#1271 Guillermo Rauch | Artificial Intelligence Will Change Everything

Guillermo Rauch is the founder & CEO of Vercel, working on giving developers the frameworks, workflows, and infrastructure to build a faster, more personalized web. In this conversation, we talk about whether artificial intelligence is going to replace jobs or create more of them, open-source vs closed-source, role of government & regulations, most over-hyped areas vs areas that need more attention, how value will accrue, and what Guillermo is doing with Vercel. ======================= Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people onchain. But what exactly is Base? It's an Ethereum L2 offering a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near-zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the onchain world. Base is a canvas for everyone, with hundreds of apps in the Base ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the onchain space for the first time, Base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So, if you're looking for a platform where the future of onchain is being built daily, Base is your destination. Join in and make onchain the next online. Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠base.org⁠⁠⁠⁠ and follow along on Twitter at @BuildOnBase to see cool things to do onchain, everyday. ======================= Trust and Will has simplified the process of creating and managing your will or trust online. They leverage a data-driven, design-first approach and amazing customer support to help you protect your legacy from the comfort of your home starting at just $159. Sign up today for 10% off using ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://trustandwill.com/pomp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Guillermo Rauch is the founder and CEO of Versell. In this conversation, we talk about whether artificial intelligence is going to replace jobs or create more of them, whether open source or closed source will win, what the role of government and regulators are in the development of this innovative technology, where Guillermo sees the most

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  overhyped areas and the areas that deserve more attention, how value will accrue, whether to startups or to the incumbents. And then we even talk about things like pioneering generative UI to transform web design, how AI is going to help in the big shift to front end cloud, and what Guillermo has been most surprised by after building Versell for so many years. I really enjoyed this conversation. It's highly informative, but also entertaining, and I hope that you enjoy it as well. Here is my conversation with Guillermo Rousch.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Base. Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people on-chain. What exactly is Base? It's a layer-two offering, a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near-zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the on-chain world. Base is a canvas for everyone, with hundreds of apps in the ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the on-chain space for the first time. Base is designed to Bring your ideas to life. So if you're looking for a platform where the future of on-chain is being built daily, Base is your destination. Join in and make on-chain the next online. Learn more at base.org or follow along on Twitter at BuildOnBase.

• 2:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, that's at BuildOnBase to see cool things to do on-chain every single day. Today's episode is brought to you by Trust and Will. I've gone through a number of different changes in my life over the last few years. I got married, I had a kid, and I had to start thinking about how could I ensure that my wife and my child would be okay if anything ever happened to me. That's where trust, wills, and estate planning come into play. Now, most people, what they do is they get introduced to a friend, an uncle, or someone in their local community. It tends to be someone who's really expensive, a lawyer, an accountant, or somebody who does estate planning, and they just simply are using a one-size-fits-all template and just telling you, "Pay me thousands of dollars and I'll use the same thing for you as the guy down the street." But that's not what Trust and

• 3:08Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:49Anthony Pompliano?

  ones, having a trust and/or a will can literally be the difference between someone being taken care of and someone not. Go check them out today at trustandwill.com/pomp.

• 4:01Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Guillermo here with me. I thought a great place to start the conversation is in the depths of all the controversy. AI is here. It's accelerating, and there's a lot of people who think it is going to replace all human jobs. Humans are going to have nothing to do all day. It's going to make this horrible dystopia. Do you agree with that? Or is it actually something that's going to create more jobs over time?

• 4:23Speaker 02

  I think there's a mixed, there's a healthy mix of both. I'll give you my own perspective. I've been a front-end engineer. That's the software engineer that focuses on the, the parts of the software that touches the user experience, the things that the people see when they open up a website, when they open up an application. And I've been doing that for 20 years. Since I was like 10 years old in Argentina, I taught myself how to code. And the last thing that would have imagined, being a professional that's obsessed about code for so long, is that AIs in 2023 could be replacing my job. That AIs can write code and program better than human beings.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  So the, the short answer is it won't replace jobs. It will replace some jobs. But it will, I think, augment our cognition in a way that I still think most people do not fully understand.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  It's one of those things where like, you have to use these AIs in order to truly, you have to use them at work. You have to use them as this copilots of everything you do in order to like, really understand the implications that they're going to have for jobs. And what's really fascinating is that this most complex, technical jobs are the ones that are being most profoundly affected. So it almost seems like for the average person that, like, imagine like, blue collar jobs, right? The impact there doesn't seem to be as obvious to me yet as it is for even my own job, which is so technical and, and in many ways creative.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  But again, like, my, my whole thing has always been, I'm a techno-optimist, and I believe that anytime we have new tools that massively amplify our ability and our cognition, we end up creating more jobs and, and better prospects for everybody.

