that goes live on my public website there, right? So it's just, this is, this is, like, the, the simplest way to build a web app that's ever existed, you know? Like, that's kind of one of the key realizations I had a couple weeks into the thing. I was seeing people use this for, like, personal use cases, like medical donation sites or weddings or whatever, and I was like, don't these people know that, like, Wix or Squarespace exists? Should I tell them, you know? And then it hit me, this, those things are so complicated to use. Like there's a, there- I don't know if you've ever seen a, just the UI of these things, but like, they're crazy complicated. And that's just for building, like, kind of like a static website. They can't, there's no way you could actually build, like, a functional app. And that's, like, with Bolt, if, if we were to sit here for another 30 minutes, we would be ha- 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's kind of the, I think some of the cool, uh, core experience of Bolt here.

4. 15:28 – 19:09

   Expanding to native mobile apps with Expo

   1. ESEric Simons15:28

      I can show you something cool that we just launched, if that would be, uh, of interest.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky15:32

      Let's do it.

   3. ESEric Simons15:32

      So this is, like, web apps, right? So, like, web apps are amazing. But often you wanna have, like, a native app, you know? And, uh, it's hard to build web apps. It's even harder to build native apps that can actually, that you can then go put in the App Store, right? And so we partnered up with a, a company called Expo, and their entire, uh, business is making, uh, basically, like, React Native tooling in this ecosystem that makes it super easy to build beautiful apps and actually get them in the App Store. And so, um, right here, I'll zoom in a little bit. You know, we have this little Build a Mobile App with Expo. So if you click that, we kind of instruct you on how to just prompt mobile apps into existence. So, um, yeah, let's make another Spotify clone that's an actual native mobile app. We'll say, "Make me a Spotify clone." Go ahead and hit enter. And what this thing's gonna do is actually, again, spin up a operating system here where it's gonna boot up, uh, the Expo tool chain and actually go and make a mobile app for us. And what's cool about this is, uh, we could actually preview it just in the browser here. But, uh, once this thing's done and, and it boots up, uh, it's gonna show a QR code where we're gonna be able to scan it and in real time actually, uh, basically have, like, a test flight of this native application that we can try out on our phones. And as we keep prompting, you'll see it making changes and stuff, right? Um, this is like, ki- kind of the first time, right, that, you know, you don't, you don't have to be technical to make production grade web, full stack web and, and mobile apps. You know, like I've, at this point I've done nothing that is, that is, requires developer knowledge to do any of this stuff, you know? And that's, that's kind of the, I think that's what a lot of people are really excited about with this, and, you know, majority of our audience, uh, are people that are not developers that are using this. They're PMs, uh, they're designers, they're entrepreneurs, 'cause these are people that are, all have always been great at building products, and, but previously the only way they could get their ideas into coded software was through a developer's fingertips, right? And now, now they can, you can take a

   4. GUGuest17:35

      Yeah.

   5. ESEric Simons17:35

      ... view with their own, you know, through prompting. So, uh, you can see here, you can, we got this little QR code. I'm going to go ahead and scan the thing.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky17:43

      I'm gonna do it too.

   7. ESEric Simons17:44

      And... Cool.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky17:44

      By the way, I love that you had-

   9. ESEric Simons17:44

      (laughs)

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky17:44

       ... just enough things to say until it finished. That was pro.

   11. ESEric Simons17:48

       (laughs)

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky17:48

       (laughs)

   13. ESEric Simons17:50

       Uh, just as I planned, you know? (laughs) But, um, so on, on my screen it's, it's booting up. It's, it's bundling the, uh, the JavaScript of this thing. And this is beta. We just launched this last week, by the way. So, uh, y- you can kind of see on my screen here, uh, I actually have this Spotify-looking app, right?

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky18:07

       Wow.

   15. ESEric Simons18:07

       That, um, you know ...

   16. LRLenny Rachitsky18:09

       That's, that looks, like, exactly like Spotify. (laughs)

   17. ESEric Simons18:11

       It looks ex- exactly like Spotify.

   18. LRLenny Rachitsky18:13

       Let's, let's clone it way too, too good.

   19. ESEric Simons18:14

       Yeah. We're gonna be sued right now, so let- let's be quiet. (laughs) You're doing too good a job with this. (laughs) No, that's amazing. Yeah. So, it's- it's- it's pretty cool right? I mean, and like so what's cool is that, and as you keep prompting on your device, it'll just keep reloading. Like, without you having to like, kill the app, it'll just, you know, you can actually see the functionality getting added. And so, in this use case that you and I have right now, it's like, if I was, if you and I were building an app together, you know, uh, we could be on other sides of the planet and you could actually be not just seeing a screenshot of the thing, but actually touching it and- and feeling it like, and- and- and putting it through its paces. And so, a lot of product teams, um... I mean, this is just changing how people do product development, you know? It's faster to do this than- than design a whole bunch of Figma frames necessarily, right? So... We're gonna, we're gonna spend a lot of time on that. Okay. This is incredible. Like, this whole episode so far is you just blowing my mind, I imagine the listener's mind just over and over and over. Like, I- I don't even know where to go with all this sometimes.

