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Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz)
01:28:51
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- [00:00]
A
The rate you're growing is absurd. You're in this cohort of companies that are just growing at rates that we've never seen in the history of startups.
- [00:06]
B
The company was on the verge of going under when we launched Bolt and what ended up happening is in the first two months we went from 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.
- [00:22]
A
This is just a non stop wild shit. How is this possible? What has allowed you to grow this much this fast with such a small team?
- [00:30]
B
Most importantly, it's been the people. It's rare to find startups where you have kind of the core group of five, six, seven people that have been there for five years plus.
- [00:38]
A
You basically were building a tech first and then looking for a problem to solve later, which is often what people tell you not to do.
- [00:44]
B
I think that's the hard thing about being an entrepreneur. There are periods of time where you have to make judgment calls that are not going to be the consensus view. You got to have confidence in your convictions on how to best play the hand.
- [00:54]
A
A lot of people see these stats and they sometimes don't see that. There was also years and years of work before that.
- [00:59]
B
It was kind of like both this overnight success, seven years in the making.
- [01:06]
A
Today my guest is Eric Simons. Eric is co founder and CEO of Stackblitz, which makes a product called Bolt, which is currently neck and neck with cursor for being the fastest growing product in history. They're currently the number one most popular web AI code app with over 3 million registered users. Two months after launching last October, they hit 20 million array. At the time of this recording, they're approaching 40 million ARR. The story of Bold is wild. They actually started the company seven years ago and were about to run out of money and shut down. But they realized the tech that they'd been building for the past seven years called Web Container, was perfectly suited for building AI products in the browser. So they launched the product with a tweet and as Eric describes it, it was an overnight success, seven years in the making. If you'd like to better understand the cutting edge of AI coding apps and where things are going with AI and product building, this episode is a must. Listen. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become a yearly subscriber of my newsletter. You now get a year free of Perplexity, Pro Notion, Linear Granola and Superhuman. Check it out at lenny'snewsletter.com with that I bring you Eric Simons. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. EPO is a next generation AB 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 EPO helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues and analyze performance all on my own. EPO does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time. An accessible UI for diving deeper into performance and out of the box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytics cycles. EPO also makes it easy for you to share experiment 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@geteppo.com Lenny and 10x your experiment velocity. That's get eppo.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 swing wildly on a headline. Hello Deep Zeek. But with real estate investing, there's no drama or adrenaline or excuses to refresh your portfolio every few minutes, just bland and boring stuff like diversification and dividends. So you won't be surprised to learn that the Funrise Flagship Real Estate Fund is a complete snooze fest. The fund holds $1.1 billion worth of institutional caliber real estate managed by a team of pros focused on steadily growing your net worth for decades to come.
- [04:22]
B
See?
- [04:23]
A
Boring. That's the point. You can start investing in minutes and with as little as $10. By visiting fundrise.comLenny 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@fundrise.com Flagship this is a paid ad. Eric, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
- [04:52]
B
Thank you for having me. Yeah, I'm stoked to be here for.
- [04:54]
A
Folks that are not super familiar with Bolt. What is Bolt?
- [04:58]
B
It's really simple. You go there, there's a tuxbox and you tell it 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, you know, text to app building tools that become pretty popular over the past few months here. And it's not just like building, you know, like a static site or something like that, but you can actually build full stack real software with databases and hosting and et cetera. Yeah. Just from prompting and you know, in, 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. I'm like, I'm in it.
- [05:36]
A
Let's just share some numbers about the scale of what you're building. It's, the rate you're growing is absurd. You're kind of in this cohort of companies that are just growing at rates that have never seen, we've, that we've never seen in the history of startups. And you guys are the edge of that. Share some numbers about how things went when you launched and where they're at today.
- [05:53]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, when we launched, I mean we, I mean the company was on the verge of going under when we, when we launched Bolt. Like, you know, our company Stack Blitz, we've been around for seven years building web based, you know, development environment stuff. And, 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, you know, and what ended up happening is, you know, you know, in the first two months we, you went from 0 to 20 million of ARR. And I think we're on like month four or four and a half or something like that at this point. And we've already crossed 30 million of ARR and we're on the verge of crossing 40. Like by the time this comes out, it, it appears that we're going to be at 40 million ARR. So it's just like the, the scale of the growth of the revenue has been nuts. I mean, and of course like kind of that correlates with like insane user growth as well. Like we've added, you know, 3 million registered users, you know, just in the past few months here and you know, monthly active users is, you know, around a million, I think, at this point per month. So it's, it's just, I mean, I've, I've never seen anything. I've been doing startups for like 15 years. I've never seen anything like this. Everyone I've talked to, you know, our investors or you know, etc. There's not a lot of corollaries to kind of what's going on here, you know, and it's kind of extraordinary because I mean like we, you know, our company wasn't doing AI stuff six months ago. We had no AI products and just out of nowhere we, you know, from almost death of the company to being you know, the number one by traffic revenue, et cetera. Like you know, AI code gen app that's web based in the world. Like it's, I think the only other like startup ahead of us is you know, for, for Cogen, just in general it'd be like cursor on adoption revenue at this point. And so anyways it's, yeah, it's been, it's been a heck of a ride, you know, and, and our team's like 15, 20 people, you know, so it's just dealing with, you know, we're going to be closing on like 100,000 customers and we've got our support team's like three people. You know, we're, so we're trying to scale as fast as we can. So anyways, it's just kind of mind boggling, just the, the scale of the, the demand and, and the how we've had to, you know, turn things around to match the demand as best as we can.
- [08:13]
A
You know, mind boggling is an excellent way to describe what you just shared. A million monthly active users, you're at 40 million annual recurring revenue five months into the business. Is that right?
- [08:27]
B
Yeah. With single digit week. Yeah, single digit weeks. Right. It's like that's, that's the current track rate that we're seeing for this thing. Yeah.
- [08:33]
A
I think are you guys the fastest growing startup in history?
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B
I, I mean, I think it depends on probably where you peg the number. Right. Because yeah, we're, yeah, we're here to just like build great products. Right. And, and just you know, push the limits of like what's possible with the, the technology and you know, and, and I think that, that you know, we do our jobs well. You know, it's kind of crazy things can happen. But I mean the current, the current track rate we have, we're already, we're going to be exceeding kind of the, the forecast for Q1, the current rate we're on and you know, our forecast for the year is we want to get to 100 million of ARR. And that would. I, you know, I, I think there's been a couple I. That would either be on par with Cursor or ahead of him or something like that. But I mean it's, and I think there's going to be more things like this too. I don't think that like, you know, it's just this, there's something really, you know, I think a lot of people are in disbelief about it too. We like, this is okay. And this is from when we were got to 4 million of ARR, 5 million in the first month. I would talk with people and they're like, okay, yeah, but like that could go to zero, right? And then it went to 20, the next could go to zero. And, but now we're, now we're closing on 40. And so I just, I, and so from, from my view, I was also very skeptical, you know, as this, like, I've never seen anything grow like this, right? And so part of me, I was just. 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?
- [09:58]
A
Yeah.
- [09:59]
B
I mean like it's this, this, this, this crazy thing happened and now it's not. But, but that's just that data just hasn't come. And, and, and, and you see this happening with Cursor, you see this happening with a lot of these other AI startups. And 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, 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 say I think we're going to see more of this whether it's encoding or other verticals or whatever. You know, in a sense it's almost like maybe the new normal, right? For as AI just continues to get better.
- [10:39]
A
But anyways, let's get to a demo of Bolt so people can actually see what this looks like in action. And as you go through it, if you can even point out stuff that is different from other products in the space, say lovable v0replid that other folks have heard about, that'd be useful.
- [10:57]
B
Awesome. Cool. Yeah. So this is Bolt. You just go to Bolt. New things that I think are really interesting about Bolt one is it's just like dead simple. Whether you're logged in or logged out, it's the same ui. It's extremely simple. It's just a Text box. And 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. But it's how fast it is and how reliable it is. And this is because of how we are actually doing the compute. Because what's going on here is like when you type into whether it's Bolt or another product, it has to spin up a dev environment to actually make that application. So there needs to be some operating system somewhere that's running it. Everyone else runs those things on cloud servers which they, those can take minutes to boot up and they often will run into issues and then you can end up literally stuck, right, and have to contact support to get it done, you know, and get it unstuck.
