The Exchanges

Q There's a lot of code generation tools out there. You can do this, you know, directly, um, in the core model products as well. What do you think people are finding special about Bolt?

A Yeah, totally. Yeah, what's special about Bolt, and it kind of comes to the origins of our company, but, you know, in short, we've written an operating system in WebAssembly that can, like, run in your browser, and that's really important, because if you want to run dev environments, uh, You need to be able to install arbitrary packages and run different tool chains, right? Whether it's Next.js or Veed or anything else. It's very complicated and expensive to typically do this if you're going to use servers. So it's very valuable to like do it in the browser because it's extremely fast. There's no latency. You're not paying by the minute, you know, for some cloud. What we've done, um, has kind of married these frontier models with this technology we've been making. Um, and when you kind of look at the other stuff in the market, there, there's, uh, you know, like a cloud artifacts is, you know, Probably one of the first things that, uh, that hit the market that did a really good job of this, where you could say, Hey, build me a UI and it will like do it. The problem comes when you actually want to build stuff that's more meaningful. Like it's very good if you're saying, Hey, like, yeah, I use that, you know, Claude, uh, you know, every week you're just kind of generating graphs based on numbers or whatever. Very good for that sort of use case, but if you want to say, hey, create …

AI assessment note: “we've written an operating system in WebAssembly that can, like, run in your browser”

Q What's your favorite use case? What are people building that's cool?

A What's really cool to me is Folks are actually able to build real world products. And then so, you know, we've been online for just under two months now, and we've already had the first startups launch out of this thing. You know, they've used Bolt to build their startup and are making money, like, you know, charging on Stripe or whatever have you. Um, so a couple of examples, uh, just off the top of my head. Um, one is from, uh, this gal in Thailand. Uh, she's a PM in a software banking company and, uh, her company is, uh, viralhooks.ai. And so she launched this project, um, you know, by herself. Um, on the side, just moonlighting it. And the product is actually pretty cool. So the general idea is, uh, you know, when you make like a TikTok or something, I'm not a TikToker, but you know, I've had aspirations. Um, when you make a TikTok, you need, you need to have like a viral hook to kind of get people to keep watching. Right. And so she's actually, uh, trained up some, uh, uh, models, you know, for open AI or whatever have you to actually help you write, uh, great viral hooks for your videos and kind of reverse engineer how they're great creators have done that. So as you can go check it out, viralhooks.ai. And so what, what was kind of mind blowing and it's a beautiful site, like awesome product. And, um, what was mind blowing about this is a week before we launched Bolt, uh,…

AI assessment note: “one is from, uh, this gal in Thailand... her company is, uh, viralhooks.ai.”

Q was working on developing their point of view and trying different ideas to refine it for five years, and then they made Notion. Um, and you guys have been working on this for, you know, five plus years as well. Like, uh, Can you talk a little bit about like the, the origin of StackBlitz and, and you and Pi and like when, uh, when you decided to do both?

A Yeah. So I, I co-founded StackBlitz with one of my childhood best friends. His name's Albert Pi. He and I grew up in a settler of Chicago together. Um, and when we were 13, uh, we, we, we, we had ideas. We and I were always very interested in computers. We were building PCs and we wanted to learn how to, to write web applications. This is like the mid 2000. Um, so like for our 13th birthdays, we asked, For, you know, the O'Reilly books. Cause they're like 200 bucks a pop instead of an Xbox, you know, and then we learn how to code together. Um, and, and really, and it was, it was painful. I mean, get to, to, at that time, there's not like Code Academy and all the stuff that's for free online. Um, there wasn't really online communities around these things, but he and I really wanted to be, we thought we had cool ideas for products or whatever. And, and we really wanted to build them and launch them. I think, and, and that's really, I think that's, that's why, and, you know, we've been building stuff together for You know, 1520 years. Um, it's been about that, you know, coding was really a way to, you know, a necessary part of, of how you bring these things to life, you know? Anyways, um, fast forward, Albert and I have done a couple of different startups over the years. Um, but back in 2016, 20 17, we had this realization that browsers had gotten really powerful. Like we've been …

AI assessment note: “I co-founded StackBlitz with one of my childhood best friends. His name's Albert Pi.”

