AI transcript
0:00:07 What if I told you build a fully functional web app in under 60 seconds without writing a single
0:00:12 line of code? And not just a landing page, a fully functional web app with a database,
0:00:16 user authentication, and everything, and it’s live on the web. Today we have on Eric Simons,
0:00:20 the co-founder of Bolt, one of the hottest AI startups. And Eric’s going to show us how to use
0:00:24 Bolt to create an application that before would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make,
0:00:29 and now it costs next to nothing. So if you’ve ever had an idea for an app before and got stuck
0:00:33 because you couldn’t code, you couldn’t find a technical co-founder, this episode is going to
0:00:36 unlock so many new opportunities for you. So let’s just jump right in.
0:00:47 Listen up. The old playbook is slowing you down. AI broke the funnel. Loot marketing fixes it. It’s
0:00:53 a new era for marketers. AI is capturing search traffic, channels are fragmented, and generating
0:00:58 leads feels less predictable than ever before. HubSpot’s loop marketing playbook will guide you
0:01:04 through this unprecedented disruption. It’s the system your marketing teams should use to move
0:01:10 faster, connect deeper, and grow smarter. The modern growth playbook for the AI era, built by HubSpot,
0:01:16 designed for today’s marketer. Get the loop marketing playbook at hubspot.com
0:01:22 slash loop dash marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind. All right, back to the pod.
0:01:29 Eric, thanks for coming on the next wave. Awesome. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
0:01:32 You know, so I’ve been following Bolt for a long time. We have kind of a weird connection because
0:01:37 the first time I saw Bolt was your episode with Greg Eisenberg. You know, Greg was one of our very first
0:01:41 guests on the show. And actually, when I was thinking about starting the show with my friend,
0:01:46 Matt Wolf in HubSpot, I went for a long walk with Greg here in Kyoto when he was visiting. I was like,
0:01:50 should I do this podcast thing? And he’s like, yeah, you’d be great at it. You should do it. And I’ve been
0:01:53 doing it for a long time. It’s hard, but it’s worth it. And so that’s kind of like our connection
0:01:58 through Greg Eisenberg. I love it. That’s awesome. Yeah, it was funny. Yeah. That was like one of the
0:02:03 first podcasts I really went on after we had launched Bolt. And it ended up being huge. Like we got just,
0:02:08 you know, a massive number of people that ended up coming and trying out Bolt as a result of being
0:02:12 on Greg. So he’s like an angel in the company and that sort of thing now too. Oh, that’s awesome.
0:02:15 He was stoked enough about Bolt. He was like, if you guys are raising, you know, I’d love to put in a check.
0:02:18 Yeah, that’s great. Yeah. Greg does also doesn’t even invest in that many startups. That’s
0:02:22 impressive. Maybe just a demo, a quick demo of like what Bolt is and like what, you know,
0:02:26 what you can use it for and that sort of thing. Yeah, for sure. Let’s just do that. Just jump
0:02:30 right into it. It was almost a year ago. Exactly. We launched Bolt. And the idea was like, you know,
0:02:35 what if chat GPT could actually make web apps, you know, and mobile apps, you know, now there’s like a
0:02:39 lot of these things that can do that. But Bolt was really the first one that could actually build
0:02:44 full stack web applications just by like typing text in a box and hitting enter. Right. So I’ll go ahead and
0:02:48 share my screen. We can like go ahead and use this thing. And Bolt’s improved a ton, you know,
0:02:51 over the past year since we originally launched it. But we’ve like stayed true to the roots of the
0:02:55 thing of just having it be this really, really simple interface where you can literally, it’s
0:03:00 just a text box and you can type in what you want to build with it. You know, for the purposes of this
0:03:08 demo, let’s just say, you know, make me a dashboard for viewing company metrics or something. Right.
0:03:14 And so you can imagine like a very common use case folks use for Bolt or like PMs, designers at
0:03:19 companies that are using this instead of Figma to prototype out their applications. It’s like way
0:03:24 faster to just type in words into a box. Yeah. And you can show something real that actually works.
0:03:28 And like, it’s easier to talk about that versus like some design file. Exactly. Right. So if you
0:03:32 kind of come back to like, you know, Marty Kagan wrote this book, you know, it’s kind of like the
0:03:35 foundational, like how to build products sort of book. I think it’s called like inspired,
0:03:41 if I’m not mistaken, but he had this, like a concept of high fidelity prototypes. And really
0:03:44 the core idea is, you know, if you’re going to make a prototype, you want it to be as true
0:03:50 to form as possible to get the most highly accurate feedback from the end user on whether or not
0:03:54 it’s like something they would use. Right. Right. And prior to this type of tool existing,
0:03:59 the fastest way to create a prototype was dragging stuff around in Figma and then basically showing
0:04:03 people JPEGs and being like, does this look good, which is like better than nothing. And then it’s
0:04:08 like, if it, if that, if it passes that test, then maybe you get some engineers to like spend a couple
0:04:12 of weeks prototyping something that is a real application to put in front of them. But it just
0:04:15 took too long. It was too expensive to just, yeah. I feel like there could be so much loss in translation
0:04:19 there too. Of like, you think you understand the idea, but then when you actually get your hands on it,
0:04:23 it’s like, Oh, I don’t really like that. Exactly. Right. Bolt has it like kind of flipped that
0:04:27 around where it’s like, you can just like come in and start prototyping an idea. That’s like a real
0:04:31 application. You can try out where I just typed some random thing in and it’s gone ahead and,
0:04:36 you know, kind of created a dashboard that we can like look at with our different business metrics
0:04:40 and like whatever have you. And you can actually pull in like your company’s design system to this
0:04:44 thing. So it actually build applications and use the libraries your company does. So it’s like on
0:04:49 brand, right. With, with your company’s apps. How do you pull that in? Is that like, like Figma or
0:04:52 something like that? It’s like a library of like your fonts and colors and all that kind of stuff.
0:04:56 Absolutely. Yeah. So you can actually pull it in from your Figma. So if you go to the Bolt homepage,
0:05:00 there’s like a Figma button, you can paste it in there. Kind of cool. Like in front of any Figma
0:05:04 URL, you can just put bolt.new in front of it and then it’ll automatically suck it in. You know,
0:05:08 if you have a coded version of your design system, like an NPM package or something,
0:05:13 you can actually configure that in Bolt and say, okay, our design system lives in these packages in
0:05:18 registry and it’ll actually install from there and use those things. We’re like one of the,
0:05:22 I think the only company that actually allows that at this point where, you know, where we’ve designed
0:05:27 it to be able to pull in from arbitrary registries, pull in from Figma, et cetera. So yeah, a lot of
0:05:32 companies use us for, you know, rapid prototyping, et cetera, and collaboration, you know, amongst folks
0:05:36 on the team. And what’s cool is like, as you get feedback, you can just go to Bolt and you can,
0:05:41 you know, prototype and, you know, give it direction and say, let’s like make this optimized,
0:05:48 you know, for mobile devices, you know, and use a blue color theme or something. Yeah. I don’t know.
0:05:52 You can keep interacting with it and chatting with it and building this interactively. So it’s like
0:05:57 very simple. You don’t have to be technical to use the product. And so it’s been a game changer,
0:06:01 you know, across the spectrum for businesses, for like PMs, especially. And even for entrepreneurs
0:06:06 that are like going and building their first application ever and like trying to launch a startup
0:06:09 on there. Cool. And I assume you get all the code for this too, that you could hand off to a
0:06:13 developer, like once you prototyped it. Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And to me, that’s like
0:06:18 one of the most magic things about this entire transition happening where you can have AI just
0:06:23 spit out actual code. This is using, again, the same code your company does, or, you know, if you’re
0:06:27 starting a company, it’s using like React, which is like typically the default choice or whatever have
0:06:31 you. You can instruct it to use anything for that matter. But yeah, you can take this code. We actually
0:06:35 have an integration with GitHub. So you can like commit this to a repo and like have it be
0:06:39 committing there. We have integrations for deployment and that sort of stuff built in.
0:06:44 So this is not like some proprietary thing, like, you know, maybe Wix or Squarespace, right? Sort of
0:06:48 is. This is like something that’s actually really focused on real workflows and use cases.
0:06:51 I was kind of thinking about, I was like, who is your competition? I mean, I know there’s like
0:06:57 lovable and Vercel v0. And then obviously there’s IDEs like, you know, cursor and windsurf. And then
0:07:03 there’s agents like Devon and factory. I am kind of wondering like where this all goes. And like,
0:07:07 do they all converge in some way or are they all serving different markets? I kind of see
0:07:12 Devon and factory a little bit more targeting enterprises and enterprises that also have
0:07:16 engineers. It feels like with what you guys are doing is great for like replacing the website
0:07:19 builders and things like that. But maybe you’re thinking about it totally different than I am.
0:07:25 I think that it’s somewhat the website builders. I think for us, we’re very focused on having this
0:07:29 be a tool that people are using for rapid product development. So again, I think like the Figma use case
0:07:35 of like, we’re making prototypes, giving feedback and iterating. That strikes me as really our lane
0:07:40 and where we are having really, really great results. We have two ICPs that we see on our
0:07:45 prosumer side. It’s a largely filled with people that are entrepreneurs building their startups,
0:07:50 that sort of thing. On the B2B side, it’s entirely like PMs at companies doing rapid prototyping.
0:07:55 And they’re kind of largely the same use case. Both sides, they’re trying to iterate towards great
0:08:01 products. The prosumer side of it though, they really, really care about having production grade
0:08:05 hosting and things of that nature, which like the businesses also care about in regards to like
0:08:09 creating real prototypes they can share internally and that sort of thing. There’s just a little bit
0:08:14 of weight emphasis difference between what these two different types of users are doing, but it’s like
0:08:17 kind of a classic product-led, you know, growth sort of motion for us.
0:08:20 And do you guys provide kind of hosting like that right now or no?
0:08:24 Yeah. So by the time this is live, like, so tomorrow we’re actually announcing this, but
0:08:28 basically we have actually integrated hosting directly into the product. I’ll go and hit
0:08:32 publish. So, oh yeah, this is that. Okay. So this is actually a time production. I’m feature flagged
0:08:36 right now. So we get to see it actually in action. This breaks, by the way, it’s because I’m feature
0:08:40 flagged and this is like going on. But what’s really cool about what we’re up to here with
0:08:45 hosting, a lot of the tools today for vibe coding, they’re very fun. They’re kind of like,
0:08:51 they’re fun toys, but they don’t actually set you up to build and scale your product to millions of
0:08:57 people, even thousands of people. And there’s been a lot of stuff in the news around databases being
0:09:02 deleted by other folks and like security issues, et cetera. And a lot of the issue is that the vibe
0:09:07 coding tools, like the web-based ones, like Lovable and Replit and whatever, the way that they’ve
0:09:12 approached hosting your applications that you make is that they’ve kind of tried to home roll their own
0:09:16 hosting infrastructure. And the problem with that is that all these companies are about the same size.
0:09:21 Like we’re like 45 people, so is Lovable, so is Replit. If you’re going to go and scale databases
0:09:27 and servers and DNS to do it well and reliably for actual businesses, it’s a whole business in itself.
0:09:33 And so what we ended up doing is we have partnered with Netlify and Supabase, which are some of the best
0:09:39 companies in the world for databases and hosting. And we’ve actually taken their offerings and for the
0:09:45 first time ever, like brought it underneath one interface, like one seamless experience inside of
0:09:48 Bolt where you’re not even like, you’re not signing up for a Netlify or Supabase account.
0:09:54 It’s actually just part of Bolt. Like every Bolt project has its own production hosting and database
0:09:59 associated with that. So when you create a project on Bolt, it automatically has those things and it’s
0:10:06 being scaled and supported by Netlify and Supabase with us. So you can actually go and scale things to
0:10:10 millions of concurrent users, right? With these different tools. So Bolt is actually like really
0:10:15 the first vibe coding tool that’s going to actually have this amazing type of, you know,
0:10:18 idea to million sort of experience, right?