• 6:19Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that's a great way to look at the world and you know, we probably look at it very similar in terms of like, it gets better over time, not worse for most people on the planet. But the path there or the structure of the technology is also hotly debated. And so right now there's a big debate between closed source and open source. When it comes to artificial intelligence, how do you all think about that? And what are the maybe the pros and cons of each approach?

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll give you a very quick framework that I use to understand open source versus closed source. In the short term, when there is new technology, there, there seems like there's an, a huge opportunity for large companies to move really fast and put all their weight behind proprietary solutions.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  So way back in the day, the way that the entire internet run, it wasn't proprietary software. If you look at how the internet runs today, how cloud services run today, the vast majority of it runs on open source software. Open source wins over the long haul. In the beginning, it's always the proprietary solutions that move fast. So obviously today, when you look at AI, things like OpenAI and proprietary models clearly better. It's more intelligence, more intelligent, better integrated. They're moving really fast. There's a lot of investment going on. The open source models are not so intelligent yet. They're not so powerful yet.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  But to me, this rhymes a lot with what I've seen in my past where, for example, the advent of Linux as a competitor to Windows, especially in the data center and in the cloud. In the beginning, not so good. When, a lot of people don't know this, but when Linux first came out, which is this open source operating system, the creator of Linux introduced it as, he called it a toy. He emailed this mailing list and he said, I'm introducing this new operating system. It's kind of a toy. I'm here, out here researching at the University of Helsinki. And then what happened was it just gained this momentum and this massive ecosystem and community of people that were pushing it. So on one hand, I tell you, like, the very first thing I think about is never write off open source.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  It's a way of people to collaborate at massive scale. It's a way for people to exchange ideas. It's a way for companies to do business development without people being involved in meeting rooms. Now, there is a question of safety and alignment, right? And that's the one that is most controversial these days because folks are arguing, well, this AI, it can become this super intelligence that can destroy the earth, it's best if they're heavily regulated and if there are, you know, if there's maybe two or three proprietary ones and the government can like wrap their hands around, wrap their arms around them. However, the counterargument of that is that without open source, it's just hard for the

• 9:09Speaker 02

  entirety of the world to be monitoring the evolution of the technology and ensuring its safe deployment. So, in that sense, I'm actually almost a contrarian in that I really do not believe that AIs in their current form and in the current architectures that we're seeing will pose an existential threat to humanity. I think any new technology that comes out has the potential for misuse, even email, right? Like, I think this example has been shared a bunch, but I still get spam from a Nigerian prince that wants to donate the entirety of their fortune to me. And I'm like, oh, cool, like, here's my bank account details, right? This is what's gonna happen with AI.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  So there's gonna be a bunch of people that are gonna misuse the heck out of it for ill intentions. I do not believe that it's on the scale of a nuclear weapon. I think folks that are arguing for that either are misunderstanding the technology or perhaps in a more tinfoil hat on, trying to secure regulatory capture. So if you look at open source versus proprietary, from that point of view, open source just allows for more scrutiny. Everybody can read the code. Everyone can read the changes to the code. So there is, there is significant benefits, I think, to the open source approach there as well.

• 10:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, when we start to see open source or closed source, some small companies, startups are trying both. Some big companies are trying both. We've obviously seen, you know, Facebook take a very specific step versus maybe other companies. How do you think about value accrual? Are the startups better positioned to kind of capitalize on this AI wave? Where normally an innovative technology is used by the small companies to move quickly and kind of take on the incumbents? Or actually, in this case, are the incumbents better positioned to just simply incorporate it like maybe what we saw with Adobe? And, you know, the joke being that some of these incumbents killed thousands of startups with a single announcement. How do you think about the balance there?

