Guillermo (00:00):
We know that every time that we have a big idea about where the future's going to be, we need to be mindful of how do we meet people where they are today and incrementally bring them to the Promised Land.
VO (00:09):
Welcome to Spotlight on a podcast about how companies are built from the people doing the building, one messy, exhilarating decision at a time.
Dan (00:19):
Welcome to Spotlight On. I'm Dan Levine, your host, and I'm here with Guillermo Roush from Versal. It's great
Guillermo (00:24):
To be here.
Dan (00:24):
Okay, so Guillermo, for those who might not be familiar, can you tell us a little bit about Versal, how long it's been going, how big it is, and a little bit about what it does
Guillermo (00:32):
All. So Versal builds frameworks and infrastructure for people to ship amazing products on the web, from websites to AI agents to the next big thing on the internet.
Dan (00:43):
I don't want you to pick your favorite customer, but what's an example website that everyone here has used? We
Guillermo (00:46):
Were just talking about Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A runs the operational logistic backend
Speaker 4 (00:51):
For
Guillermo (00:51):
4,000 stores in the US on Versal.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
So
Guillermo (00:54):
It's big companies, but it's also startups like the next big AI agent that might hit on the market.
Dan (01:00):
Very cool. Very cool. Okay. And then how long have you guys been doing it? For?
Guillermo (01:03):
About nine years now since the first line of code was written till today.
Dan (01:08):
Sure. And then I think Ians right is the term for employees. How many Ians do we have these days?
Guillermo (01:14):
Six 50. Wow.
Dan (01:15):
Wow.
Guillermo (01:16):
So I think nearly 700 now. It's growing fast. And do you know everyone's name?
Dan (01:21):
Yeah. What
Guillermo (01:23):
Do?
Dan (01:24):
Incredible.
Guillermo (01:25):
We hosted our big offsite this year in person for the first time, everybody in one place in Monterey, and right before someone built with our AI agent V zero, someone by the coded an app so that we would match faces to names.
Dan (01:41):
Oh, the directory. Yeah.
Guillermo (01:42):
Yeah. So it was a fun game. It just maybe took 10 prompts and I knew all of them, so I had a perfect score.
Dan (01:47):
That was incredible. That's very cool. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I want to start kind of at the beginning. You have this incredibly inspiring story from growing up and getting started, and it really is stranger than fiction to me. So first, very briefly, where are you from and when did you first interact with computers?
Guillermo (02:06):
I'm from Argentina.
Dan (02:07):
Yeah, where in Argentina.
Guillermo (02:09):
So most people know about Buenos Aires because of the city of Buenos Aires, but I grew up in the province of Buenos Aires, which is the outskirts of the city, and it was kind of hard to come by computers, internet infrastructure. But my dad was a huge nerd for software and he foresaw the big wave of software that was coming. So we got a computer when it was about seven years old at home. What year is this? This is 1997.
Dan (02:34):
1997. You're seven years old. Do you have Netscape? Is that the internet? Not yet a thing in Argentina?
Guillermo (02:41):
No, this was offline. So Windows 95, the best way to get software was CDs and floppy discs. Super early days.
Dan (02:49):
Did you guys have Minesweeper?
Guillermo (02:51):
Of course, ships with the operating
Dan (02:53):
System. I mean, Minesweeper, solitaire Hearts. Hearts was a big one.
Guillermo (02:56):
Yeah, but it was fun. I think one of the big, I don't have a lot of memories from then, but I do remember the joy of getting new software onto the computer. So getting either the small followup with this large py, this and then being successful at loading something. I mean, Versal is obsessed with this idea of making it easy to deploy because making it easy that something runs is kind of a miracle, I guess. So getting new software successfully running was orders of magnitude harder back then, and it was a joy just to see it boot up.
Dan (03:28):
Okay. So in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, the city in the province, you have a computer. What was your first exposure to writing software?
