Channel
Interviewed Person
Guillermo Rauch
So I thought maybe just to start like Rell is such the classic overnight success 10 years in the making and unlike a lot of AI companies you know you you have this long history and I just can't believe the acceleration. So first of all congratulations on such an epic run. I think the last time we did an interview you were like three billion now it's 9 billion. It just seems like it's it's been amazing. But I was reflecting on it. You know, the goal of this session is to talk about how do you grow a company like this in an environment which is like so insane. We
got the hype driven mania and money flowing like crazy without losing your soul because we've all seen it. We've all seen how many companies like cease to be that missiondriven purpose- driven thing once the money gets involved. And I just thought maybe you could start with, you know, what was your original purpose or what was your original intention in creating Vercel and how has that helped you navigate through this like truly epic pivot from, you know, from web hosting into the world of AI agents? >> Yeah, first of all, thank you for the nice words. Uh, it's been 10 years in
the making, but it does feel like it's been a day, right? The days are long, the uh the decades are short. The first intuition that I had when I started Versell was that going from idea to application going from idea to cloud production grade application needed to be instantaneous and available to everybody. So a part of me I spent decades you know learning the blade and becoming a software engineer and there was a bit of a like a ego death moment of like what if I could give this superpower to everybody it's not just
for me it's not just for the exclusive club of software engineers who you know I I grew up in Argentina since I'm like 10 years old I've been spending like 18 hours a day on a computer like memorizing lines of code and APIs and commands Um, and so there was something about my personal journey of I felt like if you could publish anything to the web, you were one hyperlink away from changing your life. >> Mhm. >> Because that was my story. When I was in Argentina, I would I built my resume. I
didn't go to I didn't finish high school and didn't go to college. And so I built my entire resume by we can call it vibe coding. Didn't exist back then, but I basically vive coded my way to success. And I needed a platform that could do that. Uh my biggest struggle if I go back in time was just setting up everything before the idea. >> Setting up the servers, setting up the infrastructure, setting up the frameworks, setting up the compilers. It was like weeks or months until you could
actually say, "Okay, this is where I'm going to add value." >> Mhm. >> And so progressively got better. But when the cloud came out, which is basically as around the time that I started Versell, I felt like that was a perfect moment to start a company like this. >> Yeah. because it meant that I could delegate to the hyperscalers all of the data center work creating this massive networks like AWS and Google are laying out like submarine cables to connect continents and I could create a developer experience that harnessed all of that power and put it into the hands
of as many people as possible. So if you think about AI and what's happening with VIP coding today, it's just a continuation of that. >> It's about making it easier and giving it to more people, giving the superpower to more people. So help us see the throughine of that democratization energy into the world of AI agents. So so you know I think most people here know that like milking a cash cow is actually considered to be like a strategy best practice going back decades. Yeah. >> And we again we've all seen it. We've all been on boards. We've all been
around companies where when something's really working there's tremendous pressure to double down on that and not to go on some speculative other thing. Now obviously everyone's talking AI crazy nonsense but I think it would have been pretty easy for you to just say like do dabble in AI a little bit but to really fundamentally keep the company going in that same direction and I can imagine for a lot of employees you know as as the company grows you know at the beginning missiondriven true believers of course are there but as you grow you start to to accumulate more and more employees you know who never saw the
