Get in. We're rebuilding the whole freaking internet. Coding is a misnomer. Everything is code. A slide deck is code. A document is code. Excel spreadsheets is code. If I DM you, it probably meant that my agent couldn't figure it out. No one at Vercel has the right to block things. The spies must flow. The tokens must flow. The products have to be shipped. You don't get to relax. I'm any visa. Send me the email. And when I get time to review it, your product goes out. I refuse to have an AI as a friend. Human empathy and emotion and connection is ours. Overrated sort of advice, ambition to be honest.
You have five kids, a sixth one on the way. You're very obsessed with fitness. You're at the gym every morning. Where is all this energy coming from?
You know, I remember my early days in ASA before I was married. I think the level of discipline that I had my entire life was like so well curated for learning and working, it was Monday through Monday. The number of hours put on top of that, I think I joke like 10,000 hours, 996, that's rookie numbers. What are we talking about?
For the last decade if you built on the internet you probably touched something Guillermo made. Next.js is the most popular React framework in the world and Vercel, his $9.3 billion company with more than $500 million of revenue run rate, powers the front end for OpenAI, Stripe, and Nike. A kid from Argentina who became one of the great infrastructure builders of the modern web. Now he's doing something even bigger, giving the power of building to everyone. With v0, you describe what you want in plain English and working software appears. But AI is not just changing who builds software. It's changing how companies get built and how society will function. Today we get into what happens to talent, to companies, and to builders when everyone can build. Knuckle up, Guillermo, welcome to the show.
So in September 2024, after Paul Graham's founder mode essay, you put out your own idea, which is recursive founder mode. And your main point if I understood it correctly was that founder mode doesn't scale. Recursive founder mode is where it needs to be. What do you mean by recursive founder mode?
Yeah, Vercel has been in this journey towards becoming a multi-product organization. So we started out hosting frontends, mostly front-end sites and web applications, and then we started evolving into hosting backends, hosting agents, helping people with the whole software development life cycle, or we could call it the agentic software development life cycle. And so in this journey I've had to expand the product portfolio, grow the team, and I totally identified with the idea of founder mode because you need someone that has this pioneering spirit to break down tape, push through, be the voice of the customer all the time, and just feel extreme pride over everything, every detail, like make sure everything is perfect. But clearly it doesn't scale, especially as you think about an organization that's working on multiple products, multiple surfaces, millions of customers.
And looking back on things that have worked really well for us, and by this I mean people come to me and they're like, 'Man, how is this thing so good?' Like yesterday, someone asked me, 'Why is the AI SDK so cool? How do they communicate so well on X? Why does everything seem to be so nicely polished?' Immediately my mind went to the founder of this project, Lars Grammel, who for me embodies that because he's an entrepreneur at heart. He joined Vercel and he was a seasoned engineer and he came in with a very strong point of view of the world. He'd been working on this developer experience for making basically model-agnostic applications in TypeScript. And so when he joined Vercel, I got a founder, a visionary, and someone that if given the right company setting can again blast through walls and cut down tape and whatnot. The things that you would want a founder CEO to do. He's almost like the CEO of his own product.
And over the years, we've been very fortunate to identify a handful of these people that what I've seen is that these are the people you want as you're scaling your company. You know, the co-founder can only go so far. You kind of want to build the machine that builds the machine. You know, software factories are in vogue these days. And I think of it as like how do I set up this recursive software factory? I need managers of these factories within the company. We've done it for Fluid Compute. We acquired a one-man company, a guy that was totally full stack. His name is Tom Leonard, and he would take care of the marketing, the comms, the product design, and he would write this low-level Rust-based runtime. It's like, oh, this could be a great person to add to our fluid compute offering.
I think the thing that resonated a lot with that essay, I mean it exploded on Twitter that day, over the weekend, and in the weeks to come, was that the founder has to go deep in what matters. The founder has to be in the weeds of everything. How do you now ensure in this model that you're talking about, like the unit of ownership is at this founder of that product level? What do they own? Where do you go deep versus where do you force yourself to stay out so that somebody else feels that they have the flexibility?