- [11:48]
A
Right.
- [11:49]
B
With Bol, we like, for the past seven years, what our company's been doing has been building an operating system that runs inside 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 want 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 I can, you know, run commands on it, et cetera. And really this is like what you're seeing down here, this terminal and kind of what's backing it. This is what took us really like 5, 6, 7 years to build and make so reliable. Like there would not be a Bolt without this technology called Web Container that allows us to run an operating system in the browser. Because what's going on here is our AI agent for Bolt has bi directional 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 a matter of 60 seconds. I said, make me a Spotify clone and now we have one, right? And it looks pretty darn good.
- [12:56]
A
That looks really good.
- [12:57]
B
And, and so that's, and that's one of the, you know, the other aspects around Bold is like this technology we made for the operating system side, the guys that have been working with us, you know, for 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 Bull, we had just an incredible amount of in house expertise on how to actually like merge these two different technology sets to have this really reliable experience that produces really beautiful, really functional stuff. So that's, that's kind of like, you know, based on like what's really cool about the Bolt experience. The other thing is, you know, a lot of these products, it's like you can like make something but you know, often you want to like actually have a URL where you can share this, like, have it like maybe even attach a domain to it or whatever have you. So with, with Bolt, we actually have built in integrations with you know, production grade hosting providers like netlify and for databases with Supabase. So if I go and just like click the deploy button here, this is actually going to run a production build of this project we made here, right? Again, this is doing this entirely inside my browser. So you know, it doesn't, it doesn't cost us anything to do this. So again, you can do this for free, right? And it has gone ahead and deployed this on a real URL on netlify. This is live. I can share this with anyone. And if I want to have like, you know, buy the domain Spotify clone.com and point it at this, I can click this link here that kick me into netlify. I can attach this to my account by domain, point at that thing and then from there on out whenever I'm prompting Bolt to make changes to this application and hit deploy, that goes live on my public website. That right? So it's just this is, this is like the simplest way to build a web app that's ever existed. You know, like, that's kind of one of the key realizations I had a couple of weeks into the thing. I was seeing people use this for like personal use cases like medical donation sites or weddings or whatever. And I was like, don't 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, I don't know if you've ever seen 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 we were to sit here for another 30 minutes, we would be, we would have streaming. You'd be able to make playlists of different MP3 files or whatever. Like you can just keep prompting this thing to keep adding functionality, you know, so that's kind of the, I think some of the cool core experience of Bolt here. I can show you something cool that we just launched if that would be of interest. So this is like web apps, right? So like web apps are amazing but often you want to have like a native app, you know, and it's hard to build web apps. It's even harder to build native apps that can actually, that you can then go put in the App Store, right. And so we partnered up with a company called Expo and their entire business is making basically like react native tooling and this ecosystem that makes it super easy to build beautiful apps and actually get them in the App Store. And so right here I'll zoom in a little bit. We have this little Build a mobile app with Expo. If you click that, we kind of instruct you on how to just prompt mobile apps into existence. So yeah, let's make another Spotify clone that's an actual native mobile app. We'll say make a Spotify clone, go ahead and hit Enter. And what this thing's going to do is actually again spin up a operating system here where it's going to boot up the Expo tool chain and actually go and make a mobile app for us. And what's cool about this is we can actually preview it just in the browser here. But once this thing's done and it boots up, it's going to show a QR code, we're going to be able to scan it and in real time actually 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? This is 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, 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, I think that's what a lot of people are really excited about with this. And yeah, majority of our audience are people that are not developers. They're easiest, they're PMs, they're designers, they're entrepreneurs. Because these are people that are, oh, I've 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 could, they can do it with their Own, you know, through prompting. So you can see here we got this little QR code and go and scan the thing.
- [17:43]
A
I'm going to do it too, by the way. I love that you had just enough things to say until it finished. That was pro.
- [17:50]
B
Just as I planned, you know. But so on my screen it's booting up, it's bundling the JavaScript of this thing. It is beta. We just launched this last week, by the way. So if you kind of see on my screen here I actually have this Spotify looking app, right, that you know.
- [18:10]
A
That looks like exactly like Spotify.
- [18:11]
B
It looks exactly like Spotify, right?
- [18:14]
A
We're going to be sued right now. So let's. You're doing too good a job with this. No, that's amazing.
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B
So it's, it's, it's pretty cool, right? I mean like. And so what's cool is. 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 know, we're building an app together, you know, 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 putting it through its paces. And so a lot of product teams, 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.
- [18:58]
A
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. Imagine listeners mind just over and over and over. Like I, I don't even know where to go with all this. Sometimes you made a really important point that you worked on this for seven years before you launched Bold. A lot of people see these stats 0 to 40 million IR in like 5 ish months. And they sometimes don't see that. There was 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 it just that part of the journey. I know we'll go through like the origin and where Bolt came from, but I guess just that web container component specifically, that feels like a huge deal.
- [19:45]
B
100% is. Yeah. And I would say this is kind of surprisingly to me, it's like still one of the contrarian viewpoints of our company. Like you know, despite, despite. Because over the years it was like when we first this is and that the web container was the bet that we made the company on. Just to be clear, like Stack Blitz was like a deep tech, a browser based deep technology play on. Can we make a, you know, a webassembly 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 like the we'd gotten the idea for this and kind of the insight that this might be possible because back when my co founder and I came out to the Valley, he and I like grew up down the street from each other in Chicago, learned how to code together at 13 and build stuff ever since. And we came out to the Valley in 2012 and we just had the good fortune of bumping into Dylan Field and Evan Wallace when they were building Figma in the early days. And that was, I don't think a lot of people know that like Figma was, was also a browser based deep technology play. Like when their first pitch for Figma, they didn't have a design tool. Their first pitch was this 3D ball dropping into water inside of a browser tab. And the pitch basically was, you know, browsers have this new capability called WebGL, the predecessor to WebAssembly. And with these things for the first time you could actually, you know, create a graphics rendering engine that you could then build a design tool on top of. But you're, but you're going to have to write that rendering engine from scratch because you know, nothing exists that can just compile into WebGL or whatever. If you want the performance you need, et cetera. It's going to take us years to do, but if we do it, you know, we think this will change everything design. And obviously we know how that story, you know, has panned out now. And back in 2017, 2016, 2017, Albert, my co founder and I saw the same sort of story begin to play out but for web development and like development environments and specifically there was some stuff that landed in browsers like web assembly, shared memory service works like these different APIs and we were like, oh wow, like it should be possible theoretically like to write an operating system that in WebAssembly that could, you know, run Node JS and NPM and all the tool chains on top of it that you need to do to do web development. And that would be huge because setting up developer environments is, it's a, it's a pain for beginners like a lot of people churn out. 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 fan 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. And so when you look at Cloud IDEs like, you know, Cloud 9 was the first one back in, you know, 2009 or so, the way these have always worked is that your browser is basically doing nothing when you go to them, it's every user that gets connected. There has to be a cloud VM that gets spun up for them. And then your, your browser's just kind of like taking your keystroke, sending it to the server and then, you know, sending back the results of it. And that's how all these, these other AI, you know, code, text to app sort of tools work. They're all using Cloud VMs. And the problem is, you know, on a small scale it can work, but as you scale it up there, I mean, there's not even a hundred million VMs to run 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 bull where, you know, it's, if you want to have build a product that's, that's going to be able to scale to that side, 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 cost to. There's a permissive free tier, right? Because the other problem with the server is like, you End up, if you have a free tier, people are mining bitcoin on it, they're 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 that's. Web Container was the key piece. And what we struggled with. It took us like four or five years something to build Web Container. What we struggled with for the years after that was just how to build a product around it that like that because developers loved it, but they weren't using it in ways that they would pay money for, you know, and, and as much as I, the, the nerd side of me wished that that would be enough, that it's like building cool technology was enough. It's like, it's not like this. We're here to build a venture, a venture scale company. And, 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 it back.
- [25:03]
A
Right. There's a lot of really interesting lessons from this, this journey that I think are counterintuitive. One is you, you basically were building a tech first and then looking for a problem to solve later, which is often what people tell you not to do. And it worked out in this case. The other interesting takeaway here is it feels like 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 maybe let's just work there for a while and see if something comes up. And then I think the other lesson here is just as a founder, just survive as long as you can, because you may find something that works.
