The Exchanges

Q What do you think it takes to make that transition to agent, and do you think we will?

A I think we absolutely will, but it requires the close feedback loop with the person that that agent is acting on behalf of. It requires that the, the person is still in charge. The metaphor that I like to use is being the editor in the newsroom. And you're, you're having the agents bring you the ideas and you're saying, no, Uh, go back to the drawing board. This is a feedback. Nope. This doesn't make the cut. And you're the one that's also setting the creative direction. This week, we have to go after AI safety. That's a hot topic that people are interested in. Next week, we have to go into this. We have to go into that. So you're still in charge. And this is why, you know, ultimately this is the healthiest version of an AI future after all, right? Because we don't want an AI future that inverses and puts us into key. We are the agent. The AI is calling the shots. That's what people actually get scared about. So I very much like this idea of AI in the assistance of the creative process in AI, which is making processes more efficient.

AI assessment note: “I think we absolutely will, but it requires the close feedback loop”

Q I love Mullenweg. What a fucking hero. I mean, what a dude. Um, listen, final one, Guillermo. I've so enjoyed this. Uh, final one. If everything works out with Vassell, Where are we in 10 years time?

A The way we talk about this is, we still live in a world where there are a lot of bad products. There are a lot of bad experiences that you have on it on a given day. Our dream and our ambition is that Vercel has raised the bar of every experience that people have with software, with applications, with products. It has to permeate all the way down to the average person doesn't have applications they hate, processes that bog them down. Why? Because we empowered every creator, every developer To fulfill their creative dreams and, and, and we give them the tools to turn those, those dreams into, into the best products that they can. And I think AI will play a huge role in this. Um, I think part of what we're doing now is, uh, creating a bigger funnel. Bringing this technology into more and more people and, and putting the creative process in, in charge.

AI assessment note: “Our dream and our ambition is that Vercel has raised the bar”

Q they don't know. So my, my question to you is I, as a result, favor second time or serial entrepreneurs Because I believe that there are so many things that you fuck up the first time that you will not do the second and third, and I then won't have to stay for those learnings. So I basically only like second and third time founders. Am I right or wrong?

A No, I think you're right. I think the only risk there is that the pool could be constrained, but you don't have to get every single opportunity right. You just have to get a few great ones. I think as a way of Constraining the state space, the search space. I think that's a very good technique. I would add to that from my own personal experience, like someone that Had an experience being an early member of a startup and was able to learn a lot about, like, if their story is not just, oh, I had this idea and I happened to work there, but my story was with one of the earliest jobs that I had was I had seen decisions A, B, and C get made where I would have chosen the exact opposite. And I was like, okay, I want to start something because These non-obvious decisions that I would have taken a different path, I can now take the right path. And it felt like that was almost like an unfair advantage in the marketplace. It really is all about finding whatever alpha you can across a number of dimensions, right? And to me, I was like, okay, like, I want to do hiring very differently. I want to do product development very differently. I want to just move faster. Period. And I, I felt that even without even getting into the weeds of the technology, I would set up different foundations for success for what I would start. But yeah, I think to your point, um, I had my first startup, which had a…

AI assessment note: “No, I think you're right. I think the only risk there is that the pool”

Q but I've been thinking more and more kind of about the integration or kind of the relationship between front end and AI. And I, I think more and more, UI will matter less and less with the increasing prominence of AI creating this kind of chasm between consumer and UI. Doesn't remove the importance of UX, but UI for sure. Do you agree? Or do you think I'm missing it?

A I think UI will change. I think, I think you're right in, in, on, on a certain level, right? Like if we can go to a chat bot in that chat bot, Is again, acting as a simplification of what used to be a very complex dashboard, let's say, of lots of menus and sub menus. And like, you're like, where did it go to find this and that? But at the end of the day, the information has to be surfaced to you. I'll give you an example. I just saw this incredible approach to surfacing data with AI. That you just interface with the system with natural language. And then the system is basically guiding you to where the data is, right? Like it's, it's, it's surfacing what otherwise would have been maybe the 20, 30 different clicks. Now the AI is just like serving on demand with some of our products. We're basically going in that direction, right? Like what used to be dragging and dropping and like spending like hours or going into a text editor and like, Going through like all these auto completions and like errors, and now it's just you go into UI that expects that you type in English. But our point of view is that now people will be creating a lot more of those UIs. It's a new tool in your toolbox. So our job is to actually empower you to create those new kinds of interfaces.

