Building the Generative Web with AI ft Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch

It's really nice that now we have this

really powerful tool to input that

guidance in a very very very scalable

way. Right? Like if we're talking about

the world of development, you're talking

about like you know maybe singledigit

millions, twodigit millions of

developers. Now we can actually give

this guidance and direction to a much

broader set of people. Um I it's

exciting for someone I think that's

getting into building software today

because in some ways you're kind of

leapfrogging the past generation. The

best generation has their gray hairs and

hard-earned lessons on how to build

these interfaces, but people that are

getting into software today have, you

know, this incredible access to what

we've all learned collectively. So, it's

super exciting.

[Music]

Today we're speaking with GMO Rouch, CEO

of Verscell, for a conversation about

how AI is reshaping software

development. GMO shares insights from

building Vzero, Verscell's text to app

generator that's attracting not just

developers, but designers and marketers,

essentially anybody who can describe

what they want to build. GMO predicts

that we're heading towards a generative

web where applications are created on

demand for individual users, potentially

making traditional downloadable software

obsolete.

He also reveals how Chat GBT has

unexpectedly become one of Versel's

fastest growing customer acquisition

channels, offering a glimpse into how AI

is already transforming business

fundamentals. Enjoy the show.

>> GMO, thank you so much for joining us

today.

>> Excited to be here.

>> I want to get right into it. It seems

like the coding market is being turned

upside down, you know, blown up in

different ways, and it seems like the

kind of front-end web developer segment

of the market is the one that's changing

the most rapidly. uh what are you seeing

and what do you think happens to that

core community?

>> Yeah, it seems like whatever LMS are

good at, you know, like people get

really excited about. And in a couple

years ago when Chad GBD came out, one of

the first things we noticed at Verscell

was Chad GBD is extremely good at

writing React code

>> and Tailwind code, which is the styling

code that most most web developers use

these days. And we got really excited

because we saw, okay, you know, Verscell

has been in the business of giving

people tools and frameworks to make it

really easy to develop websites and

publish them online. But it seems like

this is a almost like a generational

shift towards something that is even

better than a framework.

>> It's not exactly a framework. Like

Nex.js is like a React framework. You

know, you sit down and you write code

and it makes it a lot easier to write an

application. But LLMs seem to me like a

generational leap, like more general

than a framework and potentially

something that opens up the top of final

to every person on the planet because

all you need to know is to you know use

your natural language and generate code.

And so that actually inspired us instead

of like um perhaps the typical reaction

would be like you either ignore it or

you're in fear of it. Uh we really

deeply embraced it. I personally really

embraced it because at the time I was

using copilot which was the

autocompleter inside your IDE mostly

focused on that at the time

>> and then I realized okay like this feels

like the next big thing in AI so we

created Vzero which is a text to app or

text to front end and ever since you

know it's been now a couple of years uh

its growth has been astronomical and

we've learned a lot about what AI can do

to I think power the next generation of

software builders which might not be

just developers I think That's the

biggest discontinuity or the biggest

thing we've seen on the market. There is

AI coding tools that are now attracting

what I would call dev adjacent profiles

like designers, marketers, um basically

anybody with a keyboard that I sometimes

make the joke instead of like yapping

into your team chat application just

yapp into vzero and you're creating more

value.

>> That's awesome. when we first did our

internal landscape on, you know, GPT3

and what it might mean, I remember one

of the example apps we laid out was kind

of text uh to to front-end uh uh web

app. And awesome.

>> It's crazy to see that VZ, you know, out

in its full full power. And you know, I

got a series B pitch the other day from

a company whose front end was built from

from Vzero.

>> Nice. Well, that's the thing about like

seat rounds. You used to raise money to

create your first prototype, right? And

like the cost of like coming up with the

idea and then transforming it into

software is pretty high. So you would

raise a seat around to get the

prototype. What I hear these days is

that these VZero prototypes are actually

replacing pitch decks. Right? By the

time you get to your pitch, it'd be rare

these days to not have a working front

end because the cost has gone so low.

And and I think the iteration velocity

that is giving the wouldbe builders is

amazing, right? like you can go through

like hundreds of prototypes before you

settle on your first idea.

>> With Vzero as it exists today, what are

you most proud of and what do you feel

is not quite there yet?

>> Most proud of is the reach. So over 3

million builders, the level of

engagement and retention is really high.

So people are actually getting a lot of

value. Teams are getting a lot of value.

We have Fortune 10 using the product on

the enterprise tier. So, I think the

number one thing is people are excited

about agents, but this is an agent

that's working out in the real world and

providing value. One of the things that

I'm proud of is how much we've extracted

lessons from building Vzero that we're

giving back to the world. We've written

extensively about how we're building it.

We've opened the underlying framework,

the AI SDK. We recently released the

Vzero model. So we're inviting

entrepreneurs to innovate in the space

and create their own agents that can

build websites, application market

marketing uh products etc.

I think another thing is quality

>> from the beginning to now. To your

point, anybody that used Chachet

realized very quickly, oh, it can do

haikus, it can do poems, and he can

write code. It's pretty cool, right? And

so getting it to the point where it can

be reliable. That took a lot of work,

fine-tuning. We trained our own custom

code application model that sits in

front of the frontier model. All in the

service of reliability. You want to come

in, you create a generation, it has to

work.

>> Well, yeah. One of the things that I

think you've been known for for many

years now, even before Vzero, was

quality and in particular the developer

experience. And I know there's an aspect

of taste that goes into that. I'm also

wondering how do you systematize that?

Like is there a standard definition for

quality or are there metrics that you

track, you know, to just ensure that the

bar remains high and that the developer

experience remains pristine? Yeah, one

of the things that excited me a lot

about building AI products is that the

feedback loop and the metrics come built

in. You've probably seen a lot of

pitches from would be entrepreneurs that

maybe they get they put the cart before

the horse and they're not tracking their

growth and and measuring things

correctly and you realize wouldn't it be

cool if like every product you created

came with a standard set of metrics

>> so that you're off to the races but you

have a compass on where to go.