Yeah, I think what I can contribute is I set up the overall organizational framework, the values of the company. Obviously, my executive team and I decide on like, you know, what are the KPIs, targets, north stars, but you need to create these pools of autonomy within the company because the best people in the world, they could be starting companies, they could be building $10 million ARR businesses and deploying them on Vercel. And so you really have to create these pockets of autonomy. And so these people I think have control over or input into and influence into the messaging, the marketing, and obviously using a platform under them, namely the Vercel platform. A lot of people actually want to come to build products out of Vercel because they know that they get to use Vercel. So funny enough a lot of our new products are completely bootstrapped on top of the Vercel infrastructure. And so it's a little bit like we have millions of companies building on Vercel and now we also have companies within Vercel.
Does that autonomy extend to them deciding who to hire or even ship against your judgment?
So this is a good example is that I give enough rope to see, you know, people pleasantly surprise me all the time with their innovations, discoveries, ways to communicate their customer obsession, right? Like I expect people to go out and talk to customers. So you're asking what is a defining characteristic of this founder mode thing? At the end of the day, we're here to ship. We're here to drive urgency. We're here to make customers happy. So for me, my love language is seeing someone within the company take full ownership of the end-to-end business. And I think AI is going to force people into this because if you thought your job was a very narrow thing like 'I write code in Rust,' well, models can also do that very well now. And so you have to expand your scope.
In this world, are you as CEO the chief quality officer or chief taste officer?
I joke internally a lot, like I do a lot of QA and I put a lot of input into the autonomous systems of quality assurance. So my focus has really been into, and I think this is what should be going through everyone's minds, is like how do I identify myself? How do I identify my skills? No pun intended. You know, one of the big ecosystem contributions that Vercel has made recently is skills.sh, which is this massive repository of skills. We invented it because we invented Next.js and obviously we have a lot of the know-how of the world and how to build React applications. Those people work at Vercel. And my challenge was how can I grab any customer in the world no matter how technical, maybe they're a healthcare company or financial services. How can I even the playing field? How can I make sure that their Next.js code is as good as my Next.js code? Enter AI skills.
So we created this repository where we said, by the way it was so funny when we put that out, people were like, 'Aren't you just open sourcing all of your know-how? Is that allowed? Are you out of your mind?' And this is one of the moments where founder mode is so important because my conviction is our value is the entire Vercel platform and the trust that we get from customers when we open source and give away things like this. So skills is where I'm thinking a lot, okay, how can I, if I have a quality assurance skill, today I was chatting with one of our content engineers.
I've spent a lot of time trying to perfect the way that I communicate succinctly with people. The reason that I love X, like Naval has said many times, is it's wonderful that it limits you to 280 characters. He and I actually were pretty outspoken at the time, like why do you even go to 280? Why stay at 140, right? Because it's this amazing compression and creative constraint that helps you. And so I put a lot of my work over the years in how can I communicate effectively with customers? And I coach a lot of folks when they join Vercel. You're not here to just ship technology into the void. You're here to help with storytelling. You're not here to just launch. You also need to land. People need to understand the thing that you're working on. And so nowadays I'm thinking, all right, I've learned all of these things. How can I transfer that to the internal Vercel agent that helps this factory continue to produce high-quality products, delight and accelerate the business?
How do you then recruit for that talent? Like let's talk about that. What are you looking for? What is the DNA you're looking for, founders abroad? Like are there skills you're looking for in interviews?
Honestly, the requirements are changing weekly, right? And so what I look for a lot these days is do you have this mindset? First of all, some of the world still debates whether AI is here to stay or not. You know, there's levels. Some people are still stuck in like, well, agents can only do a few things. And some people are like, no, I'm actually using agents to superpower my work and to ship great things. I still have this bias of like no matter what the technology is, the implementation detail, I look for people that can ship great things.
There is an element of proof of work that I look for when I recruit or when I reach out to people. But there's also this future-based mindset, like are you able to extrapolate and position yourself in the future? Where are things headed 6 months from now, 12 months from now? What are the requirements going to be? Because we are in the middle of an exponential. So I can have people that show me like, oh yeah, I built this awesome developer platform at, I don't know, Uber, Lyft, or whatever. And then it's like, okay, can you actually show me how that becomes self-actualizing? What would you do today? What are you going to ship next week? That kind of thing.
