We Were Going to Shut Down Our Company…Now We’re Worth $700M | Eric Simons (Bolt)

so we were you know we were at the end of the year we were going to start figuring how to spin things down and so we had a handful of ideas and like I i' mentioned like we had tried the idea for bold and February last year and the models weren't good enough and so in may we got an early preview of Sonet we're like this whoa like this changes potentially everything this is really good and so July 1st we green L it and then in October we launched it and in the first two months alone we went from 0 to 20 million of brr in the first two months it's just kept growing since then and to buy know I mean it's like buy traffic Revenue whatever I mean this is like the number one web-based code Jen thing in the world and I mean in developer stuff I think it's second only to like cursor which is crazy cuz it's been out four months or something like the speed here is wild but yeah I mean we went from you know being ready to shut down the company you know to you now something that's huge all right welcome everyone my guest today is Eric the CEO of boat uh boat is an AI coding platform that's exploded from uh 0 to 3 million users and uh I'm excited to watch Eric demo building a mobile app from scratch with AI and also talk about how his overnight success was actually seven years into making so welcome Eric awesome yeah thank you for having me I'm stoked to be here yeah so shall we dig in should I start with just to Dive Right In show I demo this thing yeah let's do it man I mean you just launched product so I'm excited to take a look yeah heck yeah so for those who

haven't like heard of bull before it's like you know a text to app product and so I'm going to go pull my screen here and so it's really the simplest interface in the world what do you want to build and there's just an input box you can type anything and so we started with just full stack web applications we still do that insanely well and this week we just announced that we also now support building native mobile apps for IOS and Android so you can go from idea to App Store just by prompting it's like pretty mind-blowing so I'll show you just I'll start with one example you know make me we have this like build a mobile app with Expo so we partner with Expo if folks are familiar but they've got like the best react native tooling and ecosystem in the world so this it's really cool so build me a mo I say is build me a mobile app that and I'll just say I'll start with like a simple one is a clone of Spotify see if this works and so this is the core experience of Bolder so it kind of at this point kind of looks like chat gbt or something until this right side of the screen comes in we have a full developer environment that's like booted inside of the browser this is what we spent the past seven years building was like this technology to like boot an OS inside of your browser tab right but any so it's getting to work it's installing all the FES we need it's writing all the code it's going to go ahead and quickly spin up a uh a clone of Spotify here and one of the main I think things people really love about bolt is that we've done a lot of work to make the actual user interfaces it builds to be really beautiful and so once this thing boots up you'll kind of get to see that but that's this is kind of the core of the experence and it took this very seriously it's making a very sophisticated clone here of Spotify I mean I one of the things as a beginner program where it's just like installing all the librar are pay ass so it's nice that it's doing all that for you already yeah y exactly that's like what I think you know especially like with Bol the bir directional you know communication between the operating system layer and the AI agent have has complete access to all the processes and the runtime and all the errors that are happening the state of the file system whatever have you so it can when things go wrong you can really dig in and drill in and so you can see here this native iPhone app here that's great man yeah this looks like Spotify right you know it's pretty insane how well so you kind of get the idea and this is just the UI right so we can keep prompting and building on top of this and so this is like I think someone that you people use Spotify or music as you kind of get an idea I mean that that's zero shot right like that's just it's just off the Dome just whip that thing up so like let's maybe start another app and we were kind of talking V before they like what would be kind of a cool app to build and so you know I

was mindblown to find out that like CM the meditation app is worth like three billion dollars you know yeah it's kind of wild so it's like you know you want to start a three billion dollar company right now let's do it man yeah all right so I build app that is you know a simple meditation app have it be you know beautiful and minimalistic and so this is like you can you know obviously you can like you know create like a PRD type dog where you can like really outline what you want if you want to be specific but a lot of times it's just it's fun and you actually get really great results just by kind of giving your general idea and then throwing Vibes at it you know like what does it mean to be beautiful and ministic find out yeah you know this is like I guess like kpo is you got the vibe coding thing it's yeah I mean it's kind of true I mean you can really go to this thing and you know give it you what the sort of feel you're looking for if like a Super Genius Like kath is do it that you know like I have no shamee in just like Vibe coding too like totally it's fun I mean then like it's not like you're going to go and you know at this point with where Frontier AI is at it's not like you're going to go and someone at JP Morgan Chase is not like Vibe coding transaction you logic right but if you're building user interfaces it's a great you know you just be very creative and kind of spitball with the thing so one thing I want to show here

