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)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/a1b8596d3ec68a10

The rate you're growing is absurd. You're from this cohort of companies that are just growing at rates that we've never seen in the history of startups. The company was on the verge of going under when we launched Bolt. And what ended up happening is in the first two months, we we went from zero to twenty million of ARR, and we've already crossed thirty million of ARR with the current rate we're on. Our forecast for the year is we
We want to get to a hundred million a mirror. This is just uh nonstop wild shit. How is this possible? What has allowed you to
Grow this much this fast with such a small team. Most importantly, it's and the people. It's rare to find startups where you have kind of the core group of five, six, seven people that have been there for five years plus.
What people tell you not to do. I think that's the hard thing about being an entrepreneur. There are periods of time where you have to make judgment calls that are not gonna be the consensus view. You gotta have like confidence in your convictions on how to best play the hand. A lot of people see these stats and they sometimes don't see that. There was also years and years of of work before that. It was kind of like you have both this overnight success seven years in the making.
Тима гест і ексим. Ерик із ко фотор и сіот.
Which makes a product called Bolt.
Which is currently neck and neck with cursor for being the fastest growing product in history.
They're currently the number one most popular web AI code app.
with over three million registered users. Two months after launching last October, they hit twenty million ARR.
At the time of this recording, they're approaching forty million ARR.
The story of Bolt is wild. They actually started the company seven years ago and were about to run out of money and shut down.
But they realized the tech that they've been building for the past seven years called web container.
was perfectly suited for building AI products in the browser, so they launched the product with a tweet, and, as Eric describes it,
It was an overnight success, seven years in the making.
If you'd like to better understand the cutting edge of AI coding apps and where things are going with AI and product building,
This episode is a must listen.
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Notion, linear, granola, and superhuman. Check it out at lenny's newsletter.com. With that, I bring you Eric Simons.
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Eric, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
Thank you for having me. Yeah, I'm stoked to be here.
For folks that are not super familiar with Bolt, what is Bolt?
It's really simple. You go there, there's a text box and you tell it uh what you want to build.
whether it's a web or a mobile app. And so it's you know kind of one of these uh you know
Text to app.
uh building tools have become pretty popular
For the past few months here.
And uh it's not just like building yeah, like a static site or something like that, but you can actually build
Full stack.
real software with databases and
Hosting and et cetera.
Yeah, just from prompting.
And yeah, in in in a ridiculously short period of time.
Hours and hours or days.
putting this together and you can get results like a minute.
Let's just share some numbers uh about the scale of what you're building. It's
The rate you're growing is absurd. You're kind of in this cohort of companies that are just growing at rates that have never seen we've that we've never seen in the history of startups, and you guys are the
Edge of that.
Share some numbers about how things went when you launched and where they're at today.
Yeah, yeah. I mean when we launch, I mean we I mean the the the company was on the verge of going under when we when we launched both like you know our company stock blitz.
We've been around for seven years building web based uh you know development environment stuff.
And um and so when we launched this, we were like, this would be amazing if this added like a hundred K of ARR over the next couple of months, you know.
Um and what ended up happening is uh
Yeah, in the first two months we you went from zero to twenty million of ARR.
And I think we're on like month four or four and a half or something like that at this point.
And we've uh already crossed thirty million of ARR and we're on the verge of crossing forty like by the time this comes out.
Um it
My peers that were to be at forty million ARR.
So it it's just like
Peace.
The scale of the growth of the revenue has been
Nuts. I mean and and of course, like kind of that correlates with like insane user growth as well. Like we got a you know, three million
uh registered users, you know, just in the past few months here.
And uh you know monthly active users is you know, uh around a million, I think, at this point per month.
So it's it's just I mean I've
I've never seen I've been doing startups for like fifteen years.
I've never seen anything like this.
Um yeah, everyone I talk to, you know, uh our investors or you know, et cetera.
I
There's there's not a lot of
Corollaries.
To kinda what's going on here, you know.
Um
And
It's kind of extraordinary'cause I mean, like we you know, uh our company wasn't doing AI stuff uh the six months ago.
We had no AI products.
And
Just out of nowhere we uh
You know.
From almost death of the company to being, you know, the number one buy traffic revenue, et cetera, like you know, AI code gen app.
uh the web based in in the world. Like it's
think the only other like startup ahead of us is you know from for Kojun just in general would be like Cursor.
The option arriving at this point.
And so it was it's yeah, it's been it's been a heck of a ride.
Yeah, and and our team's like fifteen, twenty people, you know, so it's just
dealing with uh, you know, we're gonna be closing on like a hundred thousand customers and we got our support team's like three people. You know, and we're so we're trying to scale
as fast as we can. So anyways, it's just kind of mind boggling just the the scale of the
the the demand and and uh
Uh
And and and
How we've had uh you know
turn things around to match the demand as best as we can, you know.
Mind boggling is an e excellent way to describe what you just shared.
A million monthly active users.
Yeah at forty million.
Annual recurring revenue.
Five months into the business. That right? Yeah, we' w with w single digit week. Yeah, single digit weeks, right, is like that's that's the current track rate that we're seeing for the thing. Yeah.
I think have you guys the fastest growing startup in history?
I I I mean it I think it depends on probably where you peg the number right. Yeah, we're
Yeah, we're here to just like build like great products, right? And and just um
You know, uh push the limits like what's possible with the the technology.
Um
And um
You know, and so and I think that that yeah, we do our jobs well, you know, it's the kind of crazy things can happen, but I mean the current
The current track rate we have uh it's
We're already we're gonna be exceeding kind of the the forecast for T one. Um
with the current rate we're on.
And you know our forecast for the year is we want to get to a hundred million of ARR.
And I'd I'd you know, I'd I think there's been a couple I don't that that would either be on par with Cursor or or ahead of him or something like that, but
I mean it's
And I think there's gonna be more things like this too. I don't think that like
Uh you know, it it's just that this there's something really
You know, I think a lot of people are in disbelief about it too. We're like this is okay, but and this is
From when we were got to four million of error or five million of our in in the first month.
We I would talk with people and they're like, Okay, yeah, but like that could go to zero, right? And then it and then it went to twenty the next could go to zero and it but
Now we're now we're closing around forty and
So I just I I and and so from from my view, I was also very skeptical, you know, as as this like I've never seen anything grow like this, right?
And so part of me I was just I was kind of for like a month I was kind of waking up waiting for the day where it just was like okay, it's a
Yeah, I mean like it's
This this this this
crazy thing happened and now it's not, but but that's just that data just hasn't come.
And and and and you see this happening with Kurse, you see this happen with a lot of these other AI startups.
And I
The value proposition is real. Like
The free market is filled is filled with rational actors.
People are coming to these tools because it is solving problems.
They're
they were able to do way more.
for for way less cost than it than it would otherwise.
And so and that's why I say I I think we're gonna see more of this, whether it's encoding or get kind of other verticals or whatever, you know.
In a sense it's almost like the maybe maybe the new normal.
Right, for
as AI just continues to get better, but
Anyway.
Let's get to a demo.
Uh Bold.
So people can actually see what this looks like in action.
And as you go through it, if you could even point out stuff that is uh
Different from other
product in the space, say level of V zero repli that other folks have heard about that be useful.
Awesome. Cool. Yeah. So this is bull if you show bullet on new.
Um
Things that I think are really interesting about Bull. One is it's it's just like dead simple. Whether you're logged in or logged out, like this is it's the same UI.
It's extremely simple. It's just a tux box. Um
Yeah.

between Bull and the other stuff out there. It's actually subtle. It's not like something you necessarily see in the UI.
But it's how fast it is and how reliable it is.
And this is because of how we are actually doing the compute. Cause what's going on here is like when you type into whether it's bolt or another product.
It has to spin up a dem environment to actually make that application.
So there needs to be some operating system somewhere that's running it.
Everyone else runs those things on cloud servers, which they could they those can take minutes to boot up.
And they often will run into issues.
And and then you can end up literally stock, right, and have to contact support to get it done. Yeah, and get it on stock a rubber, right?
With Bull, we like in for the past seven years, what our company's been doing has been building an operating system that runs inside of your browser.
locally using your CPU.
So we have a very permissive retail
And it's insanely fast and it's insanely reliable.
Right. So if I want like just as a quick example of this, say like make a clone.
You know, a Spotify.
Right.
I just hit enter.
This thing's already getting to work.
And already on the right here.
This is a full dev environment. Like this is an actual operating system.
running inside of my browser.
And and I can, you know, run commands on it, et cetera.
And uh really this is like what you're seeing down here, this terminal and kind of what's backing it.
This is what took us really like five, six, seven years to build and make so reliable. Like there would not be a bolt without this technology called web container that allows us to run an operating system in the browser.
'Cause what's going on here is our AI agent for bold.
has bi directional communication with this operating system. It's writing code. It's running the dev server for this thing. It's gonna go ahead and spin this up.
You can see how fast this is in like the matter of sixty seconds. I said, Make me a Spotify clone, and now we have one, right?
But it looks pretty darn good.
That looks really good.
And and so that's and that's one of the you know, the other aspects around bold is like
This technology we made uh for the operating system side, the guys that have been working with us, you know, for the past five plus years on it.
Before this, they were actually doing machine learning AI stop.
And so when it came time to write the aging for bull
We had
Just an incredible amount of
in house uh expertise
on how to actually like merge these two different technology sets to have this really reliable experience that produces really beautiful, really functional stuff. So that's that's kind of like, you know, uh based on like what's really cool about the Bolt experience.
