No Priors Ep. 92 | With StackBlitz CEO and Co-Founder Eric Simons

1. 0:00 – 0:36

   Introduction

   1. SGSarah Guo0:00

      (music plays) Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, we're hanging out with Eric Simons, the co-founder of StackBlitz 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. 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? We'll talk about AI code generation, creative community, and if everyone really wants to build websites.

2. 0:36 – 2:04

   Bolt.new

   1. SGSarah Guo0:36

      Eric, good to see you.

   2. ESEric Simons0:37

      Good to see you too, Sarah.

   3. SGSarah Guo0:39

      You have had a wild, uh, two months since you guys launched Bolt.new. Uh, can you explain what it is? Like, zero to 20 million of ARR? Uh, I have, I don't think, ever seen that sort of crazy growth.

   4. ESEric Simons0:56

      Yeah. I- I- I haven't either. Y- y- it's been kind of surreal. (laughs) It's kind of far beyond any of our expectations here.

   5. SGSarah Guo1:03

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

   6. ESEric Simons1:06

      Bolt is... It's kind of similar to, like, ChatGPT or Claude, except, uh, you use Bolt to build full-stack web applications. So you can come and just prompt if you want a landing page, a blog, or even like a f-... You know, any type of full-stack web app where you have authentication and you can log in. 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- and get a real production website for you. If you look at the world, there's, you know, 25 million developers, I think, globally. And, you know, to date, you know, we... Last week we had, you know, almost 200,000, uh, software composers, you know, we like to call them, that use Bolt to build web applications. And we think, we think that that number should be (laughs) 100 million. And, you know, and we- we- we're on this growth clip, um, that seems like, uh, you know, may- maybe we'll get there, um, sooner or later. Bolt is really enabling folks to, to build real software, not just kind of drag and drops or, uh, static sites, uh, you know, the- the previous era of how the web was made.

   7. SGSarah Guo2:02

      There's a lot of code generation

3. 2:04 – 3:28

   How Bolt stands out from other coding assistants

   1. SGSarah Guo2:04

      tools out there. You can do this, you know, directly, um, in the core model products as well. What do you think people are finding special about Bolt?

   2. ESEric Simons2:14

      Yeah, totally. Yeah, what's special about Bolt, and it kind of comes to the origins of our company, but, you know, in short, we've written an operating system in WebAssembly that can, like, run in your browser. And that's really important, because if you want to run dev environments, uh, you need to be able to install arbitrary packages and run different tool chains, right, whether it's Next.js or Vite 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, is kind of marry these frontier models with this technology we've been making, um... And, uh, 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, like, do it. The problem comes when you actually want to build stuff that's more meaningful. Like, it's very good if you're saying, "Hey, like, yeah, I use Zap-, you know, Claude, uh, you know, every week for just kind of generating graphs based on numbers or whatever." Very good for that sort of use case, but if you want to say, "Hey, create a landing page where people can log in and, like, do some type of functionality," you can't go npm install, you know, Firebase or Supabase or whatever have you, and plug all that up and actually deploy it. So that's what, uh, Bolt specifically is, you know, uniquely capable of doing without any other setup.

4. 3:28 – 6:13

   Building beyond ChatGPT wrappers

   1. ESEric Simons3:28

      Um, it's just all kind of baked in.

   2. SGSarah Guo3:29

      A common, um, engineer, investor, tech person pushback. "Hey, like, these code generation tools are often the same. You guys have this web container technology that allows you to, you know, abstract away the backend and, uh, uh, allow that to, um, run locally without handling that dev- developer environment mess yourself." Th- there's this concept of, like, a GPT wrapper company, right? And so I- I think there were a number of companies that were less generously, like, some system prompts and, like-

   3. ESEric Simons4:03

      Yeah.

   4. SGSarah Guo4:03

      ... a well SEO'd website. Uh, you guys open sourced your system prompts, so... Uh, and, like, a lot of the code for Bolt. Can you explain that strategically?

   5. ESEric Simons4:14

      As we were building Bolt... Um, yeah, I mean (laughs) , over the past couple years, there's been a ton of more simple sort of wrappers that have come out, you know, around these, uh, frontier models. And, and the problem is, like, when- whenever the next model comes or whenever, you know, one of the, the AI labs eventually integrates that into th- their chat products or whatever, uh, those companies, you know, kind of tend to, tend to go away pretty quickly. So, when we were working on Bolt, I mean, I th-... One of the big advantages, uh, we have is we've been building this web container technology for five years, and it's, like, pretty, pretty difficult stuff to do. Um, and so when we were going to build, uh, 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, where they actually could open source their system prompts and kind of open source their products so, so you could see how it's actually made. And for us, uh, you know, we just... We felt that it was inevitable that someone would, uh, you know, get our AI model to dump out our system prompts anyways. But also it was... We- we- we felt there was kind of something missing in the open source world, where, where we see... Like, we come from a web developer background, right? Open source is key for innovation for everyone. 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 this secret sauce. And, uh, 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, and contribute to it. You know, if we're gonna build a great business here, what's gonna allow us to win is, is, you know, growing extremely quickly, building the best end-to-end product experience that, that really works incredibly well. It's not gonna 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. Like, you can go to google.com, you can view source (laughs) -No one so far has kinda done that and built a, another trillion-dollar company th- that took out Google by doing that, right? You can learn a lot, but it's not actually, you're kind of building this cohesive end-to-end product business experience

5. 6:13 – 9:42

   Driving growth through community

   1. ESEric Simons6:13

      is, is a totally different thing.

   2. SGSarah Guo6:14

      Why is the community valuable to you? I, I mean, you've always been, like, very committed to, uh, 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? Or is there, like, an ongoing way that happens?

   3. ESEric Simons6:29

      100%. Yeah, this has actually been one of the most interesting things for, for Bo- I mean, StackBlitz, it, the company, we've been investing in open source a ton over the past, you know, five, seven years or whatever have you. When we, when we put Bolt, um, out in open source, we were really curious to see, does anyone find this valuable, you know? And the answer is like, yeah, actually. And, um, there's kind of a couple of, couple of key things kind of worth calling out on this. You know, one, from a general community standpoint for, I would say, just AI tools in general, is one of the biggest problems that a company like us has, that's building an AI experience with AI models and tech, even the, the AI labs themselves, is educating folks on how to best use the tool. Because the problem with AI models is that they're non-deterministic. It's not like, uh, instructing someone, "Hey, here's how you send an E- uh, you know, an email in Gmail." You hit the compose button, you type, you hit send. If you go to a chat product, prompts, you know, prompt engineering is something that folks have to be educated on and, and learn how to, you know, use properly, 'cause it costs money every time you send a message. And so one of the interesting things I think we've done a good job of is really investing in the community and, um, and having it be a place where folks are sharing their knowledge on how to best use the tool. Because that's actually, you're gonna see a lot of churn in your product if folks are coming, can't figure out how to use it, and leave. And we're finding, we are learning, we are actually be- you know, not even the experts on how to use our own product at this point, our power users now that actually know more. And so we're bringing them on live streams to actually show, "Hey, what's working for you in your workflows?" Um, and to the degree that we can, you know, upstream what they're doing by typing prompts into the product, we're doing that. So I think from a, if you're building an AI tool, it's critical to, to be building out a community and actually be directly engaging with them and, like, giving them a place to share their knowledge, because, uh, otherwise everyone else on, on the product, um, is, there's gonna be a high amount of churn, which is exactly what you've seen happening with these AI apps. Churn on these things can be like 60, 70% for folks that are not doing what I'm describing. And that's kind of like, that seems to be the, the most common case with a lot of AI applications that are kinda in their earlier stages. It's just crazy how to churn rates.

   4. SGSarah Guo8:36

      Oh, I was just gonna draw a parallel to, um, what David Holz had done, and, uh, the, the Midjourney team overall, uh, 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, um, their position versus-

   5. ESEric Simons9:05

      Yeah.

   6. SGSarah Guo9:05

      ... like, the many other image generators that are out there. And so, um, uh, uh, that I think is just an interesting parallel.

   7. ESEric Simons9:12

      Yeah. I, I think that's an e- an excellent example, and, and probably the best example that I've seen. Um, there's, there's surprisingly not a ton of, of at least very visible examples of this. But I think it's gonna be extremely important. I think for the com- for the companies, especially the startups, they, they really wanna win big here. This is, I mean, just a critical qua- more than ever, right? More than ever, I would say, community strategy and, and real investment is, is gonna be key for success in building, you know, this, this type of product, um, you

6. 9:42 – 13:29

   Evals

   1. ESEric Simons9:42

      know, and user base.

