Bolt

“My most recent investment was a company called Bolt. And normally, funny enough, it was a uncapped note. I never signed on do uncapped notes, just on principle alone.”

“I think that they still are yet to kind of prove out their product market fit.”

“And what happened was that revenue from the last couple of years wasn't for one click checkout. It was for their sort of old fraud checkout form thing, right? And, but they were able to raise a lot of money last year, now selling one click checkout, save one c…”

“In January, we onboarded our first Billion dollar merchant. There were 50 X the size of our second biggest merchant. Twice the size of Bolt's biggest live customer, right? More than twice the size.”

“So we were running all of this with a tiny team of About five people from Estonia.”

“We bootstrapped the company completely for about the first year. So we built the product, we got to some thousands of daily trips and we did all of that with 5000 bucks for my parents.”

“A lot of conviction that long-term that's going to be a multi-billion dollar category for us.”

“I've would have likely gone to these New York funds much earlier. I think that actually I at first just didn't even think that they would be willing to invest in private companies such as ours, but actually the moment we got to first meetings with them and the…”

“I don't even have a driver's license, so the most expensive thing I've bought is probably in my apartment in Tallinn, which is probably still cheaper than anything you could get in London.”

“So I remember we had this meeting over a call with the top management, and we decided we're not gonna do any layoffs. We're gonna be the only company in the industry that's gonna retain all of our people. And it's gonna be a huge gamble because we lost 85% of …”

“Probably we should have been even more aggressive in our expansion. So if I look back at this period that we had from 2015 to 19, where we launched all of these markets remotely, it was a fantastic time. I think what we did back in 2019 was that we started rai…”

“I think we talked to, it must've been at least 30 people. And every single one of them turned me down because why would you join? It's a 19 year old kid. They have no experience, no money.”

“Without Oliver, the company would have never be where it is, so I'd say it's even close to a hundred percent of luck.”

“I think with VCs, it was their way around. So the numbers were great, but they didn't really focus on numbers. They sort of focused on what they thought was sort of the narrative in the industry. And that turned out to be completely wrong. So all these New Yor…”

“They just said that this category is a winner take all market. There's not gonna be any room for number two, and therefore it doesn't matter how great your metrics are, we're not gonna invest.”

“90% of them immediately said, get out of my car.”

“So, so we cobbled together half a million from this real estate company. Similarly, a couple of 100,000 from a local railway operator couple of 100,000 from a local telecoms guy. So it was just this tiny, all together, maybe one million bucks.”

“So then we managed to convince them that they invested more than a hundred million at the billion dollar valuation. So it went in a year from being an acquisition to being an investment.”

“In Poland or in Czech or in the Baltics, we were the ones who defined the category and the regulators were then coming to us and were asking us for input.”

“And seeing those people who started in the company as basically interns, and now they're running hundreds of people's organizations,”

“And then we went from that to now we have two billion ARR in sort of the next few years.”

“There's about seven companies left. What they've been doing better than us is raising money. They've just all raised multitudes of how much we have raised. Many of them have raised five billion. Some of them have raised 15, even thirty billion. Well, we have r…”

“We have a couple of these extremely, extremely intelligent people at Bolt who really defined the company. I'd say Oliver, our lead software engineer has been like that like he was able to do alone, but It took probably 10 average engineers to do the same work,…”

“And we almost bankrupted the company in six months. So, so we burned for most of that one million very rapidly with nothing to show for it.”

“At some point, we were losing three percent of the vehicles every week because people were just stealing them, throwing them in the river, trashing them.”

“So our priority for sure is still growth. A hundred percent. So there's no intention for us anytime soon to become a profitable company that would be paying dividends or anything like that. Absolutely the focus is growth. However we have a set of markets where…”

“So they approached us and they tried to buy the business back then for maybe a hundred million euros, which obviously as a young kid would have been a fantastic outcome. So we discussed it with the founders, but my view was immediate. We don't want to sell the…”

“We went from zero to two million ARR in about 18 months, and then from there we went to about ten million ARR in the next 18 months, and then we went from that to a hundred million ARR in less than two years.”

“So in good markets, you are maybe able to get to 20% contribution margins, but in bad markets, it can be negative.”

“The hard part from us from 11 years ago until today has always been the supply side. So our mantra every single time we have our internal all hands meetings for 11 years, it always ends with one slide, which is add supply.”

“We probably got to the point of doing about twenty-five million ARR, growing multiple hundred percent a year, and still no VCs wanted to invest.”

“I think I should have been more aggressive with initial fundraising. I think we could have sped ourselves up a couple of months if I had gotten out and raised a small angel check before I did, because we bootstrapped the company completely for about the first …”

“In our experience, what has worked significantly better is, is taking people, especially from central Eastern Europe who are really talented, extremely intelligent, hardworking, good, trustworthy people, but they've just never had the chance to compete at the …”

“From the moment I had the call with them to them getting back to me was 48 hours where we're joining the round.”

“Still to this day, Bolt is the largest ticket Sequoia has ever done into Europe.”

“How do we turn these bad businesses into actually good businesses through just a level of cost efficiency that none of these other companies can match?”