Has your own interviewing changed in the world of AI?
Yeah. Give us examples because this is the multi-billion dollar question for all of us.
I ask people to build. First of all, you can't be of two minds. I either go on X and say like everybody can build and use v0 and Vercel plugin and whatever and like you can ship immediately, and I also have to eat my own dog food. So I actually have that expectation, like I ask people to build stuff during the interview process. And everybody, by the way, some people just don't have a strong opinion on what to use. So they take our recommendation, you know.
Funny enough, we call this work prompts. It's almost like we're not hiring agents per se, but our expectation is that hey, here's a work prompt. What can you do? Depending on the role, I think it might be something that we have the expectation that you just vibe code something and you produce an output, an artifact, and how you talk through it. And I also always look for what is your perception of the details and what interesting side quests did you take. I've asked people to build certain things and they come back with really clever ideas for the platform itself. They can tell me what features are missing or where they found problems or where they got stuck.
I had an awesome experience yesterday because someone delivered this beautiful output but she told me, 'Well, at this point I wasted an hour on this thing, that's an opportunity for us to fix.' So she kind of came in with a point of view on what she wants to improve about the company and the platform. So I think the level of transparency and the availability of information today is unprecedented.
Do you go through this with even non-technical hires? So, marketing, sales, customer success, somebody who's the chief customer officer, all of that.
My marketing team, they all have to, the future is them building agents that produce marketing artifacts. A common problem in marketing organizations is can I beg, borrow, and steal engineering resources or agency resources so that I can ship an idea into the world. That probably doesn't exist ever because you have the platform, you have the agents, and because you're expected to create that factory. You're not here to file Jira tickets. 'Hey, can someone help me with this poster? I need to host a dinner with prospects. Can you help me with the creatives?' No. You solve that problem. And that's where the bias towards founder mode comes, is I'm hiring people that can solve problems.
Solve problems. You know, I have 99 problems. Like if you're coming to me to add to the problems list, like I'm...
So, but how have you scaled this in recruiting? So, how many people are you today now?
800. So I presume there's recruiting happening at Vercel now that doesn't touch you. Meaning you are not part of every hire.
We have agents. I don't meet every hire but we have agents that can be posted on the progress of all of the interview loops. We've put in a lot of my requirements into the different prompts that summarize the candidates. I spend a lot of time reviewing their work, reviewing who they are, going through their profile, the things that they've created. I ask questions sometimes. I ask to have almost like an asynchronous conversation, like we care a lot about candidate experience even if we don't hire you, like we think of you as a customer. So we want to balance moving really quickly but also asking some questions or asking for revisions on some of the work that gets presented.
I take these decisions very seriously because hopefully people understand that this is a long-term project. This kind of work takes generations. So I take each hire so seriously because I'm going to invest in you and because I expect you to stick around for a decade.
In our earlier conversation, we just said you're kind of the chief quality officer. It sounds like you're also the chief talent officer at the company.
It's all quality, right? We want the highest quality people.
But it sounds like you're very involved in every single hire even to this date.
And that's also a point of leverage, right? So the way that I think about it is I can give a lot of consistent product feedback. And in fact I embrace the fact, we have one of our values is iterative greatness, ITG. No one at Vercel has a right to veto, sorry, to block things. I've been joking a lot about this Dune reference, the spies must flow, the tokens must flow, the products have to be shipped. Customers need help. No one is here to say hold the production lines. Only security can do that. And the occasional executive saying like, but that's a veto most of the time. That's a veto which means that the onus is on you to not veto.
You don't get to relax. I'm any visa. Send me the email and when I get time to review it, your product goes out.
And so we have very, very few and very carefully designed choke points. And so that's where we introduce friction. But you know, Malte, our CTO, and I spend a lot of time reviewing this machinery because at the end of the day, by the way, it's all engineering.
One of my banger tweets recently was everything is code. A slide deck is code. A document is code. The reason that coding agents are driving most, we have this data from the AI gateway, most of the token volume in the world is coming from coding agents. Coding is a misnomer. Everything you do, Excel spreadsheets, is code. It's just that it was so deceptive because we used to drag and drop columns and do the math and perhaps do all this and we didn't think it was code but it's actually a series of tool calls and a little Python script. Everything is code, right? And so you can think of the streamlining of your organization and its operations and the agents that you design, you can apply that engineering mindset to it.
