Guillermo Rauch: One Stroke Dragon

I really think that human effort is still incredibly underrated. All of the success that I've gotten is by obsessing over simple ideas and just pushing them way harder and further than it would seem reasonable or possible. And occasionally having to go against the grain and having to go against common wisdom. So there's an element of, uh, Being a rebel.

First of Kind is the story of design and tech told by its pioneers, powered by Framer, Noon, Grokbot, Ramp, Vercel, Granola, and Profound, all of whom believe the future belongs to the designers who build. We're kicking off season 3 with Guillermo Rauch, the founder CEO of Vercel, and most people who hear about this are going to be like, well. Wait, I thought this was a show about designers,

right?

But in practice, you know, we've always been fairly consistent. We've said First of Kind is a story of design and tech told by its pioneers. And so I feel like there's an argument to be made that you are not just chief executive, you're also chief designer. Yeah. And, and so I kind of, I know, I know my answer for, for that question. Uh, I want to start off just like, what is your answer? For YG, it's a first of kind.

I think more so than a lot of my engineering peers, I've always looked at building a product or engineering itself as a design problem. I've always worked backwards from what is the interface of this thing to the world, using design tools to model my thinking. So even when I designed the first command line interface, CLI, for Vercel to deploy, I started out with laying out artboards on Sketch on the application saying, okay, when you run VC deploy, this is what you get. And this is what happens when this other thing happens. But I've also liked the engineering-centric approach of you can't just design perfect things in a vacuum. Your little design tool needs to confront reality as soon as possible, which is kind of like the mission of Vercel if you think about it is Can I deploy so quickly that some other human agent, some system will give me feedback that'll inform that next step? And so I think it is about the convergence in many ways of design and engineering. I dreamt of a platform that'll bring both closer together. And I think another important bit about my past is when I was a kid in Argentina, My dad bought us computers and he brought a vision to my brother and I of software will eat the world. He didn't have the language of Andreessen yet, but that was his whole thing. He didn't know how to write software, but he knew that people that could would have some kind of advantage. That was kind of his contribution. My mom's contribution was people that know English, speak English fluently, will have an advantage.

And you learned those 2 things simultaneously.

Yeah. So funny enough, as fate would have it, I needed to master English to teach myself programming. The courses, the manuals, the documentation was only available in English. And the software bit was also a very interesting challenge for us. We didn't have the money to purchase software licenses. We leaned into open source. We leaned into hacking. Can I download something, fork it, make it my own? And so It really pushed that entrepreneurial bit, significant bit into our mindset. But when my dad offered up all of these potential programming languages, he would come home and say like, I heard from someone at the office or so-and-so about Java or about C++. I tried a lot of them. It's like I had a little bit of a taste of everything.

Yeah.

And what I really fell in love with was things that leaned towards the user interface. So one of the critical moments in my upbringing was when I realized, one, the web is this universal platform. The web is more hackable. The web browser is also an IDE and a design environment of sorts. I think a lot of people might have the experience of like, oh, you can inspect elements, you can view source, you can even change some text. That's kind of wild that Every webpage, even the ones you haven't made, are modifiable by you. You can redesign them, you can change the colors. Because I leaned heavy into frontend engineering, I think I kind of was a person that could bring these worlds closer together. Designers would love to see their ideas take shape and become alive. And the easiest, least friction way to do that is through the web browser and through the introduction of frontend engineering concepts.

Do you remember the first time you did view source? Because I feel like that was like a voice from on high. You know, the idea that like you can see something, go anywhere on the web, click view source, and then be able to reverse engineer what's in front of you.

Yeah. I remember now, I haven't thought about this in such a long time, but I like visions are flashing back. What really got me excited about the web was that it was not for static documents, contrary to the deepest wishes of Safari and Apple. I think when they designed Safari, you see it even in the gesture when you, when you go back, they think of this as a digital book. That gesture, that pane that you drag, oh, you're dragging a page.

Yes.

And I remember when Google came out with Gmail, this was literally the most important breakthrough in this history of dynamic HTML. Because they, they said, well, you could download Microsoft Outlook and check your mail, or you can just go to gmail.com. We'll run the whole application there.

And most people think of it as like, oh, it was infinite storage that made Gmail magical.

Yeah.

For me, Gmail was my siren call.

Yeah.

When that came out, it was this convergence of like AJAX.

Yeah.

It was this realization that you can create desktop software-like experiences inside the browser. And therefore anybody with a browser could use your software. And it felt like overnight the CD-ROM was done. It's like, we are no longer shipping software physically. This is how we're going to be shipping software.

Well, it's that convergence of 2 things, because on one hand, you have the idea of unlimited storage that comes from the cloud. So if you say my email's interface is the web browser, and that goes to a server, and that server is in the cloud, all of these elements are connected, which lead to such a better user experience, right? You have, you don't have to worry about backups. You don't have to worry about storage. But the idea that the webpage would come alive with JavaScript, that's what really got me into this world. And I remember taking jobs as a freelancer because when I was in high school, I had these 2 competing priorities. I had to like, you know, get good grades at school. And I was literally just working almost every night with my clients in Europe as my, you know, second life. And I remember I would take jobs specifically where I could go deeper into these interests. They never asked for AJAX to make the CRM interface faster. I wanted to create a higher quality product that was more responsive. And then the other thing that it was kind of like a domino reaction because that also led me to the world of real-time. Gmail at one point said, well, why are we stopping at page refreshes? Why are we stopping at pulling emails on a list and clicking them? can we enable real-time communication between people? And they launched GChat almost at the same time, perhaps some overlap with Facebook Chat.

And

so the browser becoming now the medium by which people can connect in real time also blew my mind. And once again, it brought focus to a certain set of engineering skills that would enable that kind of experience. So if I was already excited about JavaScript and frontend, I got even more excited because in order to create this real-time client-server communication, I realized I'm going to have to run a lot of overlapping code. I'm going to have to run some code on the server. I'm going to have to write some code on the client, and I can use JavaScript as the lingua franca of these communications. And that led me to the world of Node.js, Socket.IO. I created a lot of foundational technology for the web. to enable this kind of like real-time communication experience. And again, you're only interested in this if you're sort of dreaming up what the product experience is going to be. I got excited about real-time document collaboration, real-time drawing, real-time chat, what would eventually become one of the most important generations of software. I think Web 2.0 was underlined by let's make things more real-time, collaborative, notifications, Facebook, all these things.

And then when you think about like your own honing of your design sense, how much was reverse engineering a part of it? Because I feel like one of the things that comes to mind when I think about the genesis of Vercel, it really started from this impulse to dog food. It is this bias towards building infrastructure that you kind of need first and foremost, but then probably every other developer that encounters this problem needs. Like, how does that kind of roll into the design philosophy of Vercel and of, of, of you? Yeah.

Yeah, there are a lot of elements of Vercel which are about, can I disseminate this power as broadly as I can? That's why I got into open source. You know, it was kind of possible to create a real-time communication system, but only Google and Facebook could do it, especially at that scale. So that's why I created Socket.IO. And then I realized, if you're someone that maybe doesn't have a strict title, you're not a designer, You're not a front engineer, you're not a backend engineer, you're not a DevOps engineer. You're a person with an idea and you want to ship. What is the tooling and infrastructure for those people? And you could argue, well, there were things before Vercel like Squarespace. They allowed someone to put up a website online. And there were things like Kubernetes and very deep tech infrastructure systems. But there was no system for everybody and that could scale up to the largest and most ambitious ideas and scale down to just make it magical, make the experience of deploying an application one command. So there was an overlapping interest there of, I want to democratize this to as many people as possible. And I also want to take on the engineering and cognitive challenge of simplifying something that takes weeks or months. Can I bring it down almost mathematically to its like physical limit on latency and its simplest design from an interface perspective, which ended up being for us one command deploy.

So much of like what you focused on was around this end user experience. Even the way that you talk about feedback and the qualities of products, that really resonate with you, it's always with the designer's eye. You're an aesthete through and through. Like, what advice do you give founders when you talk to them about how they develop their taste, their sense of discernment, how to essentially start to become the chief designer of their own businesses?

Yeah, I think there's something tactical, which is, I call it exposure hours. There's something about absorbing a lot of information about the field that you're interested in. in creating a huge amount of empathy with the end user. And so to your point, I think there's something about you are the end user of your product and having a dissatisfaction with the status quo. And so I had that ability to actually know how to assemble 5 different systems to deploy a production-grade application. But I also had that, oh my God, like it could be so much better. could be so much faster. This is not a good experience. And so I had my own exposure hours, but I also had a huge amount of empathy for every developer in the world. And I still do. People praise us for our developer experience. And every time I see a developer that had even one minor edge case, I go and sweat the details. Even today, someone sent me a DM saying, hey, I added this collaborator to this project. He deployed. And in this particular PR, because of this edge case, the check didn't trigger. And I was like, this is the end of the world. You know, for, I think for a lot of other companies, they don't have that pain empathy. They're like, well, just turn your computer off and on again.

And

so I created a set of values internally at Vercel to create almost like an immune system against that status quo or that, you know, giving up attitude that I think predates a lot of systems.

Yeah.

And so I think That design-led mantra is not just something that was instituted 10 years ago. It's something that you fight for every day. But there's also this, I think, higher-level concept beyond exposure hours. And I think it's the authenticity of the mission. It's about founder-mission fit. I'm not saying that, you know, every problem in the world that people are going to go out and solve has a deep story back to when they were 10 years old. But I am very grateful that for me it is the case because when I was 10, had I had Vercel, I would've gotten to where I wanted to go faster. I always tell people a hyperlink will travel the world. Your brightest ideas, one hyperlink away from impressing a prospect, getting you connected to your next business associate, whatever. The web sets your ideas free. I would encourage entrepreneurs to try to find that authentic thing about Their journey that cannot be easily replicated, especially in the age of AI, right? There's, there's no substitute for that deeply ingrained desire that comes from your personal experience.

And when I hear people talk about working with you, the one thing that always circles back is how close you stay to the metal, right? There's a quality of dogfooding, which I always feel like is very like Facebook native. It's like, we really cared about dogfooding. It's like, it's got to be good enough for me for us to ship this out the door. But then they also talk quite a bit about, you're just relentless about the quality, right? The details don't slip through. As a consequence, people then sort of learn by osmosis. It's like, okay, he's always going to focus on this kind of visual detail. I need to write a skill file to catch that next time we actually, you know, deploy a change of that nature.

The classic one there is layout shift.

Yes. Yeah.

Which is that, you know, actually this is a good example of the overlap between design and engineering.

Okay.

So layout shift is this concept of when you're loading an application interface, a website, things should have a predictable paint path. They should have a predictable layout. If imagine the classic example I give business people is I'm going to go purchase your product and I'm about to press buy now and some engineer made a mistake, the page shifts down. Instead of buy now, I click on an ad or I go out of the website or I go back. And so you lost my sale. And so this is bad because now when you start really paying attention, you realize that a product that janks and jitters around when you load it just doesn't feel good or doesn't look good.

Right.

It also has the business element of like, we know from the data that if you are not doing your layout work well, your conversions will decrease or whatever. And it also has the engineering side of it because You're making the machine do so many recalculations. The poor web browser, which is a marvel of engineering, is like, oh, okay, I have to do all of this. I did all the math. I'm ready to go. I'm ready to paint. And it's like, no, no, sorry, sorry, sorry. So we have to do it all over again. I sometimes give people the metaphor of imagine that instead of loading an app once, you wrote code that made the app load 5 times because you're wasting all of this time and compute. You're wasting energy. I can go on and on to speak of the downsides. And obviously there's times where you break the rules. It's not that— I want people to also be free to make their own choices and not be guided by dogma, right?

But like the layout shift, like it erodes trust. It feels unreliable. It feels shifty, right? Like a shifty person is not a trustworthy person.

That's right.

And so you want to make sure that every single web experience that you deliver is like a highly honed video game where like as sprites like emerge, As things kind of like appear on the horizon, they're not sort of jumping around, right? You want to have a stable world.

I don't know if you knew this, there's an art in Japan where they paint a dragon in one stroke. Like they load up the brush and they've predicted how you can draw this beautiful dragon in one paintbrush, in one stroke. And I've given people that metaphor of like a really awesome application or website will have that intentionality. It's not shifty, of course.

