Lenny Rachitsky: recommendation

Transcript context

…nboarded, to run that stuff on your computer and set up your environment. And we're like, "If we could just have that be something, you click a link and it just boots in your browser, that'd be huge." It's also, if you look at the other productivity apps that have really worked on the web, they've all had this compute model, right? Figma, when you open a Figma document, there's not like some cloud VM that gets spun up for you to render the documents. You're dragging things around. It's using your CPU and your memory to do the work. Same thing with Google Docs. That's the only model that's ever scaled to a billion users. And so, when you look at Cloud IDEs, like Cloud 9 was the first one, back in 2009 or so. The way these have always worked is that your browser's basically doing nothing, when you go to that. Every user that gets connected, there has to be a cloud VM that gets spun up for them, and then your browser's just taking your keystrokes, sending it to the server, and then sending back the results of it. And that's how all these other AI code, text to app sort of tools work. They're all using cloud VMs. And the problem is, on a small scale it can work, but as you scale it up, I mean there's not even a 100 million VMs to rent, on the planet. But there are a billion devices that you can run this stuff on. Because that's kind of what we've seen with Bolt where, if you want to build a product that's going to be able to scale to that size, you have to look at all factors and go, "We have to build, make sure the technology provides the best experience, zero latency, transient cost." There's a permissive free tier, because the other problem with the server is, you end up, if you have a free tier, people are mining Bitcoin on it, they're DDoSing people using your servers. So inevitably, you have to nerf these things and roll them back. But if it's all done on the end device, it doesn't matter. So anyways, WebContainer was the key piece, and what we struggled with, it took us four or five years or something, to build WebContainer. What we struggled with for the years after that was just how to build a product around it, because developers loved it, but they weren't using it in ways that they would pay money for. And as much as the nerd side of me wished that that would be enough, that it was like, building cool technology was enough. It's like, "It's not. We're here to build a venture scale company." And so that was kind of why we were high at the end of the journey, where it was like, we're taking shots on goal. And at some point, this got a connected bat, right? There's a lot of really interesting lessons from this journey, that I think are counterintuitive. One is, you basically were building a tech first, and then looking for a problem to solve later. Which is often what people tell you not to do. And it worked out, in this case. The other interesting takeaway here is, it feels like it's a similar moment to when AJAX came out and then everyone's just like, "Wow, you can build new things here." So it feels like there's a lesson here of just, "If there's a new technology that has enabled, something big that we think may, let's just work there for a while, and see if something comes up. " And then I think the other lesson here is just, as a founder, just survive as long as you can. Because you may find something that works. All great points, all great points. Because you're dead right. And fortunately, my co-founder and I had, we had built a lot of unsuccessful stars before this. We spend most of the, or 20 times, churning through ideas on things. So when we had conviction, I was like, "This seems like a technology that will be important." It seems like, the web is the most ubiquitous... The pitch or the theory in our head was like, "The web is the most ubiquitous platform in the world, but yet it has no, you can't use the web to build the web." Every other platform, Mac has Xcode. Windows has Visual Studio. The web had nothing. And we were like, "At a minimum, Google should probably buy this thing from us. It seems like it should probably be part of Chrome," at a minimum. And we thought, "Hey, this could be a huge enabler." The vision of just making it as easy to build full stack applications as using Canva, it just seemed really compelling. But when you do that sort of risky deep technology play, you need to... And we were very good about this, like the previous company Albert and I did, we bootstrapped it all the way through to acquisition, so we understood and we were living hand-to-mouth, to bootstrap that thing. So we understood out of it how to have a low burn rate, and take a lot of shots on goal, and make every dollar stretch beyond what anyone would think is reasonable or possible. And that's how we played our hands with StackBlitz. We didn't raise money for the first two or three years of the company's life. We were bootstrapping it. When we did raise money, we barely spent it. Largely because it was like, "We need to just take a lot of smart bets, and it doesn't make sense." And I would just say generally, until you see pull, just people pulling the product out of your hands, you don't want to be spending money. You should be like, default, no. And when you go and buy software, you should be going, "We're a tiny startup. Can you sell it for half?" Everything you buy, just keep the burn rate as low as possible, because you need as many shots on goal as you can possibly get. Because you have no idea. I think just generally, for startups, that's the right way in my view, to approach it. Unless you're seeing, again, immediate demand and pull, or whatever. But yeah, I think that'd be, maybe the extra context I'd add on top is, I think that we ended up doing a good job of being extremely conservative. During a time in which, during 2020, through 2020 and 2021, which were times where exuberance and growing headcount was like, KPIs of companies. And were things that were being... With lot of emotional force of like, "Hey, you guys ought to be doing this." And I'm glad that we didn't heed the advice, because if we had tripled the company and kicked up the burn rate, there would be no Bolt. We would've gone out of business a lot of time ago.…

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