- [25:43]
B
All great points, all great points. Right. Because what we, you're dead. Right. Like for. And you know, fortunately, my co founder and I had, we had built a lot of unsuccessful startups before this. Like, we spent Most of the 2010s, like churning through ideas on things. And so we, you know, what we had conviction on is like this is. This seems like a technology that will be important. Like, it seems like the web is the most ubiquitous. Like the kind of the pitch or the theory in our head was like, the web is the most ubiquitous platform in the world, but yet it has no. You can't use the web to like build the web, right? Like every other platform, like Mac has, you know, xcode, Windows has Visual Studio. The web had nothing. And we were like, you know, at a minimum, Google should probably buy this thing from us. It seems like that it should probably be part of Chrome at a minimum. Right. And 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 and. But when you, when you do that sort of risky, deep technology, play it, yeah, you, you need to. And we were very good about this. Like the previous company, Albert and I did, we bootstrapped it all the way through to acquisition. So we understood. And we were like living hand to mouth to like bootstrap that thing. So we understood out like how to, how to have a low burn rate and take a lot of shots on goal and make every dollar stretch beyond what anyone would think is reasonable or possible. And that's how we played our hands with Stack Blitz. You know, like what we, you know, we didn't raise money for the first two or three years, you know, the company's life. We were, you know, bootstrapping it. 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 bats and it doesn't make sense. And I, you know, I would just say generally, like until you see pull, like and you just people pulling the product out of your hands, you, you want to, 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 for, you know, for half, like everything you buy. I just like keep the burn rate as low as possible because you need as many shots on goal as you can possibly get because you have no idea. And I think just generally for startups, that's the right way in my view to approach it, you know, unless you're seeing again immediate demand and pull or whatever. But yeah, I think, 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 good job of like being extremely conservative during a time in which, during 2020 through 2020 and 2021, which were times where exuberance and growing headcount was like KPIs of companies, right? And were things that were being you know, you know, with a lot of. A lot of, you know, emotional force of like, hey, you guys ought to be doing this. And. And I'm glad that we didn't heed the advice, because it, you know, if our. We tripled the company and kicked up the burn rate, there would be no goal. You know, they're like, we would go out of business a long time ago.
- [28:50]
A
Right.
- [28:51]
B
So 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 going to be the consensus view. Maybe years later, people, you know, it'll become the consensus view. But, you know, you got to have, like, confidence in your convictions on how. How to best play the hand, you.
- [29:14]
A
Know, so there's so many great lessons here. I think just this idea of just staying alive. Dalton came on the podcast. He's a partner 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.
- [29:36]
B
Yep. Yeah.
- [29:37]
A
Maybe talk about that moment of just after launch signs that, okay, this is working. Something's different.
- [29:43]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So day one, it was like, there's great reception to, like, the tweet. You know, we were like, wow, this is like, you know, one of the biggest things, you know, unlocked 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, like, he was the one who flagged. He's like, guys, we have 60k today. Like, this is crazy. Around 78. But, like, this is launch day. Like, it's the. The. There's. There's the TechCrunch peak of initiation or, you know, the classic startup. Yeah. I was like, listen. Yeah, I'm trying to, like, temper enthusiasm for the team. Like, this is great. Got a lot of work to do. Da, da, da, da. And then the next day, you know, we added 80k or whatever it was, right. And it just kind of kept going and, you know, and all the while, like, the product we Put out. We built the thing in 90 days. We built Bolt. So there's a lot of things that were missing in the product. Basic stuff. Basic stuff. And which again, like we, you know.
- [30:44]
A
We.
- [30:46]
B
We cut the right corners on the thing to get it online, but we had this just growing influx of people using it going. You know, how is there not a mobile responsive view? Like how, how. How are chat messages not. We got to 20 million of ARR without a mobile responsive view. By the way, just throwing that out there, you know, this. It was like the iPhone not having copy and paste until like iPhone5 or whatever. You know, that was. This was that was that. This is 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 traffic and, and, and you know, there's, there's. There was a whole bunch. I mean, I could. The list of problems that were happening every single day was nuts. I mean, like, to start, we had never had a plan on stackus.com you know, for more than $9. Like we had one price, nine bucks, right? And so we launched bull. We're like, again, we don't think they will think. Hopefully people like this. But, you know, nine bucks doesn't get you a lot of inference. And so people burn through nine bucks in like 48 hours, you know, and they're like, I want to buy more. How do I buy more? Why won't you take my money? So it was like that within the week we we raw just completely new pricing plans you could upgrade which. Which ended up has kind of now become this the standard. All the other guys in the space have copied this where, you know, prior to Bolt going online Copilot, like all these previous AI things, everyone kind of wanted this like Netflix model where there's like one price. It's like all you can eat or whatever. And the problem is like, if you do that, like, you can't really like, you want the inference cost to be kind of low because you're expecting people to use it a lot, right? And so you don't. You can't do these agentic experience things. It would be too expensive. And what we ended up stumbling into is that, okay, actually people are willing to pay more, right? They're willing. People want to pay for more inference because we've crossed this threshold where, you know, you can get a very tangible roi. Like, you know that this is providing a tremendous amount of value to you. Right. So anyway, so that was like, that was like one thing. And you know, the servers were just melting. Anthropic ran out of GPUs for us. Like, Dario emailed me, he was like, listen, we just, we don't have anything more to give you at the times where we're like, how do we deal with, you know, it was just, it was just bananas, you know, for, for, for weeks. It felt like in 300, you know, when. When they're surrounded by like 10,000 people and our team is just like doing everything. Like 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. Anyways, so, yeah, it was, it was a crazy wild time. And I mean, it still is. 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.
- [33:38]
A
Up often, often decades.
- [33:40]
B
Yeah. You know, so it's, you know, that was hard. We go to people and kind of be like, what do we do? And the playbooks we get back are like, take, take six months or a year or something. It's like, this isn't going to work. You know, and. Which is funny. This is what it's all about, right? I mean, this is, this is, um. You know, it's. At least for me, this is. That level of intensity is, is. It's, it's. It's challenging, fun challenges, you know.
- [34:09]
A
Wow. Okay. This is just a non stop wild, wild shit. So you mentioned that your team was about 20 people through all this. You guys are growing at this insane rate. 20 people. How is this possible? What has allowed you to grow this much this fast with such a small team? This 300 visual is interesting. I imagine having these Spartans is a big part of it. Just what has allowed you to do this?
- [34:40]
B
Yeah, yeah, I think a lot of, I mean a lot of. Again, I mean, if you kind of look at where a lot of the other folks in the like the code Gentexa app space have really been struggling. A lot of it has been scaling their servers and stuff. Right. Because, and, and, and you know, it was kind of like, you know, both this overnight success, seven years in the making, like all of this stuff, like there's no way if you've rewind like year two, we can. There's no way we could have. We would not be at the, the growth and on, on DAUs and revenue or whatever. There's just no way. 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, you know, it's, it's, it's rare to find startups where you have kind of the core group of five, six, seven people, you know, that have been there for five years plus. Right. Like, that's, that's a pretty rare thing to see. Like in Silicon Valley it is. Usually folks are kind of at a job for, you know, start for a kind of year or two, they kind of go to another one. You know, I mean, and the problem with the turnover like that is that you can't take like really long bets like the one we did. And so we've had kind of from the get go. Again, this comes back from bootstrapping the previous company, like just having, you know, less people and more context per head. Like, that's just, that's just been, that's just been how we do it and we feel very strongly about it. And the reason for that is, is one that you can have high levels of trust with anyone you're talking to because you know that they, they have a lot of contacts. It's not like, you know, this person's completely in the dark and in some quarter of the company. I mean, the second thing, everyone has agency to actually get stuff done front to back. Right. And, and there's no political community to get stuff approved by. There's no, 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, cooking up the UI on the spot and landing this thing, like without involving anyone else on the team. Right. And you know that, you know, so I think it's the culmination of just high trust. And you know, people like, we all just have enjoyed working together over the past. I think that's why, that's the only reason anyone would ever stay right at a company for that long or whatever. And so those sorts of stressful situations I think can are 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 is a direct reflection of the strength and the bonds of the people that are making this thing and supporting the thing.
- [37:22]
A
Yeah, I think that's such an Important point that you guys have been working together for many years. Most people won't have that benefit. When you're hiring people, when you hire this initial team, is there anything you look for that you think maybe people aren't looking for enough? Anything you prioritize? When you're hiring new folks, is it this idea that they can do a lot? They can do customer calls, they can do design, they can do engineering?
