The inside story of how Silicon Valleys hottest AI coding startup almost died
Summary
In early 2024, Simons, Pai, and their co-workers probably should have been meeting more with the investment bankers Krane had introduced them to — an attempt to ring what value remained from the struggling startup. Bolt used StackBlitzs technological base — that WebContainers underpinning that allows engineers to work in a browser — and added a simple box on top with a flashing cursor and a question, "What do you want to build?" Before this, digital products like these required professional software engineers and developers to build them using complex coding languages and tricky tools that were way beyond the capabilities of non-technical people. "You can imagine after years of grinding on our amazing core technology, endlessly searching for a valuable business use case of it, just striking out over and over again, how I and the team feel looking at this graph," Simons wrote. A few San Francisco blocks away, on the same day as Bolts hackathon party, graphic design giant Figma announced a competing product at its annual Config conference.