(708) E111: How Bolt Hit $40M in Four Months and Why It Took Eric Simons Seven Years to Get There - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQrHYjIU8bU

Transcript: (00:05) [Music] Welcome to Topline, the podcast for the best founders, operators, and investors in B2B tech. Every week, AJ Bruno, Asad Zaman, and me, Sam Jacobs, will break down what's important for you to know to be the most well-informed professionals in the market. This episode is brought to you by Adio, the AI native CRM built for the next era of companies. (00:37) Connect your email and Adio instantly builds your CRM right before your eyes with every company, every contact, and every interaction you've ever had enriched and organized. With Adio, you can build AI powered automations and use its research agents to tackle complex operational processes like finding key decision makers and triaging incoming leads. (00:56) Join industry leaders like FlatFile, Replicate, Modal, and more. Head to adio.com/topline and you'll get 15% off your first year. That's at io.com/topline. Hey everybody, it's Topline Topline 111, our 111th episode. And today we've got a very special guest. Obviously, you know me, Sam Jacobs, CEO of Pavilion, AJ Bruno, CEO of Quotapath, and Asid Zaman, the CEO of Sales Talent Agency. (01:28) But today, we've got Eric Simons on the phone. And Eric is the CEO of Bolt. It's one of the fastest, it's one of these AI products that is just at a torid growth rate. One of the fastest growing SAS products ever from zero to 40 million ARR in just five months with five million signups and profitability on a sub20 person team which is absolutely amazing. (01:50) It runs entirely in the browser via web containers eliminating cloud spin-up lag and slashing infraost. Industry observers call bolt chat GPT level velocity for software creation. So this is we are talking to somebody that is in the in the business of shaping the future. Serial scrapper at 19. Eric famously squatted in AOL's PaloAlto offices for two months uh while bootstrapping his first startup. (02:14) Actually he raised $20,000. So it wasn't completely bootstrap. He wants to make that clear. And I believe recently, but you'll tell me when recently just finished a full iron man after not even having run a marathon ever before. Did I get all of that accurately, Eric? Yeah. Yeah, that's that that's about all all about about right. (02:34) Uh yeah, the Iron Man was in October, so it's been it's been a bit I'm not in the same, you know, uh V2 max range I was back then. V2 max is is one of the best predictors of longevity there is according to this guy I follow on X Dan Go. Are you in the 50s for your V2 max? Uh I need to should I spend a minute on like the drop off was hard after completing the Iron Man. (02:56) So whatever got to go back up. I just did the the Big Sur marathon like a couple weeks ago, a month ago maybe at this point. So, it couldn't be that bad of a drop off. You're still running marathons. Well, there's kind of it's like it's like there's a huge difference. So, I think, you know, I feel like what it takes to run a marathon is is a lot to complete a marathon is is a lot lower of a bar than I think uh most people realize. (03:20) It's like if you're trying to get a a really aggressive time, then it's hard, right? But if you're trying to like complete like I'm doing um the San Diego marathon this uh this weekend with just a handful of friends. But it sounds insane but it's like but you people listen people are that's a ridiculous thing to say. (03:36) You're like I'm so unfit these days. I'm running the marathon on Sunday ran one on Tuesday. Well it's it's like chill. It's like because if you're doing like a a four and a half hour range like it's it's it's not you know you you can have fun and you're just kind of going at a you know not not that you should do zero training forever but it's like the bar is a lot lower I think than people realize to just complete one of these things you barely said you barely leave your house so I get it you're I ran two miles on Saturday I came home I was like (04:06) Sherry I'm a gangster you did it I did two miles you did it uh well Sam what's your V2 max. I don't know. It's like 46, so it's not that great. It's not that bad either. That was a little humble brag. You're like 50 is great. Minus 40. No, I mean I've got friends that are in the 55 range. Like I mean, you know, so uh and I and I've run a bunch of marathons and I will strongly disagree with Eric that it is easy and pleasant and every one of them I paid tremendously. (04:41) So I am humbled to be in your presence. [Laughter] not even including your ARR growth. Um Austin, why don't you kick us off? Okay, we're gonna talk about Eric. You obviously Bolt is an exceptional company, a very a story that has been told a couple of times over and so we're going to do something different. We're not not going to talk about the product as much because there's some great places where you've done that. (05:04) People should go listen to your podcast with Lenny. It was fantastic. What we're going to talk about is building this business which is I think an area that others haven't clicked into and is really interesting. I think we want to talk about pivots because there was a really I think there lot of takeaways related to pivots in your story. (05:22) We want to talk about product market fit competition and then how do you prepare yourself to be able to run this type of marathon that business building is. Let's start with the pivot. So you started this business in 2017. Yeah. Right. And by 2023, you still hadn't found it yet to the point where your board was pushing you to just sell the business, move on, try something else. This isn't working. (05:49) And fast forward a year, almost a year, less than a year, October 2024, you launch Bolt and within four months, you go from a million to 40 million in ARR. What a pivot, right? And our ecosystem has a couple of these legendary pivot stories. yours. Instagram is one where they raised a bunch of money. (06:10) They were trying to build something else. It wasn't working. They had a little bit of money left and they're like, "Hey, we like this." It was a very different idea. Let's have this photo sharing app with some filters. And it took off. Um, and so what we find are that there are founders out there that are trying to find the idea and are wrestling with it for years and years and they're just tinkering and they're wrestling with it and they're trying to find it and sometimes the advice they get is just let it go. Try something else. Put a new (06:38) team together. It something's not working here. But then there's stories like yours that from 2017 to 2023 it wasn't working and then now look at you. What are what have you learned about pivots? If you went back in if you went back in time, what would you do differently or what advice would you give yourself around this concept of trying to pivot and find the thing? Yeah. (07:03) No, it's a good question and like I think um I think all things considered, I think we actually I I I wouldn't actually um I wouldn't change anything about how like how we played our hand here. Um because it's just you know startups in general are it's a game of probability just like a sales pipeline right like if you want to go and close a million dollars of sales you know there's like your pipeline it's like your top of funnel cold calls like you have 100 of those maybe like 20 of those take a second one of those 10 you know are actually warm and of those like three (07:34) close right so but it's it's a pure game you can't you you couldn't just as a salesperson be like I'm going to talk to three people only and then just expect to make a million dollars this year right Um, and entrepreneurship is the same way where it's you're dealing with probability. And so it's it's a lot about just how fast can you iterate, put things out there, get feedback, learn from it, and then and then decide what the the correct course of action is based on that. (07:59) Oftentimes that's just iterating on your current product and trying to continue to make it better. But then sometimes there's like a okay, we got to we need to like burn this thing down uh kind of like a you know a prairie fire. Burn it down so that we can kind of grow something new out of out of what we learned effectively. And so I think like you know when when I first came to the valley but so my I started the company with one of my childhood best friends. (08:21) He and I have been building stuff together uh for 20 years now. We learned how to code when we were 13 and um and like we've been we've been building stuff together. Beautiful story. Like 20 How old are you? 33. Yeah. So literally 20 years since he and I learned how to write PHP and my SQL or whatever at my parents house. (08:40) And um and so you know a lot of the the things that have ever worked for us meaningfully were things that just we actually wanted to use and solve the problem that we actually had. And I think it's like very easy to especially if you've like raised money and something's not working. It's very easy to like fool yourself into thinking like, "Oh, I want this and I need this thing and like and other people need it and then you know, but really there's it's kind of this artificial thing, you know, where you're trying to make something work, but it's (09:08) just not it's just not the market mapping, the product market fit just isn't there, right? Do you have a view on when a person when a team should let it go and move on, try something else, maybe put a new team together and just start completely from scratch, like leave this thing versus when they should keep