Inside Vercel’s AI-era playbook: “Recursive Founder Mode”
Guillermo Rauch · Founder & CEO, Vercel
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.
Guillermo Rauch is the founder and CEO of Vercel, the AI cloud company behind Next.js, v0, the AI SDK, and the AI Gateway, valued at $9.3 billion following a $300 million Series F led by Accel and GIC in September 2025. Rauch created Socket.IO and Mongoose, two of the most widely used libraries in the JavaScript ecosystem, and co-created Next.js, the most popular React framework. 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 and serves customers including OpenAI, Stripe, and Nike.
The most quotable moments from Guillermo Rauch
“The founder CEO can only go so far. You kind of want to build the machine that builds the machine.”
“If I DM you, it probably meant that my agent couldn’t figure it out.”
“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.”
“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.”
“You have to spend energy to increase your energy budget.”