Guillermo Rauch Quotes

The only durable moat in technology is relentless execution

Shipping is the best kind of marketing

The first test you must pass as an entrepreneur is to speak clearly.

When you introduce yourself and your company, be concise, don’t ramble, don’t rush, err on being blunt.

Happiness and productivity are two sides of the same coin. We’re at our best when our work creates value for others and we get rewarded. This is why socialism, communism, and any kind of unearned welfare inevitably lead to misery and the end of civilization.

First wave of AI: know it all
Second wave of AI: do it all

Software wants to be shipped

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

When manual programming became obsolete around 2026, it represented almost exactly 183 years¹ of refinement by some of the best minds of our times. That is a really long run, but the runs are getting shorter.

¹ Since Ada Lovelace's "Note G"

There's no easy way from earth to the stars

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.

I generally agree that calls can be the kryptonite of productivity. However, the single most IQ-enhancing activity I do is customer calls. It's insane how much you can learn in 15 minutes of listening to a customer's vivid accounts of pain or watching them use your product in realtime

It's an amazing time if you know what you're doing and if you don't know what you're doing

There’s a simple rule that predicts the success of emergent technologies

They make things easier and accessible for larger numbers of people. Tech is the true ‘power to the people’

It explains everything from Win95, FB, ChatGPT, and it’s the fundamental thesis of Vercel

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.

How you feel about yourself is how you feel about the world