Eric Simons, CEO of StackBlitz / Bolt.new, discusses Bolt's hyper-growth trajectory following its viral launch.
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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?”
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…”