The other thing is, you know, uh a lot of these products it's like
You can like make something, but you know, often you want to like actually have a URL where you can
share this, like having like maybe that attach a domain to it or whatever have you.
So
With uh with Bull, we actually have built in integrations with you know production grade hosting uh providers like Nellify.
Yeah, and for databases with Superbase.
So if I go and just like click the deploy button here.
This is actually gonna run a production build.
of this project we made here.
Right.
Again, this is doing this entirely inside of my browser, so
You know, it doesn't it doesn't cost us anything to do this. So again, you can do this for free, right?
And it has gone ahead and deployed this on a real URL.
On Live.
This is live. I can share this with anyone. And if I want to have like, you know, buy the uh domain spotify clone.com and point it at this.
I can click this link here.
They'd kick me into Netwhy. I'm going to attach this to my account.
Buy domain point at that thing.
And then from here there on out, whenever I'm prompting Bolt to make changes to this application and hit deploy.
That goes live on my public website that.
Right.
So it's just
This is
This is like the the simplest way.
To build a web app that's
Ever existed.
You know?
Like
That was kinda one of the key realizations.
I had a couple of weeks into the thing where I was seeing people use this for like personal use cases, like
Medical donation sites for weddings or whatever, and I was like
Don't these people know that like Wix or Squarespace exists? Should I tell them, you know?
And then it hit me.
This those things are so complicated to use. Like there's a there I don't know if you've ever seen uh just the UI of these things, but like
Yeah.
They're crazy complicated. And that's just for building like kind of like a static website. They can't there's no way you could actually build like
a functional app. And that's like with bull if if we were to sit here for an hour thirty minutes.
We would be
We would have streaming. You'd be able to make playlists of different MP three files or whatever, like you can just keep prompting this thing to keep adding functionality.
You know?
So is that kinda the I think some of the cool uh core experience of Bolt here.
I can show you something cool that we just launch if that would be uh of interest.
So this is like web apps, right? It's like web apps are amazing, but often you want to have like a native app.
You know?
And uh it's hard to build web apps. It's even harder to build native apps.
that can actually that you can then go put in the app store, right?
And so we partnered up with a a company called Axpo, and their entire uh business is making uh basically like React Native tooling in this ecosystem.
That makes it super easy to build beautiful apps and actually I'm in the app store.
And so um right here, I'll zoom in a little bit. We have this little build a mobile app with expo. So if you click that.
We kind of instruct you on
how to just prompt mobile apps into existence.
So um yeah, let's make another Spotify clone that's an actual native mobile app.
We'll say make a Spotify clone.
Go ahead and hit enter.
And what this thing's gonna do.
Is actually again spin up.
a operating system here where it's gonna
boot up uh the expo tool chain and actually go and make a mobile app for us.
And what's cool about this is uh we could actually preview it.
Just in the browser here.
But um once this thing's done it then it boots up.
Uh it's gonna show a QR code. We're gonna be able to scan it.
And in real time actually
Uh basically have like a test flight.
of this native application that we can try it on our phones and as we keep prompting.
You'll see it making changes and stuff. Right.
Um
Kind of the first time.
Right, that
You know, you don't you don't have to be tactical.
To make
Production grade.
Web full stock web and
And mobile apps.
You know, like I've at this point I've done nothing that is
That is it requires developer knowledge.
to do any of this stuff. You know, and that's
That's kind of the I think that's what a lot of people
are really excited about with this and
Yeah, majority of our audience uh are
people that are not developers, they're using us, they're PMs.
Uh, they're designers, they're entrepreneurs.
Because
These are people that are
Oh, I've always been great at building products.
And but previously the only way they could get their ideas
into coded software.
was through a developer's fingertips.
Right.
And now
Now they can you could they can deal with their own.
Yeah, through prompting.
So uh you can see here.
You got still a QR code.
I'm going to scan the thing.

By the way, I love that you had just enough things to say until it finished. That was pro

But um so I'm on my screen it's it's it's booting up. It's it's bundling the uh the JavaScript of this thing.
So uh if you can kinda see on my screen here.
Bye.
I actually have this Spotify looking app, right? That um
You know, that's
That looks like exactly like Spotify. It looks exactly like Spotify.

We're gonna be sued right now, so let's let's be You're doing too good a job with this. No, that's amazing.
So it's it's it's pretty cool, right? I mean like and so what's cool is that and as you keep prompting on your device, it'll just keep reloading. Like without you having to like kill the app, it'll just you know, you can actually see the functionality getting added.
And so in this use case that you and I have right now, it's like if I was if you and I were building an app together, yeah, uh
We could be on other sides of the planet and you could actually be
Not just seeing a screenshot of the thing, but actually touching it and and feeling it and like and and and putting it through its paces.
And so a lot of product teams, um I mean this is just changing how people do product development.
You know?
It's faster to do this than
Than design.
A whole bunch of Figma frames, necessarily, right?
So
We're gonna we're gonna spend a lot of time on that. Okay, this was incredible. Like this whole episode so far is you just blowing
My mind, I imagine, listener's mind, just over and over and over. Like I I I don't even know where to go with all this sometimes.
You made a really important point that you worked on this for seven years before you launched
Bolt.
A lot of people see these stats.
Zero to forty million IR in like five ish months.
And they sometimes don't see that there's also years and years of
Other of work before that.
And the reason that you guys have been so successful is all the work you did.
that allowed that build this web container technology, it sounds like
Is there anything there that's worth sharing you think it would just
that part of the journey. I know we'll go through like the origin of that hall.
where both came from, but I guess just that web container component specifically, that feels like a huge deal.
It it it it it a hundred percent is. Yeah. And
Um
I would say this is kinda surprisingly to me, it's like still one of the
Um
Contrarian
Well I got you despite
Despite
Um'cause over the years it was like when we first this is the and that the web container was the bat.
that we made the company on, just to be clear. Like the Stackplitz was like a deep tech uh a browser based deep technology play.
On can we make
U
You know, a web assembly based operating system that can like boot in a browser in like a hundred milliseconds and like run full on development tool chains. Like that was really it.
And and like the we gotten the idea for this and kinda the insight that this might be possible.
'Cause back when my co founder and I uh came out to the valley, he and I grew like grew up down the street from each other at Chicago, card on a co together at thirteen, and we've built stuff ever since.
And we came out to the Valley in twenty twelve and we just had the good fortune of bumping into Dylan Field and Evan Wallace when they were bu uh building Figma.
In the early days.
And that was um I I don't think a lot of people are like know that like Vigma was was also a browser based deep technology play.
Like when their first pitch
For Figma, they did they didn't have a design tool. Their first pitch was this
a three D ball dropping into water inside of a browser tap.
Yeah and
The the the the pitch basically was, you know, browsers have this new capability called WebGL and the predecessor's predecessor to WebAssembly.
And with these things
Uh for the first time that you could actually
Uh you know, create a
A graphics rendering engine.
that you could then build a design to on top of.
But you but you're gonna have to write that
that rendering engine from scratch.
'Cause yeah.
Nothing exists that can just compile into WebGL or whatever.
If you want the performance you need, et cetera. Um, it's gonna take us years to do, but if we do it, you know, we think this will change everything for design.
And obviously we know how that story, you know.
Has panned out now.
Yeah.
back in twenty seventeen, twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen.
Um Albert, my co-founder and I.
saw the same sort of story begin to play out.
But for uh my development.
And like development environments.
And specifically, there is some stuff that landed in browsers like WebAssembly, shared memory, service workers, these different APIs.
And we were like, Oh wow, like
It should be possible.
Theoretically, like to write an operating.
That uh in WebAssembly that could
You know.
run Node.js and MPM and all the tool chains on top of it that you need to do to do web development.
And that'll be huge because setting up
developer environments is it's a it's a pain for beginners.
Um, like a lot of people churn out. They see like the first thing you do when you learn how to code is not even learning how to code, is how to set up your computer to even start writing the code.
Right.
If you go join Netflix or any of these other fan companies
The first month or two is is you being onboarding.
to run that stuff on your computer and set up your environment, right?
And we're like, we could
just have that be something you click a link and it just boots in your browser, that'd be huge.
It's also if you look at the other productivity apps that have really worked on the web.
They've all had this compute model.
Right.
Figma, when you open a Figma document.
There's not like some cloud VM that gets spun up for you.
to render the documents, you're dragging things around. It's using your CPU and your memory to do the work.
Same thing with Google Docs, right?
That's the only model that's ever scaled to a billion users.
And and so when you look at uh cloud IDEs, like it you know, cloud nine was the first one back in you know two thousand nine or so.
The way these have always worked is that your browser's basically doing nothing.
When you go to them.
It's every user that gets connected, there has to be a cloud VM that gets spun up for them.
And then your your browser's just kinda like taking your keystroke, saying it to the server, and then
You know, sending back the result of it.
And that's all all these other these other AI uh you know
code text to app sort of tools work.
We're all using cloud VMs.
And the problem is you know, it that it on a small scale it can work.
But as you scale it up.
There I mean there there's not even a hundred million VMs to run it on the planet.
But there are like a billion devices that you can run this stuff on.
