Channel
Interviewed Person
Malte Ubl
In this episode, we sit down with Malte Ubl, CTO of Vercel, for an in-depth fireside chat covering the intersection of AI, developer experience (DX), and the evolving landscape of web development. Malte shares his journey from labeling floppy disks in northern Germany to leading engineering at Google Search, and now, shaping the future of developer tools at Vercel. We dive into: How Malte got into computer science and his early work with Smalltalk and web pages The unique story of how he ended up at Google—and what happened on day one Lessons from building front-end infrastructure at Google, including the birth of frameworks used in nearly every Google product today The culture shift he experienced joining Vercel and rediscovering the joy of working with passionate teams Behind the scenes of Vercel’s AI SDK and the V0 product—how they were built, what worked, what didn’t, and how they’re being adopted Why Vercel chose a composite model architecture for AI, and how it enables fast iteration without training their own foundation models The shift to evals-driven development and how it’s changing how AI-native products are built and measured Opening Vercel's Berlin office and thoughts on the US vs. EU tech ecosystems Malte’s candid take on the current state (and future) of Google Search, and how LLMs are reshaping information retrieval Whether you’re building AI products, using Next.js, or just curious about the future of developer tooling, this is an unmissable conversation with one of the industry’s most forward-thinking engineering leaders.
Right, welcome everyone. Really nice to see all of these familiar faces as well as the new ones here. I'm really excited about this chat. Malta, thank you so much for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me. And uh we have one question that we start off each fireside chat with. Um it's a really general question uh that we have for every of our guests. How did you get into computer science at all? Oh my goodness. Uh do I have to say the year and age myself? No, no, no.
Like I So I am from a town north of Hamburg and I got a job when I was 14 years old at a software company and this was still when they were actually distributing floppy discs and my job was to label them and print out the manuals and then package it up for the mail. And at some point that was right around the corner when the very earliest websites were being developed. And while like everyone there was like a math PhD and you know the at the time they were
actually working in small talk if you heard of that. Um and no one knew how to make web pages so I kind of just picked it up. Okay. So really early on and uh that interest stuck with you. Um just giving a brief overview. Uh Malta spent uh about 11 years at Google and then his latest role as the CTO of Versel that most of you probably know. And um I want to talk first about your time at Google and kind of what got you there because um going uh to such a great company
which I guess most of us kind of aspire and have these uh really big grand uh opinions about. Um what kind of got you there? uh how did you I mean fast forward from uh at 14 years old to your position there but um kind of what led you there uh especially also going to the US uh instead of kind of staying here? Yeah. So like the the I actually so it's actually really funny story. So I
started at Google in Hamburg, Germany and um as this was in Germany, you start I think always on the first which uh is like a random day of the week which Americans think is weird. Um but it was like so I think it was a Friday and I had my first ever of my life video conference. This was like in 2010 and uh and I was very excited and in this video conference I was told that they would close the engineering office in Hamburg, Germany. Um that was later at 4 p.m. my first
day. Um and then I I I so but you know I wasn't like being let go. I was just being given the choice to to find a new team. And in hindsights this was really cool because when you first of all I mean I you know I didn't have any choice at all what to work on in Hamburg. Obviously they were working exactly on one thing which was um keeping the my SQL database at the time that was running Google Adwords alive. And so now I you're on the inside, you
understand like what the what everyone's working on, what's exciting and so I got to basically pick a team and uh and then I you know I I I ended up picking a team that was in Mountain View at the headquarters and essentially just stuck out the year in Germany to qualify for L1 visa and then moved over. Uh which team was it that you ended up working on? So uh that tells you a lot about me being smart. Um it was uh the team that would eventually become plus. But the the lucky thing is that because it was
so well funded um we I was working on on front end infrastructure. And so the we were basically we just had too much many people and and would would be able to build really cool things. And so the the thing I actually built kind of my first large project was um a JavaScript framework called Whis, which now is used by essentially every Google consumer product and um and is actually