tinkering, keep keep iterating and try to find it together. (09:34) Um, how do you make that decision of which one to do? Yeah, it's hard, right? I think it's like it's useful to to you know um like the job of the entrepreneur right is to turn over every stone because I I think like especially last year for us it was I um you know we were talking with our board at the end of 2023 about the next year it's like listen if this if we can't figure something out you know to make this a real business we need to start spinning it down or whatever. (10:00) real quick just for context so everyone knows because this is pre all this growth. What was your board configuration at that time? Like who was your institutional investor on our board as a a a board adviser and then uh uh and then board observer, excuse me, and then Tom Crane of Insight was our voting board member. (10:21) And Albert and I have control of the board. So it it wasn't like you know it wasn't it wasn't like we were we were necessarily going to be forced out of our jobs but at the same time like we're operators right like we've taken capital we've taken this deal and so like we have to do what's in best interest of all the shareholders and employees and if this thing's like if we don't see a clear path we have to be realistic about that original what was the original premise upon which you raised money totally so back in 2017 um well (10:49) the story kind of starts actually when we first came out here we'd had the good fortune of bumping into Dylan Field um as he was uh you just starting Figma. And so we got to see that story play out which is the premise of how Stack Blitz uh you know started out which is the fact like the first pitch of Figma was not a design tool. (11:06) It was just this like a demo of a 3D ball dropping into water in a browser tab and the pitch was okay browsers have become very powerful. You can now do a complex graphics rendering with like WebGL in their case. Um, and what that means is like you could build a new type of rendering engine that ran in a browser that then you could build a design tool around and bring design to the browser just like Figma brought docs and email and things like that, right? And and that it was a classic like browserbased deep technology play. And (11:33) they spent the first couple of years of Figma building just that rendering engine and then building the design tool around it. And obviously we know how that story's played out at this point. And so back in 2017, we saw that same story starting to play out for web development environments, right? So like uh because it's kind of weird like you you you actually like every major operating system or platform comes with a built-in development environment. (11:58) Like Microsoft has Visual Studio, Mac has Xcode, the web has nothing despite being the most ubiquitous platform. You cannot build web apps in your browser, right? Like using your browser. But there were some new APIs that landed in browsers. We were like, okay, theoretically like you could go and use web assembly shared memory and this and that and like write a micro operating system that boots inside of your browser in like 100 milliseconds. (12:22) There's zero latency because it's using your CPU and your memory. But that would be huge because setting up in dev environments is the hardest part of like one learning how to code, but two is just an experienced engineer. It's a huge time suck, right? And we could bring full stack development to the web in the same way that Canva did and Figma did for design or whatever, right? the the challenge and so when when we built the first you know three four years of the company we were just building that technology which was like very like no one had done it we (12:48) were talking to the browser vendors and they were just like we don't think you're going to be able to do this we got it to work we were like hell yeah right like we did it right and um and so we the first product uh the the way that technology though that we built was wrapped with a IDE like VS Code in the browser and obviously targeting developers and and so we ended up finding you know, over the the couple of years after that from 2021 to, you know, end of 2023 is like developers didn't have a huge need to leave their local (13:18) environments and use a web-based tool. And therefore, you know, developers thought what we built was really cool. They used it for light use cases like prototyping and stuff, but was not something they would pay a lot of money for, right? And so that was the the challenge is we're a venture scale. We have to be a venture scale company. (13:33) And so, you know, at the end of uh before we launched Bolt, we had gotten to 0.7 million of ARR, right, after seven years or whatever. Um, so that was that was kind of the original vision. And and so in a sense like Bolt is how much have you raised by the way? At that point, we had raised so we raised our series A in 2022. We raised our C in 2019. (13:54) So like uh you know total raise before Bull was like 29 million and we still had u you know over half the money in the bank before we even launched Bull. But it was really just more and and and this is like again if you view startups as taking as many shots on goal as possible like how fast can you how fast can you learn before you have product market fit you want to extend your runway as much as you possibly you don't want to be burning money right um which we did a great job of like we were well capitalized we were not at risk of (14:22) running out of money um but but it was like after seven years it's like okay well we can sit here and just slowly you know slowly burn down the money that we've raised is potentially just going nowhere, right? Or or at some point we got to pull the plug and go, "Okay, we should we should sell the company or whatever. (14:40) " Um, and and and explore that path, right? You know, it's interesting, Eric, you're uh because we share Insight as an investor and I I bet you were having similar conversations uh we were having in in maybe a different way, which I think Insight for us has done a really great job of just being like, look, it's your company, but at the same time, like time value of money, how much longer do you want to be doing and banging your head against the wall? Um were those type of conversations like is that what you you felt and at the end of 203 24 a (15:11) little bit? Yeah, more or less. Right. And I think um and I I like the the insight guys are like, you know, they're a New York based firm, so they have like a a New York style of uh you know, brutalist uh reality check, right? Which is which is why I enjoyed and Tom Crane's a brilliant guy. Um, and it it was a good it was a good like uh and you know I think for us I think Albert and I were also pretty tired at that point because we're you know it's like it's confusing to be seven years in and and you climb this mountain of like no one (15:40) had built this technology before and you know okay but you know kind of the product that it enabled that we first built didn't make sense or you know to the degree where we could actually build a venture scale business. So we Albert and I were not like opposed to like the idea of spinning the thing down. (15:58) But what kind of became clear though to me was like okay I I will feel um it's still it's still it's still a bitter pill to swallow. But but kind of the the the the reality check is like okay well the only way I would ever walk away from this and feel like ah we just I feel regret is if we didn't go and turn over every stone we possibly could here. Right. (16:24) Um and and we have been trying to like make that specific product where we're like okay if it's like holistically as a company we need to go and we need to like you know we need to burn the prairie and and just try completely different product orientations um that will best leverage this technology we've made. Was there some foundational connection to the original idea still? For I mean for sure, right? Because again the whole really the the core the core thing that we wanted to build I mean was effectively what we wanted when we were 13 and everything (16:52) you know we've built since then is like I want to be able to come to a web browser and build actual full stack web apps that have a backend and stripe and whatever have you right um and and then the our web container the technology we built um you know is key to enabling that um but you know really all Bolt was was just a different product and interface to that technology and obviously he heavily uses the latest in you know generative AI and codegen you know to make that experience possible um but it was effectively the same the same (17:27) the same vision it's just the orientation of the product um you know was was tweaked how big is how big is the team you know in the period from 2017 to 2023 and I guess you know to the point of like a conversation about being an operator how do you manage your, you know, your week, your day as you're searching for years on end looking for like the thing that's going to be the wedge. (17:54) And I asked that because there's a lot of operators today that are in exactly where you were, you know, maybe without the great technology, but where you were in 2022, 2023, where they are confronted with the reality that, and it's sort of to the point of acid's question, capital's going away. Maybe it's not going away super quick, but it is going away. (18:14) They have to figure out like what is my mental state that I need to be pursuing here? How do I manage my day-to-day and my week to week and maintain the right level of energy and confidence and ambition but also try and be