Guillermo Rauch Quotes

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.

Immortality is attained by having children, leaving the world in a better place than you found it, and pushing the human frontier. Not by drinking “longevity mix powder”.

Inherent to Founder Mode is the courage to be disliked. For a founder, the mission, customer and product reigns supreme. Effective leadership is not about making everyone at your company happy or producing the average of everyone’s opinions. It’s about doing what’s right.

To write a blog post, you must first redesign your blog

• writing style → prompt
• coding style → prompt
• color system → prompt
• design system → prompt
• brand guidelines → prompt
• a11y requirements → prompt
• compliance & legal → prompt
• vendor preferences → prompt
• product requirements → prompt
• customer preferences → prompt
• institutional knowledge → prompt

On a long enough timeline, everything gets subsumed by the (system) prompt and integrations that populate it

Make something people love

Learn to ship. Shipping is a skill distinct from coding. Shipping is designing, coding, QAing, story-telling, teaching, marketing, selling, pivoting, iterating…

It used to be that coding dominated in importance because of coding ability scarcity. AI will push you to go further.

Remote work is individual convenience at the expense of group effectiveness

Designers should vibe code

Ship the best product. Use lots of AI, some AI, maybe no AI. Just be the best.

America is losing the real battle: truly open⎵AI. Everyone knows that in the fullness of time, open wins.

Open is crucial to a thriving and competitive ecosystem. You see this with the proliferation of Chinese model finetunes among US startups. They’ve done a great job.

This has been true for kernels and operating systems (Linux), compilers (GCC and Clang), browsers (Chromium and Blink), runtimes (v8 and Node.js), frameworks (React and Next.js), and it has to be true for AI.

AI is too important to remain closed, because the future of civilization will be built on it.

In a world of self-improving software, nothing feels more dated than "click here to update the app". This will become more obvious as the rate of software production continues to increase. The only viable software delivery model is the web's: "Hot app replacement".

There’s a contagion effect to good habits. When you watch your friends or relatives exercise, you want to exercise.

Same is true for shipping, giving back, eating well… Surround yourself with people who raise your bar.

AI makes the web shine brightest. The web browser is unique in that it can enable consumption and creation in the same medium. A fully dynamic app can be streamed from a GPU and built just in time for any user according to their wishes and needs.

A good rule of thumb when you design products and give support: “how do I make this person a 𝘤𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘳 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦?”

If you do right by them, customers will reward you with business over the long term that doesn’t jump out on spreadsheets.

There’s a meme about venture capitalists looking for “generational companies.” It’s hard to pinpoint what and which those are, but when I think about the companies I look up to… I’ve been buying from them for ages.

Earned customer trust is like compounding interest. It’s unwise to trade trust for a short term gain.