And so Malte and I were always obsessed with where are the choke points, what is our throughput. We study, we ask our agents, let's study the changelog rate, meaning how frequently are we communicating product improvements to customers. And so this is kind of how we keep that pace and keep the quality up.
So everything you're saying there then relies on exceptional people, founder mode type people themselves, but in a world where OpenAI and Anthropic are throwing ridiculous packages, seed funding is everywhere, I'm saying that as a VC, why if a founder can build things that they want to see in the world over a weekend and then distribute, why should they stay at Vercel? Why not go out and do their own thing?
Founders are also people that have long-term commitments and long-term visions. I see this revolving door between Google and OpenAI and Anthropic and I'm like, you know, that doesn't look good for anybody. So you're saying that the guy spent 9 months, left, and now he's over at this other thing. And I think the world is beginning to actualize because Dario was saying, 'I'm a little worried that people are chasing money.' And that's the problem, right? And I think one of the antidotes to this is to invest in people that are not necessarily like, they have this big fame and Twitter followers and whatever. You can get there, you know, people have joined Vercel and have built careers like that. But it's also about investing in the people that have high slope.
And I spend a lot of my time identifying and investing in people that are willing to, obviously it just takes an insane amount of work, and again the founder mentality comes there too, like you have to be ready to work really freaking hard. And this is something over the years I become more and more explicit to people. In our interview process I'm very explicit now, this is going to take at least a decade and we're going to work insane hours and we're going to have a lot of fun. So there's also the grind, slab culture, whatever, and it's fun. You have to calibrate, for some people like myself find this really enjoyable.
Let's say somebody is a high-slope person, you've invested a lot in them, 3 years in, 4 years in, so not 9 months but 4 years in, they come to you and say, 'Guillermo, I need to leave. I'm compelled by this idea, like I want to start a company.' What happens?
Yeah, I'm supportive of people starting companies. I try to suss it out also in the beginning, like sometimes I can tell, this person is anxious. Like I was never a good employee in the sense that I actually delivered a lot of value for the company that I worked for very quickly. But I'm a person that is just not meant to work well in sort of a hierarchical structure and whatever. There are people that actually satisfy that itch. Going back to the recursive founder mode, they satisfy that itch within Vercel. And I get this feedback from people. I got someone DMing me the other day saying this person was an entrepreneur in a past life and it was like, 'I just love what you guys have been able to create for me,' which is like I almost designed my perfect life within Vercel.
The reason that I'm selective and the reason that I spend a lot of time in the interviewing process is that you don't want jitter in your organization.
Yeah. But partly my question was that can recursive founder mode survive in an era where shipping is fast and seed money is everywhere?
It could arguably do better. I'll explain why. So, one of our quote-unquote founders or product leads, the product that he's running within Vercel, he kind of tried to build it before and it didn't work unless it was part of a broader platform. And this has been true for a few of the acquisitions that we've made that have been really successful where you say, I have this awesome idea and maybe it doesn't do quite as well unless it gets presented as part of a broader platform.
And this is overall a strong thesis that I have around the future of software. I don't subscribe to the idea that there's a complete SaaS apocalypse coming and whatnot. But what is true is that let's say that you just close a deal with a very large marketing agency. What they're moving from is they used to buy software for bespoke needs that they have. Now they've moved into a world where their IP becomes the agents and internal tools that they're building. And this is a kind of transition from SaaS to build your own, and it is quite competitive because the rigid static software off the shelf is nowhere near as good as the one that they're coding and deploying on Vercel.
In a past life they could have never thought about like, I'm going to create a competitor to an Adobe product just for my needs, is kind of a crazy thought, right? And yet I'm hearing about it every single day. And what it's doing is it's making them more efficient, it's adding to their IP, and it's simplifying their life because they went from procuring 10 or 20 pieces of software to just procuring one platform. And I do think that platforms are going to do extraordinarily well in this world. Maybe some of the bespoke pieces of software that you could put into that platform do not survive outside of it, and that's more of a reason for someone to come and say, hey.
