Bolt’s Eric Simons on Enabling Everyone to Generate Websites with AI AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Bolt’s Eric Simons on Enabling Everyone to Generate Websites with AI) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Go to PodExtra AI's podcast page (No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups) to view the AI-processed content of all episodes of this podcast.

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups episodes list: view full AI transcripts and summaries of this podcast on the blog

Episode: Bolt’s Eric Simons on Enabling Everyone to Generate Websites with AI

Author: Conviction
Duration: 00:38:17

Episode Shownotes

In this episode of No Priors, Sarah talks with Eric Simons, co-founder and CEO of StackBlitz. The company has experienced explosive growth since the launch 2 months ago of Bolt.new, an AI application that lets users prompt, run, edit, and deploy full-stack applications directly in the browser. Eric talks about

the years-long journey that led to overnight success, why so many non-technical users are forming a community around Bolt, and the democratization of coding. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @EricSimons40 Show Notes: 0:00 Introduction 0:36 Bolt.new 2:04 How Bolt stands out from other coding assistants 3:28 Building beyond ChatGPT wrappers 6:13 Driving growth through community 9:42 Evals 13:29 Eric’s favorite use cases and startups leveraging Bolt 17:10 Why engineers are embracing no- code tools 24:32 The years long journey of StackBlitz 31:50 Balancing an Ironman, a newborn, and a product launch 35:18 Predictions for developers and code generation tools

Full Transcript

00:00:05 Speaker_01
Hi listeners, welcome back to No Priors.

00:00:08 Speaker_01
Today we're hanging out with Eric Simons, the co-founder of StackBlitz and the makers of Bolt.new, a new AI tool that enables everyone from developers to designers to non-technical folks to build full stack real applications entirely in their browser.

00:00:22 Speaker_01
Eric has spent the last decade and a half thinking about how to make development more accessible. And since its launch, Bolt has taken off like lightning. Is it over for site builders?

00:00:31 Speaker_01
We'll talk about AI code generation, creative community, and if everyone really wants to build websites. Eric, good to see you. Good to see you too, Sarah. You have had a wild two months since you guys launched Bolt.new.

00:00:46 Speaker_01
Can you explain what it is, like zero to 20 million of ARR? I have, I don't think ever seen that sort of crazy growth.

00:00:56 Speaker_00
Yeah, I haven't either. It's been kind of surreal. It's kind of far beyond any of our expectations here.

00:01:03 Speaker_01
So for anybody who hasn't seen it yet, what is Bolt?

00:01:06 Speaker_00
Bolt is, it's kind of similar to like chat into your cloud, except you use Bolt to build full stack web applications.

00:01:12 Speaker_00
So you can come and just prompt if you want a landing page, a blog, or even like a, you know, any type of full stack web app where you have authentication, you can log in and, you know, you can use it effectively instead of going to like a web development agency or shop, you can come here, put in your idea, hit enter, and then get a real production website for you.

00:01:29 Speaker_00
If you look at the world, there's 25 million developers, I think, globally. And today, last week, we had almost 200,000 software composers, we like to call them, that use Bolt to build web applications.

00:01:42 Speaker_00
And we think that that number should be 100 million. And we're on this growth clip that seems like maybe we'll get there sooner or later.

00:01:51 Speaker_00
Bullet is really enabling folks to build real software, not just kind of drag and drop sort of static sites, you know, the previous era of how the web was made.

00:02:02 Speaker_01
There's a lot of code generation tools out there. You can do this directly in the core model products as well. What do you think people are finding special about Bolt?

00:02:14 Speaker_00
Yeah, totally. Yeah, what's special about Bolt, and it kind of comes to the origins of our company, but in short, we've written an operating system and WebAssembly that can run in your browser.

00:02:23 Speaker_00
And that's really important because if you want to run dev environments, you need to be able to install arbitrary packages and run different tool chains, whether it's Next.js or Veed or anything else.

00:02:33 Speaker_00
It's very complicated and expensive to typically do this if you're going to use servers. So it's very valuable to do it in the browser because it's extremely fast. There's no latency. You're not paying by the minute for some cloud.

00:02:43 Speaker_00
What we've done has kind of married these frontier models with this technology we've been making.

00:02:48 Speaker_00
And when you look at the other stuff in the market, a cloud artifacts is probably one of the first things that hit the market that did a really good job of this, where you could say, hey, build me a UI and it will do it.

00:03:00 Speaker_00
The problem comes when you actually want to build stuff that's more meaningful. It's very good if you're saying, hey, I use a cloud every week for just generating graphs based on numbers or whatever. Very good for that sort of use case.

