Eric Simons

Eric Simons is the co-founder and CEO of StackBlitz, the company behind WebContainers — a technology that runs Node.js entirely inside the browser. He is part of Silicon Valley lore for once secretly living in the AOL offices while bootstrapping a startup, and spent years building developer tools with a modest following.

The Bolt pivot

In 2024 Simons bet the company on generative AI, launching Bolt.new — a tool that turns natural-language prompts into working full-stack web apps in the browser. It exploded, reportedly reaching roughly $40 million in annual recurring revenue within about five months on a team of fewer than twenty, and becoming one of the flagship products of the “vibe coding” wave alongside rivals like Anton Osika’s Lovable.

Simons frames Bolt not as a threat to developers but as a leveling tool: in a 2025 Founder Boat interview he compared it to a power drill — the same DeWalt a parent uses to hang a baby gate is the one professionals use on a construction site. His pitch is that AI lets product managers, designers, and entrepreneurs build the thing themselves, and that “how many shots on goal you can take” matters more than credentials.