The Exchanges

Q No, it's a very, it's a very positive part of the ecosystem. So, so tell us a little bit about Vercel. What does Vercel do? Who are your customers?

A For sure. So we create web infrastructure. That means we give you the tools and platforms for you to develop, preview and scale and initiative on the web. So we have customers like underarmor.com. Uh, which, uh, they sell sneakers or we have customers like Washington post. What we've solved, which is a hard engineering problem is how can you create applications that can scale to like billions and billions of, of traffic, but also be extremely dynamic in nature. So you can personalize, customize, uh, and deliver them really, really, really fast. So the, the, uh, wisdom that gets shared in the industry a lot is for each hundred milliseconds. That you slow down an e-commerce experience, you have a one percent drop off in conversion. And we've all experienced this when you're like on Instagram and you go to a product, you, you need to buy it and, and everything has to click.

AI assessment note: “we create web infrastructure... So we have customers like underarmor.com”

Q So how do you think about, and there must be a tough line between being a community first company and fully monetizing the opportunity, right? And you obviously don't want to do things that grow the community. Long-term, but you want us to make money. Like, like how do you make those trade-offs or what trade-offs are there?

A For sure. I'm very, very passionate about this idea of education. So one, one principle that we have is we have to have developers learn our methods and techniques and basically have no barrier to entry there. So we give away a lot of resources for free because we know that the engineer that's working on a side project to evaluate the technology We'll bring it to a large enterprise the next Monday. And this has actually happened in ways that are quite fascinating to me. So I like to tell a story of therealreal.com, really big enterprise public company, uh, on, on the e-commerce side. The CTO was testing out our platform on a weekend with his personal email address on our platform. If I had added a lot more friction to that process and like, oh, there's no free account. Like you can't deploy more than end times.

AI assessment note: “we give away a lot of resources for free because we know that the engineer”

Q Got it. And so, and so, and so, and so you went also with the open source route, but just redesigned it from scratch. It made it easier. Are there any unexpected network effects you found with the open source thing or any surprises to you?

A Oh my God. So because Next.js uses this API called react. So the innovation there is that you can model the entire world as components. When you talk to a program programmer, they tell you, well, I model my world as functions. I model it as strings methods. I remember Steve jobs at one point was excited about, uh, object oriented programming objects. And it turns out that none, none of those abstractions really helped. Build products. So when you, when you work at Airbnb and you're experimenting, you're creating a new experience, you have to bring in reusable components from almost like a bookshelf of ingredients and you say, okay, I'm going to bring in the carousel that shows the photos for the property. I'm going to bring in the buy button. And what's important here is that when your company invests in these things, like companies like Amazon have perfected the buy button. They've iterated, tested, they've instrumented it with, with events and observability and metrics. They know what shade of yellow can converse the best. So you want to reuse all those things. So that's what this component oriented programming methodology enabled. And what's happened is that Because our technology is open source. Now there's an entire ecosystem of reusable components, which means back to that idea of even in, in Lanus in Argentina, I didn't want to start from scratch. No company in the world…

AI assessment note: “Because our technology is open source. Now there's an entire ecosystem of reusable components”

Q And what, what led you to America? What led you to come to the United States?

A So my fondest memory is I was helping my mom out with her resume when I was a kid. Cause I was all about, she needs to have her own online resume. I was like, Making websites for, for different things. And I remember how proud she was of the American multinational company that she worked in, in Argentina. Uh, it was called Fisher Rosemount, a subdivision of Emerson Process Management. And she loved being a sales engineer for that company. And the things that she would tell me are like, they just do things better. They have better rigor for their engineering. They have better specs. It's funny. A lot of things change over the decades and a lot of things stay the same. Like a lot of what we do at Vercel, we take a lot of pride in the quality of our documentation. Uh, and I think back in the day.

AI assessment note: “I remember how proud she was of the American multinational company that she worked in”