ACQ2: Building Web Apps with Just English and AI (with Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch)

hello acquired listeners and welcome to another great episode of aq2 today we have GMO Rous the founder co-founder and CEO gearmo what's the right terminology here all of the above everything The Man Behind versel aside from all the big fancy numbers valued over3 billion dollar and amazing customer list and blah blah blah we wanted to turn the question to you and say how do you describe versel versel is the infrastructure platform to build and deploy Loy modern web applications something that's personal that is infused into the company is I'm

obsessed with developer experience with performance and with design so the platform is a way of deploying the best possible web applications with ease for the average visitor of the internet what it means is that every time you go to a link if it's fast if it's delightful it's likely to be built on versell amazing yeah it's quite the flex yes so

but I'll give you an example think back to November 2024 us election and you're checking out new sites you're refreshing you want to know the latest and greatest you need real time data and so whether you're going to Washington Post whether you're going to I don't know Minnesota Star Tribune or the innovators of the space like poly Market perplexity all of those are built on versale and so increasingly whether it's a start startup or with's established Enterprise they're leveraging for sale to build

Innovative products or later in the month right like Black Friday e-commerce you need to scale you need to serve tons of traffic you need to have really good experiences so household names like Bose or Fanatics Supreme in the up and comers the new brands like Axel arato or ragul so those companies are all building on versel and hopefully delivering products that people love all right so sounds today like very successful widely deployed everyone sort of accepted it's

this amazing product and platform that we should use it was not always that way so take us all the way back to 2015 or even before and and how did this start yeah it's kind of crazy to go back in time the company has grown so much now but the original idea was simple so there were a million ways to build a website or a web application there still are a million waves to build a website or application but none of them that met the quality bar of the Giants of the web it was almost like for sale was that democratization effort if you think

about companies like meta or Google or Amazon they build really fast they try lots of things they experiment a lot and their experiences are highly Dynamic and tailored to every visitor but the web at the time was actually super static it was really difficult for customers to stay online the cloud was coming up but the the cloud was exceedingly difficult to use

like it felt like you needed a PhD and and this was my personal experience because when I started this company I didn't set out to build exactly what you see now I started trying to build a website and I reached for the latest and greatest again my aspirations were super bold super ambitious it has to be like Google or Amazon quality and what is the latest and greatest at this point in 20145 that you're you're thinking oh this might solve my problem yeah so Google had just open sourced kubernetes an incredible sophisticated way of deploying

infrastructure and managing it and meta had open source react which is a UI library for it's the engine that powers user interfaces The Narrative at this time is like oh the web is fast like there's react there's kubernetes like all this stuff is open source it's out there but like exactly but think about the average developer or think about the company that's going through digital transformation what tools do they grab for if they grapped those tools they would have to spend month