The Exchanges

Q that was it. And I was like, yeah, that works just as well. And like for the model, that's probably the simplest way to do it because it like limits the amount of files that are there. Can you talk just more about how much of this is like the model coming out with it? How much you're prompting it to kind of like be very like compressed and concise?

A A ton of it is the model, but I think what's interesting though is You know, kind of the baseline model, if I, it's just like, if it's kind of like, try and put it into like a, you know, a way, if you had to quantify, you know, the effect is, I mean, 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 know, prompt engineering and, you know, multi-agent approaches, et cetera, kind of kick in. And so I, I think, I think with us, you know, our, our folks, like with the, Guy on our side that, um, you know, led the web computer engineering, like that kind of our core technology for the past, you know, seven years here, you know, his name's Dominic Elm, based out of Germany, and he was one of the founding engineers of the company. Previous to StackBlitz, he actually was doing machine learning, and he basically built a StackBlitz, like online IDE for machine learning. So think like, kind of like Google CoLab sort of thing, or like Hugging Face has their kind of version of this. Back in You know, training, you know, ML models and that sort of thing. So I just, you know, as we began, uh, you know, kind of digging into AI stuff over the past year, he's been kind of leading that off. And…

AI assessment note: “A ton of it is the model, but I think what's interesting though is”

Q Like, this is what I want to do. And you build a beautiful, what people ask That's the next step, you know, going back to, like, the general versus, like, specific. Have you had people say, hey, you know, this is great to start, but then I want a specific bolt.new.whatever else to do a more vertical integration and kind of, like, development, or what's the, what do people say?

A Yeah, I think, um, I think you kind of hit the, hit it head on, which is, you know, kind of the way that we've, we've kind of talked about it internally, is it's, like, people are using Bolt to go from, like, zero dot zero to one dot O. Like, that's, like, kind of the biggest unlock that Bolt has versus, Most other things out there. I mean, I think that's kind of, you know, what's, what's very unique about Bolt. I think the, uh, you know, the working on like existing enterprise applications is, I mean, it's crazy important because, you know, there's, uh, you look, when you look at the fortune 500, I mean, these code bases, some of these have been around for, you know, 2030 plus years. And so it's important to be going from, you know, 101 dot three to 101 dot four, et cetera. I think for us, so what's been actually pretty interesting is we see there's kind of two different Users for us that are coming in and it's very distinct. It's like people that are developers already. And then there's people that have never really written software and, or if they have, it's been very, very minimal. And, and so in the first camp, what these developers are doing, like to go from zero to one, they're coming to bolt and then they're ejecting the thing to get up or just downloading and, you know, opening cursor, like whatever to, to, you know, keep iterating on the thing. And sometimes they'll b…

AI assessment note: “people are using Bolt to go from, like, zero dot zero to one dot O”

Q How do you kind of reconcile that and the consumer side where maybe the consumer doesn't even really need to know what a token is. Right. Like on that, like your mom probably doesn't really care what AI token is. How did you structure it to start? How did you come up with that? And then maybe ideas that you have to like improve or like modify that?

A Totally. Yeah. So we, so when we first launched the stack, but it's like, we were an enterprise play, right? And so, um, when we launched in 2017, I think we turned on pricing 2018 or 2019, like it was free for a long time. And then we had a nine dollar plan and that was just the way it was. It was kind of like our, our dollar 50 hot dog at Costco. It's kind of like this, This, you know, just low price, just, you know, it, it wasn't the primary rev driver and we just wanted to, you know, say, Hey, pay for some more storage and private projects or whatever. And so we went to launch bolt again, like our expectation was, Hey, we'll, we'll probably get a good number of people that'll sign up and be excited about it. And, you know, we're not too concerned. You know, we're just, we're just not, we were unprepared for the tsunami that hit. And so after going online the first week, we were like, wow, this is cool. There's a, I mean, it just kept growing. And then once we hit week two, I mean, we were just nine bucks was, I mean, it's like the cheapest AI coding thing you can get, maybe other than Copilot, but, like, we were overrun by support tickets, and it just, and just the sheer volume of people coming in, it's just laws of supply and demand. We were like, okay, this isn't, there's no way we can scale to meet this. Also, the people coming in are burning through their tokens, and th…

AI assessment note: “people coming in are burning through their tokens, and there's no way to actually”

Q And you weren't, you were not like a super endurance athlete before, right? Like, let's like make this clear.