actually so you can pull out your phone and do this too so um the cool integration with Expo is I we have a mobile preview you can see on the web which I showed earlier but if you actually Expo has this app called Expo go you just download that and you pull out your camera app and take a picture of the QR code what it'll actually do is over the air in real time it will take the app that you are building and build it up on your phone hopefully this works you know across wherever you're where are you based out of actually uh I'm in a bear yeah okay so you're probably connected to the same point of presence that I am for this thing all right but so I just booted this up this is here's the app that we're looking at on my phone here this meditation app and you can actually use it it's like complet clearly you it's like functional I can go between the different tabs and whatnot right and so as I'm prompting this thing it will actually just update like live on my phone right so it looks like for example this timer this is just like a placeholder that we got here right so I can actually say you know make the timer you know work and just hit enter and it's going to get to work and actually go and make that timer happen how does it not to make like multiple tabs and stuff like you have some like default prompt or something like you know we've got some default prompt like things that you know we think it'll you know the different like Fast tracks of like hey we it'll have you'll have the best experience kind of doing these things and you kind of injecting you know contacts that'll you know make more holistic sort of apps right and now if I go ahead and click here it should start counting down and it does right looks like we can turn on ambient sounds and I don't know if this works right now let's see it's probably a placeholder no up put some sounds yeah so let's add some sounds like I let's see why you know normally like if you want the best experience probably go some mp3s and drop it into bolt which you can do but I'll just say you know make the sounds actually play real sounds you know when you click them like the this is like this goes against everything I know as a p man like these kind of like kind of requirements it's just like if I tell engineer this like you know I don't think he'll be very H happy yeah no not at all right not at all and the kind of the cool thing is like before you know like we're just on the whim just prototyping idea which I think is cool right because it's like you know stack bletz my co-found and I this we started backlits B like out of a coffee shop you know just SP what would be kind of cool ideas to try right yeah we're like the AI will write code that's you know not valid or you know there's something missing and this is like one of the nice Integrations that we've got in bold is it will actually capture that and then you can you know actually do something useful with it right and and maybe after this let's try to make it look a little bit more like calm like maybe you can just like upload a screenshot or something like do it we can do it and let's see if this works hopefully yeah okay there we go cool this might be it might be a browser issue and pull it up on my device let's see if we can get this rolling this this's another actually cool thing about bold is like if something's going wrong in the dev environment you can actually just refresh the page it like it's booting an entire operating system from scratch in here right if you ever used any of these other online IDE code things big problem is like you the dev environments this happens with Dev environments locally they just like go wrong right so be able just like boot the thing from the ground up here and just have the dev server be completely starting up from scratch it's on depencies writing the code huge Advantage because you now it's you before there was some error happening in the dev server now it's not happening and that's just because something in the operating system you know got wonky just like repo a computer ex 100% right so that's and when you think about web apps all the time like stuff happens with these things right and you how do you get back to your fresh date you hit the refresh button and but if you're using like a cloud VM to do that work that's like not how it's going to work right so that's the general idea so we can add whatever functionality we want but it went out and grabbed MP3s for these things and you know have some of them work or not okay well it tried its best to find MP3s that would work but yeah that's the general idea this episode is brought to you by vanta whether you're a startup founder navigating your first audit or a security professional scaling your GRC program security has never been more critical or more complex that's where Vana comes in businesses use van to establish trust by automating compliance needs across over 35 Frameworks like sock 2 and ISO 271 Venta can help you start 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like just like a Google image search or something yeah we it okay so maybe like what like get a screenshot of Comm yeah like the Comm time timer thing or something yeah let's do it let's see what it can do here there we go this I like that UI that looks cool yeah yeah okay let me go ahead and save this and then I will go ahead and over here and I will drag her in I'll say you make the timer look like this UI and's see what it does you'll get to work it's doing it I mean I feel like these uh AI Coen tools like both are like really exceptional at front and stuff right to they like yeah look at that oh nice it knows to expand it that's funny we go like response if you get a little bit bigger but yeah so it's like going in and out I can then prompted say make that Circle you know make the breathing smaller and go and do that but yeah I mean you took that because before there wasn't even a circle I mean it was like there's like a timer countdown right like this thing it just kind of ascertained okay yeah like this is you're going to start the breathing thing and it's going to like it should probably go like that right so it got that from a screenshot I didn't we didn't say anything about that yeah need to expand the circle yeah exactly and how would I actually deploy this to the App Store may be like is it already show that or yeah so the way that you deploy this look I said now it's like fitting probably within the viewport and it's doing its thing it's got the timer content out there but yeah I mean to make a mobile app like this I mean I this would you know get X code and all the stuff St it would be insane and I don't know how half this stuff works I don't most of it works right and you want like you're like hey this looks really great I want to get this to the App Store so we actually up in the top right here you can actually you can build a web version of this if you want and then you instantly that'll be online want go to the App Store you can click deploy to App Store and that takes you over to Expo so what Expo does they all the tooling kind that you're seeing there like running this app Etc that's all their stuff right um they also have this thing called EAS that is basically like they're FastTrack actually like building these things and getting it into the App Store and so for both Apple Google you have to sign up for individual accounts right uh to go and um actually do that but then um EAS you can run from like command line uh whether it's like locally or in Bolt you can actually say take this Expo react native project they will bundle it up and then using your app store credentials they will publish that to test flight or actually into App Store review but it's like you tap like you know out of five or 10 minutes maybe if you already have all this stuff