No Priors Ep. 30 | With Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch

(instrumental music plays) So much of the web runs on Vercel, and now it'll run on Vercel and AI. Elad and I are super excited to welcome Guillermo Rauch, the founder and CEO of Vercel. It's one of the most popular developer front-end framework companies and is widely used by Adobe, Okta, eBay, and others. We unpack the company's AI strategy, what's next for the web, and more. Guillermo, welcome to No Priors.

Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

Just for people who are not, uh, super familiar with Vercel, can you give us a quick explanation of the company?

Yeah. You described it well. We're basically a web infrastructure company. We provide the frameworks, tools, infrastructure, and workflows for companies to deploy the most dynamic and ambitious websites on the internet. So we power anything from the technology behind ChatGPT, in fact, is powered by Next.js, our, uh, open source framework, to websites like underarmor.com or Nintendo, where, uh, we provide the infrastructure to serve all their traffic and, and help them iterate on their, on their web presence.

A- and what's the sort of founding story of this?

Technically, I started it in, at the very, very end of 2015. But, uh, I kinda, like, settled on the idea and launched some of my first prototypes at the beginning of 2016.

Yeah. It's, uh, hard to imagine even it not existing now. At the time, what drove your belief that this was a different defensible product than the incumbent clouds?

So there's an interesting, uh, duality in me. Uh, on one hand, uh, I'm, I'm basically a missionary of the web. I want the web to win. I want open platforms to win. I want developers to win. On the other hand, I really love Apple and companies that invest a lot in design and, and integration and making things really easy. So many ways the inspiration was, can we create a developer platform that does for the cloud what maybe, like, the iPhone did, uh, or, or the MacBook did for, for personal computing? And, um, at the time, I had just sold my company to, uh, Automattic, the company behind the WordPress. So I had this idea in my mind of just making it really, really easy for, for developers to, to deploy an idea to the global web, uh, and to start focusing on the front end, which is sort of my strength. I've been a front-end engineer for, like, the vast majority of my life. Um, there's always been sort of this, you know, almost like disdain in engineering for front end. It's like the last thing you worry about. But we've kind of turned that upside down and we've made the case that front end is the most important thing that your company has because that's where you meet your customer, that's where you can accelerate your website or drive more conversion, more sign-ups, more sales. So I wanted to also create a company that focused on this last mile of end user experience and kinda work backwards into, you know, all the integrations and back ends that you need to bring in to, to create a full stack application. And that's what's be- what's Vercel has become basically. It's, uh, to me, it's a, it's a portal into, into the web and into a new way of building software.