00:03:11 Speaker_00
But if you want to say, hey, create a landing page where people can log in and like do some type of functionality, you can't go NPM install, you know, Firebase or Superbase or whatever have you and plug all that up and actually deploy it.

00:03:22 Speaker_00
So that's what Bolt specifically is, you know, uniquely capable of doing without any other setup. It's just all kind of baked in.

00:03:29 Speaker_01
a common engineer, investor, tech person pushback. Hey, like these cogeneration tools are often the same.

00:03:39 Speaker_01
You guys have this web container technology that allows you to, you know, abstract away the backend and allow that to run locally without handling that developer environment mess yourself. There's this concept of like a GPT wrapper company. Right.

00:03:56 Speaker_01
And so I think there were a number of companies that were less generously like some system prompts and like a well SEO website. You guys open sourced your system prompt. So and like a lot of the code for Bolt. Can you explain that strategically?

00:04:14 Speaker_00
we were building Bolt, over the past couple of years, there's been a ton of more simple wrappers that have come out around these frontier models.

00:04:23 Speaker_00
And the problem is whenever the next model comes, whenever one of the AI labs eventually integrates that into their chat products or whatever, those companies tend to go away pretty quickly.

00:04:36 Speaker_00
So when we were working on Bolt, one of the big advantages we have is we've been building this web container technology for five years, and it's pretty difficult stuff to do.

00:04:45 Speaker_00
And so when we were going to actually launch Bolt, when we were building the system prompts and the user interface around it,

00:04:53 Speaker_00
When we looked out there, there's not a lot of other folks doing this, where they actually could open source their system prompts and kind of open source their products so you could see how it's actually made.

00:05:03 Speaker_00
And for us, we felt that it was inevitable that someone would get our AI model to dump out our system prompts anyways.

00:05:13 Speaker_00
But also, we felt there's kind of something missing in the open source world, where we see like we come from a web developer platform. Right? Open source is key for innovation for everyone.

00:05:23 Speaker_00
And to date, a lot of these companies in the AI space have been looking at their system prompts and kind of their specific, you know, glue code is the secret sauce.

00:05:33 Speaker_00
And it just seems there's a whole lot that has been left on the table by not just putting this stuff out there and letting people fork it and improve it and contribute to it. You know, if we're going to build a great business here,

00:05:43 Speaker_00
What's going to allow us to win is growing extremely quickly, building the best end-to-end product experience that really works incredibly well. It's not going to be the system problems.

00:05:54 Speaker_00
For those who have done web development, it's kind of like view sourcing on a web page. You can go to google.com, you can view source.

00:06:02 Speaker_00
No one so far has kind of done that and built another trillion dollar company that took out Google by doing that, right?

00:06:07 Speaker_00
You can learn a lot, but it's not actually, you're kind of building this cohesive end-to-end product business experience is a totally different thing.

00:06:14 Speaker_01
Why is the community valuable to you?

00:06:16 Speaker_01
I mean, you've always been like very committed to the developer community and to open source, but have you learned anything from the community that improves, as you said, the end-to-end stacklet system, or is there like an ongoing way that happens?

00:06:30 Speaker_00
100%. Yeah, this has actually been one of the most interesting things for BOLT. I mean, StackBlitz, the company, we've been investing in open source a ton over the past five, seven years or whatever have you.

00:06:38 Speaker_00
When we put BOLT out in open source, we were really curious to see, does anyone find this valuable? And the answer was like, yeah, actually. And there's a couple of key things worth calling out on this.

00:06:52 Speaker_00
One, from a general community standpoint, I would say there's AI tools in general.

00:06:57 Speaker_00
One of the biggest problems that a company like us has that's building an AI experience with AI models, and heck, even the AI labs themselves, is educating folks on how to best use the tool.

00:07:09 Speaker_00
Because the problem with AI models is that they're non-deterministic. It's not like instructing someone, hey, here's how you send an email in Gmail. You hit the compose button, you type, you hit send. If you go to a chat product,

00:07:22 Speaker_00
Prompt engineering is something that folks have to be educated on and learn how to use properly because it costs money every time you send a message.

00:07:29 Speaker_00
And so one of the interesting things I think we've done a good job of is really investing in the community and having it be a place where folks are sharing their knowledge of how to best use the tool.

00:07:40 Speaker_00
Because that's actually, you're going to see a lot of churn in your product if folks are coming, can't figure out how to use it and leave. And we're finding we are learning.

00:07:48 Speaker_00
We are actually not even the experts on how to use our own product at this point. Our power users, they actually know more. And so we're bringing them on live streams to actually show, hey, what's working for you and your workflows.

