AI Transformation and the Future of Coding: Insights from Guar, CEO of Versel

In many ways, I think MCB will be the new business development, but it's going to be at a 100 times the speed. It's not

going to be people meeting and it's going to be agents meeting. We can call it AI transformation. Every company will

have to rethink itself what Jensen Huang calls a token factory. The fundamental thing is that companies will be

producing intelligence at scale. Welcome to the Mad Podcast. Today we have an epic conversation with Guar, the CEO of

Verscel. A legendary engineer and one of the most prolific coders of this generation. Giammo moved to the US from

his native Argentina when he was 18 years old and sold his first startup to WordPress a few years later. He then

started Versel, a cloud platform to develop and ship fast web apps which has grown to over 6 million users and powers

websites like Stripe, Adobe, Midjourney, Nike, and OpenAI. On top of that, Versella has scored a major hit with the

launch of Vzero, their immensely popular text to code AI builder. This is a really fun conversation where we covered

tons of ground, including the rise of vibe coding. There's a way of building software where you don't pay attention

to the code. The importance of taste. You need taste. You need to have a vision of what you want and you need to

be able to articulate it. Versel's brand new AI cloud that they just announced yesterday at their annual Versel ship

conference. An AI cloud should have agents that automatically produce solutions rather than give you problems.

The fundamental importance of the MCP protocol. think about MCP is like the HTTP for AIS, a protocol that allows AIS

to talk to other AIS and what advice he would give himself if he were an 18-year-old developer today. My advice

would be focus a lot on getting to know everything that's available in the new world. Please enjoy this fantastic

conversation with Germa Raj. GMA, welcome. Thanks for having me. So you're recording this on the big Versel

ship annual conference and the big announcement of this week is the AI cloud which we're going to discuss at

length uh in a minute but I was hoping to uh start with Vzero which is a big hit that you have on your hands and it

seems like it was an overnight sensation when uh you launched everything that works is an overnight success. Yes. Uh

so you launched it in the in the fall of of 2024 and you've been on a tear since. Are there any metrics or any qualitative

information uh you can share to help us get a sense for traction? Yeah, it's pretty insane. We've passed over 100

million generations of applications. For those that don't know, Vzero allows you to convert text to application, idea to

application. It speaks to an audience that Versell has typically not spoken to. It's basically everybody with a job

or even everybody without a job. Whereas Versel required that you knew engineering skills. This requires that

you have an idea. I think it's the embodiment of what people have been calling vibe coding. And to give you an

idea of the difference between the two personas, every single second there's seven app generations happening on

Vzero. Vzero has more than doubled the entire user base of Versel. And Versell has

been around for almost 10 years. uh vis has doubled our number of users in less than a year and so what's happening

really is that coding is being automated more people can code with the ease that you could type into chat GBT and I think

that's creating more software some people call it personal software or hyper specialized applications but the

two things that are driving this is one I call it everybody can cook you and I have an idea we can

bring it to life as individuals, right? Like during the weekend, maybe with our kids, the other thing that's happening

is that within companies, teams and enterprises, people have the same fundamental need. They need to prototype

their ideas. They need to communicate better with designers and marketers and engineers like everybody needs to come

together around something tangible and real. And that's what VZO is enabling. And by the way, I I read somewhere that

um part of the reason why you were able to launch this uh quickly is that you had a separate SWAT team within the

company of uh what was it 10 people? How did that work? It's 10 people now. It's actually been It was less. Yeah, it was

I think I actually saw a photo of the original team the other day. It was four people and one was me who was doing QA

when we were launching it. So the idea was because we're building the AI cloud, we need to be able to prove to ourselves

and the world that this infrastructure has a good first patient zero application.

We wanted to embody what we believe every company will go through. We can call it AI transformation. We can call

it AI. Every company will have to rethink itself as what Jensen Huang calls a

token factory or what I could call you know a AI native interface or you could call it an agent. It doesn't matter what

you call it. The fundamental thing is that companies will be producing intelligence at scale. And for sale for

many many years we've been in this business of creating like what I believe to be like really high quality web

experiences. And so we wanted to put that on autopilot like how can we get everybody in the world to be able to

produce those highquality web experiences. So we infused a lot of our knowledge. We connected it to the things

that we are experts in. So obviously we created the Nex.js framework. Nex.js today is the largest web framework in

the React ecosystem. 1.4 million monthly active developers. So imagine going from 1.4 4 million monthly active developers

to you know a 100 million to a billion developers. That's what Vzero enables. So you can you know if you're cooking on

Versel the thesis is you can do that with an extraordinarily small team you can start

with like three people four people because all the infrastructure stuff is taken care of. So Vizer is full stack

versel front end backend middleware and some of the new primitives that we're introducing uh this week and that's um

you know a theme that people have been thinking about a lot in the last uh whatever year or two this idea that you

can build very large companies with very oh yeah few people. So you you've you're the living embodiment of it. We've

created that startup within the startup. That's right. And right now, this is probably breaking news of this podcast,

but we've actually as of last week fully adopted what what I call the GM model. There's a general manager for Vzero.

He's like the CEO of Vzero and he's a customer of the Verscell platform. This is not unlike people as a service kind

of micro architecture for people. This is not unlike the micros service architecture Amazon and AWS paradigm

right like you can think of vzero as amazon.com we all use it you know anybody can shop uh anybody can cook on

v 0ero but you know as far as like the verscell infrastructure we actually host a lot of

prolific competitors to vzero as well I believe that there's going to be billions of agents I l right before this

meeting I got another pitch for a code review coding agent that had interesting properties and niches that it was

satisfying. So as the market realizes that every company, every task, every role will need this complimentary

agents, we want to be the platform on top of which they're built. So Vzero actually benefits a lot from that kind

of infrastructure, but also the agility that this GM model gives us. You mentioned uh competitors. So I think it

would be really helpful for people to hear you compare and contrast the various companies and products that fall

under the general AI coding umbrella whether that's cursor or winerf or lovable or replet. Does everybody do the

same thing or different things in different ways? Great question. So as of last week uh an article came out that I

loved by the zed team the high performance text editor with AI native uh capabilities or code editor. They

called what their focus will be agentic engineering to contrast it with vibe coding. They kind of I think maybe

provocatively some people took it as like ah vibe coding is old agentic engineering is new. My framework is that

there is vibe coding and there is agentic engineering in the sense of look if you're working on Verscell's mission

critical infrastructure. I literally just announced on X that we hit a trillion function invocations on our new

fluid compute platform. A trillion function invocations. the people that work on that infrastructure platform,

you know, sure they should vibe code maybe to like test things out and whatever, but I want them to even

agentic engineering is like, hey, like you have to be on, you have to put a lot of attention into everything that the

the agent generates, etc. This is hardcore deep engineering. VIP coding is the coding that will be

available to everybody in the world. And I think both have a place in this world. And our bet with vzero is actually that

there is connective tissue between the two worlds. You can start on v 0ero vibe coding and with our git integration for

example you can begin collaborating with people that are doing more agentic engineering you can eject to

professional coders you can get help from professional coders etc. So there is a binding between these two worlds

but Vzero is sort of the top of final personal software and everybody in the organization participating whereas I

think agentic engineering I think for the foreseeable future until we really you know reach

SSI or safe super intelligence or whatever you want to call it or AGI it'll still it's going to be a more

reduced number of software professionals and the way that I anticipate it going is look mission critical infrastructure

uh and really low-level stuff more on the agentic engineering side. And then if you're creating apps, interfaces,

demos, prototypes, specifications, slide decks, you know, vis versatile piece of software, you're going to be on

the sort of vibe vibe coding world. And again, in an effort to make this uh interesting to a broad group of people,

uh could you actually define vibe coding? I think for for people that live on you know X minuteby minute it's it's

obvious but there's a large group of people that are just starting to hear about it. Yeah. VIP coding is uh came up

uh in a ex thread of Andra Karpathy who was the lead of machine learning at Tesla worked on self-driving cars later

joined open AAI and later left and he started you know building software and he realized look there's a way of

building software where you don't pay attention to the code it's almost like the postcode way of building software

because the LLMs and the agents have gotten so good. You give them your product requirements. You give them what

you want to build and they just start building and they and you can see what's being built and you can give feedback.