set up like you're you register on Apple or Google and then you just link e with those like it's wild how fast it is to actually get deployed I think the Expo folks actually made a video going from like idea to App Store with the launch of this week I think we're doing a live stream with them I think like next week or something but yeah they've done a phenomenal job you know of making this crazy easy to actually take these things to the App Store yeah I love how you kind of partner with these other uh platforms like you know Expo for deployment to App Store and also superbase for dat databases right to extend BS functionality yeah yep absolutely yeah so up here if we want to add a you know Su based database we can click so if we want to have like user log in and let people you know track their meditations or share it with FES I don't know yeah you can build full stack web and mobile apps with this you know and yeah like there's you know expo's great at mobile superbase is great at database the hosting like we do a web build of this thing that's using netlify to do the hosting so we've got great Integrations with you the best companies in the world that specialized in this stuff just built in out of the box and how about if I uh like if I want to refer a change or like can you like walk through some of that yeah so like this one right so you know I said make the breathing Circle smaller and so right here on every message there's a you the most recent one there's an undo button and on all the other ones you can say roll back to checkpoint right so if I if let's say we didn't like this change I could just you know hit revert and what'll happen is it's now we have the big circle back again oh was fast that's like almost instant yeah cuz it's we're checkpointing every single message turn and so then you would basically just calculate the diff apply it and then you know the dev server picks that up and recompiles it you know usually within milliseconds that's great man because yeah I was using some other ID the other day and like you know I have to use like GitHub and stuff and like you do all commands yeah just kind of a pain too yeah it's like a huge pain right and often with these with you know the reality of using these AI you prompting based you know text to app things is like the AI is just going to do stuff sometimes it's going to take what you say it's G like kind of be you know do something that you know is following your instructions but like isn't and you're like oh crap I need to roll that back and like change what I actually want then like you know and so what you need to have this sort of you know having that be a fast process where you have to like dig around how like check out a specific command or you know whatever right is a pretty key part of you know the experience you know to allow to actually use these things well okay so do you

have any uh like can you give me like your top you know three to five tips for actually gting the most out of both like Beyond just like Vibe Co coding like what are some tips to actually yeah if you're like really building something if you're really if you're building like a an app or you're not just like you like well we're just having fun here right but if I really wanted to like take this to production I mean a lot of this stuff you're sitting down and kind of planning out like hey what am I looking for right like having a clear idea of okay what should the different pages be how should they like what should generally be on them how should it work like what exactly I'm looking for because when you come into the prompt here it's like coming in with that information and you can like you actually list out the different things you need has a huge it has a huge swing on this thing's ability to actually make an app that's going to really fit your requirements and then with that you want to break it into concrete you don't want to like just throw an entire PRD at this thing or whatever you want to like break it into concrete tasks where like those an engineer right it's like the same way you would start out if want to build this app what we do we would build out just building the UI we would be like okay does the breathe functionality work okay yes it does and this like generally looks good okay let's go to this tab does this a look and function you know like without all that Core Business logic does the skeleton this thing actually like work yes or no right once you kind of get that done then you go okay now let me actually add let me add my database let me add authentication like let me go get the actual MP3s to play this thing from you know all those sorts of things like you want to start adding the logic in once the UI is complete because you're kind of just delineating then like what the AI is focusing on doing it's not focusing that on like UI stuff it's just focusing on hey when that button gets clicked you're going and you know making you're going and like registering the user in superbase right versus if you were saying okay make me a login page that has superbase right up and like it sometimes it can do that right but if when things go wrong you have to like completely revert but even if some things are working for that one tromped it's like you can't granularly kind of roll back that okay no that just that one part wasn't quite right you know because all this stuff is combined in a mega you know commit basically from the AI you know so that would be kind of my recommendation this is like anyone you know Building Products in general it's like have a plan and then you know kind of like really think through what you want break down you know those into specific trunks start with the UI first get the UI to really be great and then break out the chunks of okay now like let's make the login page actually log you let's make the registration B actually register you for account you know and then like that sort of thing so you want to you do want to wrun like a PRD orbe help get AI to help you write a PRD but you don't want to feed the whole thing into B at once it would get confused so you want to do it one by one that's what you're saying typ that would be my recommendations and again you can actually get good results by just feeding the entire thing in and zero shot it'll like get it all right or most of it right you know but it's it you know it's you can try that and if it doesn't work then you can just say okay let me just start from scratch and just kind of break it out piece by piece then right but yeah so but generally if you do the work of having a PRD you know just B which is like just a fancy way of saying like having a plan like of like how each page works how the functionality will work it'll allow it puts kind of you know bumpers on what the agent is going to actually go and do which is just really helpful for you to actually get to the end zone and have a great app really quickly you know and how about I think you probably stop sharing now chat about stuff yeah but how about like when I get stuck in this like you know Doom Loop right where like he was making bugs like so obviously you can hit the button like fix the bug but what if it doesn't work yeah good question I mean this is like this is kind of the problem with all of these

