guillermo rauch

I only have a handful of role models whose footsteps attract me enough. Some are already popular, yet some are seriously underrated or unnoticed. One of them is Guillermo Rauch.

We must first calibrate our baseline: developer products are the finickiest to nail it. There are many reasons, but mainly:

• Developers have a very nitpicky taste

• It’s hard to ‘wow’ them engineering-wise

• They are not loyal; they try out and switch tools a lot

• They don’t spend as much.

In the worst case, developers will rebuild your app and open-source it. Just Google open-source alternatives to [service], and you will see a handful of examples.

Yet, we have witnessed some jackpot products in the past few years. Once you get the knack of how to earn developers’ and communities’ trust and support, you’ll likely never fail. They will even go ahead and build extensions and apps for your platform. That’s how you reign on developers, which will give you authority on how software gets made in this world, which, ultimately, is the backbone of the modern economy. These jackpot examples include Chrome, VS Code, and GitHub, as well as many more “indie-er” examples, such as Supabase, Tailwind, and many more.

Guillermo Rauch was at the center of these tectonic shifts in the developer landscape since the 2015-2016s.

First, he started as a front-end engineer. But he unleashed his peculiar harmony with apt software and business models sooner than later. He founded Cloudup, which Automattic later acquired, and while on the way, spawned many brainchildren we know and love. Socket.io, Mongoose, and many small developer productivity tools are his inventions. Thus, Rauch knew precisely how the developer ecosystem works. He exactly saw the limitations of the web, and he knew how much to open-source and how much to monetize. And these experiences led him to Vercel, the trendsetter of the modern web.

We have a fantasy where tech founders should look like Steve Jobs. They know nothing about tech but are so charismatic yet stubborn that they exert high standards on nerd engineers. Even if the founders knew coding, such as Zuckerberg, Musk, and Gates, they knew very shallowly about everyday engineering. They’re just superbrains who happened to dip their toes into CS undergrad courses. Here, the legend still stands: brilliant, shitty, but visionary non-engineer leaders educate their nerdy book-smart coders.

But these fantasies exist because they are spicy. Software founding stories are much more nuanced than that.

To put it in some way, Rauch is more of Richard Hendricks than any of the other “Silicon Valley” founders. Well, he’s much more confident and in good shape than Richard :) But I’m pointing out that he’s not the typical SV stereotype founder.

Not many founders fall into this category; the best I can think of is Michael Morhaime (Founder of Blizzard. He was first a game dev and then transcended his experience into one of the most successful game companies. at… least during his time). If we expand from software to tech, Lisa Su will also fall into this category.

Rauch is still one of a kind. He built Vercel into a Mafia Company and now influences the dev ecosystem the most. With his deep knowledge of practical programming and extensive background in open-source, I hope he continues to inspire people like me to follow his path.

Written 100% by a human only with spellcheck.