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

(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. Eric, good to see you.

Good to see you too, Sarah.

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.

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.

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

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.

There's a lot of code generation 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?

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