0:10:22 Yeah, that’s amazing. So it feels like you guys could really, in theory, dominate like zero to one,
0:10:26 basically, right? Like when you’re, when you’re creating something new and I can see why Greg
0:10:29 invested in this, you know, he’s got the whole idea of marketplace and all that, right? So you’ve got an
0:10:35 idea. You want to create something, whether you’re an individual or at a company. And it sounds like
0:10:39 you guys could be the best at that. Like just from idea in your head to like, it’s now a real thing.
0:10:41 And it’s actually published on the web, which is awesome.
0:10:45 Yeah, exactly. And you’re spot on, which is like the people that are primarily using Bolt are not
0:10:51 developers, right? When you look at Cursor, the inverse is true. Like nearly everyone using Cursor is
0:10:57 a developer. The people that are using Bolt are people that have great taste in products and,
0:11:02 and business, right? And they have good intuitions around those things, but have never had the
0:11:08 technical knowledge on how to actually build, you know, a product themselves from the ground up as
0:11:13 far as like writing code and that sort of thing. And so Bolt for them is really their tool to actually
0:11:19 go and take direct control of the building their products and experiences. And to that end,
0:11:22 it’s been a very important part of that. And there’s like a lot of the growth of the other
0:11:27 guys too, in the space I’ve been seeing from this type of archetype, but the issue is it’s not just
0:11:32 about building a prototype or building an app. You have to have this thing wired up to be able to
0:11:37 actually be secure and actually be able to scale and like not have these crazy, obvious holes.
0:11:38 Right.
0:11:42 So then that just strikes us as it’s important to have as a first grade thing in the experience,
0:11:47 we are actually hosting Bolt on Bolt hosting. Like we use the exact same stuff, you know,
0:11:54 for this. And, you know, and even like Lovable also uses the same stuff as what Bolt hosting is,
0:11:57 right? The tagline is you can go from idea to production or whatever in a prompt.
0:12:02 If the Vibe coding tool itself is not using their own hosting, that’s like, it’s a big red flag.
0:12:03 Right, right, right.
0:12:06 And there’s been a lot of this where like everyone’s saying the stuff is secure and stuff,
0:12:09 but it’s like, I mean, if you really believe that, like, why are you kind of selling people
0:12:12 one thing and not actually using it yourself? Right. It kind of goes to show though,
0:12:18 like where, what we think is important from the user experience, how people actually get their
0:12:21 ideas online in a secure way that will actually scale.
0:12:25 I think that’s awesome. Yeah. In Silicon Valley, there’s a huge bias towards engineers, which I mean,
0:12:30 I love engineers. I code myself a bit. People who were like great at business or marketing or sales,
0:12:34 they were such a disadvantage. If you do have an idea, okay, now you’ve got to find developers and
0:12:39 pay them at least 10 grand, maybe 10, 20, whatever, to build some kind of prototype of something
0:12:43 really simple. And you have no idea what they’re doing. You have no idea if they’re like how much
0:12:47 they’re charging you, if any of it makes sense, if their timelines make any sense. And then maybe it
0:12:52 doesn’t work. It’s like now instead of that, you’re gonna have a world where someone who’s good at
0:12:56 talking to people or has good ideas or is a good, good at doing social media marketing or whatever,
0:13:02 they can have an idea and just start talking to Bolt and then the website’s live and then they can just
0:13:06 go test it, then go share it. If it doesn’t work, you try something else. I’ve told people that,
0:13:10 you know, people don’t realize like you can launch a lot of things now. People used to be worried
0:13:13 about like launching something and it failed and like, oh my God, people are gonna think you’re a
0:13:19 failure. People forget things like a week later. Now you’re literally just trying new ideas and seeing
0:13:27 what works with something like Bolt. Absolutely. Look, vibe coding is the fastest way to go from idea to
0:13:33 shipped product. And most marketers are completely sleeping on it. And here’s what’s wild. HubSpot just
0:13:40 dropped 10 vibe coding prompts. That’ll take you from, I have an idea to an actual working product
0:13:49 in hours. You get the complete zero to ship framework with prompts at every stage from ideation, technical
0:13:55 optimization, and scaling. It’s the entire package. Get it right now. Click the link in the description.
0:14:00 Now, let’s get back to the show. For like people that are entrepreneurial, I think this is the best
0:14:05 thing really in the past decade that’s come out as far like the capabilities of being able to iterate
0:14:11 this fast. Because like, to me, I look at early stage entrepreneurship, like finding product benefit,
0:14:16 it’s purely a numbers thing. Like it’s how many shots on goal can you take? Like how many iterations
0:14:21 can you take? And how fast too, right? Like the speed matters a lot. Bingo, right? Your speed dictates how
0:14:25 many shots on goal you get, right? And this increases that by like an order of magnitude.
0:14:31 That to me is like why every entrepreneur should be using these things because it’s never been faster
0:14:36 to go and validate or invalidate the ideas that you have. And heck, you don’t even necessarily,
0:14:40 if you’re not a technical person, you don’t even need to necessarily be technical to like go and
0:14:45 actually do this. And we’ve had like, just, you know, from what we hear from our own users,
0:14:50 we’ve had just dozens and dozens of startups that have used Bolt to build their MVP, go improve it
0:14:55 out and have gone and raised their seed rounds to continue scaling their company out. And I love
0:15:00 hearing that because I mean, what like a great enabler, you know? And all the integrations we’re
0:15:04 building in as well, like what we’re doing with like our Bolt cloud offering stuff. Again, it’s like,
0:15:10 these are things that if it wasn’t just built in, you’d have to go and figure out how to set these
0:15:14 things up and get them all configured and dah, dah, dah. And then like, and if you’re not technical,
0:15:19 it’s like the agent’s not going to know how to use these other things. Right. So having that all
0:15:23 built in, it’s like, now you can come to Bolt and be like, Hey, buy my domain, like deploy that thing
0:15:28 to production, like go and add this feature and just knows how to do all this stuff across all of the
0:15:32 infrastructure that you don’t even know what it is and how it works, but it does. Right. And you can
0:15:36 build a business like amazing, you know? Yeah. It is amazing. Yeah. It used to be, I mean,
0:15:40 we’re like even like learning how to set up a domain properly and dealing with DNS with like a
0:15:43 skill, you know, like at least for me back in the day, I was like, okay, I have to learn how to do
0:15:47 this to like just mess with the DNS and everything. It was a pain. I think it’s probably a good moment
0:15:49 to like talk about the hackathon because it fits really well into talking about all the new
0:15:53 opportunities for people to be able to create things. So maybe tell me about the hackathon and
0:15:55 show me some examples as well. Like what’s, you know, what people built.
0:16:01 Yeah. So back in, I think it was like March or April, this guy, KP, who runs the startup stuff over
0:16:06 at Paddle, he tweeted out this idea. He’s like, if I was the CEO of Bolt, I would throw the world’s
0:16:09 largest hackathon and have a giant cash prize, have Guinness world record
0:16:14 actually like validate the world record title. It just is a lightning rod to like get
0:16:20 entrepreneurs and builders to come and actually try out, you know, these new tools like Bolt.
0:16:25 A lot of people are not aware that they can actually go and build startups and, you know,
0:16:29 tech products themselves with Bolts and other things. And so I tweeted back, I was like, cool,
0:16:32 let’s do it. I didn’t know who he was, but I was like, let’s do it. And a couple hours later,
0:16:36 we had like over a million dollars of commitments that the thing went like viral on Twitter and
0:16:40 whatever. And so we got roped in running the world’s largest hackathon, which I will tell
0:16:44 you in retrospect, I mean, it was a heck of a lot more work than I would have ever expected.
0:16:49 But it was, it was, it was incredible. Like we had, I think we had like over 130,000 people
0:16:54 that participated in this thing. And the top folks that won the thing, it’s, you know,
0:16:57 it was amazing. Like, I think the first prize was like a hundred grand. The second prize was
0:17:00 like 75 or 50. Did you say 130,000 people?
0:17:01 130,000. Wow.
0:17:06 Huge, massive, massive. It was just, it was just crazy. Yeah. Our cloud and inference bills were
0:17:12 through the roof. But yeah, it was, it was such a cool initiative that we ended up doing because
0:17:18 there’s so many, I mean, so many people that came from all different walks of life and backgrounds.
0:17:22 Some people that were engineers, most people were not, they had never, and they were just like,
0:17:25 Hey, I’ll give this a shot. Like I’ll go and, you know, build something cool.
0:17:28 And so this heck of them was all in person. They all had to be there.
0:17:30 It was, it was all global actually. Yeah. It was global.
0:17:31 Oh, okay. Okay.
0:17:34 We had an in-person component to kick the thing off. The chain smokers threw a concert
0:17:40 for this. That was how this thing kicked off. Believe it or not, they’re like investors in
0:17:44 our company. And so in San Francisco, there was a concert to kick off this hackathon, which is
0:17:48 pretty cool. Other than that, it was like pretty much online though. But yes, I found the one first
0:17:54 place, super cool guy. He made a AI app that actually lets you like edit videos with AI. So like,
0:17:57 I don’t know if you’ve done a lot of video editing. It’s kind of monotonous.
0:18:03 A little bit. Yeah. And so it’s like the idea of having an AI integration or agent where you can
0:18:06 actually just tell it, Hey, like go and take these parts, clip them together and dah, dah, dah. And
0:18:11 it just like does it pretty magic. Right. Right. You ended up making, you know, a actual app for this.
0:18:15 That’s cool. You know, I, I own lore.com and there’s been so many people who’ve told me,
0:18:18 Nathan, you should be doing that with lore. That’s what lore should be.
0:18:23 It’s a really good idea. You know, it was really sophisticated application actually,
0:18:27 because he had a full timeline scrubber and everything. And I mean, it was like a full on,
0:18:28 you know, project.
0:18:30 And he used Bolt for all of this.
0:18:33 Bolt was the tool that he used to prepare me with this. So you can kind of see like,
0:18:38 this is not, you know, super trivial stuff to make here. Right. Especially in the course of just
0:18:42 like a month, like pretty wild. So you can, you know, chat with it and actually tell it to edit it
0:18:47 and whatever have you, but it was like, this is like a reasonably sophisticated application. Right.
0:18:51 This is like a real startup. I mean, you think about like a couple of years ago, the idea of
0:18:57 one person building something like this is this would have taken like a year to build solo. Right.
0:19:02 But you know, made this entirely through prompting. This is the guy that won first place. And then on
0:19:09 second place was this guy, his name is Serge. So he made this app called Weight Coach. And basically
0:19:14 the idea is it allows you to take control of like what you’re eating and to like help create
0:19:19 recipes for you based on the ingredients you have and help you like, you know, actually get down to
0:19:24 like the target weight that you’re looking for. It actually uses AI to go and like create recipes and
0:19:28 create different aspects of the experience, which is like really cool. Cause there’s like these weight
0:19:34 loss apps, you know, that you can download, but his is like, I thought was very interesting because
0:19:39 it was something where it actually got to know you and like your preferences. And it wasn’t like,
0:19:42 Hey, here’s like five different recipes that are like hard-coded into this thing. It’s like,
0:19:47 it can actually go and dynamically adjust to like, Oh, I’m traveling. Okay. Well, here’s something you
0:19:51 could do in that area, blah, blah, blah. Right. So it’s like very, very cool app that he made.
