Hi, I'm Jules and this is Show Me Your Stack, a series where we're interviewing your favorite techies to understand what their day-to-day tech stack actually looks like. Today we're interviewing Guillermo, who is the founder and CEO of Vercel.
This is Show Me Your Stack.
One thing about G, he loves to hack.
He loves to hack. Benevolently, only good hacks.
I actually love reverse engineering, taking things apart.
Is that to sort of identify the holes in that system as you take it apart?
Something that I focus on a lot is trying to understand what's true about the world.
If someone tells me like this framework or this tool is really successful, popular, etc., I try to understand like is that so? Like can I go out into the world and see how it's being used? I have an attitude of like trust but verify with what I hear.
So are you always first person verifying things or?
I try to, and because I have agents that can do the work for me, I can say send my agents out into the world. And I do that not because I don't trust you, but because I actually don't trust you.
I want to verify technology from an end-user perspective. I want to try it out. Like I'm the first person to ever use this technology, like where I pretend to be a novice.
I click things that are not meant to be clicked. People sometimes like don't look forward to my product reviews.
When I first came to San Francisco, mobile and cloud were like blowing up, much like AI is blowing up today.
I don't know that we had so many billboards dedicated to it. It took a lot of reconfiguring of your priors and your mind of I now have to think more about mobile. And if you succeeded in doing that, this massive market opened up to your company. And so now people have to do that for agents.
So to me, there's a lot of elements of deja vu.
One of the most magical parts of early Vercel days was the ease in which a developer could spin up a UI and create an interface, which is like so ironic that we're now here crafting interfaces.
I think we need to now think about what is the equivalent design philosophy but for building agentic products. The new interface for agents is going to be natural language and conversation. So, WhatsApp, Telegram...
Vercel just announced the chat SDK to help developers build agents that have interfaces in all of the messaging platforms. I think UI is still going to be important that you can dive deep into the things that the agent looked into. Let me read those logs. The models continue to improve. More and more of the world will be the agentic interface.
So I still think a lot about like more and more of our company runs on our internal agent. Right now it's called D0.
Unfortunately a little too close.
It's going to get renamed soon.
What are the interfaces that are going to be most important to us in our day-to-day? You were asking about like what are some apps that I use, and I believe that in the fullness of time, and this is what Vercel is enabling, I'm going to be able to go to any application and it's going to be agentic and AI native. For applications that are not fully AI native yet, I can do command shift space brings up Raycast AI. I still use the terminal a lot by the way. I use Claude Code and I use this for automating some things on the operating system side.
How are you actually operating day-to-day?
D0 is a big part of it. I have a bunch of channels where I get periodic reports of company metrics. I also can ask D0 for bespoke questions. I also shared on X recently, every Monday I get the brain dump. The agent does basically like a business analysis. It looks at our metrics. This is what happened to total requests on the platform. This is what happened to total compute on the platform. This is what happens to all tokens on the platform. Agents are really good at spotting trends.
Okay. So, walk me through, this is how you're also reading your email. Yeah. How does that work? You no longer use a Gmail superhuman interface?
I still use it from time to time. One of my predictions that is actually, I'm stealing it from Nikita Bier. He mentioned that the spam problem is going to become more and more insurmountable because of things like OpenClaw. It's very hard to notice if some post on social media is coming from a person or some agent.
So if you were to write me an email right now, how would you do that?
Writing doesn't happen that often. Although I will say that for example I can say here summarize these actions I just took and send them to Valerie on Slack. I have the Slack MCP wired up.
You are not in Slack writing these messages yourself.
Well I am most of the time. I am most of the time.
Every Vercel employee is twice when they receive a message.
Right. And by the way I think it discloses it. So let's open it.
She's going to be like aren't you in an interview right now?
So perfect. Right. So, here's a summary of what I just knocked out.
So cool.
It's so impressive how in the weeds you are still as a developer. Obviously, you've always been a developer. You love building side projects, but this still occupies a lot of your time.
Well, the funny thing is, is this developing? G from 10 years ago would be like, 'No, man. It's an IDE or using Vim.' Like, I'm a huge Vim user and whatnot, but I haven't really had the need. I use Nano Banana a lot and Grog to take an image of something and very quickly prompt to do something else or to give an idea to the teams. I think creation really replaces a lot of the more bespoke ways that we used to communicate. I really believe that a real link and a real product is worth not a thousand words, it's worth 1 billion words. We've been talking about it and I always say like whenever we catch ourselves talking, we should be v0-ing.
Why? Why are you chatting on Slack?
Get to v0. I love our documentation, but it's overwhelming. So, let's actually open it. I was telling our designer of like, hey, let's actually make it real. And within two basically v0 shots, I now have a new version of documentation. This is a clear instance of a CEO actually adding value even though it's marginal.
I prefer to do this, which doesn't take me that much time, than give a bunch of unstructured feedback on Slack or meetings or whatever.
Right? When you already have a clear idea of what you want.
