Guillermo Rauch of Vercel - La Famiglia Castle Chats

Guillermo, great to have you here Thanks for having me. Very exciting. As the king of front end how do you think that AI is going to change how we as humans interact with the world? I think the front end experience of your product will become even more meaningful in an age of AI, because it's all about connecting these large language models with the intent and experience that user desires. So a lot of talk is about how the large language models are becoming commodities, right?

The, they're the building blocks of this new era. So I think for every company, they're asking themselves the question of how do I leverage them? And it's going to be through some front end experience, some product opportunity to connect the user with this super intelligence that is now one API call away for every company in the planet. Exciting. In general, what is an advice to your younger self? I would say double down on my strengths and supplement every weakness of air or area where I'm not an expert

with the best experts that we can recruit in the world. So when I started this company, I knew that I had all the front end engineering skills. I'm a front engineering engineer by trade, but every other skill that you need in order to build a company, you have access to this incredible networks. I live and work in Silicon Valley. My biggest advice would be Recruit the best people, surround yourself with the best possible people as soon as you can. And obviously we ended up doing that and we built an entire community around our products and our company.

But the sooner you do that, the better. Very cool. As one of the few, successful entrepreneurs who built both an open source product and company, as well as like a non open source product at the same time, what is your advice to founders that, do similar things? as like a non open source product at the same time, what is your advice to founders that, do similar things? So first of all, I advise everybody to pursue open source. It's amazing the virality and speed at which your open source software can travel. One day I woke up and realized, oh, ChatGPT is built with NextJS. And one day I woke up and said, oh, TikTok is built with NextJS so that ability for software to travel the world and educate

everybody on your behalf, I think is completely unstoppable. But at the same time, you have to think about how does that software get augmented? And I think with the rise of cloud and edge computing, there is a, as good of an opportunity as ever to supplement that open source component with global infrastructure. So the way we think about this at Vercel is we want to be the absolute best place in the world to host and deliver

planet scale Next.js experiences and other frameworks as well. And I think the key here is that companies are always looking for great services. You know, the era of, I purchase a license of a piece of software is long gone, but companies are always willing to incorporate services and APIs into their toolbox. And that's where I think open source entrepreneurs have to be thinking about, how can I supplement my open source project with a service that can work at planet scale, has good margins that can replicate autonomously, right?

Like, one of the neat things about Vercel is that we have tens of thousands of teams using it. And for each one of them, they're using the same platform. We're not out there carving out a specific piece of software for each company. We do things that truly scale. So I would encourage entrepreneurs to think about it this way as well. Touching on that, did you build, Next.js and Vercel at the same time from the beginning or did you sequence it out? Yeah, I was really lucky that I was pursuing two problems at the same time. One was, how do we build better sites?

How do we use the latest and greatest techniques like React and other inventions for the UI layer? But at the same time, I was really, really obsessed with iteration velocity. Meaning, how quickly can you deploy your idea into the world and share it for collaboration with others? So I was thinking about, I need a service in the cloud that can supplement this piece of technology such that we can make all these artifacts shareable. So the way that I encourage people to think about this is think about what Google Docs did for...