Eric Simons
Co-Founder & CEO, StackBlitz. On 4 shows, 6 appearances, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineer@ericsimons40 ↗LinkedIn ↗stackblitz.com ↗
Eric Simons co-founded StackBlitz in 2017 alongside Albert Pai, developing WebContainers technology to run full-stack development environments inside web browsers. In late 2024, he created Bolt.new, a conversational AI application builder that rapidly scaled into tens of millions of dollars in ARR.
4shows
6appearances
80statements
11resolved
9supported
0contradicted
82%fully supported
3said about them ↓ Everything Eric Simons said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Simons: AI reduces a month of engineering time to five minutes
“What would take a month of engineering time Can take literally five minutes.”
Simons: Bolt grew from zero to over $30M ARR in 4.5 months
“In the first two months, we went from zero to twenty million of ARR. And I think we're on like month four or four and a half or something like that at this point. And we've already crossed thirty million of ARR and we're on the verge of crossing 40.”
Simons: Cursor is the only code-gen startup ahead of Bolt in revenue
“Our company wasn't doing AI stuff the six months ago, we had no AI products and just out of nowhere, we you know, From almost death of the company to being, you know, the number one by traffic revenue, et cetera, like, you know, AI co-gen app that's, you know,…”
Client-side compute is the only web model scaling to a billion users
“If you look at the other productivity apps that have really worked on the web, they've all had this compute model, right? Figma, when you open a Figma document, there's not like some cloud VM that gets spun up for you to render the documents you're dragging th…”
Cloud VM-based AI coding tools cannot scale due to global capacity limits
“And that's how all these other AI you know, code text to apps sort of tools work. They're all using cloud VMs. And the problem is, you know, on a small scale, it can work, but as you scale it up, there, I mean, there, there's not even a hundred million VMs to …”
Simons: Prototyping in Bolt is faster than using Figma
“Now it's faster to do this with bolt in code and have a real working software products than Dragging around frames in Figma to actually make a static version of it.”
Simons: PMs will directly ship code via AI instead of Jira tickets
“How this is going to work, if you fast forward, you know, one, two, five years, whatever, like PMs are, they're going to be writing quote unquote, instead of just writing a Jira ticket and waiting for a developer to do it. The developers are going to be able t…”
Claude 3.5 Sonnet was the first model reliable enough for AI coding
“Sonnet was, you know, Sonnet was the, really the first model that flipped the equation because that was really us and all cursor and all these other things. The rapid growth started the second sauna went online, right? Like we actually tried building bull like…”
Simons: System prompts are not a moat, like viewing source on Google
“It's not going to be, you know, the system prompt kind of a, you know, for those who have done web development, it's kind of like view sourcing on a webpage. Like you can go to google.com, you can view source. No one so far has kind of done that and built anot…”
Simons: Claude 3.5 Sonnet crossed tipping point to write production applications
“And just from a technical perspective, AI code gen models there's a tipping point specifically with Sonnet three, five, there's a chasm that's been crossed here as far as AI models are,
Have gone over the tipping point of being good enough to really write real…”
Simons: Code Generation Is Not Hitting AI Scaling Limits
“I think folks have been kind of concerned about are we hitting kind of limits of this stuff, et cetera, and no, I don't think so. Like, in the specific realm of CodeGen, I think we're going to see, I think we're going to see a lot of improvements pretty rapidl…”
Simons: Base AI models provide a 10x lift; agent scaffolding adds 3-4x
“The model is like this sort of like 10 X multiplier. You're, how good the bottom line model is, huge, huge swing. And then kind of what you can do on top of that, you can squeeze out three, four X kind of more. And so that's kind of where the realm of, you kno…”
Simons: Bolt Hackathon broke world records with 130,000 participants and 1M apps
“The world record for the largest hackathon prior to this hackathon was 66,000 people. On day one, we crossed that number. At the end, we had over a 130,000 people, and over a million new web apps were created in, in that 30 day period.”
Simons: AI will augment workers rather than replace them
“Most people think AI is going to replace them, but in, in reality, it's just gonna augment them and supercharge them.”
Simons: Bolt forecasts reaching $100M ARR within the year
“Our forecast for the year is we want to get to a hundred million of ARR.”
Competing web-based dev tools rely on slow, fragile cloud servers
“Everyone else runs those things on cloud servers, which they, those can take minutes to boot up and they often will run into issues.”
Bolt runs a full operating system locally inside the user's web browser
“With bold, we like in the past seven years, what our company has been doing has been building an operating system that runs inside of your browser locally using your CPU.”
Simons: Anthropic ran out of GPUs to supply Bolt post-launch
“The servers were just melting anthropic. Ran out of GPUs for us. Like Dario emailed me. He was like, listen, we just, we don't have anything more to give you at the times”
Simons: 67% of Bolt users are non-developers
“And we just kept seeing more and more and more people that were not developers using it to the point where it's like 70, 67% of our users are not developers, right? At this point.”
LLMs improve faster at coding due to its deterministic execution
“Software is deterministic. When you write code and you hit run, either runs or it doesn't. And that is why that's the key insight Anthropic really had. They just went deep. And this is what they're doing. It's just reinforcement learning. I'm basically permuta…”
Simons: Most Bolt users are non-technical, led by former dev managers
“That's like the majority of people using Bolt at this point are, you know, non-technical. And it's interesting, the most successful people that are using Bolt are actually people that have had to interact with or manage development teams.”
Simons: Managing AI models is extremely similar to managing human developers
“Because it turns out kind of managing an AI is extremely similar to managing actual software developers.”
Simons: Startups are launching and making money on Stripe using Bolt.new
“We've been online for just under two months now, and we've already had the first startups launch out of this thing. You know, they've used Bolt to build their startup and are making money, like, you know, charging on Stripe or whatever have you.”
Simons: Bolt.new reduced a $5k, 3-month app project to $50 and 2 weeks
“A week before we launched Bolt she went onto Upwork and listed this project and said, Hey, I want to build this product. Da da da. Asked for quotes on the thing. She got a quote for 5000 dollars from, I think it was Dev in like Ukraine or something estimated t…”
The other half of the tape: Eric Simons's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 1 episode across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Greg Isenberg 2
Statements about Eric Simons, by other people (1)
Greg Isenberg advises choosing AI coding tools by betting on specific founders
“My recommendation to people is actually to follow all the founders of these businesses. So, V-Zero, Guillermo. Kodak, Sam Altman. Lovable, Anton. Bolt is Eric Simons. Replit, Amjad, et cetera. Follow them, and then see who you believe in. Like, if you really c…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the Startup Ideas Podcast 2
2025 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Eric's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, StackBlitz | 1 | 26 | 50% 1/2 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
| STARTUP IDEASLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, StackBlitz | 3 +1 | 21 | 80% 4/5 | full record on the Startup Ideas Podcast → |
 NO PRIORSLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, StackBlitz | 1 | 19 | 100% 2/2 | full record on No Priors → |
 LATENT SPACELEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, StackBlitz | 1 | 14 | 100% 2/2 | full record on Latent Space → |