Another example, our feature flags offering, the entrepreneur that built that outside of Vercel, he was having some decent traction but can you really come in, like people expect this to be part of a broader offering. So now he has one of our fastest growing products out of Vercel and he's having a fantastic time because he's found a delivery, he's found channel, he's found distribution, which is to your point something that will be a bit of a choke point as software becomes easier to make.
One theme that I consistently read as I was preparing for this was that there's two things that pull at each other. I think one is that this culture of iterate to greatness, it seems like there's a lot of urgency at Vercel. On the other side, you're obsessed with taste. Do you see them pulling at each other or you think no, it's fine?
In a naive way, yes. Because are you going to ship slop and then you iterate to greatness? I will say part of the hiring process, part of the culture, part of the platform that we give you sets the floor really high. So let me give you another example of a fantastic quote-unquote founder within Vercel. Shadcn. This gentleman created the world's most popular UI component framework. When you ask an AI, 'Build me an application,' nine times out of 10, it uses shadcn, which incidentally is also his online nickname.
What shadcn did is he invented a component system that raised the floor of literally the entire internet. This sidebar that he gives you, beautiful and extensible. The button, the dropdown, even the AI components, the reasoning bar and the shimmering text and all of this stuff off the shelf, beautiful. Within Vercel, we extended this component system into the Vercel Geist component system. So it's kind of hard to come into Vercel, be competent, be a high-agency individual, have access to all these primitives, and then ship a POS into the world.
And so I think the platform itself, Vercel is like a recursive self-improvement machine, right? The platform itself is constantly raising the floor. The agents, our design engineering team right now, I'm extremely excited about this. They were like, 'Design engineering always weighs in on polish, the delight, the surprising details in the customer journey.' But they know that to scale themselves, we can't just keep hiring a billion design engineers. And so now right now they're working on the agent that gives you that review that incorporates a lot of, to your point about taste, it incorporates taste.
I think people sometimes create this false dichotomy between AI and taste. You know what's tasteless is grabbing the model and having it output as it is. That's literally how you end up with purple gradients and highly separated uppercase text and a little green dot that says 'online' out of the blue. Meta announced their new model today and you know what else they did? They announced the skills. So one of the skills is I think they call it like the de-slopifying or the anti-slop skill. It literally tells the model to not be itself.
Don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. I think every company needs to take this very, very seriously because you can take a lot of that taste that you have, institutional best practices, etc., and turn them into skills and agents that will give you massive, massive upside.
Let's shift towards the heart of what's happening in the world today with AI. Let's start with engineering. How should engineers think of what's happening to their profession? And it probably is a big identity shift to go from 'I'm coding 24/7, I'm obsessed with it, I love this craft of building' to code gen.
I have a lot of thoughts. Look, it's happened several times in my career. The gatekeeping of what is coding has happened many times. The first time I felt that was I knew that JavaScript was a faster way to ship and build software. Why? Because it sat on top of the web platform. And so shipping a website with JavaScript was infinitely faster than shipping a desktop application. The gatekeeping at the time was like, JavaScript is a toy language. That's a joke. I have my Windows GTK Qt C++ codebase for desktop applications. What are you doing with that? Get off my lawn.
Then JavaScript started powering some of the best experiences on the planet. Gmail was made possible because it was a JavaScript-heavy application that moved desktop into the web browser. And so there's been these disruptions to the industry non-stop where you had to self-actualize. If you were the grumpy gray beard gatekeeping, 'I only do desktop software,' you missed the web, you missed mobile. This happened with data centers. 'Oh, I'm the data center guy. I know how to rack hardware. What is this AWS thing? Get off my lawn.' And so you missed cloud.
And so for me, I've taught myself this skill. My dad also has this mindset. So if it's new, we're kind of into it. Doesn't mean we go all in. We are open-minded. I bought Bitcoin. I mined Bitcoin as soon as it came out and I try things constantly. So I think this has helped me in my life keep up with the changes, that you can take a fork on the road. It's like the fork in the road meme, is like you either have this identity crisis or you leap into the next platform and the next big opportunity in your life.
