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A
I sat down with Guillermo, the founder of Vercel, which is a $9 billion company. In this conversation, he dropped three powerful startup ideas that really got me to stop and think. We also went through V0, his vibe coding product, to tell us how to make money from it, how to build software from it, and how to use it to the best of its capabilities. I always find when you sit down with the founder of these vibe coding tools, they really, really give you the sauce around, how to fine tune it so you get the most out of it. I'm not sponsored by Vercel. I have no relationship with them. Just thought it would be cool to give you some ideas, see how their platform works. I hope you find it interesting. At the end of the episode, I bought a domain that I'm giving away to one of you. I think it's an incredible domain that all you got to do if you want it, like, and comment. And I'm gonna pick one person, one person randomly to give it away. I can't wait to see what you build. Enjoy the episode. We got Guillermo on the pod from Vercel. Guillermo, by the end of this episode, what are people gonna learn?
B
Well, hopefully they're gonna learn a little bit about my system, how I think, how I use our own tools, how I prototype, how I come up with ideas. I have some ideas that I think are good. Maybe most are bad, but some might be gems for some of the listeners. Yeah, I like to work in public a lot. At Vercel, we do a ton with open source. Maybe I'll share some of the things that we've been open sourcing. That can be great starting points for people that are entrepreneurial and.
A
Yeah, cool. And I just asked for one little commitment from you. On this podcast, we talk about sauce. Giving the sauce to the people so that the they can, you know, can you commit to giving this?
B
I'm all sauce.
A
All sauce.
B
I'm all sauce.
A
All sauce. No breaks.
B
Yeah.
A
Okay, let's do it. Let's go. Let's. Let's. Let's rip.
B
All right. So, Greg, how familiar are you with V0?
A
I'm pretty familiar.
B
Okay, awesome. Yeah, yeah. I think I've seen some of your tweets. So what you're looking at here, in case you're not familiar, is the vercel workspace for V0. So I'm literally showing you, like, all this awesome, right? Like our. Our own workspace, how we use V0, but you're looking at the favorites, which are mine, obviously. I created a couple Things that I wanted to show you all. And by the way, funny little behind the scenes thing, this is how I pitch product. We have a lot of huge enterprises using V0. Yesterday I met with one of the world's largest companies. They came to the office and I basically did a version of this. So it's also a little bit of advice for, for people watching, like, how do you sell? Like, do you do decks? Like, I try to show product as much as I can. So walk you through a few things that I've created. So one that's one use case of V0 that's really interesting is freeform data visualization. So it's really hard sometimes to explain complex technical concepts that have to do with different things of the Vercel infrastructure, et cetera, to customers. So I use v0 a lot to basically give some prompt ideas and then come up with unique visualizations. So what you're looking at here is that something that I think could have taken me quite a long time to create with slides or whatever. And the AI walked me through how to represent this, how our fluid compute system works and create something that I can hand off to other teams, I can hand off to customers can hand off. You know, I can further solidify my understanding of technical concepts. I actually use V0 for learning a lot, so that's a fun one. I'm actually really proud of this one that you're going to look at now. So if you're super familiar with Vercel, this might look like our blog. And so what I did is I started from the point of view of the Vercel blog and what it looks like. And by the way, if you're, if you're curious about how V0 works, it's all prompting. And so really what you're looking at here is that when I engage with my Vercel team, I could take two routes. Is that one, I can make a suggestion based on like 10 Slack messages or I can just talk to V0, create something that I kind of like and then share with the team. So what you're looking at here specifically is it's a pretty novel component. I think I've seen this only a handful of times on the Internet. So when we launched the Vercel mcp, pay attention to this little component here and the evolution of the video, I suggested to the team that in order to highlight our partners of this launch, which were anthropic cursor, I believe, VS code as well, I wanted to highlight them front and center. MCPs are a highly, highly, highly technical concept. So I wanted to show you. Okay. How does Vercel MCP work? And so I actually cooked on the entire component. Like you can kind of like jump to the different markers and so then the team can take it, implement it. They can actually share and sort of copy paste a lot of the code. And now this became kind of a foundation of our blog system. Whenever we have a change log or we have a new blog post, now we have this really cool resource, a little bit of a spoiler alert. We have the ambition that whatever you vibe code in v0 can actually become what we call remote components. Imagine prompting on a slice of a website and enabling anyone in your team or organization to do this. So this is a kind of like a little example of like what that would look like. Like I'm basically like prompting the blog. I'm also pretty proud of this. When I collaborated with our head of design on this, he sent me kind of like a raw, rough sketch of. And I'll explain why I got so involved with this. We're launching a new product, or we launched, which is already kind of growing sort of exponentially. It's called the AI Gateway. Greg, I don't know if you're familiar with things like open router or AI gateways.
A
Yeah, open router we've covered. But yeah, explain it a little bit.
