Frustrating Group Photo
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Guillermo shares a story about a frustrating photo-taking experience that inspired his AI camera idea.
"This idea came up because we were at a very big meeting for a bank that I wanted to use for Vercel in New York. The champion on the bank side was like, 'Let's take a photo with the beautiful New York backdrop.'
It was so awkward that we tried to take the photo 20 times because it's hard to take a photo with the sun in the back. We want New York to be visible but we want our faces to be visible, and someone blinks during the photo.
This experience made me think about how the average consumer just wants to take awesome photos, and how AI could help solve these common photography problems by automatically fixing issues like poor lighting, blinking, and unwanted objects in the background."
Guillermo Rauch
CEO and founder of Vercel, creator of Socket.IO
Guillermo Rauch is an Argentine-born software engineer and entrepreneur best known as the founder and CEO of Vercel (originally ZEIT, founded 2015), a cloud application company that created and maintains the Next.js web development framework. Before Vercel, he created Socket.IO, the widely-used real-time event-driven JavaScript communication library. Vercel raised $250 million in a Series E round in May 2024 at a $3.25 billion valuation and is also the maker of the v0 AI web development tool and the AI SDK.