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Eric Simons

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2025-03-13
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2025-03-13
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  1. “Yeah, totally. I mean, yeah. So bolt.news, the website over on Twitter, I'm Eric Simons 40 on Twitter. And I think our Twitter account is bolt.new, not with a period. It's like B-O-L-T-N-E-W. And yeah, I'm very curious to hear what folks think. I mean, this is, again, like we are learning so much from the people that are coming and trying this thing out and giving their feedback. you know, within the first week of it going online, we were not the experts on how to use the tool anymore. And it's been that way ever since. And so I love hearing from folks on what they want to see next and how this is helping them and where they run into problems. Where we need to go and fix things. So my email address is Eric at stackbloods.com. That's Eric with C. So I'd love to hear anyone from anyone, whether it's a DM on Twitter or an email.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “It's always good to just have the perspective of you should start companies to keep the mindset that you're doing it to have fun, right? And so. Stoked to see where this goes one way or the other. It's going to be interesting.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “This is back when McDonald's had the dollar menu. Literally. So I was like, you know, I would, you know, occasionally go and get a cheeseburger or whatever. And yeah, it was ultimate scrappiness, you know.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “And then I think I hit up one of the other entrepreneurs that was in the program. I was like, Do you have a couch? I think I kind of need it at this point. Yeah, the Prescott Windevan is this like, you know, worldwide story. I lived on a dollar a day. That was the crazy thing. My burn rate was a dollar a day at that time. When did you use that?”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “The security guards, you know, they weren't 12 hour shifts. And so the guys that when I was there at night, I was coding all day, every day basically. So the guys at Nitrus were like, dang, this guy works really hard, you know. And then in the morning, they'd be like, wow, this guy is working really hard, right? So I became friends with some of them. And then eventually, I think they, you know, there were also a bunch of Stanford students that I think they put bunks in one of the, it was just like starting out controls. I think they started cracking down. Then one morning at like four in the morning, guard came in and threw me out. And I from Chicago. I don't know anyone at that point. I'm like, I know no one in the Bay Area. So I went to a Starbucks. Was out open. I just like I slept on the table outside of the”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And so I was there. And we ended up running out of money like 20, 20 grams and go very far in the valley. So like three or four months in, we were like, oh, God, we're, you know, what do we do? And I was going to the AOL office a couple of multiple times a week because we had to access cars to get into to get to the investor's offices. And I realized I was like, you know, like they have like couches here. And they have food. Like there's ramen that you can microwave. There's a gym where there's like a shower and even you can do laundry. And so I was like, you know, I don't know. I mean, maybe I'll figure this out. I'll just live out of here. And so that's what I ended up doing for I think like four or five months. I was like living out of this headquarters over on PageMill and Al Camino in Palo Alto. And then I got away with it for a while just because the guards, you know.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But yeah, for a while, I was like, I have to do something more notable than living in AOL. This can't be what I'm like known for, right? Now people are like, oh, like, wait, you're the stackless guy and you're the earwell guy. So yeah, so yeah, when I first came out to Silicon Valley, you know, we got into a, I was building a K-12 education startup at the time. And this is back during the days where Y Combinator, they only give you like 20 grand. And so there was this offshoot of Y Comedy are called Imagine K-12. It was Jeff Ralston, who I think he was CEO of YC a couple of years back. And Magic K-12 merged into Y Combinator a couple years after Rob went through it. But they had an office space at AOL. Like at the time, AOL was trying to like reinvigorate the company. And, okay, we should get like young startup blood in here. So let's rent out office space to, you know, to teenagers, basically.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, yeah, I know. That was like, you know, the thing I was like most known for that happened like 2012 and I was like 19 years old. So it's been a very long time. I think I'm like 33 now or something. But the statute of limitations.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “And that gives you the taste of like, okay, cool. So if I really take the time to think this through and make a PRD and then kind of put that in piece by piece into this thing, this guy's the limit, you know?”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, and then, and you know what I mean? And then you can hit deploy. And if you don't have a dot com yet, now you can't, right? Like, I mean, now you have a real personal server. It's like, I think there's kind of a moment around that where it's like, okay, wow, like this, you know, it zero shot, zero shot, 99.99% of the time, like you're getting a beautiful personal website that you didn't have before that would have taken you an hour on Wix, if not.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, totally, right? Especially if you have a clear vision of what you're trying to build, right? It's something that reasonably sophisticated. And what I recommend everyone to do whenever they, if it's your first time trying bowl and you're like, what should I have do? And I don't have an idea. Tell it to build you a personal website. Like there's something like magic. Like you take your LinkedIn, copy and paste your LinkedIn bio and work experience, just like select text, copy, paste it. I eat a website. My name is So-and-so. Here's my LinkedIn history. My favorite color is blue and I like dogs.