- [37:42]
B
Yeah. For us, and even if the folks we're hiring now is like hiring people that are that, that don't care about the titles and they don't care about, you know, it's not like they're, they're people, of course it's working will 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, and are, you know, chucking their ego at the door and, and they're there to like, collectively build something great, not just, just kind of you know, be, be the, the. The brilliant jerk. Right. You know, most of the people that we've hired have been, you know, in Europe, and we're a fully remote company. Like, you know, I, my co founder and I are in, 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 because we thought we'd hire people here. And like a year into it, we were like, what are we doing? You and I are coming to like, an office for 10 people we've hired. The people working for us are, you know, in Europe, across the U.S. and you know, I think. And we have a, you know, one or two other people we've hired that are in the Bay Area at this point. But yeah, I think, I think we kind of look for folks that are, that are intrinsically just trying to. Trying to build great stuff and are interested. And then the first people that we hired, the reason we found them is that they were users of stock blitz. You know, like that was that a lot of people that the majority of people we hired at the company have been people that actually came from our community, basically. 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 yeah, those, those are the, those are the general, like, kind of kind of qualities we look for, though.
- [39:27]
A
You know, I'm excited to chat with Christina Gilbert, the founder of one Schema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Hi Christina.
- [39:36]
C
Yes, thank you for having me on, Lenny.
- [39:38]
A
What is the latest with One Schema? I know you now work with some of my favorite companies like Ramp, Vanta, Scale and Watershed. I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from especially tricky systems like ERPs.
- [39:53]
B
Yes.
- [39:54]
C
So we just launched one scheme of 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.
- [40:15]
A
I can tell you that if my team had to build integrations like this, I how nice would it be to be able to take this off my roadmap and instead use something like One Schema and not just to build it, but also to maintain it forever?
- [40:27]
C
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 One Schema will notify your team immediately of any data that looks incorrect.
- [40:46]
A
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. I want to ask a couple more questions about Bolt and then I want to zoom out and talk about where things are heading in the future. Let's talk about protisation. I imagine you guys are just like barraged with as you described after you launched there, 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?
- [41:28]
B
There's a lot of things that you just don't even know are possible to do. Right. And so people aren't going to be like necessarily like explicitly asking for them. And so there's been kind of a couple of these where we, you know, kind of use our, 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 going to be a big deal. Best example was last week with native mobile app support. Like that's the, the, you know, buy reception, like the biggest thing we've ever launched. And it was something that even internally at the company, you know, some folks like this, you know, I don't know, people are like 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 net new capabilities. But it's like this is. Strikes me as an important one where we, where we, you know, put some chips into the middle of the table on. And the. Okay, dead right. Like it's, it's, it's just this mind blowing experience. And now just. There's just, you know, thousands of mobile apps being created a day that weren't before. 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 have never made an iPhone app before. It made no sense. It's super expensive. Like now that's not the case. I mean like they. So, 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. I think the best analogy would just be like it's, it's kind of like, I think, you know, you working at a restaurant, being like a chef, it's like there's some amount of, there's feedback from the customers, right, of like this thing didn't taste good. And then there's like, hey, we've been kind of cooking something interesting. This, this tastes this. Yeah, I don't know this. I think people are gonna like this. You know, I think this is a, a killer dish. And, and so you kind of have to balance those things. And I think it's actually largely a function of just, you know, years of experience doing it. I think if you kind of rewound like 10 years ago, I would had, I really know I would have had the, just the, the years of getting my butt kicked by the free market 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.
- [43:39]
A
You know, to unpack this a little bit further. Do you have kind of a cadence you guys work through to Decide what to build and ship. Do you have, like, a weekly meeting every week? Because I know, like, the answer is probably really. It's just like chaos constantly. And fires we're putting out constant. Like, I know that's a lot of it, but is there some kind of process that you guys have for deciding what to build and how to share it and just, you know, work with the team?
- [44:02]
B
We all meet, like, every day. Like, pretty much the entire team gets on a call and we just kind.
- [44:07]
A
Of meet like that. Like a zoom?
- [44:08]
B
Yep. Yeah. Every day at 8:00am Pacific, we're on a zoom for like, every day.
- [44:12]
A
The whole company?
- [44:13]
B
Pretty much the entire company, yeah.
- [44:15]
A
Wow. For an hour. Okay.
- [44:16]
B
Yeah. And we just go over everything and I think we're going to probably start as the team's kind of growing, we're going to start, you know, splintering off into, you know, different, you know, syncs or whatever. But the thing about just having everyone in the same room every day is that it's, you know, a lot of people will complain that it's, you know, that this is, you know, on Twitter, you'll see people say, oh, like, it's the most expensive. Use everyone's time. Right. But it's like, yep. But, like, there's zero percent fidelity loss in that. Like, everything is. Everything every day is. Is being audited front to back and being discussed front to back. And so when you're in these times of just extreme growth, right, It's. It's you, You. You want as close to zero percent, you know, loss, right. On. On communications. And so that's. That's how we've. That's how we've been doing since. Especially since Bolt went online. And I think it was like the week after Bolt went online, we were like, every day until. 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 content, more context on, you know, and less heads. You know, every person at the company is aware of everything else that 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.
- [45:31]
A
You know, that is so interesting. I've never heard that before, especially for a company growing like that is like yours. That is super interesting that that's what you do.
- [45:42]
B
I don't think we're going to do that forever.
- [45:44]
A
Yeah, yeah, of course. No, but that's. That's. I think that's a really Cool thing to note that that's, that works and that has worked 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, what tools are kind of in the stack of the company's tool set?
- [46:01]
B
Yeah, on the engineering side, we use linear, like heavily on kind of product, you know, road mapping. I think we were using notion and, you know, kind of making like PRD type stuff in Notion, you know, and then we use Figment for like design and we actually, we use Bolt for a little while. Design and prototyping at this point, as you can imagine. But yeah, I think, I think the tooling is nothing crazy. There's nothing crazy sophisticated. I think we'd 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 weren't going to be brought.
- [46:45]
A
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 going to create a prototype immediately. That's it. Talk about just like, why you still find that useful and just what you put into your prd, whatever that is for you.
- [47:01]
B
Unless there's something that's very sophisticated that we're working on, we tend to keep them pretty light. I like to just have the minimal amount of context possible, that it just ensures everyone's on the same page and that the key outcomes for whatever feature that we're working on are going to, are going to be present when we get there, you know, because the thing is that when these things, when these documents get really beefy, you're looking at, God, there's so much stuff to decipher here. You know, the problem is a lot of people are going to gloss over it when it gets kicked to development or design or whatever. They're. It's just going to start snowballing into a lot of stuff. It's just better to keep it as simple as you possibly can. And at least that's, that's kind of our, our approach to the thing. And you know, and often it's, it's. Some of these things are like, here's a link to a bolt.
- [47:48]
A
Here'S what it might look like.
- [47:49]
B
Yeah, like, here's not just look like here's, here's kind of a working demo of what it will effectively feel like. Right. And be. Because that just, you know, if a picture is worth, you know, a thousand words, like a live actual demo is, is worth billions. You know, like you can, you can feel it. It's, it's real. And that's what we're seeing like a lot of the, you know, the businesses that are adopting Bolt now that's the use case that they're using this for is high fidelity prototyping. Because it's, it's like now faster to make real prototypes using Bolt and writing. You know, before it was too expensive. Like you did the idea of like let's prototype it by having the. Yeah. The engineers code a prototype. It's like that it would take forever. It would, it would 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 version of it.
- [48:43]
A
So let's actually talk about that. Just how, how far have companies gotten with Bolt? Like prototypes is where everyone's kind of imagining these tools are at. I know that the goal isn't just to make prototypes. It's to build full scale. I imagine long term Salesforce, you know, Atlassian style companies that scale. Just what's like what are some examples of products people have built with Bolt that are maybe would surprise people just how far they've. They've gotten.
- [49:08]
B
Yeah. I mean especially when you're starting greenfield stuff, you, I mean you can use Bolt to build, you know, like on the, like Salesforce as an example. Right. One of the first people that signed up for Bolt was this guy named Paul and he's an entrepreneur and doesn't know how to code built a CRM in three weeks that has like AI built into it and stripe for billing, et cetera. He had gotten a quote from an agency for this. It was gonna be 30 grand and take six months. He had it done in three weeks and at least spent like 300 bucks on both of 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. Right.
