Everyone’s an engineer now: Inside v0’s mission to create 100 million builders | Guillermo Rauch

Guillermo Rauch is the founder and CEO of Vercel, creators of v0 (one of the most popular AI app building tools), and the mind behind foundational JavaScript frameworks like Next.js and Socket.io. An open source pioneer and legendary engineer, Guillermo has built tools that power some of the internet’s most innovative products, including Midjourney, Grok, and Notion. His mission is to democratize product creation, expanding the pool of potential builders from 5 million developers to over 100 million people worldwide. In this episode, you’ll learn: 1. How AI will radically speed up product development—and the three critical skills PMs and engineers should master now to stay ahead 2. Why the future of building apps is shifting toward prompts instead of code, and how that affects traditional product teams 3. Specific ways to improve your design “taste,” plus practical tips to consistently create beautiful, user-loved products 4. How Guillermo built a powerful app in under two hours for $20 (while flying and using plane Wi-Fi) that would normally take weeks and thousands of dollars in engineering time 5. The exact strategies Vercel uses internally to leverage AI tools like v0 and Cursor, enabling their team of 600 to ship faster and better than ever before 6. Guillermo’s actionable advice on increasing your product quality through rapid iteration, real-world user feedback, and creating intentional “exposure hours” for your team Transcript: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/everyones-an-engineer-now-guillermo-rauch Brought to you by: • WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: https://workos.com/lenny • Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security: https://vanta.com/lenny • LinkedIn Ads—Reach professionals and drive results for your business: https://www.linkedin.com/podlenny Where to find Guillermo Rauch: • X: https://x.com/rauchg • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rauchg/ • Website: https://rauchg.com/ Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • X: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to Guillermo Rauch (04:43) v0's mission (07:03) The impact and growth of v0 (15:54) The future of product development with AI (19:05) Empowering engineers and product builders (24:01) Skills for the future: coding, math, and eloquence (35:05) v0 in action: real-world applications (36:40) Tips for using v0 effectively (45:46) Core skills for building AI apps (49:44) Live demo (59:45) Understanding how AI thinks (01:04:35) AI integration and future prospects (01:07:22) Building taste (01:13:43) Limitations of v0 (01:16:54) Improving the design of your product (01:20:09) The secret to product quality (01:22:35) Vercel’s AI-driven development (01:25:43) Guillermo's vision for the future Referenced: • v0: https://v0.dev/ • Vercel: https://vercel.com/ • GitHub: https://github.com/ • Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/ • Next.js Framework: https://nextjs.org/ • Claude: https://claude.ai/new • Grok: https://x.ai/ • Midjourney: https://www.midjourney.com • SocketIO: https://socket.io/ • Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-notion-ivan-zhao • Notion: https://www.notion.com/ • Automattic: https://automattic.com/ • Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder & CEO of StackBlitz): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-bolt-eric-simons • v0 Community: https://v0.dev/chat/community • Figma: https://www.figma.com/ • Git Commit: https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/saving-changes/git-commit • What are Artifacts and how do I use them?: https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/9487310-what-are-artifacts-and-how-do-i-use-them • Design Engineering at Vercel: https://vercel.com/blog/design-engineering-at-vercel • CSS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS • Tailwind: https://tailwindcss.com/ • Wordcel / Shape Rotator / Mathcel: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wordcel-shape-rotator-mathcel • Steve Jobs’s Ultimate Lesson for Companies: https://hbr.org/2011/08/steve-jobss-ultimate-lesson-fo • Bloom Hackathon: https://bloom.build/ • Expenses Should Do Themselves | Saquon Barkley x Ramp (Super Bowl Ad): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1Tgsy7D0Jg • Velocity over everything: How Ramp became the fastest-growing SaaS startup of all time | Geoff Charles (VP of Product): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/velocity-over-everything-how-ramp ... References continued at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/everyones-an-engineer-now-guillermo-rauch Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected]. Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  One of our users yesterday submitted feedback. They were saying, V0 is like a super genius, five-year-old PhD with ADHD. I'm not gonna oversell this, it's like, it knows everything about everything, but it has these sparks of brilliance.

• 0:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  How do you think things are gonna change for product managers, for product teams?

• 0:18Speaker 00

  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. We shouldn't put limits on ourselves and what we can build and what we can ship and what we can dream about making possible on these web services.

• 0:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  A lot of people are wondering, what happens to engineers? Should I learn how to code?

• 0:37Speaker 00

  A lot of the programming jobs to be done that used to be specializations, I think, are going away in a way. They're translation tasks. But knowing how things work under the hood is gonna be very important for you because you're gonna be able to influence the model and make it follow your intention a lot better.

• 0:52Lenny Rachitsky?

  We hear this word taste all the time. In terms of building taste, people are always like, how the hell do I do that?

• 0:57Speaker 00

  Taste, sometimes I think we think of as like this inaccessible thing that, oh, that person was born with taste. I see it as a skill that you can develop. I think it's extremely important to try lots of products. We have one of our sort of internal operating principles as increasing exposure hours. Try to quantify how much time you expose yourself to watching how people use your products. And you'll develop that muscle.

• 1:25Lenny Rachitsky?

  Where do you think the biggest change is gonna happen?

• 1:26Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:38Lenny Rachitsky?

  Today, my guest is Guillermo Rauch. Guillermo is the founder and CEO of Versale, which amongst other things, makes a product called V0, which has become one of the most popular AI website building tools in the world. He's also a legendary engineer and contributor to open source. He's created some of those popular JavaScript frameworks in the world, like NextJS and Socket IO. He's both a builder and is building a product that's gonna change the way we all build products in the future. This episode is incredible. If you wanna really understand how product development is gonna change with the rise of AI and what skills You should be focusing on right now. I highly recommend you keep listening. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube.

• 2:18Lenny Rachitsky?

  Also, if you become a yearly subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of Linear, Notion, Superhuman, Perplexity Pro, and Granola. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com. With that, I bring you Guillermo Rausch.

• 2:34Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 3:20Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 3:52Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 4:20Lenny Rachitsky?

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• 4:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  Guillermo, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me. Longtime listener, first time, I guess, participating in the podcast and love being here.

• 4:56Lenny Rachitsky?

  I appreciate that. Okay, so I know you saw this. I did the survey recently where I asked my readers, what tools do you use most in your day-to-day work as a product builder, as a product manager? And in the category of engineering tools, V0 came in right below Cursor and GitHub for people's most-used AI-building tools. So clearly, people love what you're doing.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're very happy to see that. And for us, we're at the very beginning of the journey in some ways because V0 is a relatively new tool. But Vercel, our company has been around for a while, you know? The way that I explain to people is anytime you're using the internet, if there is a website or web application that's really fast, innovative, hopefully it's running on our platform. We're out there, we're running a lot of websites at scale. If you watched the Super Bowl recently, three different companies were promoting digital products that were built and delivered on Vercel. So not only can you deploy your ideas and build them on Vercel, they can scale to huge volumes of traffic and huge audiences. So a lot of people know us because of a framework called NextJS.

• 6:03Speaker 00

  It's an open-source framework based on the React technology, open-source by Meta, and it powers some of the most innovative products on the internet. So when you use Claude or Grok or Midjourney, you're using NextJS, you're using Vercel's technologies. So with V0, what we're trying to do is, and it's funny because you put us in the, rightfully, I think, in the building or development category in that survey. But what we're trying to do with V0 is help more people participating in building software, increase the sort of the total addressable market of people that are actually shipping things, shipping real products. And at the same time, just like you would with ChatGPT,

• 6:47Speaker 00

  we want V0 to be just extremely, extremely easy. And the outputs that it generates make them as refined and realistic as possible. Like, the things that you created with V0 hopefully live up to that standard set by, you know, some of the best and largest websites on the internet.

• 7:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  I was gonna ask you how V0 came out of Vercel. And I, my theory was, it was like, you guys are sitting around, you're like, how do we get more people building websites? And it's like, okay, let's just help them do it really easily. Is that, it's like TAM expansion for Vercel. Is that?