B
Yeah. So the main idea is that when you access models, you, one, might not have made up your mind about which one you need. Two, because of the insane demand for AI tokens, a lot of model providers are unreliable or out of capacity. And three, you always want the best price and performance. And I will actually add a fourth one. You don't want to lock yourself into a model, even if everything that I just mentioned is perfect. You have the right model, you have the right provider, whatever. It might not be the smartest thing to lock yourself in. So we created the AI SDK, which is the universal developer experience for AI. I'm very proud of it, particularly because I didn't invent it, my team did. I invented Next js. I have that going for me. But this is something that emerged organically at Vercel when we were building V0. Maybe a metaphor for people listening. It's almost like the react of AI. It's a very, very, very cool developer experience. So AI Gateway is very exciting to Vercel as a company because it's a new entry point into the Vercel cinematic universe. Meaning you can adopt this AI Gateway regardless of whether you're using any other Vercel product. And so what I wanted to do basically communicate to the team is a couple of things. It's like one, and frankly this is inspired by Apple. I have to come out and say it. I wanted to create this sub product navigation so that I can go to vercel.com AI Gateway and you believe that that's an entire company. And second, I wanted to show this really cool. This actually was my idea, this really cool animation that represents how easy it is to switch between models. It's like that easy. Also we wanted to represent that we support not just our own AI SDK. Like I said that reactive AI, but there's other options, et cetera. If you go to the page today, does it look exactly like this? No, but that's the point. I was able to have this super high fidelity conversation with the team and I did this on a way more ride back home. It was actually pretty fast for me to do. Um, let me jump to something that I think is interesting for also for people to understand how we build v0. Like imagine that you have the ambition of building something like V0. So I have a surprise for you. We use V0 to build V0. And so and I kind of nerded out hardcore on this by the way because of many, many moons ago when I was 16 years old I created a component like what I'm about to show. So I'll explain the growth mindset here. Like from a growth hacking perspective. Whenever you share a Vercel deployment, you're going to see them throughout the web as Vercel app. The way to think about this is like this is like the Vercel marketing machine. And what I mean by that is that we're not actually spending any marketing budget. You're asking for the sauce. This is the sauce, right? We created such a great product hopefully that people build ship and then say. It's almost like saying it was built with Vercel, right? And it can be toys, it can be big ideas, it can be your next startup, et cetera. And obviously we support custom domains. But with V0 I also wanted to preserve that identity. It's almost like a communication. It's like a significant bit. You want to communicate that the thing was built with V0. And so by default today you might have already noticed this. We default to like v0 as the prefix of the things that you ship and when you hit that button, publish. But I was noticing that when people were customizing they were nuking the V0 prefix and so I wanted to both give them the freedom to nuke it, but also, if they don't mind it, keep it. Just like they're keeping that Vercello app. So notice that if I select text and I say Guillermo talks to Greg, I'm not nuking it, but if I go to the beginning of the input and I press delete, I'm deleting that entire token and if I press command Z, it comes back. So I couldn't have imagined describing this with any other tool. I would have spent more time putting words down. And you know that batch little token thing that you've seen on Facebook when you do an ad mention? Well, imagine it says, I actually had tried to do that, to be completely honest, and no one understood what I was talking about, so I just went ahead and built it. And because V0 is so smart, things like the. You can tell it well when you hover, do this, select the text by default. All those kinds of things are just prompts. And 14 prompts probably took me like, I don't know, 15 minutes. So really cool. I could keep going to some of this. We do all kinds of product specs. But I also wanted to show you something that kind of became, what I almost say, the foundation for a real product. Almost. Did you see this on X, by the way? Okay, so. And this is connected to something I think really relates to your audience, which is that I've posted all of these free ideas threads and no one picked up on this one. So I'm actually gonna like, you know, point this out to the people. I think one person paid attention to this one. So I had this concept of an AI camera. The idea of an AI camera came from a frustration that, um, my. My relative takes. Loves to take photos of the moon and like, no, no this. But like, they're so bad. She loves the moon. Heart goes out of her. She. She's obsessed with this thing. But they're just so bad. And I was thinking also the. The. I just upgraded or downgraded, you could say, to an iPhone. Air. The camera got worse than. And so I was telling my team the other day, I don't mind because I love this slick form factor and also because I believe that in the future cameras will be inputs or what do you take with a camera will be an input, not an output. And why is it going to be an input? Because every photo will go through an LLM or an AI model. And so that was kind of like the idea. And so I actually. Because I got this iPhone and I was telling the V0 team about it. We at V0, we don't have devrels, we have vibros. It's someone that vibe codes to show the potential of the tool. And so he built this. I took a selfie of myself when I was in London, I believe and then I took another one and so let's see it here. So I opened it. So you can. The idea is that you can choose between different filters actually because. Let's see. Kill Bill, because I'm from Argentina, I'm gonna go with Argentino. So photo goes in. So it was actually quite easy to prompt the success of this. And by the way, what I mean by success is it went quite viral. The success of this speaks to. Okay, that actually looks like me a lot. The success of this speaks to just how simple we made the interface, which I'm really proud of. You know, we obviously it's inspired by the. The iPhone camera. We used really cool prompts for the different styles. So I'm going to go, let's see, let's do another one. I'm going to go with maybe more focused. I'm going to go with this. Go now. Okay. So when Nano Banana came out, I told my team and by the way, for people listening, I still believe this nanobanana is a GPT4 moment for image models and you can create amazing things. I think there's going to be a lot of great consumer products that come out of this little great utilities. I was showing this off by the way, going the meta work here when I was in London. I was obviously pitching to companies, startups, et cetera, like what Vercel and V0 can do for you. And I was in a lot of meetings where this was kind of like the memorable bit of the pitch. Taking a selfie with someone and showing them what V0 can do. So I actually ended up executing on that idea from the free ideas thread.
