From bankrupt to $20 million ARR in 2 months

She was saying something. Eric Simons wasn't listening. 

Sitting in the back of the classroom, he tapped his pen against the desk, eyes drifting to the window. His absent mind caught fragments, something about chemical reactions, before sliding away again. He glanced at the clock: 3 minutes, and he'd be free. After what felt like an eternity, the bell rang. The young, blond student with spiked hair rushed to gather his things and head home.

"Eric, do you have a minute?" asked the chemistry teacher.

She's going to call me out for doing nothing in class. Again. He sighed quietly, looking the other way so she couldn't see his face. "Sure." He walked over to her desk.

The question she asked would be the beginning of Eric's career as a serial entrepreneur and, some years later, would lead to the company that went from $0 to $20 million in ARR in just two months.

Today, we’re excited to unveil Unicorner’s second publication, Zero to Unicorn.

Every other Thursday, we’ll send you a deep dive sharing the life stories of billion-dollar founders, investors, and operators.

We’ll tell the untold tales of the miraculous founders who have made it to the pinnacle of their industries against all odds. That includes the impossible pivots that arose out of necessity, the years where the product was great but the business wasn't, and the moments our protagonist almost walked away. And expect the highly coveted, hard-won lessons they learned along the way.

We’ll also host regular, in-person Zero to Unicorn founder fireside chats in SF and NYC, similar to our past conversations with founders like Tyler from beehiiv and Eric from Bolt.

That’s all for now. We hope you enjoy. Back to Eric’s story!

Ethan and Arek 🦄

At the time of that fateful day, learning to program was a challenge. One Google search in and you'd be inundated with words like HTML, frontend, backend, databases, React, and JavaScript. Even the smallest idea felt like climbing a mountain. To no one’s surprise, most of them didn’t get built. 

Today, instead of trying to build the app brick by brick, you simply navigate to bolt.new, describe what you want, and a full project appears in front of you. 

When Bolt was launched in October 2024 with nothing more than a single tweet, the internet lost its mind. Over 60,000 people signed up on day one. 

Within two months, the company went from $0 to $20 million in ARR, a growth curve so steep that even seasoned investors said they'd never seen anything like it. Today, more than 10 million people have signed up to use Bolt, including employees at 75% of Fortune 500 companies.

Hidden behind this seemingly overnight success story is years of hard work and tough times. How did they do it? In our inaugural article of Zero to Unicorn, we tell the story behind how Bolt went from a tweet to tens of millions of users while trailblazing a new industry and democratizing building for all.

Long before Bolt, our story begins in a suburb of Chicago with two little boys who liked computers a little too much.  

Eric Simons and Albert Pai were drawn together because of a mutual love of computers at age 13. Soon, they’d taught themselves to code to create games, and the bond stayed for life. 

Not long after, they had already shipped their first product, a cloud storage service for students to sync their schoolwork between home and school. It was, essentially, Dropbox-meets-Pinterest years before either was developed. It spread across school districts in Illinois and the Midwest.

Although he created a great product that helped a lot of schools, Eric was not an A+ student. As he describes himself: "I couldn't stay focused in school, I wasn't interested in homework, and I wasn't motivated by grades."

In 2010, during his junior year in high school, Eric was asked a question that would change his life.

"What would make you interested in learning what I’m teaching?" 

It was his (desperate) chemistry teacher. Naturally, being a computer lover, Eric’s first suggestion was "Let’s get everyone working together on computers – I'll even build the software for us to use."

This was the humble origin of ClassConnect, officially launched in 2011, which he spent the next two years of high school building, eventually making him a kind of celebrity among startup entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

The idea of ClassConnect was to allow students to work together using videos and websites, making them learn better. 

Ironically, despite not being a straight-A student, Eric developed a passion for education.   

At 18 years old, with high school ending, the duo was facing a challenge common for young adults. College was too expensive, but rather than bite the bullet, they took a different approach befitting two ambitious teenagers with a knack for technology and no money. They applied to accelerators. 

Thanks to ClassConnect, they were accepted into Imagine K12, a startup accelerator focused on startups building products for primary and secondary education (K-12), which awarded them $20,000 and a reason to pack their bags for Silicon Valley around 2012. The goal was to work full-time on the solution, expanding it from a student tool into a platform that also helped teachers create, share, and discover lesson plans.  

They burned through the $20,000 before the product was ready. When the money ran out and the program ended, Eric, now 19 and essentially homeless, found a creative solution to keep working on ClassConnect: squatting at AOL headquarters. 

See, everyone involved in Imagine K12 had access to AOL's Palo Alto campus, since the accelerator was located there. It turns out, the badges still worked even after the program had ended. The building had couches, a gym, and showers…

At 19, that was good enough housing.

For four months, he coded from 9 a.m. to midnight and slept on AOL's furniture until someone finally noticed and threw him out.

The story could have ended there with a broke 19-year-old with a half-built product and no place to sleep. But CNET caught wind of it and published an article, and the internet loved it. Even CNN picked it up, and Eric found himself famous as “the AOL squatter,” becoming the protagonist of one of those stories the startup world can't quite let go of. To this day, it follows him into talks and interviews, a reminder that in Silicon Valley, sleeping on a couch in a building you're not supposed to be in can, under the right circumstances, make you a legend.