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I would say talk to this thing like you do a linear ticket or a G or a ticket. That would be my advice and talk to this like you would like you're talking to one of the developers on your team, right? And what that means is be specific on things that matter, right? And on things where also you can let it be creative, you know, you can go to and just say, hey, make it prettier, you know, and it'll take it does a good job. Like it actually does a really good job. And you like give it just vibes, you know. And so I think for like PMs, it's like you have the skill set. You know how to do this. This is just think of this as your coworker, your developer co-worker, you know.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, good question. Yeah, we definitely use cursor. Folks use cursor a lot. We use Bolt a lot for the product development process a ton. We're using it. And when we're doing basically the flow that describes, we're like things that need to be pixel perfect. We're going to Figma for. And then often we're taking that and we're pulling that into Bolt because we've got access to the integration today. So pulling that into bolt and we're saying, hey, go add these things or whatever. Or just saying, hey, here's a screenshot of our URI. Go to unit to do dot dot dot. Other AI tools that the developers are using, I think those are like the primary ones. I mean, I think we've got a subscription to Claude and like ChatGPT and things like that. But, you know, I think for development, it's like cursors like the main thing.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “This, I can just go and convert that thing out of the box, and then you want me to add a page to it and then do this thing. Got it. I'm going to go do that. Oh, here's the URL where you can open it up and keep prompting. Yeah, I mean, so it's like having a developer and some really kind of kick this thing out and you're just like, go make this thing real quick. So it's like those two things, I think, you start to think about how are companies going to change how they're currently doing product development. Even just like, hey, we need to spin up a marketing side. Here's the thing. We're like, can you do that both? Yep. Let me go do that. You know what I mean? And that's why I'm kind of excited about those two in particular because I think they're going to be, I think it's going to be well received and folks can be stumped about it and hope, you know, not the work.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yep, that's all you got to do. And in bowl, we're going to also have a little figma icon in the chat. So, like, if you go to bowl, itself, you can like click in and then paste the URL or whatever. But yeah, it's like just, but it's like that. It's like from Figma to full stack app in a click, literally, you know, that's crazy. So that one's pretty cool. And then kind of the other one that we're working on is like an integration with Slack because often, you know, when you're talking about figmas, you know, like Figma links or whatever at a company, you're in Slack or whatever. And so you're like having conversations about, hey, you know, we should run out a page to this that does. And so we're actually creating a bolt slack bot that's whose job is to basically act like a developer on your team. And so you can be like in a thread, you can be like, hey, I think we should have a homepage. Like, yeah, okay, like at bolt, like you like whip this up real quick and it'll like go and just kind of suck down the entire conversation history so far in your slack on that thread or whatever. It'll be like, okay, cool. So you kind of want me to like take this figma URL, which I can convert automatically thanks to the future I just mentioned right before.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “It's going to be nuts. Yeah, I mean, it's like it's really fun to use because, you know, like when you're, you know, as you're a developer, designer or whatever. Going and taking that and turning it into an actual code of app. And the thing is, once it's built, you can just keep prompting from there. You're like, yeah, we'll add another page here, do this. So it's like, you can have things that we want pixel perfect design. You can have it. It'll translate one to one. And it's splitting out the assets. Like Anima's been doing this since 2017, like, you know, Figma to code. They've got the best agent in the world. They're the number one Figma plugin, you know, or whatever. And so in both, it's just going to just work. Like, it's just deeply integrated.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “In your use case. So the features that we're going to be shipping, I'm pretty stoked about this one. So we've been working on this for a while and we've partnered up with a company called Anima to do this. But basically, so on any Figma URL, when you're looking at like a, you know, a design that you've made, if you just put bolt.new in front of that URL and hit enter, it's going to suck that design into bolt and turn it into a full stack app or mobile app just.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “This is I found actually being a leaky faucet on talking on podcasts and stuff is my engineer is like how could you tell them like you shut your ship it faster now like you gotta make it real right No, no, yeah, but I think for us, it's like, again, we've seen a lot of PMs, designers, entrepreneurs, et cetera using Bolt. And so we're really looking at how to better kind of better fit in with the tools that Folks are using to do those things today. Bolt's not going to like replace them or something, right? And for if you're working at a company, how do you integrate this stuff with your existing business and your existing product and code base? Because that's the question we often get from people is how do I open my, you know, like we're talking to, you know, one of the fan.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I think that's the best way to put it. It's the best way to put it. It's exactly that. And so it's very interesting to just”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “RD and seeing the results of it and going, what and then digging in, doing another thing, then going, what again? And then it just keeps happening because there's no charted course for this, you know?”