>> Yeah. AI products have that kind of

built in which is amazing right like if

you look at the first coding AI product

which is copilot what it did is you

write some code and it produces ghost

text right after your code it proposes a

completion

the creator of that now has a really

cool metric to evaluate the progress of

their product with which is the

acceptance rate of the completion so

it's like you're building your product

and then now like you have a dashboard

that has one gigantic metric that says,

"All right, we're at 51%." You come back

to the office the next week, "Oh, cool.

We we're at 52%. You've replaced the

model. All right, cool. What are we

seeing?"

>> So, I I love that aspect. We have that

in VZ in spades because we have, you

know, the the fact that people want to

deploy these applications into the real

world. That's a very high signal of

engagement for us. We have the what

happens to the application later on,

right? Like are people coming to the

application uh integrations they

install? But we also have the

fundamental one which is that does the

code work? Is it you know rendering

correctly? So there's an aspect of the

product that is the reliability of

creating a functioning application. But

the other one that is more subjective is

taste, right? How can we embed all of

the best practices that we've learned

over over the years on creating products

on the web. little things like you know

for example on iOS when you open a

website you want to make sure that the

theme bar which is the uh what sits

outside your website the color of the

Safari theme bar has to match the

background color of the page

>> if it doesn't maybe most people would

not notice it's off but when it's on

it's just so delightful right it's like

a continuity of the canvas it takes over

the entire screen so little things like

that in the past we would have to you

know build frame frameworks or education

and hoping people upgrade and nowadays

we can embed all of those learnings into

the model and we can say okay when

you're going to generate a landing page

make sure that that happens and this

cuts across so many things that's why I

call it almost like the next thing after

frameworks

>> uh because frameworks worked really hard

both the designers and the users to put

you into a pit of success

>> if you fit into the framework you know a

lot of things about the world will true

around performance, security, etc. But

the world is very dynamic. People are

fluid. They want to try different

things. So it's really nice that now we

have this really powerful tool to input

that guidance in a very very very

scalable way, right? Like if we're

talking about the world of development,

you're talking about like you know maybe

singledigit millions, twodigit millions

of developers. Now we can actually give

this guidance and direction to a much

broader set of people. Um, I it's

exciting for someone I think that's

getting into building software today

because in some ways you kind of

leaprogging the past generation. The

past generation has their gray hairs and

hard-earned lessons on how to build

these interfaces, but people that are

getting into software today have, you

know, this incredible access to what

we've all learned collectively. So, it's

super exciting.

>> I love it. Before we go deeper into the

AI stuff, maybe can we take a step back?

Can you situate us and orient us towards

what is Verscell? How do you see your

company's role in the world? Yes. And

how does the slate of AI products we've

been talking about, Vzero, etc. How do

those fit into kind of Verscell in the

preAI era?

>> Yeah. When Versell was born, it sort of

started out of the pain that I felt on

bringing a cutting edge website online.

>> On one hand, I had to configure all of

the cloud provider stuff from scratch.

And there was a lot of progress in

making the cloud better open source with

things like Kubernetes etc. It was

intensely painful to like just put my

idea online.

>> And then I felt the same on the tools

side. It's before Verscell I feel like

it was very hard to bring tools and

cloud infrastructure together which is

what led to the invention of NexJS.

But it was always that fitness function

of I want to bring my idea online

immediately. So chapter one of Versel

you can think of it as

uh infrastructure on autopilot

>> an autonomous cloud and we did this with

developer experience that's the number

one tool think of it as a Trojan horse

you want to automate the cloud how do

you do it do you you know teach courses

do you sell certifications or do you

give people the best possible developer

experience on the planet that's what we

set out to do chapter two of oursel

feels like again the postframework era

we automated infrastructure can automate

writing the software to begin with. You

know, you can hit diminishing returns

with frameworks. Like we would obsess

over how many characters you need in

order to create a really cool page or

component. When I would give

presentations about introducing XJ, I

would say, okay, what is the minimum

number of steps I have to take?

>> Create a folder, create a file, inside

that file, export my first React

component. So, I had it almost down to a

mathematical science, right? like what

is the number of characters between you

and aha in a successful outcome online.

>> So with AI being able to generate code,

I think we're opening up this new

frontier of automating it all

potentially, right? And putting the

putting the human in in the driver's

seat from a creative perspective and

from what is it that I'm trying to ship,

right? Uh what what do you want to ship

is actually the the question we ask when

you go to vzero as the as the headline

for the prompt. Hm.

>> What are your strongly held beliefs and

have any of those changed uh with with

the rise of AI generated code?

>> Strongly held beliefs, I'll tell you

the meta of that is that I encourage

people to not have too many strongly

held beliefs, right?

>> If anytime people say, well, AI can't do

this,

>> I try to I try to be on the side of AI.

like well you know I've caught myself

thinking that and then 6 months later 3

months later nine months later the

situation changes. So that's one. Um

another big one for me is that we're all

in the business of producing an artifact

or outcome that we want to share with

the world.

>> So I try to think always from the first

principles of like look everything is up

for grabs in this generation of

software. any any habit any assumption

about who the persona is that is going

to be able to build something I think is

currently up for disruption. So I I pick

on chat apps a lot because you know the

assumption is imagine that you all are

going to start a startup tomorrow. What

are the set of tools that you actually

like procure? What is the first things

that you install? Where do you track

your price? All of these things I think

are going to be disrupted by AI. M

>> uh and uh I like to always think from

clean slate I guess that's my strongly

uh held belief something I do as a habit

is any weekend I try to start something

from scratch like whether you know use

for sale so on one hand I get to dock

through the platform and try it out but

also I'm always doing this exercise of

like what else can we remove how can we

remove that friction from idea to to

application bringing bringing new things

online

>> you talked about you know developer

experience first that was the most

important thing before uh before

thinking about the infrastructure. Um

what are some of the things that you did

to nail the developer experience and do

you think a great developer experience

changes in this act two of AIdriven

code?