5. 19:09 – 25:03

   The journey and technology behind WebContainer

   1. ESEric Simons19:09

      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 AR in like, five-ish months and they sometimes don't see that there's also years and years of other... of work before that. And the reason that you guys have been so successful is all the work you did that allowed- that built this web container technology, it sounds like. Is there anything there that's worth sharing, you think, of just that part of the journey? I know we'll go through like, the origin and how... where Bolt came from, but I guess just that web container component specifically. That feels like a huge deal. It- it- it- it 100% is, yeah. And, um, I would say this is kind of, surprisingly to me, it's like, still one of the, um, contrarian, uh, viewpoints of our company. Like, you know, despite, despite, um... 'cause over the years it was like, when we first this is the... and that, the web container was the bet that we made the company on, just to be clear. Like, the StackBlitz was like a deep tech- 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 in like, 100 milliseconds and like, run full on development tool chains? Like, that was really it. And- and like, the, we'd gotten the idea for this and kind of the insight that this might be possible 'cause back when my co-founder and I, uh, came out to the Valley, he and I grew, like, grew up down the street from each other in Chicago, learned how to code together at 13 and built stuff ever since. Yeah. And we came up to the Valley in 2012 and we just had the good fortune of bumping into Dillon Field and Evan Wallace when they were bui- building Figma in the early days. And that was, um... I- I don't think a lot of people, like, know that like, Figma was- was also a browser-based deep technology play. Like, when their first pitch for Figma, they- they didn't have a design tool. (laughs) Their first pitch was this, uh, 3D ball dropping into water inside of a browser tab. And the- the- the pitch basically was, you know, browsers have this new capability called WebGL and the predes- predecessor to WebAssembly. And- and with these things, uh, for the first time, like, you could actually, uh, you know, create a- a graphics rendering engine that you could then build a design tool on top of. But you- but you're gonna have to write that- that rendering engine from scratch 'cause, you know, nothing exists that can just compile into WebGL or whatever. And if you want the performance you need, et cetera, um, it's gonna take us years to do. But if we do it, you know, we think this will change everything for design. And obviously, we know how that story, you know, has panned out now. Yeah. And back in 2017, 2016, 2017, um, Albert, my co-founder, and I, uh, saw the same sort of story begin to play out but for, uh, web development and like, development environments. And specifically, there is some stuff that landed in browsers like WebAssembly, shared memory, service workers, these different APIs, and we were like, "Oh, wow. Like, it should be possible, theoretically, like, to write an operating system that, uh... in WebAssembly, that could, you know, run no JS and NPM and all the tool chains on top of it that you need to do to do web development." And that would be huge because setting up developer environments is, it's a- it's a pain for beginners. Um, like, a lot of people churn out. They see like, the first thing you do when you learn how to code is not even learning how to code, it's how to set up your computer to even start writing the code, right? If you go join Netflix or any of these other FAANG companies, the first month or two is- is you being onboarded 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. Yeah. And- and so when you look at, uh, cloud IDEs, like, you know, Cloud9 was the first one back in, you know, 2009 or so. The way these have always worked is that your browser's basically doing nothing when you go to them. It's every user that gets connected, there has to be a cloud VM that gets spun up for them and then your- your browser's just kind of like, taking your keystrokes, sending it to the server and then, you know, sending back the results of it. And that's how all these o- these other AI, uh, you know, code text to app sort of tools work. They're all using cloud VMs. And the problem is, uh, you know that on a small scale it can work, but as you scale it up there, I mean, there's not even 100 million VMs to rent on the planet. But there are like, a billion devices that you can run this stuff on. And so, that's kind of what we've seen with Bolt where, you know, uh, it- it's... if you want to have, build a product that's- that's gonna be able to scale to that size, you have to kind of look at all factors and go, "We have to build, make sure the technology provides the best experience, you know, zero latency, transient costs to, there's a permissive free tier," right? 'Cause the other problem with the server is like, you end up, if you have a free tier people are mining Bitcoin on it. (laughs) They're DDOSing people using your servers, right? So inevitably, you have to nerf these things and roll them back. But if it's all done on the end device, doesn't matter, right? So yeah, so that's... web container was the- the key piece and this, and what we struggled with, it took us like, four or five years something to build web container. What we struggled with for the- the- the years after that was just how to build a product around it that like, that, um, 'cause developers loved it but they- they- they weren't...... using it in ways that they would pay money for, (laughs) you know? And, um, and as much as I, I, the, the, the nerd side of me wished th- that would be enough, that it was like building cool technology was enough, it's like, it's not. Like, this, we're here to build a, a venture, a venture scale company. Um, and, um, and so that, you know, that was kind of why we were, we were kind of at the end of the journey, where it was like, you know, we're taking shots on goal and we, you know, at some point, we just got to connect the dot,

6. 25:03 – 29:15

   Lessons learned and future outlook

   1. ESEric Simons25:03

      right?

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky25:04

      There's a lot of re- really interesting lessons from this journey that I think are counterintuitive. One is you, you basically were building a, a tech first and then looking for a problem to solve later, which is often what people tell you not to do, and it worked out in this case. The other interesting takeaway here is, it feels like AJAX, it's like a similar moment to when AJAX came out and then everyone's just like, "Wow, you can build new things here." So, it feels like there's a lesson here of just if there's a new technology that has enabled something that, something big that we think may... Let's just work there for a while and see if something comes up. And then I think the other lesson here is just as a founder, just survive as long as you can because you may find something that works.

   3. ESEric Simons25:43

      All great points, all great points, right? 'Cause what we, you're dead right, like, for, and, you know, unfortunately, you know, my co-founder and I had, (laughs) we had built a lot of unsuccessful startups before this. (laughs) Like, we spent most of the 2010s, like, churning through ideas on things, and so we, you know, w- what we had conviction on is like, this is, this seems like a technology that, that will be important. Like, it, it seems like the web is the most ubiqu- like, the kind of the, the pitch or the theory in our head was like, the web is the most ubiquitous platform in the world. It, but yet, it has no, you can't use the web to, like, build the web, right? Like, every other platform, like, Mac has, uh, uh, you know, uh, Xcode. Windows has Visual Studio. The web had nothing, and we were like, you know, "At a minimum, Google should probably buy this thing from us." (laughs) You know? Like-

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky26:24

      Yeah.

   5. ESEric Simons26:24

      ... it seems like that it should probably be part of Chrome, a- at a minimum, right? And, uh, uh, and r- when we thought, "Hey, this could, you know, this could be a huge enabler." Like, we, you know, the vision of just making it as easy to build full stack applications as using Canva, right? It's like, just seemed really compelling. Um, and, uh, but when you, when you do that sort of risky deep technology play, it, yeah, you, you need to... And, and we were very good about this. Like, the previous company Albert and I did, we bootstrapped it, um, all the way through to acquisition. So, we understood, and we were like living hand to mouth to, like, f- bootstrap that thing. So, we understood how to, like, how to, how to have a low burn rate and take a lot of shots on goal and make every dollar stretch beyond what anyone would think is reasonable or possible, and that's how we played our hand with StackBlitz. You know, like, what we, you know, uh, we didn't raise money for the first two or three years of, you know, of the company's life. We were, you know, bootstrapping it. Um, when we did raise money, we, we barely spent it, you know? Largely because it was like, we need to just take a lot of smart bets, and it doesn't make sense. And I, you know, I would just say generally, like, until you see pull, like, and you know, just people pulling the product out of your hands, you, you wanna, you don't want to be spending money. You should be like default no. And like, when you, when you go and buy software, you should be going, "We're a tiny startup. Can you sell it, it for, uh, you know, for half?"