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Well, and then the impacts of bulwarks like we have people that are not technical using this. How are they using it? Why are they doing this? And then just kind of all the stuff we've talked about on this podcast has been the result of, you know, nine months of just.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “And from there, it's just we've been piecing together all this other stuff. And so it's been a kind of like the thrill of like a murder mystery of like what is going on here, you know? Oh, really? Yeah, you know, piecing together.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I agree. Yeah, it's been kind of again like it's not there was no blog post that laid all this out for us. It's just been kind of this like.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Why we went and raised money for bold. It's like this seems like an extremely clear shot. There's not this like you can kind of separate the hype of what people say and blah blah blah when you break it down technically this makes sense. It makes sense what's going to happen here. And so and for us, we're like, we are just so happen to be well positioned to like go and enable people to like kind of ride this wave of the innovation that is here in Ollums and is going to just keep coming and therefore enable more people to build even crazier amazing software, right? So that's kind of that's that's our worldview at least of kind of what's going on here at like the mackerel.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Applications. I am extremely bullish, right? I mean, it makes technical sense why of anything LMs are going to get insanely better at writing code than probably most other types of applications for LMs simply because it's something that can be extremely deterministic and permutated thousands and thousands and thousands of times per second. And so I think the broader trend here is, and Sana has woken everyone up, like Google and Open AI, all the, everyone is now gunning for coding because how big is the market opportunity to rewrite the software world order? It's trillions of dollars or something, right? Like the world runs on software. So I think that just kind of in a macro, kind of the highest macro view.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “The judge's ruling is dependent kind of on society's view of things at the time, right? Political stuff, the jury, there's a ton of things that it's not deterministic. And so you can't really create a lot of training data that's going to be super reliable, right? And produce really good results. And you can't just make up cases and say theoretically the judge would say this. Yeah, I mean, it's like, it just doesn't work. Software is deterministic when you write code and you hit run, it either runs or it doesn't. And that is the key insight Anthropic really had. They just went deep. And this is what they're doing is just reinforcing the learning on basically permutating every type of app you could ever build and just spinning up tens of thousands of course or whatever to do that just building tons of training down and doing reinforcement learning and making their LMs the best in the world at building beautiful relationship.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Did not realize that. It is. And in retrospect, you know, for the, you know, I'd mentioned we'd never done an AI product in StackBlitz. And, you know, it's like, it's tempting because it's like when, you know, kind of when ChatGPT went online, everyone started kind of adding AI to their products. We were just like, we just didn't see like a clear place for like a really added value, right? I was not super bullish on a lot of people like, hey, AGI is going to be here 2023. There's all this stuff that was being said. I was like, I just don't know if I necessarily buy how fast people say it's going to move. And to a certain degree, like that was the correct view. What I didn't really think about though is like if AI, if LLMs are going to get better at a specific vertical kind of like what you're going to be the things that it would be. And if you look at like law, for example, you want to make the best outline for looking at case law. The problem with that stuff is it's not deterministic.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yeah, yeah, that's what's wild. I think Sonic was really the first model that flipped the equation because that was really us and old cursor and all these other things, the rapid growth started the second Sonnet went online, right? Like we actually tried building both almost exactly a year ago with kind of the frontier models at the time. Spent like a week or two building it. It just didn't work. Like the output, the code output was not reliable enough. It would constantly just, it would be a broken app or it would look ugly or whatever. And then we got a steep peek at the sauna stuff in May and we were like, oh, okay. Like we should take that project back off the shelf and green line it because this might be it. And, you know, lo and behold, that's exactly what has happened, you know. But yeah, that's the big deal. That is kind of under the hood. Like, this is what's going on here is a very critical threshold has been passed with LLM's ability to write production grade code.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Debugging is challenging and they're in fun, you know, like going and work on intellectually stimulating tasks and like all this stuff that's just copy pasta over and over, all this error happens, just like let the AI do all that crap, right? Like, you know.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “These are people that were like certifying. And so in Bolt in the coming weeks or whatever, there's going to be a button where you can just say, hey, connect me with a certified expert. And you can chat with them live and they'll help you get unstuck and you pay, I don't know, 50 bucks an hour or whatever it is, right? And then you get unjammed in and you keep prompting, you know. And again, it's like I just think this stuff is, it just all seems like gravy to me. engineers get to focus on like difficult challenges, not like cookie cutter or let's make another crud app stuff you know like they they get to like”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Oh, totally. Yeah, I mean, so we actually two weeks ago, I think, we announced this program called Bolt Builders. And it's basically the genius bar at the Apple store, where as folks are building on bolt that are not developers, they will. They'll run into some nooker cranny of where the AI just cannot figure it out or whatever. I think it's just going to continue to be the case for time to come. That's our position. And that's why we spun up this program. And these are humans.