- [49:45]
A
Okay. So, so he built this and he's selling it like people are paying to use it.
- [49:48]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and, and, and there's many such cases of this. Right. When you can you. If 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, you're not going to get a zero shot but you're, you're, you're going to spend a couple days, weeks, whatever. But the cost reduction there, 30 grand versus $300, I mean 99% cheaper six months versus three weeks. I mean it's like order of magnitude sort of 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, you know, apps, like people, they go to upwork, they get a quote for five grand, they have it done within 50 bucks. You know, it's just nuts what you're able to do with this thing. And so I think on the flip side, you know, a lot of the like existing companies, yeah they will, there are very legitimate use cases where things are greenfield spot up good examples like public websites, like marketing pages, landing pages, whatever have you. Folks are adopting Bolt to just power those instead of using webflow for example, because it's like this is simpler to use than webflow and it integrates with the existing design system of the company and et cetera. Right. And the marketers can update without knowing how to code, you know, whatever. But then for product development teams, this is most commonly for again existing software businesses. They're using this to just accelerate the product development process and in a way where it's not just like a greenfield wholesale. Hey, we're building the entire thing in Bolt or whatever, right.
- [51:20]
A
Can Bolt integrate with your existing code base or. Not yet.
- [51:23]
B
So yeah, we can actually open up repos in Bolt. You can like go and use Bolt on your code base. It kind of depends on your setup. Right. Like we, you know, and we do have companies again that like have marketing sites that are using SOD or like, you know, their admin panel or whatever. And I think it's going to be a use case that we see a lot more people orienting towards. These LLMs are not great depending on how big your application is though, right? These things are not quite there where if you have something that's, you know, a thousand files or something or more, where you're going to be able to have a really reliable, super reliable experience per se. Right. Within a year, if you chat a year from now, I suspect the answer is going to be different. But you know, so it kind of depends on the size of the app, the scale of the app and if it's too big, you're looking at the prototyping like just, just pure acceleration, right. Of product development and if it's not, then, then you're, you can just do it entirely right from Bolt.
- [52:24]
A
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 going to get you here yet. Maybe in the future it will. So it sounds like if you have just like a really large existing code base, probably not the best tool yet. What else should people know?
- [52:39]
B
I would say that's probably the main one, you know, because I think if you have a large existing code base, you're going to need something like cursor and you're going to need to be a developer meaningfully to be, to be editing that stuff. You know, I think outside of that it's, there's a just like using any other productivity tool like Photoshop or Figma or like a DSLR or whatever. There's some level of kind of education and just kind of like, and using the tool and like learning how to use it. That's required to like really unlock a lot of the maximum capabilities of the thing. Right. And you know, the people that we see that are most successful with both like outside of developers, the people we see that are most successful are people that are amazing PMs for example, because these are people that understand enough about how the technology works typically and their job is to like direct developers on how to go and improve the product and go and like look into like how to, how to actually spec this thing out in a way that's like executable without, you know, without lossiness 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 helping it go and debug various things or whatever have you. And so there's a huge overlap of the skill set of just like being a rockstar PM and being really good at using frankly any of these text to apps or code gentools.
- [54:09]
A
I love that you made that point. That's exactly the point I been trying to make. I have a newsletter post about this because when all these tools came out, there's so many people saying, okay, PMS are dead, we don't need them anymore. We could just build things and build things so quickly and easily. What's the point? But I completely see the world the way you see it. The hard part now is now it's easy to build the thing. Now it's what the hell should we build? Can we clearly articulate what it is we want to build and then can we just have the taste to know, is this right? Is this correct? Is this good? Is this going to solve the problem? And then it's like grow it. Which is something also PM sleek about. So I completely agree. Basically it feels like PMs are, and there's a lot of, a 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.
- [54:55]
B
Zero question. I mean that, that was like, you know, as bold was, was growing and like we were like who? Because we were 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 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 what's going on here? But then it, what it just kind of clicked is like, oh well this is, this is, this is, this is going to change everything. The entire software world order is going to get rewritten here because like the way that companies are organized to build software today, totally going to change, right? Like the idea that again like PMs are, 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 a, I'm a developer myself. They have to go and harangue the developer so 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, they're going to be writing quote, quote unquote instead of just writing a JIRA ticket and waiting for a developer to do it. The developers are going to be able to work on, you know, intellectually challenging tasks that LLMs are not well suited for, right? And still being augmented by LLMs to do it. But PMs are going to be able to go in and just make the changes themselves. And, and just 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 going to completely change the winners. At least the org charts are going to completely change in how they approach building products and shipping products completely, you know, and it's starting this, this is, this is the beginning.
- [56:50]
A
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, that also applies to founders, like product thinking founders, 100% similar. And then I think it's also important to note like if you also have engineering skills and design skills, you will be at an advantage. Like that only helps you. But if you're like looking at this triangle of the triad of product engineering, pm, it feels like the PME skills are the ones that will be most important and valuable. Although it'd be great if you can also be in code and if you could also design really well.
- [57:22]
B
Absolutely. And to me it's like the most exciting mix. I think, I think PMs, designers and entrepreneurs that are non technical, that's the most exciting thing to move. Just because it's a brand new market that's being unlocked here. You know, like for the first time ever, these folks can like directly code and build the product themselves. Like their vision directly into the software itself. That, that is, that's, that's, that's going to change everything. That is changing everything.
- [57:49]
A
So you talk about how Org charts are going to change. What are you imagining there? Is it just like fewer engineers mostly? Or what, what is, what do the future ORG charts look like?
- [57:57]
B
Good question. And I, I, I, I bet you there's going to be, you know, there's going to be like some gardener analysis someday, you know, a year 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, you know, I think that you're going to see developers probably being pulled off of a lot of the, and generally speaking pulled off of a lot of, you know, user interface type work I would imagine, except for the most complicated of those things. And you're going to see designers and PMs really, really leading the charge and being responsible for crafting those experiences and perhaps having a developer attached to like be reviewing the code and making sure, you know, like the, the extra, the guiding, you know, the code that they're writing, reviewing those pull requests and et cetera. And I think maybe even the engineers are, you know, like you pointed out, having Engineering skills is not going to hurt you. It's going to make you way more effective. Right. So I think that engine, but I do think there's going to be, you know, there's going to be the leverage that a front engineer is going to have is in it is now insane. It's only to get more so and so I could see, I could see there just being fewer front engineers attached to like I've seen more product, 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, that's. That something like that strikes me as probably how this is going to start.
- [59:33]
A
Trending towards this touches on. We had a researcher from OpenAI on the podcast. She actually started her career, she worked at Anthropic first as a front end engineer and said that once she saw what Clyde could do for front end engineering, she's like, I need to move to a different function. And so she moved into research because she saw that role disappearing potentially. That's exactly what you're saying.
- [59:57]
B
Yep.
- [59:57]
A
So let me ask you this. I don't know if you have a clear thesis on this yet, but say you just had a kid, say your kid is going to in the future starting school. Let's say your kid was starting college soon. Do you have thoughts on just what skills slash areas you, you think they should go into versus avoid that maybe are popular now and be less popular?
- [60:19]
B
Understanding how to leverage these AI tools is key. 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?
- [60:32]
A
There's like technical foundations just understanding how things, how, how systems work, how executing works.
- [60:37]
B
Exactly. Right. And, and, but, but it doesn't have to be because 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, you know, since the get go stack, we've been building the thing that we wish we had when we were 13 and heck, for everything we built since then and, and especially with Bolt, I mean, it's like I don't know if I would have gone as deep as I did on, you know, learning how to code and being an engineer if, if that had been around that, you know, like the whole reason we got into it is we had ideas for products and businesses that we, that we wanted to build and coding was, was a, it was just like a necessary requirement, you know, in order to do that. So you know, I think, I think that, and, and that said, it's like I think people need to follow their intrinsic interest. If folks are really interested in, you know, really getting the nitty gritty of how computers work and probing leaders work and compilers or whatever, like go for it. Like, I think stuff's still going to be relevant, you know, like it's, I, I, I don't know if we're going to really have. Hey, we'll see. But 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.