realistic? Like what was that like for you over those six years? Yeah, really good question. I mean I think it's it's it was definitely like a up and down up and down sort of thing as as the case with entrepreneurship. (18:37) I think that the times where I was most effective is when I was doing active measures personally to level that stuff out, right? Because the problem is if you if you go when you have these pendulum swings, which would be natural to do if you're just kind of hanging on to the the roller coaster, um you know, the highs are high and the lows are low. (18:54) And the problem is especially in the lows, you can you can end up in a default state of inaction and just letting things drag on far longer than they need to. And that's a problem because again it's all about how fast can you just like get up iterate. You know you probably get punched in the face but learn something from it and then just go get back up and do it again. (19:14) So if you're and the high doesn't have as much like lasting power as the low does. Like a person can stick in the low for a lot longer than they stay in the high. For sure. For sure. Yeah. It's like it's like the when you put something cool out there that the number of likes and retweets is great for a day or whatever, right? Fantastic. Yeah. (19:30) Yeah. And then then and then it's and then it's like the oh wait a second like this is this is some trans. Am I a loser? Like am I silly? My ideas don't work. Like that part stays for weeks and months. Totally. And so a lot of it like is is you have to I think that um you have to sharpen your own blade personally to to be to be really good at this stuff. (19:51) I think you have to at least for me and I think a lot of other people I've talked to that um that I look at and tend to be reliably good operators at least, right? they are pushing themselves as hard if not harder uh physically like they they take their physical health and their mental health extremely seriously and that doesn't mean that they wake up like I need to be physically fit but they they go and they seek out like painful things to do. (20:15) Um and they and you kind of train your brain into just like embracing pain, embracing discomfort where it's like first thing in the morning you're like cold plunging or you're working out for two hours or whatever and etc etc. And that just kind of level sets you for all of the challenges that you're going to face throughout the day, right? And and there's like there's physical benefits, there's also uh you know psychological benefits that come from that. (20:36) Um but but to me like that was like there would be no bolt if if there wasn't the me also going and gearing for an Iron Man last year. like the sort of like you know humbling daily humbling uh uh that that comes from doing that sort of thing and um having to reverse engineer an outcome that is extraordinarily difficult in a short period of time all the way back to today and like you have to work at it for six months like that's it's one of the same like preparing for an Iron Man versus preparing for a major release you (21:08) know over this period you know you've learned this lesson about I need push myself physically. I need to torture myself physically to be able to handle the torture of building this company basically. Um, and you've But along the way, you must have had some moments where you landed up in a low, right? And we've all had it where you like start questioning yourself and you you have these like really negative thoughts and it takes away your ability to create momentum and then inevitably we've along the way figured out how to get out of (21:40) it. What have you figured out that has in terms of how to get out of the loop if you do land up in it? Yeah, perhaps the most important thing um because it's about building momentum, right? And the hardest part of building momentum is the first steps you take, right? Um because they're hard um and you don't want to do it. (22:03) Um, and it it it for me it typically starts with uh something small that you're doing and you're but you're being consistent about it every day. Um, and so that could be going and standing in in your your shower on cold for two minutes to start the day, right? That could be, you know, my number was like 15 minutes for a workout. Like everyone has 15 minutes. (22:24) You can say you're busy, you can say this, that's it's Like everyone has 15 minutes. You can go and do pull-ups and push-ups or run on a treadmill or whatever have you. And here's the thing is like most times I would I'd be at the 15 minute mark and I'm like I don't you know I could go like do a little bit more. Exactly. (22:39) Yeah. Because once you're doing it then your your your perspective is completely changed. Right. And and but the thing but you have to give yourself like when you're in when you're in the starting phase you have to give yourself something where it's like such a small commitment that it's obviously doable. It's like I've got I can it. (22:55) I don't want to do this but I'll do it for 15 minutes. you go and do it. You tick the box and and there's there's something extremely um powerful psychologically about that because you're going and forcing yourself to do something that you don't want to do that's good for you that trains you to have discipline. (23:13) And uh you know again just kind of it it it level sets your your perspective on what is pain and what are because a lot of things you stress about that you're you know when you're in the walls you're depressed about something it's stuff that actually if you just go and push forward most of the time you'll just make progress right like it's it's it's you'll end up stuck on something that's really not that big of a deal right um and over of all the things I I look at when you're stuck Everything feels 10x, right? Like every little every little (23:45) comment on any little thing. You go into a one-on-one and you feel like somebody has a little less belief in you as a leader in your company. And that the hangover of that is 10 times more than it would be on a good day when you're feeling momentum. And so it is hard. What have you learned about team morale management? Let's say because you're controlling your volatility, right? you've figured out how to do that, but now you're 2017 to 2023, you've got a team and you every few months you're like, we're going to do this thing (24:15) different. This is the idea. It's going to work and then it doesn't work and you need to keep them excited. You need to keep them motivated. What have you learned about managing a team through that period? Yeah. Yeah. I think um a lot of it is, you know, if you really invest in just actually, you know, spending time with with the folks on your team and you're having fun just working together on hard problems. (24:48) It's kind of like if you were going to go and train for, you know, a marathon or an Iron Man or whatever with this group of people, there's every day is going to be painful, right? Like, but people are not going to necessarily if if they signed up to do an Iron Man, like, you know, and they're serious about it, they're not going to drop out in training, right? Even on the days that suck, on the days it's hot, the days that they're sick, the days, you know, I mean, like you're you're you're gearing up for a larger goal. And so, I think I think (25:12) that and so that the kind of the maybe the lesson there is like, you know, especially when you're in the ideation searching phase, you don't really want to like rile people about any specific idea. It's like you want to give it all your own. Like, we want to make something that is great for the sake of make of making something that is great. (25:27) Yeah. Right. But that's not the end all be all. We're here to like what matters is every single day we're we're sharpening our blade and we're and we're doing the best work we can and learning and improving, right? Um because if if that's why people are working on stuff, they're going to be much more impervious to like setbacks which are which is is that just going to happen all the time, right? Um and those are the people that at an early stage company, those are the people you want working with you as people that are are there to to grind (25:54) and have extreme grit, you know? Um, and so I think we covered a really interesting way to qualify grit in the interview process because it seems really important and it seems really important to the environment you've built is like, okay guys, we're here to build something. There's going to be failure along the way. (26:11) We're going to stay zen. We're going to keep moving forward. This is the game. How do you qualify if the person has the backbone to be able to fight this fight with you? Yeah, that's a good question. Um because like we we we vet for this this today still, right? Um especially for kind of the stage where we're at and kind of what we're going up against. (26:36) Um I think that it's not it's actually not too difficult typically um to spot like most usually it's pretty clear and and I think the hard the hard ones are where it's like you know some sometimes it's hard to delineate like okay is this is this person really down for the grind? I mean t typically what what you'll see is like the sort of people that come into like our hiring pipeline that you know one have worked at startups previously two have built their own you know projects previously or and it doesn't have to be like a startup like some of (27:05) the guys that the first engineering hires we made they they were doing uh you know they they were going and like running workshops teaching people how to do you know cutting edge web development and that sort of thing but running their own their own businesses effectively um as as sole propri propritors and that sort of thing, but and they're just looking for for cool challenges to cut their teeth on and are just genuinely like great people. (27:30) Like I the sort of people we hire are not like these like egotistical like, oh, I'm a macho man. I can take on any level of great. Yeah. I mean, it's like it's that's that's usually like there's going to be problems with that sort of personality. What what you really want to look for is people that that you can have like an honest conversation with about difficult topics and they're like open-minded. (27:48) they're not going to just like flip out, etc. Um, because that's what a lot of this is, is like people are going to have their ideas get attached to certain outcomes. If those don't happen, people are going to feel a certain way. And so, it's like if you're working with people that can't actually have a a levelheaded conversation about reality and how we turn Yeah. (28:06) what we need to do to go and win. It's not going to work. Is using Bolt a part of the interview process? Our our new one, you mean? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a couple of the people we've hired have actually uh sent us their resumes built in Bolt and you know, etc. Um, but uh yeah, what's it what's it been like? So, we we've talked, you know, about the process leading up to this moment of explosion over, you know, the last year or so, but what's it been like since you sort of found like describe the moment that you felt like, okay, we found it. And then (28:42) to the point of there's this whole different series of challenges now that you know you've been stamped with the impromature of like you are a world-class company. You're going to build something huge and how do you keep yourself contained in the right way so that you can pursue the right level of ambition, not get over your skis, but also enjoy this very rare thing that happens where you've you've discovered something beautiful. (29:09) Great question. Yeah, I'm I'm glad I'm talking to you now and not in Q1 because I think because like Yeah, I mean we we we closed our be at the beginning of January and then and Q1 was like I mean so you know we launched B at the beginning of October um and when we launch we had spent 90 days building the product and so what we put out there was like a a true MVP. (29:32) I mean it was it's like those race cars where they strip everything out of the interior. It's just like you're holding on to metal and it's just metal, you know? I mean it's it's it works. It's it proves the concept but like there's a lot missing and and so once we saw the the you know explosion of demand we were just you know working 247 on the product fixing obvious things in it. (29:54) Um, but then to the customer support side, like we were like, you know, less than 20 people when we launched it. And so my my chief of staff and I were were the customer support team for the first like two, three months and and there was like, you know, tens of thousands of people uh like paid subscribers that were like going and emailing us, right? And um anyway, so that was keeping during that time, first few months. (30:17) Yeah, it not much. And I remember thinking in the first two weeks because I did the Iron Man uh on week three of October and and so it had been two weeks of of Bolt being online at that point. I remember thinking like God I this is not not the best time to be going and and doing an Iron Man right now. Um and then after that it was like you know throughout Q4 and then uh through much of Q1 um I had I had to dial back on a lot of the like purely from time allocation side just the amount of stuff that had to be done. (30:48) I was not able to actually go and refill my own cup to the degree that I needed to be doing that you know the things I' I've been saying are important. Um but but you know kind of hit a point where like you we made a lot of key hires we shipped a lot of key things etc. We're kind of towards the end of Q1 it was like okay we're in a good spot here. (31:03) Um and it's and it's you know we've kind of built out you know the requisite sort of uh you know uh support systems at the company to go and like lead these various things but it was very challenging you know um and and it still is I mean just even now just growing into the you know most companies have years to grow into the sort of revenue scale and customer base that we have um and they have I don't know multiples of the headcount that we have um and there's just not a playbook for this stuff not That's the thing I think I (31:33) find most interesting is all these the companies that are 0 to 40 whatever the infrastructure you need just on like the back office and accounting and being a real company. I mean you had seven years of some of this already. So the question that you asked like oh this could still go to zero. (31:51) Well you had a real company behind it. Do you still say that to the team to the company today? I I probably would say like this could go to zero, but like in my head um in my head I nothing has changed I guess from my mindset because I've had friends that are like oh man you guys made it and I'm just like my honest no shut up. (32:15) This is yeah this is this is not this is not certain right like this is you know nothing here is certain and um you know and I I I've seen other founders that have uh had you know similar sort they've had kind of a success tick uh and then and then kind of fall into that mindset where it's like hey you know we're we're now one of these things that people talk about or whatever and they made it but it's I look at I'm like this is one I don't I I don't I don't maybe if I was 19 again I would care about that sort of stuff but like but at 33 I've seen enough of these (32:42) where it's like That's that stuff does not matter. You should not care about it. I do not care about it. Uh and my perspective is like we like this space is moving incredibly fast and that's just true. Um and and we have to be we have to we certainly must act like you know we are under constant threat here um and being extremely aggressive with the flip side of it being like we are like we're building awesome things. (33:08) Like we're having a great time working on this thing. Um, and that's what's going to yield the the best products and outcomes is when you're actually building stuff that you want to use and you're having fun doing with people that you enjoy working with. Um and um so kind of keeping that grit of uh to to go to again an analogy to like sporting, it's like you have a team that like wins the playoffs or something one year. (33:30) You that that next training season they should not be if you want to win again, you should not be you know taking a breather and you know relaxing and thinking you're really hot you you need to you need to go back into that same pain cave you were in the season before and then and take the learnings and the lickings you got from the previous one and the things you did well to double down on those. (33:52) But you go and you know that that the next who wins the playoffs this coming year who won last year doesn't matter, right? Like that doesn't matter. Has zero effect on who's actually going to win it this year. That's kind of our It reminds me of the 21 and 22 and so many anointed unicorns and looking back to like see where they are today, which they're not unicorns anymore. (34:14) But there was, we were talking about this last week, like builder.ai, another insight company that I'm sure you followed really closely. Their founder in 2122,23 was was very much all over TechCrunch in the news. He was living the good life though. That guy, that guy was living the good life. Yeah. But it feels like things can change quickly and you just never know. (34:33) So I love the like healthy skepticism that it seems like you have about your own business which I don't think a lot of founders I don't think that guy was putting himself through the pain that Eric is putting himself through which is really interesting like I think you do see this as when you get a little bit of success and it can get to your head. (34:48) I I have a lot of empathy for success getting to people's head because it's easy like it can happen right momentum and but the building great things does require trying to find a way to keep yourself steady and keep moving forward. Are you a B2B tech CRO, VP of sales or VP of revenue operations? Join over 200 of your peers at CRO Summit 2025, a one-day executive only event designed to help you tackle the challenges of today and position you for growth tomorrow. (35:17) Hosted at the Denver Art Museum, this summit combines cutting edge insights and actionable strategies. Learn from industry pioneers covering all aspects of sales and revenue growth into 2026 with sessions from Andrea Kol of Help Scout, Guy Rubin of Eba, Wendy Sturgis of Cleverbridge, and more. Visit joinpavilion. (35:39) com/cro-summit to secure your spot today. One of the things I'm thinking about as we're talking is you went from nothing to 40 million essentially in a handful of months. Right? If we look back to this pre-ai phase shift, the the best companies in the world were these companies that would grow at the triple triple double double double meaning that you almost had four to five years. (36:05) Best-in-class was 5 years in you would get to 40 million, right? And you as you mentioned you you had that much time to build your team and figure out how to hire and create infrastructure and get marketing right and position all these things and you got none of that