Channel
Interviewed Person
Guillermo Rauch
Guillermo Rauch is founder and CEO of Vercel, a company that provides the developer tools and cloud infrastructure to build, scale, and secure a faster, more personalized web. He was interviewed by Ben Casnocha, co-founder and general partner at Village Global, an early stage venture capital firm backed by some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs. Takeaways: - Any modern cloud-native app is a nexus of services that all work together to create a coherent interface for the user. For example, Auth0 handles login, Stripe handles billing, React is used for the interface, among many more services all working in concert. Vercel helps ensure that the user has an amazing experience no matter what services are all working together on the back end. - Guillermo tells the story of open source Unix winning out over proprietary versions of Linux, even though the proprietary versions had an early lead. He suggests that over the long term, open source will win, more often than not, and that the same story will likely play out when it comes to AI models, with open source models winning out in the end. - When it comes to investing, Guillermo loves to bet on someone who has been obsessed with a topic for years and years. He recounts the story of the Auth0 team who had written books and given talks and spent years of their lives just on logging in and logging out. He also says that he prefers a leadership team that lives and breathes a company’s problem space. He says that he's allergic to the idea of a professional leadership team swooping in at a certain stage. - Rauch was born and raised in Argentina. He says that he has a sense of urgency and that tomorrow is not promised that stems from his childhood experience growing up in Argentina. He tells the story of Mark Zuckerberg keeping the Sun Microsystems logo on the back of the Facebook sign at their headquarters when they moved in to cultivate a sense that tomorrow is not promised to anyone. - Guillermo believes in giving his team leads radical ownership of their products. He provides the leads with frameworks that explain clear principles for how they build products at Vercel but beyond that he gives the leads a long leash and a sense of ownership over the product. Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal. Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup
hey everybody this is Ben kesoa co-founder and partner at Village Global a network driven Venture firm and this is our podcast where we go deep on all things Business and Technology with World leading [Music] experts all right good afternoon I was thinking we got the little fireplace behind we could have actually had a fireside chat in front of the actual fireplace which is a rare opportunity it's a gigantic fire side chat it would
be indeed um well we have a giant of silon valley with us here today in GMO who's a top one of the most important companies in Tech today in verel and so we're going to have a bit of a conversation about the founding story lessons AI what's going on and all things Tech and then uh we'll open it up for broader discussion and uh in questions gyo thank you for being here we were last together uh at our other event The Grove for unicorn Founders where you had the tall order of following G and hangs theatrics um and present he gave us chips remember that's
right yeah we got he gave free uh free h100 for everyone attended meaning potato chips that were branded uh he said look under your chair there's free chips and we looked and it's like literally a bag of chips with his face on them yeah so um but great to have you with us and we have a bunch of of of early stage Founders as well as some angels uh and and and GPS so let's start with with just getting everyone on the same page about the founding story of Rell where the company stands today and maybe importantly how do you interface
with the early stage startup ecosystem yeah founding story I would say there's many checkpoints in time once upon a time I was I was born and and grew up in Argentina and I became obsessed with fronted engineering and open source in the early days and I always tell people that uh deploying a hyperlink to the open web was my raft out of Argentina which is a little bit of an exaggeration
because Argentina has a lot of problems but it wasn't too desperate of a situation but it allowed me to connect with the world it got me a job in through a open source Library called mul I got a job internationally I left Argentina moved to the Bay Area so front engineering has always been this thing that has tremendous Alpha for companies if you make a really delightful web experience if you make a really delightful UI you're way more likely to
capture customers retain them turn them into loyal fans and for certain uh Industries like e-commerce you dramatically increase conversion having a better front end is better for your business so I decided to start a company around the idea of maximizing the potential of the front end on the web and uh that's how versel was born so um we created a framework called nexj which is sort of our open-source framework that allows you to create very Dynamic and and very fast web applications
nextjs is very interesting because it grew out of me scratching a niche uh I wanted to create a website for my startup at the time the founding story is actually this is a checkpoint that was really really interesting so I sold my first company to Wordpress and I left and I knew that I wanted to start another startup and I wanted to use the best practices available at the time so there were two that were really popular on Twitter and Hacker News which is how one decides what technologies to use of
course one was reactjs So Meta at the time was called the Facebook or Facebook they've been through three Riv and I think about it that's funny so they uh open sourced what they had discovered to be an incredible way of creating front end interfaces um and I call it a discovery more so than an invention because it's such an awesome way of structuring very very compl frontend applications they open sourced it they gave react to the world kudos to meta they've now since