0:19:56 And this is actually a native mobile app. So this is not just like a web app. It’s actually a native
0:20:01 app, which is something unique that Bolt is the only slash one of the only web-based tools where you can
0:20:06 like make a native iOS or Android app with the thing. Yeah. So there’s just a couple of cool hackathon
0:20:10 projects that came out of that. Oh, very cool. That’s awesome. I was sitting there thinking,
0:20:13 when you were talking about this, I was remembering back that, uh, one of my cousins in Alabama was
0:20:17 asking me like, Hey, I’ve got this idea for an app. You know, I used to have tons of people in my
0:20:21 family. He’d like, you know, cause I knew I was, you know, having some success in San Francisco and
0:20:24 they’re like, I have an idea for an app and can, you know, how would I make it or how would I get
0:20:28 started? And I was like, you gotta go learn this programming language for like a year. You got to learn
0:20:32 whatever, then maybe make a prototype and it’s probably not going to work. And I just told him that too.
0:20:36 I was like, it’s probably not going to work. You got this idea. It sounds great. You probably
0:20:40 should do it though. Cause you’re going to learn a lot. And, you know, and I do wonder like if that
0:20:43 would have changed things, if they could have just like went to something like this and just tried it
0:20:48 and in a day saw if their idea had any merit or not, you know, that’d be awesome.
0:20:52 Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think, and that’s like, you know, so my co-founder and I, he and I
0:20:56 actually grew up down the street from each other in a side of Chicago and he and I learned how to code
0:21:00 together when we were like 13 and we’ve been building stuff together ever since. And it’s
0:21:03 like, we look at this, we’re like, we’re building the thing that we wish we had when we were 13 years
0:21:09 old, because it’s so painful to have to learn how to program from scratch. And the drop-off is just
0:21:12 huge. Like a lot of people have interest in this stuff, but just to do anything, it’s like, yeah,
0:21:17 there’s all this random kind of archaic things almost that you have to become good at. That’s
0:21:20 really ancillary to the point of actually building something.
0:21:24 And then you’re just getting started. That doesn’t mean that you’re going to have any success at all.
0:21:29 A hundred percent. And so I think that it seems, and this is like Greg says, this vein of thinking a
0:21:35 lot, but like, this is just, we’re already starting to see an explosion here of ideas and products that
0:21:41 just would have never existed before because, you know, the sheer drop-off that inevitably happens
0:21:45 if you have to know how to set up dev environments and how to code and like, and then getting good at
0:21:48 coding to the degree you can actually make something that’s beautiful and like secure and can scale and
0:21:53 stuff. I mean, that’s like, it takes years to even just get to that point. And then you get
0:21:59 to start taking shots on goal in an actual way. So yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s just transformative,
0:22:02 right? The dynamics of startups in general, you know?
0:22:07 Yeah. I guess my mind was like going like, should they be doing something like almost like competing
0:22:11 with YC in some way where like, they’re like subsidize people and teach them how to do business
0:22:15 and then use Bolt. I don’t know, just like random ideas off my head.
0:22:17 It’s a great point, right? Like we’ve been kind of kicking around the ideas around this
0:22:21 because then the hackathon was, was like really our first foray into this where it’s like, how
0:22:25 do we go in like foster entrepreneurship on our platform? Right. Cause we think this is
0:22:31 one of the most exciting unlocks that this thing has. And the hackathon was kind of the first
0:22:36 way. And we’ve been exploring what would it look like to have something that’s like more
0:22:40 ongoing, like maybe it’s like an accelerator built in or I don’t know, you know, things of that
0:22:44 nature. Right. Yeah. I know you’ve talked about this before, but maybe if we could briefly go into
0:22:49 like how that happened, like from like stack blitz to bolt, cause I feel like I heard of stack blitz.
0:22:52 I think I did on Twitter or something at some point, I’m not entirely sure. I think, you know,
0:22:56 and then definitely like I saw bolt in the early days, like when you guys first launched and stuff.
0:23:01 Yeah, totally. I’ll do the quick zero to 60, but yeah, back in 2017, Albert Pai, my co-founder and
0:23:05 I, he and I launched stack blitz, which is web-based IDE. And the idea was really,
0:23:11 we wanted to make it as easy to build like full stack web applications as it was to use Figma or
0:23:15 Canva. The idea I guess kind of started because back when we first came to the Valley in 2011,
0:23:20 2012, we’d had the good fortune of bumping in Dylan Field and Evan Wallace when they were first starting
0:23:25 Figma. And, you know, back then, like they didn’t have a design tool. Like the initial pitch was like
0:23:31 this demo of a 3d ball dropping into water inside of a browser tab. And the pitch went basically along the
0:23:35 lines of like, you know, browsers have become very powerful. You can now do complex graphics
0:23:41 rendering in them. And so like, if you can create a rendering engine that runs in a browser, you can
0:23:44 bring design to the browser in the same way that Google brought docs and email, et cetera, and that’ll
0:23:49 be hugely valuable. But obviously we’ve seen how that story has played out now. And so back in 2017,
0:23:54 we saw that for the first time, like, oh, it might be possible to do that same play, but for development
0:23:59 environments. So for the first time, you can actually mount dev environments in a browser using the end
0:24:04 users, you know, CPU memory, et cetera. And that would be huge for the same reason was for Figma and Google Docs
0:24:10 and whatever have you. We started the company in 2017. We launched that technology in 2021. A lot of developers
0:24:14 thought it was very cool. But over the couple of years after that, like we had millions of developers using the
0:24:20 product for free every month. We just could not get anyone to pay us money. And that was like, by and large, like if you
0:24:26 think about, you know, what’s really the difference between StackBlitz and Bolt, StackBlitz was an IDE where you
0:24:30 still had to know how to code. Like you didn’t have to set your environment, but you still had to know
0:24:31 how to code, which is huge.
0:24:35 Yeah. When you were saying that, I was like, to me, that would have been great for like, maybe competing
0:24:38 with like Codecademy kind of thing where like, you’re actually teaching people to code or something.
0:24:44 Exactly. And it’s funny because we started StackBlitz because we were competing with Codecademy on our
0:24:49 previous company, in a sense, like we were teaching people how to code online, needing an online
0:24:53 environment to do that. And that was really where StackBlitz kind of popped out. But, you know, there wasn’t an
0:24:57 obvious way for us to make money, or at least the things that seemed obvious. We tried, all the other
0:25:02 competitors tried, no one figured out how to make money on cloud out of ease in any meaningful way.
0:25:07 It was, it was just a mirage. And so that came to last year, we’ve been around for seven years as a
0:25:11 company. You know, if we can’t figure out how to make a venture scale business, like it just doesn’t,
0:25:15 and we don’t have any clear paths to doing so, like, what are we doing here? Right. And so the decision
0:25:19 was made, like, if we don’t have something by the end of the year, you know, that’s like, changes the
0:25:24 trajectory, we’re going to start spinning down the company or getting acquired or like whatever.
0:25:28 Right. And so what we ended up doing is we launched a couple of different products last year.
0:25:32 All of them were very cool, but you know, the first couple we launched, you know, didn’t get the
0:25:38 commercial traction that we were, you know, hoping to see. And, you know, when we launched Bolt, it was
0:25:43 the last experiment that we were going to run. We were launched in October. Our board meeting was in
0:25:49 November where we were going to, you know, begin disassembling the company and what ended up
0:25:54 happening. Surprise guys. We got this, this Bolt thing. Yeah, totally. Right. I mean, it was, it was,
0:25:59 yeah, unexpected for literally everyone. At that point, we’d been around for seven years and we got
0:26:04 to like 700K of ARR. And then we launched Bolt in the first 30 days, we added 4 million of ARR.
0:26:08 And then in the month after that, we went to 20 million. It was, it was crazy. And so it was like,
0:26:11 and there’s a lot of these stories now, these companies that are, that can, they’re seeing
0:26:17 these like revenue ramps like we did. But we were really the first one that actually saw that type
0:26:21 of hockey stick and we’re like, what the hell is going on? That was how Bolt came to be. It was an
0:26:26 idea I’d had earlier in the year. And then once we saw the Sonnet 3.5 model from Anthropic, I was like,
0:26:31 okay, this is actually the coding models have really caught up and this, this would be an interesting
0:26:37 product. We had no idea it would be as well-loved and received as it has been and grow as fast as it
0:26:41 has been like, we thought we would add like the best case scenario in our view was if we add 100K
0:26:46 of ARR by the end of the year off this, that would be amazing. And we cleared that, I think on like
0:26:50 the first or second day or something, you know? Wow. Yeah. Anyways, that’s kind of the story of,
0:26:55 of how Bolt came to be. Well, dude, that’s, you know, congrats on that. I mean, like the fact that
0:26:59 you did that for seven years and it sounded like you were just like hustling and like, you know,
0:27:02 barely holding on and, you know, and then had this huge assess. That’s amazing.
0:27:06 It actually relied on the technology we had made. The browser dev environment stuff,
0:27:09 like when you go to Bolt, all that technology we made over the past seven years, like that is what
0:27:14 is actually making that possible. We built Bolt in 90 days because we had spent seven years building
0:27:18 this technology to run dev environment. So it was, it was a very natural product progression.
0:27:23 Actually, it was really effectively like a UI change and a little like a rebranding because
0:27:28 instead of an IDE, you have a chat box, you know? But yeah, so it was, it was very natural actually.
0:27:33 Cool. I’m curious, you know, which model are you guys using right now? Like primarily like
0:27:37 with Bolt or are you, have you switched over to GPT-5 or are you still using Claude or?
0:27:42 Yeah, we primarily use Claude. I mean, we found Claude to have generally for when you, when you’re,
0:27:47 you know, doing code generation stuff, like Claude has the best models. Yeah. We’ve also,
0:27:52 we were, you know, one of the launch partners on GPT-5 and GPT-5 is a great model. I think there’s
0:27:57 certain areas where we’re using it, but Anthropic has just done a really good job of really
0:28:02 lasering in on software code gen and just being the best in the world at that. And they’re doing
0:28:06 a lot of interesting stuff there where I, I, I just, I suspect that they’re going to be the preferred
0:28:10 tool for, for some time. Maybe other things will come, but you know, just, it seems like that’s
0:28:13 really the niche that they’re focusing on and focus matters a lot.
0:28:18 Yeah. Yeah. I went on vacation for a few days and I came back and like Twitter was full of like all
0:28:23 this, all the people arguing over GPT-5 and some people were like, you know, it’s, it’s amazing.
0:28:26 Other ones like, it’s horrible. And this is like the end of AI. It was all a big bubble.
0:28:30 We’re all done for it. And I was like, what the hell is going to come back to? What did I come
0:28:35 back to? What the, you know, I tried GPT-5. It seemed really good. Like, you know, not like a
0:28:39 gigantic step forward, but like a nice step forward. I thought it was really smart how they had like
0:28:43 switched to like an automatic model. Cause like for the average person, the UI was horrible. And then
0:28:47 now everyone’s basically like forced them back into having the same kind of UI again, or like
0:28:51 similar. I mean, I’m just curious, what are your thoughts on AI progress?
0:28:52 It depends on like kind of the dimension of it.
0:28:54 Coding and like building applications.
0:28:59 Yeah. I think on coding, I think there’s very meaningful improvements that we’ve witnessed
0:29:03 across model to model, especially across the, the anthropic family just over the past year.
0:29:09 Like it seems like the, the RL stuff that’s going on there has legs and has a lot of room
0:29:16 to run. Looking at the more AGI stuff, I think that all of these things are kind of reliant on
0:29:20 new approaches being invented and proven out. Right. So I think on the current, if you kind of take
0:29:25 the current state, the whole idea of like scaling things up, like that has topped out, but you know,
0:29:31 the adding like the reasoning and, and, you know, RL stuff has kind of moved the needle a bit in a way
0:29:35 that you couldn’t have forecasted. So I think we might see more stuff there, but it’s like, you know,
0:29:36 it kind of a TBD.
0:29:40 Yeah. I guess it’s kind of hard to know if that’s also going to like cap out to like the, you know,
0:29:43 the, the, the thinking, the reasoning side, is that going to continue to scale up or it’s also
0:29:46 going to have diminishing returns. It’s kind of hard to know.