A
So that whole product that you showed me you made with V0?
B
Yeah, 100%.
A
And how long did that take you?
B
So say it again, how long did.
A
That take you from start to finish?
B
So it was lunchtime here in sf by the way. You know what's funny about the importance of. And by the way, this is not just me patting myself on the back. Cause like I have a lot of bad ideas like you. You should see my team, my chats with my devil team. But I do think it's in the age of AI and I think obviously this is going to resonate with you. Preaching to the choir the value of ideas is pretty freaking significant. Why? Because I pitched this idea to a lot of people and they were like, I don't know what you're talking about. Like, oh, that's cool, you're a CEO. I'm not going to annoy you, but I'm not going to be mean. But a lot of people kind of ignored it. But the day that we're at that launch and I saw that the lens of the iPhone had just gotten worse and whatever, I pitched it hard and said, guys, we have to actually do this. And so most of the process is actually downloading it into the prompt. And so there's a lot of debate about, like, is prompt engineering a thing? And whatever. I'll say it again. If you have a vision in your head and if you're able to explain it in English, amazing things can happen. So I think it was mostly. So I explained it to my colleague and I told him, and in the beginning, he first didn't get me. So it goes back again to, like, sometimes you might get frustrated with AI, but remember, like, us humans are also not flawless in that department. Like, explaining yourself really, really well, using the right metaphors, et cetera is really important. One thing, by the way, that if anyone wants to continue to riff on that idea, which I encourage, is. And by the way, you can actually open it in v0. So, like, when you click this, you're going to go to the V0. When you click build with V0 here, you're going to go to the template. So I had originally pitched it as Instagram in the sense that, like, I wanted this to be a preview of what the different filters are going to look like. We implemented it as, like, the different types of, like, photo portrait, whatever, which makes it super relatable. I think that has a strength for sure. But there's another version, and this is what's exciting about AI because, like, the models are going to keep getting better. So the first pushback that I got was, oh, no, that's going to cost us a lot of money because you're going to have to do 20 nano banana runs and whatever. So we started litigating, like, well, but you could do. Maybe you could prompt nanobanana to give you a grid of all the permutations and then you tell Vzero to slice it. Because the vision was just like, Instagram invented filters, we can invent AI filters. So you could have seen Guillermo Solarpunk, almost like a little preview. And then I click it and then we do a higher fidelity AI pass. So I think there's a lot more to do with this particular idea. But yeah, 100% V0. There's a Nano by Nano template. So if you go to the V0 community, there are a lot of really amazing starting points. Right. So we have all kinds of templates that you can use to. To use as your starting points. There is game if you want to create games landing pages I mentioned. Data viz is really big for us, especially for teams that throw unstructured data, CSVs, whatever. There's really cool components that can. When liquid glass came out, everyone lost their minds and started trying to create different versions of liquid glass. So this is a great place to get inspired. Frankly, I have my own contribution here. I guess I cooked, huh? So I love particle effects. So speak of the value of vibe coding. We're hosting a Happy Hour with AWS at Re invent about V0, and we didn't have a promotional artifact that I felt truly proud of. A lot of people I think that listen to us are always curious about how do you get big on X? How do you get a lot of impressions? And I'll tell you, just because you have a lot of followers, it doesn't mean that you are putting things out into the world that people are interested in. So I actually use V0 a lot to cook on visualizations of data and things like that. For example, when Next JS came out and we wanted to communicate that in the past 12 months it had 5, over 500 million downloads. And then over previous 12 months, it had a ton of downloads. Basically 500 million in 9 years, and then 500 million in 12 years. I used V0 to create my banger tweet. So there's a lot, a lot of cool stuff here to learn from.
A
One thing I'm learning about you is I know you say you don't have, you know, you have bad ideas and good ideas, but you do have a lot of good ideas and you have a lot of good taste. Like you're able to, you know, think of, okay, Instagram works like this. Therefore I'm going to use that as a reference to put it into V0. So, you know, what advice do you have for people who are trying to like, build their inner Guillermo?
B
Basically, yeah, so you mentioned something really cool, which is that what comes out of me is good ideas. What started out was probably a ton of ideas, bad, good, medium, whatever. And then there's a filter that happens for sure.
A
Yeah.
B
I try to be a less smart guy. So what I put out I have some degree of conviction that it might hit. You also talked about the idea of, well, Instagram exists, therefore you can bring this over to this other product and whatever. I do think that that's extremely, extremely, extremely important to basically accumulate a bunch of exposure hours to products in general. So even just from what I've been doing here, you might have gotten ideas about how v0 how I think about v0. Right. Like, you see the way that we have the community with templates, projects, search like little nuggets of how products work that I think are really interesting. I'll show you actually something also super cool. Notice that when I've been opening these V zeros, they're in full screen, so they're ready to be shared. So I care a lot about the first impression that a product has on people. And so I can reveal the chat, but the chat is not interesting to the presentation that I've been doing. So I wanted to also communicate that to the team. And I basically created this mini V0 inside V0 to basically show Imagine a world. And by the way, the design ended up being quite similar to what ended up landing at the end. Imagine a world where it's all content, everything is computer, and we hide the chat. So there's one version of V0 there was like so much chat in your face. And the nugget of this idea, or like the origination of this idea came from watching people use the product. A colleague of mine that works on Next JS sent me a photo of his girlfriend working on a V0 for her education class. And she had a big desktop monitor. And I saw that half the screen was chat and the other half was the content that she was working on and immediately had the idea of like, well, that doesn't seem right. And so the. The TLDR there is that you have to always be rethinking your assumptions, trying to observe how people use your products in the real world. And, you know, whenever something doesn't work, when I never think, well, it's the fault of the user, it's the fault of the people. I don't have followers, whatever. It's the product, it's the design, it's the idea.
