Bolt.new, Flow Engineering for Code Agents, and >$8m ARR in 2 months as a Claude Wrapper

**Charlie** (0:00)
Happy December, this is Charlie, your AI co-host. We're delighted to host the return of Itamar Friedman, CEO of Codo, formerly Codium, back on the pod to give an update on the enterprise code agent journey, but also as guest co-host like Harrison Chase, Aman Sanger, and Jon Frankle before him. He helped us introduce our new guest, Eric Simons, CEO of Stackblitz, who launched Bolt.new on October 1st as a rapper of Anthropic's Claude Sonnet, 3.5 Comma, and reached 4 million ARR in one month, which we alluded to on last week's pod with Eric Schluntz. Bolt has since repeated and exceeded that feat in month two, and we caught him in studio for the full story where Swix was honored to play a small part. In Latent Space News, we have now announced the full lineup for the new Latent Space Live Industry Event at NeurIPS 2024, hosted both online and in person. By overwhelming audience demand, we have settled on best papers of 2024 overview talks and Oxford-style debates for the following categories. Computer vision, open models, Transformers killers, synthetic data, agents and LLM scaling, featuring friends and past podcast guests from Roboflow, AI2 slash Meta, Recursal Together, HuggingFace, OpenHands and SemiAnalysis, and a special Startup Landscapes Keynote from Sarah Guo of Conviction. Head to https colon slash slash lu.ma slash lslive to sign up and apply to speak or sponsor. If you want to take part in the Kianda, limited in-person tickets are available now. Lastly, we are making a last call for listener questions for our 2024 recap. Head to speakpipe.com/latentspace to submit questions. Watch out and take care.

**Alessio** (2:01)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Desible Partners, and I'm joined by Michael Swicks, founder of Small AI.

**Swyx** (2:09)
Hey, and today we're still in our sort of makeshift in-between studio, but we're very delighted to have a former returning guest host. Itamar, welcome back.

**Itamar** (2:18)
Great to be here after a year or more.

**Swyx** (2:20)
Yeah, a year and a half. You're one of our earliest guests on Agents. Now you're CEO, co-founder of Codo, which has just been renamed. You also raised $30 million Series A.

**Itamar** (2:31)
Series A was $40.

**Swyx** (2:32)
$40 million Series A, and we can get caught up on everything. But we're also delighted to have our new guest, Eric. Welcome.

**Eric** (2:40)
Excited to be here.

**Swyx** (2:41)
Should I say Bolt or Stackblitz? Is it like its own company now?

**Eric** (2:44)
Yeah. It's definitely Bolt.new. That's the thing that we're probably the most known for, I imagine, at this point.

**Swyx** (2:51)
Which is ridiculous to say because you were working at Stackblitz for so long.

**Eric** (2:55)
Yeah. Within a week, we were doing double the amount of traffic. Stackblitz had been online for seven years. We're like, what?
So we're Stackblitz, the company behind Bolt.new. If you've heard of Bolt.new, that's our stuff.

**Swyx** (3:09)
Yeah. Excellent.

**Itamar** (3:10)
I see, by the way, that the founder mode, you need to know to capture opportunities. So like kudos on doing that, right? Like you're working on some technology and then suddenly you can exploit that to new world.

**Eric** (3:21)
Totally. I mean, I think not to jump, but 100 percent. I mean, a couple of months ago, we had the idea for Bolt earlier this year. We haven't really shared this too much publicly, but we actually tried to build it with some of the state-of-the-art models back in January, February, you can kind of imagine which, and they just weren't good enough to actually do the code generation where the code was accurate and it was fast and whatever have you without a ton of rag, but then there's issues with that. So we put it on the shelf and then we got a sneak peek of some of the new models that have come out in the past couple of months now. So once we saw that, once we actually saw the code gen from it, we were like, oh my God, okay, we can build a product around this. So that was really the impetus of us building the thing. But with that, it was, you know, the core Stackblitz product of the past seven years has been an IDE for developers. So the entire user experience flow we've built up just didn't make sense. And so when we kind of went out to build Bolt, we just thought, you know, if we were inventing our product today, what would the interface look like, given what is now possible with AI code gen? And so there's definitely a lot of conversations we had internally, but you know, just kind of when we logically laid it out, we were like, yeah, I think it makes sense to just greenfield a new thing and let's see what happens. If it works great, then we'll figure it out. If it doesn't work great, then it'll get deleted at some point.