00:08:00 Speaker_00
And to the degree that we can upstream what they're doing by typing prompts into the product, we're doing that. So I think if you're building an AI tool,

00:08:09 Speaker_00
it's critical to be building out a community and actually be directly engaging with them and giving them a place to share their knowledge.

00:08:16 Speaker_00
Because otherwise, everyone else on the product, there's going to be a high amount of churn, which is exactly what you've seen happening with these AI apps. Churn on these things can be like 60, 70% for folks that are not doing what I'm describing.

00:08:29 Speaker_00
And that seems to be the most common case with a lot of AI applications that are in their earlier stages. It's just crazy high churn rates.

00:08:36 Speaker_01
Oh, I was just gonna draw a parallel to what David Holtz had done and the MidJourney team overall, in that I think that the fact that there are like obsessive, creative, really capable power users of MidJourney that are teaching the entire community how to use MidJourney models and demonstrating like what can be created is like a huge part of their position versus like the,

00:09:06 Speaker_01
many other image generators that are out there. And so that I think is just an interesting parallel.

00:09:12 Speaker_00
Yeah, I think that's an excellent example. And probably the best example that I've seen, there's surprisingly not a ton of at least very visible examples of this, but I think it's going to be extremely important.

00:09:24 Speaker_00
I think for the company, especially the startups that really want to win big here, This is, I mean, just a critical, more than ever, right?

00:09:32 Speaker_00
More than ever, I would say, community strategy and real investment is going to be key for success in building this type of product and user base.

00:09:43 Speaker_01
You guys are what, like 10, 12 people right now?

00:09:45 Speaker_00
I think like 15 to 20, I don't know what the exact number is, but.

00:09:49 Speaker_01
15, okay, to 20, that's better. I'm a little out of date. I think the, like the idea of like, let's have 200,000 plus users and growing be using this every week and tell us what works in a world where like, there aren't evals that are, you know, from,

00:10:10 Speaker_01
academia or standard that are useful in terms of like what real world applications can you build with your system, right? And so I think that virtuous cycle seems really powerful.

00:10:24 Speaker_01
And you guys also, like I think a big part of the Bolt theory is like make anyone a developer, right? Versus you guys are all developers. You also need to see how non-technical humans build with this stuff.

00:10:36 Speaker_00
Yeah, 100%. And that's like the majority of people using Bolt at this point are non-technical. And it's interesting, the most successful people that are using Bolt are actually people that have had to interact with or manage development teams.

00:10:49 Speaker_00
So think like entrepreneurs, PMs, et cetera, because it turns out kind of managing an AI is extremely similar to managing actual software developers, right?

00:11:02 Speaker_00
And one of the things you just mentioned on the eval, so this is actually kind of the second piece regarding why we open source and one of the most interesting aspects that's popped out of it is that, like I had mentioned earlier, there's not a lot of good open source AI tools today, like real world AI tools.

00:11:20 Speaker_00
And especially ones where the products that clearly are providing a lot of value to the degree they're growing quickly and both by revenue and usage. more like maybe one of the only, the few, or something like that.

00:11:31 Speaker_00
What's kind of happened is that, as you mentioned, the eval suites were very good the past couple of years at kind of generally measuring how good are these models at coding.

00:11:39 Speaker_00
But the problem that folks are kind of running into now, when you talk about building a real-world product around these things,

00:11:45 Speaker_00
The eval suites that exist today are very specific and not representative of like, hey, I want to go build a landing page or I want to build X, Y, Z. There's nothing in those suites that you can actually test against.

00:11:59 Speaker_00
And so what's ended up happening, this is what's going on with our open source version of Bolt, is Bolt Local is becoming kind of like one of the main ways people are testing out new code gen models when they're coming out.

00:12:11 Speaker_00
I think there's one that was released by NVIDIA recently, and there's one called Quorum that was released recently.

00:12:16 Speaker_00
And some of the folks, I think over at Hugging Face, have been basically just... One of the first things they're doing is taking Bolt Local and dropping that in and saying, okay, how good is this thing versus Sonnet 3.5 or whatever.

00:12:30 Speaker_00
And so that's been kind of interesting. It reminds me, for those that were into video games in the 2000s, can it run Crysis? As far as measuring your PC performance, it's kind of becoming that. People are asking, okay, can this run Bull?

00:12:46 Speaker_00
How well can this run Bull? They drop in like, okay, yeah, can't really do da, da, da. So I think that's, to me, one of the most interesting things that's going on as far as the open source side and the community there for us.

00:12:59 Speaker_00
And we've got some stuff we're announcing on that end that's going to further bolster this. But already, there's some benchmarks being set up around this thing where

00:13:10 Speaker_00
The latest AI models have a way to actually get tested in a real product that's actually pretty sophisticated with use cases that are not just, hey, can it write hello world?