>> Yeah, so number one is we realized early

on that in some ways the world had its

priorities reversed. People got really

excited about the technology cloud

infrastructure and so a developer would

sit down and they would start with that.

You would start your project by creating

a cluster, resources, cloud formations,

terraforms, and things like that.

>> But really, if again, if you think from

first principles, you're not trying to

create like you're not going to give

your customers infrastructure.

>> Yep.

>> You have to always think backwards from

the end user. One piece of advice that I

give to people that want to get into the

world of dev tools is remember that you

have two customers. You have your direct

customer who's the developer, but then

you have to be thinking about what is

that developer trying to create? What is

their customer? So, it's a powerful and

actually intellectually challenging

position to be in because you're

thinking, okay, I'm selling something to

you who's going to sell something to

somebody else. So, there's by definition

another hop or layer of interaction. So

I think something that we did well was

we set out to create a great developer

experience that was in the service of

user experience.

>> I'm always keeping the end user in mind.

I I try to an exercise that I do all the

time is okay I'm going to go to a new

website that launches a new AI product.

Is it great or not? As an end user like

how does it feel?

>> And then work backwards

>> to what's powering it. And this

sometimes creates a creative tension

between because it might be easier for

me if you're the developer, I might be

able to sell you something that gives

you, if you think about it as a video

game, like imagine like plus 10

happiness points

>> and then you sell it to the end user.

Let's let's see what happens a quarter,

two quarters in because your users are

not happy. Y

>> so your short-term gratification did not

pan out into a successful business

outcome. So you have to be extremely

thoughtful about navigating that

tension. And sometimes in the early days

I I got it wrong or like you know I

would get the developer extremely

excited about a new thing or a new

feature or even something as subtle as

like an extra configuration flag or

sometimes it's an operational limit that

you relax. This this always catches the

wouldbe infrastructure uh entrepreneur.

>> Developers love weird stuff

>> because you think you think okay um I'm

going to make it unlimited. People are

going to love this. And then you realize

well unlimited is not really good recipe

for operational excellence.

>> You have to think about all of the

services and infrastructure that are

going to have to deal with this entity

that has an unbounded property. And so

that's a good example of like navigating

that tension because if you're buying my

product, you may think, okay, like why

is the quota not infinity? And I'm like,

oh, you know, like it's hard to explain

sometimes. And like so navigating that

tension, I think is one of the one of

the the key secrets of success. and it's

it's hard to get right.

>> Can you talk a bit about the AI

inflection at Verscell? I think last

year you publicly announced some stats.

Can you share just the latest in terms

of how AI has changed the uh changed the

whole speed of your business?

>> Yeah, I think the two most dramatic

things when I look at our journey is

number one the zero cost our entire user

base numbers to double year-over-year.

So that kind of gives you a glimpse of

the developer of the future. It took us

years of being a pretty, you know, hypy

successful company to get a certain user

base and now AI opens the top of final

so much that you just double it

year-over-year.

f fascinating to me and encouraging for

everybody that wants to build an AI

application on Verscell because I think

they're going to see that there can

participate in this incredible one I

think once in a generation upside in

okay with all these tools and

infrastructure because the interesting

thing about Vzero is it's an app that is

full stack created on Verscell

>> mh

>> zero tricks access special features

nothing it's just we became a customer

of our own platform So, that was a

really cool thing to see.

>> How are those new users different from

some of your older users?

>> They're they're different in some on

some ways, but not different in the in

the in the sense that they they're

thinking about that end user. Yeah.

>> So, they're they're different in the

sense of some of that those developer

sensitivities are not there like do they

care that much if the code is long,

short, the shape of the APIs of the

things that the LLM is generating. So

what's fascinating is that LLM's

strengths and weaknesses will inform the

development of runtimes, languages, type

checkers, and frameworks of the future.

>> Think of it as your customer is no

longer the developer.

>> Yep.

>> Your customer is the agent that the

developer or non-developer is wielding.

That is actually a pretty significant

change.

The first thing that I hypothesized is

look developers by nature have always

preferred things that look shorter. So

if you know if the API call it looks a

little bit more succinct and for example

for stripe there's a beauty to their API

the dot notation on the SDKs etc. And by

the way, this is going to continue to be

super relevant in the future. But now

you have to think about, well, is there

something that I could change about that

API that actually favors the LLM being

the the quote unquote entity or or user

of this API? So that's one big change on

like how we think about the product.

>> Uh I think these people

>> share something that's very fundamental

to all of us. They just want things to

work and perhaps they have a little less

patience. I think developers go through

this, you know, journey of learning to

deal with errors. You know, you're just

used, I sometimes say, you know,

developers are typically known to be

well compensated, but they're dealing

with like terrible negative feedback all

day long. The the type checker, god

forbid, the borrow checker just like

screaming at you, giving you errors that

sometimes are hard to understand. And

and this is why developer experience

obviously matters so much.

And so now we're going into this world

where I I I feel like this user has an

even shorter fuse if something goes

wrong. Going back to that quality

metric, to that reliability metric,

they're just like, you know, flip the

table like what is this? And honestly,

it's amazing pressure for for us as uh

as product builders. Like you want

something that works 99.99% of the time.

Yeah. And I will say when people ask me

there is someone asked me look if we

were if this was um uh 1990

and the internet is starting to like

really gain serious traction and you

know the 2000s are coming like where do

you think uh we are relative to like old

eras of the internet like are we in uh

are we in the dotcom uh boom are we you

know five years before five years after

it's a very interesting era that we're

in, right? Like on some level you notice

that the reliability of the underlying

models is very low.

>> Yeah.

>> Uh the uh outages that you see very

frequently on API uh AI providers is

very low. But on the other hand, the

massification on the consumer side is

super high.

