The Pomp Podcast - #1271 Guillermo Rauch | Artificial Intelligence Will Change Everything

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

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/

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 Vercel. 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 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 Vercel for so many years. I really enjoyed this conversation. It's highly informative, but also entertaining, and I hope that you enjoyed it as well. Here is my conversation with Guillermo Rauch. 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. 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. 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.

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literally be the difference between someone being taken care of and someone not. Go check them out today at trustinwill.com slash Pomp. 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? I think 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 parts of the software that touches the user experience, the things that people see when they they open up a website or 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 I 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. So 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. It's one of those things where you have to use these AIs in order to truly... You have to use them at work. You have to use them as these co-pilots of everything you do in order to 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 uh 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 uh and in many ways creative 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 better prospects for everybody 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 um 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 maybe the pros and cons of each approach?

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 seems like there's a huge opportunity for large companies to move really fast and put all their weight behind proprietary solutions. 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 open AI and proprietary models are clearly

better. It's 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. 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. 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 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, these AIs can become this super intelligence that could destroy the earth. It's best if they're heavily regulated. And if there's maybe two or three proprietary ones, and the government can like wrap their hands around and wrap their arms around them. However, the counter argument of that is that without open source, it's just hard for the 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 like oh cool like i here's my bank account details right um the same is going to happen with ai so there's going to be a bunch of people that are going to misuse the heck out of it for eel 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 that 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 are significant benefits, I think, to the open source approach there as well. 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 Facebook take a very specific step versus maybe other companies. How do you think about value accrual? Are the startups better positioned to capitalize on this AI wave where normally an innovative technology is used by the small companies to move quickly and 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 the joke being that some of these incumbents

killed thousands of startups with a single announcement. How do you think about the balance there? 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 vZero. It allows people to create software interfaces by just using English.

So you go to vZero.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 a list of podcasts and a buy button. 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 and complexity and tools and pixels on screens for decades. And they've become addicted to them and their customers have become addicted to them. Now, there could be a scrappy two-person startup in a garage in San Francisco,

although there's not a ton of garages, but they're in 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 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. 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 wave. 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? I think overhyped, but I'll caveat this by saying that I think the excitement 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 thinks and reads back the answer from the outside world and then makes another decision and so on.

So it is really exciting. But the fact that any idea that leaves the human out of the loop 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 of 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. As I mentioned earlier,

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 can not 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 context and the ideas and then so think of it as the human is still the creative director and they're sourcing ideas from a team of AIs.

That's what the future looks like. 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 that 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 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, 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. I just heard about a company that is a customer of Vercel that is providing chatbots specifically to train large numbers of salespeople. What is the biggest hurdle that organizations face when they have a huge salesforce? How do we 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 they're correct things.

Well, what are you going to need there? A specialist assistant that knows your product really well and how to sell it. That is different from my typical interaction with ChatGPT where I'm asking for some facts about Wikipedia. I do think that there is going to be an explosion in this domain-specific AIs that are conversational and provided by different companies and tied to different data sets. That's very underrated, I think. What's the role of government or regulation in the development of all 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 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 the next atomic bomb. Other people being like, hey, idiots, no, we don't. And so how do you see them playing into it? 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 that 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. 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, again, if I were to make the determination here, it 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. 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 basically scams where 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. I don't know if you've seen this, but there is 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 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. 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. 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. So how do you think about generative AI and kind of these 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? 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 on 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 make you more efficient. We're going to help you generate more applications.

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. For example, like Vercel has been around for only eight years, but it's also true for the businesses that have been around for a hundred, right?

When I was in Europe, I was meeting with the heads of companies like Airbus. And frankly, you know, there's this sense of like, there's fear on some level, right? Like, can you, especially 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? So 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 .com.