time. The second thing is those companies could rely on the advice of investors and advisers and thought leaders on things to do, things not to do etc. (36:33) But you guys, you curse a handful of these other companies. You guys are pioneering in a way because we've never seen companies grow at this pace before. So many of them like it it's not a normal thing. So it's not like Bobby who's giving you advice on how to do XYZ. You can take it for face value. You you you don't have as many things to look at to learn and then do as other people did. (36:58) So how do you handle that? like I'm sure there's no shortage of people giving you advice. How do you take it in, compute it, and do something with it? What how do you make sense of it all? Yeah. Yeah. Um Yeah, good question. I I think I think for us, like we've been um Albert and I, you know, have have bootstrapped a good number of companies. (37:20) Uh like the company we did before this when we bootstrapped it all the way through the sale of the thing. And that teaches you just like a lot about how far you can stretch a dollar and like how to intelligently place bets on things and and how to position yourself because when you don't have, you know, the the backing of like and we were broke, too. (37:37) So it's like it monthto-month rent mattered for us like so we had to be we had to get, you know, become very good at at, you know, taking calculated bets and and coming with our own sort of like first principles perspective of like here's how we should go play our hand on these things. And so can you expand on that a little bit? I'm really interested when you say like taking calculated bets. (37:57) How did you think about it? Because I think that's a skill that a lot of people do not have. Totally. And and I I got to tell you, I don't know, maybe some people are born with this, but like I think that my recommendation to most people is go and and spend a year or two bootstrapping a company from nothing because you will learn so much. (38:14) You'll learn you'll learn so much uh more practical how to build a business than if you just went and raised money and had to figure it out that way, right? because you can't just throw money at problems. You have to like solve problems. So, you really have to like I learned how to do email marketing because I was the guy that had to write the emails, right? Like for when we were selling courses at our previous company, I had to learn how to do SEO. (38:35) I had to learn blah blah blah all these things, right? And and the thing is that's that's super helpful because when you actually need to go hire people to do these functions, you've cut your teeth on on the things that they're going to have to go and do. episode that helps you hire great people and also just uh be able to actually meaningfully contribute to these conversations around hey how do we like how do we connect the dots faster here and you know what are interesting things we can do right um but that's effectively is you like when you're (38:59) bootstrapping a company you have to do all this stuff yourself and so you and you're not going to make every uh every bet is going to be like correct or whatever have you but you you you have to learn quickly um okay well that was a bad idea because xyz because we need results immediately whereas again when you have money in the think you can kind of, you know, it's not a, oh, we we did we screwed it didn't work as well, blah blah blah and like, you know, uh people don't don't laser in on the on the fine grain details, but like a tangible (39:28) example of like that when we were uh back in 2021, Stack Blitz was around at that time. We launched this incredible technology that had a lot of hype and we had you know uh we had investors screaming at us to go and raise more money go and you know increase our headcount to 50 or 100 or whatever and we're like not not doing any revenue at that point you know and Albert and I were we were steadfast on like we're not doing that like we are not we we don't think that this is this doesn't make sense to us and and we may be wrong here (39:59) like we we see what's going on with all these companies raising tons of money at crazy valuations, etc. We certainly could probably go and do that, but like but and then what like you know this it there's kind of a disconnect. Lo and behold, one year later, same investors were going, you need to cut your burn rate and we're like there's nothing cut. (40:20) We never increased it, right? You know, and and so it it pays to just be focused because when you look at the other companies that through that a lot of them went and got way ahead of their skis, cranked their headcount, then had to reduce their staff, blah blah blah. Now we're seeing like you know builder AI stuff like this that you know it's all coming home to roost like these things have consequences like when you take these strategic you know missteps that when everyone around you is like this is a good idea and these like professionals like investors and (40:46) whatever. Okay so I have a I have a question on that. So you've been almost frugal in a great way along the way right and that has been almost a competitive advantage for you. you I remember meeting so many companies in that 202122 period series B 120 employees 2 million in revenue like what like what are these people why do you have seven people in marketing there's nothing to market um and so and you saw what would happen to those companies so I think it's really commendable that you guys had the backbone to push back on investors and (41:21) not make those bets that everybody was trying to make because they weren't sensible things to do now you're in a kind of a different situation though where you have this really strong signal from the market. We love what you've built. 40 million in 4 months. So now you need to make bigger bets than you've traditionally made. (41:40) Right now you need to go after it. How do you change how you calculate what a appropriate bet is because you're now at this very different size and scale very quickly. You haven't had time to like grow into that mindset. You have to switch and be like, "Oh yeah, now we need to make bigger bets because we're in a competitive environment. (41:57) other people are going after the same thing. If we're too frugal here, somebody who's really well capitalized with really good technology might eat our lunch. How do you make how do you do this right now? Yeah, totally. And sorry, go ahead, Tim. No, I mean I just feel like you could have that you could have made that same logical argument in 2021. (42:18) Like I don't know that the calculus has changed. I would I would question but obviously want to hear what you think, Eric, because like do you need to increase the size of your bets? I mean just because I remember very clearly in 2021 you know we raised money. I mean it's a community. It's definitely not you know a browserbased development application. (42:36) It's like it's like this is a thing with no barriers to entry and no moat. And I was like I got to spend this money. I was exactly thinking what was thinking because this other stage two company that AJ knows Sales Impact Academy was like they were spending all this money. They hired this guy from Snowflake. (42:52) I was like I gotta go big. And that was a huge mistake. So I guess first of all, do you agree with us premise? I would love to hear your reaction. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that to me it's like they're they're um we had this exact conversation uh in November of last year after Bull um you know was online and the revenue was cranking because I think and to zoom out it's I think the the proper way when you don't have product market fit it's all about being extremely conservative to extend your runway to get as many shots on goal over (43:23) as long of a period of time as possible because time is actually a huge factor right like we our main competitor to stacks the IDE We have been knife fighting these guys for seven years, right? And they are better at us than some things and whatever. And it was this whole thing for seven years. Can you say who it is now or No, I there they seem so this the founders I see I think a nice guy. (43:46) So I don't want to like you know put him probably Google this and kind of figure it out, but like we're gonna look them up and throw them under the bus. Actually, be clear. They had a great browserbased ID product, you know, and I can say that honestly, especially now that I don't have a dog in the fight, right? But like great product, very competitive. (44:02) they uh you got aqua hired for parts two weeks before we launched Bolt and because they had you know they were they were down to they were running out of money because again time is a huge factor. You you just can't predict how the sands of time will change you know how you're positioned and the sort of products you can build. (44:22) So as an entrepreneur you have to op like before you have product market fit it is all about optimizing how many iterations you can get in how much you can learn and how how how the environment around you can change to your favor based on what you're doing right once you have product market fit it is a different game right and so this was one of the key and so this is the conversation that we had at the end of November was like there's two routes here we either continue to do this basically we're kind of treating this like a bootstrapped company where we're (44:47) like not we're living below our means and blah blah blah blah, we're profitable, etc. We could just keep doing this. Or you go you go big, right? You you pull out the blitz scaling playbook