Smash Notes
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch on Building the Internet for Agents
Guillermo Rauch, Founder and CEO of Vercel, joins Sourcery from the company's San Francisco headquarters to discuss how AI agents are transforming software development, infrastructure, and the economics of SaaS. Vercel has reportedly reached $600M in annualized revenue, growing 148% YoY, with more than 485,000 paying teams and a $9.3B valuation. Its…
People
Notes
-
Guillermo Rauch says an operating principle is to stay mindful of the data and the anecdata. In a fast-moving market like AI, he will not go off last quarter's little spreadsheet from the data analysts alone.
The board is getting reshuffled every two weeks. Rauch marries the anecdata, the vibes, and the instincts with the arithmetic of the business. He tries to go off how he feels and how people feel, then adapt and move really fast. What has proven really valuable to Vercel is a mission about enabling builders and enabling people to ship what's next. The mission means Vercel constantly has to rethink and reinvent who the company is and how the company works.
Rauch treats the work as a real-time conversation with the world. Based on the real-time conversation, he informs the next move.
-
Guillermo Rauch says Vercel started the year with 3% of deployments coming from coding agents. Now 60% are agentic.
He calls the figure a wild stat. At the start of the year, coding agents accounted for 3% of deployments on Vercel. The agentic share is now 60%. Rauch says more and more of the software of the world is robots telling other robots what to do. He also describes robots that take in English and get out code for other robots to run.
The move from 3% to 60% happened inside the same year. On Vercel, a majority of deployments now come from agents, with English going in and code coming out for another robot to run.
-
Guillermo Rauch says almost everything at Vercel now runs through agents. He prepares for a customer meeting on Slack and never opens Salesforce himself. The agent goes to Salesforce.
He laid out the contrast after speaking at a Salesforce conference. Salesforce was built as a product for humans: a list of contacts and a CRM on a pixel interface. On Slack he can say he is the account executive, ask how often Molly deploys on Vercel, and request a quick report on problems she reported. He does not have to learn 20 different tools. In Palo Alto, teams used to gather in a room and freeze a profile picture and support tickets into one layout a product design team had already chosen. The Vercel agent that helps prepare the sales force and customer support teams is generative. A question about a person renders a profile. A question about a company brings contextual information about the company. Rauch says he may not want a beginner sales development representative to get the same sophistication he wants to give his finance team. He wants to give the finance team an outlook of the business. Agents can solve for the split in what each role sees. Websites, traditional pages, and pixels could not. Vercel is helping a new generation of software be easy to build and ship to companies.
-
Guillermo Rauch does not believe in aggregating piles of lowest-common-denominator software. He believes in a future of personalized software. Vercel lets you prompt a coding agent and generate software that is perfect for you. You can build the podcast schedule note-taking app and agent that fits just your needs. For enterprises, the ROI on creating domain-specific tools is much, much, much greater.
He stands on the opposite end of the no-code category of SaaS. Vercel is a yes-code company because coding agents make the code free. Buy Vercel as the platform and you never have to buy software again, because you generate it to your needs.
Software needs data, so Salesforce and SAP stay in the picture as sources of record. Meeting prep, reports, websites, applications, and agents deploy on Vercel and pull customer history, contacts, meeting notes, and support tickets from somewhere. Rauch calls the place where that data lives critical data infrastructure. Headless means people no longer go to the head themselves. The agent gets the data out and then creates new software or new visualizations. The world of software is changing, and Rauch says he thinks some of the fundamental pillars will still be there.
-
Guillermo Rauch says infrastructure is extremely valuable because free source code still has to be deployed somewhere, and the value compounds. Security matters just as much. Vercel created new services to secure and contain agents, including an enterprise platform that works like an intranet for the agent era, so software meant to stay inside an organization does not leak onto the internet.
On the platform a company can plug in coding systems and deploy securely. Rauch says agents, for better and for worse, will do whatever it takes to fulfill a mission, like a soldier whose frontal lobe has been removed. If someone tells an agent to close a sale, or to find Molly O'Shea's email and send a birthday note, the agent can run for 40 minutes and then report the job done. Rauch says the search might run through the web, Crunchbase, or a YouTube comment where the address was posted.
What changed from ChatGPT to today is autonomy. A person used to stay in the loop, asking ChatGPT one turn at a time. Put the turns in a loop and the result is an agent trained to act longer without intervention.
-
Guillermo Rauch says Vercel put a million dollars toward a sandbox challenge. He told the world that Vercel sandbox is one of the most secure sandboxes, if not the most secure sandbox in the world, and invited everyone to poke holes in it.
Only one person, using an army of agents, made progress. Rauch says the contribution is small but impactful: sophisticated cybersecurity skill, not a child asking Claude to hug the sandbox. Vercel is processing the contribution and sharing the finding with industry peers. It uncovered a critical vulnerability in Linux, and Rauch says almost the entire world runs in Linux. He and the researcher are direct-messaging on X and plan to keep collaborating.
Vercel is building cybersecurity harnesses and incentive systems so the company can find flaws first, protect its infrastructure, and deploy lots of tokens toward the hunt.
-
Guillermo Rauch says serverless is the opposite of dead. So much compute is needed, and so much software is being deployed, that enterprises have no way to keep every program their employees produce running all the time. The beauty of serverless was spinning software down when it is not being used.
People are building personal software they use only once in a while, or they deploy it only when they need it. Servers have to come online and go offline intelligently. He calls the next evolution fluid compute, a better generation of the technology and a better name for what is happening. Compute has to flow like liquid. Lots of traffic makes it expand. No traffic makes it compress. It can run sandboxes, functions, a website, or an agent.
Guillermo Rauch has never been more excited about fluid compute as the next chapter of serverless. He thinks it is going to define the next decade.