>> It took quite a long time for us to get

everyone on on team internet. But on

team AI, the adoption is just uh

amazing. So there's almost like a tale

of two cities. You have the

infrastructure is being built as we go

and like we're improving the reliability

of it all the time. Um and the consumer

demand is unprecedented.

>> Yeah.

>> How do you think uh AI is kind of

changing the underlying infrastructure

demands? So for example, my my layman's

understanding of what you all do at

Verscell is that there's quite a bit of

caching that happens that makes you know

website loading very fast.

>> Is that as relevant in a world where a

lot of content is generated? I will say

the main thing that we optimized for

that kind of found us in a lucky time,

lucky place is we're noticing that the

web was going from being a static to

dynamic.

>> And I feel like now we're going from

dynamic to generative.

>> And so Versel was investing for years

and years and years on this transition

from a static to dynamic. We were

working on technology for streaming

websites. So, one of the magic things

that makes websites like Amazon.com so

fast is they stream the response to you.

It actually is almost like an LLM is you

can think of as like a a a LLM before AI

of sorts because when you're coming to a

product page, they're computing

dynamically just in time. What are the

product recommendations for you guys?

>> What are you likely to buy next? I think

we've all been through the uh scenario

where like you add to cart and they're

like hm scroll a bit and then you add

the bundle you're like customers also

buy. So versel was working really hard

on democratizing that kind of

technology.

>> We're noticing that most like e-commerce

websites were like they even struggled

to just serve a cached page period let

alone a page that for each user makes

amazing recommendations.

So we were able to repurpose a lot of

that infrastructure especially in the

compute side. Uh we call it fluid

compute. It was the perfect fit for this

new generation of applications that are

streaming content. Yeah.

>> Not from databases but from LLMs. M

>> the one shift that is significant is you

have to think about a web for end users

and humans like you know you open up

sequoia capital.com but you also have to

think about a web for agents

>> you have to think about the fact that

there's emergent protocols right you

have llm.txt txt is a good example, very

simple, but now a website can

communicate better with the wouldbe

agent and give them an alternative

representation.

>> You can think about MCP servers as being

the next evolution of that.

>> In some ways, the static to dynamic uh

metaphor is happening on an expedited

timeline for AI protocols because

alms.txe txt is very much like the

static representation of an agentic

website and the MCP now enables you to

put an agent out into the internet that

can communicate with another agent. So,

Verscell is now enabling these new kinds

of AI workloads but sharing a lot of the

same foundational infrastructure.

>> Where do you see your AI product roadmap

going?

>> I posted a tweet recently that said, you

know, I think the journey that a lot of

companies are going to go through is

they have no AI

uh then they say we're going to start an

AI prototyping team. Then they're going

to evolve that prototype into a

production grade product. So they're

going to say now that's the AI product

team. And then the end state is that

every company will be an AI company.

>> Mh. Meaning that whatever lessons you

gar you gathered from that produ

productionizing of that AI prototype or

idea or you know thing that you launched

maybe it's a new product

you will use those lessons to transform

the rest of your business. You kind of

see this with support AI. Why is support

AI so successful? Well, it's the lowest

friction way for any established

business, enterprise or company to say,

"All right, I'm going to incorporate AI

into my business."

>> What Versell did was, I think, more

ambitious than that because we said,

"Look, in order for us to actually give

high quality support,

we need an expert model in our

technologies. It'd be devastating if a

customer comes to us who we are the

experts in Nex.js, JS React the web and

our support agent doesn't know the

latest and greatest on our own

technologies right so we started with

down this path of you know how can we

have an expert AI in our own

technologies and so we launched Vzero

which interestingly enough served two

purposes it's the expert model that

feeds into our support u streams so if

you go to versell.com/help

and you ask for help that's going to

reuse this global intelligence that

we're creating for the for the company.

We also wanted to make sure that

everybody in that works at Verscell, you

know, we've hired some of the best,

hardest working people that have

mastered the ins and outs of web and

cloud infrastructure and a lot of

companies come to us saying, can I hire

you for professional services or

support? And typically the answer has

been, look, we have over 100,000

customers. our ability to give like

comprehensive professional service

support is extremely limiting. But I

would love to help you out. Now we have

a mechanism because we can sell them our

AI agent and they can get as much of a

direct access to my brain and my CTO's

brain

>> to answer their problems. And then we

have Vzero which actually tries to like

go even more ambitious, right? Like

let's write the code for them. So in

many ways actually you can look at all

of this disruption from the lens of like

the most excellent customer service you

could give on the planet right like

customers have been asking us like hey

rout can you come you know give a

workshop I I I gave a workshop many many

years ago on XJS I wish I had the

bandwidth to do more of those. So AI I

feel like is that human amplifier of our

business,

>> that token factory that Jensen talks

about for our business. And the other

the other big change is that as you look

at all of the other areas of our

business like firewall and security,

like observability, all of the

foundations of our cloud, we are also

disrupting those with AI. So imagine a

an agent that instead of reporting that

your workload is experiencing 500 errors

can actually give you a pull request

with the solution

>> and it'll be rooted in the same systems

that are making us good at generating

applications. We'll use them to repair

production applications and to optimize

them.

>> How far are we from just fully

self-driving infrastructure? I know

you've automated a lot. How far are we

from sort of the picture you just

painted? I think we're practically

almost there. So it depends on each

domain. The best case scenario, we have

Verscell being able to automatically

scale for any kind of workload. And in

the worst case scenario, we can give you

a really good investigation of whatever

problem you're experiencing that is

completely autonomous. Mhm.

>> So, uh, going back to, you know, the

evolution of the company, I think the

the biggest sticking point was you have

to land the developer experience in

order to get all of this upside in the

autonomous infrastructure. What I'm

excited about is that if you now know,

you don't even have to convince

developers. If it's the agents that are

falling into those pits of success with

the frameworks, then you can have much

broader impact toward with this

autonomous infrastructure.