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky27:50

      (laughs)

   7. ESEric Simons27:50

      Like, everything you buy, like, just like keep the burn rate as low as possible 'cause you need as many shots on goal as you could possibly get 'cause you have no idea. Um, and I, I think just generally for startups, that's the right way, in my view, to just, to approach it, you know? Um, unless you're seeing, again, immediate demand and pull or whatever, um, but, um, yeah. I think, uh, uh, I, I think that'd be kind of like maybe the extra context I'd add on top is like, I think that we ended up doing a, a good job of, like, being extremely conservative during a time in which, during 2022, 2020 and 2021, which were times where exuberance and growing headcount was like KPIs of companies, right? And, and, and were things that were being f- you know, uh, you know, with a lot of, a lot of, uh, uh, you know, emotional force of like, "Hey, you guys ought to be doing this." And, and, and I'm glad that we didn't heed the advice because it, it, you know, if, if our, we had tripled the company and kicked up the burn rate, there would be no Bolt, you know? There, like, we, we would have gone out of business a long time ago, right? So, um, I think that's, that's the hard thing about being an entrepreneur, I think, is you kind of have to... There are periods of time where, you know, you have to kind of, you have to make judgment calls that are, that are not gonna be the consensus view. Maybe years later, people, you know, it'll become the consensus view, but, you know, you gotta have, like, confidence in your convictions on how, how to best play the hand, you know? So.

7. 29:15 – 34:15

   Post-launch analysis

   1. ESEric Simons29:15

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky29:15

      There's so many great lessons here. I think just this idea of s- of just staying alive. Dalton came on the podcast, he's a partner at YC once, and he just had this phrase, "Just don't die." And that's exactly what you guys did. Seven years of just trying it until something worked, and I, I love that you actually were planning to shut down the company right before you launched Bolt, and I know you launched it with just like a tweet, right? That was the launch moment.

   3. ESEric Simons29:35

      Yeah. Yep, yeah.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky29:36

      Uh, maybe talk about that moment of just after launch signs that, okay, this is working, something's different.

   5. ESEric Simons29:42

      Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so at day one, it was like, there's a great reception to, like, the tweet. (laughs)

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky29:47

      (laughs)

   7. ESEric Simons29:47

      You know, we were like, "Wow, this is, like, you know, one of the biggest things, you know, uh, lau- on launch 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, crazy. We were at, you know, again, we were at 600 so we added like 10% in a day. And I remember our DevOps engineer of like, yeah, he was the one who would flag me. He's like, "Guys, we added 60K today." Like, this is crazy, and I was like, "Yeah, yeah," but like, this is launch day. Like, it's the, (laughs) the, the, there's, there's the Tech Crunch peak of initiation or, you know, the, the classic startup-

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky30:16

      Trough of sorrow.

   9. ESEric Simons30:17

      ... you know, trough of sorrow. Yeah. I was like, "Listen, guy," you know, I'm trying to, like, temper enthusiasm for the team. I'm like, "This is great. Got a lot of work to do, dah, dah, dah, dah." Um, and then the next day, you know, we added 80K or whatever it was, right? And, and it just kind of kept going. And, um, and, you know, and, and all the while, like, the, the product we put out, we, we, we built the thing in 90 days.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky30:36

       (laughs)

   11. ESEric Simons30:36

       (laughs) Like, we built Bolt in n- so there's a lot of things that were missing.... in the product. Like, basic stuff, basic stuff. And which I again, like, we, you know, we, we, we cut the right corners on the thing to get it online but, um, we had this just growing influx of people using it going, you know, "How is there not a mobile responsive view?" Like, "How i- how i- how are chat per- messages not..." We got to 20 million of ARR without a mobile responsive view, by the way.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky31:01

       (laughs)

   13. ESEric Simons31:02

       Just throwing that out there, you know. This, it was like the i- iPhone not having copy and paste until, like, iPhone 5 or whatever, you know. That was, this was, that was that, th- this was that for us. It was like no mo... 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, the growing, uh, traffic. And, and, and you know, (laughs) there's, there's, there's a whole bun... I mean, I could... Th- the list of problems that were happening every single day was nuts. I mean, like, to start, we had never had a plan on stackbus.com, uh, you know, for more than $9. Like, we had one price, nine bucks, right? And so when we launched Bolt, we were like, again, we don't think, they, we'll think hopefully people like this but, you know. And 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 wanna buy more. How do I buy more? Why won't you take my money?" (laughs) So it was like, uh, that, th- within the week, we, we rolled out just completely new pricing plans where you could upgrade, which, which ended up as kind of now become this, the standard. All the other guys in the space have copied this. Where, uh, you know, prior to Bolt going online, CoPilot, like all these previous AI things, e- everyone kind of wanted this, like, Netflix model where there's, like, one price, it's, like, all you can eat or whatever. And the problem is, like, if you do that, like, you can't really, like, you want the, the, the inference cost to be kind of low 'cause you're expecting people to use it a lot, right? And so you don't, you can't do these agentic experience things 'cause it would be too expensive. And what we ended up stumbling into is that, okay, actually, people are willing to pay more, right? They're willing, people wanna pay for more inference because we've crossed this thr- threshold where, you know, y- you can get a, a very tangible ROI. Like, you know that this is providing a tremendous amount of value to you, right? So anyways, 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 and he was like, "Listen, we just, (laughs) we don't have anything more to give you." At the time it's where we were like, uh, "How do we deal with..." You know, i- it was just, it was just beating on us, you know, for, for, for weeks. It, it felt like in 300, you know, when, when they're surrounded by, like, 10,000 people. (laughs)

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky33:10

       (laughs)

   15. ESEric Simons33:11

       And, and our team is just, like, doing everything. Like it's, there's 15, 20 people just doing everything. Like, my chief of staff and I were doing customer support 95% of the day. You know, just a... Anyways, so yeah. It was, it was a, uh, a crazy, wild time and, uh, I mean, it still is. I mean, we- we're, you know, we've had a little bit more time to kind of grow into this. And usually, I mean, as a company, to grow into, like, even 20 million ARR, you get a year, at least, or something, you know, to kind of staff up. Uh-

   16. LRLenny Rachitsky33:38

       Often, uh, often decades.