AI assessment note: “I think UI will change. I think, I think you're right in, in, on, on a certain level”

Q an AI first world? I've never thought about that before, but if we think about that where it's like, it sells the work, it completes the project, and it delivers it back to you, is that a world of visual first, chart first, aesthetic beauty by data? And data relay versus simplicity and beauty. I'm just trying to understand, like, does it change the way we think about great UI?

A One of my hypotheses is that we actually in some ways have to give people more UI. I'll explain why. So there's two things that I, two references that I give my teams a lot. One is minority report and Tom Cruise, you know, uh, historically and like famously being in this Uh, AR interface of the future where in order to detect crime was like, he, he's like in charge of like the pre-crime forensics. He can predict crime and he gets all of this data in front of his visual cortex in this three D space. And he's like, I'm going to zoom in here and get this, this data point and this data point, et cetera. And like, forget science fiction for a second. We don't have AR that works at scale yet. And we're not Tom Cruise. Let's actually look at what's succeeding in the AI world today. We have Meet Journey. Meet Journey gives you this text interface, but as a result of your text prompt gives you four choices. Of what you could possibly like. This is really interesting, right? Like, that's what I mean by it's actually giving you more UI, not less, because it's uncertain about what it is that you actually want. So it needs to give you more choices. This is very different from software one point now, which is the world of determinism, the world of rule following, the world of predictable, predictable algorithms. You give me a form and I put A, B, and C, I give you a result D a hundred percen…

AI assessment note: “One of my hypotheses is that we actually in some ways have to give people more UI.”

Q I hope so. Um, I, okay. Tell me, um, what's your biggest lessons from angel investing? You're secretly one of the most successful angel investors, I think in the Valley. What's your biggest lessons from doing so?

A I think people underestimate just how much their own time goes into thinking about important problems that need to be solved, but you just don't have the bandwidth to solve them. If I look back on some of the most interesting investments that I've ever made, there are things that I would have loved to do myself. I just didn't have the time, uh, and it wasn't the right Place. Maybe I was working on another project. Maybe I was working at a different company to actually execute in those. So just to give you some examples, I invested in this company called Scale AI. I really that badly wanted to work on a product like Scale AI. I don't know if I would have been the person to build it. And I think I got really lucky by, you know, I chose the right horse in that particular space. But I do think that your own experiences are very validating, especially I think this was making a lot of founder CEOs successful in angel investing is that The things that you see, the things that you perceive, and this is also why I'm so bullish on AI as well. Like there's so many AI products I want our company to, to buy. There's so many AI products that I want the world to benefit from. There's so many inefficiencies. There's so much repetition that's happening. There's this mismatch between supply and demand. Uh, and, and that's how a lot of great investments happen.

AI assessment note: “things that I would have loved to do myself. I just didn't have the time”

Q My question to you, I, I love the book, you know, the paradox of choice. I believe that too many options make an enemy of us all. Does, how do we think about kind of actually simple and telling users what they need versus this kind of explosion of options that any consumer can choose between one of eight? Fuck, is that really a better user experience?

A I don't think, I don't think it, it depends on what stage of the, of the problem solving sort of workflow you're in, right? If it's in a very creative, uh, side of the process, I do think having more options is better. The other reference I mentioned that I like to give the, the minor report reference. I like to give the Rick Rubin reference of like his contribution to the world is telling the artists if they like something or not. Right? Like he says in that interview, like, I'm not an expert in the specific music techniques. I don't know how to play an instrument. The feedback that I give to the artist is what's valuable. What I like and what I don't like is what's valuable. So if the tool is very much in the creative sort of stage, I do think having options to go through is really good because I was mentioning in my experience was made A designer of a certain piece of software or UI really good is just how much they've rejected over time. What makes a company good is how much they reject over time, how many things they say no to, how many attract, seemingly attractive on the surface ideas they rule out before they decide, yes, that's the one that goes to market. Yes, that's the one that earns the position of being in our product lineup. So it's really, Going through lots of iterations of yes and no. That it gets you to the point where you can say confidently, this is what I …

AI assessment note: “it depends on what stage of the, of the problem solving sort of workflow you're in”

Q team members, and they said about the incredibly high bar that you have of yourself. What drives you from like earning money at 13 to pay for the family to Staying up late beyond belief while doing side jobs when you're, you know, you're a teenager to get into schools, to moving the SF on your own with no friends. What drives you? And has it always been the same?

