Building Web Apps with Just English and AI (with Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch)

Vercel has become the infrastructure platform powering modern web development over the past several years, with companies from Stripe to Adobe to Runway all building their front ends on them. Today we’re joined by founder and CEO Guillermo Rauch, who shares why Vercel has been uniquely successful in the fragmented (to say the least!) world of web development platforms. There are now more than 6 million Vercel users, 80,000 active teams, and users have grown 200% year-over-year. The company also crossed $100m in annualized revenue last May, and Guillermo shared with us that they’ve been growing at 80% since, and were recently valued at $3.25 billion.

This is also a particularly interesting moment for Vercel. Last year they launched a new product, “v0”, which lets anyone create and deploy a working website simply by describing it in English and letting AI take care of the rest. Guillermo shares its origin story within the company (and insanely that it reached $2m ARR in the first 14 days!), and how it’s changed their entire thinking about what’s possible now with AI products.

We also cover:

• How to build a business around an open source project (Next.js)
• How they balance both being a fast and nimble platform for startups with being a reliable platform for enterprises
• Guillermo's unconventional approach to staying deeply technical as CEO at scale

Links:

• Vercel
• V0.dev
• Next.js

Sponsors:

• Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra