Vercel’s CEO & founder Guillermo Rauch on AI’s impact on web development and front end engineering

you're listening to gradient descent a show about making machine learning work in the real world and I'm your host Lucas Bal gar Rous is the CEO and co-founder of versell which is a company I really admire they make it incredibly easy to deploy websites using the nextjs framework which they also invented and they've been doing a ton of cuttingedge stuff on automatic website development with AI it's a product I use and really like and

we really get into how to make a good product but then the conversation actually expands to other AI products both inside big companies and in AI native startups and what makes them good and he goes down a list of his favorite companies and applications I hope you enjoy this conversation I learned a lot from it I thought it'd be fun to to start with some you know softball questions of things we have in common I mean I saw that you um started programming at a 10 I think you said and yeah um I also

started programming at a young age I was kind of curious what your first computer was and first uh language was and and what you were doing at at age 10 yeah we got our earliest computer was a PC I think it was Windows 95 nice and at the time I was probably like six seven years old really and um I had a lot of full starts I don't know if it was true for you but it had a lot of full starts trying to learn a code I would do a little bit here and then like not continue a little bit here and then not

continue my very first inspiration was or the thing that got inside my head was when my dad said well like video games are created created by people that know how to code nice it's like if you know how to code like it's a ke keys to the kingdom so to speak and uh my very very first line of code must have probably been I mean if we take coding to its extreme I would say it's probably an app called logo which is like you would compute the trajectory of a little turtle totally that's like the most

primitive programing I had done yeah yeah uh and then probably Visual Basic basic and C kind of around all of the same time lots of HTML type programming but the thing that really was I think like the made it the calling of my life was uh I got Linux installed on RPC which is like in itself a huge feat for me totally and then using the terminal

to run the compiler and noticing how easy it was to install all the compilation tooling compared to what I had experienced on Windows and just compiling C progress with GCC and like just running the binary and everything is quick and snappy and easy um that's kind of when I like it it took off for me and it became a career and that was like age 10 yeah probably maybe been earlier at that point when I started like really coding was

when I got more into like HTML PHP I started creating and Publishing websites I started making a little bit of money like I think my first check was at about 11 or 12 years old from like this online referral program that I participated in and then when I started forking software like I would like I would find all this Pearl or PHP or um kind of like software that I could just like use as a platform mhm so if you remember like the era of like the PHP based forums yeah of course uh like

phpbb and the bulletin and like there were all this uh there were cms's now there's a whole controversy around WordPress but I was also a really big fan of like like standing up sites and platforms for my friends family I run the uh on forums for my high school this is a little later it actually became quite popular like Facebook wasn't a thing yet and like it became like the a central point of connection for all the students um the web really captivated my attention and then later on of course