So it's not fully autonomous. You're still, you know, driving, but you're not caring so much about what's being

generated. You're caring about the product that's being like what does it look like? What does it feel like? And

this was excellent in the context of Vzero because Vzero has always had that focus on like the most important thing

is does it fulfill the the vision of the end user like do you want it to look a certain way. We always started you know

arguably we started all of our engineering kind of like interface first. We care a lot about how things

look and feel adversel. So VIP coding is now become that it started out as a as a way of describing

how Karpathy was using cursor. He was also using a tool called super whisper so that he could talk to the machine. So

like imagine just like being in a sci-fi movie where like you sit down like this and you just start talking and then

interfaces show up and you're like ship that. That's kind of what vibe coding is. The really cool thing that I think

is new uh and this is the space of vzero and lovable and rebllet is that this is continuously getting more and more

democratized everybody can now use these applications and it's very exciting I think you know when I think about the

tam the total addressable market of each tool when I think about the coding IDE you still have to be a coder meaning you

know how to download an ID you have to you you know how to set up you know the dev server the tooling the SDKs, the

libraries. Whereas a product like Vzero, the TAM is everyone with a computer and they can

just open a website as opposed to having to download something. You can just go to vzero.dev and you start cooking. So I

think it's exciting because again there's a connective tissue. So cursor and claude code and windsurf they're

really good at what they do. Uh one of the other announcements that we've made recently is we took the vzero model the

sort of underlying code generation engine and we've made it available to code editors as well. So there's a lot

of crosspollination that's happening in this in this ecosystem right. So you can take a tool like cursor VS code open

code and you can say please use the visero model. Now the question is why would you want to do such a thing? Why

would you use that over the stock anthropic model etc. Well, we're continuously infusing our expert

knowledge on building Nex.js and React applications. We have up-to-date knowledge on the libraries that are

really important like the AI SDK. We infuse design patterns and taste. Uh, we have a bunch of best practices about how

to build applications, which is super exciting to me because I the story of my life is that I've just

been a door-to-door evangelist of like best practices for web applications. I still do it. Your your new uh Twitter

bio right there. Yeah. And uh you know B Brazil actually started because I'd gone to Braziljs

a massive uh conference with thousands of engineers and he gave a presentation called the seven rich principles of web

applications and I did two things there. I presented this essay that I'd written and he also

made a joke about uh Brazil losing 7 to1 with Germany and I'm from Argentina which is like not

not a super smart thing to do. Uh but then when I came home I was living in San Francisco at this point. I realized

well I can't scale myself by just going to every conference in the world making bad jokes about soccer and uh and

teaching people. It's just too much. is said could I create a framework that embeds these best practices and that's

how NexJS was born. It was literally an essay to web framework pipeline. Now web frameworks get you far but there's a lot

of beginning and effort like for everyone to understand Nex.js being the open source library that you created on

top of React. Yeah, for context, Nex.js powers a lot of your favorite web applications. You don't know it. It's

sort of the plumbing of the pixels behind. It's like for a pixel to appear on your screen, there has to be a

technology that renders that pixel uh for web applications. So, Nex.js is one of the most popular in the world. Uh for

example, we're just talking about Midjourney's new model. Midjourney.com is built with Nex.js, but so is

Walmart.com and so is Nike.com. And that's the technology that I mentioned has 1.4 million active uh

developers, but it's not everybody in the world. But also, and I've talked to Nike's team about this, when I go to

nike.com, me Rouch G, I can spot a few things that are like uh I would have done this differently. So, how can I

scale my knowledge and my team's knowledge? My CTO was at Google for 11 years. Uh my CPO was at Meta and created

React. He was there for 13 years. Would could there be a technology that allows us to download our brain and sort of

disseminate those uh best practices and ideas that I would go to conference to talk about and that's a model. So the

vzero model is essentially my brain into tokens and my team's brain and the community's brain and we're constantly

making it better. And I I think that is the crux of every company in the world I believe will have to go through a

similar process. How do you go from you know ad hoc or maybe SAS software etc to tokens v0ero as a result is very uh

front end centric is that is that fair as of now and then if so is part of the road map to add more backend to it.

Yeah. So people have asked us for a long time to create entire web applications. When Vzero came out, the models couldn't

really do it like they couldn't generate enough thinking to sustain data flows and state. State is like a really

complicated word that we deal with in in development a lot. So we started out with like more of just uh you could call

it like simple stateless applications. Over time, we've developed more of an ecosystem of integrations. So, it's now

possible to get data from other platforms that bring full stack to vzero. So, Superbase is a good example

of uh we have an integration that allows you to basically have a Postgress database. So, you can read and write

data. Another really exciting integration actually and we haven't really publicized this broadly, but it's

the beginning. We built an integration of Salesforce commerce cloud. So we showed how you can vibe code e-commerce

and you could imagine vibe coding interfaces for sales processes. You know in so many ways v 0ero feels a lot like

the what the spreadsheet and the word processor allow people to do is like you

can you can turn simple tools into very you know flexible and and potentially sophisticated business processes. We're

hoping to do that same thing through this ecosystem of integrations. The other huge integration obviously is the

AI models. People want to use AI to create AI apps or to prototype AI apps. One of our largest customers uh it's a

Fortune 10. And the reason that they use Vzero is because they're trying to think about what does our future with AI look

like. We have to very quickly prototype. have to, you know, see things and experience them at the speed of thought,

not at the speed of like multi-quarter planning. Think about a quarter in AI could be 20

different models, three new architectures, etc., etc., and it doesn't seem like it's slowing down

anytime soon. So, Vzero is is being useful for the individuals that want to create full stack apps. is also being

very useful for the enterprises that want to prototype and come up with their next big app. Let's spend a second on

the implication of all of this and then we'll go into the the back end, how it works behind the scenes, the AI cloud

and and all of those things. But um so vibe coding uh curious about your thoughts about uh

the sort of general implications of this um including how does one become a good vibe coder? Yeah, I believe that the

Rick Rubin thing that went viral quite a few times now, which is you need taste, you need to have a vision of what you

want and you need to be able to articulate it. You know, those are like the fundamental like literacy of a of a

person. A successful individual will be able to discern what they want and what they don't want. They'll be able to give

feedback. You know, so much of being good at or successful in Silicon Valley is receiving and giving feedback, right?

Or or even paying attention to the feedback that your customers are giving you. In some so many ways, I think you

and the AI are like you and a co-orker that are going back and forth. Not unlike if I had an idea and I hired

someone off of a jobs marketplace to do it, right? So now you have AI which never gets tired which is being kept up

to date with everything that's happening in the world and also has companies like Verscell that are infusing new knowledge

and expert knowledge in it. So you're basically having this like worker that can make your ideas come true but

obviously you still need to come here and input the idea. There are things that we're doing to help you. So a good

example is a VZero community. It's massive now. So, we help connect people that have ideas with all of these

examples that exist in the world of, you know, it might be a dashboard, it might be a crypto app, it might be an cool

animation. And so, there's a there's a lot of things that you can one-click clone, which is a very successful sort

of like go to market motion for a lot of really popular apps, like notion, for example. The cool thing about notion is

I could go to notion. They were like, "All right, it's really cool with an empty document,

but that requires like a certain amount of creativity and and and intention." Yeah. Or you can just get something from

the community. So that's that's a way, you know, which is a big problem for AI in general, right? Like we uh we in

front of Chad GP or whatever. All of these UI quote look the same. People people make fun of this sometimes like

they take a screenshots of like four, five, eight apps and and they all say something similar like Vzero asks you

what do you want to ship? Mhm. If you don't know what you want to ship, you can start with something from the

community. Another way to start is from a screenshot. So or even a diagram. Sometimes people just don't know how

powerful these things are. You could literally take a photo of your napkin idea. like you can draw it, take a photo

of it, upload it, and it'll give you something pretty good. There's a couple other things. We have a little button

called uh embellish prompt or enhance prompt. So, if you wrote a very simple prompt, it'll enhance it. By enhance it,

it's like someone that is giving you ideas like that friend is like, "Oh, that's cool, but why don't you do this

other thing?" So, you have to be aware that when you press enhance prompt, somebody else is giving you ideas.

