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

The full schedule for Latent Space LIVE! at NeurIPS has been announced, featuring Best of 2024 overview talks for the AI Startup Landscape, Computer Vision, Open Models, Transformers Killers, Synthetic Data, Agents, and Scaling, and speakers from Sarah Guo of Conviction, Roboflow, AI2/Meta, Recursal/Together, HuggingFace, OpenHands and SemiAnalysis. Join us for the IRL event/Livestream https://lu.ma/LSLIVE! Alessio will also be holding a meetup at AWS Re:Invent in Las Vegas https://lu.ma/16teumi6 this Wednesday. See our new Events page https://www.latent.space/i/115665083/events for dates of AI Engineer Summit, Singapore, and World’s Fair in 2025. LAST CALL for questions for our big 2024 recap episode! Submit questions and messages on Speakpipe here https://www.speakpipe.com/LatentSpace for a chance to appear on the show! When we first observed that GPT Wrappers are Good, Actually https://www.latent.space/p/gpt-wrappers, we did not even have Bolt on our radar. Since we recorded our Anthropic episode discussing building Agents with the new Claude 3.5 Sonnet https://www.latent.space/p/claude-sonnet, Bolt.new (by Stackblitz) has easily cleared the $8m ARR bar, repeating and accelerating its initial $4m feat https://www.anthropic.com/customers/stackblitz. There are very many AI code generators and VS Code forks out there https://x.com/kregenrek/status/1860954651518026107, but Bolt probably broke through initially because of its incredible zero shot low effort app generation: But as we explain in the pod, Bolt also emphasized deploy (Netlify)/ backend (Supabase https://x.com/supa_community/status/1863292275087843732)/ fullstack capabilities https://x.com/stackblitz/status/1841873251313844631 on top of Stackblitz’s existing WebContainer full-WASM-powered-developer-environment-in-the-browser https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/introducing-webcontainers/ tech. Since then, the team has been shipping like mad (with weekly office hours https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReTjXR9_ipw&t=4220s), with bugfixing https://x.com/stackblitz/status/1856399662351303017, full screen https://x.com/stackblitz/status/1856808312181833923, multi-device https://x.com/stackblitz/status/1857106454844465289, long context https://x.com/stackblitz/status/1858606307940704268, diff based edits https://x.com/stackblitz/status/1861489910294946195?s=46 (using speculative decoding like we covered in Inference, Fast and Slow https://www.latent.space/p/inference-fast-and-slow). All of this has captured the imagination of low/no code builders like Greg Isenberg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDMhK8DamuE and many others on YouTube/TikTok/Reddit/X/Linkedin etc: Just as with Fireworks https://www.latent.space/p/fireworks, our relationship with Bolt/Stackblitz goes a bit deeper than normal - swyx advised the launch and got a front row seat to this epic journey, as well as demoed it with Realtime Voice at the recent OpenAI Dev Day https://www.latent.space/p/realtime-api. So we are very proud to be the first/closest to tell the full open story of Bolt/Stackblitz! Flow Engineering + Qodo/AlphaCodium Update In year 2 of the pod we have been on a roll getting former guests to return as guest cohosts (Harrison Chase https://www.latent.space/p/shunyu, Aman Sanger https://www.latent.space/p/iclr-2024-benchmarks-agents?utm_source=publication-search, Jon Frankle https://www.latent.space/p/llm-training-2024), and it was a pleasure to catch Itamar Friedman back on the pod, giving us an update on all things Qodo and Testing Agents from our last catchup a year and a half ago https://www.latent.space/p/codium-agents: Qodo (they renamed in September https://www.qodo.ai/blog/introducing-qodo-a-new-name-the-same-commitment-to-quality/) went viral in early January this year with AlphaCodium https://venturebeat.com/ai/new-open-source-ai-coding-tool-surpasses-its-inspiration-google-deepminds-alphacode/ (paper here https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.08500, code here https://github.com/Codium-ai/AlphaCodium) beating DeepMind’s AlphaCode with high efficiency: With a simple problem solving code agent: * The first step is to have the model reason about the problem. They describe it using bullet points and focus on the goal, inputs, outputs, rules, constraints, and any other relevant details. * Then, they make the model reason about the public tests and come up with an explanation of why the input leads to that particular output. * The model generates two to three potential solutions in text and ranks them in terms of correctness, simplicity, and robustness. * Then, it generates more diverse tests for the problem, covering cases not part of the original public tests. * Iteratively, pick a solution, generate the code, and run it on a few test cases. * If the tests fail, improve the code and repeat the process until the code passes every test. swyx has previously written similar thoughts on types vs tests https://css-tricks.com/types-or-tests-why-not-both/ for putting bounds on program behavior, but AlphaCodium extends this to AI generated tests and code. More recently, Itamar has also shown that AlphaCodium’s techniques also extend well to the o1 models https://www.qodo.ai/blog/system-2-thinking-alphacodium-outperforms-direct-prompting-of-openai-o1/: Making Flow Engineering https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1748043513156272416 a useful technique to improve code model performance on every model. This is something we see AI Engineers uniquely well positioned to do compared to ML Engineers/Researchers. Full Video Podcast Like and subscribe! https://youtu.be/swQLziqWgus Show Notes * Itamar https://twitter.com/itamargilad * Qodo https://www.qodo.ai/ * First episode https://www.latent.space/p/codium-agents * Eric https://twitter.com/ericsimons40 * Bolt https://bolt.new/ * StackBlitz https://stackblitz.com/ * Thinkster https://thinkster.io/ * AlphaCodium https://github.com/Codium-ai/AlphaCodium * WebContainers https://blog.stackblitz.com/posts/introducing-webcontainers/ Chapters * 00:00:00 Introductions & Updates * 00:06:01 Generic vs. Specific AI Agents * 00:07:40 Maintaining vs Creating with AI * 00:17:46 Human vs Agent Computer Interfaces * 00:20:15 Why Docker doesn't work for Bolt * 00:24:23 Creating Testing and Code Review Loops * 00:28:07 Bolt's Task Breakdown Flow * 00:31:04 AI in Complex Enterprise Environments * 00:41:43 AlphaCodium * 00:44:39 Strategies for Breaking Down Complex Tasks * 00:45:22 Building in Open Source * 00:50:35 Choosing a product as a founder * 00:59:03 Reflections on Bolt Success * 01:06:07 Building a B2C GTM * 01:18:11 AI Capabilities and Pricing Tiers * 01:20:28 What makes Bolt unique * 01:23:07 Future Growth and Product Development * 01:29:06 Competitive Landscape in AI Engineering * 01:30:01 Advice to Founders and Embracing AI * 01:32:20 Having a baby and completing an Iron Man Transcript Alessio [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners https://decibel.vc/, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of Smol.ai https://smol.ai/. Swyx [00:00:12]: 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 [00:00:21]: Great to be here after a year or more. Yeah, a year and a half. Swyx [00:00:24]: You're one of our earliest guests on Agents. Now you're CEO co-founder of Kodo. Right. Which has just been renamed. You also raised a $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 [00:00:42]: Thank you. Excited to be here. Should I say Bolt or StackBlitz? Swyx [00:00:45]: Like, is it like its own company now or? Eric [00:00:47]: Yeah. Bolt's definitely bolt.new. That's the thing that we're probably the most known for, I imagine, at this point. Swyx [00:00:54]: Which is ridiculous to say because you were working at StackBlitz for so long. Eric [00:00:57]: Yeah. I mean, within a week, we were doing like double the amount of traffic. And StackBlitz had been online for seven years, and we were like, what? But anyways, yeah. So we're StackBlitz, the company behind bolt.new. If you've heard of bolt.new, that's our stuff. Yeah. Swyx [00:01:12]: Yeah. Itamar [00:01:13]: Excellent. I see, by the way, that the founder mode, you need to know to capture opportunities. So kudos on doing that, right? You're working on some technology, and then suddenly you can exploit that to a new world. Yeah. Eric [00:01:24]: Totally. And I think, well, not to jump, but 100%, I mean, a couple of months ago, we had the idea for Bolt earlier this year, but we haven't really shared this too much publicly. But we actually had tried to build it with some of those 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 like rag, but then there was like issues with that. So we put it on the shelf and then we got kind of a sneak peek of some of the new models that have come out in the past couple of months now. And so once we saw that, once we actually saw the code gen from it, we were like, oh my God, like, okay, we can build a product around this. And so that was really the impetus of us building the thing. But with that, it was StackBlitz, the core StackBlitz product 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 the 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. So that's kind of how it actually came to be. Swyx [00:02:49]: I'll mention your background a little bit. You were also founder of Thinkster before you started StackBlitz. So both of you are second time founders. Both of you have sort of re-founded your company recently. Yours was more of a rename. I think a slightly different direction as well. And then we can talk about both. Maybe just chronologically, should we get caught up on where Kodo is first and then you know, just like what people should know since the last pod? Sure. Itamar [00:03:12]: The last pod was two months after we launched and we basically had the vision that we talked about. The idea that software development is about specification, test and code, etc. We are more on the testing part as in essence, we think that if you solve testing, you solve software development. The beautiful chart that we'll put up on screen. And testing is a really big field, like there are many dimensions, unit testing, the level of the component, how big it is, how large it is. And then there is like different type of testing, is it regression or smoke or whatever. So back then we only had like one ID extension with unit tests as in focus. One and a half year later, first ID extension supports more type of testing as context aware. We index local, local repos, but also 10,000s of repos for Fortune 500 companies. We have another agent, another tool that is called, the pure agent is the open source and the commercial one is CodoMerge. And then we have another open source called CoverAgent, which is not yet a commercial product coming very soon. It's very impressive. It could be that already people are approving automated pull requests that they don't even aware in really big open sources. So once we have enough of these, we will also launch another agent. So for the first one and a half year, what we did is grew in our offering and mostly on the side of, does this code actually works, testing, code review, et cetera. And we believe that's the critical milestone that needs to be achieved to actually have the AI engineer for enterprise software. And then like for the first year was everything bottom up, getting to 1 million installation. 2024, that was 2023, 2024 was starting to monetize, to feel like how it is to make the first buck. So we did the teams offering, it went well with a thousand of teams, et cetera. And then we started like just a few months ago to do enterprise with everything you need, which is a lot of things that discussed in the last post that was just released by Codelm. So that's how we call it at Codelm. Just opening the brackets, our company name was Codelm AI, and we renamed to Codo and we call our models Codelm. So back to my point, so we started Enterprise Motion and already have multiple Fortune 100 companies. And then with that, we raised a series of $40 million. And what's exciting about it is that enables us to develop more agents. That's our focus. I think it's very different. We're not coming very soon with an ID or something like that. Swyx [00:06:01]: You don't want to fork this code? Itamar [00:06:03]: Maybe we'll fork JetBrains or something just to be different. Swyx [00:06:08]: I noticed that, you know, I think the promise of general purpose agents has kind of died. Like everyone is doing kind of what you're doing. There's Codogen, Codomerge, and then there's a third one. What's the name of it? Itamar [00:06:17]: Yeah. Codocover. Cover. Which is like a commercial version of a cover agent. It's coming soon. Swyx [00:06:23]: Yeah. It's very similar with factory AI, also doing like droids. They all have special purpose doing things, but people don't really want general purpose agents. Right. The last time you were here, we talked about AutoGBT, the biggest thing of 2023. This year, not really relevant anymore. And I think it's mostly just because when you give me a general purpose agent, I don't know what to do with it. Eric [00:06:42]: Yeah. Itamar [00:06:43]: I totally agree with that. We're seeing it for a while and I think it will stay like that despite the computer use, et cetera, that supposedly can just replace us. You can just like prompt it to be, hey, now be a QA or be a QA person or a developer. I still think that there's a few reasons why you see like a dedicated agent. Again, I'm a bit more focused, like my head is more on complex software for big teams and enterprise, et cetera. And even think about permissions and what are the data sources and just the same way you manage permissions for users. Developers, you probably want to have dedicated guardrails and dedicated approvals for agents. I intentionally like touched a point on not many people think about. And of course, then what you can think of, like maybe there's different tools, tool use, et cetera. But just the first point by itself is a good reason why you want to have different agents. Alessio [00:07:40]: Just to compare that with Bot.new, you're almost focused on like the application is very complex and now you need better tools to kind of manage it and build on top of it. On Bot.new, it's almost like I was using it the other day. There's basically like, hey, look, I'm just trying to get started. You know, I'm not very opinionated on like how you're going to implement this. Like this is what I want to do. And you build a beautiful app with it. What people ask as the next step, you know, going back to like the general versus like specific, have you had people say, hey, you know, this is great to start, but then I want a specific Bot.new dot whatever else to do a more vertical integration and kind of like development or what's the, what do people say? Eric [00:08:18]: Yeah. I think, I think you kind of hit the, hit it head on, which is, you know, kind of the way that we've, we've kind of talked about internally is it's like people are using Bolt to go from like 0.0 to 1.0, like that's like kind of the biggest unlock that Bolt has versus most other things out there. I mean, I think that's kind of what's, what's very unique about Bolt. I think the, you know, the working on like existing enterprise applications is, I mean, it's crazy important because, you know, there's a, you look, when you look at the fortune 500, I mean, these code bases, some of these have been around for 20, 30 plus years. And so it's important to be going from, you know, 101.3 to 101.4, et cetera. I think for us, so what's been actually pretty interesting is we see there's kind of two different users for us that are coming in and it's very distinct. It's like people that are developers already. And then there's people that have never really written software and more if they have, it's been very, very minimal. And so in the first camp, what these developers are doing, like to go from zero to one, they're coming to Bolt and then they're ejecting the thing to get up or just downloading it and, you know, opening cursor, like whatever to, to, you know, keep iterating on the thing. And sometimes they'll bring it back to Bolt to like add in a huge piece of functionality or something. Right. But for the people that don't know how to code, they're actually just, they, they live in this thing. And that was one of the weird things when we launched is, you know, within a day of us being online, one of the most popular YouTube videos, and there's been a ton since, which was, you know, there's like, oh, Bolt is the cursor killer. And I originally saw the headlines and I was like, thanks for the views. I mean, I don't know. This doesn't make sense to me. That's not, that's not what we kind of thought. Swyx [00:09:44]: It's how YouTubers talk to each other. Well, everything kills everything else. Eric [00:09:47]: Totally. But what blew my mind was that there was any comparison because it's like cursor is a, is a local IDE product. But when, when we actually kind of dug into it and we, and we have people that are using our product saying this, I'm not using cursor. And I was like, what? And it turns out there are hundreds of thousands of people that we have seen that we're using cursor and we're trying to build apps with that where they're not traditional software does, but we're heavily leaning on the AI. And as you can imagine, it is very complicated, right? To do that with cursor. So when Bolt came out, they're like, wow, this thing's amazing because it kind of inverts the complexity where it's like, you know, it's not an IDE, it's, it's a, it's a chat-based sort of interface that we have. So that's kind of the split, which is rather interesting. We've had like the first startups now launch off of Bolt entirely where this, you know, tomorrow I'm doing a live stream with this guy named Paul, who he's built an entire CRM using this thing and you know, with backend, et cetera. And people have made their first money on the internet period, you know, launching this with Stripe or whatever have you. So that's, that's kind of the two main, the two main categories of folks that we see using Bolt though. Itamar [00:10:51]: I agree that I don't understand the comparison. It doesn't make sense to me. I think like we have like two type of families of tools. One is like we re-imagine the software development. I think Bolt is there and I think like a cursor is more like a evolution of what we already have. It's like taking the IDE and it's, it's amazing and it's okay, let's, let's adapt the IDE to an era where LLMs can do a lot for us. And Bolt is more like, okay, let's rethink everything totally. And I think we see a few tools there, like maybe Vercel, Veo and maybe Repl.it http://repl.it/ in that area. And then in the area of let's expedite, let's change, let's, let's progress with what we already have. You can see Cursor and Kodo, but we're different between ourselves, Cursor and Kodo, but definitely I think that comparison doesn't make sense. Alessio [00:11:42]: And just to set the context, this is not a Twitter demo. You've made 4 million of revenue in four weeks. So this is, this is actually working, you know, it's not a, what, what do you think that is? Like, there's been so many people demoing coding agents on Twitter and then it doesn't really work. And then you guys were just like, here you go, it's live, go use it, pay us for it. You know, is there anything in the development that was like interesting and maybe how that compares to building your own agents? Eric [00:12:08]: We had no idea, honestly, like we, we, we've been pretty blown away and, and things have just kind of continued to grow faster since then. We're like, oh, today is week six. So I, I kind of came back to the point you just made, right, where it's, you, you kind of outlined, it's like, there's kind of this new market of like kind of rethinking the software development and then there's heavily augmenting existing developers. I think that, you know, both of which are, you know, AI code gen being extremely good, it's allowed existing developers, it's allowing existing developers to camera out software far faster than they could have ever before, right? It's like the ultimate power tool for an existing developer. But this code gen stuff is now so good. And then, and we saw this over the past, you know, from the beginning of the year when we tried to first build, it's actually lowered the barrier to people that, that aren't traditionally software engineers. But the kind of the key thing is if you kind of think about it from, imagine you've never written software before, right? My co-founder and I, he and I grew up down the street from each other in Chicago. We learned how to code when we were 13 together and we've been building stuff ever since. And this is back in like the mid 2000s or whatever, you know, there was nothing for free to learn from online on the internet and how to code. For our 13th birthdays, we asked our parents for, you know, O'Reilly books cause you couldn't get this at the library, right? And so instead of like an Xbox, we got, you know, programming books. But the hardest part for everyone learning to code is getting an environment set up locally, you know? And so when we built StackBlitz, like kind of the key thesis, like seven years ago, the insight we had was that, Hey, it seems like the browser has a lot of new APIs like WebAssembly and service workers, et cetera, where you could actually write an operating system that ran inside the browser that could boot in milliseconds. And you, you know, basically there's this missing capability of the web. Like the web should be able to build apps for the web, right? You should be able to build the web on the web. Every other platform has that, Visual Studio for Windows, Xcode for Mac. The web has no built in primitive for this. And so just like our built in kind of like nerd instinct on this was like, that seems like a huge hole and it's, you know, it will be very valuable or like, you know, very valuable problem to solve. So if you want to set up that environments, you know, this is what we spent the past seven years doing. And the reality is existing developers have running locally. They already know how to set up that environment. So the problem isn't as acute for them. When we put Bolt online, we took that technology called WebContainer and married it with these, you know, state of the art frontier models. And the people that have the most pain with getting stuff set up locally is people that don't code. I think that's been, you know, really the big explosive reason is no one else has been trying to make dev environments work inside of a browser tab, you know, for the past if since ever, other than basically our company, largely because there wasn't an immediate demand or need. So I think we kind of find ourselves at the right place at the right time. And again, for this market of people that don't know how to write software, you would kind of expect that you should be able to do this without downloading something to your computer in the same way that, hey, I don't have to download Photoshop now to make designs because there's Figma. I don't have to download Word because there's, you know, Google Docs. They're kind of looking at this as that sort of thing, right? Which was kind of the, you know, our impetus and kind of vision from the get-go. But you know, the code gen, the AI code gen stuff that's come out has just been, you know, an order of magnitude multiplier on how magic that is, right? So that's kind of my best distillation of like, what is going on here, you know? Alessio [00:15:21]: And you can deploy too, right? Eric [00:15:22]: Yeah. Alessio [00:15:23]: Yeah. Eric [00:15:24]: And so that's, what's really cool is it's, you know, we have deployment built in with Netlify and this is actually, I think, Sean, you actually built this at Netlify when you were there. Yeah. It's one of the most brilliant integrations actually, because, you know, effectively the API that Sean built, maybe you can speak to it, but like as a provider, we can just effectively give files to Netlify without the user even logging in and they have a live website. And if they want to keep, hold onto it, they can click a link and claim it to their Netlify account. But it basically is just this really magic experience because when you come to Bolt, you say, I want a website. Like my mom, 70, 71 years old, made her first website, you know, on the internet two weeks ago, right? It was about her nursing days. Swyx [00:16:03]: Oh, that's fantastic though. It wouldn't have been made. Eric [00:16:06]: A hundred percent. Cause even in, you know, when we've had a lot of people building personal, like deeply personal stuff, like in the first week we launched this, the sales guy from the East Coast, you know, replied to a tweet of mine and he said, thank you so much for building this to your team. His daughter has a medical condition and so for her to travel, she has to like line up donors or something, you know, so ahead of time. And so he actually used Bolt to make a website to do that, to actually go and send it to folks in the region she was going to travel to ahead of time. I was really touched by it, but I also thought like, why, you know, why didn't he use like Wix or Squarespace? Right? I mean, this is, this is a solved problem, quote unquote, right? And then when I thought, I actually use Squarespace for my, for my, uh, the wedding website for my wife and I, like back in 2021, so I'm familiar, you know, it was, it was faster. I know how to code. I was like, this is faster. Right. And I thought back and I was like, there's a whole interface you have to learn how to use. And it's actually not that simple. There's like a million things you can configure in that thing. When you come to Bolt, there's a, there's a text box. You just say, I need a, I need a wedding website. Here's the date. Here's where it is. And here's a photo of me and my wife, put it somewhere relevant. It's actually the simplest way. And that's what my, when my mom came, she said, uh, I'm Pat Simons. I was a nurse in the seventies, you know, and like, here's the things I did and a website came out. So coming back to why is this such a, I think, why are we seeing this sort of growth? It's, this is the simplest interface I think maybe ever created to actually build it, a deploy a website. And then that website, my mom made, she's like, okay, this looks great. And there's, there's one button, you just click it, deploy, and it's live and you can buy a domain name, attach it to it. And you know, it's as simple as it gets, it's getting even simpler with some of the stuff we're working on. But anyways, so that's, it's, it's, uh, it's been really interesting to see some of the usage like that. Swyx [00:17:46]: I can offer my perspective. So I, you know, I probably should have disclosed a little bit that, uh, I'm a, uh, stack list investor. Alessio [00:17:53]: Canceled the episode. I know, I know. Don't play it now. Pause. Eric actually reached out to ShowMeBolt before the launch. And we, you know, we talked a lot about, like, the framing of, of what we're going to talk about how we marketed the thing, but also, like, what we're So that's what Bolt was going to need, like a whole sort of infrastructure. swyx: Netlify, I was a maintainer but I won't take claim for the anonymous upload. That's actually the origin story of Netlify. We can have Matt Billman talk about it, but that was [00:18:00] how Netlify started. You could drag and drop your zip file or folder from your desktop onto a website, it would have a live URL with no sign in. swyx: And so that was the origin story of Netlify. And it just persists to today. And it's just like it's really nice, interesting that both Bolt and CognitionDevIn and a bunch of other sort of agent type startups, they all use Netlify to deploy because of this one feature. They don't really care about the other features. swyx: But, but just because it's easy for computers to use and talk to it, like if you build an interface for computers specifically, that it's easy for them to Navigate, then they will be used in agents. And I think that's a learning that a lot of developer tools companies are having. That's my bolt launch story and now if I say all that stuff. swyx: And I just wanted to come back to, like, the Webcontainers things, right? Like, I think you put a lot of weight on the technical modes. I think you also are just like, very good at product. So you've, you've like, built a better agent than a lot of people, the rest of us, including myself, who have tried to build these things, and we didn't get as far as you did. swyx: Don't shortchange yourself on products. But I think specifically [00:19:00] on, on infra, on like the sandboxing, like this is a thing that people really want. Alessio has Bax E2B, which we'll have on at some point, talking about like the sort of the server full side. But yours is, you know, inside of the browser, serverless. swyx: It doesn't cost you anything to serve one person versus a million people. It doesn't, doesn't cost you anything. I think that's interesting. I think in theory, we should be able to like run tests because you can run the full backend. Like, you can run Git, you can run Node, you can run maybe Python someday. swyx: We talked about this. But ideally, you should be able to have a fully gentic loop, running code, seeing the errors, correcting code, and just kind of self healing, right? Like, I mean, isn't that the dream? Eric: Totally. swyx: Yeah, Eric: totally. At least in bold, we've got, we've got a good amount of that today. I mean, there's a lot more for us to do, but one of the nice things, because like in web container, you know, there's a lot of kind of stuff you go Google like, you know, turn docker container into wasm. Eric: You'll find a lot of stuff out there that will do that. The problem is it's very big, it's slow, and that ruins the experience. And so what we ended up doing is just writing an operating system from [00:20:00] scratch that was just purpose built to, you know, run in a browser tab. And the reason being is, you know, Docker 2 awesome things will give you an image that's like out 60 to 100 megabits, you know, maybe more, you know, and our, our OS, you know, kind of clocks in, I think, I think we're in like a, maybe, maybe a megabyte or less or something like that. Eric: I mean, it's, it's, you know, really, really, you know, stripped down. swyx: This is basically the task involved is I understand that it's. Mapping every single, single Linux call to some kind of web, web assembly implementation, Eric: but more or less, and, and then there's a lot of things actually, like when you're looking at a dev environment, there's a lot of things that you don't need that a traditional OS is gonna have, right? Eric: Like, you know audio drivers or you like, there's just like, there's just tons of things. Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. That goes . Yeah. You can just kind, you can, you can kind of tos them. Or alternatively, what you can do is you can actually be the nice thing. And this is, this kind of comes back to the origins of browsers, which is, you know, they're, they're at the beginning of the web and, you know, the late nineties, there was two very different kind of visions for the web where Alan Kay vehemently [00:21:00] disagree with the idea that should be document based, which is, you know, Tim Berners Lee, you know, that, and that's kind of what ended up winning, winning was this document based kind of browsing documents on the web thing. Eric: Alan Kay, he's got this like very famous quote where he said, you know, you want web browsers to be mini operating systems. They should download little mini binaries and execute with like a little mini virtualized operating system in there. And what's kind of interesting about the history, not to geek out on this aspect, what's kind of interesting about the history is both of those folks ended up being right. Eric: Documents were actually the pragmatic way that the web worked. Was, you know, became the most ubiquitous platform in the world to the degree now that this is why WebAssembly has been invented is that we're doing, we need to do more low level things in a browser, same thing with WebGPU, et cetera. And so all these APIs, you know, to build an operating system came to the browser. Eric: And that was actually the realization we had in 2017 was, holy heck, like you can actually, you know, service workers, which were designed for allowing your app to work offline. That was the kind of the key one where it was like, wait a second, you can actually now run. Web servers within a [00:22:00] browser, like you can run a server that you open up. Eric: That's wild. Like full Node. js. Full Node. js. Like that capability. Like, I can have a URL that's programmatically controlled. By a web application itself, boom. Like the web can build the web. The primitive is there. Everyone at the time, like we talked to people that like worked on, you know Chrome and V8 and they were like, uhhhh. Eric: You know, like I don't know. But it's one of those things you just kind of have to go do it to find out. So we spent a couple of years, you know, working on it and yeah. And, and, and got to work in back in 2021 is when we kind of put the first like data of web container online. But swyx: in partnership with Google, right? swyx: Like Google actually had to help you get over the finish line with stuff. Eric: A hundred percent, because well, you know, over the years of when we were doing the R and D on the thing. Kind of the biggest challenge, the two ways that you can kind of test how powerful and capable a platform are, the two types of applications are one, video games, right, because they're just very compute intensive, a lot of calculations that have to happen, right? Eric: The second one are IDEs, because you're talking about actually virtualizing the actual [00:23:00] runtime environment you are in to actually build apps on top of it, which requires sophisticated capabilities, a lot of access to data. You know, a good amount of compute power, right, to effectively, you know, building app in app sort of thing. Eric: So those, those are the stress tests. So if your platform is missing stuff, those are the things where you find out. Those are, those are the people building games and IDEs. They're the ones filing bugs on operating system level stuff. And for us, browser level stuff. Eric [00:23:47]: yeah, what ended up happening is we were just hammering, you know, the Chromium bug tracker, and they're like, who are these guys? Yeah. And, and they were amazing because I mean, just making Chrome DevTools be able to debug, I mean, it's, it's not, it wasn't originally built right for debugging an operating system, right? They've been phenomenal working with us and just kind of really pushing the limits, but that it's a rising tide that's kind of lifted all boats because now there's a lot of different types of applications that you can debug with Chrome Dev Tools that are running a browser that runs more reliably because just the stress testing that, that we and, you know, games that are coming to the web are kind of pushing as well, but. Itamar [00:24:23]: That's awesome. About the testing, I think like most, let's say coding assistant from different kinds will need this loop of testing. And even I would add code review to some, to some extent that you mentioned. How is testing different from code review? Code review could be, for example, PR review, like a code review that is done at the point of when you want to merge branches. But I would say that code review, for example, checks best practices, maintainability, and so on. It's not just like CI, but more than CI. And testing is like a more like checking functionality, et cetera. So it's different. We call, by the way, all of these together code integrity, but that's a different story. Just to go back to the, to the testing and specifically. Yeah. It's, it's, it's since the first slide. Yeah. We're consistent. So if we go back to the testing, I think like, it's not surprising that for us testing is important and for Bolt it's testing important, but I want to shed some light on a different perspective of it. Like let's think about autonomous driving. Those startups that are doing autonomous driving for highway and autonomous driving for the city. And I think like we saw the autonomous of the highway much faster and reaching to a level, I don't know, four or so much faster than those in the city. Now, in both cases, you need testing and quote unquote testing, you know, verifying validation that you're doing the right thing on the road and you're reading and et cetera. But it's probably like so different in the city that it could be like actually different technology. And I claim that we're seeing something similar here. So when you're building the next Wix, and if I was them, I was like looking at you and being a bit scared. That's what you're disrupting, what you just said. Then basically, I would say that, for example, the UX UI is freaking important. And because you're you're more aiming for the end user. In this case, maybe it's an end user that doesn't know how to develop for developers. It's also important. But let alone those that do not know to develop, they need a slick UI UX. And I think like that's one reason, for example, I think Cursor have like really good technology. I don't know the underlying what's under the hood, but at least what they're saying. But I think also their UX UI is great. It's a lot because they did their own ID. While if you're aiming for the city AI, suddenly like there's a lot of testing and code review technology that it's not necessarily like that important. For example, let's talk about integration tests. Probably like a lot of what you're building involved at the moment is isolated applications. Maybe the vision or the end game is maybe like having one solution for everything. It could be that eventually the highway companies will go into the city and the other way around. But at the beginning, there is a difference. And integration tests are a good example. I guess they're a bit less important. And when you think about enterprise software, they're really important. So to recap, like I think like the idea of looping and verifying your test and verifying your code in different ways, testing or code review, et cetera, seems to be important in the highway AI and the city AI, but in different ways and different like critical for the city, even more and more variety. Actually, I was looking to ask you like what kind of loops you guys are doing. For example, when I'm using Bolt and I'm enjoying it a lot, then I do see like sometimes you're trying to catch the errors and fix them. And also, I noticed that you're breaking down tasks into smaller ones and then et cetera, which is already a common notion for a year ago. But it seems like you're doing it really well. So if you're willing to share anything about it. Eric [00:28:07]: Yeah, yeah. I realized I never actually hit the punchline of what I was saying before. I mentioned the point about us kind of writing an operating system from scratch because what ended up being important about that is that to your point, it's actually a very, like compared to like a, you know, if you're like running cursor on anyone's machine, you kind of don't know what you're dealing with, with the OS you're running on. There could be an error happens. It could be like a million different things, right? There could be some config. There could be, it could be God knows what, right? The thing with WebConnect is because we wrote the entire thing from scratch. It's actually a unified image basically. And we can instrument it at any level that we think is going to be useful, which is exactly what we did when we started building Bolt is we instrumented stuff at like the process level, at the runtime level, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Stuff that would just be not impossible to do on local, but to do that in a way that works across any operating system, whatever is, I mean, would just be insanely, you know, insanely difficult to do right and reliably. And that's what you saw when you've used Bolt is that when an error actually will occur, whether it's in the build process or the actual web application itself is failing or anything kind of in between, you can actually capture those errors. And today it's a very primitive way of how we've implemented it largely because the product just didn't exist 90 days ago. So we're like, we got some work ahead of us and we got to hire some more a little bit, but basically we present and we say, Hey, this is, here's kind of the things that went wrong. There's a fix it button and then a ignore button, and then you can just hit fix it. And then we take all that telemetry through our agent, you run it through our agent and say, kind of, here's the state of the application. Here's kind of the errors that we got from Node.js or the browser or whatever, and like dah, dah, dah, dah. And it can take a crack at actually solving it. And it's actually pretty darn good at being able to do that. That's kind of been a, you know, closing the loop and having it be a reliable kind of base has seemed to be a pretty big upgrade over doing stuff locally, just because I think that's a pretty key ingredient of it. And yeah, I think breaking things down into smaller tasks, like that's, that's kind of a key part of our agent. I think like Claude did a really good job with artifacts. I think, you know, us and kind of everyone else has, has kind of taken their approach of like actually breaking out certain tasks in a certain order into, you know, kind of a concrete way. And, and so actually the core of Bolt, I know we actually made open source. So you can actually go and check out like the system prompts and et cetera, and you can run it locally and whatever have you. So anyone that's interested in this stuff, I'd highly recommend taking a look at. There's not a lot of like stuff that's like open source in this realm. It's, that was one of the fun things that we've we thought would be cool to do. And people, people seem to like it. I mean, there's a lot of forks and people adding different models and stuff. So it's been cool to see. Swyx [00:30:41]: Yeah. I'm happy to add, I added real-time voice for my opening day demo and it was really fun to hack with. So thank you for doing that. Yeah. Thank you. I'm going to steal your code. Eric [00:30:52]: Because I want that. Swyx [00:30:52]: It's funny because I built on top of the fork of Bolt.new that already has the multi LLM thing. And so you just told me you're going to merge that in. So then you're going to merge two layers of forks down into this thing. So it'll be fun. Eric [00:31:03]: Heck yeah. Alessio [00:31:04]: Just to touch on like the environment, Itamar, you maybe go into the most complicated environments that even the people that work there don't know how to run. How much of an impact does that have on your performance? Like, you know, it's most of the work you're doing actually figuring out environment and like the libraries, because I'm sure they're using outdated version of languages, they're using outdated libraries, they're using forks that have not been on the public internet before. How much of the work that you're doing is like there versus like at the LLM level? Itamar [00:31:32]: One of the reasons I was asking about, you know, what are the steps to break things down, because it really matters. Like, what's the tech stack? How complicated the software is? It's hard to figure it out when you're dealing with the real world, any environment of enterprise as a city, when I'm like, while maybe sometimes like, I think you do enable like in Bolt, like to install stuff, but it's quite a like controlled environment. And that's a good thing to do, because then you narrow down and it's easier to make things work. So definitely, there are two dimensions, I think, actually spaces. One is the fact just like installing our software without yet like doing anything, making it work, just installing it because we work with enterprise and Fortune 500, etc. Many of them want on prem solution. Swyx [00:32:22]: So you have how many deployment options? Itamar [00:32:24]: Basically, we had, we did a metric metrics, say 96 options, because, you know, they're different dimensions. Like, for example, one dimension, we connect to your code management system to your Git. So are you having like GitHub, GitLab? Subversion? Is it like on cloud or deployed on prem? Just an example. Which model agree to use its APIs or ours? Like we have our Is it TestGPT? Yeah, when we started with TestGPT, it was a huge mistake name. It was cool back then, but I don't think it's a good idea to name a model after someone else's model. Anyway, that's my opinion. So we got Swyx [00:33:02]: I'm interested in these learnings, like things that you change your mind on. Itamar [00:33:06]: Eventually, when you're building a company, you're building a brand and you want to create your own brand. By the way, when I thought about Bolt.new, I also thought about if it's not a problem, because when I think about Bolt, I do think about like a couple of companies that are already called this way. Swyx [00:33:19]: Curse companies. You could call it Codium just to... Itamar [00:33:24]: Okay, thank you. Touche. Touche. Eric [00:33:27]: Yeah, you got to imagine the board meeting before we launched Bolt, one of our investors, you can imagine they're like, are you sure? Because from the investment side, it's kind of a famous, very notorious Bolt. And they're like, are you sure you want to go with that name? Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Itamar [00:33:43]: At this point, we have actually four models. There is a model for autocomplete. There's a model for the chat. There is a model dedicated for more for code review. And there is a model that is for code embedding. Actually, you might notice that there isn't a good code embedding model out there. Can you name one? Like dedicated for code? Swyx [00:34:04]: There's code indexing, and then you can do sort of like the hide for code. And then you can embed the descriptions of the code. Itamar [00:34:12]: Yeah, but you do see a lot of type of models that are dedicated for embedding and for different spaces, different fields, etc. And I'm not aware. And I know that if you go to the bedrock, try to find like there's a few code embedding models, but none of them are specialized for code. Swyx [00:34:31]: Is there a benchmark that you would tell us to pay attention to? Itamar [00:34:34]: Yeah, so it's coming. Wait for that. Anyway, we have our models. And just to go back to the 96 option of deployment. So I'm closing the brackets for us. So one is like dimensional, like what Git deployment you have, like what models do you agree to use? Dotter could be like if it's air-gapped completely, or you want VPC, and then you have Azure, GCP, and AWS, which is different. Do you use Kubernetes or do not? Because we want to exploit that. There are companies that do not do that, etc. I guess you know what I mean. So that's one thing. And considering that we are dealing with one of all four enterprises, we needed to deal with that. So you asked me about how complicated it is to solve that complex code. I said, it's just a deployment part. And then now to the software, we see a lot of different challenges. For example, some companies, they did actually a good job to build a lot of microservices. Let's not get to if it's good or not, but let's first assume that it is a good thing. A lot of microservices, each one of them has their own repo. And now you have tens of thousands of repos. And you as a developer want to develop something. And I remember me coming to a corporate for the first time. I don't know where to look at, like where to find things. So just doing a good indexing for that is like a challenge. And moreover, the regular indexing, the one that you can find, we wrote a few blogs on that. By the way, we also have some open source, different than yours, but actually three and growing. Then it doesn't work. You need to let the tech leads and the companies influence your indexing. For example, Mark with different repos with different colors. This is a high quality repo. This is a lower quality repo. This is a repo that we want to deprecate. This is a repo we want to grow, etc. And let that be part of your indexing. And only then things actually work for enterprise and they don't get to a fatigue of, oh, this is awesome. Oh, but I'm starting, it's annoying me. I think Copilot is an amazing tool, but I'm quoting others, meaning GitHub Copilot, that they see not so good retention of GitHub Copilot and enterprise. Ooh, spicy. Yeah. I saw snapshots of people and we have customers that are Copilot users as well. And also I saw research, some of them is public by the way, between 38 to 50% retention for users using Copilot and enterprise. So it's not so good. By the way, I don't think it's that bad, but it's not so good. So I think that's a reason because, yeah, it helps you auto-complete, but then, and especially if you're working on your repo alone, but if it's need that context of remote repos that you're code-based, that's hard. So to make things work, there's a lot of work on that, like giving the controllability for the tech leads, for the developer platform or developer experience department in the organization to influence how things are working. A short example, because if you have like really old legacy code, probably some of it is not so good anymore. If you just fine tune on these code base, then there is a bias to repeat those mistakes or old practices, etc. So you need, for example, as I mentioned, to influence that. For example, in Coda, you can have a markdown of best practices by the tech leads and Coda will include that and relate to that and will not offer suggestions that are not according to the best practices, just as an example. So that's just a short list of things that you need to do in order to deal with, like you mentioned, the 100.1 to 100.2 version of software. I just want to say what you're doing is extremely Eric [00:38:32]: impressive because it's very difficult. I mean, the business of Stackplus, kind of before bulk came online, we sold a version of our IDE that went on-prem. So I understand what you're saying about the difficulty of getting stuff just working on-prem. Holy heck. I mean, that is extremely hard. I guess the question I have for you is, I mean, we were just doing that with kind of Kubernetes-based stuff, but the spread of Fortune 500 companies that you're working with, how are they doing the inference for this? Are you kind of plugging into Azure's OpenAI stuff and AWS's Bedrock, you know, Cloud stuff? Or are they just like running stuff on GPUs? Like, what is that? How are these folks approaching that? Because, man, what we saw on the enterprise side, I mean, I got to imagine that that's a huge challenge. Everything you said and more, like, Itamar [00:39:15]: for example, like someone could be, and I don't think any of these is bad. Like, they made their decision. Like, for example, some people, they're, I want only AWS and VPC on AWS, no matter what. And then they, some of them, like there is a subset, I will say, I'm willing to take models only for from Bedrock and not ours. And we have a problem because there is no good code embedding model on Bedrock. And that's part of what we're doing now with AWS to solve that. We solve it in a different way. But if you are willing to run on AWS VPC, but run your run models on GPUs or inferentia, like the new version of the more coming out, then our models can run on that. But everything you said is right. Like, we see like on-prem deployment where they have their own GPUs. We see Azure where you're using OpenAI Azure. We see cases where you're running on GCP and they want OpenAI. Like this cross, like a case, although there is Gemini or even Sonnet, I think is available on GCP, just an example. So all the options, that's part of the challenge. I admit that we thought about it, but it was even more complicated. And it took us a few months to actually, that metrics that I mentioned, to start clicking each one of the blocks there. A few months is impressive. I mean, Eric [00:40:35]: honestly, just that's okay. Every one of these enterprises is, their networking is different. Just everything's different. Every single one is different. I see you understand. Yeah. So that just cannot be understated. That it is, that's extremely impressive. Hats off. Itamar [00:40:50]: It could be, by the way, like, for example, oh, we're only AWS, but our GitHub enterprise is on-prem. Oh, we forgot. So we need like a private link or whatever, like every time like that. It's not, and you do need to think about it if you want to work with an enterprise. And it's important. Like I understand like their, I respect their point of view. Swyx [00:41:10]: And this primarily impacts your architecture, your tech choices. Like you have to, you can't choose some vendors because... Itamar [00:41:15]: Yeah, definitely. To be frank, it makes us hard for a startup because it means that we want, we want everyone to enjoy all the variety of models. By the way, it was hard for us with our technology. I want to open a bracket, like a window. I guess you're familiar with our Alpha Codium, which is an open source. Eric [00:41:33]: We got to go over that. Yeah. So I'll do that quickly. Itamar [00:41:36]: Yeah. A pin in that. Yeah. Actually, we didn't have it in the last episode. So, so, okay. Swyx [00:41:41]: Okay. We'll come back to that later, but let's talk about... Itamar [00:41:43]: Yeah. So, so just like shortly, and then we can double click on Alpha Codium. But Alpha Codium is a open source tool. You can go and try it and lets you compete on CodeForce. This is a website and a competition and actually reach a master level level, like 95% with a click of a button. You don't need to do anything. And part of what we did there is taking a problem and breaking it to different, like smaller blocks. And then the models are doing a much better job. Like we all know it by now that taking small tasks and solving them, by the way, even O1, which is supposed to be able to do system two thinking like Greg from OpenAI like hinted, is doing better on these kinds of problems. But still, it's very useful to break it down for O1, despite O1 being able to think by itself. And that's what we presented like just a month ago, OpenAI released that now they are doing 93 percentile with O1 IOI left and International Olympiad of Formation. Sorry, I forgot. Exactly. I told you I forgot. And we took their O1 preview with Alpha Codium and did better. Like it just shows like, and there is a big difference between the preview and the IOI. It shows like that these models are not still system two thinkers, and there is a big difference. So maybe they're not complete system two. Yeah, they need some guidance. I call them system 1.5. We can, we can have it. I thought about it. Like, you know, I care about this philosophy stuff. And I think like we didn't see it even close to a system two thinking. I can elaborate later. But closing the brackets, like we take Alpha Codium and as our principle of thinking, we take tasks and break them down to smaller tasks. And then we want to exploit the best model to solve them. So I want to enable anyone to enjoy O1 and SONET and Gemini 1.5, etc. But at the same time, I need to develop my own models as well, because some of the Fortune 500 want to have all air gapped or whatever. So that's a challenge. Now you need to support so many models. And to some extent, I would say that the flow engineering, the breaking down to two different blocks is a necessity for us. Why? Because when you take a big block, a big problem, you need a very different prompt for each one of the models to actually work. But when you take a big problem and break it into small tasks, we can talk how we do that, then the prompt matters less. What I want to say, like all this, like as a startup trying to do different deployment, getting all the juice that you can get from models, etc. is a big problem. And one need to think about it. And one of our mitigation is that process of taking tasks and breaking them down. That's why I'm really interested to know how you guys are doing it. And part of what we do is also open source. So you can see. Swyx [00:44:39]: There's a lot in there. But yeah, flow over prompt. I do believe that that does make sense. I feel like there's a lot that both of you can sort of exchange notes on breaking down problems. And I just want you guys to just go for it. This is fun to watch. Eric [00:44:55]: Yeah. I mean, what's super interesting is the context you're working in is, because for us too with Bolt, we've started thinking because our kind of existing business line was going behind the firewall, right? We were like, how do we do this? Adding the inference aspect on, we're like, okay, how does... Because I mean, there's not a lot of prior art, right? I mean, this is all new. This is all new. So I definitely am going to have a lot of questions for you. Itamar [00:45:17]: I'm here. We're very open, by the way. We have a paper on a blog or like whatever. Swyx [00:45:22]: The Alphacodeum, GitHub, and we'll put all this in the show notes. Itamar [00:45:25]: Yeah. And even the new results of O1, we published it. Eric [00:45:29]: I love that. And I also just, I think spiritually, I like your approach of being transparent. Because I think there's a lot of hype-ium around AI stuff. And a lot of it is, it's just like, you have these companies that are just kind of keep their stuff closed source and then just max hype it, but then it's kind of nothing. And I think it kind of gives a bad rep to the incredible stuff that's actually happening here. And so I think it's stuff like what you're doing where, I mean, true merit and you're cracking open actual code for others to learn from and use. That strikes me as the right approach. And it's great to hear that you're making such incredible progress. Itamar [00:46:02]: I have something to share about the open source. Most of our tools are, we have an open source version and then a premium pro version. But it's not an easy decision to do that. I actually wanted to ask you about your strategy, but I think in your case, there is, in my opinion, relatively a good strategy where a lot of parts of open source, but then you have the deployment and the environment, which is not right if I get it correctly. And then there's a clear, almost hugging face model. Yeah, you can do that, but why should you try to deploy it yourself, deploy it with us? But in our case, and I'm not sure you're not going to hit also some competitors, and I guess you are. I wanted to ask you, for example, on some of them. In our case, one day we looked on one of our competitors that is doing code review. We're a platform. We have the code review, the testing, et cetera, spread over the ID to get. And in each agent, we have a few startups or a big incumbents that are doing only that. So we noticed one of our competitors having not only a very similar UI of our open source, but actually even our typo. And you sit there and you're kind of like, yeah, we're not that good. We don't use enough Grammarly or whatever. And we had a couple of these and we saw it there. And then it's a challenge. And I want to ask you, Bald is doing so well, and then you open source it. So I think I know what my answer was. I gave it before, but still interesting Eric [00:47:29]: to hear what you think. GeoHot said back, I don't know who he was up to at this exact moment, but I think on comma AI, all that stuff's open source. And someone had asked him, why is this open source? And he's like, if you're not actually confident that you can go and crush it and build the best thing, then yeah, you should probably keep your stuff closed source. He said something akin to that. I'm probably kind of butchering it, but I thought it was kind of a really good point. And that's not to say that you should just open source everything, because for obvious reasons, there's kind of strategic things you have to kind of take in mind. But I actually think a pretty liberal approach, as liberal as you kind of can be, it can really make a lot of sense. Because that is so validating that one of your competitors is taking your stuff and they're like, yeah, let's just kind of tweak the styles. I mean, clearly, right? I think it's kind of healthy because it keeps, I'm sure back at HQ that day when you saw that, you're like, oh, all right, well, we have to grind even harder to make sure we stay ahead. And so I think it's actually a very useful, motivating thing for the teams. Because you might feel this period of comfort. I think a lot of companies will have this period of comfort where they're not feeling the competition and one day they get disrupted. So kind of putting stuff out there and letting people push it forces you to face reality soon, right? And actually feel that incrementally so you can kind of adjust course. And that's for us, the open source version of Bolt has had a lot of features people have been begging us for, like persisting chat messages and checkpoints and stuff. Within the first week, that stuff was landed in the open source versions. And they're like, why can't you ship this? It's in the open, so people have forked it. And we're like, we're trying to keep our servers and GPUs online. But it's been great because the folks in the community did a great job, kept us on our toes. And we've got to know most of these folks too at this point that have been building these things. And so it actually was very instructive. Like, okay, well, if we're going to go kind of land this, there's some UX patterns we can kind of look at and the code is open source to this stuff. What's great about these, what's not. So anyways, NetNet, I think it's awesome. I think from a competitive point of view for us, I think in particular, what's interesting is the core technology of WebContainer going. And I think that right now, there's really nothing that's kind of on par with that. And we also, we have a business of, because WebContainer runs in your browser, but to make it work, you have to install stuff from NPM. You have to make cores bypass requests, like connected databases, which all require server-side proxying or acceleration. And so we actually sell WebContainer as a service. One of the core reasons we open-sourced kind of the core components of Bolt when we launched was that we think that there's going to be a lot more of these AI, in-your-browser AI co-gen experiences, kind of like what Anthropic did with Artifacts and Clod. By the way, Artifacts uses WebContainers. Not yet. No, yeah. Should I strike that? I think that they've got their own thing at the moment, but there's been a lot of interest in WebContainers from folks doing things in that sort of realm and in the AI labs and startups and everything in between. So I think there'll be, I imagine, over the coming months, there'll be lots of things being announced to folks kind of adopting it. But yeah, I think effectively... Swyx [00:50:35]: Okay, I'll say this. If you're a large model lab and you want to build sandbox environments inside of your chat app, you should call Eric. Itamar [00:50:43]: But wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I have a question about that. I think OpenAI, they felt that people are not using their model as they would want to. So they built ChatGPT. But I would say that ChatGPT now defines OpenAI. I know they're doing a lot of business from their APIs, but still, is this how you think? Isn't Bolt.new your business now? Why don't you focus on that instead of the... Swyx [00:51:16]: What's your advice as a founder? Eric [00:51:18]: You're right. And so going into it, we, candidly, we were like, Bolt.new, this thing is super cool. We think people are stoked. We think people will be stoked. But we were like, maybe that's allowed. Best case scenario, after month one, we'd be mind blown if we added a couple hundred K of error or something. And we were like, but we think there's probably going to be an immediate huge business. Because there was some early poll on folks wanting to put WebContainer into their product offerings, kind of similar to what Bolt is doing or whatever. We were actually prepared for the inverse outcome here. But I mean, well, I guess we've seen poll on both. But I mean, what's happened with Bolt, and you're right, it's actually the same strategy as like OpenAI or Anthropic, where we have our ChatGPT to OpenAI's APIs is Bolt to WebContainer. And so we've kind of taken that same approach. And we're seeing, I guess, some of the similar results, except right now, the revenue side is extremely lopsided to Bolt. Itamar [00:52:16]: I think if you ask me what's my advice, I think you have three options. One is to focus on Bolt. The other is to focus on the WebContainer. The third is to raise one billion dollars and do them both. I'm serious. I think otherwise, you need to choose. And if you raise enough money, and I think it's big bucks, because you're going to be chased by competitors. And I think it will be challenging to do both. And maybe you can. I don't know. We do see these numbers right now, raising above $100 million, even without having Eric [00:52:49]: a product. You can see these. It's excellent advice. And I think what's been amazing, but also kind of challenging is we're trying to forecast, okay, well, where are these things going? I mean, in the initial weeks, I think us and all the investors in the company that we're sharing this with, it was like, this is cool. Okay, we added 500k. Wow, that's crazy. Wow, we're at a million now. Most things, you have this kind of the