- [61:47]
A
Yeah, that's always the answer here.
- [61:49]
B
Yeah.
- [61:49]
A
Do we need to know anything?
- [61:51]
B
Yeah, it's like if we're at that point, it's kind of, I don't know. I, you know, I'm not sure but I think from what at least I feel like seems like the next at least five years of what we're looking at. It's like, I think, I think people are still going to, there's still going to be places to specialize and become and you know, really go deep. But I think you want to go into it with the idea. Not like I'm going to go and learn computer science because I'm gonna get a job for sure out of it. I just think that's like a generally, you know, not a good, this is like my co founder and I like we, we didn't, we didn't go to college and my co founder dropped out of college after like a semester or something. But like I, 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 would have been, you know, it'd been like a hundred grand of debt by the end of the thing just for like four years at in state tuition at U of I. 120 grand I think at that time. And it's like, and I. And lo and behold, I mean there's a huge issue with this where people are, you know, kind of, there was a, there was a prevailing thought, you know, societally like that going to college in, in early 2010. Yeah. Early 2010s or late 2000s. Like you're going to get a job in the early side that's going to be high paying. And that just has not been the case for a lot of people. So. And I think that's just going to continue to be the case. Right. And so it's, but you know, they get, not to deter people from doing it, but it's like you have to go into it being like I for sure this is what I want and I'm, I want to go and be the best and you know that I can possibly be at this thing. You know what I mean?
- [63:30]
A
Yeah. So I like that your answer to your kids gonna be like don't even, don't even go to college potentially unless they want to.
- [63:36]
B
Right. It's like I think at 18, it's, it's a huge ask. I mean it's a huge ass. And not even at 18, it's like it's 17 because you feel like you prepare, you can go apply for colleges at the. It's, it's just such a huge, like a six figure debt commitment to someone who's making $0 or negative dollars and you know, and, and that young. It, it just unless you really have conviction, you know, it's, it's, you know, it costs nothing to go and explore and learn for free online, you know.
- [64:02]
A
So I want to come back to the skills that I, you think are going to 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 what I'm hearing is get good at figuring out what people need and want what problems they need solved. Get good at articulating it really well to the AI tools. And there's this talk, you don't need to be a great prompt engineer, you don't need to work on prompting. But it feels like it's more and more important because you tell it something and it goes off and builds a thing. Like just if you're clear about it, it'll save you a lot of time. So it's figure out, be good at figuring out problems. People need to all figure out how to articulate that problem well and ask for a clear solution. Figure out how to grow the thing. Feels like that's still going to be a need because Bolt's not gonna go and like find like, you know, I could see that start running paid ads and stuff like that. But, but it feels like that's gonna be ongoing need. And then I feel like there's this kind of unstuck step like helping AI get unstuck. And it feels like that's where maybe engineering skills will Come in. More and more thoughts on just that skill.
- [65:13]
B
Oh, totally, yeah. I mean, so we actually, two weeks ago, I think we announced this like, program called like Bolt Builders. And it, it's basically the, the genius bar at the Apple Store where, you know, as folks are building on both that are. That are not developers, they will, they'll run into some, some, you know, nook or cranny of like where the AI just, you know, cannot figure it out or whatever. And I think it's, I think it's just going to continue to be the case for time to come. That's our position and that's why we spun up this, this program.
- [65:39]
A
And these are humans that help you out.
- [65:40]
B
These are humans. These are, these are. And people that were like, certifying. And so, you know, when in Bolt, in the, you know, coming weeks or whatever, there's going to be a button where you can just say, hey, connect me with, you know, a certified, like, expert. And you can chat with them live and they'll help you get unstuck and you pay, you know, I don't know, 50 bucks an hour, whatever it is, right? And then you get unjammed and, and you keep. Keep prompting, you know. And again, it's like, I just think this stuff is. It just all seems like gravy to me. Like, engineers get to focus on like difficult challenges, not like cookie cutter, let's make another crud app stuff, you know, like, they, they get to like, debugging is challenging and fun, you know, and like going and, and work on intellectually stimulating tasks. And like all this stuff that's just copy pasta over and over, all this error happens. Just like, let the AI do all that. That crap, right? Like, you know, this is like a.
- [66:29]
A
Potentially new job for, for now at least just unstuck the AI which I think over time it'll get better and better and we maybe won't need these people. But, but I love that it's like now AI first and person second versus person building the thing. And then AI, like when Copilot launched, it was just like, cool, here's a little suggestion for this function. And now it's flipped. Here's like everything. And then, oh, we. I don't know what to do here. Help us here. And then it's like a human suggestion. Isn't that interesting? It's like human co pilot is flipping, flipping it.
- [66:58]
B
Totally. Yeah. Yeah, it's. And we're. That's what's wild is, you know, I think Sonnet was, you know, sonnet Was the really, the, the first model that flipped the equation because that was really us and Alt Cursor and all these other things. The rapid growth started. The second Sonnet went online right. Like, we actually tried building Bolt like almost exactly a year ago with like kind of the frontier models at the time. Spent like a week or two building it. It just didn't work. Like, the output, the code output was not reliable enough. It would just, it would constantly just. It would be a broken app or look ugly or whatever. And then we got a sneak peek at the SANA stuff in May and we were like, oh, okay, like we should take that project back off the shelf and green light it. Cause this, this might be it. And you know, lo and behold, that's exactly what has happened, you know. But yeah, that's, that's the big deal that is kind of under the hood. Like, this is what's going on here is a very critical threshold has been passed with LLM's ability to write production gray code and apps that actually look beautiful and actually function well. It's not perfect, but there's kind of this zero to one moment that's happened where it's like, okay, so like now. Yeah, now. Now we're. Now the AI is the first thing and then you're kind of popping a developer at every now and then versus the other way around.
- [68:11]
A
You know, I did not know that. I didn't realize that so much of this was unlocked with like, it's sitting on top of Anthropic's work. And specifically Sonnet, that was the first model, you're saying that could code well enough.
- [68:23]
B
Yeah. Wow. Zero question, Zero question.
- [68:25]
A
I mean, it's fascinating just like the amount of, I don't know, revenue and business and E commerce. Commerce that that one model has unlocked is. Is insane. I did not realize that it is.
- [68:39]
B
And in retrospect, you know, for the, you know, like I'd mentioned, like, we'd never done an AI product at Stack Blitz. And you know, it's like, it's tempting because it's like when, you know, kind of when chat GBT went online, everyone started kind of adding AI to their products. We're just like, we just didn't see like a clear place where like really honored value. Right. So I, I was not super bullish on, you know, a lot of people. Like, hey, AGI is going to be here in 2023. You know, I mean, like, there's all this stuff that was being said. I was like, I just don't know if I necessarily buy how fast people say it's going to move. And to a certain degree, like that was like the correct view. What I didn't really think about though is like if, if AI. If LLMs are going to get better at a specific vertical kind of like which are going to be the things that it would be. And you know, if you look at like law, for example, you want to make the best outline for, you know, looking at case law or whatever. The problem with that stuff is it's not deterministic. Like the judge's ruling is dependent kind of on society's view of things at the time. Right. Political stuff going like the jury. There's a ton of things that it's not deterministic. And, and so, and so you can't really create a lot of training data that's going to be like super reliable. Right. And produce really good results. And you can't just like make up cases and say theoretically the judge would say this. Yeah. I mean it's like it just doesn't work. Software is deterministic. When you, when you write code and you hit run either runs or it doesn't. And, and that is, that's the key insight Anthropic really had. They just went deep and this is what they're doing is just reinforcement learning. I'm basically permutating every type of app you could ever build and just spinning up tens of thousands of course or whatever to do that. Just building tons of training data and doing reinforcement learning and making their alums the best in the world at building beautiful, reliable applications. I'm extremely bullish. It makes technical sense why of anything. LLMs are going to get insanely better at writing code than probably most other types of applications for LLMs simply because it's something that, that can be extremely deterministic and permutated thousands and thousands and thousands of times per second.
- [70:54]
A
Right.
- [70:55]
B
And, and so that I think the broader trend here is. And, and Sauna has woken everyone up like Google and OpenAI. All the, everyone is now gunning for coding because that the. How much is. How big is the market opportunity to rewrite the software world order? It's. It's trillions of dollars or something.
- [71:15]
A
Right.
