Bolt CEO on Turning AI Prototypes Into Production Code Engineers Trust, the Story Behind a 5M-to-20M ARR Ramp in Two Months | Eric Simons | E311

0:00People are not losing their jobs because AI, at least certainly to the degree that some AI leaders have said it was going to happen. What's actually going on though is it's like...

0:06Carlos: I was driving around and I saw a billboard. I said about your company, that's it. Yeah, yeah. Team was like 10 or 12 people at that time and we, overnight, we just woke up with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of paying customers. Eric Simons, CEO of Bolt. I saw a post you made a few weeks ago that says, best advice is don't die. I think that is so powerful. We launched in October of 24. In the first month, we went from zero to five million of ARR. Back in the day, the whole winning strategy was you have to be hyper, hyper specific. Analytics, prototyping, road mapping. And now it's about a platform.

0:40There's only two ways to make money in the software business.

0:44Carlos: Hey, this is Carlos, CEO at Product School and your host on the Product Podcast. My guest today is Eric Simons, CEO of StackBlitz, the company behind Bold. And I'm a user of the product. He skipped college, spent seven years getting to half a million dollars in ARR, and had a board meeting scheduled to wind the company down. One month before that meeting, they launched Bolt and went from half a million dollars to five and a half million dollars. In 30 days, with a team of 12, things will cover. The pivot that happened one month before the shutdown meeting, why the cloud ID market turned out to be a mirage, his Yahoo and AOL warning for everyone building everything, why he signed the open waits letter, the billboard apologizing for the SaaS-pocalypse.

1:21Carlos: Let's get into it. Welcome to the product podcast, Eric. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to have you because I'm a user of your product. And it's always great to kind of put a face on the name and like learn more about the story behind the scenes. Heck yeah. Awesome. Well, yeah, excited to dig in. So last time we spoke, you were wearing an Ironman hat. I know that you are big into sports. So maybe we're going to start there. Yeah, I have my Ironman hat over here. I can put it on if you want, you know? Yeah, yeah. So yeah, what do you want to know about sporting? I'm obsessed with sports too, but I think you kind of take it one step up.

1:53Carlos: There was a story, I think that connects also with your upbringing. I know that you are a high school dropout and like you've been always looking for a hard path in a way. So maybe tell us more about what is that thing that is driving you so much to not give up? Yeah, I think for me, yes, my parents would have shot me if I dropped out of high school. So I did, I finished high school, but then I didn't, instead of going to college, I started doing startups. And yeah, I think, I think to me, I don't know. It's a good question. I think that, I guess I tend to really look at how I want to approach life, I guess, very much like a first principle sort of way.

2:26And that's like a very, kind of an overused term at this point. But I mean, for where I grew up, the center of Chicago, kind of the thing is certainly back in the late 2000s, you know, it's like you graduate high school, you go to college, you get a job. I mean, that, that's like, that was like the path. There was no other kids that I grew up with that did not do the college thing or whatever. But I just kind of looked, you know, at the time, you know, my co-founder and I, he actually grew up down the street from each other. I think we met when we were like 13 and we learned how to code together.

2:52And so by the time we came to graduate, I was like, you know, we're going to have to pay for college out of pocket. You know, it was going to cost you for a university of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana is like$30 ,000 a year in state. And we were like, this doesn't make a lot of sense. I mean, we're making that, I think it was like, maybe we're making 50 bucks an hour at that time at 17 or 18 writing software. And so to me, it just seemed kind of obvious, like what am I going to go to college to go and learn? Like I'm writing software. I certainly can learn, but I can read textbooks. Right. And that's free.

3:20It's kind of like the Goodwill hunting thing. Right. But not, not that I'm anywhere close to the IQ of that character that Matt Damon played, but, but yeah, to me, it was just, it was just going and doing what's, what seemed kind of obvious. And then that's not kind of priced in. Like it's, you know, the whole college thing is, is the default path. Many people are questioning that, which I think is a good thing, but yeah. And then, you know, especially as you, if you're going to do business, you know, like starting startups, it is, you're not going to have a good time with it. You'll quit pretty early on if you don't develop a lot of grit and resilience, because that's kind of the entire game.

