Guillermo Rauch: Why Software Development Will Never Be the Same

In this episode, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch goes deep on how V0, their text-to-app platform, has already generated over 100 million applications and doubled Vercel’s user base in under a year.

Guillermo reveals how a tiny SWAT team inside Vercel built V0 from scratch, why “vibe coding” is making software creation accessible to everyone (not just engineers), and how the AI Cloud is automating DevOps, making cloud infrastructure self-healing, and letting companies expose their data to AI agents in just five lines of code.

You’ll hear why “every company will have to rethink itself as a token factory,” how Vercel’s Next.js went from a conference joke to powering Walmart, Nike, and Midjourney, and why the next billion app creators might not write a single line of code. Guillermo breaks down the difference between vibe coding and agentic engineering, shares wild stories of users building apps from napkin sketches, and explains how Vercel is infusing “taste” and best practices directly into their AI models.

We also dig into the business side: how Vercel’s AI-powered products are driving explosive growth, why retention and margins are strong, and how the company is adapting to a new wave of non-technical users. Plus: the future of MCP servers, the security challenges of agent-to-agent communication, and why prompting and AI literacy are now must-have skills.

Vercel

Website - https://vercel.com

X/Twitter - https://x.com/vercel

Guillermo Rauch

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/rauchg

X/Twitter - https://x.com/rauchg

FIRSTMARK

Website - https://firstmark.com

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/FirstMarkCap

Matt Turck (Managing Director)

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/

X/Twitter - https://twitter.com/mattturck

(00:00) Intro

(02:08) What Is V0 and Why Did It Take Off So Fast?

(04:10) How Did a Tiny Team Build V0 So Quickly?

(07:51) V0 vs Other AI Coding Tools

(10:35) What is Vibe Coding?

(17:05) Is V0 Just Frontend? Moving Toward Full Stack and Integrations

(19:40) What Skills Make a Great Vibe Coder?

(23:35) Vibe Coding as the GUI for AI: The Future of Interfaces

(29:46) Developer Love = Agent Love

(33:41) Having Taste as Developer

(39:10) MCP Servers: The New Protocol for AI-to-AI Communication

(43:11) Security, Observability, and the Risks of Agentic Web

(45:25) Are Enterprises Ready for the Agentic Future?

(49:42) Closing the Feedback Loop: Customer Service and Product Evolution

(56:06) The Vercel AI Cloud: From Pixels to Tokens

(01:10:14) How Vercel Adapts to the ICP Change?

(01:13:47) Retention, Margins, and the Business of AI Products

(01:16:51) The Secret Behind Vercel Last Year Growth

(01:24:15) The Importance of Online Presence

(01:30:49) Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: Being CEO 101

(01:34:59) Guillermo's Advice to Younger Self