00:00Guillermo, let's just start with the post on X and the meeting Sunday.
00:04In the comments, there appear to be employees of Vercel and customers who are reacting.
00:12Are you able to quantify for us what that reaction has been and sort of what your response is to it?
00:19So thanks for having me, of course.
00:21And maybe just to get all of the noise out of the way.
00:25And I want to clearly acknowledge that the post did cause quite a bit of pain.
00:31I want to obviously say sorry to the well-meaning people, you know, people that really care about this topic, people that are hurt by the tension that exists in the world today.
00:42But obviously not sorry to the people that are just spewing hate and anti-Semitism and the people that have come after our team.
00:49So to your point, this has been a special time for our team and obviously our customers.
00:55It's a very special time for the world.
00:57And maybe I'll give you a little bit of context for the meeting itself, right?
01:00As Vercel, a leader in developer AI, of course, we, you know, get invited to speak with world leaders about topics relevant to education, cybersecurity, AI.
01:14AI will play a huge, huge part of the future, right?
01:18And so I always welcome the opportunity to speak with world leaders.
01:21Obviously, you know, the reaction to it and the optics matter a lot to us.
01:26And we're here for our team.
01:28We're here for our customers.
01:29There hasn't been material changes to the business.
01:32A lot of it is noise.
01:34You know, there was an ex post with 5 million views from someone that allegedly quit the company.
01:39But guess what?
01:41We looked upside down and that person didn't work for Vercel.
01:44So it kind of also highlights a little bit of the challenges that we see with social media today.
01:49Guillermo, I'm grateful that you would come on the show.
01:51I think it's important to be honest with the audience.
01:53You were going to come on the show earlier in the week anyway.
01:56There was a lot of breaking news and we moved things around.
01:59But just to be definitive, you haven't had any employee resignations and you've not lost any business at all as a result of that post?
02:07Yeah.
02:07And there hasn't been any material change to the business.
02:10There has been impact to our community, by the way.
02:12And, you know, I feel bad about that.
02:16And our ethos of Vercel, and, you know, maybe to tell you a bit more context about our company, we're all about open source.
02:23The reason that I'm here today is because I built a gigantic open source project.
02:28We work in public.
02:29We engage with the community.
02:30We're always listening to feedback.
02:32We use that feedback to grow.
02:33We use that feedback to contribute directly to source code and make our products better.
02:37And this is the kind of things that, you know, world leaders are interested in.
02:40And this is why they reach out to us.
02:42And I welcome that.
02:43I don't endorse politicians.
02:45I do engage with world leaders and excited to continue our work and continue to support our community, our customers, and most importantly, our team.
02:54We appreciate how open you've been about all of that, what must have been an anxious time.
02:59And I'm interested, therefore, about the story of Vercel more broadly because you come on this show around the context that you have raised money.
03:06You are building this business.
03:07And I'm interested in particular of how many people wanted to be putting extra money to work in your business and what growth story you're telling them.
03:14Yeah, we've been around for a while building what we call the front-end cloud.
03:20It's the best way to deploy websites and applications.
03:24And it's in the world of what I call pixels.
03:27You know, most applications had some kind of human-centric user interface.
03:30But ever since, I will call it like ChatGPT, the dominant type of application that enterprises and individuals want to create is what we call the AI agent, which is kind of like a digital co-worker.
03:43So we announced that we're building the AI cloud.
03:46For people listening, this is sort of like the AWS of AI.
03:50And one of the goals of this cloud is that when you're a developer or a company of any size, you can deploy these agents, make your business more efficient.
03:58It obviously caught the interest of investors.
04:01We weren't planning to raise additional funds.
04:03We had just raised.
04:04The business is doing incredibly.
04:05We just passed $250 million in revenue, growing at north of 80% year-over-year, supporting customers like Under Armour, Nintendo, Porsche, and some of the hottest startups in the AI space, like Brex and Ramp and Notion and all of the up-and-comers.
04:23So as you could imagine, the enterprises are thinking, well, I have all this up-and-comers, all these startups, all these even individual developers coming after me with AI-native solutions.
04:32What do I need to do AI transformation myself?
04:34And that's the AI cloud.
04:37And Vercel is filling a massive void in the market today.
04:41We've talked about the reaction of some of those of your employees, potentially, and those that actually weren't current employees.
04:47But talk to us about how you're keeping them engaged and building with Vercel.
04:51Part of this raise was indeed a secondary tender offer.
04:54Is that about giving them a liquidity moment?
04:55Is that about ensuring you can get the right talent through the door?
04:59Yeah, I think employees and community have been super engaged behind our mission.
05:02Everyone is sort of galvanized behind the idea of building for the web.
05:06One of our core values at Vercel is what we call for the web.
05:10And I think the spirit of the web and openness is sort of the things that we want to represent, whether it's talking to world leaders or whether it's engaging with the products that we create and putting them in the hands of developers to build a better future.
05:20Guillermo, very quick, 30 seconds.
05:22Can you share any ARR or other financial metrics on how it's going?
05:27Yeah, as I mentioned, we've publicized that we're at north of $250 million in ARR, growing north of 80% year over year, which is world-class metrics, possibly unseen metrics for a cloud infrastructure business.
05:41That spreads a huge array of customers, from small startups to the largest enterprises, healthcare, fintech, SaaS, marketing, you name it.
05:50And we're continuing to build from here.
05:53We're taking the feedback, obviously.
05:55We're learning from it.
05:56We're growing.
05:57And we're excited about what the future holds.
Be the first to comment