There's going to be an opportunity for companies like Vercel 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. 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 of 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 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 for sale 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 was better than the code that I wrote by hand. And I can give you an objective fact for it. It 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. Part of what's interesting,

and I'm looking at the website right now, is this idea of most people think of generative AI as like the first generation, right? Like, hey, I gave it instructions. It generated kind of the initial 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 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 just your personal website, you're kind of seeing that as well. It's such a great point. It's like riding a wave, right? When we set out to create vZero, we actually created it under the principle

that AI itself is just getting better every week. So, for example, 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 going to get fast. I thought, I think we're right in the right wave right now. I think this AI is just getting exponentially better 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. He doesn't answer that he loved books or some awesome story about his grandfather's dying wish was to make books more accessible.

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 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 pointing and clicking to find your stock of choice 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's such a thing can be created. It was created on the Vercel platform.

It's called Fintool.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 now for sell itself um front end as a service front end cloud there's a couple different ways that either you guys describe it or other people would talk about it um it's this very unique technology where you're separating the back end and the front end and you're allowing for things like this kind of V0, 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? Yeah, so our mission is to enable the world

to create the best products, period. So if you look at the average product experience 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 internet 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 low clunky gives you errors you just hate it and it's amazing right because we live in the golden era of technology that like why is that why is there such a separation between like

there's almost like two classes the upper class the three or four companies that kick-started 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 vercelli enables for the world. So we're operating at a very significant scale already. We have tens of billions of requests that we serve each week on the platform. We host websites like UnderArmor.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, you come to Vercel. Now, this comes with a caveat. If it's just something very small,

where, like you said, your own personal website or things like that, that's not really where Vercel shines today. We tailored a very sophisticated use case of the internet. Like I said, we tried to bridge that gap between the brick and mortar that has existed for 100 years and cannot compete with Amazon. We helped them do that. 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? Yeah, I like this idea. So to explain why it's called frontend. So there's always an interface that a person is interested in exchanging data with. So like, for example, So when you go to ChatGPT and you go to chat.openai.com, that's built with the technology and framework

that we create. It's called Next.js. And that's kind of the place where you experience the technology. But behind that, there's a lot of sophisticated technology as well. That's called the backend of an application. So the world that we envision is one where the bet that we're making is that what really matters the most to every citizen of the world is that experience that they receive. 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 you would 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. And kind of the aspiration here is that a lot of people should probably switch away from just pure consumption to being able to create and publish great ideas on the internet. And I think over the past few decades, we've over-indexed a bit on things that tailor to

consumption. So when you think about the TikToks, the Instagrams, I think there's probably an entire generation that could have instead been creating products. If we can lower the barrier to entry to those people to create products, I think we're going to end up with a much better world. 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? I think just how fast things accelerate as you get bigger. So in some ways, 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 the thing that astonishes me. For example, when COVID happened, I went to the airport. I needed to get a test to take my flight to Japan. Both COVID applications that I had to go through were built on 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 Vercel application, so I was astonished.

And obviously, in some ways, I should have 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, it ended up we became a standard platform for creating that kind of application. When Web3 and crypto happened, we became the standard platform for creating Web3 and NFT marketplaces. We still support some of the largest in the world like OpenSea, etc. Now when AI happened, once again, we've provided the platform for folks who create these 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. It's infrastructure on the internet at that kind of scale. It's amazing because you visit these offices in San Francisco and I show you Vercel and you're like, oh, wow, it's not that many people. The impact that it represents in the world, the amount of traffic that we support and all of that is incredibly sizable. And yeah, so 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 they know what they're getting into. When you open up a service like this to the public internet, it's a freaking zoo. 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.

So I got to experience a 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. 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 when you're just enjoying the internet from your couch. I could talk to you forever. 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? Yeah, so I'm very active on X, formerly on Twitter, so Routg. The Vercel platform is on

virtual.com we have a bunch of templates that people can and companies can use to uh to deploy applications uh 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 v0.dev to check out our generative ui product awesome cameron thank you so much for the time i learned a lot today I think other people will as well, and we'll definitely do it again in the future. Thank you, Anthony.