Bolt.new CEO Eric Simons

Auren Hoffman (00:00.654) Hello, fellow data nerds. My guest today is Eric Simons. Eric is the CEO and co-founder of StackBlitz, a company behind Bolt.new, which reached 40 million ARR in five months after launching last year. He previously founded Thinkster, which was acquired in 2018, and pioneered web containers technologies that enabled the full Node.js development environments to run entirely in web browsers. Eric, welcome to World of DaaS.

Eric (00:27.207) Awesome, yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Auren Hoffman (00:29.814) And we're investors in StackBloods, very happy investors. just walk us through like, okay, so you launch, I feel like there was like four companies and all kind of launched roughly around the same time with similar products, right? got StackBloods, which is the bull.new, we had lovable, we had Replit, we had Versel, all of which have very good products, different, but very good products. All of which just went like completely vertical, like immediately.

and so like there was complete product market fit, like walk me through that time.

Eric (01:04.521) Yeah, yeah, totally. think, you know, so Vercell was, think they had the first product called VZero. It had been out for a couple of months by the time that we had launched, but it was very, very simple. Like, you know, as far as the sort of applications you can build, was really more almost of a purely design tool at that time. You couldn't like build real working applications with the thing. And that was really what we, we saw the opportunity as was really going and building full stack.

software as a non-developer that also looked great, et cetera. And so that's why we went and built Bold. We launched it in October of last year. And so we were really like the first vibe coding product that hit the market. And we just took off like wildfire. within, I think it was like two months after that is when Lovable launched and then Replit launched some of their agent stuff three months after, four months after us, something like that. But I think that

Once we had launched, think everyone saw the potential of having full stack AI agents in a browser. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And we were public too.

Auren Hoffman (02:11.896) Yeah, just building, really helping build your application essentially. Yeah.

And people were using like cursor before that on like for like if you're a real developer, but not the same as like building the full app.

Eric (02:26.813) Yeah, for sure. what we cracked the lid on by being browser-based and not having to be an IDE with Bold, it allowed product teams to really build software themselves for the first time. instead of having to go haranguing developers to ship prototypes or whatever, they could just do it themselves. then so that's why us, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (02:33.741) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (02:45.57) By the today, that's what I see. Before the PM even goes to the developer, usually the PM is building the V1 or V0 themself. They get it done in Bolt.new or one of your competitors, and then they bring it to the engineer and they say, hey, make this better, harden this, make it better security, do all the other stuff that you need to do. But here's the working prototype.

Eric (03:07.913) Yep, exactly. Exactly. And that's and you know, it's kind of crazy now because a year ago, I this was it was so new that concept. But now it's now that's just like really the default of how a lot of companies are operating. And I think everyone is going to. But yeah, I mean, that that was kind of the big the big paradigm shift. And so we were really the first ones to kind of kick that off. And then, yeah, there's there's been a number of different companies that have entered in the startup side, also incumbents like Figma has their own thing that's kind of like this.

you know, Wix bought a company and they have their own kind of I-coding thing.

Auren Hoffman (03:39.214) And then you have ones, okay, I'm doing bolt.new just for mobile apps or something. I'm doing like, there's almost like little spin outs things. Like I'm do it just for this particular thing or something.

Eric (03:50.451) Yep, exactly, exactly. We do it for mobile apps too. So it's like those spin out things are like, what are they spinning out of? We've got it. No, I'm joking. But yeah, there's a ton of different like segments. And I think that was kind of our expectation of what was gonna happen here is when we saw how explosive the growth was in the first three, four months, we were like, this is gonna be everywhere and there's gonna be a lot of different flavors of this. And so for us, we went and...

Auren Hoffman (03:55.138) Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (04:16.236) walk me through because like it was like it was like it would I mean not not not to use the pun but it was a bolt like it was literally like an explosive thing like I had never really seen anything like that before like just the amount of the adoption I don't even I don't think you even were doing marketing like somehow people were like finding out about it and just signing up and starting to use it like through kind of word of mouth or other types of channels like I imagine it's just like it was all hands on deck just to like get

Eric (04:22.899) You

Auren Hoffman (04:44.558) computing tokens and things like that.

Eric (04:46.805) Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I we spent 90 days building the product. We had no idea it was gonna explode like it did. And so we were very unprepared for the just giant surge of demand. Our team was like 12 people at that time. And yeah, I mean, in the first month, we went from zero to 4 million of ARR in the thing and tens of thousands of paying customers, again, with a team of 12 people.

And at that time, was, know, Anthropic was starting to scale up their first party, you know, inference. And so we were just slamming into the ceilings of the capacity that they had during that time. And then the second month went from, you know, 4 million to 20 million, which was even more nuts in the second month. Yeah, it was crazy. You know, just that period of time was absolutely insane because we were so understaffed and the demand was just...

You know, so far. Yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (05:43.706) For the audience, this is literally a year ago today. This is kind of insane, right? It seems like it's so long ago. It seems like this happened three or four years ago, but it actually was just a year.

Eric (05:56.501) Yeah, just a year ago. it's been kind of, honestly, since then, it's still been just kind of like holding onto the tail of the dragon because it's, you know, we've continued to scale up, but then it's also going and meeting demand is one thing. But then, you know, once you kind of get to where the demand level was before, there's even more to go now because the demands continue to grow. So it's been a, I've never seen anything like it in my career. I've been doing this for startups for like 15 years and

This was, it's been intense the past year to keep up with the demand and scaling with a small team. And I think we've done a very good job on our team of doing that, especially in the first three months. It's wild that we kept everything online. We had basically zero downtime for the most part in the first 90 days, is like considering the size of the team then, the scale that we were operating at is kind of unheard of.

So yeah, it's been crazy.

Auren Hoffman (06:55.054) It's crazy. One of the other things I think is also completely crazy is like you guys were kind of the first real to explode, but the whole space is exploding. The whole space was like zero ARR like 13 months ago or something. Right. And now I don't even know what the ARR of the whole space is, but it's in the high hundreds of millions of dollars. Right. So the whole and then there's all these companies that are doing it.

of StackBots and Bolt.New being like one great company, but there are other great companies. And it seems like you're all like every week, like one-upping each other. Right? So in some ways, like every, it's so competitive that everyone's making everyone better. Right? Cause you can't stop innovating cause otherwise your competitor is going to eat your lunch. Right? So it's like, and like people are just going to switch to the other. So I imagine it's like, in some ways it's like, it's crazy because it makes everyone, it's like playing in the NBA. Like you just have to keep upping your game.

