Everyone’s an engineer now: Inside v0’s mission to create a hundred million builders | Guillermo Rauch (founder and CEO of Vercel, creators of v0 and Next.js)

**Guillermo Rauch** (0:00)
One of our users yesterday submitted feedback. They were saying, VZero is like a super genius, five-year-old PhD with ADHD. I'm not going to oversell this. It's like, it knows everything about everything, but it has these sparks of brilliance.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:14)
How do you think things are going to change for product managers, for product teams?

**Guillermo Rauch** (0:18)
People could be more full-stacked. Imagine a designer that can ship a fully-baked product, a product manager that can prototype and ship to production. We shouldn't put limits on ourselves and what we can build and what we can ship and what we can dream about making possible on these web surfaces.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:34)
A lot of people are wondering, what happens to engineers should I learn how to code?

**Guillermo Rauch** (0:37)
A lot of the programming jobs to be done that used to be specializations, I think, are going away in a way. They're translation tasks, but knowing how things work under the hood is going to be very important for you because you're going to be able to influence the model and make it follow your intention a lot better.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:52)
We hear this word, taste, all the time. In terms of building taste, people are always like, how the hell do I do that?

**Guillermo Rauch** (0:57)
Taste, sometimes, I think we think of as like this inaccessible thing that, oh, that person was born with taste. I see it as a skill that you can develop. I think it's extremely important to try lots of products. We have one of our sort of internal operating principles as increasing exposure hours. Try to quantify how much time you expose yourself to watching how people use your products. And you'll develop that muscle.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:25)
Where do you think the biggest change is going to happen?

**Guillermo Rauch** (1:26)
We need to stop talking about AI at some point. I just see a future where AI becomes synonymous with software. We build software and we use software to build software.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:38)
Today, my guest is Guillermo Rauch. Guillermo is the founder and CEO of Vercel, which amongst other things makes a product called VZero, which has become one of the most popular AI website building tools in the world. He's also a legendary engineer and contributor to open source. He's created some of those popular JavaScript frameworks in the world, like Next.js and socket.io. He's both a builder and is building a product that's going to change the way we all build products in the future. This episode is incredible. If you want to really understand how product development is going to change with the rise of AI and what skills you should be focusing on right now, I highly recommend you keep listening. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become a yearly subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of Linear, Notion, Superhuman, Perplexity Pro and Granola. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com. With that, I bring you Guillermo Rauch. This episode is brought to you by Work OS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and skim provisioning. That's where Work OS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered by Work OS, including ones you probably know like Vercel, Webflow and Loom. Work OS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine-grain authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, skim or user management, you should consider Work OS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's workos.com.
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