• 11:03Speaker 02

  I think startups will definitely benefit in a very specific way, which is now that AI is here and democratized for every builder on the planet. What are the new disruption opportunities that are unique? To having AI as part of your design tool, meaning before AI, you couldn't conceive certain kinds of software. I'll give you an example. At Vercel, we're creating a tool called V0. It allows people to create software interfaces by just using English. So you go to v0.dev and you say, I want a UI. I'm Anthony Pompliano. I want a UI to distribute my podcasts. On the left-hand side, please put in list of podcasts and a buy button.

• 11:47Speaker 02

  And on the center, please put all my historical podcast archives. And it will just give you a new UI specifically for you at that given moment. Now, when you go to this website, you realize that it's extremely simple. All it has is this input in the middle of the screen. There's no tools, there's no toolbars, there's no icons, there's almost nothing. So that's a disruption opportunity that startups represent is that a lot of the incumbents have been accumulating software in complexity and tools and pixels on screens for decades. And they've become addicted to them and their customers have become addicted to them.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Now, there could be a scrappy two-person startup in a garage in San Francisco, though there's not a ton of garages, but there are some like. A Tokyo-style hotel capsule in San Francisco. And they're scheming the creation of a software that because it uses AI is completely disruptive to that addiction that the incumbent has. Now, here's where it gets complicated. The flip side is also true. It might turn out that for certain categories of software, the incumbent just needs to add the AI. They don't need to redesign anything. They don't have to rethink anything. You just add the AI and turn on the money printer. Because people, the demand that we're seeing at Vercel right now for AI products is like nothing I've seen ever since the iPhone came out.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Consumers want to buy this AI product. So the fact that it benefits incumbents cannot be understated. But I do think that startups are, the right startups will definitely win big in this, in this wave.

• 13:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, what are the areas you think are most overhyped? And then maybe what are the areas that don't get enough attention yet, but you're watching and think could be very big kind of counter to the public narrative at the moment?

• 13:40Speaker 02

  I think overhyped, but I'll caveat this by saying that I think the excitement is, is, is there for a good reason, is agents. So the idea that you launch this entity into the world and it'll do stuff. I think it's extremely exciting because you can do it. And then before we couldn't, before the arrival of large language models, me as a programmer, I couldn't create this autonomous intelligence that that thinks and reads back the answer from the, from the outside world and then makes another decision and so on. Though it is really exciting, but the fact that any idea that leaves the human out of the loop

• 14:24Speaker 02

  is really today fraught with peril, I think. And we have to reexamine our priors there. However, when I see AI that is augmenting the individual, and this goes back to why I think this is going to be so positive for jobs and productivity. All the things that are working, and I would argue are even underrated, are the things that are in the loop with the human and are augmenting us and giving us feedback and giving us ideas and so on and so forth. So for example, underhyped is the fact that Programmers are now seeing increasing percentage of the code that they output be generated by AI.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  As I mentioned earlier, like I could have never anticipated that was going to be the case because programming is really difficult. So just think about what that does for folks coming into the industry. Folks that want to learn programming for the first time today. Now, the AI cannot just teach how to code. It can be there reading everything you write and give you ideas for how to improve it. So I think any idea that gives that human the the context and the ideas and then. So think of it as a the human is still the creative director. And they're sourcing ideas from a team of AIs. That's what the future looks like.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  This morning, OpenAI announced GPTs. Basically, the fact that you're not going to have just one AI, but multiple. I think this is a very profound and underrated thing that's going to happen. There are a lot of companies are saying. We're not just going to build one chatbot, we're going to build multiple. The reason for this is that anytime you need a problem to be solved, you typically go to specialists. Right? If your tooth aches, you go to the dentist. If your if your back aches, you go to the chiropractor. So I think what's going to happen is very similar, and this is why I think once again incumbents like. Meta and WhatsApp are really well positioned because and this is why they're investing so much in AI.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  Is that WhatsApp in the future might be a hybrid of talking to people and talking to specialist AIs. Same is going to happen to ChatGPT. I think companies are going to be building their own specialist AIs. I'm seeing now in Silicon Valley, a lot of companies are deploying specialized chat assistants to train their sales force.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  I just heard about a company that is a customer of our cell that is providing chatbots specifically to train large numbers of salespeople. What is the biggest hurdle that organizations face when they have a huge sales force? How do you enable them? How do you train them? How do you make sure they're saying the right things and the same things to prospects? They're saying their correct things. Well, what are you going to need there? A specialist assistant that knows your product really well and how to sell it. But it's different from my typical interaction with chat G P T where like I'm asking for some fact about Wikipedia. So I do think that there is going to be an explosion in this domain specific AIs that

• 17:33Speaker 02

  are conversational and provided by different companies and tied to different data sets. And that's very underrated, I think.