A
When you were creating, let's say, the Nano Banana photo selfie thing, did you prompt V0 with the reference image of Instagram or were you plainly using English and just explaining what you wanted?
B
I think it was all English in this case, which kind of speaks to like. There is one defining characteristic that I do want to point out is that you have to be able to visualize things in your head. And if not in your head, like you have to have some close reference so that you can guide this system, right? And so all of this that you're looking at is just maybe paying more attention to the details, right? Like if you open the, if you open the camera app, there is subtleties to the border, there's subtleties to the background, there's subtleties to the gradient. Another big thing that it might, might seem small, but it's actually freaking huge, is that a few of the initial passes were overly complicated. So there was a process of trimming stuff down and deleting. If I could actually give one lasting piece of advice to everybody, including my own team, is always in myself, is always delete, delete, delete, delete. There should be as few buttons, links, et cetera, as possible on any given product. And I think we kind of nailed that here because, like, how much attention can people give you, right? Like 5 seconds, 10 seconds. Another not minor thing is this is actually a very good mobile product. So by having less ui, you are almost forcing yourself to have a good mobile product. What's very interesting about this little app, if you go to it, v0bananacam vercel app, is that it's almost impossible to believe that this is a web app. It feels like you just downloaded a native app, which also speaks to the insane potential, I think, of this vibe coding platforms. Because we're soon going to launch the V0 mobile app. You're going to be able to create apps like this on the go. And we're actually putting a lot of work into the model, the context, et cetera, to make them really good on mobile devices out of the box. So tldr fewer pixels, always better. And remember that most people don't have time and are on their mobile phones, so you have such a little window to get, to get this stuff right.
A
By the way, this just for people listening, like this idea that you had, like the V0 banana cam, the 20 different filters that you had, if you wanted to, you know, create an app that, you know, just did a little bit of cash flow and was a fun project to do, you can unbundle this and just do like Wes Anderson cam as an Apple, right?
B
Or I mean, there's just so much to do with this and you can, by the way, again, you can Click open in V0 and you can start prompting. There's so much to do with this. Yeah, because I mentioned also that the original idea, by the way, I also will give credit to my colleague who suggested to focus it more on selfies because let's analyze the ideas thread for a second, right? AI camera was the first idea and I was thinking a lot about. Another inspiration for this, by the way, was like we took a business photo with a group at a, at a large band tank and it was so awkward that we had to take like five or six. And I joked because obviously the conversation that we had had was about AI. I joked to them saying like, oh, don't worry, AI will fix this. But in reality it didn't. We took a lot of bad photos and we took six of them. It was awkward, the lighting was bad. I was like, guys, so to give you context, this was in a high rise, New York City. The background was all sun and the skyline of New York. And I remember thinking to myself, AI has seen that freaking. I mean it's beautiful, but it's seen this skyline a gazillion times. We are very clear on the photo. The lighting is not good, but our bodies are very clear. All it should take is, by the way, it shouldn't even take a prompt. And this we didn't explore with this idea. But you could ask AI first to critique the photo. So that process that I did of saying, oh, the photo is garbage, I'm sure GPT5 would do as well. And so once you get the critique from GPT5, you give it to nanobanana. And so this is why I also believe that people sometimes fear that the one model that's going to take all the jobs. In reality, most cool things happen when you combine models, combine ideas, market it well, focus it well, create easy interfaces, et cetera. So I think since you're. Since we're riffing on other things that people could do, the automatic perfect photo app where. Or the lighting fixer photo app and whatever. Especially if people can build the muscle memory to always go to you when they're taking that kind of photo. So by the way, it's fun to compare it now because like I believe that AI camera was probably the best of the bunch, but it wasn't necessarily the one that people got the most excited about.
A
So what other ideas are in this list?
B
This created a lot of excitement that I'm still bullish, so I might cook on it at some point, but obviously encourage people to try it too. So I believe that forms need to be disrupted with AI, period. All forms. Contact sales forms. We're going to be doing an experiment on vercel.com for this I think other I heard rumors and another like big tech company is going to try to do like a conversational sales form. I think it's going to be really interesting because the classic thing is, so if we go to vercel.com contact and then I go to contact sales, we do have personalization here. We're trying to eat our own dog food, right? So it knows that I'm from the US it actually knows that I'm coming from an enterprise. So it's asking me a few more questions, et cetera. So we're constantly doing experiments on this. But what if you didn't have to fill out a form? And some people, by the way, might think like, why don't you just ask nothing but like the email? Well, interestingly, we've done the experiment and like we get such an insane amount of input that to triage and get more signal out of it, we actually do need more information sometimes to actually be able to prioritize who we talk to. And so we do need more information. But a chatbot could ask you that for the follow up. And so that's an experiment worth doing. The other one is and by the way, Typeform I think cooked like, I wasn't trying to like tell Typeform, like, sorry guys, like, it's over. Quite the opposite. I think Typeform is really inspiring here because they created a, I'll say this in earnest, a revolutionary UI for forms. Because they broke it. I think they empathize with like the problem of like, I don't want to see the daunting list of a hundred questions. I want to see only one question at a time. And going back to fewer pixels are always better. I think a type form maximizes the chance of success and minimizes the chance of error by just having the user do one thing at a time. But conversational AIs also asked for one thing at a time. And so imagine if you had basically an interface where you define the data that you want and then you let the AI create the intake interface. It might have elements of a form, by the way, but it might just be purely conversational.
