Vercel CEO: How 1 Person + AI Agents Could Build a $1T Company | Guillermo Rauch

章节 1：从亲身痛点出发，打造下一代云平台

📝 本节摘要：

Guillermo 回顾 Vercel 如何从自身使用云基础设施时的挫败感出发，致力于让产品开发变得更轻松。他认为技术进步来自平台代际更替，创业公司应面向即将到来的创新浪潮，提供自动化、智能化的基础设施，而非只与旧一代方案竞争。

[原文] [Guillermo Rauch]: Not confronting as much pain as you could be about the things that are broken or shitty.

[译文] [Guillermo Rauch]: 没有充分直面那些坏掉或糟糕的事情所带来的痛苦。

[原文] [Speaker A]: What's the most challenging moment of your career?

[译文] [Speaker A]: 你职业生涯中最艰难的时刻是什么？

[原文] [Guillermo Rauch]: In the middle of the night, the freaking house got fire. Not everyone made it out of that house, let's just say, healthy.

[译文] [Guillermo Rauch]: 半夜，房子突然着火了。只能说，并不是所有人都能健康地从那栋房子里逃出来。

[原文] [Speaker A]: How do you think about just generating so much trust and loyalty and community around the brand of Vercel?

[译文] [Speaker A]: 你怎么看待围绕 Vercel 品牌建立起这么多信任、忠诚度和社群？

[原文] [Guillermo Rauch]: Trust is going to be one of the most valuable moats, you could call it, for a post-AGI business.

[译文] [Guillermo Rauch]: 对于后通用人工智能（AGI）时代的企业来说，信任将成为最有价值的护城河之一。

[原文] [Speaker A]: So, you have six kids now.

[译文] [Speaker A]: 所以，你现在有六个孩子了。

[原文] [Guillermo Rauch]: Six sub-agents. One of the gifts of having six children is that I've now sampled through a probability distribution of all kinds of different personalities.

[译文] [Guillermo Rauch]: 六个子代理。养育六个孩子带来的好处之一，就是我已经体验过各种不同性格构成的概率分布。

[原文] [Speaker A]: All right, Guillermo, or some call you G, it's great to have you here.

[译文] [Speaker A]: 好，Guillermo，也有人叫你 G，很高兴你来到这里。

[原文] [Guillermo Rauch]: It's great to be here.

[译文] [Guillermo Rauch]: 很高兴来到这里。

[原文] [Speaker A]: I think you're probably the most anticipated guest of the year for multiple reasons. So, and thank you, Madison, for making this happen. So, let's rewind to 6 months ago. Delphi is undergoing a code base migration. We literally have to rewrite everything. And I'm—I have to go out of office. When I leave office, AWS is our infrastructure provider.

[译文] [Speaker A]: 我觉得你大概是今年最受期待的嘉宾，原因有很多。也要感谢 Madison 促成这次对话。我们把时间倒回六个月前：Delphi 正在迁移代码库，几乎所有东西都得重写。而我得离开办公室一段时间。离开时，我们的基础设施服务商还是 AWS。

[原文] [Guillermo Rauch]: No.

[译文] [Guillermo Rauch]: 不是吧。

[原文] [Speaker A]: When I come back, Vercel

[译文] [Speaker A]: 等我回来时，Vercel

[原文] [Guillermo Rauch]: That's amazing.

[译文] [Guillermo Rauch]: 太棒了。

[原文] [Speaker A]: is our infrastructure provider. And I—I was not aware this was going to happen. This was a decision that the team made, and I'm not going to lie, I was a little nervous and frightened by the idea of moving from a giant to another giant, but not necessarily known for infra at the time.

[译文] [Speaker A]: 成了我们的基础设施服务商。我之前完全不知道会发生这件事，这是团队做出的决定。说实话，一想到要从一家巨头转到另一家巨头那里，我有点紧张，也有点害怕；当时 Vercel 还不算以基础设施闻名。

[原文] [Guillermo Rauch]: Future giant.

[译文] [Guillermo Rauch]: 未来的巨头。

[原文] [Speaker A]: Future giant. It turned out to be an incredible decision by the team, a product that has saved us a lot of time and money, and, you know, the team loves it. And I'm—I'd love to start off learning how you have decided to compete with the giant, and how you have gone about competing with the giant.

[译文] [Speaker A]: 未来的巨头。结果证明，团队做了一个非常棒的决定。这个产品为我们节省了大量时间和金钱，团队也很喜欢。我想先了解一下，你当初是怎么决定要和巨头竞争的，又是如何展开竞争的？

[原文] [Guillermo Rauch]: Every time I've developed a product, it's come from a—at least, I always attempt to make it come from a place of genuine interest and personal experience. So, I used to work at a company that deployed software to the data center. And then I heard about this thing, the cloud. And when I first tried to use it, after having been an engineer for over a decade, I felt like I felt stupid. I felt like I was going to spend an entire month setting up infrastructure and tools and stuff just to be able to create a product.

[译文] [Guillermo Rauch]: 我开发的每一款产品，至少都是努力从真正的兴趣和个人经历出发。以前我在一家把软件部署到数据中心的公司工作，后来听说了云。第一次尝试使用云时，我已经当了十多年的工程师，却觉得自己像个笨蛋。我感觉光是搭建基础设施和工具，就得花整整一个月，才能开始做产品。

[原文] [Guillermo Rauch]: It's also come from a place of—anytime I've tried to solve a task, I've asked myself, "What have I learned from solving the task that I could turn into the tooling or infrastructure for the next task to be much easier for me, right? Like, if I have to assemble this table, what do I learn in the process of assembling the table such that every incremental table in the future gets easier?" And so, the cloud, in many ways, has been one of humanity's greatest achievements because it gave us infinite compute capacity that we don't have to see with our eyes.