- [71:16]
B
Like the world runs on software, you know, so, so I think, I think that just kind of in a macro, the kind of the highest macro view and why we went and raised money for gold, it's like this is this, this seems like an extremely clear shot. There's not this like you can kind of separate the hype of what people say and blah, blah, blah. When you break it down technically, this makes sense. It makes sense what's going to happen here. And so, you know, and for us, we're like, we, you know, we. We are just so happen to be well positioned to like, go and enable people to like, kind of ride this wave of the innovation that is here in Alums and is going to just keep coming and therefore enable more people to build even crazier amazing software. Right. So that's our worldview at least of kind of what's going on here at like the macro.
- [72:05]
A
And when did Sonnet even come out? It's been a while. Right?
- [72:08]
B
I think, I think they officially. I think it was in June when they Officially in June.
- [72:12]
A
Okay. So since June, like this, this is the worst it will ever be, the state of AI coding. And it's already this good. And there hasn't been anything like they haven't launched their new model since. Since last June. So this tells us just how quickly things are going to start moving once they. Once they launch their next model. And as you said, everyone's gunning now for this because they realized we're behind on the coding piece. So. Wow, this is going to get crazy.
- [72:40]
B
I agree. Yeah, it's that it's. It's been like kind of. Again, like, it's not. There was no blog post that laid all this out for us. It's just been kind of this, like.
- [72:48]
A
You just noticed the code was really good, basically.
- [72:51]
B
And from there it's just, we've been piecing together all this other stuff. And so it's been, it's been a kind of like a. The thrill of like a murder mystery of like, what is going on here, you know.
- [72:59]
A
Oh, really?
- [73:00]
B
Yeah.
- [73:01]
A
Piecing together, like what you've seen anthropic releasing. Is that what you mean? Like, what have you been noticing? Murder mysteries.
- [73:07]
B
Well, and then the impacts of like Bulb, where it's like we have people that are not technical using this.
- [73:11]
A
How.
- [73:12]
B
How are they using it? Why are they doing this? You know, it's. And then just kind of all the stuff we've talked about in this podcast has been the result of, you know, nine months of just, you know, R and D and seeing the results of it and going what? You know, and then. And then digging in, doing another thing, then going what again? And then it just keeps happening because there's. There's no charted course for this.
- [73:32]
A
You know, it's like an anthropology, or is, if that's the right term, of just like Watching the. It's like an emergent discovery, it sounds like, versus you have this strategy here. We're going to do this where you person. It's a launch. This thing will happen.
- [73:43]
B
Yeah, 100%. Yeah. I think that that's the best way to put it. It's the best way to put it. It's, it's, it's exactly that. And so it's very interesting to just, you know, to walk in and be.
- [73:55]
A
A part of it. Imagine.
- [73:56]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [73:57]
A
You know, and I think, as people say, okay, these are just toys, they're prototypes. Like, it's not going to work with your existing code. It's not going to scale. Like, it's important to note just what we talked about. This is a model from last June that you're. This is possible on, and everybody's working on the next cutting edge model that will make this even better. And that's going to come real soon. Okay, Amazing. Okay. And just have a few more questions to kind of close out this conversation. One is just, what is coming next for Bolt? What are some of the cool new features that'll be launching before this comes out? Maybe right after this comes out and maybe in mid March.
- [74:33]
B
Yeah, yeah. Okay. So by, by the time. And you know, I'm going to go back and tell our engineers, like, I said this. So in this.
- [74:38]
A
Committed. Sorry, guys.
- [74:39]
B
This is, this is. I found actually being a leaky form faucet on, you know, talking on podcasts and stuff is, you know, my engineers, like, how could you tell them, like, you shut your ship faster now. Like, you got to make it real, right? No, no. Yeah, but it's, you know, I think for, for us, it's like, again, we've seen a lot of PMs, designers, entrepreneurs, et cetera, using Bolt. And so we're really looking at how to a better kind of better fit in with the tools that folks are using to do those things today. We're like, Bolt's not going to replace them or something. Right. And, and, and, and for, like, you know, if, if you're working at a company, like, how do you, like, integrate this stuff with your existing, like, business and your existing product and code base? Because that's the question we often get from people is how do I, like, open my, you know, like, we're talking to, you know, one of the fan companies the other day, like, how do we open our production code base? And that's, you know, that's like 20 years old. I'm like, you don't. That's not like, none of this stuff, like, that's not what you do. This is for, like, rapid product development in your use case. So the features that we're going to be shipping, I'm pretty stoked about this one. So we've been working on this for a while and we've partnered up with a company called Anima to do this. But basically, so on any figma URL, when you're looking at like a, you know, a design that you've made, if you just put Bolt New in front of that URL and hit Enter, it's going to suck that design into Bolt and turn it into a Full Stack app or mobile app. Just.
- [76:07]
A
That is genius. Yeah, it's amazing.
- [76:10]
B
It's going to be nuts. Yeah, I mean, it's like, it's, it's really fun to use because, you know, like when you're, you know, as a, whether you're a developer, designer or whatever, going and taking that and turning it into an actual coded app. And the thing is, once it's in Bullet, you can just keep prompting from there. You're like, yeah, we'll add another page here, do this. So it's like, you can have like things that, where you want Pixel perfect design, you can have it. It'll translate one to one. Like, you know, and it's splitting out the assets. Like Anima's been doing this since 2017. Like, you know, Figma to code, they've got the best agent in the world for, like, they're the number one Figma plugin, you know, or whatever. And, and so in Bolt, like, it's just going to just work. Like, it's just deeply integrated, it's bold.
- [76:54]
A
Bolt, that new slash, the figma URL to the design. Yep.
- [76:57]
B
That's all you got to do. Anything. And in Bolt, we're going to also have a little Figma icon in the chat thing. So, like, if you go to Bolt itself, you can like click it and then paste the URL or whatever. But yeah, it's like just. But it's like that, it's like from figma to Full Stack app in, in a click. Literally, you know, like, that's crazy. So that one's pretty cool. And then kind of the other one that we're working on is like an integration with Slack, because often, you know, when, when you're talking about Figmas, you know, like Figma Links or whatever at a company, you're in Slack or whatever, and so you're like having conversations about, hey, you know, we should really add a page to this, that us. And so we're actually creating a, A, like a, a Bolt, like Slack bot. That's whose job is to basically act like a developer on your team. And so you can be like in a thread, you can be like, hey, I think we shot a homepage. Like, yeah, okay, like at Bolt, like, can you like, whip this up real quick and it'll like go and just kind of suck down the entire conversation history so far in your Slack idea from that thread or whatever. It'd be like, okay, cool. So you kind of want me to like, take this figma URL, which I can convert automatically thanks to the feature I just mentioned right before. For this, I can just go and convert that thing out of the box and then you want me to add a page to it and then do this thing. Got it. I'm gonna go do that. Oh, here's the URL where you can open it up and like keep prompting, you know, I mean, so it's like, it's, it's, it's like having a developer and some really kind of kick this thing out and just like go make this thing real quick, you know, so, so it's like those two things. I think it's again, you start thinking about how are companies going to change how they're, how they're currently doing product development. And even they're just like, hey, well, we need to spin up a marketing side. Here's the thing, we're like, can you do that, Bolt? Yep, let me go do that. You know, I mean, that's why I'm kind of excited about those two in particular, because I think, I think they're going to be, I think it's going to be well received, you know, and folks can be stoked about it. Hope, you know, not to work.
- [78:40]
A
Those are, those are awesome features. It's. I love the Slack piece because when I think about agents, there's always talk about agents. To me, like, the simplest way to understand it is just a Slack bot. Just the AI can talk to you like they're a person in Slack. And I love. That's exactly what you're doing. And this is this agentic feature of just like, hey, you just have this engineer now that can go build stuff for you. Let me actually ask you a question along these lines that I was meaning to ask, but I forgot is just how much your engineering team, how much. What are they using to build Bolt? I imagine it's a lot of cursor, like, how much is Bolt at this point involved in building Bolt. And is there any other tools that they found useful, find useful that are worth highlighting?