A
So, I mean, two questions. One is, how big of an opportunity do you think this is? And two is if you were going to prompt V0 to do an MVP of this, how would you do it?
B
Yeah. So how big can it be? Well, forms I think are the most underrated, like fundamental particle of the Internet, right? Like nothing happens unless like the, the most interesting of the Internet is capturing input from somebody.
A
It's a primitive Forms is a primitive of the Internet.
B
Yeah. So the TAM might sound like wannabe entrepreneur here. Like the TAM is the entire Internet. The TAM is the entire world. But I do things that like, I think for this idea to succeed though, maybe it needs to be narrowed down to like it's not just forms with AI, but like a specific use case. One company that I think has done phenomenally in this idea of like we're making forms more whimsical, more domain specific, et cetera, is partyful. I see partiful as like a really cool specialized form of sorts. And so the idea is big. The problem is that I cannot yet tell you like the exact incantation is going to get big. That's your job. But I'll tell you, people have the need to create Google forms or type forms all the time and they're willing to pay for those products. And so what I would focus on here is like, can you demonstrate that by creating a more AI native interface? And by the way, when I mean AI native interface, I want to be really clear it's for the submission side as well as the creation side. Because what if there's like the fastest way to create a forum on the Internet because you just paste what you want to know, like build me a form. You're not even going to say this because this is going to be like coolfold builder.com and whatever you're going to say need data on what this user thinks about my product because I want to qualify them for early access VIP application, like something like that. And so AI is amazing because AI is so good at knowing what more most what, what the information that you're after is. And so it's going to save you a lot of time. Most form builders have all this like drag and drop and click and select the type of the question and whatever. No, it should all be AI. The other thing that you can set out to prove is that you can have a more dynamic conversational UI to submit. Maybe even there is a way where you reach out to people through voice or text message and like the form submission actually happens in a pure conversation way, but in an ad hoc conversation. So how would I start prompting about this? Like I said, I always work backwards from the interface. So I would probably start describing to V0 well, I want a conversational chat app, but it's for designing forms. The goal is that the user can talk in natural language and then as they're typing and submitting, they're seeing on the right hand side what their form is going to look like it should use LLMs to parse the input and I'll get something out right? It may take me maybe like one or two more prompts to get it to look what I like, I want and to make it work well. And then when I have something, I start playing with it and I can start seeing if it feels right. The other entry point of this can be imagine the ideal. Imagine if you have a vision for like the ideal submission ui. So one thing that I'm a really big fan of, and you're seeing that in action with V0 is hyperlinks. So imagine put yourself in the shoes of somebody that receives your really cool hyperlink off your form. So it's like supercoolform.com and the title of the form. And then imagine what interface do you want them to see. And so it could be actually something very interactive. It could be something where it's like, I just have a few questions and maybe it has a little character, or maybe it's very sober and it says, complete this questionnaire to get X. And maybe it looks like ChatGPT, where you're just gonna. Maybe it looks like a chat interface. And so maybe I'll start prompting Visio with like, build me a chat interface for a product that is like Google Forms, but way more simple. Probably AI already knows about Typeforms. Like you can tell it, it's somewhat inspired by Typeform. And the goal is that the AI will ask me a bunch of questions in order to meet this data structure that the creator is after. Because I think what's really cool about dynamic conversational interface is that you don't want to let the user complete the chat until you got what you wanted. You got the first name, the last name, the street, whatever. Like all of those things would happen conversationally. I also would explore if I'm asking for an address, what is the right input for asking for an address? So it's like more of a Google Maps thing. At some point I will say maybe the screen splits into two. So imagine if when you're asking for a location, because now we have all the space in the world, we split the screen into two and on the right hand side we show the map and the left hand side we show the input. So, yeah, this is kind of an encouragement for people who think about, okay, forms are a big deal and there's going to be something new that uses AI and turns it upside down.
A
By the way, what, what, what you just said at the end is potentially a good prompt for, you know, ChatGPT which is like, hey, I'm trying to create the, you know, a conversational AI Google Forms killer. I need help imagining what an interface which might, you know, be super clean, super fast, super beautiful to use, that's different than anything that's out there. Give me three or four ideas and sometimes that could become the.
B
Yep.
A
The fodder for what you end up putting in V0.