and you go big. And the times to do that is when the market size is astronomically large, right? Like a very clear monster oper not like a 10 million$100 million oper like like billions, right? Um, and especially and because it is so big, there are going to be there's going to be a lot of people that are going to raise money to come after it. And and (45:23) what we had was like the the clear data points of well, are we convinced that there's going to be a big market here? Yeah. Like we're seeing a shitload of revenue come in. We were talking to the people that were using the product and we're like, these people aren't even developers. (45:37) Like our previous product was a developer product. The most people that use Bolt are PMs, designers, entrepreneurs. like they're not developers, right? And so it became clear to us, okay, this the target market here is not just the developer market. We're looking at site builders, we're looking at design tools. I mean, you the market slide on the series B deck. (45:56) I mean, this is like conservatively like $200 billion a year of revenue from the existing players on this stuff. And and what's your what's your go to market motion like? How did you figure out how to allocate the capital? Is it all paid spend? Is it some kind of growth or virality loop? Like when you're thinking about, okay, I want to spend $50 million, like we can spend it. (46:17) Where do you spend it? Yeah, great great question. And that's what that's what we're doing now, Ryan. Like when we launched Bolt, we spent zero dollars on marketing for the first three, four months of the thing being online. It was entirely word of mouth growth. Even today, most of our growth is word of mouth. That was just virality of product basically. Yeah. Yep. (46:32) Exactly. And because and people would people we we launched the thing with a tweet, not even a blog post, no PR. It was just we put out a amazing That's crazy. And and and and it was a damn good tweet. We spent a lot of time on it actually. Damn good tweet. I gave it a lot of thought. (46:48) I spent like and that's the thing is it's like how like what we've How much time did you spend on that tweet? It took me uh two weeks of like kind of front to back and then the in the days leading up to it that was my job and I spent four hours a day, five hours a day just specifically tuning it, getting feedback from people, tuning it, getting feedback. (47:07) the video we made for it, etc. Um, but like it matters because in a world of such a short attention span, you need to put something out there that's going to capture people's attention, explain why does why does this thing matter to the so that they have intent to like either like read the subsequent tweets in the thread about it or whatever or and try tell me a little bit about your Twitter following at the time. (47:29) You were probably very unknown, right? like you did you have a big like how many followers did you have on on the stack blitz with now which is now the bolt account it's we had like I don't know maybe 20 or 30,000 and we had built that up over seven years and again this is like as you're building stuff and you're in that like trial and error phase of of starting before product market fit you should always be building a community of people you know that are following your stuff and you're building great stuff and um and then so that's what we've been doing is you know we had (47:56) a lot of developers that uh you know in the web development world like we were a reasonably known name specifically for professional web developers or something. Um, even there were probably a little bit a little bit niche, but we had enough where it was like when we put that online, we had enough distribution where people saw it, they boosted it, and then bang, you know, it had it had the the kindling. (48:17) Um, and that's like I mean, if you look at uh Stack Overflow is another good example of this where Joel Spolski has a you know, he was writing blogs, you know, throughout the 90s, 2000s, whatever, had a lot of following of software developers. when they launched Stack Overflow, he posted a blog post about it on his blog. That's what seated Stack Overflow, right? Um, so it's like that's always something you just got to be doing when you're building products because, you know, when the moment comes, you you want that distribution channel to initially seed (48:42) out. I've noticed this is a trend with this younger generation of founders that's coming out like the generation uh that's let's say after you, Eric, are like the ones that are in that early to mid20s right now. It's almost like when you talk to them, every move they're making, there's something at the back of their mind almost subconsciously that's thinking, how will this do on social? How will this do from an attention there? It's it's they're so digitally native that it's they're constantly thinking like that. And it's a different (49:12) type of business builder because before you wouldn't it wouldn't be this instinctive skill set in the founders of how do we gain attention where we don't have tons of money to spend and they they all like are starting off with relatively no followings on Twitter and they all go into Twitter. They all go into Twitter. (49:32) They're starting off there and they are growing on Twitter at a pace that is really shocking. the there's a AISDR company um artisan I think artisan yeah artisan AI um and they you can see from he's actually quite a reserved guy in person when you meet him he's kind of like introverted very measured in how he talks and then you look at his social media and this guy is like doing hilarious things on I I think he announced that the company got acquired on uh April's Fool and just constantly on social media he's building these campaigns to create attention and (50:07) energy and that's driven a lot of revenue for these guys. It feels very instinctive in them which is interesting. Yeah, it makes sense too because like I think that this is that it's you know kind of the generation after me is is the first one that's really grown up with uh I mean things like Tik Tok and Instagram and um and Twitter for sure. (50:28) But I mean, and and I think Tik Tok is an excellent example of a platform that's so geared towards new creators because you can be nobody, post a video, and they push that aggressively out to people's feeds. Like, you don't need to have an existing audience. So, it actually has incentivized like it's given people a way to go and cut their teeth on how do you actually make attention grabbing content regardless of who you are, right? And um and and I surely if I was in high school now I would imagine that I would want to be going viral you know like I think people (50:56) are g are these kids are making content learning how to do this huge advantage over over and it's it's actually beautiful that to them the content it's more about the atomic unit of the content they're putting together and like that thing the one thing I'm putting out will this thing do well in that world without me having a huge following versus in the past it used to be accumulating followers creating more momentum for yourself, right? For these guys, it's like it doesn't matter if this one thing is I get it right, it'll (51:24) do well. And I think that's actually a really good thing. Totally. Totally. And because it's like I think, you know, I think there's a lot of people will be like, oh, like there's, you know, long form, there's something lost about it. But I actually I think that like the tweet where we put out bold, it's like that conveyed what it was so succinctly that we it could have been a a full blog post. (51:44) We started with a blog post and I was like, this doesn't feel right. Throw this out. is like we need something that's just going to describe it in a single tweet and if we can't do that then then that's really on us because you should what what do we expect people to how how are they going to repeat this to their friends you know um I have a question for you it's very it's very much in the like the Bezos shareholder letters like clarity of communications it's the new like clarity of communications in the new way from a business standpoint do you treat like (52:12) internal comms similarly to that tweet and how you're thinking about and communicating with your team. Is that is that a similar work process? Yeah. Yeah. Funny you mentioned that. So we you know we uh we picked up the Amazon like PR FAQ style um you know product release uh approach for those you listen that might not be aware. (52:31) Basically what you do at Amazon if you want to roll out the product product you write the press release and an FAQ before you even start writing code right um or designing it or whatever have you. You purely have to just write what the press release will say. And it helps so much to start with the launch as the first thing because then it helps really it gets everyone on the same page as you're building. (52:50) And so we were doing that and then and then we realized like okay actually we need a tweet thread FAQ. Like we we're not doing press releases, we're writing tweet threads. And so that's what we would start with is we start with the tweet thread and and then you know one of the frequently asked questions that would happen after it. (53:06) Um, and we'll, you know, I think it's the even if we don't get to full fidelity on what that exact tweet thread looks like, it gives you enough of a base where it's like, okay, this what's in the lead tweet is what actually really matters and is going to capture attention. We need to make sure that that part of the the experience is really well designed