   17. ESEric Simons33:40

       Y- yeah, you know. So it's, uh, you know, that was what was hard is we'd go to people and kind of be like, "What do we do?" And the playbooks we get back are like, "Take, take six months or a year," or something. And it's like, "This isn't gonna work." (laughs) You know? And which is funny. This is what it's all about, right? I mean, this is, this is, um, um, you know. It, it's, it, at least for me, I mean, this is, thi- that level of intensity is, is, uh, it's, it's, uh, it's challenging. Fun challenges, you know? (laughs)

   18. LRLenny Rachitsky34:08

       Wow. Okay. This is just, uh, nonstop wild, wild shit. (laughs)

   19. ESEric Simons34:13

       (laughs)

8. 34:15 – 41:00

   Growing fast with a small team

   1. ESEric Simons34:15

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky34:15

      Um, so you mentioned that your team is about 20 people through all this. You guys are growing at this insane rate, uh, 20 people. How is this possible? What i- what has allowed you to grow this much this fast with such a small team? This 300 visual is interesting. I imagine (laughs) having these Spartans is a big part of it. Just what, what has allowed you to, to do this?

   3. ESEric Simons34:40

      Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think a lot of it, I mean, a lot of it, uh, again, I mean, if you kind of look at where a lot of the other folks in the, like, the, the c- c- code gen, you know, text to app space have, have really been, uh, st- struggling, a lot of it has been scaling their servers and stuff, right? Because and, and, and, uh, you know, i- it was kind of like, you know, Bolt's this overnight success seven years in the making. Like, all of this stuff, like, there's no way. If you rewind to, like, year two, we can... Uh, there's no way we could've, with i- we, we would not be at the, you know, the growth and, uh, on, on y- DAUs and revenue or whatever. There's just no way. Um, and so a lot of it is the, the technology we made. And, and most importantly, it's been the people. Like, the people, like, they w- you know, it's, uh, it's, it's rare to find startups where you have, uh, kind of the core group of five, six, seven people, you know, that have been there for five years plus, right? Like, that's, that's a pretty rare thing to see. Like, in Silicon Valley, it, 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 one. You know what I mean? There, the, 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 the bootstrapping the previous company, like, um, just having, uh, you know, less people and more context per head. Like, that's just, that's just been, that's just been how we do it and we feel very strongly about it. And, uh, 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 ha- they have a lot of context. It's not like, you know, this person's completely in the dark and in some corner of the company, da- da... You know what I mean? Uh, the second thing, everyone has agency to actually get stuff done front to back, right? And, and, you know, there's no political committee to get stuff approved by. There's no no, no duh. You know? You know, so when you look at what kind of what happened with Bolt, I mean, we had engineers that were, like, front to back were on a call with someone running into an issue, going and fixing it, uh, co- cooking up the UI on the spot, uh, and, and, and, and landing this thing. Like, without e- involving anyone else on the team, right? And, you know-... that, uh, you know, so I think it was a culmination of just high trust and, you know, people... Like, we all just have enjoyed working together over the past. So, that's what... That's the only reason any- anyone would ever stay, right, at a company for- for that long or whatever. And so, uh, those sorts of stressful situations I think can... Are, are, are make or break, right? Like, those are make or break for any team. And so that... I think that what's happened is really, you know... It, it is, is a d- direct reflection of the strength and the bonds of the people, um, that, that are making this thing and supporting the thing.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky37:22

      Yeah. I, I, I think that's such a, uh, 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?

   5. ESEric Simons37:42

      Yeah. Uh, that for us, and even if the folks we're hiring out, it's like hiring people that are... That, that don't care about, uh, the titles and they don't care about... You, you know, it's not like they're, they're... People, uh, of course, it's important to have like a career trajectory and that sort of thing, but it's like they, they're, they really are motivated by just working on cool things. And, um, and are, you know, checking their ego at the door. And, and they're there to, like, collectively build something great, not just, just kind of, um, you know, be, be the, the, the brilliant jerk, right? You know, most of the people that we've hired have been, uh, you know, uh, in, in Europe and, y- we're a fully remote company, um, like, you know, I have... My co-founder and I are in, are in the Bay Area. It's funny, like, back in 2018, we, we, like, rented an office in South and we were, like, commuting into it 'cause we thought we'd hire people here. And like a year into it, we were like, "What are we doing?" (laughs) Like, y- you and I are coming to, like, an office for 10 people, we've hired... W- the people working for us are, you know, in Europe or across the US. And, uh, uh, you know, I think, uh... And, and, and we have a, you know, one or two other people we've hired that are in the Bay Area at this point, but, um... But yeah, I think, I think we kind of look for folks that are, that are intrinsically just trying to, trying to build great stuff and are, are interested. And, and then the first people that we hired were... What they... The reason we found them is that they were users of StackBlitz, you know? Like, that was the... A lot of people that, um... The majority of people we've hired at the company have been people that actually came from our community, basically. Um, and so when we, when we want to hire people, we put out a tweet and say, "Hey, we're hiring an engineer," and then we get, you know, DMs or whatever, right? And... But, um, yeah. Those, those are the... Those are the general, like, kind of, kind of qualities we look for though, you know?

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky39:27

      (instrumental music) I'm excited to chat with Christina Gilbert, the founder of OneSchema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Hi, Christina.

   7. NANarrator39:35

      Yes. Thank you for having me on, Lenny.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky39:37

      What is the latest with OneSchema? I know you now work with some of my favorite companies, like Ramp, Vanta, Skale, and Watershed. I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from especially tricky systems like ERPs.

   9. NANarrator39:53

      Yes. So we just launched OneSchema 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.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky40:15

       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 OneSchema, and not just to build it but also to maintain it forever?