They're not necessarily yours, right? So I do think it's it's that there's still a ton of value for the wouldbe vibe

coder to get a lot of exposure to the world to get even just looking at products looking at what's what other

people are doing in in gives you more of that context so that when you prompt next time you come up with a with a

better thing that you want and I think the eloquence to express that is also very important. It's fascinating. We

were having on on this podcast conversation with Benedict Evans. I don't know if you follow his work, but

we're talking about um the open box on chat GPT versus a GUI and the beauty of GUI being that it already embeds a

finite universe of things you can do by clicking on buttons. So, it sounds like a lot of what you're talking about is

sort of one step towards the the GUI for AI. Yeah, I think the problem with guey is that to your point, it's trying to

guide the user, but it's trying to show the entire kitchen sink at once. If I think about the guies of products in

this category, like the if you even go back to things like Dreamweaver, Front Page, but then you look at other website

builders, etc. You know, I never know which one to press for the thing that I need to do. If you really decoded the

neural pathway of how a human thinks, a lot of it is a train of thought that you're following

and then it gets parsed into okay, I parse that train of thought. All right, now I need to use this tool. But starts

with the intention. The intention is please create a form, please move this thing to the left, please uh do a

different style for this thing, please connect it to this API, etc., et etc. So you're you're starting with the

intention and then it arrives to the to the outcome or the tool. Whereas guey is

frontloading all of the tools. In fact, you know something that's fascinating is what an agent fundamentally is is

there's a context, there's a prompt and there's a set of tools. But it's hard to visualize it because

it's all APIs. It's behind the scenes the agent has been given these tools. So I'll give you a very simple example.

When you give a URL to Vzero, Vzero can visit that URL to obtain information or take a screenshot because

you might say, "Hey, you know, for this page, I really wanted to be inspired on, I don't know, New York Times.com."

So the agent has that that tool to be able to use a web browser and get inspiration from it or do research or

whatever. So we're entering a world where it used to be that the tools get drawn in front

of your face and you had to wield them. In this new world, the tools are given to the agent and the agent wields them

and decides when to use which. You could also kind of influence it. You can of course tell it. You can guide the agent.

But for the most part, it's just really really powerful to give the agents more and more tools, a little bit of context

or perhaps a lot of context depends on like what stage of the development of the process you are. Uh and that and

then the magic happens. Two things I want to talk about agents and I want to talk about um taste u for agents. Do do

you consider vzero to be an agent or a co-pilot? uh in a world where some people in the

eye coding world have made the claim that they're full-on agents. Yeah, I started out as a copilot like you

mentioned kind of for more like design and front end. But as you get more ambitious with the things that you

wanted to do like create more interactive code, data fetching code, etc., you always end up with an agentic

architecture because you realize that LLMs are not bulletproof. LLMs just like us, right? Like if if you

watched a developer code, one thing that you would notice is that almost constantly they're running into

errors. I would say, you know, developers get paid really well, but their job is actually kind of it's like

not that pleasant. It's just like costly being bered. Compile red. It's all red. You never see red in UIs. Why? because

we reserve that for like negative feedback, right? So, other than I don't know, I can think of like CNN.com like

there's very few uh staples. There's very few major brands that even go with red these days. All blue, grays, greens,

etc. or black, of course, nicely coordinated. Nicely coordinated today. Yes. And um but a developer is

just constantly getting so if forget about AI if you'd watched a bunch of recordings of what your software

developers do at your at your company you would have seen oh they get this popup if they're working with tools like

NexJS or they're getting this popup all the time that has error type check failure undefined whatever or if they're

in a terminal they're getting all these red letters or the developer forgets something or doesn't quite remember an

API so they they command tab which is a shortcut for going into another window and they go into Google and this is

before AI right and they would search they sometimes they would copy paste the error put it in there open a website

tells them something about the error come back to the text editor what's happened in last two years essentially

is that we've taken that workflow and we've given it to an agent instead so the agent reads the error sometimes in v

0ero we don't can render the error because we know with a high probability that the agent is going to fix it. Mhm.

So that's why it feels magical. You don't even see this stuff. It's happening behind the scenes. And that's

why I mentioned that the magic of agents is that they took away all the graphical user interface because they're taking

all those tools and they're using it themselves and they're just coming to you with the the result. And

increasingly that result gets higher and higher and higher quality, more bulletproof. And so obviously it's

happening much faster than a developer could because a developer if you think about that uh keyboard shortcut that was

a developer trying to do research really fast. I can make my agent especially with the growing ecosystem of MCP

servers I can make my agent do that research 10 times faster 100 times faster and go through those cycles of

iteration really really quickly. How do you think about the concept of developer love which Versel is one of those rare

products that has achieved massive amounts of uh developer love in a context precisely where the eye craps

out on a regular basis and probably always will. So I guess you just mentioned

a minute ago that it abstracts away some of the errors but equally it's a mind shift. Yeah. So how do you how do you

make people happy? Yeah, it's really interesting. So the way to think about agents and the

the things that the models in VZero need are not too different from what humans need. For example, if you if you if

you're a developer tool builder, something that you would have been known for in the past generation was you put a

lot of effort into writing really good error messages. They were being processed by a human.

Now it's the same, but they're being processed by an agent. Things, some things are changing. I

think the errors that we would give humans needed to have a lot of like visual context.

AIS just need a stream of bites. They just need like raw like raw information straight into their brains, right? Like

pure signal, no noise. So that's kind of the big difference. I've been talking to a lot of researchers that have been

working on like deep research for things like open AI anthropic etc because Verscell is very invested in the future

of the web and it was we were kind of like you know coming up with what is the best framework for how you would present

your content your documentation etc for the next for the future of the internet which you know today if you write a

documentation website you're putting a lot of like navigation and pixels and whatever and that's great for humans,

you still want to have that, but AIS just need raw signal. So, there's a new emergence uh there's an emerging

convention which is HTML for humans and .txt literally.txt like it's like 1950s and we're in BBS's and Unix terminals.

LLM.txt or raw markdown is better for agents. So if you're building developers still

today, you have to have that duality in your head. You you need to think, okay, how do I make my content, my errors, my

developer tools great for agents. What's actually kind of neat is I've always been a geek of like the Unix days and

command line interfaces and terminals and those things are actually amazing for Asians. So a lot of the things that

Versell have been working on because kind of my fascination with that have become super relevant. there's almost

like a circularity in relevance. Uh we started Verscell with a really simple command line application. You would type

Verscell enter and that would deploy and then we built a lot of graphical user interfaces because we needed to attract

more and more people and you know I was told repeatedly by everybody investors advisors users everyone's like are you

sure you want to be just in the command line interface because that was kind of my my uh my bias. Uh but nowadays when

you ask clot code anthropics agent to deploy they use versel because we we had you could argue accidentally created the

perfect tool for an agent to deploy. So long story short you need to be thinking about agents as your customer and

developers as your customer. There is a lot of commonalities not necessarily though and so you have to you have to

really pay attention. Um, but that's the new world, right? Like you're not just catering to the developer choosing their

own tools. You're you're catering to an agent that chooses tools. So developer love and agent love. Agent love. Yeah.

You mentioned taste uh which is um both an exciting concept but very amorphous. And I I heard you talk about how uh in

order to increase or improve taste uh you suggested increasing exposure. Yeah. Uh but what what does that mean in

practice? If you're uh a developer at Verscell and you know you want to do great at your job and your says well you

need to have better taste what what do I do? Yeah maybe to to set the background I believe that every big inter internet

or technology wave has come with a trend and an anti- trend. So when when the internet came out and when we all got

email we got spam. So, it's like the the the tale of two cities, email and spam. Email awesome connects the world. Spam.