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “I don't know if they want to, right? It's like, I think in 18, it's a huge ask. I mean, it's a huge ass, and not even at 18. It's like at 17 because you'd feel like you could go apply for colleges. It's just such a huge. Like a six figure debt commitment to someone who's making zero dollars or negative dollars and that young, it just, unless you really have conviction, it costs nothing to go and explore and learn for free online.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “There is a prevailing thought, you know, societally, but going to college in the early 2010s or late 2000s, like you're going to get a job on the other side that's going to be high paying. And that just has not been the case for a lot of people. And I think that's just going to continue to be the case, right? And so, but they get not to deter people from doing it, but it's like you have to go into it being like, I for sure, this is what I want and I want to go and be the best and, you know, that I can possibly be at this thing. You know what I mean?”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Is my co founder now. We didn't go to college. And my co founder dropped out of college after a semester or something. But I didn't go because I was like, I just, you know, we're coding. Like we're kind of, you know, we're doing contracting at the time, making money. And it was like, you know, there's like a lot of, you know, I would have been, you know, been like 100 grand of debt by the end of the thing just for like four years in-state tuition at U of I 120 grand I think at that time and it's like And lo and behold, I mean, there's a huge issue with this where people are, you know, kind of”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Do we need to know anything? Yeah, it's like if we're at that point, it's kind of, I don't know. I'm not sure. But I think from what at least I feel like seems like the next at least five years of what we're looking at, it's like, I think people are still going to be places to specialize and become and, you know, really go deep. But I think you want to go into it with the idea not like, I'm going to go and learn computer science because I'm going to get a job for sure out of it. I just think that's like generally, you know, not a good.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “If that had been a Roba, you know, like the whole reason we got into it is we had ideas for products and businesses that we wanted to build. And coding was just like a necessary requirement in order to do that. So, you know, I think that, and that said, it's like, I think people need to follow their intrinsic interests. The folks are really interested in, you know, really getting the nitty gritty of how computers work and program religious work and compilers or whatever. Like, go for it. Like, I think that's still going to be relevant. You know, like it's, I don't know if we're going to really have, hey, we'll see. But, you know, to the degree that there's an AGI where it's like, we don't have to think about anything ever again.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Exactly, right? And but it doesn't have to be like, because I think back, you know, if Bold existed, like Albert and I say this to each other all the time, like, you know, since the get-go stack, we've been building the thing that we wish we had when we were 13. And hack for everything we built since then. And especially with Bowl. I mean, it's like, I don't know if I would have gone as deep as I did on, you know, learning how to code and being an engineer.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Understanding how to leverage these AI tools is key. I wouldn't necessarily, I think maybe getting a basic understanding of how programming works, you know, et cetera, right”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “There's going to be the leverage of the front engineer is going to have insane. It's only to get more so. And so I could see there just being fewer front engineers attached to seeing more product and design folks with one or two engineers or something and really having a larger match of like kind of pods like that. Something like that strikes me as probably how this is going to start trending towards.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Know user interface type work, I would imagine, except for the most complicated of those things. And you're going to see designers and PMs really, really leading the charge and being responsible for crafting those experiences and perhaps having a developer attached to like be reviewing the code and making sure the extra, the guiding code that they're running, reviewing those pull requests and et cetera. And I think maybe even the engineers are like you pointed out, having engineering skills is not going to hurt you. It's going to make you way more effective, right? So I think that I do think there's going to be, you know,”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Good question. And I bet you there's going to be, you know, there's going to be like some gardener analysis someday a year from now or whatever that's like, here's like how the best some some term is applied to how the best companies are organizing. But I mean, yeah, I mean, I think that we're going to, you know, I think that you're going to see developers probably being pulled off of a lot of the, and generally speaking, pulled off of a lot of.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Absolutely. And to me, it's like the most exciting mix. I think PM's designers and entrepreneurs that are non-technical. That's the most exciting thing to move just because it's a brand new market that's being unlocked here. Like for the first time ever, these folks can directly code and build the product themselves. Like their vision directly into the software itself, that's going to change everything. That is changing everything.