Eric Simons

Eric Simons is the co-founder and chief executive of StackBlitz, the company behind Bolt.new and WebContainers. His products turn web browsers into software-development environments, allowing people to build and run applications without installing conventional programming tools.

From developer education to browser infrastructure

Before StackBlitz, Simons co-founded and led Thinkster, an online programming-education company. He and his longtime collaborator Albert Pai saw how complicated development setups discouraged learners, then founded StackBlitz to make projects immediately accessible in a browser.

In 2021, Simons introduced WebContainers, a WebAssembly-based runtime that executes Node.js, package installations, development servers, and terminals inside the browser’s security sandbox. A subsequent public WebContainer API enabled other developers to incorporate that infrastructure into their own products.

He also helped make StackBlitz an institutional backer of Vite, aligning browser-native execution with faster JavaScript development. The company later established a $100,000 open-source fund supporting maintainers and community projects.

Building Bolt with a small team

Bolt.new combined StackBlitz’s browser runtime with AI coding models, enabling users to generate, edit, run, and deploy applications through written instructions. It emerged after approximately seven years developing StackBlitz and several experiments to find a stronger commercial product. Bolt reached $4 million in annual recurring revenue within its first four weeks, as documented in an Anthropic customer case study.

At AI Engineer World’s Fair 2025, Simons described the technical and organizational principles behind that growth:

• Browser-native software development: Running applications inside the browser eliminates much of the installation, configuration, and remote-machine provisioning traditionally required to start coding.
• Small, high-context teams: Employees with broad product knowledge and individual autonomy can move quickly without extensive management layers, while restrained spending preserves runway for repeated experiments.
• Product-market fit through experimentation: Early user enthusiasm cannot reliably predict commercial success; launching multiple ideas and iterating quickly produces stronger evidence than prelaunch feedback alone.
• AI support with human community: Bolt used Parahelp to handle routine support requests while maintaining public office hours, transparent product updates, and spaces where users could help one another.

Simons also supported bolt.diy, an open-source Bolt variant originated by Cole Medin that supports multiple model providers. He publicly welcomed its expansion, extending Bolt’s underlying development environment to a broader community of builders.