B
Yep. I was going to also say, if you're more comfortable with engineering what, what V0 is going to use under the hood is this AI SDK that we created. I mentioned that it's like the REACT for AI and we have a lot of really cool templates for it so that you can get started with something that's already been built. So I'm going to show you, I think it's chat SDK.dev. so this interface right here, if you go to try it out, you're going to see this is basically an open source ChatGPT. I call this open source ChatGPT for enterprise. And the main idea behind this is basically you can mold it into whatever you want it to be. So I'm going to ask it a question first. I'm going to say hi there. So it's using GROK Vision models, it's using the ISDK obviously, so you can bring whatever model. Something really cool about this is we are big fans of this concept of what we call generative ui. I'm going to ask what is the weather in San Francisco? Notice that it's responding with that UI component. I believe the future of this AI conversational interface is going to be this intertwining of chat enriched UI components. But perhaps my favorite thing about this demo that is pretty wild is let's ask you to write an essay about Silicon Valley. Look at what's going to happen when it detects and calls the tool for writing. It splits the UI into two. We also use this pattern in V0 itself and this is all open source. So imagine this concept that I just showed you. But for that conversational interface that we're just talking about, where when I get the next question, I may actually get a much richer interface for answering that question. Maybe this is a really cool interviewing ui. Maybe this is a really cool aptitude test ui. Maybe this is the future of how you give students a really cool interface for a test. It's like, hey, I'm your digital teacher. Like let's, let's evaluate your skill in math. But you know, when you're teaching kids in education and AI, especially for children. Something that I'm really passionate about. I've been thinking a lot about recently. Imagine if like one of the steps in the test needs a like little virtual game for. For testing math in addition. And so this is the beautiful thing about V0 is like all of those things that I just talked about. We have examples of games, we have examples of like all kinds of UIs like this one. So I do think the possibilities are kind of endless here.
A
I want you to do one more idea and I just want to talk about the template stuff. So what I think one good idea for people is to go through the templates and be like, okay, this is, you know, this is a really cool idea, but if I focused it on this niche.
B
Yes.
A
Then I think like this for education or this for K through 12, or this for fintech or this for whatever. And you know, I think that a lot of people are just creating their own stuff when they could just be seeing what other people have done and just kind of duplicating it and focusing on a niche.
B
Yeah. There's also OSS Vibe coding platform. I'm extremely proud of this one. The team really cooked. Again, this is a little bit more advanced, but we basically open sourced the zero if you think about it. So we have a bunch of models here and you can say build me a little to do list app. Okay, I have to sign it over. Cell. You can do it at your home. But what you're going to see is that when you start creating this, we're going to write an application here on the right hand side of the screen. We're going to create a sandbox for every creation. This is basically like open source replit, if you will. Another really cool starting point from the Vercel template marketplace. And again, these two are a little bit more advanced. If you are not that comfortable with coding yet, I would start with the V0 community templates. But you mentioned going back to some ideas, so maybe I'll show some of the ones from the most recent ideas thread.
A
Yep.
B
Okay. So. Oh wow. Speaking of Vibe coding, this one, the inspiration for this. So it's a notion style document tool where every block can be Vibe coded. For instance, if you need a chart, it's just a matter of adding a block backed by a prompt. These blocks could be live, reactive and revaluated. So this one came. This one is like taking this element further and realizing that you probably instead of wanting to write everything, you want this to be like promptable blocks could be interesting for like data this tools you mentioned in terms of niches, it could be a really cool way of creating very interactive essays. The idea there was why are we writing everything from scratch and why are we limited to the five or six types of blocks that the document tools have invented and decided for us? If we now have AI, I might decide to like here I want right here. I want like a mini game or I want a very, very cool chart or you know, another inspiration for database I think it's going to be big is have you ever seen those videos that show the growth of a thing when another thing was big? It's like the top one is like a wide rectangle and then it walks you through the years 2020, 2021. And then you see all of the players reshuffle and advance and whatever. The best data visualizations on the planet are not rigid. They're not part of like the line chart, the pie chart, et cetera. They might have elements of navigation, et cetera. So this is a big idea. Like I was trying to think like what is the future of documents with AI? This one again, like I feel like it's underrated. Like this is like AI camera vibes because the. I think.
A
Sorry, can you read? Can you read the idea?
B
Yeah, the LLM vibes radar periodically ask AIs for opinions and rankings. What's the best burger NSF? Who's the best candidate? Data visualization could look Google Trends E use isr. I mentioned like a nerd thing of like you don't want to query the AI on demand. You want like a really good caching system. And so there is a technology that Vercel has called ISR that's really good for this, especially for high traffic websites. This tool can help the world become more aware of biases in AIs Be the Wire cutter for everything, entertain, inform businesses and how they're falling in or out of favor. The idea is that this is kind of like a content virality idea and it's a good way to zing the AI model vendors. Everyone loves to expose biases in AI. And there's a thing that had gone really viral during the last U.S. election when you would ask it about Trump and different models who create different things. And so there is almost like a poly market but of AI responses thing. It's almost like a free content generation engine that I think is going to interest people. What does ChatGPT think is the best burger in SF? A lot of this. I think in order to nail this idea you have to find how do you visualize those questions and the question selection so that it is. It sparks people's interest and then ride news cycles so that when something interesting happens in the world, you're able to like go to this site and find out like what the AIs think or whatever. I also think that the timeline is also super cool. You can almost be like an archive.org but for what? LLMs have been steered to thinking. If you can discover interesting patterns over time, that can be huge. Like you ask, you know, Claude or Grok or whatever, like, who is the smartest person in the world? And like, you see it change. Like in 2020, was this. In 2021, was this. In 2022 was this. Or I, I think, I don't know exactly what. Again, like, there's a lot here, but I think there is, there is, there's something that could have the potential for virality.
A
Give me one more idea.
