Acquired Minisodes: A conversation with Guillermo Rauch

GMO welcome to the significance Summit thanks for having me excited to be here for folks who are watching this video who are not familiar with you and your company what is your full name and what do you do I'm guo Rouch CEO and founder of verel we build the frontend cloud which helps developers publish the best experiences on the web what does that mean so you build an application or a website and we make it really really

easy and then you can deploy to our infrastructure and what really stands out about versel made applications is that they're really fast really Dynamic and very sophisticated so this is tooling comparable to you know what folks would have internally at Facebook and meta to build applications so we share the sentiment with stat Sig that it's worth democratizing the tools that the biggest companies in the world would have to build their own products but what about the rest of us so verell

tries to bridge that Gap and you have some amazing companies and sites that are building on versell now can you give us a a sample of a few sites people probably go to often yeah companies like Under Armour Unity Nintendo open.com uh companies that are again at the frontier of Technology pushing growing and they need this sophisticated tools and infrastructure but they want to make it really really easy for their for their developers to make progress so your story is pretty interesting before we kind of talk about the future of

product development how did versell come to be so I had the problem of myself wanting to publish a website when I started my first actually sorry my second startup and I had sold my previous startup to a company called WordPress and when I left I wanted to publish a website for my startup that used the latest and greatest Technologies uh they were open source like Google and meta had open source all this great tech one was called react the other one was called kubernetes and I sat down and it took me weeks to just

set up all the pieces like put everything in place to start working on that first page and every big idea on the internet starts with a web page so I was like how can it take so long and this is again after like 15 years of experience as a front engineer so I kind of knew what I was doing but it was so hard that I kind of got sidetracked my original idea I put it in a drawer what was the original idea the original idea was it's kind of related like helping

developers but it was more around like realtime communication and I realized I can't go into that depth of like real time and whatever when it when the basis the basics of like using the cloud efficiently were not in place and I realized look it's hard for someone that's building a startup to go from zero to one on the web imagine the biggest companies in the World Imagine the famous car companies the famous retailers and and so I did two things

one is I created an open source project called nexs it makes it really really easy for developers to get started today next sh has power some of the best products on the planet and so I made it really really easy but also the scale and sophistication that you could get to with that project is pretty significant so like walmart.com runs on nextjs and my site project and every little idea or the AI startups that are being born every every day are using nextjs to

power their businesses but then they realized look it's not just about the tool what about sharing that Creation with the rest of the world I was very inspired and this kind of goes back to the real- time idea I was very inspired by what Google Docs had done for word processing uh we used to just email files with attachments and then they came to the scene and they were like look you can go to a website and every document you build every document you share every document you edit it becomes a hyperlink that you can share with