Guillermo Rauch, CEO @ Vercel. Full Podcast Interview

Welcome Back to the Future founder promise podcast the following is a conversation I had with gajama rock the founder and CEO of for sale we covered everything from his journey the versaille journey how he scales an organization however cell helps their customers the infrastructures they come up how they think about product how they think about metrics we Dove wide and deep to learn from him on how to build a generation defining company I hope you'll enjoy welcome to the podcast thank you for taking the time to chat with me really initially I want to ask how are you

doing doing great um just got back from Las Vegas we're at AWS re invent we had the opportunity to um speak during the serverless keynote with the VP of serverless compute at AWS and talk about how versell is um helping the the ecosystem of developers in in companies and Enterprises grow their adoption and serverless compute through the front end with an xjs for sale and other tools

amazing that sounds like a ton of fun I I really want to kick us off with a slightly unusual topic I think that not a lot of people realize I over the past many years that I've been following you have admired your ability to find undiscovered talent and really giving it the space to thrive within Brazil specifically for example a great example is Tim neutkins whom I don't think anyone knew before before he joins up

and then helped make mixtures of things right or Javi Velasco who now has been in Brazil for a long time working on the API and I'm really curious how you manage to do that you find these people that no one's ever heard of that are really really good at what they do and then you create a space for them to really Thrive what's your secret how do you find these people and then how do you Foster that environment yeah I think I think it's a super interesting question because even as a company has grown and we've become exposed to all kinds of hiring channels and recruiters

and things like that and spoken at universities and recruited from the top companies in the world I continue to go back to the things that I've made of ourselves really successful is finding those incredible people wherever they are in the world working exciting projects I think if I had to like share the secret sauce I think a lot of it comes down to community building so so those are folks that took an interest in what we were doing that the things that we were working on in open source they were contributing in some fashion or

they were using the tools themselves so it always came down to you're already putting yourself out there through open source and you are inviting the world to get to know you and the best hires you can possibly make are the people that already know your tools and how you work so one of the reasons that I'm bullish about hybrid work like in office but also remote is open source has always been remote

first right like you put out a project there and people started collaborating through pull requests and issues and deployment previews and just like sharing ideas around and and you're always building with somebody else out there and I think our our secret really has been spotting what people are building how they're leveraging our tools empowering them working with them even before they join the company so that was certainly I guess with Tim and Javi so a good example is there and there are plenty of

others yeah I think that's a beautiful way to think about it essentially looking at it at the angle from from community building I I love that framing how how do you think about creating space for those really great people to thrive inside the company how do you how do you point them in the right direction and then get out of the way right how do you how do you work with those kinds of people and really create that environment where not only they are great people but they didn't also Thrive within Brazil yeah I think one of the