Eric Simons
Co-Founder & CEO, StackBlitz · 1 appearance on the record.
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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.
26statements → 15claims → 2claims resolved → 4/5average certainty → 1.96/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated →
1 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 13 not checkable as stated how the 15 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
2 predictions · 13 assertions · 1 opinion · 6 insights · 4 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 15 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 13 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.
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 Lenny's Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Simons: Bolt grew from zero to over $30M ARR in 4.5 months
“In the first two months, we went from zero to twenty million of ARR. And I think we're on like month four or four and a half or something like that at this point. And we've already crossed thirty million of ARR and we're on the verge of crossing 40.”
Simons: Cursor is the only code-gen startup ahead of Bolt in revenue
“Our company wasn't doing AI stuff the six months ago, we had no AI products and just out of nowhere, we you know, From almost death of the company to being, you know, the number one by traffic revenue, et cetera, like, you know, AI co-gen app that's, you know,…”
Client-side compute is the only web model scaling to a billion users
“If you look at the other productivity apps that have really worked on the web, they've all had this compute model, right? Figma, when you open a Figma document, there's not like some cloud VM that gets spun up for you to render the documents you're dragging th…”
Cloud VM-based AI coding tools cannot scale due to global capacity limits
“And that's how all these other AI you know, code text to apps sort of tools work. They're all using cloud VMs. And the problem is, you know, on a small scale, it can work, but as you scale it up, there, I mean, there, there's not even a hundred million VMs to …”
Simons: Prototyping in Bolt is faster than using Figma
“Now it's faster to do this with bolt in code and have a real working software products than Dragging around frames in Figma to actually make a static version of it.”
Simons: PMs will directly ship code via AI instead of Jira tickets
“How this is going to work, if you fast forward, you know, one, two, five years, whatever, like PMs are, they're going to be writing quote unquote, instead of just writing a Jira ticket and waiting for a developer to do it. The developers are going to be able t…”
Claude 3.5 Sonnet was the first model reliable enough for AI coding
“Sonnet was, you know, Sonnet was the, really the first model that flipped the equation because that was really us and all cursor and all these other things. The rapid growth started the second sauna went online, right? Like we actually tried building bull like…”
Simons: Bolt forecasts reaching $100M ARR within the year
“Our forecast for the year is we want to get to a hundred million of ARR.”
Competing web-based dev tools rely on slow, fragile cloud servers
“Everyone else runs those things on cloud servers, which they, those can take minutes to boot up and they often will run into issues.”
Bolt runs a full operating system locally inside the user's web browser
“With bold, we like in the past seven years, what our company has been doing has been building an operating system that runs inside of your browser locally using your CPU.”
Simons: Anthropic ran out of GPUs to supply Bolt post-launch
“The servers were just melting anthropic. Ran out of GPUs for us. Like Dario emailed me. He was like, listen, we just, we don't have anything more to give you at the times”
Simons: 67% of Bolt users are non-developers
“And we just kept seeing more and more and more people that were not developers using it to the point where it's like 70, 67% of our users are not developers, right? At this point.”
LLMs improve faster at coding due to its deterministic execution
“Software is deterministic. When you write code and you hit run, either runs or it doesn't. And that is why that's the key insight Anthropic really had. They just went deep. And this is what they're doing. It's just reinforcement learning. I'm basically permuta…”
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…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Inside Bolt: From near-death to one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simo | Mar 13, 2025 | 1h 1m |