AI Superpowers for Frontend Developers, with Vercel Founder/CEO Guillermo Rauch

**Sarah Guo** (0:06)
So much of the web runs on Vercel, and now it will 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 fund and 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.

**Guillermo Rauch** (0:28)
I'm excited to be here.

**Sarah Guo** (0:29)
Just for people who are not super familiar with Vercel, can you give us a quick explanation of the company?

**Guillermo Rauch** (0:36)
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 ChatGBT, in fact, is powered by Next.js, our open source framework, to websites like underarmor.com or Nintendo, where we provide the infrastructure to serve all their traffic and help them iterate on their web presence.

**Sarah Guo** (1:06)
And what's the sort of founding story of this?

**Guillermo Rauch** (1:09)
Technically, I started it at the very, very end of 2015, but I kind of settled on the idea and launched some of my first prototypes at the beginning of 2016

**Sarah Guo** (1:20)
Yeah, it's 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?

**Guillermo Rauch** (1:29)
So, there's an interesting duality in me. On one hand, 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 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 or the MacBook did for personal computing? And at the time, I had just sold my company to Automatic, the company behind the WordPress.
So, I had this idea in my mind of just making it really, really easy for developers to deploy an idea to the global web and to start focusing on the front end, which is sort of my strength. I've been a front-end engineer for the vast majority of my life.
There's always been sort of this, 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 to drive more conversion, more signups, more sales. So, I wanted to also create a company that focused on this last mile of end-user experience. And kind of work backwards into all the integrations and backends that you need to bring in to create a full stack application. And that's what Vercel has become basically. To me, it's a portal into the web and into a new way of building software.

**Sarah Guo** (3:07)
Speaking of working backwards then, when did you begin to think about AI and get Vercel into it?

**Guillermo Rauch** (3:14)
So, I've actually been a fan of AI for many, many years.
As an angel investor, I was one of the early investors in companies like ScaleAI. To me, AI is just another important step, huge step, of course, but another important step in this idea of automating all the parts that we don't want to deal with when we're in the pursuit of a creative endeavor.
It's very true to the spirit of Vercel that incorporating any backend, any new technology into your site, especially into dynamic web applications like the ones we power, should be really, really easy. And the other insight for me was, it's clear that a lot of these AI foundation models almost feel like cloud 2.0, where tremendous SaaS businesses have been built on top of companies like AWS. Snowflake, I think you all had their CEO as a guest recently. Snowflake is a good example of maybe you don't need to reinvent all of the infrastructure. You can create a great cloud native company. My new insight is, there's going to be a lot of great AI native companies that are built on top of this new infrastructure. Let's call it cloud 2.0, which is this foundation models. These are the new backends that are going to power the most exciting front-end engineering applications. And to that end, we created this Vercel AI SDK that is now powering a ton of different startups, we just heard about a bunch of awesome companies that join their AI accelerator. A lot of them are being powered by this SDK. It's basically the easiest way to create an AI app without having to reinvent the back-end wheel. You can connect to OpenAI, you can connect to Huggingface, Replicate. So we're really focused on that idea of ease of integration and really the easiest way to put AI into the hands of users and creating actually valuable products.