Guillermo (03:37):
So one of the challenges, my dad would always say, okay, it's cool to use software. It'd be even cooler to build software. So the idea was kind of floating in our heads, but it was hard. I think maybe this actually also relates to this story of relle, but getting the developer tools running was a huge
Speaker 4 (03:56):
Pain.
Guillermo (03:57):
So especially in Windows. So a big breakthrough for me was when I switched to Linux, and I did that also at a very early age. I was like 11, 12 years old, and I successfully switched to Linux. The early days of Windows, there was software like a dj, GPP, it was an implementation of the c and c plus plus compiler for Windows. So I had early starts, we had video games that were trying to simulate coding, like the logo turtle, but I think the big breakthrough for me was the web. So the ability to just throw a couple of files into a folder, you boot up your web server, it's live, and it gets disclosed to that idea of a hyperlink that it can share with anybody in the world. That was when I really got hooked. A lot of it was having access to open source. I was a big fan of creating communities around software. I run the first forum for high school, so getting something that kind of already exists and then being able to modify it was part of that learning how to code and ship things. Got it.
Dan (05:00):
And when was the first time you traveled outside of Argentina to visit Europe or the us?
Guillermo (05:05):
This is later, right? Yeah, this is much later. But the story is I started contributing to an open source project called Mood Tools, which became a pretty popular JavaScript based UI library.
Dan (05:18):
And again, this is a global library. I mean, this is kind of the point I wanted to highlight, which is mood tools is used everywhere.
Guillermo (05:23):
I
Dan (05:23):
Always make fun of you. It was the second most used version. But yeah, there's a thing called jQuery that I used, but I was aware of.
Guillermo (05:29):
It was formative experience to understand what are the things that made jQuery click. And our project didn't so much, but it did create an incredible network. Companies like Facebook picked mood tools, sort of the inspiration for their JavaScript foundations. So it gave me a great network for 16-year-old in Argentina.
Dan (05:48):
This is 2006, you're 16 years old, you start meeting these people on the internet and you're contributing to this open source library mood tools, and that's probably the first way you start to really meet tons of people from around the world.
Guillermo (05:57):
Tons.
Dan (05:57):
Did they know that you're 16?
Guillermo (05:59):
Most people didn't. Right. Even my clients, I was really active in a couple of freelance communities and I would do jobs all over the internet. I had clients in the Netherlands. US
(06:11):
Mood tools really opened a lot of doors, a lot of startups started adopting it. It was a startup based out of Switzerland, and they needed to recruit a MUTOs expert. So they went to some of the leaders of the project and they were like, okay, where can we hire MUTOs experts? They were like, well, we all have jobs now we're moving to Silicon Valley, but this one young lad, if you're willing to take a risk on someone that's 17 years old by now, and they did. It was an amazing experience for me. And I dropped out of high school and kind of began my journey as a software engineer.
Dan (06:43):
And this is first to Switzerland,
Guillermo (06:45):
Right?
Dan (06:46):
And so when did you make your move to the Bay?
Guillermo (06:48):
So that's about 2010 to 2012 is when I started coming here more frequently, getting to know people here. I eventually met the co-founders of my startup Learn Boost. And
Dan (07:00):
You still can't drink alcohol at this point. I know when you first I was a
Guillermo (07:03):
Jail for many years. That had to be 21.
Dan (07:08):
Exactly. And that's when I start to learn about more about who you are. There's a recon later around mood tools that I think is fascinating, but all of a sudden there's this new kind of language framework around no JS developing and it's the ability to run JavaScript larger than the server side. It's the most popular way to do that. Oh, there's other alternatives. And out of nowhere I noticed there are two important libraries that are happening. The first is this thing called Mongoose,
(07:31):
Which is the Mongo driver for node js that gets popular. And the second is SOT io. And I realized the same person has written both these libraries. And that's you who still unclear if you can drink or not. At this point, I don't exactly know. That's a very odd thing to be at the forefront of such a new kind of popular, interesting framework. And having written two of the most important drivers that everyone's using, right? Mongo is kind of the hot database that would go on into power. Things like Stripe amongst others and web sockets are how you provide this realtime interactive in the site. How did you know to go all in on Node and start working on these libraries?
