Simons: StackBlitz was preparing to shut down in 2024 before Bolt
Eric Simons · Inside the $50 Trillion AI Gold Rush | Episode 1 · Sep 24, 2025 · at 20:19
Eric Simons, CEO of StackBlitz (creator of Bolt), explains how the company was near shutdown in 2024 before developing and launching Bolt as a final effort.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Last year, in twenty-twenty-four, we were getting ready to shut the company down. When you're dealing with that sort of situation where it's like, are we gonna shut down the company, or what are the other outcomes? We're gonna go and turn over every stone, and so Bolt was one of the things. It was the last thing. It was the last Bolt in the chamber of the company. It was the last idea we ran. We had to launch it in 90 days.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Eric Simons
Simons: AI reduces a month of engineering time to five minutes
“What would take a month of engineering time Can take literally five minutes.”
Simons: Bolt Hackathon broke world records with 130,000 participants and 1M apps
“The world record for the largest hackathon prior to this hackathon was 66,000 people. On day one, we crossed that number. At the end, we had over a 130,000 people, and over a million new web apps were created in, in that 30 day period.”
Simons: AI will augment workers rather than replace them
“Most people think AI is going to replace them, but in, in reality, it's just gonna augment them and supercharge them.”
Simons: Software engineers lag behind entrepreneurs in adopting AI tools
“I think a lot of software engineers have been kind of late to the game on trying to adopt AI tools. And also the way that they're kind of approaching is very different than someone who is you know, kind of entrepreneurial in nature.”
Simons: Build LLM features incrementally with minimal initial prompts rather than bulk
“Especially, especially when you're dealing with stuff that's going to be like more complicated functionality. Like for design changes, I'll often just, I'll just kind of like, I'll be like looking at the designers creating a list in, in one shop message. I'm l…”
Simons: Conversational voice AI eliminates the friction of diet tracking apps
“This is a good example of just an app that a lot of people need and I think it would be really hard to do on your own. Like, I've done this, so if you try and, you know, track your dieting, whatever have you, I think the inclusion of AI, whether we can just ta…”