No Priors Ep. 30 | With Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch

foreign so much of the web runs on versel and now it'll run on versaillan AI elad and I are super excited to welcome Guillermo Rouch the founder and CEO of versaille it's one of the most popular developer fun and framework companies and is widely used by Adobe OCTA eBay and others we unpacked the company's AI strategy what's next for the web and more Guillermo welcome to no priors thank you I'm excited to be here just

for people who are not super familiar with versel can you give us a quick explanation of the company yeah you described it well we're basically a web infrastructure company we provide the Frameworks tools infrastructure and workflows for companies to deploy the most dynamic and ambitious websites on the internet so we power anything from the technology behind Chad gbd in fact it's powered by Nexus our open source framework to websites like underarmour.com or Nintendo where we provide the infrastructure to serve all their traffic and and help them iterate on

their on their web presence and what's the sort of founding story of this technically I started it in at the very very end of 2015 but uh I kind of like settled on the idea and launched some of my first prototypes at the beginning of 2016. yeah it's uh hard to imagine even not existing now at the time what drove your belief that this was a different defensible product than the incumbent clouds so there's an interesting uh

duality in me on one hand uh I'm I'm basically a missionary of the web I want the web to win I want open platforms to win I want developers to win on the other hand I really love apple and companies that invest a lot in design and integration and making things really easy so in many ways the inspiration was can we create a developer platform that does for the cloud what maybe like the iPhone did uh or or the MacBook did for for personal computing and at the time I had

just sold my company to automatic the company behind WordPress so I had this idea in my mind of just making it really really easy for for developers to to deploy an idea to the global web uh and to start focusing on the front end which is sort of my strength I've been a front-end engineer for like the vast majority of my life um there's always been sort of this you know almost like disdain in engineering for front end is like the last thing you worry about but we've kind of turned that upside

down and we've made the case that front end is the most important thing that your company has because that's where you meet your customer that's where you can accelerate your website or drive more conversion more science more sales so I wanted to also create a company that focused on this last mile of end user experience and kind of work backwards into you know all the Integrations and back-ends that you need to bring in to to create a full stack application and that's what's what's versel has become basically it's uh to me it's it's a portal into into

the web and into a new way of building software speaking of working backwards then like when did you begin to think about Ai and get Purcell into it so I've actually been a fan of AI for for many many years um as an angel investor I was uh one of the early investors in companies like scale AI to me AI is just another important step huge step of course but another important step in this idea of like automating all the parts that we don't want to deal with when we're in the

pursuit of a creative Endeavor and and you know it's very true to the spirit of versaille that incorporating any back end any new technology into your site especially into Dynamic web applications like the ones with power should be really really easy and the other insight for me was it's clear that a lot of this AI Foundation models almost feel like Cloud 2.0 where you know tremendous SAS businesses