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Vercel’s Path to Product-Market Fit — From Open-Source Project to Billion-Dollar Business

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Guillermo Rauch, raised in Buenos Aires and fascinated by computers since age 7, taught himself to code and moved to San Francisco at 18. His company, Vercel — the frontend cloud service behind open-source development framework Next.js — was recently valued at $2.5 billion. Growing up in a suburb of Buenos Aires in the 90s, Guillermo Rauch didn’t know many people with computers. So at seven years old, when he booted up Windows 95 on the PC his father brought home, Rauch was mesmerized by this new technology. “My dad challenged my brother and me to explore what we could do with it,” he recalls. “Could we install software? Could we hack it? He had this very experimental mindset about it.” Up for the challenge, Rauch began teaching himself to code. It was the early days of the internet, so there wasn’t much information online, and it wasn’t usually in Spanish. So, undeterred, Rauch taught himself English, too. His first goal was to replace Windows with Linux, a difficult task that led him

Growing up in a suburb of Buenos Aires in the 90s, Guillermo Rauch didn’t know many people with computers. So at seven years old, when he booted up Windows 95 on the PC his father brought home, Rauch was mesmerized by this new technology. “My dad challenged my brother and me to explore what we could do with it,” he recalls. “Could we install software? Could we hack it? He had this very experimental mindset about it.” Up for the challenge, Rauch began teaching himself to code. It was the early days of the internet, so there wasn’t much information online, and it wasn’t usually in Spanish. So, u

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