Yeah. When I look back on, on, on, you know, your success, one of the key inputs in my mind, clarity of vision. I look at, you know, Pure UI. I reread it like 2 days ago. Like Pure UI was such a pristine articulation of what React would enable the web to be able to do, what the web could be like. And I feel as though right now. The industry's kind of fumbling around trying to figure out what is that vision for how we incorporate agents into making software, into designing experiences, into just working in this big paradigm shift that we're going through. Yeah. How are you currently incorporating it into the work that you do, into how Vercel thinks about work internally? And then how should people be thinking about the way in which they have to re-architect their own work to infuse agents.

I mean, overall, I'm extremely bullish, optimistic, and excited about AI because I've always believed that the best technologies are the ones that broaden access from the pencil to the printing press, to open source, to JavaScript, Next.js. All of these things are just enabling more people to join in on the fun. At its very basic, AI is fun. It's not just bringing a new class of workers in the form of agents, it's bringing a new class of builders. People that couldn't design, build, create, ship before can now do it. And this is why Vercel leaned in so hard because I saw in the premise of AI for software engineering an acceleration of our mission. Everyone should be able to ship. Everyone should be able to cook. Now, it's, I think, crucial that we infuse this point of view of quality into everything that we do with AI because I love that we have now the term slop. I tell people, look, slop is awesome, 4-letter word that speaks to the negative things that AI can do, just like spam was for the internet. You have your own email inbox. Well, it can get spam. Oh, we have AI. It can produce slop. And so I first introduced the pillar of AI focus for the company. I said, everything we'll do is in the interest of quality and we won't do any random acts of AI.

That's what I called it.

And going back to like how I—

This is like where you sort of stick a button somewhere. It says like AFI this or AI this, or like add AI to this existing work.

Or you ship something that you're just, you're only excited about it because you built it with AI. But if you look at it objectively, it's a piece of junk.

Right.

So I wanted to basically create an immune system around it. And we're just talking about how I guide the company, and sometimes it's through memes.

I see.

So when I said layout shift, or when I say random acts of AI, it kind of aligns people towards like, well, how are we going to approach this problem? I've now formalized my thinking into the statement of that which I cannot create, I don't understand, which is a famous Feynman saying. It seems very essential to intelligence that you deeply understand how things are built. A good programmer is just an extremely competent computer user. One of the biggest surprises for me has been this idea that a coding agent is going to be the foundation of every agent. Of course, not only from the knowledge point of view, but because of its ability to fix, correct, hack, right? And what do we want out of knowledge work these days? What makes you a good accountant these days? Well, when I studied accounting in my school, in my high school in Argentina, it was about balancing sheets of paper. Now, of course, you would want Excel competence for an accountant that you hired today, or Python or R, et cetera, et cetera. So it's very clear to me now that every agent that helps shape the future of a knowledge task will embed within it the capabilities of writing its own programs, of modifying them, of understanding what its own limitations are and proposing changes to the underlying skillset, instructions, prompts, et cetera. I also thought a narrative here in the Valley was in order for an agent to be possible, it needs to be perfect at every step. Because it's going to be the combination of a set of probabilities and we can't have it mess up at any step. But turns out that's actually not how programmers deal with the world, let alone these agentic programmers. We read feedback and we adapt. And in the feedback, whether it's a compiler error or some kind of exit code or whatever, we know how to repair and make progress. And so I think there was a perspective perhaps that agents had to be flawless. But it's the opposite. It's, they will keep trying.

And I guess that's maybe the thing I want to dive into is like part of the design philosophy that you've expressed through Vercel is one where rather than ideating in isolation, you put work out there in the world, you iterate in the wild, you gather feedback.

Yes.

There is a huge chunk of the design industry that's very reluctant to do that. They don't want to impose an inferior user experience to an end customer. They want to think through all the edge cases. And you recently talked about how important it is culturally to land your software. You emphasize landing. And as I understand it, you describe landing not as shipping something. Landing means having an actual business outcome that you set out from the onset. Yes. And I love this because in my mind, it's like, if that's a lesson I can teach to every single designer on the planet, like the importance of landing, That's the lesson I would choose. When you talk about landing internally, what does that mean?