Guillermo (08:04):
Yeah, this ties a lot of dots of even my formative years because I got excited because JavaScript could do all this awesome things in the client side, which makes pages come alive. But you also need the server side. It's not one or the other. I think programming communities can sometimes be very maximalist. Really? Oh, it's all client. Oh, it's all server and it's
Dan (08:23):
Do they ever fight on
Guillermo (08:24):
X about it or does that ever come up? It's like a false dichotomy ultimately. So Node, I ended up writing a book about this. They called it universal applications that could run both on the server and the client. So when I saw that potential, it's like, wow, this could be the stack that answers all of my prayers for so many years. I can do the really fast initial snappy page load and then I can bring it alive on the client. So I went all in on Node,
(08:53):
But then I realized this is probably so early, it's like 0.1 point hundred when I first adopted it, and it was basically a small runtime built on above the V eight engine that Google created for Google Chrome. It was really fast. I love Fast, but it missed all of this basic things that you need on top. So that's why I created the RRM so that I could access MongoDB to build my applications. But then it also made some things possible that were really hard to do and real time web applications were notoriously hard to build. And what I realized is that there was an opportunity to give developers a chat application in seven lines of code and massively abstract away a lot of pain and infrastructure that they would have to build for themselves. So that was my big breakthrough is that not only did I fill a missing gap in the market, but it brought something new. And I empower developers to create things in a very simple way.
Dan (09:58):
So Learn Boost happens and eventually gets acquired by automatic the makers of WordPress. And then what? You sold this company, it's what year is it now?
Guillermo (10:08):
Yeah, so the company was an EdTech company, but I was building all of this open source awesome software, and it was interesting to WordPress us because they were coming from that world of server side only PHP, and they realized, Hey, we're going to need to incorporate a lot more of this client site richness and interactivity to our products. But when I was there, what I realized is that in order to innovate, you need really awesome deployment infrastructure. If you have an idea, you should be able to just convert it into URL as soon as possible. And WordPress have become extremely good at hosting and scaling wordpress.com, which was a platform that was hosting millions and millions of websites. But if you needed to deviate from, and this kind of became a pattern across so many companies, you become very good at hosting the thing that made you successful and popular, but the incremental additions to your platform become really hard, especially in this world of maybe things will move more from PHP to JavaScript. So the idea, I'm mentioning it now, it seems so obvious in retrospect. I didn't have it so crystallized at the time, but I realized, okay, I'm going to leave. I'm going to start a company. I know that just like WordPress, I wanted started with open source foundations and I had all of these exciting ideas around real time making things really fast, the future of web applications. But when I sat down to actually create the website, the company was called Zeit at the time. That's when the light bulb went off
(11:42):
Because just creating the website and bring it online deploying, it was terrifyingly difficult weeks of work to bring the state-of-the art online. Of course, you could create a website with Squarespace and it's like three clicks, but if you wanted to create something that had continuous deployment, CICD, all of the best practices of the web production level, readiness and performance optimizations, and it could become a platform for future innovations, that was extremely difficult. So Kubernetes and React were sort of the state of the art at the time. Everyone knew that Google and Facebook had open source gems, but to actually bring them to prod was literally weeks of work for someone that at this time has been at the forefront of web for many, many years and it's terminally online. So that's when I realized, hey, there's an asymmetry here. If this is so difficult for me, if I just saw that companies at WordPress would've massively benefited from having this sort of awesome deployment infrastructure, and there is this new waves that are growing of open source like React that kind of coalesced into what Versa is today, which we built next JS one of the most popular frameworks on top of React and the infrastructure to deployed and scale it online, which now powers, like we said, companies like Chick-fil-A and some of the most awesome e-commerce services on the planet and AI companies.
