Guillermo Rauch: recommendation

Transcript context

…Or it- In some ways what I've been doing for not only 10 years that I've been almost working on Vercel, but maybe my entire life because my strength as a developer is kind of meta. It's been to create developer tools. So I've created a bunch of open source frameworks that are really popular. So Next.js is one, but before that in a previous life, I created another tool called Socket. IO, which is a real-time communication mechanism that powers, for example, every time you use Notion, I think you interviewed Ivan, when Notion is to broadcast messages in real time to other collaborators, they use a real-time engine that I built for Socket. IO. So the reason that startups and companies have used my products in the past is because I took something that was very difficult to do, but very compelling. It was with real-time in the past. It's building cutting-edge applications on the web with Next.js. And I try to make it as easy as possible. But you still needed to know development skills. For us and the opportunity was if there is maybe five million React developers, which is the the library engine that we use, and there's maybe 20 million JavaScript developers, how many product builders are people with aspirations of building products exist? My back of the napkin, minimum calculation is a hundred million. And I'll tell you, it's funny where I get that number from. Slack has about a hundred million monthly active users. And what you do on Slack is you go in IT and you talk to people. A lot of those people are building digital products. And they talk to one another about what they would want to see in the world. They talk to customers through shared channels. I love that feature. We talk to a lot of the Vercel customers and they tell us, like, "I want to build this, I want to see that. I want this feature, I want that thing." So the opportunity with v0 was, it's not that you're going to stop talking to other people, but what if you could yap into the computer and see something happen, build a prototype, build your first version of a product, build a demo, build a full stack product, build it and ship it? And so the inspiration for it was very natural to the mission of Vercel. But concretely, the genesis, the story was when ChatGPT came out, we noticed that it was very good at writing the code that our tools used. So ChatGPT, right out of the bat, was good at JavaScript, was good at Tailwind, which is a CSS styling technology, was good at Next.js, and again, the power of open source. Our tools were already in the training data of the internet. And so that long-term bet and vision in open source really paid off. So because the models were so good at writing this kind of code, the idea for v0 came naturally from, "What if we could build a ChatGPT for building web products?" Speaking of that, I didn't actually know. So I had Bolt's CEO on the podcast and he talked about how Claude kind of unlocked what they're doing and do you guys sit on ChatGPT and OpenAI's stuff?…

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