Eric (07:41.598) Yeah, yeah.

Eric (07:53.267) Yeah, definitely. And I think a lot of this year has been, I think for us and the other companies, it's just been an all out mad dash. Like how fast can you ship and how fast can you innovate? And I think that that's, when you're on the ground floor of like a gold rush, there's kind of this frenzy that happens where some amount of it is warranted where it's like, hey, we need to go and secure strategic,

assets and reserves or whatever. But then there's a kind of a part of the game where things change and you start looking at, you have to start looking at things more critically. And think we've begun entering that phase, right? And maybe a good example of this would be, if you look at it like the United States of America is a land mass, right? When we first got here is like this expansionism kind of coast to coast and it was just about purely acquiring land, it's pure land grab, right?

But over the decades and centuries after, some of most valuable land became only apparent as you kind of dug in and said, what kind of businesses are going to be built on these different plots of land? And like, for example, in the case of Exxon, they don't really care about buying all of the land in America. They care about very specific plots of land that they know oil is underneath that they can pull out and sell.

And so think we're kind of at that phase of the game where it's no longer about this kind of just, know, grab land at all costs sort of stuff. And it's really more of who are the customers that you really want to focus on? Because there's tons of, again, there's tons of these things, there's tons of competitors, there's tons of things you can focus on. You really have to get specific on where's the oil? Like where's your business, right? Where can you really have your unique slant? And so I think that's, you know, I feel like over the past quarter so, that's become...

much more, at least from our view, it's like that is kind of clearly where the game is going. And I wouldn't be surprised if the other guys are saying the same.

Auren Hoffman (09:57.294) How do you think about like, like Anthropic, like almost all of these companies are built on Anthropic and Anthropic is and wouldn't really exist without the hard work that they did. Right. And so it's like a, it's like a building block. Obviously there's open AI, which is trying to build some things also to compete with it. Like, how do you think of those guys?

Eric (10:19.411) Yeah, good question. mean, think, it's Rob, extended incredible job of, you know, really pushing the frontier of AI cogen and, know, and they have their own, they've, started to dabble with their own offerings. say dabble. It's, mean, Claude code is a, you know, went from zero to $500 million of ARR and a couple of months or something. it's wild. I mean, so, you know, there and that's, and I would consider that level of, you know, that was not a giant.

Auren Hoffman (10:40.654) Yeah, it's insane. Yeah.

Eric (10:49.065) you know, big product release. mean, the surface area of that is super small. And it had a pretty material impact, especially on the more developer oriented tools, kind of from what I've heard through the grapevine where, you know, when Claude code came out, that really kind of changed the dynamics for growth and et cetera, some of these other things. And correct, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (11:08.814) And also like a lot of cursor people moved over, right? So like that kind of like stealing from there and cursor was taking from Git and know, so yeah, so whatever.

Eric (11:14.453) 100%. And yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so I think I look at Enthropic and I think, and OpenAI and whatever have you, and I think that all of these companies are going to be getting more into the application layer. think just like outsider looking in, it's like, I think they probably want to own more of direct customer relationships versus just pure API usage.

And I also think that they probably have some specific angles where they think they can add additional value in end user products through vertical integration that just selling their stuff via API would not be able to do. And I think they should. I don't think there's any reason they shouldn't do that. And I think as a startup like us or like Reploader like, well, you have to look at that and go, okay, well, what do we think is likely that these guys are gonna do? What are they gonna care about?

And even some of the other incumbents, you look at like Wix picking up base 44, which was like a very small kind of bolt sort of clone that they picked up and they're doing a couple million of ARR when they got it. And they've pummeled their distribution behind it. And I've heard that the numbers are extraordinary. I don't know if they're true, so I won't repeat it. mean, it's like they're up there with us and the other guys as far as revenue.

Auren Hoffman (12:40.078) Like so because they had a channel so they basically bought something and stuff the channel essentially. Yeah

Eric (12:44.437) Yeah, so it's and it's like, and so then you have to look at that. If you have from our shoes, we look at that and we go, okay, so the

Auren Hoffman (12:48.91) Cause like, imagine a lot of website, quote unquote website makers, like they've never even heard of lovable or bolt.new or replet or a Versailles. Like they're just like, I'm in Squarespace or I'm in Wix and I'm just like making my website, right?

Eric (13:02.645) Yeah, and I think that was a real question for us. When Bolt exploded, started seeing the usage happening. We were like, one of the important signals that we were kind of looking for is are the existing web 2.0 site builder hosters, are they asleep at the wheel? Are they not going to do something about this? Because if not, then that in itself is gonna be, you could build a company that takes out Wix or Squarespace or something.

Given how fast Wix moved and the prowess of the result there, to me, I think in the consumer space, I think that the existing incumbents seem to be not asleep at the wheel and seem to be doing pretty good work. So I think that's the job of when you're in one of of, again, one of these gold rush markets is you have to delineate, there's opportunities everywhere, quote unquote.

But a lot of them, have to be really kind of ruthlessly pragmatic and go, do we really think that this incumbent or this other company or whatever is going to be able to do a good, do we think we can really smoke them there? And the cost of not doing that is very high, actually. Like the cost of not actually thinking critically about that is extremely high because...

Auren Hoffman (14:22.894) It was a really just figure out like, who is my customer? Who's my ICP? because like, you know, in some ways you don't want to compete against like six amazing companies. You want to really compete against one company. Right. And so it's like, great. Like, okay, let's, let's, let's narrow down and let's just figure out like, we're going to just be the best at this thing. And maybe we believe this thing is bigger than the other people believe. So they are not going to focus on it as much. Like I assume that it's going to eventually happen because you can't.

Eric (14:33.951) Yep. Yep. Exactly.

Auren Hoffman (14:51.734) It's just too hard to have like six amazing competitors all all beating each other with clubs.

Eric (14:51.797) It has to, yeah.