3:58This is an endurance sport and it is about pushing through pain. Right. And, and, and that's like, so a couple of years ago I got into, I started doing Ironmans and that sort of thing. And it's very analogous where you have to be going for very long stretches. And it's not even about race day. It's about all of the training that goes into it. I mean, you're spending six hours a day each day on every weekend for six months leading up to that thing. And again, such as startups where it's not about one big launch or whatever. It's about every day you're putting in the work and embracing pain and pushing through it.

4:36So that to me is kind of how I view these things.

4:38Carlos: I love that connection that you made between sports and business. I kind of feel the same way. I saw a post you made a few weeks ago that says, the best advice is don't die. And I think that is so powerful because sometimes I think the pressure is on growing fast at all costs or just winning the short term. But in reality, staying in the game, finding ways to not die is way more powerful and compounds much more than just trying to win the sprint. Yeah, totally. And over the past year and a half, there's been a lot of short-term in the space where there's a lot of short-term strategies being done.

5:15And every time this happens in business, there's kind of these moments where you have these manias where you can do very short-sighted things and maybe walk away financially up. The problem, though, from my view, it's what you're talking about. It's like if you're going to build a business, why do this if you're not trying to build something that's actually durable for the long term, right? Like you got to do it like the right way, you know? because otherwise it's pretty high risk endeavor for you and certainly for anyone else that's working for you, right? So yeah, so that to me is that, you know, I think business in life, it's, you know, kind of the Naval quote of like, you know, play long-term games with long-term people, right?

5:51Like I think that's just, you know, it's a good quote and I believe in it.

5:54Carlos: Let's talk about your product and your business. I mean, even your current company is called Bolt, but it wasn't the original name, right? StackBlitz was the original name and you actually started the company before AI was mainstream. So tell me a little bit more about that major pivot that you had to do in 2014 to kind of take the AI tailwinds and make sure that you are in the position that you are today with a scale of like$700 million in valuation. Yeah. I mean, so yeah, we've been around. So we started StackBlitz, which is the underlying company behind Bolt. We had started in 2017. And the insight we had there was the browsers have become very powerful.

6:29and we realized that it seemed like it was technologically possible to bring like full stack web development to the web. So in the same way that Figma had brought design to the web for the first time, the idea that you could come just in a browser, you don't have to download anything. You could actually be building real software, like real full stack applications from a browser tab. That was possible for the first time. And we wrote this really cool technology. We basically wrote an operating system that runs in WebAssembly in your browser. Very nerdy stuff, but no one had ever done it before.

6:58And it took us, I think, three, four years to build that technology. We launched it in 2021. This was in the cloud IDE market. And at that time, in late 2010s, early 2020s, there's all this hype around cloud IDEs. But it ended up being a mirage of a market where there was a lot of hype, but people weren't willing to spend money. Developers were very happy with their local environments. And so fast forward to 2024, us and all the other cloud IE companies were on the rocks. We had, you know, had to figure out what we were going to do. And, you know, for us, we had set the target of we got to inflect revenue.

7:35We got to prove that this is a venture scale business here. Otherwise, we need to start winding this thing down by the end of the year. And so through 2024, we tried out a whole bunch of different ideas of different kind of product shapes that we thought, you know, would be interesting and, you know, customers would like and et cetera. And none of them worked. And Bolt was actually the last product idea that we tried. And we launched in October of 24. Our board meeting was one month later where we were going to start spitting down the company. And in the first month, we went from zero to five million of ARR.