Dan (13:08):
Yeah, it's very cool. I want to take a quick pause because I think one of the important parts here that you mentioned but kind of glossed over a little bit is you come to this moment when you decide that the web needs something new and you have a simultaneous moment of a great piece of technology and also an excellent branding moment, I have to say. So did you, I think the first time you talked about next was maybe in Brazil at a conference or something, is that right?
Guillermo (13:32):
It's interesting because, and I now recommend this to founders that are thinking about starting new companies.
(13:37):
Before I even wrote a line of code for next, I outlined these are seven principles of what the ideal state of the art of the web would be. For example, we kind of glossed over it, but making it such that the instant that you press enter to loading that first piece of the website that has to happen instantaneously. What are the underlying rules and guidelines that would make that possible, but also the fact that data should be alive in real time. And so I learned seven principles and I was going, my formula at the time was spread the gospel of how awesome the web could be conference by conference. So the first conference where I introduced this was in Brazil. And then I think looking back, the realization was I could keep spreading the word of all these things that you need to do. It's like giving the world a to-do list or I could create the technology that automates them all.
Dan (14:38):
And I think this is a commonality for founders. I think frequently founders, they kind of have this moment where especially in your case you knew how hard it's to start a company. You know how difficult it is. You're like, here's what should happen. And then you're like, nobody's doing it though. And you're like, you know what? I'm going to have to go do it. So then you create next JS based off of those
Guillermo (14:53):
Principles
Dan (14:55):
And exactly as you articulated, react is out there. It's incredible. It's very hard to use deploying infrastructure, very hard to use, especially for a typical JavaScript developer. When you first talked about next at that conference and when you first released the code, what was the first initial response to really zoomed in? How did you feel it went? How did people respond?
Guillermo (15:14):
Yeah, I think it's always mixed. One of the things that I always recommend to entrepreneurs is thick skin. I think Y Commander recommends that you read every negative comment on HN, it doesn't matter. Take it all in. Just take it all in with next. I think there was a huge positive reaction to, oh my God, react went from being all this boilerplate to now it's you create a folder and you run a command. That's insane. So there was a lot of positive on the cover letter impact of the framework, but sometimes people are not quite tuned into the problems that they will have. They just don't know yet that they will have them. And so that's where a lot of the craft goes into the product. We call it progressive disclosure of complexity or sophistication. So I think both on the infrastructure platform and the framework, sometimes there was a small periods of time where we didn't realize that we could in fact bring that progression to the market. And I mean when we did it, that was just extremely rewarding. People were happy at any time in the revolution, and I didn't have to turn business down and I didn't have to see competitors that I was convinced didn't have the fullness of that vision succeed, so I could build together with those customers myself. But yeah, at times of course it was hard.
Dan (16:49):
What's it in the very early days of just company building, what are some of the memories you have or some lessons learned about starting a new company? What were a couple of things that stuck out to you?
Guillermo (16:58):
Oh man, there's so many. One of the reasons that I'm so excited to be investing so heavily in security is the intern can be a nasty place. In the early days, we had to learn the hard way that you're going to be constantly under attack of botnets and scans and people at the scale that we're operating in, people can make a living out of just examining every single aspect of our network to try to find any point of breakage. So having embraced that, it's a huge relief that we can now protect and secure so many workloads at scale. We improve something in the platform, and we're immediately impacting millions of customers, 750 million deployments that have been protected by Versal anyways, I think the best mix is to have an optimism about how things will play out. You can't get everything perfect right out of the gate, but also opening services, infrastructure services up to the internet can be a wild environment to be in.
