Guillermo Rauch

Guillermo Rauch is an Argentine-American engineer who taught himself to program as a kid in Buenos Aires, dropped out of school for the open-source web, and created Socket.IO, the library that brought real-time communication to a generation of web apps. In 2015 he founded the company now called Vercel, steward of Next.js — one of the most widely used web frameworks — and a deployment platform valued in the billions.

Everyone becomes a builder

Rauch has bet Vercel’s next act on AI-generated software. In 2023 the company launched v0, a tool that turns plain-English prompts into working web interfaces, and Rauch became one of the most visible evangelists for the idea that the pool of software builders is about to grow from a few million developers to over a hundred million people. On Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast in April 2025 — an episode titled “Everyone’s an engineer now” — he described v0’s mission as creating a hundred million builders; Vercel’s San Francisco billboards riffed on Ratatouille’s “anyone can cook.”

Speaking on Every’s AI & I podcast in February 2025, he was candid about what that means for his own identity: the craft he obsessed over for years is becoming a machine skill, and the human value moves up the stack — to taste, product judgment, and knowing what to build. Where Andrej Karpathy framed the shift as English becoming a programming language, Rauch is building the commercial infrastructure that assumes it.

Skeptics of the vision note that v0-style tools excel at demos and interfaces while production systems still demand engineers — a critique Rauch partly concedes by positioning v0 as the on-ramp, with professional tooling and review workflows underneath.