8:08You know, before that, we had spent seven years getting to 500K, 0.5 million of ARR. And then in 30 days, we went from, you know, 0.5 to 5.5 million of ARR, right? And then the month after, we went from, you know, 5.5 to 20.5 or something. So it was just like crazy, right? And our team was like 10 or 12 people at that time. And we, overnight, we just woke up with, you know, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of paying customers. So it was growing into that scale was insane. But that's kind of the story of how Bull came to be.

8:42Carlos: Speaking of product market fit, it's hard to pick an official definition. But what you just said, when the market is pulling, that is ultimately the best validation. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I've worked on a lot of things in my career and I've never seen anything like what happened there. At that time, there's a number of companies now that have had these zero to X explosive revenue ramps. but we were the first thing that hit the market that had ever seen anything like this. And so in the AI era, there's now been more of these, but to be the first one was an interesting experience because we were going and talking to people.

9:20Because normally you have the playbook to grow at the team of a company that's at 20 million of ARR. Usually you have minimum two years to like prepare for that. And that happened in two months for us. And so it was just, there were no playbooks. And so, you know, we ended up, you know, having to create new playbooks on how to deal with this sort of scale this quickly. So it was a fun and very challenging experience, actually.

9:46Carlos: So moving forward, you raised over$100 million, valuation of around 700 million, right? So what is the current state of your business? Yeah, I mean, I think for us, We're very focused on, when we first launched, we had lots of different types of customers using the product. And so what we've gotten very focused on is actually how do we really help very specific types of users and workflows? And so PMs and product folks are actually one of the key ones, right? And so really going and focusing on the B2B side of the business and doing a really great job of the product development workflows that folks use on Bolt.

10:22That's been a key focal point for us. So I think our B2B revenue year over year is like 10x. And so it's just, that's the fastest growing segment of revenue for the company. That's where we've been focusing all of our time.

10:34Carlos: So as I think about the category that you, in a way, pioneered, is cloud ID is then turned into some sort of AI prototyping tools, then evolved into full-on vibe coding end-to-end tools. What is the current state? And what do you think this is going? Yeah. Yeah, for vibe coding in general, you mean? Yeah, because I see that a lot of these companies, like in your category, they're just allowing users to prototype something, right? That looked cute. It was more of a demo. But then you evolved into a real solution that allows deployment into production. So it's not a toy anymore. This actually works.

11:10Carlos: So first of all, I want to learn more about what's going on with this. And then what do you think this is going next? Yeah, for sure. I think that a lot, to me, I think a lot of the core use cases that you're describing that we see today, I think those are going to continue to happen here. I think there's going to be a lot more depth to the workflows on some of these things. So, for example, the idea that you want to go in, like, as a product, like a PM or a designer, like, I want to be able to go rapidly iterate on how the experience should feel. It's actually useful to do that in an environment that is detached from your production environment because it's way faster to just iterate, get that feedback, et cetera.

11:49But the problem, though, is if you're going to do it outside of your production code base, how do you actually marry that back into the production code base in a way that your engineering team signs off on? And so this is stuff that we've been working on on our side of creating a very seamless connection of using the exact production components, having a very seamless handoff flow to developers where it automatically pulls in your changes and can code it, et cetera. So I think we're going to see more depth of integrations and workflows that really pave out those sorts of experiences there. On the flip side too of what you're saying, we have a lot of entrepreneurs that use our product to build their businesses.

12:27And so enabling people to, we have lots of entrepreneurs that are generating millions of dollars, et cetera, on our product. But how do you further enable people to do that? What are the types of applications that they are trying to make or maybe that they would want to make? And making our agent the best in the world at doing those things. And those are kind of intertwined because what is a prototype but a proposal to ship functionality into your real production code base? And perhaps that production code base is in Bolt or perhaps it's not. But yeah, I think that's kind of how we're seeing these things evolve.