Dan (18:06):
So you launched Next JS in 20 15, 20 16. 2016, late 2016. Next JS is launched in 2016. You have Zeit, the company as it's previously named, which has now become even then though, one of the things that I find fascinating and I think is a great lesson for people is initially the company is focused on these two things, but they're not necessarily perfectly aligned, which is next JS is happening. It's incredible. And you guys started out doing Docker hosting and it's going okay early on. People like the concept next JS is doing phenomenally well, but it's early
Guillermo (18:39):
To, yeah, it's like I had two independent, overly excited groups of people, the ones that wanted simplified deployment and the ones that wanted simplified react and simplified web application building. But really the magic happened once these things were aligned, which a lot of it was realizing by building. So we were customer zero of the framework. We were building things with the framework and order to have the most optimal way of shipping them. And over time these things kind of coalesced together, but it was in a way somewhat accidental. It was the desire to solve our own pain points that then became part of the productization and became in service of our mission, which was let's make the web platform the best that it can be.
Dan (19:21):
Yeah. Well, I always think one of the things that you're so good at is it's hard to find somebody who better predicts the future of JavaScript and web technology. So you live in this world always five years in the future, which is an extremely rare characteristic. And then the more, almost in some ways pedestrian thing is what's happening right now though, and I just remember this because you're kind of like, this is so clearly how it's going to be. This is literally what's next, and then there's this process of take how the world will be and find a way to really contort it to where it's going to go gap actually be part of it.
Guillermo (19:57):
I do think that's a huge observation because I did struggle in the beginning to how to deliver the vision incrementally meet the market where it is. The market at the time was very much into static. Yes, I remember this really is the wound that you I think picking on, which was I was so fixated on the web at its best coming from the principles that had outlined was highly dynamic. It brought data and personalization instantaneously to the user. And I knew because I took so much inspiration from reverse engineering how the greatest things from the internet
Dan (20:34):
Were
Guillermo (20:34):
Built, Amazon, Google, Facebook, these all have in common.
Dan (20:39):
It was so obvious that this is what was going to happen,
Guillermo (20:42):
But if I hadn't made the enormous effort to bridge the gap to where people were at the time and then deliver incrementally on that, we have a lot of principles today at the company because from those things that are hard to do, you learn and they become sort of the institutional foundations of the company so that we know that every time that we have a big idea about where the future's going to be, we need to be mindful of how do we meet people where they are today and incrementally bring them to the promised land. What I think we did well is that we didn't compromise. So of course our job was to make things easy, but because I was banking on that foundation of principles, it was easy and it could scale to the largest things on the internet. So that maybe to simplify it down to how people think about startups today is like, Hey, is that something that could work for a trial of someone that's working on a side hustle but could also scale to an enterprise saying, I'm going to go all in on this technology for the future of our business.
(21:43):
The first realization of that was when we got this email from the vp, VP of engineering of Zillow, it was like, Hey, we're rewriting everything on top of an xjs. We used to use PHP actually, in fact, similar story to what I had originally experienced myself. I was making that movement from PHP to JavaScript, and they were also because what makes Zillow great is that they have this interactive map that you zoom in and they tell you what houses are in that particular section of the map, and it's all alive. So when you heard, Hey, you are working this thing for yourself, you just open sourced it, but we're going to bid the future of our company in this. That's when you realize like, wow, there's something here.
Dan (22:26):
And one of my favorite things, by the way, and you liken this into the Zillow example where it's really important that somebody can use it when they're kind of a hobbyist and getting started and playing around and then growing with it. And one of my favorite things that you do, if I recall correctly, is you run your personal
Guillermo (22:39):
Stuff. Of course.
Dan (22:40):
Okay, so tell us a little bit about this. So where do you run your personal site?