00:13:23 Speaker_01
Yeah. Yeah. Or this very well-specified sweet bench problem. I think it would be useful

00:13:31 Speaker_01
just to paint a picture of like some of your favorite use cases of things people have built that you feel like are real, because that is definitely, I mean, correct me if you feel differently, that is a new development this year that you can use any sort of code generation tool to get to a useful application in any sort of end-to-end way.

00:13:50 Speaker_00
100%, 100%, yeah. What's your favorite use case? What are people building that's cool? What's really cool to me is folks are actually able to build real-world products.

00:14:01 Speaker_00
And then so we've been online for just under two months now, and we've already had the first startups launch out of this thing. They've used Bolt to build their startup and are making money, like charging on Stripe or whatever have you.

00:14:12 Speaker_00
So a couple of examples just off the top of my head. One is from this gal in Thailand. She's a PM in a software banking company and her company is viralhooks.ai. And so she launched this project by herself on the side, just moonlighting it.

00:14:30 Speaker_00
And the product is actually pretty cool. So the general idea is when you make like a TikTok or something, I'm not a TikToker, but I've had aspirations. When you make a TikTok, you need to have like a viral hook to kind of get people to keep watching.

00:14:44 Speaker_00
right? And so she's actually trained up some models from OpenAI or whatever have you to actually help you write great viral hooks for your videos and kind of reverse engineer how their great creators have done that.

00:14:56 Speaker_00
So you can go check it out, viralhooks.ai. And so what was kind of mind-blowing and it's a beautiful site, like awesome product. And what was mind-blowing about this is a week before we launched Bolt,

00:15:08 Speaker_00
She went on to Upwork and listed this project, said, hey, I want to build this product, da-da-da, asked for quotes on the thing. She got a quote for $5,000 from, I think it was Devon, like Ukraine or something.

00:15:21 Speaker_00
Estimated timeline, two to three months, right? It seems like, considering the app I just described, kind of reasonable.

00:15:26 Speaker_01
Sounds cheap, honestly, for what it is.

00:15:28 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's like a pretty, like not a bad price and not an unrealistic timeframe. And the next week, Bolt came out. She signed up for our $50 plan, and in two weeks, she had built and launched the entire thing.

00:15:41 Speaker_00
The cost savings there means a 99% reduction in cost from $5,000 to $50,000. then a five times faster delivery, two weeks versus months. And the alpha is just insane. And it's not actually a one-off case.

00:15:55 Speaker_00
I think the first person we had chatted with that had done this end-to-end, another guy named Paul, he launched an entire CRM called Chilled CRM. He's just been on a tear making a ton of different types of tools.

00:16:07 Speaker_00
And this is like fully featured CRM, like calendar, contacts. He has a chatbot built into the thing, an AI chatbot, et cetera. Same deal. He's been running web dev agencies for I think like 20 years.

00:16:20 Speaker_00
And so to build the CRM he made, it was like a $30,000 quote. He did that on our $200 a month plan in one month. So again, same sort of cost savings, et cetera.

00:16:33 Speaker_00
So I think a lot of folks, especially in the web dev shops, et cetera, they're able to punch out incredible web applications faster than ever before for clients and are able to charge the same price.

00:16:47 Speaker_00
And so there's one tweet I saw online where one of these folks was like, this is the most incredible arbitrage opportunity in web development ever. And it's true. I mean, it's unbelievable.

00:17:00 Speaker_00
So I think what's really cool is just seeing people be able to take their ideas, launch them into reality for a fraction of the cost way faster than ever before.

00:17:10 Speaker_01
I have, for a number of reasons, been long-term skeptical of no-code tools in the traditional sense, right? Like a GUI-based editor for people to build simple applications or more complex applications in a closed ecosystem. I'm just like, ah, like,

00:17:35 Speaker_01
For anybody who's coming from engineering, that's really scary because I'm basically trapped in your platform without the ability to leverage the entire developer ecosystem, the open source world, like frameworks, anything we might need, because I don't know where the bounds of your system is.

00:17:53 Speaker_01
You clearly believe that there's some version, I mean, it is working, but there's some version of no code and development for non-developers that is going to happen. What changes? Like why should it work?

00:18:05 Speaker_00
Yeah, good point. I mean, and to be clear, like, you know, like six months ago, I shared the same viewpoint. And, you know, and maybe even like three months ago, I would have shared it. But there's some key things that have meaningfully changed.

00:18:17 Speaker_00
Just from a technical perspective, AI code gen models, there is a tipping point, specifically with SONET 3.5. There's a chasm that's been crossed here as far as AI models are

00:18:30 Speaker_00
have gone over the tip of the point of being good enough to really write real applications that are like production grid. And it's only going to get better from here. It's an inside baseball.