Eric (14:57.013) 100%. It just strikes me as not possible, right? Like, think like what you 100 % agree with you. And so that's what we've been up to, right, is really lasering in and going, where are the things where we think that it's off the direct war path of the other incumbents that fits in with this strategic edge that we have as a company, or strategic edges that we have as a company, etc. How we really orient towards that versus, you know, the

a lot of the past quarter or two has just been pure top line error, growth, press, like just attention warfare, da da da, which we've engaged with and done. But when you kind of look beyond that, it's like, what's the real sauce here, you know, that's allowing us to win? For us, it's like the focus on selling to businesses and product teams, for us, it's been huge. We're like, are the number one tool used by professionals at 72 % of the Fortune 500.

None of the other guys are anywhere close to that number. And so, and the retention on those users are amazing.

Auren Hoffman (16:00.398) That might mean, okay, we have to build more collaborative features amongst people. It's not just for an individual. It's like for a team. And then there's all these weird team features that one has to build in. And then, okay, what do you let people see and what do you not let people see? And maybe there's got to be security around that. also like, that's a whole other thing that maybe somebody like at Wix, like they wouldn't build that because it's just like, oh, I'm just like focused on like the small business owner or something. Yeah.

Eric (16:16.97) Yup.

Eric (16:22.981) Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And so, yeah, that's been our angle. I think other people are looking in this direction as well, right? And I think it's the challenging part about the market. Again, there's so many opportunities. don't want to say no to all these things, right? But in order to really go win, you have to, you know, regardless of how much money you raise. You have to be good.

Auren Hoffman (16:46.082) Yeah, you have to figure out, this is the way, this is where we have the clear right to win. We're going to build the best, best, best product for this group. And then we just got to also understand like, okay, this group is a big market. This is, this can get us to the billion plus in revenue. And then maybe we're going to move to the next group or something. Nope. I love talking about a little bit about marketing. It's like, this is a, it's a weird thing. Usually when you have a company.

Eric (17:05.727) Yep, exactly, exactly.

Auren Hoffman (17:14.19) That's growing this fast. All these companies growing this fast. Like the company name and the name of the product is the same, you have Anthropic and then they've got Claude. You've got OpenAI and they've got ChatGPT. You have StackBlitz and you've got Bolt.new. It's very confusing, right? It's like, oh, now I have to remember like all these other names. Like, why did it end up that way?

Eric (17:30.197) Yeah

Eric (17:35.125) Yeah, yeah, think, you know, I think that in Thropic and opening, I probably have a better case for it than than we do. And for us, like Bolt was, you know, this was an experience, the last experience we ran before we were going to start shutting down the company, you know. So for us, it was like, it didn't make sense. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (17:49.058) Yep. Yeah. You guys were running out of money. I remember this. You guys were like, okay, we're like, this is like five pivots into the company, right? At least I don't even remember what we funded, but we originally funded you back, back in the day. I don't even remember the original idea. Cause I've ever just like, you guys were like the super smart guys. You like, you were just looking for product market fit.

Eric (17:57.449) Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Eric (18:11.401) Yeah, totally. We built some amazing technology that ended up being really the core of how Bolt works with our in-browser dev environment stuff. yeah, and so when we were working on Bolt, I forgot what we were just talking about. Hopefully you can edit this. right, yeah, the different names. Yeah, so when we were going to launch Bolt, we had a product called StackBlitz. The name of the company and the product were the same for StackBlitz, whereas a web-based IDE.

Auren Hoffman (18:27.643) Well, the different names. Yeah.

Eric (18:39.497) And when it came time to try out a new product type that was very different, it was the same core technology, but a very different product surface and experience than before. were like, we don't know if just adding a page on our site that we'll let people try it will be enough. We kind of think it needs to be its own standalone thing. And so we came up with the name Bolden. We didn't think much was gonna happen. And then we ended up...

Yeah, obviously Bolt's actually what most people know us for. So we're actually talking about like, you know, let's rename the company and yeah, exactly. Exactly. So we're probably gonna rename the company would be my guess, you know, is like, we're probably gonna align the branding. I think I'm like the Anthropik and OpenAI site, I think for them. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, think they, you know, it's interesting. Anthropik has started rolling over all of their, you know, even their API console is underneath the cloud.com.

Auren Hoffman (19:09.422) Right. Right. Probably. Probably most people haven't even heard of stack plants. Right. Yeah. So maybe just change the company name to bolt. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (19:36.738) Yeah. Okay. So Claude is really the big brand name there. Right.

Eric (19:36.917) know, domain now. They're really leaning in there on that. And that's like recent, right? So I think, you know, I guess it's actually not necessarily unique to us, but like as these different companies are finding a product market fit with specific products and the names of them, they're going in and you know, they're saying, okay, well, this is what we're known for, you know.

Auren Hoffman (19:52.418) Yeah. Cause a lot of people I know who use Claude don't even know the company name is Anthropic. They just think they're using, they don't even know what it is. So like, I'm just using Claude, right? Yes. Yeah.

Eric (20:02.003) Yep, makes sense. It makes sense. So yeah, so I think that it seems like that's maybe a common thing. I think for open-ended, it's like chat, GPT. guess GPT is in the name, I guess. That's a hard one though, because it's such a, know, Claude is at least, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (20:13.527) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (20:17.516) Yeah. It's a terrible name. Yeah. Like Chad GPT is such a terrible name. No one knows what GPT stands for. It just seems weird. And then, and then like, yeah, it's, very, it's very, very confusing. Yeah. That exactly. That's the thing. It doesn't matter. Usually the name actually matters a lot. Like we have this whole theory at our firm that like, like we just look at like the names of the companies when they're raising.

Eric (20:27.401) And it doesn't matter. That's what's incredible. That's why I love it. I mean...

Auren Hoffman (20:42.348) And if it's a bad name, we're usually, okay, they're never gonna make it. Like we just have like a whole history of like smart people with bad names that have never made it. So I actually think the name actually matters quite a lot, but at least, but somehow if it's your, if your product is so good, it really doesn't matter. Right.

Eric (20:53.556) Yeah.

Eric (20:58.645) Yeah, totally. Totally. I that was an interesting thing too with Bolt. like, I mean, we had to cut so many quarter corners when we were building. We had 90 days to build the thing, right? And we didn't have a mobile responsive view when we launched and we didn't have a mobile responsive view really, I think for like a quarter after we had launched, but we got to like 20 million of ARR with no mobile. There was no mobile version of this product on the web. And people were screaming at us like, you

Auren Hoffman (21:25.698) But that makes sense given the personality you're going after. They're, on a laptop. Right. So that's the key. Right. Yeah.