One of the consequences of AI and agents is that every person is becoming more and more full stack. I think it used to be that perhaps you would say like, I need someone to help my team. They're going to be a CSS expert. They're going to be an accessibility expert. They're going to be a frontend expert. Nowadays, I'm thinking of people as the Renaissance people of the prophecy. Right? Like they know and they have every skill.

All-around athletes.

All-around athletes because they can delegate work to agents. And I think this is gonna emphasize and fuel this focus on landing because you're gonna be thinking backwards from the business outcomes, from the experience that you want to create, from the data that you want to produce, from the traction that you wanna see in the world and work backwards to your design, implementation, et cetera. We used to mention this other meme internally a lot, We still use it, called iteration velocity. So velocity is a distinct concept from speed. And I've seen in my career, I've made the mistake myself of thinking that, confusing speed for velocity. So speed is you move really, really fast. You type a lot, you spend a lot of tokens, you're token maxing, but for what outcome? Velocity is speed with a direction, a vector. So For me, it's about, are we actually getting to the destination? And this is ultimately why the same agent given to 2 different people will never produce the same results. I'm actually quite a big fan of this idea of Ralph Wiggum. Yeah. If you've heard of it, which is that you throw off an agent or several with no, almost no guidance other than exit criteria.

Make no mistakes.

Exactly. It's like, it's like I want to convert this code into Rust. Make no mistakes. All right, here's the token budget. Go off. Right? And because agents are getting better at longer horizon tasks, combined with a very clear exit criteria they can work against, which is like pass tests or produce this code or ship this, I think sometimes I've seen people try to infuse too much of their own perspective into the process, and sometimes they don't get as much from agents as they could.

Because they're prescribing the solution?

You're being too prescriptive of the solution and the methodology. And I think sometimes the beauty of an agent is that it can explore the world on your behalf, explore the state space, explore the latent space. And it might be things that are not yet in your brain.

So let's talk about that a little bit because I'm a little bit sick of hearing people opine on taste. And I think in large part, I think it's because it often comes from this reflex, this belief that taste is strictly something that humans will monopolize, that machines will never have access to this. Right. And to me, taste is very much a function of your vocabulary, like what grammar you assign to all of the experiences you've inputted. And it's also your intuition built around experimentation, around taking that vocabulary, recombining it, changing it, and then seeing what it does out in the world. Everything that I just described is something that I feel like you can brute force through armies of agents. Agents should be able to run experiments for you, take frameworks, right? And be able to experiment within those and sort of grow experiences and at least feed them back. You will still need the human operator to ultimately opine on the results of those experiments. But in my mind, this regime of sort of going out there, experimenting, exploring, driving towards some end results. Yeah. If that's taste cultivation, how are agents unable to ultimately start to express their own tastes and ability to explore the opportunity space alongside people?

Yeah. One of the things that I always think about is we're still in the domain of humans making decisions for products and services and associations they want to make in relationship to other humans. So when we present the brand Vercel to the world, we are signing off on This is what the best version of ourselves looks like to the outside world. I think that's never going to change. I think the human as the editor of the product that agents create, I want that world to continue to exist. And I want to, when I interact with a product or a brand, I want to feel a connection to the team, not a connection to the team's tools. I don't care that they use Claude, Codex, v0, whatever. I want to know That's what another human did for me. And I think it's relevant because I'm starting to perceive that people confuse something as aesthetically pleasant, which of course AIs are capable of producing. I see it all the time. Like you tell V0 build something, it's going to create something beautiful. Like you wouldn't have imagined a couple of years ago that a machine could produce these arbitrary permutations. It's almost like an infinite template generator. We used to go to websites and navigate their template marketplace, right? And say, oh, this looks good, this looks good. And they were fixed in time and space. AI has now given us infinite good designs, if you will. But I think there's something still about adding your element of humanity and the value add that you bring on top.

Yeah.

And the reason that I say this is I can already kind of perceive that you've done very light editing on top of the model. Models are producing a representation of the world. They're compressing all of its available data.

It's like they have a style, right?

They have a style.