[译文] [Guillermo Rauch]: 另一个出发点是，每次解决一项任务时，我都会问自己：“从中学到了什么，可以变成工具或基础设施，让下一项任务做起来容易得多？比如要组装这张桌子，我能从组装过程中学到什么，让以后每多组装一张都更轻松？”从很多方面来说，云是人类最伟大的成就之一，因为它给了我们无限的计算能力，而这些能力不必看得见摸得着。

[原文] [Speaker A]: Mhm.

[译文] [Speaker A]: 嗯。

[原文] [Guillermo Rauch]: And now you've seen how much that has made, you know, this future of superintelligence happen. But for the vast majority of people in the world, it was inaccessible. It was very hard and tedious and uninteresting. So, in many ways, Vercel set out to solve a problem before we even called it AI. Like, could we automate away—could we make something that feels tedious self-driving?

[译文] [Guillermo Rauch]: 如今你也看到了，云在多大程度上促成了超级智能的未来。但对世界上绝大多数人来说，云服务过去遥不可及，使用起来又难又繁琐，还没什么意思。所以从某种意义上说，Vercel 早在大家称之为 AI 之前，就开始解决这个问题了：能不能把那些繁琐的事情自动化？能不能让它们像自动驾驶一样自行运转？

[原文] [Speaker A]: Mhm.

[译文] [Speaker A]: 嗯。

[原文] [Guillermo Rauch]: In fact, nowadays we call it agentic infrastructure, but in the past we've toyed with the term self-driving infrastructure. Because it's like a self-driving car for making products possible in the cloud. So, that's kind of where I approached it from, and, you know, I never thought I was competing with the solutions that I was sort of leaving behind. I tried to create the next-generation solution. In fact,

[译文] [Guillermo Rauch]: 如今我们把它称为智能体基础设施（agentic infrastructure），以前也试着叫它“自动驾驶基础设施”。它就像一辆自动驾驶汽车，让人们能在云上打造产品。我就是从这个角度切入的，而且从没觉得自己是在和那些逐渐舍弃的方案竞争。我想做的是下一代解决方案。事实上，

[原文] [Guillermo Rauch]: competition doesn't even come to mind there.

[译文] [Guillermo Rauch]: 我根本没想过竞争这回事。

[原文] [Guillermo Rauch]: It never really came to mind, and I've always thought, you know, the way that the world evolves is through generational shifts in platforms. And usually, in technologies, it's really interesting, right? The previous generation of a certain technology never fully disappears. It just loses interest and attention. So, you would still have fax machines. I always think about that. We—we—we, you know, I use Slack a lot, but I still occasionally read and send emails. So, the technology always just sticks around. But I always try to think about what is the technology that I care about and that people will care about in the future.

[译文] [Guillermo Rauch]: 我从来没怎么考虑过竞争。我一直觉得，世界是通过平台的代际更替向前发展的。技术领域有意思的地方在于，某一代技术并不会彻底消失，只是逐渐失去关注度。传真机现在依然存在，我总会想到这一点。我常用 Slack，但偶尔还是会读邮件、发邮件。技术总会留下来。我更常思考的是：哪些技术是我在意的，也是人们未来会在意的？

[原文] [Guillermo Rauch]: And so that's what we try to do with Vercel. Hopefully, the way that this manifests is whenever a new wave of innovation happens and new interesting technologies arrive, we want to be the platform for it, rather than, like, enabling some old-school migration of an application from 20 years ago. We're seeing that now with agents. The way that Vercel has gotten out to support some of the largest enterprises in the world is because they started using coding agents or developing agents, and they needed infrastructure for that.

[译文] [Guillermo Rauch]: 这就是我们希望 Vercel 做到的事：每当一波创新到来、有趣的新技术出现，我们都想成为它们的平台，而不是只帮人迁移二十年前的老式应用。智能体领域已经出现这种情况。Vercel 得以服务全球一些大型企业，是因为这些企业开始使用编程智能体或开发智能体，需要相应的基础设施。

[原文] [Guillermo Rauch]: And so I guess my meta advice is is much for a startup at least is way better to be well positioned for the incoming wave than you trying to you know, kind of compete with the wave that sort of is starting to lose steam.

[译文] [Guillermo Rauch]: 所以我给创业公司的建议是：最好提前为即将到来的浪潮做好准备，而不是试图和一波已经开始退潮的浪潮竞争。

[原文] [Speaker A]: Yeah.

[译文] [Speaker A]: 对。

[原文] [Speaker A]: So

[译文] [Speaker A]: 那么，

[原文] [Speaker A]: I mean, I think it's been incredible because, you know, we're a team of 12 people, and normally for a startup, it's very difficult to find a full-time infrastructure engineer. And we don't need one anymore.

[译文] [Speaker A]: 我觉得这太不可思议了。我们团队只有 12 个人，通常创业公司很难招到一位全职基础设施工程师，而现在我们不再需要这样的人了。

[原文] [Guillermo Rauch]: Yeah.

[译文] [Guillermo Rauch]: 对。

[原文] [Speaker A]: So, that's been great.

[译文] [Speaker A]: 所以这真是太好了。

[原文] [Guillermo Rauch]: I also want to enable the largest small smallest companies.

[译文] [Guillermo Rauch]: 我也想赋能最大的公司和最小的公司。