Inside Vercel: The $3B giant that’s changed coding forever

Have to remember that open source is extremely expensive, extremely hard to do. We really try to do our best. We work with other vendors in making all these projects better. But I do get a lot of delight from knowing that one day, some competitor of Versailles will take all of this, and that's great. It's so much better for humanity and so much better for civilization than if they had to start from scratch again and again and again and again. Today on the Air Crease Show, I'm joined by Guillermo Rauch, CEO and founder of Vercel, the company powering some of the biggest names on the Internet from OpenAI to Nintendo. Under his leadership, Vercel has grown to over $200,000,000 in annual revenue and become a cornerstone of modern web infrastructure. They've got their fingerprints all over the AI revolution. In this conversation, Guillermo shares how growing up in Argentina with limited access to technology led him to discover the world changing power of open source. How that obsession helped him break into Silicon Valley and why building in public has been Purcell's ultimate growth engine. We also dive into his vision for the AI cloud, the future of software powered by agents and even VibeCon. Plus his philosophy of recursive founder mode, empowering every team member to think and act like a founder. If you've ever wondered how open source, cloud, and AI converge to create generational companies, this episode is for you. Here's my conversation with Guillermo Rausch. Alright, Guillermo. Thank you for taking the time to have this conversation. I'm so glad to be here. Okay. I wanna jump right in because one of the things I've been obsessed with lately is the way that people are taught to build companies, leaves them blind to all kinds of externalities. So, you know, obviously, we've heard about plenty of examples of companies that do pollution or they do something bad for their customers, and they don't have to pay the consequences of that. And so we've well, a lot of company building is focused on that. But the thing I've been obsessed with lately is it also leaves us blind to positive externalities. It is things that we do that don't have any apparent, like, immediate profit making, purpose for the company and yet enable a huge company to be built on the trust that that creates. And, of course, open source to me is the number one thing that people are blind to. They don't see how powerful it can be. I feel like you have been obsessed with open source for a lot of years. And I just I wonder, like, you didn't have since you didn't come to this from a traditional, like, business building background, I wonder if you feel like that is part of why you were able to see this possibility. And maybe just, like, give us a sense of, like, how did you first discover open source? How …