• 7:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, in some ways, it's what I've been doing for not only 10 years that I've been almost working on Vercel, but maybe my entire life. Because my strength as a developer is kind of meta. It's been to create developer tools. So I've created a bunch of open source frameworks that are really popular. So Next.js is one, but before that, in a previous life, I created another tool called Socket.io, which is a real-time communication mechanism that powers, for example, every time you use Notion, I think you interviewed Ivan, when Notion needs to broadcast messages in real time to other collaborators, they use a real-time engine that I built for Socket.io.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  So the reason that startups and companies have used my products in the past is because I took something that was very difficult to do, but very compelling, like it was with real time in the past, like it's building cutting-edge applications on the web with Next.js, and I tried to make it as easy as possible. But you still needed to know development skills, right? For us, and the opportunity was, if there is maybe 5 million React developers, which is the sort of the library engine that we use, and there is maybe 20 million JavaScript developers, how many product builders or people with aspirations of building products exist? My back-of-the-napkin, like, minimum calculation is 100 million.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  And I'll tell you, it's funny where I get that number from. Slack has about 100 million monthly active users.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  And what you do on Slack is you go in it and you talk to people. And a lot of those people are building digital products, right? And they talk to one another about what they would want to see in the world. They talk to customers through shared channels. I love that feature. We talked to a lot of the Versal customers and like they tell us like, I want to build this. I want to see that. I want this feature. I want that thing. And so the opportunity with V zero was. It's not that you're going to stop talking to other people, but what if you could yap into the computer? And see something happen, build a prototype, build your first version of a product. Build a demo, build a full stack product, build it and ship it. And so the the inspiration for it was very natural to the mission of Versal.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  But concretely, the genesis story was when ChatGPT came out. We noticed that it was very good at writing the code that our tools used. So ChatGPT right of right out of the bat. Was good at JavaScript, was good at Tailwind, which is a CSS styling technology. Was good at NextJS and again, the power of open source. Our tools are already in the training data of the internet. And so that long term bed and vision and open source really paid off. And so because the models were so good at writing this kind of code. The idea for V zero came naturally from what if we could build a ChatGPT for building web products?

• 10:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  Speaking of that, I didn't actually know. So I had Bolt CEO on the podcast and he talked about how Claude kind of unlocked. What they are doing and you guys, do you guys sit on ChatGPT and OpenAI's stuff?

• 10:25Speaker 00

  We started out on OpenAI and we've always used a combination of models. It's funny, right now on Twitter, there's a million, there's three with a million views of people trying to reverse engineer the prompt and the models.

• 10:35Lenny Rachitsky?

  I saw that, I read it.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  And they're all finding that there is all this kind of different models that are specialists in different tasks. And there's a pipeline of models where a model could hand off work to another model. And so OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, but we predate Anthropic because. I'll give credit to ChatGPT that, you know, the the utility of it was so general purpose. But from the very first release, it was very good. In fact, by the way, if I'm not mistaken, we, the first prototype of V zero might have even predated ChatGPT. Or at the very least, I think we were running on GPT three point five. So we've always had this vision of unlocking more power for the web through LLMs.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  And there's a lot of very interesting technical details of why, by the way, LLMs happen to be so good at the task of web design and web development that we could get into. But it was like the perfect timing for us.

• 11:33Lenny Rachitsky?

  That's I want to come back to that. That's actually a really good question. But let me ask you a couple of other questions here. In terms of V0, what's the scale at this point? We hear all these numbers about all the folks in the space. What can you share about what's happening with V0?

• 11:45Speaker 00

  I can share that it's growing exponentially and that over 1.3 million users have interacted with V0 so far. We had our largest day ever yesterday and today again. We're the largest, we're one of the largest customers of most of cloud providers at this point. We're hitting the limits of every GPU LLM infrastructure out there in the planet. And what the most exciting thing for me is what I'm seeing people build with V0. So we launched a feature about a month ago, maybe even less than a month ago, called V0 Community. It already has 20,000 submissions. If I I'm sure people in your audience have used Figma.

• 12:28Speaker 00

  One of the things that I love at Figma is Figma files that I can go and grab a starting point for for something. Could be a logo, could be a menu. And you can start with something and someone has already contributed, kind of like that spirit of open source. And so in less than a month, I think we've done over 20,000 community submissions. So we've learned so much about building AI products with this. And we continue to sort of open source and share our best practices. But one of the things that I've definitely learned is prompting it seems like the easiest interface in the world because. It's just an input, right? And you put text in it. But there's a little bit of a writer's block sometimes.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  So one of my favorite things that I've seen, and I'm even looking at the homepage right now, and you can see like a random assortment of community submissions. And they have 1,200 forks and 1,500 forks and 6,000 forks. And this is every time people saying like, oh, instead of starting from scratch, I'll start from this application that someone else has built. And I'm going to prompt it to modify it and make it my own.

• 13:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  So these, the community submissions are people building apps on V0 and sharing what they build.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 13:39Lenny Rachitsky?

  You can look at the code and fork it.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  And it's becoming like a compounding investment, right? Like people share something, someone else grabs it, makes it better. Maybe you use it at that point. In many ways, I see this as the next evolution of GitHub. Whereas GitHub was so, it was a marvel for software development because it, I don't know if you remember this, but like the initial little tagline underneath the GitHub logo was social coding. And it had this democratization effect of building software. But you still needed to know how to code. And so what we're after is social product building in many ways, right? Like, everybody should be able to cook and share what they're, what they're building.

• 14:24Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love how, I hadn't thought of it this way, but I love that it connects so much to your open source roots, where people are building on V0 and then sharing what they're building. And then people can build off those things. It's kind of like an open source AI building experience.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  It's fascinating, right? Like, in many ways, if you think about the Git commit. The Git commit is super interesting. If you, if you, if you watch how an engineer works, they look at a problem, they spend a lot of time in their code editor. And at the end, they say, I think I got it. I think, I think I've fixed it. And then they produce a Git commit. They summarize their intent and what they try to do after they've done the work.

• 15:04Speaker 00

  D zero inverts that. The git commit is you go into the chat and say, please change the color of this button. And when I click it, save this form to a database. And so you're starting with the intent and the output is the code. And as a side effect, we can also produce a git commit for you. That feature is not online yet, but it's coming in the next couple of days. Spoiler alert for the group. And so I like this idea of we can create this superset of all software building with this platform. And that is true to my initial intention with Vercel. Our mission is to enable the world to build and ship the best products.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  And so enabling that for the largest possible group of people is very exciting to me.

• 15:54Lenny Rachitsky?

  So let's go to this question of just kind of the elephant in the room for a lot of people. Seeing these things happening, product builders that have, you know, that have been doing things a certain way for a long time. With apps like this coming around, whether you could just type a thing in and build it for you. And it's beautiful. How do you think things are going to change for product managers, for product teams? Where do you think, where do you think the biggest change is going to happen? How do you think product will be built in the next few years?

• 16:19Speaker 00

  The most profound one that I kind of alluded to is that conversations between product builders and their customers will be mediated by this V zero links, these artifacts. I think when Claude came up with the name artifacts, I found it phenomenal. Because we're all in this world, especially in this group of people. We're here to build awesome things and share them with the world. Steve Jobs had this awesome speech about it's, it's like our form of giving back to the world is to try and do the best possible job we can and share it with the world.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  And so. The idea that when we talk, we would not have the power to make those ideas a reality seems, it seems like an L to me. I would love to see people constantly live in the product, be in the design, spend time tuning and trying out new ideas. And that's what the ideal work of the future should look like. And less about kind of, again, that abstraction, that being removed from the product. Or even the, sometimes I can

• 17:43Speaker 00

  feel powerless to not be able to change something. This happens a lot when departments collaborate within an organization. Marketing wants design to do something. Marketing wants engineering to design. Engineering needs a design. It cuts all ways, right? Like, one of the things that people had got excited about that we published on the Versale blog was about design engineering. Because a lot of the people that we were noticing were being very successful at Versale, were people that had both the design and engineering skills. And that was actually another huge motivator and inspiration for B0, because we realized that people could be more full stack. We shouldn't put limits on ourselves and what we can build and what

• 18:28Speaker 00

  we can ship and what we can, we can dream about making possible on this, on this web services. And so you could imagine removing all those limitations. A designer that can ship a fully baked product, a product manager that can prototype and ship to production, an engineer, a lot of people that use V0 are backend engineers that never had the ability to, you know, sort of like, they could ship an API, they could build a great low level infrastructure system, but to actually bring their end to end vision to life, V0 is sort of completing that for them.

• 19:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  So let me follow the thread on engineers. A lot of people are wondering, do we need engineers in the future? What happens to engineers? Should I learn how to code? You're a long time engineer. Thoughts for folks that are trying to decide the career for themselves?

