Bolt’s Eric Simons on Enabling Everyone to Generate Websites with AI

**Sarah** (0:05)
Hi, listeners, welcome back to No Priors. Today, we're hanging out with Eric Simons, the co-founder of StackBlitz and the makers of Bolt.new, a new AI tool that enables everyone, from developers to designers to non-technical folks, to build full stack, real applications entirely in their browser. Eric has spent the last decade and a half thinking about how to make development more accessible. And since its launch, Bolt has taken off like lightning. Is it over for site builders? We'll talk about AI code generation, creative community, and if everyone really wants to build websites. Eric, good to see you.

**Eric Simons** (0:37)
Good to see you too, Sarah.

**Sarah** (0:39)
You have had a wild two months since you guys launched Bolt.new. Can you explain what it is? Like zero to 20 million of AR? I have, I don't think ever seen that sort of crazy growth.

**Eric Simons** (0:55)
Yeah, I haven't either. It's been kind of surreal. It's kind of far beyond any of our expectations here.

**Sarah** (1:03)
So for anybody who hasn't seen it yet, what is Bolt?

**Eric Simons** (1:05)
Bolt is, it's kind of similar to like ChatGPT or Claude, except you use Bolt to build full stack web applications. So you can come and just prompt if you want a landing page, a blog, or even like a, you know, any type of full stack web app where you have authentication, you can log in. And, you know, you can use it effectively instead of going to like a web development agency or shop. You can come here, put in your idea, hit enter, and get a real production website for you. If you look at the world, there's, you know, 25 million developers, I think, globally. And, you know, to date, you know, we, last week we had, you know, almost 200,000 software composers, you know, we like to call them, that use Bolt to build web applications. And we think, we think that that number should be a hundred million. And, you know, and we're on this growth clip that seems like, you know, maybe we'll get there sooner or later. Bolt is really enabling folks to build real software, not just kind of drag and drop sort of static sites, you know, the previous era of how the web was made.

**Sarah** (2:02)
There's a lot of code generation tools out there. You can do this, you know, directly in the core model products as well. What do you think people are finding special about Bolt?

**Eric Simons** (2:14)
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, you need to be able to install arbitrary packages and run different toolchains, 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 has kind of married these frontier models with this technology we've been making. And when you kind of look at the other stuff in the market, there's, you know, like cloud artifacts is, you know, probably one of the first things 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 a, you know, cloud every week for 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, a 3D landing page where people can log in and like do some type of functionality, you can't go npm install, you know, Firebase or SuperBase or whatever have you and plug all that up and actually deploy it. That's what Bolt specifically is uniquely capable of doing without any other setup. It's just all kind of big.

**Sarah** (3:29)
A common engineer, investor, tech person pushback. Hey, like these code generation tools are often the same. You guys have this web container technology that allows you to abstract away the backend and allow that to run locally without handling that developer environment mess yourself. There's this concept of like a GPT wrapper company, right? And so I think there were a number of companies that were less generously, like some system prompts and like a well SEO website. You guys open sourced your system prompt. So, and like a lot of the code for Bolt. Can you explain that strategically?