Q to, um, run locally without handling that developer environment mess yourself. There's this concept of like a GPT wrapper company. Right. And so I, I think there were a number of companies that were less generously, like some system prompts and like a well SEO website. Uh, you guys open sourced your system prompts. So, uh, and like a lot of the code for Bolt. Can you explain that strategically?

A As we were building Bolt, um, yeah, I mean, over the past couple of years, there's been a ton of more simple sort of wrappers that have come out, you know, around these, uh, frontier models. And, and the problem is like whenever the next model comes or whenever, you know, one of the AI labs eventually integrates that into their chat products or whatever, uh, those companies, you know, kind of tend to, tend to go away pretty quickly. So when we were working on Bolt, I mean, one of the big advantages we have is we've been building this web container technology for five years, and it's like pretty, pretty difficult stuff to do. Um, and so when we were going to build, uh, to actually launch Bolt, when we were building the system prompts and kind of the user interface around it, When we looked out there, there's not a lot of other folks doing this where, where they actually could open source their system prompts and kind of open source their products. So you could see how it's actually made. And for us, uh, you know, we just, we felt that it was inevitable that someone would, uh, you know, get our AI model to dump out our system prompts anyways, but also we, we, we felt there's kind of something missing in the open source world where, where we see, like, we come from a web developer platform. Right. Open source is key for innovation for everyone. And to date, a lot of these companie…

AI assessment note: “one of the big advantages we have is we've been building this web container technology”

Q are useful in terms of like what real world applications can you build with your system? Right. And so, uh, I, I think that, that, um, virtuous cycle seems really powerful. And you guys also, like, I think a big part of the Bolt theory is like, make anyone a developer, right? Versus you guys are all developers. You also need to see how non-technical humans build with this stuff.

A Yeah, a hundred percent. That's like the majority of people using Bolt at this point are, are, you know, non-technical. Um, and it's interesting, the most successful people that are using Bolt are actually people that have had to interact with or manage development teams. So think like entrepreneurs, uh, PMs, et cetera, because it turns out kind of managing, uh, an AI is extremely similar to managing actual software developers. Right. Um, And one of the things you just mentioned on the eval, so this is actually the, this kind of the second piece regarding, you know, how, like why we open source and one of the most interesting aspects that's popped out of it is that, like I mentioned earlier, there's not a lot of, ah, good open source AI tools today, like real world AI tools. And especially ones where the products that clearly are providing a lot of value to the degree they're growing quickly and, you know, both by revenue and usage. Um, more like maybe one of, you know, the only, the few or something like that. What's kind of happened is that, as you mentioned, the eval suites are, were very good the past couple of years of kind of generally measuring how good are these models at coding. But the problem that folks are kind of running into now, when you talk about building a real world product around these things, The, the eval suites that exist today are, are very specific and …

AI assessment note: “That's like the majority of people using Bolt at this point are, are, you know, non-technical.”

Q Oh, you had a newborn? Sorry, I forgot that.

A Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A lot, a lot has changed. Yeah. And so I think at the beginning of this year, I knew that I was my, you know, I was going to have a daughter in April and anyone that's been a parent, you know, will, will, has, you know, will tell you that it's, it's, it's stressful, you know, especially the first months of life there. Um, and at the same time on the, The business side. I mean, I think us and everyone else in our space, um, was having a tough time when we were, we were no exception and we were kind of looking at the future and, you know, Kind of, you know, looking, where do we fit in here? Things are changing really quickly. And, you know, a lot of, uh, you know, a handful of the other folks in the space have either gotten acquired or, or shutting down or whatever have you. Um, and some have actually kind of, uh, gone and, and leaned into the AI stuff in a similar way to us, a very, a few, a smaller number, but, um, you know, there, there's just, there, there's kind of storms on the horizon. And there, there's this, this quote, um, you know, I think it comes from the military, but, Uh, you know, fate, fate whispers to the warrior, you can't weather this storm. And the warrior whispers back, I am the storm. And, and so it's just kind of like, you know, if they, and that'd be my general advice to anyone is like, if, if the universe is going to try and crush you, …

AI assessment note: “I knew that I was my, you know, I was going to have a daughter in April”