Eric Simons

AI strategy should focus on deterministic verticals where reinforcement learning can be applied through automated testing and permutations.

"Software is deterministic. When you write code and you hit run, it either runs or it doesn't... It makes technical sense why, of anything, LLMs are going to get insanely better at writing code than pr..."

AI will shift the organizational structure so that PMs and designers directly drive the 'coding' of the UI, while engineers focus on complex, non-commodity logic.

"PMs, they're going to be 'writing code', quote, unquote, instead of just writing a JIRA ticket and waiting for a developer to do it... The winners, at least, their org charts are going to completely c..."

The feasibility of AI products is often gated by specific model thresholds; once a model reaches a certain reliability in a vertical, it enables entirely new product categories.

"Sonnet was really the first model that flipped the equation... We actually tried building Bolt almost exactly a year ago... It just didn't work. The output, the code output was not reliable enough......"

During periods of extreme growth, daily all-hands meetings ensure zero communication loss and maintain high context across the entire team.

"We all meet every day. Pretty much the entire team gets on a call... every day at 8:00 AM Pacific, we're on a Zoom for at least an hour... everything, every day, is being audited front to back, and be..."

AI products should move away from flat 'Netflix-style' pricing toward usage-based models that reflect the high cost and high value of inference.

"Within the week we rolled out just completely new pricing plans, where you could upgrade... people are willing to pay more. People want to pay for more inference, because we've crossed this threshold..."

Look for candidates who prioritize the product and mission over personal ego or corporate hierarchy.

"For us, and even if the folks were hiring us, hiring people that don't care about the titles, and they don't care about... they really are motivated by just working on cool things, and are chucking th..."

Long-term retention of a core team creates deep context and high trust, which is essential for surviving long R&D periods before finding product-market fit.

"Most importantly, it's been the people. It's rare to find startups where you have the core group of five, six, seven people that have been there for five years plus."

A small team with high context and agency can move faster than a large organization because there are no political committees or communication silos.

"The reason for that is, one, that you can have high levels of trust with anyone you're talking to, because you know that they have a lot of context. It's not like this person's completely in the dark,..."

A strong product vision can be built on a 'deep technology play' that anticipates new browser capabilities before they are widely utilized.

"WebContainer was the bet, that we made the company on. Just to be clear. StackBlitz was a browser-based, deep technology play on, 'Can we make a web assembly based operating system that can boot in a..."

Lightweight PRDs focused on key outcomes are more effective than 'beefy' documents that developers might ignore.

"Unless there's something that's very sophisticated that we're working on, we tend to keep them pretty light. I like to just have the minimal amount of context possible, that just ensures everyone's on..."

As AI lowers the cost of construction, the primary value of product roles shifts to problem definition, clear articulation, and taste.

"The hard part now is, now it's easy to build the thing. Now it's, 'What the hell should we build? Can we clearly articulate what it is we want to build?' And then, 'Can we just have the taste to know,..."