things is that inevitably you will you'll end up and I think if you like try and fix a bug hit the fix bug button like more than three times in a row with us we go okay like let's take a step back like you know can you describe what you know what you're seeing can you go and you know do some ancillary research on what is happening with this you know Etc I think so today the that's like kind of the you know the best way to get unjammed is like to you know go like in our Discord and say hey I'm running into this thing you know or Google and see if there's information you know that you can find that'll be helpful the kind of the next stuff we're rolling out that's cool we announced this one already which is it's called like the bolt Builders but basically you know often times you just kind of need someone who's you know like an expert you know on development stuff to like step in for like anywhere from like 10 minutes to like 30 minutes right to just come in help figure out what's going wrong you know and then and get you on your way and so we're actually rolling out a program like in bold there's GNA be a button where you can say hey like connect me with someone live that can like go and punch in it's like you there's all this stuff people are like AI is going to replace developers like no it's not like the developers are more important than ever but they just get to focus on solving hard problems instead of just you know slamming out HTML and CSS right and that's kind of one aspect of something we're rolling out and then the second one is just there's been a lot of work being done on reasoning models that are you know making a huge difference in how effective the buying be and we we're beginning to roll this out now by default in Bol where when you say like when an error occurs you say hey fix this thing it's we're going and doing you know multiple different passes across different models I mean different reasoning models to get like you know sort of like mixture of experts sort of opinion on okay what is oh than yeah what's actually happening here right and solving it and that stuff is pretty effective so I think over as new models out and they keep improving Etc it's like where you know the erors that you run into where you need to raise your hand for developers is you know going to keep going down and approach zero right but yeah that's kind of the it's a two-pronged approach with like technology and people you know this is how it's done so if I keep running to buzz on boat you actually tell me to calm down like maybe show the calm screen it's like sit here and meditate for a minute just quick and then you can keep promting yeah it does I think in the m like says like hey like listen like you've hit the fixed Buton a couple times you know you might want to go and here's our Discord like see what's going on or like you like blah you I mean because it's like people will just kind of sit there and just keep hammering and which is really frustrating and for people that haven't done a lot of development before understandably it's like there's a button that says fix it so why wouldn't I click it right or like attempt fix or you know and so it's just you know you keep hammering that thing but the reality is like you know often there there's some context that's missing and you know especially is it if it's like context is specific to how your code base is set up which these things end up you know all specializing at some point or another you need to have that additional context either come in from another human from a Google search you did or something right or like whatever have you but or you have a reasoning model that's like going and you know thinking hard about it and it's like oh maybe that's it you know so yeah I think it's really smart to build the reasoning stuff into Bol because like normally what I do is I copy the code to like chaty B3 or something try to get to solve it but like you know it doesn't have all context off all my files exactly yeah exactly so that the early stuff we've been doing on that it's very effective at you know really improving the debugging experience because it's you know has full access to the contacts that's a key differenti man if you guys saw that because like I find with these Coen tools it's kind of like the startup curve like you start like oh this is so amazing and then you get stuck in this loop it's like oh this thing is not working and then eventually hopefully people figure it out and get back on a path you know yeah totally I mean that that is the Challen ver us and all the other stuff in this is like you know and I think the thing with the Frontier Model they're they just keep getting better and better right so I think like one year ago we tried building bu and it wasn't possible because the models at the time just weren't good enough and now here we are right it's like now you can actually like you know zero shot web and mobile apps you know where like generally like you can build you know meaningful stuff with these things and you will run into errors with any of these tools but there erors where it's like today you just have to like go Google stuff and whatever have you tomorrow it's like it these things are just not going to make those errors right period these entire classes of problems are just not going to be problems and I say tomorrow I mean like literally like in the next couple of months I think we're going to see some new models potentially coming out that just you know really are step function improvement over this stuff you know it's nice to kind of work on a startup where like you know you have your engineers but you also have this like these giant companies spending billions of dollars like making your product better essentially right totally yeah I mean that's I mean that you know that for us to you know yeah I mean it's Bol wasn't you know when we launched in October could you start taking off like a rocket it was like you know we were you know it took us about a month to kind of like really get our bearing straight of kind of what was going on here and but it became pretty clear like okay this is yeah the Coen is it's G to it makes sense because software is deterministic like it either when you write code and it execute it either runs without errors or it doesn't and so I compare that to like if you have to make an LM that's like good at law is subjective like it's like what how did the judge feel about what was society's general feeling at that time about that it's like that's not deterministic right and so it's hard to do reinforcement learning you know on that type of that's like most problems right kind of are those S things software is not that and then that's what anthropic I think really identified they're like we can make the best coding models by just doing a ton of reinforcement running on these things and so I think we're going to it makes sense that they are getting better uh faster than kind of any of these other areas right that the ls could be used for and that it's probably only going to accelerate I want to