>> Maybe on a related point, why has chat

GPT been such an effective source of of

new customers and leads for you?

>> Yeah, we shared recently that the

sourcing of signups to versel from

ChatGpt has been growing exponentially.

So, I think there's a couple factors.

When we created the AI SDK, which you

can think of as the NexJS of AI, it's

it's a framework to allow developers to

connect to LLMs, we put out this

playground that essentially allows you

to talk to multiple LLMs at the same

time. So, it creates this column layout

and you can say, what's better,

Coca-Cola or Pepsi? And you can see all

the different LLMs respond with their

opinions. We've used this system over

time to understand what are the innate

vibes of the LLMs

>> around different technologies

and I can't tell you exactly how and why

these neural networks think in fact LM

interpretability is a is its own field

of study but over time if you ask it you

know what is the best way to deploy a

react application

due to all of its training data due to

all of the sourcing of all of the

opinions and writing and solutions and

GitHub issues and everything it's

trained on is chosen for sale a lot of

the time.

>> We had an anecdote the other day which

was fascinating at the AI engineering I

think this is a sign of of the changing

times at the AI engineering conference

in San Francisco. We had a booth and one

of our colleagues told me that people

would come to our booth and tell them

that they learned of Versel because Chad

Gupt told them to use Verscell. This

kind of changes how marketing is done,

right? Because like it used to be that

>> people would find out about Versel

because they watch a podcast like this

and you know to some extent that'll

still happen. Thanks for having me.

>> But now there's this you know you're

going directly to your AI buddy to to

learn about the world.

>> Totally.

>> The other aspect is that AIS are still

grounding themselves in search

>> to get access to like the cutting edge

breaking news data etc. So they are

performing Google searches. So, I always

advise our customers to still be mindful

of like look, you still have to rank

high and create good content. The kinds

of content I think that you're going to

be writing in the future uh are

different. I think you're going to have

to be thinking about look, people are no

longer doing keyword- based searches for

certain kinds of problems.

>> Yeah,

>> they're asking questions. The questions

might be more precise in some senses.

The questions might be in some in some

other aspects may be broader. And so

we've been trying to think LLM first in

how we also publish to the internet. And

I think we've had some good results.

People are hypothesizing that just

creating FAQ type content helps a lot

>> because you're kind of matching onetoone

what people could be asking. I I think

overall it's a great outcome for the

internet. like we're all asking

questions and we have these machines

that can digest the answers and and you

know uh uh help us navigate the the

immense sea of content that is the web.

>> So you don't have to promise your

firstborn kid to to OpenAI and the

robots.txt file.

>> That's right. That's right. So like you

still have to navigate like does OpenAI

like me? Does Grog like me, etc. So

hopefully you're on good terms with with

all of them.

>> I love it. Uh could you say a word about

how you see the competitive chessboard

playing out? And the way I see it, you

know, everyone is trying to get to this

ultimate goal of you have an idea of the

thing you want to build and then you

actually have a full kind of finished

application hosted deployed.

>> Um but there's different approaches

people are taking. Everything from your

approach to you know let me let me win

the IDE to let me let me go from the

design back uh the way Figma's Figma is

going. How do you think all this plays

out and does it all converge?

>> Yeah, I have a couple frameworks. I

think nobody will have the exact answer

at this point, but I'll give you a

couple frameworks of thought that I

have. One is this idea of virtual

co-workers.

So at Versel we have you know designers,

developers, marketers etc. We will now

have virtual designers, virtual

marketers, virtual developers. Probably

you can think of this as agents but

there is a wrinkle. These are expert

agents.

>> I think over time people will always

start with the double final of like the

broad safety net of I'll go to chatgbd

or I'll go to claude for my broad

knowledge questions but then I think

over time you're going to realize well

like I'm coming back to this thing with

this very specific set of problems. Is

there something better? I think it'll

come naturally, right? Like we've spoken

extensively about uh very successful

versell customers like open evidence I

if you've heard of it um

and gc.ai. I love these two examples

because one is my expert you know

healthcare physician they have a chachi

style interface but they source it in

the frontier data and they continue to

improve their models to provide better

accuracy domain expertise etc. not

unlike VZero, right? But for web

development and the other one is GZ.AI

which I love because same thing uh law

legal uh you have Harvey in the same

space you have FinTool and Hebia and

Perplexity sort of answering some of the

financial agent questions etc. So I see

a world of millions if not hundreds of

millions of agents and I think companies

have to think about you know if I was a

digital native and I came to market with

a SAS style dashboard UI if I came to a

market with a marketing website and a

content website etc. You must be asking

yourself the hard question of like, all

right, if I was reinvented today, my

interface would probably be agentic. And

I have two broad categorizations of

agents. You have the synchronous agents.

This is open evidence or chatb. You go

there and you ask a question and you get

an answer right away. I think that's

kind of the first generation. And then

you have the more potentially

interesting long-term which is the

asynchronous agents. These are the

agents that can work and solve broader

problems and can collaborate with other

agents potentially with other humans not

just you and can you know work for

prolonged amounts of time. So we're

starting to blur those lines with

products like Vzero because sometimes we

might go deeper in into a task that you

give us

>> and we might orchestrate you know

several steps in a row. Think of it as

like well if you come to us and you say

build me an interface that's optimal for

e-commerce maybe the agent will do some

research first on what it is exactly

that you need. So that's almost like an

extra step, right? The other class that

is super emergent is you look, you see

this with the IDE market. Your IDE with

AI is your synchronous agent interface.