tech crunch launch of initiation and then the thing of sorrow. And if there's going to be a downtrend, it's just not coming yet. Now that we're kind of looking ahead, we're six weeks in. So now we're getting enough confidence in our convictions to go, okay, this seems to be the trend line. I'll tell you another reason why Swyx [00:53:33]: I think, where is Jasper? They actually just announced some new numbers recently. They're still surviving. They have gone down a lot. I think that the peak that I heard was a hundred Itamar [00:53:42]: billion ARR. And now there's like tens of these. So I think their success was phenomenal, like what I see at Bolt. And I think if you want to keep that, probably, who am I? I'm just giving my two cents. You need to focus because you are going to see weeks, I think that you're disrupting their market. And you open sourced some of it and they have containers, I believe. And you need to fight. I can tell you that when we open source, I share with you a small competitor, but I can tell you, I have a friend who has built a billion dollar company and more. When we released Alpha Codium, he sent me a private email asking, what the f**k did you just do? Why did you release that? You should have kept it. Yeah, you released that open source. I'm thinking, build some stuff and now I can do that much more easily. I can tell you my answer and I thought that maybe you'll answer as well. Although I think Bolt is already very promising. For us, Alpha Codium 1 is like GPT 1. I agree with you. Being open and open source, etc. really helps to improve the product community, etc. But at some point, OpenAI closed their GPT 3.5 or whatever. And that was part of my answer. Alpha Codium is the agent that is compatible with GPT 1 and there is a lot to do for these agents to actually get that moment that we had with GPT 3.5, etc. as agents. Eric [00:55:11]: Yeah, I think you're dead right. And I think it just comes back to what GeoHot said. It's like, if you want to win, there's no other option than out hustling everyone else. And so I think that's kind of out hustling in the sense really meaning building the best product, building the best experiences. And so I think that's the only way kind of almost any route and open source and stuff just kind of burns the ships in a sense. And maybe that's the simplest way of saying it. You're burning the ships, but also it builds a lot of goodwill. I mean, there's tons of benefits to it. Salesforce are doing that, right? Itamar [00:55:43]: They're now going to be agent force or whatever. So you can also... Swyx [00:55:47]: We're going to try to get Mark on the podcast. And they're good friends with Salesforce. Any parting thoughts, any trends that you're Itamar [00:55:55]: super excited about? If we're talking about trends, I go back to our original podcast where we talked about the idea that the software world is built from specs, tests, and code. And I think you can see that one dimension are company startups that are rethinking the entire development environment, I think like Bolt, etc. And another dimension is where is their focus? Is it on the spec, is on the test and on the code? And I think it's interesting to see that from that view. We'll see more startup and more amazing announcements of new directions, new philosophy. So I think we'll see startup focusing, let's build everything from the spec. To some extent, I would say that Bolt is, from my understanding, you can say better, somewhere in the line between the spec and the code. Because you start, like I saw your demos, you're trying to describe things, not just in one row, because you want to look like you want it. So it's on that edge between connecting between spec and code. And you see others, I think all the IDEs, most of them are the new IDEs, or the fork are there. We are more focused from the test and to the code and to the spec, etc. So these are trends, I think we will see that. And I think another dimension to consider is, is it more for the highway AI, for the developers, maybe not even a technical person, or is it for the enterprise? And that also gives you different products. If they are aiming for different ICP, different ideal client profile, they will approach this triangle of spec and test and code. And that's how I see the world. And what I'm noticing is that we're seeing more and more of those new startups, new interfaces that are not focused on code. For example, talking more about the spec, talking more about the testing. Eventually, I think that that's where the world is going to. The code is going to be there, and there will be developers, etc. But as agent improves and capabilities of the LLMs and integrations to different parts of the development environment, we're going to see more and more focusing on the spec and the test. Basically, these two might unite, the spec and the test, because you can say that tests are runnable specs, to some extent. So that's another way to look at Swyx [00:58:23]: it. Yeah, that is literally on the slide here, runnable tests, right here. Yeah, I'm consistent. Itamar [00:58:27]: It's all consistent. Look, I talked about system one and system two more than a year ago. And now with O1, people are talking about system one. But I think we'll talk about it again, because I think they're totally, totally wrong about O1 being a system two. It is now in the hype or whatever, talking about that. But I think the agents are the ones that will take us towards system two. And the more they are aware of their environment, and aware of that sometimes they don't know what they don't know, then we'll really get to system two. But that's Swyx [00:59:03]: a deeper discussion. It's a deeper discussion. I love the philosophy talk that we had last time as well. All right, so we're back on to Bolt, and Itamar had to leave for another interview. But we were just talking about what happened post-launch, right? And I held this emergency council of advisors for you, because we had never seen this before. And I was like, okay, I'm going to call all the smartest people I know to join this thing. Eric [00:59:27]: Which was extremely helpful. And I'm so appreciative. There's been a handful of me. Swyx [00:59:31]: You made one hire out of that. Eric [00:59:34]: Yeah, because it was like, I think I can't remember where we were at kind of ARR-wise when I had messaged you. Swyx [00:59:40]: It was like, you messaged me at like two or three. And then by the time we got everything together, it was four. And then, yeah, now it's at- Alessio [00:59:48]: Since Eric sat down five minutes. Swyx [00:59:52]: But I mean, it sounds like you accelerated, because you told me it was like 100k, 200k a day. And now it's accelerated? Eric [00:59:58]: Yeah, this past- I mean, every week has been kind of a blowout week as far as- Is it TikTok? We're digging into the degree that we can of just like where all this stuff's coming from. I mean, there's a ton of word of mouth, right? So that you can't- which you can't just like look by refer, right? So there's a ton of direct. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of TikTok. There's a ton of YouTube. It's kind of, I think, been a sensation in the sort of like entrepreneurial, build your own SaaS, indie hacker, even developer circles. And I think, too, our team's been doing a really good job. Our folks just kind of like flipped a switch. And people were just working through the weekends or whatever to get stuff fixed. And so the product- and you'll see people say this online. Like today, there was a tweet. Someone was like, yeah, I tried this like the first week and I couldn't get whatever to work. Came back today, six weeks later, and this is ridiculous. Like this is so good, right? And so I think there's been an incredible amount of improvement to the product, to the agent, also to like the underlying models, too. Like Sonnet, they just happened to do an update with their release a couple of weeks ago. And so when we put our new agent online and the new Sonnet, we saw a huge bump in conversion just based on that. And so yeah, we've gone at that. When we were chatting, that must have been three weeks ago, maybe an average of 100K ARR per day. And this week, I will see- I've said this every week, but we'll see if it holds. The past couple of days have been like half a million of ARR per day, which is insane. I think today we've had peak traffic, just kind of set the previous- and that's kind of been every day this week. But anyways, yeah, I think things just continue to accelerate, which is kind of blowing my mind, because it's just the sheer numbers of this stuff are just mind-boggling. Alessio [01:01:40]: I think you almost suffered from the Twitter demo issues that other people had. The first time I saw Bolt, I saw the demo and I was like, oh, that's cool. I didn't go to try it because I was like, I've seen so many of these that it's like, I don't know if it's actually going to work. And then two days ago, I signed up to use it. I was building a Luma replacement. I'm done with Luma. And I was like, man, this thing really works. And I already knew you, of course. I was like, man, this thing really works. What the f**k? I was like, it's actually, I don't know if it's like the model, if it's like how you prompt it, but it's so good at coming up with the simplest thing to implement. So the Luma example, right? So first I was like, create a RSVP page for an event and it created a wedding RSVP. I don't know if it's your fault. I don't know if you bolted it. And then I was like, well, now it needs to have a way to create more events and added that. And then I was like, now it needs a way to like have an admin page to modify event. And maybe what I would have done as a developer is like, well, I'll create a different like admin view, you know, with all the events and then I'll have like the front end thing. And instead what it did is like, it created like a admin view with toggle on top and then like just a pencil button on every page to edit them in line, you know, and that was it. And I was like, yeah, that works just as well. And like for the model, that's probably the simplest way to do it because it like limits the amount of files that are there. Can you talk just more about how much of this is like the model coming out with it, how much you're prompting it to kind of like be very like Eric [01:03:04]: compressed and concise. A ton of it is the model, but I think what's interesting though, is you're kind of baseline model. If I just like, if it's kind of like try and put it into like a, you know, way, if you had to quantify, quantify, you know, the effect is obviously the model is like this sort of like 10X multiplier. You're how good the bottom line model is huge, huge swing. And then kind of what you can do on top of that, you can squeeze out three, four X kind of more. And so that's kind of where the realm of, you know, prompt engineering and multi-agent approaches, et cetera, kind of kick in. And so I think, I think with us, you know, our folks, like the guy on our side that, you know, led the web engineering, like that kind of our core technology for the past, you know, seven years here, you know, his name is Dominic Elm based out of Germany and he was one of the founding engineers of the company. You had previous to StackBlitz, he actually was doing machine learning and he basically had built a StackBlitz, like online ID for machine learning. So I think like, I kind of like Google Colab sort of thing, or like Hugging Face has their kind of version of this. Back in 2016, it wasn't as much of a market for this stuff, but he had been doing a lot of, you know, training, you know, ML models and that sort of thing. So I guess, you know, as we began, you know, kind of digging into AI stuff over the past year, he's been kind of leading that off. And so a lot of it, I really attribute to Dom's specific angle, cause he has deep understanding of our technology and how it works. Cause he's, you know, led the engineering on web container, but as you know, deep understanding of how these models work going and actually kind of writing out these you know, whether it's like the, the, the prompt engineering aspect of it or multi-agent or whatever, have you, you know, that's sort of like that much context. And, and the, and the other folks on the team are, are, you know, in the same, same sort of spot that have been working on this stuff. I think we'd be able to squeeze out a lot more than I've seen almost anything else out there, at least in the term of building web apps, at least. But I guess I think it's, I think it's kind of just because we we have more context on, on a fewer number of heads at the company. So we can kind of connect the dots of it faster, you Swyx [01:05:01]: know? Yeah. That's part of the issue with the whole raise a billion dollars thing. Like you actually run very lean and that's, that's actually been to your advantage. Eric [01:05:08]: Totally. And I think, you know, and I think we, we have to staff up because I mean, we went from, you know, call it zero customers to, you know, 20, 30,000 kind of, you know, in six weeks, we have to have certainly more customer support, customer success stuff, et cetera. But you know, also just on, on engineering we have to ramp up, but I do think that there's a, we saw this in the 2021 cycle, right? Where, you know, adding tons more people can, can, can be a thing that really hurts, you know, the company because you can, it's just harder. It's really hard to manage lots of people. Not if you're a big enough company to warrant a certain headcount, a 100%, you kind of have to do it. Right. But I think for us, it's worked just to really grow, grow the team slowly and intentionally. And so I think we're going to take the same approach here at a bit of a faster clip than we were previously. But to me, that would just be general advice to startups is like slowly intentionally as fast as you can to meet demand or whatever. Part of what I felt like you're in a unique position to Swyx [01:06:07]: talk about, but also kind of what we went through in our, in our call was I have PMF now, what is, is kind of what I've been saying. And so like, I think the first answer is hire a data scientist because we have to sort of figure out like from our data that you're now sitting on a ton of different customers and we don't really know the different customer segments. You're starting to get an idea of churn. You're starting to get an idea of like segmentation. You already had data enrichment. One of my most interesting quotes from you from that session was that because you were selling to enterprise for so long, you had already set up all that stuff and it's just like, wasn't useful for a more sort of developer bottom up centric approach. Eric [01:06:46]: Yeah. And particularly because for the first time in the company's history, we're selling primarily to almost non-developers. And so everything that we've ever, all the playbooks we had not relevant here basically. Right. So the, and you're one of one of our investors I talked with earlier this week, basically brought up a really great point, which is like, you are now a B2C company and how you operate needs to reflect that. Swyx [01:07:09]: Which is, which is what, I don't know. Eric [01:07:11]: Which is basically from an analytics perspective, like you're tracking everything. Right. And then to your point, you have, you have people kind of around the clock slicing and dicing data to understand who are these people coming in, who are the types of people you actually want to retain versus people that, you know, are just going to churn out. And that's okay. Cause they're not the actual like ICP that you're going for. Right. When you're building stuff for enterprise software, the bar is a lot lower. And then to kind of to, from the conversation before one of the biggest, and this is kind of what we found with StackBlitz, which is kind of interesting, you know, you mentioned it, it's like, it's as a startup, it's very hard to sell on-prem extremely true. But if you can do it, it's like the promised land because you know, these, these companies you know, the fortune 500s, they can write really large checks. And so when you're going and selling to them, it doesn't matter so much like on your website. Sure. You want to track the conversion to the enterprise contact form or whatever. Right. But what, what actually really matters is like the, a lot of human touch points of, Hey, we want to have a quarterly call after just getting installed this stuff. There's a whole playbook for that. And you need to hire sales engineers that can be on the ground floor and helping people install it. Then after that, you got to, okay, how do we make sure they're kind of constantly successful? Because you can't access like we can, our enterprise customer instances, we have no idea how often they're using them. Why? Because the whole point is that we can't see what they're up to for a good reason, right? Like they, they need to own their data. And so the way it's actually much, a very complicated problem of how do you have like build relationships where everyone's getting on calls, they can share kind of the telemetry that, that they can see within their instance. And you can kind of extrapolate that and make sure they're happy and successful. So that's, there's a whole art of that, of doing enterprise well, that we've gone and done and closed these folks totally unrelated to doing BC completely, completely unrelated for the most part. So anyway, so that, so that, you know, we're, as a company, we're, we're kind of reorienting, you know, our focus on, okay, going and actually really leaning in on analytics, whatever have you. And fortunately, like my co-founder and I, the art, the enterprise business of stack was, was the first time we had ever done enterprise primarily like things to the company we did before was B2C. Like we were selling people courses on how to do web development basically. Right. So a lot of the skillset that, you know, I had built up there, I able to pull that back off the shelf, dust it off, sharpen the blade. And, you know, we're doing email marketing, we're doing live streams, you know? So, so that's, it's, it's kind of cool to, you know, be shifting back to some of the, the, the, where we cut our teeth on back in the day. Alessio [01:09:35]: How did you pick the pricing? Because I had to pay. Swyx [01:09:38]: That's fantastic. You want to like slight, slightly like, yeah, you got a bit. It's like, Alessio [01:09:44]: you're running out of tokens, dude. I was like, f**k, I'm running out of tokens. It's like, I don't want to run out of tokens, but there's like five different tiers. Yeah. Right. Which are kind of like token based and capacity based. Yep. How do you kind of reconcile that? And the consumer side where maybe the consumer doesn't even really need to know what a token is, right? Like on that, like your mom probably doesn't really care what an AI token is. How did you structure it to start? How did you come up with that? And then maybe ideas that you have to like improve or like modify that. Eric [01:10:12]: Totally. Yeah. So we, so when we first launched with StackBlitz is like, we were an enterprise play, right? And so when we launched in 2017, I think we tried pricing 2018 or 2019, but like it was free for a long time. And then we had a 9𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑛𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑤𝑎𝑠𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑖𝑡𝑤𝑎𝑠.𝐼𝑡𝑤𝑎𝑠,𝑖𝑡𝑤𝑎𝑠𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑓𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑜𝑢𝑟,𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑑𝑜𝑙𝑙𝑎𝑟50ℎ𝑜𝑡𝑑𝑜𝑔𝑎𝑡𝐶𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑐𝑜.𝐼𝑡′𝑠𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑓𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠,𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠,𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤,𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑙𝑜𝑤𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑐𝑒,𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡,𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤,𝑖𝑡,𝑖𝑡𝑤𝑎𝑠𝑛′𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑦𝑟𝑒𝑣𝑑𝑟𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑤𝑒𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑑𝑡𝑜,𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤,𝑠𝑎𝑦,𝐻𝑒𝑦,𝑝𝑎𝑦𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑎𝑔𝑒𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑣𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑗𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑠𝑜𝑟𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑠𝑜𝑤𝑒𝑤𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑡𝑜𝑙𝑎𝑢𝑛𝑐ℎ𝑏𝑜𝑙𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑎𝑖𝑛,𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑒𝑥𝑝𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑤𝑎𝑠,𝐻𝑒𝑦,𝑤𝑒′𝑙𝑙𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑏𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑦𝑔𝑒𝑡𝑎𝑔𝑜𝑜𝑑𝑛𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟𝑜𝑓𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡′𝑙𝑙𝑠𝑖𝑔𝑛𝑢𝑝𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑏𝑒𝑒𝑥𝑐𝑖𝑡𝑒𝑑𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑡.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤,𝑤𝑒′𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑜𝑡𝑡𝑜𝑜𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑒𝑑,𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤,𝑤𝑒′𝑟𝑒𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡,𝑤𝑒′𝑟𝑒𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑛𝑜𝑡,𝑤𝑒𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑢𝑛𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑡𝑠𝑢𝑛𝑎𝑚𝑖𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑡.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑠𝑜𝑎𝑓𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑔𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑜𝑛𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑠𝑡𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑘,𝑤𝑒𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒,𝑤𝑜𝑤,𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑜𝑜𝑙.𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒′𝑠𝑎,𝐼𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛,𝑖𝑡𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑘𝑒𝑝𝑡𝑔𝑟𝑜𝑤𝑖𝑛𝑔.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛𝑜𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑤𝑒ℎ𝑖𝑡𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑘𝑡𝑤𝑜,𝐼𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛,𝑤𝑒𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑏𝑢𝑐𝑘𝑠𝑤𝑎𝑠,𝐼𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛,𝑖𝑡′𝑠𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑐ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑝𝑒𝑠𝑡𝐴𝐼𝑐𝑜𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑡𝑚𝑎𝑦𝑏𝑒𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑜𝑝𝑖𝑙𝑜𝑡,𝑏𝑢𝑡𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑤𝑒𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑟𝑢𝑛𝑏𝑦𝑠𝑢𝑝𝑝𝑜𝑟𝑡𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑘𝑒𝑡𝑠.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝐼𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡,𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑠ℎ𝑒𝑒𝑟𝑣𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑚𝑒𝑜𝑓𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑡𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑙𝑎𝑤𝑠𝑜𝑓𝑠𝑢𝑝𝑝𝑙𝑦𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑑𝑒𝑚𝑎𝑛𝑑.𝑊𝑒𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒,𝑜𝑘𝑎𝑦,𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑠𝑛′𝑡,𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒′𝑠𝑛𝑜𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑤𝑒𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑠𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑒𝑡𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑒𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠.𝐴𝑙𝑠𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑏𝑢𝑟𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑡ℎ𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑖𝑟𝑡𝑜𝑘𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒′𝑠𝑛𝑜𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑡𝑜𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑏𝑢𝑦𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒𝑜𝑓𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑠𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑠.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑒𝑏𝑢𝑐𝑘𝑠𝑖𝑠𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡,𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑐𝑎𝑛′𝑡𝑔𝑒𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑢𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑓𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑜𝑢𝑡𝑜𝑓𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑠𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒,ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒′𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡′𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡𝑏𝑜𝑙𝑡𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑡𝑜𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑝𝑖𝑙𝑜𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑓𝑡𝑖𝑒𝑑𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠,𝑠𝑜𝑟𝑟𝑦,𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑙𝑒𝑏𝑖𝑡𝑜𝑓𝑎𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑡𝑜𝑎𝑛𝑠𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑞𝑢𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛.𝐵𝑢𝑡𝑏𝑎𝑠𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑑𝑢𝑝𝑎𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡,𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑑𝑢𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑧𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑖𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑝𝑖𝑙𝑜𝑡,𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑡′𝑠𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑢𝑝,𝑖𝑡𝑑𝑜𝑒𝑠𝑛′𝑡𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑣𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑜𝑡𝑜𝑓𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑥𝑡𝑜𝑓𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑐𝑜𝑑𝑒𝑏𝑎𝑠𝑒.𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦𝑡𝑟𝑦𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑢𝑐𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑚𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑡𝑜𝑓𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑥𝑡𝑎𝑠𝑚𝑢𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦𝑐𝑎𝑛.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝐼𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘,𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤,𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑜𝑟𝑖𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑠𝑜𝑓𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑓𝑓𝑖𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦,𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑓𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑙𝑜𝑤𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑐𝑒𝑝𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑖𝑡′𝑠𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑒𝑎𝑡.𝑆𝑜𝑖𝑡𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑓,𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑓𝑓𝑒𝑒𝑙𝑠𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒,𝑐𝑎𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑖𝑡′𝑠𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒,𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑚𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑁𝑒𝑡𝑓𝑙𝑖𝑥,𝑖𝑡′𝑠𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒,𝐼′𝑙𝑙𝑝𝑎𝑦𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛𝐼𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑑𝑜𝑎𝑠𝑚𝑢𝑐ℎ𝑜𝑓𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑎𝑠𝐼𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑡.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝐼𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘,𝐼𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡,𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑓𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑦,𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑠𝑒𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑠𝑡𝐴𝐼𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑑𝑢𝑐𝑡𝑠𝑐𝑎𝑚𝑒,𝑖𝑡𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑓𝑚𝑎𝑘𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑒.𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦′𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒,𝑜𝑘𝑎𝑦,𝑤𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑤𝑒,𝑤𝑒𝑑𝑜𝑛′𝑡𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑡𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑡.𝐶𝑎𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑑𝑜𝑒𝑠𝑛′𝑡𝑓𝑒𝑒𝑙𝑔𝑜𝑜𝑑.𝑅𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡.𝐵𝑢𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑚𝑖𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦′𝑟𝑒𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑖𝑧𝑒𝑑𝑡𝑜𝑛𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒𝑖𝑡𝑏𝑒𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑡𝑜𝑘𝑒𝑒𝑝𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑥𝑡𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑔𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑖𝑡,𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒𝑖𝑡𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑜.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡′𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚𝑎𝑔𝑖𝑐𝑜𝑓𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑤𝑒′𝑟𝑒𝑑𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ𝑏𝑜𝑙𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑤𝑒′𝑟𝑒𝑔𝑖𝑣𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑥𝑡𝑤𝑒𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑦𝑐𝑎𝑛.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡′𝑠𝑤ℎ𝑦𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑜𝑡𝑜𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑠𝑎𝑦,𝑚𝑎𝑘𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛𝑅𝑆𝑉𝑃𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑒.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑡𝑑𝑜𝑒𝑠𝑛′𝑡𝑏𝑒𝑐𝑎𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑖𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑠𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑥𝑡,𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑜𝑓𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑙𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛,𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤,𝑒𝑡𝑐𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑎,𝑒𝑡𝑐𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑎.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡′𝑠𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑚𝑎𝑘𝑒𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑠𝑜𝑎𝑐𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑒.𝑉𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑓𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑔𝑜𝑡𝑜𝑐𝑜−𝑝𝑖𝑙𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑠𝑎𝑦𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑡,𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒′𝑙𝑙𝑏𝑒,𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤,𝑖𝑡𝑚𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡𝑝𝑢𝑛𝑐ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑛𝑡.𝑇ℎ𝑎𝑡′𝑠𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑏𝑢𝑡𝑡𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑜𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔,𝑏𝑢𝑡𝑛𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡.𝑆𝑜𝑎𝑛𝑦𝑤𝑎𝑦,𝑠𝑜,𝑢𝑚,𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤,𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑎𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛𝑝𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑒9planandthatwasjustthewayitwas. Itwas,itwaskindoflikeour,ourdollar50hotdogatCostco. It′skindoflikethis,this,youknow,justlowprice,just,youknow,it,itwasn′ttheprimaryrevdriverandwejustwantedto,youknow,say,Hey,payforsomemorestorageandprivateprojectsorwhatever. Andsowewenttolaunchboltagain,likeourexpectationwas,Hey,we′llprobablygetagoodnumberofpeoplethat′llsignupandbeexcitedaboutit. Andyouknow,we′renottooconcerned,youknow,we′rejust,we′rejustnot,wewereunpreparedforthetsunamithathit. Andsoaftergoingonlinethefirstweek,wewerelike,wow,thisiscool. There′sa,Imean,itjustkeptgrowing. Andthenoncewehitweektwo,Imean,wewerejustninebuckswas,Imean,it′slikethecheapestAIcodingthingyoucangetmaybeotherthancopilot,butlikewewereoverrunbysupporttickets. AndIjust,andjustthesheervolumeofpeoplecominginanditjustlawsofsupplyanddemand. Wewerelike,okay,thisisn′t,there′snowaywecanscaletomeetthis. Alsothepeoplecominginareburningthroughtheirtokensandthere′snowaytoactuallylikebuymoreofthesethings. Andninebucksisjust,youcan′tgetthatmuchinferenceoutofthat. Andsothe,here′stheotherthingthat′sinterestingaboutboltcomparedtolikesomethinglikecopilotorwhatever. Andthiskindoftiedthis,sorry,alittlebitofaroundaboutwaytoansweryourquestion. Butbasicallywhatweendedupatthatmoment,weendeduprealizingisthatwhenyouusecopilot,whatit′ssendingup,itdoesn′tprovidealotofcontextofyourcodebase. Theytryandreducetheamountofcontextasmuchastheycan. AndIthink,youknow,theoriginsofthisstuffisthey,everyonekindofwantsthislikelowpricepointwhereit′slikeallyoucaneat. Soitjustkindof,thatkindoffeelslike,causeit′slike,italmostlikeNetflix,it′slike,I′llpayathing. AndthenIcanjustdoasmuchofthemoviewatchingasIwant. AndIthink,Ithinkthat,thatkindofmentality,whenthesefirstAIproductscame,itkindofmakessense. They′relike,okay,wellwe,wedon′twanttometerit. Causethatdoesn′tfeelgood. Right. Buttheproblemisthatthenthey′reincentivizedtonothaveitbeabletokeepthemorecontextyougiveit,themoreitcando. Andthat′sthemagicofwhatwe′redoingwithboldiswe′regivingitallthecontextwepossiblycan. Andthat′swhyyoucangotoitandsay,makemeanRSVPsite. Anditdoesn′tbecauseithascontext,theentirestateoftheapplication,youknow,etcetera,etcetera. Andthat′swhatmakesitsoaccurate. Versusifyougotoco−pilotandsaythatit,there′llbe,youknow,itmightpunchoutareactcomponent. That′sthebuttontocreatethething,butnotactuallymorethanthat. Soanyway,so,um,youknow,andatthetimewhenpeoplehaveboughtthe9 plan, they were like, I want to give you more money. I want you to buy more tokens. How do I do that? And so our team scrambled that weekend, we just turned it around and just, you know, we said, okay, well, what do we think is reasonable? And we said, okay, so let's go, you immediately double the prices of the, of the base tier, because it's just not enough what people are getting on for nine bucks. So that'll be, that seems reasonable. It's kind of in line with everyone else. And then we added 50, 100 and $200 plans. Cause we're like, that should be enough. And so, yeah, so that, that's kind of the origins of it. And, and, um, it was, it was people that use it, fall in love with that and they want to use more of it. And the problem is the inference is expensive. And so we're not actually taking, you know, to date on the, on the revenue we've done, we have not really taken a margin at all on this stuff. Cause we're just trying to put all the value back into the folks that are there using the tool and just getting the maximum amount of value out of it. But it's really key to the kind of the magic of the experience. And so the other, the other thing kind of worth mentioning is there's kind of the ARR number, but then we, you can also buy additional tokens, you know, just with usage-based billing effectively. And that's accounting for an additional 20, 30% of, of revenue that's coming to the company. People are actually using this to do their jobs. Like, you think, think about a web development agency before this thing, they're going in using Figma to make a design. They have to pay the designer. They have to like punch that out into code, kind of man. And maybe like co-pilot can help a little bit with punching out this thing that they're coming to this thing. And there's just wild stories online where it's like guy bake, local bakeries, like we need a website. He's like, okay, well, I'm going to charge you a thousand bucks. They're like, okay, that sounds great. Reasonable price. 30 minutes later, he's like, here's a deploy preview of your thing. How does that look? They're like, wow, holy crap. I'm not giving you a thousand bucks. But they did, they were, they were, they were like, this usually takes months, you know? So some of the biggest power users are people that build websites for a living because this is the, the alpha on this is insane. Alessio [01:14:26]: That's almost like the gap, right? It's like, it used to be that if I ask you before this to do a website and in 30 minutes you return to me and you give me something, I'm like, you know, you're probably just copying something else you've done before, you know, versus now it's almost like, it doesn't really matter how much time it takes you because everybody's going to be so fast with these things. It's more like the value. And that's why when you're pricing TRL, it was almost like, there's only really going to be like either 20𝑎𝑚𝑜𝑛𝑡ℎ𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑜𝑟𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑑𝑜𝑙𝑙𝑎𝑟𝑠𝑎𝑚𝑜𝑛𝑡ℎ𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑠.𝑌𝑜𝑢𝑘𝑛𝑜𝑤,𝑖𝑡′𝑠𝑎𝑙𝑚𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑤ℎ𝑜′𝑠𝑔𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑡𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑒20amonthusersorlikeathousanddollarsamonthusers. Youknow,it′salmostlikewho′sgoingtousethe50 a month because it's kind of like in between, between being infrequent user and being like a power user, you know? So yeah, it makes sense that you have like a big part of like on demand Eric [01:15:05]: on top of that. Yeah. And on the 50, there's actually a lot of people on the one. I think it's because it's like enough to actually like for developers are using this to just kind of like punch out components or designs or whatever, kind of gets them enough for, you know, kind of in a given month or whatever. And so it's been interesting to just kind of see the, the, you know, the, the upgrades that happen, but what's been kind of cool about the product is it's, and again, I think this is kind of novel and this is, you know, us being maybe a little more transparent than we should be or something, but like, I suspect we're just, I think we're going to see a lot more of this because we're hitting an inflection point coming back to the co-pilot thing. Part of the problem before is that it didn't matter if you provided more context, the models just weren't good enough to know what to even do with it. That's not the case now. You know, just one, one, you know, story of like one of the first people, one of the power, first power users that adopted Bolt was this gal in Thailand who's a PM at a software banking company. And she had an idea for this app called viralhooks.ai http://viralhooks.ai/, which is basically, it's a tool that if you want to make viral TikToks and stuff, it's like, what's the hook of the video to make people watch. Right. And so basically she, you know, you can go and like, see, it goes and extracts hooks from other people's videos and helps you with like, you know, AI to write your own. And she had originally put the week before Bolt launched, she put that on Upwork and you know, some, I think a developer in like Ukraine had quoted her, you know, 5,000.𝐴𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑡′𝑠𝑔𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑡𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑘𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑟𝑒𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑛𝑡ℎ𝑠𝑜𝑟𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡.𝑅𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑓𝑟𝑎𝑚𝑒,𝑟𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡.𝐹𝑜𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡,𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑐𝑒.𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑘𝑎𝑓𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡𝐵𝑜𝑙𝑡𝑐𝑎𝑚𝑒𝑜𝑢𝑡,𝑠ℎ𝑒𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑡𝑡ℎ𝑒5,000. Andit′sgoingtotakelikethreemonthsorsomethinglikethat. Reasonabletimeframe,right. Foranapplikethat,reasonableprice. TheweekafterthatBoltcameout,sheboughtthe50 plan and she had the app built within a week or two. And so you're talking about like, that's it. And it's beautiful. She did an incredible job. Right. And so the numbers are wild. 5,000,𝑡ℎ𝑟𝑒𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑛𝑡ℎ𝑠𝑡𝑜5,000,threemonthsto50 and like a week. Yeah. You got to charge more. So it's, it's kind of like, so there's, there's people like when we've had a lot of people go, this pricing is insane. And we're like, well, we're not even taking really a margin at the moment on it, you know, but also, but when you, when you compare that to the price of actually going and building the cost of building quality software today, anyone who knows the price of building quality software, the alpha is obvious, right? It's a 99% cost production and five X faster, you know, delivery time, you know? So anyway, so that's, I think we're one of the first products that have actually come out kind of proving that, you know, in, in, in a revenue way to kind of underscore the point, as you can imagine, we've had, you know, kind of venture capital firms kind of reach out and kind of, you know, curious to kind of, you know, what we're up to or whatever. And so, you know, one of the most, you know, there's kind of one of the, the most notable ones or whatever reached out. So we kind of sent them, you know, you know, kind of our numbers. Actually it was the investor update, Sean, that, that I think you, you know, the, you know, the one you saw kind of gave him a snapshot of it. And they one of their analysts accidentally replied all on what we had sent them and with, with the analysis. And so on this part there, you know, one of the things they said was we haven't seen anything that's kind of eyeopening to see people going to $200 tier on this sort of thing. Haven't seen anything else like that in the space. Cause I think this is very new because of the new model capabilities, right? Where people, you know, it makes sense. Like you're willing to pay more money for this stuff. So. This is something I've talked about before in terms of matching Swyx [01:18:11]: the dollar amount of spend to the capabilities of the AIs. The chart that I published in the past was, you know, OpenAI has like five levels of AGI-ness and level, level one is sort of like a chatbots, level two is reasoning, level three is agents, four is organizations, five is some, something super, super human. I don't remember what the exact levels are, but each, you can sort of each match each of them with like tiers. Like 20𝑖𝑠𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑡𝐺𝐵𝑇𝑡𝑖𝑒𝑟.20islikethechatGBTtier.200 is where you're at. 2,000𝑖𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑒𝑟,2,000ishigher,20,000, $200,000, right? Like you can see levels where it makes sense. I think BrightWave is also there, by the way. Like I don't know what BrightWave charges, but it's higher, right? Than a chatGBT. And like, you have to deliver more value for that, but you, you can do it now. Yep. So then why not? Everyone should do it. Eric [01:18:58]: I think we're going to see a lot more of this. I think we're going to see, I think, you know, for AI, Cogen specifically, this is the first moment where I think that there's been that moment where it goes from zero to one, where it's like, yep. The price point, you know, the value, the value is so, like what you can get out of these things is so much higher than it was, you know, three, six months ago that I think we're going to see, I think we're going to see a lot more of this. Like we might, you know, Bolt is, I think one of the first things, but yeah, I mean, it's just, to me, it's inevitable that we're going to see many more things kind of leveraging this, this sort of use case and the amount of efficiency you can get out of using Alessio [01:19:38]: these systems. Right. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because I mean, the Bolt arbitrage would be quote the price based on the query, you know, you're selling high value tokens. Yeah. It's like, Hey, it's like your mom is like, you wouldn't charge your mom $2,000 to tell her stories, but like, you know, this person doing an app and like a product on it. Yeah. You got to pay more, you know, but it's hard right now. I understand. It's like, it's really hard to figure out how much you can push it, how much value the person will get out Swyx [01:20:04]: of the thing. Yeah. So I want to riff a little bit on like stuff like this, right? I think you nailed a lot with the design system. You know, one of the differences between open source Bolt and the one that you have is actually like you, you spend a lot of time on the design system. I think, right. Most things just look great when they come out, but I think there's also a whole backend portion that they need. Was that a challenge? Is there anything that you sort of like figuring out that you want to riff on? Yeah. So I think one of the main things, Eric [01:20:28]: I think you hit the nail on the head, which is, you know, kind of going into putting Bolt online. We originally, again, we've been selling to developers and so we were kind of like, this is a tool for prototyping and they'll download their code. But we ended up finding in the early user testing was how important the deployment story was and how, and this is something you said to me specifically, you're like backend, this needs to like backend needs to be part of this, like logging in, like off just to triple confirm you're dead right. That has been the absolute number one thing that folks coming to Bolt, you know, are looking to do is build a real app with a backend, with billing. And so one of this guy, Mauricio, he's one of our power users. He's like, there's three things that like every app that I'll ever want to build in Bolt, any of these other people in this community, you know, three things, a database, auth, and payments. So those three things, right. So that's- Admin dashboard. We can do that pretty decently, pretty decently. As in every database needs a WP admin. Yes. Yes. Correct. Totally. Totally. And so, yeah, today I think like viral hooks, for example, I think she's using Firebase for auth and database and that sort of thing. You know, so I think Firebase and Superbase, those are the two things that, that just work incredibly well. And so that's actually the point where we're at now, where, you know, right now it's, you know, folks have to still, you know, kind of go to Superbase, manually spin up a thing, come back to Bolt, but the thing that, you know, it's like that sort of processing thing with Firebase, each of those products are going to have their own little quirks that you have to, there's like kind of steps, right. And so- Boltbase. Yeah. Boltbase. Yeah. I think, yeah, I think initially we're like, okay, there should just be a way to like, for Bolt to just go and spin up these things on their behalf and just, and just, you know, both of them have APIs to do so. I'll go even further, like have like pre-warm Swyx [01:22:12]: instances that you just assign, like it's already spun up, right. So it's, so it's like kind of serverless feeling, even as like, not really, but like yeah, just pre-warm and then just kind of assign it when, whenever someone like- That's a really great point. Yeah. Just keep, keep one Eric [01:22:26]: Firebase in the hopper, basically. One, 10, 100, I don't know. More generally, this is what I felt Swyx [01:22:32]: that I wanted to do on our call, which is like, when you have PMF, yes, you want to invest some time in like understanding your customers and do a data analytics and like tighten, tighten things up in general, like tighten up the pricing, tighten up the cost and all that. But then like, you also have to work on like, what is next, like the next level and growth, like you can still inflect. Yeah. I don't know what that is, but you know, I wanted to, I wanted to keep pushing you and I don't know if I did, mostly because I was serving as facilitator on that call. That's what I think. Like, I think you got to still keep pushing the frontier and I don't know what it, what it is, but like, you know, I want to hear what you got thinking about. Eric [01:23:07]: I think there's, you know, we've addressed just a lot of the low hanging P0 stuff then, and we've actually seen, we've kind of the, you know, there's, there's key moments where it's just kind of like been going like that, which has been cool. Cause it's like, okay, well we were, we're just getting started. This is just the, this is just the fixing obvious things part. Fundamentally, I think a lot, what a lot of people are coming here to do is just, how can we just make it faster to go from idea to production? And a lot of it is like, I had, when I have to go to Firebase, Superbase, spin something up, run a migrate, you know, like add a table, but it's like the agent can do that, you know, so that stuff should be baked in. Yeah. And same thing with the deployment side. It's like right now it's going to Netlify, but people have to create a Netlify account and go and do that. Right. And so I think one of the things we're going to end up doing here is just having the hosting be baked in. And so I've been talking with Matt over at Netlify about this, cause they actually have a way to kind of white label stuff. And so, cause people are, they're just going to make a website, you know? And so it's I mean, that means also you take over domain registration. Can you imagine, right? Like a couple of months from now, you come to this thing, you're like, I want to make, I want to make an RSVP site. Right. And it's like, great. Do you, you know, do you have a name for it? Or do you want to, you know, a domain? You're like, I don't know a name. It's like, well, here's like 10 options and the.coms are able to look good. Yep. That one does. Okay. We want to buy it. Okay, great. It bought the DNS is pointed at the thing. Should we start building this? Okay. Does this look good? Yep. Okay. Am I okay to push this to prod? Yep. That looks good. You know, like that's without leaving the product. Swyx [01:24:31]: Right. So to me, like it's tomorrow was the first to actually say like you are the new Wix. I never, I personally never thought about it that way. Wix is a $10 billion company where you want to go, you know, cause you still have a choice here. From what we're hearing from the folks using Eric [01:24:43]: the product, I think I don't even think Wix is even able to solve their need, you know? But not to say that we don't want to, you know, that, that what you're saying is now we want, but, but I mean, yeah, like I think we want to solve folks problems. And I think that there's a huge gap in the market of being able to build, you know, kind of more sophisticated, high quality software like websites in a way that for someone who's a non-engineer. And so I think there's a huge market for that. And obviously, even if you're trying to build a wedding website, yeah, this is, this is easier and faster. Right. So I love it. I, you know, again, coming to the origins of why Albert, my co-founder and I are doing this is we've always just loved building stuff on the web. It's like this, I, this is the tool from what, even when stack was just the IDE interface to the technology, it's like, this is the thing we wish we had when we were 13 years old, you know? And with Bolt, oh my God, if this is the thing I wish we had when we were 13 years old, I'm so glad that my daughter's going to have this thing, you know? So anyways, yeah, I think it makes me pretty, pretty stoked that people are going to be able to actually build amazing web applications that can do really sophisticated things, you know? So yes, I think the short answer is heck yeah. I mean, yeah, that sort of market and totally right up our alley. One other angle that I wanted to pursue was Swyx [01:25:53]: also the other languages. You know, you're very JavaScript centric. We've talked about Python forever. Ruby maybe, is that important? You know, like the previous generation of site builders were mostly Ruby shops and some PHP. Do we want to capture that or are we just like, you know, always been on JavaScript and just let JavaScript take over the world? You know, I think, I think Eric [01:26:14]: we're, we're, we're certainly with great interest interested in other languages and we have like minimal support of Python and some C++ stuff in web container that you can like run or whatever. I think especially with the, with the stuff we're seeing though, it's the languages is kind of ancillary to the, to the, to the thing. Well, there's the ecosystem of like, Swyx [01:26:31]: I want to end up with a code base that I can hire humans on to do the stuff that Bolt cannot do. Eric [01:26:36]: Yeah, true. And I think, I think in that sense, like the, the, the JavaScript Node.js ecosystem is huge and well-established. So it's like, I think it'd be certainly be able to get people to work on this stuff. And I think the only thing that would be missing is it's like, are you building web apps that where a lot of the functionality is only in libraries that are in Python or something. Right. And I think just kind of seeing the applications that are being built here at, you know, I think that'd be like data science and like ML and that sort of thing. And so that's, we're not seeing a lot of that stuff, you know? And then, but I think that's like, we're like kind of a more generic approach is like what Repl.it http://repl.it/'s doing where they're spinning up real VMs. You can kind of run anything. And I think they started off with like doing Python service. I actually haven't tried their, their, you know, their new agent stuff that's based on. Swyx [01:27:15]: Repl.it http://repl.it/ agent. Yeah. We're close friends. Repl.it http://repl.it/ has the database, the sort of live hosting, everything integrated that you're going to want to build. And you're, I think you're on a collision course with them, to be honest. Eric [01:27:29]: We'll see. Cause I'm curious, you're not the first person to say that. I'm curious to see how it shakes out. Cause I think the challenge is focus. You know, when you are, what's kind of the end goal that you're shooting? Yeah, Repl.it http://repl.it/'s firmly for developers. Swyx [01:27:45]: You're positioning it for non-developers like that. That's legit. Eric [01:27:48]: Yeah. And even getting, even if focusing on a language or an ecosystem as well, because again, the problem is that these things can just break in a million ways. And so part of the, a lot of the work in making the experience better, like how do you get, like how make it, someone get an idea into the fingertips and live on prod, right? There's so much stuff in between there. And a lot of it is just errors that happen and how do you handle those? And a lot of that comes down to having a giant database of common errors that you can maybe even fine tune stuff on at some point, right? So doing that on, on one ecosystem, you can move a lot faster than if you're trying to support a lot of different languages. However, it's a, to the point of, if you're kind of targeting developers, they may not need that level of kind of streamline, you know, thing. I think that's kind of where I see the main divergence is that we are unabashedly focused on this ecosystem of, for building web apps. Got it. Yeah. You support it forever. Yeah. And so I'm very curious to see how, just how it all shakes out. Cause it's, I think what they're doing is actually, I mean, I'm very curious to see what Microsoft does because if anyone is good at giving out VMs, tying it to a coder and putting AI in it, it's Sia. He's got a cloud. He's got VS code. They've got code spaces. They've they're in open AI. Now they've got Anthropic and Copilot. I mean, I must imagine, I must imagine that they're cooking stuff over Swyx [01:29:06]: there, you know? We'll make sure to ask him. We have many friends from Microsoft listening to the Alessio [01:29:11]: pod. So just to wrap, I don't know, is there anything else Bolt related? I just have one personal question before we wrap the pod. Maybe like just advice, like now that you've Swyx [01:29:20]: been through this journey, right? Advice to your former self. Oh, okay. Yeah. At which point? Advice yourself, like thinking about, there are many founders out there with a business where they're like, they're working really hard at it. It's interesting, but it's not an AI business. Yeah. And you kind of took the plunge to invest in this and it worked out for you. Maybe a lot of people are like, okay, like, you know, this guy got lucky. Obviously there's a little bit of luck in everything, but like, how do you improve your chances? Like, would you say, go for it? Would you say everyone should go for it? How would you advise someone who was in your shoes and thinking about, you know, maybe I should have a second product. Maybe I should take this, this experiment or maybe it doesn't work out. Like what is, what's the calculus here? Eric [01:30:01]: Yeah. We were deeply skeptical going. I remember the conversation you and I had, you know, I was like this, I think there's something here. At that point we had built some amount, but I had waited a long time to give you the call. I said, this is your moment. Well, it was. So I remember specifically at the beginning of the conversation with Sean, he and I sat down at a coffee shop and, and, and SF, and, and so I was kind of giving him the pitch of like, you know, I think we have, I think that I can't remember the exact framing. I said, but it's, it's, it was obvious that Sean had heard a lot of people say this exact thing to him over the past year or two, which is like, Hey man, we've gotten AI play. Like this is our thing plus AI equals this, this could be crazy. And Sean, I get, you gave me this like skeptical look and then, and I was like, I really think so. And kind of here's why. Right. And and I think, I think that's, it's actually, I think it's, that is internally having, being skeptical of just kind of going and jumping on hype trains is, is good. Cause it's like, I think you, you know, your focus and your time and what you're putting your weight into is the most important thing when you're a founder. I think for us, like we actually, again, like I had mentioned at the beginning of this, you know, we had tried bold and didn't see the results and that was like a two week sprint and we rolled it back. Right. This, this isn't viable at this point, but then when, you know, once we, once we saw real tangible results of, you know, some of the new stuff, right. Okay. That, that changes. Thanks. And I think a lot of it is, is two is going and finding that out for yourself and then going and talking to the smartest people, you know, with more domain knowledge on that stuff than you have and going, here's kind of what we found. Does this track? So when Sean and I met and he, and he, and you know, we keep, he and I kind of, he saw it, we talked through it and he said, this is your moment. I specifically remember that. Cause I, I walked away from that and I was like, holy s**t, this, this is it. Like this, you know, like Sean's Sean's at the intersection of web and AI and as like, it, you know, has one of the best perspectives on this stuff of, of anyone I know that put a huge wind in our sales, honestly, of just like, okay, let's, let's go and really, let's go and double down here because you know, we had conviction before, but having someone who's in the space independently kind of verify meant a lot, you know, so it makes me uncomfortable, but thank you. I get it. I mean, and I waited, I waited until I was pretty darn sure it was not going to be a waste of time to Alessio [01:32:12]: cool. Well, that's all I have. Yeah. And then on the personal side, you had a baby in April, you ran an Ironman in October. Now it's November. Swyx [01:32:20]: He did Ironman while launching ball. I was trying to schedule the call for him and he was like, Nope, I'm sorry. I'm swimming. I was like, Hey, I'm on the swimming session. For those who don't know, actually, I did not know. I don't even know the distance of an Ironman. 13 hours. Your time was 12, 12, 12, 12, 15, 12, 15. Eric [01:32:41]: Give me my minutes. No, no, I, it's, it can, it can completely depends on, you know, the course and just the, the, the person or whatever, right. And, but yeah, I mean, it's, Swyx [01:32:51]: it's 2.4 cam open water, 2.4 mile open water swim, a hundred KM, a hundred mile, a hundred KM Eric [01:32:58]: cycle. I think it's like, I think it's 112 mile a bike and then marathon. Yeah. Full 26.2 mile marathon. Yeah. It was why. Yeah. And you weren't, you were not like a super endurance athlete before, right? Like let's like make this clear. Yeah. Kind of a wild, a wild thing. So I, you know, back when I did, we, we had our daughter in April and at that time we were, the future of the company was, you know, we're, we're figuring out what are we going to do here at that time. It was, it was pro just prior to bolt kind of getting kicked into, you know, the rebirth of it with the new models and stuff. And so I knew that it was going to be, you know, having, having a child is, you know, if you talk to anyone that's done that you're, you don't have a lot of sleep. It's it's, you know, there's a lot of, you know, to, to, to be a great parent is, is a ton of work. And then also being a startup CEO where there's a lot of uncertainty or whatever the way I've always found, like when I have to go and you kind of knock it out of the park and all aspects of my life is, is going, yeah, just to, to make it all aspects of my life. And so I was, I just won. Yeah. I woke up one day, I was like, all right, I'm going to do an Ironman this year and I burned the ships, bought the, it's cost a thousand bucks to do. These didn't know that. And, you know, just started, I'd never ran a marathon at that point. And so I think it was like 45 or 60 days after that, I ran a marathon. My brother-in-law, he's, that was even more insane two weeks before the marathon. I was like, Hey, you want to run a marathon in two weeks? He's like, sure. And, and just did it with me. He did not an endurance athlete either. Right. But anyway, so yeah, so I was training, ended up getting a coach who's usually go, you're kind of online. He's up in Marin. Great guy was on the U S Olympic team for triathlons. And when I told him, okay, I'm going to, I'm doing Ironman, California in three months, he was like, are you insane? You know, like, what are you, you know, you'd ask for my opinion, but like, I just want you to know, I don't think this is a good idea. I think, you know, like you shouldn't do this, et cetera. And I ended up doing it, you know, I ended up getting it done. And so he was like, okay, like that's pretty bad. But what makes you, what makes you ignore expert advice here? Like Swyx [01:34:59]: most sane people would be, would be like, okay, I mean, you know what you're doing? Like, Eric [01:35:03]: I'll maybe wait a year. I think, and this is, this is kind of the, and the being a founder, right. It's, it's all about like, if you, like I mentioned earlier, it's like when we talk to people that worked on browser engines, they're like, you can't, you can't build what you're talking about. I think the job of a founder is, is to, is to solicit that advice. And, and what my coach actually said, he was right about certain things. There are certain areas where I was under indexed on, like, I was not, you know, spending nearly enough time on my bike, for example. Like after that, I was on my bike six hours a day on the weekends. That's a lot of time to spend in the saddle. Just like, just kind of, you know, and that was like, you know, for a couple of months leading up to it, he was right on, on certain aspects of it. And, but I kind of had to look internally and go, okay, like, what is he kind of missing about who I am and like, what I kind of know I'm capable of at this point. I mean, it was a nail biter. I mean, going into the thing, you know, it's, you get in, this is the same thing with launching bolt. It's like, or, or launching anything you get launch day, race day, you kind of go in, you're like, all right, here we go. Like we're going to, we're going to find out, we're going to find out, you know, how based in reality I was about all the decisions that led to this moment. And so I was going and doing the Ironman in like six months. Most people spend, you know, the, the folks he trains, usually it's, you know, one to two years on this stuff before you do try and do a full, you know, it's like going and kind of doing in that sort of timeframe. It's, it's, it's very similar to the same sort of skill set of going and building products. You have to really kind of look at the base reality and go make your own assessment on Alessio [01:36:24]: it. Right. So cool. Great. Sorry to wrap. Thank you so much here. Thanks for your time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.latent.space/subscribe https://www.latent.space/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 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, Armin Sanger and John Frankel 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 and reached 4 million AR 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,

