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: Web dev shops use AI to build faster while charging standard rates
“A lot of folks you know, especially in the web dev shops, et cetera, They're just, they're able to punch out incredible web applications faster than ever before for clients and are able to charge the same price.”
Simons: Hundreds of thousands of non-developers tried building apps on Cursor
“It turns out there are hundreds of thousands of people that we have seen that were using Cursor and we're trying to build apps with that where they're not traditional software does, but we're heavily leaning on the AI.”
Simons: Bolt.new is adding $500,000 in ARR per day
“The past couple of days have been like, you know, half a million of error per day, just, I mean, which, you know, insane.”
Simons: Bolt.new is selling primarily to non-developers
“For the first time in the company's history, we're selling primarily to almost non-developers.”
Simons: Bolt.new operates at near-zero gross margin on inference
“We're not actually taking, you know, to date on the revenue we've done, we have not really taken a margin at all on this stuff.”
Simons: Software engineers lag behind entrepreneurs in adopting AI tools
“I think a lot of software engineers have been kind of late to the game on trying to adopt AI tools. And also the way that they're kind of approaching is very different than someone who is you know, kind of entrepreneurial in nature.”
Simons: Build LLM features incrementally with minimal initial prompts rather than bulk
“Especially, especially when you're dealing with stuff that's going to be like more complicated functionality. Like for design changes, I'll often just, I'll just kind of like, I'll be like looking at the designers creating a list in, in one shop message. I'm l…”
Simons: Conversational voice AI eliminates the friction of diet tracking apps
“This is a good example of just an app that a lot of people need and I think it would be really hard to do on your own. Like, I've done this, so if you try and, you know, track your dieting, whatever have you, I think the inclusion of AI, whether we can just ta…”
Simons: StackBlitz was preparing to shut down in 2024 before Bolt
“Last year, in twenty-twenty-four, we were getting ready to shut the company down. When you're dealing with that sort of situation where it's like, are we gonna shut down the company, or what are the other outcomes? We're gonna go and turn over every stone, and…”
Simons: Bolt reached 3M registered users and 1M MAUs within months
“Like we've added, you know, three million registered users, you know, just in the past few months here. And you know, monthly active users is, you know, around a million, I think at this point per month.”
Simons: StackBlitz runs Bolt with 15-20 people and 3 support staff
“And our team's like 15, 20 people, you know, so it's just dealing with you know, we're going to be closing on like a 100,000 customers and we got our support teams, like three people.”
Local compute avoids the abuse that ruins free tiers on cloud servers
“Cause the other problem, the server is like, you end up, if you have a free tier, people are mining Bitcoin on it. They're DDoS and people using your servers, right? So inevitably you have to nerf these things and roll them back, but if it's all done on the en…”
Simons: Bolt reached $20M ARR without mobile responsiveness
“We got the twenty million of ARR without a mobile responsive view, by the way.”
Simons: Tech startup turnover prevents long-term technical bets
“Like in Silicon Valley, it is usually folks are kind of at a job for, you know, to start for a kind of year or two, they kind of go to another, you know what I mean? And the problem with the turnover like that is that you can't, Take like really long bets like…”
Simons: AI coding agents fail on codebases exceeding 1,000 files
“These LLMs are not great depending on how big your application is though, right? These things are not quite there where if you have something that's, you know a thousand files or something or more Where you're going to be able to have a really reliable, super …”
Simons: Prepending bolt.new to Figma URLs converts designs into full-stack apps
“So on any fig my URL, when you're looking at like a, you know, a design that you've made if you just put bolt.new in front of that URL and hit enter, it's gonna suck that design into bolt and turn it into a full stack app or mobile app just.”
Bolt is developing an agentic Slack bot to act as team developer
“We're actually creating a you know, like a bolt, like Slack bot that's whose job is to Basically act like a developer on your team. And so you can be like, in a thread, you can be like, Hey, I think we should add a homepage. It's like, yeah, okay. Like at bolt…”
Simons: Prompt AI coding tools like writing Linear tickets for developers
“I would say talk to this thing like you do a linear ticket or a G or a ticket. That, that would be my advice is like in our order and talk to this, like you would like, you're talking to one of the developers on your team. Right. And what that means is be spec…”
Simons: Bolt generates personal websites zero-shot 99.999% of the time
“It zero shot, 99.999% of the time. Like you're getting a beautiful personal website that you didn't have before that would have taken you an hour on Wix.”
Simons: Bolt Reached Nearly 200,000 Weekly Users Building Web Applications
“Last week, we had, you know, almost 200,000 software composers, you know, we like to call them, that use Bolt to build web applications.”
Simons: AI Software Composers Could Eventually Reach 100 Million
“We think that, that number should be a hundred million. And yeah, and we, we're on this growth clip it seems like you know, maybe, maybe we'll get there sooner or later.”
Simons: In-browser dev environments eliminate server latency and cloud compute costs
“It's very complicated and expensive to typically do this if you're going to use servers. So it's very valuable to like do it in the browser because it's extremely fast. There's no latency. You're not paying by the minute, you know, for some cloud.”
Simons: Simple AI wrappers quickly die when foundation labs update products
“Whenever the next model comes or whenever, you know, one of the AI labs eventually integrates that into their chat products or whatever those companies, you know, kind of tend to go away pretty quickly.”
Simons: StackBlitz shelved Bolt in February until Claude 3.5 preview arrived
“Earlier this year, I think like in February, we had the idea for Bolt.
We tried to build it with some of the, you know, frontier models available at that time.
Wasn't possible to do.
the models were just did not spit back quality, accurate code that was const…”
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 → |