Oh my god, I'm getting fished by a Nigerian prince. I I would believe the next one probably happened with

Facebook, right? Like, oh my god, we're the world is getting connected, but then people started getting concerned about

privacy and uh you know, maybe how they were spending their time. Certainly, this is the case with Tik Tok. So you

get incredible like a creator platform then you get you know and Tik Tok is actually a good example of like you get

a lot of negative externalities and I think with AI we have the problem of slop it's kind like Tik Tok in a way

like Tik Tok could be great like it could be enhancing our IQs it could be teaching us girl Esther Bach all day

long but in reality we're just we're seeing like twerking or whatever right and so I'm glad you and I have the same

feel yeah exactly I thought it tuned it carefully. And so with AI, I think it's really important that the AI creators,

the companies, the model makers, etc., we set the bar for what people are going to create with it. Like I think Tik Tok

could have set a different bar. And so what we've done with VZ is we've embedded uh instructions. We've embedded

context. Context is king really, right? like the things that you make the model aware that exist or you want are really

important but I think there's a still because the models have like I mean even if you look at their size right like

they have so much information so many parameters that in some ways you have to discover

people call it actually discovering the latent space if you pictured it as uh you know ready player one where in this

infinite metaverse do you go to what do you pick from this tree of life like what do you manifest into the world and

so what I call exposure hours is you have to one you have to understand how people interact with your own products

today if you already have a product you have to really pay attention to okay how are people exactly leveraging your

product because I think as creators sometimes we get confused with an idealization of our products but also

you can increase your exposure of other people's products like literally go and use all the things that are available

and that's going to build up your context in your in your head and might inform

really interesting crossovers. So if you have two things that you've absorbed about the world, oh look at how

cool the interface for runway AI is and then you go and use I don't know like operator by Chad Gupt. Okay, like is

there an intersection between these two ideas that could give me my new idea? That's what Vero is really good at. But

you first have to have given it that sort of initial prompt or input so that you can create something useful and

novel and and hopefully high taste. There's something really interesting about web 2.0. A lot of people believe

that AWS started out because it had spare hardware. If you listen to the AWS

episode on the acquire podcast, the the story is actually way more interesting. The reason that it's called Amazon Web

Services is that there was a there was a hypothesis in the world that when APIs and web services started coming

out, people were going to create mashups of applications, remember even the term mashup, that was like a big principle of

web 2.0. And so Amazon believed that they needed to create web services for Amazon.com inventory and products, etc.

and that was going to be Amazon Web Services. In fact, it sounds that explains perfectly the acronym. It later

turned out that people didn't want to create those mashups. People actually wanted to create their own products. And

so you have the AWS that you have today which is known for infrastructure. But I think the idea of a mashup is

really really really interesting today again. Why? Because you're going to see soon that the world is reconfiguring

itself as MCPs. If the listeners are not familiar, the way to think about MCP is like the HTTP

for AIS. It's a protocol that allows AIS to talk to other AIs. It's a way of creating integrations between AI

products. And in a more technical ter way, it's like calling a tool over the internet. Calling a tool that a

particular agent or AI system didn't previously have. So I think what's going to happen over the next 10 years is that

people are going to start creating cross-pollinations between products and integrations between products and novel

interfaces to products that weren't I mean they were possible before but just very very difficult to do and so what

we're going to end up is with an internet that is fully generative where there is no fixed interface that is very

rigid people have different needs different levels of expertise

the the world is constantly changing and the context is getting richer. And so this this new world that we're going

into is one where again if you're if you're paying attention to like what are the right MCP servers, what are the

right things that we can connect, there's going to be alpha there for new products and new creators. While we're

on the topic, uh you started releasing product there. Maybe walk us through the versel offering and what you have on the

road map. Yeah. So, in the old uh we're going to call it old, but like in the old days of the

web, you were creating applications and and websites that you know returned HTML or JSON. So, you were you were creating

interfaces for humans. I believe that the great next demand will be to create interfaces for agents. And so Versel is

in the business of giving you the infrastructure to minimize the time that it takes you, the cost that it takes you

to deploy these applications. So we've basically now made it I like five lines of code to deploy your first MCP server.

So this is useful if a company already has a lot of data uh and they want to express that data in a way that'll be

useful for agents. It's actually your in in so many ways it's like your minimum viable AI product. That's why it

actually has so much traction. If I go to if I walk into any company in the world today and tell them like, all

right, you know, I I'll help you create your next big AI product that is going to compete with Chad GBT. You know, that

might not happen overnight, but expressing your capabilities and data through MCB is a way of participating in

the AI economy. And Versell has basically reduced that line to like a handful of lines of code. And we have

companies like Zapier using Verscell to host their MCP servers and uh companies that are like doing significant volume

by the way which actually kind of surprised me. Solana for example to make it super basic. So if you're target.com

and you want to expose uh yourself to outside agents potentially uh openio whoever then you create your MCB server

which lives on on your end uh and then that allows you yeah on Versell and then so that your website is super fast. This

these are really great uh examples. So if your target you don't want to be you don't want to miss out on being embedded

in chatbt if people are searching for products what is that agentto agent uh communication protocol MCP model context

protocol so if you're a target you write this five lines of code you connected your existing APIs and data backends and

now you're interoperable with IGBT but even cooler you're also interoperable with vzero so if someone at target wants

to create a new application to increase internal productivity like a better system for back-end logistics or quality

control systems or support systems. Now you start typing in English and the Vzero agent of course speaks MCPs like

speaking a language and can talk to the target MCP. M these MCPS can be internal, external, they can be

authenticated, they can you know in many ways I think MCB will be the new business development but it's going to

be at a 100 times the speed. It's not going to be people meeting and it's going to be agents meeting everybody

speaking in text in text as you were saying. Okay. And presumably uh that piece of software over time becomes sort

of thicker and thicker. Presumably you need security, you need the observability, you need control. This

agent can come and do this but not that agent. That's right. And that's why as part of our AI cloud offering, we're

working on security primitives that are novel for this new age. Right. So we offer the more traditional web

application firewall to protect your pages and existing systems. But I believe that you need to have more and

different kinds of systems to protect this emergent set of protocols to observe them correctly because an MCP

doesn't have the same kind of like exactly the same kind of URLs that the existing internet has. But your

team will have to understand okay what are my most popular tools that are being called? Is there harmful context being

passed in? Are people trying to make my MCP server misbehave? There's new kinds of attacks like prompt injection

attacks. In fact, there's already been quite a few incidents with MCP servers where depending on what chat message was

sent, the MCP tool that was called was made to misbehave.

A simple example that was fascinating to me that I that I saw a couple months ago was someone can encode information in an

image that the human would not see but the AI model will understand. So I can actually embed a prompt injection in an

image that then calls a tool to xfiltrate data through that MCB server. So it's a brave new world and new

security infrastructure and tools are required and that's why our AI security research team is is very focused on all

right what are the things that we can repurpose because I think the traditional firewalls are still helpful

but what are the things that are net new that need to be you know supplied to these developers and of course the

frameworks for these developers. What's your uh experience so far in the you know reward talking to customers about

their willingness to embrace that world of MCPs and agents because I mean certainly if you spend a lot of time

building a very nice responsive reactive interface uh the idea that all of a sudden you can just be you know feeder

for an automated agent may or may not be exciting or maybe scary because you're losing control. What what is the

spectrum of reactions you've seen? Yeah, the enterprise appetite for both V0ero and our AI cloud infrastructure has been

to me extremely surprising. I think it comes from a place of personal recognition of the decision

makers of look my entire life I'm spending in tools like chat GPT uh a lot of CTOs and CIOS are starting to vibe

code and like teaching their kids like this is how you create an application and and so when you realize that in your

personal life you're using so much AI but you you go back to work and you're like, oh, so we're everything happens in

four meetings and three quarters and everything is slow, etc. I do think you start realizing like, hey, if I don't

jump on this AI train, I might just be entirely left behind. And that applies to MCP as well. It's like I'm I'm

own.com. Again, to take that example, it's in my best interest to open it up to agents. Yeah. To expose your

inventory in JBT, for example. Right. And so that MCP server would allow that to happen. Whereas if you didn't have

it, you're excluding yourself from that economy. Great. Great. And in new economies and but the other thing that's

really interesting is it's you creating your own AI interfaces.