A Yeah. Kind of a wild, a wild thing. So like, you know, back when I, we, we had our daughter, um, in April, And at that time we were, the future of the company was, you know, we're, we're figuring out what are we going to do here? At that time it was, it was pro just prior to bolt kind of getting kicked into, you know, the rebirth of it with the new models and stuff. And so I, I knew that it was going to be, you know, having, having a, a, a, a child is, you know, if you talk to anyone that's done that, you're, you don't have a lot of sleep. It's, it's, you know, there's a lot of, you know, to, to, to, to be a great parent is, is a ton of work. And then also being a startup CEO where there's a lot of uncertainty or whatever, the way I've always found, like when I have to go and, um, Kind of knock it out of the park and all aspects of my life is, is, ah, going, yeah, just to, to make it all aspects of my life. And so I was, I, I just one, yeah, I woke up one day, I was like, all right, I'm going to do an Ironman this year. And, ah, I burned the ships, bought the, bought, it cost a thousand bucks to do these, didn't know that. Um, and, and, you know, just started, I, I never ran a marathon at that point. And so I think it was like three, 45 or 60 days after that, I ran a marathon. My brother-in-law, he, that was even more insane. Two weeks before the marathon, I was like, hey, you …

AI assessment note: “I never ran a marathon at that point.”

Q So then why not? Everyone should do it.

A I think we're going to see a lot more of this. I think we're going to see, I think, you know, for AI co-gen specifically, this is the first moment where I think that there's been that moment where, where it goes from zero to one, where it's like, yep, the price, you know, the value, the value is so like of what you can get out of these things is so much higher than it was, you know, three, six months ago that, uh, I think we're going to see, I think we're going to see a lot more of this. Like we might, we, you know, you know, Bolt is, is I think one of the first things, but, uh, yeah, I mean, it's just, uh, to me, it's, it's, it's inevitable that we're going to see many more things kind of leveraging this, this sort of use case and the amount of efficiency you can get out of using these systems, right?

AI assessment note: “to me, it's, it's, it's inevitable that we're going to see many more things”

Q working, you know, it's not a, what do you think that is? Like there's been so many people demoing coding agents on Twitter and then it doesn't really work. And then you guys were just like, here you go. It's live. Go use it, pay us for it. You know, is there anything in the development that was like interesting and maybe how that compares to building your own agents?

A We had no idea, honestly, like we, we, we've been pretty blown away and, and things have just kind of continued to grow faster since then. We're like, uh, today is week six. So I, I kind of came back to the point you just made, right? Where it's, you, you kind of outlined, it's like, there's kind of this new market of like kind of rethinking the software development. And then there's heavily augmenting existing developers. I think that, you know, both of which are, uh, you know, AI code gen being extremely good. It's allowed existing developers. It's, it's allowing existing developers to, Hammer out software far faster than they could have ever before, right? It's like the ultimate power tool for an existing developer, but this Cogent stuff is now so good. And then, and we saw this over the past, you know, from the beginning of the year, when we tried to first build Bolt, it's actually lowered the barrier to people that, that aren't traditionally software engineers. But the kind of the key thing is if you kind of think about from imagining you've never written software before, right? My co-founder and I, he and I grew up, uh, down the street from each other in Chicago. We learned how to code when we were 13 together and we, we've been building stuff ever since. And this back in like the mid 2000 or whatever, you know, there was nothing for free to learn from online on the inter…

AI assessment note: “the hardest part for everyone learning to code is getting an environment set up”