Guillermo Rauch: The Product Visionary Fueling Vercel and Millions of Developers

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This last week, we had three customers doing ads on the Super Bowl. Guillermo, seven years ago, would be petrified because he would be worried that the customers were responsible for that code, and it would be basically impossible to get 100 million people watching an ad going to your website and scaling. Guillermo today developed Next.js, almost guarantees certain outcomes that seem nearly impossible to do yourself.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:29)
That's the voice of Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel. His blend of technical foresight and audacious ambition, coupled with an obsessive attention to detail in products, has turned what was once a humble deployment tool into an enterprise scale platform, handling even the massive traffic spikes of Super Bowl ads. This is Mike Maples Jr of Floodgate, and it's go time with Guillermo Rauch. This is Mike Maples Jr, and welcome to the Pattern Breakers Podcast, where we explore why some founders radically change the future and how they stand apart. Together, we'll learn about the counterintuitive mindsets and actions behind their remarkable success. Brace yourself for a world where chaos is welcome, naysayers are often a positive signal, and movements galvanize misfits who transform the impossible to the inevitable.
Vercel is used by over a million developers each month, from small companies to tech giants like Netflix and Scale AI, who want to create fast and reliable websites. But in addition to Vercel's success today, much of what I admire about Guillermo's journey is that it spans decades. Even before ideas like serverless computing and AI-powered apps became popular, Guillermo was already working on open-source projects for the modern web. As a teenager in Argentina, he built an early tool to automate WordPress tasks, contributed to projects that changed web development, and later helped launch Next.js, a tool now used by many leading companies throughout the world. He makes smart choices about what to build next, because he's been thinking about these challenges all the time, for years or even decades at a time. When he acts, he moves quickly, while balancing big ideas with practical details. He also has a talent for storytelling, a love for learning, and a deep curiosity about the major changes in AI and the future of the web. Guillermo serves as a great example for founders who want to build enduring technology companies from the ground up. Let's talk to him. Guillermo, welcome to the podcast.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:55)
Thanks for having me, Mike. I've been looking forward to this.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:57)
You've been coding for a while. You're a young guy, but you've been doing this for some time. So when did you first start using computers and learning how to code?

**SPEAKER_1** (3:07)
Using computers at our home in a little neighborhood in Argentina was kind of an interesting adventure. We got a PC for the house, and my dad's first challenge for me and my siblings was, can you do something cool? Can you hack around its limits? Can we get some new software on it? So it was kind of like a love at first sight to try and get the most juice possible out of computers. And later on, I started this journey of programming, and I had a bunch of full starts, different programming languages that I tried, but I really fell in love with the web. And I kind of fell in love with like systems administration with Linux, and programming for the web with PHP and technologies like that. So open source has been my entire life, really.
And it was the key thing that, in many ways, created a career out of a very young person in Argentina. It was contributing to open source and getting to know all these amazing people all over the planet that were also passionate about the web, open source and creating new things, and trying to make the web a better place.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:13)
And so when did you make your first open source contribution? What age were you, do you think?

**SPEAKER_1** (4:18)
You know, actually, the first kind of contribution I think is really important and underrated is, whenever I would learn something, I would go and teach it. I didn't know at the time that's the best way to learn anything, right? Like the very first thing, if you can synthesize that knowledge and really assimilate it, is a Richard Feynman thing, right? When you can explain it simply, you truly understand it. I would learn something about Linux and then I would go to forums and community chats. And then if someone had the same problem I had, I would try to help them. And that wasn't quite open source in the sense of like I'm contributing code. But a lot of people now come to me and say, hey, I love your projects, Next.js. I love Verbo. I love the AISCK. How can I contribute? And in a lot of cases, I tell them, teach. And then it probably came in the form of starting to create plugins for existing systems. Another really good way of getting into open source. Creating a whole project and platform is hard. It can be daunting. But a lot of systems have plugin mechanisms. And you can actually create an enormous amount of value and leverage by creating those plugins. I can't remember the specific first thing, but I'll tell you a fun anecdote. People are talking a lot about generative SEO and creating content on autopilot. One of my first breakthroughs was I created a WordPress plugin that generated content. We didn't have LLMs at the time, but you could use RSS to actually get dynamic data. And you had little templating features into the, I called it WP-O-Matic. It was actually a huge breakthrough for me because it taught me that people were very interested in getting professional support, that they could buy it. I got a lot of leads, people wanted to acquire my plugin, and I was like 12, 13 years old at the time. So it was a fun time.