Eric (21:30.685) It does, but we were getting cooked by people on Twitter because they were just, they were taking screenshots from their phones. Like, dude, what is this? Like, this is crazy. Like, how do you guys not have this? But it kind of goes to show like the conventional wisdom, how like, that just rules, know, rules are, know.

Auren Hoffman (21:39.052) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (21:45.452) Yeah. I mean, if you're building something, you're building something on your machine, not on your phone. that's just like that builders don't build on phones. They build on their machine.

Eric (21:57.585) But here, and here's the, for us, we had to do it because we didn't have the time, but you know, you go to any startup and you're like, Hey, we're to launch a thing and like, we're going to launch this product. It's going to be people to make software on the web, blah, blah, blah. People, there would be good arguments of like, listen, if we don't have a mole response for you, no one's going to put in their credit. This is so unprofessional, like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Didn't matter. So it just, the brutal pragmatism. And that's to me, like it's a good example of the naming thing too, is like,

Auren Hoffman (22:14.028) Very, yeah. Totally.

Eric (22:25.648) You know, over the past like 10 years of 15 years of being in the valley, I think there's a lot of this conventional wisdom that's like, if you're brutally pragmatic, it's meant to be broken down because you save yourself a ton of time that would have been wasted or would have delayed our launch and, you know, which maybe changed our destiny if we wasted time on polishing those corners, you know.

Auren Hoffman (22:47.736) Yeah, you might not be around.

Eric (22:49.597) Exactly. We may not have been one of the first to market there. And I think other companies might have taken them too. And there have been companies that have launched. They came out six months after us. Base 44 was one of these. And then they did great acquisition for that founder, by the way. Like $80 million for a single person working on something for six months. to be clear, that sounds awesome. He did a great job. But just to kind of go and show, though,

Auren Hoffman (22:52.013) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (23:10.136) By the way, sounds amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Eric (23:17.205) at time of acquisition, was like our revenue was 10X or something, and he was flatlined. it's just kind of like, speed matters and rules are made to be broken, but you have to be brutally pragmatic to do that.

Auren Hoffman (23:32.18) When you first started, was like, it was like nine bucks a month or so. It was like some crazy low number or something. Right. And then, and then I assume you were like, you were like, you quickly were like, my margins are like negative or something because you're spending money on tokens and stuff. And then you have to like, kind of figure it out. Like how did that pricing, how'd you figure out the pricing so quickly too?

Eric (23:39.207) god, yeah. Yeah.

Eric (23:55.317) Yeah, there's a story here. This is where I almost had like a heart attack or something. But we spent, we had 90 days to figure this out and we had not had a lot of experience. We were just trying to figure out, we, is there something interesting here enough to keep this company alive, like, know, and worthwhile, right? Like we were not, we like, hey, if we had $100,000 of error by the end of the year, that'd be crazy, right?

Auren Hoffman (24:22.446) That'll be basic,

Eric (24:24.257) Best case scenario was that, right? So going into it, were like, okay, well, we have on StackBuds today, we have these, our subscription, we have one subscription plan, it's nine bucks a month. So for the sake of time, let's piggyback on that, let's launch this. And if there's feedback on it, we'll circle back, right? Nine bucks doesn't get you a lot of inference. And, and, and,

Auren Hoffman (24:45.122) Yeah, duh.

I'm, you know, my, my chat GPT subscription is 200 bucks a month personally. It's like, yeah.

Eric (24:54.357) Yeah, totally. Totally. Right. And, you know, and so when we went and launched it and the other thing too is so when we when we went to launch it, we were like, well, we want to make sure people get enough and we're like, OK, well, let's give them like a little bit more than nine bucks of inference to use actually. And I can't remember how much it was, but it was was basically like we were giving we were we were going to be bleeding money on people that came in, they probably won't use all of their usage. And we want to prove that there's demand and we can like adjust pricing or whatever. Anyways.

Auren Hoffman (24:57.806) It's still slow.

Eric (25:26.453) We launch, it explodes. We have tens of thousands of people signing up, burning through inference. They burn through their $9, a lot of these people on the first day or two, and they're like, I want more. And we have no way to give them more. And because we have one subscription plan and we are like, have no idea. Oh, holy heck. everyone, people are screaming, I want to use your product more, I want to use your product more, can't use more. People are signing up for multiple accounts just so can, you

keep going and then using the thing. And so I sat down with the team and I was like, I will work through this, you know, the entire weekend with whoever is around to get higher tier subscriptions landed. We have to do this. And we worked literally around the clock, 24 hours a day, got it done. And that was, and so what ended up happening there was actually pretty incredible because, know,

Auren Hoffman (26:16.302) the way, it's the best about the best scenario, which rarely happens. It's like people being like, I want to give you more money. And then you're like, I don't know how to take it. It's like.

Eric (26:26.633) Exactly, exactly. so that's to me, it's like, rarely ever ask our team to be like, hey, you know, we need to work around the clock, you know, because you don't want to burn out your team. in this scenario is like, this is there, this is a moment that we have to seize and I will do whatever it takes to get it done. And we did. And the other thing too, is at that time, you know, usage based pricing is now a very common thing. One year later, we were the first company to do it. Everyone else before this, we were the first company

Auren Hoffman (26:40.024) Yes.

Auren Hoffman (26:50.754) You were the first? I don't remember. wow.

Eric (26:53.909) for like AI cogen that said, you don't just, cause everyone else before this was like, know, 20 bucks a month, all you can eat, but if you eat too much, then we're gonna kind of like throttle you, blah, blah, blah. You couldn't pay more to just get more. And we were the first company that said, screw it. If you want more, you can pay more. You can just buy more. And that everyone does that now. When we did that, I think the month after we rolled out that pricing, Barclays actually did a report where they were like, this is the first time we've seen this.

Auren Hoffman (27:03.02) Yeah, yeah, Yep.

Auren Hoffman (27:09.336) Yeah, yeah.

Eric (27:21.397) it from the outside in looks like it's working insanely well. We think we're going to see that we think this is going to become the new default. And that's exactly what's happened over the past year.