• 19:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think knowing how things work is the most important skill in the world. I foresee a lot of people becoming incredibly impactful in building and shipping amazing products and building gigantic companies and everything you could imagine, where a single person can do the job of 100 different people in 100 different specializations. Take the example of

• 19:49Speaker 00

  one skill set that's really important to build a front end product is you need to know how to use CSS or Tailwind to style it.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  And once upon a time, I would hire people that were truly specialists in this task. The task of there's a Figma design or there is some kind of sketch and translating that into reality because they knew really well how to manipulate layouts, layout code, box model code, we call it, and borders, paddings, margins, flexbox, all these technologies for styling.

• 20:32Speaker 00

  And notice I actually use the word translation very intentionally because the origin of the LLM goes, or the transformer architecture at least, goes as far back as the architecture for systems like Google Translate. They were generative LLM techniques, basically. That's how they crossed that chasm of like, remember when translating tools were horrible? And then one day, the problem was just solved, right? And I look at, I look at a lot of the programming jobs to be done that used to be specializations that I think

• 21:14Speaker 00

  are going away in a way, or the tasks to be done. They're translation tasks. We were translating from a screenshot or intent or a design into a React and Tailwind and CSS implementation. And right now, V0 is incredibly good at doing that. It's so good that every time we put a new generation of the model out, I run this test of like converting my own website and try to generate it with V0. Last time I did it, it had taken me like 10 prompts to replicate it. Keep in mind, I'm an expert front-end engineer that's been, you know,

• 21:57Speaker 00

  in the arena since I'm like 10 years old. And I'm 35 now. And so I do that test because it's almost like a test of like self-imposed humility of like, I remember exactly how long it took me to build my website with Next.js, the framework that I created, and ship it. And so with the last model, it took me maybe 10, 15 prompts. With the most recent model, it took me two prompts. And so that translation from the design intent into working implementation, another anecdote that I like to share with people is the model, because V0 tries to embed all of the best practices of the web, the model output more accessible code than when I wrote.

• 22:42Speaker 00

  It follows the accessibility guidelines that the Web Standards Consortium put out better than I did. Because it just knows everything. And so that, those tasks where you can almost model it to a translation task, definitely going away. But knowing how things work under the hood, notice all the, I'm using specific tokens in this conversation. I'm saying CSS, I'm saying layout. I'm naming styles. Knowing those tokens is going to be very important for you because you're going to be able to influence the model and make it follow your intention a lot better.

• 23:22Speaker 00

  And so the TLDR would be knowing how things work, the symbolic systems. And that will mean that you have to probably go into each subject with less depth.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  I have engineers at Vercel that know every single CSS property by heart. They know when they became available in a certain web browser. They've been tracking this specification. Like, it's almost like you're in an encyclopedia of knowledge of each CSS property. You probably won't need that in the future. And probably that's good, because you'll free up your mind for more ambitious things.

• 24:00Lenny Rachitsky?

  That is fascinating. So what I'm hearing is a skill that will continue to be valuable in the future. No matter, but I want to push on this a little bit. No matter how far AI gets is understanding the conceptually how software works.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely.

• 24:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  Back end system databases, CSS as a thing. So say, I don't know if you have kids, whether you have kids or not, just say they were like trying to decide, what should I learn to be, you know, to thrive in this future? Well, how would you summarize it? Like, how far should they get into software engineering?

• 24:31Speaker 00

  Great question, because I have five kids and I've already enrolled them in this school of G myself. In the sense that I'm already guiding them towards the things I think are going to be very useful to them. So understanding how things work needs, I think, the ability to understand the fundamental logic behind things incredibly valuable. So I push them really hard on math.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  If you don't know math really well, you're out of my house. Just kidding, but like, it's a fundamental like skill that I want them to know.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  Eloquence. So I joke sometimes, have you heard a meme of word cells versus shape rotators?

• 25:14Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  So a shape rotator is someone that only has a math brain, right? You could argue the kings and queens of Silicon Valley have been the shape rotators, because those have been the jobs that have historically commanded the most status, respect, net worth, whatever.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  And then there's the word cells, which is communicating more of the liberal arts. There's also the funny and awesome slide of Apple saying that they're at the intersection of liberal arts and technology. I've always had immense amounts of respect for both sides of the brain, so to speak. But I think developing great eloquence and knowing and memorizing those tokens that I talked about, knowing how to refer to things in that global mental map of symbolic systems will be highly valuable. And we have some tools to help people prompt better, but prompt enhancement and embellishment cannot replace thinking and cannot replace your own creativity that you want to infuse

• 26:16Speaker 00

  into the world. So one of the things that V0 does is it tries and it succeeds, I think, at creating very nice designs out of the box. We try to infuse what we've learned about what do people think is typically good web design? We've influenced the model in that direction. But still, like, we also don't want the whole internet to look the same way. So your ability to steer the model with your words into those references, into those inspirations, is going to be very important. I actually have an amazing anecdote. We hosted a design demo night at the Versale HQ in San Francisco last night, and we're

• 26:59Speaker 00

  showing off how Versale uses V0 to build V0 and to build Versale. And one of our designers showed this amazing animation that he built, actually two amazing animations that he built. And in one of them, it was this amazing triangle that had an animation that I didn't think was possible to make, in that it was all built with V0. And he used the word turbulence to describe the effect that he wanted. So I just want to collate that to people because the difference between knowing that word and not knowing it is getting that style into that beautiful triangle that he created that was interactive and it's probably going to end up in some landing page soon that

• 27:44Speaker 00

  you're going to visit on versale.com. And so developing eloquence and your linguistic ability, I think, is going to be very important. So I'd love my kids to know that.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  And I think that idea of sharing things and putting yourself out there and broadcasting to the world. So another thing that I do is I take my kids to hackathons. We just went to an awesome hackathon at University of San Francisco USF. It was called the Bloom Hackathon and I took two of my kids. And I wanted to watch how people presented their ideas. And they had, we had a lot of fun. We also ate waffles and grilled sandwiches, which is a bonus. But so presenting and putting yourself out there. I mentioned in the beginning of the podcast when we were chatting, I learned so much from you and your guests because

• 28:38Speaker 00

  you put out all this awesome little posts on X and these videos and these snippets of your interviews. And so the ability to present what you've built and put yourself out there, incredibly important skill in the future, especially in a world where the marginal cost of producing software and new things are going down. You need to build an audience. You need to know how to talk to people. You need to build your own signature brand and style. And so maybe they're a little too young for that one, but I guess taking them into hackathons, probably like, you know, back is influencing their neural networks or pre-training data for the future.

• 29:18Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love it. They're gonna tell their friends. My dad took me to a hackathon. What's that? So are you encouraging to learn to code? Because it's interesting. You mentioned math, eloquence, presenting, and then, okay, so also learn to code.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, again, learning how to prompt, learning how to code. With V0, we show you the code when we build things. So that, if you can build that mapping of like, maybe not learning how to code in the, necessarily in like, the, as an abstraction. If you do have a knack for it, kind of like, you know, I'm a big believer also that my five kids have like, super diverse personalities and inclinations. And I don't want to be, you know, pushing for something that they wouldn't want to do or whatever. And so, learning to code in the abstract might be good for some people, might be good, might, may not be the fun thing to do for other people. And so.

• 30:17Speaker 00

  What I would recommend is try to understand how things work. So if you prompt V0 or any other tool and it generates some code, try to build an understanding of what that does at a high level. It's like actually maybe an extension even of eloquence. One of the bets that I made early on with Vercel that really paid off is we, Vercel, maybe as a metaphor, is like AWS in easy mode for a lot of people. We have a very large user base of people that would have otherwise not have been able to configure all of the ins and outs of the cloud, but do want the scale, flexibility, speed, et cetera. They want to create very high quality products and services.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  So I like to give this superbowl example because one of our customers Ramp had a 43x increase in traffic when their ad went live. The engineer that worked on that only needed to learn Next.js. Then they pushed their code of Vercel and now they can reach an audience of 100 million people without a blip, 100% uptime.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  That superpower comes from we made it as easy as possible to get started. And the language that we choose is actually very relevant in this story. JavaScript is, in my mind, has always been almost like the English of programming languages. It's a language that if you learn it, you reach billions of devices. So it's not a coincidence that when you ask ChatGPT or Anthropic or Gemini to build you a web app, it uses these tools, it uses JavaScript, it uses React. It's become the lingua franca of building products on the web.

• 32:05Speaker 00

  So I would tell to make, I would say to my kids, look, if you do want to go deeper into programming, start learning there, you can reach huge numbers of people. If you have a passion, I would say there is going to be a fundamental engineering skill that's going to be useful for decades or centuries to come, which is creating foundational infrastructure.