   11. NANarrator40:26

       Absolutely, Lenny. We've heard so many horror stories of multi-day outages from even just a handful of bad records. We are laser-focused on integration reliability to help teams end all of those distractions that come up with integrations. We have a built-in validation layer that stops any bad data from entering your system, and OneSchema will notify your team immediately of any data that looks incorrect.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky40:46

       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 oneschema.co. That's oneschema.co.

9. 41:00 – 45:51

   Prioritization at Bolt

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky41:01

      I wanna ask a couple more questions about Bolt, and then I wanna zoom out and talk about where things are heading in the future. Let's talk about prioritization. I imagine you guys are just, like, barraged with... As you described after you launched the... Like, you're just barraged with requests. Like you said, there's a million monthly active users. I can't even imagine the feature requests you guys are getting, plus all the stuff you know you want to build. Just how do you go about deciding what to prioritize and what to actually build?

   2. ESEric Simons41:27

      There's a lot of things that you just don't even know are, are possible to do, right? Um, and so people aren't gonna be, like, necessarily, like, explicitly asking for them. Um, and so there's been kind of a couple of these where we, you know, kind of use our, our gut instinct on like, "Hey, this, this... No one's asking for this, like, in meaningful numbers at least, but we think this is gonna be a big deal." Best example was last week with, uh, native mobile app support. Like, that's the, the, you know, uh, by reception, like, the biggest thing we've ever launched. And it was something that even internally at the company, uh, you know (laughs) , so far it's like this... You know, I don't know. People are, like, y- yelling about these other things, right? And then... And it's, and it is... It's always this balance of, like, how much are we just triaging various things versus, like, that new capabilities. But it was like, this is... It strikes me as an important one, where we, where we, uh, you know, put some chips into the middle of the table on. And, you know, okay, done right, like, it's, it's, it's just this mind-blowing experience. And now just... There's just, you know, thousands of mobile apps being created a day that weren't before. And it... And how does that change things? I mean, like, that's... That... Now, there's... You know, there's small businesses that are... You know, they would've never made an iPhone app before. It made no sense. It's super expensive. Like, now that's not the case. I mean, like, there's always... So there's kind of these things where it's like, hey, we should go and, you know, take bets here. But so there's kind of this... It's, um-I think the best analogy would just be, like, it- it's kind of like, I think, you know, you're-

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky42:54

      Mm-hmm.

   4. ESEric Simons42:55

      ... working at a restaurant, being, like, a chef. It's like, there- there's some amount of, there's feedback from the customers, right, of like, "This thing didn't taste good."

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky43:02

      (laughs)

   6. ESEric Simons43:03

      And then there's like, "Hey, we've been kinda cooking something interesting and this, this tastes, this, I don't know. This, I think people are gonna like this, you know? I think this is a, a killer dish." And so, you kind of have to balance those things, um, and, uh, uh, I think it's actually largely a function of just ex- you know, years of experience doing it. I think, like, if you kind of rewound to, like, 10 years ago, I would have had a really no- I would have had the, just the years of getting my butt kicked by, uh, the free market, uh, to have kind of cultivated a sense of this stuff, you know? You kind of have to build your own gun instinct for it, I guess, is the best way of putting it, you know?

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky43:39

      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? 'Cause I know, like, the answer's probably really, it's just, like, chaos constantly and fires we're putting out constantly. 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?

   8. ESEric Simons44:02

      We all meet, like, every day. Like, pr- pretty much the entire team gets on a call, and we just kind of front to back.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky44:07

      Like a, like a Zoom?

   10. ESEric Simons44:08

       Yep, yeah. Every day at 8:00 AM Pacific, we're on a Zoom for, like, at least an hour.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky44:11

       Every day? The whole company?

   12. ESEric Simons44:13

       Pretty much the entire company, yeah.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky44:14

       Wow, for an hour? Okay.

   14. ESEric Simons44:16

       Yeah, and we just go over everything. And, and, and I think we're gonna probably start as, you know, as the team's kind of growing, we're gonna start, you know, splintering off into, you know, different, um, you know, syncs or whatever. But, um, the thing about just having everyone in the same room every day is that, uh, it's, you know, a lot of people will complain that it's, uh, you know, that, uh, 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- but it's like, yep, but, like, there's 0% finality loss in that.

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky44:40

       (laughs)

   16. ESEric Simons44:41

       Like, everything is, everything every day is- is being audited front to back and being discussed front to back. Um, and so when you're in these times of just extreme growth, right, it's- it's you- you- you want as close to 0%, you know, uh, loss, right? On- on communications. Um, and so that- that's how we've- that's how we've been doing it, um, since, especially since Bolt went online. I think it was, like, the week after Bolt went online, we were like, every day we're... Un- until we're through this or whatever, we're all getting on a phone call every day, and we're- we're front to back doing this. But again, another reason why more conte- uh, more context on, you know, and less hands, um, you know, e- every person at the company is aware of everything else, uh, going on at the company, right? Um, so people can independently be making decisions that are generally by default more- more often correct than not, you know?

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky45:33

       That is so interesting. I've never heard that before, especially for a company growing, like, that is like yours. That is super, uh, interesting that that's what you do.

   18. ESEric Simons45:41

       Uh, I- I don't think we're gonna do that forever. (laughs)

   19. LRLenny Rachitsky45:44

       Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course.

   20. ESEric Simons45:45

       But- but- but yeah. (laughs)

   21. LRLenny Rachitsky45:46

       No, but that's- that's- that's, I think that's a really cool thing to know, that that's- that works, and that has worked

10. 45:51 – 48:42

    Tooling and PRD's

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky45:51

       for you. Where do you, so say you talk about stuff, then where do you put stuff? Where do you put your roadmap? Where do you plan just like with tools or kind of in the stack of the company's tool set?

    2. ESEric Simons46:01

       Yeah, on the engineering side, we use Linear, like, heavily. On kind of product, uh, you know, road mapping, I think we're using Notion, and uh, you know, kind of making like PRD type stuff in Notion, you know? And then we use Figma for, like, design. And we actually, we use Bolt for a- (laughs) like, a lot of design and prototyping at this point, as- as you can imagine. Um, but, um, yeah, I think, I think it, you know, the tooling is, uh, uh, you know, nothing, nothing crazy. There's nothing crazy sophisticated, you know? Like, uh, I- I think we're gonna be investing a lot more, and especially as you 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 weren't going to be brought up.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky46:45

       I love that you guys use PRDs. I 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 gonna create a prototype immediately. That's it." Talk about just like why you still find that useful and just what you put into your PRD, whatever you, whatever that is for you.

