Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch on Building the Internet for Agents

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Vercel recently raised 300 million dollars in a Series F funding round. It brings the cloud company's valuation to 9.3 billion dollars.

Molly O'Shea (0:09)

Vercel seems to be winning. You guys are at a 9.3 billion dollar valuation. The information reported you guys at 600 million in annualized revenue.

Guillermo Rauch (0:18)

When you're a developer or a company of any size, you can deploy these agents, make your business more efficient. We started out the year with 3% of deployments on Vercel coming from coding agents. Now 60% are agentic.

Molly O'Shea (0:31)

Oh my God.

Guillermo Rauch (0:32)

It took us about 10 years to get to a billion deployments. And then in the next 10 months, we've added another 1.5 billion deployments. So what took us 10 years, we've now surpassed in just a few months. Almost every other thing I see on X every day is just a Vercel deployment. Sometimes you see the largest companies in the world deploying on Vercel, including companies like OpenAI and Meta. Agents are now making their choices and they're choosing right. The lethal combination there is that you buy Vercel as a platform and then you never have to buy software again.

Molly O'Shea (1:11)

Gee, welcome to Sourcery.

Guillermo Rauch (1:13)

Thanks for having me.

Molly O'Shea (1:14)

Well, thanks for having me in your really cool studio.

Guillermo Rauch (1:17)

We're here in San Francisco in our seventh floor of the Vercel headquarters.

Molly O'Shea (1:21)

This is insane. You have multiple studios in here as well. I was talking to your crew before and you have like this acronym of like you have to do everything at the best. What is that?

Guillermo Rauch (1:31)

Well, we have a couple of company values. One is ITG, iterate to greatness. So once upon a time, recording at Vercel was not this good. We're always iterating to greatness and the other one is dig deep.

So whether you get a customer complaint or you find a bug, you can go as deep as humanly and agentically possible.

Molly O'Shea (1:52)

Say more about that.

Guillermo Rauch (1:53)

Well, when I started out the company Vercel, I was a framework and dev tools builder. My passion has always been, can I build, think of it as like, can I build a better hammer? Can I build a better power drill? But for software developers, back when I was a kid in Argentina, I would be given a project. This is kind of fun. I started out doing freelance gigs as a software developer.

Anytime I would be given a job, I would do the job, and also I would build my own tools to do the job for two reasons. One is that I loved it. And the other one is that, hey, each incremental job, I'll be able to do easier and faster. In fact, it ended up being true. And so my lifetime has been, can I create better tools? And when I started the company, the first tool that kind of became like super, super popular was Next.js.

We created the framework that almost everybody in the world has now used to build modern web experiences.

But I also see the company itself as a product. And the best products are built with the best tools and the best frameworks. So over the years, you know, people ask me a lot, you know, what is your role at the company these days? And I tell them, well, you know, I do a little bit of everything. I do QA, I talk to customers, et cetera. But I invest a lot in the machinery that powers the company itself, the machinery that yields innovation in the future. And I think one of the key constituents of this framework of how we run the company is the values, our mission statement, the classic things. But, you know, we put quite a bit of effort into, you know, who are we and what are our values?

Molly O'Shea (3:32)

Is this how you became and continue to be very popular on the internet? Because, I mean, Nick and I were talking about this, but like you are a celebrity, so.

Guillermo Rauch (3:43)

I'm a nerd celebrity of sorts. But I'll tell you, okay, one of my personal values is transparency and work in public. Also work in public. A lot of my personal traits, I think, have sort of, you know, permeated through the company as well.

And I'm open source, open models, building public, transparent. And so, the reason I think I've had success communicating with people over the internet is that I just tell it like it is. People have asked me if I have ghost writers for my ex. Like, young founders, I also spend a lot of time, another value of mine and our family is giving back. And so I spend a lot of time trying to give back to the ecosystem. And so I invest in a lot of young founders. And I think almost every week I get, hey, who writes the tweets for you? Really?