• 32:26Speaker 00

  Think about LLMs in terms of they're like oracles that can go and write software for you. But there's a limit to how much software they can write. There's context windows. There is time and computational constraints. So it's very hard for an agent today to go and say, I'm gonna write a cloud from scratch. I'm gonna write all the foundational services. I'm gonna write the framework from scratch. I'm gonna write the compiler. No, the LM is orchestrating those tools and infrastructure. It's not writing the compiler from scratch. Otherwise, you get into the Newton thing. In order to create an apple, you have to create the entire underlying universe. No, the LMs are interoperating with the universe as it exists.

• 33:11Speaker 00

  And so the engineers that learn foundational infrastructure are probably gonna be extremely empowered still for years to come.

• 33:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  Like, there's a world where you could argue ChatGPT will build the next version of ChatGPT. What I'm hearing from you is that's a long ways away, if ever.

• 33:30Speaker 00

  Absolutely. This is why, you know, the common, the running joke is that all of these companies have, you go to their careers page, and it's like engineer, right? The counterpoint of that is that at Vercel, we had, we have 150 engineers that can write code and 600 total headcount. Now, we have 600 engineers. One of the best things that I, some of the best things that I've seen created with V0 have not come from our engineering team. They've come from the marketing team. They've come from the sales team. They've come from the product management team. The product management team is fascinating, right? Because now they're actually building the product.

• 34:12Speaker 00

  So last night, I saw how we've specced out in V0. Think of it as like a live PRD. We've specked out how the new functionality for deploying a V0 to Vercel is going to work. The amount of detail that was contained in that V0, I mean, we're all just saying, well, just ship it. There's nothing else to discuss, right? Like it was animated, it was interactive. We were demonstrated the error state, the success state, the slow stream state. So it really empowers product builders, not only with technical skills. I think that does a disservice to the tool.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  It empowers them to explore and augment their thinking with a lot of things that perhaps it wouldn't have considered otherwise. A lot of states of the product that wouldn't have considered otherwise.

• 35:05Lenny Rachitsky?

  The name V0 implies the product is for prototypes for kind of like the first attempt at stuff. And that's definitely where all these tools are finding product market fit. Prototypes, PMs showing a thing that working versus just design. Do you expect V0 and other tools to get to a place where you can build Salesforce.com and scale it to billions of dollars?

• 35:25Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 35:26Lenny Rachitsky?

  You do, okay?

• 35:27Speaker 00

  We already, we already have a customer, an enterprise customer of V0 that only works with V0. All of their products, all of their features, all of their client communications are V0 native. Two days ago, I just heard anecdotally on X, someone tells me, my brother just sold his first website to a client, completely built in V0. Yesterday at an investor conference, an investor walks up to me and says, two of my friends just got engaged on V0. I was like, okay, okay, V0 is a dating app now. So the, the engagement, the website, the proposal, the wedding, like it's all V0 native. So because we've integrated V0, the Vercel infrastructure.

• 36:11Speaker 00

  We can do that whole story that I just told you of like, I have a website to build and I can get it in front of 100 million people. We can enable that for everybody now. And so the end to end, full stack, V0 native and built on this awesome fluid, serverless infrastructure that scales to billions of people, all just from prompts or screenshots or just copying and pasting your PRDs into the tool.

• 36:41Lenny Rachitsky?

  So let's, let's help people be successful with V0 and then let's also do a demo. But before we get there, let me ask you this. So imagine you could magically sit next to someone who's about to use V0 for the first time and whisper a tip in their ear to be successful with V0. What would your, what would a couple of tips be?

• 36:58Speaker 00

  So number one is you can be as ambitious as you want in terms of what you ask the tool. If you can steer the tool towards some kind of inspiration that you have, you're always going to get better results. If you're, if you don't have ideas on what to build or what to prompt, I would recommend using the V0 community so that you can find something to fork to get started. I would say in some ways, if you have technical skills, this one is interesting. But have some suspension of disbelief. Like what I, like it humbled me, right? I was saying about like accessibility.

• 37:40Speaker 00

  So be open minded about whether the tool actually knows some things that you might not know. And so focus more on the product description, right? Like focus more on like, what do you want the end user to experience? What do you want the product to do? And, and try to be open minded about how well the tool can implement it. Those would be my main ones. You also have to have a sense of.

• 38:08Speaker 00

  Iteration, I guess. Think of it this way. If you were working with a design firm or an agency that you've hired, you will go back and forth and say, try something else. If you were coaching an engineer that's getting stuck in something, you would say, try something else. It's amazing how many times I've gotten unstuck in V0 by just saying like, just try something else. Just saying that as the prompt, not even giving it direction. Like, I mean, the chat is like, V0, we need to have, it's like, you know, like you have a one-on-one performance review with a tool. Hey, way to talk. Try something else. What you're doing so far is not working. It's amazing.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  Like, one fitness function that I'm keeping in my head is, I really want to find the thing that I cannot build with V0. So I, as part of the V0 community, I have my own profile. We'll share the link with people. You can see six or seven things that I've built that I consider to be pretty impressive. So for example, I was flying from Tokyo to San Francisco. The internet was horrible. What I like to do during flights is I like to monitor our own flight while I'm on the flight. So I opened FlightRadar or whatever. And I was extremely bored as well. And I noticed that FlightRadar, I don't know which one it was,

• 39:35Speaker 00

  the FlightRadar is like a four or five of them. They were very bloated. They had ads. They were not what I wanted the FlightRadar to look like. So I built my own during the flight with the worst internet connection that you could imagine in the world, integrated into a flight data API called Edge Aviation. So this is what I told V0. You're gonna build, we're gonna build the best FlightRadar on the planet. I didn't, I wasn't prescriptive about how. So it used a tool called MapBox and a JavaScript library called Leaflet. I didn't tell them that, or her, and V0, what it is. And

• 40:19Speaker 00

  Subsequently, once we cooked on the design, which looks, I would say, beautiful, I then got more ambitious and I said, "All right, let's make it real now." And by the way, that's actually how I would work. So it's how I like to work. I like to work experience first, and that's also how Vercel was built. Let's start with the front end. Let's start with the planes on the screen. And by the way, there's a lot of subtleties here. For example, there's so many flights going on at any given time that there's just too many. So I had to work with V0 on improving performance. And once again, I wasn't prescribed. I just said, "We have a lot of flights, chief. Let's..." Did you say "chief"?

• 41:03Speaker 00

  I actually do say that a lot. And this is, I think, when I shared it on X, it blew a lot of engineers' minds because it created a canvas-based... Canvas is the sort of underlying rendering surface that very sophisticated products use, like Figma. And it created this awesome overlay on top of the map that can render tens of thousands of flights at any given time. And then I told it, "Let's make it a full stack application." I, "Okay, plug it into the flights API." So that's an example of like, we cooked and there was no limit. And so I'm always in the lookout. The service that I'm providing to the V0 community is, I'm part of the team that is

• 41:46Speaker 00

  really trying to break this and say like, "Can it not build something?" Or, and even when it does build it, we're very obsessed with quality and performance. Like, it has to be real. That's our commitment to our users.

• 42:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  And how much did this cost? How much time did this take to make something like this?

• 42:05Speaker 00

  So the FlightRadar example or V0?

• 42:08Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, the FlightRadar example specifically, just like...

• 42:10Speaker 00

  I mean, that one probably took less than two hours. With the worst internet... Sorry, Japan Airlines, I love you, but like, you give me a hard time.

• 42:18Lenny Rachitsky?

  And what did that cost? Like, 10 bucks? Like, what would you estimate?

• 42:22Speaker 00

  Um, I mean, I pay for the $20 VZR subscription.

• 42:26Lenny Rachitsky?

  Twenty bucks, okay, for a month. So it's like a month, but you use it for two hours, 20 bucks.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:31Lenny Rachitsky?

  Uh, if you had engineers building this, how much do you think that would cost? How long do you think that would take?

• 42:36Speaker 00

  I mean, weeks, easily, easily.

• 42:40Lenny Rachitsky?

