Guillermo Rauch Quotes

Focus on the things you can control. Work hard, eat well, stay fit, help others, and crucially: be ruthlessly truth-seeking.

Every organization that has not gone through or is not going through complete AI transformation is effectively obsolete.

And this is not “use AI to automate customer support”, but rather, a complete AI rethink of the interface to your customer.

Some people think perfectionism is at odds with shipping fast. Wrong. Shipping fast is how you get closer to perfection.

If you truly understand it, you can explain it simply to others. In a world of widespread, highly capable AI, it’s imperative to find the opportunity to pressure test your understanding of the world.

Will we hire engineers in the future?

Prompting is thinking. The sharper your thoughts, the better the prompts, the better the outputs. Engineering and design are headed into a world where most of the output is produced by prompting, if not all.

The way we interview engineers has already been trending in this direction. At Vercel, we don’t care if you memorized every API and module. When we look at your coding, we assess the quality of your thinking and collaboration. It’s more so an evaluation of your “thinking tokens” or reasoning trace. In fact, the more you expose it, walking through how you backtrack, pivot, adjust, consult, the better signal we get.

My prediction is that the demand for great thinkers will remain unabated. It’s unclear if we’ll call them engineers or if it’ll matter, because these people will have a lot of full stack impact on the whole business, as they’ll have access to prompt their way to any successful outcome.

When someone asks me for a meeting, I try to solve the problem at that exact moment.

I ask for the details, context, pitch, question in place, or if it’s important enough, I call them right away.

You’ll be amazed how many things you’re putting off by weeks, with the transaction costs of calendar management, emails, zooms, that can just be figured out… right now.

Find a problem so big that you can spend at least 10 years of your life on, but that you can also demonstrate incremental progress towards.

The secret to product quality is blood sweat and tears

The best feature of LLMs is the shamelessness with which we can ask the dumbest questions. Which is the prerequisite to intellectual and personal growth.

AI paradoxically will make us more human. The machine will solve the hard computational and scientific problems that our brains simply cannot keep up with. Writing code getting delegated to AI is the canary in the coal mine.

Love is the most important force in the universe. Love for your family, friends, neighbors, art, mission, knowledge, company, country, world. Without love, there’s no humanity.

What you name your product matters more than people give it credit. It's your first and most universal UI to the world. Designing a good name requires multi-dimensional thinking and is full of edge cases, much like designing software.

The world belongs to the fast

Slowness anywhere is slowness everywhere

Minimum v̶i̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ excellent product