00:18:42 Speaker_00
Earlier this year, I think in February, we had the idea for Bolt. We tried to build it with some of the frontier models available at that time. wasn't possible to do.

00:18:53 Speaker_00
The models just did not spit back quality, accurate code that was constantly breaking, which ruins the experience. It doesn't work, right? So we put the project on the shelf.

00:19:02 Speaker_00
And then once we kind of got an early preview of the new SONNET stuff, we're like, wow, okay, this changes everything. And so I think, if you kind of think about these no-code site builder things that have existed to date,

00:19:16 Speaker_00
The only reason that these exist, that they had to make custom Wysiwyg GUIs and stuff is because how else can you get an end user that's not a tactical to like, turn their idea into code.

00:19:30 Speaker_00
The best middleman tool or interface to do that today was like drag and drop Wix style sort of stuff, which comes with all the problems you just mentioned. Lock-in. How do you expand this?

00:19:39 Speaker_00
Like, how do you, you know, it's like, you want to actually add real development to this at some point. How do you do that? Right. And so these things kind of be these, you know, end up as these walled

00:19:49 Speaker_00
ecosystems that can't really get mainlined into building real stuff over time. That changes now because of this tipping point in the AI models.

00:20:01 Speaker_00
Now the best interface, I mean, we have people coming to Bolt that, you know, like with the week we launched, we had a salesman, I think from Dallas, that he tweeted us and said, thank you so much for making this tool.

00:20:15 Speaker_00
You know, I use this to make a website for my daughter because she has like a medical condition. She has to find donors as she travels. And so I made this websites for her so she can send it ahead of her travels.

00:20:25 Speaker_00
And it was an incredibly touching use case. But my first thought was like, Should I tell this guy that Wix exists? There's other things that can do this." And then I realized Wix and Squarespace are really complicated to use.

00:20:43 Speaker_00
The only time I've used Squarespace was to build my wedding website back in 2021. At first, I wanted to do it myself. I'm a developer. And so I was like, honey, this is important to me. I need to build this thing.

00:20:52 Speaker_00
And I spent the Saturday on it and it wasn't done. And I'm running a startup at the same time. I have other things going on. So she finally just bought an account and said, make it in this thing. And it's pretty complicated.

00:21:04 Speaker_00
Whereas you compare that against Bull, it's a text box. You say, hi, I'm having my wedding on this date. Here's the details, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. Here's the RSVP, hit enter, boom, zero shot. There's a production website ready for you.

00:21:16 Speaker_00
And to a degree, my 71-year-old mom built and launched her first website ever two weeks ago. That's super cool.

00:21:22 Speaker_00
And so it just kind of goes to show it's way simpler to build a real... And the code that's being punched out is the same stuff that developers would work with. It's like Next.js or Remix or Astro or Vite or whatever have you.

00:21:40 Speaker_00
And what's actually happening right now in the community is

00:21:43 Speaker_00
As folks are trying to do more and more complicated stuff, they're raising their hand in our Discord or on Twitter and they're saying, hey, is there anyone who can come and help me debug this or build this thing out?

00:21:54 Speaker_00
And folks are like by the hour saying, hey, yeah, book a time with me and I'll come and help you develop this thing, et cetera. So it's kind of this really beautiful mix of the best of both worlds that's happening.

00:22:04 Speaker_00
So I think that to me is what's changed. What's changed is AI code gen has gotten good enough where you can go and take your ideas, put them into your fingertips, hit enter, get a great result.

00:22:15 Speaker_00
And for things where you need to bring in actual professional developers to tidy up or fix bugs or really expand, you know, more difficult capabilities, they can't because it's like any other code base that they come into. Right.

00:22:28 Speaker_00
So I think it's a very, very interesting and kind of mind blowing point in time because I don't think anyone saw this coming, you know, years ago.

00:22:39 Speaker_01
Yeah, I find that very inspiring because I think that there are plenty of entrepreneurs or even just individuals who are not one of the 25 million professional software developers in the world, but want to make software or have a web presence of some kind.

00:22:54 Speaker_01
And this is the first time they can do it in a way that to me makes sense, where I'm like, okay, if you succeed, or lots of actual existing professional engineers use Bolt too, but it is because it's not a dead end. Right.

00:23:08 Speaker_01
Because like you can go, you know, iteratively do development or even use the, the StackBlitz ecosystem of developers or whatever over time, which is, which I think is like step function different.

00:23:20 Speaker_00
Yeah. And for existing devs, I mean, it's like, this is just like every other developer tool or innovation, you know, the past 20, 30 years. This is just allowing them to focus on the actual high value work that they do.

