How Vercel Saves Dev Teams $10M+ in Productivity Gains | Guillermo Rauch

Описание: Before founding Vercel, Guillermo Rauch, was a self-taught teenager in Argentina earning his first dollars online to help his family.

From early open-source work to remote freelancing, this episode traces how his drive to figure things out led to solving web performance at scale.

We also get into:
• how his dad instilled a mindset of pushing tech boundaries
• what growing up during Argentina’s economic swings taught him
• why he sees Minecraft as a healthy game for his kids
• why he believes speed without direction is meaningless

ABOUT US:

We’re proudly sponsored by Brex—a brand I co-founded, now supporting over 30,000 businesses like Anthropic, DoorDash, and Scale AI, helping them make every dollar count.

I’m grateful for their continued support as I bring you all conversations with some of the most exceptional founders of our generation. For more information, please go to: https://www.brex.com/?ref_code=bmk_au...

Connect with us here:
1. Guillermo Rauch-   / rauchg  
2. Brex- https://x.com/brexHQ
3. Henrique Dubugras- https://x.com/hdubugras

This episode was produced and distributed by our friends at Atomik Growth: https://atomikgrowth.com/

(00:00) Trailer
(02:07) Introduction, Brazil–Argentina, investor link-up
(03:34) Buenos Aires upbringing, “experimental” high school
(07:08) Dad’s tech prompts, Linux CD, first hacks
(11:40) Games, forums, packet-sniffing and reverse-engineering
(15:24) Burning music CDs, first pesos earned
(19:40) Freelance web gigs, earning U.S. dollars at 11
(24:10) Elite high-school grind → decision to drop out
(29:52) Swiss startup offer, Lausanne move, visa gauntlet
(36:05) Silicon-Valley coworking, Instagram/Twilio neighbors, first exit to WordPress
(41:45) MoodTools vs jQuery
(47:57) Post-exit angel investing, early bets on Scale AI & Bitcoin
(54:40) Founding Vercel, birth of Next.js, “self-driving” cloud
(1:01:15) Angel portfolio lessons & product-market focus
(1:07:50) AI surge: v0, agents, “token factories” vision
(1:13:56) Product mantra: Iterate-to-Greatness and tiny ship cycles
(1:18:10) Self-driving-car analogy for autonomous code
(1:24:30) Brand-permission, scope control, and feature flags
(1:29:35) AI as skill democratizer; enterprise adoption stories
(1:34:22) Bottlenecks: context windows, error loops, auto-repair
(1:39:48) Winning dev love: CEO must code, patient-zero testing
(1:44:55) Luck vs skill: family, immigration breaks, big bets
(1:51:30) Containing blast-radius of mistakes; experimentation culture
(1:55:40) Engineer-founder mindset, constant up-skilling
(2:00:20) Closing