mention one use case that most people might not know about with bolt so it's actually pretty good for like when my designer makes a mockup and then I want to explore some variations right and then before I had to be like hey you know please can you please explore this variation for me here is why but now with b and these other tools I can just put their design into B and be like hey can you make this like you know two columns or can you try this and then I can show them what it looks like almost right the bat you know yep totally so like that's C po I think for PM oh huge yeah it's huge right and even for like you know this is what you're saying is actually one of the main use cases that we see companies PMs and designers entrepre using us for is like you this isn't like hey you have to build your entire company using this app sort of thing some we have startups that are launched to make full stack apps and making money doing it right but when you look at existing companies especially where they have existing code bases the value of this is instead of today if you want to make a high fidelity prototype right typically you're going to do that entirely in figma where you can click between these static screens you know and that's like a lot of work to like lay all that stuff out right whereas if you can just like Take Your Design system your different components you dump that into bolt and then you just say okay may me a web app or a mobile app that has this page with the D requires this page that da da hit enter zero shot probably comes back with something that's pretty usable and you can refine over a couple of prompts boom and that's like a real app like you say here's an iPhone app take a screenshot of this QR code try it and user what do you think and actually feel it right actually like actually not like Hey how do you think this would feel in this figma screen it's like CS the mobile app you know like just like how does it and that's like you know way faster for the product Dev Elevate product Discovery process you know and so I think that I think we're you know we're already seeing a lot of companies start to do this where they're just doing all of that stuff in Bull you know like they did high level designs like the design system whatever in figma and then they're taking that and just putting in Bol and that's what action making their prototypes of stuff you know that's amazing dud yeah it's easier for me to generate the real app with Bol then to like try to fit with like Auto layout or whatever F components there exactly and that's you know but before it's like Unthinkable to like go to the code prototyping stage first to that's like expensive right to have developers SP ders whipping up you know it's like that's Unthinkable to but the equation is completely changed now where it's cheaper and faster to have a real coded prototype and that's yeah it's amazing so so Eric I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about your company building JY like I think most people don't realize you spent the seven years bu this company before boat came out of nowhere can you talk about like you know like basically right before you guys launched boat like what was going on and like you know what happened afterwards whole thing yeah yeah I mean you so my I started this with my co-founder Albert he and I've been like childhood best friends since we were like 13 we grew up

street from each other in Chicago and he I learn how to write software you know when we were 13 and just we've been building web apps and stuff ever since and like products and startups and whatever and the core Insight that we had of starting stack blist which is like the company behind bolt and you was the first product of this company you stack. com was like a webbased IDE the Insight we had was actually it kind of it came from like when we first came to Silicon Valley we had the Good Fortune of bump into Dylan field Evan Wallace when they were starting figma and this is back in like 2012 and so we got to see kind of the story play out for those guys with what they were doing and back in 2012 like first like seed round or series that they raised or whatever they didn't even have they didn't have a design tool they had a demo of a 3D ball dropping into water inside of a browser Tab and the pitch was basically browsers have gotten really powerful they can now do complex 3D graphics rending with webg and the pressor web assembly because of this we think that we can make a design tool we're have to create a new rendering engine for webgl or whatever but like if we do that we can bring design to the web just like Google BR docs and we'll change everything and obviously we know how that story you know played out for them now and it was but it was this classic like deep technology you know browser play and so in 2017 2016 2017 we saw the same deep technology browser PL emerge but for development and so specifically there was some apis that landed like web assembly and shared memory and service workers and we were like oh well like for the first time ever you could actually write an operating system in web assembly like Bo inside of the browser tab so it boots like super fast like 100 milliseconds could be like a couple of megabytes in size you have to write it from scratch but if you could do that you could run full web development tool chains in the browser so you like use the web to like build the web and which is kind of crazy you can't do that right like that seems like something that the you know browser should be able to like have built in capability to like build you Windows has uh Visual Studio Mac has xcode the web has nothing so that was the origins and really was like we wanted to build the tool that we wish we had when we were 13 you know out a code and heck for everything we built since then whereas just you go to you know instead to spend you know days weeks or months like at big companies it takes like a month just to get onboarded to the code base and have your environment set up locally like it would be great if you just open a browser Tab and it just works you have even solid thing right that makes sense yeah so that was kind of the core bet of the company we got that technology to work it took us like four or five years to really nail that and but the big challenge we ran into then is like developers had no interest in leaving their local environments a lot of developers were using the product