Guillermo Rauch — Building Vercel

[Music] Tonight I'm privileged to be joined by GMO Roush, founder and CEO of Versel. GMO is a once in a generation entrepreneur and has built one of the most popular developer frameworks that powers Adobe, eBay, Walmart, and many more. GMO was born in Argentina before moving to the US. and we're really excited to hear his thoughts on startups, San Francisco, and so much

more. Tonight's event will run for about an hour, and we'll save 30 minutes for audience Q&A. So, without further ado, everyone, please welcome GMA Roush. [Applause] So, there's so much for us to cover here tonight. Um, we're in a room full of immigrants and I want to start at the beginning at your childhood in Argentina. What was that like? Okay, so childhood in Argentina. I grew up in the outskirts of Buenos Cyrus, a city called Lanus,

which is kind of funny if you write it out. I'm not going to spoil the joke, but it's kind of funny. Lanus. And it was a pretty I'm going to use the word poor, but it was a very very humble neighborhood, especially at the time. Uh, for example, the idea of having a computer in my neighborhood was kind of like a weird thing. My parents worked really really hard to even just buy our first computer. the neighborhood was

kind of funky in the sense of even just um having technology was something that we couldn't I wasn't allowed to tell my friends that we had technology in the house because there were some safety and security risks to put it mildly but my parents were both engineers educated at the public university of Buenos Cyrus and they gave me a great upbringing in the sense of like always aspiring to learn science technology technology, the

things that we looked up to at home and the things that we respected were amazing technology and the things that people were doing to innovate and the great new things that were coming out especially out of the United States and things we were finding out about. And the other thing was my dad was extremely curious about software. I've shared in a few interviews that I think something that he was so visionary about was he studied industrial engineering, but he had grown convinced that software was eating the world before it was cool. Like the idea of like software is eating

the world and he kind of wanted to give up on like everything he'd learned and all his degrees and everything. It was like no no the way is software and he didn't really know how he could apply that or how we could bring that into fruition. But anything we could get our hands on that was software related, we were going to go after it. And this is from when I was really really young, like I was like 7 years old at the time. I started really thinking about like I need to build my own software.

Um, so just fast forward a little bit from 7 years old and you decided to drop out of high school and start the entrepreneurial journey. What gave you the conviction to start building and kind of going against the grain? Um, you went to a very competitive school in Argentina. By the way, should I use this or um, if you can, but Okay, I'll try if it works. Just want to make sure. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay, perfect. Oh, thank God. All right. So from the moment I was like 7 years old

to like 12 years old, this is like I would say like chapter one in my development which was very very curious about software could not really find a quote unquote platform that I could get traction on. So the the best way to think about it is lots of false starts in trying to learn software engineering. I literally tried everything. I wrote code in Visual Basic