Eric Simons is the CEO of StackBlitz, discussing the rapid revenue growth of their AI code-generation tool Bolt on Lenny's Podcast.
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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,…”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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 …”
Opinion
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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”