    4. ESEric Simons47:01

       Unless there's, like, something, like, that's very sophisticated that we're working on, um, we- we tend to keep 'em- keep 'em pretty light. I- I like to just have the minimal amount of context possible that just ensures everyone's on the same page and that the key outcomes for whatever feature that we're working on are gonna- are gonna be present when we get there, you know? 'Cause the thing is, like, when these things, when these documents get really beefy, if you're looking at it like, "God, there's so much stuff to decipher here," you know? The problem is that a lot of people are gonna gloss over it when it gets kicked to development or design or whatever. They're- they... It's just gonna start snowballing into a lot of stuff. It's just better to keep it as simple as you possibly can. And at least that's- that's kind of our- our approach to the thing. Um, and you know, and- and often it's- it's, uh, some of these things are like, "Here's a link to- to a Bolt." (laughs) Where-

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky47:48

       Here's what, here's what it might look like.

    6. ESEric Simons47:49

       Yeah, like here's a hu- hu- and not just look like, here's- here's kind of a working demo of what it will effectively feel like, right? Um, and- and the... Like, 'cause that just, you know, if- 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- 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, uh, Bolt and writing... You know, before it was too expensive, like the idea of like, let's prototype it by having to, you know, the engineers code a proto- It's like, that would take forever or it'd be expensive. Now, it's faster to do this with Bolt in code and have a real working software product than dragging around frames in Figma to actually make a static

11. 48:42 – 52:24

    Integration and use cases of Bolt

    1. ESEric Simons48:42

       version of it.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky48:43

       So, let's actually talk about that. Just how- how far have companies gotten with Bolt? Like, how... 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, imagine long-term Salesforce, you know, Atlassian-style companies that scale. Just, uh, what's like, what are some examples of products people have built with Bolt that are maybe sur- would surprise people just how far that, they've gotten?

    3. ESEric Simons49:08

       Yeah, I mean, es- especially when you're starting greenfield stuff, you, I mean, you can use Bolt to build, you know, uh, like a, on the, like, Salesforce as an example, right? Um, one of the, the, the first people that signed up for, uh, Bolt was this guy named Paul, and he's an entrepreneur, uh, and does, you know, doesn't know how to code. Built a CRM in three weeks that has, like, AI built into it, Stripe for billing, et cetera. He had gotten a quote from an agency for this. It was, like, gonna be 30 grand and take six months. He had it done in three weeks, and I think he spent, like, 300 bucks on Bolt for the thing. And so, it's like, this is... Like, and he's, and he's making money off of this, like, this is his startup, (laughs) right? Uh...

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky49:44

       Okay, so, so he built this and he's selling it. Like, people are paying to use it.

    5. ESEric Simons49:48

       Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, a- and, and then there-

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky49:50

       Wow.

    7. ESEric Simons49:50

       ... and there's many such cases of this, right? When you can, it's, you're, you're looking at greenfield projects, 100%. Like, there's the, today with this current state of frontier models, you can absolutely build production-grade software, right? It take, y- you're not gonna get a zero shot, but you're, you're gonna spend a couple days, weeks, whatever. But the cost reduction there, 30 grand versus $300. I mean, that's 99% cheaper, six months versus three weeks. I mean, it's like, order of magnitude sort of, uh, faster delivery on the thing. And that, and those numbers have helped for the people that we talk to that are building these full stack, uh, you know, apps. Like, people, uh, they go to Upwork, they get a quote for five grand, they have it done wi- within 50 bucks, you know? It's just nuts, um, w- what you're able to do with this thing. Um, and so, and then I think on the flip side, you know, a lot of the, like, existing companies, yeah, th- that they will, there are very, uh, legitimate use cases where things are greenfield spun up. Good examples, like public websites, like marketing pages, landing pages, whatever have you. Um, y- uh, folks are adopting Bolt to just power those instead of using Webflow, for example. You know, 'cause it's like, this is simpler to use than Webflow, and it integrates with the existing design system of the company and et cetera, right? Um, and the marketers can update it without knowing how to code, you know, whatever. But then for product development teams, this is, uh, most commonly for, again, existing software businesses, they're using this to just accelerate the product development process, you know? And, uh, in, in a way where it's not just like a greenfield wholesale, "Hey, we're building the entire thing in Bolt," or whatever, right?

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky51:20

       Can Bolt integrate with your existing code base, or not yet?

    9. ESEric Simons51:23

       It, so yeah, we can actually open up, uh, repos in Bolt. So you, you can, like, go and use Bolt on your code base. I- it kinda depends on your setup, right? Like we, you know, and, and we, we do have companies again that, like, have marketing sites they're using this on, or like, you know, their admin panel or whatever. Uh, and I think it's sh- it's gonna be a use case that we see a lot more people orienting towards. These LMS are not great, depending on how big your application is though, right? They're, the, it's the, these things are not quite there where if you have something that's, you know, uh, th- a thousand files or something or more, um, where you're gonna be able to have a really, uh, uh, reliable, super reliable experience per se, right? Within a year if, you know, we chat a year from now, I suspect the answer's gonna be different. But you know, it, so it kinda depends on the s- the size of the app, the scale of the app, and, um, if it, if it's, if it's too big, you're looking at the prototyping, like just, just like pure acceleration, right, of product development. Um, and if it's not then, then you're, you can just do it entirely, right, from Bolt.

12. 52:24 – 54:24

    Limitations of Bolt

    1. ESEric Simons52:24

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky52:24

       So, this is useful. So what are the, what would you say are the major limitations of Bolt today where people should just know, okay, it's not gonna get you here yet. Maybe in the future it will. So ... sounds like if you have just, like, a really large existing code base, probably not the best tool yet. What else should people know?

