Channel
Interviewed Person
Guillermo Rauch
Guillermo Rauch is the founder and CEO of Vercel, creators of v0 (one of the most popular AI app building tools), and the mind behind foundational JavaScript frameworks like Next.js and Socket.io. An open source pioneer and legendary engineer, Guillermo has built tools that power some of the internet’s most innovative products, including Midjourney, Grok, and Notion. His mission is to democratize product creation, expanding the pool of potential builders from 5 million developers to over 100 million people worldwide. In this episode, you’ll learn: 1. How AI will radically speed up product development—and the three critical skills PMs and engineers should master now to stay ahead 2. Why the future of building apps is shifting toward prompts instead of code, and how that affects traditional product teams 3. Specific ways to improve your design “taste,” plus practical tips to consistently create beautiful, user-loved products 4. How Guillermo built a powerful app in under two hours for $20 (while flying and using plane Wi-Fi) that would normally take weeks and thousands of dollars in engineering time 5. The exact strategies Vercel uses internally to leverage AI tools like v0 and Cursor, enabling their team of 600 to ship faster and better than ever before 6. Guillermo’s actionable advice on increasing your product quality through rapid iteration, real-world user feedback, and creating intentional “exposure hours” for your team Transcript: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/everyones-an-engineer-now-guillermo-rauch Brought to you by: • WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: https://workos.com/lenny • Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security: https://vanta.com/lenny • LinkedIn Ads—Reach professionals and drive results for your business: https://www.linkedin.com/podlenny Where to find Guillermo Rauch: • X: https://x.com/rauchg • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rauchg/ • Website: https://rauchg.com/ Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • X: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to Guillermo Rauch (04:43) v0's mission (07:03) The impact and growth of v0 (15:54) The future of product development with AI (19:05) Empowering engineers and product builders (24:01) Skills for the future: coding, math, and eloquence (35:05) v0 in action: real-world applications (36:40) Tips for using v0 effectively (45:46) Core skills for building AI apps (49:44) Live demo (59:45) Understanding how AI thinks (01:04:35) AI integration and future prospects (01:07:22) Building taste (01:13:43) Limitations of v0 (01:16:54) Improving the design of your product (01:20:09) The secret to product quality (01:22:35) Vercel’s AI-driven development (01:25:43) Guillermo's vision for the future Referenced: • v0: https://v0.dev/ • Vercel: https://vercel.com/ • GitHub: https://github.com/ • Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/ • Next.js Framework: https://nextjs.org/ • Claude: https://claude.ai/new • Grok: https://x.ai/ • Midjourney: https://www.midjourney.com • SocketIO: https://socket.io/ • Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-notion-ivan-zhao • Notion: https://www.notion.com/ • Automattic: https://automattic.com/ • Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder & CEO of StackBlitz): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-bolt-eric-simons • v0 Community: https://v0.dev/chat/community • Figma: https://www.figma.com/ • Git Commit: https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/saving-changes/git-commit • What are Artifacts and how do I use them?: https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/9487310-what-are-artifacts-and-how-do-i-use-them • Design Engineering at Vercel: https://vercel.com/blog/design-engineering-at-vercel • CSS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS • Tailwind: https://tailwindcss.com/ • Wordcel / Shape Rotator / Mathcel: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wordcel-shape-rotator-mathcel • Steve Jobs’s Ultimate Lesson for Companies: https://hbr.org/2011/08/steve-jobss-ultimate-lesson-fo • Bloom Hackathon: https://bloom.build/ • Expenses Should Do Themselves | Saquon Barkley x Ramp (Super Bowl Ad): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1Tgsy7D0Jg • Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/velocity-over-everything-how-ramp ...References continued at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/everyones-an-engineer-now-guillermo-rauch Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com. Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
One of our users yesterday submitted feedback. (instrumental music) They were saying, "v0 is like a super genius five-year-old PhD with ADHD." I'm not going to oversell this. It knows everything about everything, but it has these sparks of brilliance. How do you think things are going to change for product managers, for product teams? People could be more full stack. Imagine a designer that can ship a fully baked product, a product manager that can prototype and ship to production. We shouldn't put limits on ourselves and what we can build, and what we can ship,
and what we can dream about making possible on these web surfaces. A lot of people are wondering, "What happens to engineers? Should I learn how to code?" A lot of the programming jobs to be done that used to be specializations, I think, are going away, in a way. They're translation tasks, but knowing how things work under the hood is going to be very important for you because you're going to be able to influence the model and make it follow your intention a lot better. We hear this word taste all the time, in terms of building taste, people are always like, "How the hell do I do that?" Taste, sometimes I think we think of as this inaccessible thing that,
"Oh, that person was born with taste." I see it as a skill that it can develop. I think is extremely important to try lots of products. We have one of our internal operating principles as increasing exposure hours. Try to quantify how much time you expose yourself to watching how people use your products and you'll develop that muscle. Where do you think the biggest change is going to happen? We need to stop talking about AI at some point. I just see a future where
AI becomes synonymous with software. We build software and we use software to build software. Today my guest is Guillermo Rauch. Guillermo is the founder and CEO of Vercel, which, amongst other things, makes a product called v0, which has become one of the most popular AI website building tools in the world. He's also a legendary engineer and contributor to open source. He's created some of those popular JavaScript frameworks in the world like Next.js and Socket.IO. He's both a builder and is building a product that's going to change the way we all build products in the future. This episode is incredible. If you want to really understand how product development is
going to change with the rise of AI and what skills you should be focusing on right now, I highly recommend you keep listening. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become a yearly subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of Linear, Notion, Superhuman, Perplexity Pro, and Granola. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com.
With that, I bring you Guillermo Rauch. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and SCIM provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already by WorkOS, including ones you probably know like Vercel, Webflow and Loom. WorkoOs also
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for Auth0 and supports up to one million monthly active users for free. Check it out at WorkOS.com to learn more. That's workos.com. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. When it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices, things get complicated