And I think it happened with AI autocomplete and Copilot. I was like, my God, this is the second coming of Jesus, and people were like, no, no, no, it's junk. And then it happened with GPT, and then it happened with agents, and it's going to keep happening.
But what's the new engineering skill then in today's world?
So there's a meta game here. My best engineers have been the ones that adopted these tools the fastest. They developed an understanding of them that's deeper than the average. So there's a parallel here. If I ask a model, 'Build me a site,' I get purple. And most people that are in the know can tell right away. It's like the em dash and the GPT speak, right? The same happens with engineering. Like if you just say like, 'Fix it, make no mistakes,' you can only go so far. And so there's a meta game and a meta skill of how good are you at deploying this.
The ultimate meta skill that I think is the next evolution of software companies is that you're building the factory that produces software. And so I think what's, I can objectively look at our data and I've seen the acceleration of delivery correlated with the acceleration of revenue. And why is that happening is because we're leaning into this shift of 'I work on the output' to 'I work on the machine that produces the output.'
It's a recursive founder taken to agents.
100%. In fact, funny enough, this is hilarious. One of my poster children of founder mode is literally turning the AI SDK repository for the world to see into a software factory. Meaning you're going to be able to report an issue and 99% of the work is going to be solved automatically.
Or so a lot of people said, with AI SDK how are you going to keep up with the model changes? It's like, well, first of all, if AI is super intelligent, I can have AI reflect on what is the new capability and then add it automatically to AI SDK. That was kind of a dream a year ago. Now it's reality. Any customer report or any advancement in the underlying models can automatically get typified and then released.
But are you finding then accordingly, I actually have discussed this with many people at AI companies, that are you finding that product people are becoming more capable now because it's about what to build, or engineers who can be, yeah, where is this going?
Yeah, Lee Robinson wrote a great post, I think he called it like the rise of the product engineer, and I think that's spot-on. You know, I see it a lot in Silicon Valley, perhaps it's not yet as widespread, but it's a duality of knowing product management skills and thinking about your P&L and thinking about your customers and thinking about their case studies and thinking about expansion and thinking about retention, and also thinking about the engineering of it.
And when I say stuff like this it does sound a bit like science fiction or alchemy, like, oh wait, you have an autonomous software factory produced by someone that is this unicorn product designer engineer, but we're kind of getting there, right? And I think again that goes back to why the future is going to be very founder-centric, flatter organizations, fast information flows, higher ownership, and transparency.
You know, when you were 17, being able to build was rare and you showed your exceptionality to the world by building on open source, distributing it. Today, you can build with AI, you can distribute on X or Hacker News. So how does a 17-year-old today show that they are exceptional to the world?
I think at least for me, I've spiked in not just the ability to write the software, but try and go a few steps further. Anyone can build software but some people are able to communicate the value of that software better. Some people are able to get customers and then develop from there. So I can obviously post and say here's my technology. So you have to think about what is the delta between me and all of my competitors.
There's a handful of people that I follow that even run small businesses, but I follow them because I'm attracted to their storytelling ability. I recently invited, every Friday we do a fireside chat with the company, and I invited an indie maker, his name is Marc Lou. And I actually started asking him like, 'Walk us through your process. Tell us how you design a landing page, how you think about your call to actions, how you think about correlating visitors and revenue.' So his mind is this sort of full-stack AI-assisted engineer and business builder. And so I think that represents a lot of the ethos that we all have to have especially in this world to your point.
And so I think it's not going to be enough. Maybe I had some alpha back then because I was writing the code and I could publish it and then I could get some GitHub stars. That today feels much more like a baseline. I would have to go further. In fact, I'll tell you something that was really cool. So when I launched Socket, one of my open source projects, Microsoft started using it for a very cool product, Microsoft 365. When it was born, they took the Socket.IO protocol and the IO client and they embedded it into their tool. And looking back, that could have been an amazing story to tell. I just kind of, I don't know, I kind of let it slide. I took it for granted. Maybe because I was having so much success with just the code and the product alone. Today I would be spending a lot more time with my customers talking about them.
And this is the other realization that I had. Open source is starting blurring the lines with businesses and startups. Like it used to be that you just presented your project. You didn't even care that much about the name. You didn't care that it had a logo, a website. And so the bar just kept getting higher and higher and higher. And I would expect today, like I talk to 15, 17-year-olds who are building businesses, creating revenue breakthroughs.