    3. ESEric Simons52:39

       I would say that's like probably the main one, you know, because I think if you have a large existing code base, you're gonna need something like Cursor. Um, and your- and you're gonna need to be a developer meaningfully to be, to be editing that stuff. You know, I think outside of that, it's there's a, just like using any other productivity tool, like Photoshop or Figma or like a DSLR or whatever, there, there's some level of kinda education and just kinda like, and, and using the tool and, like, learning how to use it that's required to, like, really unlock a lot of the, the, the maximum capabilities of the thing, right? And, you know, with the people that we see that are most successful with Bolt, like, f- outside of developers, the, the people we see that are most successful are, are people that are amazing PMs, for example. Because these are people that understand enough about how the technology works typically, um, and their job is to, like, direct developers on how to go and improve the product and go and, like, look into, like, how to ma- how to actually spec this thing out in a way that's, like, executable without, uh, you know, without losing this in the communication. And when you think about, okay, how did, how, what, how would you best interact with an AI developer agent? It's basically that. You really want to be good at defining scope and, uh, helping it go and debug various things or whatever have you. And so it's, it's, it's, it takes, it, there's a huge overlap of the skill set of just, like, being a rock star PM and, uh, being really good at using, uh, frankly any, any of these texts to apps or, uh, code gen tools.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky54:08

       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. 'Cause when all these tools came out, there were so many people saying, "Okay, PMs are dead. We don't need them anymore. We can just build things and build things so quickly and easily, what's the point?" But

13. 54:24 – 59:56

    The role of PMs and developers in the AI era

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky54:24

       I completely s- 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 gonna 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, lot of PMs listen to this, so they'll love hearing this. To me, it feels like PMs are the best position role to thrive in this world.

    2. ESEric Simons54:54

       Zero question. I mean, that, that was like, you know, and, and just as Bold was, was growing and like we were like who, 'cause we, we were a developer product before this and so we expected the audience to be 100% developers that were using this and we just kept seeing more and more and more people that were not developers using it to the point where it's like 70, 67% of our users are not developers, right, at this point. And, um, you know, when we, when I started talking to these folks, at first I was just like weird or whatever, you know? It was like, well, well what's going on here? But then it, what it just kind of clicked as like, oh, whoa, this is, this is, this is, this is gonna change everything. Like the entire software world order is gonna get rewritten here because like the way that companies are organized to build software today totally gonna change, right? Like the idea that again, like PMs are, are the people that, that really understand like to the pixel level, like what matters into making a great product experience. And often they're, they're having, listen, I'm de- I'm a developer myself. They have to go harangue the developers to like get things to be how they really ought to be, like to, to the smallest levels. And now like how this is going to work if you fast forward, you know, one, two, five years, whatever, like PMs are, are, they're, they're gonna be writing quote, uh, quote unquote instead of just writing a Jira ticket and waiting for a developer to do it. The developers are gonna be able to work on, you know, intellectually challenging tasks that, that LLMs are not well-suited for, right? And still being augmented by LLMs to do it. But PMs are gonna be able to go in and just make the changes themselves. And, and, and just the, what blew my mind is it's, that is not, it's not priced into, it's not priced in, into any of these companies out there and it's not reflected in the org charts of all the software companies in the world right now. That is gonna completely change. Uh, the, the winners at least. The org charts are gonna completely change in how they approach building products and shipping products completely. You know? And it's starting. Uh, this, this is, this is the beginning.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky56:50

       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.

    4. ESEric Simons56:58

       100%.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky56:58

       It's a very similar role. And then I think it's also important to note like if you also have engineering skills and design skills, you will be at an advantage. Like that only helps you. But I feel like looking at this triangle of the triad of product engineering PM, it feels like the PM-y skills are the ones that will be most important and valuable, although it'd be great if you can also be in code and if you could also design really well.

    6. ESEric Simons57:21

       Ab- absolutely, and to me it's like the most exciting mix. I think, I think PMs, designers, and, and entrepreneurs that are non-tech, that's the most exciting thing to move just because the, it's a, it's a brand new market that's being unlocked here. You know? Like they, for the first time ever these folks can like directly code and build the product themselves, like their vision directly into the software itself. That, that is, that's, that's, that's gonna change everything. That is changing everything.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky57:48

       So when you talk about how org charts are gonna change, what are you imagining there? Is it just like fewer engineers mostly or what, what does, what do the future org charts look like?

    8. ESEric Simons57:57

       Good question, and I, I, I, I bet you there's gonna be, uh, you know, (laughs) there's gonna be like some Gartner analysis someday, you know, years from now or whatever that's like here's like how the best some, some, some term is applied to how the best companies are organizing, you know. But I mean, yeah, I mean I think, I think that we're gonna, uh, you know, I think that you're gonna see developers, uh, probably being pulled off of a lot of the, and generally speaking, pulled off of a lot of, you know, user interface type work I would imagine, uh, except for the most complicated of, of those things. And you're gonna see designers and PMs really, really leading the charge and being responsible for crafting those experiences and, and perhaps having a developer attached to like be reviewing the code and making sure, you know, like the, the extra, the guiding, you know, the, the code that they're writing, reviewing those pull requests and et cetera. And, and I think maybe even the engineers are, uh, you know, they're, like you pointed out, having engineering skills is not gonna hurt you. (laughs) It's gonna make you way more effective, right? So I, I think the engine- but I do think there's gonna be, you know, there, there's gonna be, the, the leverage that a front engineer is gonna have is, is in, it, it is now insane. It's only gonna get more so. And so I could see, I could see there just being fewer front engineers attached to, like I'm seeing more product, uh, you know, and design folks with, you know, one or two engineers or something and, you know, really having a larger, a larger matching of like kind of pods like that, you know? Um, that's, that, something like that strikes me as probably how this is gonna start trending towards.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky59:34

       This touches on, we had a, a researcher from OpenAI on the podcast. She actually started, uh, her career, she worked at Anthropic first as a front end engineer and said that she, once she saw what Claude could do for front end engineering, she's like, "I need to move to a different, (laughs) different function." And so she moved into research because she saw that role disappearing potentially. And that's exactly what

14. 59:56 – 1:14:18

    Skills for the future

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky59:56

       you're saying.