- [79:18]
B
Yeah, good question. Yeah, we definitely use cursor. Our folks use cursor a lot of. We use Bolt a lot for the product development process. Like a ton. We're using it and when we're doing basically the flow that I described, we're like things that need to be pixel perfect. We're going to Figma for. And then. And often we're taking that and we're pulling that into Bolt because, you know, we've got access to the integration today. So pull that into Bolt and we're saying, hey, go add these things or whatever. Or just saying, hey, here's a screenshot of our URI go to do da da da. Other AI tools that the developers are using. I think those are like the primary ones. I mean, I think we've got like a subscription to Claude and like ChatGPT and things like that. But you know, I, I think, I think like for development, it's like cursor's like the main thing.
- [80:03]
A
Yeah, it's cool how few tools like, like there's so many AI tools and it's interesting how few people actually end up using it's like Cursor, Claude, jbt and then maybe another tool. Like totally final ish question. Say somebody is opening a bowl for the first time. What's something that you, if you imagine you could sit next to every new user that's just trying Bolt for the first time, you could whisper a tip in your ear to be successful with Bolt. What would that tip be?
- [80:33]
B
And this is like, because we have a lot of different types of users, I imagine you talk about like PMS or design.
- [80:38]
A
That's 2pm That's a good one. That's a lot of the audience here.
- [80:41]
B
I would, I would, I would say talk to this thing like you do a linear ticket or a JIRA ticket. That, that would be my, that would be my advice is like, or, or. And talk this like you would like you're talking to one of the developers on your team, right? And, and, and what that means is be specific on some, on things that matter. Right? And, and on things where also you can let it be creative. You know, you can go to and just say, hey, like make it prettier, you know, and, and it'll take a, it'll. It does a good job. Like it actually does a really good job and you like give it just vibes, you know. And so, hey, so I think for, for like PMs, it's like, you have the skillset. You know how to do this. This is just think of this as your coworker, your developer coworker.
- [81:23]
A
You know, I love that. And the like, what. Because these tools are so easy, you just go in, it's like tailor thing and then they'll cool. You have a website like coded boom, done. And what I'm hearing here is take a little time to craft your ask. It may be tempting to just like start, cool, build me a CRM. And then you're stuck with that first version. And then you're like, oh, well, okay, I didn't mean that. So it sounds like your advice is take some time to craft the ask and be clear about what you want.
- [81:49]
B
Yeah, I, I totally. Right. Especially if you have a clear vision of what you're trying to build. Right. It's something that like reasonably sophisticated. And I, what I recommend everyone to do whenever they. If it's your first time trying bold and you're like, what should I have to do? And I don't have an idea. Tell it to build you a personal website. Like there's, it's, there's something like magic. Like you take your LinkedIn, copy and paste your LinkedIn bio and work experience. Just like select text, copy, paste it. I need a website. My name is so and so. Here's my LinkedIn history. My favorite color is blue and I like dogs Paste. Right.
- [82:19]
A
Make it pretty.
- [82:20]
B
Yeah. And then, and you know what I mean? And then you can hit deploy and, and if you don't have a dot com yet, now you can't. Right? Like, I mean, now you have a real personal. So it's like, I think there's kind of a moment around that where it's like, okay, wow. Like this, you know it. Zero shot. Zero shot 99.999% of the time. Like you're getting a beautiful personal website that you didn't have before. That would have taken you an hour on wix if not. Right. And that gives you the taste of like, okay, cool. So if I really take the time to think this through and like make a PRD and like, and then kind of know, put that in piece by piece into this thing. The sky's the limit, you know.
- [82:54]
A
So Eric, this has been just insane on so many levels. I have so much to process. I think a lot of listeners do too. Maybe as an actual final question, I saw this story about how when you were starting Stack Blitz, or maybe even before Stack Blitz, you lived. You like squatted in the AOL Office because you had some badge that still worked. Maybe just tell that story.
- [83:18]
B
Yeah, yeah, that was like, you know, kind of the thing I was like most known for. That happened like 2012 and I was like 19 years old. So it's been a very long time. I think I'm like 33 now or something.
- [83:28]
A
But the statutes of limitations are expired.
- [83:30]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But yeah, for a while I was like, I have to do something more notable than, than living in aol. This can't be what I'm like known for, right? For now, people are like, oh, like, wait, you're, you're the stock guy and you're the year old guy. So yeah, so yeah, when I first came out to Silicon Valley, you know, we, we got into a, I was building a K12 education startup at the time. And this is back during the, the days where Y Combinator, they only gave you like 20 grand. And, and so there was this offshoot of Imagine or of Y Combinator called Imagine K12. It was Jeff Ralston who, I think he was CEO of YC a couple of years back, but. And Imagine K12 merged into Y Combinator a couple years after Rob went through it. But anyways, they had an office space at aol. Like at the time AOL was trying to like reinvigorate the company. And hey, we should get like young startup blood in here. So let's like rent out office space to, you know, to, you know, to teenagers basically. And so I was there and we ended up running out of, you know, money. Like 20. 20 grand doesn't go very far in the Valley. So like three or four months in, we're like, oh God, we're, you know, what do we do? And I was going to the ol office multiple times a week because we had to access cars to get into, to get to the investor's offices. And I realized I was like, you know, like they have like couches here and they have, you know, food. Like there's ramen that you can microwave and there's a gym where there's like a shower and even you can do laundry. And then so I was like, you know, I don't know, I mean, maybe, maybe I'll figure this out. I'll just live out of here. And so that's, that's what I ended up doing for, I think it was like four or five months. I was like living out of this, this headquarters over on Page Mill and El Camino in Palo Alto. And then, you know, I got away with it for a while. Just because you know, the, the, the, the guards, you know, the security guards, you know, they weren't, you know, 12 hour shifts. And so the, the guys that, when I was there at night and I was coding like all day every day basically. So the, the, the guys at night just were like, dang, this guy works really hard, you know, and, and then in the morning they'd be like, wow, this guy, guy's working really hard. Right? So, and I became friends with some of them and, and then eventually I think they, you know, there were also a whole bunch of Stanford students that I think they like put bunks in, in one of the, it was just like started getting out control. So I think they started cracking down. Then one morning at like 4 in the morning, guard came in and, and threw me out. And I, I'm from Chicago, I don't know anyone at that point. I'm like, I know no one in the Bay Area. So I went to a Starbucks which was not open. I just like, I slept on the table outside of the thing and then, and I can't, I think I, I hit up one of the other entrepreneurs that was in the program. I was like, do you have a couch? Like I, I, I think I kind of need it at this point. Yeah, the press got wind of it was this like, you know, worldwide store. But I lived on a dollar a day. That was the crazy thing. My burn rate was a dollar a day at, at that time.
- [86:22]
A
And what did you use that dollar for?
- [86:24]
B
That? This is back when McDonald's had the dollar menu, literally. So I was like, you know, I would, you know, occasionally would go and you know, get a cheeseburger or whatever. And yeah, it was, you know, ultimate, ultimate scrappiness.
- [86:40]
A
You know, like you're technically homeless. From homeless to one of the fastest growing startups in history. Eric. What a journey. This is such an interesting point in time of your life and of just tech. Like no matter what happens, I'm sure you'll be extremely successful. But it's such an interesting just point in that journey and I'm thankful that you make time to share it with us.
- [87:02]
B
It's always good to just have the perspective of, you know, you should, you should start companies if to keep the mindset that you're have, you're doing it to have fun. Right? And so stoked to see where this goes one way or the other. It's going to be, it's going to be interesting.
- [87:16]
A
Eric, final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out, maybe follow up on some stuff you shared and how can listeners be useful to you?
- [87:23]
B
Yeah, totally. I mean, yeah. So Bolt News, the website over on Twitter. I'm Eric Simons, 40 on Twitter and I think our, our Twitter account is Bolt new, not with a period. It's like Bolt D O T N E W. And yeah, I mean, I'm very curious to hear if. I'm curious to hear what folks think. Like, I mean, this is again, like we're, we are learning so much from the people that are coming and trying this thing out and giving their feedback. And, you know, within the first week of it going online, we were not the experts on how to use the tool anymore. And it's been that way ever since. And so I love hearing from folks on what they want to see, you know, next and how this is helping them and where they run into problems, like where we need to go and fix things. So my email address is eric@stackbloods.com that's Eric with to see. So I'd love, love to hear anyone from anyone, whether it's a DM on Twitter or. Or an email.
- [88:18]
A
Amazing. Eric. Thank you so much for being here.
- [88:21]
B
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. This is a blast.
- [88:24]
A
Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review you as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show@lennyspodcast.com See you in the next episode.