# Vercel scales founder ownership through product leaders Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/vercel-scales-founder-ownership-through-product-leaders/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy. - Speaker: [Guillermo Rauch](https://realalpha.app/builders/guillermo-rauch/) · Guillermo Rauch is founder and CEO of Vercel. · Founded Vercel, which created Next.js and the v0 AI tool for building websites. - Host: [Nakul Mandan](https://realalpha.app/people/nakul-mandan/) · Host, Knuckle Up with Nakul · General partner at Audacious Ventures; his show goes deep with founder CEOs on how they build. - Show: Knuckle Up with Nakul - Episode: [Inside Vercel's AI-era playbook: "Recursive Founder Mode" | Guillermo Rauch (CEO)](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/), Aug 25, 2026 - Moment: 2:02 to 7:28 of the episode (5 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/vercel-scales-founder-ownership-through-product-leaders/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=122 ## Quote > “the founder CEO can only go so far. You kind of want to build the **machine that builds the machine**.” > — [Guillermo Rauch](https://realalpha.app/builders/guillermo-rauch/) at [4:18](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=258) · Knuckle Up with Nakul ## Takeaways 1. Founder mode alone does not scale across a multi-product company. 2. Product leaders need autonomy to own the end-to-end business. 3. AI makes narrow job scopes harder to maintain. ## About this segment Guillermo Rauch gives product leaders room to own their products like founders, while he sets company-wide values and goals. This lets Vercel scale founder-level urgency across multiple products. From “Inside Vercel's AI-era playbook: "Recursive Founder Mode" | Guillermo Rauch (CEO)”, Aug 25, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/) ## Transcript Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there. [2:08](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=128) And your main point, if I understood correctly, was that founder mode doesn't scale. Recursive founder mode is where it needs to be. What do you mean by recursive founder mode? Yeah, Vercell has been in this journey towards becoming a multi-product organization. So we started out hosting front-ends, mostly front-end sites and web applications. And then we started evolving into hosting back-ends, hosting agents, helping people with the whole software development lifecycle, or we could call it the agentic software development lifecycle. [2:38](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=158) And so in this journey, I've had to expand the product portfolio, grow the team. And I totally identified with the idea of founder mode because you need someone that has this pioneering spirit, like break down tape, push through, be the voice of the customer all the time and just feel extreme pride over everything, every detail, like make sure everything is perfect. But clearly it doesn't scale, especially as you think about an organization that's working on multiple products, multiple services, millions of customers. [3:13](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=193) And looking back on things that have worked really well for us, and by this I mean people come to me and they're like, man, how is this thing so good? Like yesterday someone asked me, why is the AISD case so cool? How do they communicate so well on X? Why does everything seem to be so nicely polished? immediately my mind went to the founder of this project, Lars Grammel, who for me embodies that because he's an entrepreneur at heart. He joined Vercel and he was a seasoned engineer and he came in with a very strong point of view of the world. He'd been working on this developer experience for making basically model agnostic applications in TypeScript. And so when he joined Vercel, I got a founder, a visionary, and someone that if given the right company setting can like, again, blast through walls and cut down tape and whatnot. [4:09](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=249) The things that you would want a founder CEO to do is he's almost like the CEO of his own product. And over the years, we've been very fortunate to identify a handful of these people that what I've seen is that these are the people you want as you're scaling your company. You know, the founder CEO can only go so far. You kind of want to build the machine that builds the machine. You know, software factories are in vogue these days. [4:33](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=273) And I think of it as like, how do I set up this recursive software factory? I need this, you know, managers of these factories within the company. We've done it for Fluid Compute. We acquired a one-man company. A guy that had this, like, he was like totally full stack. His name is Tom Leonard. And he would take care of the marketing, the comms, the product design. and he would write this low-level Rust-based runtime. [5:00](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=300) It's like, oh, this could be a great person to add to our fluid compute offering. I think the thing that resonated a lot with that essay, I mean, when it exploded on Twitter that day over the weekend and in the weeks to come, was that the founder has to go deep in what matters. The founder has to be in the weeds of everything. How do you now ensure in this model that you're talking about, like the unit of ownership is at this founder of that product level? [5:23](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=323) What do they own? where do you go deep versus where do you force yourself to stay out so that somebody else feels that they have the flexibility? Yeah, I think what I can contribute is I set up the overall organizational framework, the values of the company. Obviously, my executive team and I decide on like, you know, what are the KPIs, targets, North Stars, but you need to create these pools of autonomy within the company because the best people in the world, they could be starting companies. [5:52](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=352) They could be vibe coding 10 million AR businesses and deploying them on Vercel. And so you really have to create these pockets of autonomy. And so these people, I think, have control over or input into and influence into the messaging, the marketing, and obviously using a platform under them, namely the Vercel platform. A lot of people actually want to come to build products at Vercel because they know that they get to use Vercel. [6:14](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=374) So funny enough, a lot of our new products are completely bootstrapped on top of the Vercel infrastructure. And so it's a little bit like, you know, we have millions of companies building on Vercel, and now we also have like companies within Vercel. Does that autonomy extend to them deciding who to hire or even ship against your judgment? So this is a good example is that, you know, I give enough rope to see like, you know, people pleasantly surprise me all the time with their innovations, discoveries, ways to communicate their customer obsession, right? [6:48](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=408) Like I expect people to go out and talk to customers. So you're asking, what is a defining characteristic of this founder mode thing? At the end of the day, we're here to ship. We're here to drive urgency. We're here to make customers happy. So for me, like my love language is seeing someone within the company take full ownership of the end-to-end business. And I think AI is going to force people into this. [7:15](https://realalpha.app/v/DdbCtAScTsk/?t=435) Because if you thought your job was like a very narrow thing, Like I write code in Rust. Well, models can also do that very well now.