Building the world's fastest checkout with Vercel - Guillermo Rauch (Vercel CEO)

[Music] okay all right hello and welcome back to the m lemonade podcast the show brought to you by lemon squeezy as we hope to inspire you to make money from your own Lemonade Stand I'm on your co-host James and I'm back here with JR far who is the co-founder and CEO of lemon squeezy and we are joined by another CEO today Galo Ral who is the CEO of versel which are a cloud platform that has built some pioneering technology including the nextjs framework for react to give you a sense of the size of ver sale they raised 150 million series D back in 2021

at 2 half billion doll valuation they are absolutely massive and this is an exciting episode because this comes shortly after kilo has announced that we are working together lemon squeezy and versel to build the world's fastest checkout experience so naturally we had to get him onto the podcast to discuss how exactly we're going to achieve this together we also talk about the the Inception of nextjs if there are any

downsides to open source and we round off talking about the sale and the business as a whole let's get into the episode GMA welcome to the Pod how you doing great thanks for having me well it's a pleasure to have you I want to kick off talking about lemon squeezy and the upcoming partnership that you teased on Twitter the other day to much fanfare shall we say so tell me about how how you connected with lemon squeezy with Jr and how this all came about yeah I have an anecdote that I don't know if Jr would relate to but it does feel like lemon squeeze is this from the outside

and overnight success I'm sure a lot of years and sweat and tears in the making and I'm sure it's always like that for a lot of entrepreneurs but I started noticing it all over social media ADV verel we help a lot of folks go from zero to Global application in seconds so naturally that attracts a lot of makers a lot of folks that are creating software products Innovative software products especially in the AI space so I kind of started noticing that everyone was sharing their products and selling

them through the lemon squeezy platform and that was just me like you know Doom scrolling on X right like just noticing people talking about it and at some point someone said I'm working at an SDK for lemon squeezy I was like hm that's interesting I have a lot of experience building sdks and developer tools for the JavaScript and typescript ecosystem and it sounds like if this works really well in versel it's going to be awesome because a lot of folks are going to build apps that monetize through lemon squeezy so it reached out the threat I

think kind of died there at that time and then I think fast forward maybe like six months or a year later funny story I was in Tokyo Jr I know if I shared his story when I when we first chatted and I bought two things I was with my son we're on vacation and I was like okay we're having breakfast I was like what can I do right now I'm going to buy some software of course and I bought two apps one for compressing videos cuz I really struggle with like

the size of videos that I share and then I can't remember what the other one was and both these apps just happen to be sold on and monetized through lemon squeezy oh and the other one is a screen. studio which is amazing and I was like okay everything is lemon squeezy I think I might have even made a meme which I was do and I was like okay from Tokyo and the reason I love traveling this is like the nerdiest reason you could imagine it's not just because I like seeing New Towns

cities places to visit Etc I also love testing what the internet feels like it's the weirdest thing to say but I'm theel CEO I love testing what the internet feels like from everywhere in the world H that's I I collect a lot of anecdotes about this so I'm from Argentina even the simplest websites in Argentina just take forever to load they're not not well you know globally distributed and and things like that but you know Argentina side I go to Tokyo