for free and it was like you know widely adopted open source and stuff we couldn't figure out the monetization aspect and so you know last year we were you know the company's kind of on the Rocks because we were like we got to figure out how this like commercially makes sense to yeah to make a to be a company to be when you raise Venture Capital you have to you know you can't just sit around and you know just make cool technology it has to actually have real tangible business value that can grow quickly and so we you we at the end of the we're going to start figuring out how to spin things down and it's we had a handful of ideas like hey here's different things we could try that would be you know really interesting and like I'd mentioned like we had tried the idea for bold in February last year and the models weren't good enough and so in may we got an early preview of SAA and we're like this whoa like this changes potentially everything this is really good and so July 1 we greenl it and then in October we launched it and in the first two months alone we went from zero to 20 million of AR in the first two month since just kept growing since then and it's to my know I mean it's like buy traffic and revenue and whatever I mean this is like the number one webbased Cen thing in the world and I mean in developer stuff I think it's second to only to like cursor but which is crazy because it's been out four months or something like the speed here is wild but yeah I mean we went from you know being ready to shut down the company you know to you now something that's huge so what this because there's a lot of competitors man there's like vzero and like rep replate like what was the secret between you know scaling to from zero to three million in like four months yeah users you mean yeah like um I think I mean the technology we've been working on like booing the operating system in the browser thing we that's called Web container what we made and that is really the that's the unique differentiator because all the other tools in the market when you go to them and you say hey make me an app they have to provision a cloud VM to do that and so often the free tiers of these things are very limited because they you know otherwise people are going to be you know mining Bitcoin or hosting fishing sites or whatever because s's got to pick up the bill for that cloud BM right you can all the networking that happens there so if they're ddosing people with it like that's on you as the operator right and the experience as an end user just the latency is sucks like every keystroke has to be synced to a server synced back and so it's really hard to manage these things because like as we saw like you know like on the demo I did it's like sometimes these things will just like get into a weird State and you need to like just reboot it you know how do you do that when it's like it's a cloud VM at the end user doesn't control and you have like you know millions of people using this how do you do that reliably and I think that's the challenge a lot of people are running into and then whereas with Bol all the computer is done locally on the user's device just like how figma works just like how Google Docs work like when you go to figma they don't spin up a cloud VM for every user that's using the product oh they just it's running locally on your device and that's the same thing that's happening with B like we're not having to spin up a VM for every single user so we have like a very permissive free tier it's a great experience because there's no latency it even works offline if you disconnect to your internet you can keep like editing code and stuff and still works so that's like the big it's kind of like an under the hood difference that you wouldn't like you wouldn't see it you know what I mean like even if you're technical a lot of people are like what this is like not using a cloud VM you know but when you it's that the things that you notice in the experience is that it's faster it is more reliable like you can hit refresh and get back to a clean state right things are wonky or whatever right you know there's not there's permissive Freeds here because you know there's you have to worry about people mining Bitcoin um got Al some people have come like we've seen in our analytics they're installing Bitcoin monitors and they're sitting there and we're like I don't think you know what's happening like you're using your electricity to buy the Bitcoin that's funny anyways so I mean yeah from any user perspective they don't know anything about cloud FMS but like the speed and the Simplicity I think is like for for me at least that is like the fror right you know yeah and the reliability too because a lot of these other things it's just you'll get disconnected there's some like kind of cryptic error message that you go di in and be like oh this thing ran out of memory and then yeah I mean some weird thing like that right um and then and that and anyone who's worked in Dev environments locally this stuff breaks all the time it just there for a million different reasons and so that is really the challenge is like if you want to provide a very reliable service you know and that's if you want to grow big like have lots of people using your products you have to scale reliability in a very you know a very direct way it's like why is Chipotle so great it's like you can go anywhere in the world with a Chipotle and that burrito is going to taste like the same you know it's like it's great right okay chipy up with Co that not absolutely yeah heck yeah you know like that's you know I or insert your favorite like you know large you know but great you know sort of company of choice right yeah I also like how you made the system prompts open source like what was the decision behind doing that you know yeah unconventional it was like a very uncomfortable one but we were you know but we were like as we were building bold we were looking out just you know like in the open source world I mean typically is like a ton of great stuff you know where it's like okay there's got fav reference on this blah but for this stuff there was really not a lot and so and the more we thought about we were just like this just doesn't seem it doesn't seem like there's a real strategic Advantage here like for us like we were like if there is going to be something that differentiates us it's like web container it's like that in browser they experience that right yeah the system prompts you know every everyone figures out how to get around the system prompt so you like protect your everyone's gonna find out anyways and on top of that like we we're gonna let's just open source like the core of BU like let's just open source the first version of this thing so people can play around with it and like you know let's see if you know we've been doing a lot of work in open source for the past you know five seven years here so it's like