Vibe Coding, Tech Jobs, & Democratizing the Web with Vercel’s Guillermo Rauch | Fortune Term Sheet

I literally get very sophisticated attacks, novel ones every single week. You personally, yeah, personally, hello, hello. Welcome to term sheet. I'm Allie Garfinkel, senior finance reporter here at Fortune. And every week on the term sheet podcast, we go over the latest news and insights in venture capital, private equity and startups. Here's where you can watch and listen to us speak to the most exciting figures in the private markets. There's always a lot going on in the private markets, and this week was no exception. Here's what's been especially on my mind. Last week, crypto exchange bullish

went public in a rollicking $13 billion IPO. Now after the success of IPOs like figma and circle and chime, over recent months, it's starting to look like we are so back. Important caveat here, some of these IPOs, not all of them, but some are happening at discounts to the highest valuations. For example, chime was at a more than 50% discount to its highest possible valuation. That said, for a long time, I talked about a sort of being at the top of the roller coaster, but now it looks like

when it comes to IPOs, at least, we're pretty much on the ride elsewhere. I've been thinking a lot about the state of startup hiring. Last week, I published a story trying to codify some of the changes in the tech hiring marketplace, and there's a lot going on. On one hand, you have entry level hiring dropping precipitously, which, of course, makes me think of the haves and the have nots across startup hiring right now, because the haves are the AI researchers, the AI talent. We're talking go

to market engineering, anybody who's worked at open AI anthropic, one of these giant AI companies, and they are highly sought after. The pursuit of that talent is extremely competitive, not only from 100 million dollar checks from meta, but from startups, really, across the ecosystem at the same time, there's sort of another interesting dynamic at play. It's kind of a subplot. It's called 996 it's the push to have people working in an office from nine to nine six days a week. This is also happening, sort of amid a push towards RTO for a lot of startups. And one of the things that this really makes me

think is that the market dynamics are getting very strange, because on one hand, you're pursuing this talent, and on the other, you're trying to get them to work as much as possible. It does make sense. But personally, I think this is all a little bit of a trend, and it's going to be one of those things. Again, back to the haves and the have nots. Entry Level workers in tech maybe have less leverage than they've ever had, whereas a very specific set of talent maybe has more leverage than they've ever had. Now I'm so excited to introduce our guest this week, Guillermo rush, CEO and founder of vercel, a

cloud platform that simplifies web development. He goes by G and I'd argue his role in tech really transcends the unicorn company he's built. Someone once told me that every great technology has to have its PT Barnum like a Steve Jobs, or in the case of AI Sam Altman, and I would argue that G is the PT Barnum of vibe coding. Now vibe coding is the process by which I can use language like I'm using right now to become a

programmer. G, is super candid about what this means for the future and what it means to truly democratize the internet. Here's G. G, welcome to the podcast. Great to be here. I'm excited. You're here. I am with you. I really want to start at the beginning, because I've always been fascinated by your origin story. Tell us the quick version of the G origin story in the beginning of time. I was born in Argentina, Buenos Aires,

the outskirts of Buenos Aires, and I grew up in a humble but very engineering focused family. My parents were both engineers. They got me into software very early on, and I developed a passion for the web, for open source and for basically building businesses online. So what I do at vercel today is sort of an intersection of all my interests for the longest time, empowering developers, empowering developers with great tools, all of those things were things that I even as a kid,