So that's kind of what we've seen with bull where
You know, uh
It it's if you wanna have build a product that's that's gonna be able to scale to that side, you you have to kinda look at all factors and go, we have to build make sure the technology
Provides the best experience, you know, zero latency.
transient cost to there's a permissive free tier, right? Because the other problem with the server is like you end up if you have a free tier, people are mining Bitcoin on it.
They're DOSing people using your servers, right?
So inevitably you have to nerf these things and roll them back.
But if it's all done on the end device, it doesn't matter.
Right. So if that's a web container was the the key piece and the and what we struggle with, it took us like
four or five years something to build web container.
What we struggled with for the the the years after that was just how to build a product around it that like that um because developers loved it, but they they they weren't
Using it in ways that
They were paying money for.
You know?
And um and
As much as I uh
the the the nerd side of me wish that it that would be enough. That's like a building cool technology was enough. It's like it's not like this we're here to build a venture a venture scale company.
Um and um and so that you know that was kind of why we were we were kinda at the end of the journey where it was like you know, we're taking shots on goal and
We know.
At some point we just got a connected bat, right?
There's a lot of really interesting lessons from this journey.
That I think are counterintuitive.
One is you you basically were building a a tech first and then looking for a problem to solve later, which is often
What people tell you not to do. And it worked out in this case.
The other interesting takeaway here is
It feels like Ajax it's like a similar moment to when Ajax came out and then everyone's just like wow, you can build new things here.
So it feels like there's a lesson here of just if there's a new
Technology that has enabled something that
Something big that we think maybe let's just work there for a while and see if something comes up.
And then I think the other lesson here is just
As a founder, just survive as long as you can because you may find something
Networks.
All great points. All great points, right? Cause what we you're dead right. Like for and you fortunately, my counter and I had we had built a lot of unsuccessful stars before this. The year we spend most of the or twenty tens like
churning through ideas on things. And so we, you know
Well we had conviction on is like this is this seems like a technology that that
will be important. Like it it seems like
The web is the most ubiquito like the kinda the the pitch or the theory at R I was like
The web is the most ubiquitous platform in the world.
It but yet it has no you can't use the web to like build the web.
Right, like every other platform like Mac has uh uh you know uh X code.
Windows has Visual Studio. The web had nothing.
And we were like
You know, at a minimum, Google should probably buy this thing from us. It seems like that it should probably be part of Chrome, at a minimum, right?
And uh uh we thought, Hey, this could you know, this could be a huge enabler of like we you know
the vision of just making it as easy to build full stack applications as using Canva.
Right. It's like
Just seemed really compelling.
Um
And
Uh, but when you t when you do that sort of risky D technology play
It
Yeah, you
You need to and and we were very good about this. Like the previous company Albert and I did, we bootstrapped it um all the way through.
to acquisition. So we understood and we were like living hand to mouth like
Three drop that thing.
So we understood how to like how to how to have a low burn rate and take a lot of shots on goal and make every dollar stretch beyond
what anyone would think is reasonable or possible.
And that's how we played our hands with stack blitz.
You know, like but we you know
Uh, we didn't raise money.
for the first two or three years of it. Yeah, of the company's life. We were yeah, boots dropping it.
Um we did raise money. We
We barely spent it, you know.
Largely because it was like we need to just
Take a lot of
Smart bats.
And it doesn't make sense and I'd you know
I would just say generally like
Until you see.
pull like in you just people pulling the product out of your hands.
you w you wanna you don't wanna be spending money. You should be like default no. And like when you when you go and buy software
You should be going
We're a tiny startup.
Can you sell it for up you know, for half like everything you buy? Like just like keep the brewery as low as possible.
'Cause you need as many shots on goal as you can possibly get.'Cause you have no idea.
Um I I think just generally for startups, that's the right way, in my view, to to approach it, you know?
Um unless you're seeing again immediate demand in poll or whatever. Um
But um
Yeah, I think uh uh
I think that'd be kinda like maybe maybe the extra context I'd add on top is like I think that we
ended up doing a a good job of like
being extremely conservative during a time in which during twenty twenty three, twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, which were times where
Exuberance and
Growing headcount was like
KPIs of companies, right? And and and were things that were
Being f you know.
Bye.
you know, with a lot of a lot of uh you know, emotional force of like, hey, you guys ought to be doing this.
And and and I'm glad that we didn't heed the advice.
Because it it you know, if if our we
tripled the company and kicked up the boomerate, there would be no bolt.
You know, they're like we we've gone out of business a long time ago.
Right.
So um
I think that's that's the hard thing about
Being an entrepreneur, I think is you kinda have to
There are periods of time where, you know, you you have to kind of you have to make judgment calls that are that are not gonna be the consensus view.
Maybe years later people it'll become the consensus view, but
You know.
You gotta have like confidence in your convictions on how
How to best play the hand, you know?
So
There's so many great lessons here. I think just this idea of s of just staying alive
Dalton came on the podcast, he's a partner Y C once and he just had this phrase, just don't die.
And that's exactly what you guys did. Seven years of just trying it until something worked. And I I love that you actually were planning to shut down the company.
Right before you launch Bolt, and I know you launched it with just like a tweet, right? That was the launch moment.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe talk about that moment of just after launch signs that okay, this is working.
Something's different.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I day one, it was like there's great reception to like the tweet. You know, we were like wow, this is like, you know, one of the biggest things, you know, uh unlocked day reception we've ever seen.
And I think on the first day, you know, I think we added like
sixty K of ARR or something, which was like I mean crazy we were at yeah again we were at six hundred so we added like ten percent
Yeah, they're
And I remember our Dental Ops engineer, like yeah, he was the one who would flag and he's like, Guys, we got sixty K today. Like this is crazy. Yeah, yeah, but like
This is launch day. Like it's the the the there's there's the touch crunch peak of initiation or we know the the classic startup. Yeah. I was like, listen, kinda yeah I'm trying to like temper enthusiasm for the team. I'm like, this is great.
Got a lot of work to do, da.
Um and then the next day, yeah, we added eighty key or whatever it was, right? And it just kinda kept going.
And um
And you know, and and all the while.
Like the the product we put out, we we we built the thing in ninety days. We built Baltimore. So there's a lot of things that were missing.
in the product basic stuff. Basic stuff.
Which again, like we you know, we
We could we cut the right corners on the thing to get it online.
But um we had this
just growing influx of people using a going
You know, how is there not a mobile responsive view? Like how how are how are chat per messages not we got the twenty million of ARR without a mobile responsive view, by the way.
Yeah, just
Throwing that out there, you know, this it was like the uh iPhone not having copy and paste until like iPhone 5 or whatever, you know, that was this was that was that this is that for us. It was like no
You looked at it on mobile, it was terrible, right?
But there's like stuff like that. So we had to use like and then we're a small team and so we're completely unprepared.
For
Just the the growing
Uh traffic.
And and and
You know.
There's there's there's a whole bunch I mean, I could the the the list of problems that were happening every single day was nuts. I mean like
To start.
We had never had a plan on stackbus.com, uh, you know, for more than nine dollars. Like we had one price, nine bucks, right?
And so we launched both we're like, again, we don't think they well think hopefully people like this, but you know.
Nine bucks doesn't get you a lot of inference. And so people bird through nine bucks and like
Forty eight hours, you know, and they were like
I wanna buy more. How do I buy more? Why won't you take my money?

Yeah.
So it was like
Uh that within the week we we were just completely new pricing plans you could upgrade, which which ended up has kind of now become this the standard. All the other guys in the space have copied this.
Where
Uh you know, prior to Bolt going online.
Co-pilot, like all these previous AI things, everyone kinda wanted this like Netflix model where there's like one price, it's like all you can eat or whatever.
And the problem is like if you do that, like you can't really like
You want the the the inference cost to be kinda low because you're expecting people to use it a lot, right?
And so you don't you can't do these agentic experience things. It would be too expensive.
And what we ended up
stumbling into is that
Okay, actually people are willing to pay more.
Right. They're willing people want to pay for more inference because
We've crossed this fr threshold where
You know, y you can
get a very tangible ROI. You know that this is providing a tremendous amount of value to you, right? So anyway, so that was like that was like one thing and, you know, the servers were just melting anthropic
ran out of GPUs for us. Like Dario emailed me and he was like, listen, we just
We don't have anything more to give you at the times where we're like how do we deal with you know
It was just it was just
bananas, you know, for for for weeks. It it felt like in three hundred, you know, when when they're surrounded by like ten thousand
people and and our team is just like
Doing everything. I guess there's fifteen, twenty people. You're just doing everything. Like my chief of staff and I were doing customer support ninety five percent of the day.
Yeah, just uh.
Anyways.
So yeah, it was it was a a a crazy wild time and uh I mean it still is. We're we'd we've had a little bit more time to kinda
grow into this. And usually I mean as a company
To grow on to like even twenty million ARR you get
A year.
At least or something, you know, to kinda staff up.
Off in uh decades.
Yeah yeah, you know, so it's you know
That was as hard as we go to people and kind of be like, What do we do? And
The playbooks we get back are like take
T.
six months or a year or something. And it's like this isn't gonna work.


You know, and which is funny. This is what it's all about, right? I mean this is this is um um
You know.
Yeah, it's it's
At least for me, this is this that level of intensity is is uh it's it's
Yeah, it's challenging. Fun challenges, you know.
Well.
Okay.
This is just uh nonstop wild wild shit.

Um, so you mentioned that your team was about twenty people.
Through all this.
You guys are growing at this insane rate.
Uh
Twenty people.
How is this possible?