and and thought through because yeah that actually is like what people are going to if you're picking between two products to invest in like two I don't know features to build and you see these (53:33) two documents internally the one that you think will do better on social does that get a little bit more attention from you like is that where you'll push the resources because you're like this is fundamentally a good feature and it will do well on social and get us more attention etc. Yeah, I think so. (53:49) And they're often in line and so it's some of these things where it's like especially when you're selling to like enterprise or B2B, which we're doing, you know, to a good amount now, some of that stuff won't necessarily get this sort of social pickup, but it's obviously important from a revenue generation side. (54:02) And we know that it's going to be important to those customers. Um, but certainly when we're looking at like the proumer, if you're if you're doing a any type of consumer or proumer play, the stuff that like the stuff that's that we have a sense is going to get good pickup tends to be things that people are either asking for or want but don't even necessarily know that they that they want, right? Um and and so those things certainly uh you know will get prioritized over others um because it's kind of obvious like okay yeah like people have been asking for (54:33) this this does address those concerns and questions etc etc you know yeah I mean I have a question do people so it's a it's a browserbased development environment do you feel comfortable in that case that like the 0 to40 path is sustainable you know one of the things that we talk about a lot on this show is that there's a lot of people talking about arr R that are it's like PC revenue that they're multip you know it's a three-month PC that they're multiplying by four and calling it ARR and the reality is like we still don't (55:01) know a lot of the retention profile of these cohorts like we don't know exactly how long they're going to stick around but I would but on the other hand I would imagine if you're developing an application and then maintaining that application uh using your technology that would feel like pretty long-term you know LTV because it's like well you're not going to transmit or you know you're not going to move to a different development environment. (55:24) You're going to stay there. So therefore, as long as you're maintaining that application, you're probably going to be using Bolt. Is that how you think about it? For sure. And and I would Bolt is I I wouldn't uh it's really even though it's got a development environment under the hood, when you use it, it like to to end users, it's it's it's a it's a chat box that you can tell it to make things make software for you, right? So it's effectively like Chat GBT if Chat GBT could actually make production web applications, mobile apps, right? And um (55:51) and so when they come here, it's almost like a lot of proumers view it like Wix as if if you could actually build not just static sites or something like real full stack apps. Um and then and the the way the traditional site builders solve that retention problem is is they they have hosting built in, right? They have um different integrations built in that you know if you cancel your subscription on Wix, your website doesn't have that isn't hosted, doesn't have these integrations then, you know, etc., etc. (56:15) Um, and so that's like the same sort of thing that we're like we're implementing. We're seeing is like people want to come here and just build stuff and have it online. Um, and then and and then they they don't want to leave, right? Because this is where their thing is hosted. Do you know how many uh bolt build apps are currently on the app stores, Apple or Google for yeah for mobile apps? The mobile apps is like a fraction of the total. (56:37) Most of the things people are building on bolt are like web apps um and that sort of thing I would imagine. So, I know that we've got a couple million live websites on Bolt at this point. Let's go. Yeah, it's crazy to just the amount of like to go from where you guys were like a year ago to a couple of million anything out there is quite insane. (57:00) That's why Yeah, it's it's nuts. So to this point of product market fit right you've got these naysayers and pessimists in the market that you know they'll say something like you know even today less than half of the workloads are not even on cloud technology takes a long time to disperse through society and we are overestimating the pace at which AI is going to become is going to change the world and they make that point and then they say and I think somebody from benchmark had made this tweet that you cannot value the revenue of these AI (57:33) companies that are growing at this extreme pace the same way that you can with companies back in the day that were doing the triple triple double double this is experimental revenue it might stay it might not etc and I think you've made a really sharp point around how this does have product like you can't wait a year to be like does it re renew as you're in a competitive fight as well right like you've got the 40 million you've got this scale you're like we need to find other signals that tell us we have product market fit than waiting (58:02) for a year and seeing who renews and we need to do that I think that's a really interesting point the other risk that you have is actually the competitors themselves right so your competitive landscape is interesting AI has extreme product market fit in three use cases chat support and code generation and what you're finding is that in these three areas a the foundational model providers the infrastructure providers essentially are coming further and further into the application than before. Progeneration is an area (58:32) where they are coming in, right? And then you've got the curses and you guys and a bunch of these other companies that are fighting it out. How do you view how do how much do you care about the competitors? Like how much of your time, energy, mental space goes into looking at what they're building, looking at what they're talking about, thinking of yourselves in the context of the competitive landscape versus saying, "We're doing our thing. (58:58) We're fighting our fight. We're gonna do this our way. Let's see what happens at the end of the day. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's the market we're in is probably like one of the most competitive like probably in the world right now. And so it's, you know, I think I think it's important for us to be aware of like what are the other tools? Like what do they do? Like who are they orienting towards? What does their experience feel like look like? Um you know are there areas that they're doing things that are better than us etc. So to that I mean I think that's (59:26) like the I don't know probably like 10 years ago I had the realization like you I think a lot of founders will toil with like competitors and like and you end up these like um just if you focus on competitors you just end up with these useless dog fights that often end up just nowhere for you and the competitor and whatever have you. (59:44) Um, and I'm still working on this. He's uh Asad and I have slightly different takes on on this part. Uh, but this is our fundamental disagreement in life. I disagree. I Yes. Continue on Eric. I'm cur Okay. I'm curious to hear your take, but I mean basically it's like and it's not that like competition like you Peter Teal's like you know competition doesn't matter which I think again to a degree is true and that that should be I I think is the right viewpoint on it. (1:00:05) I think it's important to like you want to view competition as free R&D. It's free R&D. there's an entire team of people that are trying to go after similar customers and building similar products and stuff and they're going and taking a whole bunch of bets and and that's awesome because it's like we didn't have to go and deploy capital and resources and focus and time to go and figure out what things actually worked, right? So, it's like thank you for this blessing of of knowledge that you went and did and and and capital you you went and burned to (1:00:31) go and figure that out and we're going to learn the lessons from that and actually we're going to like taking that we're going to kind of figure out how to do it better, right? Because that thing was good. That all that stuff you did that sucked. Thank god you wasted money and time on that, not us. (1:00:42) I think that's the best answer to how to think that I've ever heard. And I'm thinking immediately of like some friends that are running companies where to your exact point, they're like, they have the the other guys have this feature. I'll just do that feature. That was good. Like that's when I talk to customers, that's the feature people want. (1:00:57) I should build that. Which to your point, free R&D. Well, and and but you get to look at it and the the beautiful thing though, 100% on that. But and what you to even one up that you look at what they did well and you go, why is that good? like why is it good and try it in their own product and then and then go okay you know how could and how could you even make that even more seamless and even better because often you can go and just alioopa and and and release something that's even cleaner even smoother even better and you'll have a (1:01:23) better sense of how to market it because you also got to see how they marketed their thing and go what did they do good in the market what did they what what did they kind of whiff on talk to customers and then go