A Yeah, good question. I think, I think it's been consistent in that there is a few personality traits, like anytime I see something great come to fruition. I think I don't dwell as much on it. I'm just like thinking about like, what is the next thing that we can do? So it's really exciting to be able to unlock the next thing, which acts as a launch pad of the next thing, which acts as a launch pad of the next thing. Yeah. Like there is all this that we can do and accomplish. And then there is another thing that that sets you up to do. And part of me coming here was it really expanded the horizon of what's possible. The access to capital, the access to the network, the access to Frankly, a lot of people that have the same passions and interests, that's I think the big unlock for me. I felt that in my previous path, I just had a lot fewer people that I could relate to, um, in terms of this obsessions.

AI assessment note: “I think it's been consistent in that there is a few personality traits”

Q Do you believe you have that in the US today with all the political changes?

A I think so. And I think that despite the turmoil, there's something very compelling about having the right framework that sort of governs the, and, and sort of keeps the system in balance over long periods of time. So really what I'm betting on is not the present state of a local micro measurement that you could make about the system. I'm a bigger believer in the rules, checks, and balances of the overarching system. Something that a lot of folks will point out about Argentina that's broken is the justice system. And I noticed that even though like things can be in the short term, unjust, I think the system coalesces into fairness and justice much more frequently here than where I come from. So I think really you're not betting on like what you read on the news or on the front page of a newspaper on a given day. You're betting on how does the system evolve over time and which system seems to be more likely to honor its foundations and its checks and balances. Those are the things that I look for when evaluating Systems in general, let alone engineering systems, but also countries.

AI assessment note: “I think so. And I think that despite the turmoil”

Q they don't know. So my, my question to you is I, as a result, favor second time or serial entrepreneurs Because I believe that there are so many things that you fuck up the first time that you will not do the second and third, and I then won't have to stay for those learnings. So I basically only like second and third time founders. Am I right or wrong?

A No, I think you're right. I think the only risk there is that the pool could be constrained, but you don't have to get every single opportunity right. You just have to get a few great ones. I think as a way of Constraining the state space, the search space. I think that's a very good technique. I would add to that from my own personal experience, like someone that Had an experience being an early member of a startup and was able to learn a lot about, like, if their story is not just, oh, I had this idea and I happened to work there, but my story was with one of the earliest jobs that I had was I had seen decisions A, B, and C get made where I would have chosen the exact opposite. And I was like, okay, I want to start something because These non-obvious decisions that I would have taken a different path, I can now take the right path. And it felt like that was almost like an unfair advantage in the marketplace. It really is all about finding whatever alpha you can across a number of dimensions, right? And to me, I was like, okay, like, I want to do hiring very differently. I want to do product development very differently. I want to just move faster. Period. And I, I felt that even without even getting into the weeds of the technology, I would set up different foundations for success for what I would start. But yeah, I think to your point, um, I had my first startup, which had a…

AI assessment note: “No, I think you're right. I think the only risk there”

Q but I've been thinking more and more kind of about the integration or kind of the relationship between front end and AI. And I, I think more and more, UI will matter less and less with the increasing prominence of AI creating this kind of chasm between consumer and UI. Doesn't remove the importance of UX, but UI for sure. Do you agree? Or do you think I'm missing it?

A I think UI will change. I think, I think you're right in, in, on, on a certain level, right? Like if we can go to a chat bot in that chat bot, Is again, acting as a simplification of what used to be a very complex dashboard, let's say, of lots of menus and sub menus. And like, you're like, where did it go to find this and that? But at the end of the day, the information has to be surfaced to you. I'll give you an example. I just saw this incredible approach to surfacing data with AI. That you just interface with the system with natural language. And then the system is basically guiding you to where the data is, right? Like it's, it's, it's surfacing what otherwise would have been maybe the 20, 30 different clicks. Now the AI is just like serving on demand with some of our products. We're basically going in that direction, right? Like what used to be dragging and dropping and like spending like hours or going into a text editor and like, Going through like all these auto completions and like errors, and now it's just you go into UI that expects that you type in English. But our point of view is that now people will be creating a lot more of those UIs. It's a new tool in your toolbox. So our job is to actually empower you to create those new kinds of interfaces.