• 0:43Speaker 00

  and we caught him in studio for the full story where Swix was honoured to play a small part. In Latent Space News, we have now announced the full line-up for the new Latent Space Live industry event at NURIPS 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/Meta, Recurse Together, Hugging Face, Open Hands and Semi-Analysis,

• 1:28Speaker 00

  and a special Startup Landscape's keynote from Sarah Guo of Conviction. Head to https://lu.ma.lslive to sign up and apply to speak or sponsor. If you want to take part in the Q&A, 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/latenspace to submit questions. Watch out and take care.

• 2:02Alessio Fanelli?

  Hey everyone, welcome to the Late in Space Podcast. This is Alessio, Partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by Mikolos Swiks, founder of Smali.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Hey, and today we're still in our makeshift in-between studio, but we're very delighted to have a former returning guest host, Itamar. Welcome back.

• 2:19Speaker 03

  Great to be here after a year and one more.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, a year and a half. You're one of our earliest guests on Agents. Now you're CEO co-founder of Kodo, which has just been renamed. You also raised $30 million Series A.

• 2:32Speaker 03

  Series A was 40.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  40, $40 million Series A. And we can get caught up on everything. But we're also delighted to have our new guest, Eric. Welcome.

• 2:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, excited to be here.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Should I say Bolt or Stackblitz? Like, is it like its own company now?

• 2:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, Bolt's definitely Bolt new. That's the thing that we're probably the most known for, I imagine, at this point.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Which is ridiculous to say because you were working at Stackblitz.

• 2:55Speaker 04

  For so long. Yeah, I mean, it was within a week, we were doing like, you know, double the amount of traffic. And Stackblitz had been online for seven years. We're like, what? But anyways, yeah, so we're Stackblitz, the company behind Bolt new. If you've heard of Bolt new, that's our stuff.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, excellent.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  By the way, the founder mode, you need to know to capture opportunities. So kudos on doing that, right? Like, you're working on some technology and then suddenly you can exploit that to new world.

• 3:22Speaker 04

  Totally. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think, well, not to jump, but 100%. I mean, that's, I mean, kind of a couple of months ago, we had the idea for Bolt earlier this year. You know, we haven't really shared this too much publicly, but like, you know, we actually had 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 like, weren't good enough to actually do the code generation, where the code was accurate and, you know, it was fast and whatever have you, without a ton of like rag, but then there's like issues with that. So we put it on the shelf and then we got kind of a sneak peek of some of the new models that have come out, you know, in the past couple of months now. And so, once we saw that, once we actually saw the code gen from it, we were like, oh my God, like, okay, we can build a product around this. And so that was really the impetus of us building the thing.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  But with that, it was, you know, Stackblitz, the core Stackblitz product 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 you know, we'll figure it out. If it doesn't work great, then we'll, it'll get deleted at some point.

• 4:44Speaker 04

  But yeah, anyway, so that's kind of how it actually came to be.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  I'll mention your background a little bit. You were also founder of Thinkster before you started Stackbit. So both of you are second time founders. Both of you have sort of re-founded your company recently. Yours was more of a rename. I think a slightly different direction as well. And then we can talk about both. Maybe just chronologically, should we get caught up on where Coto is first? And then, you know, just like what people should know since the last pod?

• 5:10Speaker 03

  Sure, like the last part was two months after we launched. And we basically had the vision that we talked about. The idea that software development is about specification, test and code, et cetera. We are more on the testing part as in essence, we think that if you solve testing, you solve software development.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  The beautiful chart.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Exactly that chart. And testing is a really big field, like there are many dimensions. Unit testing, the level of the component, how big it is, how large it is. And then there is like different type of testing. Is it regression or smoke or whatever? So back then we only had like one ID extension with unit tests as a focus. So one and a half year later, first ID extension supports more type of testing. As context aware, we index local repos, but also 10,000 of repos for Fortune 500 companies. We have another agent, another tool that is called the PR agent is open source. And the commercial one is Coto Merge.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  And then we have another open source called the cover agent, which is not yet commercial product coming very soon. It's very impressive. It could be that already people are approving automated pull requests that they don't even aware in really big open source. So once we have enough of these, we will also launch another another agent. In one and a half year, what we did is grew in our offering and mostly on the side of does this code actually works? Testing, code review, etc. And we believe that's the, you know, the the critical milestone that needs to be achieved to actually have the AI engineer for enterprise software.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  So and then like for the first year was everything bottom up, getting to one million installation. Twenty twenty four, that was twenty twenty three, twenty twenty four was starting to monetize, to feel like how it is to to make the first buck. So we did the Teams offering. It went well with a thousand of teams, etc. And then we started like just a few months ago to do enterprise with everything you need, which is a lot of things that discussed in the last post that was just just released by Codium.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  That's how we call it.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  At our Codium. Just opening the brackets, our company name was Codium AI.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:33Speaker 03

  And we renamed to Coto and we call our models Codium. So back to twenty points, so we started Enterprise Motion and already have like a multiple like Fortune one hundred companies. And then with that, we raised a series A of forty million dollars. And what's exciting about it is that enables us to develop more agents. That that's our focus. Like, I think it's very different. We're not coming very soon with an ID or something like that.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  You don't want to fork PS code?

• 8:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe we'll fork jet and dead brains or something just to be different.

• 8:06Speaker 02

  I noticed that, you know, I think the the promise of general purpose agents has kind of died. Like, everyone is doing kind of what you're doing. There's Coto Gen, Coto Merge, and then there's a third one. What's the name of it?

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, the Coto Cover.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Cover.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  Which is like a commercial version of a cover agent. It's coming soon.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I see something similar with Factory AI also doing like droids. They all have special purpose doing things, but people don't really want general purpose agents, right? The last time you were here, we talked about Auto GPT, the the biggest thing of twenty twenty three. This year, not really relevant anymore. And I think it's mostly just because like, I think when you give me a general purpose agent, I don't know what to do with it.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I totally agree with that. We're seeing it for a while and I think it will stay like that despite the computer use etcetera that supposedly can just replace us and it could. You can just like prompt it to be, hey, now be a QA, you know, or be a QA person or or developer. I still think that there is a few reasons why you see like dedicated agents. Again, I'm a bit more focused, like my head is more on, you know, complex software or for big teams and enterprise etcetera. And even, you know, think about permissions and what are the data sources and just the same way you you manage permissions for for users like developers, you probably want

• 9:19Speaker 03

  to have dedicated guardrails and dedicated approvals for for agents. I intentionally like touched a point on not many people think about. And of course, then what you can think of like, maybe there is a different tools, tool use etcetera. But just the first point by itself is a good reason why you want to have different agents.

• 9:38Alessio Fanelli?

  Just to compare that with bolt new, you're almost focused on like, the application is very complex and now you need better tools to kind of manage it and build on top of it. On Bolt, it's almost like, like I was using it the other day. There's basically like, hey, look, I'm just trying to get started. You know, I'm not very opinionated on like how you're going to implement this, like this is what I want to do. And you build a beautiful app with it. What people ask as the next step, you know, going back to like the general versus like specific. Have you had people say, hey, you know, this is great to start, but then I want a specific bolt new dot whatever else to do a more vertical integration and kind of like development or what's the, what do people say?

• 10:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think I think you kind of hit the hit a head on, which is, you know, kind of the way that we've we've kind of talked about internally is it's like people are using Bolt to go from like zero dot zero to one dot O. Like that's like kind of the biggest unlock that Bolt has versus most other things out there. I mean, I think that's kind of what's what's very unique about Bolt. I think the, you know, the Working on like existing enterprise applications is, I mean, it's crazy important because you know, there's, when you look at the Fortune 500, I mean, these code bases, some of these have been around for, you know, 20, 30 plus years. And so it's important to be going from, you know, 101.3 to 101.4, et cetera. I think for us, so what's been actually pretty interesting is we see there's kind of two different users for us that are

• 10:58Speaker 04

  coming in and it's very distinct. It's like people that are developers already. And then there's people that have never really written software. And more if they have, it's been very, very minimal. And so in the first camp, what these developers are doing, like to go from zero to one, they're coming to Bolt. And then they're ejecting the thing to get up, or just downloading in, you know, opening cursor, like whatever to keep iterating on the thing. And sometimes they'll bring it back to Bolt to like, add in a huge piece of functionality or something, right? But for the people that don't know how to code, they're actually just, they live in this thing. And that was one of the weird things when we launched is, you know, within a day of us being online, one of the most popular YouTube videos, and there's been a ton since, which was, you know, there's like, oh, Bolt is the cursor killer. And I originally saw the headlines and I was like, thanks for the views? I don't, this doesn't make sense to me. That's not, that's not what we kind of thought.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  It's how YouTubers talk to each other. Everything kills everything else.

• 11:46Speaker 04

  Totally. But what blew my mind was that there was any comparison because it's like cursor is a, is a local IDE product. But when, when we actually kind of dug into it and we have, you know, people that are using our product saying this, I'm not using cursor. And we're like, what? And it turns out, there are hundreds of thousands of people that we have seen that were using cursor and were trying to build apps with that where they're not traditional software to us, but we're heavily leaning on the AI. And as you can imagine, it is very complicated, right? To do that with cursor. So when Bolt came out, they're like, wow, this thing's amazing because it kind of inverts the complexity where it's like, you know, it's not an IDE, it's a, it's a chat based sort of interface that we have. So that's kind of the split, which is rather interesting. We've had like the first startups now launch off of Bolt entirely where this, you know, tomorrow I'm

• 12:31Speaker 04

  doing a live stream with this guy named Paul, who he's built an entire CRM using this thing. And with backend, et cetera. And people have made their first money on the internet, period. You know, launching this with Stripe or whatever have you. So that's, that's kind of the two main, the two main categories of folks that we see using Bolt though.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  I agree that I don't understand a comparison. Doesn't make sense to me. I think like we have like two types of families of tools. One is like we reimagine the software development. I think Bolt is there. And I think like a cursor is more like an evolution of what we already have. It's like taking the IDE and it's amazing. And it's okay, let's adapt the IDE to an era where LLMs can do a lot for us. And Bolt is more like, okay, let's rethink everything totally. And I think we see a few tools there, like maybe Vercel, VO and maybe Replit and that area. And then in the area of let's expedite, let's change, let's progress with what we already have. You can see Cursor and Coto.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  We're different between ourselves, Cursor and Coto, but definitely I think like comparison doesn't make sense.

• 13:40Alessio Fanelli?

  And just to set the context, this is not a Twitter demo. You made four million of revenue in four weeks. So this is, this is actually working, you know? It's not a, what do you think that is? Like, there's been so many people demoing coding agents on Twitter and then it doesn't really work. And then you guys were just like, here you go. It's live, go use it, pay us for it, you know? Is there anything in the development that was like interesting? And maybe how that compares to building your own agents?

• 14:06Speaker 04

  We had no idea, honestly. Like, we've been pretty blown away and then things have just kind of continued to grow faster since then. We're like, today is week six. So I kind of came back to the point you just made, right? Where it's, you kind of outlined, it's like, there's kind of this new market of like, kind of rethinking the software development. And then there's heavily augmenting existing developers. I think that both of which are AI code gen being extremely good. It's allowed existing developers, it's allowing existing developers to hammer out software far faster than they could have ever before. Right? It's like the ultimate power tool for an existing developer. But this code gen stuff is now so good. And then we saw this over the past, you know, from the beginning of the year when we tried to first build Bolt.

• 14:48Speaker 04

  It's actually lowered the barrier to people that aren't traditionally software engineers. But the kind of the key thing is, if you kind of think about it from, imagine you've never written software before, right? My co-founder and I, he and I grew up down the street from each other in Chicago. We learned how to code when we were 13 together and we've been building stuff ever since. And this is back in like the mid 2000s or whatever. You know, there was nothing for free to learn from online on the internet and how to code. So like we, for our 13th birthdays, we asked our parents for, you know, O'Reilly books because you couldn't get this at the library, right? And so instead of like an Xbox, we got, you know, programming books. But the hardest part for everyone learning to code is getting an environment set up locally. You know, and so when we built Stackblitz, like kind of the key thesis, like seven years ago,

• 15:29Speaker 04

  the insight we had was that the, hey, it seems like the browser has a lot of new APIs like WebAssembly and Service Workers, et cetera, where you could actually write an operating system that ran inside the browser that could boot in milliseconds. And you, you know, basically there's this missing capability of the web. Like the web should be able to build apps for the web, right? You should be able to build the web on the web. Every other platform has that, Visual Studio for Windows, Xcode for Mac. The web has no built-in primitive for this. And so just like our built-in kind of like nerd instinct on this was like, that seems like a huge hole and it's, you know, will be very valuable. Or like, you have a very valuable problem to solve, so people have to set up dev environments. You know, this is what we spent the past seven years doing. And the reality is existing developers have, running locally, they already know how to set up

• 16:14Speaker 04

  dev environments. So the problem isn't acute for them. When we put Bolt online, we took that technology called Web Container and married it with these, you know, state-of-the-art frontier models. And the people that have the most pain with getting stuff set up locally is people that don't code. I think that's been, you know, really the, the big explosive reason is no one else has been trying to make dev environments work inside of a browser tab, you know, for the past, if since ever, other than basically our company, largely because there wasn't an immediate demand or need. So I think we kind of find ourselves at the right place at the right time. And again, for this market, people that don't know how to write software, you would kind of expect that you should be able to do this without downloading something to your computer in the same way that, hey, I don't have to download Photoshop now to make designs because there's Figma.

• 16:57Speaker 04

  I don't have to download Word because there's, you know, Google Docs. They're kind of looking at this as, as that sort of thing, right? Which was kind of the, you know, our impetus and kind of vision from the get-go. But, uh, you know, the code gen, the AI code gen stuff that's come out has just been. You know, an order of magnitude multiplier on how magic that is, right? So is that kind of my best distillation of like, what, what is going on here?

• 17:18Alessio Fanelli?

  Yeah. And you can deploy too, right?

• 17:20Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 17:21Alessio Fanelli?

  Techlets. Yeah.

• 17:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so that's what's really cool is it's, you know, we have deployment built in with Netlify. And this is actually, I think, Sean, you actually built this at Netlify when you were there. One of the most brilliant integrations, actually, because, you know, effectively the API that Sean Bill, maybe you can speak to it. But like, as a provider, we can just effectively give files to Netlify without the user even logging in. And they have a live website. If they want to keep, hold on to it, they can click a link and claim it to their Netlify account. But it basically is just this really magic experience. Cause when you come to Bolt, you say, I want a website like my mom, 70, 71 years old, made her first website, you know, on the internet two weeks ago. Right. It was about her nursing days and so it made up.

• 18:01Alessio Fanelli?

  Oh, that's fantastic, though. It wouldn't have been made.

• 18:04Speaker 04

  A hundred percent. Cause even in, you know, when we had a lot of people building personal, like deeply personal stuff. Like in the first week, we launched this, the sales guy from the East Coast, you know, replied to a tweet of mine. And he said, thank you so much for building this, you know, to, to your team. His daughter has a medical condition and so for her to travel, she has to like line up donors or something, you know, so ahead of time. And so he actually used Bolt to make a website to do that, to actually go and send it to folks in the, the region she was going to travel to ahead of time. I was really touched by it, but I also thought like, why, you know, why didn't he use like Wix or Squarespace, right? I mean, this is, this is a solved problem, quote unquote, right? And then when I thought, I actually use Squarespace for my, for my, the wedding website for my wife. And I like back in 2021, so I'm familiar, you know, it was, it was faster. I know how to code. I was like, this is faster, right?

• 18:49Speaker 04

  And I thought back and I was like, there's a whole interface you have to learn how to use. And it's actually not that simple. There's like a million things you can configure in that thing. When you come to Bolt, there's a, there's a text box. You just say, I need a, I need a wedding website. Here's the date. Here's where it is. And here's a photo of me and my wife. Put it somewhere relevant. It's actually the simplest way. And that's what my, when my mom came, she said, I'm Pat Simons. I was a nurse in the seventies, you know, and like, here's the things I did and a website came out. So coming back to why is this such a, I think, why are we seeing this sort of growth? It's, this is the simplest interface, I think, maybe ever created to actually build and deploy a website. Cause and then that website my mom made, she's like, okay, this looks great. And there's, there's one button. You just click it, deploy and it's live and you can buy a domain

• 19:34Speaker 04

  name, attach it to it. And you know, it's as simple as it gets. It's getting even simpler with some of the stuff we're working on. But anyways, so that's, it's, it's, it's been really interesting to see some of the usage like that.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  I can offer my perspective. So I, you know, I probably should have disclosed a little bit that I'm a Stackless investor. Cancel the episode.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Eric actually reached out to ShowMe Bolt before the launch and we, you know, we talked a lot about like the framing of, of what we're going to talk about, how we marketed the thing, but also like what Bolt was going to need, like a whole sort of infrastructure. Netlify, I was a maintainer of the CLI, but I won't take claim for the anonymous upload. That's actually the origin story of Netlify. We can have Matt Bowman talk about it, but he, like, that was how Netlify started. You could drag and drop your zip file or folder from your desktop onto a website. It would have a live URL with no sign in. And so that was the origin story of Netlify and it just persists to today. And it's just like, it's really nice, interesting that both Bolt and Commission Devin and a bunch of other sort

• 20:36Speaker 02

  of agent type startups, they all use Netlify to deploy because of this one feature. They don't really care about the other features on that. But, but just because it's easy for computers to use and talk to, like, if you build an interface for computers specifically that is easy for them to navigate, then they will be used in agents. And I think that's a learning that a lot of developer tools, companies are having. That's my Bolt launch story and if I see all that stuff. And then I just wanted to come back to like the web containers things, right? Like I think you put a lot of weight on the technical modes. I think you also are just like very good at product. So you've, you've like built a better agent than a lot of people, the rest of us, including. I think myself, who have tried to build these things and we didn't get as far as you did. Don't shortchange yourself on products.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  But I think specifically on on infra, on like the sandboxing, like this is the thing that people really want. Alessio has backed E2B, which we'll have on at some point, talking about like the sort of the server full side. But yours is, you know, inside of the browser server less. It doesn't cost you anything to serve one person versus a million people. It doesn't doesn't cost you anything. I think that's interesting. I think in theory, we should be able to like run tests because you can run the full backend. Like you can run Git, you can run Node, you can run maybe Python someday. We talked about this, but ideally you should be able to have a full agentic loop, running code, seeing the errors, correcting code, and just kind of self healing, right? Like, I mean, isn't that the dream?

• 21:56Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:57Speaker 04

  Totally. At least in Bolt, we've got, we've got a good amount of that today. I mean, there's a lot more for us to do, but one of the nice things, because like in web container, you know, there's a lot of kind of stuff you go Google like, you know, turn Docker container into Wasm. Like there's, you'll find a lot of stuff out there that will do that. The problem is it's very big, it's slow, and then that ruins the experience. And so what we ended up doing is just writing an operating system from scratch that was just purpose built to, you know, run in a browser tab. And the reason being is, you know, these Docker to Wasm things will give you an image that's like 60 to 100 meg, you know, maybe more, you know? And our OS, you know, kind of clocks in, I think, I think we're like, maybe, maybe a megabyte or less or something like that. I mean, it's, it's, you know, really, really, you know, stripped down.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  This is all, basically, the task involved is, I understand it, it's mapping every single Linux syscall to some kind of Web Assembly implementation.

• 22:48Speaker 04

  But more or less, and then there's a lot of things, actually, like when you're looking at a dev environment, there's a lot of things that you don't need that a traditional OS is going to have, right? Like, you know, audio drivers, or you're like, there's just like, there's just tons of things, right?

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, that goes.

• 23:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can just kind of, you can, you can kind of toss them. Or alternatively, what you can do is you can actually be, the, the, the nice thing, this is, this kind of comes back to the origins of browsers, which is, you know, they're, they're at the beginning of the web in, you know, the late 90s. There is, you know, two very different kind of visions for the web, where Alan Kay vehemently disagreed with the idea that should be document based, which is, you know, what Tim Berners-Lee, you know, that, and that's kind of what ended up winning, winning was this document based, kind of browsing documents on the web thing. Alan Kay, he's got this like very famous quote where he said, you know, you, you want web browsers to be mini operating systems. They should download little mini binaries and. Execute with like a little mini virtualized operating system in there. And what's kind of interesting about the history, not to geek out on this, what's kind of interesting about the histories, and both of those folks ended up being right.