13:03Carlos: And I see the competitive landscape evolving that way. I think the analogy here is in LLMs, CharGPT got the first mover advantage and kind of grew within consumer, while then Anthropic grew within enterprise. And now, of course, they are converging, but they kind of pick lanes at the beginning. In your world, the Vive coding world, and you see the other company like Redbleed, Lovable, and there's always new ones popping up like mushrooms, right? So how do you position your product? It's a really good question. And this has been over the past year, I think it was a year ago, when we really made the decision to really orient more towards people who were building products professionally at businesses versus there's a lot of people that are excited about AI.

13:50It's super cool. There's a lot of consumers. I'll just comment, general consumers are very excited about AI. Maybe they've had an idea for a long time, et cetera. And we have a lot of people that come to Bolt for that. But the way that I view it is we want to build tools that help people that are professional builders of products, that's PMs, designers, engineers, et cetera, to really raise the ceiling of what they can do and remove complexity of even if instead of having to use coding agents like in a CLI or whatever, how can we help you go from A to Z as fast as possible? And so I think that focus is actually, When we go into our conversations on the sales side, obviously, all the other players, including the Frontier Labs, there's kind of bake-offs that happen.

14:41But this is really where the importance, and just generally for startups, the importance of really going deep on a specific ICP and workflows really matters because that's where we went. because we just have a level of depth on certain workflows and capabilities, especially for product builders that the other guys don't because they're going very broad, right? So it's your analogy of like open AI anthropic. We're taking a very anthropic type approach to this where we're really trying to make certain types of users and workflows within B2B type usage insanely great. And we're not just spraying hundreds of millions of dollars at everything on the consumer side or whatever, Javier.

15:25Carlos: Yeah, I think that's an interesting dichotomy. On the one hand, you want to grow the market, the addressable market or the category by expanding, but at the same time, you want to be remembered by something very specific that you do very, very well. And I noticed that you recently launched slides capability. Right now, you can also create interactive slides. That's awesome. You're also launching templates to make it easier for people to build apps, but that also creates new pockets of competition, right? Like the canvas of the world, the gammas of the world. Now they suddenly become, I don't know, frenemies in a way because you probably integrate with them, right?

15:59Carlos: So how are you thinking about that? Yeah, it was fine. I was on a podcast with one of the Gamma founders a week or two. It was the week we launched Slides. And he was like, yeah, yeah, I saw you guys launched a Slides thing like live on the podcast. And I kind of forgot that we had launched because for us it was just, it's like a fun project we made where we made it for ourselves. and it's not like we're not trying to get into the business of slides you know like like where that's like the big thing we do um but we we ended up talking on the podcast me and him about this where uh it kind of everyone's competing with everyone what i said to him on on that podcast which i'll repeat here is i don't think it's bad like for us like we we i think we added some unique uh ideas into the mix as far as slides go um and and i think that the reason we even launched it It's just as a product, if you're an innovative company, you're going to have ideas and you want to put them out there.

16:48And if you've got the cycles to do it, you know, it's fun. And we open sourced it too. It's not like it's this closed source thing. But I look back at the dot-com era. There was a lot of this sort of thinking going on where everyone was competing with everyone on everything and everyone was trying to do everything. Where like back then it was like portals, like Yahoo and AOL, like your portal. Like, oh, it's like media is coming to the internet. We have to have media. Like people need it. Like the homepage of the internet. we need to be Yahoo or AOL. And like, we're going to do all these. Oh yeah.

17:14Search is just this tiny box up there, but it's the portal. Right. Except that, no, that tiny box is, it was the juggernaut. Like that was that, that focal point, like Google was like all this other stuff, forget it. Just the input box. How do we make that thing insanely good and the best in the world? And that, and that was, that was actually, it was underneath the other guy's noses. Right. But they were so unfocused that, that they, they completely missed it. And, and that's, that to me is I think the era that we're in, I just, I look back historically and, and, and, and maybe this time is different, but, but to me, the comps, the comps don't track, right?

