Top 15 Guillermo Rauch Quotes

Software engineering will be completely unrecognizable in 5 years. Likely less

Dating advice: just do it
Selling advice: just do it
Writing advice: just do it
Coding advice: just do it
Fitness advice: just do it
Startup advice: just do it

There are no limits anymore. Anyone can do anything. The only limiting factors are agency and ambition.

Never has a college degree, work experience, network, even the accumulation of knowledge been worth less.

You can just ship things.

Remote work is individual convenience at the expense of group effectiveness

Life hack: your hobby and your job must be the same.

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.

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.

Build a product so good, your users do the marketing

Good design is a signal that you care. People prefer products built by people who care. Markets reward good design. The end

new computer:

bash is for installing zsh
npm is for installing pnpm
safari is for installing chrome
xcode cli tools is for installing brew
terminal⁠.app is for installing ghostty

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.

The only durable moat in technology is relentless execution

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.

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

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