• 23:46Speaker 04

  Documents were actually the pragmatic way that the web was, you know, became the most ubiquitous platform in the world, to the degree now that this is why WebAssembly has been invented, is that we're doing, we need to do more low-level things in a browser, same thing with WebGPU, et cetera. And so all these APIs, you know, to build an operating system came to the browser. And that was actually the realization we had in 2017 was, holy heck, like, you can actually, you know, service workers, which were designed for allowing your app to work offline, that was the kind of the key one where it was like, wait a second, you can actually now run web servers within a browser, like you can run a server that you open up. That's wild.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Like full Node.js?

• 24:23Speaker 04

  Full Node.js, like that capability, like I can have a URL that's programmatically controlled by a web application itself, boom, like the web can build the web, the primitive is there. Everyone at the time, like we talked to people that like worked on, you know, Chromium V8 and they're like, oh, I don't know. So, but it's one of those things you just kind of have to go do it to find out. So we spent a couple of years, you know, working on it and, and then got it to work. And back in 2021 is when we kind of put the first like beta of Web Container online, but...

• 24:51Speaker 02

  In partnership with Google, right? Like Google actually had to help you get over the finish line with some stuff.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  Hundred percent, because well, you know, over the years of when we were doing the R and D on the thing, kind of the biggest challenge, the two ways that you can kind of test how powerful and capable a platform are, the two types of applications are, one, video games, right? Because they're just very compute intensive, a lot of calculations that have to happen, right? The second one are IDEs, because you're talking about actually virtualizing the actual runtime environment you are in to actually build apps on top of it, which requires sophisticated capabilities, a lot, access to, you know, a good amount of compute power, right? To effectively, you know, building app in app sort of thing. So those, those are the stress tests. So if, if your platform is missing stuff, those are the things where you find out.

• 25:38Speaker 04

  Those are, those are the people building games and IDEs, they're the ones filing bugs on operating system level stuff, and for us browser level stuff. And so, yeah, what ended up happening is we were just hammering, you know, the Chromium bug tracker, and they're like, who are these guys?

• 25:53Speaker 04

  And they're amazing because I mean, just making Chrome Dev Tools be able to debug. I mean, it's not, it wasn't originally built right for debugging an operating system. Right. They've been phenomenal working with us and just kind of really pushing the limits. But that it's a rising tide that's kind of lifted all boats because now there's a lot of different types of applications that you can debug with Chrome Dev Tools that are running a browser that runs more reliably because just the stress testing that we and, you know, games that are coming to the web are kind of pushing as well.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  That's awesome. About the testing, I think like most, let's say, coding assistant from different kinds will need this loop of testing and even I would add code review to some, to some extent that you mentioned.

• 26:33Speaker 04

  How is testing different from code review?

• 26:34Speaker 03

  Code review could be, for example, PR review is like a code review that is done at the point of when you want to merge code branches. But I would say that code review, for example, checks best practices, maintainability and etc.

• 26:48Speaker 04

  It's not just like CI, but it's more than CI.

• 26:50Speaker 03

  And testing is like more like checking functionality, etc. So it's different. We call, by the way, all of these together code integrity, but that's a different story. Just to go back to the, to the testing and specifically.

• 27:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's since the first slide.

• 27:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're consistent. So if we go back to the testing, I think like it's not surprising that for us, testing is important and for both, it's testing is important. But I want to shed some light on a different perspective. If like, let's think about autonomous driving. Those startups that are doing autonomous driving for highway and autonomous driving for the city. And I think like we saw the autonomy of the highway much faster and reaching to a level, I don't know, four or so, much faster than those in the city. Now, in both cases, you need testing and quote unquote testing, verifying validation that you're doing the right thing on the road and you're reading and etc.

• 27:47Speaker 03

  But it's probably like so different in the city that it could be like actually different technology. And I claim that we're seeing something similar here. So when you're building the next Wix and if I was them, I was like looking at you and being a bit scared. That's what you're disrupting. What you just said, then basically, I would say that, for example, the UX UI is freaking important. And because you're you're more aiming for the end user, in this case, maybe it's an end user that doesn't know how to develop. For developers, it's also important, but let alone those that do not know to develop, they need a slick UI UX. And I think like, that's one reason, for example, I think cursor have like, really good technology. I don't know the underlying, what's under the hood, but at least what they're saying.

• 28:30Speaker 03

  But I think also their UX UI is great, it's a lot because they they did their own own ID. While if you're aiming for the the city AI, suddenly, like, there's a lot of testing and code review technology that's not necessarily like that important. For example, let's talk about integration test, like, probably like, a lot of what you're building in Bolt at the moment is isolated like applications. Maybe the the vision or or the end game is maybe like having one solution for for everything. Like, it could be that eventually the highway AI companies will go into the city and and the other way around.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  But at the beginning, there there is a difference. And integration tests are a good example, I guess they're a bit less important. And when you think about enterprise software, they're really important. So, to recap, like, I think like, the idea of looping and verifying your test and verifying your code in different ways, testing or code review, etc. Seems to be important in like in the highway AI and the city AI, but in different ways and different like critical for the city. Even more and more variety. Actually, I was looking to ask you like, like, what kind of loops you guys are doing. For example, when I'm using Bolt and I'm enjoying it a lot, then I do see like, sometimes you're trying to catch the errors and fix them.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  And also, I noticed that you're breaking down tasks into smaller ones and then etc., which is already a common like notion for you. You're from, you're ago, but it seems like you're doing it really well. So, if you're willing to share anything about that.

• 30:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, totally, yeah, yeah, yeah, I realize it never actually hit the punchline of of what I was saying before. I mentioned the point about us kind of writing an operating system from scratch, because what ended up being important about that is that, to your point, it's actually a very, like, compared to like a, you know, if you're like running cursor on anyone's machine, you kind of don't know what you're dealing with with the OS you're running on. There could be an error happens, it could be like, a million different things, right? There could be some config, there could be, it could be. God knows what, right? The thing with WebKit here is because we wrote the entire thing from scratch. It's actually a unified image, basically. And we can instrument it at any level that we think is going to be useful, which is exactly what we did when we started building Bolt, is we instrumented stuff at like the process level, at the runtime level, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

• 30:50Speaker 04

  Stuff that would just be not impossible to do on local, but to do that in a way that works across any operating system, whatever, is, I mean, would just be insanely, you know, insanely difficult to do right and reliably. And that's what you saw when you've used Bolt, is that when an error actually will occur, whether it's in the build process or the actual web application itself is failing or anything kind of in between, it actually captures those errors. And today, it's a very primitive way of how we've implemented it largely because the product just didn't exist 90 days ago. So we're like, we got some work out of us and we got to hire some more a little bit. But, but basically, we presented, we say, hey, this is, here's kind of the things that went wrong. Here, there's a fix it button and then a ignore button. And then you can just hit fix it. And then we take all that telemetry through our agent, you run it through our agent and say, kind of,

• 31:35Speaker 04

  here's the state of the application. Here's kind of the errors that we got from Node.js or the browser or whatever, and like da, da, da, da. And it can take a crack at actually solving it. And it's actually pretty darn good at being able to do that. That's kind of been a, you know, closing the loop and having it be a reliable kind of base has seemed to be a pretty big upgrade over doing stuff locally just because I think that's a pretty key ingredient of it. And yeah, I think breaking things down into smaller tasks, like that's, that's kind of a key part of our agent. I think like Claude did a really good job with artifacts. And I think, you know, us and kind of everyone else has kind of taken their approach of like actually breaking out certain tasks in a certain order into, you know, kind of a concrete way. And so actually, the core of Bolt, I know, we actually made open source. So you can actually go and check out like the system prompts and et cetera.

• 32:20Speaker 04

  And you can run it locally and whatever have you. So anyone that's like interested in this stuff, I'd highly recommend taking a look at. There's not a lot of like stuff that's like open source in this realm. That was one of the fun things that we've, we thought would be cool to do. And people, people seem to like it. I mean, there's a lot of forks and people adding different models and stuff. So it's been cool to see.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm happy to add, I added real time voice for my opening Dev Day demo. And it was really fun to hack with. So, thank you for doing that.

• 32:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm gonna steal your code back.

• 32:50Speaker 04

  Cause I want that.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  It's funny, because I built on top of the fork of Bolt New that already has the multi LM thing. And so you just told me you're gonna merge that in. So then you're gonna merge two layers of forks down into this thing. So it'll be fun.

• 33:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:02Alessio Fanelli?

  Just to touch on like the environment, Edamar, you maybe go into the most complicated environments that even the people that work there don't know how to run. How much of an impact does that have on your performance? Like, you know, is most of the work you're doing actually figuring out environment and like the libraries? Because I'm sure they're using outdated version of languages, they're using outdated libraries, they're using forks that have not been on the public internet before. How much of the work that you're doing is like there versus like at the LM level?

• 33:30Speaker 03

  One of the reasons I was asking about, you know, what are the steps to break things down? Because it really matters, like what's the tech stack, how complicated the software is. It's hard to figure it out when you're dealing with the real world, any environment of enterprise as a city. When I'm like, while maybe sometimes like, I think you do enable like in Bolt, like to install stuff. But it's quite of like controlled environment and that's a good thing to do. Because then you narrow down and it's easier to make things work. So definitely there are two dimensions, I think actually spaces. One is the fact just like installing our software without yet like

• 34:13Alessio Fanelli?

  Doing anything.

• 34:13Speaker 03

  Making it work, just installing it because we work with enterprise and Fortune 500, etc. Many of them want on-prem solution. So.

• 34:20Alessio Fanelli?

  You have how many deployment options?

• 34:22Speaker 03

  Basically, we had, we did a metric, metrics, say 96 options. Because, you know, they're different dimensions, like for example, one dimension, we connect to your code management system, to your Git. So are you having like GitHub, GitLab?

• 34:38Alessio Fanelli?

  Subversion?

• 34:39Speaker 03

  Is it like on cloud or deployed on-prem? Just an example, which model do we to use is APIs or ours? Like we have our own models.

• 34:48Alessio Fanelli?

  Is it test GPT or?

• 34:49Speaker 02

  And you renamed it.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  We started with test GPT, it was a huge mistake, name. It was cool at back then, but I don't think it's a good idea to name a model after someone else's model. Anyway, that's that's my opinion, so we.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  I'm interested in these learnings, like, things that you change your mind on.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  Eventually, when you're building a company, you're building a brand and you want to create your own brand. By the way, when I thought about Bolt but new, I also thought about if it's not a problem, because when I think about Bolt, I do think about like a couple of companies that already call this.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  Curse companies.

• 35:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  You could call it Chordian just to.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  Okay, thank you. Touche, touche.

• 35:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, you got to imagine the board meeting before we launched Bolt, one of our investors, you can imagine they're like, are you sure? Because from the investment side, there's kind of a famous, very notorious Bolt, and they're like, are you sure you want to go with that?

• 35:38Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  At this point, we have actually four models. There is a model for autocomplete, there is a model for the chat, there is a model dedicated for more for code review. And there is a model that is for code embedding. Actually, if you might notice that there is not, there isn't a good code embedding model out there. Like, can you name one? Like, that would dedicated for code, like, yeah, I can't sure more than that.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  There's code indexing, and then you can do sort of like the hide for code, and then you can embed the descriptions of the code.

• 36:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you do see a lot of type of models that are dedicated for embedding and for different spaces, different like fields, etc. And I'm not aware, like, and I know that if you go to the bedrock, try to find like there is a few code embedding models, but none of them are specialized for code.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  Is there a benchmark that you would tell us to pay attention to?

• 36:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's coming. Wait for that. Anyway, like, we have our, we have our models, and just to go back to the 96 option of deployment. So, yeah, so I'm closing the brackets for us. So, so one is like dimension of like what Git deployment you have, the other, like, what models do you agree to use? The other could be like if it's air gapped completely, or you want VPC, and then you have Azure GCP and. An AWS, which is different. Do you use Kubernetes or do not? Like, because we want to exploit that. There are companies that do not do that, et cetera. And I guess you know what I mean. So that's one thing. And considering that we are dealing with one of solve for enterprise, we needed to deal with that. So you asked me about like,

• 37:17Speaker 03

  how complicated is to solve that complex code? I said, it's just a deployment part. And then like, now to the software, we see a lot of different like challenges. For example, some companies, they did actually a good job to build a lot of microservices. Let's not get to the if it's good or not, but let's for a second assume that it is a good thing. A lot of microservices, each one of them has their own repo. And now you have tens of thousands of repos. And you, as a developer, want to develop something. And I remember me for coming to a corporate for the first time. I don't know where to look at, like where to find things. So just doing a good indexing for that is like a challenge.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  And moreover, the regular indexing, the one that you can find, well, we wrote a few blogs on that. By the way, we also like have some open source, like different than yours, but actually three and growing. Then it doesn't work. You need to let the tech leads in the companies influence your indexing. For example, Mark with different repos with different colors. This is a high quality repo. This is a lower quality repo. This is a repo that we want to deprecate. This is a repo we want to grow, et cetera. And let that be part of your indexing. And only then like things actually work for enterprise. And they don't get to a fatigue of, oh, this is awesome. Oh, but I'm starting, it's annoying me. I think Copilot is an amazing tool, but I'm quoting others, meaning GitHub Copilot,

• 38:46Speaker 03

  that they see not so good retention of GitHub Copilot in enterprise. Ooh, spicy. Yeah, like I heard, I saw snapshots of people like, and we have customers that are Copilot users as well. And also I saw like research, some of them is public, by the way. Yeah. Between 38 to 50% retention for users using Copilot in enterprise.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  So it's not so good, right? By the way, I don't think it's that bad, but it's not so good. So I think that's a reason because yeah, it helps you like autocomplete. But then, and especially if you're working on your repo alone. But if it's need that context of remote repos that your code base, that that's hard. So to make things work, there's a lot of work on that. Like giving the controllability for the tech leads, for the developer platform or developer experience department in the organization to influence how things are working. A short example, because already long, if you have like really old legacy code, probably some of it is like, is not so good anymore. If you just fine tune on these code base, then there is a bias to repeat those mistakes

• 39:56Speaker 03

  or old practices, et cetera. So like you need, for example, as I mentioned, to enable like, to influence that. For example, in Coder, you can have a markdown of best practices by the tech leads and Coder will include that and relate to that and will not offer like suggestion that are not according to the best practices, just as an example. Okay. So like, that's just a short list of things that you need to do in order to deal with like the, like you mentioned, the 100 to 100.1 to 100.2 version of software.

• 40:28Speaker 04

  I just want to say what you're doing is extremely impressive because it's a very difficult, I mean, the business of StackBots kind of before bulk came online was sell, we sold a version of our IDE that went on prem. So I understand what you're saying about the difficulty of selling, you know, getting stuff just working on prem. Holy heck. I mean, that, that is extremely hard. I guess the question I have for you is, I mean, we, we were just doing that with, you know, kind of Kubernetes based stuff. The spread of Fortune 500 companies that you're working with, how are they doing the inference for this? Are they, are they just, are you kind of plugging into, you know, Azure's OpenAI stuff and AWS's Bedrock, you know, Claude stuff or like, or are they just like running stuff on GPUs? Like, what is that like? How are these folks approaching that? Because man, what we saw on the enterprise side, I mean, I gotta imagine that that's a huge challenge.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  Everything you said and more, like. To the example, like, someone could be, and I don't think any of these is bad. Like, they made their decision, like, for example, some people, they're, I want only AWS and VPC on AWS, no matter what. And then they, some of them, like, there is a subset, I will say, I'm willing to take models only for, from Bedrock and not ours. And we have a problem because there is no good code embedding model on Bedrock. And that's part of what we're doing now with AWS to solve that. We solve it in a different way, but, but if you are willing to run on AWS VPC, but run your, run models on GPUs or Inferentia, like, the new version of the more coming out, then our models can run on that.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  But everything you said is right. Like, we see, like, on-prem deployment, where they have their own GPUs. We see Azure, where you're using OpenAI Azure. We see cases where you're running on GCP and they want OpenAI. Like, this cross, like, case, although there is Gemini, or even Sonet, I think, is available on GCP, just an example. So, all the, all options, that, that's part of the challenge. I admit that we thought about it, but it was even more complicated. And it took us a few months to actually, that metrics that I mentioned, to start, like, clicking each one of the blocks there.

• 42:31Speaker 04

  A few months is impressive. I mean, honestly, just, that's, okay, and every one of these enterprises is, their networking is different, just everything's, every single one is different.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  I see what you're saying.

• 42:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, so that just cannot be understated. Like, that, it is, that's extremely impressive, hats off, because.

• 42:49Speaker 03

  It could be, by the way, like, for example, oh, we're only AWS, ah, but our GitHub enterprise is on-prem. Oh, we forgot. So, we need, like, a private link or whatever, like, every time, like, it's, it's, and you do need to think about it if you want to work with enterprise. And it's important, like, I understand, like, their, I respect their point of view.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  And this primarily impacts your architecture, your tech choices, like, you have to, you can't choose some vendors because.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely. To be frank, it makes us hard for a startup, because it means that, we want, we want everyone to enjoy all the variety of models. By the way, it was. It's hard for us with our our technology. I want to open a bracket like a window. I guess you're familiar with our Alpha Codium, which is an open source. We gotta go over that. Yeah, so I'll do that quickly. A pin in that, yeah. Actually, we didn't have it in the last episode, so, so, okay. Okay, we'll come back to that later, but let's talk about. Yeah, so so just like shortly, and then we can double click on on Alpha Codium. But Alpha Codium is an open source tool. You can go and try it and let you compete on Codeforces as a as a website and a competition. And actually reach a master level level like ninety five percent with a click of a button. You don't need to do anything.

• 43:59Speaker 03

  And part of what we did there is taking a problem and breaking it to different like smaller blocks. And and then the models are much doing much better job. Like, we all know it by by now that taking small task and solving them. By the way, even O one, which is supposed to be able to do system to thinking like Greg from OpenAI like hinted, is doing better on these kind of problems, but still it's very useful to break it down for O one. Despite O one being able to think by itself. And that's what we presented like just a month ago. OpenAI released that now they are doing ninety three percentile with O one I O I left.

• 44:41Speaker 03

  And International Olympiad formation, sorry, I forgot exactly. I told you, I forgot. And and we took their O one preview with Alpha Codium and did better. Like, it just shows like, and there is a big difference between a preview and the I O I. It shows like that these models are not still system to thinkers. And there is a big difference, so. Maybe they're not complete system two. Yeah, they need some guidance. I I call them system one one point five. We can we can dive into that. I thought about it like, you know, I care about this philosophy stuff. And I think like we didn't see it even close to a system to thinking. I can elaborate later, but closing the brackets like we take Alpha Codium and as as as our principle of thinking, we take tasks and break them down to smaller tasks.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  And then we want to exploit the best model to solve them. So I want to enable anyone to enjoy O one and. Sonnet and Gemini 1.5 etc. But at the same time, I need to develop my own models as well because some of the Fortune 500 want to have all air gapped or whatever. So that's a challenge. Now you need to support so many models. And to some extent, I would say that the flow engineering, the breaking down to to different blocks is a necessity for us. Why? Because when you take a big block, a big problem, you need a very different prompt for each one of the models to actually work.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  But when you take a like a big problem and break it into small tasks, we can talk how we do that, then the prompt matters less. What I want to say like all this like as a startup trying to do different deployment, getting all the juice that you can get from models etc. is a big problem. And one need to think about it and one of our mitigation is that process of taking tasks and breaking them down. That's why I'm really interested to know how you guys are doing it. And part of what we do is also open source, so you can see.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  There's a lot in there. But yeah, flow over prompt, I do believe that that does make sense. I feel like there's a lot that both of you can sort of exchange notes on breaking down problems and I just want you guys to just go for it. Whatever, like this, this is fun to watch.

• 46:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, what's super interesting is the context you're working in is is because you know, for us too with Bolt, we've started thinking because you know, our kind of existing business line was, you know, going, you know, behind the firewall, right? We were like, how do we do this? Adding the inference aspect on, we're like, okay, how does? Because I mean, there's not a lot of prior art, right? I mean, like this is all new, you know, this is all new. So I definitely am going to have a lot of questions for you.

• 47:16Speaker 03

  I'm here. We're very open, by the way, we have a paper on a blog, like whatever.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  The Alpha Codium GitHub and we'll put all this in the show notes.

• 47:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, and even the new results of O1, we published it and.

• 47:28Speaker 04

  I love that. I also just, I think spiritually, I like your approach of being transparent and you know, because I think there's, there's a lot of. Hype you around the AI stuff and a lot of it is it's just like you have these companies that are just kind of keep their stuff close source and then just max hype it, but then it's kind of nothing. And I think it kind of gives a bad rep to the incredible stuff that's that's actually happening here. And so I think it's stuff like what you're doing where, I mean, true merit and you're cracking open actual code for others to learn from and use, you know, that strikes me as the right approach. And it's great to hear that you're making such incredible.

• 48:01Speaker 03

  I have something to share about open source. Like, oh, most of our tools are, we have like an open source version and then like a premium pro version. But it's not an easy decision to do that. I actually wanted to ask you about your strategy, but I think like, in your case, there is, in my opinion, relatively a good strategy where a lot of parts of open source and but then you have the deployment and the environment, which is not right, if I get it correctly. And then there's, there's a clear like, almost hugging face like model like, yeah, you can do that. But why should you try to deploy it yourself, deploy it with us? But in our case, and I'm not sure you're not going to hit also some, some competitors. And I guess you are, I wanted to ask you, for example, on some of them. In our case, like, one day, we looked on one of our competitors that is doing code review. We are a platform. We have like the code review,

• 48:45Speaker 03

  the testing, etc., spread over the ID to get. And in each agent, we have a few startups or a big, big like incumbents that are doing only that. So we noticed one of our competitors having not only a very similar UI of our open source, but actually even our typo.

• 49:05Speaker 03

  And you know, you sit there and you kind of like, yeah, we were not that good. Like, we don't use enough like grammarly or whatever. And we had like a couple of these and we saw it there. And then it's a challenge. Like, and I want to ask you, like, you know, Bald is doing so well, and then you open source it. So I think I know what my answer was, I gave it before, but still interesting to hear what you think.

• 49:29Speaker 04

  GeoHot said back, I think he was, I don't know what he was up to at this exact moment, but yeah, I think when on comma AI, you know, all that stuff's open source. And someone had asked him like, why, why is this open source? And he's like, if you're not actually confident that you can go and crush it and build the best thing, then yeah, you should probably keep your stuff close source. Right? Like, he said something akin to that, probably kind of butchering it. But I thought those are really, it was kind of a really good point. And that's, and that's not to say that you should just open source everything because I, for obvious reasons, there's like kind of strategic things you have to kind of take in mind. But I actually think a pretty liberal approach, as liberal as you kind of can be. It can really make a lot of sense because I mean, that is so validating that like one of your competitors is taking your stuff and they're like, eh, like, let's just, you know, kind of tweak the styles and, you know, I mean, clearly, right?

• 50:11Speaker 04

  I think it's kind of healthy because it keeps, I'm sure back at HQ that day when you saw that, you're like, oh, all right, well, let's, we, we gotta, we have to grind even harder, right, to make sure we stay ahead. And so I think it's actually a very useful motivating thing for the teams because you might feel this period of comfort. I think a lot of companies will have this period of comfort where, you know, they're, they're not feeling the competition and one day they get disrupted. So kind of putting stuff out there and letting people push it forces you to face reality soon, right? And, and actually feel that incrementally so you can kind of adjust course. And that's for us, the, the open source version of Bolt has had a lot of features. People have been begging us for like persisting chat messages and checkpoints and stuff. Within the first week, that stuff was landed in the open source versions and they're like, why can't you ship this? It's in the open source, people have forked it.

• 50:56Speaker 04

  And we're like, we're like, we're trying to keep our servers and GPUs online. Like we're, you know, like we're just, and, but it's been great because it's, um, you know, like the folks in the community did a great job, kept us on our toes and, uh, and there's, and we've, we've got to know most of these folks too, at this point that, you know, have been building these things. And so it actually was very instructively, okay, well, if we're going to go kind of land this, there's some UX patterns we can kind of look at and the, and the code is open source of this stuff, you know, what's great about these, what's not. So anyway, so I think that's, um, yeah, anyways, that, that I think it's, it's, it's awesome. I think from a competitive point of view for us, for us, I think in particular, what's interesting is, is the, uh, you know, kind of the core technology of web container going. And I think that right now there, there's really nothing that's kind of on par with that.