   2. SGSarah Guo9:43

      The idea of, like, let's have 200,000 plus users and 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, uh, 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, I think that, that, um, virtuous cycle seems really powerful.

   3. ESEric Simons10:11

      Yep.

   4. SGSarah Guo10:11

      Uh, 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.

   5. ESEric Simons10:23

      Yeah, 100%. That's like the majority of people using Bolt at this point are, are, well, you know, non-technical. Um, and it's interesting, the most successful people that are using Bolt are, are actually people that have, uh, 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 (laughs) to, to managing actual software developers. Right? Um, and one of the things you just mentioned on the eval. So this is actually the, this is kind of the second piece regarding, you know, how, like, why we open source. And one of the most interesting aspects that's popped out of it is that, like I had mentioned earlier, there's not a lot of, uh, good open source AI tools today, like real world AI tools. And especially ones where the products that clearly ha- are providing a lot of value to the degree they're growing quickly in, you know, both by revenue and usage. Uh, we're like maybe one of, you know, the only, the few, or something like that. What's kind of happened is that, as you mentioned, the eval suites are, were very good the past couple years at 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, the eval suites that exist today are, are (laughs) very specific and not representative of, like, "Hey, I want to go build a landing page," or, "I wanna build X, Y, Z." It, 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, uh, 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. Um, like, I think, uh, there's like, you know, one that was released by NVIDIA recently, and there's one called Quorum that was released, uh, recently. And, uh, you know, some of the folks, like, I think over at, like, Hugging Face, have been, you know, basically just, you know, one of the first things they're doing is taking Bolt Local...... and you're dropping it in, saying, "Okay, how good is this thing versus Sonnet 3.5 or whatever?" Right? And so that's been kind of an, an interesting ... It, it reminds me, for those that were, like, into video games in, like, the 2000s, if, uh, if you, you know (laughs) can it run Crysis, right? Like as far as-

   6. SGSarah Guo12:26

      (laughs)

   7. ESEric Simons12:26

      ... measuring your PC, um, performance. Like, it's, it's kind of becoming that. People are, you know, asking like, "Okay, can this run Bolt?" You know (laughs) ? Like, how, how well can this run Bolt? They drop it in, and they're like, "Oh, okay. You know, yeah. Can't really do da, da, da," you know? 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. And we've got some stuff we're announcing on that end that's gonna kinda further bolster this. But, uh, 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, um, in, in a real product that, uh, that's actually pretty sophisticated, um, with, you know, use cases that are not just, "Hey, can it, can it write 'Hello World'?" You know (laughs) ?

   8. SGSarah Guo13:10

      Yeah. Yeah. Or, you know, this very well specified SWE-BENCH problem, right?

   9. ESEric Simons13:15

      Yep.

   10. SGSarah Guo13:16

       I think it would be useful, uh, just to paint a picture of, like, some of your favorite use cases of things people have built that-

   11. ESEric Simons13:23

       Yeah.

   12. SGSarah Guo13:23

       ... you feel like are real. Because that is definitely ... I mean, correct me if you feel differently, that

7. 13:29 – 17:10

   Eric’s favorite use cases and startups leveraging Bolt

   1. SGSarah Guo13:29

      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.

   2. ESEric Simons13:37

      100%. 100%, yeah.

   3. SGSarah Guo13:39

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

   4. ESEric Simons13:41

      What's really cool to me is folks are actually able to build real-world products. And, and 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. 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. Um, one is from, uh, this gal in Thailand. Uh, she's a, a PM at a software banking company, and, uh, uh, her company is, uh, viralhooks.ai. And so she launched this project, um, you know, by herself, um, on the side, just moonlighting it. And, uh, the, the product is actually pretty cool. So, the, uh, general idea is, uh, you know, when you make, like, a TikTok or something. I'm not a TikToker, but, you know, I've had aspirations. Um ...

   5. SGSarah Guo14:27

      (laughs)

   6. ESEric Simons14:27

      When you make a TikTok, you n- you need to have, like, a viral hook to kind of get people to keep watching it, right? And so she's actually, uh, trained up some, uh, uh, models, you know, from OpenAI or whatever have you, to actually help you write, uh, great viral hooks for your videos and kind of reverse engineer how other great creators have done that. So it's ... You can go check it out, viralhooks.ai. And so what, what was kind of mind-blowing ... And it's a beautiful site, like, awesome product. And, um, what was mind-blowing about this is, a week before we launched Bolt, uh, she went onto 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 $5,000, um, from, I think it was a dev in, like, Ukraine or something. Uh, estimated timeline, two to three months, right? And it seems like, c- considering the app I just described, kind of reasonable.

