How AI is Changing App Development with Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, Part 1

[Music] [Applause] all right I am here with GMO raal CEO of versell the makers of nextjs so great to have you today how you doing thanks Eric really excited to be here thank you so much um so obviously you know your company makes one of the most widely used and well-known uh Frameworks in the internet so we got a lot of fun stuff to talk about today but I'd love to hear about your journey and you know the LED

you to ultimately uh lead this company yeah for sure uh just yesterday I opened X Twitter and I see Argentina trending I was like oh what do we do again uh so uh there was there was a big uh topic about Argentina getting a new president and uh it was uh it had me think a lot about my past in my journey it was a good reminder I'm I'm in San Francisco California now but I originally grew up in Argentina uh um I taught myself how

to code from a very young age I got into the world of Open Source I kind of built up a career from scratch I I designed it myself I taught myself JavaScript which is sort of the I call it the English language of modern programming because you learn that language and you can do a variety of things you can launch products you can launch servers you can do backend frontend iot you can program the edge of the network uh it's it's the gift that keeps them giving so I became sort of a an expert in that domain that

led to getting a job offers internationally even when I was like 17 18 years old I found my way to the Bay area where I discovered two things one that my true passion was to start companies and two later on and which has become now my true calling in Vercel is that you can you can build companies that sell infrastructure and developer tools I've always liked increasing the productivity of the even when I was developing by myself I would built tools

to make myself more productive so it's been a blessing that I was able to transform that idea of building developer infrastructure into like what's now become a very fast growing business in Vercel wow yeah yeah I love I love what you're talking about around sort of JavaScript being that uh that universal language I was actually talking with a CTO last week and and recalling I'm a little bit long in the tooth now but recalling that you know I've learned over a dozen programming languages my career I mean starting with

basic and Pascal and C++ and Java and Pearl and Python and so and and and it was because I needed a different language for all different kinds of problems and then you know later on kind of JavaScript sort of ate the world and now you can essentially do everything now not to say that it's the best at everything but obviously Swiss army knife it really gets the job I compar to English like it's it's a weird language in in a bunch of ways right like it has all this quirks in fact for non-native

speakers like myself like we struggle where like we Intuit it how you would pronounce a certain word oh no there's an exception in that one that one is actually like randevu whatever you know like there's all this DNA for multiple languages um you know Germanic and French words and so JavaScript is a lot like that he has all these weird quirks with like types and but it proliferated and proliferated and proliferated the Creator calls it almost like a an evolution than intelligent design like

it's just been it had a it had a very fast sort of Genesis in like a two we Sprint at Netscape where they conceived it and they just evolved and evolved and evolved and it's because it's been in the right place at the right time I think that like it's like the success in business sometimes you have to be at the right place at the right time riding the right wave and Jos rode the wave of being deeply embedded in the web browser and and that's kind of how I approached it I was looking at all these incredible apps that were launching