Guillermo Rauch, founder of Vercel: Developer Experience, AI and v0

Guillermo Rauch is the founder of Vercel. Vercel is a cloud infra platform so easy to use that it’s almost become a category: “I’m building the Vercel of X”.

Vercel also recently launched v0 which is potentially the next evolution of web development - type what you want and it builds it and deploys it for you.

He’s also the creator Next.js, socket.io and a ton of other open source tools and startups. Plus he’s a prolific investor in DevTools.

I’ve missed a ton of his achievements here but essentially, he’s the king of DevTools and you probably know him already.

What we talk about
- Why Guillermo bets on people who ship
- What AI has in common with Prettier
- v0 puts design first
- Saying ‘not yet’ is a boss move
- Why Guillermo thinks devs won’t lose their jobs
- How you can learn product building
- Why you should be careful when hiring from rocketships - not everyone was in the control room
- The value of people having a full stack skill set. And why communication is more important than ever
- Why it’s so important to explain what you do in simple terms
- Tools Guillermo is excited about right now

Links:
- Guillermo Rauch: https://rauchg.com
- Vercel: https://vercel.com
- v0: https://v0.vercel.app
- NextJS https://nextjs.org/
- Socket.IO https://socket.io/
- Browserbase: https://browserbase.com
- LiveKit: https://livekit.io
- Languine https://languine.ai/en

Chapters

00:00 The Evolution of Developer Tools and AI
03:02 Hiring for Growth and Talent
05:52 The Role of Design in Development
09:07 Integrations: The Key to Business Growth
11:57 The Shift from Rigid to Fluid Software
14:52 The Future of Development with AI
17:48 Understanding the Importance of User Experience
27:17 Quality Over Quantity in Product Development
30:44 Building a Platform Mindset
34:10 AI as a Fundamental Substrate
38:46 Navigating Customer Relationships
44:59 Balancing Ambition and Realism
51:36 The Importance of Feedback in Development
54:31 Exciting Developments in Dev Tools

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs. https://workos.com/