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 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 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 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 was like 11 12 years