The story of Vercel CEO - Guillermo Rauch

Guillermo Rauch is the founder and CEO of Vercel - a product that has made the the lives of so many developers simpler by allowing them to easily host and deploy web applications. However, his journey is not without struggles; it is a story of passion and perseverance. He never received formal education in computer science and had to find his own way to immigrate to the US to start a company.

Guillermo was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. At a young age, he started building websites - for example, a web based calorie counter. He was a bit frustrated with the complexity of existing development tools, which would later influence his technical journey.

He embraced open source software, which became one of the foundational pillars in his career. He significantly contributed to javascript based open source projects, and also authored some of the most widely used libraries such as:

Socket.IO - A popular library for real-time communication. Its underlying engine powers Notion’s realtime sync.
Mongoose - The most popular way of accessing MongoDB data in javascript ecosystem.

The O-1 Visa

Being a high school dropout, Guillermo was lacking formal academic certificates, making it challenging for him to immigrate to the US. To meet one of the multiple criteria for the O-1 visa, he wrote a book on everything he’d learned about NodeJS and server-side JS. After many challenges, he was eventually able to make his case based on his contributions to open-source software and his technical expertise, and obtained the sought-after visa for individuals with extraordinary abilities.

Technical Journey

Guillermo then immigrated to the US at the age of 18. He initially worked as a software developer in the silicon valley. His O-1 visa allowed him to stay and pursue entrepreneurial ventures.

At 22 he co-founded Cloudup, a file-sharing platform, which was later acquired by Automattic. This experience gave him insights into running and scaling businesses.

Two years later he founded Vercel (initially called Zeit). He started to design and author a web development framework for React, and as a result, NextJS was born. Today NextJS powers web apps for some of the biggest and most popular companies like Nike, Washington Post, Stripe, Spotify, OpenAI, Claude, and so many more. Most of these are powered by Vercel itself for deployment and hosting, including E-bay, Notion, and Adobe.

For the love of building

Guillermo’s journey is an inspiration for so many developers and founders who are building for the love of creating and innovating. From a self-taught programmer in Argentina to leading one of the biggest web infrastructure companies, his story shows the power of passion and perseverance.