AI assessment note: “I think UI will change. I think, I think you're right in, in, on, on a certain level”

Q an AI first world? I've never thought about that before, but if we think about that where it's like, it sells the work, it completes the project, and it delivers it back to you, is that a world of visual first, chart first, aesthetic beauty by data? And data relay versus simplicity and beauty. I'm just trying to understand, like, does it change the way we think about great UI?

A One of my hypotheses is that we actually in some ways have to give people more UI. I'll explain why. So there's two things that I, two references that I give my teams a lot. One is minority report and Tom Cruise, you know, uh, historically and like famously being in this Uh, AR interface of the future where in order to detect crime was like, he, he's like in charge of like the pre-crime forensics. He can predict crime and he gets all of this data in front of his visual cortex in this three D space. And he's like, I'm going to zoom in here and get this, this data point and this data point, et cetera. And like, forget science fiction for a second. We don't have AR that works at scale yet. And we're not Tom Cruise. Let's actually look at what's succeeding in the AI world today. We have Meet Journey. Meet Journey gives you this text interface, but as a result of your text prompt gives you four choices. Of what you could possibly like. This is really interesting, right? Like, that's what I mean by it's actually giving you more UI, not less, because it's uncertain about what it is that you actually want. So it needs to give you more choices. This is very different from software one point now, which is the world of determinism, the world of rule following, the world of predictable, predictable algorithms. You give me a form and I put A, B, and C, I give you a result D a hundred percen…

AI assessment note: “One of my hypotheses is that we actually in some ways have to give people more UI.”

Q What do you think it takes to make that transition to agent, and do you think we will?

A I think we absolutely will, but it requires the close feedback loop with the person that that agent is acting on behalf of. It requires that the, the person is still in charge. The metaphor that I like to use is being the editor in the newsroom. And you're, you're having the agents bring you the ideas and you're saying, no, Uh, go back to the drawing board. This is a feedback. Nope. This doesn't make the cut. And you're the one that's also setting the creative direction. This week, we have to go after AI safety. That's a hot topic that people are interested in. Next week, we have to go into this. We have to go into that. So you're still in charge. And this is why, you know, ultimately this is the healthiest version of an AI future after all, right? Because we don't want an AI future that inverses and puts us into key. We are the agent. The AI is calling the shots. That's what people actually get scared about. So I very much like this idea of AI in the assistance of the creative process in AI, which is making processes more efficient.

AI assessment note: “I think we absolutely will, but it requires the close feedback loop”

Q Can I ask, at this age, you're very young, and you're at this prestigious high school, and you could go to university and get the blue chip education that is so hailed. Were you nervous to eschew traditional education in favor of bluntly a much more entrepreneurial, but less secure life in many ways?

A Uh, it's really interesting. Yes and no. So the, the very first time I made money from the internet, I was 12 years old. The eBay of Latin America, Mercado Libre had kicked off a revenue sharing program. It was called Mercado Associates. So like Mercado Associates. I was building all these websites that were actually driving traffic because my interests were other, you know, as you could imagine, other kids and, and, uh, other people's interests as well. And I figured out how to send them enough referrals that I remember at the time I made like a hundred pesos. Um, so that was the very first time I showed my mom that my skills could be monetized in some fashion. And over the years that the evidence accumulated that On the internet, you could do amazing things. And by the time I think I was like, 13 or 14, I was already contributing to my family's finances because, and now, now it's gone viral on Twitter. The Argentinian economy has always been in shambles. And there's been this huge discrepancy between the purchasing power of the US dollar and the Argentinian peso that is subject to hyperinflation. So without getting too much into the weeds of like, The new presidential candidate that's making the news here in the US, people in Argentina have always succumbed to hyperinflation. I would bring in, I don't know, even like 20 dollars from solving like CSS bugs on a, on a, on a free…

AI assessment note: “Yes and no. So the, the very first time I made money from the internet”

Q Not at all, but I would love to start. You started developing at 10. Can you just walk me through, how did you first get into computers, and what were you building at 10?

A By the time I was 10, I already had a few false starts in programming. I always tell people, like, getting into software engineering is really, really hard, and it takes a lot of trial and error to, like, really get into the groove. The first thing I ever did was creating websites, uh, for my passions and, and my interests when I was a kid. At the time, I think it was like Dragon Ball Z, and I was learning just enough HTML to be able to put up a website online. I would use a tool called Front Page. You can say that my passion has always drawn me towards the web and publishing things online, and that's how the world has gotten to know me.

