The HOW of building iconic companies.
Founders who’ve done it at the highest level on recruiting, culture, intensity, and the inner game of the job. With Nakul Mandan.

latest · ep 12
Guillermo Rauch. Vercel.
Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel - the $9.3B AI cloud company behind Next.js and v0 - explains "Recursive Founder Mode": finding people who are founders at heart and making them CEOs of their own products. He covers why he's still involved in every hire at nearly 800 people, how V - the internal agent Vercel runs on - replaced ticket queues and bent the headcount curve, the new engineering meta skill when models write the code, and where his energy actually comes from.
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