there's tangible benefits that are kind of ineffable but like but are very real where people adopting your Open Source Products really is that is a tide that raises whatever boats your company has and that is exactly what we've seen happen with Bol we're like we're the only folks in like the web based AI coach like that have anything open source meaningfully much less like the actual product like you can run bolt like locally or host it yourself whatever with whatever model and that's been amazing because you have our system process everyone's the open source world is like tweaking these things they're like finding out stuff we didn't know I mean it's basically like the world is getting to collaborate and do R& D on what are the best models for cjun like what's the best way to tune this system prompt you know like what are the different things we can do and like even product functionality let's integrate super base or this like that stuff landed in our open source version before we did it yeah and so like and so with the developers there we've got a great relationship with all the people that have showed up to work on the thing because when we share our knowledge of the stuff that's working too and we're like hey this is you know this is kind of what we found and then you know ends up in the open source product yeah when these new models come out it's like because our team is like 20 people you know it's like we have a 25 as of this week but like you it's not a lot of people and we're busy just keeping our servers online it just you know that's that we're hiring as fast as we can but I mean you know to really deeply evaluate all the new models and stuff that are coming out is a gargantuan Challenge and so the open source World being able to actually do that and you know glean those results not just for us but for everyone is amazing to the degree where like you know the frontier AI labs are also using bold it's called bolt. DIY like they're using bolt DIY to actually test out their new mods and say okay because how else are they going to get this into a real production app where they can you know rapidly test it there's not many so that's brilliant dude like I when I build products I have like you know like a Discord too a community and like people give me feedback on a product and like you know my Engineers try to build stuff but like the open source is like Bally people are actually building the product for you right to a certain exent like they're probably with too yeah totally and it's cool and then they and people will take this back they take parts of Bol DIY and they put in their own products and stuff and it's like and that's like the thing right is it's like it's a situation where the pie is growing for everyone you know and I think that a lot of other I think the natural tendency if you're starting like an AI company or whatever it's like we got to like kind of control our thing it's like our secret sauce and stuff and you know like we have to increase our valuation you know it's just like all these like things it's like ah you know but the real is you know if you actually believe like hey this is not a winner takes everything scenario and in fact more people contributing is just going to increase the speed in which this pie is increasing for everyone then it's like okay well and let's be the best place that gives out free pies like you just to let everyone actually contribute and play around with this stuff in a real way you know I mean the pie is still very small right like you know like the number of Engineers coders out of everyone in the world is like tiny tiny surpris yeah especially this is enabling people that have never been able to code themselves to actually build you know and the people that like there are like non-developers taking bolt DIY and trying out the you they're to you don't have to be a crazy developer to swap the models in and out and they get the stuff running locally and so people are doing that and then and they're these people the they understand like a PM or a designer like they're going to have a better perspective on how good is this model at making a product zero shot than like an engineer typical one you know and so they're actually pulling the stuff down too and trying it out and be able to be part of the discourse that's happening which is really important because their you know this is that their knowledge set and their skill set is really key to how products like Bolter man and AI models actually are getting trained right on you know good data so any so it's very cool to see the ecosystem that's um that spawned here and I'm glad that we glad we made decision because it was you we were it was like in the butter we like we may regret this we might regret this but seems like it would be a good idea you know it's just like how figma has like a figma community right like they're people making plugins and stuff it's like amazing ecosystem yeah I also like the read your stim prompt because they kind of confirmed because you have stuff like very important or like never do this is exactly how I try to prompt this stuff is like never it's true yeah it's surprising you our folks have tried it a lot with the you know the AI yeah and this is blessed recommendations from you know from that yeah I was like wow okay yeah because I mean you when you see it coming from a programming perspective it's like that seems like uh like when you go like zindex 999999 to get something to show up above everything it's like it feels like that sort of solution to it but that's like actually you know when you're doing prompt engineering like it's they having these kind of in exlan Inc caps like you know very important critical that it actually makes it has a difference you know in the words and the calization whatever so let's wrap up with like how you guys are building both internally this product like you say you have 25 people do you have any like