AI assessment note: “The first thing I ever did was creating websites”

Q Can I ask, what have been your biggest mistakes on talent identification? Like there, I really can fall for a salesman.

A I have an easy one. I have an easy one because I have betrayed that rule in the past. Sometimes I've placed more weight than I should have on this stellar linked list of awesome brands that you worked at. I did X at, let's just name random companies for the sake of it. Apple, Google, Amazon, uh, Netflix. And you look at that and you're like, well, four companies in a row couldn't have been wrong on this candidate, right? And I'm not going to just call it skepticism, but there's, there has to be a lot of curiosity about what that candidate can bring to the table. And, and when I've Overweighted the, uh, brands on the resume. And I think this, for other folks, this could happen with universities, I think. I, I think I've never placed too much weight on that one in particular. Um, I think that's, that's one way where, um, looking back, I think I could have done better with, with a few candidates. But yeah, I think at the end of the day, it comes back to, can you evaluate the opportunity in its more objective and measurable merits? Then the approximations of merit, uh, if you can.

AI assessment note: “placed more weight than I should have on this stellar linked list of awesome brands”

Q Same for me. I mean, 3000 podcasts in, I think we can definitely say that's the same. You then dropped out of high school and moved to SF super young. How is this process? That's gotta be a defining process for you as a person.

A Yeah, that's a funny story because I would have never imagined that I would drop out of the high school that I spent so much blood, sweat and tears getting into. I'm from Argentina and, uh, there's two high schools in Argentina that are well known. They're public high schools with an entry exam, which acts like a contest. And there's thousands of signups, lots of kids that, you know, have this dream of getting into this high schools because they're so prestigious. And I really worked my ass off to get into one of the two. I entered number 10 out of, you know, everybody that signed up. And I had an amazing start. I was, I was a, you know, diligent student. But then my passion for studying math and linguistics basically got into odds with my work that I was already doing online and my reputation for Software engineering in the open source community. So basically I could stay up all night, uh, during my early high school days. Like I had these two lives. I was trying to be the good student and I was trying to also be the, you know, entrepreneur, freelance developer, open source contributor at night. And these things get more and more and more into conflict as the years went by. The high school had a pretty difficult entry exam, but then it got even harder as the years went by with like physics, chemistry, all these things. It had less and less time and my work, my, my side hustles…

AI assessment note: “these things get more and more and more into conflict as the years went by”

Q Do you believe you have that in the US today with all the political changes?

A I think so. And I think that despite the turmoil, there's something very compelling about having the right framework that sort of governs the, and, and sort of keeps the system in balance over long periods of time. So really what I'm betting on is not the present state of a local micro measurement that you could make about the system. I'm a bigger believer in the rules, checks, and balances of the overarching system. Something that a lot of folks will point out about Argentina that's broken is the justice system. And I noticed that even though like things can be in the short term, unjust, I think the system coalesces into fairness and justice much more frequently here than where I come from. So I think really you're not betting on like what you read on the news or on the front page of a newspaper on a given day. You're betting on how does the system evolve over time and which system seems to be more likely to honor its foundations and its checks and balances. Those are the things that I look for when evaluating Systems in general, let alone engineering systems, but also countries.

AI assessment note: “I think so. And I think that despite the turmoil”

Q I totally agree that you said there are product development done differently. Um, and we spoke about front ends earlier. I have this question always, which is like, Is simple always better in product? It feels like we always just aim for the least number of clicks, the least number of buttons. Is simple always better Guillermo?

A No, and it's, this is for the same reason I said, I think the, the approach you described is good because it won't give you a hundred percent of the great companies, but that's not your job. Your job is to even just find a few of the greatest companies, right? And I think that's also true for product development. Like the inspiration for me is like Google search where like there is nothing to do except for an input and like everything is so simple and like the magic is in the implementation and there is all this unfair advantages of access to data that gets constantly refined and all that. If your job is, okay, I want to find a few of the greatest products that will be produced in this generation. I do think that a lot of those will be This deceptively simple things where the interface of the user is just magical and the company took on the burden, right? So one of my earliest investments was AuthZero. And it was one of those things where I was incredibly skeptical. And yet I was like, I'll do it. Like, this is all about asymmetric upside, right? But I remember the thing that I rooted myself in, and this is true for Stripe, which I didn't do, but What I admired at the time, a simple API call that hides a tremendous amount of complexity behind. So I never want to deal with like MasterCard and Visa and like all these payment gateways and all this nonsense retries and workflows. A…

AI assessment note: “No, and it's, this is for the same reason I said”

Q My question to you, I, I love the book, you know, the paradox of choice. I believe that too many options make an enemy of us all. Does, how do we think about kind of actually simple and telling users what they need versus this kind of explosion of options that any consumer can choose between one of eight? Fuck, is that really a better user experience?