What uh what has allowed you to grow this much this fast with such a small team and this three hundred visual is interesting. I imagine having these Spartans is a big part of it. Just what what has allowed you to to do this?
Yeah. Yeah, I I think a lot of it, I mean a lot of again
I mean if you kinda look at where a lot of the other folks in the like the the c code gen the text to app space have have really been
Uh struggling.
A lot of it has been scaling their servers and stuff, right?
Because and and and
Uh you know, it it was kind of like you know, both this overnight success seven years in the making. Like
All of the stuff, like there's no way if you've rewinded like year two, we can there's no way we could have but then we we would not be at the
D the growth and
Uh on on DAUs and revenue or whatever. There's just no way.
Um and so a lot of it is the the technology we made.
And and most importantly, it's been the people. Like the people like they you know
It's I it's it's rare to find star ups where you have
Uh kind of the core group of
Five, six, seven people.
You know, that have been there for five years plus.
Right. Like that's that's a pretty rare thing to see. Like in Silicon Valley. It it is usually folks are kind of
at a job for you know start for a kinda year or two, they kinda go to another one. You know, I mean there's the and the problem with the turnover like that is that you can't
take like really long bets like the one we did.
And so we've had kind of from the get go, again, this comes back from the bootstrapping the previous company, like
Um just having uh you know less people and more contact per head.
Like that's just that's just been
That's just been how we do it. We feel very strongly about it.
Yeah.
I the reason for that is is one that you can have high levels of trust with anyone you're talking to because you know that they have they have a lot of contacts. It's not like, you know, this person's completely in the dark and
in some corner of the company that da da you know I mean
The second thing is everyone has agency to actually get stuff done.
front to back, right? And and you there's no political community to get stuff approved by there's no, you know, you know, so when you look at what kind of what happened with Bull, I mean we had
engineers that were like front to back were
on a call with someone running into an issue.
Going and fixing it.
Uh cooking up the UI on the spot.
And and and and landing the thing.
Like without involving anyone else on the team, right?
And
You know.
That uh
Yeah, so I think it's the culmination of just high trust and
You know
people like we all just have enjoyed working together in the past. I think that's why that's the only reason it anyone would ever stay right at a company for for that long or whatever.
And so uh
Those sorts of stressful situations I think can
Or or make or break.
Right.
Like those are make or break for any team.
And so that I think that what's happened is really it you know
It it is is a d direct reflection of the strength and the bonds of the people.
Um
that that are making this thing and supporting the thing.
Yeah. I I I I think that's such a
important point that you guys have been working together for many years.
Most people won't have that benefit.
When you're hiring people, when you hire this initial team, is there anything you look for that you think maybe people aren't looking for enough? Anything you prioritize when you're hiring new folks? Is it this idea that they can do a lot?
They can do customer calls, they can do design, they can do engineering.
Yeah, that for us and even if the thoughts we're hiring out, it's like hiring people that are
The the
Don't care about
The titles and they don't care about
Yeah, it's not like they're they're
Yeah, people of course it's work you'll have like a career trajectory and that sort of th like
They
They're they really are motivated by just
working on cool things and um
And
Um
you know, chucking their ego out the door and
And they're there to like collectively build something great, not just just kinda
Hell I'm
You know.
Be be the the the brilliant jerk. Right.
you know, most of the people that we've hired have been uh, you know
But
I in Europe and you we're a fully remote company.
Um, like yeah, I my co founder and I are in are in the Bay Area. It's funny, like back in twenty uh eighteen, we we like rented an office and stuff.
And we were like commuting into it'cause we thought we'd hire people here and like a year into it, we were like
What are we doing? You and I are coming to like an office for 10 people. We've hired the people working for us are you know in Europe or across the US.
And uh I
You know.
I think uh and and and we have uh yeah, one or two other people we've hired that are in the Bay area at this point, but
Um
Yeah, I think I think we kinda look for folks that are that are
Intrinsically just trying to
trying to build great stuff and are are interested
And and then the first people that we hired were they the reason we found them is that they were users of stock butts.
You know?
Like that was the a lot of people that um
The majority of people we pirate at the company have been people that actually came from our community, basically.
Um we when when we want to hire people, we put on a tweet and say, Hey, we're hiring an engineer and then
We get, you know, DMs or whatever, right? And
But um
Yeah, those those are the those are the general like kinda
kind of qualities we look for though, you know?
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I wanna ask a couple more questions about Bolt and then I wanna zoom out and talk about where things are heading in the future.
Let's talk about partisan.
I imagine you guys are just like barraged with as you described after you launched the like you're just barraged with requests.
Like you said it there's a million monthly
Active users. I can't even imagine the feature requests you guys are getting.
Plus all the stuff you know you wanna build.
Just how do you go about deciding what to prioritize and what to actually build?
There's a lot of things that you just don't even know are are possible to do, right?
Um, and so people aren't gonna be like necessarily like explicitly asking for them.
Um, and so there's been kind of a couple of these where we
you know, kinda use our our gut instinct on like hey this this
No one's asking for this, like in meaningful numbers at least, but we think this is gonna be a big deal.
Best example was last week with uh native mobile app support. Like that's the the, you know, uh by reception, like the biggest thing we've ever launched.
And it was something that even internally at the company
Uh you know, f some folks like
This, you know, I don't know, people are like y yelling about these other things, right? And then and it's and is it's always this balance of like how much are we just triaging various things versus like that new capabilities, but it's like
Mm-hmm.
Strikes me as an important one where we where we uh
You know, put some chips into the middle of the table on and
Yeah, okay, dead right. Like it's it's it's just this mind blowing experience.
And now just there's just
You know.
Thousands of millible apps being created a day.
that work before and it and how does that change things? I mean like that's
That
Now there's
Yeah, there's small businesses that are
You know, they would have never made an iPhone app before. It made no sense. It's w super expensive. Like
Now that's not the case. I mean like they so there's kinda these things where it's like hey, we should go and
You know, take bats here. But there's kinda this it's um
I think the best analogy should be like it it's it's kind of like I think, you know, you
working at a restaurant, being like a chef. It's like there's there's some amount of there's feedback from the customers, right? Like this thing didn't taste good.
And then there's like
Hey, we've been kinda cooking something interesting and this this tastes this th yeah I don't know. This I think people are gonna like this. You know, I think this is a
The killer dish. And and so you kinda have to balance
those things. Um and uh
All right.
I think it's actually largely a function of just ex you know, years of experience doing it. I think I if you kinda reround like
that ten years ago I would have had uh really no I wouldn't have had the
Just uh
the years of getting my butt kicked by uh the free market.
I
to have kinda cultivated a sense of this stuff, you know?
You kinda have to build your own gun and stay for it, I guess, is the best way of putting it, you know.
To unpack this a little bit further, do you have kind of a cadence you guys work through to decide what to build and ship? Do you have like a weekly
Meeting every week.
Probably really. It's just like chaos constantly and fires we're putting out constant. Like I know that's a lot of it.
But is there some kind of process that you guys have for deciding what to build and how to
Share it and just, you know, work with the team.
We all meet like every day. Like for pretty much the entire team gets on a call. They were just kind of like a like a Zoom.
Yep. Yeah. Every every day at eight AM Pacific, we're on a Zoom for like every day the whole company.
Pretty much the entire company. Yeah. Wow, for an hour. Okay. Yeah. And we just go over every
And and and I think we're gonna probably start as you as the teams kinda growing, we're gonna start you know splintering off into you know different um you know syncs or whatever, but
Um, the thing about just having everyone in the same room every day is that uh it's you know, a lot of people will complain that it's uh, you know
Uh this is yeah on Twitter you'll see people say, Oh like
It's the most expensive use of everyone's time, right? But but it's like
Yep, but like there's zero percent fatality loss in that.
Everything is everything every day is is being audited front to back and being discussed front to back.
Um and it's a when you're in these times of just extreme
Growth, right? It's it's you you you want
As close to zero percent.
you know, uh loss, right, on on communications.
Um
And so that's that's how we've that's how we've been doing it, um, since especially since Bolt went online. I think it was like the week after Bolt went online, we were like
Every day we're until until we're through this or whatever.
We're all getting on a phone call every day and we're we're front to back doing this.
But and again, another reason why more contact uh more context on you know in last Hads
Um
Yeah, every person at the company is aware of
everything else uh going on at the company, right?
Um so people can independently be making decisions that are generally by default more more often correct than not, you know?
That is so interesting.
I've never heard that before, especially for a company growing like it that is like yours. That is
Super uh
Interesting. That that's what you do.
Uh I I don't think we're gonna do that forever. Yeah, I of course no buttons.
I think that's a really cool thing to note that that's that works and that's work for you.
Where do you so say you talk about stuff, then where do you put stuff? Where do you put your roadmap? Where do you plan just like what tools are kind of in the stack of the companies.
Tool set.
Yeah, I on the engineering side, we use linear like heavily on kind of product.
Uh, you know, road mapping. I think we're using Notion and uh you're kinda making like PRD type stuff in Notion.
You know, and then and we use Figma for like design. And we actually we use bolt for a a lot of
design and prototyping at this point is as you can imagine.
Um
But um yeah, I think I think it you know the the tooling is uh
I
Yeah, nothing nothing crazy. There's nothing crazy sophisticated, you know? Like
I I think you're investing a lot more in that especially as you start splintering people out of being on the same call every day. It's like that's where this stuff really starts to matter.
