Guillermo Rauch is changing the way frontend developers work.
Guillermo Rauch started his first online business at just 11 years old in Argentina. A couple successful exits later, he’s now founder and CEO of Vercel. Vercel provides tools and cloud infrastructure for developers to build and scale a more personalized web.
This episode of Barrchives gets into how and why Vercel’s AI products – v0 and AI SDK – were built, how AI will enable a more personalized web, and why AI will dramatically shift the future of frontend cloud.
If you’re curious about the future of web development, and how AI fits into it, watch the full episode here:
Below are 5 interesting takeaways from my conversation with Guillermo
Before Vercel, deploying cloud infrastructure was a real headache—taking weeks to get everything up and running.
“Performance is not just about the latency characteristics of a certain discrete process, but it's also the progressive experience that you give to the customer. And so when you deploy to Vercel, we immediately allocate a URL while the build process of the application is happening in the back. So you can copy and paste that URL and send it over to someone say, hey, like, please give me feedback on this. By the time they get that URL, maybe the deployment is already ready. And of course, you also have to legitimately make the deployment very fast[…] it's like an art and a science.”
Guillermo highlights the critical shift in developer experience from DX 1.0 to DX 2.0. While metrics like latency are important, the key is creating an environment that keeps developers in the zone. His experience working alongside Instagram taught him how to craft engaging experiences that allow developers to maintain focus and productivity.
Guillermo believes that the best AI products will seamlessly work with today’s systems while also looking ahead.
“I’ve been a big believer that the most successful AI products have been the ones that interface with the world as it is, as opposed to the world that doesn’t exist. […] I think something similar is going to happen with agents, where if we need to create a bunch of new websites for agents, we're probably going to see dramatically less adoption than the agent that actually just figures out the same interface that a human would.”
This emphasizes the need for AI solutions that work within existing frameworks, maximizing their usefulness and increasing adoption. By designing products that interface with current realities while predicting future trends, Vercel ensures its AI offerings are relevant and applicable, helping developers integrate them into their workflows without requiring radical changes.
Guillermo’s personal challenges in web development ultimately inspired him to create Vercel.
“So I sat down and the first thing you do when you create a startup... you want to create a pretty awesome website landing page... And when I sat down to create that website, I literally couldn't. On the React side, it was so much configuration; you had to assemble all the pieces of your tool. It's almost like if I told you, look, you're going to need a power drill to get this job done. But first, assemble your own battery.”
These struggles fueled the creation of Vercel, and later Next.js. By transforming pain points into solutions, he highlights the value of being in your customers' shoes. This perfectly captures the principle of founder-problem fit—when founders genuinely understand the pain points of their users, they can create meaningful products that effectively bridge gaps for users.
AI plays a crucial role in Vercel's growth, enabling the company to scale its knowledge and capabilities effectively.
“Imagine if I could deploy my CTO who was at Google for 13 years and he could review the code of all of our customers and give them performance recommendations. How can I automate that process and make it scalable? […] So imagine if we can do that, but at scale, meaning we build up large data sets, we build up our evaluations, and also we're constantly infusing it with what we call the frontier data, which is the data that the models don't have.”
Vercel is leveraging AI to help scale its expertise. While out-of-the-box foundation models are useful for code generation, they are constrained by checkpoints. Vercel is constantly learning new insights, new recommendations, new APIs, and new libraries. Infusing frontier data and taste is what allows Vercel to scale its company expertise
Guillermo emphasizes the importance of user feedback in driving product development and iterations.
“A key ingredient of suggestive AI is the developer acceptance rate. These signals, plus inline opportunities, are key drivers for constant product iteration and improvement.”
User feedback is critical in shaping effective AI solutions. By actively incorporating developer acceptance rates and feedback into the design process, Vercel can iterate rapidly and effectively. This responsiveness fosters a more engaged user community and results in products that genuinely meet developers' needs, driving satisfaction and long-term loyalty.
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