Reducing barriers to AI with Guillermo Rauch

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hi I'm Scott Hansel and this is another episode of Hansel minutes today I'm chatting with g r the CEO of Rell how are you sir great thanks for having me good to be back yeah man you were on a while back and last time I saw you we were in Philadelphia having a cheese steak together was that before you found it for sale that was at around the time that we're just getting started it was my first first and so far my last cheese

steak although I'm looking forward to being back yeah and uh in in around November 2015 uh there was a company called zit which is now versel right and this was your decision that the cloud deployment story was just too complicated for regular people it was messed up yeah yeah yeah we renamed the company but the mission has remained yeah and the mission from my perspective uh and I don't want to put words in your mouth but it seems to be a lower lower the barrier for everybody it's got to be easier to develop easier to deploy

easier easier easier is that what you do in most meetings you're just in meetings saying make it easier make it easier easier and faster and actually that's an important point because easier at all costs has not worked for us we tried it sometimes uh it has to be easy with a direction we we also talk a lot about the distinction between velocity and speed and velocity being speed with a Direction so for us in the business of making deployment of the web better we found that we had to make the web FAS faster more personalized and we had to

make it easier for developers to create so we had to do both things okay so knocking barriers down is important to you in pretty much everything that you design yeah like I'm thinking about socket.io and making real-time web more like I'm just thinking all the different things that really is a theme throughout your career is to just move things out of the way definitely sucket AO was a successful open source project that kind of showed me the value of developer experience I remember the the Nirvana moment for me was I really forced myself

to create a reap me that in just a few lines of code convince you that you should use this framework I had to fit within the hero of the screen in in like a couple lines of code you could create a chat application in real time yeah that that ended up being quite successful I think the the mbas call that product-led growth yes right you just make the product so delightful that people will use it yeah I remember when I first heard that term I was a little puzzled because I remember thinking I was naive at the time I remember remember thinking how else could you

grow if it's not led by the product like is there another way to grow of course there are other ways to grow and I I've developed empathy for the other ways of building businesses but for me I've always been about having a product that's so good that you can't ignore it yeah well I appreciate that empathy and the stuff that you do and if I may back up a little bit if I understand correctly you were raised outside buenos ciris in Argentina yes so if you're outside Argentina you know 20 30 years ago I'm assuming there's not internet

and computers everywhere that everyone has a computer in their house not at the time most certainly and especially where I grew up I credited my dad with taking a bunch of risk on a buying a computer at that time two putting it inside that house like we're actually really worried that we couldn't tell anybody in the neighborhood that we had a computer and just pushing for the frontier you know like we broke a bunch of computers right off like try to like hack them we got operating systems into bad days we had