Because you don't have a time where you're
able to dynamically catch things that that weren't going to be brought up.
I love that you guys use Pierre Disa. You love that you even used that term.
There's a lot of talk of just like oh we got bald now, we got
All these tools, we don't need PRDs, we're just gonna create a prototype immediately. That's it.
Talk about just like why you still find that useful and just what you put into your BRD, whatever you whatever that is for you. Unless there's like something for like that's very sophisticated that we're working on. Um we we tend to keep them keep them pretty light. I I like to just have the minimal amount of context possible.
that it just ensures everyone's on the same page and that the key outcomes for whatever feature that we're working on are gonna are gonna be pro we get.
You know?
'Cause the thing is that when these things when these documents get really beefy
If you look at it at God, there's so much stuff to decipher.
You know, the problem is I a lot of people are gonna gloss over it.
When it gets kicked to development or design or whatever.
There and it it's just gonna start snowballing into a lot of stuff. It's just better to keep it it as simple as you possibly can.
Yeah, at least that's that's kinda h our our approach to the thing. Um
And you know, and and often it's it's
Uh some of these things are like here's a link to to a bolt.
Here's what it might look like. Yeah. Like here's you should you and not just look like here's here's kind of a working demo of what it will effectively feel like. Right. Um and and be
'Cause that just, you know, if if a if a picture's worth, you know, a a thousand words a like a live
actual demo is is worth millions, you know, like you can you can feel it. It it's it's real.
And that's where we're seeing like a lot of the
You know.
the businesses that are adopt now, that's the use case that they're using this for is
high fidelity prototyping because it's it's like now faster.
To make real prototypes.
using uh Bolt and the writing you know, before it was too expensive. Like you did the idea of like let's prototype it by the engineers code to prototype it's like
That it would take forever, it would c it would be expensive.
Now it's faster to do this with bull in code and have a real working software product than
Dragging around frames in Figma to actually make a static
First I bet.
So let's actually talk about that. Just how
How far have companies gotten with bolt?
Like h prototypes is where everyone's kind of imagining these tools are at. I know that
The goal isn't just to make prototypes, it's to build full scale
I imagine long term sales force, you know, Atlassian style companies.
That scale.
Just uh what's like what are some examples of
Products people have built with both that are maybe s would surprise people just how far the
Need God.
Yeah, I mean it especially when you're starting Greenfield stuff, you I mean, you can use both to build
You know, uh like on the Salesforce is an example, right?
Um one of the the the first people that sign up for
Uh Bull was this guy named Paul?
Yeah, and he's an entrepreneur.
Uh and does you know does not occur.
Built a CRM.
In three weeks.
that has like AI built into it and stripe for billing, et cetera.
He had gotten a quote from an agency for this. It was like gonna be thirty grand and take six months. He had it done in three weeks and it spent like three hundred bucks on both of the thing.
And so it's like this is
Like and he's and he's making money off of this. Like this is his start.
All right.
Okay, so he so he built this and he's selling it. Like people are paying to use it. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, and and then and there and there's many such cases of this, right
When you can it' and you if you're looking at Greenfield projects one hundred percent. Like there's the today with this current state of frontier models
You can absolutely build production grade software, right? It's you're not gonna get a zero shot, but you're you're you're gonna spend a couple of days, weeks, whatever.
But the cost reduction there
thirty grand versus three hundred dollars. Maybe it's ninety nine percent cheaper.
Six months versus three weeks. I mean it's like
Order magnitude sort of uh faster delivery on the
And that and those numbers have helped for the people that we talk to that are building these full stock uh you know apps.
Like people that they go to op work, they get a quell for five grand. They have it within fifty bucks, you know.
It's just nuts. Um
what you're able to do with this thing.
Um
And so I know I think on the flip side, you know, a lot of the like existing companies, yeah, they they they will there are
Very uh legitimate use cases where things are greenfield spot up.
Good example is like public websites, like marketing pages, landing pages, whatever have you.
Um yeah.
Folks are adopting Bolt to just power those instead of using Webflow.
For example.
Yeah,'cause it's like this is simpler to use than Bubflow and it integrates with
the existing design system of the company and et cetera, right?
Um and the marketers can update it without knowing how to code, you know, whatever.
But then for product development teams, this is I most commonly for again existing software.
businesses, they're using this to just accelerate the product development process. I mean
And uh in in a way where it's not just like a greenfield wholesale here, we're building
The entire thing in bolt or whatever, right? Can Bolt integrate with your existing code base or not yet?
It so yeah, we can actually open up uh repos in bold. So you you can like
Go and use ball on your code base.
It kinda depends on your setup, right? Like we, you know, and and
We we do have companies again that like have marketing sites of using the side or like
you know, their admin panel or whatever.
Uh, and I think it sho it's gonna be a use case that we see a lot more people
Orienting towards
These LLMs are not great, depending on how big your application is, though.
Right.
There the it's the these things are not quite there where if you have something that's
You know, uh the a thousand files or something or more.
Um
where you're gonna be able to have a really uh
a reliable, super reliable experience per se, right?
within a year, if yeah, with chat a year from now, I suspect the answer's gonna be different.
But you know, it it so it kinda depends on the s the size of the app, the scale of the app, and um if it if it's if it's too big
You're looking at the prototyping, like just just like pure acceleration, right, of product development.
Um and if it's not then then you're you can just do it entirely, right, from both.
So this is useful. So what are the what would you say the major limitations of Bolt today where people
Should just know. Okay, it's not gonna get you here yet.
maybe in the future will. Sounds like
If you have just like a really large existing code base, probably not the best tool yet.
What else should people know?
I would say that's like probably the main one, you know, because I think if you have a large existing code base, you're gonna need something like Cursor.
I mean you're and you're gonna need to be a developer meaningfully to be to be editing that stuff. You know, I think outside of that, it's
There's a just like using any other
productivity tool like Photoshop or
Figma or like a D SLR or whatever.
There there's some level of kind of education and just kinda like in in using the tool and like
Learning how to use it.
that's required to like really unlock a lot of the the the maximum capabilities of the thing.
Right.
And
You know
W the people that we see that are most successful with bold like outside of developers.
The the people you say they're most successful are are people that are
Amazing PMs.
For example.
Because these are people that
understand enough about how the technology works typically.
Um and their job is to like
direct developers on how to
Go and improve the product.
And go and like look into like how to make how to actually spec this thing out in a way that's like executable without um
You know, without losting us in the communication.
And when you think about okay, how did how what how would you best interact with an AI developer agent, it's basically that. You really want to be good at defining scope.
And uh helping it go in
debug various things or whatever have you.
It's it's it's it there's a huge overlap of the skill set of just like
being a rock star or PM
And uh being really good at using uh frankly, any any of these text your out sort of cogent.
I love that you made that point. That's exactly the point I
Been trying to make. I have a newsletter post about this.
'Cause when all these tools came out, there's so many people saying
Okay, PMs are dead. We don't need them anymore. We can just build things and build things so quickly and easily. What's the point?
But
I completely s see the world the way you see it. The hard part now is
Now it's easy to build a thing. Now it's
What the hell should we build?
Can we clearly articulate what it is we want to build and then
Can we just
Have the taste to know is this right? Is this correct? Is this
Good, is this gonna solve the problem? And then it's like grow it.
Which is something also PMs think about.
So I completely agree. Basically it feels like PMs are and there's a lot of
What are PMs list to this, so they'll love hearing this.
To me it feels like PMs are the best position role.
to thrive in this world.
Zero question. I mean that that was like yeah, and as bull was was growing and like we were like who'cause we we were developer product before this.
And so we expected the audience to be one hundred percent developers that were using this.
And we just kept seeing more and more and more people that were not developers using it.
the point where it's like seventy, sixty seven percent of our users are not developers, right? At this point.
And um
You know, when we when I started talking to these folks, at first I was just like weird or whatever, you know, it was like well w what's going on here.
But then it what it just kinda clicked as like, Oh wow, this is this is this is
This is gonna change everything. The entire software world order is gonna get rewritten here because
Like the way that companies are organized to build software today.
Totally gonna change, right? Like
The idea that again, like PMs are are the people that that
really understand like
uh to the pixel level, like what matters into making a great product experience?
And often they're they're having and listen, I'm a de I'm a developer myself.
They have to go and harangue the developer. So I
get things to be how they really oughta be, like to the to the smallest levels.
And now like it h how this is going to work. If you fast forward you know one, two, five years, whatever.
Like
PMs are are they they're gonna be writing quote qu qu uh quote unquote instead of just writing a Jira ticket and waiting for a developer to do it.
the developers are gonna be able to work on, you know, intellectually challenging tasks that that all abs are not well suited for.
Right. And still being augmented by alarms to do it.
But
PMs are gonna be able to go in and just make the changes themselves.
And and just the it what blew my mind is it's that is not it's not priced into
It's not priced in into any of these companies out there.
And it's not reflected in the org charts.
of all the software companies in the world right now. That is going to completely change. The the the winners, at least the org charts are going to completely change and how they approach
Building products and shipping products.
Completely.
You know?
And it's starting.
Yeah, this this is this is the beginning.
I wanna follow that thread, but first of all I wanna also add
And correct me if you disagree with this.
I think when we talk about PMs, that also applies to founders, like product thinking founders.
And then I think it's also important to note, like if you also have engineering skills and design skills, you will be at an advantage. Like
That only helps you.