00:23:30 Speaker_00
You know, it's just, it's, it's kind of not worth their time to punch out a UI, you know? And so that's what they're coming here to do, is just rapidly iterate on UIs and pull in data, et cetera.

00:23:42 Speaker_00
And some developers are just using this as a primary way to launch their startups or whatever. Or if they need to pull it into cursor, they do that and they can bring it back to bold. They can kind of use the best of both worlds.

00:23:55 Speaker_00
But certainly for non-technical people, this is huge. That was an interesting thing that we learned actually.

00:24:00 Speaker_00
There is and there was and is a large number of people that have been downloading Cursor that are not developers because it let them meaningfully dip their toes into clicking accept change, accept change, accept change from the AI.

00:24:16 Speaker_00
And when we first launched Bold, I mean, there's still comment on all these YouTube videos that are like, Cursor, Bold, it kills Cursor. And we're like, they're two different products. But to non-technical people, they aren't.

00:24:29 Speaker_00
It's actually like, this thing solves the problem of me not being able to code and et cetera.

00:24:33 Speaker_01
Maybe we can back up a little bit and just talk about like StackBlitz and the story as a company. Yeah. I think it's very funny when companies suddenly have overnight success, right?

00:24:45 Speaker_01
Because it's like, oh, well, they were, you know, Notion was working on developing their point of view and trying different ideas to refine it for five years, and then they made Notion.

00:24:56 Speaker_01
And you guys have been working on this for five plus years as well. Can you talk a little bit about the origin of StackBlitz and you and Pi and when you decided to do Bolt?

00:25:08 Speaker_00
Yeah, so I co-founded StackBlitz with one of my childhood best friends. His name's Albert Pye. He and I grew up in a suburb of Chicago together. And when we were 13, we had ideas. He and I were always very interested in computers. We were building PCs.

00:25:22 Speaker_00
And we wanted to learn how to write web applications. This is like the mid-2000s. So for our 13th birthdays, we asked for the O'Reilly books, because they're like 200 bucks a pop, instead of an Xbox. And we learned how to code together.

00:25:35 Speaker_00
And really, it was painful. I mean, at that time, there was not like Codecademy and all the stuff that's for free online. There wasn't really online communities around these things.

00:25:43 Speaker_00
But he and I really wanted to, we thought we had cool ideas for products or whatever, and we really wanted to build them and launch them. And that's really, I think, That's why we've been building stuff together for 15, 20 years. It's been about that.

00:25:59 Speaker_00
Coding was really a necessary part of how you bring these things to life. Anyways, fast forward, Albert and I have done a couple of different startups over the years.

00:26:09 Speaker_00
But back in 2016, 2017, we had this realization that browsers had gotten really powerful. We've been building web apps at that point for a decade and a half or so.

00:26:22 Speaker_00
And we had this realization that the browser had gotten really powerful and it had hit this new inflection point where you could actually basically like run an operating system in a browser tab that was like really fast, et cetera.

00:26:34 Speaker_00
And that was really cool. because that means that you could actually use the web to build the web.

00:26:41 Speaker_00
If you look at every other platform that's ever existed, that's been an important capability of every platform that's ever succeeded in a meaningful way. Windows can build Windows apps. Macs can build Mac apps.

00:26:52 Speaker_00
The web does not have a built-in way to do that. So there's kind of this nerd instinct of ours where we're like, this is important, this seems very valuable to solve, right? And so we kind of set out to go and do this.

00:27:04 Speaker_00
And part of this was that we had actually seen this story play out six, seven years earlier with Dylan Field and Figma. Their first pitch for Figma was not like a design tool. They didn't have a design tool.

00:27:17 Speaker_00
They had a demo, like a WebGL demo of a 3D ball dropping and the pitch was, Browsers have gotten powerful enough to do meaningful 3D graphics rendering.

00:27:29 Speaker_00
And because that is true, that means you can build a design tool that lives entirely in the browser. That was the pitch. And we saw that same sort of story playing out for web development.

00:27:40 Speaker_00
Browsers have gotten powerful enough to run entire development environments in a browser tab.

00:27:45 Speaker_00
That means you can build an entirely new product experience that's web native, you can share it instantly, you can be viral because there's no cost of spinning at VMs or something. Incredible experience, no latency.

00:27:56 Speaker_00
So that was really the origins of it. And we built in, that technology took us four years, I think, to build, end to end, it's called web containers.

00:28:05 Speaker_00
We hired a couple of people on, specifically one guy in particular, Dominic Gellum from Germany has been leading the engineering on that project and now our AI stuff.