“I think we could have actually been more deliberate about which markets we choose to expand into. So I think that as I mentioned, we had this first wave where we just expanded with the wrong model and looking back, if we hadn't done that and we would have done…”

“We today are one of the few players that's fully vertically integrated, so we have our own hardware team, so we design our own squatters, we have our own team in China where we manufacture them, we then ship them to Europe, we have hundreds of warehouses, we t…”

“Literally never. Over these last 10 years, I've never sacrificed sleep for the sake of the business.”

“It actually happened very quickly. It was probably five or six months before we were fully back. And then we already started hitting new records after that.”

“At Sequoia we actually didn't get the meeting. That was the sad part. So we tried to approach them many times. And then back then I think we weren't an interesting enough company.”

“So I think we probably could have done that more of a year or two earlier of just engaging with the public and sort of trying to influence where this goes.”

“In the grand scheme of how much money we've raised in, in general, it's maybe been about 10% of our total funding.”

“So to get going in a city like London, you need to invest ballpark at least a hundred million euros to reach that critical mass. Otherwise it's just not going to work.”

“My parents and I was like, hey, we really need some budget to get this thing off the ground. And we came from a very modest means in Estonia, especially back then, wasn't a rich country. So they said, yeah, we'll put aside 5000 bucks for your university fund. …”

“In six months, Johannesburg went from being zero to being more than half the business just from scratch. With one local student running the whole operation.”

“Out of the first 10 people I hired, I had to fire seven of them.”

“So we raised about one million of an annual of the first seed fund, and then we built the company to ten million ARR with that.”

“So COVID hit, and in four weeks we went from just massive, like, about two hundred million of revenues to losing 85% of that.”

“My view is that most of these companies Like Waymo over the longterm don't want to operate a car network. It's just too much hassle. So I think that these companies can build what they're fantastic at, which is building the software. And then there's going to …”

“Today we operate in about 50 countries around the world and Bolt is the number one most popular platform in more than 20 of them.”

“We became overnight from being, having almost no presence in that sector to becoming the largest micro-mobile to operate in Europe. Still to this day, nobody operates with such a big fleet in so many cities.”

“So the one I'm currently bullish about is dining payments. So in many parts of Europe and the world, it's actually not a common thing that you can scan the QR code, you see the menu, you can order and pay from that. And you can integrate it with everything els…”

“They invested at the valuation of about fifteen million. So by now they made like easily more than a hundred X return on that investment.”

“I'm still in the camp of intelligence, so I would rather get somebody who's very smart. It's fine if they work a bit less hours, but they make the right decisions. At least for our business you cannot compensate with hard work if you don't make the right decis…”

“So in aggregate, we will now raise 1.5 billion. So it's been a mix of maybe 10% of that from strategic investors and then the most of that from then European and then US based investors.”

“So, so we effectively came out of it with market shares that were twice or three times higher than the ones going in.”

“I think that the, their only way out of this is to optimize their costs. I just generally don't see how they're going to be an independent company five years from now with the current cost structure.”

“About 40% of the ride-hailing trips in a lot of these countries are less than four kilometers long.”

“I mean, one example that's probably our biggest loss is we met Bolt, the car ailing company, and they were called Taxify at the time, a small Baltics ride-hailing company, and even though, you know, Marcus, the founder, was extraordinary, we really couldn't se…”

“I believe that B to B software, I believe software vendors have an important role in the future, even if the bolts of the world, the curses of the world make coding cheap, easy, in some cases free.”

“We're seeing examples like Bolt, you know, which went zero to 20 in two months”

“When I look at tools like bold and lovable, the category itself has something where it seems obvious that there will be a lot of money spent there. Just because like, when you see some of the examples of what people can do with those tools that they just could…”

“When the cost of building an e-commerce that looks like any of the current brands today goes down to like, just Ask Bolt to do it for you. Ask Lovable to do it for you. And you have that. Those brands are going to have to come up with something much more engag…”

“I mean, I know Cursor almost died, right? Bolt almost died, right? And then finally it hit for Cursor. I don't know the whole story of Windsurf. Even Windsurf was Codium before it, right? It wasn't even the same, like everyone talks about Windsurf. 90 days ago…”

“I spent a lot of my limited liquidity buying up secondaries in, in Bolt in like, 2017.”

“I think with time, they're going to need to build out more and more tunables, more and more ways to configure the product with time. But I think for us, if we can deeply understand code, like large code bases, it'll naturally follow that with very little effor…”

“Spotify, early investment that he trusted our business model in, let's say eight to 10 X. Bolt, you have to be determined, but let's just assume it's somewhere between, you know, 50% and face value of what Sequoia paid. It's, you know, six, seven X.”

“I think it was like, 20 bucks a share or something, and Sequoia did it at two 60.”

“So even Bolt, which was the early leader, they're now just at number three, They don't even have an AI agent anymore. They've outsourced it to Claude.”

“I'm not worried about those three.”

“Claude figured that out. Cursor didn't figure this out. Replit and Lovable and Bolt didn't figure it out. I can tell you the story. Claude figured it out. Anthropic, the guys, you know, once they quit OpenAI, they figured it out and everyone grafted on this, i…”

“Replit and lovable of a year ago and bolt were not a moat today. They have massive moats. And so I think it could easily happen with an instinct. All the use cases that has to accomplish become a moat.”