• 17:40Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the role of government or regulation in the development of this? We're talking about this amazing new frontier and it's obvious that there's going to be this explosion of innovation and kind of economic, you know, production. The government obviously is very interested and some of it's coming from the industry itself saying, hey, wait a second, we might have, you know, the next atomic bomb. Other people being like, hey idiots, you know, no, we don't. And so how do you see them playing into it?

• 18:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think right now, based on what I'm hearing from my peers in Silicon Valley, there's a fear that they're over indexing on this is a nuclear bomb. I think maybe the better way to think about it is it's nuclear power in that we should be not fearful of it. Of course, there has to be safety protocols and thresholds around it. It's a very powerful thing. And if miscalibrated, just like a nuclear power plant, it can lead to damage. However, just like nuclear power, these risks are typically overstated. We become fearful of things that we do not understand deeply. But just think about the upside of every person being able to create with AI, of being able to create their new businesses as AI-first businesses.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  That's what I think the role of government should be, which of course is a government that would prioritize freedom of enterprise and freedom of access and freedom of speech, right? So I do think that if, again, if I were to make the determination here would be, hey, all of our startups need to be able to access these tools, all of our small businesses, all of our individuals. Of course, we must protect people. We must protect the average citizen. I have this fun anecdote of one of the investors in Vercel is a major firm that invests in Silicon Valley companies that want to have a presence in Japan. Japan, for many verticals, is the second-largest software-buying market in the world.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Japan is a country that loves innovation. They're early adopters of all software. We have all these exciting communities of engineers that love the Vercel platform in Japan, so I went to visit. And one of the things that the Minister of Technology was talking about was the fear of how voice AI could become very prevalent to attack the elderly population of Japan that are already victims to this, basically scams, where like they get phone calls, hey, it's your nephew Anthony, or it's your grandson, I need money wired. Now, think about how easy it is. And OpenAI also made an announcement this morning, and there's technologies like 11 labs where you can just clone anybody's voice.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  I don't know if you've seen this, but there is like even AI music, where Kanye sings Rebecca Black Friday. And it's just perfect. So imagine the potential for using that and abusing that power to make phone calls on autopilot, and especially for like the older population, what it could do to their financial well-being. So I do think that deployed at mass scale, these AI systems are dangerous. But again, this is very similar to the email example I gave earlier. Any technology at scale, there's going to be bad actors that find ways to abuse it and misuse it. But we cannot throw the baby out with bathwater.

• 20:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, one of the areas that I know you've got a lot of experience with, you mentioned earlier, is around this kind of front-end UI. And you spent years, maybe decades of your life, becoming very good at it and understanding all the intricacies and essentially building expertise. Now, I can go to many of these different products and with a couple of words, almost as if I was speaking caveman English, all of a sudden get a UI. And maybe it's not perfect, but you can see that the, you know, kind of direction that we are headed here, it is going to get very, very good.

• 21:31Anthony Pompliano?

  On one hand, it kind of just replaced, you know, 15, 20 years of your life and then the work that you did. On the other hand, it would free you up now to not have to go and do the work. And so how do you think about generative AI and kind of this UI front-ends, maybe as like one area where it's very clear the machines are probably going to be just as good, if not better than the human at some point in the near future?

