Vercel’s Guillermo Rauch | Bold Visions Delivered Incrementally | S3E13 | Spotlight On | AccelVC

We know that every time that we have a big idea about where the future's going to be, we need to be mindful of how do we meet people where they are today. Yeah. And incrementally bring them to the to the promised land. Welcome to Spotlight On, a podcast about how companies are built from the people doing the building, one messy, exhilarating decision at a time. Welcome to Spotlight On. I'm Dan Lavine, your host, and I'm here with GMA Rous from Verscell. It's great to be here. Okay. So, Gamma, for those who might not be familiar, can you tell us a little about Verscell, like how long it's been going, how big it is, and a little bit

about what it does. All right. So, Versel builds frameworks and infrastructure for people to ship amazing products on the web. Yeah. From websites to AI agents to the next big thing on the internet. I don't want you to pick your favorite customer, but what's an example website that everyone here has used? We were just talking about Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A runs the operational logistic back end for 4,000 stores in the US on Versail. So, it's big companies, but it's also startups. Yeah. Like the next big AI agent that might hit on the market. Very cool. Very cool. Okay. And then how long have you

guys been doing it for? About nine years now since the first line of code was written till today. Sure. And then I think Verselians, right, is the term for employees. How many Verscelians do we have these days? 650. Wow. So, I think nearly 700 now. It's It's growing fast. And do you know everyone's name? Yeah. What? I probably do. Incredible. We hosted our big offsite this year in person for the first time. Everybody in one place in Monterey and right before someone built with our AI

agent Vzero, someone vive coded an app so that we would match faces to names. Oh, the directory. Yeah. Yeah. So, it was a fun game. just maybe took like 10 prompts and I knew all of them so I had a perfect score. That was incredible. That's very cool. Um well, thank you so much for joining us. I want to start kind of at the beginning. Um you have this incredibly inspiring story from growing up and getting started and it really is stranger than fiction to me. So first uh very briefly, where are you from and when did you first interact

with computers? I'm from Argentina. Yeah. Where in Argentina? So most people know about Buenos Cyrus because it's the city of Buenosyus, but I grew up in the province of Buenosirus, which is the outskirts of the city. Sure. And it was kind of hard to come by computers, internet, infrastructure, but my dad was like a huge nerd for software and he kind of foresaw the the big wave of software that was coming. So we got a computer when I was about 7 years old. And what year is this? This is 1997.

1997. You're seven years old. And so like what is even I mean do you have like Netscape? Is that like the internet not yet a thing in Argentina? No, this is offline. So Windows 95 the best way to get software was CDs and floppy discs like super early days. Did you guys have Mind Sweeper of course ships with the operating system. I mean Mind Sweeper Solitire rights hearts was a big one. Um yeah but it was fun. I think one of the big like I I don't have a lot of memories from then but I do remember the

joy of getting new software onto the computer. So getting either the small floppy disc, large floppy discs and then like being successful at loading something. I mean Verscell is obsessed with this idea of making it easy to deploy. Yeah. Because making it easy that something runs is kind of a miracle I guess. And so getting new software successfully running was orders of magnitude harder back then and it was a joy just to to see it boot up. Very very Okay. So you're in the outskirts of Buenosis the city in the province. Uh you have a computer. Um, what was your

first exposure to writing software? So, one of the challenges my dad would always say like, okay, it's it's cool to use software, it'd be even cooler to build software. So, the idea was kind of floating in our heads, but it was hard. I think, you know, maybe this actually also relates to the story of Versell, but getting the developer tools running was a huge pain. Yeah. So, especially on Windows. So, a big breakthrough for me was when I switched to Linux. Sure. And I did that also at a very early age. I