They

have a smell. And that in itself is like you didn't pass the test. And I remember being able to perceive this about templates, like free templates that people could get. I would see Y Combinator startups launch and I said, yeah, that kind of reminds me of a template that I've already seen before. And so there's so much value to pushing the model past the average. You've infused it with something else. You've completed it because it's by definition a model. It's incomplete. I think the people that are going to win are the ones that fully embrace agents and push them past their limitations.

They're kind of going off-piste. They're going outside of the training data, outside of what exists within culture.

Yes. There's this meme of like, never ship the org chart. I've always respected that about Facebook because when people, when engineering teams get bigger, you have this temptation of, okay, each team is going to ship something to the world directly. And it even manifests into the interface, like the URL changes because you're going to the product of some team, some team, facebook.com.

And in some directory, right?

Or even worse. Yeah, right. And think Facebook, For the longest time fought back against that. Whereas other companies were like, we just need to like, we're like an economic value producing machine. Let's just start shipping whatever. You have a risk with AI of just, you're just shipping the unmodified output of the model and you're not really adding value to the world. I can also use the model directly. If you're just going to like proxy the model, you're just adding a tax, right?

And then what would you say is important for us to then teach aspiring designers, builders, creatives. You know, we now exist in a world where I would argue this, this false boundary between design and engineering seems even more like a mirage, more so than ever before, especially as we're creating the full-stack builder archetype in real time with these tools. When you think about what design is missing in the world today, what designers need to really be thinking about, caring about, learning. What is the whole gap that you see right now?

Well, I'll tell you one thing that I think people really want is they want great software experiences. And even within enterprises, no one wants software that's clunky, that's slow, that's insecure, that doesn't have the data that they wanted. And this is the frustration of a lot of people in their everyday lives is, you know, they have the experience of using their iPhone and enjoying an app, and then they go to work and the expensive app sucks and sucks their soul out of them. And so you see the punishment on traditional SaaS a lot in the markets because AI is really an answer to that. You don't have to put up with the world as it is. You can recreate it, modify it, migrate it. And so agents will do the things that people want. And so I think a lot of people are going to say now, well, I have 2 possible solutions here. I continue to fight this piece of software and I beg their creators to improve it, or I just build and create my own. And so there's something so awesome there about when I think about it, my ideal future is one where I've created my favorite tools. that are just for me. I actually think there's an economic incentive for people to create their own tools. And I use the metaphor of the software factory and the design factory. Now that everybody can prompt and produce code, the interesting thing is not the code output, it's the machinery that enabled it. And going back to that metaphor of like, are you just proxying tokens or are you infusing them with your value add? So the metaphor there is like, Let's work on that factory. Let's perfect it. Let's make it use the best materials, the best instructions, the best frameworks. And so I think there's something to be said about the companies with the best software factories that embrace AI and agents are the ones that are going to win. And so we're learning what it means to build the best possible agentic developer experience, the best possible agentic infrastructure. What are the best ways to communicate? with these agents. A lot of the web has already shifted towards Markdown instead of HTML. Well, it turns out agents don't need all of that fluff that was designed for human consumption. They don't need a layout. That's right. That's why we saw a layout shift.

They just need the structure.

They just need the signal. They just need the pure data and content. And I think what's awesome is that you can create a world that maximizes the human experience element, and maximizes the agent experience element.

And they can live in parallel.

And they can live in parallel. I think this is what every company is going to have to do because there's, it's also true that we're seeing agents make infrastructure choices. The agent says, I'm going to use Vercel for this. Sometimes the agent might be like, here's why, or here's a comparison with other solutions. But a lot of people are saying, okay, agent, I trust you, right? Because you're basically delegating work. And so we're also dealing with, okay, what does it mean to have been purchased by an agent? So I've been noticing this experience with people that's similar where like they come to us and, hey, yeah, oh yeah, 3 months ago my agent chose you guys. And what I need from you is different from what you would have expected another customer would need. Maybe they're debugging something and their expectations already that we are an agent as well. Yeah. So they don't want to talk to humans. They don't want to click around. People need to think about this too, right? The person that grows up in this world, in what they know is interactions with agents, will have that UX expectation when they also come through the proverbial .com. They'll come to Vercel.com and they'll say, they almost want like a continuity of their experience. And so this is how I think the web becomes ultimately agentic in itself, is that no matter where you go, you have this conversational experiences are highly adaptive. They carry context

and it conforms to you perfectly.