   7. SGSarah Guo15:13

      Sounds cheap, honestly, for what it is.

   8. ESEric Simons15:15

      Yeah. It, it's like a pretty ... Like, not, not a bad price and not a, not an unrealistic timeframe. And, uh, 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. The cost savings there, I mean, it's a 99% reduction in cost, from $5,000 to $50. And then a five times faster delivery. You know, two weeks versus, you know, months. And th- the alpha's just, like, insane, you know? And, and this is not, it's not actually, like, a one-off case. Like, she was ... I think the, I think the first person we had chatted with that had done this end-to-end, another guy named Paul. He launched a, a- an entire CRM called ChilledCRM. He's just been on a tear, making a ton of different types of tools. Um, but, like ... And this is, like, fully featured CRM, like, calendar, contacts. He has a chatbot built into the thing, you know, an AI chatbot, et cetera. Um, same deal. Like, he actually ... Uh, he's been running web dev agencies for, I think, like, 20 years. And so, you know, to, to build the CRM he made, it was like a $30,000 quote. Um, he did that on our $200 a month plan, you know, in one month. Right? So again, same sort of cost savings, et cetera. So, I think a lot of, a lot of folks, uh, you know, especially in the web, web dev shops, et cetera, they're just ... (laughs) They're able to punch out incredible web applications faster than ever before for clients, um, and are able to ch- charge the same price. Right? And s- uh, so ... You know, there's, there's, there's one tweet I saw online where, uh, one, one of these folks was like, "This is, uh, this is the most incredible arbitrage opportunity in web development ever."

   9. SGSarah Guo16:43

      (laughs)

   10. ESEric Simons16:44

       (laughs) Uh, and it's true. I mean, it's, it's, it's unbelievable. Um, so th- I think what's really cool is just seeing people, uh, be able to, like, take their ideas, launch them into reality for a fraction of the cost, way faster than ever before.

   11. SGSarah Guo16:57

       I have, um, for a number of reasons, uh, been long-term skeptical of, like, no-code tools in the traditional sense, right? Like a GUI-based

8. 17:10 – 24:32

   Why engineers are embracing no-code tools

   1. SGSarah Guo17:10

      editor for people to build, uh, a- m- simple applications or more complex applications in a closed ecosystem. I'm just like, "Aah!" 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, uh, anything we, um, might need, because I don't know where the bounds of your system is. Like, how do you ... 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. Like, what, what changes? Like, why, why should it work?

   2. ESEric Simons17:52

      Yeah. Good point. I mean, and, and to be clear, like, you know, like, six months ago, I, I shared the same viewpoint. And, you know ... A- and maybe even, like, three months ago, I would have, I've shared it.

   3. SGSarah Guo17:59

      (laughs)

   4. ESEric Simons18:00

      Um, but there's some, some key things that, that have meaningfully changed. And just through, from a technical perspective, AI code gen models, uh, there was a tipping point. Specifically with, with Sonnet 3.5, there's a chasm that's been crossed here, as far as AI models are ...... ha- have gone over the tipping point of being good enough to really write real applications that are like production grade. And it's only gonna get better from here. But this, but up, and 'cause you know, kind of some inside baseball, earlier this year, uh, I think like in February, we had the idea for Bolt. We tried to build it with some of the, you know, frontier models available at that time, wasn't possible to do. Um, the sh- the, the models were n- 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, 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." Um, 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, that (laughs) th- that 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, as these walled, you know, ecosystems, um, that can't really get mainlined into building real stuff on top of, you know, over time. That changes now because of this, this tipping point in the AI models. Now the best interface... I mean, (laughs) we have people coming to, to Bolt that, you know, like with the, with the week we launched, we had a, a salesman, uh, I think from Dallas that, um, he, he tweeted us and said, "Thank you so much for making this tool. Uh, you know, I used this to, uh, make a website for my daughter 'cause she has like a medical condition. She has to find donors as she travels. Um, and so she... I made this website for her so she can send it ahead of, you know, her travels." And it's, it was an incredibly touching use case, but it, I... my first thought was like, (laughs) "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, and Squarespace are, are really (laughs) complicated to use. Like I... a- 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."