That notoriety didn't hurt, and Eric was determined. His hard work with ClassConnect during this period paid off with $50,000 in seed funding. 

Unfortunately, this is not our successful story yet. ClassConnect, later called Claco, didn’t ramp up. With funding running out, a mix of more complex competitor platforms started to appear, and the difficulty of scaling in EdTech, with its rigid cycles, led the company to wind down around 2012. It was an early lesson: building something valuable doesn’t guarantee people will use it. Distribution and ease of adoption matter just as much. It’s a lesson that would come back later, in a very different context.

Money was tight, but the ambition to keep creating was still very much there. 

As Eric recalls, this was a time when the duo was constantly testing new startup ideas and building web applications for them. They soon realized they had become experts at web development and had the insight to create an online platform teaching what they knew, hoping it would generate enough income for them to keep trying ideas. 

This idea became Thinkster, launched in 2014, an online platform designed to teach web development. And it worked, eventually reaching over 100,000 learners.

Thinkster was acquired by Joe Eames in 2019, a developer educator Eric and Albert trusted enough to hand the keys to. In a Medium post sharing the news, Eric signed off with, "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end," which, for the team’s story up until this point, felt about right.

For the duo, it was less an ending than a redirect because, with Thinkster taken care of, they could turn their full attention to their next company. That’s because, while working on Thinkster, there was one recurring problem they encountered: learners needed to set up a local environment on their computers to start programming, but doing so was challenging, and most beginners quit before ever writing a single line of code. 

They wondered… what if the entire development environment could run inside the browser, so new learners wouldn't have to install anything? That would eliminate the biggest challenge standing between their students and their lessons. 

Someone must have done this already, right? 

They looked around. 

No, no one had.

Thus begins the story of StackBlitz, the duo’s focus over the next half a decade that unlocked the insight and competitive advantage behind Bolt.

StackBlitz was born to make coding more accessible by creating a full-stack web development environment in the browser, just as Figma and Canva brought design to the web. 

It was founded in 2017, before Thinkster’s acquisition. At this point, the team was building StackBlitz alongside Thinkster, addressing the recurring pain point through StackBlitz.

To make it possible, they built a technology called WebContainers, a browser-based runtime that lets you run full Node.js development environments (the runtime that learners need to install to begin programming) directly inside a web app. It took years of trial and error to make it work (remember, this technology simply didn’t exist back then!), but they eventually got it up and running. In the end, they had their flagship product, a web-based IDE for aspiring and working developers. 

Developers were supposed to love it, in theory. But in practice, getting them to actually leave their local environments was nearly impossible. 

If you know one, you’ll understand. Developers are creatures of habit. They have setups they've spent years perfecting. A browser-based alternative was a cool novelty, sure, but they weren’t about to start from scratch there, no, thank you. 

The cloud IDE category, as Eric would later describe in a Forbes Talks episode, turned out to be "a mirage of a market."

The founders ran into the same problem twice, in very different ways.

With ClassConnect, teachers and students liked the product, but adoption depended on institutions, slow-moving systems that made it hard to scale or generate revenue. StackBlitz hit a different wall, with developers liking it too, but not willing to change the environments they had spent years refining.

In both cases, the product worked and people liked it. However, it failed at different layers of growth.

The real challenge wasn’t building a good product for users; they had already done that twice. It was figuring out how to make this great product easy to distribute and adopt, without friction slowing it down.

Seven years in, StackBlitz was in decline, doing around just $500,000 in annual revenue. The technology was really amazing. The business was not. 

So, in 2023, the team found themselves facing the hardest choice of their lives.

The team, now in 2024, was faced with a moment of truth. With a year of runway, either they would find a way to make StackBlitz profitable, or they would start dissolving the company.  

2024 was also the year Eric became a father. With both a baby and a company necessitating his attention, Eric found comfort in pursuing yet another challenge. He committed to training for a full Ironman triathlon despite having never run a marathon before.

It sounds irrational, but it wasn’t. He had made peace with the idea that the outcome might not be in his control. Persistence, he understood, is only as good as what's driving it, and what was driving him wasn't success, but a genuine desire to see what he had built come to life. If it didn't work out, he could live with that. What he needed to focus on was how hard he worked at everything, including his health, his family, and his work, before the clock ran out. 

Despite his mindset, the team still needed a miracle.

With nothing left to lose, for all of 2024, they experimented. A lot.

Bolt was the last experiment on the list before the end of the year, and with it, StackBlitz.

When we set out to create Zero to Unicorn, we were ambitious. We wanted to produce a publication that was never made before.

Just like our IRL Zero to Unicorn firesides, our mission was to unearth the untold founder stories, all of the true ups and downs, the mistakes as well as the successes, and share the hard-earned lessons that were learned along the way, of the very best.

Turns out, we had too much for just one article.

In Part II of Bolt’s story, we’ll cover the miraculous turn around that not just saved the company, but helped usher in a whole new paradigm of engineering. Plus, we’ll tell all of the untold lessons from years of entrepreneurship that bolstered Bolt’s success.

Stay tuned!