A I don't think, I don't think it, it depends on what stage of the, of the problem solving sort of workflow you're in, right? If it's in a very creative, uh, side of the process, I do think having more options is better. The other reference I mentioned that I like to give the, the minor report reference. I like to give the Rick Rubin reference of like his contribution to the world is telling the artists if they like something or not. Right? Like he says in that interview, like, I'm not an expert in the specific music techniques. I don't know how to play an instrument. The feedback that I give to the artist is what's valuable. What I like and what I don't like is what's valuable. So if the tool is very much in the creative sort of stage, I do think having options to go through is really good because I was mentioning in my experience was made A designer of a certain piece of software or UI really good is just how much they've rejected over time. What makes a company good is how much they reject over time, how many things they say no to, how many attract, seemingly attractive on the surface ideas they rule out before they decide, yes, that's the one that goes to market. Yes, that's the one that earns the position of being in our product lineup. So it's really, Going through lots of iterations of yes and no. That it gets you to the point where you can say confidently, this is what I …

AI assessment note: “it depends on what stage of the, of the problem solving sort of workflow you're in”

Q Can I ask, what have been your biggest mistakes on talent identification? Like there, I really can fall for a salesman.

A I have an easy one. I have an easy one because I have betrayed that rule in the past. Sometimes I've placed more weight than I should have on this stellar linked list of awesome brands that you worked at. I did X at, let's just name random companies for the sake of it. Apple, Google, Amazon, uh, Netflix. And you look at that and you're like, well, four companies in a row couldn't have been wrong on this candidate, right? And I'm not going to just call it skepticism, but there's, there has to be a lot of curiosity about what that candidate can bring to the table. And, and when I've Overweighted the, uh, brands on the resume. And I think this, for other folks, this could happen with universities, I think. I, I think I've never placed too much weight on that one in particular. Um, I think that's, that's one way where, um, looking back, I think I could have done better with, with a few candidates. But yeah, I think at the end of the day, it comes back to, can you evaluate the opportunity in its more objective and measurable merits? Then the approximations of merit, uh, if you can.

AI assessment note: “Sometimes I've placed more weight than I should have on this stellar linked list”

Q Uh, so I worry when I think I could do that. Like, you know, I saw a company the other day, and I was like, I'm better positioned to do this than the founder is. Do you not feel that it's a requirement when investing in a company that the founder is uniquely positioned to the extent that no one else is?

A The founder needs to be uniquely positioned in a number of dimensions, uniquely willing to go through the grind, uniquely positioned to Either have the background or learn really fast what it takes to solve the problem. That's one that's kind of messed up about angel investing. You can lose a lot of deals if you just look for expertise. Sometimes, and this is also true for my hiring philosophy, it's about the slope. It's about how fast people can learn. Here's, here's the universal truth. Is that ultimately it's all about the market, right? It's all about people's willingness to buy a certain thing that determines winners and losers. That's why I wouldn't underestimate your own ability to judge What it is that you want to buy, what it is that you ultimately need. Now, you might be actually really bad at judging the solution, so you have to be extremely open-minded. I made a quick comment earlier that the thing where I got lucky with Auth Zero is that I just didn't feel like a hundred percent confident about their solution, frankly. And if the founders were listening, they're gonna hate me. Like, I felt at the time, holy shit, outsourcing auth Like to a startup, how does that make sense from a chicken and egg point of view? How does it make sense that your homes and your company's door and they lock you outsource to what the lowest bidder, like a startup that has three people. S…

AI assessment note: “The founder needs to be uniquely positioned in a number of dimensions”

Q Did you feel the weight of responsibility? It's a lot to be contributing financially at 13 or 14. That'd be really meaningful. Did you feel that weight?