• 51:38Speaker 04

  And we also like, we have a business of, because you know, web container runs in your browser, but to make it work, it, you have to install stuff from MPM. You have to like make cores bypass requests, like connect to databases, which all require server side, you know, proxying or acceleration. And so we actually sell web container as a service. The original, one of the core reasons we open sourced kind of the core components of Bolt when we launched was that, you know, we think that there's going to be a lot more of these AI in your browser, AI code gen experiences, kind of like what Anthropic did with Artifacts and Claude. By the way, Artifacts uses web containers.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  Not yet.

• 52:13Speaker 04

  No, yeah.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Should I strike that?

• 52:15Speaker 04

  I think that they've got their own thing at the moment, but there's been a lot of interest in web containers from folks doing things in that sort of realm and in the AI labs and startups and everything in between, you know, and so I think there'll be, I imagine, a good, you know, over the coming months, there'll be lots of things to being announced to folks kind of adopting it. But yeah, I think, I think effectively.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  Okay, I'll say this, if you're a large model lab and you want, you know, to build, you know, sandbox environments inside of your chat app, you should call Eric.

• 52:41Speaker 03

  But wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, like, I have a question about that.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  What?

• 52:45Speaker 03

  Like, I think like OpenAI, you know, they felt that people are not using their model as they would want to. So they built ChatGPT, but I would say that ChatGPT now defines OpenAI. I know they're doing a lot of business from their APIs, but still, is this like how you think like, isn't Bolt new is your business now? Like, why don't you like focus on that instead of the?

• 53:14Speaker 02

  What's your advice as a founder?

• 53:16Speaker 04

  You're right. And so, so going into it, we candidly, we were like, okay, Bolt new, this thing is super cool. I'm like, we think people are stoked. Well, we think people will be stoked. But we were like, maybe this lab, you know, at best case scenario, after month one, we'd be mind blown if we added a couple hundred K of error or something, you know? And we were like, but we think there's probably going to be, you know, an immediate huge business because there was some early poll on, you know, folks wanting to put web container into their product offerings, you know, kind of similar to what Bolt is doing or whatever. We were actually prepared for the inverse outcome here. But I guess we've seen poll on both, but I mean, what's happened with Bolt? And you're right, it's actually the same strategies like OpenAI or Anthropic where, you know, we have a, our ChatGPT to

• 53:59Speaker 04

  OpenAI's APIs is, you know, Bolt to web container. And so that's, we've kind of taken that same approach and we're seeing, I guess, kind of some of the similar results, except our, right now, the revenue side is extremely lopsided to Bolt, right?

• 54:15Speaker 03

  I think like, if you ask me what's my advice, I think you have three options. One is to focus on Bolt, the other is to focus on the web. Container. The third is to raise one billion dollars and whatever and do them both. I'm I'm serious. Like, I think like otherwise, you you need to choose. And if you if you raise enough money, like, and I think it's big bucks because you're going to be chased by competitors and it's I think it will be challenging like to do to both like. And maybe maybe you can. I don't know. Like, we do see these numbers right now raising above one hundred million dollars even without having a product.

• 54:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:49Speaker 03

  Uh, you can see these.

• 54:50Speaker 04

  It's excellent advice. And I think I think what's been amazing, but also kind of challenging is as you, you know, kind of. We're like trying to trying to forecast, you know, okay, well, what where are these things going? Because I mean, in the initial weeks, I think us and all the, you know, investors in the company that we're kind of sharing this with, we were, it was like, this is cool. Okay, we added five hundred K. Uh, wow, that's crazy. Wow, we're at a million now. Okay, you kind of, you know, most things, you have this kind of the the tech crunch launch of initiation and then the the thing of sorrow. And this is, this is just, you know, we haven't, if if there's going to be a downtrend, it just, it's just not coming yet. Now that we're kind of looking ahead, we've we're six weeks in. So now we're getting enough confidence in our convictions to go, okay, this this kind of seems to be, this seems to be the trend line and kind of.

• 55:30Speaker 03

  I'll tell you what other reason why I think like, where where is Jasper?

• 55:33Speaker 02

  They actually just announced some new numbers recently, like they, you know, they're they're still surviving. They have gone down a lot. I think the the peak that I heard was a hundred billion E R.

• 55:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 55:42Speaker 02

  Then they died.

• 55:43Speaker 03

  Now, you know, there's like tens of these. So I think like, um, the the and their success was phenomenal, like what I I see at Bolt. And and I think like, if if you want to keep that, probably it's, who am I? Like, I'm just like giving my uh.

• 55:56Speaker 04

  No, I think you're right.

• 55:57Speaker 03

  You need to focus because you are like, you are going to see like weeks, I think that you're disrupting their market and you open sourced some of it and they have containers, I believe.

• 56:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:08Speaker 03

  And you you will need to fight. Like, I can tell you that when we open source, I I share with you like a small competitor. But I can tell you, I have a friend who's built a billion dollar company and more. Like, when we released Alpha Codium, he like sent me a private email asking, what the fuck did you just do? Like, why did you release that?

• 56:26Speaker 04

  You should have kept it.

• 56:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, like you released that open source, like, um, you know, I'm thinking you build some stuff and now I can do it. Much more easily. I could tell you my answer, and I think I thought that maybe you will answer as well. Although like I think Bolt already very promising. For us, like Alpha Codium one is like GPT one. I agree with you, like being open and open source, et cetera, really helps to improve the product, community, et cetera. But at some point, OpenAI closed their GPT three point five or whatever. And that was part of my answer, like Alpha Codium is the agent that is compatible with GPT one. And there is a lot to do for these agents to actually get that like moment that we had with GPT three point five, et cetera, as agents.

• 57:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think you're dead right. And I think it just comes back to, it kind of comes back to what GeoHot said, right? It's like, if you want to win, there's no other option than out hustling everyone else, you know? And so I think that's kind of, and then out hustling in the sense really meaning building the best product, building the best experiences. And so I think that's the only way, kind of almost any route. And, you know, kind of open source and stuff just kind of burns the ships in a sense, right? And then maybe that's the simplest way of saying it, just you're burning the ships. But also it builds a lot of goodwill. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot, tons of benefits to it.

• 57:40Speaker 03

  Salesforce are doing that, right? They're now going to be.

• 57:42Speaker 04

  Agent force.

• 57:43Speaker 03

  Or whatever. So you can also.

• 57:45Speaker 02

  We're going to try to get Mark on the podcast and they're good, Desi is good friends with Salesforce. Any parting thoughts, any, you know, trends that you're like super excited about?

• 57:54Speaker 03

  If we're talking about trends, I go back to our original podcast where we talked about like the idea that the software world is like built from specs, tests and code. And I think like you can see that like one dimension are company startups that are rethinking the entire like development environment, like I think like Bolt, et cetera. And another dimension is like, where is their focus? Is it like on the spec, is on the test and on the code? And I think like it's interesting to see that from that view. We'll see more startup and more amazing announcements like of new, you know, directions, new philosophy. So I think we'll see startup like focusing, let's build everything from the spec.

• 58:38Speaker 03

  To some extent, I would say that like Bolt is, from my understanding, you can say. Somewhere in the line between the spec and the code because you start like I saw your demos. You're trying to describe like things like not just in one row because you want like to look like like you wanted it. So it's on that edge between connecting between spec and code. And you see others like, like I think like all the IDs, most of them are are the new IDs with the fork are there. We are like more focused from the test and to the code and to to the spec, et cetera. So these are trends. I think like we will see that and and I think like the the another dimension to to consider is like, is it more for the highway AI for the developers, maybe not even like a technical person? Or or is it for for the enterprise?

• 59:23Speaker 03

  And that also like gives you like different products. If they are aiming for different ICP, different ideal client profile. They will approach this triangle of spec and test and and code. And and that's like how I see the world. And what I'm noticing is that we're seeing more and more of those new startups, new interfaces that is are not focused on code. For example, having talking more about the spec, talking more about the testing. Eventually, I think that that's where the world is going to. Like the code is going to be there and where there will be developers, et cetera. But as agent improves and capabilities of the LLMs and and integrations to different parts of of the environment, development environment.

• 1:00:07Speaker 03

  We're going to see more and more like focusing on the spec and and the test. Basically, like these two might unite, the spec and the test, because you can say that tests are runnable specs. Right? To some extent. So like that's another way to look on it. Yeah.

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  Literally on the slide here, runnable tests right here.

• 1:00:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm consistent.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  Tower consistent.

• 1:00:27Speaker 03

  Look, I talked about system one and system two like more than a year ago.

• 1:00:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:31Speaker 03

  And now now with O one, people are talking about.

• 1:00:33Speaker 02

  We're halfway there.

• 1:00:34Speaker 03

  Uh, system one and and but but I think we'll talk about it again because I think they're totally totally wrong about O one being a system two. So like it is now like in the hype or whatever, talking about that. But I think like the agents are the one that will take us towards system two. And the more. They are aware of their environment and aware of that sometimes they don't know what they don't know. Then we will really get to system two, but that's like a deeper discussion.

• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  It's a deeper discussion. Love the philosophy talk that we had last time as well. All right, so we're back onto Bolt and you know, it's tomorrow has to leave for another interview. But we were just talking about like the what happened post-launch, right? And you know, I held this like sort of emergency council of advisors for you. Because we had never seen this before and I was like, okay, I'm gonna call the smartest people I know to join this thing.

• 1:01:25Speaker 04

  Which was extremely helpful and I'm so appreciative. There's been a handful of me.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  You made a couple, you made one hire out of that.

• 1:01:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, cuz I, you know, it was like, I think I, I can't remember where we were at kind of ARR wise when I, when I messaged you.

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  It was like, you messaged me at like two or three.

• 1:01:41Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  And then by the time we got everything together, it was four.

• 1:01:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:44Speaker 02

  And then, yeah, now it's at. Since Eric sat down five minutes.

• 1:01:50Speaker 04

  But I mean.

• 1:01:51Speaker 02

  It sounds like you'd accelerate it cuz you told me it was like a hundred K, two hundred K a day.

• 1:01:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  And now it's accelerated?

• 1:01:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, this, this past, I mean, every week has been kind of a blowout week as far as.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  Is it TikTok?

• 1:02:05Speaker 04

  We are digging into the degree that we can of just like where all this stuff's coming from. I mean, there's a ton of word of mouth, right? So that you can't, which you can't just like look by refer, right? So just ton of direct, but yeah, I mean, there's a lot of TikTok, there's a ton of YouTube. It's kind of, I think, been a sensation in the sort of like, you know, entrepreneurial, build your own SaaS, indie hacker, you know, even developer circles. And I think too, like our team's been doing a really good job. Our folks just kind of like flipped a switch and like we, you know, people were just working through the weekends or whatever to get stuff fixed. And to the product and you'll see people, people say this on there, online, like today, there's a tweet, someone was like, yeah, I tried this like the first week and like couldn't get whatever to work, came back today, you know, six weeks later. And this is ridiculous. Like this is so good, right?

• 1:02:48Speaker 04

  And so I think there's been an incredible amount of improvement to the product, to the agent, also to like the underlying models too, like Sonnet, you know, that just happened to do an update on, you know, with their, with their release like a couple of weeks ago. And so, you know, when we put our new agent online and the new Sonnet, we saw a huge bump in conversion just based on that. And so, yeah, like, you know, we've, we've gone, I did when we were chatting, that must've been three weeks ago, you know, maybe an average of 100K ARR per day. And, you know, this week I will see, I've said this every week, but we'll see if it holds, you know, it's like, kind of, we've, the past couple of days have been like, you know, half a million of ARR per day, just, I mean, which, you know, insane. I mean, you know, I think today we had our peak, we've had peak traffic, you know, just kind of set the previous, you know, and that's kind of been, you know, every day this week. But anyways, yeah, I think things, things just continue to accelerate, which is kind

• 1:03:33Speaker 04

  of blowing my mind, you know, because it's just the sheer numbers of this stuff are just like, mind boggling.

• 1:03:38Alessio Fanelli?

  I think you, you almost suffered from like the Twitter demo issues that other people had, like the first time I saw Bolt, I saw the demo and I was like, oh, that's cool. Like I didn't go to try it because I was like, I've seen so many of these that it's like, I don't know if it's actually gonna work.

• 1:03:52Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:03:52Alessio Fanelli?

  And then two days ago, I signed up to use it. I was building a Luma replacement, I'm down with Luma. And I was like, man, this thing really works. I was like, and I already knew you, of course. I was like, man, this thing really works. What the fuck? I was like, it's actually, I don't know if it's like the model, if it's like how you prompt it, but it's so good at coming out with like the simplest thing to implement. So the Luma example, right? So first I was like, create a RSVP page for an event and it created a wedding RSVP. I don't know if it's your fault. I don't know if you bolted it to the auto. And then I was like, well, now it needs to have a way to create more events and add it that. Then I was like, now it needs a way to like have an admin page to modify event. And maybe what I would have done as a developer is like, well, I'll create a different like

• 1:04:36Alessio Fanelli?

  admin view, you know, with all the events and then I'll have like the frontend thing. And instead what it did is like, it created like a admin view toggle on top and then like just a pencil button on every page to edit them in line, you know? And that was it. And I was like, yeah, that works just as well. And like for the model, that's probably the simplest way to do it because it like limits the amount of files that are there.

• 1:04:56Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:04:56Alessio Fanelli?

  Can you talk just more about how much of this is like the model coming out with it? How much are prompting it to kind of like be very like compressed and concise?

• 1:05:05Speaker 04

  A ton of it is the model, but I think what's interesting though is you're kind of the baseline model, if I just like if it's kind of like try and put it into like a way if you had to quantity quantify, you know, the effect is the model is like this sort of like 10x multiplier. You're how good the bottom line model is huge, huge swing. And then kind of what you can do on top of that, you can squeeze out three, four X kind of more. And so that's kind of where the realm of, you know, prompt engineering and multi-agent approaches, et cetera, kind of kick in. And so I think, I think with us, you know, our folks, like with the guy on our side that, you know, led up the web container engineering, like that kind of our core technology for the past, you know, seven years here, you know, his name's Dominic Elm, based out of Germany, and he was one of the founding engineers of the company. Previous to Stack

• 1:05:49Speaker 04

  Blitz, he actually was doing machine learning. And he basically had built a Stack Blitz, like online IDE for machine learning. So think like a kind of like Google Colab sort of thing, or like Hugging Face has their kind of version. Back in 2016, it wasn't as much of a market for this stuff. But he had, he had been doing a lot of, you know, training, you know, ML models and that sort of thing. So I just, you know, as we began, you know, kind of dig into AI stuff, you know, over the past year, he's been kind of leading that off. And so a lot of it, I really attribute to Dom's specific angle because he has deep understanding of our technology and how it works because he's led the engineering on web container, but has a deep understanding of how these models work. Going and actually kind of writing out these, you know, whether it's like the prompt engineering aspect of

• 1:06:34Speaker 04

  it, or multi-agent, or whatever have you, you know, that's sort of like that much context. And then the other folks in the team are, you know, in the same, same sort of spot that have been working on this stuff. I think we'd be able to squeeze out a lot more than I've seen almost anything else out there, at least in the term of building web apps at least. But I guess I think it's, I think it's kind of just because we, we have more context on a fewer number of heads at the company. So we can kind of connect the dots a bit faster, you know?

• 1:07:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's part of the issue with the whole raise a billion dollars thing. Like, you actually run very lean and that's, that's actually been to your advantage.

• 1:07:06Speaker 04

  Totally. And I think, and I think we have to staff up because we went from, you know, call it zero customers to, you know, 20, 30,000 kind of, you know, in six weeks. We have to have certainly more customer support, customer success stuff, et cetera. But you know, also just on engineering, we have to ramp up. But I do think that there's a We saw this in the 2021 cycle, right? We're, you know, adding tons more people and it can be a thing that really hurts, you know, the company because you can, it's just harder. It's really hard to manage lots of people. Not if you're a big enough company to warrant a certain headcount of 100%, you kind of have to do it, right? But I think for us, it's worked just to really, you know, gross, grow the team slowly and intentionally.

• 1:07:50Speaker 04

  And so I think we're going to take the same approach here at a bit of a faster clip than we were previously. But to me, that'd just be general advice to startups is like slowly, intentionally as fast as you can to meet demand or whatever.

• 1:08:01Speaker 02

  Part of what I felt like you're in a unique position to talk about, but also kind of what we went through in our, in our call was I have PMF now what? It's kind of what I've been, I've been saying. And so like, I think the first answer is hire a data scientist.

• 1:08:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  Because we have to sort of figure out like from our data, you're now sitting on a ton of different customers and we don't really know the different customer segments. You're starting to get an idea of churn. You're starting to get idea of like segmentation. You already had data enrichment. One of my most interesting quotes from you from that session was that because you were selling to enterprise for so long, you had already set up all that stuff and it just like wasn't useful for a more sort of developer, bottom up centric approach.

• 1:08:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, and particularly because for the first time in the company's history, we're, we're selling primarily to almost non-developers.

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:08:50Speaker 04

  And so everything that we've ever, all the playbooks we had, not relevant here, basically. Right? So the, and you're one of, one of our investors I talked with earlier this week. It basically brought up a really great point, which is like you are now a B to C company. And how you operate needs to reflect that.

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  Which, which is what? I, I don't know.

• 1:09:09Speaker 04

  Which is basically from an analytics perspective, like you're tracking everything. Right? And then to your point, you have, you have people kind of around the clock slicing and dicing data to understand. Who are these people coming in? Who are the types of people you actually want to retain versus people that you know are just going to churn out? And that's okay, because they're not the actual like ICP that you're going for, right? When you're building stuff for enterprise software, the bar is a lot lower. And so kind of from the conversation before, one of the biggest, and this is kind of what we found with StackPuts, which is kind of interesting. You know, you mentioned it's like it's as a startup, it's very hard to sell on prem. Extremely true. But if you can do it, it's like the promised land, because you know, these, these companies, you know, they're Fortune 500s, they can write really large checks.

• 1:09:52Speaker 04

  And so when you're going and selling to them, it doesn't matter so much like on your website. Sure, you want to track the conversion to the enterprise contact form or whatever, right? But what actually really matters is like the, a lot of human touch points of, hey, we want to have a quarterly call after just getting them to install this stuff. There's a whole playbook for that. And you need higher sales engineers that can be on the ground floor and helping people install it. Then after that, you gotta, okay, how do we make sure they're constantly successful? Because you can't access, like we can, our enterprise customer instances, we have no idea how often they're using them. Why? Because the whole point is that we can't see what they're up to for, you know, good reason, right? Like they, they need to own their data. And so the way, it's actually much a very complicated problem of how do you have like build relationships where everyone's getting on calls, they can share kind of the telemetry

• 1:10:37Speaker 04

  that, that they can see within their instance and you can kind of extrapolate that, make sure they're happy and successful. So it's that's, there's a whole art of that, of doing enterprise well, that we've gone and done and, and closed these folks, totally unrelated to doing B2C, completely, completely unrelated for the most part. So, hey, so that's, that, yeah, we're, as a company, we're kind of reorienting, you know, our focus on, okay, going and actually really leaning in on analytics, whatever have you. And fortunately, like my co-founder and I, the, our, the enterprise business of StackPuts was the first time we had ever done enterprise. Primarily like things to the company we did before was B2C. Like we were selling people courses on how to do web development, basically, right? So a lot of the skillset that, you know, I had built up there, I able to pull that

• 1:11:20Speaker 04

  back off the shelf, dust it off, sharpen the blade and, you know. We're doing email marketing. We're doing live streams, you know? So that's it's kind of cool to, you know, be shifting back to some of the stuff where we cut our teeth on back in the day.

• 1:11:33Alessio Fanelli?

  How did you pick the pricing? Because I had to pay. And there's like.

• 1:11:38Speaker 02

  Fantastic. That's fantastic. You want to like slightly like.

• 1:11:42Alessio Fanelli?

  It's like you got to be. It's like you're running out of tokens, dude. I'm sorry. I'm running out of tokens. It's like, I don't want to run out of tokens. But there's like five different tiers.

• 1:11:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:51Alessio Fanelli?

  Right. Which are kind of like token based and capacity based.

• 1:11:54Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:11:54Alessio Fanelli?

  How do you kind of reconcile that and the consumer side where maybe the consumer doesn't even really need to know what a token is, right? Like on that, like your mom probably doesn't really care what an AI token is. How did you structure it to start? How did you come up with that? And then maybe ideas that you have to like improve or like modify that?

• 1:12:11Speaker 04

  Totally. Yeah. So we, so when we first launched the stack, but it's like, we were in enterprise play, right? And so when we launched in 2017, I think we turned pricing 2018 or 2019, like it was free for a long time. And then we had a $9 plan and that was just the way it was. It was kind of like our, our $1.50 hot dog at Costco. It's kind of like this, this, you know, just low price, just, you know, it wasn't the primary rev driver. And we just wanted to, you know, say, hey, pay for some more storage and private projects or whatever. And so we went to launch Bolt again, like our expectation was, hey, we'll probably get a good number of people that'll sign up and be excited about it. And, you know, we're not too concerned, you know, we're just, we're just not, we were unprepared for the tsunami that hit. And so after going online, the first week we were like, wow, this is cool. There's a, I mean, it just kept growing.

• 1:12:52Speaker 04

  And then once we hit week two, I mean, we were just nine bucks was, I mean, it's like the cheapest AI coding thing you can get, maybe other than Copilot. But like, we were overrun by support tickets and it just, and just the sheer volume of people coming in, it just lost the supply and demand. We were like, okay, this is, there's no way we can scale to meet this also. The people coming in are burning through their tokens and there's no way to actually like buy more of these things. And nine bucks is just, you can't get that much inference out of that. And so here's the other thing that's interesting about Bolt compared to like something like Copilot or whatever. And this kind of tied, this, sorry, a little bit of a roundabout way to answer your question, but basically. What we ended up, at that moment, we ended up realizing is that when you use Copilot,

• 1:13:35Speaker 04

  what it's sending up, it doesn't provide a lot of context of your codebase. They try and reduce the amount of context as much as they can. And I think, you know, the origins of this stuff is they, everyone kind of wants this like low price point where it's like all you can eat. So it just kind of, that kind of feels like, because it's like, it's almost like Netflix. It's like, I'll pay a thing and then I can just do as much of the movie watching as I want. And I think, I think that, that kind of mentality, when these first AI products came, it kind of makes sense. They're like, okay, well, we, we don't want to meter it because that doesn't feel good, right? But the problem is that then they're incentivized to not have it be able to capable, like the more context you give it, the more it can do. And that's the magic of, of what we're doing with Bolt is we're giving it all the context we possibly can. And that's why you

• 1:14:16Speaker 04

  can go to it and say, make me an RSVP site. And it does it because it has context, the entire state of the application, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And that's what makes it so accurate versus if you go to Copilot and say that it'll be, you know, it might punch out a React component that's the button to create the thing, but not actually more than that. So anyway, so, um, you know, and at the time when people had bought the $9 plan, they were like, I want to give you more money. I want you buy more tokens. How do I do that? And so our team scrambled that weekend. We just turned it around and just, you know, we said, okay, well, what do we think is reasonable? And, and, and said, okay, so let's go, you immediately double the prices of the, of the base tier because it's just not enough what people are getting on for nine bucks. So that'll be, that seems reasonable. It's kind of in line with everyone else. And then we added 50, 100 and 200 dollar plans

• 1:15:01Speaker 04

  because we're like, that should be enough. And so, yeah, so that, that's kind of the origins of it. And it was, it was people that use it, fall in love with it and they want to use more of it. And the problem is the inference is expensive. And so we're not actually taking, you know, to date on the, on the revenue we've done, we have not really taken a margin at all on this stuff because we're just trying to put all the value back into the folks that are, they're using the tool and just getting the de-maximum amount of value out of this. But it's really key to the kind of the magic of, of the experience. And so the other, the other thing kind of worth mentioning is there's kind of the ARR number, but then we, you can also buy additional tokens, you know, just with the usage based billing effectively. And that's accounting for an additional 20, 30% of, of revenue that's coming to the company. People are actually using this to do their jobs. Like, you think, think about a web development agency before this thing.