>> But then you're vibing from bed and you

have a new idea and you're like, "Hey, I

just came up with the idea to fix that

problem." And you tell the agent to cook

on it and come back to you with a pull

request. And so what I encourage people

to think about the front ends are still

immensely important. You have to think

about the output front end because at

the end of all that work there is

something that comes out

>> your artifact. It might be a website. It

might be a port request. It might be a

chat message that asks you for your

confirmation or whatever. And you also

have to think about capturing people's

attention. the input side like you have

to if if I'm a a a doctor I have to

memorize okay what is the interface that

I go to and you have to make that really

ergonomic one thing that I've noticed by

studying UI a lot is there's a sense

that agents actually are their own

modality

and that it's very hard to like merge

them together with existing things is

why Verscell we chose to create a new

entry point and a new app vzero.dev

If you're Google, you have a tough

challenge ahead of you. This is why

they're calling their agentic interface

AI mode. It's almost like a separate

product. Kind of like Google Maps is is

a separate product. So there is a top of

funnel. You go to Google, but then you

have to like choose your warrior. Do I

go AI mode? Do I go maps? Do I go

images? Or do I go traditional keyword

search? So I I still encourage people to

sort of sweat the details on how are you

finding the customer and and are you

creating a very ergonomic entry point

into that intelligence uh agent?

>> Can you say more about why in your case

it makes sense for it to be a separate

product?

>> Yeah. So think of it as there's two

classes of users. You have the developer

that might be thinking about creating

more of a platform, right? You might be

thinking about the developer that is

more experienced and maybe already has

an existing infrastructure project,

maybe they have already GitHub

repository, etc. They're not going to

come into an interface that is purely

conversational, right? And so they're

they're seeking a different style of

engagement with Verscell. So that's why

I always encourage people to think about

look if you're creating the vzero of the

future go to Verscell because you you

you're going to need a different set of

tools to create a platform.

The world I think is splitting almost

into two classes of developers. The ones

that are creating apps and the ones that

are creating platforms and so if you're

creating an app we want you to have the

easiest possible onboarding journey that

is again more conversational. If you're

creating a platform, we're still making

it really easy for you. So like we give

you templates, we give you starting

points that are really meaningful, but

there's still a sense of like you're

going to have to roll up your sleeves

and like have to do a little bit more of

a traditional like developer work and

engagement. This is why the metaphor

that I use for the the Vero style

products is

think of it as Whimo where in the ideal

experience there's never a human

operator but there's still a very small

chance that there is a disengagement and

Whimo calls home

>> and a human has to intervene. So I think

of Verscell as a platform that has like

the human is more centered on the human

intervention where you're creating a

platform but you're more of an expert

and you're still going to have a lot of

AI tools in your journey. But Vzero is

the dream of that self-driving car that

end to end you never disengage. If you

happen to have to disengage we have

integrations we're building integrations

to code editors where you can say okay

this is as far as I got. Let me eject

into something like cursor or VS code.

But I think as LMS continue to improve,

you're going to see this VZero side of

the world take more and more and more

and more of that top of funnel. Yeah, I

myself as a coder

>> have not used the more traditional

coding tools in a while.

>> I just use Vzero

>> because again it's with my limited time

and bandwidth as a CEO, I'm obsessed

about like time to from idea to online

and VZero fits that bill perfectly.

>> Yeah. So Vzero and kind of the overall

trend of making it easier and more

seamless for people to produce software

is almost certainly going to lead to

more apps, more software in the world.

Will it also lead to better apps, better

software in the world or will it just

produce more noise?

>> I think it'll lead to better apps for

sure. um to check myself what I do very

frequently is I analyze the categories

of errors

>> that our customers are falling into or

ourselves are falling into and I always

ask myself could a model have solved

this problem

>> and this takes the form rigorously of

evaluations into our product. So

whenever we see I kind of mentioned the

it seems silly but like the you know the

background color between the Safari bar

and your content has to match that is

easily and trivially trainable so that

we can embed it and then we can put it

into the hands of millions of people.

The other thing we do is our security

research team is constantly on the

lookout for what are the broad classes

of vulnerabilities that are impacting

websites and web applications.

And I shared a story not too long ago

that our CTO found a vulnerability in an

open source framework.

Luckily, we helped them catch it and

repair it before this version of the

product broadly went out. What we did

right after is we created an eval

against all of the frontier coding

models.

We gave the task to the models of like

look this is the pull request. Do you

notice something wrong?

And I can't remember how many of them

got it right, but several of them got it

right.

It was it was a pretty non-trivial

vulnerability. And I remember at the

time I thought to myself,

>> the next version of this is that we can

give LLMs

existing code bases and have them spend

tokens and tokens and tokens until they

find problems like this. Lo and behold,

recently the news came out that in the

Linux kernel,

someone found that use after free

vulnerability, which is considered very

high severity because it can lead to a

segmentation fault, a crash, a denial of

service type of attack at best, or at

worst it can lead to data leaks, uh,

cryptographic secret leaks, etc., etc.,

remote code execution vulnerabilities,

the worst kind of vulnerabilities on the

planet. And this was done by 03 almost

exclusively.

>> There was some prompting, but it it

wasn't like nothing extraordinary.

And you know, I've spoken with people

that are very uh seasoned Linux kernel

engineers and they told me, look, the

reality is that there is a lot of those.

And he, you know, one of them kind of

trivialized the finding because he said

like, look, if I spend all of my time

doing this, I could find other use after

free vulnerabilities.

>> Yeah.

>> But the problem is that exactly that

there isn't that many Linux kernel

experts and that they don't have the

bandwidth to to find these kind of

vulnerabilities. So the reality is that

I think, you know, you're going to see

LLMs that create code that is secure by

construction.

>> Mhm. This is as LLMs get better at more

formal languages,

>> as they get better at Rust, as they get

better at safe languages, of which, by

the way, TypeScript is one of them.

You're going to see that LM are

producing more secure code for the

world. You're going to see that, you

know, the next hardleed won't happen in

a world of AI written code. Now, for

people that are listening to me, they're

probably like, "Wow, this guy is so

optimistic." We're also hearing that

LLMs are leaking secrets into web

browsers, like literally shipping

database secrets into clientside code.