Auren Hoffman (27:29.038) And walk. So, and then like, so what, what, like, I imagine all of a sudden you have this, like, you have these two customers that are spending just like gobs of money or like, how are they spending so much money on us? Like, did you start like calling these guys up? Like, Hey, what are you, what are you doing?

Eric (27:42.441) Yeah. Yeah, totally. Absolutely. Because we were like, what is going on? Like we had, you know, this, this, just the explosion of people coming. Who are these people? Because we thought developers were going to be the ones using this product that we had been building developer tools. And we thought it was developers were going to be the main audience. And when we went and talked to these people, they weren't developers. They were PMs. They were product people. They were startup founders. They were sales guys. They were, they were like every kind of walk of life. And that's, and that's kind of when it

when things started, it was like, it was kind of like a murder mystery. We were like, okay, what the hell? what is causing all of this? And that it started to click when we talked to these people like, oh, okay, wow. Like this is allowing non-developers to actually build and ship software. Okay, that changes everything because the TAM here is not 25 million developers. The TAM here is like a billion people, right? And which was mind blowing, you know?

Auren Hoffman (28:39.182) crazy. It's insane. At the same time, you're building these tools for people. You're also using all the code tools to build these tools. So you're trying, I assume you're trying to curse. You're using all this other stuff as well. You're trying to call code. What have you learned as you're building this? You're building an AI coding company, but you're also

for other people, but you're also building internally an AI coding company for yourself, right?

Eric (29:12.243) Yep, totally. Yeah, I mean, the other thing too is like, it's all about how do we maximally leverage the resources we have for the maximum amount of scale, right, that we can achieve. And certainly we're using code gen tools ourselves. Like we use Bolt internally, we use Cursor and Cloud Code and whatever internally. The other really key unlock was during that first three months when we were exploding in usage,

with a 12 person team, none of which was customer support. My chief of staff and I were responding to literally a thousand emails a day for the first two months. Just no one else. And I called up my buddy, he's an MD and was in between jobs or whatever. And I was like, we need help. I will pay you money to come help write these support emails. He's a medical doctor. And now he's working full time with us actually. He's doing other stuff with us, which is hilarious.

Auren Hoffman (29:49.55) can see it.

Auren Hoffman (30:02.53) He's a doctor, he can help you. That's hilarious.

okay.

Eric (30:11.605) I have my wife responding to emails, et cetera. But then with this company ParaHelp, which there were two guys back then, and they probably had done a few more people at this point, but Y Combinator company, they're doing AI-based support that pulls from your documentation and from all of your Discord, whatever, to answer questions and support and refunds or whatever. We integrated that thing, and that thing takes out 90 % of our tickets.

automatically. It's the top rated support agent that we have. And so you look at that, mean, if we didn't have that, we would have had like our support team today, it's like just under 10 people, I think, it would have to be like 50 to 100 people just doing support. wouldn't you, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the quality support would be lower because like the thing is this is an AI agent that's powered by

Auren Hoffman (30:39.539) it's fantastic. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (30:53.634) Yeah. Yeah. You'd have this whole office in the India or Philippines. You managing all these people and stuff.

Eric (31:08.665) GPT-5 or something. So if you ask it a technical question, it's like, I'm getting this error. It actually will be able to kind of search the web and be like, oh, this is maybe what's going on. It can actually do the job of someone maybe almost like the level of a sales engineer almost. So you kind of look at that. It's like these sorts of things. We're constantly looking for things where it's like, are there tools that we can adopt that allow us to

Auren Hoffman (31:27.022) Totally.

Eric (31:36.774) really scale up without adding a ton of headcount and allow to be much higher leverage, right? We were constantly looking for new AI tools or startups or whatever that we can bring in.

Auren Hoffman (31:49.23) And part of the thing is like, you are, you guys are in, if you hire too fast, it's like, can be really the death of a company. like yours, like, cause just like having managing all these people's hard, like the communication, you have this N squared communication problem in any company. Um, and so you don't want to hire too many people too quickly. So you've got to bring in all these other tools to help you, um, get everybody leverage. Right.

Eric (32:14.451) Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. that's and I think I I there's different camps of thought of it. But I mean, our our our view, though, is like and we've always had this view where it's like having a small, tight knit team. It allows you to just move faster than going and scaling up headcount. We went we lived through the twenty twenty one era as a company and we we did not take the bait of just raising a boatload of capital and just deploying and hiring people and kind of, you know,

founder status games like what's your office how big is it how many people do you have you know

Auren Hoffman (32:46.798) Yeah, by the way, you're so lucky you didn't because you would have been out of money. You would have never made the pivot. Yeah.

Eric (32:52.309) Exactly. Exactly. You know?

Auren Hoffman (32:56.43) Now I think we Flex Capital, we invested in you guys in 2019, is like, that's like, that's it. Yeah, that's six years ago. It's so long ago. And you guys were like, we talked about this a little bit earlier. You're kind of in the wilderness for a while, like pivoting, doing, now it's like your huge, massive success, right? So now it's awesome. So now we can kind of laugh about it and talk about it, but like, how did you keep the team motivated for those five years? Cause you have these amazing, by the way, like,

Eric (33:02.239) The seed, the original seed.

Eric (33:23.156) Yeah, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (33:24.952) You have these amazing people who easily could have gone somewhere else, made a lot more money, right? Somehow they stuck with you. Maybe not everybody, but a very core group stuck with you that whole time. what did you do? Like, I want to learn from you.

Eric (33:40.575) Yeah. Yeah, yeah. think in the early days, we were really, you know, a group of engineers, they just wanted to build some really cool technology and bring it to market, right? was, StackBlitz was basically a research lab for, in the first four years of the company, we were a research lab that was trying to figure out how to bring software development environments into the browser, like using WebAssembly.

Like that was what we were doing. And at the same time, we were like releasing our products, like our web-based IDE, were going competing in that space, et cetera. And in 2021, we finally cracked it, the technology. We put out the first version that was really usable. mean, developer, like it was a big deal in like the software development world. And the real problem though is that over the two years or whatever after we launched it, we couldn't figure out how to actually make money on the thing.