  And that's like tens of thousands of dollars.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  Maybe the most cracked engineer out of our cell could knock it out in a, like, without using any AI, could knock it out in a couple of days, but then what about the design? What about like me? Cause I'm the bottleneck, not the engineer. And this is what's amazing about this collaboration, right? Cause like I'm providing the product guidance. I'm saying, draw a dashed line between the, by the way, this VZR just blew my mind so hard. I said, draw a dashed line between the two destination airports. And VZR said, well, I have to account for the spherical, or what is it? It's a pseudosphere

• 43:23Speaker 00

  for the curvature of the earth. It's like, okay, VZR, super genius, like whatever, like, and so that's what I mentioned about like how you can kind of go back and forth is it's like a product co-pilot is like an all-knowing being. One of our users yesterday submitted feedback to the tool and it was positive feedback. They were very happy with what they were saying, like, VZR is like a super genius, five-year-old PhD with ADHD. So like, you still have to like, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna oversell this. It's like, you know, it knows everything about everything. It's like, gets everything perfect, of course.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  But, um, but it has this sparks of brilliance. Really, truly, I think, I've been a big believer that AGI undersells what we're collectively building. Because we already have, all of this is sparks of super intelligence. I don't believe that VZR is an AGI, if it knows everything about how to draw a dashed line according to the curvature of the earth and this high-performance map of airplanes. Like, that's just superhuman. Um, and it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's a joy to use.

• 44:40Lenny Rachitsky?

  Today's episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads. One of the hardest and also most important parts of B2B marketing is reaching the right people. I'm constantly getting ads for products that I will never buy. And I almost feel sorry for the money that these companies are spending pitching me on their spend management software or some kind of cybersecurity solution that my one man business just does not need. When you're ready to reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn Ads. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals, including 130 million decision makers. And that's where it stands apart from other ad platforms. You can target your ad buyers by job title, industry, company, role, seniority, skills, even company revenue.

• 45:24Lenny Rachitsky?

  All the professionals that you need to reach in one place. Stop wasting budget on the wrong audience and start targeting the right professionals only on LinkedIn Ads. LinkedIn will even give you $100 credit on your next campaign so that you can try it for yourself. Just go to LinkedIn.com/podlenny. That's LinkedIn.com/podlenny. Terms and conditions apply, only on LinkedIn Ads. As you talk, it's interesting the way I'm thinking about this now. There's almost like three core skills in building apps with AI. There's figuring out what to build. There's making it look good, like design. And then there's getting it unstuck. Yeah. And it's interesting how like these are gonna move. Coaching.

• 46:07Lenny Rachitsky?

  Coaching it, yeah, or just like, here's a, oh, here's the, here's like the database error. I don't know, it's not figuring it out. Yeah. On the, I guess, does that resonate? I've never thought about it. Oh, absolutely. In fact, I'll tell you a little bit of a story of something that I, so even going way back in time, Nextdoor has built on React. React was this UI component library that Facebook created. Actually, with very similar goals, they had so many cracked engineers and they had to help them collaborate on an enormous product surface. So they invented, or at least pioneered, I would say, the concept of this component as a unit of reusability, as a building block, as a Lego brick of how you build software.

• 46:49Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's no coincidence that LLMs love to work with React components, by the way. And one of the things that always stood out to me about that model.

• 47:01Speaker 00

  Is it basically enables people to scale in how they work together?

• 47:09Speaker 00

  And one of the key design principles that they embedded into this thing is they called it a scapehatch.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  The API, when when React doesn't perfectly model your problem with its component system, they give you a scapehatch. They say, okay, engineer, you're on your own now. There's no guardrails. And in fact, one of these escape hatches is called dangerously set inner HTML. They want the developer to know uncharted territory. But they did give people the API. That is a profound systems design engineering principle. And throughout my life, I've always thought about scapehatches. One amazing scapehatch that B0 has is that you're looking at the code that we're generating with Next Shays.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  You can edit it. You can even have other experts look at it. One thing that one of our demos last night came from this awesome company, Luma Labs. They're creating one of the most amazing video models in the world. And they use V0 N for sale extensively to build their application, their websites, etc. And the design engineer was talking about how he was on a V0 that had 100 in 20 or so iterations. So he was knee deep into the latent space. He was in the matrix. And at one point he got stuck, but you know what he did? He copied and pasted the code that we generated and he gave it to ChatGPT-01.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  And ChatGPT-01 thought about the solution. I honestly, I'd never even thought about this myself. I was so blown away. And it doesn't speak to, I love your third point of you need to learn a skill how to get unstuck. It's like a profound like life lesson, like it's just more a generic life advice. You need to get, Facebook actually had a principle. Don't get blocked, like seek to get unblocked, seek help from other people. What's fascinating is that you can seek help from other AIs to get unstuck.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  And those escape hatches of like actually understanding and seeing the code underneath and even being able to say, okay, now let's use Git. Let's turn this into a less, more of a hybrid project, not just prompts, but also traditional software engineering. The fact that that door is open to you is extremely valuable.

• 49:44Lenny Rachitsky?

  Let's actually make this super concrete and show people what this actually looks like in V0. So pull up, we'll share a screen and then we'll do a little live demo. We'll keep it brief. I find people are like, okay, I get it. But we'll make it fun and brief at the same time. There it is. I see it.

• 49:59Speaker 00

  Beautiful.

• 50:00Lenny Rachitsky?

  What can I help you ship?

• 50:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course. We're all about shipping. Okay, so as I mentioned, you write in English, you yap into the tool.

• 50:12Speaker 00

  I'll say for a demo, let's create a contact sales form in the style of, by the way, I had a typo, I don't care. Yeah, let's get it. It's El Supreme, the clothing company for an online store. Now, I mentioned that sometimes people get blocked on like, there is like a rider paralysis at this step. So we added enhanced prompt.

• 50:40Speaker 00

  So now like you're tapping into the latent space of the model, which has a random component to it. And by the way, this is still not a substitute. It doesn't contradict what I said earlier of you knowing that the meaningful tokens, knowing what, what like the right style is and what it's called and whatever. It's still highly valuable. So the first thing you're going to notice is that as the model thinks, you can introspect its thinking. So we added this recently and it's been mostly inspired actually by the DeepSeek revolution, I would say. So the fact that when you tell it, develop a contact sales form, like what is it going to do? Like we talked about escape hatches.

• 51:24Speaker 00

  Okay, it's going to use Shat CNUI, it's going to use Tailwind CSS, it's going to use React. And this is your opportunity that if V0 is not doing exactly what you wanted, this is your opportunity to actually go and sort of correct or influence or give feedback and so on. So you're gonna notice it spits out a bunch of files and it gives me the thing that I wanted, right? So I'm gonna zoom out a little bit here. So a couple of things that stand out here that, I mean, as a, again, as an experienced engineer, I can point out, the underlying component system that it uses is the same component system that the best tools on the planet are built with.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  This is called ChatCN. If you go to grok.com today, they're using ChatCN to build their UI, they're using NextJS, you're getting that caliber of code. The other thing that it did is, people on social media talk about this a lot, when you use a global shared component system with the world, you don't want everything to look the same. So the fact that he was able to apply the style and he kind of knew what Supreme looked like was kind of cool. But now I'm gonna say, actually, because I'm building a financial institution, make it more serious, make it in the style of, let's say, Charles Schwab, change typefaces.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  So this is the iteration process of like, I'm gonna go and give feedback to the model, I'm gonna make it try different things. So once that initial generation was already created, now the model is actually acting more as an editor. It's going and making tweaks to what's already been built. And this actually scales to very large projects. You could have started with something much bigger. So in the meantime, I'm gonna show you what Luma Labs created with V0, which is absolutely phenomenal. I looked at this last night. It already has 2000 forks. I was telling you about the, the power of our community. So by the way, you can just click community here on the V0 sidebar. I'm gonna fork it because they generously shared it with the world.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  Notice all the incredible animations here. By the way, they shipped this to hire and attract talent to their company. I recommend them, by the way, like you should, if you want to be a brand designer, take them into consideration. Notice that it's an interactive, everything is AI-generated. They use their own AI image generation tool to create this beautiful frames. These are all AI-generated as well. And it's interactive, so like there is the autoplaying functionality. This is actually a complex layout in animation system that they built entirely in V0. I was telling you that at one point, they even got some advice from O1. So shout out to OpenAI.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  I'm going to say, make it Sepia-style colors. So this is an example of like, okay, I fork something. I already have a starting point. My bank-grade contact form is ready in the meantime. Another fun thing to do is you can start with a screenshot. So I'll use another NextJS user as an example, which is fortune.com. Shout out to them, they built a slick website. But let's say that I'm actually wanting to break into the news business. So I'm just going to paste a screenshot. I could have also attached a Figma file.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  And I'm going to have, V0 already knows, V0 can answer questions as well about the engineering design product world. So like, I can ask V0, what is a newsletter? Explain with a diagram. Use Lenny as an example. So V0 is also a knowledge-seeking tool. But we do strongly sort of like, quote unquote, steer the tool to create things. So if I paste a screenshot, as you can see, it's cooking on creating a, hopefully, awesome news website. I specifically ask because I think it's funny to explain a newsletter with a diagram.

