Guillermo Rauch: Why Software Development Will Never Be the Same

In many ways, I think MCB will be the new business development, but it's going to be at a 100 times the speed. It's not going to be people meeting and it's going to be agents meeting. We can call it AI transformation. Every company will have to rethink itself what Jensen Huang calls a token factory. The fundamental thing is that companies will be producing intelligence at scale. Welcome to the Mad Podcast. Today we have an epic conversation with Guar, the CEO of Verscel. A legendary engineer and one of the most prolific coders of this generation. Giammo moved to the US from

his native Argentina when he was 18 years old and sold his first startup to WordPress a few years later. He then started Vercel, a cloud platform to develop and ship fast web apps which has grown to over 6 million users and powers websites like Stripe, Adobe, Midjourney, Nike, and OpenAI. On top of that, Versella has scored a major hit with the launch of v0, their immensely popular text to code AI builder. This is a really fun conversation where we covered tons of ground, including the rise of vibe coding. There's a way of building

software where you don't pay attention to the code. The importance of taste. You need taste. You need to have a vision of what you want and you need to be able to articulate it. Vercel's brand new AI cloud that they just announced yesterday at their annual Vercel ship conference. An AI cloud should have agents that automatically produce solutions rather than give you problems. The fundamental importance of the MCP protocol. think about MCP is like the HTTP for AIS, a protocol that allows AIS

to talk to other AIS and what advice he would give himself if he were an 18-year-old developer today. My advice would be focus a lot on getting to know everything that's available in the new world. Please enjoy this fantastic conversation with Germa Raj. GMA, welcome. Thanks for having me. So you're recording this on the big Vercel ship annual conference and the big announcement of this week is the AI

cloud which we're going to discuss at length uh in a minute but I was hoping to uh start with v0 which is a big hit that you have on your hands and it seems like it was an overnight sensation when uh you launched everything that works is an overnight success. Yes. Uh so you launched it in the in the fall of of 2024 and you've been on a tear since. Are there any metrics or any qualitative information uh you can share to help us get a sense for traction? Yeah, it's pretty insane. We've passed over 100

million generations of applications. For those that don't know, v0 allows you to convert text to application, idea to application. It speaks to an audience that Versell has typically not spoken to. It's basically everybody with a job or even everybody without a job. Whereas Vercel required that you knew engineering skills. This requires that you have an idea. I think it's the embodiment of what people have been calling vibe coding. And to give you an idea of the difference between the two

personas, every single second there's seven app generations happening on v0. v0 has more than doubled the entire user base of Vercel. And Versell has been around for almost 10 years. uh vis has doubled our number of users in less than a year and so what's happening really is that coding is being automated more people can code with the ease that you could type into chat GBT and I think that's creating more software some

people call it personal software or hyper specialized applications but the two things that are driving this is one I call it everybody can cook you and I have an idea we can bring it to life as individuals, right? Like during the weekend, maybe with our kids, the other thing that's happening is that within companies, teams and enterprises, people have the same fundamental need. They need to prototype their ideas. They need to communicate