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “They have to go and harangue the developer so I get things to be how they really ought to be like to the smallest levels. And now how this is going to work. If you fast forward one, two, five years, whatever, like PMs are going to be writing quote, quote unquote, instead of just writing a JIRA ticket and waiting for a developer to do it. The developers are going to be able to work on intellectually challenging tasks that LLMs are not well suited for, right? And still being augmented by LLMs to do it. But PMs are going to be able to go in and just make the changes themselves. And just what blew my mind is that is not priced into any of these companies out there. And it's not reflected in the org charts of all the software companies in the world right now. That is going to completely change the winners at least. The org charts are going to completely change and how they approach building products and shipping products.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Zero question. I mean, that was like, and as Bull was growing and like, we were like, because we were a developer prog before this. And so we expected the audience to be 100% developers that were using this. And we just kept seeing more and more and more people that were not developers using it to the point where it's like 70, 67% of our users are not developers, right? At this point, and when I started talking to these folks, at first I was just like weird or whatever. It was like, well, what's going on here? But then it just kind of clicked is like, oh, well, this is going to change everything. The entire software world order is going to get rewritten here because the way that companies are organized to build software today totally going to change, right? Like the idea that, again, like PMs are the people that really understand to the pixel level, like what matters into making a great product experience. And often they're having, listen, I'm a developer.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Because these are people that understand enough about how the technology works typically. And their job is to direct developers on how to go and improve the product and go and look into how to actually spec this thing out in a way that's executable without lossiness in the communication. And when you think about, okay, how would you best interact with an AI developer agent? It's basically that. You really want to be good at defining scope and helping it go and debug various things or whatever have you. And so there's a huge overlap of the skill set of just like being a rock star PM and being really good at using, frankly, any of these text two apps or gen tools.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “I would say that's probably the mean one, you know, because I think if you have a large existing code base, you're going to need something like cursor and you're going to need to be a developer meaningfully to be editing that stuff. You know, I think outside of that, there's a, just like using any other productivity tool, like Photoshop or Figma or like a DSLR or whatever, there's some level of kind of education.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “So, yeah, we can actually open up repos in bold. So you can go and use Bult on your code base. It kind of depends on your setup, right? Like we, you know, and we do have companies, again, that like have marketing sites of using Son or like, you know, their admin panel or whatever. And I think it's going to be a use case that we see a lot more people orienting towards. These LLMs are not great, depending on how big your application is, though. These things are not quite there where if you have something that's, you know, a thousand files or something or more where you're going to be able to have a really reliable, super reliable experience per se, right? Within a year, we've chatted a year from now. I suspect the answer is going to be different. But so it kind of depends on the size of the app to scale of the app. And if it's too big, you're looking at the prototyping, like just pure acceleration rate of prototype.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “What you're able to do with this thing, and so I think on the flip side, you know, a lot of the existing companies, there are very legitimate use cases where things are greenfield spun up. Good examples like public websites, like marketing pages, landing pages, whatever, have you. Folks are adopting Bolt to just power those instead of using Webflow, for example, because it's like this is simpler to use than Webflow and it integrates with the existing design system of the company and et cetera, right? And the marketers can update without knowing how to code, you know, whatever. But then for product development teams, this is most commonly for, again, existing software businesses. They're using this to just accelerate the product development process. And in a way where it's not just like a greenfield wholesale here, we're building the entire thing in bolt or whatever, right?”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And there's many such cases of this, right? If you're looking at greenfield projects, 100%, like there's today with this current state of frontier models, you can absolutely build production grade software, right? You're not going to get a zero shot. But you're going to spend a couple days, weeks, whatever. But the cost reduction there, 30 grand versus $300. I mean, 99% cheaper, six months versus three weeks. I mean, it's like order of magnitude sort of fashion delivery on the thing. And those numbers have helped for the people that we talk to that are building these full stacks. They get a quote for five grand. They have it within 50 bucks, you know. It's just nuts.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Yeah, I mean, especially when you're starting greenfield stuff, you can use bolt to build on the Salesforce as an example, right? One of the first people that signed up for Bolt was this guy named Paul, and he's an entrepreneur and doesn't know how to code, built a CRM in three weeks that has AI built into it and stripe for billing, et cetera. He had gotten a quote from an agency for this. It was going to be 30 grand and take six months. He had it done in three weeks and at least meant like 300 bucks on both for the thing. And so it's like, this is like, and he's making money off of this. Like this is his startup. Right. Okay.”

    2025-03-13 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source