B
All right, this one I actually think I might build at some point because I need it. Like there is asking an LLM. Okay. The prompt or idea is deep EST research, emphasis on est. I noticed that when I really need to study a topic in depth, I don't want to bank on the viewpoint of a single LLM. Many times I fire up ChatGPT, Grok and Perplexity and Claude and in a bunch of tabs. I would love a tool that uses all the available intelligence on the Internet to produce the best possible report key. Tell me how the experts, aka AIs, differed, especially if they have contradicting facts, figures or conclusions. So have you heard of this being done before?
A
No, but I'm obsessed with the name Deepest Research, by the way.
B
Yeah, take it.
A
Yeah. Also the idea I'm going to. I was just seeing if Deepest Research AI is available. It's $30,000, which honestly isn't crazy, but.
B
It could also be the AI.
A
I'm. Would you say Deepest AI?
B
I was thinking that, yeah. Because I also think people underestimate how important it is that you build something that is so simple and effective that you return to it by typing the URL. Because, like, maybe you have an instance where you got exposure through it on X. You went, you click the link. Maybe you didn't have quite the use case for it at that time, but then you're going to be in a conversation or something and you're going to say like, oh shit, I need to do the deepest research here and you need to be able to recall that URL and then type it into their mobile device. And this is why I was insisting on like the AI camera being successful because it was mobile friendly and so you need to be able to like get back to the URL quickly. So I think short here might pay dividends.
A
I'm going to buy the domain deepest research.net and which is kind of like old school 90s vibe because that'll be the.
B
I do like a donet the net.
A
Is under, I actually think is criminally underrated and I'm going to give it away. You know, if you want to compete with Guillermo because he's going to do this in the future, he's.
B
Well keep in mind that my, the way that I execute on this is like I open source things. So like you might actually take benefit from it. But you should race me to it for sure.
A
Race, race Guillermo. I'm going to, for people, I'll just pick a random comment and I'll gift it to someone and let's see who builds it.
B
Okay. Yeah. And to give you some more context on this one, I think the people that select into this kind of thing are going to be highly, highly, highly qualified buyers. I think you don't do deepest research of like, you know, what kind of banana like grows in the Mediterranean, whatever, like none. But it's going to be for people that are doing financial stuff, that are doing competitive research, that are like maybe they're really stuck on a bug and they need every angle explored and whatever. You might want to have some prompt presets like select the level of the kind of analysis that you want to do and the prompts would be your secret sauce. Maybe do analyze critically find edge cases. Tell me about public opinion. So there might be by, by putting this tool in front of users you might get into like some really cool like what kind of research do you want to do? And, and again like you know, you know what's really interesting about the world. You can argue that ChatGPT will continue to get super sophisticated and will eat every startup and whatever, but what I find is that some products are so important or some capabilities are so important that they always deserve their unique entry point, their unique URL, their unique interface dedicated to that problem. And you might actually out compete the giants in things like this. Much like what I think ChatGPT is doing to Google. Because what ChatGPT is doing to Google is that I don't think to go to Google to ask this long like long form questions with prompts and I want to engage in a chat. So it's so hard for Google to compete with ChatGPT, because the best they can do is do that AI overview thing, right? But pay attention to what they called their ChatGPT AI mode. You have to go into a mode, you have to go to a quote, unquote, a different product in order to compete with ChatGPT. And so my argument is you can do that to ChatGPT itself. Because when I go to ChatGPT, in order to do deep research, I have to get into a mode, and they're trying their best to route and whatever, but when I get into that mode and I want all of this new capabilities, maybe there's buttons, maybe there's levels of depth of research. It's like a pro tool for deep research.
A
Mm. Damn. I want to do this idea. I'm like, I don't want to give away this domain to someone, but we'll give it away. We'll give it away. All right. I think we're out of time.
B
Sadly, I want to keep going, but, yeah, there's a lot to do with this.
A
Sadly, we're out of time. One thing my biggest takeaway from just talking to you is it really is like, the limit is your ideas, you know, coming up with good ideas. The tools are out there. This fires me up. Gee, thanks for coming on. I'll include some of the links in, you know, like, the templates and all that stuff in the show notes, I'll include where to find G on X. Anything else you want to leave people with? No.
B
If you do build any of this, just ping me on X. I love to take a look and maybe give you feedback.
A
I appreciate you, man. I'll see you next time.
Greg Isenberg sits down with Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel (valued at $9B), for a hands-on deep-dive into Vercel's "v0" workflow—a toolset enabling developers to prototype and build products at lightning speed using AI-assisted "vibe coding." Guillermo opens up his actual workspace, shares his process, and drops both tactical advice and multimillion-dollar AI startup ideas, including unique perspectives on product ideation, rapid prototyping, and shipping. Together, they discuss building for virality, minimizing UI friction, and the next wave of AI-empowered tools in consumer and enterprise spaces.
Building in Public & Using Open Source: Guillermo explains that Vercel’s innovation comes from working openly and iteratively, not just internally but as a model for Vercel users and the broader startup ecosystem. ([01:15])
Vibe Coding & v0: "Vibe coding" is introduced as a workflow that relies heavily on AI prompting to rapidly iterate product ideas. The v0 platform enables users to transform UI/UX ideas into prototypes in minutes, blurring the line between ideation and execution. ([02:10])
“At Vercel, we do a ton with open source. Maybe I'll share some of the things that we've been open sourcing. That can be great starting points for people that are entrepreneurial.”
