Inside Vercel’s AI Journey: Building the Future of Frontend Development (with Vercel CTO Malte Ubl)

everybody thank you so much for joining For those of you who are new to the guilds or that I haven't had the pleasure of meeting yet I'm I'm David Uh I'm a principal here at Firstark and um naturally given today's topic I'm I'm focused mostly on dev tooling and infrastructure and uh I'm incredibly thrilled to be joined today by Malta the CTO at Burcell Um on a personal note I I was at another firm called Excel for seven years before this where we first invested in Burcell back when it was called Zeit in 2019 So um you know it

feels like with with every month in the tech universe forcell continues to become more and more of a hyper relevant company for everything that we're all working on Um but it's been it's been absolutely incredible to see the journey from day day one day two Um a few housekeeping items before we we we jump in Um as with all guild events would love if everyone could keep their cameras on throughout Um as most of you know everything today is off the record So would appreciate if everyone keeps everything they hear today between this

group Um you can all drop questions in the chat throughout the conversation and then once we open up things to Q&A with call it 10 to 15 minutes left um you can use the hand raise button on Zoom and we'll take questions one at a time Uh and then the last thing please please please rename yourselves in the Zoom to include your company name so that Malta has context when you comment or ask questions or jump in Um so so with all that being said let's let's jump in Um I

am going to start with 3 to five minutes or so of background I know everybody wants to talk about AI but I'm I I would love to start with Malta yourself Uh you spent 11 years at Google from 2010 to 2022 That's about uh roughly $170 billion of market cap to one and a half trillion of market cap I'm sure we could spend a whole other hour just talking about that But you decided to join Verscell Why so first of all thanks for having me Hi

everyone Uh good to be here The Okay why did I join Versell i used to run a conference in Berlin called JSCON for you And in 2010 GMO who's our founder and CEO uh gave a talk there Um he was like 17 or whatever at the time very young Um and at the time also we were both in the very early Noode.js scene and we were making this uh like separately we're making kind of Node.js JS modules for

real-time communication and I was implementing like a new web a standard emerging web center at the time called websocket and he built his own thing called socket io and like for from like you know basic point of view my mind mine should have won because it was like implementing a standard it was like backed up basically by all of big tech and but it turns out I had no chance like like game at the time already had such a like finger on the poles and he like again It's 2010 It has a marketing website for his for his like open source

project Like people didn't do that at the time GitHub was uh maybe two or three years old right like it's it was in the very very early days And so I just realized like uh like how much of a genius he is in that that area And so we kind of just kept in touch And then at some point point it was the right thing for me to do something new Um I I literally texted him do you need a CTO and then he said yes And then actually I kind of chickenened out Uh I like Google

had good timing They offered me a kind of incredible opportunity but then that was kind of done and I kind of said "Okay now I might as well do like the real change and and go in for real." So and here we are Makes sense I'm sure everyone on the call gets texts from awesome people all the time asking if they need VPN CFO etc Uh very natural story May May maybe maybe on background