00:28:13 Speaker_00
But really, I think we're doing like 3 million developers a month using StackBlitz today. And the original product was, if you imagine web development prior to the AI revolution, how do you do it? In an IDE.

00:28:26 Speaker_00
So that was like, it was basically VS Code in a browser, powered by our web container technology, and became pretty popular in the open source world, and then for enterprise reuse cases.

00:28:37 Speaker_01
Yeah, I remember when we first met, I was lucky enough to also be an early investor in Figma and, you know, just believe in the power of the web and see the gap that you described without knowing what the actual valuable product was.

00:28:54 Speaker_01
I think, you know, this era is funny because there's been It's sort of longstanding wisdom that nobody ever makes money on anything that looks like an IDE. Doesn't feel exactly true anymore.

00:29:07 Speaker_01
But I still remember, like, my first impression of you was, like, we met and I was like, oh, this guy seems like a cracked engineer. And then he really seems to care about the web.

00:29:17 Speaker_01
And then also, like, there was like real, even the first company was like a, is some sort of like JavaScript education thing, right? Like a, you know, Codecademy like precursor thing. I was like, okay, he's like committed.

00:29:29 Speaker_01
He like has the authentic understanding of community having grown up on the web himself. But the weirdest thing I remember was I was like, I Googled Eric

00:29:40 Speaker_01
and the previous company name and whatever, and you were living in an AOL building because it had free food and showers. I was like, okay, this person is insane, but at least it is high beta bet.

00:29:55 Speaker_00
Yeah, I was 19, so I'm 33 now, so it's been a minute.

00:30:00 Speaker_01
Do you have a house? Do you have an apartment now?

00:30:02 Speaker_00
I have a place to live. I've got a dog and a daughter and a wife, so living out of an office building would be tough, I think, with this whole crew. But yeah, I was 19 when I came out to Silicon Valley. I came out here with literally like zero dollars.

00:30:17 Speaker_00
I was part of this incubator called Imagine K-12 that ended up being picked up into Y Combinator itself.

00:30:24 Speaker_00
And they had access cards to get into AOL because at that time, AOL was trying to reinvent themselves and get startups into the building, et cetera.

00:30:31 Speaker_00
I think they shut that down after the press story about me came out, but sorry about that, everyone who was going to AOL. Yeah, I was bootstrapping this K-12 educational company and I had run out of money. And so I was sleeping on couches.

00:30:48 Speaker_00
I was going to the AOL gym every morning, taking a shower, literally eating kind of the leftovers of when teams would order food in and put it in the fridge and they were done with it and they would get thrown out, I would eat it.

00:30:58 Speaker_00
There's a quote from me in the article at the time, pretty sure it was a dollar a day. I think that's why I got my burn rate. which was pretty wild. But yeah, that's kind of my origins in Silicon Valley.

00:31:12 Speaker_01
Well, it's nice to be working on a cash generating business now, right? Yeah, 100%. But you're still nuts. I remember we were talking maybe six months ago, maybe seven months ago. And honestly, the company was in a bit of a tough place, right?

00:31:36 Speaker_01
You weren't about to run out of cash anytime soon, but it was unclear what the growth-oriented revenue-generating product would be. And you're running a bunch of experiments. I remember you also being like, oh, yeah.

00:31:50 Speaker_01
You have to tell me what the original reason to do this was, but going from that to, we're going to launch this new product. I'm going to run a marathon. I'm not a runner. I guess I'll do an Ironman too. Like, what are you thinking, man?

00:32:05 Speaker_00
It's a good question. A lot's changed in the past seven months.

00:32:08 Speaker_01
But yeah, I mean, I think- Oh, you had a newborn? Sorry, I forgot that.

00:32:11 Speaker_00
Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot has changed. Yeah, and so I think at the beginning of this year, I knew that I was going to have a daughter in April. And anyone that's been a parent will tell you that it's stressful, especially the first months of life there.

00:32:27 Speaker_00
And at the same time, on the business side, I mean, I think us and everyone else in our space, was having a tough time when we were no exception. And we were kind of looking at the future and kind of looking, where do we fit in here?

00:32:43 Speaker_00
Things are changing really quickly. And a handful of the other folks in the space have either gotten acquired or shutting down or whatever have you.

00:32:52 Speaker_00
And some have actually kind of gone and leaned into the AI stuff in a similar way to us, a smaller number. There's kind of storms on the horizon.

00:33:03 Speaker_00
And there's this quote, I think it comes from the military, but fate whispers to the warrior, you can't weather this storm. And the warrior whispers back, I am the storm.

00:33:16 Speaker_00
And so it's just kind of like... And that'd be my general advice to anyone is like, if the universe is going to try and crush you, just make it try harder.

