Software Supernova: Bolt.new - The AI Web App Developer In Your Browser

**Eric Simons** (0:00)
The numbers we publicly disclosed, like in the first eight weeks, we went from zero to 20 million of ARR, and we've just continued to grow since then. We actually wrote an operating system that runs natively inside of your browser, it boots in like 100 milliseconds, there's zero latency, there's no cloud VMs that have to get spun up. It gives you a very reliable experience that actually can scale. If you force people to go download a thing to their computer and set all of that up, and then they get to use AI, the drop off is insane, right? I mean, it's like 90% or something, if not more, you know? Whereas when it's native in the browser, it's frictionless, and the actual AI augmentation, that actually even picks up from there, right? So there's an order of magnitude, more complexity of the SAP environment locally for any of these things.

**Nathan Labenz** (0:44)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, we're simultaneously releasing the first two parts of a series that we're calling Software Supernova, with the makers of new and stunningly fast growing full-stack AI developer products, Bolt and Lovable. Both episodes explore in different ways how AI's rapidly improving coding capabilities are beginning to tangibly transform the software industry, by expanding the space of what can be built, changing how professional software developers work, and making it possible for people to create software without ever learning to code. My guest in this episode is Erik Simons, founder and CEO at StackBlitz, makers of Bolt, online at bolt.new. Which has suddenly gone vertical after adding an AI coding assistant to the web-based IDE that they'd spent the previous seven years building. After announcing that they'd reached $20 million in annual recurring revenue after just a couple months in market, the company has gone on to raise and recently announced a $105 million funding round. In this conversation, Erik walks us through how the company's foundational web container technology works and how it's allowed them to scale so rapidly, explains the company's open source approach and shows where we can check out their prompts on Github, uses the agent to build a Spotify clone with just a few natural language interactions, showcases a few web apps that real customers have built, and describes how product managers are having especially notable success using Bolt to bypass design platforms like Figma and instead go directly to working prototypes. Video of the demo, by the way, is on YouTube and the app design did come out looking really good. But you can take my word for that and I think you'll be fine with the audio-only version if you prefer. We also discuss how the economics of AI development are creating unique opportunities for Bolt users. One freelancer, Erik says, spent $7 on Bolt Inference to deliver a $9,000 project for a client. To be honest, I have no idea how much of that is really happening in the economy at large or how long it will last. But I can confirm that there is at least some real AI arbitrage going on right now. Businesses that are used to paying tens of thousands of dollars for projects are now effectively paying thousands of dollars per hour in some cases without realizing it. In any case, I'm confident that the market, including the market for rapid response human help that Erik and team are planning to build on the Bolt platform, will rapidly bring prices down and send quantities soaring before we know it. Once again, I feel like the safest bet in the AI revolution is high consumer surplus. As always, if you're finding value in the show, please share it with friends, write a review, or reach out via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai. We always welcome your feedback and suggestions. For now, I hope you enjoy this unique perspective on AI-powered software development with Erik Simons, CEO of StackBlitz, makers of Bolt, online at Bolt.new.
Erik Simons, founder and CEO at StackBlitz, makers of Bolt, online at Bolt.new. Welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Eric Simons** (3:44)
Awesome. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:46)
You guys have made a splash to say the least in one of the hottest categories going right now, which is the full-stack AI software engineer. People are prompting their way to all sorts of creations on your product, and the revenue is popping off. You guys have raised a bunch of money. We're going to get into all of that. For starters, I would love to get just a kind of general sense of your AI worldview, because I feel like so many of these conversations are much more intelligible, much easier to sort of understand the details when you have the person's big picture in mind. How would you describe where we are right now in the AI moment? What is your expectation for AGI or transformative AI? Are you somebody who worries about risks? Do you maintain a P-Doom? Give me the Eric Simons' AI worldview in a minute.