Guillermo (22:43):
It's funny, I was just talking at all hands today to the company about this. It's so important that there is a aha moment that feels very personal to a new user. And when we put out next and the early versions of Brazil, the obvious use case was, I'm going to create my own website with this platform just to kick the tires. And it was so awesome that so many CTOs and VPs of engineering and just builders all over the world also felt that need. Oh, who doesn't like to try out a new technology and build something small with it? But the magic was you also have to be able to, with the same technology, be able to scale to really big things. Otherwise you're just answering for a small fraction of the market. So of course I run rahi.com and ell, but the thing I was mentioning to the company today is that I think we always have to be, and the company used to be called Zeit
(23:35):
Because I love the word zeitgeist, which is the spirit of the time. Our job is to capture the spirit of the time and understand what's the thing that's around the corner that people are going to need very soon, and us being ready to provide that aha moment for whatever it is they need. I think the new her Hello world might just become an AI agent. Maybe instead of just having chy.com, I have my own route GBT that is basically a version of myself or automate some tasks for myself. So we're always thinking, how can we give you that delightful experience that's zero to one as fast as possible and with the best available experience.
Dan (24:16):
It's really unbelievable. Okay, so you have next JS one, then you have the infrastructure platform. You talk about this a lot. These things work and they're beautifully intertwined and incredible, and you give world-class infras people. Do you have any high level stats you'd like to share about how big the infrastructure of Versal is?
Guillermo (24:30):
I checked the other day and I realized we've made people have made 750 million deployments to date. Wow. And if you were to not do it with Versal, each of those deployments takes an amount of effort. That, and also the space, sometimes I tell people it's just imagine visualizing all the data centers that we have not built because it's all virtualized in the cloud to make space for that amount of volume. So anytime you go to a website, whether it's again your favorite item, DoorDash also hosted on Versal. So if you're exploring the internet, you're touching Versal behind the scenes. Hopefully you notice because it's faster and more dynamic than alternatives. But yeah, it's a huge privilege to be behind the scenes of so many great companies.
Dan (25:20):
Yeah, it's really incredible. And one thing I'd call out in particular is we power a ton of e-commerce businesses. And of course Black Friday is this huge moment every year for them. And one of the interesting things is, I mean, at least to my memory, I'm sure there's a bunch of people at Marcel broadly working very hard. It was remarkable how much commerce was powered by Versal and Black Friday with no interruptions. I mean, it was kind of an incredible moment.
Guillermo (25:43):
It's been amazing that some of my favorite personal brands have moved to versa. Like Nintendo, they recently had, one of the things that, to your point we've sort of become known for is if you have massive amounts of traffic, somewhat unpredictably, and companies kind of have an idea of when they're going to hit it big. But in a world of social media and X and Elon retweeting, you never know, right? So Nintendo did a drop of 200,000 switch to in Europe, and they were telling us it's because of Relle that these things are going without hitch, it's just scaling perfectly. Or three companies had ads on the most recent Super Bowl, and we're talking about going from, I dunno, thousands of requests per second to hundreds of thousands. A scaling effort that done manually would've taken entire teams of people doing load tests and greasing the gears behind the scenes and just preparing for these big things that Versal makes almost mundane. So there's a huge amount of pride in the amazing effort that an infrastructure team has put into this magic of, yeah, you could have no traffic, no users or all of the users, it doesn't matter in the same platform for sure,
Dan (27:00):
And you're dogood it every day. And I hear from your team that they get feedback from you on the regular about the product using facade. I think that's super good. I almost think every founder should onboard through their product on an ongoing basis. They should be using it.
Guillermo (27:12):
Oh, I have so many rules about this. So this days I actually vibe code a lot with V zero. V zero as the name implies, allows you to go from your first version of your product with just a few English prompts, think of it as chat gt, but for creating applications, full stack applications. And this is for me, amplified the amount of stuff that I can try, but in order to magnitude, I can just go to V zero and all of the things that I know how to do, it can just do better and faster. So of course I know next js, but I don't remember every single little API on the dial would've to go and check the documentation and whatever. So it can just go to V zero and say, build me an eCommerce website. I can go to vro and say, build me a subscription service. I can go to visavis, maybe actually let's experiment with a new type of onboarding flow. Maybe I have an idea on how to iron out some friction in the product that I want to communicate with my team with high fidelity. And so any idea that I have, I challenge myself instead of just lazily writing them down. Could I instead ship something? I give a lot of demos to people. I might walk up to you and be like, Hey, look at this thing we built.