0:29:50 Yeah. It might. Right. I mean, I think there’s just going to be a lot of new research and invention
0:29:53 done, but I think even with the current state of the stuff we’re looking at, a lot of the games,
0:29:58 like moving away from like, do we have the best model and kind of moving more towards,
0:30:03 do we have the best model that’s designed to work well with agents? Right. Because if you think
0:30:08 about like how a human brain works, it’s kind of rare where there’s like off the top of your head
0:30:13 on any given sufficiently complicated question, you will just zero shot an answer that is completely
0:30:17 perfect. Right. And it makes sense that maybe we can get machines to be at that point, but it,
0:30:22 but it seems like a pragmatic way to approach this is like, you know, that’s maybe the North star
0:30:27 or whatever, but like the way in which people think is by bouncing things around and going back and forth.
0:30:32 And that’s like what agents do. Like cloud code is going and looking at different files and like
0:30:35 kind of digging it. And sometimes it’ll hit like a dead path and like what it’s trying to figure out
0:30:40 and it’ll revert back and like, you know, blah, blah, blah. And so to me, it’s like the area where
0:30:47 innovation is ripe and it’s like early days is really making that sort of critical thinking really,
0:30:51 really good and making good at tool calling and like for building agents and that sort of thing.
0:30:56 And so I think it actually kind of matters less about the specific model capabilities,
0:31:00 because even with like some of the frontier models, like I just, I don’t think we’re really
0:31:04 maxing out what they can do. If you actually have a really good agent that’s orchestrating,
0:31:09 but that also relies on the models themselves being trained to be, to work better as agents.
0:31:15 I think there’s some number of years we’re just focusing on that is going to yield some incredible
0:31:16 results. I think.
0:31:22 Yeah. It seems like that plus more compute and we’ll get like an amazing progress for at least
0:31:22 like three to five years.
0:31:27 You could argue that AGI is like 20 years away or like we’ve already reached it, like depending on
0:31:27 your definition.
0:31:33 Yeah. Yeah. And I think too, it’s going to take time for the application layer to actually fully
0:31:39 utilize even the current state of the art. Right. So I think that, that there’s not actually to me an
0:31:45 urgent need for these things to go like 10 X better tomorrow. There’s real revenue coming into us and
0:31:49 other companies. And there’s a lot of new innovation happening. That’s not even related to the models
0:31:54 getting better. So from that end, I think it’s going to be transformative on just how
0:32:01 the world operates, um, without really needing some giant step function in any short period of time.
0:32:04 Yeah. I think the average person doesn’t even realize how good the current models are.
0:32:07 They’re using it as like a basic chat bot or, or Google.
0:32:12 For sure. And there’s just not a proliferation of products that have, are really leveraging these
0:32:17 things, um, to the max and integrating into people’s workflows. Like it’s taking time. Right. And that’s
0:32:23 the same thing we’ve seen with every other wave of technology where it’s like the adoption of cloud
0:32:27 services, you know, adoption of the internet. It’s like, it kind of takes time for there to be
0:32:31 proliferation of these, um, of, of the builders who are delivering the services and the consumers that
0:32:37 are purchasing them. Right. And there is, it is faster than ever has been in previous cycles,
0:32:42 but even still, it’s again, coming back to like, for our products, like most people don’t know that
0:32:47 they can write software now. Right. And so like the TAM is like 98% of the planet.
0:32:47 Right.
0:32:52 There’s not even a hundred million people that are using these. There’s not even like 20 million.
0:32:56 Yeah. I do wonder how you reach those people. Like, even if you just told them that you like,
0:32:59 they wouldn’t be able to process it. Like that was actually where you go, that you could just go
0:33:03 type in and it would make a website for you or an application or whatever. Like people have a hard
0:33:04 time, you know, grasping that.
0:33:09 Yeah, exactly. And so, and again, a lot of this is like, it’s, it’s really people,
0:33:14 builders and doctors need to go and solve the last mile problems of these things at the application
0:33:18 and distribution side of this problem set. And so for those reasons, I feel like everyone,
0:33:23 and maybe in large part, because of some companies have been just like hammering about AGI for the
0:33:27 past five years or whatever. But yeah, it’s like, I think there’s some expectation. It’s like
0:33:28 AGI or bust.
0:33:30 Right.
0:33:30 Right.
0:33:35 This isn’t zero sum, right? Like this is not zero sum. Like maybe I’ll pass lead to that,
0:33:39 but like, that’s not needed. Like if you look at software development specifically,
0:33:47 what is the value of going and like creating products that whose purpose is to like go and
0:33:50 basically rewrite all of the world’s software? Right. I mean, that’s like, that’s what we’re
0:33:54 talking about here. Like with bolts and other products, you can go and just build new software
0:33:59 that replaces previous human written software. The market size of that is like trillions of dollars.
0:34:04 You can rewrite how the world works with just basically the current state of technology.
0:34:06 And if it gets better, it’s just going to happen faster. Right.
0:34:10 Yeah. Me and Matt did an episode early on in the podcast where we were talking about
0:34:14 the implications for the software industry. And I was talking about like the refactoring of software
0:34:18 or like rewriting of software, even with like the government, like the, some of the software
0:34:22 they’re using, it’s like, it’s been there for like 30 years because it’s just like, well,
0:34:25 we didn’t know how it was written in the first place. So we don’t know how to change it.
0:34:29 We’re scared to touch things. There’s so many complex things like that, that AI is definitely
0:34:33 help us do it. I think that’s the kind of stuff the next five years all become realistic.
0:34:38 Totally. So that’s kind of my take on like, you know, what’s progress or not, or like,
0:34:42 but I think just like pragmatically, it’s like, we haven’t even scratched the surface of the
0:34:48 current level of capabilities as far as applying it into the world. And then it’s still improving.
0:34:52 And that’s crazy because again, even with the current state of the art, there’s so much
0:34:53 more to be done, you know?
0:34:57 Yeah. And I’m convinced also, like if you ask people like 10 years ago, if you show
0:35:02 them what we have today, they’d be like, you’ve got AGI. I think a lot of people actually would
0:35:06 be calling what we have today AGI. But anyways, there’s two questions I’d like to ask people
0:35:11 just like kind of for fun as we end the podcast. And one is I have 11 year old son. I’m constantly
0:35:15 thinking of, you know, what should I be teaching him? And I know apparently this has become a pretty
0:35:19 common question that people in Silicon Valley ask each other. If you had a son, what would you
0:35:23 be teaching your son? Would you still be teaching him to code? Would you be teaching him like,
0:35:26 hey, use things like Bolt and just go create your ideas?
0:35:30 Yeah, good question. Yeah. So I’ve got a one-year-old daughter, so she’s not at the point
0:35:31 where I can be like teaching her.
0:35:33 Use Bolt.
0:35:38 Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But I think like in a couple of years, I mean, I will absolutely have
0:35:44 her going and using Bolt if she likes to build things at least, right? This is amazing. I mean,
0:35:50 you know, the reason that we give kids like Legos and like Tonka trucks instead of actually putting
0:35:55 them behind a forklift is that it’s just, it’s not safe to like give kids access to the real tools
0:36:00 that professional use, right? That’s not true anymore, right? Like, and there’s also, of course,
0:36:05 it’s not safe and there’s a huge learning curve, right? Even if it is safe. And when you look at
0:36:09 things like Bolt, neither of those things are a problem. But we have people of all ages coming and
0:36:15 using Bolt of all skill types of all backgrounds. And to me, it’s like, often people don’t end up
0:36:19 becoming engineers or looking into building things or being entrepreneurs because they don’t get
0:36:25 exposed to what it actually is about because the drop-off is so big. And I think that’s to me why
0:36:31 it’s important for my own child, like to use Bolt or things like it is to go and experience what it’s
0:36:36 like to build stuff for yourself, right? And so that would certainly be one of the main things.
0:36:41 She’s one, so should she learn to code or not? Or would that be totally irrelevant in 17 years?
0:36:46 To me, it’s like, it’s all like, I think learning how to code is still a great thing to learn,
0:36:53 right? Because it’s like, your ability to really understand what’s happening at a lower level with
0:36:57 these tools, that’s always, always been helpful in this profession. And I think that’s going to
0:37:01 continue to be the case. But assuming you want to like, this is what you want to work on, right?
0:37:06 For as a career. Other things too, I think arts are cool. I think going and learning how to sing and
0:37:11 dance or whatever is fun or sports and that sort of thing. Those are the main things I think all of my
0:37:16 own kid, I would encourage them to go dig into. Yeah, that’s a good answer. Okay, you get into a
0:37:20 time machine. You’re in time, let’s go, you step out, it’s 2050. What do you see? Like, is it
0:37:25 dramatically different? Or is it like, you know, robots everywhere? And you know, or is it just like,
0:37:33 pretty much the same? I think I would expect it to be the same in some ways. But I think we tend to get
0:37:38 like the frontier technology way faster than the rest of the world. It’s like, I remember when I
0:37:46 moved here from Chicago back in early, like 2010, 2011, Uber was just a, it was just becoming a thing
0:37:50 then. Yep. Yep. Me too. I was there. Yeah. I saw Travis at a party, like when it was first starting.
0:37:54 Yep. Yep. And so I was using Uber all the time in the Bay Area. And I went back to Chicago to visit my
0:37:58 family in like 2012. And like, it was like, there’s, there’s no Ubers in the entire state.
0:38:05 And so it’s stuff like that, where I think, I think the, the, the Bay Area is going to have,
0:38:10 they’re going to have, I, 2050, it’s going to be robo taxis or whatever. And like robots delivering
0:38:14 food. I think it’s going to be probably the epicenter of what that stuff looks like, I would
0:38:19 imagine. And, uh, you know, I would imagine there’s probably a lot less cars on the road in that sense,
0:38:25 or at least, you know, um, non-robotic ones, but that would be maybe my base expectation of the
0:38:28 thing. Cause we already see that now. It’s like, we were the first to have Waymos and right. So I
0:38:33 suspect by that time, it’s probably gonna be the de facto way of getting around or whatever, you know?
0:38:37 Yeah. Well, dude, Eric, this has been awesome. Where should people find you online and anything like
0:38:42 that? You want to share? Yeah, for sure. So yeah, like bolts is like bolt.new. That’s the domain. Um,
0:38:47 you can find me on Twitter, just, uh, at Eric Simons and on LinkedIn, you can search Eric Simons,
0:38:55 I guess. It’s like forward slash in or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like there’s
0:39:01 like a UTM tracking code you need and all that. Yeah. So yes. It’s been awesome. Thank you. Awesome.
0:39:02 Thanks for having me. Yep.
0:39:42 Thank you.
0:00:12 line of code? And not just a landing page, a fully functional web app with a database,
0:00:16 user authentication, and everything, and it’s live on the web. Today we have on Eric Simons,
0:00:20 the co-founder of Bolt, one of the hottest AI startups. And Eric’s going to show us how to use
0:00:24 Bolt to create an application that before would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make,
0:00:29 and now it costs next to nothing. So if you’ve ever had an idea for an app before and got stuck
0:00:33 because you couldn’t code, you couldn’t find a technical co-founder, this episode is going to
0:00:36 unlock so many new opportunities for you. So let’s just jump right in.
0:00:47 Listen up. The old playbook is slowing you down. AI broke the funnel. Loot marketing fixes it. It’s
0:00:53 a new era for marketers. AI is capturing search traffic, channels are fragmented, and generating
0:00:58 leads feels less predictable than ever before. HubSpot’s loop marketing playbook will guide you
0:01:04 through this unprecedented disruption. It’s the system your marketing teams should use to move
0:01:10 faster, connect deeper, and grow smarter. The modern growth playbook for the AI era, built by HubSpot,
0:01:16 designed for today’s marketer. Get the loop marketing playbook at hubspot.com
0:01:22 slash loop dash marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind. All right, back to the pod.
