WordPress Deployment Inspired Vercel

Guillermo Rauch shares how his experience at WordPress inspired the creation of Vercel.

"Before Vercel, I was at WordPress. I noticed WordPress as a company had become quite good at deploying one app - WordPress.com. But if you were working for the company and you had a new idea, you were kind of getting stuck. You had to go to the IT team and be like, 'Hey, please can you set up a server for me? Can you give me an area here where I can come up with a new application or a new idea?'

So Vercel started out as 'Can we reduce that friction from idea to live to seconds?' In fact, it became such an obsession, I started measuring each millisecond of like - you have an idea, you write it down in JavaScript or HTML or whatever, you press deploy - how quickly can we get it online? It was literally an obsession. I love the Formula One metaphor because it was about shaving down the seconds that were stopping the car. And this car is not just one app or one idea or one person - it's literally how the entire business works."