• 55:43Speaker 00

  This V0 can create again like explanations, content, knowledge. The creator is Lenny. You were a former Airbnb product lead. I guess I should have used some examples from Airbnb, by the way. But let's look at here at what it created with.

• 56:01Lenny Rachitsky?

  Wow.

• 56:01Speaker 00

  With Fortune. So notice that the I'm just noticing now the the cyber should have been in the center. Let's use the I'm gonna zoom out a little bit. Let's use the refinement tool. To.

• 56:19Speaker 00

  Center this. I call this, by the way, one of the hardest problems in computer science is actually centering things.

• 56:26Lenny Rachitsky?

  With CSS.

• 56:27Speaker 00

  So. That's right. Centering a div. And in fact, look at it. It was a div. So notice that I did a precise sort of inline prompt. And the difference between V0 and a lot of other tools is that. Yes, you do have the code and code is very important, but I call it code last rather than code first. You're living in the product. So it centered that. Another website that I love. Also built with Next.js is Semaphore. So. I really like their sepia style. So I'm gonna say use this, apply this style instead. Including.

• 57:09Lenny Rachitsky?

  So you're sharing a screen. So you used a screenshot to design to build the site. And I'm using a different screenshot to tell it, make it look like this.

• 57:16Speaker 00

  Yes. And and so the idea is that V0 can grok different aspects of what it needs to build. It can be functional aspects. It can be layout aspects. One and one of the things that's also very important to know is. We influence the model. So a lot of the things that you would have had to prompt, you might get for free. One that's important to call out is responsiveness. So as an example, if I notice that if I do this. It's going to like make it work quite well in mobile. It's going to give me that hamburger menu. I can now tell it like. Apply that style. To everything.

• 58:00Speaker 00

  In the meantime, I'll show you.

• 58:04Speaker 00

  This is actually, to me, very, very impressive. And I don't know why today I'm so fixated on the theme of sepia. But notice that not only did it change the background, I hope people can notice this. It applied it to the checkboxes. And it applied CSS, I'm assuming this is CSS filter. Yeah, I applied a CSS filter. Just for the sake of it, because I'm a nerd. I'm gonna look at it, but yes, it applied a CSS filter.

• 58:34Speaker 00

  Confession time, I actually didn't know that there was a sepia function in the filter property of CSS. There were many ways to accomplish this. You could have also written the images or the videos to a canvas and like applied all kinds of algorithms and whatever.

• 58:48Lenny Rachitsky?

  I like that it did it more elegantly than you would have.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. So that's why you can't be too opinionated with the tool. So another cool thing is I do like showing screenshots. But I do want to remind people that the idea is not to clone other people's websites necessarily, right? Like.

• 59:09Lenny Rachitsky?

  It's just a cool demo. It's a simple way to show off what it can do.

• 59:11Speaker 00

  Exactly. Like, take screenshots of your own things, right? Take screenshots of your artboards, take screenshots of things that people post in Slack. And also, don't hesitate to add functionality.

• 59:22Lenny Rachitsky?

  Incredible. Thank you for doing the demo. It's, I'm just trying to imagine having an engineer I'm working with asking them to do these things. And not only just how annoying that would be, like, make it sepia. But just how much time it would take from, okay, do this thing, copyfortune.com. It'd be like days, weeks. Here it's just like, we'll check it out here. Months, if ever.

• 59:41Speaker 00

  Maybe it never ships.

• 59:44Lenny Rachitsky?

  That's right. Well, something that I noticed that I loved at the beginning, when you were doing the prompting and that prompt improvement feature. Is it, it basically is like best practices to make it look good and look better. Which I think is one of the more interesting, I don't know, levers to working with AI. Is it just has best practices to help you build things that are beautiful. And also feels like there's this opportunity of just like, helping you figure out if what you're building is at all a good idea. Like, what is the problem you're trying to solve? Like, it feels like there's a, like a PM1 pager step that should exist. Like, how do you know this is a problem? What, what have users told you? How many people have told you this? Things like that.

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's something to be said about the fact that over time, we're. More and more peeking into the mind of the AI. That in itself is becoming a killer feature. So the DeepSeek extreme, the thinking tokens moment was a very big moment for industry, I think. Because OpenAI did have the technology. But they decided that for competitive reasons, which you know are it's a reasonable thing to think, no pun intended. They were going to withhold it. And also, it wasn't clear there was going to be product and user and product utility. But when DeepSeek hit, it was very obvious that people really liked the idea of understanding

• 1:01:07Speaker 00

  how the AI thinks and influencing where it should go. We've gotten actually amazing feedback and bug reports where people actually specifically point out, look, this is where the AI went wrong. Please fix it. So the more people we get on this product, the more thumbs up, thumbs down, the more user feedback we get. And by the way, I'll tell you like, for people out there building products, my number one guidance or piece of advice I would give to any startup founder was create a lot of opportunities for people to give you feedback inside the product. I drew inspiration from Stripe. And this was amazing for the early days of our cell.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  There was a feedback button with a very slick inline form with four emojis that would allow you to decide how you were feeling about the feature, the product at that very moment. And that would go straight into Slack. And we were building day in and day out, just like streaming users' thoughts right into our consciousness. And maybe we would get, I don't know, like tens, hundreds a day, especially in the early days, maybe like a couple a day and whatever. When you're building AI products, it's a constant stream of user feedback. So for people that are thinking about not building AI products, you know, it's, it's going to be hard to compete

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  with something that has such a tight feedback loop with users.

• 1:02:40Speaker 00

  It's the whole idea is to capture users' feedback. So the next iteration of the model, the prompt, the fine tuning, the examples, the rag is better. And one of the things that Versal has done as a result of this insight is we've open sourced a lot of what makes B0 work. So let's say that you wanted to create the B0 for doctors as an example. You can go to vercel.com slash templates and you can clone a chat GPT template that basically follows all of the best practices in the world for like really high performance, awesome UIs. And now you can go out and build your own AI products.

• 1:03:24Speaker 00

  We've also open sourced the AISDK, which is the foundational plumbing of B0. It allows you to connect any model and generate UI from its responses. Not just output text, but actually generate UI. So maybe because I love showing stuff, I'll just really quickly show you this.

• 1:03:45Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, cool.

• 1:03:45Speaker 00

  I'm kind of excited about it.

• 1:03:46Lenny Rachitsky?

  Let's do it.

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  So if you go to chat dot versal at AI, super quick, you're going to see this is the open source chat GPT demo that we've built. It can, you can ask questions like old school LLM. But also you can ask, let's actually finish this. Let's ask, what is the weather in San Francisco? We call this generative UI. It's responding not with just plain text, it's creating components as a result. Last but not least, and this is a sort of B0 style opportunity. Let's ask it to help me write an essay about Silicon Valley. It's going to create a canvas or artifacts style experience.

• 1:04:29Speaker 00

  And everything is generative, but also users can edit, refine, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:04:36Lenny Rachitsky?

  This actually reminds me of something I've been thinking about. There's all these startups that are building vertical AI tools. This got like a little bit of a tangent and there's always this like AI stuff for lawyers, AI stuff for doctors, nurses. And the pitch there is that these are going to be founders that know a lot about the specific problem in this market. And so they'll build like the tools that are very specific to them.

• 1:04:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm absolutely convinced that expert AI tools are the future. There's an amazing product being built on Versal called chatprd.com. It's the V zero for writing PRDs and it's going to get a V zero integration soon. So you can write your PRD with AI and then you can deploy it, create it with AI. That's just an example of like a vertical that you can go after. There's also open evidence. It's like the chat GPT for doctors, actually. There is an amazing startup building X-ray AI tooling. So the ideas I think are infinite and what I've seen from users of AI at Versale, like for example, our legal team loves this tool called GetGC.ai.

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  They could in theory go to chat GPT to ask legal questions. But someone out there decided, I'm going to build the best legal AI tool in the world. It's going to be up to date. I'm going to obsess about this problem. The CEO herself is a lawyer. So it's going to be hard to compete with that, I think.