(28:24):
Notice a few things are off in that process. So demos over memos is another one of my principles,
Dan (28:30):
And this is one of the things that I love most about you, but also you're incredibly good at giving detailed feedback. I mean, I don't think there's somebody out hear more the number of people who you slide into their dms on X or you message them and then they ping me and go, I feel so special. Gary ping me. And I go, you are very special. It's wonderful. But I'm also like, he does ping lots of people.
Guillermo (28:50):
No, and you should feel special. And also don't hit me because
Dan (28:54):
Going
Guillermo (28:54):
Straight into
Dan (28:55):
The no, that's right because you care and you give useful feedback. I always thought there's a big thing in software between people who say there's something wrong and they're not trying to be helpful. They're not interactive. And then people who provide a good bug report or a good thoughtful thing and are trying to be helpful. And I
Guillermo (29:09):
Think going back to my hello world of an agent is I have all of the accumulation of all these little best practices that I've picked up over the years that are easy to miss. And always I'm thinking to myself, how can I automate myself? But in the meantime, I just have to tell you
Speaker 4 (29:26):
I have
Guillermo (29:26):
To record the video myself. The gif point out, the missing frame, the skipped frame, the slow motion camera recording of your animation that is glitchy. So there's that category. And then there is the perspective of will really get this when you are in the weeds of your creation, you're so obsessed with the problem space. I was actually giving feedback to one of our engineers today, and it is somewhat provocative. Do you think people will get this?
Speaker 4 (29:55):
Yeah.
Guillermo (29:56):
Do you think if you just see this for first time, is it clear what this even is? So there's that other category and everything in between.
Dan (30:05):
It's really, really important. One of the things that I think you guys do really well, which is very hard. And so I think it'd be a good lesson for people watching is, and it's always hard to be perfect at this, but I think better than most companies of your size and scale, you guys do a bunch of different things. So we talked about next js, we talked about Versal infrastructure. You guys also employ the team behind Felt and they're doing wonderful work and people loves felt. I think it's always one of the most popular, beloved.
Guillermo (30:31):
In fact, one of the most exciting moments for VE is it now Powers, Logitech incredible going back to powering really big companies and it's had a transformative effect on both their happiness as developers and conversion rates for the
Dan (30:48):
Business. Yeah, it's unbelievable. That's incredible. And then V Zero is great and doing very well. You're also, you have Turbo Pack on the open source side. You have the ai SDK, which I love. So we'll dig on maybe the A SDK in a second. But first it's really hard to do one thing. Well, in startup Land, it's virtually impossible to do two. How do you think about and balance doing different things, which is always hard, and when do we do another thing? When don't we? How do we hold people accountable? How do we make sure we're trying to build the best thing?
Guillermo (31:20):
Yeah. So one of the things that I always think about is we have to have a strong foundation to build on. So nothing matters more than the foundations. If there's a crack on the foundation, you can keep adding things, it's going to exacerbate the problem. I outline the priorities for the company in three buckets, and one of that is foundations. Foundations is developer experience the fastest deployments in the world, truly for projects at any scale. I just have so much love and respect for that. I love great infrastructure. So that's sort of become, and with that also comes the responsibility over amazing uptime availability, celebrating that our customers are getting so big, or like I said, they're in front of hundreds of millions of people and our infrastructure doesn't break a sweat. The next priority for us is ai. So the world's being completely overhauled by ai. That means creating our own AI innovations that makes sense in the context of what we're good at. I think we're good at front end and design and bringing ideas alive with next Js and React. So we created the Zero in the context of that. So the things where we've expanded into New Horizons
(32:39):
Needed to have extreme buy-in from first principles about things that we're excited about, things that our community is excited about and things that we think we can make meaningful contributions to. But the other thing I mentioned earlier was we like to dock food a lot. If we're building V zero, there's probably something that we're doing that the world can benefit from. This is why we open source x js. So you can think of the AI SDK as open sourcing, the foundations of V zero so that anybody in the world can create their own agents, their own website builders, whatever it is. We know that it's going to involve ai. And so that's something where we felt, okay, we know how to do this well. We know how to create good developer experiences and we know that this is essential to the future of the web. So it makes sense to invest really
Dan (33:28):
Quickly though. Take a second, tell people what the AI SDK is. I just want to make sure the audience does.