and put your thing out and then and then and then people are going to be going oh other competitor why don't you have this thing your version of that sucks blah blah blah you know, so it's it's a it's just a free opportunity to get it's a free iteration cycle you didn't have to spend. So So don't just clone the thing. (1:01:45) Go and figure out the iteration cycle you're going to do to take the knowledge and learning from that and just and and make the actual better version of the thing. Right before we're almost at the end of our time together, Eric, but one thing I do want to ask you, uh it I mean I don't know if you feel this disorientation, but I definitely do that you're watching the pace of innovation right now in AI. (1:02:08) You're watching folks like Bolt and folks like Lovable and folks like a million other applications that are redefining, you know, the market in in so rapidly that it's like really hard to make any kind of predictions over the next 3, five, seven, 8, 10 years. What's your what's your take on the place that Bolt will have in the broader ecosystem over the next couple of years? like what are you most excited to pursue and what do you think is going to be the moat that you're building that other people won't be able to attack? Yeah, great question. I mean I think for (1:02:41) us um you know a lot of this stuff is just becoming table stakes in you know like the incumbents have started to wake up and start and they began shipping things like bolt you know whatever in their products like uh Figma's done this canvas done this WordPress is like everyone's kind of doing something like this and what specifically makes us unique uh from a technical perspective is that we can like because of that technology we made we can run basically anything um like if you look at Bolt like you can build not just web apps but (1:03:10) mobile apps, etc. Um, and so I think, you know, and then again with like full payments, you know, I did a live stream a couple of weeks ago just on a whim showing off, you know, we have this direct Stripe integration and I was like, let's just build a a website to sell courses where you log in, can access a course, you put in your credit card, blah, blah, blah. (1:03:29) Five minutes end to end like with from from the homepage of bolt.new first prompt to live site with Stripe, credit card in um and so to me it's like I think that what I you know this we want to build the tool that people are actually building great products in from idea to to credit card in whether that's startups right like trying to get as many iterations in as they possibly can because our previous company we were selling courses it took us a month to build what I did in five minutes on that live stream right um you know or if (1:04:00) you're at a Fortune 500 a much faster way to actually prototype out the next versions of your application that's actually real, get in the hands of customers and actually ship it. Um, and so I think in order to do that, you have to be able to actually run and support all these things and have a great agent to do that. (1:04:15) And that's that's that's where Bold shines and is just going to continue to shine just because of the the technical trajectory we've had uh on this thing. Awesome. The uh the last question that we like to ask, I mean, you've mentioned a bunch of influences, but when you think about who shaped you, could be books you've read, could be podcasts you've listened to recently, could be guys like Peter Teal or less controversial figures, whomever you like, but when you think about people that you think the audience should know about or ideas that the (1:04:43) audience should know about, what comes to mind? Yeah, great question. I think um I think there's kind of like the obvious ones like in the early 2010s I you know I and many other people really uh listen to what you know Steve Jobs had to say and the Apple folks about really caring about designing the experience kind of front to back. (1:05:05) You look at Elon um and his you know kind of the approach he takes the engineering le approach to building you know difficult technology and how to bring that to market. I think there's a lot to be learned there. Um, those are kind of the obvious ones. But the I think the the especially in the the day and age we're in now though with AI and what's happening, Greg Eisenberg actually um is someone that I would recommend following because I mean he's constantly just kind of punching out ideas on um you know different types of AI apps you can build (1:05:31) and that sort of thing. But but and the stuff that I really like that he posts is his analysis of kind of the market, what's going on here. and um and he's kind of got this view of you know it's it's AI is enabling everyone to be a builder and the existing incumbents are going to are going to kind of get getting eaten by you know the piranhas of all these entrepreneurs that for the first time time can just go build SAS applications basically so and that's just like to me like one of his takeaways but he's constantly posting (1:06:00) these really uh wellthoughtout um analysis of of kind of what's happening here what's going to happen and how there's been a step up in his content post AI like you know he was always around and he was good but as soon as this AI thing happened he's really like leveled up into this he's showing people what is possible today and then giving you a thousand ideas of what you can build using the technology and some of them are actually really good ideas like there are a lot of businesses that he advises that you can build now very (1:06:29) easily that can be really nice bootstrap two three four five million businesses and they're they're legit ideas like it's very impressive actually. Totally. Yeah. He's he's just got a great perspective on on what's happening here and how individuals can can go and and do things to have leverage that wasn't possible before, you know, and so I think that's like it's just it's it strikes me as very precient a lot of things that you said. That's great. (1:06:54) Uh we'll do shout outs before you leave. Uh AJ uh Eric gave a Greg Eisenberg shout out. AJ, who you shouting out? I'm shouting out Ashley Stamps Leafant, our new VP. Oh, you hired her, right? Exactly. We hired her. Where did you find this incredible VP of CS? Oh man, I don't know. I think this community, apparently communities are easy to start, Sam. (1:07:15) You don't need any capital and so people just show up and so this community brought uh brought Ashley out of the woodwork and we uh had a fantastic and pal I will give her a shout out and ba is awesome. She's an adviser for COP also uh very connected to the pavilion community. Uh she referred her Before we even had the posting out, we spent about 25 hours with her beforehand. (1:07:41) Um, and she and she's still wanting to work with you. She I know it's shocking. I know. I know that, Sam. I'm Yeah, I'm surprised myself. I truly am. But she's been awesome. And so, shout out to to Ashley and her first two weeks, which have been phenomenal. Awesome. Acid, I'm gonna shout out a publication called Every. (1:08:04) Every. EO is the website. As everybody here knows, I've been looking at media a lot more recently and I'm trying to find media companies that are doing things really nicely and every is covering AI and doing really interesting things like trying to take a model and say okay we can make it a therapist but how do we get it to be the best therapist possible? So testing like 10 different prompts like put you are sigman Freud today now here's my problem like deal with this and it just showing me I think striking creativity in all of us in (1:08:38) terms of how to get the best out of these models these guys are doing a really good job of that but beyond that the website and the way that they present the content there's so much there's such beauty in there there's so much thought there's so much taste and I've just been very inspired by what they have built Um, I think they just raised 2 million from Reed Hoffman, um, and somebody else who I don't remember. (1:09:01) Um, but they are, if you're trying to learn more about AIA, this is one to bookmark. Awesome. I'm going to shout out uh, my friend Vincent Jong, who's the departing uh, chief product officer at Dealfront, and he just hosted SAS on the Beach, the first ever SAS conference here in Barcelona. (1:09:18) And I had a great time with about 40 different founders and CEOs and investors. And one of the guys I got to meet was Chris Cunningham, one of the founding members of ClickUp, who runs their uh social media program and their YouTube channel. Got gave us a bunch of great ideas. And actually, the ClickUp founding story is not dissimilar from the Bolt founding story, Eric. (1:09:37) So, pretty cool company that also got started in the valley. So, uh those are my shoutouts. Eric, thank you so much for joining us and being so generous with your time. Congrats on building an incredible company and for persevering and uh hope to see you out there on the track at some point running a race. Likewise, heck yeah. (1:09:53) Thanks for having me on, guys. Thanks. Thanks, Eric. Thanks for listening to Topline. New episodes come out every Sunday. If you like what you heard today, subscribe so you never miss an episode. Leave a fivestar review and share it with your friends. Don't forget to join our topline Slack channel to connect with us and discuss the topics we cover with other listeners. (1:10:17) Click the link in the show notes. Lastly, if you're interested in joining Pavilion, you can learn more about membership at joinpavilion.com/membership. Thanks again for listening. [Music]