   5. SGSarah Guo20:38

      (laughs)

   6. ESEric Simons20:38

      "I ne- I need to build this thing." And I, I s- I spent a 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, "Make it in this thing." Um, and y- you know, it's, it's, it's pretty complicated, whereas you compare that against Bolt, it's, it's a text box. You say, "Hi, I'm having a... my wedding on this date. Here's the details, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. Here's the RSVP." Hit enter, boom, zero shot there's, there's a production website ready for you, right? And like to degree, my, my 71-year-old mom built (laughs) and launched her first website ever two weeks ago or three weeks ago.

   7. SGSarah Guo21:09

      That's super cool.

   8. ESEric Simons21:09

      Yeah. And so ba- it just kind of goes to show like the... i- it's way simpler, right, to build a real... and the, and, 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. It's like Next.js or Remix or Astro or Vite or whatever have you. So, uh, 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, is there anyone who can, like, come and help me debug this or build this thing out?" And folks are like, by the hour, saying, "Hey, yeah, y- book a c- time with me and, you know, I'll, I'll come and help you develop this thing," et cetera. So it's kind of this really beautiful mix of the best of both worlds that's happening, right? So I think, um, that to me is what's changed. What's changed is like, AI code gen has gotten good enough where you can go and take your ideas, put 'em into your fingertips, hit enter, get a great result. 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 'cause it's, it's like any other code base that they come into, right? So I think that... it's a very, very interesting and, and kind of mind-blowing point in time because, yeah, I don't, I don't think anyone saw this coming, you know, years ago, so.

   9. SGSarah Guo22:26

      Yeah. I, I find that very inspiring because I, 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. And, uh, and 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 e- and lots of eng- actual, like, existing professional engineers use Bolt too, but it is... because it's not a dead end, right?

   10. ESEric Simons22:55

       Yeah.

   11. SGSarah Guo22:55

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

   12. ESEric Simons23:06

       Yeah. I th- and, and for existing devs, I mean, it's like this is just... uh, like every other developer tool or innovation, you know, in the past 20, 30 years, this is just allowing them to focus on the, on the actual high value work that they do. You know, it 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, et cetera. And, um, and some folks, you know, some developers are just using this as a primary way to launch their startups or whatever. Um, or if they, if, if they need to pull it into Cursor, they do that and they can bring it back to Bolt. They, you know, it's... they, 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 was a l- there was a lar- there is and (laughs) there was and is a large number of people that have been downloading Cursor that are not developers (laughs) because it let them meaningfully dip their toes into kind of like clicking accept change, accept change, accept change from the AI. Um, and when, when we first launched Bolt, I mean, there's just... I mean, there's still, there's still comment all these YouTube videos that are like, "Cursor and... you know, Bolt, it kills Cursor," and we're like, "That's... we're... they're two different products," you know? Uh, but to non-technical people, they, they, you know, they aren't. It's actually like this is... this thing solves the problem of me not being able to code and et cetera.

   13. SGSarah Guo24:20

       Maybe we can back up a little bit and, uh, just talk about like stapli- Stackblitz and the story as a company.

   14. ESEric Simons24:27

       Yeah.

   15. SGSarah Guo24:27

       I think it's very funny when companies suddenly have overnight success-...

9. 24:32 – 31:50

   The years long journey of StackBlitz

   1. SGSarah Guo24:32

      right? Because it's like, oh, well, they were, you know, Notion was working on developing their point of view and trying different ideas to refine it, and for five years, and, and then they made Notion. Um, and you guys have been working on this for, you know, five-plus years as well. Like, uh, can you talk a little bit about, like, the, the origin of StackBlitz, and, and you, and Pai, and, like, when, uh, when you decided to do both?