• 1:06:03Lenny Rachitsky?

  But here's, here's what I'm thinking. This is like almost the opposite and I'm curious to get your take, but let's not spend too much time on this because it's a complete tangent.

• 1:06:10Speaker 00

  No, no, I love it.

• 1:06:11Lenny Rachitsky?

  So you showed me this, the weather widget that you just built. Basically, it's like a little mini app that the AI built as you're talking to it. Is there a world where when AI, when AGI is far enough and approaching superintelligence, can it just build you a Harvey? For example, in real time, here's the best experience for a lawyer. Here we go, we got it for you.

• 1:06:31Speaker 00

  Totally, totally. I believe that eventually, yes, but humans will always want to have some guardrails. The reality is that GetGC is taking a double job. One is making the best tools for lawyers possible, but also putting their, you know, weight behind it. But it's saying like, we've actually used this and we believe that this is, this is what the future should look like. There is a sense of direction and opinion about things. And I think left to its own devices, AI, I don't know, like this is the, this is the double edged sword of like prompt embellishment. Like AI doesn't always know exactly what we want or what we need.

• 1:07:13Speaker 00

  It's still very much a co-pilot, a partner, an assistant is not really running our lives. And I don't know that we even would want that ultimately.

• 1:07:23Lenny Rachitsky?

  Okay, I'm going to go in a whole different direction, which is taste. We hear this word taste all the time. It feels like a thing that people are always suggesting this will continue to be an important skill to know what is good, basically, to know what people are likely to find valuable and good. And I know clearly you have great taste. You're building incredibly beautiful products. These Euros clearly, it's like the most beautiful by default builder out there as we've seen. So in terms of building taste, people are always like, how the hell do I do that? I have great taste. I know I do. I don't need to. How have you built taste? How do you think that is? How do you think you've built taste? And any advice for folks that are trying to improve their taste?

• 1:08:03Speaker 00

  Yes, I think it's extremely important to try lots of products. You need to get yourself out there. I think it's very important to go back to that sort of like get into the world, ship things. Don't be hesitant of self-promotion in a way. So being very honest with yourself, like building something, getting it out there. See how people react. Go back to the drawing board. I think it's about exposure. At Versel, we have one of our sort of internal operating principles as increasing exposure hours.

• 1:08:40Speaker 00

  Try to quantify how much time you expose yourself to watching how people use your products. Even to watch how people use other products. And you'll develop that muscle. Like taste, sometimes I think we think of as like this inaccessible thing that, oh, that person was born with taste. I see it as a skill that you can develop. And again, the AI will help you a lot here because we try and capture some of the universal principles of it. But there's also trends in the world, right?

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  Like, I'm not a super couture guy, but like you can see that like every year, like Paris Fashion Week has like a theme to it. And like there is some innovations that have some breakthroughs, whatever. And so trying to stay at the frontier or even try and define the frontier as well is certainly very exciting.

• 1:09:41Lenny Rachitsky?

  I love how doable this is increasing your exposure hours. Basically, what I'm hearing is use the best apps.

• 1:09:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:09:50Lenny Rachitsky?

  There's like a feedback cycle component to it, just like show.

• 1:09:54Speaker 00

  And there's some nuances, right? So I actually recently created a, I published it to my community, Proflam V0. I created a chat GPT style interface inspired by Grok. And I captured a few things that Grok does that are just so smart. So on mobile web, when you press enter on their input, they default to creating a new line. Because they know that the way that people are used to submitting things on mobile is not by hitting enter, like we would do on a desktop computer. You can tap the little icon and like your message goes out. On desktop, they inverted it. When you press enter, you're expected to submit. And I think if you got a new line, I think a lot of people would get frustrated that most people don't know that they can press

• 1:10:39Speaker 00

  command enter to submit and whatever, and like it slows everything down.

• 1:10:44Speaker 00

  And you can basically prompt for those things, right? But you have to pay attention to the details and you have to, you know, decide what you want to see in the world. And sometimes that means like either defining best practices or seeking the best practices and learning from others. Another aspect of exposure hours is that you tend to overrate how well your products work. It's very important to give your product to another person and watch them interact with it. Expose yourself to the pain of reality. And the more you sort of like submerge yourself in the, in the real deal, nitty gritty of what happens when people

• 1:11:25Speaker 00

  use your, your interfaces and whatnot, I think you'll, you'll come out stronger, more grounded, hopefully more humbled.

• 1:11:34Lenny Rachitsky?

  We don't like pain though, and I like the, this is a push. Create some more pain in your life. Show people the thing you're building. Is there like a, you have like a heuristic or a number of how many exposure hours per week, per month you want your team to have? Or is it just more is always better?

• 1:11:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, more is always better. I mean, the, because inertia is to get inside your head. And the inertia is to think you know, everything and assume that everything is going good and you know, there are no errors. Of course, it's fast. It worked on my machine. I, I think it's the, it's always a push for more. I, I do sometimes little things like I ask my team to color my calendar. So I say like, I have to have a certain amount of like one on ones with my team. Uh, in, uh, representing on my calendar, uh, you know, kind of, kind of like meetings so that I can sync with people and see how the company is doing. Uh, then I want to have customer meetings and during those customer meetings, I push myself to use the products.

• 1:12:33Speaker 00

  In fact, with our enterprise customers, something that I do is like, I try to forget how things are billed, what feature of next year's reverse sale they use and whatever. I just frequently use their products and I want the product to be great. That's all. And then I could try to work backwards. So a form of exposure hours for me is seeing what kind of success. Our customers are having in the real world. And so, but again, it's just a heuristic, like maybe one third of my meetings this week were customer meetings. And I tried and watched them do. Another really quick one is we invite people frequently to demo how they use the product. Uh, live, sometimes to the executive team, to sometimes to the whole company.

• 1:13:15Speaker 00

  And, um, we discuss, we always inevitably discover something interesting from the customer about. Maybe there is something that they're in pain about that we didn't know about, or maybe something was not as intuitive as we thought.

• 1:13:31Lenny Rachitsky?

  And I find with these sorts of things, when you do them, when you talk to customers, you have them show how they use the product. You always like, why have I not done this off more often? Why am I, what am I, what am I thinking? This is, it's just so mind blowing usually.

• 1:13:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:13:44Lenny Rachitsky?

  I want to talk about limitations of V0 at this point. So what should people know about just like what V0 can't do? Like, can you, if you have an existing codebase, can you plug it in and start doing stuff? Or is that coming? What else should people know of just like, okay, it's not going to do this yet?

• 1:13:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can import codebases through zip files and Git is coming very soon. It can do full stack development, it can connect to APIs. In the next couple of days, maybe even before this podcast is out, we'll have this very tight integrations. So that if you need a database, or if you need an AI model, or if the AI decides it needs that, it'll just seamlessly install it from the Versale Marketplace. And the Versale Marketplace has already curated some of the best infrastructure products in the world to store data, to search data, et cetera. So it's gonna, it's gonna make the product even more powerful. I'll say, again, I kind of did that exercise, and I do that exercise every day of like,

• 1:14:42Speaker 00

  I have a wild idea and try to see if it can come to life. It's, it's, it's very powerful so far. AIs are still very much a work in progress. They can make mistakes. We have it as a little disclaimer underneath the input. You, you will find errors. Our, our fitness function, and we've seen such a strong correlation between user love and retention. V0 is actually their retentive product compared to other AI products that I've built in the past, or, or, you know, little demos that we've done, or whatever. People subscribe and use it every single day and are very sort of, like, if they notice a bug, they're like, very, very like jittery about it because they're depending on it day in and day out.

• 1:15:26Speaker 00

  But I'll say errors are still possible, right? Like, every once in a while, you might get a runtime error or whatever. But a lot of the technology that we've added is so that V0 is very agentic. It has a lot of agency in how to act. So you're going to see very frequently that if it runs into errors, V0 tries to solve that, solve them itself. And, and then last, I will say, when products get really big, AI today is just not as good at dealing with massive codebases.

• 1:16:02Speaker 00

  But going back to that idea of the React component,

• 1:16:06Speaker 00

  because we break down things into files and components, we tend to do quite well in that dimension. In fact, one thing that Next.js was sort of known for is that in order to start a project, you just create a file and Next.js will route to that page. If anyone is familiar with PHP, it's kind of like how PHP worked. And so it's so good that LLMs are good at working with files now because it fits very naturally into our world. And if you can scope down when things get really big, if you can give it a smaller task to work on a specific component or a specific file, you decrease that likelihood of the LM

• 1:16:49Speaker 00

  not being able to reason over very, very, very long context windows.

