How Vercel Works 🔍 — with Malte Ubl

And I think everyone can, can ask themselves like, where am I the bottleneck and what can I kind of do to no longer be the bottleneck and. And the impact can be, like if you're in a leadership position, the impact of that can be very substantial. And people kind of usually don't have that perspective. Today's guest is Malte Ubl, CTO of Vercel, which is the front-end cloud provider and creator and maintainer of Next.js, the most popular React framework. With Malte, we deep dived into how Vercel works as a team, what could developer

experience look like, and the future of AI-enabled applications. So let's dive right into it.

Hey Malte, welcome and thank you so much for being here with us today. Hi Luca, nice to meet you and I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for having me. Thank you.

So Malte, you are the CTO of Vercel, which is of course the popular front -end cloud provider and also creator and maintainer of Next .js, which is the most popular React framework. So the first thing I would like to talk about with you is how Vercel works as a team, because from the outside, Vercel has always moved pretty fast in the industry. And I'm thinking of... all the things you do, of course the cloud and then there's Next and how you started to support AI applications very quickly.

So when one thinks about elite engineering teams, Vercel is one of the names that comes to my mind. So my very basic question is, what does your team look like from a 10,000 feet view? So the way I would describe it is we are a very unique mix of top-down and bottom-up culture. I think what is special about a company like Vercel, but we're certainly not unique in that fashion, is that because we build developer tools and the engineers

that build them are using them themselves, there is this baseline empathy for what developers want. where you don't have to do market research, you don't have to ask someone else to ask someone what they want. You just kind of say, what would I like? And kind of start from there. Obviously, that's like, you're not the center of the universe. That might not be the perfect answer. But you start out with something that's pretty good. And then you can go and iterate from there.

So that's part one. The other part is that throughout the entire organization, we use our product every day. - Yeah. Guillermo, our CEO, I think hasn't like not deployed an app on Vercel every single day in five years or so, probably more. The company is seven years old. So that's kind of the combination where kind of everyone really understands what the product is and how changes would make an impact for our developer audience.

Yeah, that looks like really a superpower, being able to get so much feedback, not just from your customer base, but also from your own engineers. And so speaking of engineers, do you have like regular product teams with PMs or you are more like engineering heavy than other companies, for example? I would say we are engineering heavy. And that is because of what I was saying that there is a baseline like empathy in every engineer for the product that we're building and for our developer audience. But otherwise, we are, I think, a modern product company that's built on the