   2. ESEric Simons24:55

      Yeah. So I, I, 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. Um, and when we were 13, uh, we... Well, we, we had, we had ideas. He and I were always very interested in computers. We were building PCs. And we wanted to learn how to, to write web applications. This is, like, the mid-2000s. Um, so like, for our 13th birthdays, we asked for, you know, the O'Reilly books 'cause they're like 200 bucks a pop, instead of an Xbox, you know, and then we learned how to code together. Um, and, and really... And it was, it was painful. I mean, you know, to, to... At that time, there was no, like, Code Academy and all the stuff that's for free online. Um, 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, and, and we really wanted to build them and launch them. And I think... And, and, you know, again, that's really, I think... That's, that's why, and, you know, we've been building stuff together for, you know, 15, 20 years. Um, it's been about that. 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, we had this realization that browsers had gotten really powerful. Like, we'd been building web apps, you know, at that point, for a decade and half or so. And we had this realization that the browser had gotten really powerful, um, 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, et cetera. 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, e- every platform that's ever succeeded in a meaningful way. You, you know, Windows can build Windows apps. Macs can build Mac apps. The web does not have a built-in way to do that. So there's kind of this nerd instinct of ours where we were like, "This is important. This is, this seems very valuable to solve," right? And so we kind of set out to, to go and do this. And part of this was that, like, we had actually seen this story play out, uh, you know, six, seven years earlier with, uh, Dillon Field in, in Figma. When they... Their first pitch for Figma was not a, like, a design tool. They didn't have a design tool. They had a demo, like a web GL demo of a 3D ball dropping into one. And the pitch was, "Well, browsers have gotten powerful enough to do meaningful 3D graphics rendering, and that... Because that is true, that means you can build a design tool that's in- lives entirely in the browser." That was the pitch. And that was... That we saw that same sort of story playing out for web development. Like, browsers have gotten powerful enough to run entire development environments in a browser tab. That means you can build, you know, an entirely new product experience that's web native, you share it instantly, you know? It can be viral 'cause there's no cost to spin up VMs or something. Um, incredible experience, no latency. Um, so that was really the origins of it, and, you know, we built in... You know, the technology took us, you know, four years, I think, to build. End-to-end, it's called WebContainers. Um, we had, we hired a couple people on. Um, specifically one, one guy in particular, Dominik Elm from Germany has been leading the engineering on that project and our AI stuff. Um, but, you know, really, uh, we got to the... You know, I think we're doing like three million developers a month using StackBlitz today. And that... And the original product was, you know, if you imagine web development prior to, uh, you know, the AI revolution, how do you do it in an IDE? You know, so that was like, it was basically VS Code in a browser, powered by our WebContainer technology, um, and became pretty popular in the open source world, and, um, for, you know, enterprise use cases.

   3. SGSarah Guo28:24

      Yeah, I remember, uh, when we first met. I was lucky enough to also be an early, uh, investor in Figma, um, and, you know, just believe in the power of the web and see the gap that you described without knowing what the actual valuable product was. I, I think, you know, this, this era is funny because there's been... Um, it, it's, 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, I still remember, like, my first impression of you was, um, like, we, 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... Um, even... I'm from... The first company was like a... It was some sort of, like, JavaScript education thing, right?

   4. ESEric Simons29:13

      Yes.

   5. SGSarah Guo29:13

      Like a, you know, Code Academy, like, precursor thing. I was like, "Okay, he's like, committed. He, like, has the, the authentic, uh, understanding of community, having grown up on the web himself." But the weirdest thing I remember was I was like... I googled Eric, uh, and the previous company name and whatever, and you were, like, living in an AOL building because it had free food and showers.

   6. ESEric Simons29:34

      (laughs)

   7. SGSarah Guo29:35

      And I was like, "Okay, this person is insane, but at least it is, uh, like high, high-beta bet." (laughs)

   8. ESEric Simons29:41

      (laughs) Yeah, yeah. That, um... Yeah, I was, I was 19, so I'm, I'm, I'm, uh, 33 now, so it's been, it's been a minute.

   9. SGSarah Guo29:47

      Do you have a house? Do you have an apartment now?