The best example is that if I go to target.com, the best way to explore their inventory

will not be what we came up with 10 years ago, right? like we now have all these agents, tools, integrations,

specialized models. So the way that it can I think the web will evolve to have this hyperpersonalized experience,

it's probably going to start with search. So when you arrive to these websites, you kind of have an idea of

what you need. One of the key inventions there from a UI perspective that actually required machine learning and

dynamic web rendering etc was when Amazon started recommending when you buy this people also buy this this filtering

right and so I think there's going to be new primitives like that in the world of agentic commerce where the agent jumps

alongside you in your navigation journey kind of like having like a personal shopper a personal assistant like today

we've not been able to scale that for stores because you know imagine just you know you call them on demand when you

need them but I think it's going to be possible now to have for uh returning customers signed in customers etc

they're going to have a super personalized experience and typically when they talk to you know the c the the

decision makers of these companies they want to cater to their returning customers they want to they want to

cater to the people that are loyal to these brands. And I think that's most likely where AI will play an outsized

role. Memory being one of the key components. AIs get better the more context they have. But the other really

cool thing is that AI can take down notes of what you like, what you've spent more time in. Even by just giving

them the log of events of what you've done on target.com, we can extract probably like five very important facts.

that will imp will improve your next navigation. Uh this person, you know, likes black, this person is a male, this

person is so and so, this person lives in San Francisco. And those five facts and carrying them along in your

subsequent journeys can create, I think, like subtly, mind-blowing, and customer loyalty earning experiences. Mhm. Do you

think we're far from a world where all of this communicates including internally internally meaning that an

interaction with customer service could lead to actually changing the code for a certain product based on a certain

amount of feedback? Absolutely. I think everything needs to go into the context. A good example for us is on Verscell.

Our customer support team is actually one of the most important teams at the company because we deployed AI uh we

took the underlying VZO model and when you go to versel.com/help we give you this cutting edge help of everything you

could possibly imagine that relates to Verscell you know from you know I have a problem with uh my code to I don't know

how to solve this problem to can you explain this usage all the things that are typically part about the cloud. We

have that AI that can just like automate and explain. But there's always a class of problems

that an AI cannot solve. I can call them the frontier problems. And so it's made the job of our customer service team

even more interesting and challenging. Now they're customer support engineers. When something arrives to them, it's

gone through the filter of our cutting edge models. That means that you know these are the people that are going to

inform the next iteration of the product. Our customer support team uses Vzero very extensively because they they

want to produce suggestions of hey if we make this part of the product better if we improve this area of this of the

service we will avoid this category of issue that is arriving to me. So it's like you're kind of endeavoring to like

make the model smarter, make the product better so that you don't have that ticket, but that doesn't mean that

there's not another frontier ticket coming. And so their job is still extremely important. I think we've just

removed, you know, our our numbers are are kind of staggering in terms of how many redundant tickets we're answering

every single day. And our customers are actually happier. I was a little skeptical a couple years ago when we

rolled out uh customer service AI because our product is so technical. We're so well regarded in the community

that I didn't want I didn't want to run the risk of like someone wants to talk to a human and they get this AI thing

and they might get upset. But people tell us this is amazing. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you bot. I love

you. And so we we pay a lot of attention to I use the term disengagement as in self-driving. what is the disengagement

uh event from the product and then we pay a lot of attention to like where are we leaking uh uh alpha where do where do

we need to go and improve our models and our product let's talk about the AI cloud the big announcement of this week

uh what uh what is it what does that do yeah I kind of talked about the origin of Amazon web services it was created in

many ways to create websites and I see this really big transition happening from what I'd call pixels to tokens.

Pixels are going to be very very important. The humanentric interactions, you want to have fast pixels, beautiful

pixels. So, Verscell will continue to help you with that. But we're entering a world where so much is going to happen

egentically, where so much is going to happen because you're serving tokens rather than, you

know, the more traditional like SAS pixels or or GUIs. And so there's an opportunity to create a cloud that is

purpose-built for enabling the creation of AI products, but also using AI to solve some of the most painful

traditional problems of the cloud. One of them being for example that if you use the cloud today, if you use AWS,

Google Cloud, etc., you're showered with problems. If you use data dog for example, if you

use Splunk, what do you get? Like going back to like how developers were confronted with negative feedback,

DevOps people and cloud operators are constantly being uh you know given like the system is down, the API endpoint is

creating 500 internal server errors. We believe that an AI cloud should have agents that automatically produce

solutions rather than give you problems. So today you're kind of seeing a glimpse of this because agents are creating pull

requests. So if you're not familiar with a pull request, you know, when when a developer needs to make a change to an

existing large codebase, they can't just like yolo the change into production. They create a pull

request and other people review it. Because Purscell has this end-to-end intelligence, we see every transaction,

every data point, every request from our from our CDN through our firewall, through the rendering process, and

through the backend systems. We can create AI agents that completely automate both the infrastructure side of

things but also the problem solving that happens in the day-to-day of operating really really large websites and

applications like we host uh openai.com is one of the top 20 websites on the internet. If there's a problem in their

infrastructure I don't want to tell them hey there's a problem tough luck buddy. I want to open a request and say I've

cooked on what I believe to be 95% or in many cases actually 100% of the solution. So it's a cloud that's

completely autonomous. Um and of course what are you going to be building with AI cloud? Most likely you're going to be

building AI products. You're going to be building MCP servers. You're going to be building agents. You're going to be

creating conversational AIS. But very very importantly, I believe that you're going to be creating a lot of AI

platforms. Uh I call it, you know, you're going to be creating vzero style agents. You're going to be a you're

going to be creating coding agents, support agents, law agents, fintech. I believe that every single

industry and vertical in the world is up for disrup disruption. I think your best bet is to start with an AI cloud rather

than like figuring out all of that infrastructure yourself. Okay. So, this is a pretty spectacular

um as not just an announcement but as progress. So, to unpack it, you're basically saying that the Versel AI

cloud is making DevOps redundant. I mean, is that a selfhealing system? Everything is so

there's two parts I could call infrastructure and code. Infrastructure we've been automating for the past 10

years. And of course, it's all automate. it's on autopilot, it's autonomous, etc. What's been harder for people is the

operations of that, right? For example, someone attacks your website. Uh, a partic I'm talking about a particular

targeted attack. We host a really really popular sneaker website on Verscell. It constantly has bots trying to do credit

card stuffing attacks, like trying out stolen credit cards. They're trying to scrape their inventory

and they're anomalous in nature. Let's say that you know 9 to5 business hours you're operating your your online store.

You kind of know for the US what your hot hours are, what your peak traffic looks like. It's really easy and Versel

already does this to detect an anomaly. But what we're doing now is we're deploying the Verscell agent to

investigate that anomaly. We're going to tell you what the recommended action is to do. Maybe the attack originates from

a country that you don't even do business in. It's like why did traffic from Argentina just to throw myself

under the bus. I'm from Argentina cuz I always say like what country like I don't want to see a country that's going

to get people upset. All right. Your traffic from Argentina on that.com increased by 100x. I don't want to give

this problem to the website to the developer to the website builder etc. And so Versell Asia is going to tell

you, you know, you've never received traffic from Argentina. Uh, this is a 100x. Uh, we're going to

actually, this is really cool. Obviously, we we showed this demo on stage because we understand the network

so well. We can decode who the user agents are. Are they trying to fake their user? Are they trying to do

spoofing? And so we're going to give you all of the facts first of all and then we're going to give you the decision.

And so you're still in the loop. You make the decision. But imagine the other world, a world of a more traditional

cloud where maybe there's some anomaly stuff, but typically an operator is going to get paged with zero context.

Literally the pager goes out. I don't know if you heard this story from Patrick Collis on the CE of Stripe. uh

in the early days of Stripe, he was holding a pager uh and it was a duck sound because he was trying to make it

as stress-free as possible and he he was sharing he he had this really funny tweet of like anytime he's walking

around in a lake in a new city or whatever he hears ducks his cortisol levels like go up automatically because

it's the pager sound. But this is the real world of the cloud today. You get you get paid you get your ducksh and

then you're like okay what do I do? All right, begin the investigation process. Maybe an hour later, if you have someone

that's like really on the ball, they kind of have an idea of what's going on. So, we believe that the AI cloud will be

self-healing as well as completely autonomous from an infrastructure point of view. And we believe that agents and

humans will collaborate. So, it's not going to be just like off the rails autonomous. It's going to be with you in

the loop. And that's why the poll request is such an important tool here where like we can create code changes.

