A conversation with Vercel's Guillermo Rauch

Well, thanks so much for being here today for Build Day. Build Day's really all about turning great ideas into great products, and so when we stepped back and asked what that might mean, we thought, well, no better company to talk to than Vercel, who's very much at the forefront of making that possible, and Guillermo, in particular, who, of course, is the genius behind Next.js

and Vercel in parallel. So, lots of good conversation to be had around open source- Good to be here, thank you. -And business. I think earlier this year you guys announced 200 million ARR and a doubling of users year over year. For those of you who are reasoning about sort of scale and what might be possible, I heard 4.3 million downloads a week of your AI SDK alone. Yeah, it's hard to keep count of downloads 'cause they're growing so fast.

Good problem to have. But, yeah, the business has been growing really fast, and, as many others I think here, it was born in the cloud and it was born on Stripe. Amazing, and, you know, I think with many of today's startups, rather than reasoning about year-over-year growth, we're increasingly reasoning about month-over-month growth or even week-over-week growth- Day. Day. Day? You could ship something today that makes a huge difference. Always elevating ambitions, amazing. Well, thank you for being here. I thought we could start maybe a bit with your background.

Born in Buenos Aires, taught yourself how to code? True story? That's right, yeah. Curious about kind of your early journey and what brought you to the US. You know, there are a lot of parallels between what I set out to do with Vercel in my early days because teaching myself to code and speak English was quite the challenge, but- You taught yourself English? English was not spoken at home? The funny story, no. In fact, my parents were really interested in it

'cause, in Argentina, like, the country was always divided between like capitalism and socialism. And my parents were very much like engineers themselves, industrial and chemical engineers, and they had a lot of admiration for great engineering. And they knew that the cutting edge would be in Silicon Valley in the United States, but you needed to know English in order to get there. And so I was interested in software engineering, and I noticed that a lot of the programming manuals, documentation, readmes, were in English. So I basically had a bootstrapping process to do. And I tell people these days that, you know,

AI is sort of a before and after because, if I go back in time and I'm trying to teach myself how to code, I can do it in my native language, and I can do it at every step. I can just ask the LLM to teach me. Like, literally, one of the things with LLMs is like, "Explain quantum mechanics like I'm five." I could have done that. I could have- When you were five. You could have done that when you were five, yeah. So I didn't have that. The next best thing was the internet, and the next, next best thing was open source.

So, for me, one of the discontinuities in my learning journey was when I started getting to know the open-source communities, contributing to open source, spending a lot of time connected with strangers on the internet, as one does, and learning together. And so I started contributing to a lot of web frameworks. One of the earliest was called MooTools. It was a JavaScript library, and that was actually very formative. You know, if I think of my resume, my resume was a bunch of the open-source projects that I contributed to.

And the web itself was for me sort of the vehicle that allowed me to basically leave Argentina and become a worldwide figure in programming because the instant that I was able to use the web to very quickly ship things, fork something and put it out into URL, now you have a worldwide audience, right? These hyperlinks can travel at the speed of, you know, thought pretty much. So fast-forward to Vercel and had the same inspiration. If you wanna start a company,