I still think the reality is models can only do this much. If you have a very compelling thing that you've been able to do with the models that it didn't occur to other people or you've pushed them. Sometimes there is actually meta alpha where you're educating the world on how different models are better or how they disagree or how combined they produce better results. That's what's attracting a lot of people to our AI gateway. It's no longer a game of just one model and it might be a game of efficiency as well. It might be that you are able to produce at much lower cost.
So I still think there's alpha everywhere, but again the game is fundamentally different. There's a theoretical possibility already today that everybody's a builder and everybody can do more to automate and 10x themselves. But when I talk to CEOs, they're seeing a huge spectrum even in their own organizations around like is every marketer 10xing themselves? Is every finance person 10xing themselves? No. They're finding that of course engineering is deeper but like there's top 5% people in every organization even in AI organizations that are really 10xing themselves and 95% are still lagging.
Two questions there. One is are you finding that Vercel, maybe not because of the technical nature, but I'm curious. And second is how much of that is just a cultural upheaval that every company has to go through because the delta between the top 5% and the next 95% has multiplied.
No, this is real even at Vercel. Well, so here's how we're solving this. So what we noticed is most organizations said in order to superpower my organization with AI, I'll give everybody a Claude subscription. And then the divergence started. You have this prompt library and you follow @rauchg on X and you have skills and whatever. And that other person just prompts, clocks in, clocks out. And so how do I raise the floor? How do I make everyone build on a platform?
So maybe we didn't have this problem as drastically as some of the anecdotes that I've heard. Literally, I heard from one of our customers that they invite AI CEOs to do fireside chats to inspire the organization how to use agents because people don't even use them and so they want to hear the success stories and things like that. Maybe they're skeptical. I don't know. But what we did is we created an internal agent that is in a self-improvement loop.
This is the one you announced four days ago.
Yeah. So I told the story because what we announced is v0. We announced the framework of how you can build an agent to run your organization and our own internal agent is called V. And so instead of having people all over the place go to ChatGPT over here and go to Claude over there, they go to V. And this is to us a culmination of a lot of scars, lessons learned, trial and error.
At the end of the day, for an agent to be successful, it has to be like the iPhone. There's just one place to go. I can call, I can text, I can play video games. I can do anything with this thing. But I just know I take it out of my pocket. One interface. That's the future of agents. We internally, we used to call this the omni-agent project. We want to have one front door so that everyone in the company, when you don't know something, when you want a job to be automated, when you have a question about the business, when you have a question about a customer, or even when you want something automated, you can go to V. And under the hood V has a collection of agents, applications, capabilities, crucially skills, and a team that maintains it.
What you just described, I believe in it. But at the same time, you earlier said you don't believe it's the end of SaaS. Like, but why will somebody log into a CRM? Why will somebody log into a Zendesk? I'll always talk to V.
Okay. So, great question. So for example, I literally just approved some spend for a sales and marketing platform today that plugs into V and yesterday gave feedback to one of my colleagues that one of our content solutions, it takes too long because it was not designed for agent interoperability.
So I'm literally reconfiguring all of my priors. I used to think your software is good or bad based on, I don't know, the website is fast, it has a lot of features, I can click around and it works reliably. Now that's all table stakes of course. But the thing that is making some platforms spike is their ability to interoperate with the Vs of the world. And if you're not good with V, I actually have a few vendors on the chopping block literally because of their inability to. And by the way, it's subtle things sometimes because maybe they do have an MCP but their MCP takes 2,000 tool calls and it fails a lot and they just checked the box.
You know that they're either late to market and they're trying to play catch-up or you know that their infrastructure doesn't hold up. So this one's fascinating, right? Literally today there's a major GitHub outage and I have a lot of love for what that product has done and what that platform has done for the world and I have a lot of friends there but the reality is that their infrastructure has not been able to hold up with the agentic demand and that has become a bottleneck for us.