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think being in Silicon Valley and having been here for 10 years, one of the lessons for me is that technology is always accelerating and you must be able to disrupt yourself. So we built Vercel as the front-end cloud. We want to make it really easy for businesses to create the fastest websites in the planet. We have customers like Under Armour, Pinterest, Unity. They host incredible user interfaces on Vercel. But what I hear from these businesses is that they're always looking to streamline, speed up, reduce costs and just become more efficient. And there's a once in a lifetime opportunity for Vercel to say, we are going to help AI and make you more efficient. We're going to help you generate more applications.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  We're going to help you speed up those applications and we're going to provide you that technology. So that's what, to me, the AI opportunity represents today as opposed to saying, okay, yeah, I'm just watching from the sidelines, let's see what happens with that AI thing. I think every business on the planet must become an AI-infused, AI-first business. And that's true for tech companies that have been around for not as long as, for example, like Vercel has been around for only eight years. But it's also true for the businesses that have been around for 100, right? When I was in Europe, I was meeting with the heads of companies like Airbus. And frankly, you know, the, there's this sense of like,

• 23:21Speaker 02

  There's fear on some level, right? Like, can you, with everything you hear around AI safety, like, what do you do with this? Do you just watch it because it's somewhat dangerous? Do you embrace it? Do you prototype with it? Though, my philosophy has been, just like, there was an opportunity for cloud providers to accelerate the adoption of the Internet and give you your first dot com. There's going to be an opportunity for companies like Versale to give you the opportunity to have your first AI product. And right now, our best hypothesis is developers are spending a lot of time carving each pixel of our UI.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  There's this famous meme of making things pixel-perfect. There's a designer that conceives the idea, then there's a developer that implements it. And to your point, that almost feels like translation. I don't know if you remember when Google Translate came out. Me being a native Spanish speaker, I couldn't believe just how good it was at translating Spanish from English. But once upon a time, people believed that translation was the job of the human being and that computers were never going to get as good. I think we're going to see the same with design and implementation. There's a perception, even in engineers, the best engineers that I know, that software is a thing that you first design with pixels

• 24:48Speaker 02

  and then someone translates into working software. What if that translation could be just done by AI? And that's what we're doing with this product, V0. And so far, it's been astonishing to me. I'll give you a quick anecdote. I use our own platform, Versale, to create my own personal website, rouchg.com. And I designed it with my skills, to your point, I accumulated over 20 years. And then I went to V0 and I asked it to create my blog and I gave it the creative direction. I said, "Okay, make the background more gray. Make the design more minimalistic. Use this other kind of font." And I was able to replicate what I had created in just a couple hours. But here's the kicker. The code that it produced

• 25:33Speaker 02

  was better than the code that I wrote by hand. And I can give you an objective fact for it. He was able to make it more accessible for visually impaired or any other kind of user that needs an assistive device. It was a thing that I was just not an expert in. I was not an expert in accessibility. The AI created something that was good looking and more accessible to more people. So that was when I had my first epiphany with like, holy crap, AI quote unquote will take my job. But in reality, it would just make my job more awesome.

• 26:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Part of what's interesting, and I'm looking at the website right now, is this idea of, uh, most people think of generative AI as like the first generation, right? Like, hey, I gave it instructions. It generated kind of the initial, um, you know, draft, if you will. The part that is more interesting to me is the speed at which you can iterate and improve that design. So when you say, hey, make the background, you know, more gray, do this, do that, whatever. You could spend minutes, hours, days, depending on what the product is, et cetera, iterating. Now, by simply just typing words, it's almost like you're delegating to someone else. Hey, go do this and come back when you're done. But it's happening now in seconds. And so the iteration speed feels like a part that is under discussed, but quite powerful. And even with just your personal website,

• 26:51Anthony Pompliano?

  you're kind of seeing that as well.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  It's such a great point. It's like riding a wave, right? When we set out to create B0, we actually created it under the principle that AI itself, it's just getting better every week. So for example, when I, when we first created this, the most intelligent AI model we could use was pretty slow. Guess what? By the way, this product came out three months ago. We onboarded 100,000 engineers to the product so far. Today, the same AI model just became faster. So I actually didn't have a ton of technical knowledge to back the assumption that the AI was getting fast. I thought, I think we're riding the right wave right now. I think this AI is just getting exponentially better.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  And it makes sense to make an investment in that, under that principle alone. It actually reminds me of this awesome interview that everyone should look up to. They asked Jeff Bezos why he's creating Amazon. And why he chose books? And he doesn't answer that he loved books or some awesome story about like his grandfather's dying wish was to like make books more accessible. And he says, the internet is coming. And I know that it's going to empower things that are just not possible in the real world. For example, in the real world, it's not possible to have a single bookstore with more than like 10,000 items in the bookstore. It's just not enough space. So the internet was going to create a once in a lifetime opportunity

