"The rate you're growing is absurd. You're from this cohort of companies that are just growing at rates that we've never seen in the history of startups. The company was on the verge of going under whe..."

"years in the making. [Music] Today my guest is Eric Simons. Eric is co-founder and CEO of Stack Blitz which makes a product called Bolt which is currently neckand-neck with Cursor for being the fastes..."

"you Eric Simons. This episode is brought to you by EPO. EPO is a next generation AB testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies li..."

"velocity. That's get epo.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 th..."

"here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. Yeah, I'm stoked to be here. For folks that are not super familiar with Bolt, what is Bolt? It's really simple. You go there, there's a text b..."

"based uh you know development environment stuff and um and so when we launched this we were like this would be amazing if this added like 100k of ARR over the next couple of months you know um and wha..."

"here, you know. Um, and it's kind of extraordinary because I mean like we you know our company wasn't doing AI stuff uh six months ago. We had no AI products and just out of nowhere we uh you know fro..."

"the thing. Yeah. I think Are you guys the fastest growing startup in history? I I I mean I think it depends on probably where you peg the number right? Yeah. We're Yeah, we're here to just like build ..."

"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 wai..."

"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 othe..."

"things are so complicated to use. Like there's a there I don't if you ever seen a just the UI of these things, but like they're crazy complicated. And that's just for building like kind of like a stat..."

"preview it just in the browser here. But uh once this thing's done and it boots up, uh it's going to show a QR code. We're going to be able to scan it and in real time actually uh basically have like ..."

"by the way. So uh if you kind of see on my screen here, I actually have this Spotify looking app, right? That um you know, that looks like exactly like Spotify. It looks exactly like Spotify right? It..."

"incredible. Like this whole episode so far is you just blowing my mind, I 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 re..."

"the years it was like when we first this is and that the web container was the bat that we made the company on just to be clear like the stack blitz was like a deep tech a browserbased deep technology..."

"theoretically like to write an operating system that uh in web assembly 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 ..."

"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 ar..."

"important like it seems like the web is the most ubiqu like kind the pitch or the theory in our head was like the web is the most ubiquitous platform in the world it but yet it has no you can't use th..."

"Um unless you're seeing again immediate demand and pull or whatever. Um but um yeah, I think uh uh I think that'd be kind of like maybe the extra context I add on top is like I think that we ended up ..."

"that okay, this is working. Something's different. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So day one it was like there's great reception. into like the tweet, you know, we were like, "Wow, this is like, you know, one of t..."

"it going you know how is there not a mobile responsive view? Like how how are chat messages not we got to 20 million of error without a mobile responsive view. By the way just throwing that out there...."

"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..."

"Wow. Okay. This is just a non-stop wild Um so you mentioned that your team was about 20 people through all this. You guys are growing at this insane rate. Uh 20 people. How is this possible? What what..."

"all of this stuff like there's no way if you rewind like year two we can there's no way we could have we would not be at the the growth and uh on on DAUs and revenue or whatever, there's just no way. ..."

"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 cust..."

"to learn more, head on over to onskeema.c co that's ones schema.co See how 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 f..."

"aren't going to be like necessarily like explicitly asking for them. Um, and so there's been kind of a couple of these where we, you know, kind of use our our gut instinct on like, hey, this this no o..."

"um 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 there's some amount of there's feedback from the c..."

"share it and just you know work with the team. We all meet like every day like pretty much the entire team gets on a call and we just kind of like a Zoom. Yep. Yeah. Every day at 8 a.m. Pacific we're ..."

"you That is so interesting. I've never heard that before, especially for a company growing like that is like yours. That is super uh interesting that that's what you do. I was I I don't think we're go..."

"whatever whatever that is for you. Unless there's like something like that's very sophisticated that we're working on. Um, we we tend to keep keep them pretty light. I like to just have the minimal am..."

"a static version of it. 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 ..."

"of magnitude sort of fashion delivery on the and that and those numbers have helped for the people that we talk to that are building these full stack uh you know ass like people they go to Upwork they..."

"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, IPMs are dead. We don't need them anymore. We could just build thi..."

"right at this point. And um you know when we when I started talking to these folks at first I was just like weird or whatever you know I was like well what's going on here? But then it what it just ki..."

"want to follow that thread but first of all I want to also add and correct me if you disagree with this I think when we talk about PMs it also applies to founders like product thinking founders very s..."

"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 ..."

"going to really have We'll see. Well 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. Yeah, that's always the answer here. Yeah. D..."

"you know kind of there was a there was a prevailing thought uh you know uh so society like that going to college in in the early 20 yeah early 2010s or late 2000s like you're going to get a job on the..."

"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 old cursor and all these other things. The ra..."

"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 in every now and then versus the other way around. You know I did not know that. I didn't ..."

"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 t..."

"bullish, right? I mean, it makes it makes technical sense why uh of anything LMS are going to get insanely better at at writing code than probably most other types of applications for LMS simply becau..."

"what's going on here at like the mackerel and when did set even come out it's been a while right I think I think they officially We I think it was in June when they officially put it in June. Okay. So..."

"this you know it's like an anthropology or if that's the right term of just like watching the it's like an emergent discovery it sounds like versus you have the strategy here we're going to do this yo..."

"soon. Okay. Amazing. Okay. I 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 launchin..."

"entrepreneurs etc using Bolt. And so we're really looking at how to better you kind of better fit in with the tools that folks are using uh to do those things today. We're like we're Bolt's not going ..."

"have 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 um yeah, it's like just but it's like that. It's l..."

"that's why I'm kind of excited about those two in particular because I think I think they're going to be I I think it's going to be wellreceived you know and folks can be stoked about it I hope you kn..."

"few tools it like like there's so many AI tools and it's interesting how few people actually end up using. It's like cursor cla and then maybe another tool like totally. Okay finalish question. Say so..."

"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 t..."

"listeners do too. Maybe as an actual final question, uh 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. Uh..."

"make time to share it with us. 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, ri..."