And for us, was like, none of us actually ever really came, none of us were working on this thing because we actually expected to make a ton of money, which sounds like kind of weird, but the reason we were here was just to build cool technology. And that intrinsic motivation is what allowed us to build and persevere. And that technology we made, Web Container, is what powers Bold, what allows us to have...

really healthy, sustainable margins where our competitors are having to bleed money on cloud VMs and stuff. And so that's a huge advantage that they will take years if anyone else wants to go and build something similar. So I think to me, it's like if I were to start another company, I think it's always good to just get people. I mean, this is like the classic, like get mission driven people, because if you're working on something because you really just love it,

you know, and you're making progress, which we were, you know. Yeah, I mean, you're not gonna wanna go, right? If you're working with really cool people on a really cool mission and you're making progress, it's not just superficial like, man, are we on the front page of TechCrunch today? Like, it's like, if you're making progress, like, man, we just built.

Eric (35:58.485) This that the past month was crazy. We had no idea how to make a file system work in a browser Right, like that's and now we do right so it's like it's just like these act these tangible milestones that are cool to you that To that maybe to others and that are playing different games. They're like what you know, but that's that's kind of the nature of long-term games Right. I mean look at like professional athletes I think that the best ones are the ones that are like I grew up in Chicago during the 90s like

Auren Hoffman (36:03.438) That's right.

Eric (36:24.745) Dude, Michael Jordan was just, he was at practice, man. Like that was his thing. Like he was going and doing extremely unglamorous, you know, physical work most of his waking day. And if you want to be really great, you have to be willing to do that for, you know, extraordinary amounts of time that most normal people wouldn't be willing to. Everyone wants to be, you know, an NBA star, you know, and then to be the greatest, but like the...

Not many are willing to do actually what it takes to do that, right? Which includes just bucking, you know, bucking these, yeah, and bucking the social games that come with these things, you know?

Auren Hoffman (37:00.152) freaking grinding, right? mean, yeah. How do you, it's hard, especially you live in San Francisco, you took some venture money, like it's hard to not play the social games, right? It's like you can get it all around you. Every coffee shop, every, you know, social gathering, every time you look at LinkedIn or X or something like that, like, and obviously you can't avoid it 100%, but how do you, how do you not?

get into, get sucked in.

Eric (37:30.901) Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, I don't go to a ton of networking. I'm actually kind of a recluse. That's the funny thing about it. I live in the Bay Area and I don't really, I don't make a, I don't go out a ton, you know? And I've got a wife, a daughter and a dog at this point. So I like spending as much time as I can with those folks. But even before this, yeah, I think that

You know, for us, like we, one part of the, for us is that we've been a remote company. So we haven't had a giant SF office. We were about to open one up, but even then it's, you know, we're not planning to do to bring up a ton of hiring. We're really going to be using this office and, and, um, you for a lot of marketing and things of that nature. But, um, yeah, yeah, totally. And, and I don't know to me, um, I, maybe it's just the nature of how I approach solving problems. I like.

Auren Hoffman (38:16.972) Yeah, sales meetings.

Eric (38:26.995) I like sitting and thinking on problems for long periods of time. I guess I'm the sort of person when I'm analyzing stuff, I don't really go and talk to dirty people. I like to come to my own conclusions. It's actually kind of important to me, I guess. So I think that's maybe why I tend to, not that I don't ask for help or ask for questions and that sort of thing when needed, but.

I think all the alpha, if you could just kind of get the answers from conventional wisdom and just from the crowds around you, I mean, that would mean you have effectively almost no edge, you know, in finding insights that are valuable, right? And that's just not the case. Like I think you have to do independent thinking and make the space for that. And I think I'm maybe a little wired towards that.

I would avoid networking events. I'd spend more time just talking to your customers and thinking with your team and thinking with yourself.

Auren Hoffman (39:26.934) I think avoiding networking events is always a good suggestion. Unless you're like a sales guy or something. So speaking of sales, mean, you've got, you basically have like at least four things that you've got to be focused on. You've got to be like, you're focused constantly on product and just like making the product better, at least for that core group that you care about. You've got to, you got to like somehow be focusing on your margins, right?

Cause like this is a very tricky world where like they can get out of hand and you have to, you have to make sure you've got a robust business. You can invest back into the business, right? You've got to be focused on marketing so you can put all these new people in the funnel. And then, and then maybe you got to focus on like sick, like enterprise sales, which probably a very new thing, right? Okay. We're at like talk to the enterprise and

Maybe there's like, and that might be a weird product that we have to do, or there might be a service contract we have to do on top of that or something like how, how has all these evolvements happened over the last, over the last six months.

Eric (40:27.753) Yeah, yeah, it's been a lot of stuff running in parallel. So we brought on our head of sales at the beginning of the year. And so we actually, we were going to the B2B side before anyone else was in the space was really meaningfully looking there. And so we've been investing in that end a lot. A lot of our work on like the product and engineering side has been, the space is moving so fast that it's, know, that has been the primary

that I and a lot of the team have had to really, really laser in on and just scale the size of the team and go and ramp our current technology. And we just put out our V2 release almost exactly a year after we had launched a couple of weeks ago. And we've got the state of the art of anything out there now. It's actually the fruits of that labor have very much panned out for us.

And there's a lot more work to do on those things. So now we're at a phase though where, and we tried a lot of different experiments around consumer marketing and versus B2B and all of that culminated now in, you know, over the past quarter, really in our decision to really, really, really laser in on the B2B use cases. And so today it's, you lot of our team is we're saying, you know, we have our sales, our sales engineer spokes.

our EPD teams, they're spending a lot of time with customers and like, how are they using the product? How do we really lift the ceiling with the types of things they can do with this for their ambitions and that sort of thing. But yeah, it's been very, very collaborative and every week is like kind of a different challenge and different insights.

Auren Hoffman (42:13.454) Totally. How do you think of capital as a lever? Earlier this year, you raised $100 million Series B. How do you think of that as a lever? Obviously, lots of other companies in this space also have a ton of capital as well.

Eric (42:29.877) Yeah, I think it's an important one. mean, think to a certain degree, you need some amount of money to be playing, you know, at this level of the game. I think for the scale we're at, simply, you know, that's why we raise, we're like, if we're going to continue to go and meet this scale, we have to have this type of capital on hand. I think there's, you know,

Auren Hoffman (42:46.21) Yes. And you have to plop down, like you got to sign commits sometimes. Those commits are big and, people have to understand like they're, that those commits are serious.

