StarZero All shows Try the podcast clipper →

Eric Simons

Co-Founder & CEO, StackBlitz · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

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.

14statements → 8claims → 2claims resolved → 3.86/5average certainty → 1.71/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated →

2 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 6 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

8 assertions · 3 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 6 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Eric argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Simons: Startups have launched entirely on Bolt.new with full backends
“We've had like the first startups now launch off of Bolt entirely where this, you know tomorrow I'm doing a live stream with this guy named Paul, who he's built an entire CRM using this thing and, you know, with backend, et cetera. And you know, people have ma…”
Eric Simons Dec 2, 2024 ▶ 10:29 0 to over $8M ARR in 2 months as a Claude Wrapper (Bolt.new, Qodo)

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
100% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: not measured why? →

We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Eric Simons on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.

Everything Eric Simons said on Latent Space that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
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…”
Eric Simons Dec 2, 2024 ▶ 1:03:09 0 to over $8M ARR in 2 months as a Claude Wrapper (Bolt.new, Qodo)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Eric Simons Dec 2, 2024 ▶ 10:01 0 to over $8M ARR in 2 months as a Claude Wrapper (Bolt.new, Qodo)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Eric Simons Dec 2, 2024 ▶ 1:01:07 0 to over $8M ARR in 2 months as a Claude Wrapper (Bolt.new, Qodo)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Eric Simons Dec 2, 2024 ▶ 1:06:44 0 to over $8M ARR in 2 months as a Claude Wrapper (Bolt.new, Qodo)
Disclosure
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.”
Eric Simons Dec 2, 2024 ▶ 1:13:10 0 to over $8M ARR in 2 months as a Claude Wrapper (Bolt.new, Qodo)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Simons: Bolt.new Doubled StackBlitz's Seven-Year Traffic in One Week
“Within, within a week, we, you know, we were doing like, you know, double the amount of traffic, and StackBlitz had been online for seven years, and we were like, what?”
Eric Simons Dec 2, 2024 ▶ 0:58 0 to over $8M ARR in 2 months as a Claude Wrapper (Bolt.new, Qodo)
Disclosure
Simons: StackBlitz Shelved Bolt in Early 2024 Due to Model Limitations
“We had the idea for Bolt earlier this year, you know, we haven't really shared this too much publicly, but like, you know, we actually had tried to build it with some of those, you know, state of the art models back in January, you know, February, you can kind…”
Eric Simons Dec 2, 2024 ▶ 1:24 0 to over $8M ARR in 2 months as a Claude Wrapper (Bolt.new, Qodo)
Assertion Supported
Simons: Startups have launched entirely on Bolt.new with full backends
“We've had like the first startups now launch off of Bolt entirely where this, you know tomorrow I'm doing a live stream with this guy named Paul, who he's built an entire CRM using this thing and, you know, with backend, et cetera. And you know, people have ma…”
Eric Simons Dec 2, 2024 ▶ 10:29 0 to over $8M ARR in 2 months as a Claude Wrapper (Bolt.new, Qodo)
Assertion Supported
Simons: StackBlitz Browser OS Clocks In at One Megabyte or Less
“These Docker two awesome things will give you an image that's like, oh, 60 to a hundred meg, you know, maybe more, you know. And our OS, you know, kind of clocks in, I think we're in like a, maybe, maybe a megabyte or less or something like that.”
Eric Simons Dec 2, 2024 ▶ 20:25 0 to over $8M ARR in 2 months as a Claude Wrapper (Bolt.new, Qodo)
Insight
Simons: Games and IDEs Are Ultimate Stress Tests for Platform Bugs
“The second one are IDEs, because you're talking about actually the virtualizing the actual runtime environment you are in to actually build apps on top of it, which requires sophisticated capabilities, a lot, you know, access to, you know, a good amount of com…”
Eric Simons Dec 2, 2024 ▶ 23:16 0 to over $8M ARR in 2 months as a Claude Wrapper (Bolt.new, Qodo)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Simons: Bolt.new grew to 20,000-30,000 customers in six weeks
“We went from you know, call it zero customers to, you know 20, 30,000 kind of, you know, in, in six weeks”
Eric Simons Dec 2, 2024 ▶ 1:05:07 0 to over $8M ARR in 2 months as a Claude Wrapper (Bolt.new, Qodo)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Simons: Token add-ons drive 20% to 30% of Bolt's revenue
“You can also buy additional tokens, you know, just with usage based billing effectively. And that's accounting for an additional 20, 30% of revenue that's coming to the company.”
Eric Simons Dec 2, 2024 ▶ 1:13:25 0 to over $8M ARR in 2 months as a Claude Wrapper (Bolt.new, Qodo)
Insight
Simons: Single-Ecosystem AI Code Tools Move Faster via Error Databases
“And a lot of that comes down to having a giant database of common errors that you can maybe even fine tune stuff on at some point. Right? So doing that on, on one ecosystem, you can move a lot faster than if you're trying to support a lot of different language…”
Eric Simons Dec 2, 2024 ▶ 1:28:07 0 to over $8M ARR in 2 months as a Claude Wrapper (Bolt.new, Qodo)
Disclosure
Simons: StackBlitz made Bolt.new core and system prompts open source
“And so actually the core of Bold.net, we actually made open source. So you can actually go like, go in and check out like the system prompts and et cetera, and you can run it locally and whatever have you.”
Eric Simons Dec 2, 2024 ▶ 30:15 0 to over $8M ARR in 2 months as a Claude Wrapper (Bolt.new, Qodo)

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
0 to over $8M ARR in 2 months as a Claude Wrapper (Bolt.new, Qodo) Dec 2, 2024 48m
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.

Try the podcast clipper Learn more