Yes. Yeah.

I want to talk a little bit about evolution. When I think back on the whole journey of Vercel, it started off as Zeit. You as an entrepreneur, it wasn't your first rodeo. But it felt like this was the company, this is the planet you were going to build and you were going to stay on for a long time. I think back to long-haired, samba-wearing—

I've looks-maxed since then. That's what you're saying.

Well, you've evolved and your company has evolved with you. I want to talk a little bit about how your design philosophy has changed through this evolution. Like when you look back on, oh yeah, this, these are where I made the most meaningful strides. What would they be? What were some of the lessons along the way?

So much of what I do is communicate. And for me, everything is communication and every communication can be intentionally designed, whether it's this beautiful space that we've chosen for this conversation or the words that I choose, or, you know, people may be surprised about how much I pay attention to even how the words flow on a blog post or a tweet. Everything has intention behind it. I think I've only grown more radicalized about the power of storytelling and everything. The world is made up of stories and we remember the best stories and everything we ship that makes sense, that people love. It's because it was part of a story and you can connect deeply with its creators. I've become even more neurotic in some ways about the quality of language and the words that I choose. I've told people, look, you'll get out a lot more out of AI systems the stronger your language gets.

Yes.

In some ways, it's a true calling for me because when I got into my high school in Argentina, which had this sort of exams and competitions, I was good at math, which is what my parents knew, But I actually ended up getting a lot of points from literature and the Spanish basically like side of the exams. I've always looked up to an Argentinian writer called Borges.

Yes, of course.

He's written a number of stories that are about physics and the universe and concepts like recursion. He was almost like a proto-programming expert, but also the importance of language. And vocabulary. And he, like me, was obviously a native Spanish speaker, but had tremendous respect for the breadth and flexibility and physicality of the English language. And so I, you know, what I do at Vercel as a CEO is I communicate with my employees. I try to motivate and inspire. I communicate with the world. Now I communicate to computers very directly because I talk to agents a lot. And so I think a big part of my evolution has been this nonstop refinement of how I communicate with the world.

I love that you talked about the importance of story because to me, one of the things that I feel as though leaders in technology, leaders and pioneers, is we have to pioneer a new American story. There's so much reluctance, and, and fear around AI that I think technologists believe deep down is unfounded.

Right.

And yet it's very real. And I think a lot of it boils down to storytelling, that we're very good at storytelling within our own industry, but it doesn't seem to kind of permeate out into the broader American public. And I think Vercel is fundamentally an American story. Like, Deep down, right? It's an American immigrant story. And so I want to know, what do you think we need to be doing from a storytelling perspective that can at least help people understand that they can in fact just build things, that they have tools at their disposal that not only give them far greater powers than anything you or I grew up with, but these tools can explain themselves to you. They can give you very granular answers. Yeah. To every question that your heart desires to have an answer for. What is it that we're failing to do as an industry from a storytelling perspective?

Yeah, I think sometimes the sheer optimism that I feel here in the city of San Francisco and that I share with so many of my peers and colleagues, it doesn't permeate all the way through to the rest of society. There is a level of skepticism or that the optimism is unfounded because something went wrong in the past, that I think can be quite toxic because I've seen it firsthand when I grew up. There was this constant, everyone that creates something has a hidden agenda. No one creates something because they want to see something better in the world or create a more beautiful world. Argentina in that sense was a lot worse because People would think that anyone that succeeds had some kind of arrangement. It's almost going to like the paranoid conspiracy world.

The corruption is the only reason why you're there, right?

