Guillermo Rauch didn't go to Stanford. He didn't have a Silicon Valley network. He didn't even finish high school.
What he had was a Windows 95 PC, an obsession with the internet, and the kind of relentless curiosity that doesn't need a classroom to thrive. Today, he's the founder and CEO of Vercel, a company valued at $9.3 billion that quietly powers some of the most visited websites on the planet.
This is the story of how he got there.
Growing Up in Lanus, Buenos Aires
Guillermo Rauch Federico was born in December 1990 in Lanus, an industrial suburb on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Argentina was in the middle of an economic crisis, but at home, his father (an engineer) brought back a Windows 95 PC that would change everything.
By the time he was 11, Guillermo had taught himself to code. By 13, he was attending lectures by Richard Stallman, the founder of the free software movement, and becoming deeply involved in Linux and open source. He learned English not in a classroom, but by reading software manuals.
At 16, he released an open-source project called FancyMenu that was featured on a popular tech blog. His first taste of global recognition, and proof that the internet could level the playing field for a kid from Argentina just as much as one from Palo Alto.
The Move to San Francisco
Guillermo never graduated from school. Instead, he moved to Switzerland at 17 and then to San Francisco at 18, not on a standard work visa, but on an O-1 "Extraordinary Ability" visa. To prove his expertise, he co-authored a book on Node.js. It worked.
By then, he had already become a core contributor to MooTools, one of the most influential JavaScript libraries of the era, and had built Socket.IO. A real-time communication library that would go on to be used by millions of developers worldwide.
San Francisco gave him the network he didn't have. But it was his open-source reputation that opened the doors.
"One thing that helped me was open source," he later reflected. "People were happy to talk to me because I'd built things that piqued their curiosity."
LearnBoost, Cloudup, and the WordPress Years
His first company, LearnBoost, was an ambitious EdTech platform. It was broad, complex, and ultimately too scattered. The lesson it taught him – simplify – would shape everything that came after.
From the ashes of that pivot came Cloudup, a beautifully simple file-sharing tool. Drag a file onto the menu bar, get a shareable link instantly. That was it. Clean, focused, useful.
Automattic, the company behind WordPress, saw the potential and acquired Cloudup in 2013. Guillermo spent two years there working on editing and site-building technology, watching up close how a company could build a sustainable business on open-source foundations.
It was the final piece of the puzzle before Vercel.
Founding ZEIT (Now Vercel)
In November 2015, Guillermo founded ZEIT , and this is a cloud deployment platform built on a simple premise: deploying websites should be as easy as sharing a file.
At the time, deployment was a painful, technical process that often required dedicated DevOps engineers. ZEIT flipped that. Developers could push their code and have it live in seconds, globally distributed, with zero configuration.
In parallel, Guillermo created Next.js. A React framework that made building production-ready web applications dramatically simpler. It spread quickly through the developer community, and the two products grew together, each making the other more valuable.
In April 2020, ZEIT rebranded to Vercel. The name change marked a new chapter: the company was no longer just a deployment tool. It was becoming the infrastructure layer for the modern web.
The $9.3 Billion Company
The numbers today are staggering for a company that started as a side project by a self-taught developer from Argentina.
| Metric | 2026 Reality |
|---|---|
| Valuation | $9.3 Billion |
| Annual Recurring Revenue | ~$172 Million |
| Active Users | 6 Million+ |
| Total Funding | $863 Million |
| Notable Clients | Nike, OpenAI, TikTok, Airbnb, Uber |
Next.js is now one of the most widely used web frameworks in the world. When you visit the websites of some of the biggest companies on the internet, there's a good chance Vercel is running underneath.
The company tripled its valuation in a single year in 2025, a remarkable feat in a market where many tech valuations were heading in the opposite direction.
What Makes Guillermo Rauch Different
There are plenty of founders who raise big rounds. Fewer build products that developers genuinely love. Guillermo has done both, and the reason comes down to a philosophy he's held since he was a teenager in Buenos Aires.
He calls it "progressive disclosure of complexity", technology that's simple enough for a beginner to use in minutes, but powerful enough to scale to some of the internet's most sophisticated applications. Next.js embodies this. You can start with a single line of code and end up powering a global platform.
His other conviction is that open source is a great equaliser. It's what gave him his career. It's what built his reputation before he had a network. And it's what he's used to build Vercel's community from the ground up.
"I think that's ultimately what will make our society more equitable, more interesting, more artistic, more creative," he's said. "Giving everybody the opportunity to create products."
The Bigger Picture
Guillermo Rauch's story is a reminder that the most transformative companies don't always come from the expected places. He didn't have a prestigious degree or a built-in Silicon Valley network. What he had was curiosity, craft, and the conviction that the web should be accessible to everyone.
From a suburb of Buenos Aires to a $9.3 billion company powering the modern internet, it's one of the more remarkable founder journeys of the last decade.
Want to go deeper on how Vercel actually got from a deployment tool to a $9 billion AI cloud? We've broken down the full story, the fundraising rounds, the product bets, the near-misses, and the strategy behind Next.js – in our full founder deep-dive.
Read the Full Vercel Story on We Are Founders (Subscriber exclusive)