• 28:20Speaker 02

  for a business to exist that has more inventory that can physically fit in the real world. AI is very similar. It's going to create things that are just impossible. And the proof point is just, okay, what product can I create that fits into the into that wave into that transformation? And then it'll expand into more categories. So that's where I get my insight of, okay, I think what we're seeing, okay, front end is being generated by AI. Law will be accelerated by AI. Finance will be accelerated by AI. I just heard of a Bloomberg terminal that you speak to in natural language. Instead of saying, instead of pointing and clicking to find your stock of choice

• 29:04Speaker 02

  and look at the market capitalization, you can just say, please plot Tesla's market cap and contrast it with vehicle production output according to what you've indexed of the earning call transcripts. That such a thing can be created today. It was created on the Versal platform. It's called finetool.com. That's going to disrupt finance. You're going to have all these verticalized disruptions of a lot of existing businesses predicated on this incredible and accelerating AI capability.

• 29:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, Versal itself, um, front end as a service, front end cloud. There's a couple of different ways that you guys described it or other people would talk about it. It's this very unique technology where you're separating the backend and the frontend. And you're allowing for things like this kind of V zero, but, but other capabilities. Talk a little bit just in terms of like, how do you think about the business today? And then what is the next 12 to 24 months look like in terms of the product roadmap? And how you guys think you can kind of really go from those 100,000 developers that you sign up very quickly to eventually millions and millions across all the different products that you have?

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so our mission is to enable the world to create the best products, period. So if you look at the average product experience on the internet today, it actually kind of sucks. And outside of maybe three companies, let's just say that they're called Google, Amazon, Meta. The average inner experience is pretty poor. The thing you find a lot is during Black Friday, your favorite e-commerce goes down. Taylor Swift announces a new tour and the ticketing website goes down. It's slow, clunky, gives you errors. You just hate it. And it's amazing, right? Because we live in the golden era of technology.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Like, why is there such a separation between like, there's almost like two classes. The upper class, the three or four companies that kickstarted the internet revolution. And then the middle class, everybody on the internet that wants to create great freaking products, but they don't have the platform to do so. And that's what Vercel enables for the world. So we're operating at a very significant scale already. We have like tens of billions of requests that we serve each week on the platform. We host websites like Under Armour dot com. As I mentioned, we host some of the who's who of the AI revolution. OpenAI themselves are a customer of Vercel. So the key thing is, if you want to create a fast, dynamic web application or website,

• 31:35Speaker 02

  you come to Vercel. Now, this comes with a caveat. If it's just something very small, where like it's your own personal website or things like that, that's not really where Vercel shines today. We tailored a very sophisticated use cases of internet. Like I said, we tried to bridge that gap between the brick and mortar that has existed for a hundred years and cannot compete with Amazon. We helped them do that.

• 31:59Anthony Pompliano?

  When you look at AI and the boom, there's always the thought process, you can go search for the gold or you could sell the picks and the shovels to the gold miners. It feels very much like you guys are doing the latter. Does that also position you to eventually vertically integrate and go do some of these other things that obviously are use cases? Or is that a distraction and kind of staying with the picks and the shovels? And kind of where you guys are playing now is actually the better strategy?

• 32:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I like this idea. So to to explain why it's called front end. So there's always an interface that a person is interested in exchanging data with. So like, for example, when you go to chat GPT and you go to chat dot open AI dot com, that's built with the technology and framework that we create is called Max J S. And that's kind of the the place where you experience the technology. But behind that, there's a lot of sophisticated technology as well. That's called the back end of an application. So the world that we envision is one where when the bed that we're making is that what really matters the most to every citizen of the world is that experience that they receive.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  And Vercel exists to make those experiences awesome. Fast, personalized, unique to each person on the planet. And we facilitate businesses to create those awesome experiences. Now, we're also in a very interesting position to your point about we can connect all the services that exist in the cloud. So think of us turning each capability, whether it's AI, payments, product recommendations, all the things that we want to include in your applications. We can turn them into Lego bricks that people can really easily slot in into our cloud. So instead of trying to compete in every dimension, we think of ourselves as aggregating this global marketplace of ideas, products and services so that people can create.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  And kind of the aspiration here is that, you know, a lot of people should probably switch away from just pure consumption to be able to create and publish great ideas on the internet. And I think over the past few decades, we've we've over indexed a bit on things that tailor to consumption. So like, when you think about the TikToks, the Instagrams, I think there's probably an entire generation that could have still that could instead been creating products. And if we can lower the barrier to entry to those people to create products, I think we're we're going to end up with with a with a much better world.