But if you're like looking at this triangle of the triad of product engineering
PM it feels like the PME skills are the ones that will be most
Important and valuable.
Although it would be great if you could also be in code and if you could also design really well.
Ab absolutely and to me it's it's like the most exciting mix. I think I like PM's designers and and entrepreneurs that are non technical.
That's the most exciting thing to move just because
Th it's an it's a brand new market that's being unlocked here.
You know, like they for the first time ever. These folks can
Like directly
code and build the product themselves. Like their vision directly
into the software itself. That that is that's that's ch that's gonna change everything. That is changing everything.
So you talk about how org charts are gonna change. What are you imagining there? Is it just like fewer engineers?
Mostly or what what is what do the future or charts look like?
Good question. And I I I I bet you there's gonna be
uh, you know, there's gonna be like some gardener analysis someday, you know, a year from now or whatever, that's like here's like how the best some some some term is applied to how the best companies are organizing, you know.
But I mean yeah, I mean I think I think that we're gonna uh
You know
I think that you're gonna see developers uh probably being pulled off of a lot of the
Then generally speaking.
pulled off of a lot of
you know, user interface.
Typework.
I would imagine.
Except for the most complicated of of those things.
And you're gonna see designers and PMs really
really leading the charge and being responsible for crafting those experiences and and perhaps having a developer attached to like
be reviewing the code and making sure it, you know, like it the the extra
the guiding, you know, the the code that they're writing, reviewing those pull requests and etc. And and I think maybe even the engineers are
Uh you know, the it like you pointed out, having engineering skills is not gonna hurt you. It's gonna make you way more effective, right?
So I I think the engine but I do think there's gonna be
You know
Th there there's gonna be the the leverage that a front engineer is gonna have is is
In the it it it is now insane, it's only to get more so.
And so I could see it.
I could see there just being fewer front engineers attached to I seeing more product
uh you know in design folks.
with, you know, one or two engineers or something.
And you know, really
having a larger a larger match of like kind of pods like that, you know?
Um
That's that something like that strikes me as probably how this is gonna start trending towards.
This touches on we had a a researcher from OpenAI on the podcast.
She actually started uh her career. She worked at Anthropic first.
As a front end engineer.
And said that she once she saw what Clyde could do.
for front end engineering, she's like, I need to move to a different different function. And so she moved into research because
She saw that role.
Disappearing potentially.
That's exactly what you're saying.
Yep. So let me ask you this. I don't know if you have a clear uh
Thesis on this yet, but say you you just had a kid.
Say your kid is
gonna s in the future starting school. Let's say your kid was starting college soon.
Do you have thoughts on just what skills slash areas you you think they should go into?
versus avoid that maybe are popular now and be less popular.
Understanding how to leverage
These AI tools um is key. Uh
Like I wouldn't necessarily I think I think maybe getting a basic understanding of like how programming works, you know, et cetera, right, is like is is great, right?
There's like technical foundations, just understanding how things have
Yeah. How systems work. How much exactly, right? And and uh but it but it doesn't have to be said like'cause I I think back like, you know, if bold existed, like my Albert and I say this to each other all the time, like
We w you know, since the get go stacked that we've been building the thing that we wish we had when we were thirteen.
Um and hack for everything we built since then.
And and especially with Bull. I mean it's like I don't know.
If I would have
Gone.
As deep as I did.
On uh
you know, learning how to code and being an engineer.
If if that had been a rabbit.
You know, like a the whole reason we got into it is we had ideas for products and businesses.
That we that we wanted to build.
Um
And coding was was a
It w it was just like a necessary requirement, you know, in order to do that.
So
You know, I think
I think that um and in that said, it's like I think people need to follow their intrinsic interests. If folks are really interested in
You know.
really getting into nitty gritty of how computers work and programs work and compilers or whatever, like go for it. Like I think stuff's still still gonna be relevant.
You know, like it's I I I don't know if we're gonna really have but you know, to the degree that there's like AGI where it's like we we don't have to think about anything ever again. Yeah.
Yeah. It's like if we're at that point, it's kinda I I don't know. I'm I you know, I I'm I'm not sure, but I I think from what at least what I feel like
Seems like the next at least five years.

I think the I think people are still gonna it's there's still gonna be uh places to specialise and become and you know
Uh really go deep.
Uh but I I think you you want to go into it with the idea not like I'm gonna go and learn
computer science because
I'm gonna get a job for sure out of it. I just think that's like a generally
You know.
Not a a good um
This is like my co founder and I, like we we didn't we didn't go to college. And my my co founder dropped out of college after like a semester or something. But like I I didn't go because I was like, I just you know, we're coding, like we're kinda you know, we're doing contracting at the time, making money and it was like
You know, this this is like a lot of, you know, I I would have been you know, it would have been like a hundred grand of debt at by the end of the thing, just for like four years of in state tuition.
And U of I. Um, I think at that time and um
It's like
And I and lo and behold, I mean, there's a huge issue with this where people
Or you know.
Kind of
Th there is a there is a prevailing
Thought uh you know, uh
S socially like that.
going to college in in the early twenty or tw yeah, early twenty tens or late two thousands that you're gonna get a job on the other side.
that's gonna be high paying and that just has not been the case for a lot of people.
So and I think that's just gonna continue to be the case. Right. And so it's but yeah, again, not to deter people from doing it, but it's like you have to go into it being like,
I for sure this is what I want and I'm I want to
Go and be the best and you know.
Than I can possibly be at this thing. You know what I mean? Um like the transfer chick it's gonna be like
Don't even don't even go to college. Unless they want to, right? I think in eighteen it's it's a huge ask. I mean it's a huge ass and not even at eighteen, it's like at seventeen'cause you have to like you prepare you can go apply for colleges at the it's it's just such a huge
Like
A six figure.
debt commitment to someone who's making zero dollars or negative dollars and you know and then and not young
It it just
Unless you really have conviction it you know, it's it's
You know, you d it costs nothing to go and explore and learn for free online.
You know?
So
I wanna come back to with the skills that I you think are gonna be most important and let me try to mirror back a few things you said that I
Very much agree with.
So it feels like if you want to be successful in the world where AI can build things for you.
More and more.
Uh what I'm hearing is
Get good at figuring out what people
Need and want, what problems they need solved.
They're good at
Uh
Articulating it really well.
to the AI tools.
Uh, and it there's this talk, you don't need to be a great prompt engineer, you don't need to work on prompting, but it feels like it's more and more important because you tell it something.
And he goes off and builds a thing like uh
Just if you if you're clear about it, it'll save you a lot of time.
So it's
Uh figure out.
be good at figuring out problems, people need solved, figure out how to articulate that problem well and ask for the a clear solution.
Figure out how to grow the thing. Feels like that's still gonna be
Uh a need.
Because
Bolt's not gonna go in like
Find ever like you know, I could see that start running paid ads and stuff like that, but
But it feels like that's gonna be ongoing need.
And then I feel like there's this kind of unstuck.
Step like helping AI get unstuck.
And it feels like that's where maybe engineering skills will come in more and more thoughts on just that skill.
Oh totally. Yeah, I mean so we actually uh two weeks ago I think
We announced this like program called like Bult Builders and it's basically at the the Genius Bar at the Apple store.
Where you know as folks are building on both that are that are not developers, they will they'll run into you know some some uh you know, necrocranity of like where the AI just you know cannot figure it out or whatever.
I think it's I think it's just gonna continue to be the case for time to come. That's our position, and that's why we spun up this this program. And these are humans that help you.
These are these are and and people that were like certified. And so um you know, when in bolt uh in the you know coming weeks or whatever
Uh, there's gonna be a button where you can just say, Hey, connect me with
You know, a certified like expert.
And you can chat with them live and they'll help you get unstock and you pay, you know, I don't know, fifty bucks an hour, whatever it is, right?
And then you get unjammed and and you keep keep prompting, you know?
Um and and again it's like
I I just think this stuff is it just all seems like gravy to me, like
Engineers get to focus on like difficult challenges, not like cookie cutter must make another crun app stuff. You know, like they they get to like
Debugging is challenging and fun, you know, and like going and and working on intellectually stimulating tasks and like all this stuff that's just
copy pasta over and over all this air happened. Just like let the AI do all that.
D
Right.
You know, this is like a potentially new job for for now at least, just unstuck the AI.
Which I think over time it'll get better and better and we maybe won't need these people, but but I love that it's like now
AI first and person second versus person building the thing and then AI
Like when Copilot launched, it was just like, Cool, here's a little suggestion for this function.
And now it's flipped.
Here's like everything and then oh sh we I don't know what to do here. Help us here.
And then it's like a human suggestion. Isn't that interesting? It's like human copilist flipping flipping it.
Totally. Yeah.
Yeah, it and it were w that's what's wild is you know, I think sauna was, you know
Sonic was the really the the first model that flipped the equation because that was really uh us and old cursor and all these other things.
The rapid growth started the second sauna went on one.
Right. Like we actually tried building bull like almost exactly a year ago with the kind of the frontier models at the time. Um
Spend like a week or two building it.
it just didn't work. Like the output to code output was not reliable enough. It would just it would constantly just it would be a broken app or look ugly or whatever.
And then we got a sneak peek at the Sana stuff in May and we were like
Oh, okay. Like we should take that project back off the shelf and green line it'cause this this might be it.
And and you know, lo and behold, that's exactly what has happened.
You know.
