Channel
Interviewed Person
Guillermo Rauch
Episode #11 of Yesterday: This week, we cover the life story of Guillermo Rauch, the founder and CEO of Vercel. Rauch grew up in Lanús, a working-class neighborhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He taught himself to code and by 11, he was freelancing online for clients abroad. In his teens, he became well-known for creating several influential open-source projects, including Socket.IO and Mootools. Rauch then dropped out of high school to work in Switzerland, and after a stint there, he moved to San Francisco. Around 2015, he founded Vercel (originally called ZEIT) out of Dogpatch Labs with the vision of radically simplifying frontend deployment through tools like Next.js, which his team also maintains. Today, Vercel powers the websites of Netflix, MrBeast, Supreme, and many more… and valued multiple billions of dollars. Sponsors: • The Cannon Project (TCP) builds founding go-to-market and engineering teams for venture-backed startups in San Francisco and New York. They’ve built founding teams at Ramp, Cursor, Decagon, Rogo, and many more — while selectively investing through their flagship venture fund. With over a decade of experience and trusted partnerships across the top 15 U.S.-based venture firms, TCP is the premier talent partner for high-slope opportunities in early-stage technology. To learn more, get in touch, or explore roles across a curated list of breakout startups, visit thecannonproject.com -- 0:00 Intro 1:12 Growing Up in Argentina and Buying First Computer 3:42 The Power of Open Source 7:47 First Steps into Making Money Online 12:32 Dropping Out of High School and Early Career 18:29 From Firefox Tabs to AI Web Browsers 30:52 Turning Down a Dream Job in Switzerland 32:35 Instagram and Twilio Were Born 40:31 MrBeast's Builds on Vercel 44:02 The Kindest Thing and Advice Ignored 48:24 Why People Should Join Vercel
MrBeast used Vercel to host the website. Did you watch that live or was that live? He launches his e-commerce website, he's doing a live stream, and he has one of the biggest audiences in the world. What was some fun story that you haven't mentioned about the early, early days? I was in this glorious co-working space with what ended up being some of the best startups of our generation. So Instagram was being formed there, Twilio was being formed there. Paint a bit of that story, now you freelance a lot. The internet is not just fun thing, it's also an economy. It's also a platform, it's where you can get to meet people.
What's some advice you're glad you ignored? One investor told me one day that... The Canoncology built family go-to-market and engineering teams for venture-backed startups in San Francisco, New York. They built founding teams at Ramp, Hurster, Ductagon, Rogo, and many more, while selectively investing through the flagship venture fund. With over a decade of experience in trusted partnerships across the top 15 US-based venture firms, the Canon project is the premier town or number of high-slope opportunities in early-stage technology.
To learn more, get in touch, or explore roles across a curated list of breakout startups, visit thecanonproject.com. It would be good if you can start as early as possible, with maybe your earliest memory, from where you grew up and paint a bit of a picture, what it was like with your parents, and what you did day to day, and whatever comes to mind. For sure. In the earliest days, I grew up in the outskirts of Buenos Aires in Argentina.
So when people think of Buenos Aires, they think of a really nice city, but it's huge suburbs outside of Buenos Aires, in the province of Buenos Aires. It's a little bit like New York City and New York. It was rough in the sense of it was a neighborhood that almost nobody had a computer in the neighborhood. Very little in terms of technology, but my parents were engineers. Industrial engineer and chemistry engineer for my mom. And my dad specifically always had the vision of softwares eating the world.
Softwares going to eat the world. And he got us a computer when we were very young, mostly for exploring, playing video games. The first thing I remember actually going back to an old memory was getting new software into the computer, which was just so fun. And a little bit of a challenge, just installing programs. This is even before Windows had the pattern of next, next, next finish in order to like it was called the wizard. But so I was making it easier to install and get software,
let alone develop it. Like we're doing what the Microsoft was the challenge at the time. So that was kind of the earliest memory, I think. I remember one day, I always remember the hum moments. And when people are building products, I always encourage them to minimize time to a ha. So like you go to a website and like, how long does it take me to actually grok what you're doing and try to be like, whoa. And so I had a few time to a ha with like, the web was a huge one.
So when I was able to get a web server serving PHP files, so rendering a dynamic application combined with open source. So writing software from nothing from scratch, difficult. That's why we created V zero, make it really easy to go from text to application. Right. Funny story, when you guys first launched the zero, I was at the little thing at the ramp headquarters. And I forgot what it was. It was an amazing demo. And I think it didn't work the first time, but I was like, this is super cool. That's it.
It was like, it was like, you hear two years coming. I don't know something. It was amazing. Yeah, it's AI. It's just constant iteration. Right. So going back to those days, that concept of like, I have an idea. I'm going to write software. You could think months, weeks, especially if you're learning. But open source was a shortcut because you could fork something. You could grab some source code, download it and run it. And that was a huge moment for me.