0:01:29 Eric, thanks for coming on the next wave. Awesome. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
0:01:32 You know, so I’ve been following Bolt for a long time. We have kind of a weird connection because
0:01:37 the first time I saw Bolt was your episode with Greg Eisenberg. You know, Greg was one of our very first
0:01:41 guests on the show. And actually, when I was thinking about starting the show with my friend,
0:01:46 Matt Wolf in HubSpot, I went for a long walk with Greg here in Kyoto when he was visiting. I was like,
0:01:50 should I do this podcast thing? And he’s like, yeah, you’d be great at it. You should do it. And I’ve been
0:01:53 doing it for a long time. It’s hard, but it’s worth it. And so that’s kind of like our connection
0:01:58 through Greg Eisenberg. I love it. That’s awesome. Yeah, it was funny. Yeah. That was like one of the
0:02:03 first podcasts I really went on after we had launched Bolt. And it ended up being huge. Like we got just,
0:02:08 you know, a massive number of people that ended up coming and trying out Bolt as a result of being
0:02:12 on Greg. So he’s like an angel in the company and that sort of thing now too. Oh, that’s awesome.
0:02:15 He was stoked enough about Bolt. He was like, if you guys are raising, you know, I’d love to put in a check.
0:02:18 Yeah, that’s great. Yeah. Greg does also doesn’t even invest in that many startups. That’s
0:02:22 impressive. Maybe just a demo, a quick demo of like what Bolt is and like what, you know,
0:02:26 what you can use it for and that sort of thing. Yeah, for sure. Let’s just do that. Just jump
0:02:30 right into it. It was almost a year ago. Exactly. We launched Bolt. And the idea was like, you know,
0:02:35 what if chat GPT could actually make web apps, you know, and mobile apps, you know, now there’s like a
0:02:39 lot of these things that can do that. But Bolt was really the first one that could actually build
0:02:44 full stack web applications just by like typing text in a box and hitting enter. Right. So I’ll go ahead and
0:02:48 share my screen. We can like go ahead and use this thing. And Bolt’s improved a ton, you know,
0:02:51 over the past year since we originally launched it. But we’ve like stayed true to the roots of the
0:02:55 thing of just having it be this really, really simple interface where you can literally, it’s
0:03:00 just a text box and you can type in what you want to build with it. You know, for the purposes of this
0:03:08 demo, let’s just say, you know, make me a dashboard for viewing company metrics or something. Right.
0:03:14 And so you can imagine like a very common use case folks use for Bolt or like PMs, designers at
0:03:19 companies that are using this instead of Figma to prototype out their applications. It’s like way
0:03:24 faster to just type in words into a box. Yeah. And you can show something real that actually works.
0:03:28 And like, it’s easier to talk about that versus like some design file. Exactly. Right. So if you
0:03:32 kind of come back to like, you know, Marty Kagan wrote this book, you know, it’s kind of like the
0:03:35 foundational, like how to build products sort of book. I think it’s called like inspired,
0:03:41 if I’m not mistaken, but he had this, like a concept of high fidelity prototypes. And really
0:03:44 the core idea is, you know, if you’re going to make a prototype, you want it to be as true
0:03:50 to form as possible to get the most highly accurate feedback from the end user on whether or not
0:03:54 it’s like something they would use. Right. Right. And prior to this type of tool existing,
0:03:59 the fastest way to create a prototype was dragging stuff around in Figma and then basically showing
0:04:03 people JPEGs and being like, does this look good, which is like better than nothing. And then it’s
0:04:08 like, if it, if that, if it passes that test, then maybe you get some engineers to like spend a couple
0:04:12 of weeks prototyping something that is a real application to put in front of them. But it just
0:04:15 took too long. It was too expensive to just, yeah. I feel like there could be so much loss in translation
0:04:19 there too. Of like, you think you understand the idea, but then when you actually get your hands on it,
0:04:23 it’s like, Oh, I don’t really like that. Exactly. Right. Bolt has it like kind of flipped that
0:04:27 around where it’s like, you can just like come in and start prototyping an idea. That’s like a real
0:04:31 application. You can try out where I just typed some random thing in and it’s gone ahead and,
0:04:36 you know, kind of created a dashboard that we can like look at with our different business metrics
0:04:40 and like whatever have you. And you can actually pull in like your company’s design system to this
0:04:44 thing. So it actually build applications and use the libraries your company does. So it’s like on
0:04:49 brand, right. With, with your company’s apps. How do you pull that in? Is that like, like Figma or
0:04:52 something like that? It’s like a library of like your fonts and colors and all that kind of stuff.
0:04:56 Absolutely. Yeah. So you can actually pull it in from your Figma. So if you go to the Bolt homepage,
0:05:00 there’s like a Figma button, you can paste it in there. Kind of cool. Like in front of any Figma
0:05:04 URL, you can just put bolt.new in front of it and then it’ll automatically suck it in. You know,
0:05:08 if you have a coded version of your design system, like an NPM package or something,
0:05:13 you can actually configure that in Bolt and say, okay, our design system lives in these packages in
0:05:18 registry and it’ll actually install from there and use those things. We’re like one of the,
0:05:22 I think the only company that actually allows that at this point where, you know, where we’ve designed
0:05:27 it to be able to pull in from arbitrary registries, pull in from Figma, et cetera. So yeah, a lot of
0:05:32 companies use us for, you know, rapid prototyping, et cetera, and collaboration, you know, amongst folks
0:05:36 on the team. And what’s cool is like, as you get feedback, you can just go to Bolt and you can,
0:05:41 you know, prototype and, you know, give it direction and say, let’s like make this optimized,
0:05:48 you know, for mobile devices, you know, and use a blue color theme or something. Yeah. I don’t know.
0:05:52 You can keep interacting with it and chatting with it and building this interactively. So it’s like
0:05:57 very simple. You don’t have to be technical to use the product. And so it’s been a game changer,
0:06:01 you know, across the spectrum for businesses, for like PMs, especially. And even for entrepreneurs
0:06:06 that are like going and building their first application ever and like trying to launch a startup
0:06:09 on there. Cool. And I assume you get all the code for this too, that you could hand off to a
0:06:13 developer, like once you prototyped it. Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And to me, that’s like
0:06:18 one of the most magic things about this entire transition happening where you can have AI just
0:06:23 spit out actual code. This is using, again, the same code your company does, or, you know, if you’re
0:06:27 starting a company, it’s using like React, which is like typically the default choice or whatever have
0:06:31 you. You can instruct it to use anything for that matter. But yeah, you can take this code. We actually
0:06:35 have an integration with GitHub. So you can like commit this to a repo and like have it be
0:06:39 committing there. We have integrations for deployment and that sort of stuff built in.
0:06:44 So this is not like some proprietary thing, like, you know, maybe Wix or Squarespace, right? Sort of
0:06:48 is. This is like something that’s actually really focused on real workflows and use cases.
0:06:51 I was kind of thinking about, I was like, who is your competition? I mean, I know there’s like
0:06:57 lovable and Vercel v0. And then obviously there’s IDEs like, you know, cursor and windsurf. And then
0:07:03 there’s agents like Devon and factory. I am kind of wondering like where this all goes. And like,
0:07:07 do they all converge in some way or are they all serving different markets? I kind of see
0:07:12 Devon and factory a little bit more targeting enterprises and enterprises that also have
0:07:16 engineers. It feels like with what you guys are doing is great for like replacing the website
0:07:19 builders and things like that. But maybe you’re thinking about it totally different than I am.
0:07:25 I think that it’s somewhat the website builders. I think for us, we’re very focused on having this
0:07:29 be a tool that people are using for rapid product development. So again, I think like the Figma use case
0:07:35 of like, we’re making prototypes, giving feedback and iterating. That strikes me as really our lane
0:07:40 and where we are having really, really great results. We have two ICPs that we see on our
0:07:45 prosumer side. It’s a largely filled with people that are entrepreneurs building their startups,
0:07:50 that sort of thing. On the B2B side, it’s entirely like PMs at companies doing rapid prototyping.
0:07:55 And they’re kind of largely the same use case. Both sides, they’re trying to iterate towards great
0:08:01 products. The prosumer side of it though, they really, really care about having production grade
0:08:05 hosting and things of that nature, which like the businesses also care about in regards to like
0:08:09 creating real prototypes they can share internally and that sort of thing. There’s just a little bit
0:08:14 of weight emphasis difference between what these two different types of users are doing, but it’s like
0:08:17 kind of a classic product-led, you know, growth sort of motion for us.
0:08:20 And do you guys provide kind of hosting like that right now or no?
0:08:24 Yeah. So by the time this is live, like, so tomorrow we’re actually announcing this, but
0:08:28 basically we have actually integrated hosting directly into the product. I’ll go and hit
0:08:32 publish. So, oh yeah, this is that. Okay. So this is actually a time production. I’m feature flagged
0:08:36 right now. So we get to see it actually in action. This breaks, by the way, it’s because I’m feature
0:08:40 flagged and this is like going on. But what’s really cool about what we’re up to here with
0:08:45 hosting, a lot of the tools today for vibe coding, they’re very fun. They’re kind of like,
0:08:51 they’re fun toys, but they don’t actually set you up to build and scale your product to millions of
0:08:57 people, even thousands of people. And there’s been a lot of stuff in the news around databases being
0:09:02 deleted by other folks and like security issues, et cetera. And a lot of the issue is that the vibe
0:09:07 coding tools, like the web-based ones, like Lovable and Replit and whatever, the way that they’ve
0:09:12 approached hosting your applications that you make is that they’ve kind of tried to home roll their own
0:09:16 hosting infrastructure. And the problem with that is that all these companies are about the same size.
0:09:21 Like we’re like 45 people, so is Lovable, so is Replit. If you’re going to go and scale databases
0:09:27 and servers and DNS to do it well and reliably for actual businesses, it’s a whole business in itself.
0:09:33 And so what we ended up doing is we have partnered with Netlify and Supabase, which are some of the best
0:09:39 companies in the world for databases and hosting. And we’ve actually taken their offerings and for the
0:09:45 first time ever, like brought it underneath one interface, like one seamless experience inside of
0:09:48 Bolt where you’re not even like, you’re not signing up for a Netlify or Supabase account.
0:09:54 It’s actually just part of Bolt. Like every Bolt project has its own production hosting and database
0:09:59 associated with that. So when you create a project on Bolt, it automatically has those things and it’s
0:10:06 being scaled and supported by Netlify and Supabase with us. So you can actually go and scale things to
0:10:10 millions of concurrent users, right? With these different tools. So Bolt is actually like really
0:10:15 the first vibe coding tool that’s going to actually have this amazing type of, you know,
0:10:18 idea to million sort of experience, right?
0:10:22 Yeah, that’s amazing. So it feels like you guys could really, in theory, dominate like zero to one,
0:10:26 basically, right? Like when you’re, when you’re creating something new and I can see why Greg
0:10:29 invested in this, you know, he’s got the whole idea of marketplace and all that, right? So you’ve got an
0:10:35 idea. You want to create something, whether you’re an individual or at a company. And it sounds like
0:10:39 you guys could be the best at that. Like just from idea in your head to like, it’s now a real thing.
0:10:41 And it’s actually published on the web, which is awesome.
0:10:45 Yeah, exactly. And you’re spot on, which is like the people that are primarily using Bolt are not
0:10:51 developers, right? When you look at Cursor, the inverse is true. Like nearly everyone using Cursor is
0:10:57 a developer. The people that are using Bolt are people that have great taste in products and,
0:11:02 and business, right? And they have good intuitions around those things, but have never had the
0:11:08 technical knowledge on how to actually build, you know, a product themselves from the ground up as
0:11:13 far as like writing code and that sort of thing. And so Bolt for them is really their tool to actually
0:11:19 go and take direct control of the building their products and experiences. And to that end,
0:11:22 it’s been a very important part of that. And there’s like a lot of the growth of the other
0:11:27 guys too, in the space I’ve been seeing from this type of archetype, but the issue is it’s not just
0:11:32 about building a prototype or building an app. You have to have this thing wired up to be able to
0:11:37 actually be secure and actually be able to scale and like not have these crazy, obvious holes.