Eric (42:51.945) Yep, exactly. They're huge. Yep.

Eric (42:57.979) Absolutely. Absolutely. remember like, yeah, it was like when we did our first commit with one of our main AI vendors, I think I can probably say it, but I need to double check. When we did one of our commits with them, was kind of, I remember it was like, was the scariest thing I'd ever signed. This was like October of last year. I think it was like, I think we had committed to like three or $4 million of spend or something. was, and that, know,

for the year, for an entire year. And at that time we had like, of A or R, but that's like, know, it's like, we don't know what the turn is gonna like, don't know if the growth is gonna like. And so we were like, I think we ended up going down to like two or three, something like that, where it's like, but it was still like, Jesus, this is a ton of money. And like, God, like, this might be me signing the grade of this, but then we ended up, know, the spend has been like 10 to 20 X of that.

Auren Hoffman (43:28.386) Right. And at the time you have 4 million, 4 million ARR or something, Right. Right.

Auren Hoffman (43:42.936) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (43:49.442) Right. Then you're like, we spent it in a month. Like, yeah, like, like, we thought it was going to take a year. We literally spent it like three weeks later.

Eric (43:57.077) Yeah, exactly. Exactly. so, but it's one of those things where we're looking at now, now from where we're at, though, it's like now the commits are even bigger and, you know, blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, I think that's it's important thing. I think the other thing, too, from 2021, where when we looked around at the companies that were raising these just tons of money, it kind of breeds this really bad mindset where

It doesn't mean that companies shouldn't raise a lot of money if they know how to deploy it effectively and blah, blah. But the problem is that if you are running into problems with deploying it effectively, then you start just doing things that sound good, that like, maybe get you likes on LinkedIn. Like we just hired this heavy duty person that's now going to hire 50 more people underneath them. It's like you start doing these things that, not to say that that's not what a company should do, but you're doing things that are

actually further ahead of where you are as a business. you look at, remove how much money is in the bank account, you product business customers, where are you at? Right? But once you raise a ton of money, the, I think the...

Auren Hoffman (45:07.032) Yeah. They're like, you need like a world-class CFO. like, why do I need a world-class CFO? Like, you know, it's like, you know. Yeah.

Eric (45:12.245) Exactly, exactly. this stuff slows you down because the CFO's job is to make sure that nobody's going to go to jail, which is an important job, especially if you're going to prepare to go public and blah, blah. But if you're not there yet, it's going to slow you down from getting to where you actually would need that.

Auren Hoffman (45:32.27) Yeah. Well, I love the anecdote you had about the customer support because you're right. You could have just spun up all these people. And then of course you need, you would need to hire these, you know, executives and customer support who know how to spin up all these people and motivate these teams. So, or you could just like work with another company that's already very good at that. Maybe they're not exactly what you want, but they do a pretty good job. They can take off 80, 90 % of what you need. You pay them.

Maybe you're even paying them more. Like it's not about the money, right? But now it's like, you just like, you got rid of it. It's not, there's no time. You don't have to spend all this time hiring people. You don't have all the complexity of all these extra people in your org that you have to motivate and give them a career path and you know, all those other types of things. So it's a very, very, and I think more and more companies like StackBlitz are doing this, which is really exciting.

Eric (46:23.711) Totally, totally. Yeah, and to that to me is I think we raised the right amount of money to go and make the impact that we think we can with the money, but we didn't raise enough, we didn't raise it too much where we would be going, okay, we're getting external pressures to do things because expectations are set so much higher, right?

But relative to where the business is at, there's almost like people don't wanna wake up to the reality of that. so I think we may start to see some of that happen here in the AI space where companies have raised a lot of money, but they're finding out, okay, wait a second, this business actually isn't as mature as we thought it was when we invested in it, right? And that's where these bad paths can kinda happen. A lot of the 2021 zombie companies sprouted out of. So I think that to me, I think we've kind of done a good job.

over this past year, but also in the previous years of calling the balls that we actually want to swing out and actually connecting in a way that's going to allow us to sustain and grow.

Auren Hoffman (47:33.58) You a few personal questions. How are you personally using AI, like in your personal life, like with your family or with yourself or hobby? Like, what do you, how are you personally using AI?

Eric (47:44.317) Yeah, I used ChatGPT a lot actually and like Google's AI mode stuff. mean, this is just, know, whether it's, you know, random stuff around the house where I'm like, hey, this thing is, I think it's broken. How do I fix this faucet? know? Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (47:59.878) my God, so good. Like you see this weird error on your dishwasher. You're like, I have no idea. you're like, take a picture. And it's like, just do this. Do this weird keystroke thing on it. Like, wow, this is amazing.

Eric (48:12.565) Yeah, it's like dad GPT. It's like something that I have to call my dad and like, hey, have you ever fixed one of these things? But sometimes I still do if Chad doesn't know how to do it whatever. yeah, think stuff like that. I also think just, I think the most useful thing to me is, this is also as an entrepreneur, but also just as you're navigating things in your personal life, et cetera. I feel like a lot of,

Auren Hoffman (48:15.086) Totally.

Auren Hoffman (48:18.754) Yeah

Eric (48:41.489) life is about figuring out how to kind of calibrate your perspective. And I'll use entrepreneurs, my experience as an entrepreneur is an example of this, but if you're like trying to go and find, we need to hire a head of sales, right? If you go Google that, there's tons of information. You can go ask people that. They're gonna have tons of different advice because it's so context specific to your company, right? And like your exact circumstances.

Auren Hoffman (49:07.384) Yeah. Yeah.

Eric (49:11.503) And you really have to try and find the, much of this advice is going to be useful, but it's going to be slivers of different things. That's going to be then this like this package of context for you specifically that this is like the sort of head of sales that you need at your company for your stage for the type of product you're making. And here's the, and you want them with this title, with this level of experience, because as you succeed, you're going to want to hire this for you. It's like,

You know, and again, some of this is applicable, but a lot of it, you just need to like immerse yourself with what's kind of normal. How do I, you know, and just ancillary questions around how does like, you know, OTE work, blah, blah, blah. Like if you've never done this before, right? This is what I, you know, I mean, like going and talking to a chat, you can see here, like whatever about this sort of stuff is incredibly helpful because normally you would have to spend a ton of time talking to other entrepreneurs, sales leaders, which I think is still a good thing to do. But like being able to just go and

Auren Hoffman (49:49.304) Yeah, yeah, totally.

