Inside Vercel's AI-era playbook: "Recursive Founder Mode" | Guillermo Rauch (CEO)

Guillermo Rauch's kindergarten teachers had a question for his parents: "What do you guys give this kid? He's a freaking ball of energy." Today Guillermo is at the gym every morning, has five kids with a sixth on the way, does Vercel's customer support rotations himself, and measures his own keystrokes with an app he vibe coded. He is also the founder and CEO of one of the defining infrastructure companies of the AI era. If you have built anything on the internet, you have probably touched his work. Guillermo created Socket.IO, co-created Next.js, the most popular React framework in the world, and founded Vercel, now valued at $9.3 billion with a revenue run rate of more than $500 million, powering frontends for OpenAI, Stripe, and Nike. The throughline of this episode is his answer to Paul Graham's Founder Mode essay: founder mode doesn't scale, so Vercel runs on what Guillermo calls Recursive Founder Mode, finding people who are founders at heart and making them the CEOs of their own products. It's the machine that builds the machine. In this conversation, Guillermo walks through what that looks like in practice. Why he is still involved in every hire at nearly 800 people, and why nobody at Vercel except security can stop a launch. How V, the internal agent the company runs on, replaced ticket queues and bent the headcount curve. What the new engineering meta skill is when models write the code. And the inner game: the energy budget, the lulls, and why he calls 996 rookie numbers. Listen on: • Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5KorHDr... • Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Guillermo Rauch is the founder and CEO of Vercel, the AI cloud company behind Next.js, v0, the AI SDK, and the AI Gateway. Rauch created Socket.IO and Mongoose, two of the most widely used libraries in the JavaScript ecosystem. Born in Lanús, Argentina, he taught himself to program, moved to San Francisco at 18, and co-founded LearnBoost and Cloudup, acquired by Automattic in 2013. He founded Vercel, originally called ZEIT, in 2015; the company now employs nearly 800 people. Where to find Guillermo Rauch: • Vercel: https://vercel.com/ • X: https://x.com/rauchg • LinkedIn:   / rauchg   Where to find Nakul: • Audacious Ventures: https://www.audacious.co/ • X: https://x.com/nakul • LinkedIn:   / nakulmandan   Where to find Audacious Ventures: • Website: https://www.audacious.co/ • LinkedIn:   / audaciousventures   In this conversation with Guillermo Rauch: 00:00 Who is Guillermo Rauch? 02:01 What is Recursive Founder Mode? 07:28 Why did Vercel open source its playbook with skills.sh? 10:14 What is a "work prompt" interview? 14:33 Why is Guillermo still involved in every hire at nearly 800 people? 18:17 What keeps founders at Vercel when seed money is everywhere? 23:41 Do urgency and taste pull against each other? 26:43 What is the new engineering meta skill? 32:21 How does a 17-year-old show they're exceptional today? 35:47 Why does Vercel route the whole company through one agent? 38:47 Which software survives the agent era? 42:11 How has AI changed Guillermo's job as CEO? 51:39 Does Vercel even need executives anymore? 54:40 If Guillermo started Vercel today, what would he build first? 57:45 What's the story behind v0? 1:03:48 Are there still moats when anyone can build fast? 1:11:24 How does a legendary coder learn the inner game of being a CEO? 1:19:21 Where does Guillermo's energy actually come from? 1:23:07 Quickfire: overrated advice, Chrome, voice AI, Demo Fridays 1:28:38 What does the journey actually require? Guillermo's sharpest lines from this conversation: On scaling founder mode: "The founder CEO can only go so far. You kind of want to build the machine that builds the machine." On agents being the first port of call: "If I DM you, it probably meant that my agent couldn't figure it out." On AI and taste: "I think people sometimes create this false dichotomy between AI and taste. You know what's tasteless is grabbing the model and having it output as it is." On why AI doesn't write his tweets: "I think the best connection I'm gonna be able to make with you is if you get my legitimate, authentic farm-to-table next token from me, not from a machine." On working out consistently: "You have to spend energy to increase your energy budget."