0:11:38 Right.
0:11:42 So then that just strikes us as it’s important to have as a first grade thing in the experience,
0:11:47 we are actually hosting Bolt on Bolt hosting. Like we use the exact same stuff, you know,
0:11:54 for this. And, you know, and even like Lovable also uses the same stuff as what Bolt hosting is,
0:11:57 right? The tagline is you can go from idea to production or whatever in a prompt.
0:12:02 If the Vibe coding tool itself is not using their own hosting, that’s like, it’s a big red flag.
0:12:03 Right, right, right.
0:12:06 And there’s been a lot of this where like everyone’s saying the stuff is secure and stuff,
0:12:09 but it’s like, I mean, if you really believe that, like, why are you kind of selling people
0:12:12 one thing and not actually using it yourself? Right. It kind of goes to show though,
0:12:18 like where, what we think is important from the user experience, how people actually get their
0:12:21 ideas online in a secure way that will actually scale.
0:12:25 I think that’s awesome. Yeah. In Silicon Valley, there’s a huge bias towards engineers, which I mean,
0:12:30 I love engineers. I code myself a bit. People who were like great at business or marketing or sales,
0:12:34 they were such a disadvantage. If you do have an idea, okay, now you’ve got to find developers and
0:12:39 pay them at least 10 grand, maybe 10, 20, whatever, to build some kind of prototype of something
0:12:43 really simple. And you have no idea what they’re doing. You have no idea if they’re like how much
0:12:47 they’re charging you, if any of it makes sense, if their timelines make any sense. And then maybe it
0:12:52 doesn’t work. It’s like now instead of that, you’re gonna have a world where someone who’s good at
0:12:56 talking to people or has good ideas or is a good, good at doing social media marketing or whatever,
0:13:02 they can have an idea and just start talking to Bolt and then the website’s live and then they can just
0:13:06 go test it, then go share it. If it doesn’t work, you try something else. I’ve told people that,
0:13:10 you know, people don’t realize like you can launch a lot of things now. People used to be worried
0:13:13 about like launching something and it failed and like, oh my God, people are gonna think you’re a
0:13:19 failure. People forget things like a week later. Now you’re literally just trying new ideas and seeing
0:13:27 what works with something like Bolt. Absolutely. Look, vibe coding is the fastest way to go from idea to
0:13:33 shipped product. And most marketers are completely sleeping on it. And here’s what’s wild. HubSpot just
0:13:40 dropped 10 vibe coding prompts. That’ll take you from, I have an idea to an actual working product
0:13:49 in hours. You get the complete zero to ship framework with prompts at every stage from ideation, technical
0:13:55 optimization, and scaling. It’s the entire package. Get it right now. Click the link in the description.
0:14:00 Now, let’s get back to the show. For like people that are entrepreneurial, I think this is the best
0:14:05 thing really in the past decade that’s come out as far like the capabilities of being able to iterate
0:14:11 this fast. Because like, to me, I look at early stage entrepreneurship, like finding product benefit,
0:14:16 it’s purely a numbers thing. Like it’s how many shots on goal can you take? Like how many iterations
0:14:21 can you take? And how fast too, right? Like the speed matters a lot. Bingo, right? Your speed dictates how
0:14:25 many shots on goal you get, right? And this increases that by like an order of magnitude.
0:14:31 That to me is like why every entrepreneur should be using these things because it’s never been faster
0:14:36 to go and validate or invalidate the ideas that you have. And heck, you don’t even necessarily,
0:14:40 if you’re not a technical person, you don’t even need to necessarily be technical to like go and
0:14:45 actually do this. And we’ve had like, just, you know, from what we hear from our own users,
0:14:50 we’ve had just dozens and dozens of startups that have used Bolt to build their MVP, go improve it
0:14:55 out and have gone and raised their seed rounds to continue scaling their company out. And I love
0:15:00 hearing that because I mean, what like a great enabler, you know? And all the integrations we’re
0:15:04 building in as well, like what we’re doing with like our Bolt cloud offering stuff. Again, it’s like,
0:15:10 these are things that if it wasn’t just built in, you’d have to go and figure out how to set these
0:15:14 things up and get them all configured and dah, dah, dah. And then like, and if you’re not technical,
0:15:19 it’s like the agent’s not going to know how to use these other things. Right. So having that all
0:15:23 built in, it’s like, now you can come to Bolt and be like, Hey, buy my domain, like deploy that thing
0:15:28 to production, like go and add this feature and just knows how to do all this stuff across all of the
0:15:32 infrastructure that you don’t even know what it is and how it works, but it does. Right. And you can
0:15:36 build a business like amazing, you know? Yeah. It is amazing. Yeah. It used to be, I mean,
0:15:40 we’re like even like learning how to set up a domain properly and dealing with DNS with like a
0:15:43 skill, you know, like at least for me back in the day, I was like, okay, I have to learn how to do
0:15:47 this to like just mess with the DNS and everything. It was a pain. I think it’s probably a good moment
0:15:49 to like talk about the hackathon because it fits really well into talking about all the new
0:15:53 opportunities for people to be able to create things. So maybe tell me about the hackathon and
0:15:55 show me some examples as well. Like what’s, you know, what people built.
0:16:01 Yeah. So back in, I think it was like March or April, this guy, KP, who runs the startup stuff over
0:16:06 at Paddle, he tweeted out this idea. He’s like, if I was the CEO of Bolt, I would throw the world’s
0:16:09 largest hackathon and have a giant cash prize, have Guinness world record
0:16:14 actually like validate the world record title. It just is a lightning rod to like get
0:16:20 entrepreneurs and builders to come and actually try out, you know, these new tools like Bolt.
0:16:25 A lot of people are not aware that they can actually go and build startups and, you know,
0:16:29 tech products themselves with Bolts and other things. And so I tweeted back, I was like, cool,
0:16:32 let’s do it. I didn’t know who he was, but I was like, let’s do it. And a couple hours later,
0:16:36 we had like over a million dollars of commitments that the thing went like viral on Twitter and
0:16:40 whatever. And so we got roped in running the world’s largest hackathon, which I will tell
0:16:44 you in retrospect, I mean, it was a heck of a lot more work than I would have ever expected.
0:16:49 But it was, it was, it was incredible. Like we had, I think we had like over 130,000 people
0:16:54 that participated in this thing. And the top folks that won the thing, it’s, you know,
0:16:57 it was amazing. Like, I think the first prize was like a hundred grand. The second prize was
0:17:00 like 75 or 50. Did you say 130,000 people?
0:17:01 130,000. Wow.
0:17:06 Huge, massive, massive. It was just, it was just crazy. Yeah. Our cloud and inference bills were
0:17:12 through the roof. But yeah, it was, it was such a cool initiative that we ended up doing because
0:17:18 there’s so many, I mean, so many people that came from all different walks of life and backgrounds.
0:17:22 Some people that were engineers, most people were not, they had never, and they were just like,
0:17:25 Hey, I’ll give this a shot. Like I’ll go and, you know, build something cool.
0:17:28 And so this heck of them was all in person. They all had to be there.
0:17:30 It was, it was all global actually. Yeah. It was global.
0:17:31 Oh, okay. Okay.
0:17:34 We had an in-person component to kick the thing off. The chain smokers threw a concert
0:17:40 for this. That was how this thing kicked off. Believe it or not, they’re like investors in
0:17:44 our company. And so in San Francisco, there was a concert to kick off this hackathon, which is
0:17:48 pretty cool. Other than that, it was like pretty much online though. But yes, I found the one first
0:17:54 place, super cool guy. He made a AI app that actually lets you like edit videos with AI. So like,
0:17:57 I don’t know if you’ve done a lot of video editing. It’s kind of monotonous.
0:18:03 A little bit. Yeah. And so it’s like the idea of having an AI integration or agent where you can
0:18:06 actually just tell it, Hey, like go and take these parts, clip them together and dah, dah, dah. And
0:18:11 it just like does it pretty magic. Right. Right. You ended up making, you know, a actual app for this.
0:18:15 That’s cool. You know, I, I own lore.com and there’s been so many people who’ve told me,
0:18:18 Nathan, you should be doing that with lore. That’s what lore should be.
0:18:23 It’s a really good idea. You know, it was really sophisticated application actually,
0:18:27 because he had a full timeline scrubber and everything. And I mean, it was like a full on,
0:18:28 you know, project.
0:18:30 And he used Bolt for all of this.
0:18:33 Bolt was the tool that he used to prepare me with this. So you can kind of see like,
0:18:38 this is not, you know, super trivial stuff to make here. Right. Especially in the course of just
0:18:42 like a month, like pretty wild. So you can, you know, chat with it and actually tell it to edit it
0:18:47 and whatever have you, but it was like, this is like a reasonably sophisticated application. Right.
0:18:51 This is like a real startup. I mean, you think about like a couple of years ago, the idea of
0:18:57 one person building something like this is this would have taken like a year to build solo. Right.
0:19:02 But you know, made this entirely through prompting. This is the guy that won first place. And then on
0:19:09 second place was this guy, his name is Serge. So he made this app called Weight Coach. And basically
0:19:14 the idea is it allows you to take control of like what you’re eating and to like help create
0:19:19 recipes for you based on the ingredients you have and help you like, you know, actually get down to
0:19:24 like the target weight that you’re looking for. It actually uses AI to go and like create recipes and
0:19:28 create different aspects of the experience, which is like really cool. Cause there’s like these weight
0:19:34 loss apps, you know, that you can download, but his is like, I thought was very interesting because
0:19:39 it was something where it actually got to know you and like your preferences. And it wasn’t like,
0:19:42 Hey, here’s like five different recipes that are like hard-coded into this thing. It’s like,
0:19:47 it can actually go and dynamically adjust to like, Oh, I’m traveling. Okay. Well, here’s something you
0:19:51 could do in that area, blah, blah, blah. Right. So it’s like very, very cool app that he made.
0:19:56 And this is actually a native mobile app. So this is not just like a web app. It’s actually a native
0:20:01 app, which is something unique that Bolt is the only slash one of the only web-based tools where you can
0:20:06 like make a native iOS or Android app with the thing. Yeah. So there’s just a couple of cool hackathon
0:20:10 projects that came out of that. Oh, very cool. That’s awesome. I was sitting there thinking,
0:20:13 when you were talking about this, I was remembering back that, uh, one of my cousins in Alabama was
0:20:17 asking me like, Hey, I’ve got this idea for an app. You know, I used to have tons of people in my
0:20:21 family. He’d like, you know, cause I knew I was, you know, having some success in San Francisco and
0:20:24 they’re like, I have an idea for an app and can, you know, how would I make it or how would I get
0:20:28 started? And I was like, you gotta go learn this programming language for like a year. You got to learn
0:20:32 whatever, then maybe make a prototype and it’s probably not going to work. And I just told him that too.
0:20:36 I was like, it’s probably not going to work. You got this idea. It sounds great. You probably
0:20:40 should do it though. Cause you’re going to learn a lot. And, you know, and I do wonder like if that
0:20:43 would have changed things, if they could have just like went to something like this and just tried it
0:20:48 and in a day saw if their idea had any merit or not, you know, that’d be awesome.