What I'm very happy to report is that

Vzero

has prevented tens of thousands of such

vulnerabilities. Last I checked with one

of our AI research engineers,

it was a thousand vulnerabilities

prevented per day relative to what the

LM had the inclination to ship. Hm. And

this is where you were asking me what

are you know some of the u intrinsic

advantages that Verscell has. Well,

Verscell has really a really powerful

set of infrastructure primitives where

we can ship code that the LM generates

to the server side and deploy it

instantly. If it's interactive, we can

ship it to the client side. So, our

ability to guide the LM towards a secure

outcome is really, really high.

>> We can basically do what I would

recommend and what we in the

documentation would recommend a human

do. we can do on autopilot. But it's not

just security, it's also performance.

We're very excited about bringing agents

that automatically do the performance

optimizations that I still recommend to

entrepreneurs by hand. Like I kid you

not, I will DM you an X or I will text

you saying, "Oh, I noticed this glitch

here that is non-trivial to find by

frameworks." Why is it non-trivial to

find? Because they happen at runtime.

One of the things that makes web

engineering actually extremely complex

is that it's not a discrete process.

It's not a function that takes an input

and immediately produces a result. It's

uh in in programming language lingo, you

can think of it as a generator. It

produces multiple values over time. It's

like a set. So when you go to a website,

it's giving you information over time.

So for a website to be performant,

everything that is coming through your

retinas has to fall in the right place.

Companies like Apple are amazing at this

because so much of this is like

literally the human testing. Does it

feel right? They do a lot of demos. They

have a culture of like putting it into

people's hands before it goes out into

the world. So what I want to do is give

all of these tasks to an AI that

performs that quality judgment that

performs the performance optimization

and is rooted in all of the data that

gets captured in production so that by

the next generation your your software

gets better.

>> Yeah.

>> And now that computer use agents are

getting good, you can actually go and

click through and see how the experience

is. Yeah,

>> absolutely. Like an agent that just uses

the product and finds problems, right?

Uh so many of the uh startup pitfalls

that I see is I literally cannot log in

or sign up to your product.

>> Like literally like you give me a

something happened in that critical

path. So fun fun anecdote this week.

This past weekend my my uh fun hobby

task was I'm going to try every product

in the speechtoext operating system

category which is super hot right now.

There's three products that people are

using very broadly. Two of them I had

problems in that critical phase of

getting to the aha moment.

>> So that meant you know uh coming to the

website, downloading the app, signing

up, giving operating system permissions.

It's a very delicate process. It's

actually like hardcore distributed

systems problem. everything can fail and

it's a very delicate time to aha that

you're optimizing for and the system is

so dynamic that I I'm sure that the

entrepreneurs thought at some point this

is rock solid

>> trust me bro like I tested it worked

perfect but so many things can go wrong

that what you actually want is a QA

agent that is just constantly checking

this stuff especially for the critical

paths

>> totally

>> buying something sign signing up

contacting sales downloading the thing

uh and in the real world things are the

CTO of Amazon has this uh uh meme or fa

phrase is everything is failing all of

the time.

>> Mh.

>> And so you need robots that are

constantly watching everything and

repairing it.

>> Do you think that we end up in a world

of a lot of disposable apps or like what

happens in the world where everyone is

creating lots of apps all the time?

Yeah, I think I've always fought the

idea that an app is a permanent thing.

The idea that you download and install,

the idea that you have you seen on the

Mac, you download a DMG.

>> Yep.

>> Which is a kind of temporary volume.

It's a relegant of the past that we get

to experience very frequently. You mount

a temporary volume that later you have

to eject from finder and then you have

to drag and drop from the volume to

applications folder and now at that

point it's installed and it's like a

responsibility. It's like this is your

puppy now like take care of him, feed

him over time and then you have to

launch it and so that's insane to me

because I'm team web where everything is

instantaneous. Go to chatgbt.com go to

vzero.dev dev, right? And so I've always

been on this philosophical fight against

on one side the gatekeeping of the app

stores and so on. Not only on sort of

like this like idealistic and

philosophical sense, but also on the

latency and friction they introduce for

end users. It's insane. You go to the

app store on iOS and yes, you don't have

a DMG that you mount, but you have to

download the app which has takes

hundreds of megabytes and it takes

forever to download. So the web has

always felt to me as the end means of

distribution and the best platform to

actually host AGI

>> and I think of the web as being the

place where everything will be

generative just in time for everybody.

>> So I think it's even more ambitious at

personal software or ephemeral apps. I

think you won't even notice it's an

ephemeral app.

>> Everything will be ephemeral for that

matter.

>> Yeah. Uh and the battle here or the the

realization for me here was and it

happens very fre frequently still I have

this aversion now to searching for

software

because the idea that I can generate it

seems in my mind to beat the total

latency of finding the software

installing it. M

>> so we're in this race between if the

generations continue to get better

>> quality performance security reliability

then it's it's going to be an unwinable

battle for the downloadable installable

procurable god forbid like you have to

procure the software

>> it's just an impossible battle to win so

I'm team

>> fully generative uh software uh forever

>> that's interesting I'm thinking about

that in the context of your comment

earlier about how you have to think

about your customer who is the developer

and also your customer's customer who is

the end user. Does that mean that

eventually

your developer customer is not producing

a single app that's going to serve a

bunch of users? Those users are each

somehow interfacing with something the

developer has done on vzero or on

Verscell. It's generating applications

on the fly for each individual user.

>> That's right.

>> That's wild.

>> Yeah. It's almost like a direct human to

agent interface, right?

>> Yeah. Yeah.

>> And yes, like I think developers will be

creating agents. That's agentic

platforms is kind of my my distinction,

right? That's why I was mentioning if

that's your goal, you probably are going

to oversell. But if you're if your goal

is to actually generate apps, you're

going to Vzero and Vzero itself might

become sort of the engine of generation

of this future internet. you know, we're

we're starting to uh see some

integrations into web browsers,

especially now with the model where

people can just call Vzero just in time

from existing applications and existing

distribution channels. The the battle

will continue for where are users going,

you know, where are the front ends that

they're spending time in? And I think

those are the things that we need to

continue to pay attention to.