Yes. It's so funny because at one point I started to go more viral in Argentina whenever news of our funding would come out and whatnot. And there was an Instagram story that my wife— I tried not to read the comments because like they can be demoralizing sometimes. And my wife was telling me about like, There was this story that went viral where everyone is convinced I was a rich kid from Argentina. And now people are realizing I came from a very poor neighborhood in Argentina where like my dad one time got kidnapped, uh, trying to rob his car and steal his car and whatnot. Gosh. Yeah. It's like a bad neighborhood. Also some decent, like good people neighborhood vibes. Like it wasn't all bad, but it was a pretty bad place. And now people in Argentina, I think the tides are changing a lot culturally there for the better. understand more of my original story. But I think it's so easy for people sometimes to just like, I don't know, expect the worst or try to poke holes because they cannot believe just the magic that can happen, obviously with 10 years of work and relentless dedication. But I think there's an element of suspension of disbelief that is necessary, of optimism, positivity that you put into your interpretation of the story. There's only so much words can do. They get combined with your system prompt. Right.

Right?

Your system prompt. What does it say about the world? The world is a dark place. Only the rich get ahead and no one can make these leaps of progress. And I think we have to work really hard on detoxing that system prompt from our heads. We have to have this very open mind. And positive outlook.

We can't leave this room without talking about life maxing. You have 5 beautiful children. You're expecting a 6th. Congratulations.

Thank you.

You're operating a high-stakes business as CEO. You're an athlete. You're an athlete. When we were filming B-roll, I was sweating watching you stand out in broad daylight wearing a black sweater. And to me, it's like a It feels as though something to do with your work in infrastructure and durability and the road that you've taken this far is like some expression of the way that you open your eyes into the world every single day. How do you do it, Ji? What is the secret? Like, am I onto something here?

Oh, you're most certainly onto something. I hadn't realized until you pointed out how much of the fitness work that I do It's about hardening. It's about hardening my mind and my body. And so much of what we do every day when we protect the world from cyberattacks, from DDoS attacks, from like making the infrastructure robust, it's hard work. It requires tenacity. I mean, I've spoken at length about the work of an engineer has never been easy. Like even, even though you're just sitting at a computer and it doesn't look like you're physically like lifting boulders. Your mind is doing that, and your mind is dealing with the pressure and stress, and sometimes the negative feedback. And so these things have always been connected. You know, from the moment that I had an idea about Vercel, I would just leave the house, run for an hour, come back, keep working. And that it would give me the adrenaline rush. I started realizing how much of a prerequisite it was. to clear out my head. You know, for many years here in the Bay Area, I did boxing every morning, 6:00 AM to 7:30.

Yes, sir.

I would do a boot camp and I would then sign up for the next boot camp. And then, so I was probably the only person that was a perpetual boot camp attendee. And those were formative times, you know, getting punched or just like dealing with a nonstop combination of cardio and strength training. And it gave me a foundation that never leaves you.

Yeah, it's a nice legend, right?

There's no magic pill that you can take that'll give you that foundation of pain that you've overcome. I love that thought experiment of like, do you leave it all in the field? If you judge yourself from your last day and looking back, did you squeeze as much juice of opportunity and effort and intention that you could. I also think a lot about the days and the relativity of time and how the day in itself is a universe. And then we look back and a decade was a blink of an eye. And I love to ponder that paradox. And that's why I'm a huge believer that it doesn't matter what you've done up until this point. You're only as good as your next game. You're only as good as your next day. And so every day, it's an opportunity to reset the clock. You have to prove yourself out every single day. You know, if you're into fitness, you know this because you're as good as your last lift. And like, if you don't keep pushing, your body just doesn't get— doesn't improve or it deteriorates. And so I think about my children and How much we absorb from what others do. We're all looking for references in the world. What's possible? How hard does that person work? How does that compare to me, right? So you're always setting the standard if you can. You know, you might not be able to do it across every aspect of your life, but I like the idea of, can I set the standard? Can I set the pace? I remember reading this book, Running with the Kenyans. The Kenyans were all about at the time, Front running. They start at a marathon running faster than is even conceivable because they send a message that, all right, this is the new pace. And in that process, teach their brains that they could have gone faster. So there's elements of fitness that I try to bring into my work and the standard I try to set for others.

Well, I definitely see it in the work that Vercel produces. This is why you are first of kind. You are truly at the front of the pack. Thank you. Thank you. First of Kind is a story of design and tech told by its pioneers, powered by Framer, Noon, Grokbot, Ramp, Vercel, Granola, and Profound. Follow us on X, YouTube, Threads, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. The future belongs to designers who build.