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