Guillermo Rauch

Founder and CEO at Vercel

Founder and CEO of Vercel, creator of Next.js and Socket.IO, building v0 which has become one of the most popular AI website building tools in the world with over 1.3 million users, expanding the total addressable market of people who can build and ship web products.

The Visionary The Growth Architect

Dimension Profile

Strategic Vision 90%

Execution & Craft 75%

Data & Experimentation 35%

Growth & Distribution 65%

Team & Leadership 35%

User Empathy & Research 65%

Key Themes

AI-powered product building democratization future of product development with AI taste as a developable skill open source as strategic moat social product building full-stack product roles

Episode Summary

Guillermo Rauch explains how Vercel's v0 emerged from the natural intersection of open source developer tools and generative AI, growing to over 1.3 million users building web products. He shares his vision for social product building where everyone can participate in shipping software, why taste is a developable skill through exposure hours, and how AI will transform product development by enabling designers, PMs, and back-end engineers to become full-stack product builders.

Leadership Principles

→ We need to stop talking about AI at some point — AI becomes synonymous with software, we build software and use software to build software
→ Taste is not an inaccessible thing you're born with — it's a skill you develop by trying lots of products and increasing exposure hours watching how people use your products
→ People could be more full stack — imagine a designer that can ship a fully baked product, a product manager that can prototype and ship to production

Notable Quotes

"We need to stop talking about AI at some point. I just see a future where AI becomes synonymous with software. We build software and we use software to build software."
— On the long-term vision for how AI integrates into product development

"Taste, sometimes we think of as this inaccessible thing. I see it as a skill that can develop. One of our internal operating principles is increasing exposure hours — try to quantify how much time you expose yourself to watching how people use your products."
— On building taste as a concrete skill through deliberate practice

"v0 inverts the Git commit. You're starting with the intent and the output is the code. Instead of doing the work and summarizing what you did, you describe what you want and the system builds it."
— On how v0 fundamentally changes the software development workflow

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