A Yeah, yeah. A hundred percent. Uh, it's like the more money, more problems. Uh, because I think the one time that it showed up the most was my revenue stream was strong, but unreliable. Like I would have this project and it would like make a lot of money all at once, but then it would have to like find the next one. So what it created was a certain sense of like, we really can depend on this, but it's really nice when it's there. And it was also so much fun. That's the other thing, right? Like there's this, uh, intersection between like, what do you love and what you can make money with. And for a lot of us, I think in software engineering was that thing. And so overall, Even though it came with its own stressors over the years, I think it was an amazing choice.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, yeah. A hundred percent. Uh, it's like the more money, more problems.”

Q I totally agree that you said there are product development done differently. Um, and we spoke about front ends earlier. I have this question always, which is like, Is simple always better in product? It feels like we always just aim for the least number of clicks, the least number of buttons. Is simple always better Guillermo?

A No, and it's, this is for the same reason I said, I think the, the approach you described is good because it won't give you a hundred percent of the great companies, but that's not your job. Your job is to even just find a few of the greatest companies, right? And I think that's also true for product development. Like the inspiration for me is like Google search where like there is nothing to do except for an input and like everything is so simple and like the magic is in the implementation and there is all this unfair advantages of access to data that gets constantly refined and all that. If your job is, okay, I want to find a few of the greatest products that will be produced in this generation. I do think that a lot of those will be This deceptively simple things where the interface of the user is just magical and the company took on the burden, right? So one of my earliest investments was AuthZero. And it was one of those things where I was incredibly skeptical. And yet I was like, I'll do it. Like, this is all about asymmetric upside, right? But I remember the thing that I rooted myself in, and this is true for Stripe, which I didn't do, but What I admired at the time, a simple API call that hides a tremendous amount of complexity behind. So I never want to deal with like MasterCard and Visa and like all these payment gateways and all this nonsense retries and workflows. A…

AI assessment note: “No, and it's, this is for the same reason I said”

Q Can I ask, at this age, you're very young, and you're at this prestigious high school, and you could go to university and get the blue chip education that is so hailed. Were you nervous to eschew traditional education in favor of bluntly a much more entrepreneurial, but less secure life in many ways?

A Uh, it's really interesting. Yes and no. So the, the very first time I made money from the internet, I was 12 years old. The eBay of Latin America, Mercado Libre had kicked off a revenue sharing program. It was called Mercado Associates. So like Mercado Associates. I was building all these websites that were actually driving traffic because my interests were other, you know, as you could imagine, other kids and, and, uh, other people's interests as well. And I figured out how to send them enough referrals that I remember at the time I made like a hundred pesos. Um, so that was the very first time I showed my mom that my skills could be monetized in some fashion. And over the years that the evidence accumulated that On the internet, you could do amazing things. And by the time I think I was like, 13 or 14, I was already contributing to my family's finances because, and now, now it's gone viral on Twitter. The Argentinian economy has always been in shambles. And there's been this huge discrepancy between the purchasing power of the US dollar and the Argentinian peso that is subject to hyperinflation. So without getting too much into the weeds of like, The new presidential candidate that's making the news here in the US, people in Argentina have always succumbed to hyperinflation. I would bring in, I don't know, even like 20 dollars from solving like CSS bugs on a, on a, on a free…

AI assessment note: “Uh, it's really interesting. Yes and no.”

Q Can I think about needing to do things very, very differently? Uh, and then we will move into a quick fight because I could talk to you all day, but business models have not changed at all in many, many years, largely on a per seat basis. Does AI like solidify the shift away from per seat pricing and entirely change the business model of software?

A I really like what's happening with AI because I think it's an acceleration of what was already happening with cloud. If you look at Vercel, Vercel offers you two very powerful things for your organization. Number one is the most obvious and the most visceral to a lot of developers, which is that you give us your front end project, Next.js, Nuxt, whatever. And we host it. We give you infrastructure to scale it autonomously. And that's traditionally a consumption. You pay for what you use business model, like Snowflake. But what Vercel also gives you is the iteration, velocity, and agility. Very much like what Google Docs or Figma gave you, which is like, now I can collaborate really fast with hyperlinks, and I can share around my entire organization what everybody's working on. It's almost like a Jira type thing. My maybe narrative violation is that businesses that only do one half of the equation Are gonna become less and less popular over time. Because when I buy software, I expect to buy a comprehensive platform that solves business problems. And solving business problems is never about just procuring a very specific material, a cog. I want this to do more for me. I want it to be like an operating system for my organization, especially as you hit scale. You're like, oh, I'm using Vercel for this little thing here to like host this, but I'm using Asher here and Google here. G…

AI assessment note: “we've done a combination of like SaaS that is by seat and purchasing platform capabilities”

Q Did you feel the weight of responsibility? It's a lot to be contributing financially at 13 or 14. That'd be really meaningful. Did you feel that weight?