And so I see this pattern a lot because what has happened is a lot of software maybe did present the right API, maybe did present the right interface, and now you have a billion agents querying it at 100 requests per second and so it's airing a lot of dirty laundry. You know, we used to say come to Vercel because you're going to need this elastic serverless compute capability. And so people would say no, you know what? I don't think I need that. Well, look at this. From week to week, agents can 100x your load. Our own load has doubled in a couple months.
And so sometimes, obviously not every piece of infrastructure is perfect but some of the key bets that we placed I'm really thankful for because no one could have predicted this massive acceleration. And what's probably happening at a lot of companies is that someone has an agent and is deploying to Vercel and is deploying to the homegrown legacy platform and the agent is just going and going and going and the Vercel one is delightful and the legacy one literally gets replaced.
So a lot of companies are finding this with their, I mentioned that marketing company. Can your platform where you deploy software absorb the creative demands that all of these coding agents have unleashed? Most of the time the answer is no. It's like I gave you a Ferrari. I was like, here's Cursor. It can do anything. All right. Deploy. Oh, I just went into a two-week queue or I can't deploy an internal tool or an agent. And so there was that impedance mismatch that obviously has fortunately really favored us.
Let's shift towards how AI has changed Vercel and how it operates and stuff. Starting with you, how has your life as a CEO changed with AI? What are decisions you were personally making now you've outsourced to AI? Yeah. Walk us through some real examples.
It's been amazing. You know, one thing I respect about, super random thought, but like Garry Tan from Y Combinator, he did something that's so unusual, he went back to the arena and he started building with AI. I would say to every CEO, you have to do that. I recently mentioned this. It should be mandatory that your C-suite and your top engineers need to come to SF and spend some time here because sometimes it's hard to believe what these agents can do and how fast companies are upgrading their operational rhythm, their best practices, their internal platforms, and the world is moving so fast.
And so when Garry starts publishing AI skills and whatever, that's fantastic because how can he select or pick or invest in the next generation of companies if he doesn't understand the technology? And the fact that it's somewhat controversial or funny or a meme is kind of so ironic to me because it's so obvious and that's what I try to do every day. I try to gain a grasp on is your product, is your idea, is my customer's UI good in this agentic world? And that requires you to use agents. You can't outsource that.
It's such a dramatic platform shift. It's a little bit like mobile in the sense that if you were a CEO and you're like, you know what, I'm not even going to get a mobile phone. How could you possibly understand that you need to shift your roadmap and priorities to be a part of that platform, right? And so I think it's the same with agents. So I spend a lot of time dogfooding our products from an agentic perspective. I spend a lot of time looking at the landscape, looking at how others are doing things. I'm building things.
But are there decisions that you're spending less time on because AI is able to give you a recommendation much faster?
I do a lot of research with AI. I just published and I actually quite chuffed about this. So I created a research folder. I'm a CLI guy. So when I started the company, the big idea was a CLI that made it one command to deploy your application. 10 years later, what do agents need? One command to deploy their applications. And I've done the same with AI. So I try to use this AI like I...
I call it the inexhaustible IQ machine. I try to unleash it in the lowest level substrate I can find, meaning the most access possible to my computer, my data, etc. And so CLI I really like and I fire off a lot of asynchronous research tasks. The ones that are personal I launch on my CLI. The ones that related to the business I just have a DM thread with V. So I go to Slack and I talk to V. And in that context, V can access the company's know-how. In my personal context it can access my personal information, my Gmail, my experiments because I also try and maybe this is I know how unique this is but I try to put myself in the shoes of someone that doesn't know anything about. Sometimes I even ask the agent, you know, I have the thought and this is the beautiful thing about agents like the ability to expand your mind and your throughput is insane because as they become better doing longer horizon tasks, they don't need a whole lot of babysitting. I can say, 'Hey, go and research how easy it is to sign up for the Vercel AI gateway and get an API token.' I had that thought. It's like I'm curious how easy is that? And in a past life, that would have been like a product review session. It would have been a meeting. It would have been some slideshow, someone like taking screenshots of the onboarding funnel or whatever. It would have been a conversation, I would have been pestering something on Slack. 'Hey, can you check on that please?' No, go to the agent. So, when I go to a human, I'm really, you know, respecting their time and their attention because I kind of, if I DM you, it probably meant that my agent couldn't figure it out actually.