Guillermo (33:31):
Yeah, think of it as the next JS of ai. It is a framework that allows you to connect to models. It doesn't lock you into a specific model, which I think is going to be very important for the future. It can be open models, it can be open ai, it can be anthropic, and it gives developers a great experience. So the key unlock is that in order to ship with ai, you don't have to be a machine learning PhD that has used Python in their entire life. Quite the opposite. There's a huge amount of upside for application developers that know React or next really well to incorporate AI into their products or create new ones from what I would call first AI principles. But again, it makes sense in the context of what we do. And so I think that's allowing us to make these investments in parallel. They make sense to our audience, they make sense to our teams. They're high quality products. And then like I said, the third bucket is security because I think a lot of people are rightfully concerned about bots online scraping. Whether you're protecting your content from AI is that you might not want on your site, the visibility of your traffic, what it's going to look like in the future to serve agents that are basically operating on behalf of
Speaker 4 (34:55):
People.
Guillermo (34:56):
And so security is also very much tied into ai, but it's in the service of helping our customers to scale and make sense of how their infrastructure is being used and ultimately delivering the best products online.
Dan (35:09):
One of the really cool things about Versal now, we've talked a lot about the scale, which is this huge advantage. You grew up in the suburbs of Buenos Aires in Argentina, which is incredible. Now you have impact globally with tons of customers everywhere. Maybe pick a few of your favorite really large scale funds, stories of big companies using in transformational ways and maybe some of the fun ways that they use you guys.
Guillermo (35:29):
I think the innovators using us, the companies that I highly respect as an example, Stripe, in the early days when I would pitch for sale, I would say it's like Stripe for deployment. I want to make it really easy for developers, just like they did for financial infrastructure,
Speaker 4 (35:44):
For
Guillermo (35:44):
Developers to build and ship to the web. And so knowing that we host now Stripe, do Dev, their developer infrastructure online is extremely rewarding. Notion is another company I highly respect because it just massively grew. So hosting their workloads, open ai.com, which is now one of our sources on the internet.
(36:06):
The other one that's been super rewarding too is when we conceived the V zero, it was very much like the early days of a new company. So like, okay, how does an entrepreneur, someone with an idea, go from zero to one by coding? And recently a Fortune 10 just became the biggest customer of V Zero ever. So to see it now succeed in the enterprise is really exciting because I think AI for creating products obviously has product market fit for people that are terminally online, maybe freelancers that want to make their work more efficient. Maybe entrepreneurs that are in the early stages of coming up with new products, but seeing companies at massive scale in highly regulated environments also get excited about V zero is highly rewarding. You've done a great
Dan (36:56):
Job. Are there any thoughts you would want to share with founders thinking about building their next company, building an open source company, building a great brand with beautiful design, growing a mustache? What's that? I mean, it's very
Guillermo (37:07):
Important. I love the mustache. I mean, that's the main takeaway. No, I would say I think iteration of velocity matters more than anything else in this world. I think it feels so exciting to be in AI today. Almost like every idea and every product is up for grabs. Everything is being transformed into a new form factor. So yeah, hopefully Versal provides the foundations for people to chase those big ideas. And my parting piece of advice would be like, don't take anything for granted. I feel like every piece of software, everything out there today is ripe for disruption and you just have to go after it
Dan (37:48):
And do it. Building with Versal,
Guillermo (37:49):
Of course.
Dan (37:50):
Well, thank you so much for joining us on Spotlight On, and we really appreciate it.
