Shipping amazing experiences faster - ft. Guillermo Rauch, Next.js Creator & Vercel Founder

Hello everyone today I have a special guest with me I have Guillermo and you know at Prismic we really love what Next is doing and what Verso is doing and I have to tell you Guillermo that a third of our revenue comes from people that use Next.js. Oh that's awesome to hear. That's a big number and we thought like how about we bring you back. Thanks for the data point by the way. Sorry. Thanks for the data point. Yeah. It has been

a long time since we talked here last time. Okay well we need to refresh that kind of discussion and there's so much that happened since that time and the word in Vercel you know you mentioned offline that you were like Covid happened you Vercel grew a lot you know from that conversation but I think that you still have this same sharp vision about things and I think it makes sense to talk about all that. Yeah for sure. Happy to be here. Yeah well first let's start with the big news you raised your series D is it? E. E yeah. So can you tell us a

little bit about that so that we get that into the context? Yeah so as you mentioned Vercel has experienced tremendous growth and it's been really explosive ever since I was last here which is really funny the company was called Zeit at the time. We relaunched it as Vercel and that was during Covid and then every single year since then which has been seeing like this rocket ship of the growth story predicated on the rise of what

we call now the front-end cloud which is this decoupled way of building applications where if you choose Vercel and frameworks like Next.js you start building the customer experience and then working backwards into your back ends right so the cloud becomes this really compostable set of lego bricks that you can assemble to create amazing experiences for your customers and I take a lot of pride in the fact that we're a cloud that is obsessed with customer experience. When you go to a website built with Vercel and

Prismic or you know other services you should see that it's faster more personalized etc and the time to market is like vastly accelerated. So yeah I saw an interview of Sam Altman who was talking about that we have to ship every day or yeah like that kind of very tight iterations I mean at the time we used to talk about iterations of two weeks now iterations are so much shorter and you need to kind of experiment with the customer and and you enable that as

well. That's a great example of our experience right. So openai.com itself is built with Next and Vercel and I as a visitor of the internet as a user of the internet I'm impressed with like the shipping cadence like every single day there seems to be like new content new pages new documentation whatever so enabling companies to move fast actually in some way ended up being even more important than the thing that was in some ways like even more near and dear to my heart which is like the technology itself like making the web

really fast in fact when we raised our service to see I think we called it make the web faster and we kind of joked that it was like make the web faster so it's both like make it really fast and also the process of building it making it really really iterative and efficient. Now you're more into them making the web. So it's interesting I think over the as we've gone more up market and we've gotten to help bigger companies they kind of are burnt out and hearing from vendors that there's like a like a silver bullet to like

speed up things into the stratosphere and like we'll take you to space overnight they know that software is this iterative journey in that you're constantly innovative and launching and relaunching and expanding and acquiring and emerging and I think providing the platform that accelerates that iteration velocity is more valuable than a point solution that says like oh I'll