Vercel Founder Guillermo Rauch on Raising the Bar for Front-End Design

uh wanted to uh you know invite you to the gv family um you know we're excited to be part of your journey uh excited to work with you maybe just to get started kind of tell us a bit about yourself you know where you from where'd you grow up all that kind of good stuff yeah i'm originally from argentina i grew up in the outskirts of buenos aires so right outside the city of buenos aires most people think uh buenos aires is just the city but it's a large province and i grew in the

outskirts of it uh throughout my entire life i've been interested in software development since i was a small kid but what really captivated my heart was when i learned about putting dynamic behavior with javascript in the web browser i started working remotely very early obviously pre-pandemic when i was like 11 or 12 i started working as a remote contractor for software development projects and i would select the projects that had something to do with

my ability to put javascript in them i was doing it more for fun than anything else being a kid and yeah my my that's what kind of got my career started a lot of open source a lot of front-end development javascript uh it um i developed this love over many many years for dev tooling and i was lucky enough that a company hired me and they opened an office in san francisco which is where i live now when did you move over to the u.s and what was that like coming from

argentina to u.s yeah it was quite a bit of a shocker so having that background of working online and working a lot on on programming stuff i was always reading manuals in english and that's how i taught myself english for the most part it's just always reading and writing in english nowadays we're lucky that there's so much material for learning programming and so on that's in all languages oh there's so many youtubers and influencers of programming and boot camps uh but back then i had to kind of build

myself up from uh reading whatever manual that was free because i really didn't have that much money to invest in learning that i could get my hands on and uh when it came to the us the biggest uh thing for me was a shocker of realizing i actually didn't know how to speak like i was having a really hard time understanding what people were saying and talking back uh but the first thing i kind of fell in love uh with here in the bay area was kind of like that openness toward

entrepreneurship and new ideas and creating new things and giving everybody a chance to build new things and uh that's what really made me stay one of the first doors that kind of that opened for me was this world of startups and i realized that i wasn't so interested in coming here to work uh for another company i was here to you know start something new and that there was a lot of you know opportunities in the space of things that i was interested in and

luckily you know made connections i made a lot of connections of immigrant entrepreneurs as well that kind of uh you know showed me it was possible so i was really helpful and and nowadays i try to do the same so i try to like uh you know invite everybody to start something new and and and uh put forward new ideas so so vercell what does vercell do so vercell is a platform that puts the front end development first the from the developer first

and it gives them comprehensive tools to create very high performance websites and applications that scale globally so we're known for this framework in xjs which is completely open source and it's been the framework of choice for companies like hulu.com and target.com to reinvent their frontends it's completely open source and versailles builds the best platform to deploy