But yeah, that's that's the big deal. That is kinda under the hood. Like this is what's going on here is
A in a very
critical threshold has been passed with
L M's ability.
to write production grade code and apps that actually look
beautiful and actually functioned well.
Um it's not perfect, but it but it would be we have there's kinda this this zero to one moment that's happened where it's like okay. So like now, yeah.

Now now we're now the AI is the first thing, and then you're kind of popping a developer in every now and then versus the other way around, you know?
I did not know that.
I didn't realise that so much of this was unlocked with
Like it's sitting on top of Anthropics work.
And specifically Sonnet.
That was the first model you're saying that could code well enough.
Yeah.

Zero question. That is fascinating. Just like the amount of
Uhhuh.
Uh
I don't know. Revenue and business and ec commerce that that one model has unlocked is ups is is insane.
I did not realize that.
It is. And it in retrospect, you know, for the you know, like I'd mention like we've never done AI product uh in Stock Plus. And you know, it's like it's tempting'cause it's like when you know, kinda when Chat GBT went on went online, everyone started kinda adding AI to their products and we're just like
We just didn't see like a clear place for like a really added value.
Right.
So
Yeah, I was not
uh super bullish on you know a lot of people like A AGI's gonna be here in 2023. You know, I mean like there's all this stuff that was being said on I was like, I just don't know if I necessarily buy
how fast people say it's gonna move. And and and and to to a certain degree, like that was like the correct view.
What I didn't really think about though is like if if AI if LMs are gonna get better at at
Yeah, a specific vertical kind of like which are gonna be the the things that it would be.
And
You know, if you look at like law, for example, you wanna make a the best L line for
You know, looking at case.
Law.
The problem with that stuff is it's not deterministic.
Like
The the judge's ruling is dependent kind of on society's view of things at the time, right? Political stuff, correct?
The jury it there's a ton of things that it's not deterministic.
And and so
And and so you can't really create a lot of training data.
that's gonna be like super reliable.
Right, and you and produce really good results.
And you can't just like make up cases and say theoretically the judge would say this. Yeah, I mean it's like it it just doesn't work.
Software.
is deterministic.
When you when you write code and you hit run, it either runs or it doesn't.
And and that is what I that's the key insight Anthropic really had. They just went deep.
And and this is what they're doing. It's just reinforcement learning.
I'm basically permutating every
type of app you could ever build.
And and just spinning up.
tens of thousands of course or whatever to do that just building tons of t training down and doing reinforcement learning.
And and and making their LMs the best in the world at building
Beautiful, reliable applications.
I am I'm extremely bullish, right? I mean you it makes it makes technical sense why
Uh of anything.
L Ms are gonna get
Insanely better at at writing code.
Then probably most other
types of applications for our labs.
Simply because
It's something that that can be
uh extremely deterministic.
And permutated.
thousands and thousands and thousands of times per second. Right. And and so that I think the broader trend here is
And and sauna has woken everyone up. Like
Google and open the I all the
Everyone is now gunning for coding'cause
Yeah.
The I how much is um how big is the market opportunity to rewrite the software world order?
It's it's
Trillions of dollars or something.
Right.
Like the world runs on software.
Yeah, so I think I think that just kind of in a macro, the kind of the highest macro view and why we went and raised money for bull, it's like
This is
This this seems like an extremely clear shot. There's not this like you can kinda 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 gonna happen.
Um and so, you know.
It it and and for us we're like
We you know, we we are just so happened to be well positioned to like
Don't enable people to like
Kind of ride this way.
of of the innovation that is here in Alms and is gonna just keep coming.
And and therefore enable more people to build even crazier amazing software, right?
Um so is that's kinda that's that's our worldview, at least of kind of what's going on here at like the mackerel.
And when did Sonnet even come out? It's been a while, right?
I think I think they officially
I think it was in June, when they officially. So since June, not
Like this
This is the worst it will ever be, the state of
AI coding.
And
It's already this good.
And there hasn't been anything like they haven't launched their new model.
Since last June.
So this tells us just how quickly things are gonna start moving once they
Once they launch their next model, and as you said, everyone's gunning now for this'cause they realized
We're behind on the coding piece.
So
Wow.
This is gonna get crazy.
I agree. Yeah. It's that it's it's been like kind of again, like it's not that there was no blog post that laid all this out for us. It's just been kind of this like You just noticed the code was really good, basically. And and from there, it's just we've been piecing together all this other stuff. And so it's been it's been a uh
Kind of like a the the the thrill of like a murder mystery of like what is going on here, you know? Oh really? Yeah, you know. Piecing together like what you've seen enthropic releasing. Is that what you mean? Well like what have you been s noticing murder mystery was?
Well and then and then the impacts of like bulb where it's like we have people that are not technical using this. How how are they using it? Why are they doing this? You know, it's and then just kinda all the stuff we've talked about in this podcast has has been the result of
you know, uh nine months of just uh
You know
R and D and seeing the results of it and going, what? You know, and then and then digging in
Doing another thing then going, What? Again? And then it just keeps happening because there's there's no chartered course for this, you know. It's like an anthropologies, if that's the right term, of just like watching the it's like an emergent
Discovery, it sounds like versus you have the strategy. Here, we're gonna do this, where persona to launch, this thing will happen.
Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah, I think that that's the best way to put it. The best way to put it. It it's it's it's exactly that. Um
And um
And so it it's it's it's it's very interesting to just um you know uh
Yeah, be a part of it, I imagine. Yeah, yeah, you know.
And I think as people say, Okay, these are just toys, they're prototypes, like it's not gonna work with your existing code, it's not gonna scale.
Like
It's important to know just what we talked about.
The this is a model from last June that you're this is possible on.
And everybody's working on the next cutting edge model that will make this even better.
And that's gonna come real soon.
Okay.
Amazing. Okay. I just have a few more questions to kinda close out this conversation.
One is just what is coming next for Bolt. What are some of the cool new features that will

Before this comes out, maybe right after this comes out, and maybe in mid March.
Yeah. Yeah, okay. So by by the time and you know, I'm gonna go back and tell our engineers that I said this on this podcast. Committed, sorry guys. This is I found actually being a leaky faucet on uh you know talking on podcasts and stuff is said, you know, the my engineers 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 it it's um
I
You know, I think for for us it's like
Uh again, we've seen a lot of
PMs, uh designers, uh, entrepreneurs, et cetera.
using both. And so we're really looking at how to a better you're kind of better fit in with the tools that folks are using.
Uh to do those things today. We're like we're Bolt's not gonna like replace them or something, right?
And and and and for like, you know, if you if you're working at a company, like how do you like integrate this stuff with your existing like business and your existing product and code base? Because I th that's the question we often get.
for people is how do I like open my you know like we're talking to
You know, the one of the fan companies the other day like, How do we open our production code base and that's you know, that's like twenty years old? I'm like, You don't. Like that's not like none of this stuff. Like that's not
But you do this is for like rapid product development.
Um
in your use case. So I the the the the features that we're gonna be shipping, I'm pretty stoked about this one. So we've we've been working on this for a while and we've we've uh partnered up with a company called the Anima to do this, but
Uh basically so on any figmite Rural.
When you're looking at like a
You know, the design.
That you've made.
Uh if you just put bolt on new in front of the URL and hit enter.
It's gonna suck that at design into ball and turn it into a full stack app or mobile app.
Just
That is
Yeah. It's amazing.
It's gonna be nuts. Yeah, I mean it's like it's it's really fun to use'cause you know, like
When you're you know, the as a d whether you're a developer, designer, or whatever.
Going and taking that and
Bye.
uh turning it into an actual coded out. And the thing is once it's bullet, you can just keep prompting from there. Like, yeah, we'll add another page here. Do this. So it's like
You can have like things that where you want pixel perfect design.
You can have it and it'll translate one to one. Like, you know, where it's and it's splitting out the asset. It's like Anima's uh been doing this since twenty seventeen, like you know, figment of code.
Um they've got uh yeah the the best agent.
uh in the world for like they're the number one Sigma plugin, you know, or whatever. Um
And um and to in both like it's just gonna
just work. Like it's just deeply integrated.
So it's bold bolt.ne slash the Figma URL to the design. Yep.
That's all you gotta do. Anything. And in bull, we're gonna also have a little Figma icon in the chat thing. So like you go to Bull.
itself, you can like click it and then paste the URL or whatever.
But um yeah, it's like just but it's like that, it's like
From Figma to full stack app and
in a click, literally, you know that's crazy.
Uh so
That one's pretty cool. And then kinda the other one that we're working on is like an integration with Slack. Cause often, you know, when when you're talking about Figmas, uh you know, like Figma links or whatever.
But a company
You're in Slack or whatever. And so you're like having conversations about hey, you know, we should really add a page to this, that does that.
Um and so we're actually creating a a uh you like a a bolt.
Like Slack bot.
That's uh
Whose job is to
Basically act like a developer on your team. And so you can be like
In a threat, you can be like, Hey, I think we should have a home page like Yeah, okay, like at Bull, like can you like whip this up real quick? And it'll like go and just kind of suck down the entire conversation history so far in your Slack you know on the 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 feature I just mentioned right before this.
I can just go and convert that thing out of the box and then you want me to add a page to it and then do this thing, got it.
I'm gonna go do that. Oh, here's the URL where you can open it up in my key prompting. Yeah, I mean, so it's like
It's it's it's like having a developer and someone kinda kick this thing out and just like go make this thing real quick, you know?