product principles or values or like beliefs in building making B greater like building these AI products yeah good question you know I think for us like we want to build a product that is great for developers and but is also great for people that love building products you know in websites and web apps and so like PM designers entrepreneurs Etc and so I think it's kind of interesting where balancing those like there there's not a lot of prior art products that have been able to balance those because it's all prior to AI Coen right I mean it's not this is New Territory and so it's kind of tricky you have to like you know for us we want to take bets because like there's only so many bets we can take with the size of team we have we're scal but even then like we still it's still a fine number of things we can sync our time into and so it's like one of the things that are going to be really great for both audiences you know it's like I the analogy that I often like kind of lean on is like it's like a power drill you know like my mom uses to install stuff at home right get most homes in America right have a power drill right but so do most construction sites you know like so do most professionals who build you know structures right and so I think that the trick is like how do you build uh a tool that's like going to be really that's going to be able to really cater to different types of people and different types of use cases and you know that's powerful but it's bounded and is you know gives you like reliable results and yeah I think that's how we think of the tool and then the sort of bets that we're making and I think the other thing is like we I we expect the AI Cen like the AI models to get better quickly and if you look at kind of what happened before Sonic came out I mean there's a lot of like a lot of the other guys in the space if for text to app or whatever they existed and they had all this stuff built out around rag pipelines and down like there's all this in for they'd spend a year building or whatever and then Sonic came out and then it just obliterated all that like son a zero shot was better than all the stuff that they had spent you know however much time in money making and so we kind of look at that it's like so there's like a tsunami wave that hit but it but we expect more to happen and so how do you like make how do you make bets right in product and Engineering when you're on the beach tsunami just came there's probably another one you probably don't want to like build a whole village right you don't want to like completely you know set up a whole bunch of info that's going to get wiped out like you probably want to like get a really good surfboard you know and kind of prepare for the wave that's coming in and set up structures that you some can be durable some are designed to like be like hey we this can and will get wiped out and some things you don't build because you're like we it's too expensive to invest there we think it's likely that it that this is going to happen so that's kind of the multi-dimensional you know sort of analysis and like kind of that placing that we're kind of looking at least right and which I don't hear a lot of other people kind of talking about because it's you know I think there's kind of a hunger to just like laser in and do you know build the best things now but you know I think that's actually a really important point because I talked to the granola founder too about this and yeah he made the same point it's like you know maybe your customers are screaming as you to improve this feature but you know that the next model is probably going to improve it for you it's like you don't want to do something that the next model just do yeah exactly exactly and because all of that is just lost time and effort and like yeah you'll get to Market a little before you know maybe other people will or something but then it's also going to be probably worse than whenever the model the next bottle has anyways and so you're kind of better off you know and that's the trick things you just don't know you don't know what things necessarily going to improve so you have to like it's hang outside the opening eye anthropic offices you know what's going on guys yeah it helps be like the Early Access programs or whatever I think for these but like but even then it's like you know it's when you're doing like it's how do you do road map planning six Beyond six months heck even six months you know it's like that's the stuff where it's fun because it's so Dynamic everything can change you know and we've seen it happen already and so we're acutely aware and paranoid about okay we startups are an energy conservation and application project and so it's like you case boy like the granola founder what they said is like dead on it's like you know not a good investment of time if you think there's high probability that this will be fixed Upstream effectively you know maybe in short order you know what I really like about all this like you know I feel like there's a lot of like kind of work to a certain extent with like pm has a right bunch of documents and then developers have to like you know tell all environments and like download stuff and like the core feedback loop is just like you build something you talk the customers show the customer you build me like that so like that's what I really like about what you're building because like you're getting those bull man like just like getting stuff into the hands of customers as quickly as possible and then getting the feedback like that's what actually ma matters right you know me I totally agree and like and for me it's like I you my co we learned how to code because it was the only way to get stuff in front of customers right like and it's like if this stuff existed then it's like I don't know if I would have gone as deep as I have if you know understanding how software works now you know building whatever have you because is especially if you're like a product person or an entrepreneur it's like of course like great CS making sure the software is going to be reliable performance all that matters right but it's actually like the rote task of writing that is often inciler to the higher order task that you that actually really matters that determines whether any of this code is even going to be used by anyone ever it's like does this thing solve your problem you know a prospective customer yes you know I mean and as soon if the fast you can get answers on that oh my God amazing right like that's I think the hardest part about building products or services or startups or whatever is just it is you know it can take a very long time to actually get real data and insights on from customers you know and like if something is great or not you know and this is this accelerates that you know I don't know order magnitude more you know and a fraction to the cost I love it man I love it all you is bat and you got like do some ship posting on tw Twitter and then you know to get the customers and then that's all you need I loved your meme with the Jeff Bezos overlooking the yeah I retweeted that from our company account he like God this that is a dank meme so what can people find B and also what can people fall H you yeah yeah so for bolt we have the simplest domain in the world it's bolt. new you can just go there and we I think our Twitter link and stuff is on that page but on Twitter we are at bolt. new and not the period but b t d o t NW so like bolt. new spelled out and then my Twitter is I think I'm Eric Simons 40 so like yeah that's where you find me and I tweet yeah I tweet every day or two or something I don't know but I post stuff that I find interesting like when we're releasing stuff and so yeah hope you follow me there awesome Eric I really appreciate your conversation and hope to see great things for both coming soon yeah awesome yeah thank you for having me appreciate it