• 1:16:54Lenny Rachitsky?

  I want to go back to design. We talked about how V0 is really good at just great design by default. So kind of lean into that more. If someone wants to improve the design of their product, most people are not designers. They don't really know how to make it look good. They don't know what to ask for. They need just tips and best practices for making their app even better, look even nicer.

• 1:17:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was really interesting. The other day I met with a CIO of a large bank who on the side does a lot of coding or like tries out new technologies and whatnot. And I showed him V0 and he immediately became a V0 addict. He texts me every day with feedback. He moved two websites of his own from another like sort of website builder type provider to V0 and Vercel, deploy them, give them a domain name, they're live in production. And then he said, look, I have this challenge. I have this music festival that I organize with a couple of friends. And this is what the designer gave us. And he had this kind of like brochure. It looked very much like a print style design.

• 1:18:00Speaker 00

  And so he gave that to V0. And the first result, he was kind of like digging me for it. He's like, look, this doesn't look good. And then because I have experience with the tool, I said, like, why don't you just give it the feedback? Like literally, you know, you were asking yesterday, like earlier, some of the things that I've learned with the product and now is or the best practice, what would I recommend if I were sitting next to someone?

• 1:18:24Speaker 00

  Not only you should not hesitate to give the AI feedback. It's so interesting, dude. Like, sometimes people will press a feedback button to tell us what they wanted V0 to do. And literally, all we had to do in many cases is just, can you just tell V0 that? And so he sent me this message saying like, yeah, I just don't like the design. And I gave him back a prompt that I would have given. I said like, I don't know what I said specifically, but make it more jazzy. Get it, make it more, make it pop, make it. And so trying, and again, goes back to like, try to draw inspiration from variety that the AI already knows about.

• 1:19:08Speaker 00

  So in a couple of prompts, we ended up something that was, in his mind, better than the original print design of that brochure, that concert lineup. And at that time, again, I'm even learning about what V0 is capable of and the best ways to use it. But with design, I think unleashing its creativity and seeing things and playing with it is definitely super helpful.

• 1:19:35Lenny Rachitsky?

  So one thing I'm hearing here is just tell it, make this look better.

• 1:19:39Speaker 00

  Make it pop.

• 1:19:40Lenny Rachitsky?

  Make it pop.

• 1:19:42Speaker 00

  You can totally. But, and if you can use tokens that are relevant, so neo-brutalist, minimalist, newspaper-like, vintage, make it look like a telegram. Like, you can sort of like try and reach for things that you maybe would not naturally come to mind and you would be surprised about how well it can transfer those ideas into reality.

• 1:20:09Lenny Rachitsky?

  Incredible. Too easy. Maybe to close out our conversation, we'll see where this topic goes. I had this tweet that I loved, that I super resonate with. "The secrets of product quality is blood, sweat, and tears." I completely agree. I think that's why I think my newsletter's been successful. I spend so much time on every newsletter post, more than I think anyone spends on a newsletter post, like 10, 20, 30 hours. And that's why I think it works. Is there anything more behind that tweet? Anything you've learned, just the importance of working hard, I guess, to create great stuff?

• 1:20:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mentioned exposure hours is a good example of like, look, it can be painful. It can be painful to see your baby break in front of everyone and noticing all the... The other thing is that a great product is made up of a thousand little details, right? And so you're never really done. There's a humility that comes from the process also of why the best product builders will say nine no's for every yes. Because when you say yes, it's like adopting a puppy. A feature is like adopting a puppy. It grows into a beast that you have to take care of and is very demanding and loving, but also, you know, it's a lot and poops everywhere.

• 1:21:27Speaker 00

  So you have to have a creative restraint and while you also have to have a give, you have to withhold sometimes with a respect of the real world complexity that emerges. A little thing that I, you know, kind of obsess about, I'll give kudos to the Mid Journey team. I really love how Mid Journey works in mobile web. I don't know if they have an app yet, like a native app, but like their mobile website is phenomenal. And to get it to be that good, by the way, it's possible. It's actually possible to get, make great things on mobile web. But it needs that sense of love and restraint and obsession and testing a lot.

• 1:22:12Speaker 00

  And using your own products a lot. Duck fooding is a great mechanism, obviously. So we use the heck out of Versal and V0 to make Versal and V0. And hopefully that helps us do better. But there is a lot of blood, sweat and tears in the process.

• 1:22:30Lenny Rachitsky?

  Yeah, you can tell how much you use the product. Like it comes through in everything you say. Let me actually ask about this. You talked about how you have, you said you have 600 engineers?

• 1:22:39Speaker 00

  No, 600 people total and 150 so.

• 1:22:42Lenny Rachitsky?

  How is AI changing the way they work? Is there anything there? Cause I feel like you guys are at the cutting edge of how, how products are built. What's happening? Like, is it just everyone's on cursor and V0 to build stuff?

• 1:22:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yes, but actually it's more profound. I think it's the everybody can ship. It's the we build with AI principles in mind. I actually will give a shout out to the Luma Labs engineer who said, well, I'll use AI for everything. I'll use AI also to generate the images for the website, you know? And I'm seeing, for example, our designers that are working on our next conference, generate all of the animations with video models. I'm looking at our marketing team are creating demos of how the infrastructure works

• 1:23:36Speaker 00

  with V0 that are better than any static diagram or landing page that I've ever seen. One of my most viral zits or X posts is something that one of our designers created, which explains how our compute infrastructure works with an interactive demo. And until until he created that, by the way, he designed it and created it and we shipped it all in the tool. First of all, it wasn't part of his day to day job to do that. He it these years making you such a powerful generalist that you can step out of your comfort zone of like, well, my job was to do only this. You just create.

• 1:24:19Speaker 00

  We have a ritual every Friday, we had it this morning called Demo Fridays. And so it's very important to create the space for people to step out of that comfort zone and use AI. So us giving permission to people to build and ship things is part of that cultural backdrop that makes these things possible. We had a demo today as part of Demo Friday of our VP of Sales Engineering, also creating an amazing tool that he's going to use to help prospects understand Versal with V0. So.

• 1:24:55Speaker 00

  I've heard from DevOps and infrastructure engineers how much they use tools like Cursor to work on the low levels of the Vercel infrastructure. So I think very quickly, we're seeing AI being embedded everywhere. I just heard a product request from a customer and so was saying, okay, Vercel, you sell domain names. Let me, let me come up with new domain ideas with, with AI. So I just see a future where AI becomes synonymous with software. I do look forward to it because we need to stop talking about AI at some point. I foresee, it's probably not going to happen, but it is useful to remind people that AI equals software now. And we're a software company. We build software and we use software to build software. So.

• 1:25:40Lenny Rachitsky?

  And AI is just a part of that.

• 1:25:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:43Lenny Rachitsky?

  Garama, what a beautiful way to end it. Is there, is there anything else you wanted to mention, anything else that you want to leave listeners with before I let you go?

• 1:25:52Speaker 00

  I'll leave you with my vision of the future, which is, we have, we have this billboard in San Francisco, which is, everybody can cook. It's also part of the Ratatouille film, one of my favorite movies. I, I look toward, I look forward to a future where everybody can get their ideas out there. If you can dream it, you can ship it. And also that when you use products and when you see the creations of other people and the things that they put out into the world, that we are collectively making the world better. So anything you experience hopefully gets faster, higher quality, fewer bugs as we go along.

• 1:26:35Speaker 00

  And I think we're all contributing to that and I look forward, look forward to that and look forward to everyone's feedback on how Vercel can, can play a part in that future.

• 1:26:44Lenny Rachitsky?

  So to build on that, where can folks find you online? Where can they, should I just go to Vercel.com? Is it vzero.com?

• 1:26:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. And go to vzero.dev to get started.

• 1:26:53Lenny Rachitsky?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:26:54Speaker 00

  I did mention the, if you want to, if you want to build your own V0, this is more advanced, but check out our templates on Vercel.com slash templates. And also I'm Brauch G on X, so you can DM me or, or, or tweet at me at any time.

• 1:27:10Lenny Rachitsky?

  Amazing. Garama, thank you so much for being here.

• 1:27:13Speaker 00

  Thank you, Lenny. It was so fun.

• 1:27:15Lenny Rachitsky?

  Bye, everyone.

• 1:27:19Lenny Rachitsky?

  Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.