• 34:32Anthony Pompliano?

  You've been working on this for a while. My last question for you is, what is the most surprising thing that you have experienced? Or the thing you didn't anticipate over those years?

• 34:45Speaker 02

  I think just how fast things accelerate when you, as you get bigger. So in some ways, like it feels like, you know, I can't believe that we have a 450 person organization where it used to be literally just me in an apartment in San Francisco. The global impact that technology can have is a thing that astonishes me.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  For example, when COVID happened, I went to the airport, I needed to get a test to go to my, my, take my flight to Japan. Both COVID applications that I had to go through were built in our platform. The one where I could scan the QR code to get the test, and then I actually got the wrong test, by the way, because apparently Japan required another kind of COVID test, so I had to go to another kind of clinic in the airport, also a Versal application. So I was astonished. And obviously, in some ways, I should have, you know, eaten my own dog food. I created this platform so that people could create applications so fast, the pandemic hit, and how do you create a fast application to give people digital appointments for getting COVID tests and vaccines and so on?

• 35:52Speaker 02

  It ended up, we became a standard platform for creating that kind of application. When Web 3 and crypto happened, we create, we became the standard platform for creating Web 3 and NFT marketplaces. We still support some of the largest in the world, like OpenSea, et cetera. Now, when AI happened, we, once again, we've provided the platform for folks to create this AI innovations. So that was certainly unexpected in the sense of, if you work hard and long enough, magical things can happen and they tend to grow faster than you can imagine. It's also been stressful, to be honest, like it's infrastructure on the internet at that kind of scale. It's amazing, it's like you, you visit these offices in San Francisco and like, I show

• 36:35Speaker 02

  you Versal and you're like, oh wow, it's, it's not that many people. The impact that it represents in the world, the amount of traffic that we support and all that is incredibly sizable. And yeah, so there's, there's a lot of pressure, there's a lot of attacks on the network, for example. There's a lot of bad actors that we're fighting every day and mitigating attacks on behalf of our customers. So I always tell people, especially aspiring entrepreneurs, so that they know what they're getting into. When you open up a service like this to the public internet, It's a freaking zoo.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  You get everything, you get all the good, and you get to see pretty nasty things about the internet, especially when you're so diversified across so many verticals. Um, so I, I got to experience the dark side of the internet, especially now with AI, it happened again. I got interviewed about this recently, so there are a lot of bots and bad actors trying to find AI applications and misuse them and try to extract the intelligence, which is really expensive. Each time you make an API call to use one of these large language models, it's very expensive. So there are a lot of bad actors that are trying to basically leech your AI resources that you embedded in your product.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  So there's all these new categories of attacks and threats that we have to fight on behalf of our customers. I would have never expected the size and volume of that and it's, awesome and it's a privilege to be serving the internet on that basis, but it's kind of hard for folks to relate to what that's like uh, when you're just enjoying the internet from your, from your, from your couch.

• 38:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I could talk to you forever. Uh, where can we send people to find you on the internet? Or if they want to follow along, they want to ask questions, where's a great place to send them?

• 38:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, so um, I, I'm very active on, on X, uh, formerly on Twitter, so Route G. Um, the Vercell platform is on vercell.com. We have a bunch of templates that people can, and companies can use to, uh, to deploy applications and learn. And, and then if you want to get started building with AI and perhaps you, you're not an expert in front end, but you have ideas, go to vzero.dev to check out our generative UI product.

• 38:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Kieran, well, thank you so much for the time. Uh, I learned a lot today. I think other people will as well and we'll definitely do it again in the future.

• 39:00Speaker 02

  Thank you, Anthony.