A Yeah, yeah. A hundred percent. Uh, it's like the more money, more problems. Uh, because I think the one time that it showed up the most was my revenue stream was strong, but unreliable. Like I would have this project and it would like make a lot of money all at once, but then it would have to like find the next one. So what it created was a certain sense of like, we really can depend on this, but it's really nice when it's there. And it was also so much fun. That's the other thing, right? Like there's this, uh, intersection between like, what do you love and what you can make money with. And for a lot of us, I think in software engineering was that thing. And so overall, Even though it came with its own stressors over the years, I think it was an amazing choice.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, yeah. A hundred percent. Uh, it's like the more money, more problems.”

Q I get you, but when you have that level of validation of testing, it does just mean you can't ship tomorrow. Do you worry that you'll lose an inch on speed if you are? I didn't say this, your team said it, and your investors said it. Maybe a slight perfectionist when it comes to the level of quality that you need to ship.

A I think that if you're rigorous in your process and you do it very frequently and you make it a part of the culture, you would be surprised because like in a way you're, your best outcome is that people are carrying it, carrying that idea and that approach in their work. I'm not the one that is like going after every single project and applying this rigorous testing. You know what I mean? I'm the one that is saying, this is the bar. These are some of the techniques. These are some of the stories. So I think there's, there's a lot of power to storytelling, to sharing to people, like, how do we even get here? What are the things that we've learned have worked well? How have we been successful in the past in moving fast and shipping with quality? I think if you don't have those stories that you can actually give people, like, it almost sounds like, it sounds like, it sounds so contradictory, That you could move fast and ship with high quality, that if you cannot offer people those stories of like, this is how we do it, did it for next.js. Or this is how we did it for when we launched, um, the new deployment infrastructure. It almost sounds impossible.

AI assessment note: “How have we been successful in the past in moving fast and shipping with quality?”

Q What do you mean by sequencing? Sequencing by funding around, sequencing by a stage of Product market fit by CEO.

A The reason I like this A, B, C, and D thing is they're arbitrary, but they help us anchor, and they help give us a common language to evaluate and pressure test different frameworks. The simplicity of your product from zero to one might not be the simplicity of your product from one to two and two to three, or let's call it serious seed to A to B to C to D. This is very clear in that companies become multi-product over time, and it's really easy to look at AWS and say, Whoa, what a cluster F they have going there with like, they have all these products and like, they have all this complexity. Yeah. But like, that's where they are at now. And certainly if you're trying to compete with them, you're not going to replicate their approach. You're going to try to bring a simplification to the market. But over time you have to reevaluate your priors because the challenge, the market, the growth, like things are changing over time. So you asked me the question of is what I should be looking for only really simple products. And to me is the answer is very much stage dependent, very much market dependent. And there is no Universal truth to the question.

AI assessment note: “let's call it serious seed to A to B to C to D”

Q team members, and they said about the incredibly high bar that you have of yourself. What drives you from like earning money at 13 to pay for the family to Staying up late beyond belief while doing side jobs when you're, you know, you're a teenager to get into schools, to moving the SF on your own with no friends. What drives you? And has it always been the same?

A Yeah, good question. I think, I think it's been consistent in that there is a few personality traits, like anytime I see something great come to fruition. I think I don't dwell as much on it. I'm just like thinking about like, what is the next thing that we can do? So it's really exciting to be able to unlock the next thing, which acts as a launch pad of the next thing, which acts as a launch pad of the next thing. Yeah. Like there is all this that we can do and accomplish. And then there is another thing that that sets you up to do. And part of me coming here was it really expanded the horizon of what's possible. The access to capital, the access to the network, the access to Frankly, a lot of people that have the same passions and interests, that's I think the big unlock for me. I felt that in my previous path, I just had a lot fewer people that I could relate to, um, in terms of this obsessions.

AI assessment note: “I think it's been consistent in that there is a few personality traits”