— Guillermo [01:27]
Pitching with Product, Not Decks: When selling Vercel, Guillermo prefers showing live prototypes over slide decks. This approach, powered by v0, helps communicate complex features using interactive, AI-generated visualizations. ([04:00])
V0 for Technical Visualization and Internal Communication: He demonstrates how v0 is used for technical learning and to communicate nuanced product features (like the new "fluid compute" infrastructure or blog components with embedded animations). ([04:20])
“When I engage with my Vercel team, I could take two routes... or I can just talk to v0, create something that I kind of like, and then share with the team.”
— Guillermo [05:02]
Dogfooding: Using v0 to Build v0: Vercel’s internal teams use their own tools—a recursive approach allowing faster iteration, immediate feedback, and building marketing virality (users see “built with v0” on product URLs). ([09:00])
Speed of Prototyping:
"14 prompts probably took me like, I don't know, 15 minutes."
— Guillermo, describing building a UI token system [12:57]
Genesis: Inspired by personal frustrations with bad moon photos and smartphone downgrades, Guillermo ideates the "AI camera"—a product where every photo is an input to an LLM that applies AI-powered filters.
Execution: The v0 team rapidly ships "BananaCam," allowing selfie uploads with stylistic AI filters (e.g., “Kill Bill” or “Argentino” mode), demonstrated virally in live meetings. ([13:45])
Iteration: The original vision included Instagram-style preview grids, AI-critique of images before enhancement, and leveraging future improvements in generative AI. ([14:35])
“I believe that in the future, cameras will be inputs…every photo will go through an LLM or an AI model.”
— Guillermo [12:40]
Implementation: BananaCam is open-source and templated in v0, allowing anyone to copy, remix, and launch their own variants (e.g., Wes Anderson Cam). ([25:30])
Good Taste = Cross-Domain References: Guillermo credits his product “taste” to cross-pollination—borrowing UI/UX patterns from successful products like Instagram and adapting them for new contexts.
“You also talked about...Instagram exists, therefore you can bring this over to this other product...accumulate a bunch of exposure hours to products in general.”
— Guillermo [20:22]
Simplicity & User Empathy: He advocates ruthless reduction—continually deleting unnecessary UI until only essentials remain. Fewer pixels means faster onboarding, better mobile experience, and higher engagement. ([23:12])
“If I could actually give one lasting piece of advice…always delete, delete, delete, delete.”
— Guillermo [24:12]
Observation & Assumption-Busting: Real-world usage inspires product improvements; watching a user struggle with chat-heavy layouts gave rise to minimal, content-first views. ([21:50])
Core Insight: Forms are “the primitive of the Internet”; they're ripe for disruption with AI-powered, conversational interfaces that reduce friction, dynamically adapt, and gather only necessary info.
Execution Steps: Start by prompting v0 for “a chat interface for a product that is like Google Forms, but way more simple”—build and iterate from there. ([31:21])
“Forms I think are the most underrated, like fundamental particle of the Internet…TAM is the entire Internet.”
— Guillermo [31:39]
Nuance: True AI-native forms benefit both the creator (building via natural language rather than drag-and-drop) and the end-user (dynamic, adaptive questioning, better mobile UX).
“I was just seeing if DeepestResearch.ai is available. It's $30,000, which honestly isn't crazy…”
— Greg [47:19]
Ultimately Greg buys the domain “deepestresearch.net” live on air and offers to give it to a listener. ([48:28])
On being generous with ideas:
“I'm all sauce.” — Guillermo [01:54]
The tone of the episode is playful, “all sauce, no breaks,” with Guillermo openly sharing startup playbooks.
On the relentless removal of UI clutter:
“Always delete, delete, delete, delete. There should be as few buttons, links, etc. as possible on any given product.” — Guillermo [24:12]
On combining LLM outputs:
“You might want to have some prompt presets...the prompts would be your secret sauce.” — Guillermo [49:08]
On the accessibility of tools:
“It really is like, the limit is your ideas, you know, coming up with good ideas. The tools are out there.” — Greg [52:05]
| Timestamp | Segment | |-----------|-----------------------------------------------------------| | 01:15 | Guillermo's working philosophy, open-source approach | | 02:10 | Intro to v0 “vibe coding” and product demo philosophy | | 04:20 | Using v0 for technical visualization and communication | | 09:00 | How “built with v0” becomes viral marketing | | 13:45 | The "AI Camera / BananaCam" idea background and demo | | 20:22 | On product “taste” and cross-pollination | | 24:12 | On simplifying UI—“delete, delete, delete” | | 25:55 | How BananaCam can be remixed for micro-apps and niches | | 31:39 | AI disrupting forms—scope and approach | | 42:02 | Notion-style docs with prompt blocks | | 44:06 | LLM Vibes Radar and tracking AI opinions | | 46:28 | Deepest Research app concept and live domain purchase | | 49:08 | Product specialization, and why vertical projects win | | 52:05 | Final takeaways on ideas being the bottleneck |
For more templates and to start building, check out:
https://gregisenberg.com/30startupideas
Guest: Guillermo Rauch
Find him on X (Twitter): @rauchg
Host: Greg Isenberg
Find him on X (Twitter): @gregisenberg