00:33:24 Speaker_00
And so I think back right after my daughter was born, one day I woke up and I was like, I'm going to do an Ironman this year, like a full Ironman. I don't know why, that was just kind of thought hit my head.

00:33:36 Speaker_00
And yeah, so I think it was like six months from then was when the full was going to be, which is in October, just like a month ago.

00:33:42 Speaker_00
And so to do that, two weeks after that, I never ran a marathon before, I'd never done all the things that are in an Ironman. two and a half mile swim, 110, 112 mile bike, and then a full 26.2 mile marathon. I'd never done any of that.

00:33:57 Speaker_00
And so a couple of weeks after I had the idea for the Ironman, I just went and did a marathon with my brother-in-law. And then it was just throughout the summer, I was just training. I ended up getting coached.

00:34:08 Speaker_00
He had formerly been on the US Olympic team for this stuff. And so I think it was like two months from when I was going to go and do the Ironman, he was like, This is a bad idea. You shouldn't do this. He was pretty concerned about it.

00:34:23 Speaker_00
But he had some really great points on where I needed to improve, et cetera. And so in October, I did it. I did the whole thing. And I think I was in the top 25% of all the people that finished. And that was pretty wild.

00:34:40 Speaker_00
But yeah, that's kind of how I approach problems in my life. You make them harder.

00:34:45 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's just you kind of bring full intensity, especially when if there's things that are mentally stressful, having something like some physical challenge is an incredible way to balance out.

00:34:56 Speaker_00
intensity you bring to it, you can kind of feed off of it from both sides. When I was running the Ironman, it was like two weeks after Bullhead came online and we were scaling up at a crazy rate. So that was nuts, kind of what was going on then.

00:35:10 Speaker_00
But I think it kind of kept me sane during that time. And I think it was important as far as getting this thing online. That's how my brain works at least.

00:35:18 Speaker_01
In terms of inspiring others that may not yet be prepared to commit to the Ironman with the newborn and the product launch, what do you, what do you predict in terms of like what we can imagine for developers or for code gen, maybe just for the next like six, 12 months?

00:35:32 Speaker_01
Because I think past that in AI is really tough.

00:35:35 Speaker_00
The one thing that I'm very convinced of is that to date, a lot of the AI code gen stuff has been like tab completion, sort of like line completion stuff. Things like cursor taking a little bit further, agentic workflows are here.

00:35:49 Speaker_00
And I think Bolt has been one of the most visible ones that's really, really worked well. I think we're going to see a lot more of folks, there's like this kind of this term being thrown around of like software composer.

00:36:02 Speaker_00
I think engineers are going to more and more just be instructing these things at a higher level than just, hey, tab, complete this thing. It's like, hey, go and do X, Y, Z and send it off. So I think that's going to be a major one.

00:36:17 Speaker_00
And I think the other thing too, and this is a big part of the reason that we made the bet on Bolt was that I've got a lot of conviction that AI models are going to get better at code gen specifically. And it kind of makes sense.

00:36:30 Speaker_00
We kind of look at the other things that folks are trying to use AI for, or are using successfully, I should say.

00:36:38 Speaker_00
One of the hard things about training these models is obviously like, you need to get more data to train it and to improve it over time, but it has to be accurate. And it's hard to do that for things that are not easy to be deterministic about.

00:36:53 Speaker_00
When it comes to software, it is. It's either this thing, this code you wrote, executed without errors or it didn't. This thing actually created a landing page, you can capture an image and analyze, et cetera.

00:37:06 Speaker_00
And so I think when you look at what the frontier AI labs are doing, they're doing the best job of this stuff.

00:37:11 Speaker_00
Their mission is to just go and create every permutation of every application you could ever build, put it into the training data and make these models incredible. That strikes me as obviously a very long tail goal there, but I mean,

00:37:25 Speaker_00
just for what we have now, it's unbelievable what can be done and it's only going to keep getting better.

00:37:30 Speaker_00
So I think that's the main thing is, you know, for, I think folks have been kind of concerned about, are we hitting kind of limits of this stuff, et cetera. And no, I don't, I don't think so.

00:37:40 Speaker_00
In the specific realm of CodeGen, I think we're going to see, I think we're going to see a lot of improvements pretty rapidly, which is what we've been seeing over the past year.

00:37:49 Speaker_01
Okay, awesome. I think that's a great note to end on. Thanks, Eric, for doing this.

00:37:55 Speaker_00
Thank you for having me. It's been a blast.

00:37:58 Speaker_01
Find us on Twitter at NoPriorsPod. Subscribe to our YouTube channel if you want to see our faces. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. That way you get a new episode every week.

00:38:10 Speaker_01
And sign up for emails or find transcripts for every episode at no-priors.com.