You know, by and large the cloud has I would say like three like the dark side of the cloud would be three things.

Number one is what I talked about. The internet is a very nasty place. Attacks constantly happen and that's why we've

been investing so much in our firewall capabilities, the OS mitigation capabilities, etc. The other one is

stuff goes down. So we you saw the Google cloud outage the other day for hours a lot of the

cloud was down. So I'll give you an example. Verscell didn't go down and this is not me throwing shade at Google

but if you were using a Google cloud service in Verscell your endpoint is now down because you would you took a

dependency on Google Cloud. Luckily for us a lot of our customers did not. We actually looked at the numbers but there

were there was quite a few customers that had increased 500 errors. This is an error happens when your website is

crashing but many times your website crashes because of somebody else's stuff crashing.

Versel agent will also help you investigate and repair that. Attributing the cause is so important and liberating

and empowering because if I get uh an investigation from versell agent that says the reason that you have an

elevated error rate is because this outgoing host is down. Knowledge is power. I can now I know I

now know what phone to pick up and who to yell at or I could help you fail over that system. So that's that's the second

category is like when things break we will help you. The other one is optimization.

So frameworks like Nex.js help you make the web a lot faster but you can you still have like I always tell people

like this is touring complete systems. We don't yet have the quantum computers that would allow us to like simulate

every possible future. things can still get slow in ways that it was hard for the developer or agent to anticipate.

And so we can help you. We can emit pull requests that optimize your systems. We can say, "Look, big e-commerce website,

this image that you're rendering from a mobile phone is just awfully slow." And this is the stuff that I was telling you

like I would do doortodoor. I literally open a website, I can immediately spot, yeah, that image you're not prioritizing

and optimizing correctly. So the Versell agent will not just tell you, oh, you're slow loser, you have a 50 score, it's

actually going to be a part of the solution. Mhm. So that's kind of like the on the autonomy side. The other

thing that an AI cloud needs is services and SDKs purpose-built for AI. So we announced the AI gateway in beta. We

announced the Verscell sandbox. Obviously, we announced the Verscell agent. And we announced improvements to

Fluid, which is our compute platform that make it better and faster and way more costefficient

to host things like MCP servers and AI workloads. And Fluid itself is a reasonably recent launch as well, right?

That was a few months ago. Yeah, it's very recent. Um, one of the things that this, you know, cloud 1.0 to cloud 2.0

transition has done is that the profile of workloads that run in the cloud has changed dramatically. I cannot emphasize

enough just how different these programs are. By and large, the big difference is you can call it a transition from front

end to back end. In the past, everything was pixels. They need to render really fast and and you have uh short bursts of

compute. Amazon invented the 100 millisecond rule is a very important rule for the world

to know. For each 100 millisecond that you know Amazon takes longer to load, they would lose 1% in in conversions.

And so we optimize all of our systems around that world of pixels. The world of tokens. I don't know if you've used

the new model by OpenAI 03 Pro. Yes. It can think for 15 minutes. What compute platform was optimized for

a request comes in, something gets launched and it cooks for 15 minutes? Basically none except for fluid. So what

we announced is fluid now only char this is actually only a billing model change. We already did the sort of like compute

optimizations for like running longer etc. But we changed the billing model. If you're waiting for 15 minutes for

OpenAI to respond and you do a tiny bit of compute maybe to like transform it into HTML, HTML or

transform it into an MCP response or you know call other systems. We're only going to charge you for the

actual CPU cycles that you use. This is amazing because the cloud started out maybe we can call

the cloud 1.0 you know, started out with pay for what you use, but you're actually paying for the idle time. It's

kind of a a a white lie. You're paying for what you allocated, and you most likely overallocated the heck out of

your system. With fluid compute, you're actually paying exactly for what you use in the sense of what you compute. So,

it's a really, really, really high efficiency CPU that complements your GPU. So you're still going to call

models like anthropics and open ais and mistrols etc but you need to do computation on top of them and so that's

where fluid really shines. Mhm. Fascinating. So it's a a reinvention of serverless for the world of uh AI

infrastructure. Correct. In particular around response time idle time. Okay. Um what about sandbox? Yeah. So one of the

fascinating things in the world of agents is that fluid needs to run the code that humans wrote to power your

applications. But what's happening is that increasingly more and more code is being created by agents on demand. A

good example is when you're working on things like deep research. Let's say you're a big pharmaceutical company or a

bank and you want to create your own deep research system. So first of all, you're going to need

this sort of like high efficiency compute like fluid. You're going to need obviously some of the foundational

infrastructure we talked about like CDNs, firewalls, etc. But now you need a new thing that actually quite doesn't

exist in the world, which is you need a sandbox, meaning a a secure place for compute to run that is generated by the

model. So when Asians are doing research, they might decide, hey, I need to run a quick Python script to compute

some numbers or to produce a visualization of the data or to make up my mind or whatever. So you can think of

sandbox as the uh Amazon EC2 of AI. It's not for the code that your developers wrote. It's for the code that gets

emitted by the LLMs. And it allows you to create this incredible new products. I mean you could create your own vzero

and lovable with this sandbox primitive but also you can create systems where the code runs behind the scenes in the

service of an outcome like a like a deep research report in a lot of what you've described both

for the AI cloud and and vzero it it seems that you have a constant data flywheel going where you constantly

learn and optimize is that how you think about it and uh to which extent have you formalized it into a product to worry

part of the product. Yeah, I think part of the AI cloud is going to be what we build like we build fluid, we build the

sandbox, we build the AI gateway, but also the rich ecosystem of integrations. So for evals, we use a product called

brain trust for example and we want to make sure that every product that we don't build but you still need in the AI

world is in our marketplace. Another really cool product that you I think most people are building agents are

going to need is you need to give your agent the ability to run code securely like sandbox. You also need to give it a

web browser which is also another kind of sandbox in a way like you need to be able if you're an agent you need to be

able to browse the web and so you you're you can expect integrations like uh browser base and browser use. They're

building browser infrastructure for agents. So the things that we don't build,

you're going to have one click away as part of the versel marketplace. Evals, I can't emphasize sort of like that data

flywheel. I just cannot emphasize enough how important that is. I think in the old world, there's companies that are

more data driven, there's companies that are less data driven, right? Like Apple famously is is always been a vibes

company where their designers sit down, they look at the product, how it feels. is a very demo culture. We do a lot of

that at Verscell, but famously other companies like um Facebook for example, very data

driven. Oh, the user stopped at an ad for less than 10 milliseconds. Like we should create another ad, we need to

optimize this and like if you add seven friends, you're going to be a long-term engaged user and whatever. like those

that kind of thinking in the AI world is not optional to have that datadriven approach where every

data point you need to synthesize you need to pay attention to you know how users are responding to generations what

feedback they're given what are the what's the error rate you know Satia was just talking about the

acceptance rate of when you propose something if you're building an agent that proposes changes, you want to

monitor very closely the acceptance rate of the things that the agent proposes. So this world is I actually think it's

nature is healing in a way. It's you cannot participate in the AI product economy without getting your metrics in

a good place which I believe could have been a blind spot for would be entrepreneurs in the past. Luckily like

the AI was sort of batteries included. Let's switch to the business sides side of things if you will. How do you adapt

as a company to a changing ICP presumably because you you create by virtue of viro a new type of users for

the sale are going to be nontechnical people who are going to need different kinds of interaction with the the

product. then presumably the over time the the difference between a front-end engineer and a backend engineer and

perhaps a product all of that's going to blur. So from a business product and business standpoint how do you adapt to

that? Yeah, one of one of the basic things was we talked to so many people using Vzero and we I use the famous Jeff

Bessos thing. We doubled down where there was the light. So, I think Vzero has always uh been

appealing to so many people. Like everybody would use the product. It's just so easy to use and like everybody

would have at least an okay experience. But we doubled down on the people that were telling us this is life-changing.