• 1:15:45Speaker 04

  They're going in using Figma to make a design. They have to pay designer. They have to like punch that out into code kind of man. And maybe like Copilot can help a little bit with punching out this thing that they're coming to this thing. There's just wild stories online where it's like guy bake local bakery is like, we need a website. He's like, okay, well, I'm going to charge you a thousand bucks. They're like, okay, that sounds great. Reasonable price. 30 minutes later, he's like, here's a deploy preview of your thing. How's that look? They're like, wow, holy crap.

• 1:16:10Alessio Fanelli?

  I'm not giving you a thousand bucks.

• 1:16:13Speaker 04

  But they did. They're they're online because they're like, this usually takes months.

• 1:16:17Alessio Fanelli?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:17Speaker 04

  You know, so some of the biggest power users are people that build websites for a living, because this is the the alpha on this is insane.

• 1:16:25Alessio Fanelli?

  That's almost like the gap, right? It's like, it used to be that if I ask you before this to do a website, and in 30 minutes, you return to me and you give me something, I'm like, you know, you're probably just copying something else you've done before, you know, versus now, it's almost like it doesn't really matter how much time it takes you, because everybody's going to be so fast with these things. It's more like the value. And that's why in your pricing tier was almost like, there's only really going to be like either $20 a month users or like a thousand dollars a month users, you know, it's almost like, who's going to use the $50 a month? Because it's kind of like in between between being infrequent user and being like a power user, you know? So yeah, it makes sense that you have like a big part of like on demand on top of the tiers.

• 1:17:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. And on the 50, there's actually a lot of people on the one. I think it's because it's like enough to actually like for developers are using this to just kind of like punch out components or designs or whatever, kind of gets them enough for you know, kind of in a given month or whatever. And it's been interesting to kind of see the, you know, the upgrades that happen. But what's been kind of cool about the product is it's, and again, I think this is kind of novel. And this is, you know, us being maybe a little more transparent than we should be or something. But like, I suspect we're just, I think we're going to see a lot more of this, because we're hitting an inflection point. Coming back to the Copilot thing. Part of the problem before is that it didn't matter if you provided more context, the models just weren't good enough to know what to even do with it. That's not the case now.

• 1:17:44Speaker 04

  You know, just one, one, you know, story of like one of the first people, one of the first power users that adopted Bolt was this gal in Thailand, who's a PM in a software banking company. And she had an idea for this app called viralhooks.ai, which is basically it's a tool that if you want to make viral TikToks and stuff, it's like, what's the hook of the video to make people watch, right? And so basically she, you know, you can go and like see, it goes and extracts hooks from other people's videos and helps you with like, you know, AI to write your own. And she originally, the week before Bolt launched, she put that on Upwork. And, you know, some, I think a developer in like Ukraine had quoted her, you know, $5,000 and it was going to take like three months or something like that. Reasonable timeframe, right? For an app like that, reasonable price.

• 1:18:25Speaker 04

  The week after that, Bolt came out, she bought the $50 plan and she had the app built within a week or two. And so you're talking about like, that's it. And it's beautiful. It's, it's, and she did an incredible job, right? And so the numbers are wild. $5,000, three months to $50 in like a week.

• 1:18:44Alessio Fanelli?

  Yeah, you gotta charge more.

• 1:18:48Speaker 04

  It's, but so it's, so it's, it's kind of like, so, you know, there's, there's people like when, we've had a lot of people go, this pricing is insane. And we're like, well, we're not even taking really a margin at the moment on it, you know? But also, but when you, when you compare that to the price of actually going and building, the cost of building quality software today, anyone who knows the price of building quality software, the alpha is obvious, right? It's a 99% cost production and 5X faster, you know, delivery time, you know? So anyway, so that's, I think we're one of the first products that have actually come out, kind of proving that, you know, in, in a revenue way. To kind of underscore the point, as you can imagine, we've had, you know, kind of venture capital firms kind of reach out, kind of, you know, curious to, you know, what we're up to or whatever. And so, you know, one of the most, you know, there's kind of, one of the, the most notable ones or whatever.

• 1:19:34Speaker 04

  Reach out and we kind of sent them, you know, you know, kind of our numbers. Actually, it was the investor update, Sean, that I think you, you know, the, you know, the one you saw. Kind of gave them a snapshot of it and they, one of their analysts accidentally replied all on what we had sent them. And with, with the analysis and so on, on this part there, you know, one of the things they said was we haven't seen anything. It's kind of eye opening to see people going to $200 tier on this sort of thing. Haven't seen anything else like that in the space because I think this is very new because of the new model capabilities, right? Where people, you know, it makes sense. Like you're willing to pay more money for this stuff. So.

• 1:20:06Speaker 02

  This is something I've talked about before in terms of matching the dollar amount of spend to the capabilities of the AIs. The chart that I published in the past was, you know, OpenAI has like five levels of AGI-ness. And level, level one is sort of like a chat boss. Level two is reasoning. Level three is agents. Four is organizations. Five is something super, superhuman. I don't remember what the, the exact levels are. But each, you can sort of each match each of them with like tiers, like $20 is like the chat GPT tier. $200 is where you're at. $2,000 is higher, 20,000, 200,000, right? Like you can see levels where it makes sense. I think Brightwave is also there, by the way. Like I don't know what Brightwave charges, but it's higher, right? Than a chat GPT and like you have to deliver more value for that.

• 1:20:52Speaker 02

  But you, you can do it now.

• 1:20:53Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:20:54Speaker 02

  So then why not? Everyone should do it.

• 1:20:57Speaker 04

  I, I think we're going to see a lot more of this. I think we're going to see, and I, I think, you know, for AI code gen specifically. This is the first moment where I think that there's been that moment where, where it goes from zero to one. Where it's like, yep, the price, the value, the value is so like of what you can get out of these things is so much higher than it was. You know, three, six months ago, that I think we're going to see, I think we're going to see a lot more of this. Like we might, you know, Bolt is, is I think one of the first things. But yeah, I mean, it's just, to me, it's inevitable that we're going to see many more things kind of leveraging this, this sort of use case and the amount of efficiency you can get out of using these systems, right?

• 1:21:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:38Alessio Fanelli?

  Yeah, because I mean, the Bolt arbitrage would be quote the price based on the query.

• 1:21:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're selling high value tokens.

• 1:21:44Alessio Fanelli?

  Yeah, it's like, hey, it's like your mom, it's like you wouldn't charge your mom $2,000 to tell her stories. But like, you know, this person doing an app and like a product on it.

• 1:21:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:53Alessio Fanelli?

  You gotta pay more, you know, but it's hard right now. I understand it's like, it's really hard to figure out how much you can push it. How much value the person will get out of the thing, you know?

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  So I want to riff a little bit on like stuff like this, right? I think you nailed a lot with the design system, you know, one of the differences between open source Bolt and the one that you have is actually like you, you spent a lot of time on the design system, I think. Right? Most things just look great when they come out, but then there's a whole backend portion that they need. Was that a challenge? Is there anything that you're sort of like figuring out that you want to riff on?

• 1:22:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I think one of the main things, I think you hit the nail on the head, which is, you know, kind of going into putting Bolt online. We originally, again, we've been selling to developers. We were kind of like, this is a tool for prototyping and they'll download their code. But what ended up, we ended up finding in the early user testing was how important the deployment story was and how, and this is something you said to me specifically, like backend. This needs to like backend needs to be part of this, like logging in, like auth. I just to triple confirm, you're dead right. That's been, that has been the absolute number one thing that folks coming to Bolt, you know, are looking to do is build a real app with a backend with billing. And so one of this guy, Mauricio, he's one of our power users. He's like, there's three things that like every app that I'll ever want to build on Bolt, any of these other people in this community, three things.

• 1:23:10Speaker 04

  A database, auth and payments. Those three things, right? So, so that's.

• 1:23:15Speaker 02

  Admin dashboard.

• 1:23:16Speaker 04

  We can do that pretty, pretty decently, pretty decently.

• 1:23:19Speaker 02

  Every database needs a WP admin.

• 1:23:22Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, correct. Totally, totally. And so, yeah, today I think like viral hooks, for example, I think she's using Firebase for auth and database and that sort of thing. You know, so I think Firebase and Superbase, those are the two things that, that just work incredibly well. And so that's actually the point where we're at now, where you know, right now it's, you know, folks have to still, you know, kind of go to Superbase, manually spin up a thing, come back to Bolt, put the thing that, you know, it's like that sort of processing thing with Firebase. Each of those products are going to have their own little quirks. You have to, there's like kind of steps, right? And so.

• 1:23:52Speaker 02

  Boltbase.

• 1:23:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:55Speaker 04

  I think, yeah, I think initially we're like, okay, there should just be a way to like, for Bolt to just go and spin up these things on their behalf and just, and just, you know, both of them have APIs to do so.

• 1:24:08Speaker 02

  I'll go even further, like have like pre-warm instances that you just assign, like it's already spun up, right? So it's like kind of serverless feeling, even as like, not really, but like, yeah, just pre-warm and then just kind of assign it when, whenever someone like.

• 1:24:22Speaker 04

  It's a really great point. Yeah. Just keep, keep one Firebase in the hopper, basically.

• 1:24:26Speaker 02

  One, 10, 100, I don't know. More generally, this is what I felt that I wanted to do on our call, which is like, when you have PMF, yes, you want to invest some time in like, understanding your customers and do a data analytics and like tighten, tighten things up in general, like tighten up the pricing, tighten up the, the cost and all that. But then like, you also have to work on like, what is next, like the next level in growth? Like you can still infect. I don't know what that is, but you know, I wanted to, I wanted to keep pushing you and I don't know if I, I did, mostly because I was serving as facilitator on that call. That's what I think. Like I think you got to still, still keep pushing the frontier and I don't know what it, what it is, but like, you know, I want to hear what you got thinking about.

• 1:25:05Speaker 04

  I think there's, we've addressed just a lot of the low hanging P zero stuff and, and we've actually seen, we've kind of the, the, you know, there's, there's key moments where it's just kind of like been going like that, which has been cool because it's like, okay, well, we, we're just getting started. This is just the, this is just the fixing obvious things part. Fundamentally, I think a lot, what a lot of people are coming here to do is just, how can we just make it faster to go from idea to production? And a lot of is like, I, when I have to go to Firebase, Superbase, spin something up, run in my grid, you know, like at a table, but it's like, the agent can do that, you know? So that stuff should be baked in. Yeah. And same thing with the, the deployment side. It's like, right now it's going to Netlify, but people have to create a Netlify account and go and do that, right? And so I think one of the things we're going to end up doing here is just having the hosting be baked in. And so I, yeah, I've been talking with, with Matt over

• 1:25:50Speaker 04

  at Netlify about this because they actually have a way to kind of.

• 1:25:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, the white label stuff.

• 1:25:53Speaker 04

  Yep, the white label stuff. And so, because people are, they're just going to make a website, you know? And so it's.

• 1:25:57Speaker 02

  I mean, that means also you take over domain registration.

• 1:26:00Speaker 04

  Can you imagine, right? Like a couple of months from now, you come to this thing, like, I want to make, I want to make an RSVP site, right? It's like, great, you know, do you have a name for her? Do you want to, you know, a domain? You're like, I don't know a name. It's like, well, here's like 10 options and the dot coms are available. Do any of you look good? Yep, that one does. Okay, you want to buy it?

• 1:26:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:17Speaker 04

  Okay, great. It bought the DNS is pointed at the thing. Should we start building this? Okay. Does this look good? Yep. Okay. Am I okay to push this to prod? Yep, that looks good. You know, like that's without leaving the product, right?

• 1:26:30Speaker 02

  So to me, like, Yitomar was the first to actually say, like, you are the new Wix. I never, I personally never thought about it that way. Wix is a $10 billion company. Where you want to go, you know, because you still have a choice here.

• 1:26:40Speaker 04

  From what we're hearing from the folks using the product, I think, um, I don't even think Wix is even able to solve their need. You know?

• 1:26:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:48Speaker 04

  But, but not to say that we don't want to, you know, that that what you're saying is now we want, but, but I mean, yeah, like, I think we want to solve folks' problems. And I think that there's a huge gap in the market of being able to build, you know, kind of more sophisticated, high-quality software, like websites, in a way that for someone who's a non-engineer. And so I think there's a huge market for that. And obviously, even if you're trying to build a wedding website, yeah, this is, this is easier and faster, right? So I love it. You know, again, coming to the origins of why Albert, my co-founder and I are doing this is, we've always just loved building stuff on the web. It's like this, I, this is the tool. From even when Stack was just the IDE interface to the technology, it's like, this is the thing we wish we had when we were 13 years old, you know? And with both, oh my God, if this is the thing I wish we had with 13 years old,

• 1:27:31Speaker 04

  I'm so glad that my daughter's going to have this thing, you know? So anyways, yeah, I think it makes me pretty, pretty stoked that people are going to be able to actually build amazing web applications. They can do really sophisticated things, you know? So yes, I think the short answer is heck yeah. I mean, if, you know, that sort of market, then totally right up our alley.

• 1:27:50Speaker 02

  The one other angle that I wanted to pursue was also the other languages. You know, you're very JavaScript-centric. We've talked about Python forever, Ruby, maybe. Is that important? You know, like the previous generation of site builders were mostly Ruby shops.

• 1:28:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:28:04Speaker 02

  And some PHP. Do we want to capture that? Or are we just like, you know, always bet on JavaScript and just let JavaScript take over the world?

• 1:28:11Speaker 04

  You know, I think, I think we're certainly with great interest interested in like, you know, other languages and we have like minimal support of Python and some C++ stuff in web container that you can like run or whatever. I think especially with the, with the stuff we're seeing though, it's the language is kind of ancillary to the, to the, to the thing.

• 1:28:28Speaker 02

  Well, there's the ecosystem of like, I want to end up with a codebase that I can hire humans on to do the stuff that Bolt cannot do.

• 1:28:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, true. And I think in that sense, like the JavaScript, Node.js ecosystem is huge and well established. So it's, I think you'll be certainly be able to get people to work on this stuff. And I think the only thing that would be missing is it's like, are you building web apps that where a lot of the functionality is only in libraries that are in Python or something, right? And I think just kind of seeing the applications that are being built here, you know, I think that'd be like data science and like ML and that sort of thing. And so that's, we're not seeing a lot of that stuff, you know? And then, but I think that's like, we're like, kind of more generic approach is like what Replit's doing where they're spinning up, you know, real VMs, you can kind of run anything. And I think they started off with like doing Python service. Actually, I haven't tried their, their, you know, their new agent stuff that's based on.

• 1:29:14Speaker 02

  Replit agent, yeah. We're, we're close friends.

• 1:29:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:16Speaker 02

  Replit has the database, the sort of live hosting, everything integrated that you're going to want to build and you're, I think you're on a collision course with them, to be honest.

• 1:29:27Speaker 04

  We'll see. Cause I'm curious, again, you're not the first person to say that. I'm curious to see how it shakes out. Cause I, I think the challenge is focus. You know, when you are, what's kind of the end goal?

• 1:29:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, Replit's firmly for developers. You're positioning it for non-developers. Like that's.

• 1:29:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. And even getting, even if focusing on a language or an ecosystem as well, because again, the problem is that these things can just break in a million ways. And so part of the, a lot of the work in making the experience better, like how do you get, like how, make it, someone get an idea into their fingertips and live on prod, right? There's so much stuff in between there and a lot of it is just errors that happen and how do you handle those? And a lot of that comes down to having a. Giant database of common errors that you can maybe even fine tune stuff on at some point, right? So doing that on on one ecosystem, you can move a lot faster than if you're trying to support a lot of different languages. However, it's like to the point of if you're kind of target developers, they may not need that level of kind of streamlined, you know,

• 1:30:29Speaker 04

  thing. I think that's kind of where I see the main divergence is that we are unabashedly focused on this ecosystem of for building web apps.

• 1:30:37Speaker 02

  Got it. Yeah, you support a V for ever.

• 1:30:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so I'm very curious to see how just how it all shakes out because it's I think what they're doing is actually, I mean, I'm very curious to see what Microsoft does because if anyone is good at giving out VMs, tying it to a coder and putting AI in it, it's sigh. He's got a cloud. He's got VS Code. They got code spaces. They've they're in OpenAI. Now they've got Anthropic and Copilot. I mean, I must imagine, I must imagine that they're cooking stuff over there, you know?

• 1:31:05Speaker 02

  We'll make sure to ask him. We have many friends from Microsoft listening to the pod.

• 1:31:10Alessio Fanelli?

  So just to wrap, I don't know. Is there anything else both related? I just have one personal question before we wrap the pod.

• 1:31:17Speaker 02

  Maybe like just advice, like now that you've been through this journey, right? Advice to your former self.

• 1:31:21Speaker 04

  Okay. Yeah, at which point?

• 1:31:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. Advice to yourself, like thinking about there are many founders out there with a business where they're like, they're they're working really hard at it. It's interesting, but it's not an AI business.

• 1:31:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:31:35Speaker 02

  And you kind of took the plunge to to invest in this and it worked out for you. Maybe a lot of people are like, okay, like, you know, this guy got lucky. Obviously, there's a little bit of luck in everything, but like, how do you improve your chances? Like, would you say go for it? Would you say everyone should go for it? How would you advise someone who was in your shoes and thinking about, you know, maybe I should have a second product? Maybe I should take this this experiment or maybe it doesn't work out? Like, what is what's the calculus here?

• 1:32:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, we were deeply skeptical going. I remember you do the conversation you and I had, you know, I was like this, I think there's something here. At that point, we had built some amount, but I had waited a long time to give you the call.

• 1:32:10Speaker 02

  This was your moment.

• 1:32:11Speaker 04

  Well, it was. So I remember specifically, the beginning of the conversation with Sean, he and I sat down at a coffee shop in SF. And so I was kind of giving him the pitch of like, you know, I think we have, I think that. I can't remember the exact framing I said, but it's, it was obvious that Sean had heard a lot of people say this exact thing to him over the past year or two, which is like, hey, man, we've got an AI play like this is our thing plus AI equals this, this could be crazy. And Sean, you gave me this like skeptical look and then, and I was like, I really think so. Okay. Here's why, right? And, um, and I think, I think that's, it's actually, I think it's, that is internally having, being skeptical of just kind of going and jumping on hype trains is, is good. Cause it's like, I think you, you know, your focus and your time and what

• 1:32:54Speaker 04

  you're putting your weight into is the most important thing when you're a founder. I think for us, like we actually, again, like I had mentioned at the beginning of this, you know, we had tried Bolt and didn't see the results. And that was like a two week sprint and we rolled it back, right? This, this isn't viable at this point. But then, you know, once we, once we saw real tangible results of, you know, some of the new stuff, we're like, okay, that, that changes things. And I think a lot of it is, is two is going and finding that out for yourself and then going and talking to the smartest people you know, with more domain knowledge on that stuff than you have and going, here's kind of what we found. Does this track? So when Sean and I met and he, and you know, we keep, he and I kind of, he saw it, we talked through it. He said, this is your moment. I specifically remember that because I walked away from that and I was like, holy shit. This, this

• 1:33:36Speaker 04

  is it. Like this, you know, like Sean's, Sean's at the intersection of web and AI and has like, it, you know, has one of the best perspectives on this stuff of, of anyone I know. That put a huge, you know, wind in, in our sails, honestly, of just like, okay, let's, let's go and really, let's go and double down here because, um, you know, we had conviction before, but having someone who's in the space independently kind of verify meant a lot, you know? So. Makes me uncomfortable, but thank you. I mean it. I mean it. You know, and I waited, I waited until I was pretty darned sure I was, it was not going to be a waste of time to.

• 1:34:10Speaker 04

  Cool. Well, that's all I have.

• 1:34:12Alessio Fanelli?

  Yeah. And then on the personal side, you had a baby in April. You ran Ironman in October. Now it's November.

• 1:34:18Speaker 04

  He did Ironman while launching Bolt.

• 1:34:21Alessio Fanelli?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:34:22Speaker 02

  I was trying to schedule the call for him and he goes like, nope, I'm.

• 1:34:25Alessio Fanelli?

  Sorry, I'm swimming. It's like, hey, I want the swimming session.

• 1:34:28Speaker 02

  For those who don't know, actually, I did not know. I didn't know the distance of an Ironman.

• 1:34:32Alessio Fanelli?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:32Speaker 02

  Thirteen hours. Your time was twelve, twelve, twelve thirty.

• 1:34:35Speaker 04

  Twelve fifteen, yeah.

• 1:34:36Speaker 02

  Twelve fifteen.

• 1:34:40Speaker 04

  Give me my minutes. No, no, it completely depends on, you know, the course and just the the person or whatever, right? And but yeah, I mean, it's.

• 1:34:50Speaker 02

  Two point four km open water swim.

• 1:34:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, two point four miles.

• 1:34:53Speaker 02

  Open water swim, hundred km, hundred mile, hundred km cycle.

• 1:34:57Speaker 04

  I think it's a hundred and twelve mile bike.

• 1:35:01Speaker 02

  And then marathon.

• 1:35:01Speaker 04

  Then full, yeah, full twenty six point two mile marathon. Yeah.

• 1:35:04Speaker 02

  It was. Why?

• 1:35:06Alessio Fanelli?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:07Speaker 02

  And you were you were not like a super endurance athlete before, right? Let's like make this clear.

• 1:35:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, kind of a wild, a wild thing. So, you know, back when I we had our daughter in April. And at that time, we were the future of the company was, you know, we were figuring out what are we going to do here? At that time, it was just prior to Bolt kind of getting kicked in, you know, the rebirth of it with the new models and stuff. And so I knew that it was going to be, you know, having having a child is, you know, if you talk to anyone that's done that, you don't have a lot of sleep. It's it's, you know, there's a lot of, you know, but to be a great parent is a ton of work and then also being a startup CEO where there's a lot of uncertainty or whatever. The way I've always found like when I have to go and kind of knock it out of the park in all aspects of my life is is go and yeah, just to make it all aspects of my life. And so I was I just one, yeah, woke up one day. I was like,

• 1:35:56Speaker 04

  all right, I'm going to do an Ironman this year and burn the ships, bought the buy. It costs a thousand bucks to do these. Didn't know that. And, you know, just started. I never ran a marathon at that point. And so I think it was like thirty, forty five or sixty days after that, I ran a marathon. My brother in law, he's that was even more insane. Two weeks before the marathon, I was like, hey, you want to run a marathon in two weeks? He's like, sure. And and just did it with me. He did not an endurance athlete either, right? But anyway, so, yeah, so I was training. Ended up getting a coach who was usually go you kind of online. He's up in Marin. Great guy was on the US Olympic team for triathlons. And when I told him, okay, I'm doing Ironman California in three months, he was like.

• 1:36:41Speaker 04

  Are you insane? You know, like, what are you? You did ask for my opinion, but like, I just want you to know, I don't think this is a good idea. I think, you know, like, you shouldn't do this, etc. And I ended up doing it, you know, I ended up getting it done. And so he was like, okay, like, that's pretty.

• 1:36:54Speaker 02

  But what makes you, what makes you ignore expert advice here? Like, most sane people would be, would be like, okay, I mean, you know what you're doing, like, oh, maybe wait a year.

• 1:37:02Speaker 04

  Totally. Well, I think, and this is, this is kind of the, and the being a founder, right? It's all about like, if you, like I mentioned earlier, it's like, when we talk to people that worked on browser engines, they're like, you can't, you can't build what you're talking about. I think the job of a founder is to, is to solicit that advice. And what my coach actually said, he was right about certain things. There are certain areas where I was under indexed on, like, I was not, you know, spending nearly enough time on my bike, for example. Like, after that, I was on my bike six hours a day on the weekends. That's a lot of time to spend in the saddle, just like, just kind of, you know, and that was like, you know, for a couple of months leading up to it. He was right on, on certain aspects of it. And but I kind of had to look internally and go, okay, like, what is he kind of missing about who I am? And like, what I kind of know I'm capable of at this point?

• 1:37:44Speaker 04

  I mean, it was a nail biter. I mean, going into the thing, you know, it's, you get, and this is the same thing with launching Bolt. It's like, or launching anything, you day, launch day, race day, you kind of go in, you're like, all right, here we go. Like, we're, we're going to find out, we're going to find out, you know, how based in reality I was about all the decisions that led to this moment. And so going and doing the Ironman in like six months, most people spend, you know, the folks he trains, usually it's, you know, one to two years on this stuff. Before you do, try and do a full, you know, it's like going and kind of doing in that sort of timeframe, it's, it's very similar. The same sort of skill set of going and building products. You have to really kind of look at the base reality and go, make your own assessment on it, right?

• 1:38:23Speaker 02

  So. Cool. Very sorry to wrap. Thank you so much, Eric. Thanks for your time.

• 1:38:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.