Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, joins Immad Akhund and Raj Suri at a live Founders in Arms event to break down the full arc of building one of the most widely used developer platforms in the world—from a contrarian bet that VCs said was already solved, to a multi-product company powering the future of the web.Guillermo walks through the three chapters of Vercel's growth: finding focus (trimming a portfolio of open source projects down to the one that had undeniable traction), building repeatability (anchoring go-to-market around customer-led ROI stories), and scaling the company itself as the product. Along the way, he shares how he thinks about feedback, why consensus is a red flag for startup ideas, how customer-led innovation beats internal roadmaps, and what "brand permission" has to do with why Google keeps failing at social.The conversation also gets into the current moment in SF—the AI supercycle, the anxiety around who gets left behind, and why Guillermo's answer to all of it is the same: product market fit solves most problems. Just stay focused on building.What you'll learn:Why Guillermo treats everything—including silence—as feedbackThe "pain discovery" method he uses to extract what's actually brokenHow Next.js started as a personal solution and became a wedge into the entire cloudWhy he deliberately ignores competitors when buildingThe three chapters of Vercel's growth and what drove each inflection pointHow customer-led innovation produced some of Vercel's biggest revenue linesWhy your second product has a higher bar than your firstThe iPhone and AirPods framework for thinking about adjacenciesWhat "brand permission" means and why it explains Google's failuresWhy consensus around an idea is a signal to walk awayChapters:00:00 – Managing your own psychology as a founder00:51 – Welcome + live event intro02:55 – Vercel's web stack vs. agent stack04:04 – Guillermo's background and first exit to WordPress05:15 – Spotting the waves: cloud and front end in 201308:49 – Everything is feedback; the pain discovery method10:40 – Short-term pessimism, long-term optimism13:14 – Opinions vs. ideas: the Jony Ive mental model16:40 – Chapter 1: Finding focus — how Next.js became the wedge21:03 – Why consensus is a red flag for startup ideas21:40 – The MacBook moment: simplicity wins25:37 – Chapter 2: Repeatability — e-commerce as the GTM unlock29:30 – Chapter 3: Scaling the company as the product34:41 – iPhone and AirPods: smart adjacencies to a strong core38:41 – Brand permission: why Google keeps failing at social40:18 – The SF culture divide: AI optimists vs. AI anxious43:09 – The AI gentrification of San Francisco49:05 – Being your own coach; founder loneliness and burnout50:46 – What fundraising actually feels like