   10. ESEric Simons29:49

       I have a place to live. Uh, I've got, I've got a, a, a dog and a daughter and a wife. Um, so, you know, we gotta... (laughs) Living out of an office building would be tough, I think, with, with this whole crew. But yeah, I was m- I was 19 when I came out to Silicon Valley. I, you know, I came out here with, uh, literally, like, zero dollars, was part of, um, this, this incubator called Imagine K12 that ended up getting picked in- picked up into Y Combinator itself. Um, and they had, uh, you know, access cards to get into AOL, 'cause at that time AOL was trying to reinvent themselves and get startups into the building, et cetera. Um, and I think they shut that down after the press story about me came out, but sorry about that-

   11. SGSarah Guo30:22

       (laughs)

   12. ESEric Simons30:22

       ... everyone who was going to AOL. Um, yeah, you... I, I was bootstrapping this, this, uh, K12 educational company. And, um, you know, I, uh, I, you know, I'd run out of money. And, um, so I was sleeping on couches, I was going to the AOL gym, uh, every morning, taking a shower.... um, literally eating kind of the leftovers of the (laughs) d- when teams would order food in and put it in the fridge, and they were done with it, and it would get thrown out, I would eat it. There's a quote from me in the ar- the article at the time. Pretty sure it was a dollar a day. I think that's why I got my burn rate down so much, um, which- which was pretty wild. Uh, but yeah. That's- that's, um, that- that's kind of my origins, uh, in Silicon Valley. (laughs)

   13. SGSarah Guo30:59

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

   14. ESEric Simons31:06

       (laughs) Yeah, 100%.

   15. SGSarah Guo31:07

       But y- but you're still, you're still nuts. I remember, like, we were, we were talking, uh, maybe, maybe s- six months ago, maybe seven months ago, and like, uh, honestly, like, the company was in a bit of a tough place, right? Like, you weren't about-

   16. ESEric Simons31:23

       Yeah.

   17. SGSarah Guo31:23

       ... to run an- uh, run out of cash any time soon, but it was unclear what the growth-oriented, revenue-generating product would be. And you're- you're running a bunch of experiments, and I remember you also being like, "Oh, yeah, well, I..." Uh, I- uh, you have to tell me what the, uh, original, um, reason to do this was, but going from that to, "We're gonna launch this new product. I'm gonna run a marathon. I'm not a runner. I guess I'll do an Ironman too." Like,

10. 31:50 – 35:18

    Balancing an Ironman, a newborn, and a product launch

    1. SGSarah Guo31:50

       what are you thinking, man?

    2. ESEric Simons31:51

       It's a good question. A lot's changed in the past-

    3. SGSarah Guo31:54

       (laughs)

    4. ESEric Simons31:54

       ... seven months. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think-

    5. SGSarah Guo31:56

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

    6. ESEric Simons31:58

       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 g- my- you know, I was gonna have a daughter in April. And- and anyone that's been a parent, you know, will- will- has, you know, will tell you, it's- it's- it's stressful, you know, especially the f- the first months of life there. Um, and at- at the same time on the- the business side, I mean, I think us and everyone else in- in our space, um, was having a tough time. And w- we were- we were no exception. And we were kinda looking at the future and, you know, kind of, you know, looking h- wh- where do we fit in here? Things are changing really quickly. And, you know, a lot of, uh, you know, a handful of the other folks in the space have either gotten acquired, or- or are shutting down or whatever have you. Um, and some have actually kind of, uh, gone and- and leaned into the AI stuff in a similar way to us. A very s- a few, and a smaller number. But, um, you know, there- there's just, there were k- there was kind of storms on the horizon. And there- there's this- this quote, um, you know, I- I think it comes from the- the military. But, uh, you know, "Fate phis- uh, fate whispers to the warrior, 'You can't weather this storm.' And the warrior whispers back, 'I am the storm.'" And, and so it was just kind of like, you know, if the... And that would be my general advice to anyone, is like, if- if the universe is gonna try and crush you, just make it try harder. And, uh, so I think back right after my daughter was born, um, you know, one- uh, one day I woke up, and I, I was like, "I'm gonna do an Ironman this year. Like, a full Ironman." I don't know why. That was just kind of a thought I had in my head. And, um, you know, so I think it was like six months from then was when the full was gonna be, which was in October, um, just like a month ago. And, um, so to do the, you know, two weeks after that, I had... You know, I'd never ran a marathon before. (laughs) I'd never had, I'd never done all the things that are in an Ironman. It's like a two and a half mile swim, 110, 112 mile bike, and then a, you know, full 26.2 marathon. I'd never done any of that. And so, a couple weeks after I had the idea for the Ironman, I just went and did a marathon with my brother-in-law. Um, and then, uh, you know, it was just throughout the summer, was just training, and ended up getting, um, Coach. Uh, he had formerly been on the US, uh, Olympic team for this stuff. And so, you know, I think it was like two months from when I was gonna go and do the Ironman, he was like, "This is a, this is a bad idea. You should not-"

    7. SGSarah Guo34:05

       (laughs)

    8. ESEric Simons34:05

       (laughs) "You shouldn't do this." (laughs) He- he was, like, pretty concerned about it. And, um, uh, but he- he- he had some really y- you know, really, uh, great points on where I needed to improve, et cetera. And so, uh, in October, I did it. I did the- I did the whole thing. And, um, got... I think I was in the top 25% of, uh, all the people that finished, and, um, that was pretty wild. But- but yeah. And yeah, that- that's just, uh... That's kind of how I- how I approach problems in my life.