0:20:52 Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think, and that’s like, you know, so my co-founder and I, he and I
0:20:56 actually grew up down the street from each other in a side of Chicago and he and I learned how to code
0:21:00 together when we were like 13 and we’ve been building stuff together ever since. And it’s
0:21:03 like, we look at this, we’re like, we’re building the thing that we wish we had when we were 13 years
0:21:09 old, because it’s so painful to have to learn how to program from scratch. And the drop-off is just
0:21:12 huge. Like a lot of people have interest in this stuff, but just to do anything, it’s like, yeah,
0:21:17 there’s all this random kind of archaic things almost that you have to become good at. That’s
0:21:20 really ancillary to the point of actually building something.
0:21:24 And then you’re just getting started. That doesn’t mean that you’re going to have any success at all.
0:21:29 A hundred percent. And so I think that it seems, and this is like Greg says, this vein of thinking a
0:21:35 lot, but like, this is just, we’re already starting to see an explosion here of ideas and products that
0:21:41 just would have never existed before because, you know, the sheer drop-off that inevitably happens
0:21:45 if you have to know how to set up dev environments and how to code and like, and then getting good at
0:21:48 coding to the degree you can actually make something that’s beautiful and like secure and can scale and
0:21:53 stuff. I mean, that’s like, it takes years to even just get to that point. And then you get
0:21:59 to start taking shots on goal in an actual way. So yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s just transformative,
0:22:02 right? The dynamics of startups in general, you know?
0:22:07 Yeah. I guess my mind was like going like, should they be doing something like almost like competing
0:22:11 with YC in some way where like, they’re like subsidize people and teach them how to do business
0:22:15 and then use Bolt. I don’t know, just like random ideas off my head.
0:22:17 It’s a great point, right? Like we’ve been kind of kicking around the ideas around this
0:22:21 because then the hackathon was, was like really our first foray into this where it’s like, how
0:22:25 do we go in like foster entrepreneurship on our platform? Right. Cause we think this is
0:22:31 one of the most exciting unlocks that this thing has. And the hackathon was kind of the first
0:22:36 way. And we’ve been exploring what would it look like to have something that’s like more
0:22:40 ongoing, like maybe it’s like an accelerator built in or I don’t know, you know, things of that
0:22:44 nature. Right. Yeah. I know you’ve talked about this before, but maybe if we could briefly go into
0:22:49 like how that happened, like from like stack blitz to bolt, cause I feel like I heard of stack blitz.
0:22:52 I think I did on Twitter or something at some point, I’m not entirely sure. I think, you know,
0:22:56 and then definitely like I saw bolt in the early days, like when you guys first launched and stuff.
0:23:01 Yeah, totally. I’ll do the quick zero to 60, but yeah, back in 2017, Albert Pai, my co-founder and
0:23:05 I, he and I launched stack blitz, which is web-based IDE. And the idea was really,
0:23:11 we wanted to make it as easy to build like full stack web applications as it was to use Figma or
0:23:15 Canva. The idea I guess kind of started because back when we first came to the Valley in 2011,
0:23:20 2012, we’d had the good fortune of bumping in Dylan Field and Evan Wallace when they were first starting
0:23:25 Figma. And, you know, back then, like they didn’t have a design tool. Like the initial pitch was like
0:23:31 this demo of a 3d ball dropping into water inside of a browser tab. And the pitch went basically along the
0:23:35 lines of like, you know, browsers have become very powerful. You can now do complex graphics
0:23:41 rendering in them. And so like, if you can create a rendering engine that runs in a browser, you can
0:23:44 bring design to the browser in the same way that Google brought docs and email, et cetera, and that’ll
0:23:49 be hugely valuable. But obviously we’ve seen how that story has played out now. And so back in 2017,
0:23:54 we saw that for the first time, like, oh, it might be possible to do that same play, but for development
0:23:59 environments. So for the first time, you can actually mount dev environments in a browser using the end
0:24:04 users, you know, CPU memory, et cetera. And that would be huge for the same reason was for Figma and Google Docs
0:24:10 and whatever have you. We started the company in 2017. We launched that technology in 2021. A lot of developers
0:24:14 thought it was very cool. But over the couple of years after that, like we had millions of developers using the
0:24:20 product for free every month. We just could not get anyone to pay us money. And that was like, by and large, like if you
0:24:26 think about, you know, what’s really the difference between StackBlitz and Bolt, StackBlitz was an IDE where you
0:24:30 still had to know how to code. Like you didn’t have to set your environment, but you still had to know
0:24:31 how to code, which is huge.
0:24:35 Yeah. When you were saying that, I was like, to me, that would have been great for like, maybe competing
0:24:38 with like Codecademy kind of thing where like, you’re actually teaching people to code or something.
0:24:44 Exactly. And it’s funny because we started StackBlitz because we were competing with Codecademy on our
0:24:49 previous company, in a sense, like we were teaching people how to code online, needing an online
0:24:53 environment to do that. And that was really where StackBlitz kind of popped out. But, you know, there wasn’t an
0:24:57 obvious way for us to make money, or at least the things that seemed obvious. We tried, all the other
0:25:02 competitors tried, no one figured out how to make money on cloud out of ease in any meaningful way.
0:25:07 It was, it was just a mirage. And so that came to last year, we’ve been around for seven years as a
0:25:11 company. You know, if we can’t figure out how to make a venture scale business, like it just doesn’t,
0:25:15 and we don’t have any clear paths to doing so, like, what are we doing here? Right. And so the decision
0:25:19 was made, like, if we don’t have something by the end of the year, you know, that’s like, changes the
0:25:24 trajectory, we’re going to start spinning down the company or getting acquired or like whatever.
0:25:28 Right. And so what we ended up doing is we launched a couple of different products last year.
0:25:32 All of them were very cool, but you know, the first couple we launched, you know, didn’t get the
0:25:38 commercial traction that we were, you know, hoping to see. And, you know, when we launched Bolt, it was
0:25:43 the last experiment that we were going to run. We were launched in October. Our board meeting was in
0:25:49 November where we were going to, you know, begin disassembling the company and what ended up
0:25:54 happening. Surprise guys. We got this, this Bolt thing. Yeah, totally. Right. I mean, it was, it was,
0:25:59 yeah, unexpected for literally everyone. At that point, we’d been around for seven years and we got
0:26:04 to like 700K of ARR. And then we launched Bolt in the first 30 days, we added 4 million of ARR.
0:26:08 And then in the month after that, we went to 20 million. It was, it was crazy. And so it was like,
0:26:11 and there’s a lot of these stories now, these companies that are, that can, they’re seeing
0:26:17 these like revenue ramps like we did. But we were really the first one that actually saw that type
0:26:21 of hockey stick and we’re like, what the hell is going on? That was how Bolt came to be. It was an
0:26:26 idea I’d had earlier in the year. And then once we saw the Sonnet 3.5 model from Anthropic, I was like,
0:26:31 okay, this is actually the coding models have really caught up and this, this would be an interesting
0:26:37 product. We had no idea it would be as well-loved and received as it has been and grow as fast as it
0:26:41 has been like, we thought we would add like the best case scenario in our view was if we add 100K
0:26:46 of ARR by the end of the year off this, that would be amazing. And we cleared that, I think on like
0:26:50 the first or second day or something, you know? Wow. Yeah. Anyways, that’s kind of the story of,
0:26:55 of how Bolt came to be. Well, dude, that’s, you know, congrats on that. I mean, like the fact that
0:26:59 you did that for seven years and it sounded like you were just like hustling and like, you know,
0:27:02 barely holding on and, you know, and then had this huge assess. That’s amazing.
0:27:06 It actually relied on the technology we had made. The browser dev environment stuff,
0:27:09 like when you go to Bolt, all that technology we made over the past seven years, like that is what
0:27:14 is actually making that possible. We built Bolt in 90 days because we had spent seven years building
0:27:18 this technology to run dev environment. So it was, it was a very natural product progression.
0:27:23 Actually, it was really effectively like a UI change and a little like a rebranding because
0:27:28 instead of an IDE, you have a chat box, you know? But yeah, so it was, it was very natural actually.
0:27:33 Cool. I’m curious, you know, which model are you guys using right now? Like primarily like
0:27:37 with Bolt or are you, have you switched over to GPT-5 or are you still using Claude or?
0:27:42 Yeah, we primarily use Claude. I mean, we found Claude to have generally for when you, when you’re,
0:27:47 you know, doing code generation stuff, like Claude has the best models. Yeah. We’ve also,
0:27:52 we were, you know, one of the launch partners on GPT-5 and GPT-5 is a great model. I think there’s
0:27:57 certain areas where we’re using it, but Anthropic has just done a really good job of really
0:28:02 lasering in on software code gen and just being the best in the world at that. And they’re doing
0:28:06 a lot of interesting stuff there where I, I, I just, I suspect that they’re going to be the preferred
0:28:10 tool for, for some time. Maybe other things will come, but you know, just, it seems like that’s
0:28:13 really the niche that they’re focusing on and focus matters a lot.
0:28:18 Yeah. Yeah. I went on vacation for a few days and I came back and like Twitter was full of like all
0:28:23 this, all the people arguing over GPT-5 and some people were like, you know, it’s, it’s amazing.
0:28:26 Other ones like, it’s horrible. And this is like the end of AI. It was all a big bubble.
0:28:30 We’re all done for it. And I was like, what the hell is going to come back to? What did I come
0:28:35 back to? What the, you know, I tried GPT-5. It seemed really good. Like, you know, not like a
0:28:39 gigantic step forward, but like a nice step forward. I thought it was really smart how they had like
0:28:43 switched to like an automatic model. Cause like for the average person, the UI was horrible. And then
0:28:47 now everyone’s basically like forced them back into having the same kind of UI again, or like
0:28:51 similar. I mean, I’m just curious, what are your thoughts on AI progress?
0:28:52 It depends on like kind of the dimension of it.
0:28:54 Coding and like building applications.
0:28:59 Yeah. I think on coding, I think there’s very meaningful improvements that we’ve witnessed
0:29:03 across model to model, especially across the, the anthropic family just over the past year.
0:29:09 Like it seems like the, the RL stuff that’s going on there has legs and has a lot of room
0:29:16 to run. Looking at the more AGI stuff, I think that all of these things are kind of reliant on
0:29:20 new approaches being invented and proven out. Right. So I think on the current, if you kind of take
0:29:25 the current state, the whole idea of like scaling things up, like that has topped out, but you know,
0:29:31 the adding like the reasoning and, and, you know, RL stuff has kind of moved the needle a bit in a way
0:29:35 that you couldn’t have forecasted. So I think we might see more stuff there, but it’s like, you know,
0:29:36 it kind of a TBD.
0:29:40 Yeah. I guess it’s kind of hard to know if that’s also going to like cap out to like the, you know,
0:29:43 the, the, the thinking, the reasoning side, is that going to continue to scale up or it’s also
0:29:46 going to have diminishing returns. It’s kind of hard to know.
0:29:50 Yeah. It might. Right. I mean, I think there’s just going to be a lot of new research and invention
0:29:53 done, but I think even with the current state of the stuff we’re looking at, a lot of the games,
0:29:58 like moving away from like, do we have the best model and kind of moving more towards,
0:30:03 do we have the best model that’s designed to work well with agents? Right. Because if you think
0:30:08 about like how a human brain works, it’s kind of rare where there’s like off the top of your head
0:30:13 on any given sufficiently complicated question, you will just zero shot an answer that is completely
0:30:17 perfect. Right. And it makes sense that maybe we can get machines to be at that point, but it,
0:30:22 but it seems like a pragmatic way to approach this is like, you know, that’s maybe the North star
0:30:27 or whatever, but like the way in which people think is by bouncing things around and going back and forth.
0:30:32 And that’s like what agents do. Like cloud code is going and looking at different files and like
0:30:35 kind of digging it. And sometimes it’ll hit like a dead path and like what it’s trying to figure out
0:30:40 and it’ll revert back and like, you know, blah, blah, blah. And so to me, it’s like the area where
0:30:47 innovation is ripe and it’s like early days is really making that sort of critical thinking really,
0:30:51 really good and making good at tool calling and like for building agents and that sort of thing.
