Everyone’s an engineer now: Inside v0’s mission to create a hundred million builders | Guillermo Rauch (founder and CEO of Vercel, creators of v0 and Next.js)
episodePreviously titled “Everyone’s an engineer now: Inside v0’s mission to create a hundred million builders | Guillermo Rauch (founder & CEO of Vercel, creators of v0 and Next.js)” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
Transcript
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What is v0’s mission and how does it aim to democratize product building?
One of our users yesterday submitted feedback. They were saying, V Zero is like a super genius five year old PhD with ADHD. I'm not gonna oversell this as like it knows everything about everything, but it has this sparks of brilliance.
How do you think things are gonna change for product managers, for product teams?
People could be more full stacked. Imagine a designer that can ship a fully baked product, a product manager that can prototype and ship to production. We shouldn't put limits on ourselves and what we can build and what we can ship and what we can dream about making possible on these web services.
A lot of people are wondering, what happens to engineers should I learn how to code?
A lot of the programming jobs to be done that used to be specializations, I think, are going away in a way. They're translation tasks, but knowing how things work under the hood is gonna be very important for you because you're gonna be able to influence the model and make it follow your intention a lot better.
We hear this word taste all the time. In terms of building taste, people are always like, How the hell do I do that? Taste
Sometimes I think we think of it as like this inaccessible thing that, oh, that person was born with taste. I see it as a skill that you can develop that I think is extremely important to try lots of products. We have one of our sort of internal operating principles as increasing exposure hours. Try to quantify how much time you expose yourself to watching how people use your product. And you'll develop that muscle.
Wh where do you think the biggest change is gonna happen?
We need to stop talking about AI at some point. I just see a future where AI becomes synonymous with software. We build software and we use software to build software.
Today, my guest is Guillermo Rausch. Guillermo is the founder and CEO of Vercell, which amongst other things makes a product called V0, which has become one of the most popular AI website building tools in the world. He's also a legendary engineer and contributor to open source. He's created some of those popular JavaScript frameworks in the world, like Next.js and Socket.io. He's both a builder and is building a product that's gonna change the way we all build products. Products in the future, this episode is incredible. If you want to really understand how product development is going to change with the rise of AI and what skills you should be focusing on right now, I highly recommend you keep listening.
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become a yearly subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of Linear, Notion, Superhuman, Perplexity Pro, and granola. Check it out at lenny's newsletter.com. With that, I bring you Guillermo Rausch. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point your customers will start asking for enterprise features, like SAML authentication and skim provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features.
Today, hundreds of companies are already powered. By WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine grain authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining A flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, skim, or user management, you should consider WorkOS. It's a drop-in replacement for OTZero and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free.
Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's work oscillators.com.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is v0’s mission and how does it aim to democratize product building?
0:00–15:26
2
How will AI change the speed and workflow of product development for engineers and PMs?
15:26–30:14
3
What three core skills (coding, math, eloquence) should product builders focus on to stay ahead?
30:14–42:39
4
How does v0 turn prompts into full‑stack applications in just a few minutes?
42:39–55:50
5
What practical tips does Guillermo give for improving design “taste” with AI?
55:50–1:08:55
6
Why are “exposure hours” and rapid iteration crucial for product quality?
1:08:55–1:22:55
7
What are the current limitations of v0 and what features are coming next?
1:22:55–1:27:13
8
How can listeners start building with v0 and join the community?
1:27:13–1:27:39
Speakers
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