17:51The comps to me go, we're in the middle of this. And so it may seem like this time's different until, until it's clear that this time isn't different and certain companies break away because they actually focused. Right. And so that to me is kind of, and that's how we view our product strategy. And it's not to say that we won't do things that we won't release things that would be competitive with gamma or whatever, but it's like, even on this podcast, like I think both sides is cool. It's open source. You can use it with any agent. On the flip side, I don't know what Gama's feature suite. They've certainly got a ton of stuff that we don't, that we probably never will, right?

18:24And that's cool. Like that's why you would want to use those guys or whatever. I don't know what those things are, but there's no, that's their entire product. Surely there's depth, right? And the positioning,

18:33Carlos: I think is also very clear in each of the products, right? Like you're starting from a bi-coding solution for PMs and engineers when the other one started more as a solution for marketers. Eventually, there's some points of conversion, but that doesn't mean that you don't have your own identity. I've seen this movie play out even in the product tech category. It didn't even exist. Like there were, I don't know, Optimizely was doing A-B testing for marketers. And then you had like, I don't know, designers using Photoshop. And suddenly you start seeing tools that are being created specifically for PMs.

19:00Carlos: And back in the day, the whole winning strategy was you have to be hyper, hyper specific, like analytics, prototyping, road mapping. And now it's about a platform. Instead of portal, now the game is the only one platform. Everybody's overlapping. At the same time, they're also integrating because they're assuming that a lot of these enterprises are probably using different point solutions and the winner, in a way, needs to allow the data to flow. Yeah. It reminds me of the quote from the old Netscape CEO. His name slips my mind, but he said there's only two ways to make money in the software business, bundling and unbundling, right?

19:34And these things go in phases, right? Where bundling will happen and then unbundling. Streaming services are an excellent example of this. Where Netflix really rose to prominence by bundling. It was like, okay, I don't have to buy all these subscriptions. And now there is a whole bunch of streaming services. And so everything's getting unbundled. So I think these things kind of go in phases. And typically the unbundling, it becomes clear that the unbundling is where the value is going to be. once there's too much bundling going on, right? Like that's kind of the issue. And that's kind of, I think we're approaching that in the market, if not already.

20:17Yeah, I think in some senses, we're already there in certain parts of these things, but yeah.

20:23Carlos: Another thing you mentioned briefly is open source. And I think that is a big deal here. You recently signed the Open Waits letter created by Microsoft. and I know you connect with so many different models. I want to hear more about your take. Yeah, I think, so StackBuds is a company and we've been like deeply, deeply invested in open source software, you know, for, since we were founded. And that's not even just lip service. I mean, we've put substantial amounts of money even when we were not profitable behind open source and backed, like, you know, there's a project called Vite, which is pretty much how everyone does web development these days.

20:59I mean, we were the earliest backer of that. We hired people onto our team to just work on that thing full time and open source. So like this is, you know, there's there there as far as, you know, our roots to this stuff. And you look at like the open weights models. It's key that these things remain available and usable to all companies and all people around the world. And there's kind of a number of reasons for this, right? But again, I looked at past parallels, maybe similarly match the situation, I think, back to the 90s with Windows versus Linux. And if the amount of innovation that has come, by the way, Windows is fine.

21:41Windows is used everywhere, right? Windows is doing great, right? And they've added a lot of value to this world. Boy, Linux has been a workhorse, right, for how the hyperscalers that we have, like our ability to spin up micro VMs, blah, blah, blah, everything, right? And back then, these same things were being said where, hey, Linux maybe should be outlawed, like crazy stuff, in retrospect, crazy stuff. And it reminds me a lot of now. And so I think that if you want to fast forward 10, 20 years and kind of look back, like where's the bulk of the world's innovation? What's it being powered by?

22:14I would be surprised if open-weight models were not a key pillar of that story. And I think just geopolitically, I think it's a very bad idea for us to, you know, if we were to try and bifurcate, which it does not appear we are doing this at this point. But if Western countries were to try and bifurcate, the open-source models coming from non-Western states, right? The availability of them within Western states and enforcing use of frontier labs, that tends to not be a good recipe for how, at a national level, how countries get to actually play to win. Right. And you see a lot of great companies in the States that are that are doing really incredible things with these open models.

