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Video starts at 21:06
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Interviewed Person
Guillermo Rauch
"v0 is like chat but for creating web applications. Instead of giving you text, it gives you a fully working web application."
"I've always been obsessed with democratizing the web for everyone. Anyone with an idea has to be able to create."
"This idea is so powerful that you cut down the time for humanity to go from some hypothesis to a production-grade deployment and going down from weeks of setup to seconds."
"It became such an obsession I started measuring each millisecond of like you have an idea, you write it down in JavaScript or HTML or whatever, you press deploy, how quickly can we get it online."
"Vercel started out as can we reduce that friction from idea to live to seconds."
myself. I've been an engineer for like, you know, a couple decades now, and I no longer write code. I only [Music] prompt. All right. So, you founded this company, but your story is crazy. So, you're high school dropout, grew up in Argentina, have been building things and hacking on things since, you know, a very young age. Sold a company kind of early on. I don't know if it was big sale or small sale. And then you built this product that has just taken off. Every front end developer I know
loves it. It's valued, I don't know, $3 billion or so, you know, whatever, give or take. And you've just done this incredible thing. And now, and now you have this AI tool that's also like super on trend and is something that is doing really really well. It's a really cool uh agent that that builds sites for you. That's my version of the of the the summary of your story. It's a great summary. Maybe the only thing I'll add is the the crazy way that I've been able to
go from like a teenager in Argentina to today was has been a lot of open source. So I've been involved in creating a lot of technologies that have become foundational in the tech ecosystem. And I felt like that and the web has sort of been my ticket to success of course over decades of hard work. Well, explain that. So why did you drop out of high school? I I I've never been a fan of like the high school dropout moniker because I actually really loved the high school that I went to. So, it was a high school in Argentina that was a free public school that had an entry exam. You had to study really hard to get in. And I worked so hard to get in. Uh
entered in position number 10 out of like thousands of students. But I had two competing interests. I was becoming popular in this open source ecosystem because I was creating libraries for JavaScript and front-end development. You're like becoming popular at in open source but you're only 15 16 years old. So when did you start? Started coding very early like uh you know seriously I would say when I was 10 years old I was
creating websites shipping I started doing work online helping my parents with our uh like home finances. Was it just a lucky break or what got you started? lucky break in some ways, but um open source. So, I was contributing a lot to like online forums uh helping people out. And the lucky part was I remember this guy who whose name I guess I'll never know. It was like Dark Shadow 123. He's like, "Hey, you seem to really enjoy helping people out by writing tutorials and guides and things like that. There's this website is a freelancing website. You could just sell
your services here because you know so many things about Linux and PHP and programming." So there was a bit of a lucky break in that I figured out a business model for myself really early on. I got my first check when when I was in like 11 years old then started I had a client in the Netherlands when I was like 12 or 13. Are you pretending to be a adult or are you openly like it never I wanted really badly for it to never come up. And I'm really I guess lucky that at the time like even Skype was not
a thing. So it was like actually kind of rare that you have to get on the phone. So I really took advantage of that. But so when I got into this high school, my reputation for doing all of this work and then my reputation in the open source world were both growing simultaneously. So as my grades were decaying, my sort of online net worth and contribution and notability in the world was growing. So I would write articles, I would get to the front page of dick.com. I would write open source
software that would get a lot of traction. I would get written out. Give give me a sense. Are you I'm gonna say it in a dumb way. Like are you a genius or you were just being extremely helpful? Like was it just like nobody was writing the tutorial on how to host your WordPress site or whatever? Was it like you were figuring things out really cutting edge stuff? Where were you? Yeah. When I advise young people on like how to bootstrap their careers, I say start by teaching anything. So I started with like how to compile. There was a project called RPPO to get internet connectivity in
