Developer Health Twitter Space -- Maintaining Culture while Scaling w Guillermo Rauch, CEO at Vercel

Welcome everyone, thank you for joining  us for our weekly developer health Twitter   spaces today we are super excited and thankful  to have Guillermo Rauch of Vercel joining us to talk about maintaining culture while scaling  a company from a leadership perspective. So Vercel is a platform and has tooling for front-end  frameworks and sites also the creators of Next.js which is a JavaScript framework for static and  server-rendered apps. Guillermo is absolutely

prolific in web development and software the  creator of several node OSS libraries, also previously the CTO at Learn Boost and CloudUp and  of course now the CEO and founder of Vercel which just announced their 150 million dollar series D  and their latest valuation of 2.5 billion dollars last month so congratulations on that and thank  you for joining us. Thank you so much. Alright so really quickly before I jump into the questions  I also want to set the context for the space if

you haven't joined us before these are our weekly  developer health Twitter spaces. It's part of the work that I do with Gabe Greenberg at G2i where we  create like a community focused solutions around developer health so that's anything to do with the  mental physical and emotional health of software   developers so we have these weekly conversations  and we have all different topics and guests

we had Tejas Kumar talk about mindfulness and  meditation, Nader Dabit talk about working out   and exercise, we even had somebody from the  Vercel team join us a couple weeks ago Rizwana Akmal Khan talk about developer experience how  that relates to developer health which was a   super cool conversation. And really quickly  the format for these the space is run for 60 minutes today we're going to do 30 so we're going  gonna have a hard stop at the bottom of the hour. I'll ask Guillermo about four or five questions uh  kind of set the context for the conversation and

then I'm gonna open it up to the audience for  any questions, thoughts, opinions or comments and last thing the space is recorded so I just  want to make everyone aware of that. So with that said again welcome Guillermo is there anything  that you wanted to add to your introduction   or the introduction of Vercel that I missed.  No that's great um super comprehensive thank you

Alright sounds good so getting into it we're  talking about maintaining culture while scaling a company so to start could you give us an idea  of what it's like the culture at Vercel today for employees, for leadership, for work-life  balance, things like that what's it like to be   a part of the team. So one of the things I think  has determined a lot of our culture has been open source itself we started the company out  it was me and two other people that I knew from the Socket.io project. So started my career with  doing a lot of open source and I created a lot

of frameworks over time that companies would use  and you know had relatively different levels of success. Socket.io was one of them where we had  this experience of being able to create a full stack end-to-end system in JavaScript we had  a real-time server and we had client SDK's for JavaScript, Node, Java other languages. And when  I started the company it was like you know like

who are the best people that you can possibly work  with, I don't know, people that you already know and that's something I still recommend for  most folks that are starting something new, is   you've already experienced what it's like to be  in a state of flow together with other people and I think something that we did that was pretty  unusual at the time, relative to how common it is today, is that we were sort of distributed  first, remote first our first collaboration