How Vercel found extreme product-market fit by focusing on simplification | Guillermo Rauch (Vercel's CEO)

In Depth

Guillermo Rauch is the CEO of Vercel, a frontend-as-a-service product that was valued at $2.5b in 2021. Vercel serves customers like Uber, Notion and Zapier, and their React framework - Next.js - is used by over 500,000 developers and designers worldwide. Guillermo started his first company at age 11 in Buenos Aires and moved to San Francisco at age 18. In 2013, he sold his company Cloudup to Automattic (the company behind WordPress), and in 2015 he founded Vercel.

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In today’s episode we discuss:

• Guillermo’s fascinating path into tech
• Learnings from building Cloudup and selling the company to Automattic (the company behind WordPress)
• Vercel’s origin story and path to product market fit
• How to make an open source business successful
• Vercel’s unique philosophy on developer experience
• Insights and predictions on the future of AI

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Referenced:

• Algolia: https://www.algolia.com/
• Apache Zookeeper: https://zookeeper.apache.org/
• Apache Kafka: https://kafka.apache.org/
• AWS: https://www.aws.training/
• C++: https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/definition/C
• Clerk: https://clerk-tech.com/
• Cloudup: https://cloudup.com/
• Commerce Cloud: https://www.salesforce.com/products/commerce/
• Contentful: https://www.contentful.com/
• Debian: https://www.debian.org/
• Fintool: https://www.fintool.com/
• Figma: https://www.figma.com/
• GitLab: https://about.gitlab.com/
• IRC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat
• KDE: https://kde.org/
• Linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
• Mozilla: https://www.mozilla.org
• MooTools (UI library): https://mootools.net/
• Next.js: https://nextjs.org/
• React Native: https://reactnative.dev/
• Red Hat: https://www.redhat.com/
• Redpanda: https://redpanda.com/
• Resend: https://resend.com/
• Rust: https://www.rust-lang.org/
• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com
• Servo: https://servo.org/
• Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/
• Socket.io: https://socket.io/
• Symphony: https://symphony.com/
• Trilio: https://trilio.io/
• Twilio: https://www.twilio.com
• Vercel: https://vercel.com/
• V0.dev: https://v0.dev/

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Where to find Guillermo:

• Twitter/x: https://twitter.com/rauchg
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rauchg/
• Personal website: https://rauchg.com/

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Where to find Todd Jackson:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/tjack
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddj0

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Where to find First Round Capital:

• Website: https://firstround.com/
• First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital
• This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast

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Timestamps:

(02:35) Becoming an “internet celebrity” at age 11

(08:30) Guillermo's first company: Cloudup

(11:09) Biggest learnings from Cloudup and WordPress

(15:06) The insights behind starting Vercel

(17:11) Sources of validation for Vercel

(20:29) How Vercel formed its V1 product

(23:25) Navigating the early reactions from competitors and users

(25:58) The paradox of developers and how it impacted Next.js

(31:20) Advice on finding product market fit

(34:48) The forces behind a trend towards "Front-end Cloud”

(38:35) Why people now pay so much attention to the front-end

(40:06) How to make an open source business successful

(44:54) Insights on product positioning and category creation

(48:52) Vercel's journey through becoming multi-product

(51:44) Guillermo's take on the future of AI

(53:43) Heuristics for building better product experiences

(55:49) AI insights from Vercel’s customers

(57:37) How AI might change engineering in the next 10-20 years

(62:43) Guillermo's favorite advice

(65:45) Guillermo's advice to himself of 10 years ago