Eric (50:04.661) get a perspective to calibrate and ask the questions that are ancillary, but help give you a sense of the shape of the problem and the nature of it or and the nature of the solution, the shape of the solution that you probably want. For this and other things in life, I think it's great, right?

Auren Hoffman (50:23.054) find it great for like self-directed learning. Like I'm just trying to learn personally right now for like, I'm trying to learn about tariffs. So I'm like super interested in learning about tariffs, like how they work, what's going on. And then I can start asking questions. Sometimes it tells me things like I clearly already know, I can just like cut it off. Like, Hey, I understand. But sometimes it's like, it's going in a direction that like, I don't understand. I need you to, I need you to explain this more like a fifth grader here to me, cause I'm not getting what that is. So it's a very helpful, like tutor on stuff.

Eric (50:26.248) Exactly.

Eric (50:31.421) Exactly.

Eric (50:38.761) Yep.

Eric (50:51.701) Totally. Exactly. And I think that to me is, that is why I use it for all of the time. And then like what I'm describing to you there is it's like, it can tutor you on things that are so context specific because you can just go back and forth, give it all the context. Exactly. And that's just never existed before. That would require you talking to other humans, which takes a lot of time to go and find the right people, get interested. Hey, do you have 30 minutes like next week? I mean, that...

Auren Hoffman (51:04.706) Yeah, specific to what you were doing. Yeah, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (51:18.327) Yeah, yep.

Eric (51:19.253) That is such a process. Whereas if you can kind of get 80, even 80-20, you don't have all the sauce, but you at least can be 80-20 on the synthesized result. And then you talk to the experts and then they validate and then add their chairs on top. And then it's like, you know, it just pulls forward stuff that would take so long, you know?

Auren Hoffman (51:35.608) By the when you talk to a human, there's some pleasantries you have to have. There's a two-way street. You can't just take from them. They might be asking you questions. It's not as efficient. I can just be cutting to chat. Hopefully, the AI still likes me when they run the world. But I can be cutting them off all the time and start moving.

Eric (51:46.737) Exactly, exactly.

Eric (52:00.381) Exactly, exactly. So yeah, I think that to me is like, that's why that is the primary thing that I use it for all the time because I, you know, I just, I think it's, I just have curiosity about the world around me and, you know, the things that I am responsible for in my personal and professional life, right? And so I think the more that I can be aware of that stuff, the better. mean, you know, as living creatures, we kind of tend to do in play what actually is important for us to survive.

in not play, right? And so I think asking questions and understanding your environment is play, but it's actually important for where all of your personal alpha is in whatever endeavors you want to do.

Auren Hoffman (52:44.878) Absolutely. Now two more questions we ask all of our guests. First is what is a conspiracy theory that you believe?

Eric (52:51.669) Oh God. Oh man, okay. have, there are, mean, there are some, I, like I do want to wake up tomorrow morning though, you know? Let's see.

Conspiracy theory. mean, I think it's weird what happened with Epstein. I think pretty much all of America is aligned on that. I don't know if that's even a conspiracy versus just like, you know.

Auren Hoffman (53:17.25) Yeah. Super weird. Yeah. Yeah. At this point, like, well, we still, I mean, I still think there's a lot of theories. There's a lot of good theories about what was going on. And I don't think there's, I don't think there's alignment on what those theories are. So there's probably like 10 % of America that believe each of the weird theories, you know, and, and some of which may be true. Yeah.

Eric (53:32.435) Yeah, that's true. That's fair.

Eric (53:37.717) Yeah, that's fair. And so I guess it's less of a theory and more of just like, it seems improbable that this guy died on his own.

Auren Hoffman (53:49.772) Yeah. Also like, how did he make his money? Like no one knows. Like it's just crazy. Like the guy was clearly wealthy guy. No one has a sense of like, how did he make his money? Why did people pay him for his services? Like it's not even clear what he did. You know, it's like, it's so weird. Yeah. I'm with you. Like, but I don't want to talk too much about it because I want, I want my family to be safe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

Eric (53:51.209) But, yeah.

Eric (54:04.297) Yep, totally.

Eric (54:11.677) I'm like, I'm I'm like, I don't know if I actually want this anywhere actually, like, you know, now I'm roped into this publicly. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, I know. think,

Auren Hoffman (54:18.318) Yeah, exactly. Like, hey, whoever, whoever's in the conspiracy, just, just keep, leave me alone. I do not want to end up. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Uh, all right. Last question. We ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

Eric (54:24.693) You know, I haven't seen the evidence, to be fair. I haven't seen the evidence. So, you know, like I could have my mind changed.

Eric (54:39.923) Hmm.

Eric (54:48.041) Yeah, I think...

Eric (54:52.927) God, there's a lot of it, right? I just, it's hard to pinpoint one specific thing, I, you know, I guess any, I'll say if you're building startups and you're in the Valley and you're kind of in the hype sphere of stuff, anytime there's some narrative going on, I usually will.

I don't know, I usually will tend to look at it and I'll really analyze why it would be wrong and really try and figure out, you know, what am I missing here? And oftentimes there's just kind of these gaping holes in it. so, and the thing is that people will follow these trends just blindly, right? And so, I don't know, I would just...

Auren Hoffman (55:36.706) Yeah. Well, we're mimetic creatures, right? So we like to copy each other and things like that.

Eric (55:41.853) 100%. So I think just like getting out of the rat race entirely and just spending time independently thinking about stuff and coming to your own conclusions is really key. And sometimes, and then that's the thing, that thing about advice and whatever is that it's not all good, it's not all bad, it's often context specific, right? And so then this, we're talking to AI can help with like kind of delineating that stuff.

So I would, anyways, that's my general, I don't have anything specific, because it all comes down to context typically, right? But that would be my guidance on how to delineate it.

Auren Hoffman (56:17.742) love it. It's great guidance, great advice. You're an amazing entrepreneur who I admire. Thank you, Eric Simons, for joining us on World of DaaS. I follow you at Eric Simons on X. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. This has been awesome and a ton of fun.

Eric (56:34.503) Awesome, thanks, Auren, appreciate it.