22:54And that's it's exciting to me because there's some companies I've talked to recently that are doing really great research on how to like, you know, how to optimize open source models to run at a fraction of the cost. You know, like 90 percent, like you imagine running Kimi K3 at one tenth the current price. Right. And it's it's possible to do. It's a possible problem, if not 90%, 80 % off of what the list price is. But that's because they have access to the weights. If you don't have access to open model weights that people can use, no innovation happens. And if those guys crack that nut, I mean, that's going to be transformative for the level of ubiquitous access to these models and the degree to which people can affordably use these things.

23:38So to me, it's unfathomable that we would cut off that sort of innovation, but that's what would happen if open-weight models were not permitted to be used.

23:49Carlos: The way I think about this is it's much riskier to not participate in the open source game than participating in it. And I think about your product as an application layer on top of a ton of models, right? And I trust you to, in some cases, make the right decision to pick the models that are optimizing for my use case, as well as for my price sensibility. Yep, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And I think price is a really important thing where the open weights models are allowing us to give more value to our customers at a lower price. Right. And so it's just you're hurting customers. You're hurting the people that are trying to use AI if these sorts of models can't be used.

24:31Right. And of course, the ability for us to actually use our own data to better tune the open weights models out there so that it better fits the workloads that our customers are doing. Obviously, Cursor has been the phenomenal example of this with their Composer models. But that moves the needle. That moves the needle. It's a way better experience at a fraction of the price.

24:50Carlos: So how are you thinking about pricing for your own product? Good question. I mean, I think for us, we want to get really aggressive on the pricing. Again, I think that the big sea change happening here is the open source models are really catching up with the labs. And there's a very tiny, I wouldn't even call it last mile at this point, but it's like there's a last bit of distance to really kind of marry these things where we can provide the same level of experience. Right. But, you know, this we're in a couple, some number of weeks from now, we're going to be rolling out some stuff that will be our first foray into this where, you know, we can we can go and offer stuff at price points that just would not have been possible before while providing a great experience.

25:28But that to us is we're all in giving our users the most bang for buck. And that's kind of from the get-go for us. That's always how we've approached this is like when we figure out ways where we can reduce costs, right? Which is always a top concern for us, not just for us as a business, but it's actually really more like, hey, how can we actually make this a better economical decision for the folks using the product? Like we are always trying to figure out how we can make this better and more affordable.

25:53Carlos: Speaking of pricing and being aggressive, the other day I was driving around and I saw a billboard. your company that said buy SaaS or let me, sorry, SaaS. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you hear your take on the SaaSpocalypse, right? And how these previous pricing models are probably not going to cut it and what you are thinking about it to make sure that you end up on the winning side. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So we're doing this whole campaign on the, yeah. So we have all these billboards in like New York and San Francisco that say, sorry, SaaS. We're like, we're apologizing for the SaaSpocalypse.

26:24But yeah, so I think, you know, I think the per seat model thing, I think that's the biggest risk point, I would say, for SaaS businesses, right? Is with agents, as agents become more capable, more powerful, you may just, you may not need as many seats for certain types of products, not because like those people won't be at the company, where you're going to have agents that are going and doing things. And it makes a lot more sense to charge based on usage and access and that sort of thing. So that, and that just across the industry, it was, when we launched Bolt, actually, it was, I'm very proud of our team.

26:59We got a lot of things right that ended up being how the industry now works, where when we launched Bolt, to that time, all these AI tools, they all have been doing the, for, you know, for whatever reason, people were charging like Netflix does, where it's like, hey, one price, all you can eat, except in the case of these AI things, if you eat too much, you, we're going to, you know, kind of throttle you and make you come back later. But it was like 20 bucks a month. that was kind of like Copilot was doing that. I think Cursor was doing that. Like all the, everyone was doing this. Right. And when we launched Bolt, the demand was so nuts in the first 24 or 48 hours, people ripped through our subscription was like nine bucks at that time.