And so for example within companies the people that were dev adjacent the people that were sitting outside of the

developer room but still every single day work with developers for those people this product is a superpower. And

so that helped us refine the persona because we're like okay everybody can use this. I'm never going to turn away a

sign up to the product, but for people that are not professional developers, this is transformative. Um, even just

before this podcast, I got another message from a father that was like maybe probably a developer and saying

like, I just cooked with my son an application. I could have never done this before. Um, so double down where

there is the light is one of one of my operating principles. The other one again is like realizing

how the world of AI is evolving and what are the model capables what are models capable of and there's another emerging

principle of you have to design from the model forward. If you go too far into a world of

science fiction you actually might not have a working product. So the f the very first UI of

Vzero was almost too ambitious. So you would type in a prompt and then it would give you three generations of the

application and it was very very hard to actually get into an agentic conversation where

you were going to improve that product. We're almost aspiring in in a world of in one shot it's going to be perfect

and then we realized well the models are not there yet and so we actually have to redesign the entire product.

We called it internally V1, which is kind of a joke, but when V1 came out, our traction improved by 100x

because we designed for where the model was at. You still have to create enough leeway that you can that you can you

still need to leave that door open into the science fiction future when you're working with LM systems. But so much of

what we've done is that again recognition of who is the persona for which this is a 10x better experience

and what is the reality of the models and how how do you create a product that meets the models not not just where they

are but like where they are in the next six months right and then design for that. All right, sorry in advance for a

couple of VC questions. Um, but retention and gross margins. So to start with retention, it's been one of the

open questions. In particular, when cursor was raising, a lot of people were questioning whether retention was was

high or not. By all accounts, apparently it's it's high, but I'm curious what uh you think and what you see. And then on

the gross margin side um same thing heard in the context of of cursor that some of those products are have negative

gross margins. So on a unit basis people lose money as as those things are getting used. uh something what do you

what do you see what do you um what have you yeah B 0 has positive gross margins it's a healthy business the margins are

improving the business is improving and I think it's rooted in the fact that we designed for an enduring persona

because Vzero is helpful to both companies and individuals vibe coding we're not just left with the very

volatile world of you know you saw it on X, you saw it on YouTube, you got really excited and and

rightfully so, right? Like you want to try new tools, you want to try everything that's out there, but you

know, you your usage of the tool is more sporadic is when the inspiration comes, whereas you know, to put it in in a

funny way, like at work, you're forced to be creative, right? like your your paycheck depends on your ability to you

know produce value and and and continue to improve things and talk to customers and talk to your colleagues etc. So I

think something has improved uh I think maybe perhaps I don't have the numbers of other products you do this for a

living but I think something that's making Vzero uh better in in the world of retention and in margins is that it's

actually delivering value for businesses. there is like an economic equation attached to it. The thing that

I'm excited about for individuals is that we want to give them ways to make money, right? I think very much like the

app store made it so easy. You know, I've talked [ __ ] about Apple's app store for a while because there's a tax,

there's a review process. It's not like the web. The web is permissionless, etc. So that out of the way, what Apple has

done really well is that you implement inapp payments, you implement subscriptions, they have Apple Pay. Like

I I believe that they're a money-making machine for their developer ecosystem. And so I think Vzero, you'll see same

kinds of things come to Vzero. So that I think what's going to improve retention is that you're not just like vibe coding

into the void. you're actually creating a successful economy. And because I sold my previous company to WordPress, I saw

how Matt did this really well for WordPress. And I think I I have a lot of the right inspirations and data points

uh to hopefully have a good shot at this. Still on the business side of things, uh it seems that Versel just had

a super big year in terms of revenue. So I read somewhere that you were at 100 millionish

last year. Uh so to put this in perspective that was year 1 to9 0 to 100 and I also read somewhere uh that you

were probably at like 180 at the beginning of this year so like 80% growth.

What why was that? Was that uh was that V0? Was it um now you're evolving towards the enterprise? Was it now you

have fluid compute so you're taking more dollars because you you're also involved in the back end? All of the above. A lot

of it is AI. I mean, just to put it simply, right? Like on both sides, it's Vzero is growing really fast and is a

significant percentage of our revenue. And then you get and then you got the fact that like we are quick to meet

people where they are because in order to best serve enterprises, I spend all of my time with the startups

and innovators. and the startups and innovators. You know, when Chachd came out, it became a joke. I never made fun

of it. I actually have I'm on record on this. People were joking about the Chajb rappers. I was like, "Chappers are

amazing. Everything's always been a rapper of a rapper of a rapper." And we leaned in. So, we created um the AISDK.

The ISDK, if you look at the download numbers, I wouldn't be surprised if it surpasses an XJS, right? like in the

trajectory it's the second biggest module in the TypeScript ecosystem which is the largest develop JavaScript and

TypeScript are the largest developer ecosystem in the world is the second largest AI module behind

open AI so we created the next sh of AI because we want to respond to that trend really quickly

and the AI SDK and what do we call the chat SDK which gives you like the UI primitives to build your own chat GP SL

style products. That gave us a ton of momentum on the cloud infrastructure side because we realized that's what

people want to build today. What people want to build tomorrow is these agents, these token factories, these MCPs, and

we're meeting them where they are. But what's abundantly clear is that there's no going back. You know, we've

accidentally had product market fit in certain areas in the past. I'll call two big ones that helped us actually go from

like you know the the one to 50 was insane. And it was like in a couple years right like and then to to 100

co made e-commerce a not a priority a must right so we saw a lot of tailwinds of like the acceleration of e-commerce

crypto cryptos this always perpetual it's so over we're so back and like a lot of the largest crypto companies in

the world that versel but AI is different in the sense of you you can talk about temporary churn and

like short-term churn and whatever. But even with our individuals trying out things churn, what we've noticed with

VZero is that it's a mind virus. You buy it for a month and it's like, you know what, I'm going to churn and then 3

months later you're like, [ __ ] I need a prototype. I'm not going to. It's just like once you learn that way, like you

don't go I I mean obviously we could lose a a customer to a competitor. Totally fair, but even that I call it a

win for like AI team AI. What happens with AI is that once you use it, it's like a new muscle. It's a

new efficiency. I I I wrote an article uh years ago called you can't forgo efficiency.

Once you've acquired or tried a higher efficiency system, it's impossible to go back. And my

thesis was built on the fact that Albert Einstein wrote this beautiful piece on what it was like to be in America

compared to Europe. Now begins the dunking on Europe podcast but no offense but like it was going to happen at any

point. It was some point. It's in the DNA of this country because he talk this is before like anything internet etc. He

talks about how America is huge but we we that played into our advantage because we started creating you know

high uh uh cohesion networks. So the the railways and the telegraph like we needed technology to scale our enormous

distances and you know for him I think it was like literally a one-way street of well once

you have that kind of efficiency how do you go back and that was my journey personally of like once I came here I

would go back to Argentina and it was very very hard to readapt because because in the beginning before I got my

O1 visa I could only come here in business and so I could come here to do conference presentations and meetings

and things like that and like the lion share of my work. I needed to go home and like all right you know create my

standing desk, my computer, my internet connection etc. And just everything would be slower. Starting a company is

slower, doing paperwork is slower, like getting a loan is slower, like phone calls are slower, like um you know like

restaurant services is slower. Literally we have an unfair latency advantage. I love coming to New York

because it's close to US East one which is where the vast majority of cloud services are right so like you feel the

better latency to the internet and so with AI the efficiency win is so remarkable that I believe that if you

have a good product on the consumer side even uh the even churn that you might see is short term uh especially for like

productivity tools I think um and and of You want things to be so high engagement and this is what we see more on the on

the company side like when there's economic utility that you use it every single day of your life actually these

products you can use them on your phone which is remarkable right uh there's there's uh the the Vzero app um uh uh

we've sort of spoiled spoil alerted on on on X but the fact that you can take these agents on the go this is going to

open up a whole new world of if you have a desktop app, there's a still a potential now to have a mobile app even

if the desktop app doesn't fit because now you can control computers remotely with agents. And again, we're just at

the beginning of that. I think there's very few uh people that have actually done this. Uh there's a company called

Manos AI that has like this like on your phone you are controlling remote computers essentially. So you're going

to see a huge wave of this and this is why I talked about the AI cloud because that world requires new primitives, new

services that don't exist. Um you need sandboxes for running virtual computers. You need web browsers. So this has a lot

of upside to mobile users. This is a lot of upside to consumers. And uh yeah, it's just it's really exciting to be

powering so many of these and that explains a lot of our growth. Fascinating. All right, I want to close

on a on a couple of more uh personal questions if I if I may. Um, so one uh you're you're truly um inspirational in

how you communicate with the community like you've you know through conferences like this week you've super active on X.