So it's like those two things I think it's
Again.
You start thinking about how our companies are gonna change how their
how they're currently doing product development and
Even it's like, Hey we need to spin up a marketing side. Here's the thing we're like, Can you do that, Bull? Yep.
Let me go do that. Yeah, I mean.
That's what I'm kind of excited about those two in particular,'cause
I think I think they're gonna be
I I I think it's gonna be
Well received, you know, and folks should be snarked about it. Those are those are awesome features. It's uh I love the slack piece because when I think about agents, there's always talk about agents.
To me, like the simplest way to understand it is just a slack bot.
Just the AI can talk to you like they're a person in Slack.
And I'm that's exactly what you're doing.
And this is this agency feature of just like, hey, you just have this engineer now that can go build stuff for you.
Let me actually ask you a question along these lines that I was meaning to ask but I forgot is just how much
Your engineering team, how much uh
What are they using to build?
Bolt. I imagine it's a lot of cursor.
Is uh like how much was Bolt at this point involved in building Bolt?
And is there any other tools that you they found useful find useful that are worth highlighting?
Yeah, good question. Yeah. Yeah, we we definitely use cursor. Folks use cursor a lot. We use bolts a lot for the product development process, like a ton, we're using it.
And uh and when we're doing basic the the flow
that described like things that need to be pixel perfect, we're going to Figma for
And then and after we're taking that and we're pulling that into bold like'cause you know, we've got access to the integration today. So pulling that into bold and we're saying, Hey, go add these things or whatever, or just saying, Hey, here's a screenshot of our URI go to you need to do dot.
Um
Other AI tools, um
That the developers are using
I think those are like the primary ones. I mean, I think we've got like a sub a subscription to Claude and like chat GBT and things like that.
But you know
I I think I think like for development it's like cursor's like the main thing.
Yeah. It's cool how few tools it like
Like there's so many AI tools and it's interesting how few
People actually end up using.
It's like cursor, clawed jet G V T, and then maybe another tool.
Like.
Talking.
Final ish question.
Say somebody.
Is
Opening a bowl for the first time.
What's something that you if you s imagine you could sit next to every new user that's just trying Bolt for the first time, you could whisper a tip in their ear to be successful with Bolt.
What would that tip be?
And and and this is like'cause we but we have a lot of different types of use. I imagine you're talking about like PMs or design. That's a good one. That's a lot of the audience.
I would I would I would say uh talk to this thing like you do
Uh a linear ticket or a Jira ticket.
That that would be my that would be my advice is like in your order tr and talk to this like you would like you're talking to
What are the developers on your team, right? And
Uh and and what that means is
Um be specific on some on things that matter, right?
And and on things we're
Also you can let it be creative.
Yeah, you can go to and just say.
Make it prettier, you know? And and it'll take a it'll and 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 but I think for 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 coworker, you know.
I love that.
Like what'cause these tools are so easy, you just go in and it's like tell the thing and then cool, you have a website just like coded, boom, done.
And what I'm hearing here is take a little time.
So
Uh craft your ask.
It may be tempting to just like start
Cool. Build me a serum.
And then you're stuck with that first version and then you're like, Oh well, okay, I didn't mean that.
So it sounds like your advice is take some time to craft the ask and be clear about what you want.
Yeah, I I that totally, right? Especially if you have a clear vision of what you're trying to build, right? It's something that like
Reasonably sophisticated.
And I what I'd recommend everyone to do whenever they
If it's your first time trying bull and you're like what what should I have a do? And I don't have an idea.
Tell it to build you a personal website. Like there's it's there's something like magic. Like you take your LinkedIn, copy and paste your LinkedIn bio and and and work experience just like
Select text, copy, paste it, I need a website, my name is so and so.
Here's my LinkedIn history. Um, my favorite color is blue and I like dogs. Paste, right? Make it pretty actor.
Yeah, and and then and you know I mean and and and then you can hit deploy and and if you don't have a dot com yet, now you can.
Right. Like I mean, now you have a real personal sort. It's like I think there's kind of a moment around now where it's like, Okay, wow, like this, you know, it zero shot, zero shot.
Ninety nine point nine nine percent 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 if if not.
Right. And that gives you the taste of like okay, cool. So if I really take the time to think this through
and like make a PRD and like and then kind of in you know put that in piece by piece into this thing.
The sky's the limit, you know?
So
Eric, this has been just insane on so many levels. I I have so much to process. I think a lot of listeners do too.
Maybe as an actual final question.
Uh I saw this story about how when you're starting Stack Blitz or maybe even before Stack Blitz
You lived you s you like uh squatted in the AOL office.
Uh'cause you had some badge that still worked. Maybe just tell that story.
Yeah, yeah, I know I and that that was like um you know kinda the the thing I was like most known for. That happened like twenty twelve and I was like nineteen years old. So it's been it's been a very long time. I think I'm like thirty three now or something. The statutes of limitations are expired.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Um
But um uh yeah, for a while I was like I have to do something more notable than than living in AOL. Uh yeah, this can't be what I'm like known for, right?
If we're now people are like, Oh, like wait, you're you're you're the stock guy and you're the earwal guy? So
Yeah, so yeah, when I first came out to Silicon Valley, you know, we I we got into a I was building a K twel education startup at the time.
Yeah, and this is back during the uh the days where why combinator they only give you like twenty grand.
Um and so there's this uh offshoot of Imagine or uh of my commoner called Imagine K twelve. It was uh Jeff Ralston, who I think he was CEO of YC.
A couple of years back.
But and then Magic H twelve merged into Y Combinator uh a couple of years after Rob went through it.
But they had on 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 let's like rent down office space to you know to to
Uh yeah, to t to teenagers, basically. Yeah. And um and so I was there and I mean we we ended up running out of, you know, money like twenty twenty grand doesn't go very far in the valley.
Three or four months in and we're like, Oh God, we're you know, what do we do?
And
I was going to the AL office a couple multiple times a week'cause we had to access cars to get into to get to the investors' offices.
And I realized I was like, you know, like
They have like couches here and
I
They have you have food. Like there's ramen that you can microwave and
There's a gym where there's like a shower and even you can do laundry and and so I was like
You know, I don't know, I mean maybe maybe I'll figure this out I'll just live out of here.
And so that's that's what I ended up doing for
Like four or five months I was like living out of this
This headquarters.
Um over on uh Page Mill and Alcomino in Palo Alto.
Um
And then uh you know, I got away with it for a while just because
You know, the the the the uh guards, you know, the security guards, you know, they worked st you know, twelve hour shifts. And so the the guys that when I was there at night and I was coding like
All day, every day, basically. So the the the guys at night just were like ding, this guy works really hard, you know?
And and then in the morning they'd be like, Wow, this guy
This guy's working really hard, right? So
And I became friends with some of them and and then eventually I think they you know, there were also a whole bunch of Stanford students that that they think they like put bunks in in uh one of the it was just like
Start getting control. So I think they start cracking down then one morning at like four in the morning.
Um
Guard came in and threw me out. And uh I I'm from Chicago. I don't know anyone at that point. I'm like, I know no one in the Bay Area. So I went to a Starbucks.
Which was not open, I just like I slept on the table.
Outside of the figure.
Hmm.
And then and I can't I I think I I hit up one of the other entrepreneurs that was in the program and I was like Do you have a couch like I
Think I kinda need it at this point.
Yeah, the press got wind of it, and it's just like
You know, worldwide story. But I lived on a dollar a day. That was the crazy thing. My burn rate was a dollar a day.
Um
At at that time. And what did you use that dollar for?
Uh that this is back when McDonalds had the dollar menu.

Literally. So it was like uh you know, I would you know, occasionally we go and
Yeah, get a cheeseburger or whatever.
Um
And
Yeah, it was you know.
Ultimate, ultimate scrappiness, you know.
Like you're
Technically homeless. From homeless to one of the fastest growing startups in history.
Eric, what a journey.
This is such an interesting point in time of your life and of
Just tech. Like no matter what happens, I'm sure you'll be extremely successful, but it's such an interesting just
Point in that journey.
And I'm thankful that you make time to share it.
With us.
It's always good to just have the perspective of, you know.
You should you should start companies if to
keep the mindset that you're have you're doing it to have fun. Right. And so
Stoke to see where this goes, one way or the other. It's gonna be it's gonna be interesting.
Eric, final questions, where can folks find any line if they wanna reach out, maybe follow up on some stuff you shared, and how can listeners be useful to you?
Yeah, totally. I mean uh yeah, so uh both on ears, the website.
Um
Over on Twitter, uh I'm uh Eric Simons forty uh on Twitter and I I think our our Twitter is Bolt dot new, not with a period, it's like B O L T D O T N E W
Um
And um yeah, I mean I'm very curious to hear
Yeah, I'm curious to hear f what folks think. Like I mean, this is again like we're
We are learning so much, um, from the people that are coming and trying this thing out and giving their feedback.
And
You know.
Within the first week of it going online, we were not the experts on how to use the tool anymore. And it's been that way ever since.
And so I I love hearing from folks on on what they want to see, you know, next and how this is helping them and
And then where they run into problems. Like where we're where we need to go and fix things. So my email address is uh Eric at stackbloods.com. That's Eric with C.
So I'd love love to hear anyone from anyone, whether it's a DM on Twitter or
Uh or an email.
Amazing.
Eric, thank you so much for being here.
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. This is a blast.
By everyone.
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