    9. SGSarah Guo34:31

       You make them harder. Yes. (laughs)

    10. ESEric Simons34:32

        Yeah, it's just you kind of bring full intensity. Especially like when... I- if there's things that are mentally stressful, having something like some physical challenge is an incredible way to balance it out, 'cause you- you... The- the intensity you bring to it, you can kind of feed off of it from both sides. Um, and so I... As- as it... When I was running the Ironman was like two weeks after Bolt had came online. And it was... We were scaling up at a crazy rate. So it was- it was just... That was nuts, uh, kind of what was going on then. But, um, but I think it kind of kept me sane, you know, during that time. And I think it was important, you know, as far as getting this thing online. But that- that's how my brain works, at least.

    11. SGSarah Guo35:05

        In terms of inspiring others that may not yet be prepared to commit to the- the Ironman with the newborn and the product launch, what do you, what do you predict in terms of like what we can imagine for developers or for code gen, maybe

11. 35:18 – 38:04

    Predictions for developers and code generation tools

    1. SGSarah Guo35:18

       just for the next, like, six, 12 months? Because I- I think past that in AI is really tough.

    2. ESEric Simons35:22

       The one thing that I'm- I'm very convinced of is that, you know, w- to date, a lot of the AI code gen stuff has been like tab completion, sort of like line completion stuff. Things like Cursor are taking it a little bit further. Agentic workflows are- are here. Um, and you know, I think Bolt has been one of the most visible ones that's- that's really, really worked well. Um, I think we're gonna see a lot more of folks... Uh, there's like this, kind of this term being thrown around of like software composer. I think- I think engineers are gonna, um, more and more just be instructing these things at a higher level than just, "Hey, tab complete this thing." They're... It's like, "Hey, go and do X, Y, Z, and send it off." You know? So I think that's gonna be a- a major one. Um, and I think the other thing too, and this is- this is a big part of the reason that we- we made the bet on Bolt, was that I've got a lot of conviction that AI models are gonna get better at code gen specifically. Um, and it- and it 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, uh, AI for in their products, or- or are using successfully, I should say, one of the hard things, um, you know, about training these models is obviously like how do you, how do... You need to get more data to train it and, you know, to improve it over time. But it has to be accurate. Like, you know, and- and it's hard to do that for things that are not easy to be deterministic about. When it comes to software, it is. It's either this thing (laughs) , this code you wrote, execute it without errors, or it didn't. This thing actually created a landing page you can, you know, capture an image, and you know, a- analyze, et cetera. And- and so I think when you look at what the- the frontier AI labs are doing, they're doing the best job of this stuff. It's their mission is to just go and perm- you know, create every permutation of every application you could ever build, put it into the training data, a- and make these models incredible. That strikes me as, uh, o- obviously a very long tail goal there. But I mean, just w- what- for what we have now, it's unbelievable what can be done. And it- it's only gonna keep getting better. So I think that's the main thing is, you know, for... I think folks have been kinda concerned about are we hitting kind of limits of this stuff, et cetera. And no. I- I don't, I don't think so. Um, like I... And in, and in the specific realm of code gen, I think we're gonna see, I think we're gonna see a lot of improvements pretty rapidly, um, which is what we've been seeing over the past year.

    3. SGSarah Guo37:35

       Okay. Awesome. Um, I think that's a great note to end on. Uh, thanks, Eric, for doing this.

    4. ESEric Simons37:42

       Thank you for having me. This has been a blast. (instrumental music plays)

    5. SGSarah Guo37:45

       Find us on Twitter @nopriorspod. Subscribe to our YouTube channel if you wanna see our faces. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. That way, you get a new episode every week. And sign up for emails or find transcripts for every episode at no-priors.com.

Episode duration: 38:04