Um how do you think about the importance of of that um in a context where you have like a million other things to to

do? Yeah, I think of it as number one when I speak on X, I speak first to myself,

second to my team, believe it or not, right? Like it's actually like a highly scalable communication channel to the

almost 700 Verselians. I speak to our community of builders. I want to give them ideas. I want to

support them. I want to engage with them and get feedback from them about the product. And so that's kind of where

like you can call it inspirational. You know, I tried really hard to bring positivity into the world and I

try to always recognize that, you know, in the short term things look very unclear to people. there's a it's so

over we're so back like side of the world and especially for developers this happens a lot like one day you know like

everything's great the next day everything is awful so I'm trying to bring that optimism into the world that

translates into there's always more things to build etc and because I'm the first customer of what I say I'm

sharpening my thought process I'm minimizing the number of words. You know, one of my internal principles out

of Versel is we sweat every pixel. Not in the sense of like we want to make it look good, which we do. But my principle

of sweat every pixel is every pixel is a liability. Every little feature, button, text link, etc. is a

huge liability. It's product surface area. It's things that can go wrong. It's things that can confuse users.

If you look at Chad GBD, one fundamental advantage they have over Google is the simplicity of the UI. You go to Chad GBD

and notice that there's a concerted effort to remove stuff. Go to Google and you have the the search

stuff is somewhat clean still, but they have a very uphill battle. You have AI mode and AI overview that shines in

front of your face and links and ads. It's this it's just overwhelming. So I try to do the same for words. I try to

do the same for my thoughts. Sharpen my thinking, speak clearly. It's almost like practicing for AI like you know

like prompt. I called it out recently. is like I do believe that in life there is a

positive correlation between prompting and success. The more you prompt, the more you get your ideas out there, the

more you hop on sales calls, the more you market. And obviously you have to do this with taste. You can't just do it

like intention every time 1% better, etc., etc. But by prompting and and taking in that feedback, you're actually

making progress. So, you know, the way that I communicate to the world is every single time I try to like refine what I

say and make it a little bit better and then see what feedback I get from the world. How do you manage negative

feedback when you get it? Because you're building and thinking in public. So, my approach to negativity is like every

other human being, I have my own. And so, I try to catch myself like am I going to say something mean or negative

about a person or a product? and literally just don't write it or leave it on your drafts, right? So like try

really hard like stay positive. And I think negativity is a is useful tool. You can't just be Mr. Positive all all

day long and you have to deploy it when it's needed and when it's useful, especially with feedback with people

like regulate the harshness of the feedback so that yeah, hey, this really matters to me and etc etc. Um, but I do

think that it's really easy to get engagement through negativity and so I try to resist that. And then when I meet

negative feedback, it's always an opportunity as as long as it's not a troll from a troll farm orchestrated by

Cloudflare. Just kidding. Uh, you know, I engage in as much as good faith as possible. There's I always say there's a

kernel of truth in everything a customer says. Another operating principle of me which is more of a traditional I think

American business principles like the customer is king, the customer is always right. And so if the customer is annoyed

and hating on you, they're still right. And so get to that kernel of right and truth.

Sometimes it can be frustrating because when people are acting in bad faith and this is a problem as of recently on X

and I would say probably the larger inner is that you don't really know who you're interacting with and so you don't

really know if if the other part is engaging in good faith. So you don't know if they're an AI bot increasingly

and again if they're engaging in good faith but provided that I calibrate my compass to the good faith principle

I dig deep as uh uh as much as I can to try to understand and I think this what helps me is that because I've been a

developer for so many years and because I build things I understand the insane amount of frustration that these tools

can produce on Um, and so again, try to like meet with as much empathy as I can and and then

try to uh uh um fix the product. At the end of the day, I'm I'm in this world. I very very firmly believe this is I'm not

here to create fans of Rouch G. I'm here to create amazing products that make people's lives better. And and I the way

that Rouch G wins, I get a lot of joy when people say I love Versel. Like someone tweeted today, I love Versel.

Like hey, that's awesome. and they had and the reply was it was because of a positive product experience. It's not

because they like me as a person, right? Uh and so try to make the best possible product for ourselves and for our

customers and like again the negativity is is is part of the process. How do you do it all? So you're a CEO of an almost

700 person company. Your tenure into the journey and here you are bursting with energy and passion. Uh you tweet a lot

as just mentioned. Uh by the way, you're also a very prolific angel investor uh with a lot of uh lot of great companies.

Um you're a dad of five. Uh how do you uh not lose your mind? How do you manage your stress? Uh you know,

it so happens we're recording on this on a Sunday, by the way. You could be walking around the streets of New York,

but like you're investing time in in doing this, which we immensely appreciate. Thank you. How do you how do

you balance it all? So number one is I owe it all to my team because going back to like you can't forgo efficiency. My

team and my family create efficiency for me. So, you know, I try to remove all the stuff that would be a waste of my

time so I can focus on the essence on the signal. And so, in order to produce signal for the world, I have to capture

that signal myself. And and that requires by definition tuning out all the noise. The other one I can't just

emphasize enough is just how much investing in your own health and well-being

will help you create more energy. I'm not sure how this works, right? But like it's ATP in the cells and whatever,

but like it's kind of amazing that spending energy in a hard workout somehow creates more energy for the day.

And so today I had like a one-hour run that you know what's fascinating is every every exercise every workout is

like a spiritual experience because I wanted to quit 20 minutes in and you can start is the uh I never done therapy but

I have a lot of friends that have done in fact it's huge in Argentina. Everyone has a psychotherapist.

Uh there is cognitive behavioral therapy which is if my understanding is correct is the it's rooted in paying attention

with the help of the therapist to your thought patterns using a AI lingo to your

thinking tokens your reasoning trays whatever and spotting bad thought patterns. What's interesting when you

work out is that I'm always fascinated by like, holy [ __ ] it's a negative thought pattern after negative thought

pattern. It's like every single workout, 25 minutes in, I'm like, why are you doing this? Like, you could just be

eating breakfast. You could be eating a Lux bagel right now. Uh, that's literally my thought today. It's like I

woke up, I was like, there's two paths today. Locks bagel or I'm going to go to the gym. Uh cuz one thing in a sef we

don't get in any remote like semblance of is a good bagel in locks. I'll give that to the city. Okay. One for New

York. Yeah. So so that's the thing is that uh I love um there's a David Gogggins quote of like every day we have

an opportunity to find out who we are as people. And there like you know what's fascinating and this is also true of the

world of startups is that I'm competing with the next you know garage 20some years old and I take that

extremely seriously like it doesn't matter how big your company is how much history you have how

much money in the bank you have you're still competing with the seat of an idea of a vibe coder

in a garage somewhere. And so that vitality and recognition of the game and respect for the game is what actually

makes you realize that every single day you you need to show up your best. And that doesn't mean that I don't have weak

days or like bad days and whatever, but like um you know, part of part of this this um being in this world uh requires

that. So it's kind of like a give and take. It's like, of course, um, I do all these things, but like, if I didn't do

them, I I think I'd be be in a bad bad spot. All right, last question. What advice would you give the 18 old

18-year-old version of yourself or I know you started coding super young. So maybe maybe for you that's 15 or 12 or

I'll give the advice of the 10-year-old. Yeah, I was actually thinking about this today. So, my first website, I believe,

it's so hard to like actually pinpoint uh the first event, but I believe it was a a website about Dragon Ball Z, an

anime that I loved. I still love actually. Um, and it sadly looked like [ __ ] It was on It

was in a platform called Geio Cities or or might have been on Fortune City. There was another one.

And I'm almost jealous because uh the reason that this thought popped into my head today is that I was work I was um

playing with uh image generation models and video generation models. The quality of the first thing your

first X that you can create today is like infinitely higher than what I could do back then. Infinitely higher. And so

that means that when you are getting into this industry, if you're getting in today,