0:30:56 And so I think it actually kind of matters less about the specific model capabilities,
0:31:00 because even with like some of the frontier models, like I just, I don’t think we’re really
0:31:04 maxing out what they can do. If you actually have a really good agent that’s orchestrating,
0:31:09 but that also relies on the models themselves being trained to be, to work better as agents.
0:31:15 I think there’s some number of years we’re just focusing on that is going to yield some incredible
0:31:16 results. I think.
0:31:22 Yeah. It seems like that plus more compute and we’ll get like an amazing progress for at least
0:31:22 like three to five years.
0:31:27 You could argue that AGI is like 20 years away or like we’ve already reached it, like depending on
0:31:27 your definition.
0:31:33 Yeah. Yeah. And I think too, it’s going to take time for the application layer to actually fully
0:31:39 utilize even the current state of the art. Right. So I think that, that there’s not actually to me an
0:31:45 urgent need for these things to go like 10 X better tomorrow. There’s real revenue coming into us and
0:31:49 other companies. And there’s a lot of new innovation happening. That’s not even related to the models
0:31:54 getting better. So from that end, I think it’s going to be transformative on just how
0:32:01 the world operates, um, without really needing some giant step function in any short period of time.
0:32:04 Yeah. I think the average person doesn’t even realize how good the current models are.
0:32:07 They’re using it as like a basic chat bot or, or Google.
0:32:12 For sure. And there’s just not a proliferation of products that have, are really leveraging these
0:32:17 things, um, to the max and integrating into people’s workflows. Like it’s taking time. Right. And that’s
0:32:23 the same thing we’ve seen with every other wave of technology where it’s like the adoption of cloud
0:32:27 services, you know, adoption of the internet. It’s like, it kind of takes time for there to be
0:32:31 proliferation of these, um, of, of the builders who are delivering the services and the consumers that
0:32:37 are purchasing them. Right. And there is, it is faster than ever has been in previous cycles,
0:32:42 but even still, it’s again, coming back to like, for our products, like most people don’t know that
0:32:47 they can write software now. Right. And so like the TAM is like 98% of the planet.
0:32:47 Right.
0:32:52 There’s not even a hundred million people that are using these. There’s not even like 20 million.
0:32:56 Yeah. I do wonder how you reach those people. Like, even if you just told them that you like,
0:32:59 they wouldn’t be able to process it. Like that was actually where you go, that you could just go
0:33:03 type in and it would make a website for you or an application or whatever. Like people have a hard
0:33:04 time, you know, grasping that.
0:33:09 Yeah, exactly. And so, and again, a lot of this is like, it’s, it’s really people,
0:33:14 builders and doctors need to go and solve the last mile problems of these things at the application
0:33:18 and distribution side of this problem set. And so for those reasons, I feel like everyone,
0:33:23 and maybe in large part, because of some companies have been just like hammering about AGI for the
0:33:27 past five years or whatever. But yeah, it’s like, I think there’s some expectation. It’s like
0:33:28 AGI or bust.
0:33:30 Right.
0:33:30 Right.
0:33:35 This isn’t zero sum, right? Like this is not zero sum. Like maybe I’ll pass lead to that,
0:33:39 but like, that’s not needed. Like if you look at software development specifically,
0:33:47 what is the value of going and like creating products that whose purpose is to like go and
0:33:50 basically rewrite all of the world’s software? Right. I mean, that’s like, that’s what we’re
0:33:54 talking about here. Like with bolts and other products, you can go and just build new software
0:33:59 that replaces previous human written software. The market size of that is like trillions of dollars.
0:34:04 You can rewrite how the world works with just basically the current state of technology.
0:34:06 And if it gets better, it’s just going to happen faster. Right.
0:34:10 Yeah. Me and Matt did an episode early on in the podcast where we were talking about
0:34:14 the implications for the software industry. And I was talking about like the refactoring of software
0:34:18 or like rewriting of software, even with like the government, like the, some of the software
0:34:22 they’re using, it’s like, it’s been there for like 30 years because it’s just like, well,
0:34:25 we didn’t know how it was written in the first place. So we don’t know how to change it.
0:34:29 We’re scared to touch things. There’s so many complex things like that, that AI is definitely
0:34:33 help us do it. I think that’s the kind of stuff the next five years all become realistic.
0:34:38 Totally. So that’s kind of my take on like, you know, what’s progress or not, or like,
0:34:42 but I think just like pragmatically, it’s like, we haven’t even scratched the surface of the
0:34:48 current level of capabilities as far as applying it into the world. And then it’s still improving.
0:34:52 And that’s crazy because again, even with the current state of the art, there’s so much
0:34:53 more to be done, you know?
0:34:57 Yeah. And I’m convinced also, like if you ask people like 10 years ago, if you show
0:35:02 them what we have today, they’d be like, you’ve got AGI. I think a lot of people actually would
0:35:06 be calling what we have today AGI. But anyways, there’s two questions I’d like to ask people
0:35:11 just like kind of for fun as we end the podcast. And one is I have 11 year old son. I’m constantly
0:35:15 thinking of, you know, what should I be teaching him? And I know apparently this has become a pretty
0:35:19 common question that people in Silicon Valley ask each other. If you had a son, what would you
0:35:23 be teaching your son? Would you still be teaching him to code? Would you be teaching him like,
0:35:26 hey, use things like Bolt and just go create your ideas?
0:35:30 Yeah, good question. Yeah. So I’ve got a one-year-old daughter, so she’s not at the point
0:35:31 where I can be like teaching her.
0:35:33 Use Bolt.
0:35:38 Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But I think like in a couple of years, I mean, I will absolutely have
0:35:44 her going and using Bolt if she likes to build things at least, right? This is amazing. I mean,
0:35:50 you know, the reason that we give kids like Legos and like Tonka trucks instead of actually putting
0:35:55 them behind a forklift is that it’s just, it’s not safe to like give kids access to the real tools
0:36:00 that professional use, right? That’s not true anymore, right? Like, and there’s also, of course,
0:36:05 it’s not safe and there’s a huge learning curve, right? Even if it is safe. And when you look at
0:36:09 things like Bolt, neither of those things are a problem. But we have people of all ages coming and
0:36:15 using Bolt of all skill types of all backgrounds. And to me, it’s like, often people don’t end up
0:36:19 becoming engineers or looking into building things or being entrepreneurs because they don’t get
0:36:25 exposed to what it actually is about because the drop-off is so big. And I think that’s to me why
0:36:31 it’s important for my own child, like to use Bolt or things like it is to go and experience what it’s
0:36:36 like to build stuff for yourself, right? And so that would certainly be one of the main things.
0:36:41 She’s one, so should she learn to code or not? Or would that be totally irrelevant in 17 years?
0:36:46 To me, it’s like, it’s all like, I think learning how to code is still a great thing to learn,
0:36:53 right? Because it’s like, your ability to really understand what’s happening at a lower level with
0:36:57 these tools, that’s always, always been helpful in this profession. And I think that’s going to
0:37:01 continue to be the case. But assuming you want to like, this is what you want to work on, right?
0:37:06 For as a career. Other things too, I think arts are cool. I think going and learning how to sing and
0:37:11 dance or whatever is fun or sports and that sort of thing. Those are the main things I think all of my
0:37:16 own kid, I would encourage them to go dig into. Yeah, that’s a good answer. Okay, you get into a
0:37:20 time machine. You’re in time, let’s go, you step out, it’s 2050. What do you see? Like, is it
0:37:25 dramatically different? Or is it like, you know, robots everywhere? And you know, or is it just like,
0:37:33 pretty much the same? I think I would expect it to be the same in some ways. But I think we tend to get
0:37:38 like the frontier technology way faster than the rest of the world. It’s like, I remember when I
0:37:46 moved here from Chicago back in early, like 2010, 2011, Uber was just a, it was just becoming a thing
0:37:50 then. Yep. Yep. Me too. I was there. Yeah. I saw Travis at a party, like when it was first starting.
0:37:54 Yep. Yep. And so I was using Uber all the time in the Bay Area. And I went back to Chicago to visit my
0:37:58 family in like 2012. And like, it was like, there’s, there’s no Ubers in the entire state.
0:38:05 And so it’s stuff like that, where I think, I think the, the, the Bay Area is going to have,
0:38:10 they’re going to have, I, 2050, it’s going to be robo taxis or whatever. And like robots delivering
0:38:14 food. I think it’s going to be probably the epicenter of what that stuff looks like, I would
0:38:19 imagine. And, uh, you know, I would imagine there’s probably a lot less cars on the road in that sense,
0:38:25 or at least, you know, um, non-robotic ones, but that would be maybe my base expectation of the
0:38:28 thing. Cause we already see that now. It’s like, we were the first to have Waymos and right. So I
0:38:33 suspect by that time, it’s probably gonna be the de facto way of getting around or whatever, you know?
0:38:37 Yeah. Well, dude, Eric, this has been awesome. Where should people find you online and anything like
0:38:42 that? You want to share? Yeah, for sure. So yeah, like bolts is like bolt.new. That’s the domain. Um,
0:38:47 you can find me on Twitter, just, uh, at Eric Simons and on LinkedIn, you can search Eric Simons,
0:38:55 I guess. It’s like forward slash in or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like there’s
0:39:01 like a UTM tracking code you need and all that. Yeah. So yes. It’s been awesome. Thank you. Awesome.
0:39:02 Thanks for having me. Yep.
0:39:42 Thank you.
Want to build your own apps with AI? Get the prompts here: https://clickhubspot.com/gfb
Episode 75: What if you could turn your app idea into a fully functional web application—without writing a single line of code—in under 60 seconds? Nathan Lands (https://x.com/NathanLands) welcomes Eric Simons (https://x.com/ericsimons), co-founder of Bolt, one of the hottest AI startups revolutionizing how apps are built.
In this episode, Eric reveals how Bolt makes it possible for anyone, regardless of technical skill, to go from idea to live, production-ready web or mobile apps—complete with authentication, databases, and hosting. He shares Bolt’s unique approach that enables rapid prototyping, real business-grade deployments, and makes high-fidelity MVPs accessible to entrepreneurs, product managers, and non-coders everywhere. The conversation covers Bolt’s founding story, its growth, and details from their record-breaking hackathon that empowered 130,000+ makers.
Check out The Next Wave YouTube Channel if you want to see Matt and Nathan on screen: https://lnk.to/thenextwavepd
—
Show Notes:
-
(00:00) High Fidelity Prototyping Essentials
-
(04:32) Revolutionary Prototyping and Collaboration Tool
-
(06:33) Rapid Prototyping Tool Focus
-
(11:35) Empowering Non-Tech Entrepreneurs
-
(13:34) Fast MVP Development with Bolt
-
(18:19) AI-Powered Personalized Weight Coach
-
(22:10) Launching Stackblitz: Web IDE Vision
-
(22:48) Browser-Based Dev Environments Revolution
-
(28:05) Advancements in Coding and AI
-
(29:28) Critical Thinking in AI Development
-
(34:08) Teaching Kids Future Skills
-
(37:05) Bay Area’s Autonomous Transport Future
—
Mentions:
-
Eric Simons: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-simons-a464a664/
-
Bolt: https://bolt.new/
-
Figma: https://www.figma.com/
-
Netlify: https://www.netlify.com/
-
Supabase: https://supabase.com/
-
Cursor: https://cursor.com/
-
Lovable: https://lovable.dev/
Get the guide to build your own Custom GPT: https://clickhubspot.com/tnw
—
Check Out Matt’s Stuff:
• Future Tools – https://futuretools.beehiiv.com/
• Blog – https://www.mattwolfe.com/
• YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/@mreflow
—
Check Out Nathan’s Stuff:
-
Newsletter: https://news.lore.com/
-
Blog – https://lore.com/
The Next Wave is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by Hubspot Media // Production by Darren Clarke // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.