>> Yeah.

>> Reminds me of that Jensen quote at AI

sense of like all pixels will be

generated, not rendered. It's like that

for your web experience as well. Really

cool. Should we wrap with some rapid

fire questions?

>> Let's go.

>> Okay. Favorite AI app right now.

>> Well, Vzero.

>> Okay. Favorite AI app.

>> Outside your own baby.

>> Um, okay. I'm really into this new, as I

mentioned, uh, talk about

self-disruption. I grew up known as the

kid that typed really fast. I'm really

into this new category of super whisper,

whisper flow, the speech to text that

boggles people's minds. Uh, it's it's

fascinating to play with.

>> Pat types really slow, so he must be

excited that

>> it's funny. I I've actually started

taking typing lessons, so I get better

at that.

>> We did we did a typing competition one

day when we're bored.

>> Oh, that's so cool. Who won?

>> I won. But me and then Andrew,

>> I wasn't like embarrassing behind. I But

I I'll tell you what, it it is

impressive that I can do 90 words per

minute with like two to four fingers.

>> By the way, so um it's it's indicative

of future success at Versel that we hire

people that are fast typists.

>> Yes.

>> So you you should apply.

>> Okay.

>> By the way,

>> by the way, the the really cool thing is

there's something about intelligence

having evolved through motor dexterity.

Like the the things that you do for a

kid when they're growing up, like the

test that you give them when like

they're very little is like how is their

speech evolving? Like them like clear

sign of like development, but also how

is their dexterity? Can they throw? Can

they grab? Can they grasp? So you should

we all collectively should continue to

learn how to type fast.

>> But it's really cool that now these

speech text things are are so like

mindbogglingly fast.

>> Yeah.

>> Love that. Um, who who do you admire in

the world of AI?

>> Carpathy. So, funny enough, when he

introduced the term vibe coding, he

talked about using super whisper as I'm

just going to speak and applications

will be generated.

>> I think he laid out a great vision of

the future that is coming into fruition.

And obviously, he did it also before at

Tesla with self-driving. So I think it

yeah hugely inspiring.

>> Uh recommended reading

>> recommended reading

>> your Twitter.

>> I do love X. Um okay so I there's a

bunch of like engineering articles that

I love but okay so one that comes to

mind is there was an article that was

called the five wise

>> and I think it was called like the five

wise and why the world is about to get

weirder. H actually talks about uh

airplane crashes. Sadly, there was one

today. And and and he talks about how

rare they are. And and because they've

gotten so rare, the world has been

studying and adding patches and

protocols and fixes so that nothing bad

happens again. And it's a very

interesting sort of mental model on on

what the world of AI. This article

doesn't deal with AI, but it talks about

a future in which we've perfected and

refined so many things that the things

that bubble up. The things that are

going to come into your ex feed of the

future are going to be the wildest

>> because yeah, everything is getting so

good so fast

>> that is whatever breaks the norm goes

from zero to taking over the world.

You're starting to see a little bit of

this with startups. Yeah,

>> I don't know if you've noticed that like

the pace at which they're growing,

>> how weird sometimes the things that they

do to get big or get attention are,

which I'm not exactly a fan of, but this

article was fully predictive of.

>> In the world of AI, what's overhyped?

What's underhyped?

>> I think underhyped, oh, underhyped is so

easy. LLMs are so capable and there's so

many great applications, so many great

applications to be created and shipped

and so I'm a team. All right, even if we

froze everything as it exists, the

amount of value that the world will get,

the amount of successful entrepreneurs

will see in the future building on this

new platforms. It is a new platform,

it's a platform shift. It requires that

you rewire your brain, which is very

hard to do. Uh, and luckily for some

people, they're just going to be born

into this and they're just going to see

a lot of upside, right? Uh, it's very

good underhyped,

like being an engineer that never

learned anything about the old world and

now can, you know, one of my bangard

tweets recently was almost like a

confession. I feel like the most the

more honest and and like the more I

confess, you know, AIS are like this

confidant that you trust with everything

and especially around like not asking

silly questions like there's nothing

that's a silly question. There's no

embarrassment. And so the rate of

improvement o over uh world models,

mental models, uh the things that you're

going to be competent at, you were

before constrained by either what your

personality was. If you were kind of

aspie, like maybe had a lower bay filter

for like asking important and

interesting questions. Now you can just

ask any question in the world and get

good at anything. You can truly know it

all. I'm really jealous of like

someone's growing up today with this

like psychic magic powers.

>> Yeah.

>> Overhyped. Um,

>> you know, I take such a longterm

view that it's hard for me to find

something that's truly overhyped.

>> I'll be hyped about Bitcoin at its peak.

I'll be hyped about crypto. I've been

hyped about crypto for years uh through

laws, winter, summers, whatever because,

you know, all money will be digital of

course and all software will be AI. So,

it's very hard for me to like say, well,

that's overhyped if you take a a very

long long long-term view.

>> Yeah,

>> great answer. Okay, last question.

Timelines. When do you think we'll get

to that uh utopia of the kind of uh

generative web? I think in the next five

years we'll see the biggest

transformation to the web in its

interfaces in the habits of people in

the number of creators that are coming

into participating in the web.

>> Even five sounds like a lot. I will even

say in the next three years we're gonna

see kingdoms collapse in a sense of like

you know companies that were born on the

internet that have not been able to make

those adjustments fast enough and the

new AI native companies rise to to as we

were speaking earlier to like un

unprecedented heights very very quickly.

>> Wonderful GMO. Thank you so much for

taking the time to share with us your

vision for the future of the web uh and

the generative web and Verscell's role

in in creating that.

>> Thank you for having me. That was fun.

>> Thank you.

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