The Exchanges

Q reason that you guys have been so successful is all the work you did that allowed, that built this web container technology, it sounds like. Is there anything there that's worth sharing? You think of just that part of the journey? I know we'll go through like the origin at all, where Bolt came from, but I guess just that web container component specifically, that feels like a huge deal.

A It, it, it, it, a hundred percent is. Yeah. And, um, I would say this is kind of surprisingly to me, it's like still one of the, um, contrarian, uh, viewpoints of our company. Like, you know, despite, despite, um, cause over the years it was like, when we first, this is the web container was the bat that we made the company on just to be clear. Like the stack puts was like a deep tech, a browser based deep technology player on, can we make a You know, a web assembly based operating system that can like boot in a browser and like a hundred milliseconds and like run full on development tool chains. Like that was really it. And like the, we gotten the idea for this and kind of the insight that this might be possible because back when my co-founder and I came out to the Valley, he and I grew up down the street from each other in Chicago, learn how to code together at 13 and build stuff ever since. And we came out to the Valley in 2012 and we just had the good fortune of bumping into Dylan Field and Evan Wallace when they were building Figma. In the early days. And that was, um, I, I don't think a lot of people are like, no, that like Figma was, was also a browser-based deep technology play. Like when their first pitch for Figma, they, they, they didn't have a design tool. And their first pitch was this, uh, three D ball dropping into water inside of a browser town. And the, the, th…

AI assessment note: “web container was the bat that we made the company on just to be clear.”

Q I'm stoked to be here for folks that are not super familiar with bolt. What is bolt?

A It's really simple. You go there, there's a text box and you tell it, uh, what you want to build, whether it's a web or a mobile app. And so it's, you know, kind of one of these, uh, you know, text to app, uh, building tools have become pretty popular for the past few months here. And, uh, it's not just like building, you know, like a static. Cider or something like that, but you can actually build full stack, real software with databases and hosting and et cetera. Yeah. Just from prompting and, you know, in, in a ridiculously short period of time, it's not like you're spending, you know, hours and hours or days putting this together. You can get results from like a minute.

AI assessment note: “you can actually build full stack, real software with databases and hosting”

Q No, but that's, that's, that's, I think that's a really cool thing to know that that's, that works and has worked for you. Where do you, so say you talk about stuff, then where do you put stuff? Where do you put your roadmap? Where do you plan just like what tools are kind of in the stack of the company's tool set?

A Yeah. On the engineering side, we use linear, like heavily on kind of product, uh, you know, road mapping. I think we were using notion and, uh, you know, kind of making like PRD type stuff in notion, you know, and then, and we use figment for like design and we actually, we use bolt for a lot of design and prototyping at this point as you can imagine. Um, but, um, yeah, I think, I think it, you know, the, the tooling is, I, I. You know, nothing, nothing crazy. There's nothing crazy sophisticated, you know, like, uh, I think we'd be investing a lot more and especially as you start splintering people out of being on the same call every day. So that's where this stuff really starts to matter because you don't have a time where you're able to dynamically catch things that, that work and be brought up.

AI assessment note: “On the engineering side, we use linear, like heavily on kind of product”

Q ask you a question along these lines that I was meaning to ask, but I forgot is just how much your engineering team, how much, uh, what are they using to build bolt? I imagine it's a lot of cursor is, uh, like how much does bolt at this point involved in building bolt? And is there any other tools that they found useful, find useful that are worth highlighting?

A Yeah. Good question. Yeah. We, we definitely use cursor. Our folks use cursor a lot. We use bolt a lot for the product development process, like a ton. We're using it. And, uh, and when we're doing basically the, the flow that I described, we're like things that need to be pixel perfect, we're going to Figma for, and then, and often we're taking that and we're pulling that into bolt, like, cause you know, we've got access to the integration today. So pull that into bold and we're saying, Hey, go add these things or whatever, or just saying, Hey, here's a screenshot of our UI. Go to you need to do data doc. Um, other AI tools, um, that the developers are using. I think those are like the primary ones. I mean, I think we've got like a subscription to Claude. And like chat GPT and things like that. But you know, I, I think, I think like for development, it's like cursors, like the main thing. Yeah.

AI assessment note: “We definitely use cursor. Our folks use cursor a lot. We use bolt a lot”

Q So you talk about how org charts are gonna change. What are you imagining there? Is it just like fewer engineers mostly, or what, what is, what are the future org charts look like?

A Good question. And I, I, I bet you there's gonna be. Uh, you know, there's going to be like some Gardner analysis someday, you know, a year from now or whatever. That's like, here's like how the best, some, some, some term is applied to how the best companies are organizing, you know, but I mean, yeah, I mean, I think, I think that we're going to, uh, you know, I think that you're going to see developers, uh, probably being pulled off of a lot of the, and generally speaking, pulled off of a lot of, you know, user interface type work. I would imagine, except for the most complicated of, of those things. And you're going to see designers and PMs really, really leading the charge and being responsible for crafting those experiences and perhaps having a developer attached to like, be reviewing the code and making sure, you know, like the, the extra, the guiding, you know, the, the code that they're writing, reviewing those pull requests and et cetera. And, and I think maybe even the engineers are Uh, you know, the, like you pointed out, having engineering skills is not going to hurt you. It's going to make you way more effective. Right? So I, I think the engine, but I do think there's going to be, you know, there, there's going to be the, the leverage of the front engineer is going to have is, is. In the, it is now insane. It's only to get more so. And so I could see, I could see t…

AI assessment note: “I could see there just being fewer front engineers attached”

Q guys have been working together for many years. Most people won't have that benefit. When you're hiring people, when you hire this initial team, is there anything you look for that you think maybe people aren't looking for enough? Anything you prioritize when you're hiring new folks? Is it this idea that they can do a lot? They can do customer calls. They can do design. They can do engineering.

A Yeah. For us. And even if the folks were hiring us, like hiring people that are, that, that don't care about the titles and they don't care about You know, it's not like they're, they're people, of course it's where you'll have like a career trajectory and that sort of thing, but it's like, they, they're, they really are motivated by just working on cool things and, um, and are, you know, checking their ego at the door and, and they're there to like collectively build something great, not just, just kind of, um, you know, be, be the, the, the brilliant jerk. Right. You know, most of the people that we've hired have been, uh, you know, but in Europe and we're a fully remote company. Um, like, you know, I, my co-founder and I are in, are in the Bay area. It's funny, like back in, uh, we, we like rented an office and stuff and we were like commuting into it. Cause we thought we'd hire people here in like a year into it. We were like, What are we doing? You and I are coming to like an office for 10 people we've hired. The people working for us are, you know, in Europe or across the U S and, uh, uh, you know, I think, uh, and, and, and we have, uh, you know, one or two other people we've hired that are in the Bay Area at this point, but, um, yeah, I think, I think we kind of look for folks that are, that are intrinsically just trying to, trying to build great stuff and are, are inte…

AI assessment note: “hiring people that are, that, that don't care about the titles”