27:33People ripped through that in not even a day. And they were like, I want to give you more money. And so we ended up doing was within 72 hours of that. We shipped usage-based pricing where you could actually choose, you know, you could like upgrade to the amount of usage that you wanted. And I think it was within a few weeks of that, Barclays, they're like an investor banking sort of outfit or whatever, mega. They wrote a report that they sent to their whole client base or whatever that said, we think that this model, that this random company, Stackblood's bull, like at the time, do you think this model is actually going to end up being how this stuff gets priced?

28:13And that is exactly what has happened, right? Where all these AI products, everyone's charging based on usage. You can choose how much, for like in the case of like Claw, they have like the$20 plan, the$100 plan, the$200 plan. That is what we pioneered, right? So I look at things like that. I think that's just going to continue, right? How do you charge based on the value being provided versus just, oh, hey, you have 10 ,000 people at your company. And if you want them to be able to log in and use this, they're going to have to pay. It's like, how much value are all those people getting out of this, right?

28:47Like, is the value actually there? Because if it's not, then what's probably going to happen is people are going to be using their agents. They're going to go and, you know, hit your APIs, blah, blah, blah. And then there's going to be three people at your company that actually need to use your product and 2 ,000 that are getting this, you know, through an agent via hitting the API. I mean, so it's like that's, you have to kind of go, okay, how do we actually price to value? So to me, it's actually kind of a healthy, how do I put this? To be in the incumbent position, of course, is uncomfortable, but such is the nature of free markets.

29:20The reason that those margins are under pressure is it's not because this stuff is bad, blah, blah, blah. And what we're seeing is people are not losing their jobs because AI, at least certainly to the degree that some AI leaders have said it was going to happen. What's actually going on, though, is it's bringing into question, what is the value of all these seats that you're forcing people to buy? right and in a lot of cases it was really more of well we have to do it not because we're getting this much value so that's that just kind of comes back to okay well then you need to go innovate right so that's that's kind of that's that's my view on on the sass side of things and we are

29:53Carlos: seeing this across the board right back in the day i think b2b sass was mostly a captive audience because first of all the person who's buying the thing is not using the thing that is already a a yellow flag, but also like usage was only being measured at the, maybe the week before renewals where like all these customer success managers will have to prove, Hey, someone in the company did something very good. Hence we deserve 12 more months of grace, right? And now you're kind of on the hook and you are sharing risk and reward, but ultimately the access to value and the access to usage is right there for everybody.

30:26Exactly. Yep. And so I think to me, it's, again, it's, I think it's just a, it's a good unfattening of margins where value was not tremendously present. Because then you see other, there are SaaS companies that are crushing it, right? Like Shopify is crushing it, you know? And so I think early in the year, there's an over-rotation on all of SaaS is dead and blah, blah, blah. And what's really going on, I mean, I think that there was pending question of, okay, well, what of these things are any of them, do the fitness function of them or are any of them gonna, is it clear any of them are gonna be able to thread the needle here?

31:00And now we're seeing the first crops of these where it's like, yeah, these guys are doing great. And so I think those are the gold standards of what the other SaaS companies have to look up to and go, okay, this is how we have to approach the problem. And similar seed change that happened during the dot-com era, right, where the traditional media, print companies, et cetera, like these sorts of questions, right? Some threaded the needle really well, some did not. But it's, again, such as life and business, how good are you at embracing pain quickly and embracing it and then pushing through it and figuring out what needs to be done, right?

31:32Carlos: Such a beautiful way to wrap up this conversation. Thank you so much for your time, Eric. It's been a pleasure to learn from you. Yeah. Thank you for having me. It's been a blast.