    2. ESEric Simons59:57

       Yeah.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky59:57

       So let, let me ask you this. I don't know if you have a clear, uh, thesis on this yet, but say you, you just had a kid. Say your kid is gonna, in the future starting school. Let's say your kid was starting college soon. Do you have thoughts on just what skills/areas you, you think they should go into versus avoid that maybe are popular now and be less popular?

    4. ESEric Simons1:00:19

       Uh, understanding how to leverage these AI tools, um, is key. Uh, like I wouldn't necessarily, I think, I think maybe getting a basic understanding of like how programming works, you know, et cetera, right, is like, is, is great, right? But-

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:31

       So it's like technical foundations, just understanding how things, how-

    6. ESEric Simons1:00:35

       Yeah.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:35

       ... how systems work, how coding works. Mm-hmm.

    8. ESEric Simons1:00:37

       Exactly. Exactly, right? And, and, but, but it doesn't have to be, like as I, I think back to like, you know, if Bold existed, like my, Albert and I say this to each other all the time, like we, you know, since the get-go of Stack, we've been building the thing that we wish we had when we were 13, um, and heck, for everything we've built since then. And, and especially with Bold. I mean, it's like I don't know if I would have gone as deep as I did on, uh, you know, learning how to code and being an engineer-... if, if that had been around then. You know, like the whole reason w- we got into it is we had ideas for products and businesses that we, that we wanted to build. Um, and coding was, was a, it w- was just like a necessary requirement, you know, in order to do that. So, you know, I think, I think that, um... And, and that said, it's like I think people need to follow their intrinsic interests. If folks are really interested in, you know, really getting into the nitty-gritty of how computers work and program leaders work and compilers or whatever, like go for it. Like I think that stuff's still, still gonna be relevant, you know? Like it's, uh, I, I don't know if we're gonna really have... Maybe we'll see. But, but I, you know, to the degree that there's like AGI where it's like we, we don't have to think about anything ever again-

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:47

       (laughs)

    10. ESEric Simons1:01:47

        ... uh, I don't know, like-

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:47

        Yeah, that's always the answer here. (laughs) Yeah.

    12. ESEric Simons1:01:49

        (laughs) Yeah.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:49

        Do we need to know anything?

    14. ESEric Simons1:01:51

        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, I'm not sure, but I, I think from what, at least what I feel like seems like the next at least five years of what we're looking at, it's like I think, I think people are still gonna, there's still gonna be, uh, places to specialize and become, and you know, uh, really go deep. Uh, but I think you, you want to go into it with the idea not like, "I'm gonna go and learn computer science because I'm gonna get a job for sure out of it." Like, I just think that's like a generally, you know, not a, a good, um... This is like, my co-founder and I, like we, we didn't, we didn't go to college, and my, my co-founder dropped out of college after like a semester or something.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:31

        (laughs)

    16. ESEric Simons1:02:31

        But like, I, I didn't go 'cause I was like, I just, you know, we're 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, I would've been, you know, it'd been like 100 grand in debt by the end of the thing, just for like four years of in-state tuition at U of I. Um, 120 grand I think at that time, and um, it's like... And lo- and lo and behold, I mean, there's a huge issue with this, where people are, you know, kind of... Th- there is a, there is a prevailing thought, uh, you know, by soci- societally like that going to college in, in the early 2010s, you know, tw- yeah, early 2010s or late 2000s, like you're gonna get a job on the other side that's gonna be high-paying. And that just has not been the case for a lot of people. So, and I think that's just gonna continue to be the case, right? And so it's... But, you know, again, not to deter people from doing it, but it's like you have to go into it looking like, "I for sure... This is what I want and I'm, I wanna go and be the best in, you know, that I can possibly be at this thing." You know what I mean?

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:30

        Yeah, yeah.

    18. ESEric Simons1:03:30

        Um, so.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:30

        I like that's your answer so your kid's gonna be like, "Don't even, don't even go to college," potentially.

    20. ESEric Simons1:03:34

        Unless they want to, right? It's like, I think at 18-

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:37

        Yeah.

    22. ESEric Simons1:03:37

        ... it's, it's a huge ask. I mean, it's a huge ask-

    23. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:39

        Yeah, yeah.

    24. ESEric Simons1:03:39

        ... and not even at 18. It's like at 17, 'cause you have to like, you prepa- you go apply for colleges at the... It's, it's just such a huge, uh, like a six-figure debt commitment to someone who's making zero dollars (laughs) or negative dollars and, you know, and then y- and that young. It, it just, unless you really have conviction, you know, it's, it's, you know, it costs-

    25. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:59

        Yeah.

    26. ESEric Simons1:03:59

        ... nothing to go and explore and learn for free online, you know?

    27. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:01

        Yeah.

    28. ESEric Simons1:04:02

        Um, so.

    29. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:03

        I wanna come back to the skills that I, you think are gonna be most important, and let me try to mirror back a few things you said that I very much agree with. So, it feels like if you want to be successful in the world where AI can build things for you more and more, uh, what I'm hearing is get good at figuring out what people need and want, what problems they need solved. Get good at, uh, articulating it really well to the AI tools, uh, and if... There's this talk you don't need to be a great prompt engineer, you don't need to work on prompting, but it feels like it's more and more important, because you tell it something and it goes off and builds the thing. Like, uh, just if you, if you're clear about it, it'll save you a lot of time. So, it's, uh, figure out, be good at figuring out problems that people need solved, figure out how to articulate that problem well and ask for a clear solution. Figure out how to grow the thing. It feels like that's still gonna be, uh, a need 'cause Bolt's not gonna go and like find every... Like, you know, I could see that still running paid ads and stuff like that, but, but it feels like that's gonna be an 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?

    30. ESEric Simons1:05:13

        Oh, totally. Yeah, I mean, so we actually, uh, two weeks ago I think, we announced this like program called like Bolt Builders, and it's, it's basically at the, the genius bar at the Apple store, where, you know, as folks are building on Bolt that are, that are not developers, they will, they'll run into, you know, some, some, uh, you know nook or cranny of like where the AI just, you know, cannot figure it out or whatever. And I think that's, I think that's just gonna continue to be the case for time to come. That's our position, and that's why we spun off this, this program.

Episode duration: 1:28:50