Guillermo Rauch

Guillermo Rauch says layout shift loses the sale. He gives business people this case: a shopper is about to press buy, an engineer's mistake shifts the page down, and the shopper clicks an ad, leaves the site, or goes back. The sale is gone. A product that janks and jitters on load does not feel good, and conversions fall when the layout work is sloppy. The browser has already done the math and is ready to paint, then has to calculate the page again. He compares that waste to code that makes an app load five times, burning time, compute, and energy.

Layout shift also erodes trust. It feels unreliable, the way a shifty person does not feel trustworthy. People should still be free to break a

Guillermo Rauch grew up with the constant idea that everyone who creates something has a hidden agenda, and that no one builds something to make the world better or more beautiful. Argentina was a lot worse: people would think that anyone who succeeds had some kind of arrangement, and that corruption was the only reason they were there.

When news of funding came out, he started to go more viral in Argentina. He and his wife tried not to read the comments on an Instagram story because they can be demoralizing. One story went viral with everyone convinced he was a rich kid from Argentina. People are now realizing he came from a very poor neighborhood, where his dad one time got kidnapped when

Guillermo Rauch says you get a lot more out of AI systems the stronger your language gets. He has only grown more radical about storytelling: the world is made of stories, people remember the best stories, and what ships and earns love does so because it was part of a story people can connect to the creators through.

The habit started before Vercel. Getting into high school in Argentina meant exams and competitions. He was good at math, which is what his parents knew, but a lot of his points came from literature and the Spanish side of the exams. He has always looked up to the Argentinian writer Borges, whose stories take on physics, the universe, and recursion, almost like a proto-programm

Guillermo Rauch says agents want Markdown instead of web pages because they do not need the fluff designed for human consumption. They do not need a layout. They need the structure, the signal, and the pure data and content. A lot of the web has already shifted toward Markdown instead of HTML. The companies with the best software factories that embrace AI and agents are the ones that are going to win, and Vercel is learning how to build the best agentic developer experience and the best agentic infrastructure.

A product can maximize the human experience and the agent experience at the same time, and the two can live in parallel. Every company is going to have to do that. Agents already make

Guillermo Rauch says the same agent given to two different people will never produce the same results. Velocity is speed with a direction, a vector, and the point is whether the work is actually getting to the destination. Speed is moving really fast: typing a lot, spending a lot of tokens, token maxing, with no outcome attached.

He has made that mistake in his own career, confusing speed for velocity. Iteration velocity is the internal meme he still uses, and he treats velocity as distinct from speed. The direction comes from thinking backwards from the business outcomes, the experience to create, the data to produce, and the traction to see in the world, then working back to design and im

Guillermo Rauch is extremely bullish on AI because the best technologies broaden access. The pencil, the printing press, open source, JavaScript, and Next.js each let more people join in. AI is fun in that same basic way. It brings a new class of builders: people who could not design, build, create, and ship before can now do it.

Vercel leaned in so hard because AI for software engineering accelerates the mission that everyone should be able to ship and everyone should be able to cook. Quality has to be infused into everything the company does with AI. Slop is the four-letter word for the negative things AI can do, just as spam was for the internet. An email inbox can fill with spam, and AI

Guillermo Rauch calls the tactical path exposure hours: absorb a lot of information about the field and build a huge amount of empathy with the end user. The founder is the end user of the product and stays dissatisfied with the status quo.

He already knew how to assemble five different systems to deploy a production-grade application, and still felt it could be much faster. People praise the developer experience, and even one minor edge case gets his attention. Someone sent him a direct message the same day: a collaborator was added to a project, deployed, and on one pull request an edge case meant the check did not trigger. He treated that as the end of the world. A lot of other companies

Guillermo Rauch says Gmail was the most important breakthrough in the history of dynamic HTML. Google showed that someone could download Microsoft Outlook to check mail, or open gmail.com and run the whole application there.

Apple designed Safari, in his telling, like a digital book. The back gesture feels like dragging a page. Most people credit Gmail's magic to infinite storage. For him, Gmail was the siren call: Ajax, and the realization that desktop software-like experiences could live inside the browser, so anybody with a browser could use the software. Overnight, the CD-ROM was done. Software would no longer ship physically.

Unlimited storage from the cloud meant a mail interface in

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 s

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.

Ver

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

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 t

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

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 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 rea